Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:03:20 · Andrew Huberman
[00:03:20] S1: Physiologically. I mean, there are examples throughout history of people who seem to require less sleep, they just have more energy, and most people can get their energy up. There are lot of healthy ways to do that now. And I think now we've undergone this huge shift whereby everyone understands you have to sleep eventually, and you have to know your own sleep requirements. So to dilute oneself into thinking you only need four or five hours because Elon only needs four or five hours, that's ridiculous. An honest self assessment about how much sleep one actually needs to perform well, and perhaps best, and what you can get by on, if you can't get that, that's an important thing to understand. But most people know, like for me, it's seven hours, I feel great. Eight probably puts me into the day a little bit groggy. Six, I can manage just fine. Five for one day or a sleepless night, I'm good. Two nights like that, four to zero hours of sleep, and I'm cratered. And I think most people are similar. What's really changed is that we have effective, healthy ways to build our energy up. We know to sleep, we can talk about exercise, caffeine. Some people are using nicotine. Yes, it's addictive, it raises blood pressure, but it does put people into that focused but relaxed mode. I would say if you really want the benefits of nicotine, don't use it very often. If you want the actual cognitive enhancing effects or the focus enhancing effects, then you have to not be a chronic user and then spike your system with nicotine at low amounts every once in a while. Setting Elon aside, with the understanding that he represents that extreme in terms of energy and sleep requirements being very low, I think what's really happening now is people are hopefully doing this self assessment. Like, I would hope people would have an honest conversation about themselves and say, at this point in my life, with or without kids, at this stage of my company, at this stage of my career, whatever it is, at this age, how much sleep do I need in order to feel awesome, good enough, or it's not enough? And I think most people know that. Okay, so that's step number one. The next one is something most people don't ever talk about, which is some people actually just have more energy. They can focus for long, long periods of time.
00:05:19 · Andrew Huberman
They have a ton of energy to run, they have a ton of energy to then go work, but what we never ask is, what is that person's internal state? So I know people that can do all of that, but they're kind of redlining, and they're using a lot of stimulants to do it, or they're not using stimulants to do it, but they're red lining. And then at night, they're having a hard time switching it off, and so they're not resetting their system. Some people, however, are these like wake up at 4AM, workout, handle business, deal with family, go off to work, back to business, come home, and they pivot and task switch really fast. I don't think these things are necessarily stable features throughout our entire life. Seems to be a lot of young guys come up to me, they're like, What should I do? The Oracle said it best. Know thyself. You really have to be honest with yourself about what you need in order to do something for a long period of time. Now that said, I do recall working eighty, even one hundred hour weeks in graduate school, and that served me well. I mean, it eventually led me to tenure at Stanford, etcetera. I do think that if you can pull it off, I think from zero to maybe first four years of starting a company, or if you're in medical school, the goal is don't die. Get as much done as you can, and don't impair yourself with an injury or chronic disease. We don't really define this thing optimization. And then you start to pivot into, how can I insert components of rest along the way, maybe during the day, or across the week, or the month, that really allow me to access my best levels of focus and creativity? But I'd be naive, and I'd be lying if I said somebody's starting a company in the AI realm in the Bay Area or elsewhere these days, you're gonna sit them down and you go, Listen, you really need eight hours of sleep. You gotta do your resistance training. You should do some breath work. Like, no, None of that. What they should determine is how much energy they actually have. And you've met these people, right? Occasionally, you'll run into, like, Jimmy Ivein, or some of the folks doing AI at Meta, and they just seem to have an extra gear. Some people have this extra gear. Now, there's one other component, we can deep dive into any of these, that nobody talks about.
00:07:17 · Andrew Huberman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And that's the ability to switch off your thoughts, your planning, and your concerns at the end of your day, and drop into sleep. [00:07:23] S0: Yeah, can we go deeper in that one? Because to be very selfish about it, if I was to self diagnose, the biggest problem I have is downshifting. Sometimes where it'll take literally four hours to go from a crazy, exciting, awesome day to literally even be able to fall asleep or just like stop the mind. If I could bestow myself with any gift, it would be what you're describing. So what is the research there of how to So do
00:07:45 · Andrew Huberman
[00:07:45] S1: in terms of sleep, there are a couple of prerequisites for sleep. There are a bunch of don'ts. So obviously you don't want to drink caffeine too late. Being under too much bright light late in the day can make it difficult, but a lot of us can't control that. Alcohol, cannabis, these things impair the quality of your sleep, but help you get to sleep. We all know that by now. But in terms of being able to turn your thoughts off, this is a very, very difficult thing for people, for good reasons. The brain wants to think, plan, remember, and organize itself around what's coming next, because such a huge aspect of brain function is prediction of what's happening next. So first requirement, turn your thoughts off. Second requirement is slow your heart rate down. Okay, so that's purely of body. And then third is you need to forget about the position of your limbs in space. So let's work through each one systematically. For the first one, turning your thoughts off is a skill. We can think, we can predict, we can remember, but we also can get into pure sensation, and that's the gateway to turning off your thoughts. And this doesn't come from Eastern tradition per se, although this has been discussed for a long time in those traditions, but there's a neuroscience correlate to all of this, of course, and we can talk about those. So how do you do that? You have to focus on pure sensation. So you start focusing on the surface of your body, if you can detect your heart rate. Some people are very good at what's called interoception, they can actually get pretty accurate measurements of their heart rate without pressing on a vein or artery, and they're just listening to their own breathing, they're listening to the sounds in the room, they're sort of bringing their conscious awareness just to the body, and it generally helps, and this relates to the second thing, to slow the heart rate down by just doing long exhales. Now this might sound very woo, but I want to be very clear, this is not meditation. Because meditation has you do something very different. Meditation has you focus all of your attention on your breathing, or all of your attention on some region behind your forehead, or your hands, or whatever.
00:09:40 · Andrew Huberman
In this sort of practice, what you do is you actually migrate your attention to your feet, to your legs, to your breathing, to sounds in the room, then back again. Now, this might sound really squishy, but you're moving away from thinking and planning to pure sensation and perception. And you're literally bringing your perception into the present. Remember, this is one door in front of turning off your thoughts. To actually turn off your thoughts, your heart rate actually has to drop a certain amount. Those long exhales drop your heart rate through something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Arrhythmia makes it sound dangerous or bad, but it's actually very good. As you're breathing, the size of your heart is literally changing based on the amount of space it has because of the movement of the diaphragm and the filling of the lungs. And when we inhale, our heart rate actually speeds up a bit. When we exhale, the heart actually gets a little bit smaller volume wise, and the blood, therefore, that's in it moves a little bit quicker per unit volume, and the brain sends a signal to slow the heart down. So when you exhale, you're slowing the heart rate down through this thing that we call the vagus nerve. So if you want to slow your heart rate down anytime in waking to de stress or just bring your level of activation down, or if you want to fall asleep, it really helps to do some long exhales until lungs are empty, and then just passive inhales. Normally, when we're really activated, we're doing a lot of inhaling, we're passively exhaling. And then the last piece is to be able to turn off your perception of your limbs relative to you. It's something that we call proprioception. There are three ways to do this. One is old school, everyone accepts it. One is pretty wacky sounding, and then there's a new technology that's coming out that I wish I had developed, that I think is gonna make people more comfortable with the second one. So here it goes. Believe it or not, there have been studies of what puts babies to sleep and what puts adults to sleep without pharmacology. And it turns out that the rocking pacing that we do with babies at a certain rate, parents figure this out on their own, puts them to sleep. Turns out that you can build, and they've done this for studies, a bed that rocks at a certain frequency, and adults will fall asleep very quickly.
00:11:43 · Andrew Huberman
What it has to do with is the fact that when you're moving side to side, your eyes are generating, under your closed eyelids, compensatory eye movements. Our eye movements, all the time, are communicating through our brainstem to our cerebellum to control balance and proprioception. So, when people are rock this way, somehow they fall asleep more quickly. That's interesting, actually. And the frequency at which that works best and fastest is known. Now, I don't have a rocking bed. I don't know anyone large enough to rock me and hold me, and if they did, I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable with that. Can't imagine you would either. So there are two ways to approach this. One is something that looks kinda wacky but works, which is to mimic the eye movements under closed eyelids that help you forget about your limb position. I've been talking about this a lot in public education recently, and I confess it makes me feel really weird as a neuroscientist. Somebody just prefaced this by saying, Please don't just put the part out into the world about the eye movement thing without just allowing me to first say that this confuses the circuit between, for the aficionados, these direction selective cells in the retina, the accessory optic nuclei of the brainstem and the cerebellum, and you forget about body position. And basically, what you do is under closed eyelids, you move your eyes to one side, then the other, slowly or fast, doesn't really matter, then up then down, you can roll them counterclockwise and clockwise, you can do a long exhale, but really what you're doing is confusing this system. The reason I got so interested in this, and the reason I went to the literature on rocking of babies and adults to fall asleep, is because a group out of MIT approached me and they said, We'd like you to try this eye mask. The eyes are two pieces of brain, they're just not in the cranial vault, which makes them unusual in terms of parts of brain. So the eyes are an amazing gateway to the rest of the brain. Everyone knows about eye masks to get the darkness out. These guys have developed eye masks that measure rapid eye movement, because right now, your whoop, your aura, your eight sleep, they're not measuring REM directly. This can measure REM directly. But they designed this mask specifically to make people fall asleep faster. Like, I want that thing.