The Science of Emotions & Relationships

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Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. My name is Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast.

Our first sponsor is InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and inform your health goals. I’m a big believer in getting blood tests taken because it’s simply the only way to get in-depth data about your metabolic factors, hormones, all the things that inform your immediate and long-term health. Nowadays, there are also excellent DNA tests that can further inform you about your immediate and long-term health. Now, the problem with most blood tests out there is that you get information back, you get a lot of numbers, and they’ll tell you whether or not your numbers are in normal range or high or low, but they don’t inform you what steps to take as a consequence.

In addition, they can often be very confusing what all the factors are and what they really mean. InsideTracker has a dashboard and a platform that makes interpreting all that information really easy. It also points you in the direction of certain lifestyle factors, exercise, nutrition, et cetera, that you might want to change in order to bring the numbers into the ranges that you want. So, InsideTracker is something that I’ve been doing for some time now, and it’s really helped me inform the choices. For instance, I’ve swapped out some of the foods that I was eating regularly.

I found out I was actually too high in certain vitamins and minerals. I was too low in others. It’s really helped me adjust my diet and my exercise regimes, and it really gives me the confidence that I’m on the path to long-term health. So, if you want to try InsideTracker, you can go to insidetracker. com/huberman to get 25% off any of InsideTracker’s plans.

Use the code Huberman at checkout. That’s insidetracker. com/huberman to get 25% off any of InsideTracker’s plans and use the code Huberman at checkout. Our next sponsor is ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data safe and secure and private.

It does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see or sell your data. I started using ExpressVPN because my bank account got hacked. I still don’t know exactly how it happened, but it was an absolute mess. I lost money. I lost a lot of time.

I wouldn’t want to have it happen to anybody. When that happened, I talked to my friends in the tech community and they told me that even though you think your internet connection is secure, often times it’s not. So, I tend to use internet connections on planes, in hotels, in cafes, but also at home. And I was told that even at home, your data may not be as secure as you think. And so, with ExpressVPN, your data is absolutely secure.

So are your online activities. The great thing is you don’t even notice that it’s operating. It’s running in the background. You just turn it on and it goes without you realizing that your data is being protected. It doesn’t interfere with any of your online activities.

So, I use ExpressVPN when I travel, anytime I’m outside the house, when I’m at work, and when I’m at home. If you want to try ExpressVPN, you can go to expressvpn. com/huberman. And if you do that, you’ll get an extra 3 months free on one of their one-year packages. That’s expressvpn.

com/huberman to get 3 months free on a one-year package. The final sponsor of today’s podcast is Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a zero sugar, grain-free, keto-friendly cereal. As I’ve mentioned before on the podcast, I’m neither ketogenic, nor am I all meat, nor am I vegan. The way I eat is that early in the day I fast and then sometime around noon I eat my first meal and that meal is always low carbohydrate.

And then throughout the day I maintain a low carbohydrate diet. The fasting and low carbohydrate diet during the daytime optimizes alertness and wakefulness. I want to be awake and be able to work. And then at night is when I eat my carbohydrates cuz it facilitates the transition to sleep. So for me, Magic Spoon is a terrific snack in the afternoon.

I’ll sometimes even have it with lunch. And the reason I like it is because it tastes really delicious and it’s compatible with the keto-friendly or you know, keto-like meals that I eat throughout the day. They come in a variety of flavors, cocoa, fruity, peanut butter, frosted. I particularly like the frosted because it tastes like donuts in my opinion and I love donuts. As a consequence, I love Magic Spoon cereal.

I can consume it, it tastes like a pastry and it has 0 g of sugar and it’s compatible with this nutritional regimen I mentioned earlier. If you want to try Magic Spoon, you can go to magicspoon. com/huberman to grab a variety pack. Use the code Huberman at checkout and get $5 off your order. That’s magicspoon.

com/huberman and use the code Huberman to get $5 off. This month we’re talking all about the science of emotions and tools related to the science of emotions. We’ve talked about the science of stress and resiliency, tools to access more calm, tools to raise your stress threshold to become more resilient. We’ve talked about motivation and the role of the dopamine system. I’d like to make a couple of announcements about some new resources.

The first one is that we have now captioned all the Huberman Lab episodes in English and in Spanish. We were able to do that thanks to your support of our sponsors and on Patreon. So now all of the podcasts have a captioning feature on YouTube and those were done by experts. So, while there might be the occasional error, for the most part, they’re very precise. We’ve done that so that people that prefer to consume the content in Spanish or that like to read the content from the English subtitles can do so.

And we’re going to continue to expand the number of languages that are captioned for the Huberman Lab Podcast. So, we want to thank you for that resource. It’s now available for all episodes. In addition, in previous episodes, I’ve talked about NSDR or non-sleep deep rest. NSDRs come in a variety of different forms.

There’s self-hypnosis. I’ve pointed you to some resources for that previously. There’s yoga nidra. NSDR is really about achieving calm quickly and doing that in a self-directed way for many reasons in order to access sleep more readily, in order to de-stress very deeply, in order to replace sleep that you’ve lost. It also seems to aid neural plasticity.

It can enhance the rearrangements of connections in the brain that occur during learning. There’s scientific support for that. There’s a link in today’s episode caption to a new site. This is a YouTube video that was brought free of cost by the folks over at Madefor, a company that’s been a sponsor of the podcast previously. So, this is an NSDR script that doesn’t contain any of the intentions or some of the more typical language of yoga nidra.

Instead, it’s focused purely on the breathing protocols as well as includes a sort of body scan where you direct your attention to different locations around your body. It has all the core elements of non-sleep deep rest, but is distinct from yoga nidra. I just offer this to you as a resource if you’d like to use it. It’s about 30 minutes long and should be very effective in bringing you into deep states of relaxation for all the reasons I mentioned before. So, let’s talk abo