The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman (4K) | Modern Wisdom 700

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Nasal Breathing

In today's fast-paced world, many of us have developed a habit of mouth breathing, often without even realizing it.

While this may seem like a harmless habit, it can have significant consequences for our overall health and well-being.

People who overuse mouth breathing as opposed to nasal breathing, in general, are less attractive as it changes their facial structure.

And it goes beyond this—breathing through your mouth will limit the oxygen you get, and you’re putting yourself in a state of apnea.

According to Dr. Huberman, there’s a nasal microbiome that is particularly well suited to capture and destroy viruses, bacteria, and some fungal infections.

But if you breathe through your mouth—you're putting yourself at risk of getting infections, especially in the winter.

How can you address this?

• You can try mouth-taping yourself at night.

• Try to breathe through your nose throughout the day.

• Eat foods that require chewing on both sides.

Stress

Forced exercise vs. Voluntary exercise

Huberman talked about an interesting study that highlights a stark contrast where they put an animal that is running voluntarily and the other that is forced to do it.

The animal that voluntarily exercises leads to all sorts of improvements in health metrics, such as resting heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, etc.

But when they looked at the other animal, it was the opposite—it was detrimental to that animal.

Mindset and Beliefs

Dr. Ali Crum, a colleague of Huberman from Stanford's psychology department, conducted experiments exploring the profound impact of mindset and beliefs on health.

When people watch a short video about all the ways in which stress can diminish their health, they experience a decline in their health when under stress.

While a separate group watched how stress can enhance performance, they showed a significant boost in their well-being under similar stressful conditions.

This suggests that it’s not just a placebo effect. You literally get benefits from being optimistic.

Will Power

One of the most interesting structures in the entire nervous system is the one that is overlooked. Most neuroscientists aren’t even aware of what it is.

It’s called the AMCC (anterior mid cingulate cortex), and it’s a hub for many inputs and outputs. Podcast Timestamp: 14:15

AMCC plays a pivotal role in generating tenacity and willpower for various tasks.

And when we say you lose brain mass across your lifespan—most of it is from the AMCC.

There’s a beautiful experiment done by Dr. Huberman’s colleague. When they stimulate this tiny area of the brain, they immediately feel there’s an impending challenge.

This gets even more interesting when Dr. Huberman lists off a bunch of peer-reviewed published results.

Individuals that are dieting or resisting any sort of tempting behavior and are successful in doing that have an increased size and activity of their AMMC over time.

But dieters who fail have a flat or downward trajectory.

What activates AMCC?

People who are given an easy task don’t activate their AMCC.

But if you give them a hard task that they really don’t want to do—physically or cognitively—their AMCC levels of activity go through the roof.

What shocked me the most is that if you’re a person who loves weightlifting, running, etc., you're doing all sorts of hard things that the average person doesn't want to do.

You are not going to increase the AMCC levels, according to research data.

So what will increase it?

Dr. Huberman calls it a “microsuck” or “macrosuck”. In essence, you do the things you don’t want to do—subjective to each individual.

The thing you want to do the least is what actually builds up your AMCC.

Health

Dr. Huberman believes we are finally approaching a time in human history where we accept that the brain and body are intimately linked.

From a longevity standpoint, maintaining healthy nerve-to-muscle function is one of the things that resistance exercise does. And it’s highly correlated with cognitive function into older age.

And it’s clear that we should all be doing 150-200 minutes of Zone 2 per week or walking a lot. Getting your heart rate up once a week in whatever way you prefer.

We should also be doing at least six sets of resistance training per muscle group per week minimum.

If you want to improve your body, do something for your mind, and if you want to improve your mind, do something for your body.

Cognitive Improvements

When you improve blood flow to the brain, you improve cognitive function.

Cardio positively impacts brain health and memory in particular.

When you do load-bearing cardiovascular exercise, e.g., running, swimming, etc.—anything where your skeletal system is under some load—there’s a hormone that is literally secreted from your bone.

It’s called osteocalcin.

When it is released from the bones, it can cross the blood-brain barrier, and it plays an active role in promoting new cell production and the enhancement of nerve health and function in the hippocampus.

So when you’re moving, your brain is saying, "Oh! we’re moving… we need to maintain or enhance our ability to remember things.”

Our Screen Time

Dr. Huberman believes many of today’s mental health issues are the consequence of disrupted circadian rhythms.

Lots of our time is spent in a two-dimensional screen space.

In addition to this, the lights that we use are too bright at night, and we are not getting enough sunlight during the day.

An important thing to understand about your circadian system in terms of health is that throughout the day, your eyes are less sensitive to light, and you need more of it to get what you need.

But at night, your eyes are very sensitive to artificial lights, and you need far fewer of them.

Myopia Epidemic

Dr. Huberman said, “There’s an epidemic of myopia, which means nearsightedness, and it’s been shown in a bunch of clinical trials”

If you look at how people go through the day, they’re spending most of their time looking at their phones.

This makes their eyeballs longer, and this makes their visual image not focus on the retina. (the light-sensing portion at the back of the eye)

And the image falls in front of the retina—so-called nearsightedness.

How can we avoid this?

We need to get out and view things from a distance.

Kids that spend 2 hours or more outdoors per day have a lower risk of myopia.

Vaping

Many people switched to vaping, thinking it’s healthier than smoking. But it turns out that vaping is terrible because of the other chemicals that are delivered to the lungs.

Vaping is associated with disruptions in egg health and egg quality. And It could create certain mutations in eggs and serious endocrine issues in women.

Additionally, vaping is addictive, and it’s a mutagen—it mutates the genes of cells.

You’re introducing a laundry list of toxins to the lungs, and they’re getting into the bloodstream. Some of them even cross the blood-brain barrier.

Dr. Huberman suggests we don’t vape, as there are many risks associated with it. And is especially bad for the developing brain.

He even believed that in the next few 5 years—we are going to see a slew of studies showing vaping is bad.

Phone And Our Focus

The circuits in the brain that are required for setting and maintaining focus are inhibited by the process of deliberately shifting one’s focus over and over throughout the day.

If one is constantly moving their attention from one thing to the next, it undermines the stability of all the circuitry in the brain that’s responsible for prolonged focus.

Dr. Huberman believed the scroll function, especially in social media, is a practice of shifting focus, which is detrimental to us.

When you scroll, you’re essentially putting yourself into a new context after the next, and the brain has to adjust to all of that.

Dr. Huberman believes the brain is like a library. For instance, if you’re watching football, your brain will call up all the books about football.

And without you noticing, your library—all the books around you—are changing to books about football and the history of it.

This is how the brain works, and it’s calling up context to make it easy to flip to a discussion about that particular thing.

Focus is not about maintaining a single tunnel of cognition.

Focus is about calling to mind all the additional contextually relevant groups of information that you might need.

Phone Addiction

Using your phone and scrolling is like itching. It gets worse every time you do it.

Dr. Huberman believes there are certain gems in social media that, to some people, have even enriched their lives. And it even allowed people to connect with old friends.

But if you think about it, the downsides are greater than the upsides.

And it seems like success is largely going to be determined by who has the most self-discipline, more than ever.

Dr. Huberman notices that prolific individuals like Elon Musk, his friend Carl, Einstein, and Richard Fineman will force themselves to sit and think for a moment.

We do the same when we scroll through social media, but the problem is that we don’t get creative imagination for things from the inside.

Body still, Mind active.

Procrastination and the Brain

There’s some interesting data that Adam Grant shared with Dr. Huberman recently. People who procrastinate actually tend to have access to certain creative states that non-procrastinators don’t.

Way to beat Procrastination?

According to Dr. Huberman, the way to overcome procrastination is to do something harder than the hard thing that you’re putting off.

For instance, if you find yourself procrastinating instead of writing, you should do hard things, and this is subjective.

• Taking a walk

• Exercising

• Cold plunge, etc.

You’ll write with ease after doing any of those things.

Overoptimization

Dr. Huberman thinks the word “optimization” needs a clear definition. Most people believe it means being perfect all the time.

But optimization is something we need to look at in the context of:

• The moment.

• The hour.

• The day.

• The week.

For instance, if you have a jet leg or you’re sick, optimization means doing whatever you can to fix things.

You have to take into account that things happen in life. Travel, kids, illness, etc.

There are times when you have to be gentle with yourself. And sometimes you just have to ignore all the distractions or problems and do the things regardless of the situation you’re in.

There are moments where you try to avoid thinking about the past, but it’s inevitable—sometimes you just have to confront it.

Remember, as a human being, you need to accept that there are certain aspects of life you can’t control or optimize.

Optimization is not about removing all negative emotions or physical emotions.

Optimization is about working with what’s right in front of you.

🎉You’ve made it to the end🎉

If you like this summary, feel free to check out the full video because I cut out some interesting things.

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