Andrew Huberman — Optimizing Sleep, Enhancing Performance (2023)

Huberman avoids melatonin, prefers 3 safer sleep tools with better margins

Huberman steers away from melatonin because it's a hormone with roles beyond sleep. He recommends three alternatives with better safety profiles. Emphasizing exhales over inhales slows heart rate. He also discusses self-hypnosis as a powerful, underappreciated sleep and focus tool.

"And these are hormones that have other issues and other roles, I should say, in the body. So that's why I veer away from melatonin. Also, there are three things that I personally have found to be much more beneficial that seem to have very good safety margins. Of course, everyone needs to check with their physician, but those three things are magnesium threonate, T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, or biglycinate, magnesium biglycinate. Magnesium threonate and magnesium biglycinate are able to be transported across the blood-brain barrier more readily than other forms of magnesium. I know you know a lot about this topic, Tim, so correct me anywhere I might misspeak, but like for instance, magnesium citrate is a great laxative. It goes by another name too. You can imagine what it might be that will remind you that it's a great laxative. What it's not great at inducing sleep, magnesium threonate or magnesium biglycinate, so 200 to 400 milligrams about 30 minutes before sleep is a powerful sleep aid. People with heart issues might not want to take it or might want to check with their doctor, but I take a cocktail of magnesium threonate and then two other things. One is very commonly known, which is theanine, T-H-E-A-N-I-N-E, 200 to 400 milligrams of theanine can create a kind of a hypnotic state, help you fall asleep. Basically, falling asleep requires turning off your thoughts. And the only people that should really avoid theanine, I think, are people who suffer from sleepwalking or night terrors. It can create very vivid dreams. And then the third thing is apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N, which is a derivative of chamomile, but it acts as a chloride channel agonist. So it essentially helps shut down the forebrain by hyperpolarizing neurons and all this kind of stuff for the aficionados if they want to know. So that cocktail of 50 milligrams of apigenin, 300 to 400 milligrams of magnesium threonate or biglycinate, and 200 to 400 milligrams of of theanine for me has been the best way to consistently fall asleep quickly and stay asleep most, if not the entire night, which for me is about seven, eight hours. And of course, I'm not a physician. I'm a scientist. Everyone needs to figure out what's right for them. But many, many people who I've recommended this to have told me that in combination with the morning light viewing, that their sleep has been completely transformed. They thought they were so-called insomniacs, but they actually were just having a hard time turning off their thoughts and probably their cortisol was drifting too late in the day. So to that cortisol point, this is fascinating. And I just find it endlessly interesting that different forms of magnesium can be so target specific with respect to different tissues in the body. So, so fascinating. With respect to cortisol, and needless to say, I have used phosphatidylserine before sleep to help blunt cortisol release, but I do cycle. I use it as needed, really, if there's a lot of rumination or I've had a particularly stressful day. But do you have any thoughts on whether or not you would ever do that personally or if you'd be too concerned about side effects or long-term side effects? I suppose that could be a larger issue if you're just never cycling off. But do you have any thoughts on using different compounds to blunt cortisol release if you're over ruminating and want to sort of minimize that, in this case, stress response while you're trying to sleep? I have not tried PS. I use ashwagandha from time to time if I'm in a particularly long bout of stress. One of the things that I think is relevant here is that we hear about stress as terrible, but of course, short-term stress buffers the immune system. It actually activates the spleen to release killer cells and things of that sort. We are more robust in fighting off infection in the short term from pulses and cortisol. But I would say we can define long-term stress as if you are having sleep disruption or you're feeling like you're in that wired and tired mode, we don't really have a technical name for this, for more than two or three days, you're starting to enter the realm of long-term stress. And that's where buffering cortisol can really help. And that's where I start to take some ashwagandha late in the day. There's good evidence it can buffer cortisol. I do cycle it, so I'm not gonna take it every night or every day. I would probably stop after a week or so and then just go back to my normal regimen, which doesn't include ashwagandha, but I always have some on hand. I have to say that I certainly use and enjoy the benefits of supplements, many of them in fact, but the practice that for me has really helped reduce stress and allowed me to fall asleep more easily and control my state of mind late in the evening is this practice that some people call yoga nidra, which literally means yoga sleep. And that practice of taking 20 or 30 minutes a day, and it doesn't have to be done every day and lying down and doing a sort of body scan. It involves some long exhale breathing, which is very relaxing to the nervous system and really allowing the mind to enter one of these pseudo sleep states. We know from work in my laboratory and work that I'm doing with David Spiegel's laboratory, as well as work from other labs, that that state of shallow nap or shallow sleep done in waking allows the brain to, and the person to get better at turning off their thoughts and falling asleep in the evening. So I use both behavioral tools and pharmacology, which of course is really what supplementation is. I don't have any problem with buffering cortisol a little bit in the short term. So doing that for a week or two, but I wouldn't suggest that people suppress their cortisol long-term unless there's a real clinical need to do that. Long-term being longer than two weeks. if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. You mentioned long exhales in the context of the yoga nidra practice. Is it fair to refer to that yoga nidra practice as also non-sleep deep rest or NSDR or those separate phenomena? Yeah, so Yoga Nidra is one of several what we call NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocols. Admittedly, I coined the term NSDR because scientists like acronyms almost as much as the military likes acronyms. And I did it deliberately not to rob the beautiful history and community that is Yoga Nidra and the Yogurt communities of anything, but rather because many people are averse to doing anything that has a name like Yoga Nidra. And yet it's such a powerful tool. It's a zero cost tool that has enormous effects on not just accessing sleep and calm, but enhancing rates of neuroplasticity, something that we could talk more about. Also, David Spiegel, again, our associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford and close collaborator and friend of mine is a world expert in clinical hypnosis. We are part of a, just in full disclosure, we both sit on the advisory board of a company called Reverie, R-E-V-E-R-I.com. Reverie is a zero cost app on Android and Apple that has short hypnosis protocols, anywhere from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. Hypnosis and yoga Nidra both fall under the umbrella of NSDR non-sleep depressed. And these are protocols that people can use to deliberately access states of deep rest for sake of, again, falling asleep more easily, reducing stress, but also for enhancing rates of learning of neuroplasticity. And because these are zero cost tools, and because they're grounded in excellent peer-reviewed research, I feel comfortable mentioning them. And what you find is that if people who are not familiar with meditation or mindfulness, or maybe they're not from West LA or the Bay area, um, if they hear yoga Nidra, they think magic carpets and they think, and they hear hypnosis and they think that somebody is going to control their brain. NSDR is my attempt to create a more friendly language, which is because all of these things are really just the same thing. They really involve two things. One, self-directing a state of calm. That's something that we never learn how to do unless we have a need to do it. We suffer some trauma, we have chronic stress, we start taking a mindfulness class. We, self-inducing a state of calm through respiration and vision is the hallmark of yoga nidra and hypnosis. And frankly, of all meditative practices, our thoughts follow our vision and breathing. And I can explain why that is in a moment. In addition, these NSDR type practices involve not just self-directing calm, but they also involve directing our focus to something. We generally have a hard time falling asleep because we think we have to turn off our thoughts completely like a switch. But the transition to sleep involves allowing our thoughts to become fragmented and then we become relaxed. And then the brain enters the state where space and time are very fluid and not under our conscious control. And those are things that we can teach ourselves. So yoga nidra scripts are found all over YouTube. There's some great apps out there. The zero cost ones that I use are any of the stuff by Kamini, K-A-M-I-N-I Desai, D-E-S-A-I. I like her voice very much. Some people like my sister loves Liam Gillen's voice, another zero cost yoga nidra tool, Liam Gillen, a double L-G-I-L-L-E-N. You have to find a voice that you like. The Reverie app is David's voice. He has a very hypnotic voice. And there are scripts in there for smoking cessation, stress and anxiety, sleep, etc. These, I really want to emphasize, in addition to being zero cost, are very powerful tools if done regularly. There are two papers that were published in the last two years from Cell Reports and Cell Press Journal, excellent journal, showing that a 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocol after a bout of intense focus or intense attempt to learn anything, skill learning or cognitive learning, accelerates plasticity by about 50%. So you are learning faster, much faster, and retention of that information lasts much longer. And that's because these are sleep-like states. And we know that neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience, is triggered by high focus, by deliberate periods of very high focus. But the actual rewiring of neurons, the formation of new synapses and the reordering of the circuitry that leads to that skill or that cognitive ability becoming reflexive that happens in states of deep rest and non-sleep deep rest NSDR, whether it's hypnosis or yoga nidra or a shallow nap of about 20, 30 minutes, those things will all accelerate learning. Let's hop around just a little bit. Yoga nidra first on the NSDR study that you mentioned and the increase in plasticity, which I'm assuming was measured by retention, recall, et cetera, but perhaps it wasn't. If you could send afterwards a link to that study, I'll put it in the show notes for listeners who who might be interested we've touched on breathing in a few different capacities i have a term in front of me that seems kind of self-explanatory but i don't know what form it takes physiological size contrasted with other breathing methods for stress reduction. Could you define what that is? Yeah. A few years ago, when my laboratory got interested in studying stress in humans, we asked ourselves, what are the patterns of breathing that allow for the most rapid reduction in stress levels? And more importantly, what are the patterns of breathing that can be done in real time so that people can adjust their stress while they're still engaging in life, right? Breathwork classes, running off to Esalen for a weekend is a magical experience, but life demands pressing on you. That's typically when you feel stressed. So it is still true that vacation, long meditation retreats and massages or a nice drink, if you're of drinking age, still work, but they're slow and they take you offline. The physiological sigh is a pattern of breathing that was actually discovered by physiologists in the thirties. And that was essentially rediscovered by professor Jack Feldman at UCLA, a world expert in the neurobiology of respiration. And by my colleague, Mark Krasno at Stanford, who studies lung function. The physiological side is a pattern of breathing that we all engage in, in deep sleep. When levels of carbon dioxide in our bloodstream get too high, we or our dogs, you can see your dog do this, we'll do a double inhale followed by an extended exhale. Children or adults for that matter that are sobbing and lose their breath, so to speak, will also do a double inhale exhale. That's the spontaneous execution of what we call the physiological sigh. The reason it works so well to relax us is because it offloads a lot of carbon dioxide all at once. And the way it works is the following. Our lungs are not just two big bags of air. We have all these little millions of sacks of air that if we were to lay them out flat, they would be as big as about a tennis court or so. The volume of air, therefore, and the volume of carbon dioxide that we can offload is tremendously high, except that we get stressed as carbon dioxide builds up on our bloodstream and it's kind of a double whammy. These little sacks deflate. Now, when we do a double inhale, so I'll do this now twice through my nose, or you could do this, or you could do it through your mouth, but it works best through the nose. It's inhale. And then you sneak a little bit more air in at the very end. When you do that, you re-inflate those little sacks. And when you exhale, then you discard all the carbon dioxide at once. So the simple way to describe this protocol is that unless you are underwater, you do a double inhale followed by an extended exhale, and you offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide. And we found in our laboratory and other laboratories have found that just one, two or three of those physiological size brings your level of stress down very, very fast. And it's a tool that, you know, you can use any time. I do hope that people will kind of watch other people or dogs as they start to relax or go down to sleep. You'll see this pattern of breathing. But again, it can be consciously driven. The other thing about breathing and the reason why exhales are so vital is the following. I know there's a lot of interest nowadays in heart rate variability. Well, most people don't realize this, but your breathing is actually driving heart rate variability. So when you inhale this dome shaped muscle beneath your lungs, your diaphragm actually moves down because the lungs expand, it moves down. When you do that, you create more space in the thoracic cavity and you actually, the heart gets a little bigger. It actually expands. As a consequence, blood flows more slowly through that larger volume and the brain quickly sends a signal down to the heart to speed the heart up. The short, simple version of this is inhales speed the heart up. When you exhale, the opposite is true. That dome-shaped muscle of the diaphragm moves up. The space in your thoracic cavity gets a little bit smaller. The heart gets a little bit smaller. Blood moves more quickly through that small volume and the brain sends a signal to the heart to slow the heart down. Physicians know this as respiratory sinus arrhythmia, but this is the basis of what we call HRV, heart rate variability. And the simple way to remember this is anytime you emphasize exhales, in other words, making them longer than your inhales, you are slowing the heart rate down. You're calming your system. Anytime you emphasize Inhales, you make them more vigorous or longer than your inhales, you are slowing the heart rate down. You're calming your system."