00:33:05 · Andrew Huberman
[00:33:05] S0: Great. Morning bright light ideally from sunlight. So that would be in the first thirty to sixty minutes after waking. If you can't get it from sunlight, get a 10,000 lux artificial light, then get some sunlight if and when you can. So that's number one. The next would be do the weight training protocol I talked about earlier. It will completely change your life. If women are concerned about being too bulky, it's not gonna do that. It's... I mean, in terms of body recomposition, mood, brain health, you know, you're not gonna find a more potent stimulus. And then the last one would be to figure out some way to make the sleep you can get the highest quality sleep. You know, I sometimes get, you know, appropriately attacked for, hey, you know, I've got kids, I've got a busy job, you know, the neighbors are always making noise, what do I do? Find a two bed time to shoot for most nights that allows you to get the most deep sleep. Don't miss that window. And here I'm lumping in a fourth, but really learn to get to sleep and fall back asleep. You know, I'm not gonna say get perfect sleep because you'd have to organize your whole life around that. I'm gonna say do long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate. Learn how to close your eyes, and this sounds so kooky, but it's grounded in what we understand about the underlying circuitry. Moving your eyes back and forth, and up and down, and so forth, you're having a hard time falling asleep because your mind is racing will greatly help you fall asleep. And it's not mysterious why. It's because in order to fall asleep, you need to forget about your body position, and this confuses the vestibular system. In fact, if I may, one of the technologies that I'm most excited about, and I'm hoping a16z will make this... I don't have a company related to this, are sleep masks that induce sleep by controlling eye movements in certain ways. Interesting. How cool would that be? And measure rapid eye movement sleep and slow wave sleep. I think that's the next wave of technology that we all desperately need. But the three things are, as I said, the morning bright light. Yep. The resistance training. Still do cardio if you want, but the resistance training is the really sharp blade of of of health improvement.
00:35:18 · Andrew Huberman, Daisy Wolf
And find a way in your current circumstances each night to get the highest quality whatever, five hours, six hours, ideally it's eight hours, but know the things that you can do in the context of the hotel room, the airplane that you happen to be on. Figure those things out. And then you'll start to experience the flexibility that comes from not fearing that you didn't get the perfect night's sleep. Mhmm. Like, I'm fine on six hours because I know how to regulate my energy during the day if I just got six. And I would love to get eight, but I can't tell you the last time I got eight solid hours without getting up once or twice. This just doesn't happen. [00:35:57] S1: We have a lot of founders who listen to our podcast. If you had to also kind of narrow it down to three pieces of evidence based habits for cognitive performance for founders or anyone, what would those things be?
00:36:11 · Andrew Huberman
[00:36:11] S0: Yeah. First one is know when your windows of high cognitive capacity are. This is different for everybody. So for me, I can feel 11AM come around. Gosh, I wish it was 7AM when this happened, and I get up pretty early. I should say I tend to get up between six and 7AM. Sometimes, if I go to sleep at nine, I wake up at five. Okay, if I go to sleep at ten or eleven, I tend to wake up at seven. So it's just, and I wake up in the middle of the night, like I think most normal human beings, use the restroom and get back into bed 90% of the nights in my life. Okay. So I know that in the morning, I tend to have a lot of sleep inertia. I need to do these things. I'll do the exercise, etcetera. But part of the reason I do that is I know if I exercise before 9AM, I have a lot more energy and focus for the rest of the day. If I exercise at 11AM, which is kind of peak of my morning energy, at three in the afternoon I'm exhausted. This is just me, but other people might be different. So some people find that that peak for work lies at a certain time of the day. For me, there's two times. It's really between the hours of 09:30AM and 12:30PM. That window is crucial, so I have to be very careful that I'm not exercising in that window. Because I, like most founders, don't get paid to exercise. This is very important. If you're going to do things for your health, they have to support the other areas of your life in a way that feed back onto something where your company succeeds, and then you actually have the resources to maybe change your schedule someday. But otherwise, if people are trying to just pack all these protocols in, they're just going to deplete themselves. So for me, it's 09:30 to 12:30. That's one key window. Then I tend to have a little bit of dip in focus and cognition, and then for me, somewhere in the late afternoon, right around 04:30, 5PM, I start to get another window that lasts until about 7PM or so right before dinner, and I have to capture that. And I've learned that my mind is better at certain things in those two windows. Again, this is highly individual. For some people it might be the middle of the night. So I think knowing yourself, and this might change across stages of life or life circumstances, but knowing yourself and really capturing those two, and protecting those times as if they were the most important times of the day.
00:38:29 · Andrew Huberman, Daisy Wolf
So maybe only your family members and coworkers can access you with emergencies during that time or those times. For most people, it's going to be about twice a day. You might say that's not enough time. That's three hours of focused work, then maybe three hours again in the afternoon or two or three. I don't know many people that are completely focused for eight or nine hours a day without the next day being completely shot. [00:38:54] S1: I agree.
00:38:55 · Andrew Huberman
[00:38:55] S0: Especially if you use pharmacology, and we could talk about pharmacology. Caffeine, I sip on throughout the day, as I said, till the afternoon. If I exercise in the morning, I tend to not need as much caffeine in the afternoon. I just hydrate electrolytes. A lot of people will find that just hydrating better will increase their alertness. So that's number one. Figure out when you can exercise so that it gives you more energy, and protect those. I call them workabouts. I literally think of real work as a fight. My friend Rick Rubin likes to wake up rather, I wouldn't say slowly, but move into the day with a lot of kind of peace, and you know, and kind of calmness, and then his work block generally is in the afternoon. I know this because I've spent a lot of time with Rick. And that's when his mind is sharpest, and then he tapers off in the evening. But he's working extremely hard in those hours, and he knows when those fall. I'm a little different. Mine come in two bouts. But they are like bouts. You should think of them as a fight. And here's the real danger. If you're in one of those windows and you allow your attention to be captured by something that's not worthwhile towards your company build, you're losing ex... You're not just losing that three or four hours, because the the productivity that comes in those three or four hours is exponentially greater than the productivity that comes from doing that work at some point later, or the catch up work. It also prevents you from having a healthy personal life. Mhmm. So you you have to protect that time as if it were the most important thing with the exception of family emergencies. Okay. So that's number one. I think the other one is, you know, it used to be in the valley, I grew up down here, that everyone said, you know, no successful founder, you know, is a non meditator or something, or they all meditate. And I think, can that really be true? Like, are they all just meditators? I think that what that's really about is that you need to be pretty good at being in the whole stimulus response mode of living life. Like, you know, task, you're handling tasks, you're organized. But I think...
00:41:06 · Andrew Huberman
I do think that once a day, it's very valuable, even if it's for just a few minutes, to just get out of stimulus response and going kind of inward, and checking with yourself whether or not you're allocating your energy properly. Some people are more prone to getting pulled into conversations and dramas and what they see. Sometimes people will see things online that has a long tail in their nervous system, and there's data on this showing that your thoughts in two hours are sort of seeded by what you saw in previous hours. But some people are more of like square waves, when they compartmentalize better. Other people like myself, if I have a conversation earlier that's of interest to me, it sort of lingers, and it will impact the next thing that I do. So I think these moments where you just kind of check-in and separate yourself from all the inputs, allows you to to pivot more effectively. And so we don't really have formal protocols for task switching, but this is extremely important for company founders and employees across the board. Right? You have to be able to to cognitively task switch. And so we need more more data on how that's done, but it certainly involves re... Returning to some state where there aren't any inputs. I think this is very important. In fact, Rick and I have been kicking around some some tools that are not meditations. We've been trying to build some tools that are not meditations. They're not yoga nidra, but that would allow you to program your mind for what comes next. Like, if you think about it, it's 2026. Why in the world are we sitting down to do work and just going, okay, now I'm gonna be focused. And now I'm gonna be creative. Well, I'm gonna... Like, we should have ways to control neural activity that would allow us to access those circuits more quickly and more deeply.