hello and welcome to a special episode of after skool. I'm Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. I'm also the host of the Hubermann Lab podcast, a weekly podcast focused on science and science-based tools for everyday life. Today, you're going to learn about practical tools for optimizing your morning routine. So, without further ado, practical tools for optimizing your morning routine. There are certain foundational behaviors, do's and don'ts, that set the stage for you to be better at everything. So, a lot of times people say, How can I lift more, focus better, remember things better? It's like, well, let's think about the foundation of that, and that's always going to come back to two elements, and that's sleep and what I call non-sleep deep rest. So, sleep is the fundamental practice or part of our 24-hour cycle where if you don't get it on a consistent basis, you

are down-regulating your ability to do everything. Right metabolism is screwed up, immune system is screwed up, etc., etc. However, it is not the case if you get a one night's bad sleep or that if you're not sleeping perfectly that you can't perform well. But let's talk about sleep, and just because I think it's important. The goal for most people, unless you're pulling vampire shifts on deployment or you're a shift worker, and thank you shift workers, we'll talk about shift work, you should try and get really good sleep eighty percent of the time, eight percent of the nights of your life. The other twenty percent, I hope you're not getting good sleep for good reasons that you enjoy. But the point is that there are a couple things that you can do. First of all, every cell in your body has a circadian rhythm, meaning every cell has a 24-hour circadian clock that's regulated by genes. Think of these. Your body is a bunch of millions of clock to need to align.

those clocks to a single time. This is why when 
you travel overseas, your gut goes off, or it's   more easy. You more easily get sick or uh, your 
thinking isn't quite right. The clocks aren't in   alignment. They're not entrained, as we say. Number 
one practice for everything, sleep especially, is   try and get some natural light in your eyes within 
an hour of waking up. If you wake up before the sun,   turn on a bunch of bright lights and then 
get sunlight in your eyes once it comes out.   If there's dense cloud cover, there 
are still more photons, light energy,   coming through that cloud cover than there are 
coming from artificial lights. So try and get   five to ten minutes without sunglasses 
outside in the morning once the sun is out.   Most days, if not all days, this has an outsized 
effect on a number of things. First of all, it   modulates the timing of what's called the cortisol 
pulse. Once every 24 hours, you're going to get a

boost in cortisol big spike in cortisol. It's a 
healthy boost. It sets your temperature rhythm   in motion, sets your level of alertness, your 
level of focus, and your mood. You want that   cortisol pulse to happen as early in the day 
as once. What's triggering the cortisol pulse?   The cortisol pulse is naturally entrained by these 
genetic programs to happen once every 24 hours, but   light will anchor it to the period where you see 
bright light. Got it? A late-shifted cortisol pulse.   So imagine the kid that wakes up and spends the 
morning in bed, or you spend the morning bedding.   You're texting, or you're indoors, and you're 
typing on the computer. That's not enough light to   accomplish what I'm talking about. And then you go 
outside around noon or one. You're in what's called   the circadian dead zone, which is the time in which 
light arriving at the eyes can do certain things,   but it can't time this pulse. That means that 
cortisol pulse is going to come in the afternoon.

which means that your temperature rhythm is going 
to be shifted late, and that's actually a signature   of depression and anxiety and difficulty falling 
asleep. Many people are waking up, and they're just   spending time indoors, and they're putting on 
sunglasses, getting in their car, and driving, or   there's cloud cover, and they think there's no sun 
out. I don't mean that you actually have to stare   at the sun; never stare at any light so bright 
it's going to damage you, please don't, and blink as   necessary, but the indirect rays from the sun 
trigger these cells in the eyes called melanopsin   ganglion cells. These ganglion cells, these are our 
neurons, they send a signal to your hypothalamus,   then the hypothalamus releases this peptide, which 
is a wake-up signal for your whole brain and body,   and sets a timer for the onset of melatonin 
release 16 hours later. Melatonin being the   hormone that makes you sleepy and makes you want 
to go to sleep. So you can imagine what happens if

you don't get that light until a few hours later. Everything shifted and then you want to go to st. You don't know why you're wide awake at 11:30 or 12, and everything's messed up. The other thing is that you can get bright light from electronic devices early in the day, but it's not enough. You need photons from sunlight. Now, if you live in Scandinavia in the depths of winter, if you're up in like, you know, Trondheim or Ohus or something like okay, fine, don't buy an expensive daytime simulator. Get one of these LED light boxes for drawing. They're very inexpensive in comparison. You find them on Amazon. I don't have a relationship to any of these brands, but they're easy to find. 20-30 bucks. Put that on your desk and just look at that thing for a few minutes in the morning. Not as good, but better than being in the darkness. Then when the sun's out, get outside.

now this is a huge huge effect for the following 
reason. The signal that arrives from the eyes to the hypothalamus also triggers the release of the neuromodulator dopamine. We hear about dopamine as a feel-good molecule, dopamine dopamine dopamine dopamine hits, but dopamine's main role in the brain and body is to drive motivation, craving, and pursuit. It is not the molecule of pleasure, it is the molecule of drive, it is life force. Dopamine is actually the molecule from which adrenaline (epinephrine) is manufactured, and you may notice you said we crave sun, it also does make you feel good. Here's why. If you think about seasonally breeding animals, let's think about the arctic fox. Well, the arctic fox in winter is white, but in the summertime has darker pelts. It actually there's a pathway going from sunlight to dopamine to melanin production in the skin in fur. So animals that transition from light color to dark color, that's all mediated by dopamine. Guess what.

else happens the gonads grow there are animals 
that i've worked on in the laboratory and that also in humans. It's now been shown in a beautiful study that people who get 20 to 30 minutes of light on their skin. This was a study done in Israel so they wear an appropriate amount of clothing but they're sleeveless. No hat no sunglasses. They were told to go outside 20 or 30 minutes three times a week just in the sunshine. Ideally they were shorts. Also they measure testosterone and estrogen in men and women. Significant increases in both and all the associated things of increased passion blah blah blah. That is what they measured in the study. Why well it turns out that light to the eyes but also light to the skin. The skin is an endocrine organ. It's not just something to tattoo and hang earrings from and put clothing on. And actually there's a pathway involving a molecule called p53 and the keratinocytes are these skin

cells that when sunlight when uvb ultraviolet 
blue light penetrates the skin because it can   penetrate the skin superficially triggers these 
keratinocytes to stimulate a pathway that releases   dopamine in the brain and body so you feel better 
when you're getting light in your eyes and on   your skin and you're increasing testosterone 
and epinephrine and dopamine increase that's   why you feel good in the summer months people in 
scandinavia know this this kind of spring fever   in the winter months you want to go through every 
bit of effort to double or triple the amount of   time that you're spending outside in the morning 
so instead of 10 minutes make it 30 minutes   we all are familiar with getting sleepy and 
falling asleep that's the parasympathetic   nervous system taking over the longer we are 
awake the longer the buildup of something called   adenosine in the brain and body and adenosine 
turns on the parasympathetic nervous system

suppresses the sympathetic nervous system when 
we sleep. Adenosine is pushed back down. What is caffeine? Caffeine effectively through 
some chemical steps blocks the effects of adenosine. So if you wait. So here's a little trick 
if you. That's. I don't like the word hacks because hacks imply using something for a purpose it 
wasn't designed for. Here we're talking about hardwired biology. But if you wake up in the 
morning and you didn't sleep quite as much as you would have liked, that means and you're 
sleepy, that means you still have a buildup of adenosine in your system. Let's say you immediately 
reach for caffeine, great. You suppress the action of that adenosine and you will be more alert 
and guess what happens then. The caffeine wears off and the adenosine binds to the receptors with 
greater affinity and you have your afternoon crash. So a practice that's very useful to people is 
to delay the intake of caffeine by 60 to 90

minutes after waking, allow the adenosine to be cleared out because it's not just cleared out in sleep. It's also cleared out in those kind of sleepy states of early morning. So allow it to be cleared out. The other thing that clears it out: exercise. Exercise. So when you get up in the morning, you're kind of sleepy. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. But you hydrate and train, you clear out the adenosine. Now, I like to drink caffeine before I train. During training, I'm weak like that. But for people that have an afternoon crash, this can have tremendous benefits of and maybe start by pushing it out 15 minutes per day. Most everyone that does this says, Oh my goodness, I didn't understand why in the afternoon I'm crashing so hard. This will really, really help. So let me ask you this. I have a sense for you. What time do you wake up typically? Generally between

well, between 4:15 and 4:30. Okay, so for most people, it's gonna be a little bit later, probably, but for you, that means so you're waking up. If it's because of an alarm, it's because of an alarm, but if that's your natural wake-up time now without an alarm, that means that your temperature is starting to rise at that time. That's why you wake up. That temperature increase triggers that cortisol release. Now, and that's why some people wake up right before their alarm clock. It's this cortisol pulse, okay, and two hours before that. So for you, approximately 2:30 in the morning is what we call your temperature minimum. It's when your temperature is lowest that it's ever going to be in the 24-hour cycle. So the way it works is you wake up because of an increase in core body temperature. That increase in core body temperature triggers that increase in cortisol and by viewing.

light at that time you entrain you you ensure 
that it happens at the same time the next day the   clocks of your body are matched to this cortisol 
pulse so viewing bright light in the morning   anchors it when we say entrained it it tel through 
a circuit that involves cells in the eye and cells   in the hypothalamus which then talk to the rest of 
the cells of the body through a signal a peptide   that's released make sure that the temperature 
starts rising goes up up up up up and sometime   around two or three in the afternoon you're going 
to hit your temperature maximum you might feel a   little sleepy at that time but that's actually 
the time in which your gut your all your systems   are kind of revving at the maximum capacity 
and then it's going to start to drop and start   to drop drop drop now that drop in temperature 
eventually will be a full one to 3 degrees below   what your temperature maximum and that's when 
you're going to get sleepy and fall asleep

this is why it's important to keep 
the room cool at night. To fall asleep, the goal here is to increase body temperature in 
order to be awake and to decrease body temperature   in order to be asleep. If we stay with those 
themes, a lot of this will just fall into bins. Exercising will increase body temperature somewhat, 
paradoxically. Getting into a cold shower or cold   water, everyone says what must make you cold, 
right? Well, if you stay in there a long time,   to become hypothermic. Right, but let's remember 
the thermostat example. You have a little area in   your brain called the medial pre-optic area, and if 
you make the surface of your body cold, guess what   happens? Core body temperature goes up. So getting 
into so if you're going to do ice baths or cold   showers, you can do. I would say do them sometime 
better than not at all. There's a beautiful paper   published in the European Journal of Physiology 
in the year 2000, which took people and had them

sit. They actually had them on lawn chairs in 
water, a pool. It's a great way to run an experiment. I always say people ask about cold showers. 
They're not a lot of experiments on cold showers because think about it's very hard to 
control. Is everyone under the shower the same way, et cetera. You put someone up in water up 
to their neck, it is, you know what you're doing. So there's experimental rigor that drives 
that, but they had people get into reasonably cool water, 60 degrees Fahrenheit, so it's not 
that cool, but they had them stand for an hour. Or they've had people get into very cold water, 
something like 40 degrees, for just 20 seconds. Now here's what's really interesting, that shock 
that you referred to is adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and it is released from the adrenals, 
obviously, but also from a site in the brain called locus ceruleus, a little area of the brainstem 
that then sprinkles the rest of the brain with

epinephrine and wakes up the rest of the brain so 
that shock occurs in the brain and the body and   actually the stuff in the body doesn't cross the 
blood-brain barrier so you're a two-part system   when those two systems are aligned it's beautiful 
when those two systems are out of alignment that's   not good so you get into cold water that's the 
shock for the first 30 seconds for most people who   are untrained your forebrain which is controlling 
decision making is basically suppressed in its   activity and other areas are ramped up so just 
know that exact panic just understand that passes   then what happens is when you get out of the cold 
whether or not it's a longer period at 60 degrees   or a short period. I would hate to hear that people 
are only doing 20 seconds but maybe a minute to   three minutes at 45 degrees or something. There's 
a long arc release of dopamine and epinephrine.

that's what was shown in the study in humans because people always go well it's just in mice no in humans and that long arc of dopamine leads to a near doubling or more of dopamine and epinephrine in my colleague anna lembke's book called dopamine nation she works on addiction runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic at stanford she talked about a patient of hers that basically helped himself get over cocaine addiction by doing cold baths because it was the only thing that would give him the kind of dopamine release that even slightly mimicked his cocaine addiction and allowed himself to wean himself off with a healthier behavior now i'm not saying it's the equivalent of a drug like cocaine but i am saying that it's a better decision than than a drug like cocaine for obvious reasons so that mood-enhancing effect that you feel afterwards it's real it's based on a real neurochemical effect and that dopamine and epinephrine will

combine with the temperature increase from cortisol, plus light, plus exercise. All things that increase core body temperature. Now you've got increased core body temperature. You created a dopamine release, epinephrine. You've created a summer month inside your body. I don't care if you live in Minneapolis in the depths of winter or someplace even as cold as New Hampshire. You are creating summer in your body by doing that. Now if you live in San Diego or Los Angeles or Arizona and it's the summer and you're staying indoors and you're on your phone and you're not doing any movement until the afternoon, which is fine, exercise in the afternoon, I realize there's some important benefits of that, and you're laying in bed or you're just walking around the kitchen and putting on sunglasses and driving to work, guess what, you're creating a Colorado winter inside of your body despite the fact that the sun is out. So if you're wondering why you're

slightly depressed. Your metabolism is lower, your 
testosterone output is slightly lower than maybe   you'd like it to be. There could be other reasons 
too, of course, but again, we're talking about   modulators. I'm not saying getting sun in your eyes 
in the morning is going to make your testosterone   perfect. What I'm saying is you're setting 
an internal milieu through things that increase   core body temperature, dopamine, epinephrine, etc., and 
that should be done relatively early in the day. Thank you for joining for this special 
episode of after skool. If you'd like to   learn more tools for mental health, physical 
health, and performance, check out the Huberman   Lab podcast, which is available on all platforms: 
YouTube, Apple, Spotify, anywhere podcasts are found.   Also, check out Huberman Lab on both Instagram and 
Twitter. There, I cover science and science-based   tools, some of which overlaps with the content 
of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which   is distinct from the content of the Huberman Lab 
podcast. We are also hubermanlab.com. That's our

website. And there, you can find links to all of our social media and all of our podcast episodes. You

The Optimal Morning Routine - Andrew Huberman

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