Essentials: How to Optimize Testosterone & Estrogen

Estrogen Metabolism Discussion

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

"Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance."

Nasal Breathing: Protocol

Believe it or not, being a nasal breather and avoiding being a mouth breather can actually positively impact hormones, and in particular, the hormones testosterone and estrogen.

"But it does that in part through indirect mechanisms because deep sleep supports the gonads, the ovaries and the testicles, and their turnover of cells and the production of cells."

Cold Exposure: Dopamine

It's fine to wear prescription lenses and contacts.

"But it does that in part through indirect mechanisms because deep sleep supports the gonads, the ovaries and the testicles, and their turnover of cells and the production of cells. Remember in the ovary, particular cells and the egg follicles themselves make estrogen. And in the testicle, that the Sertoli cells and the Leydig cells are important for the formation of sperm and for testosterone respectively. So what does this all mean? This means we have to be breathing properly to get your breathing and sleep right so that your sleep can actually be deep enough and you're not entering apnea states. Getting proper sleep can really offset all the reductions in testosterone and estrogen and reductions in fertility that occur if we don't get enough sleep. But seldom is it discussed how sleep actually adjusts things like testosterone and estrogen, and it does it by modifying cortisol. So the molecule cholesterol can be converted into testosterone or estrogen, but there's a competition whereby the cholesterol will turn into cortisol and not testosterone, or it'll turn into cortisol and not estrogen if stress levels are too high. So the simple version of this is getting your breathing right during the waking hours, meaning primarily unless you're working out really hard or there's some other reason why you're maybe eating or speaking that you need to be breathing through your mouth, you should be a nose breather. There's really good evidence for that now. And in sleep, you also want to be a nose breather because that's going to increase the amount of oxygen that you're bringing into your system and the amount of carbon dioxide that you're offloading. Okay, so the simple version of this is get your breathing right. So how do you do that? How do you get your breathing right? Well, for some people that have severe sleep apnea, they're going to need the CPAP machine. This is a machine that you actually put on your face and it helps you breathe properly and sleep. In the daytime, the best way to get good at nasal breathing is to dilate the nasal passages, because a lot of people have a hard time breathing through their nose. And one way to do this is to just breathe through your nose more. And one way to do that is that when you exercise, in particular cardiovascular exercise, most of the time, provided you're not in maximum effort, you should be nasal breathing. Now, for a lot of people, nasal breathing during exercise is hard at first, but as you do it, because the sinuses have a capacity to dilate over time, you'll get better at it. So my advice would be breathe through your nose while exercising, unless you're in maximum effort. Pretty soon, what you'll find is you actually can create more output than you would if you were breathing through your mouth. Learn to be a nasal breather, has positive cosmetic effects, it reduces apnea, it offloads more carbon dioxide, it increases lung capacity, it dilates the sinuses, and it prevents apnea in sleep. So unless you have severe apnea and you need the CPAP, becoming a nasal breather can have all sorts of positive effects by reducing cortisol, reducing apnea, and indirectly raising testosterone and estrogen in the proper ratios. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health, and performance. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast or even knew what a podcast was, and I've been taking it every day since. I find that AG1 greatly improves all aspects of my health. I simply feel much better when I take it. AG1 uses the highest quality ingredients in the right combinations, and they're constantly improving their formulas without increasing the cost. Whenever I'm asked if I could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? I always say AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. Right now they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. The second piece of behavioral advice relates to the viewing of light. And many of you have heard me talk about this before, and I'm not going to belabor the point that viewing bright light within the first hour of waking, whether or not it's from artificial light or ideally from sunlight has these powerful effects on sleep and wakefulness. But we have to return to this. If you want to understand how light can impact hormones, because hormones, light and dopamine have a very close knit relationship. So much so that your light viewing behavior can actually have a direct effect on hormone levels and fertility. I think most people don't really understand how powerful this relationship is between light, dopamine, hormones. And when dopamine levels are high, as I mentioned before, there's a tendency for more gonadotropin-releasing hormone, luteinizing hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, all the hormones that come from the hypothalamic pituitary axis and stimulate estrogen and testosterone release from the ovary and testes. So how does this translate to a protocol? If you want to optimize testosterone and estrogen, you need to get your light viewing behavior correct. It's not just about optimizing your sleep, which is also important. It's about getting a sufficient amount of light in your eyes so you have sufficient levels of dopamine. So the simple protocols for that I've reviewed before, but it means getting anywhere from two to 10 minutes of bright light exposure in your eyes early in the day. It is not sufficient to do this with sunglasses unless you have to do that for safety reasons. It's fine to wear prescription lenses and contacts. If you can't get sunlight for whatever reason, you want to use bright artificial light, but that is absolutely critical for timing the cortisol release properly, limiting cortisol release to the early part of the day, getting increases in dopamine that are going to promote the production of testosterone and estrogen to healthy levels. The other aspect of light viewing behavior that's extremely important is to avoid bright light exposure to your eyes in the middle of the night. If you're viewing bright light in the middle of the night, you are suppressing dopamine release. If you're suppressing dopamine release, you are suppressing testosterone levels. So you can't even begin to talk about supplements and other ways to optimize testosterone, diet, and its effects on testosterone and estrogen and fertility and reproductive behavior, et cetera, until you get your breathing right, until you get things like your light viewing behavior right. So bright light early in the day and throughout the day is great and avoiding bright light in the middle of the night is not just about not disrupting your sleep. It's also about optimizing the sex steroid hormones. Okay, so we've talked about breathing. We've talked about light. Let's talk about a third element that there seems to be some excitement about lately for other reasons, but that can actually have some pretty profound influences on hormone levels, and that's heat and cold. So as always, rather than just offer a tool, I'm going to tell you the underlying science as it relates to naturally occurring phenomenon, because in understanding that and understanding the mechanism, you're going to be in a far better position to understand the tools and mechanisms and how you might want to adjust them for your own life. So now you understand the relationship between light, day length, dopamine, and hormone levels. And everyone should realize that temperature and day length are linked. Temperature and day length and sunlight, those are all intimately related because of the systems that we evolved in, right? So nowadays there's a lot of interest in using cold as a way to stimulate testosterone. Sounds pretty crazy, but believe it or not, that and things like ice baths and cold showers can have positive effects on the sex steroid hormones. What happens is there's a rebound in vasodilation after cooling. So cooling causes vasoconstriction. And then after the cooling, there's a rebound vasodilation, and there's more infusion of blood into the gonads. Put simply, we don't know whether or not cold and heat directly affect the production of testosterone and estrogen. We only know that cold and heat can modulate those probably through indirect mechanisms like controlling the amount of blood flow by way of shutting down or activating the neurons. Now let's talk about particular forms of exercise and how they modulate the steroid hormones. So what's interesting is when you start digging into the more mechanistic studies, what you find is that heavy weight trainings, but not weight training to failure, where completion of a repetition is impossible, leads to the greatest increases in testosterone. So anywhere from one rep maximum to somewhere in the, you know, six to eight repetition range in males or females increases testosterone significantly. And it does it for about a day, sometimes somewhere in the six to eight repetition range, in males or females, increases testosterone significantly. And it does it for about a day, sometimes up to 48 hours. Now, many of you might be endurance athletes or also enjoy exercise besides heavy weight-bearing exercise. And there are several studies exploring whether or not endurance activity can increase or decrease androgen levels, and whether or not you combine endurance activity and exploring whether or not endurance activity can increase or decrease androgen levels and whether or not you combine endurance activity and weight training, whether or not that has any effect if you do the endurance activity first or second."

Resistance Training Discussion

In other words, if you want to optimize testosterone levels, it seems to be the case that weight training first and doing cardio type endurance activity afterward is the right order of business.

"And the takeaway from all of this was that endurance activity, if performed first, leads to decreases in testosterone during the weight training session as compared to the same weight training session done first, followed by endurance activity. In other words, if you want to optimize testosterone levels, it seems to be the case that weight training first and doing cardio type endurance activity afterward is the right order of business. Now, when these are done on separate days, it doesn't seem to have an effect. There is, they showed no statistical interaction, but it seems that if you're going to do these in the same workout episode, that it's move heavy loads first, then do cardiovascular exercise. So there's a little bit of data looking specifically at how endurance exercise impacts testosterone and its derivatives. And it's very clear that high intensity interval training, sprinting, et cetera, which somewhat mimics the neural activity that occurs while moving heavy weight loads is going to increase testosterone. There's ample evidence for that in the literature. And that endurance exercise that extends beyond 75 minutes is going to start to lead to reductions in testosterone, presumably by increases in cortisol. So now let's switch over to talking about estrogen. So there are many people who are trying to optimize their estrogen levels. And one of the places where this shows up a lot, and I get a lot of questions about is menopause. So menopause, as I mentioned earlier, is this fairly massive reduction in the amount of estrogen that is circulating in one's blood, mainly because the ovary is now depleted of some estrogen production of its own. The eggs are not being produced. They've been depleted, et cetera."

Zone 2 Cardio Discussion

In other words, if you want to optimize testosterone levels, it seems to be the case that weight training first and doing cardio type endurance activity afterward is the right order of business.

"And the takeaway from all of this was that endurance activity, if performed first, leads to decreases in testosterone during the weight training session as compared to the same weight training session done first, followed by endurance activity."

Estrogen Metabolism: Protocol

In males, it's interesting to point out that testosterone is promoting seeking of sex, but it's also estrogen in males that's important for libido.

"So menopause is characterized by a variety of symptoms, things like hot flashes, things like mood swings, things like headaches, in particular migraine headaches. There can be a lot of brain fog. It can be very, very disruptive for people."