Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, a number professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today we are going to discuss your brain chemistry and how to control and optimize your brain chemistry for all aspects of mental health, physical health and performance.

Many times before on the Huberman Lab Podcast, and frankly every time I'm a guest on another podcast, I get questions about science and science-based tools for things like enhancing sleep, enhancing focus, enhancing creativity, improving relationships, getting over grief, and on and on.

All of which are valid questions and for which there are protocols that are based in science and that work, the first time and every time.

However, far more important than knowing a protocol is understanding why a given protocol works. That's why I'm always hammering on mechanism and explaining the cells and circuits and chemicals, at least to some detail, so that people can understand not just what to do, but why it works and therefore how to change a protocol as their life circumstances change or as goals change.

Now today we are going to go even a layer deeper. We're going to explore the foundations of your biology in your brain and body that allow any protocol to work because as it turns out, all of the protocols out there, whether or not it's a breathing protocol or a supplement or a prescription drug or an exercise routine, they all tap into and leverage a core set of just a few biological mechanisms.

That's right, beneath everything you are able to do and feel and indeed beneath every protocol that allows you to change for the better and optimize your mental health, physical health and performance, there's just a small subset of chemicals that you're leveraging toward that change.

So today we are going to talk about the four major pillars of neurochemistry that allow you to, for instance, be focused when you want to focus, that allow you to relax when you need to relax and de-stress, that allow you to optimize your sleep, that allow you to optimize your exercise routine or to work through a pain point in relationship or in career or in your relationship to yourself.

So what I can say for sure is that by the end of this episode, you will have a much richer understanding about how your brain and nervous system and indeed your entire body work and you will have a much firmer understanding as to which protocols and tools to reach for given your particular goals in the moment, in the day, across the week, across the month, across the year and indeed across your entire lifespan.

So what we're really going for today are principles, deeper understanding of why any given protocol works and we are also going to discuss specific protocols.

Some of those protocols I've discussed on previous episodes of the human lab podcast, but I must say many of the protocols and tools that I will discuss are brand new and based on research that I have not discussed at all simply because the research papers came out only recently or these are papers that I only recently unearthed.

In fact, I'm going to share with you two recent studies in a moment that are exceedingly important for optimizing your sleep and these are studies that, again, I've never discussed in any episode on sleep or on any other podcast.

So by the end of today's episode, you're going to have far more knowledge about your biology and psychology than you did at the start and you'll be armed with many more tools and most importantly, principles so that you can navigate not just the tools presented on this podcast, but in the vast landscape of tools that are out there for many years.

So I'm going to share with you two of those who are interested in the research that are out there for mental health, physical health and performance.

Every so often, I come across a study or set of studies that I get so excited about that I start telling everybody in my immediate life and I insist on also sharing with you the listeners of this podcast because I find the information to be so incredibly interesting and actionable.

So I'm going to discuss both relate to sleep and sleep states and how to access better sleep. The first one was published in the journal Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal, excellent journal.

The title of this paper is Rapid and Reversible Control of Human Metabolism by individual sleep states. We will provide a link to this study in the show captions.

So this is Nora Noak and OWAK and basically what they did is they measured the different forms of metabolism that occur while humans sleep as far as I know this is one of the first studies of this kind.

There are many studies of metabolism. There are many studies of sleep. This study focused on how different states of sleep such as rapid eye movement sleep, which is associated with dreaming and high emotional content dreams versus slow wave sleep, which tends to be more focused on physical repair of the body,

more mundane dreams, how those different states of mind during sleep relate to different aspects of metabolism and what they found was absolutely fascinating.

First of all, they found that sleep states regulate more than 50% half of all the metabolite features detected in human breath.

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