Huberman Lab Clips

Science and science-based tools for everyday life from @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

If you're drinking all the time stop immediately:

That's a downward spiral and it's the one thing you can cut today.

From the outside looking in, someone self-medicating with alcohol is not in a good place and probably needs help.

Huberman dabbled with drugs when he was younger and regrets it. The brain is plastic early on - he didn't need that.

@jockowillink on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

Telling your kid it's no big deal reduces their confidence:

When they come home saying they got picked last, "everyone gets picked last sometimes" teaches them that other people are better feelers of their feelings than they are.

Say instead: "I'm so glad we're talking about this. I could tell that was a really hard gym class. I believe you." Parents report it diffuses the whole thing and the kid is ready to move on.

What the kid learns: if my parent likes me when I have this feeling, I can like myself when I have it.

@GoodInside on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

No one can predict who gets paranoid from cannabis:

Same sativa, same THC to CBD ratio. One person gets relaxation, focus and creativity. The next gets intense anxiety and paranoia.

The dorm room advice that you just need to use more is categorically false. THC and CBD potentiate whatever those circuits are already doing.

If a strain makes you paranoid, it will very likely do the same thing every time you take it.

@hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

How to get someone to open up in 3 words:

- Repeat the last one to three words they just said. Never more than five
- It's not body language, tone or affect. Just their words
- Use it in place of "what did you mean by that" or "could you say more"
- Upward inflect so they hear their own words out loud
- Mirror them when their voice trails off mid-thought to help them recover it
- Mirroring and labeling run on different parts of the brain, so you have to make a conscious point of it

@fbinegotiator on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

Keep the eye mask on for the entire psilocybin session:

- Eyes open, and most of your thinking goes to altered outside perception: the visual world fracturing into geometric shapes, faces melting and morphing
- That has a strong draw for anyone chasing a highly unusual experience, but it is not where the lasting benefit comes from
- Eyes closed sends you inward, combining what you see in your mind's eye with thoughts, memories and shifts in emotion
- Staying in the mask for the majority of the session is the critical feature of an effective therapeutic session

@hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

How to use light to optimize testosterone and estrogen:

- 2-10 min of bright light in your eyes early in the day
- Sunglasses block it. Prescription lenses and contacts are fine
- No sunlight? Use bright artificial light
- Keep viewing bright light through the day but never anything painful to look at
- Avoid bright light in your eyes in the middle of the night - it suppresses dopamine and testosterone
- Two studies in Cell and Neuron back the night light effect

Light timing sets dopamine and cortisol, which set your sex hormones.

@hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

The best response when your kid says they hate you:

- Say nothing first. Let the "I hate you" sit there between you
- Fire back and you start a ping pong match that lets them off the hook for what they said
- Stay sturdy and your kid has a much higher chance of reowning it
- Or try: "Whoa, clearly you're disappointed. I get that. I know there's another way you can say that to me"
- If it keeps coming: "I love you, you're a good kid, you're having a hard time. I won't stay while you keep saying this"
- You're not a punching bag. Separate the feeling from the behavior or your kid never will

@GoodInside on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

The energy you feel has nothing to do with calories:

- Focus on hydration and movement and you'll have 2 to 4 times more energy than if you focus on what to eat. That's a guess, not a study
- Go do 100 burpees. You're tired and sweating, and you just created energy
- Cold water works the same way: a reliable source of adrenaline release
- The energy you have walking out of a cold shower couldn't have been caloric. It's adrenaline

@hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

What to do if you only have 3 days to train:

- Day 1: speed and power first, then hypertrophy. Do hypertrophy first and you compromise the speed and power work
- Day 2: pure strength, then a high heart rate finisher - 20 second bursts, 90 second bursts, or 5 minute mile repeats
- Day 3: steady state long duration endurance
- Mon/Wed/Fri or Tue/Thu/Sat. The days in between are totally off
- Whole body exercises throughout: 45 min of work time, in and out of the gym under 60 min
- Want more speed or more muscle? Keep the template and add volume to that one

@DrAndyGalpin on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

How to see the strengths you are blind to:

- Contact 10 to 20 people who know you well - family, friends, colleagues
- Ask each one for a story about a specific time when you were at your best
- Collect the stories and run pattern recognition on the common themes
- Note what those situations shared so you can put yourself in them more often
- Flip it: write 100 people who matter to you a story about when they were at their best

Strengths that come naturally to you are the ones you assume are easy for everyone.

@AdamMGrant on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

The medical definition of constipation is wrong:

- Harvard Medical School and UCSF residency taught that constipation means a bowel movement less often than once every 3 days
- Her definition: one every single morning with a feeling of complete evacuation. Anything less is constipation
- In India, where food carries more microbes and a different microbiome, people often go after every meal
- In the US, once a day

@DrGottfried on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

Ketone drinks won't replace the ketogenic diet:

- Ketone salts and esters have been available for over a decade
- There is not one case report of a child controlling seizures with exogenous ketones alone, without the diet
- Patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia doing well on the diet tried to switch to exogenous ketones and their symptoms came back
- The diet isn't only about ketones - it lowers glucose, improves insulin signaling, and ramps up liver mitochondria, which is where ketones are made

@ChrisPalmerMD on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

6 minutes of all-out work per week is enough:

- 30 seconds all out / 30 seconds rest for at least 4 rounds, 1-2 days a week
- Or 20 seconds all out / 40 seconds rest for 6-8 rounds - the extra rest keeps quality extraordinarily high
- Or 1 minute sprints with 1-3 min rest between, 4-6 rounds
- Gauge rest by breathing, not heart rate: once you are back to nasal only, wait another 30 seconds and go
- Past 3-4 days a week you add excess fatigue plus endocrine and sleep problems

Marty Gabala compared 6 total minutes of work per week to 180 minutes and saw equal or greater VO2 max improvements.

@DrAndyGalpin on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

Why your first meal should be 30-50 grams of protein:

- If you're young and healthy the timing of that first meal doesn't matter
- In your 60s continued fasting starts to work against muscle health
- 40 to 50 grams stimulates muscle protein synthesis - the marker for overall muscle health
- 30 to 50 grams improves satiation by releasing gut peptides: GLP-1, CCK, PYY
- Heather Leidy's lab fed adolescents 30 to 40 grams and they were far less likely to choose donuts later that day

Protein at meal one augments willpower at meal two.

@drgabriellelyon on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

How to protect your eyes from diabetes:

- Get a comprehensive retinal exam at least once a year if you are diabetic
- Blood sugar control comes first. Keep your hemoglobin A1C in range
- Randomized trials show patients who managed their diabetes well had much less retinopathy
- High blood pressure on top of diabetes damages the retina, and the kidneys too
- Caught early, type 2 responds to lifestyle: food intake, exercise, weight loss
- Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs are an exciting development for diabetes

Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

Most of your hydration should come from food:

- Watermelon is 95+% water - high in sugar by percentage but almost exclusively water
- Meat is a high percentage of fluid too, less the longer you cook it
- A biscuit is about 10% water - processed food is dehydrated and heavily salted
- That combination leaves you under hydrated and over salted
- Switch to mostly whole real food and your hydration skyrockets
- Add salt back on that switch: salt your food to taste or use electrolytes

@DrAndyGalpin on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

Why he's been on a statin since age 29:

His grandmother had a stroke at 30. His own cholesterol ran past 300, and his blood looked creamy.

His doctor said he was too young for a statin. His answer: you want me to have a heart attack first? Give it to me now.

Today his HDL to LDL ratio is 2 (you want it under 5), LDL is below 100, and an MRI of his beating heart looks like a 20-year-old's.

Statins aren't perfect drugs. With that family history, he'll take the tradeoff.

@davidasinclair on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

EMDR works but it's incomplete:

- Erasing a trauma takes two steps: extinguish the old response, then relearn a new narrative and attach reward to the old event
- EMDR taps into the first step only. Deliberate side to side eye movements reduce activation of the threat reflex while you retell the event
- Standard retelling starts with a huge amplitude response that drops with each repeat. EMDR sneaks around the corner of that
- Attaching reward requires high amplitude arousal, a feeling of victory. EMDR has no active component for that

Many people get great relief from it. On its own it is not the whole therapy.

@hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

The keto diet was invented to stop seizures:

- Developed in 1921 by Dr. Russell Wilder at the Mayo Clinic to treat epilepsy - not as a weight loss diet
- Built to mimic fasting which had been known to stop seizures since Hippocrates
- Fasting works short term but you can only go so long before you starve and the seizures return with a vengeance
- 50% of early patients became seizure free and another 35% cut seizure frequency by half or more - about 85% efficacy

@ChrisPalmerMD on @hubermanlab

[Huberman Lab Clips @HLPClips]

If you never fail you aren't challenging yourself:

Confidence comes from taking the risk, not before it.

Set a goal to start at least one project every year that doesn't succeed. Not aiming for failure - creating an acceptable zone of failure that motivates risk taking, experimentation and growth.

Succeed on 90% of your projects and that's a hugely successful year. Succeed on 100% and you're aiming too low.

@AdamMGrant on @hubermanlab