LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Portland, OR

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Recently I had the pleasure of hosting two live events, one in Seattle, Washington and one in Portland, Oregon, both entitled the Brain Body Contract, where I discussed science and science related tools for mental health, health, physical health, and performance. My favorite part of each evening, however, was the question and answer period that followed the lecture. I love the question and answer period because it gives me an opportunity to hear directly from the audience as to what they want to know most, and indeed to get into a bit of dialogue. So we really clarify what are the underlying mechanisms of particular tools, how best to use the tools for things like focus and sleep. We also touched on some things related to mental health and physical health. It was a delight for me, and I like to think that the audience learned a lot. I know that many of you weren't able to attend those events, but we wanted to make the information available to you. Therefore, what follows. This is a recording of the question and answer period from the lecture in Portland, Oregon. I hope you'll find it to be both interesting and informative. I'd also like to thank our sponsors of these live events. The first is momentous supplements, which is our partner with the Huberman Lab podcast, providing supplements that are of the very highest quality, that ship international, and that are arranged in dosages and single ingredient formulations that make it possible for you to develop the optimal supplement strategy for you. And I'd also like to thank our other sponsor, which is inside Tracker, which provides blood tests and DNA tests so you can monitor your immediate and long term health progress. I'd also like to announce that there are two new live events scheduled. The first one is going to take place Sunday, October 16 at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. The other live event will take place Wednesday, November 9 at the Beacon Theater in New York City. Tickets to both of those events are now available online@hubermanlab.com. Tour that's hubermanlab.com tour. I do hope that you learn from and enjoy the recording of the question and answer period that follows this. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. What are the current best practices for post tbis? Traumatic brain injuries? For those of you that aren't familiar with TBI, especially long term multiple ooh, etc. Thoughts on hyperbaric. Oh, I'm so glad you asked this. Danny Morlage as treatment for tbis. Okay, TBI. One thing about TBI and concussion, everyone thinks football. Guess what? Most of the TBI is not football. There aren't that many football players. They're just large, so they stand out. There might be a few here this evening. Of course, football players are a concern when it comes to TBI. Most head injuries are going to be construction workers. Have you ever seen the hard hats they wear? I don't even know if they are just there for show. It doesn't make sense. And we actually have a lab at Stanford that's focused very hard on trying to solve this problem. So construction workers, car accident, bicycle accidents, Portland, amazing city to cycle. I'm frankly afraid to cycle. You're a small moving object around these big objects, and people are staring into their little aperture on their phone while driving. I mean, whatever happened to that, by the way of not texting while driving, somehow that just disappeared. It's like it really has just disappeared. There was all this science showing that it's worse than drunk driving. TBI. Well, the basic rules of the don't apply if you get a head injury, don't get a second head injury. But that often isn't feasible for people that need to continue work in construction or that are struggling. What do we know? Well, this is a great opportunity for me to distinguish modulatory foundational tools from things that directly change your brain and nervous system the way that you want to. What do I mean by modulatory? We hear so much, and there's so many studies showing that great sleep, quality nutrition, good social interactions, avoiding chronic stress, and on and on and on are important for everything. Reduce they're related to Alzheimer's, they're related to ADHD. I mean, we could do thousands of podcast episodes just returning to the same ten things. Sleep, don't stress too much or too long. Good social connection, avoid toxic people, eat good food, not too much processed food. We could have an argument all night, and I don't want to have one about whether or not it's mainly plants or this. Obviously, eating high quality food is something that we should all be doing. Which foods you select is a topic that is very barbed wire and I can give only my opinions. All of that modulates your brain function, but it doesn't mediate or change anything directly. It's setting a foundation of what's possible. So we should all be doing those things, and especially people who have TBI. Now, this question relates to hyperbaric chamber. Hyperbaric chamber. There's some very interesting data it's essentially a hyperoxygenation of the brain for very brief periods of time. I think the data on hyperbaric chamber and TBI are very encouraging. The problem is much in the way that a few years ago, cryo was only available in a few places, and now people are doing ice baths and cold showers on their own. It's hard to find a hyperbaric chamber. They aren't just laying around, and they don't have them at spas typically, and they are quite expensive. So yes, there are interesting and important data, I think, on hyperbaric chamber. You definitely want to work with a physician or somebody who is very skilled, a practitioner who's very skilled in hyperbaric chamber. They do seem to improve brain function by hyperoxygenating the brain for brief periods of time, seems to improve a number of things, but above all, it seems to improve the quality and duration of sleep, which indirectly allows the brain to repair itself, because as I mentioned earlier, brain repair occurs, or brain change largely occurs in sleep. So if you don't have access to hyperbaric chamber, but you do have TBI, what are some of the other data? What do those point to? Well, I go on and on, and you don't have to get this from supplements, you can get it from food. But this threshold level of essential, these EPA essential fatty acids, there are now so many data, so much data on the valuable role of these essential EPA fatty acids thresholds being somewhere between one and 2 grams per day of the EPA. So much so, actually, that there are now prescription forms of EPA that doctors are starting to prescribe for people with TBI. Although for most people you can look up, and we've done podcast episodes about different ways to access this also functions as an antidepressant. Equally good, believe it or not, in clinical trials to ssrIs, once one gets over the one, or basically 2 grams per day of the EPA. The resident expert on the Internet about this is pretty extreme about the dosages, and that's Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who, by the way, deserves a nod of acknowledgement and support, because turns out that before me or David Sinclair or Matt Walker or any of these guys were blabbing to the world about stuff that they had learned in the archives of science and in their laboratories, the first person in was this woman named Rhonda Patrick. As far as I know, the first public facing, formally trained scientist to start going on all these podcasts and risk her reputation and this kinds of stuff that you deal with when you put your neck out there like that. And Rhonda's, I think, terrific. We don't agree on everything, and they would be weird if we did. But I think she's really been the proponent of these higher doses of epas for TBI and for cognitive function. Into all ages, we often hear about ways to increase dopamine. However, are there effective ways to decrease dopamine when you get too much of it for certain behaviors or habits we want to break? Katie ham, I think, is the last name. Thank you, Katie, for your question. Yeah, dopamine is a slippery slope, and Dr. Anilemki is the expert in this, and we've had a lot of conversations. She's one of my closer friends on the faculty. Unfortunately for her, our coffee discussions often last 4 hours or more. Her poor patients and family. Here's the thing. When dopamine is higher in your brain and body, when you've deployed it through excitement or pharmacology or otherwise, it tends to narrow your focus and make you seek more of it in that general theme that you happen to be focused on. Could be anything. That's the scary thing about dopamine. What can you do to control it and to reduce it? Well, for those of you that are engaging in habits that are healthy, maybe that doesn't require reducing dopamine. How do you define healthy versus unhealthy? Well, I think the simplest way to define addiction, at least by my mind, is that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. A rather simple definition. And yet, when we think about the biology of dopamine, dopamine is not unique to one pursuit. It's not unique to pursuit the pursuit of sex or the pursuit of warmth when you're cold or cool, environments when you're too warm or food or social media. It's just a dumb molecule that puts you into this forward state of mass, small visual aperture, and a kind of obsessive like nature. What can you do to counter that? Well, the best thing to do is to not get into that state too long. But if you do, the best thing you can do is to try and