Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman On Changing Your Biology With Behavior

If you were going to do a breathwork practice, first of all, you don't need more than five minutes per day. If you were going to select one breathwork practice, cyclic sighing, this double inhales followed by exhales for 5 minutes a day, seems to have the greatest positive effect on the greatest number of parameters.

If one is feeling stressed, or I should just say more alert, than one would like to be under any conditions, physiological sighs are, at least to my knowledge, the fastest way to bring down that level of alertness. And again, it's a full inhale through the nose as deeply as you possibly can, and then sneak in a little bit more air at the top... and then a long exhale until basically you have no more air to exhale.

I do think that the information that we consume sets the internal context of our subconscious and sets the internal context for what we decide to do consciously. And in many ways, it's sort of, like, garbage in, garbage out. And if it's positive stories and inspiration in, that's how you're basically going to react in the world.

There's a lot of data to support the fact that getting as much bright light in your eyes throughout the day, provided it is not painfully bright, is excellent for your wakefulness mechanisms and even for the mechanisms of the brain and body that control metabolism and feeding, mood, and well-being.

What I would suggest for people that experience moderate seasonal depression would be to really emphasize trying to get as much bright light in your eyes as you can outside and, if appropriate, there's a study out of Israel that shows that exposing as much of your bodily surface to light actually can be useful, too.

First of all, a couple sort of myths or pseudo-myths to eliminate: The first thing is that we are very good at splitting our attention. Humans can multitask. All old-world primates have what's called covert attention. I can look at you and have a conversation with you, and I can attend to the glass just to the right of my right hand, so I can split my attention into two cones.

Memory and recall for material that's consumed on a phone is much lower than on the written page.

One of the hardest things to do is to calibrate one's consumption of social media or any kind of high-potency information. If you think about it, this is the first time in human history that you can scroll through 50 movies in one minute.

There are a whole set of things that shift workers suffer from: digestive issues, mental health issues, they're prone to more cardiac events and suicides. I mean, it's obvious that shift work, especially swing shift work where people are alternating their schedule pretty frequently is extremely detrimental to brain and body.

Dopamine is very strongly regulated by seasonality in a lot of animals ... When days are short and nights are long, levels of dopamine are reduced.

Even brief 20-minute periods of resting or napping after a learning bout can greatly accelerate the neural plasticity process.

Anytime you're learning something, it pays to have random intervals in which you stop and do nothing.

I think the current numbers are somewhere between 10 and 11% of young folks are now diagnosed with ADHD, and I think that's probably accurate.

It's commonly thought that people with ADHD cannot focus, but that's simply not true. If they are engaged in something they really care about or like, they can focus very intensely.

Some people who have trouble with attention, especially while reading, are finding it very beneficial to listen to audiobooks while actually reading the book.

I've personally found hypnosis to be very valuable for enhancing my ability to get into sleep and for any time I'm dealing with a problem that I can't seem to solve simply by talking, running, and a couple good night's sleep...

Relief from trauma, in some way or another, almost always involves deliberately bringing oneself back into the state of mind and body that occurred during the trauma. As horrible as that might seem, avoiding that seems to be an issue.

If ever there was a truth in neuroscience, it's that the nervous system can change in response to experience. The more heightened or critical that experience is the faster, the faster those changes are going to occur.