Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:13:45 · Andrew Huberman
So I got to try it, and it works very well in the daytime or at night. And what does it do? It generates these slow back and forth, up and down eye movements through a small amount of stimulation behind your ears, because it turns out you can access the extraocular muscles well enough from that location. So just an eye mask with some straps. You sometimes feel a little bit of the stimulation, and you're out. And then once REM sleep starts, it actually helps amplify the REM stage, and you get much more REM. So I wish I had a stake in this company, I don't. These technologies are about seven to twelve months from release. I'm super excited about them. I'm also super excited about the fact that people can just do this on their own. And obviously babies get rocked. You could do the non mask tool approach, or you could use the mask. I will say, and I don't want take us too far off course, but for those interested in emerging technologies and AI, in particular neural technologies, I do think that in sleep, reading from and writing to the brain is going to be a huge area. But of course, I'm also interested in reading from and writing to the nervous system in waking states. Like, you can imagine that within twelve months, or a year of the release of the technology that I just described, you can imagine somebody developing eyeglasses like this, that are stimulating some component of the autonomic nervous system so that I'm exceptionally focused at certain times of day, and then when I'm walking home, I'm sort of in a slightly more relaxed state to capture some more of that energy. We're gonna start shifting brain states into focus, into modes for learning, and we're going to start doing it with technologies. Right now, we're doing cold showers, caffeine, exercise. We're doing inhale emphasized breathing versus exhale emphasized breathing to get more alert or calm. If you think about it, all breathing exercises can be summarized as inhale, emphasize or exhale, emphasize. So yes, we can do that stuff deliberately, but you can imagine that pretty soon, there will be non invasive stimulation devices that will allow people to do this. But it will start in sleep, Because we're all kind of comfortable with the idea now of measuring our physiology in sleep, a little bit in waking states. But this is where this is going.
00:15:46 · Andrew Huberman
So, to return to this in sequence, you need to learn to turn your thoughts off. You need to forget about your body position, and slow your heart rate down. And the order in which you do that doesn't really matter. Ideally want to combine all three, but I think that's going to be a significant achievement for humanity, because if you look at recovery from illness, healing, learning, stress control, burnout, right, if you're going through grief or psychological stress or trauma healing, if you're trying to start a company and you've got kids, or even if you're just trying to work the maximum number of hours, and you've got four hours to sleep and you're somebody who needs six, you want to be able to hit the pillow and shut it off. And we don't have good ways to do that, except the tools I described. So I think we are starting to go about things in a more healthy way. But what I'm talking about is people doing a thorough self assessment of sleep need, ability to turn off thoughts, and then training those things. In fact, lot of hard driving people will come to me and say, like, What workout should I do? I'm like, Look, how much time do you have? In graduate school, I worked out twice a week. I don't talk about this, but I lifted weights and I ran really far because I just wanted to maintain while I worked my ass off publishing as many great papers as I could. And then later I'm doing, you know, three workouts a week with the weights. I do cardio three times a week, long, medium, and short, Take a day off, maybe do some sauna and cold. My life's a little bit different now, or a lot different. But I do think those first years, you're trying to just not die while you create this thing. Then you start moving into some quote unquote balance and optimization. And then you get the people who have really achieved some level of mastery or virtuosity in their craft. And you really get an assessment of how accurately their schedule matched who they really were at a physiological level by looking at them and going like, they look like shit. They have a chronic illness. They look ten years older than they were supposed to. Or there are certain people who are like phenoms, like in Elon, or you look at some people and you just go, holy crap, they just got an extra gear. And I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing that Jack Dorsey was always a pretty calm, thoughtful guy.
00:17:49 · Andrew Huberman
That's what people tell me of him, and that's how I experience him too. But I'm guessing he's also put some work into it. He's figured out that staying alert and calm all day, and sleeping well at night is the key to having a really long successful arc.