LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre｜Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Recently, the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted a live event at the Great Hall in Brisbane, Australia.

The event was called the Brain Body Contract and featured a lecture followed by a question and answer session with the audience.

We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend.

I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are 8 Sleep and AG1.

8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.

I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health, physical health, and performance.

Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.

And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually needs to drop by about 1-3 degrees.

And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and alert, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1-3 degrees.

8 Sleep mattress covers make it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and thereby to control your core body temperature so that you fall and stay deeply asleep and wake up feeling your absolute best.

I've been sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover for about three years now and it has completely transformed the quality of my sleep for the night.

8 Sleep recently launched their newest generation of pod cover, the Pod4 Ultra.

The Pod4 Cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the Pod4 Cover has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve airflow and stop your snoring.

If you'd like to try an 8 Sleep mattress cover, you can go to 8Sleep.com slash Huberman to save $350 off their Pod4 Ultra.

8 Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.

Again, that's 8Sleep.com slash Huberman.

The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients.

I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event.

I started taking AG1 and I still take AG1 once or twice a day because it gives me vitamins and minerals that I might not be getting enough of from Whole Foods that I eat, as well as adaptogens and micronutrients.

Those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical because even though I strive to eat most of my foods from unprocessed or minimally processed Whole Foods,

it's often hard to do so, especially when I'm traveling and especially when I'm busy.

So by drinking a packet of AG1 in the morning and oftentimes also again in the afternoon or evening, I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need.

I'm covering all of my foundational nutritional needs.

And I like so many other people that take AG1 regularly just report feeling better.

And that shouldn't be surprising because it supports gut health and of course gut health, supports immune system health and brain health.

And it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another.

While certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome like sleeping better or being more alert,

AG1 really is foundational nutritional support.

It's really designed to support all of the systems of your brain and body that relate to mental health and physical health.

If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash huberman to claim a special offer.

They'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2.

Again, that's drinkag1.com slash huberman.

And now for the live event at the Great Hall in Brisbane, Australia.

What are my thoughts on nicotine?

Nicotine causes cancer when it's consumed in the form of smoking, vaping, dipping, or stuffing. So don't do that.

There's a debate now about vaping. Is it bad? Is it good? It's bad.

It is. Is it worse for you than smoking? Probably not. Is it better? Probably. Slightly.

You know what's better? Just not doing it.

But if you need to do it and you have to pick, you know, I suppose, you know, I'm not going to tell you what to do.

But I think that vaping has allowed a good number of people to smoke less. I'll acknowledge that.

And it's also clear it's not good for you. So if you're going to do something that's bad for you, do a bunch of things to offset the thing that's bad for you.

That's always my advice. But now in terms of nicotine itself, nicotine doesn't cause cancer.

The mode of consumption causes cancer. That's important. Nicotine finds just so-called nicotinic acetacolene receptors.

So these exist naturally in your body and on your muscles, they're the way that actually your nerves control contraction of your muscles.

So the consumption of nicotine, let's just say in, I don't know about down here, but in Europe it's becoming fairly common.

And in the Middle East, also for people to take little pouches of nicotine, can be absorbed, you know, sublingually or through the gum, gets into the bloodstream.

And it is truly a cognitive enhancer. It's a cognitive enhancer. Not going to lie to you.

It will raise attention, focus, cognitive performance. This is well established.

The problem is it also raises blood pressure and causes vasoconstriction. This is well established.

So, you know, you have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Do I do it sometimes? Do I do it often? Do I choose to not do it at all?

I don't think the young brain should be consuming nicotine even in these non-cancer-causing forms, like pouches, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the brain is so plastic at a young age anyway.

But I actually am familiar with the use of nicotine for offsetting certain neurologic diseases. When I was visiting Columbia Medical University in New York City, some years ago I was in the office of a Nobel Prize winner.

I won't tell you what it was necessarily. And he proceeded to consume no fewer than six pieces of nicorette gum in our half-hour meeting.

At the time he was in his late 70s, he's now in his 80s, and I was like, hey listen, what's the deal with the nicotine?

And he said, oh well, it offsets Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I said, really? He said, yeah, you can increase cognitive function. I used to smoke by I want to get cancer, so I just chew a lot and a lot of nicorette.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of nicorette. It can increase the amount of acetylcholine activation through the binding of these nicotine and acetylcholine receptors might even maintain some dopamine orgic neurons, which are the neurons that one tends to lose with age and is rampant in diseases like Parkinson's.

I thought, whoa, okay, so there's something there. The fact of the matter is that nicotine can enhance focus, alertness, and learning, but it does have those other issues.

So you want to be considerate of those other issues and not become dependent on it.

And my experience is that people who taste the nicotine focus from a zin patch are those people who are buying those things pretty regularly. I know somebody that went from one zin patch twice a week to a canister a morning in about a month because the effect will wear off if you keep consuming it every day.

You have to consume more and more. So take that into consideration. Probably best to avoid unless you need really need the boost and you can afford the increase in blood pressure. That would be my suggestion.

I've never taken nicotine and I don't smoke.

What's the best you can do for managing ADHD if not taking medication? Okay, so we did two episodes of the Huberman lab podcast on ADHD. The first was on behavioral nutritional and supplement based tools, 50% of the comments. Thank you so much. This is very helpful.

Can't wait to try some of the stuff the other way like your evil.

You are trying to persuade people to not take pharmaceuticals, which is not true. I'm interested in all of it. I just covered that stuff in the first episode. And then the second one we don't need ADHD was about things like violence at or all.

Ritalin, etc. Most of which by the way are fedamines. Are we putting our kids on speed? Yes. Yeah, they're fedamines. But I don't think that we should walk away from those things in every case. They do have real clinical value.

And they're clinical value comes from the fact that one not all but one of the major effects of amphetamines is that it can increase dopamine or gin or gin or gin or gin or gin or gin or in release in the brain which can increase attention and focus, which is actually beneficial in some cases for the brain to learn to focus to get neuroplasticity of those very circuits.

So consideration than 50% of the comments of that second episode were why don't you talk about the behavioral tools, the supplemented tools and the nutrition tools and everyone else that thank you for talking about the prescription drugs.

So the point being several fold one is that certainly a combination of behavioral nutritional supplement based and prescription tools is viable for most every situation. And it's worth thinking about all of those when considering a treatment for ADHD and I think we really need to get out of these silos of thinking you know like big pharma is evil listen there are drugs that can help people.

And it's evil I don't know is it going away now. Okay is there value there sometimes is it over prescribed sometimes what about nutritional tools well in some cases it can really help in other cases it's one still needs prescription drug tools in some cases doing behavioral nutritional supplement based tools can allow one to take lower doses of pharmaceuticals if that's your goal.

So it really needs to be tailored to the individual what I would like to see is more of a tailoring to the individual than the simple writer script send people off or tell people that it's all bad if it comes out of a prescription drug label format.

So I think that's why I think it's a good idea to share that the original dosing schedule for things like at or all by events etc was during the weekdays but not the weekends that somehow is moved to no weekends off so there's been a lot of changing the dosing schedules.

So I think that's why these drugs are taken are we creating a dependency on these drugs is always a big question and the answer seems to be a sort of very few people for whom these drugs work decide to come off them.

There's nothing magical about turning 25 after which you don't need these these enhancements but sometimes people don't need them or need as much of them because the neural circuits can be built up one thing that I would like to see more of is attention to the behavioral tools for ADHD not the least of which is what's being carried out in many schools and clinics and child.

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if he woke up on New Year's Day and said, all right, 50 rabbits this year, he never actually achieved that but listen, the point is some of us sleep like bulldogs some of us tend to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people go to sleep four hours wake up. I hate it but I figured out that non-sleep deep rest or yoga knee-dra is taught me how to fall back asleep really quickly and I can recover some sleep by having gotten through non-sleep deep rest. Some people have been asleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people have been asleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people have been asleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people have been asleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people have been asleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people have been asleep and wake up in

the middle of the night because they don't have their sleep timing right. We have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker recorded six episode series with Matt and he talks about something I take no credit for this. This is Matt's acronym QQ RT quality quantity, regularity and timing. You want to pay attention to the amount of sleep. Some people need six. Some people need eight. If you only got seven for years and you're reading that you need eight or else you'll get dementia, please don't worry about it. It is simply not the case.

Some people need less. Some people need more of this varies across the lifespan. Then there's the quality. How much of that sleep is continuous? Did you drink caffeine in the afternoon or alcohol in the evening which case the quality will be diminished? The regularity is very interesting. Going to sleep more or less five nights a week at least. Going to sleep more or less at the same time every night plus or minus an hour. It's fine on the weekends. Not just saying that so you don't all leave at once or a third of you leave. Some people do best by going to bed.

You can go to bed at eight or nine pm and waking up at three or four in the morning. That's where you would feel best. If you're so many who wakes up at three or four in the morning you might be going to sleep too late and you have this intrinsic chronotype as it's called. You can shift your clock a bit later. Most people want to go to bed sometime between 10 pm and midnight. Wake up sometime between 6 am and 8 am. There's great variation there too. QQ RT. Think about the quality of the quantity.

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I've lost my taste for sweets, but occasionally I'll do that and I love vegetables like croissants and things of that sort. But all kidding aside, I do try and eat pretty healthy every day. With a ton of intro out there about health and wellness, Andrew, I love the way that I eat.

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