back to indexHow to Optimize Your Brain-Body Function & Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #30
link |
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
where we discuss science and science-based tools
link |
for everyday life.
link |
I'm Andrew Huberman,
link |
and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
link |
at Stanford School of Medicine.
link |
Today, we continue in our discussion about sensation
link |
or how we sense things.
link |
On previous episodes, we talked about sensing light
link |
and sound waves for things like vision and hearing.
link |
Today, we are going to talk about our sense of self
link |
or what's called interoception.
link |
Interoception is our sensing of our internal landscape,
link |
things like our heartbeat, our breathing, and our gut,
link |
how full our gut might happen to be
link |
or how empty our gut might happen to be,
link |
but also our inner landscape with respect to chemistry,
link |
how acidic or how good or bad we feel on the inside.
link |
This discussion about sense of self and interoception
link |
has many important actionable items
link |
that relate to bodily health and brain health,
link |
and believe it or not,
link |
our ability to perform well or perform poorly in life.
link |
Indeed, it has profound influence on our rates of healing.
link |
So today we are going to talk about
link |
all the aspects of our inner landscape
link |
and how our brain and body communicate,
link |
and there will be many actionable protocols
link |
as we go along that discussion.
link |
Before we begin our discussion about sense of self,
link |
I want to highlight some very recently
link |
published research findings
link |
that I believe are immediately actionable
link |
and that everybody should be aware of.
link |
These are data that were published by my colleague,
link |
Justin Sonnenberg's laboratory
link |
at Stanford University School of Medicine,
link |
and the data were published in the journal Cell,
link |
which is a very, very high stringency cell press journal.
link |
So phenomenal data.
link |
What the study showed
link |
was that individuals given a high fiber diet
link |
actually experience less diversity
link |
of what's called the gut microbiome.
link |
The number of positive or health promoting bacteria
link |
in the gut was actually reduced by a high fiber diet.
link |
Whereas individuals that ate just a couple of servings
link |
of fermented food each day
link |
experience important and beneficial increases
link |
in anti-inflammatory markers,
link |
and that could be traced back to improvements
link |
in the gut microbiome diversity.
link |
The diversity of bugs,
link |
literally little bacteria that live in the gut,
link |
which might sound bad,
link |
but they are actually very health promoting.
link |
I'm going to get into all the details of this study
link |
later in the episode,
link |
but I just wanted to emphasize these findings
link |
because they are immediately actionable.
link |
I think for most people,
link |
ingesting one or two servings of fermented food each day
link |
is reasonable and does not bring with it
link |
tremendous costs or tremendous inconvenience.
link |
And I think many people are ingesting high fiber diets,
link |
thinking that that's the best way
link |
to improve their gut microbiome.
link |
So while these data may prove to be controversial
link |
among the folks out there in the nutrition community
link |
that really promote high fiber diet,
link |
I want to just emphasize that these data
link |
were looked at in a very unbiased way.
link |
They were done with large scale screens
link |
of all sorts of inflammatory markers.
link |
There was no specific hypothesis going in,
link |
it was purely exploratory,
link |
but the data are very, very clear.
link |
It doesn't mean you shouldn't eat fiber,
link |
doesn't mean that fiber is bad,
link |
but it really shows that eating fermented foods,
link |
just one or two servings a day,
link |
and maybe even ramping up to three or four servings per day
link |
can be very beneficial for many aspects of health.
link |
Before we go any further,
link |
I'd like to emphasize that this podcast
link |
is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
link |
It is, however, part of my desire and effort
link |
to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
link |
and science-related tools to the general public.
link |
In keeping with that theme,
link |
I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
link |
Our first sponsor is Roca.
link |
Roca makes sunglasses and eyeglasses
link |
that are of the absolutely highest quality.
link |
The company was founded by two all-American swimmers
link |
and everything about their sunglasses and eyeglasses
link |
is developed with performance in mind.
link |
I've spent my career working on the visual system
link |
and its various functionings within the brain
link |
and within the eye.
link |
Roca sunglasses and eyeglasses are so phenomenal
link |
because they allow the visual system
link |
to do what it does best,
link |
which is to adjust to changes
link |
in what we call luminance or brightness.
link |
With many sunglasses out there
link |
and with many eyeglasses as well,
link |
if the brightness in the room changes
link |
or you get cloud cover or you walk into a shadow,
link |
you have to take the glasses on or off,
link |
you can't see as well.
link |
But the folks at Roca really understand
link |
how the visual system works,
link |
and so they've designed their sunglasses and eyeglasses
link |
such that you never experienced that shift.
link |
You can walk into a shadow,
link |
the amount of sunlight can change,
link |
you can go into a dark room, et cetera,
link |
provided there's enough light to see,
link |
you're going to see everything crystal clear.
link |
In addition, you see everything crystal clear
link |
because the lens quality is terrific.
link |
And the sunglasses and eyeglasses are very lightweight,
link |
so you don't even notice that they're on your face.
link |
Also, the sunglasses and eyeglasses
link |
are designed for performance.
link |
You can use them while running or while cycling.
link |
Even if you sweat, they won't slip off your face,
link |
and as I mentioned before, they're very lightweight.
link |
So everything about these glasses is terrific,
link |
and they have a terrific aesthetic.
link |
They have a lot of different styles to select from,
link |
and unlike a lot of performance eyeglasses out there,
link |
they won't make you look like a cyborg.
link |
You could wear them to dinner or to somebody's home,
link |
and they look really nice.
link |
If you'd like to try Roca glasses,
link |
you can go to Roca, that's R-O-K-A,.com,
link |
and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your first order.
link |
That's Roca, R-O-K-A,.com,
link |
and enter the code Huberman at checkout.
link |
Today's podcast is also brought to us by Inside Tracker.
link |
Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform
link |
that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
link |
to help you better meet your health goals.
link |
I'm a big believer in getting regular blood work done
link |
for the simple reason that many of the factors
link |
that impact your immediate and long-term health
link |
can only be assessed, can only be measured
link |
from a quality blood test.
link |
And now with the advent of quality DNA tests,
link |
you can get further insight into the status
link |
of your immediate and long-term health.
link |
One of the problems with a lot of blood and DNA tests
link |
that are out there, however, is you get the numbers back,
link |
you get the levels of metabolic factors, hormones, et cetera,
link |
but you don't get any information about what to do
link |
with those numbers or how to actually shift them
link |
in the direction that you want to.
link |
With Inside Tracker,
link |
they have this very easy to use dashboard,
link |
and that dashboard makes it very clear
link |
not just what your levels of hormones, et cetera, are,
link |
but what actions to take in terms of nutrition or exercise
link |
or other lifestyle factors to bring those numbers
link |
into the appropriate ranges for you.
link |
If you'd like to try Inside Tracker,
link |
you can go to insidetracker.com slash Huberman,
link |
and if you do that,
link |
you'll get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans.
link |
Just use the code Huberman at checkout.
link |
That's insidetracker.com slash Huberman
link |
to get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans.
link |
Today's podcast is also brought to us by Headspace.
link |
Headspace is a meditation app
link |
that's backed by 25 peer-reviewed published studies
link |
and has over 600,000 five-star reviews.
link |
I started meditating when I was in my teens,
link |
but for many years,
link |
I found it hard to maintain a meditation practice.
link |
I don't think I'm alone with that.
link |
I think many people start meditating.
link |
They'll do it for a few weeks or a few months
link |
or maybe even a year,
link |
and then they'll give up the meditation practice.
link |
And we know from so many peer-reviewed studies
link |
that meditation has a number of very positive effects
link |
on our brain health,
link |
our ability to focus,
link |
and our bodily health.
link |
So it's a great thing.
link |
We probably should all be doing it,
link |
but most of us, including myself,
link |
have found it hard to stick to a meditation practice.
link |
Then I started using the Headspace app,
link |
and what I found is I could be very consistent
link |
with my meditation practice
link |
because they have meditations that are short,
link |
meditations that are medium length,
link |
and meditations that are a bit longer,
link |
all of which benefit me.
link |
The meditations that they have also are of different styles.
link |
You can try different forms of meditation.
link |
I particularly like having a guide for my meditation.
link |
It just helps me stay focused,
link |
helps me stay on track,
link |
and I'm able to derive all those regular benefits
link |
of meditation and keep the practice up on a regular basis.
link |
If you want to try Headspace,
link |
you can go to headspace.com slash special offer.
link |
And if you do that,
link |
you'll get a one month totally free trial.
link |
And with that, you'll get all of Headspace's meditations,
link |
the full library of meditations.
link |
You just go to headspace.com slash special offer,
link |
and you get all of their meditations for one free month,
link |
and you get to try it.
link |
If you don't like it, you can stop,
link |
but I think you will enjoy it.
link |
I certainly enjoy meditation,
link |
and we know that it's very beneficial for all of us.
link |
If you're somebody who cares about your immediate
link |
and long-term health,
link |
and if you're somebody who's interested in performance
link |
of any kind in work, in relationships, et cetera,
link |
today's topic, I believe,
link |
is among the more important ones for you.
link |
Of all the topics I could cover,
link |
this thing that we call sense of self,
link |
which is also called interoception,
link |
has perhaps the most foundational level of importance
link |
for all that we feel, all that we do,
link |
and all that we are capable of doing.
link |
In fact, I will go so far as to say that interoception,
link |
or our ability to sense our inner real estate,
link |
is right there next to sleep,
link |
and perhaps one other feature of our health
link |
and bodily function that primarily determine
link |
how good we feel in the now, in the short term,
link |
and in the long-term,
link |
and sets the stage for everything we are capable of doing,
link |
and if we don't take care of this thing
link |
that we call interoception,
link |
just like if we don't take care of sleep,
link |
we cannot perform well and we will not remain healthy.
link |
Interoception and sense of self
link |
are essentially the same thing.
link |
I will use those terms interchangeably,
link |
at least for sake of today's discussion.
link |
And I promise that if you can learn a little bit
link |
about the mechanisms of self-sensing,
link |
of understanding what's going on in your internal milieu,
link |
as we say, your internal environment,
link |
you will position yourself to do some very simple things
link |
that can lead to outsize positive effects on everything,
link |
from sleep, to body composition, to mental focus, to mood,
link |
your ability to regulate stress,
link |
and indeed even your ability to heal and recovery
link |
from injuries of different kinds,
link |
brain injury and bodily injury.
link |
So sense of self is absolutely crucial.
link |
It's sometimes called our sixth sense,
link |
right alongside the other five senses,
link |
like hearing, vision, touch, taste, smell, et cetera.
link |
But sense of self is different.
link |
Sense of self is really about what's going on internally
link |
within the confines of our skin.
link |
And it involves two key features
link |
that if you can understand those features
link |
and you understand what modulates
link |
or changes our ability to sense those features,
link |
there are a lot of things that you can do
link |
in terms of how you structure your nutritional practices,
link |
how you relate to your exercise practices,
link |
perhaps even certain things that you take
link |
in terms of supplementation
link |
that can basically make you feel better,
link |
more alert, and more capable for everything.
link |
I don't think that's a hyperbolic statement.
link |
In fact, I know it's not a hyperbolic statement
link |
because we have a system in our body
link |
that connects our brain to all of our bodily organs
link |
and connects all of those bodily organs to our brain.
link |
And that communication between brain and body
link |
in both directions creates a situation
link |
where either we are positioned to do things well
link |
or we are positioned to do things poorly.
link |
So I really want to dive in and dissect
link |
what is this system of brain-body communication?
link |
What does it look like?
link |
What are the actual neurons and connections?
link |
I promise that I'm going to place protocols,
link |
tools that you can apply in order to make sure
link |
that those neurons and connections are working optimally.
link |
So let's begin by talking about what system
link |
communicates the brain to the body
link |
and the body back to the brain.
link |
The system that's most often associated with this
link |
is our 10th cranial nerve called the vagus nerve.
link |
The word vagus relates to the word vagabond,
link |
which is to wander.
link |
And indeed the vagus nerve is a vast,
link |
enormous wandering set of nerves.
link |
So it's not one nerve.
link |
It's not like one fiber, one axon, as we say.
link |
In the nervous system, we have these wires
link |
we call axons that let neurons communicate.
link |
It's a bunch of neurons and a bunch of wires
link |
that go everywhere.
link |
So where do they go?
link |
Well, they leave the brain and the brainstem.
link |
The brainstem is kind of the back of your brain.
link |
If you touch the back of your neck,
link |
it's about three inches deep to where you're touching.
link |
The neurons that are there send information
link |
into the body to control your bodily organs.
link |
How fast your heart is beating, how fast you're breathing,
link |
how fast your digestion is occurring.
link |
Even things like whether or not you are going to secrete
link |
so-called killer cells, your immune cells from your spleen
link |
to go ward off bacteria.
link |
Now, the neurons there don't know what to do
link |
unless they receive information about what's going on
link |
And within the body, your heart, your lungs, your diaphragm,
link |
your gut, so everything from your intestines
link |
to your stomach, et cetera, and your spleen
link |
are sending information also up to the brain.
link |
So as I mentioned before, it's a two-way street.
link |
So the vagus nerve is a very important nerve,
link |
but just by saying vagus nerve, it sounds like a singular.
link |
It sounds like one thing.
link |
But actually what we're talking about
link |
is a series of super highways.
link |
It's like Google maps.
link |
It's got stuff going everywhere with alternate routes,
link |
communicating back and forth.
link |
There are two fundamental features
link |
of what's going on in your body
link |
that need to be communicated to your brain,
link |
these neurons in your brainstem,
link |
in order for your brain and your body
link |
to work together correctly.
link |
And the two types of information are mechanical information.
link |
So things like pressure, things like lack of pressure,
link |
and chemical information, whether or not your gut is acidic
link |
or whether or not it's not acidic,
link |
whether or not you have some sort of pathogen,
link |
you know, something that you ate
link |
or that got into your body somehow and is making you sick,
link |
or whether or not you don't have a pathogen in your body.
link |
So you've got mechanical sensing and chemical sensing.
link |
So when you think about your sense of self
link |
and your ability to understand what's going on in your body,
link |
if you feel good or if you feel bad,
link |
your sense of self is dependent
link |
on these mechanical phenomenon and these chemical phenomenon.
link |
And for every organ in your body,
link |
whether or not that's your heart or your lungs
link |
or your spleen, both the mechanical information
link |
about that organ, for instance,
link |
is if your gut is full or empty,
link |
whether or not your heart is beating fast or beating slowly,
link |
that's mechanical, and chemical information,
link |
whether or not your gut feels nice
link |
and whether, you know, when I say nice,
link |
I mean whether or not it has a balance of acidity
link |
and alkalinity that feels right to you
link |
or whether or not your gut feels off,
link |
it doesn't feel quite right, that's chemical information.
link |
If you are not getting enough oxygen
link |
and levels of carbon dioxide and other gas go up too high,
link |
so your lungs can register that
link |
and that chemical information is sent to your brain
link |
and then your brain does certain things,
link |
actually it really encourages you to do certain things
link |
in order to adjust that chemistry.
link |
So the first principle that everyone should understand
link |
about their sense of self is that they are sensing
link |
mechanical and chemical information
link |
about every organ in their body, except for one,
link |
and that's the brain.
link |
Your brain actually doesn't have pain receptors,
link |
it doesn't even have touch receptors,
link |
the brain is a command center,
link |
it helps drive and govern changes in the organs of the body,
link |
but your brain doesn't move, at least not much,
link |
it can move a little bit, fluid moves within it,
link |
but as long as you're healthy, it's not moving that much.
link |
Your brain has no sensation of its own,
link |
in fact, when they do brain surgery on people,
link |
they will anesthetize or put some anesthesia on the scalp,
link |
they'll cut away the skin there
link |
so that people don't feel anything,
link |
they'll use some anesthesia, they'll peel back the skin,
link |
and then they'll use a, well, let's call it what it is,
link |
and they basically saw open a little window in the skull,
link |
I've actually done this before and seen this before,
link |
I've done this many times before,
link |
and once you're inside the brain,
link |
you can put electrodes in there
link |
and you can put various things in there,
link |
of course, all for therapeutic purposes,
link |
and you do that without any anesthesia
link |
to the actual brain tissue,
link |
because it has no receptors to sense anything,
link |
it doesn't have pain receptors,
link |
it doesn't have pressure receptors, none of that,
link |
when you have a headache
link |
and your head feels like there's too much pressure,
link |
well, that's because of receptors that lie outside the brain
link |
so your organs are different,
link |
they need to tell your brain what's going on,
link |
and there are ways that you can control the mechanical
link |
and the chemical state of your organs
link |
in ways that are very powerful,
link |
and this is crucial to do
link |
because if you can properly regulate
link |
the mechanical and chemical environment of your body,
link |
your brain functions better,
link |
this is absolutely clear from data
link |
that if your gut is healthy,
link |
if you get the alkalinity right, the acidity right,
link |
and if your spleen is healthy and happy,
link |
and if your lungs are working properly,
link |
not just breathing and pumping in and out air,
link |
but you're breathing at the right cadence
link |
for a particular activity,
link |
then your brain will function better,
link |
so let's talk about how you can adjust the mechanical
link |
and chemical environment of your organs
link |
in order to make your brain better,
link |
and how your brain can make the mechanical
link |
and chemical environment within your organs function better,
link |
for instance, we're going to talk about
link |
how you can change the chemistry of your gut
link |
in order for your brain to be able to focus better,
link |
think better, remember better, and sleep better,
link |
and we're going to talk about how you can change
link |
the chemistry of other organs in your body
link |
such that your immune system will function better
link |
than it would otherwise,
link |
and you can actually heal faster
link |
from small cuts and bruises,
link |
but also injuries of any kind, even major injuries,
link |
so as I mentioned before, we've got these organs,
link |
the heart, the lungs, the diaphragm,
link |
and I'll explain what that is, the gut and the spleen,
link |
and the spleen is this immune organ,
link |
let's take one example of these
link |
and explain how mechanical and chemical information
link |
from this particular set of organs
link |
communicates to the brain
link |
and how that changes how our brain works,
link |
and the organ I'd like to focus on first
link |
are the lungs and the diaphragm,
link |
so we're all familiar with our lungs,
link |
these two big bags of air,
link |
but they're actually not two big bags of air,
link |
they actually have little tiny sacs within them,
link |
actually millions of little sacs
link |
called the avioli of the lungs,
link |
the avioli of the lungs are like little tiny balloons
link |
throughout our lungs,
link |
and the more of those balloons we have,
link |
the more air that we can actually contain,
link |
so we are not two big bags of air in there, our lungs,
link |
we actually have millions and millions
link |
of little tiny bags of air within those lungs,
link |
those little bags of air can fill up
link |
or they can deflate, right?
link |
Just like your lungs overall can fill up
link |
or they can deflate,
link |
the diaphragm is a muscle,
link |
it's kind of shaped like a dome,
link |
so it's kind of a, you know,
link |
think about a basketball or a soccer ball
link |
that has most of the air pushed out of it,
link |
and so it's kind of crescent shape or dome shaped,
link |
and it sits below our lungs,
link |
and the way the diaphragm and the lungs work together
link |
is very interesting,
link |
the diaphragm is actually skeletal muscle,
link |
so it's just like a bicep or a quadricep,
link |
and the fact that it is skeletal muscle is important
link |
because it has a unique property,
link |
which is that you can control it voluntarily,
link |
you can decide to take control of your diaphragm
link |
by just consciously deciding
link |
you want to breathe in a particular way,
link |
just like you can take conscious control over your legs,
link |
they will work just fine
link |
if you're not thinking about them as you walk,
link |
as provided you already know how to walk,
link |
but at any moment you can decide to change the rate
link |
of your walking, your so-called cadence of walking,
link |
so the diaphragm as a skeletal muscle
link |
also has that property,
link |
the diaphragm moves up and down
link |
depending on how you breathe,
link |
or rather I should say how the diaphragm moves up and down
link |
determines how you breathe,
link |
how you breathe is also dependent on little muscles
link |
that are between your ribs,
link |
the intercostals and other muscles,
link |
if you're a martial arts fan,
link |
Bruce Lee was famous for having
link |
these very pronounced intercostals
link |
from doing all sorts of bridging exercise, et cetera,
link |
but those are the muscles,
link |
and we all have them even if some of us,
link |
most of us don't have intercostals like Bruce Lee,
link |
so when you breathe, a couple of things happen,
link |
but let's talk about the mechanical things first,
link |
and then let's talk about how those mechanical steps
link |
relate back to the brain and what that does for the brain,
link |
and I can promise you that if you develop an awareness
link |
of these mechanical changes,
link |
you do not have to go through extensive breath work practice
link |
or do extensive breath work,
link |
you will immediately, believe it or not,
link |
develop a sense of your breathing self,
link |
of your lungs and diaphragm,
link |
it takes no practice, but once you do it,
link |
you will forever be changed
link |
in terms of your awareness of your breathing
link |
and your ability to leverage your breathing,
link |
kind of like the steering wheel on a car
link |
in order to shift your brain
link |
in the direction that you want to go,
link |
so it's a very powerful system,
link |
and the way it works is the following,
link |
and this will also incorporate the heart,
link |
so, and by the heart, I don't mean it in the emotional sense
link |
although we don't rule out emotions
link |
here at the Huberman Lab Podcast, we like emotions,
link |
but I'm talking about the heart as an organ,
link |
as a beating organ that circulates blood,
link |
so when we inhale, these little sacs in our lungs fill up
link |
and our lungs expand, and when we do that,
link |
we take up space in our thoracic cavity
link |
and our diaphragm moves down, okay?
link |
When we exhale, the diaphragm moves up,
link |
the lungs get smaller, okay?
link |
So inhales, diaphragm moves down, exhales,
link |
diaphragm moves up, this actually controls our heart rate,
link |
but it does it by changing the way that our brain works,
link |
and it works in the following way,
link |
so when we inhale, our lungs fill, our diaphragm moves down,
link |
our heart actually has a little more space
link |
because the diaphragm's moved down,
link |
so the heart gets a little bit bigger, physically bigger,
link |
not in the emotional sense, but physically bigger,
link |
and as a consequence, whatever blood is in the heart
link |
flows at a slower rate because it's a larger volume,
link |
so bigger volume heart, same amount of blood inside the heart
link |
means slower flow, okay, sort of like expanding a pipe.
link |
The brain registers that
link |
because there are a set of neurons on the heart
link |
called the sinoatrial node,
link |
it sends that information to the brain,
link |
that information is registered by the brain,
link |
and the brain sends a message back to the heart
link |
to speed the heart up, so every time you inhale,
link |
because of these mechanical changes in the diaphragm and lungs
link |
and because of the mechanical changes in the heart,
link |
your brain sends a signal to the heart to speed the heart up,
link |
so if you do long inhales or you inhale more vigorously,
link |
you actually are speeding your heart up.
link |
Now, of course, you have to exhale as well,
link |
but for instance, if I were to inhale very long,
link |
like the entire time my heart rate is increasing,
link |
and then if I did a quick exhale, something else will happen
link |
but if I kept doing that, my heart rate would increase,
link |
it's not going to increase linearly and forever,
link |
but it will increase with each inhale,
link |
or I can simply make my inhales more vigorous
link |
and my heart rate will speed up,
link |
this is an autonomic and automatic relationship
link |
between the diaphragm, the lungs, the brain, and the heart.
link |
Now, if inhales speed the heart up, what happens on exhales?
link |
When we exhale, the diaphragm moves up,
link |
it's a little counterintuitive,
link |
but you can kind of think about it
link |
as like pushing the plunge on a syringe, right?
link |
When you exhale, this thing moves up,
link |
and as the diaphragm moves up, the heart has less space,
link |
meaning it gets a little bit smaller,
link |
which means that whatever volume of blood
link |
is inside the heart moves faster through that smaller volume
link |
that information is sent to the brain
link |
via these collection of neurons called the sinoatrial node
link |
for you aficionados.
link |
The brain then sends information via the vagus nerve
link |
back to the heart to slow the heart down.
link |
So while inhales speed up the heart, that's the net effect,
link |
exhales slow the heart down,
link |
and the reason they slow the heart down
link |
is because of a register in the change in mechanical pressure
link |
between the diaphragm, the lungs, and the heart.
link |
So this is, to me,
link |
the simplest and most straightforward example
link |
of how the brain is changing the way our organs work,
link |
our heart in this case,
link |
according to changes in mechanical interoception.
link |
Now, we're not always aware of this.
link |
Some of us are aware of it, some of us aren't.
link |
If you do it right now, you will be aware of it.
link |
So you can try this.
link |
Basically, this is an experiment or an example
link |
in interoception, in sensing one's self.
link |
So if you inhale, doesn't matter how long you inhale,
link |
I'll do it for a couple seconds,
link |
and then exhale twice as long.
link |
Nose or mouth, doesn't matter.
link |
The entire time that you're exhaling,
link |
you're slowing your heart down.
link |
So just as a car has an accelerator and a brake,
link |
or you can slow a car by coming off the accelerator,
link |
you're effectively coming off the accelerator,
link |
or if you want to think about it differently,
link |
you're hitting the brake.
link |
You're slowing down your heart rate.
link |
Now, normally your heart rate stays in more or less
link |
the same range for a given activity,
link |
because you're inhaling and exhaling.
link |
But this is just a simple way of showing
link |
that mechanical changes in your viscera
link |
can change the way that your brain works,
link |
and then your brain changes the way that those viscera work.
link |
And it's a very concrete agreements,
link |
like a contract between the organs of your body
link |
In fact, you can think about this contract
link |
and you can leverage this in a very powerful way
link |
to set the conditions of your mind.
link |
If you want to be more calm, emphasize exhales.
link |
And the simplest way to do this,
link |
I've talked about this many times before,
link |
but if you haven't heard me say it,
link |
this will become immediately clear,
link |
is to emphasize exhales
link |
through what's called a physiological sigh.
link |
Two inhales, could be through the nose or the mouth,
link |
but ideally through the nose.
link |
So, followed by a long exhale.
link |
Those double inhales are kind of important
link |
because what they do is they maximally fill
link |
all those little sacks in your lungs.
link |
And then when you breathe out,
link |
you're exhaling as much of the so-called carbon dioxide
link |
in your system as possible.
link |
We'll talk about carbon dioxide in a second.
link |
So the fastest way to calm down is to emphasize exhales.
link |
When you make exhales longer,
link |
you're slowing your heart rate, you're calming down.
link |
You don't need any sophisticated training.
link |
You don't have to do this for minutes on end.
link |
You don't have to do anything.
link |
You don't even have to call it breath work.
link |
It's just respiration.
link |
And in fact, you do this every night when you go to sleep
link |
and carbon dioxide builds up too much in your bloodstream,
link |
or if you hold your breath or something,
link |
or you watch an animal or a small child that's sleeping,
link |
they will occasionally do these double inhale long exhales.
link |
It's a way of slowing the heart down
link |
and eliminating carbon dioxide.
link |
The opposite is also true.
link |
If you inhale deeply or vigorously
link |
and then exhale less long or less vigorously,
link |
you will increase your level of alertness
link |
through these purely mechanical aspects
link |
of your interoception.
link |
So for instance, if I were to take a big, deep inhale
link |
and then a short exhale, and then another one,
link |
big inhale, short exhale,
link |
it only takes two or three of those
link |
before you start to feel more alert.
link |
And that's because your heart rate is increasing.
link |
And actually, if you keep doing that
link |
for 25 or 30 breaths of inhale deep, short exhale,
link |
you will start to secrete a lot of adrenaline.
link |
This hormone that comes from your kidneys
link |
and from your brainstem make you feel really alert.
link |
You will actually feel as if you've had a couple of espresso.
link |
You will immediately wake up.
link |
And there's an intermediate form of breathing,
link |
which is sometimes called box breathing,
link |
but it's really equal inhale and exhale duration.
link |
And these, it basically goes like this.
link |
You're going to inhale.
link |
So do this for maybe two, three seconds.
link |
Inhale, then hold, two, three seconds,
link |
then exhale, two, three seconds,
link |
then hold, two, three seconds.
link |
Most often people forget to hold.
link |
So it's inhale, hold, exhale, hold
link |
for equal or more or less equal duration.
link |
So it could be one second, could be two seconds,
link |
could be three seconds.
link |
Most people find that when you get out past five seconds,
link |
they start to struggle
link |
to maintain the so-called box breathing.
link |
And most people can't consciously box breathe
link |
for too terribly long without having to think about it.
link |
But the point here is that through purely mechanical means,
link |
changing the way that you breathe,
link |
emphasizing inhales or exhales or keeping them the same
link |
will change the way that your brain works,
link |
how alert you are and how well you function in anything.
link |
And again, this doesn't mean that breath work has no value.
link |
It's just simply to say that long extended protocols
link |
of breath work are simply,
link |
they are truly simply just an exploration
link |
of this fundamental relationship
link |
between the mechanics of your internal organs
link |
and how your brain controls those internal organs.
link |
Now, you might ask, well, how is this pressure known?
link |
How does the body actually know how full the lungs are?
link |
Now, this is an answer
link |
that's more for the aficionados out there,
link |
but I've had a few requests or I should say
link |
thousands of requests for more in-depth science.
link |
So if you're not interested in more in-depth science,
link |
just this will allow you to tune out now
link |
for maybe just 10 seconds.
link |
And if you are interested, pay careful attention.
link |
There is a set of receptors
link |
which are called piezoreceptors, P-I-E-Z-O, piezoreceptors.
link |
Piezo means pressure.
link |
And these were discovered a few years ago
link |
by a couple of different laboratories.
link |
But one of the main ones,
link |
one of the main laboratories
link |
that discovered these piezoreceptors
link |
is the laboratory of Ardem Padepuchen.
link |
I love saying his name,
link |
even though I'm probably pronouncing it.
link |
He's a friend and a former colleague.
link |
When my lab was down in San Diego,
link |
he's at the Scripps Institute.
link |
He's a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator,
link |
which just basically means that he's a total stud of science
link |
and has made many important discoveries.
link |
The piezoreceptors line many tissues
link |
and inform the brain about pressure in those tissues.
link |
But the lungs have a particular category of piezoreceptors
link |
called piezo two receptors.
link |
And as you fill your lungs
link |
and these little sacks of air, the alveoli fill,
link |
the piezo two receptors,
link |
because of the way they react to that filling,
link |
send information by way of a bunch of neurons,
link |
a bunch of wires up to the brain
link |
and tell you how full your lungs are.
link |
So that's the kind of mechanistic detail.
link |
If you want to learn more about that,
link |
you can look up Ardem's lab at the Scripps
link |
and the beautiful work that they
link |
and other laboratories are doing on piezos.
link |
Piezos are pretty cool.
link |
I think I also just like saying piezo.
link |
So that's why I brought that up as well.
link |
So mechanical sensing of the lungs, heart, and diaphragm.
link |
And now let's talk about chemical sensing
link |
because there's carbon dioxide and there's oxygen.
link |
And this is really simple.
link |
You have oxygen and carbon dioxide and you need them both.
link |
I sometimes hear people talk about carbon dioxide
link |
as this bad thing and oxygen as a good thing.
link |
You need them both
link |
and you need them in the appropriate balance.
link |
You have a collection of neurons in your brain
link |
that register when carbon dioxide levels
link |
get to a certain point in your bloodstream.
link |
When that point, that threshold is reached,
link |
these neurons fire and they cause you to breathe.
link |
It's sometimes called the gasp reflex.
link |
It just makes you want to inhale.
link |
And as a consequence, you bring in more oxygen.
link |
So we don't really breathe to get oxygen.
link |
That's a by-product of inhaling
link |
to eliminate carbon dioxide.
link |
You don't want carbon dioxide levels to go too high.
link |
In fact, if you want to freak somebody out
link |
and we do these in experiments
link |
and I don't recommend you do this,
link |
you just increase the levels of carbon dioxide
link |
that they inhale and the brain will go
link |
into an almost immediate panic response
link |
because the health of all our tissues depends
link |
on keeping a nice balance between carbon dioxide and oxygen.
link |
You don't want carbon dioxide levels to go too high.
link |
So the impulse to breathe, if you're underwater
link |
or if you hold your breath is triggered by these neurons.
link |
And the triggering of those neurons
link |
comes from elevated carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.
link |
And for those of you that don't quite know
link |
how to conceptualize the relationship
link |
between bloodstream and breath,
link |
I do think it's important.
link |
And maybe you remember this from high school biology
link |
but if you don't, I'll make it clear for you now.
link |
You inhale air and that air and the oxygen molecules
link |
in that air actually move from your lungs
link |
into the bloodstream because these little avioli
link |
of the lungs, those little sacks of air,
link |
they basically have a lot of little micro vessels
link |
and capillaries, little tiny, basically blood vessels
link |
essentially, although they're mostly capillaries,
link |
micro capillaries, little tiny ones that line them.
link |
So there's actually an interface, an opportunity
link |
for air and molecules within the air to pass into the blood
link |
and then they move in your bloodstream.
link |
And when you exhale, the opposite is true.
link |
So you can move things from the air into your bloodstream
link |
or from your bloodstream into the air by way of the lungs.
link |
And there's a lot more detail to it.
link |
And I'm sure those of you that are experts out there,
link |
if you want to put some stuff in the comments,
link |
maybe a little bit of an kind of intermediate tutorial,
link |
you might even title it intermediate tutorial.
link |
If you know a lot about this, just I'll check it,
link |
but make sure you get the details right.
link |
Make sure you know the process.
link |
And I find that for people that are interested
link |
in understanding how breathing really works,
link |
it's really nice to think about the relationship
link |
between the heart and the vascular system,
link |
the blood and the air system,
link |
the respiration system and breathing,
link |
because those two things are very,
link |
we say they're interdigitated,
link |
they're interwoven with one another.
link |
So how's this work?
link |
Well, carbon dioxide is too high.
link |
You breathe in, you inspire, you inhale.
link |
As a consequence, when you exhale,
link |
you offload carbon dioxide.
link |
There's a really cool way that you can explore
link |
this chemistry of your breathing and your bloodstream
link |
and the way that your brain works
link |
in ways that can really benefit your health.
link |
And it works the following way.
link |
You want to essentially sit or lie down.
link |
It doesn't really matter.
link |
You definitely don't want to be anywhere near water,
link |
not a bathtub, not a hot tub,
link |
not a, you know, not a cold dunk or something.
link |
In fact, don't even be in a puddle.
link |
And what you want to do in this case
link |
is you're going to breathe in deep,
link |
so that's going to increase your heart rate,
link |
and then exhale passively
link |
by just letting air fall out of your mouth.
link |
So it would look something like this.
link |
So let's say you breathe in vigorously
link |
and then you let the air just fall out of your mouth.
link |
When you do that, what you're essentially doing
link |
is you're bringing in a lot of oxygen
link |
through that deep breath,
link |
and you're exhaling a little bit of that carbon dioxide.
link |
But if you were to repeat it 25 times, maybe 30 times,
link |
it doesn't matter if it's 25 or 30, somewhere in there,
link |
you would essentially start bringing in a lot of oxygen
link |
and blowing off or exhaling a lot of carbon dioxide.
link |
So you're actually going to change the chemistry
link |
of your internal landscape and you can then sense it.
link |
You can interocept what that is like.
link |
And there are some really interesting reasons
link |
for wanting to do that.
link |
So I'm not going to do all 25 or 30 now,
link |
maybe do five or 10,
link |
so you can get a sense of what it looks like
link |
so that it's clear.
link |
I'm going to essentially demonstrate now.
link |
So it's inhale, exhale through the mouth.
link |
I am inhaling through the nose.
link |
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
link |
So it's essentially, excuse me,
link |
a two second or so inhale,
link |
and then a one second or so exhale.
link |
And as I was doing that,
link |
I can kind of feel my face get flush
link |
and my body is heating up and my brain is heating up.
link |
What's happening there?
link |
Well, that pattern of breathing is increasing levels
link |
of adrenaline in my brain and body,
link |
and I'm getting more alert.
link |
Then after 25 or 30 of those, you exhale all your air.
link |
You dump all your air.
link |
You can do that your nose or your mouth.
link |
And then you hold your breath with your lungs empty
link |
for about 15 to 30 seconds.
link |
Now, for those of you that want to explore this,
link |
and please be careful as you explore this,
link |
don't do anything stupid,
link |
like do this while you're driving or something like that.
link |
You can exhale all your air.
link |
And what you'll find then is you can hold your breath
link |
for a very long time.
link |
And the reason you can do that
link |
is because you've blown off all the carbon dioxide
link |
or most of the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream.
link |
So you've shifted the chemistry of your blood
link |
by breathing in a particular way.
link |
And by doing that, you are no longer triggering
link |
these neurons that cause the gasp reflex
link |
or the reflex to breathe.
link |
Now, of course, you have to breathe sooner or later,
link |
but what you'll find is if normally your ability
link |
to hold your breath is a minute or so
link |
before you really feel that gasp reflex kick in,
link |
you might find that you can go 90 seconds or two minutes.
link |
And with some practice,
link |
people find that they can start holding their breath
link |
for three or four minutes or longer.
link |
This is actually how free divers do what they do.
link |
I do not want anyone free diving.
link |
If you're going to learn free diving,
link |
please learn it from an expert.
link |
Many people die trying to teach themselves out of free dive
link |
or trying to teach their friends out of free dive
link |
when they don't know what they're doing.
link |
This is not what this is about.
link |
Again, don't do this anywhere near water,
link |
but it is a very interesting exploration
link |
of how you can shift the chemistry of your bloodstream
link |
by modulating your air,
link |
by modulating the mechanics of your diaphragm and lungs,
link |
and thereby shift the way your mind works, your brain.
link |
In fact, what you'll notice is that even though
link |
during that 25 or 30 breaths, you'll feel very alert.
link |
When you exhale all your air and you're in the breath hold,
link |
you will feel very alert, but very, very calm.
link |
Now, this is interesting because it's a state
link |
that we all sort of want to achieve, alert but calm,
link |
but have a hard time achieving.
link |
And so for those of you that have a hard time
link |
obtaining focus for sake of work
link |
or focus for sake of anything, I should say,
link |
and when you are able to achieve focus,
link |
it's through the use of things like stimulants,
link |
or you feel like you have to have a cold shower or ice bath,
link |
or you have to have four espresso in order to be alert,
link |
but then you're too alert, you're jittery, you can't focus.
link |
This pattern of breathing can lend itself very well
link |
to entering states of alert but calm
link |
for the 10 or even 20 minutes that follow that breathing.
link |
And then you could repeat it if you want.
link |
So it's a very useful practice to explore.
link |
Some of you may be familiar with this practice
link |
and so-called Wim Hof breathing.
link |
Wim Hof is a practitioner of what's called tumor breathing.
link |
Tumor breathing has been around for centuries.
link |
And for those of you that are familiar with breath work
link |
and yoga practices, I acknowledge that nothing
link |
I just described is new based on science.
link |
However, the science informs why those practices work.
link |
And just as a little mini editorial,
link |
I just want to emphasize as well that one thing
link |
that this podcast is really about is trying to remove
link |
fancy nomenclature, whether or not it's yogic nomenclature
link |
or scientific nomenclature so that people
link |
can access protocols.
link |
Because the moment we start naming things after people
link |
or calling them tumor, et cetera,
link |
I have no problem with that,
link |
but it doesn't inform how the practices are done,
link |
nor does it inform the underlying mechanisms.
link |
So here I'm trying to teach you the mechanisms.
link |
And as a final point to that,
link |
the most powerful form of breathing is the one
link |
that takes into account the fundamental mechanisms
link |
that inhales increased heart rate,
link |
that exhales decrease heart rate,
link |
and that carbon dioxide and oxygen relate to the bloodstream
link |
and the brain in particular ways.
link |
Once you understand those components,
link |
then you can create your own so-called breath work practices.
link |
You can breathe in the ways that best serve you,
link |
as opposed to thinking that one protocol is the best
link |
or holy protocol for everything, because it's simply not.
link |
As a final, final point, I want to say that as you shift
link |
the way that you breathe,
link |
whether or not you're blowing off more carbon dioxide
link |
or bringing in more oxygen,
link |
you are fundamentally changing the chemistry
link |
of your internal milieu of your body.
link |
And that has been shown to have important effects
link |
on the way that your immune system functions
link |
and the way that you deal with inflammation
link |
and all sorts of different sort of things
link |
that can enter your body and cause problems
link |
or conditions of stress, et cetera.
link |
So I will explore that further as the episode goes on,
link |
but I want to move on to just touch on one other aspect
link |
of breathing that's purely mechanical,
link |
which I think is very interesting and important,
link |
which relates to a particular reflex
link |
that you're going to be very familiar with in a second
link |
and that can serve you very well in times of extreme stress.
link |
The reflex I'm referring to is something called
link |
the Herring-Brewer reflex.
link |
I'm not going to go into details
link |
about how the Herring-Brewer reflex works,
link |
but it has to do with particular classes of neurons
link |
and cells that are called a baroreceptors.
link |
Those are basically pressure receptors.
link |
They sense pressure.
link |
And basically what the Herring-Brewer reflex is about
link |
is that when your lung is inflated,
link |
your desire to breathe is reduced.
link |
So you can try that right now.
link |
You can inhale huge big thing of air and hold, okay?
link |
Your desire to breathe will kick in later
link |
than were you to exhale all your air and hold your breath.
link |
When you exhale all your air and hold your breath,
link |
unless you've done the sort of protocol
link |
I described a few minutes ago
link |
of doing a bunch of inhales and exhales first
link |
in a very deliberate way, you will feel empty.
link |
Those baroreceptors are going to be firing like crazy
link |
saying there's no pressure in here.
link |
There's no pressure in here.
link |
I got nothing in here.
link |
You need to breathe.
link |
You need to breathe and the gas reflex will kick in sooner.
link |
You can apply that in all sorts of situations
link |
related to exercise, related to modulating stress, et cetera.
link |
So the Herring-Brewer reflex is a very powerful one.
link |
This is why you take a big deep breath
link |
before you go underwater, all right?
link |
You're not going to exhale all your air and go underwater.
link |
If you were to exhale all your air and go underwater,
link |
you would absolutely feel the need to come up sooner
link |
for a breath of air than had you a full tank, so to speak,
link |
a full lungs full of air.
link |
And this is also the way that people teach themselves
link |
to feel comfortable underwater.
link |
So when you learn how to swim, you learn how to swim
link |
both by having air in your lungs while you're underwater
link |
and no air in your lungs while you're underwater.
link |
In any event, the Herring-Brewer reflex
link |
is yet another dimension to the way
link |
that mechanical pressure influences
link |
your brain's decision-making about what to do
link |
with your body, in this case, whether or not to breathe.
link |
So now I want to shift away from breathing
link |
and diaphragm and lungs and move toward another organ
link |
within our viscera, which is our gut.
link |
So this includes our stomach and our intestines,
link |
our esophagus and so forth.
link |
It's been said before, both by me and by others,
link |
that we are but a series of tubes.
link |
And indeed, that's true.
link |
Believe it or not, every system in your body is a tube.
link |
Your brain is actually a tube
link |
that connects to your spinal cord, which is also a tube.
link |
You started off as a tube.
link |
You were like a churro, you know, those like churros,
link |
I don't know if you're not familiar with churros,
link |
they're like donuts that are shaped like a tube.
link |
That's essentially what you look like early in development,
link |
not long after conception.
link |
And the front end of that churro grew and grew and grew,
link |
but you always maintained a hollow through that tube.
link |
That's why you have what are called ventricles, gaps,
link |
or a space in your brain and spinal cord
link |
that run the length of your brain and spinal cord
link |
and fluid, cerebral spinal fluid
link |
and other things move through that space.
link |
We're going to return to the ventricles later.
link |
They are very, very important.
link |
They're just space filled with fluid, but they do a lot.
link |
Similarly, your digestive system starts with the tube
link |
at your mouth and of course goes down through your throat.
link |
And then you've got all the elements of the stomach
link |
and the intestines, and then it comes out the other end.
link |
So you are, but a series of different tubes,
link |
your vascular system, a series of other tubes.
link |
So your tubes, the way your digestive system works
link |
is to communicate to your brain about the status
link |
of the mechanical pressures along this tube.
link |
So within your stomach and your intestines, et cetera,
link |
and the chemical status of that tube
link |
at various portions within that tube
link |
to inform your brain about how your brain
link |
should control that tube.
link |
So let's start with the mechanical sensing of your gut.
link |
If you drink a lot of fluid, or if you eat a lot of food,
link |
your gut will fill up.
link |
Your stomach will fill up with food.
link |
Now it gets digested there.
link |
It gets digested elsewhere along your digestive tract too,
link |
of course, but it starts getting digested there
link |
because along this tube, you have a series
link |
of what are called sphincters,
link |
which basically are like little draw pulls.
link |
Have you ever had a laundry bag
link |
where it has a drawstring on it?
link |
You pull it and then it cinches shut
link |
and then you can open it again.
link |
That's what those are.
link |
Those are sphincter openings
link |
and you have them in your throat.
link |
You have them along your digestive tract
link |
all the way to the end.
link |
Food will enter your gut.
link |
And if there's a lot of that food, pressure receptors,
link |
some of which are these piezo receptors,
link |
will communicate to the areas of your brain
link |
that are involved in feeding and will say,
link |
don't eat anymore.
link |
You don't need to consume anymore.
link |
Now, some people bypass that.
link |
I guess they have these like hotdog eating competitions.
link |
I'm always struck by how some of those people
link |
seem to be rail thin,
link |
but they actually train for those competitions
link |
by ingesting large volumes of water.
link |
Actually a very dangerous practice.
link |
You can actually kill yourself by drinking too much water
link |
and you can kill yourself by ingesting too much
link |
of anything really to expand your gut.
link |
Not a good practice, not a big fan of those competitions,
link |
but even if you're one of those people
link |
or you're the world heavyweight champion of them,
link |
they are informative toward what I'm talking about now,
link |
which is that as you expand the gut,
link |
a signal is sent by neurons,
link |
literally nerve cells that are in the gut
link |
to the brainstem up to the areas of the brain
link |
that are involved in feeding.
link |
I did a whole episode on feeding.
link |
You can find on feeding metabolism and hunger.
link |
You're welcome to listen to that episode if you like.
link |
And it will shut down the neurons
link |
that drive the desire to put more stuff in your mouth.
link |
That thing that people say sometimes on,
link |
well, in this country frequently after Thanksgiving meal,
link |
I can't put another bite in my mouth.
link |
Literally they shut down some of the basic movements
link |
of the musculature to take another fork bite.
link |
I know it sounds crazy,
link |
but they can actually control your brain.
link |
So your gut is so full that it's controlling your brain
link |
such that this action of spooning food
link |
towards your mouth is actually inhibited.
link |
It's made more difficult or less likely to occur.
link |
The converse is also true.
link |
When these piezo receptors signal to the brain
link |
that the gut is empty,
link |
independent of your need, your actual need for food,
link |
there's a signal that's sent to your brain
link |
that says gut is empty and neurons get stimulated
link |
in areas like the arcuate nucleus
link |
and these areas of the hypothalamus, et cetera,
link |
that drive the desire to make this action to open the mouth
link |
and to put stuff in it, in particular food.
link |
So when you find yourself at the refrigerator
link |
or you find yourself almost manically trying
link |
to get food of different kinds,
link |
you're not even thinking about what you're eating
link |
because you're so hungry.
link |
In part, that's because the lack of food in your gut
link |
has sent that information to your brain
link |
and is driving particular fixed action patterns
link |
that are associated with eating.
link |
In fact, one of the first things children learn how to do
link |
is open their mouth when something is presented to it.
link |
And then they learn how to move a spoon or a fork.
link |
They're not very good at it.
link |
First, they get all over the place,
link |
but eventually they get good at it,
link |
at least most people get good at it.
link |
If you watch how people eat,
link |
it's kind of variable out there.
link |
In any event, this is a purely mechanical phenomenon.
link |
And this purely mechanical phenomenon is driving our brain
link |
to drive certain behavior.
link |
You can get better at registering sense of fullness
link |
or lack of fullness in a very particular way.
link |
Some people have a very keen sense
link |
of how full or empty their stomach is.
link |
So if you've eaten anything,
link |
even if it's a small volume of food
link |
in the last hour to three hours,
link |
it's actually a worthwhile practice
link |
to take a few moments, maybe 10, 20 seconds,
link |
and actually just try and concentrate
link |
on sensing the neurons in your gut and how full you are.
link |
Like for instance, I ate a few hours ago,
link |
then I had a little snack about 30 minutes ago or so,
link |
and my gut feels neither terribly full nor terribly empty.
link |
It's kind of, I would put it at kind of like 30, 40%.
link |
So by just taking conscious awareness
link |
of how full or empty our gut is at various times,
link |
between meals, after a meal, before a meal,
link |
you can very quickly develop a sense
link |
of how full or empty you are.
link |
Now, what's the consequence of that?
link |
The consequence of that is actually rather interesting.
link |
It's been shown that the consequence of that
link |
is actually that you can better override the signals
link |
of these piezo receptors and gut fullness or emptiness.
link |
So for those of you that find that you eat
link |
kind of compulsively or non-consciously,
link |
or subconsciously, I should say,
link |
probably have to be conscious enough to be awake to eat,
link |
but subconsciously, you just find yourself eating,
link |
and here I'm describing myself.
link |
I'm a drive-by blueberry eater.
link |
If there's a bowl of blueberries,
link |
every time I walk past it,
link |
I sort of have to grab a handful of them
link |
and pop them in my mouth.
link |
But if you develop this sense of how much mechanopressure,
link |
it's not really a word,
link |
but how much mechanosensation is in your gut,
link |
very quickly you can learn to override that.
link |
You might ask, why would I want to be able to override
link |
whether or not my stomach is empty or my stomach is full?
link |
Well, there are many reasons to want to do that.
link |
Many people right now are interested
link |
in so-called intermittent fasting.
link |
They're doing fasts of anywhere from 12 to 16 hours
link |
every 24-hour cycle.
link |
That's actually what my practice is.
link |
I do that on a regular basis.
link |
Sometimes, yeah, I eat breakfast,
link |
but normally I push breakfast out till about 11 or noon
link |
or sometimes a little later.
link |
Some people are doing longer fasts,
link |
and there are really wonderful data
link |
published in excellent journals
link |
from my colleague Sachin Panda
link |
at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies,
link |
and of course from other laboratories
link |
showing that intermittent fasting
link |
can and will have some positive health effects
link |
on things like liver health and brain health
link |
and other aspects of health.
link |
Whether or not it's the best form of dieting
link |
for the sake of losing weight, that's very controversial,
link |
but it's clear that having a period of fasting
link |
every 24 hours or perhaps even longer from time to time
link |
can be beneficial because it stimulates
link |
what's called autophagy, the clearing away
link |
or the body's ability to eat certain dead cells,
link |
so-called senescent cells.
link |
And for many people, they struggle with fasting
link |
because they feel they have a very keen sense
link |
of their stomach being empty,
link |
and they feel as if they have to eat.
link |
And in a kind of counterintuitive way,
link |
there's some data that indicate that being able to sense
link |
whether or not your gut is full or empty
link |
and just the knowledge that that's communicating information
link |
to your brain about whether to not to eat or not.
link |
Just that awareness, that understanding
link |
allows them to override the signal.
link |
They think, oh, you know, I'm not actually
link |
in need of nutrients right now.
link |
It's just that my stomach is empty
link |
and these piezo receptors and some other ones
link |
that I'll tell you about in a moment
link |
are signaling to my brain that it's empty.
link |
I don't actually need food.
link |
It's just that my brain is reacting to the fact
link |
that my gut is deflated, so to speak,
link |
or is smaller, doesn't have food in it.
link |
So there are other ways that our guts
link |
communicate with our brain.
link |
It's not just our stomach talking to our brain.
link |
It's also our intestines talk to our brain.
link |
The Lieberle's lab, the guy's name is Steven Lieberle's.
link |
He runs a lab at Harvard Medical School,
link |
his terrific lab, does excellent work
link |
on gut brain communication and other aspects
link |
of viscera brain communication.
link |
They discovered a category of neurons
link |
called the GLP-1R neurons.
link |
These are neurons that are basically in your neck.
link |
I mean, they're part of the nervous system,
link |
but they can be found near your neck.
link |
And those neurons send little wires down
link |
into the intestines and deep into the stomach,
link |
but mostly into the intestines,
link |
and they sense stretch of your intestines.
link |
So this is pretty wild.
link |
These neurons sense how stretched out your intestines are
link |
and how fast things are moving through your intestines,
link |
slow or fast, or if there's nothing there.
link |
And then those neurons send another branch.
link |
So they have a branch in one direction,
link |
senses what's going on in your intestines,
link |
and they have another branch that goes up from your neck
link |
into your brain to either trigger the desire to eat more
link |
or just stop eating.
link |
So these are really, really cool neurons,
link |
and they're basically stretch receptors.
link |
They look a lot like the piezo receptors
link |
that we talked about before.
link |
So these GLP-1R neurons are sensing stretch,
link |
so purely mechanical sensing.
link |
And in addition to that, the Lieberle's lab
link |
discovered neurons that detect nutrients themselves.
link |
Now, the main reason why we need to eat
link |
is to bring nutrients into our body.
link |
And there is another set of neurons,
link |
those are called GPR-65 neurons,
link |
if you want to know that you don't have to remember that,
link |
that do the same thing in terms of their connections.
link |
They send connections down into the intestines
link |
and into the gut, into the stomach,
link |
but mostly into the intestines,
link |
and then send that information back up to the brain
link |
as to whether or not there are certain kinds of nutrients
link |
in our digestive tract.
link |
Now, these neurons are the ones to pay attention to
link |
if we're talking about chemical signaling.
link |
And in the next couple of minutes,
link |
I'm going to tell you about how you can understand hunger
link |
and how to modulate your hunger for the right foods,
link |
in fact, for healthy foods.
link |
The way this is done is by leveraging the activity
link |
of these GPR-65 neurons, these neurons that sense nutrients.
link |
They're telling your brain
link |
what's in your gut and intestines.
link |
And you have another set of neurons
link |
that were discovered by another guy.
link |
He's out at Duke University.
link |
His name is Diego, excuse me, Diego.
link |
Diego Borges, he's a wonderful scientist.
link |
He has a degree in nutrition, but also in neuroscience.
link |
And he found that there are neurons that line the gut
link |
and those neurons, in collaboration with these GPR-65 neurons
link |
are sensing for three things, okay?
link |
So we say nutrients, which nutrients are they looking for?
link |
What are these neurons paying attention to?
link |
Well, these neurons are activated
link |
by the presence of fatty acids,
link |
in particular, omega-3 fatty acids,
link |
sorts of things that come from fatty fish, fish oil, krill,
link |
certain kinds of animal and plant substances.
link |
You can look up what has a lot of omega-3s.
link |
And those omega-3s make these neurons fire electrically
link |
like crazy up to the brain
link |
and make you want to eat more of those things,
link |
but it turns out in pretty appropriate levels.
link |
These neurons also respond to amino acids.
link |
So when you eat a food, it's broken down in the gut.
link |
Actually, the way it's broken down in the gut
link |
is kind of interesting.
link |
Your gut basically cinches off a sphincter up top,
link |
cinches off a sphincter below it when there's food there.
link |
And then you have a series of smooth muscles
link |
that tumble the food
link |
and literally physically break it down.
link |
And then of course,
link |
enzymes come in and start digesting the food.
link |
And we're going to talk about digestion
link |
and how that's communicated to the brain in a moment.
link |
And for those of you with any autoimmune issues
link |
or digestive issues,
link |
this is going to be a very important conversation.
link |
But meanwhile, there are these neurons in the gut.
link |
And as these fatty acids float out of the digested food,
link |
so literally fat molecules,
link |
and as amino acids are coming from the proteins
link |
as they're digested in the gut,
link |
and as a third food item,
link |
sugars are coming from the foods that we eat.
link |
These neurons will fire a lot to the brain that says,
link |
hey, whatever you're doing up there, do more of it, okay?
link |
Now the sugars are a little bit cryptic
link |
because when I say sugars or I say amino acids,
link |
or I say fatty acids,
link |
this has nothing to do with taste.
link |
In fact, beautiful experiments have been done
link |
by the Borges lab and by other labs showing
link |
that even if you numb the mouth,
link |
even if you gavage,
link |
which is a really just a,
link |
it's a fancy word for basically tube feeding,
link |
you put a tube down in the gut,
link |
you just deliver the food to the gut
link |
so you get no opportunity to taste it.
link |
Sounds pretty awful.
link |
If you force feed by gavage or you numb the mouth,
link |
these neurons don't care about the mouth,
link |
they only care about the nutrients coming from these foods
link |
and then they signal to the brain,
link |
hey, do that thing,
link |
do that thing where you lift that object
link |
we call a fork or a spoon,
link |
do that thing where you drink the milkshake,
link |
do that thing where you move your mouth like this,
link |
not talking, but do that thing where you swallow.
link |
So that's how the nutrients in our gut control us
link |
and this is why for people
link |
that experience extreme sugar cravings
link |
or even mild sugar cravings,
link |
replacing those foods with foods
link |
that have high levels of omega-3 or amino acids
link |
can reduce sugar cravings
link |
and I've talked about this on a previous episode,
link |
but if you didn't catch it, no big deal,
link |
I'll tell you right now that for many people,
link |
the solution to sugar cravings is to ingest a small amount,
link |
maybe a teaspoon or so of an amino acid called glutamine
link |
and if you have really extreme sugar cravings,
link |
you can even mix that glutamine with a full fat cream,
link |
which actually makes it taste pretty darn good,
link |
and you drink that anytime you have a sugar craving,
link |
just a sip or two of that
link |
and what you find is that the sugar cravings disappear
link |
because you're basically giving fat and amino acids
link |
to those neurons in the gut and in the intestine
link |
that signal to the brain that you want more.
link |
Now, this doesn't give you a kind of runaway hunger
link |
for full fat cream,
link |
although it will say when I was in high school
link |
for various reasons,
link |
but mostly because I liked the way it tastes,
link |
I was using half and half in my cereal
link |
and I was waking up in the middle of the night
link |
and drinking half and half
link |
and that stuff tastes pretty darn good
link |
once you get used to the high fat content,
link |
not something I do now,
link |
but the point is these neurons don't really know taste,
link |
they only know nutrients
link |
and so you can work with that system.
link |
If you crave sugar and I do believe that most,
link |
if not all of us should be trying to limit,
link |
if not eliminate simple sugars as much as possible
link |
then things like glutamine,
link |
things like high omega-3 foods, et cetera,
link |
maybe even want to supplement with fish oil
link |
or something similar to get omega-3s,
link |
there are other reasons for wanting to do that too,
link |
can be very beneficial
link |
and here's what we're talking about is interoception.
link |
It's your ability to sense your inner real estate,
link |
but in this case by way of chemical signaling,
link |
not by way of mechanical signaling.
link |
So now I'd like to talk about another aspect
link |
of gut chemistry that has profound effects on the brain
link |
as well as on the immune system
link |
and for those of you with autoimmune conditions
link |
or for those of you that know people with autoimmune
link |
this is going to be a very important discussion.
link |
Your gut needs to maintain a certain level of acidity
link |
For those of you without any chemistry background,
link |
basically the low numbers on the pH scale,
link |
that means more acidic.
link |
The higher the numbers, more alkaline.
link |
So more alkaline means more basic
link |
and acidic means acidic
link |
and it has to do with number of hydrogen atoms
link |
and all this other stuff,
link |
you don't need to worry about that right now.
link |
We're not going to pH your gut right now,
link |
but we are going to talk about the pH of your gut.
link |
Your gut needs to be more acidic
link |
than essentially all other tissues of your body
link |
in order to function properly.
link |
Bacteria thrive in alkaline conditions.
link |
I think this is important for people to understand.
link |
People are always thinking,
link |
oh, you should be more alkaline,
link |
being acidic that almost sounds like being inflamed.
link |
Well, it's a complicated discussion,
link |
but I think the semantics can be confusing sometimes.
link |
You want your gut to be acidic.
link |
You may ask, well, why are people taking anti-acids?
link |
Well, those anti-acids are there for a particular purpose
link |
to essentially combat acid reflux,
link |
which is the sending up of stuff in the gut
link |
towards the esophagus and it can cause heartburn
link |
and things of that sort.
link |
And the way that anti-acids work
link |
is they essentially cause the sphincters
link |
above the gut to cinch shut,
link |
but they really are only dealing with a symptom,
link |
So rewind about 10, 20 years ago,
link |
the discussion about gut acidity
link |
was quite a bit different than it is now
link |
in the scientific and medical literature.
link |
In fact, for many years,
link |
long before I'm going to say it here,
link |
people have been saying that it's important
link |
to maintain proper acidity of the gut,
link |
but the science and medical professions
link |
sort of looked at that as a kind of a scants,
link |
like, you know, what's going on there?
link |
I don't know that there's any evidence
link |
that that's actually true.
link |
There are communities of people that were prescribing,
link |
recommending that people take hydrochloric acid, HCL,
link |
and adjusting gut acidity that way.
link |
And it was kind of frowned upon.
link |
Now, in looking over the peer reviewed literature,
link |
it's clear that this business
link |
of trying to make the gut a little more acidic
link |
is actually one way in which people treat
link |
or try and ameliorate acid reflux.
link |
So it's kind of counterintuitive,
link |
increasing acidity in the gut
link |
to try and reduce acid reflux.
link |
I thought you're supposed to take antacids.
link |
Well, the field has shifted quite a bit.
link |
And so we're going to review what it is
link |
to maintain the chemistry of the gut
link |
at a slightly more acidic level
link |
or a more acidic level, I should say,
link |
because it turns out that there are a number of things
link |
that are in gut, I just call it what it is.
link |
It's gastric juice, sounds kind of gross,
link |
but gastric juices are actually powerful modulators
link |
Put differently, one of the best things that you can do
link |
to have a healthy brain, a well-functioning brain
link |
and a healthy and well-functioning body
link |
is to maintain proper gut chemistry.
link |
And that's basically accomplished
link |
by getting the right level of acidity
link |
and alkalinity in your gut.
link |
Now, this is not quack pseudoscience.
link |
This is not based on cleanses or anything of that sort.
link |
What we're going to talk about now are peer reviewed data
link |
in very high quality journals, like the journal Cell,
link |
which is one of the three apex journals,
link |
Science, Nature, Cell,
link |
and journals of that sort that point to the gut microbiome
link |
and its relationship to acidity of the gut
link |
and how the gut microbiome
link |
can help enhance autoimmune function
link |
and various other aspects of brain and body health.
link |
So within all the mucosal line tissues of our body,
link |
we have what are called microbiota,
link |
little microorganisms that we didn't make
link |
that actually come from our environment or our food
link |
and live inside us.
link |
And there are good microbiota and there are bad microbiota.
link |
Whether or not we have good microbiota or bad microbiota
link |
depends on one thing.
link |
And that one thing is how acid or alkaline
link |
the given mucosal tissue is.
link |
So we actually have a microbiome in our nose.
link |
And just as a very brief aside,
link |
because I'd be remiss if I didn't say this,
link |
if you emphasize nasal breathing,
link |
most of the time, except when speaking or eating,
link |
and if you downplay mouth breathing,
link |
meaning you refrain from mouth breathing,
link |
especially in sleep,
link |
you improve the nasal microbiome.
link |
It gets better at fighting off infections.
link |
This was shown in a beautiful paper
link |
published in Cell Reports last year.
link |
And that paper I should mention was performed in humans.
link |
So you've got a microbiome in your nose
link |
and by nasal breathing most of the time,
link |
because there can be times when you need to breathe
link |
through your mouth for whatever reason,
link |
hard exercise or eating or speaking,
link |
but by breathing through your nose most of the time,
link |
you are creating an additional layer of immune defense
link |
against particles that could get you sick.
link |
Whereas when you mouth breathe,
link |
you are taking down a layer of defense
link |
and you are putting yourself more at risk of infection.
link |
This is what this paper shows.
link |
You also have a gut microbiome that is in your throat,
link |
in your stomach and in your intestines.
link |
And that gut microbiome is extremely powerful
link |
in regulating your mood and your immune function.
link |
Now, this is not something that you can sense directly.
link |
You don't know when you have a bunch of good microbiota
link |
or a bunch of bad microbiota
link |
because you can feel them moving around in there.
link |
Actually, that would be pretty awful.
link |
That would be pretty creepy feeling.
link |
Rather, that according to whether or not your gut
link |
is alkaline or acidic in the appropriate ways,
link |
you will populate your gut with the appropriate microbiota.
link |
So you want your stomach to be pretty acidic,
link |
but other elements of your digestive tract
link |
are going to be more pH.
link |
And basically there's a gradient,
link |
meaning there's a low to high pH gradient along the gut.
link |
You don't have to know what the pH
link |
should be at any one given point
link |
because you're not going to go
link |
and put microbiota at one location and not another.
link |
What you essentially want to do is create an environment
link |
where the proper microbiota can thrive.
link |
Because when you do that,
link |
you greatly decrease what are called inflammatory cytokines.
link |
So these are things that are secreted
link |
both by cells within the body and cells within the brain
link |
to impact brain health and brain function
link |
and bodily health.
link |
They go by a particular name.
link |
So there's something called TNF alpha,
link |
tumor necrosis factor alpha.
link |
It is inflammatory.
link |
It's not a good thing to have at elevated levels.
link |
You have something called interleukin-6 IL-6
link |
also causes inflammation, causes damage to tissues.
link |
Not a good thing to have for elevated
link |
for long periods of time.
link |
And then you have anti-inflammatory cytokines,
link |
things like interleukin-10, which reduce inflammation.
link |
And there are hundreds of these,
link |
if not thousands of these different cytokines,
link |
some of which promote inflammation,
link |
some of which reduce inflammation.
link |
The simple way to adjust these things
link |
in the proper ratios is to adjust your gut microbiome.
link |
The best way to adjust your microbiome
link |
is to ingest certain types of foods.
link |
So there is a beautiful literature on this now,
link |
but the most important literature
link |
is the one that I referred to
link |
at the beginning of this episode,
link |
which is what to ingest and what not to ingest
link |
in terms of foods in order to create
link |
the best conditions in your gut
link |
so that you can create the best conditions
link |
in your brain and body.
link |
There was a study done by my colleague, Justin Sonnenberg
link |
at Stanford School of Medicine.
link |
Justin's actually my upstairs neighbor
link |
in the building at Stanford where I work.
link |
And they explored how different foods
link |
or different diets, I should say,
link |
impact the gut microbiome and inflammatory markers.
link |
And this is a beautiful study
link |
because it was done in hundreds of human patients.
link |
These actually weren't patients that were sick.
link |
I should say human subjects that were otherwise healthy
link |
from a huge variety of backgrounds.
link |
So you had men, you had women,
link |
you had people of different races, different ethnicities.
link |
You had a huge range of backgrounds
link |
and they tracked all of that.
link |
And what they did is they explored two types of diets.
link |
One is a high fiber diet.
link |
So dietary fibers are non-digestible
link |
or only partially digestible carbohydrates typically.
link |
And they compared that to diets that were unchanged
link |
except for the inclusion of a few to a few more servings
link |
of fermented foods each day.
link |
Things like sauerkraut, things like kimchi.
link |
They even explored, sounds pretty disgusting to me,
link |
but who knows, I've never tried it,
link |
which is fermented cottage cheese.
link |
And what they found was that after initial period
link |
of a few weeks where they had people
link |
either eat a lot of fiber
link |
or eat one or two servings of fermented foods,
link |
they had those people ramp up their ingestion
link |
of either fiber or fermented foods.
link |
So they kind of ease them into it.
link |
So they went baseline, then ramp up
link |
to the point where they were ingesting
link |
four or five servings of fiber
link |
or of fermented foods per day,
link |
which sounds like a lot, but for fermented foods,
link |
that would be four or five tablespoons
link |
of sauerkraut or kimchi.
link |
It's not quite, it's not like huge platefuls
link |
of fermented foods.
link |
And then they looked at a number of things.
link |
They looked at the proteome,
link |
which is a kind of like looking at the genome,
link |
but a bunch of proteins that are made in the body.
link |
And they did this by fecal samples, by stool samples.
link |
And they did this by blood draw, which is great.
link |
It's a real power of this study.
link |
In fact, the most comprehensive study that I'm aware of.
link |
By looking at these different tissues
link |
across long periods of time, so many, many weeks,
link |
and then returning people to the diet that they were on
link |
before they went into the study,
link |
they were able to establish in a causal way
link |
how ingesting fiber or fibrous foods
link |
versus ingesting these fermented foods on a daily basis
link |
could impact the gut microbiome
link |
and many, many inflammatory markers.
link |
And many, many markers of immune function
link |
and autoimmune function.
link |
And the takeaway message from this study
link |
is that the fermented foods far outperformed
link |
the high fiber diet.
link |
In fact, the high fiber diet in some people was beneficial
link |
and in other people caused issues with inflammation.
link |
This is very different than what I was taught growing up
link |
and what many of us were taught.
link |
Interestingly, they also observed that people
link |
that ate the high fiber diet had increases
link |
in certain enzymes that lend themselves
link |
to better digestion of carbohydrates.
link |
And I think there's an important insight to come from this.
link |
Nowadays, we kind of live in the age of extremes
link |
where people seem to either want to be carnivore,
link |
like never ingest a vegetable.
link |
I hear they don't even, they're like allowed pepper,
link |
but they're not even allowed, you know,
link |
sauerkraut or something like very extreme
link |
or pure plant-based, pure vegan, or pure.
link |
So essentially pure carbohydrate or pure animal protein,
link |
I like to eat a mixture of different things
link |
at different times of days, but very extreme.
link |
But this is interesting because what these data show
link |
is that perhaps ingesting a high carbohydrate,
link |
high fiber diet, which is really what these,
link |
the high fiber condition really was,
link |
actually makes people better at digesting carbohydrates.
link |
This may explain why people who are used
link |
to a kind of more paleo type or carnivore type diet
link |
might eat carbohydrates and say,
link |
oh, that doesn't work for me.
link |
I don't feel good.
link |
It might also explain why people who predominantly eat
link |
plant-based foods and carbohydrate foods
link |
will try eating meat as an experiment
link |
or because they lost a bed or whatever it is,
link |
and they'll do, or desperation or they'll do that.
link |
And then they'll say, oh, I don't feel good when I eat meat.
link |
How good you feel, it seems,
link |
how well you can utilize that food
link |
and how much of that food you crave may be determined.
link |
In fact, it appears is determined
link |
by your food eating history, the types of food you eat.
link |
And I think this might explain some of the divide
link |
and hopefully might bridge some of the chasm
link |
between these different groups that are saying
link |
it should be one way or it should be another.
link |
But at the core of the study was the bigger message.
link |
The bigger message is that all of us
link |
should be ingesting on a regular basis, daily basis,
link |
two to four servings of fermented foods of different kinds.
link |
And why I say that is because
link |
the inflammatory markers went down,
link |
the markers of autoimmune disruption went down,
link |
and the chemistry of the gut therefore
link |
was adjusted in the appropriate ways.
link |
Now it's not to say that high fiber is bad
link |
or that fiber is bad.
link |
I don't want people to confuse this.
link |
But even though this is a discussion about interoception,
link |
about sensing the self, this is a subconscious mechanism
link |
by which the gut communicates to many, many organs,
link |
including the brain.
link |
And it's been shown in other studies,
link |
also in quality peer review journals,
link |
that when the correct gut microbiota are present
link |
and these inflammatory markers are reduced,
link |
cognition improves, so ability to focus,
link |
ability to sleep, ability to ward off infection,
link |
and wound healing all enhanced.
link |
In fact, even in autism spectrum disorder,
link |
in people that struggle with various mental conditions
link |
or disorders of the mind,
link |
improving the gut microbiome seems to have powerful effects
link |
on improving brain symptoms.
link |
Along the lines of autoimmunity,
link |
there are a number of conditions
link |
that we call autoimmune conditions.
link |
And we will do entire episodes about these going forward,
link |
but for people with so-called irritable bowel syndrome,
link |
for people with Crohn's disease,
link |
for people with leaky gut, Hashimoto's,
link |
which is a kind of an immune system self-attack
link |
on one's thyroid gland,
link |
and things like eczema, skin conditions,
link |
adjusting the gut microbiome has been shown to be useful
link |
in positively adjusting the symptoms of all of those.
link |
Will it fix those conditions entirely?
link |
but can it have a significant positive impact on them?
link |
There is one thing that's worth mentioning in that list,
link |
which is leaky gut.
link |
What is leaky gut?
link |
Here we're talking about the guts.
link |
What is it to have a leaky gut?
link |
It sounds like something sort of like leaking out
link |
the end of the tube, and maybe that too, I don't know.
link |
But leaky gut is actually because your gut is not a tube
link |
that's continuous one cell.
link |
It's actually made up of many, many cells,
link |
and those cells form a barrier,
link |
and they form what are called tight junctions.
link |
So if you have two cells and you want to create a fence
link |
out of those cells, you bind them together.
link |
The way that the body does this is to bind them together
link |
with what are called tight junctions.
link |
They go by names like cloudins and things like that
link |
if you want to look them up.
link |
These tight junctions form a nice barrier
link |
like a cyclone fence that things can't get past,
link |
but like a cyclone fence,
link |
only molecules of a certain size can go through those holes.
link |
So you're not going to pass a soccer ball
link |
through an intact cyclone fence,
link |
but you could pass, for instance,
link |
a feather through that fence.
link |
So leaky gut is when the conditions in the gut
link |
are too alkaline or the gut microbiota are off in the gut,
link |
meaning microbiota that like alkaline guts are living there,
link |
and those tight junctions can't function
link |
at that particular pH,
link |
and you create little holes in that fence.
link |
And then what happens is when you ingest foods,
link |
some of those foods literally leak out of the gut
link |
and into the extracellular space and into the bloodstream.
link |
And because foods include proteins
link |
and antibodies react to proteins,
link |
what ends up happening in leaky gut,
link |
and the reason we talk about it in autoimmune conditions
link |
is that you start developing antibodies
link |
to particular food proteins.
link |
And then people start feeling like they have food allergies
link |
and they do, they actually create particular food allergies.
link |
Now, one way to prevent leaky gut
link |
is to get the rest of the gut situation happy
link |
by ingesting the proper foods that we talked about before,
link |
ingesting fermented foods on a regular basis.
link |
The other is our old friend glutamine again.
link |
There are some data,
link |
and I should say it's a limited number of studies,
link |
showing that ingesting glutamine
link |
anywhere from one to three teaspoons per day
link |
can help alleviate leaky gut.
link |
Now, the mechanism for that still isn't clear
link |
whether or not it's adjusting pH
link |
or whether or not it's creating more favorable environment
link |
for the microbiota,
link |
but it is clear that supplementing with glutamine
link |
can in some people enhance,
link |
or I should say improve conditions of leaky gut.
link |
So that might be useful as well.
link |
And then the final thing about this
link |
I want to talk about
link |
is we're talking about chemical sensing in the gut
link |
and how that impacts wellbeing is about gut acidity.
link |
And this, I confess is a little bit controversial.
link |
Some people are on board this, other people are not.
link |
And so I'd love your feedback on this.
link |
If you agree, please tell me.
link |
If you disagree, please tell me,
link |
but please tell me why you disagree in particular.
link |
Experience or data, although it's always better
link |
if you can point me towards peer reviewed studies.
link |
There is a practice that some people embrace.
link |
I'm not recommending people necessarily do this
link |
and you would definitely want to talk to your doctor,
link |
but where people have food allergies
link |
or they're having mood or autoimmune issues
link |
and they treat this,
link |
some people recommend treating this
link |
through the ingestion of HCL, hydrochloric acid tablets.
link |
Now, hydrochloric acid can burn you, right?
link |
Acids can burn you, they literally can melt away skin.
link |
You want to be very careful with acids of all kinds, truly.
link |
But hydrochloric acid is sold as in supplement form
link |
in capsular pill form.
link |
And there is a practice of starting to ingest
link |
one or two hydrochloric acid tablets midway through a meal.
link |
And then what people will generally do
link |
is examine to see whether or not
link |
that improves their symptoms of indigestion,
link |
how it relates to mood,
link |
how it relates to wellbeing,
link |
how it relates to their sensation of their gut viscera.
link |
By changing the acidity,
link |
you also change the way that the gut communicates
link |
with the brain through the mechanisms we talked about before.
link |
And there are a growing number of people
link |
embracing these practices of taking HCL.
link |
It's often combined with other things.
link |
It's usually combined with an enzyme
link |
and that enzyme is pepsin.
link |
So most of these supplements come in the form
link |
betaine HCL pepsin.
link |
And while they're not a cure-all,
link |
I certainly don't want to suggest that they're a cure-all,
link |
many people that have a hard time
link |
adjusting the pH of their gut
link |
and have a hard time adjusting the microbiota of their gut
link |
in the appropriate ways have benefited from taking
link |
these betaine HCL pepsin tablets or capsules during meals.
link |
And the general instruction is to start slow,
link |
to start with one or two,
link |
and then to find a level that you're comfortable with
link |
that doesn't create an excessive feeling of warmth
link |
in the stomach that doesn't throw off your digestion.
link |
So it takes a little bit of experimentation.
link |
Again, definitely talk to your healthcare provider
link |
before exploring this,
link |
but this has become a very common practice
link |
for people with autoimmune disorders and accessing the gut
link |
because it is accessible by taking things
link |
has also become a way in which people
link |
with various mental conditions
link |
are trying to adjust their mood and adjust their wellbeing.
link |
Along these lines, I do want to mention
link |
that there are studies that show
link |
that people that supplement with a lot of probiotics
link |
or even prebiotics can sometimes experience brain fog.
link |
This isn't discussed a lot
link |
and the data are a little all over the place,
link |
but it is worth thinking about.
link |
The goal here is not to create
link |
as many microbiota as possible.
link |
What you want is microbiota diversity.
link |
And I should mention this again
link |
in reference to the Sonnenberg study.
link |
What the high fiber diet does
link |
is it increases certain microbiota,
link |
but it limits their diversity.
link |
And what the fermented food diet does,
link |
or I should say the diet that includes
link |
regular ingestion of fermented foods,
link |
a few servings a day,
link |
is it increases microbiota diversity.
link |
Now, lack of microbiota diversity
link |
has a name in the medical profession.
link |
It's called dysbiosis and dysbiosis is bad.
link |
Dysbiosis is what you see
link |
when people are spending long periods of time on bed rest
link |
or when they've been chronically ill.
link |
And so here again,
link |
we're talking about creating a positive environment
link |
in the gut, either by adjusting acidity,
link |
maybe you explore the betaine HCL pepsin thing.
link |
I think if you have healthy digestion,
link |
if you feel like you have a good relationship to your gut
link |
and it has a good relationship to you,
link |
sort of a silly phrase because it is you and you are it,
link |
then I don't think there's any means or any need to pursue
link |
this, but if you don't,
link |
that might be one avenue to pursue.
link |
However, I think primary in all of this
link |
is the fermented food findings.
link |
And it's not just one study,
link |
it's many, many findings that now bring us to a place
link |
where a huge center of mass of data are pointing us
link |
in the direction of saying ingest fermented foods
link |
on a regular basis.
link |
I should also mention that conditions like sarcopenia,
link |
which is the loss of muscle tissue as we age,
link |
has been shown to be offset by improving the gut microbiota.
link |
So while today is about interoception,
link |
we're talking about sensing,
link |
we're also talking about subconscious sensing.
link |
What are we talking about subconscious sensing?
link |
We're talking about subconscious sensing
link |
of the milieu of the body.
link |
When the milieu of the gut and the body is right,
link |
then the brain and the immune system function very well.
link |
And so this isn't something where you can sit back and say,
link |
oh, you know, I feel all those good microbiota in my gut,
link |
or, oh no, those are bad microbiota.
link |
You can't do that unless you're going to take fecal samples
link |
and blood samples and analyze them
link |
with the extreme exhaustive nature
link |
that the Sonnenberg and other labs do.
link |
You're not going to get that kind of information.
link |
I know there are companies out there that do this,
link |
and I don't want to knock on any of them,
link |
but I do want to emphasize that to do this right,
link |
to really analyze which cytokines you're making
link |
and which ones you're not,
link |
you really need to look at a huge number of them.
link |
And that requires large-scale proteomic and genomic
link |
and inflammatory marker screens.
link |
It's just not the kind of thing
link |
that most commercial enterprises can really provide
link |
to people in a way that they can interpret.
link |
Rather, this is a case where you can simply go
link |
to the effector, to the thing that can actually move
link |
the needle in the right direction for you.
link |
It's very clear that's fermented foods,
link |
and that's keeping the stomach slightly more acid
link |
than one might think you would want to.
link |
So let's talk about barfing first.
link |
Barfing, AKA vomiting, is when the contents
link |
of your guts run in reverse,
link |
meaning when they go up from your stomach,
link |
sometimes even up from the intestines,
link |
even though that sounds horrible, it sometimes happens,
link |
up out the esophagus and mouth
link |
and onto whatever surface happens to be in front of you.
link |
It's a terrible thing, nobody likes to do it,
link |
but it's a very interesting aspect to our biology
link |
because it reveals a beautiful
link |
and absolutely fundamental relationship
link |
between our chemistry and our brain.
link |
So your brain is actually locked behind a gate,
link |
and that gate is not your skull.
link |
That gate is the so-called blood-brain barrier.
link |
So just like your gut has these epithelial tight junctions,
link |
the things I talked about before that provide a fence
link |
so things can't get through and get through and leaky gut,
link |
your brain has tight junctions that are very, very tight.
link |
It's absolutely fundamental that only certain molecules
link |
get across the blood-brain barrier and that others don't.
link |
And the reason for that is that most all,
link |
99.9999% of your neurons do not regenerate.
link |
I don't care what you've read,
link |
especially in the news recently
link |
about how psychedelics cause neurogenesis
link |
because they don't, it's absolutely wrong.
link |
Psychedelics have effects on brain plasticity,
link |
but they have nothing to do with neurogenesis,
link |
at least no data support it.
link |
But because you can't make new neurons,
link |
you also can't damage the ones you've got
link |
or you shouldn't as much as possible.
link |
And that's why you have a blood-brain barrier or a BBB.
link |
So the BBB, as it's called,
link |
prevents substances from getting to the brain.
link |
However, like any fence,
link |
it is not always uniform along its length.
link |
And there are little spots within that fence
link |
where chemicals can sneak across to the brain
link |
and through a beautiful design,
link |
I don't know anything about the design,
link |
as I always say, I wasn't consulted the design phase,
link |
so I'm not talking about any kind of intelligent design
link |
or anything, that is not the topic of this podcast.
link |
This is not a philosophy podcast,
link |
nor is it a religion podcast, it's a science podcast.
link |
But through a beautiful design of some sort,
link |
there are little holes in that fence
link |
and there are little neurons
link |
that sit right behind those holes.
link |
And those neurons sense what the chemistry of the blood is.
link |
So I'm guessing you probably didn't imagine
link |
that today's discussion about sensing the self
link |
would be sensing your own blood, but you do.
link |
There's a little area of your brain that's little indeed,
link |
but is very, very important called area postrema,
link |
An area postrema is an area of the brainstem
link |
that sits right next to another brain area
link |
called the chemoreceptor trigger zone.
link |
And when the contents in your bloodstream
link |
are of a particular kind,
link |
meaning when there are pathogens or it's too acidic,
link |
the neurons in area postrema
link |
and the neurons in the chemoreceptor trigger zone,
link |
the CTZ as it's called,
link |
trigger a bunch of motor reflexes in the abdominal wall
link |
that make you barf, okay?
link |
The feeling that you need to throw up
link |
is triggered by these neurons in the brainstem.
link |
And those neurons in the brainstem
link |
are triggered by the presence of certain chemicals.
link |
And the reason why you don't have any blood brain barrier
link |
at that location is because postrema has to be there
link |
like a crossing guard,
link |
making sure that everything
link |
that's coming through the blood is okay.
link |
And if it even senses just the tiniest bit
link |
that things are off, it's going to trigger that reflex.
link |
Now, the really interesting thing
link |
is that the neurons in area postrema
link |
respond to the chemistry of the blood,
link |
but they also will respond to our consciousness,
link |
to things that we think and things that we believe
link |
and even particular memories.
link |
This is why when certain people see vomit
link |
or see someone else vomit or even somebody else heaving
link |
as if they're going to vomit,
link |
they themselves feel as if they're going to vomit.
link |
I'm guessing there are probably even a few of you right now
link |
that feel like you might vomit.
link |
You might feel salivation in your throat,
link |
which is always a precursor to vomiting.
link |
Some people, the memory of,
link |
or the thought of something like blood or vomit
link |
or use your imagination can actually trigger
link |
And that's because these neurons in area postrema
link |
are very sensitive to prior experience of interactions
link |
with negative things.
link |
So, and actually, as I'm saying this,
link |
I feel my gut kind of cramping up again.
link |
I don't vomit very easily.
link |
I'm not one of those.
link |
Nor am I somebody who's never vomited.
link |
And here we are talking about my vomit history,
link |
but I think it's appropriate in this context.
link |
The neurons of area postrema
link |
are there basically to keep your whole system safe.
link |
And thank goodness they are because for instance,
link |
some people, unfortunately,
link |
they drink so much alcohol that they throw up.
link |
Have you ever wondered why that is?
link |
Well, it's because alcohol fundamentally is a poison.
link |
I'm not saying for age appropriate folks
link |
that ingesting alcohol is bad.
link |
This isn't a judgment call,
link |
but alcohol itself at excessive levels in the bloodstream
link |
triggers postrema to cause vomiting.
link |
So this is an example whereby memories, context,
link |
but also just the chemistry of our internal state
link |
is triggering behaviors that are very hardwired.
link |
They're very reflex driven.
link |
And why would it be that some people
link |
get more nauseous than others at a given level?
link |
Well, they'll have to do with alcohol tolerance.
link |
Some people have what's called a,
link |
we refer to as a stronger stomach or a stomach of steel.
link |
Other people, they throw up very easily
link |
if they don't feel well,
link |
or if they ingest anything that's just a little bit off.
link |
From a purely adaptive standpoint,
link |
it's probably better to vomit up things
link |
that aren't good for you
link |
rather than to have them pass through your system,
link |
especially if those things are contained in lipids.
link |
For instance, if you ingest something that's in lipid form,
link |
because cells, literally every cell in your body
link |
is surrounded by a little thin layer of fatty tissue,
link |
and we call it the bilayer membrane, it's a little membrane,
link |
fat can move through fat very easily.
link |
And so any bad stuff you ingest
link |
can get stuck in your system.
link |
So let's talk for a second about how to reduce nausea,
link |
because nausea, that salivation,
link |
that feeling that you're going to vomit
link |
can be very beneficial in an adaptive circumstance,
link |
like you've ingested something bad,
link |
but some people experience nausea for other reasons.
link |
There are good ways to regulate nausea,
link |
and the ways they regulate nausea are very interesting.
link |
They actually adjust the activity
link |
of these neurons in the area of postrema,
link |
or they change the chemistry of the blood directly.
link |
And many of you have heard this before, perhaps,
link |
but it turns out that there are good data.
link |
11 research studies were the ones that I could find,
link |
peer-reviewed research studies with no bias,
link |
so independent studies, showing that ginger
link |
can cause a notable reduction in nausea.
link |
One to three grams.
link |
What's one to three grams?
link |
Well, you have to measure it out on a scale
link |
unless you're taking it in pill or capsule form.
link |
It doesn't seem to matter if you take it
link |
in pill or capsule form.
link |
So this thing that you've heard before,
link |
that ginger can reduce nausea indeed is true.
link |
Peppermint apparently can also do that,
link |
and some of you will not be surprised to learn
link |
that cannabis can reduce nausea.
link |
Not surprised because cannabis,
link |
which has different legality in different places,
link |
and I understand that,
link |
so please take that into consideration,
link |
but cannabis, THC, and, or it turns out CBD,
link |
can reduce nausea.
link |
That's been shown in at least one study,
link |
and it probably does that,
link |
not by changing the chemistry of your blood,
link |
but by changing the threshold for firing
link |
of these neurons in area postrema.
link |
And there are conditions such as in chemotherapy
link |
and radiation therapy and others
link |
where people are feeling very nauseous.
link |
I'm not recommending people go use cannabis
link |
unless they've decided with their selves
link |
and their family and their doctor that they should.
link |
But what's interesting is this thing about CBD,
link |
and we'll do a whole episode on THC and CBD.
link |
CBD doesn't have, or isn't supposed to have,
link |
these psychoactive properties that THC does,
link |
although CBD can have a mild to major anxiolytic,
link |
anxiety-reducing effect,
link |
but it does appear that the data are what,
link |
the data support, I should say,
link |
the anecdotal reports,
link |
which are that cannabis can reduce nausea.
link |
So to barf less, ginger, peppermint,
link |
and if appropriate and legal for you, possibly cannabis.
link |
Now let's talk about fever.
link |
In previous episodes and in future episodes,
link |
we deal with thermal regulation,
link |
which is the body's ability to regulate its temperature.
link |
Talk about cold and heat and saunas and ice baths
link |
and physical performance.
link |
We're not going to deal with all that right now,
link |
but I promise we will going forward.
link |
Today, I only want to talk about fever
link |
because fever directly relates to interoception.
link |
What do I mean by that?
link |
Well, a fever is simply an increase in body temperature.
link |
That increase in body temperature is triggered
link |
by neurons in the brain.
link |
And those neurons in the brain are triggered
link |
by the presence of particular things in the bloodstream.
link |
What sorts of things?
link |
Well, toxins, bacteria, viruses.
link |
When something bad gets in our system,
link |
the body doesn't know it's bad.
link |
It just knows it's foreign and it hasn't seen it before
link |
or that it's in the wrong compartment of the body.
link |
So earlier we were talking about proteins
link |
that leak out of the gut and get elsewhere.
link |
You don't want a piece of steak sitting in your bicep.
link |
That would be bad.
link |
You would actually develop antibodies.
link |
You would have a horrible infection,
link |
but your body has this intelligence.
link |
And that intelligence is to know,
link |
hmm, these proteins are normally not seen in this region.
link |
And then your body or the cells there, I should say,
link |
will release something that then will travel to the brain
link |
and will trigger an increase in body temperature
link |
so that your body cooks the bad thing
link |
or the cause of the bad thing.
link |
It's really a beautiful adaptive mechanism.
link |
We always think fever is so terrible,
link |
but fever is there to cook the bad thing that's inside you
link |
or that has left the correct compartment inside you
link |
and is in the wrong compartment inside you.
link |
So what's beautiful about the fever mechanism
link |
is that it looks a lot like the barfing mechanism.
link |
Basically, you have a set of neurons
link |
that sit near the ventricles.
link |
Remember the ventricles is this hole
link |
in the tube that is you, the tube that is you.
link |
You are a tube, a series of tubes,
link |
and your brain has a hole down the middle
link |
and it extends down to the bottom of your spinal cord.
link |
At the front, it's called the ventricles.
link |
They start with what are called the lateral ventricles
link |
and the, excuse me,
link |
starts with the third in the lateral ventricles
link |
and then it goes to the fourth ventricle
link |
and then to what's called the central canal.
link |
But basically, it's just a big space
link |
in the middle of your nervous system,
link |
the middle of your brain.
link |
And you have one ventricle that I already mentioned
link |
called the third ventricle
link |
and it's shaped kind of like a thin oval upright.
link |
If you're listening to this, just think an eye,
link |
just seeing the shape of an eye,
link |
but it's kind of rotated 90 degrees.
link |
So it's up and down as opposed to across.
link |
And along that third ventricle,
link |
there are little neurons that can sense what's
link |
in the cerebral spinal fluid that fills the ventricle.
link |
So in other words, you have neurons that are sensing
link |
the chemistry of your cerebral spinal fluid
link |
and that have access, therefore,
link |
to the chemistry of your body
link |
because that cerebral spinal fluid
link |
is going up and down the brain and spinal cord,
link |
but into that cerebral spinal fluid
link |
are signals about the various chemicals within the body.
link |
So this is not a mechanical system.
link |
This is a chemical system.
link |
Remember, we're talking about mechanical information
link |
and chemical information accessing the brain.
link |
So if you have something bad in your system,
link |
you've ingested a virus, you breathed in a virus,
link |
or you inhaled some bacteria, or you got a cut on your leg
link |
and some bacteria are growing there,
link |
of course, locally, there will be effects.
link |
Little things called mast cells, M-A-S-T,
link |
little packets of histamine,
link |
literally will go there and explode and cause inflammation,
link |
which is actually a good inflammation,
link |
and will release little things called macrophages,
link |
try to gobble up the infection.
link |
The other day, I was in Texas,
link |
there was a mean little mosquitoes in Texas
link |
and a lot of them, and I would stand outside
link |
and I'd get bitten.
link |
I didn't feel a thing, but then later that night,
link |
they started swelling up and itching
link |
and then I'd itch them and then they'd swell even more.
link |
That was because of the release of mast cells,
link |
of histamines inside those mast cells
link |
that were literally causing inflammation of the tissue.
link |
It wasn't the poison from the mosquito itself.
link |
It was the immune response to those.
link |
Well, you also have this systemic or body-wide attempt
link |
to kill stuff, and that's the fever.
link |
So the neurons that line these ventricles
link |
with cerebrospinal fluid go by a particular name.
link |
They're called circumventricular organs,
link |
meaning near, circumventricular, near the ventricles,
link |
and you have these organs and there is a set of neurons
link |
has a really cool name called the OVLT.
link |
I don't know why I like that, but I just like it.
link |
It's the organum vasculosum of the lateral terminalis.
link |
Organum vasculosum lateral terminalis, OVLT,
link |
are the neurons that respond to toxins
link |
and bad stuff in your bloodstream,
link |
however minor or major,
link |
and they release things like ILK-1,
link |
which are inflammatory cytokines.
link |
Inflammatory in this case is good.
link |
You want inflammation at the site of an infection.
link |
It's a good thing.
link |
It's going to help with healing.
link |
And it's going to change the conditions in your body.
link |
What's going to happen is when those OVLT neurons
link |
are activated because you have something bad in your body
link |
or something bad is happening in your body,
link |
they communicate with an area of the brain
link |
called the preoptic area of your hypothalamus,
link |
and the preoptic area cranks up your temperature
link |
and tries to cook that bad thing.
link |
Now, it's worth talking about fever for a moment
link |
and talking about thermal regulation
link |
because I think this actually could save some lives.
link |
So if you are overheated to a point
link |
where you're getting up past 102 or 103,
link |
it's going to vary depending on person to person
link |
and certainly age.
link |
Kids, some people think,
link |
can tolerate higher levels of fever than adults,
link |
but look, you always want to be cautious
link |
about heating up the brain too much
link |
because once those neurons are gone, they do not come back
link |
and neurons do not do well in very high temperatures.
link |
Once your body temperature starts getting up to 102, 103,
link |
certainly 104, you are starting to enter serious danger zone.
link |
This can happen through exercise in hot environments
link |
or an inability to escape heat
link |
because you don't have covering
link |
or adequate ventilation or cooling.
link |
It can also be because of excessive fever
link |
for whatever reason.
link |
A lot of people think the way to deal with this
link |
is to put a cool compress on the back of the neck
link |
or to cool the torso.
link |
In discussing this with my colleague, Craig Heller,
link |
who's at Stanford School of Medicine,
link |
and he's on the undergraduate side of the campus as well,
link |
runs a biology lab.
link |
He's a world expert in thermal regulation.
link |
It's very clear that that's the wrong response
link |
to try and cool off the body.
link |
If you put a cold towel or you put an ice pack
link |
on the back of the neck,
link |
what you effectively do is cool the blood
link |
that's going to the brain.
link |
And if you do that, then your brain will react
link |
by turning up the crank in, so to speak,
link |
on the neurons in the preoptic area
link |
and will heat you up further
link |
and can cook your brain and organs further.
link |
So what you want to do is, as I've talked about before,
link |
you want to cool the bottoms of the feet,
link |
the palms of the hands, and the upper part of the face.
link |
I'm not going to go into all the details
link |
as to why you want to do that right now,
link |
but those are the locations you want to cool.
link |
Now, you can also cool the rest of the body,
link |
but it's not okay to just stay under the covers
link |
and just cool the neck or something like that.
link |
You really want to try and create a systemic
link |
or whole body cooling if the goal is to bring fever down.
link |
But in many cases, fever is adaptive.
link |
And so taking non-steroid and inflammatory drugs
link |
like Advil and Tylenol sometimes can be good
link |
if that's recommended,
link |
but other times, because it reduces your fever,
link |
it's allowing that pathogen,
link |
that pyrogen it's sometimes called.
link |
A pyrogen is a substance that causes fever.
link |
Think pyro, think fire, think pyromaniacs, think pyro.
link |
Those pyrogens can survive at moderate to low temperatures
link |
and they can't survive at high temperatures.
link |
So the fever is an adaptive mechanism and the OVLT
link |
and the sensing of your chemistry is how the OVLT,
link |
organum vasculosum and the lateral terminalis, does that.
link |
So we've talked about sensing lung volume,
link |
speed of our heartbeat.
link |
We talked about sensing the gut volume,
link |
the intestinal volume or the absence of volume.
link |
We talked about chemistry of the gut and the gut microbiota
link |
and autoimmune functions.
link |
And we've now talked about vomiting
link |
and we've talked about fever.
link |
Lots of aspects of sensing our internal self.
link |
Now I want to turn our attention to interoception
link |
as it relates to feelings,
link |
the way that interoception is most commonly described.
link |
And I want to highlight a term
link |
that many of you have probably heard,
link |
which is the vagus nerve.
link |
We talked about vagus a little bit earlier,
link |
but the vagus nerve, this vagabonding wandering nerve
link |
is involved in everything I've talked about up until now.
link |
And the reason I saved it till now,
link |
rather than mentioning it all along,
link |
is to highlight a specific point,
link |
which is that whenever we hear about the vagus
link |
in popular culture, it's like the vagus calms you down.
link |
You want to stimulate the vagus
link |
by rubbing in front of the ear.
link |
And it's a parasympathetic nerve and it will calm you down.
link |
It will mellow you out.
link |
And actually, most of the time, the vagus is stimulatory.
link |
When you ingest foods with amino acids, sugars,
link |
or fatty acids, the vagus nerve gets activated
link |
and triggers the release of dopamine.
link |
It makes you more alert and go seek more of those foods
link |
or what led to those conditions.
link |
When you feel nauseous, it's rarely calming.
link |
When you feel like you have a fever, it's rarely calming.
link |
So you're starting to get the picture
link |
that even though the vagus nerve
link |
is in the parasympathetic branch
link |
of the autonomic nervous system,
link |
and if that doesn't mean anything to you
link |
because you're not an aficionado, don't worry about it,
link |
but it's not a calming system.
link |
It's a communication system and it's a motor system.
link |
It communicates brain to body and body to brain,
link |
and it changes the function of different organs.
link |
Now, one thing that's important to highlight
link |
is that stress itself will alter the chemistry of your gut
link |
because of the ways that it shuts down the vagus nerve
link |
and quiets the neurons that communicate from gut to brain.
link |
I want to say that again.
link |
Stress will disrupt your gut and make you feel not good,
link |
poor digestion, and just lousy,
link |
because of the way that it shuts down the vagus nerve
link |
and the neurons of your gut.
link |
So what stress does is it blocks the communication
link |
between gut and brain.
link |
It doesn't mess up your gut.
link |
It just doesn't let your gut get the signals
link |
up to your brain, and it also then throws off the chemistry,
link |
and then there's a whole cascade of effects.
link |
If you want to learn more about stress,
link |
I did a whole episode called Master Stress,
link |
or I think maybe it was called Conquer Stress.
link |
I think it was Master Stress.
link |
Either one, the whole point of that episode
link |
is to give you tools and practices
link |
to deal with short-term acute stress, moderate-term stress,
link |
and long-term chronic stress through behavioral mechanisms,
link |
nutrition, supplementation, and many other things as well.
link |
It's chock-a-block full of protocols and tools for stress.
link |
The vagus nerve, however, is responsible for emotion,
link |
and the way it does that is to pool,
link |
to aggregate the conditions of your gut,
link |
the conditions of your heart
link |
and the conditions of your breathing,
link |
which includes your diaphragm and lungs,
link |
and takes that kind of as a collection of information
link |
and sends it to the brain
link |
and controls what we call your emotions.
link |
Now, that might seem obvious to some people,
link |
but to other people, that might seem totally crazy.
link |
You thought your emotions were because the market was down
link |
and you had invested,
link |
or because something that you thought was going to happen
link |
is not going to happen,
link |
or because you thought that school was going to open
link |
and then it's not,
link |
or maybe you thought it wasn't and it is.
link |
Whatever it is that bothers you,
link |
you think of generally as a purely cognitive event,
link |
but the brain doesn't really know
link |
what to do with that information.
link |
It doesn't act directly on that information to create moods.
link |
Moods are created through the heart's response
link |
to reading that headline,
link |
to the change in your breathing
link |
that's caused by someone that you love telling you
link |
that actually they're not interested
link |
in spending time with you anymore,
link |
or that you screwed up,
link |
or that they're interested in spending
link |
a lot of time with you and you like that, right?
link |
Emotions can be good or bad or neutral.
link |
So this thing that we call interoception,
link |
the sense of self,
link |
I've been building up from very fundamental layers,
link |
gut chemistry, spleens, immune systems, autoimmune,
link |
and you might've been thinking,
link |
wait, I thought this was going to be about a sense of self,
link |
a noticing or a feeling.
link |
And indeed all of those things are plugging in
link |
like a series of ingredients in a recipe
link |
that gives rise to your mood and how you feel.
link |
And that mood and how you feel
link |
is shown in one location in your body
link |
that other people can see,
link |
and that's in your facial expressions.
link |
And indeed there are now beautiful data
link |
showing that your face,
link |
including the size of your pupils,
link |
the tonality of your face,
link |
how flushed you are or how pale you are,
link |
even the degree to which you are frowning or smiling
link |
relative to other periods of time,
link |
that is all an aggregate of,
link |
or a reflection rather of your gut,
link |
your heart and your breathing
link |
and the chemistry of your body.
link |
And so this is why I sort of backed into this conversation
link |
about interoception.
link |
I kind of Trojan horse this on you on purpose,
link |
which is that when we talk about the vagus and you hear,
link |
oh, you know, you can get vagal tone by breathing
link |
or rubbing on the front of the ear,
link |
sure, that's probably true.
link |
But another fundamental layer is the acidity of your gut,
link |
how fast you're breathing.
link |
Are you inhale emphasized or exhale emphasized breathing?
link |
When we are relaxed, our pupils tend to constrict.
link |
When we are very alert, our pupils tend to be dilated,
link |
whether or not that alertness has to do
link |
with being happy or being sad.
link |
And what's remarkable,
link |
and this is where interoception really, really
link |
takes a leap into the incredible,
link |
is that there are beautiful studies that show
link |
that for instance, when we know somebody pretty well,
link |
and they are going through some sort of experience
link |
of any kind, our heart rate actually starts
link |
to mimic their heart rate.
link |
Our breathing starts to mimic their breathing
link |
even if we aren't conscious of their breathing.
link |
It's not like we see their chest heaving
link |
and we think, oh my goodness.
link |
And then we breathe that way.
link |
There's a mirroring and no,
link |
it's not carried out through mirror neurons.
link |
Mirror neurons are more of a myth than a reality.
link |
Sorry to burst people's bubbles,
link |
but that bubble around mirror neurons
link |
is definitely made of myths and a topic for another time.
link |
But we start to mirror.
link |
Somehow human beings are able to register
link |
the internal state of other beings.
link |
And I think probably for animals too,
link |
but certainly for other humans, even at a distance.
link |
And these studies are many now
link |
and they're really wonderful studies.
link |
And so your sense of your internal landscape
link |
is linked to others.
link |
Now you can enhance this interoceptive capacity
link |
for how you feel and how others feel.
link |
In other words, you can start getting a better readout
link |
of your internal state by doing a simple exercise,
link |
what is really a tool.
link |
And that is to learn to sense your heartbeats.
link |
So some people are very good at this.
link |
Other people are not.
link |
Some people can do this more easily
link |
when they have all their air exhaled
link |
and some people can do it better
link |
when they are holding a breath hold.
link |
But one thing that's kind of cool
link |
about this whole interoceptive capacity
link |
is that you can enhance it very, very quickly.
link |
You can learn or teach yourself
link |
to have heightened levels of interoception
link |
in a way that you can't really just give yourself
link |
heightened levels of vision by snapping your fingers
link |
in one round of one tool or exercise.
link |
There are things you can do to improve vision.
link |
That's the topic of a previous episode.
link |
I encourage you to look it up.
link |
There are things you can do to improve your hearing
link |
and your taste and your smell.
link |
We talked about all those.
link |
But within interoception,
link |
you can get very good at this very fast.
link |
And I think this is one of the reasons
link |
why meditation is powerful.
link |
I think there are a lot of reasons
link |
why meditation is powerful.
link |
But one of the reasons is when you stop
link |
taking in exteroceptive information,
link |
information from the outside world,
link |
by closing your eyes and focusing inward, as they say,
link |
you start paying attention to your breathing cadence.
link |
You start directing your mind's attention
link |
to your heart rate.
link |
And if you can start to perceive your heart beating,
link |
you actually are very quickly strengthen
link |
the vagal connections between the body and the brain.
link |
And so there's no real practice here.
link |
There's no breathe this way or do this thing,
link |
except to direct your awareness toward your heartbeat.
link |
And some people can get very good at this very fast.
link |
Most people find that just by doing this for a minute or so,
link |
every once in a while,
link |
they start to tap into this sixth sense.
link |
They start to notice when they don't feel quite right
link |
about something or somebody or some situation,
link |
or they start to notice when they feel quite right
link |
about somebody or something or some situation.
link |
So this interoceptive awareness can be tuned up.
link |
It used to be called vagal tone,
link |
but I think that term doesn't take into account
link |
all the other things that are going on with the vagus.
link |
So I don't really like that term.
link |
It's more of an interoceptive awareness.
link |
And again, there are many studies now showing
link |
that for sake of bettering one's mood overall,
link |
for sake of moving through a challenging phase in life,
link |
for sake of just enhancing one's experience of life overall,
link |
whether or not it's the taste of foods,
link |
interactions with other people, enjoyment, focus, pleasure,
link |
tuning up one's interoceptive awareness is both easy,
link |
again, by just taking a minute or two
link |
and trying to count heartbeats.
link |
And then this works best, of course,
link |
if you have some independent readout of heartbeats
link |
and you can compare, you can see how accurate you are.
link |
But even if you don't use a device
link |
or have a device to do that,
link |
without taking your pulse,
link |
using your thumb on your wrist or something
link |
or your fingers on your neck,
link |
as you typically would for taking your pulse,
link |
trying to sit still for a minute or two,
link |
every once in a while, maybe once a week,
link |
maybe twice a week, maybe while you're meditating,
link |
maybe while breath work,
link |
maybe during the breath holds or breath work.
link |
You don't really have to do this
link |
in any kind of extended way.
link |
You can very quickly increase your interoceptive tone
link |
and that has a huge and outsized effect
link |
on the brain-body relationship
link |
and your brain's ability to tap into
link |
both the subconscious and the conscious aspects
link |
of this chemical and mechanical signaling
link |
that's happening all the time.
link |
And it can have real and outsized positive effects
link |
on your ability to engage with other people
link |
and your ability to focus at work
link |
and your ability to notice,
link |
ah, I'm finding myself kind of feeling
link |
like I'm losing focus,
link |
but really it was my heart rate was just increasing.
link |
Maybe I just exhale a little bit
link |
and bring my heart rate down.
link |
So what I've effectively tried to do today
link |
is to give you a window into this incredible relationship
link |
between your viscera and your brain
link |
and your brain and your viscera,
link |
all these organs of your body.
link |
And what I hope is that you'll appreciate
link |
that it's a system, that you aren't just a system of tubes.
link |
I said that in sort of in jest.
link |
I mean, you have a lot of tubes
link |
and you are a system of tubes,
link |
but that system of tubes is linked
link |
through the nervous system.
link |
And those links work in very specific ways.
link |
So whether or not you remember about piezos
link |
and all the GLP-1Rs and all that stuff,
link |
it doesn't really matter.
link |
What I encourage you to do is start sort of pushing
link |
and pulling on the various levers
link |
within this beautiful system
link |
that we call the interoceptive system, this sense of self.
link |
If you're learning from this podcast
link |
and or if you're enjoying it,
link |
please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
link |
That really helps us.
link |
Also on the YouTube channel,
link |
please leave us comments and feedback,
link |
including feedback of topics you'd like to see
link |
in future episodes or guests you'd like to see
link |
on future episodes.
link |
We do read all the comments.
link |
In addition, please subscribe on Apple and Spotify
link |
and follow us on Instagram at Huberman Lab.
link |
If you want to leave us a five-star review on Apple,
link |
you also have the opportunity to leave us a five-star review.
link |
You can also leave us comments and feedback on Apple.
link |
During the course of today's episode
link |
and on previous episodes, I mentioned supplements.
link |
I realize supplements aren't for everybody,
link |
but for those of you that are interested in supplements,
link |
it is important that the supplements that you take
link |
have a high level of stringency
link |
with respect to the amounts of the contents
link |
that are listed on the bottle
link |
matching what's actually in the bottle,
link |
in the capsules and tablets,
link |
and that the quality of those ingredients be extremely high.
link |
For that reason, we partnered with Thorne,
link |
that's T-H-O-R-N-E,
link |
because Thorne supplements have the highest levels
link |
of stringency for both the content
link |
and the amount of content in those bottles and supplements.
link |
If you want to try Thorne supplements
link |
and you want to see the supplements that I take,
link |
you can go to thorne.com slash the letter U slash Huberman,
link |
and you can see all the supplements that I take.
link |
You can get 20% off any of those.
link |
And if you enter the Thorne site through that portal,
link |
you can get 20% off any of the supplements
link |
that Thorne makes.
link |
In addition, we have a Patreon account.
link |
It's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman.
link |
There you can support the podcast
link |
at any level that you like.
link |
Please also visit us at hubermanlab.com
link |
and sign up for our free newsletter.
link |
Our newsletter starts in August, 2021,
link |
and you'll be receiving protocols and excerpts from podcasts,
link |
some condensed information
link |
that we think will really be of value to you.
link |
It's totally zero cost.
link |
Again, just go to hubermanlab.com
link |
and sign up for what we call our neural network newsletter.
link |
And most of all, thank you for your time and attention,
link |
and thank you for your interest in science.
link |
We'll see you next time.