The video addresses the nuanced discussions around alcohol consumption, suggesting that while alcohol can be enjoyed, understanding its effects is crucial. The speaker shares their stance on alcohol, acknowledging its use and potential dangers, particularly on cognitive health and sleep quality, advocating for minimal consumption.

The discussion extends into the realm of social media usage, emphasizing the importance of moderation and structured engagement. It highlights the impact of excessive usage on social interactions and mental health. By setting personal rules, like timing and limiting engagement, individuals can maintain a healthier relationship with social media.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. adage [ˈædɪdʒ] - (noun) - A traditional saying expressing a common experience or observation; proverb. - Synonyms: (saying, proverb, maxim)

Do as you wish, but know what you're doing. That's my stance.

2. metabolize [məˈtæbəˌlaɪz] - (verb) - To process a substance through metabolism. - Synonyms: (process, digest, absorb)

First of all, how well or poorly you metabolize alcohol.

3. neuronal [nʊˈroʊnəl] - (adjective) - Related to neurons or nerve cells in the nervous system. - Synonyms: (nerve cell-related, neural, cerebral)

Is that the direct or indirect cause of any kind of disruption in brain structure or in neuronal health?

4. vigilance [ˈvɪdʒɪləns] - (noun) - The action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties. - Synonyms: (alertness, attentiveness, watchfulness)

You know, this isn't a domain that I... to stay in positive vigilance.

5. microbiome [ˌmaɪkroʊˈbaɪoʊm] - (noun) - The microorganisms in a particular environment, including the body. - Synonyms: (microbial flora, microbiota, microbial community)

Alcohol is changing for the worse the gut microbiome and sleep patterns.

6. incidence [ˈɪnsɪdəns] - (noun) - The occurrence, rate, or frequency of a disease, crime, or other event. - Synonyms: (occurrence, frequency, rate)

Higher incidence of cancers, especially in women, higher incidence of cancers generally.

7. symbiotic [ˌsɪmbaɪˈɒtɪk] - (adjective) - Involving interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association. - Synonyms: (mutualistic, interdependent, cooperative)

Lex Friedman, my buddy, our buddy has a far more kind of symbiotic relationship with X.

8. neuroscientist [ˈnjʊroʊˌsaɪəntɪst] - (noun) - A scientist who specializes in the study of the nervous system and the brain. - Synonyms: (brain scientist, neural researcher, cognitive scientist)

There's a neuroscientist up at University of Washington, Sam Goldmand.

9. vestibular [vɛˈstɪbjʊlər] - (adjective) - Relating to the vestibule, particularly the inner ear involved in maintaining balance. - Synonyms: (balance-related, inner ear-related, equilibrium)

Otherwise, there's rewiring of the visual system and vestibular system, the balance system, in ways that might not be healthy

10. regimen [ˈrɛdʒɪmən] - (noun) - A prescribed course of medical treatment, way of life, or diet for the promotion or restoration of health. - Synonyms: (routine, diet, schedule)

Sure to be introduced by that kind of regimen.

3 Habits That WILL Make You Powerful Beyond Belief - Andrew Huberman

Do as you wish, but know what you're doing. That's my stance. I am not anti alcohol. I'm not an alcoholic. I don't particularly like alcohol. So I can drink or not drink. I don't tend to drink. I might have a sip of alcohol. Well, it's been a long time since I've had a sip of alcohol. But, you know, there are certain white tequilas I've enjoyed and, like, occasionally, like one of those or vodka and soda or something. So just to be clear, I'm not anti alcohol. My read of the data are, as you pointed out, that, yes, alcohol is a poison, but many things are a poison, and the dose determines the poison. It seems that our threshold for what we call moderate or low amounts of drinking is shifting nowadays. I don't know if that had something to do with the alcohol episode that we did, but here's what I do know.

The data say that zero to two drinks per week, you're probably fine, provided you're not an alcoholic and you're of age, okay? And you're not pregnant or dealing with some other. Something that would make it case where you wouldn't want to drink at all. Zero to two drinks per week. Now, what happens past two drinks per week depends on a lot of other contextual factors. Okay, first of all, how well or poorly you metabolize alcohol, how much alcohol dehydrogenase you tend to express. Why do I say that? Well, a lot of the so called negative effects of alcohol are due to disruptions in sleep and gut microbiome. So those are indirect. Right. Alcohol is changing for the worse. The gut microbiome and sleep patterns, we know this. People that track their sleep, they have one drink and they're like, holy cow, my sleep is so much worse. Not just sleep score, but amount of REM sleep, amount of deep sleep, etcetera.

Is that the direct or indirect cause of any kind of disruption in brain structure or in neuronal health? We don't know. But what these larger scale studies show is that if you look at the amount of gray matter thinning, which occurs with age, regardless, gray matter being the neurons in the brain, white matter being the fiber tracts, the axons and myelin in the brain is how they're imaged, so they show up as gray or white. The amount of gray matter thinning starts to increase as you get out past two drinks per week. Now, is it significant enough that people should be concerned about cognitive decline as a consequence of three drinks per week induced grey matter thinning? Probably not. So then should we set the threshold at three drinks per week or four drinks per week? I don't know. And I'm not here to say that one way or the other. What I'm saying is, my read of the data, and I know there are people that disagree with me, is that zero is better than any.

And that, I think I'm told, has brought great relief to a number of people that didn't want to drink, but that actually were drinking red wine specifically to try and get some, quote unquote, health benefits. It also brought great relief to a number of people because they tell me that did not like drinking. They didn't like the way drinking made them feel, either while they were under the influence of it, or maybe taste or just general malaise the next day or due to disruption in sleep. I don't really know the reasons. But for people who don't like drinking or who don't want to drink, I think there's ample evidence that zero is great. Great that you don't need to drink. Okay. It might seem like a kind of silly statement, but I think a good number of people kind of doing it. Cause they thought there were health benefits.

Now, to be fair, most people were drinking, and if they were talking about the health benefits because they like the way alcohol makes them feel. And to me, it's clear that if you care very much about your brain, that more than two drinks per week on a consistent basis, probably not a good idea. Now, are there exceptions to that? Sure. Are there people who, you know, everyone says, well, I had a grandparent and they lived to be 98, and they're super sharp, and they drank, you know, a shot of vodka every night. Great. Like, great. I just say, well, how much better would they been had they not? But I also understand you need to live life. And for many people, alcohol is one route by which they enjoy life more because of its relaxing effects. And that's important to note that anxiety is bad. Anxiety that disrupts sleep is bad.

So many people will drink to provide a segue from the work day to the evening, and they find it helps them calm down and sleep better. But we know it disrupts your sleep. Would it be better to not drink at all? Probably. But I want to be respectful of that scenario as well. If we look at four drinks per week, five drinks per week, let's say a drink a night, seven drinks per week, I just don't see where the debate is. To me, you look at the gray matter thinning. You look at some of the other metrics on gut microbiome, you look at the disruption in sleep and again, people should do as they wish, but know what they're doing, and it's just oh so clear that it's not good for people and that they're doing at least some degree of harm.

Now, there's also the business of offsetting harm. I always say, listen, if you're the kind of person who wants to have a drink every night, be my guest, if that serves you well. But you might be wise to also do some things that offset I, some of the, for instance, gut microbiome disruption. Perhaps pay a bit more attention to consuming one to four servings of low sugar fermented foods per day to really feed the gut microbiome. Maybe be extra thoughtful about a consistent sleep schedule, maybe be extra thoughtful about a number of other things to offset whatever negative effects are sure to be introduced by that kind of regimen.

So zero is best, two is probably fine. 34567 is where you're, are you going to shorten your life by a significant amount? Well, provide you don't drive while you're drunk? Probably not. Are you going to be disrupting your health? Probably mainly indirect effects through disrupted sleep or gut microbiome trying to offset those effects. But then once you get past a drink per night, which many, many people are consuming, then I think there's general agreement. Higher incidence of cancers, especially in women, higher incidence of cancers generally. And a number of other things relate to immune system disruption. So, and on and on.

And, you know, you know, just as a final statement, I don't have anything against alcohol. Alcohol is, you know, I understand it's part of the fabric of most every culture, and that says something. But to my mind, alcohol, if you don't like it or you care about your health more than you care about alcohol, I say, you know, don't drink. It's pure and simple. Two things. One is an observation, one is a, perhaps a suggestion to everyone. The observation is that disengaging from social media takes time, but it happens very readily, every single time. So, for instance, get off work, you're still on your phone, you're still on your phone, you're with family, still on your phone. They're like, hey, want to engage? You put it away, expect some agitation. Expect like something's been taken away from you.

It's this kind of low level malaise. Other things aren't as interesting. I mean, hopefully one's life is interesting and hopefully isn't just drawing us out out of, like, urgent demand, but it requires a little bit of time if you've ever gone camping or you don't have access to your phone. In fact, this coming weekend, I'm going to take three days away from my phone, and I'm sure getting back to the phone will feel a little bit oppressive. It'll feel like a little bit oppressive. But once the phone is away, expect, I don't know, 20 minutes to an hour during which you don't feel quite right. Maybe even some underlying anxiety, because it's that unconscious anticipation.

So that's my observation. So that's the observation. The suggestion I have for people to have a healthy relationship with social media. It's one actually that I learned from a professional poker player, which is play for time, don't you know if you're winning, don't stay there, right? You're losing, don't. I mean, I guess I don't want to suggest people gamble, but this is all just translating to social media. Play for time, designate how much time you're going to spend on there in a given bouth, you know. So for me, getting a post up once every day or so, maybe four times a week, is kind of the goal. And I try and mix up the form of post, and I have rules for myself. Most specifically, I try and make sure that 90% of posts are so the audience can learn something useful, hopefully also interesting and actionable, et cetera. 10% are kind of, for my delight, I can't help it.

Or where I'm curious about, I'm kind of pinging the audience for their thoughts because I genuinely want to know. I was walking up the Upper east side with my girlfriend a few weeks ago and saw the sign outside a store and said, we have ozempic and monjaro. And I took a picture of it and thought, that's kind of weird. It's normally you see like we have lattes or something, and I just kept walking. Then when I got back to California, I posted that on social media. I thought, kind of curious, what do people think of Ozempic and Manjaro? I know it's controversial. I'll just ask people. And it just tons of engagement. I didn't even expect it, but I'm learning a lot from all those comments.

So I have rules, but the main rule is I don't let myself or I try to not let myself pick up the phone and just any, at any old time and go into social media. I really try. I don't always succeed, but I really try. And if I'm going to be on there. I'm like, okay, I'm on here now for an hour, where I give myself an hour. That's the best thing I can do. I also know that if I answer a few comments, I'm kind of a runaway train when it comes to people pinging me with questions about science. I just. It's very hard for me not to reply, so I have to limit myself to, you know, five to 15 responses, and I'm like, and then I. And then I actually feel some anxiety as I go to do my life activities. I have to tell myself they'll be okay.

It's just. It's just kind of like you ask a professor, at least this professor, a question about something. If I know the answer, like, I'm gonna try and tell you. So there's always that agitation. But, um, for me, so expect that agitation when you set it away and play for time. Don't base it on any particular mode of engagement or whether or not it feels good or doesn't feel good. Play for time. So decide. I'm be on here for 30 minutes. And it's interesting because when I don't do that, what I start to notice is I'm scrolling, but I don't even know what I'm doing. Like, what am I doing here? X and Twitter, totally different picture.

Cause I now go on X and Twitter, and I know they're gonna try and get me through a. Let's just call it a psychosocial dynamic. Someone like, you're on there to see how people are gonna engage. It is a little bit more combative. It also can be really supportive because of the immediate retweet function. You see something you like, it can get out to a lot of people. You can link out to things, but it's more of a, like, the center of the town square where everybody's interacting. And so I have very clear cognitive pictures of, like, Instagram feels pretty benevolent to me. You know, people have to generally show their face, right? X feels like, okay, do I really want to engage in this very intense dynamic? So I go on X far less, and I've had much more polarized responses to things that I've put up there. I've had things clipped out of context.

I've had attacks, and I just don't enjoy being angry. I don't enjoy feeling that friction. It just sucks for me, and I don't like seeing other people suffer. So on X, I see just a lot more of that, and I've got nothing against it. And I think they've done great things with the platform, but I just, I have to just be really protective of myself to not go there terribly much. Is there, like, studies that have shown that there's a maximum amount of time that adults, maybe children versus adults, should spend with their smart devices to prevent these huge amplitude and peaks and dopamine where they're just getting really rewarding things? Or even, just like you were saying, negative things that can be, in a way, it's very, you're getting that engagement, and then it's the clap back.

If you get a good clap back on somebody, there's a neuroscientist up at University of Washington, Sam Goldmand, who's shown that animals will work for the opportunity to fight. They'll work for it. We never understood this until recently. I mean, you could say we always understood that, but no, humans probably do. Engaging in those kind of high intensity ways can be rewarding for some folks, even for people who don't like that, unless they're really conflict averse, it has a certain level of arousal itself can become rewarding. Right. Just the engagement. When I say arousal, like the level of cognitive engagement, especially if the rest of life feels kind of passive and uninteresting, there have not been clear studies that I'm aware of.

But at the same time, if I think of something like virtual reality, like my colleague at Stanford, Jeremy Bailenson, has done, he's one of the early pioneers of virtual reality. And as virtual reality came to be, they established, and I'll get the numbers wrong here, so forgive me, Jeremy, I have to look this up, but, you know, limits of, you know, kids should only be in the VR goggles for x number of minutes per day. And it was minutes. Otherwise, there's rewiring of the visual system and vestibular system, the balance system, in ways that might not be healthy. They had real clear limits and guidelines with social media, sort of like, as much as you want. And then, of course, there's the intrusion of social media and tablet use and phone use into sleep, where then you're depleting the replenish, where you're undermining the replenishment of the dopamine reserve.

Right. So then there's all that contextual stuff, I think an hour a day on Instagram. If you think about it, that's a pretty significant investment. And with X, I can't even make a recommendation. I do go on there and post. I have kind of a bittersweet relation to it right now. Lex Friedman, my buddy, our buddy has a far more kind of symbiotic relationship with X. It just sort of works for him. Whereas I feel that more on ANH Instagram platform and it's just, it's different cultures and maybe I need to adjust my follows and so on. But I think an hour a day to me just seems like, okay, that's plenty and is enough because I grew up and spend still a fair amount of time in the Bay Area, although I'm in Los Angeles far more now.

An interesting question is always to ask the heads of these companies or the CEO's how long they let their kids be on the social media. And you'll often find that it's a very, very small number. And that tells you something right there. Okay. So I think the task switching, the context switching, no doubt is impairing adults ability to adults ability to engage and stay engaged in one thing. Reading a book, unless it's extremely engaging, is gonna be less attention harnessing than social media. Why social media is movies. Why you're scrolling. I mean, the brain has never seen this kind of thing before. Even you have 300 channels on your television, you know, and you're just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling at short distance with the feedback of people you recognize and which isn't true for most people watching television or, and feedback and likes and comments and clapbacks and attacks.

And I reward. I mean, it's incredible. I think I'm a content consumer, but I'm a content creator, as you are, of course. And I like to think in terms of, are we consuming content or are we creating content and just being very judicious about consumption of content. I mean, I think it's great fun and I encourage people to put stuff out on social media. In fact, recently a clip was cut. There was like a math gaffe that I did, and I came out and apologized for the error. I occasionally make errors in podcasts and we put them in the captions, but anyway, put something out there. But the caption to that post was, you know, I would hate for anyone to resist posting their creative thoughts, their creative outlet for fear of attack or making mistakes. I think we need to.

I sound kind of like, you know, it's a party line now, but to foster a community of people, like encouraging people to create stuff and put it online. But that's different than just passive consumption all the time. I think there's so much good to be had with social media, but I think an hour a day on Instagram, maybe 30 minutes a day on x, and you're good and even there, 90 minutes out of your waking day. And then what part of your day? This is important. You know, when I look at my day, I know that when I wake up in the morning, I'm a little groggy. But then I've got three or 4 hours that if I can get, if I'm going to get really quality work done, it's in that three or 4 hours or the three or 4 hours right after lunch and that's it. I'm not the kind of person that's doing quality work now between the hours of 08:00 p.m. and midnight. It's just not happening anymore.

It happened years ago, but it's not happening anymore. So where is that? 60 to 90 minutes falling is also key. Maybe it should be for an hour or so before bedtime, provided it's not too stimulating. Maybe it should be over your lunch break. You just handle it then. But when it's first thing in the morning, then several times throughout the morning, and then later in the afternoon and then in the evening, I think what I'm describing is not unusual. And not unusual, not just for kids. Jonathan Hate's work that's being discussed so much now about social media consumption and the challenges and concerns with that, but also in adults. I mean, since when? I'm 48 years old and it's kind of remarkable. I mean, I see people from my high school class and like, I'm one of them, so I can only laugh at myself here.

But it's like we're grown adults, like posting what we did and like showing it off to the world. There's a kind of teenage element to it. It's kind of like silly. If I really step back from it, I go, wait, like, are the adults behaving like kids? And the kids are behaving like adults, like what's going on here? But it's sort of, if we step back and look to ourselves like an experiment, we'd say, wow. You know, like the, the people in the 35 to 60 year old range of this species that we call human is kind of like doing the same stuff that the kids are doing. And maybe you just say, well, duh. But it's interesting. I mean, you say, well, like how good or poor of one's life is that? And so I think about this stuff a lot, but I'm on there and I teach and I enjoy it and I learn and, you know, and I'll continue, but I've.

But I think one has to be really discerning and set constraints. Absolutely. I mean, if it's tapping into your dopamine system and you're. I mean, if it's. If it's kind of like that substance, right? It's technology. It's not methamphetamine, it's not cocaine, but it sure as heck is affecting your dopamine system. And so it absolutely is. And it also has the potential for a lot of problems. You know, this isn't a domain that, you know, I have expertise in or that is covered on the podcast. But, you know, there's this guy on who's done some podcasts with Lex Friedman, and he's been on a few others, James Sexton. He's a. He's a divorce lawyer in New York. And he talks about how the advent of social media has created this huge surge in, I don't know if overall divorce rates.

But then, you know, he talks about the trajectory of a lot of the failures of a lot of marriages, and it's like, you know, that. And actually, people have talked about Instagram as, like, one of the main dating apps. It's not sold as a date. It's not offered as a dating app. But this is where a lot of people meet. They see people they used to know, hey, how's it going? And then the conversation converts. I mean, this is, you know, I'm neither saying I'm not passing judgment. I'm just saying, you know, there's a lot in the landscape of social media that lends itself to too much ease in certain types of human interaction and that inhibits our ability to do things that are really functional for our relationships and for our professional lives and for family. I mean, you know, or just presence.

You know, just like, being there. Not to get sentimental here, but that graduate advisor I was talking about before, unfortunately passed away young. She had the BRCA mutation. Died at 50. Her name was Barbara Chapman. Had two lovely daughters, actually. The second one just finished university in neurosciences. So I was super happy for her. And I'll never forget at her, it wasn't her funeral, but it was a kind of, like, celebration of life thing. After she ended that, her daughters, maybe it was one or both, talked about how one of the best things about their mom and their memories of their mom was unstructured time with her where she would just, like, sit with them and hang out, and they would just, like, do stuff.

And she wasn't heavy user of the phone, so that was 2014. She passed away. So phones were kind of really beginning to pick up in terms of their use smartphones. But that rung in my mind because I was thinking, wow, like, of all the things for children to remember about their deceased mom, it was the unstructured time. It wasn't the Giants game, although they probably remember that they were big giants fans or other things. But it's the unstructured time that we spend with people where they are giving us their full presents and we're giving them our full presence. And then you look around at like, dinner tables. Now in restaurants, you look around and like everyone's on their phones anyway, I'm saying what everyone already knows, and I'm guilty of it too. But I think we the world is due for an adjustment.

Your ability to focus and in fact, your ability of neurons to encode specific information in your environment, that is, to represent what's out there in the world, is actually related to your blood glucose level. Now here I'm setting aside the discussion of ketosis and ketogenic diets for the moment. But there's a beautiful study that was published in neuron not long ago that showed that the tuning, that is, the precision with which neurons in the brain represent things in our environment is actually much greater when there is sufficient glucose in the brain. Translated into English, this means that when we are fasted, or when our blood glucose is very low, we aren't able to perceive and think about things as clearly. Now, there's a twist to this, however.

Many people who practice intermittent fasting, and I should say I practice a sort of pseudo intermittent fasting, I generally eat my meals between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 08:00 p.m. although sometimes there's some wiggle around that. Occasionally I have an early breakfast. I'm not super rigid about it, but I know there are a number of people who are doing longer fast or they're eating in a six hour window. We did an entire episode about fasting. You can again find that hubermanlab.com. intermittent fasting has a lot of different potential benefits. For some people, it's a convenient way to restrict their calories. For other people, it's a convenient way to avoid eating. That is, it's easier to not eat than to eat a small portion.

So they opt for intermittent fasting and so on and so forth. But one of the things that you hear very often is that some people like being fasted because they like the clarity of mind that it provides. Here's the situation. Neurons, unless you're in a ketogenic diet, really thrive on glucose. They love glucose. And as I mentioned before, your ability to think and perceive things is actually enhanced by having sufficient glucose in your bloodstream. So why would it be that some people experience a heightened state of mental clarity when they are fasted? I've certainly experienced that before. Well, I should say that provided you're well hydrated enough and you have enough electrolytes in your system, what tends to happen is that when you ingest food, there's a shift in your nervous system towards so called parasympathetic mode.

That is, the more relaxed you probably heard it as rest and digest, although it does other things. A more relaxed mode that can indeed make us very sleepy. If we have too many carbohydrates, it actually can make us quite sleepy. However, if we have any food, if we have enough of it, that is, if our gut is full, it diverts blood to our gut and we become sleepy, and we can't focus as well. So a lot of people really like fasting in the state of being fasted for focus and concentration, because they don't have as much of that parasympathetic activation. They're just not as sleepy. And in fact, under those conditions, half as much caffeine will give you just as much lift, as twice as much caffeine will give you on a full belly of pasta. And that's just the way that caffeine interacts with blood glucose.

So what I'd like you to imagine is if you had a measure of focus from zero to ten, these are arbitrary units, ten being maximally focused and zero being not focused at all. Imagine a u shaped function, right, where if you're very fasted, you're going to have a high degree of focus and concentration. But then if you ingest some food and your belly is full, your focus and concentration is reduced. But having enough blood glucose and maybe even elevated blood glucose will increase cognitive function. So there are two ends of the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, blood glucose is relatively low, and you're fasted, and you can think and behave in a very concentrated way. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have a lot of blood glucose, or I should say, sufficient blood glucose. You never want your blood glucose to be too high. And that allows your neurons to encode and perceive and basically allow you to think really clearly.

So you sort of have to pick your condition. What do you want for your bouts of focus and concentration? I actually do both. So what I do is, as I mentioned before, I eat my meal sometime around 11:00 a.m. my first meal, typically unless I'm very hungry when I wake up. And so I will do my workout and one bout of focused work. I always think of this as my hard work early in the day, and I do that fasted. I'll be consuming water with electrolytes, maybe element or other electrolytes, maybe some caffeine as well, in the form of yerba mate or coffee. That's my first focus bout of 90 minutes or less that is essentially done fasted. And then I'll eat. And then I do notice after I eat, I actually have a diminished capacity to focus. But then again, in the afternoon, I will do another 90 minutes bout of focus.

And. And I'll talk about some of the tools I use to make sure that that bout of focus is optimal for getting the most amount of focused work done, whether or not it's mental work or physical work. Although I tend to do my physical work early in the day and my mental work both early and late in the day, to make this very simple or as simple as I can for you. Being fasted is great for focus and concentration, provided you're not thinking about food the entire time. And being fed is terrific for focus. And concentration actually can improve neuronal function provided that you didn't eat too much food. So one way to manage this is if you're going to have a lunch to make sure that you don't stuff yourself at lunch, that you're not overeating, and to not get quite so full that you push your nervous system into this parasympathetic mode and make it hard to focus in the afternoon.

I know a lot of people experience a dip or even a crash in energy in the afternoon that make it really hard to focus. For that reason, I'll just remind people of a tool I've talked about many times before, which is based on the biology of adenosine and caffeine, et cetera, which is to delay your first caffeine intake to 90 to 120 minutes after waking up. I know that can be painful for certain people. I violate that rule when I'm working out very early in the morning. I'll drink my caffeine before my workout, which often occurs within 30 to 60 minutes of waking. But in general, unless I'm working out very early, I will ingest my caffeine 90 to 120 minutes after I wake up.

So again, I want to emphasize that if you hear somebody out there say being fasted is optimal for focus and concentration, well, that is true in one context and perhaps ideal for a certain part of the day, and other people will say, no, you know, neurons run on glucose. You need glucose in your bloodstream in order to get those neurons to be tuned, that is, to respond with electrical activity in the optimal way when you're reading something or when you're trying to perform exercise. Well, that's also true. And of course, you can incorporate both. I, in fact, as I just described, incorporate both fasted states and fed states in order to optimize my concentration and focus.

I know many people are curious as to whether or not caffeine can improve focus and concentration. Indeed it can. There is an immense amount of data supporting the idea that caffeine, provided it's consumed in the appropriate dosages, can improve mental performance and physical performance. And it largely does that through improvements in focus and concentration. The dosage of caffeine, of course, is going to depend on how caffeine adapted you are, how much caffeine tolerance you have, and that is going to vary tremendously, tremendously, depending on whether or not you ingest that caffeine with or without food, as I mentioned earlier. But there is a kind of general range in which we can talk about caffeine as being useful for focus and concentration.

And the range is basically from 100 milligrams to 400 milligrams. I want to caution everybody out there. If you're somebody who suffers from anxiety or panic attacks and you're not used to ingesting caffeine, and you run out and ingest 400 milligrams of caffeine in the form of a spoon or yerba mate or an energy drink or in pill form, that is going to be very uncomfortable for you. You're going to be sweating profusely, your heart rate is going to increase, you're going to be quite panicked, in fact, or at least anxious. So be cautious with your use and adopting of caffeine if you're not already caffeine adapted.

But most people do quite well to ingest 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine prior to doing some focused work. And again, I recommend delaying your caffeine intake to 90 to 120 minutes after waking unless you are using that caffeine to really jolt your system before a workout.

Caffeine can, of course, be ingested in various forms, even pill form, but most people ingest in the form of coffee or. My particular favorite way to ingest caffeine is yerba mate. It is important, and I should note that you should actively avoid the smoked versions of yerba mate, as they contain a lot of carcinogenic, cancer promoting compounds. There's some great yerba mate brands out there. The most cost effective way to consume it would be to use the loose leaf tea and to pour water over that. There's one particular brand that I like. I don't have any affiliation to them whatsoever, but I've been using it for years. It's Anna park. It's an organic brand that is sold. I buy mine on Amazon. You can find it elsewhere on the Internet as well.

Again, I don't have any affiliation to them. It's just very cost effective, very clean. It doesn't have the smoked flavor. At least the one that I buy is not the smoked variety. So none of the carcinogenic compounds are in there, at least that I'm aware of. And I like the way it tastes, and it provides a very even lift and stimulant that I think certainly works for me. And that a number of people I know that have suggested to also enjoy yerba mate or caffeine also have other additional benefits. In particular, the caffeine in yerba mate and coffee and other sources of caffeine. Caffeine are known to increase the density and efficacy, that is the number and the function of dopamine receptors. And this has been shown in humans several times. So by ingesting caffeine pretty regularly, you're actually increasing the ability of dopamine to have this effect of increasing motivation and drive.

I tend to ingest caffeine only early in the day. I tend to cut off my caffeine intake somewhere around one or 02:00 p.m. to ensure that I can get into a good night's sleep. But I realize that there are people out there that ingest caffeine as late as two or three in the afternoon and can still sleep fine. I will caution those of you that think that you can drink caffeine in the evening or nighttime and still fall asleep. All of the research points to the fact that the architecture of your sleep and the depth of your sleep is disrupted. Even if you're able to fall and stay asleep, the sleep you're getting is simply not as good as the sleep you would get if you were to shut off your caffeine intake at least 8 hours before bedtime, and ideally more like ten or even 12 hours before bedtime.

But of course, there are practical constraints as well. Okay, so caffeine is increasing dopamine's function by changing the number and efficacy of dopamine receptors. But of course, it also increases our wakefulness, our alertness. And that is largely through the neurochemical systems related to adenosine, which is a molecule that builds up in our brain and body the longer we are awake. Part of the sleepiness system, if you will, makes us feel fatigued or tired. And caffeine also operates on the epinephrine, the adrenaline system.

In fact, if we ingest too much caffeine, we'll sometimes get the jitters. Those jitters are really the sympathetic, as it's called, nervous systems bias toward movement, and our pupils will dilate. They actually get broader. Now, somewhat paradoxically, when our pupils get bigger, the pupils of our eyes, that is, our visual world, actually narrows. It becomes more tunnel like. A lot of people don't realize this. When our pupils are really small, that means we are relaxed. So if you ever see someone with really tiny or pin sized pupils, they're very relaxed. If their pupils are very big, they're very dilated, well, then they are very amped up.

They are very, very alert. Caffeine increases alertness by increasing epinephrine, adrenaline release both in the brain and within the body. And so that's another way that it facilitates focus and concentration. One of the great challenges in assigning a good, you know, giving a good answer to the question of, like, what's the meaning of life? Is, I think, illustrated best by the Viktor Frankl example, although there are other examples, too, which is that our sense of meaning is very elastic in time and space. And we talked a little bit about this earlier, but it's amazing to me that somebody locked in a cell or a concentration camp can bring the horizon in close enough that they can then micro slice their environment so that they can find rewards and meaning and power and beauty, even in a little square box or a horrible situation.

And I think this is really speaks to one of the most important features of the human mind, which is we could do, let's take two opposite extremes. One would be, let's say the alarm went off right now in this building, and the building started shaking. Our vision, our hearing, everything would be tuned to this spacetime bubble for those moments and everything that we would process, all that would matter. The only meaning would be, get out of here safe, figure out what's going on, contact loved ones, etcetera.

If we were to sit back totally relaxed, we could do the, you know, I think it's called pale blue dot thing or whatever, where we could imagine ourselves in this room, and then they were in the United States and this continent and the earth and then peering down us, and all of a sudden you get back, it can seem so big that all of a sudden it's meaningless. Right? If you see yourself as just one brief glimmer in all of time and all of space, you go to, I don't matter, and if you go to, oh, every little thing that happens in this text thread or this, you know, comment section on YouTube or Instagram, your spacetime bubble is tiny. Then everything seems inflated and the brain will contract and dilate its space time. Brilliant. Yeah.

Vision and time, but also sense of meaning. And that's beautiful. And it's what allows us to be so dynamic in different environments and we can pull from the past and the present and future. It's why examples like Nelson Mandela and Viktor Frankl had to include. It makes sense that it wasn't just about grinding it out. They had to find those dopamine rewards even in those little boxes they were forced into.

So I'm not trying to dodge an answer, but for me personally, and I think about this a lot, because I have this complicated history in science where my undergraduate, graduate advisor and postdoctoral advisor all died young. So, you know, and they were wonderful people and had immense importance in my life. But what I realized is that we can get so fixated on the thing that we're experiencing holding tremendous meaning, but it only holds that meaning for as long as we're in that space time regime. And this is important because what really gives meaning is the understanding that you can move between these different space time dimensionalities.

And I'm not trying to sound like a theoretical physicists or anyone that thinks about the cosmos in saying that. It's really the fact that sometimes we say and do and think things, and it feels so important. And then two days later, we're like, what? What happened? Well, you had a different brain processing algorithm entirely. You were in a completely different state. And so what I want to do in this lifetime is I want to. I want to engage in as many different levels of contraction and dilation of meaning as possible. I want to go to the micro. I sometimes think about this.

I'm like, if I just pulled over the side of the road, I bet you there's an anthill there and their whole world is fascinating. You can't stay there, and you also can't stay staring up at the clouds and just think about how we're just these little beings and it doesn't matter. The key is the journey back and forth, up and down that staircase, back and forth and back and forth and my goal is to get as many trips up and down that staircase as I can before the reaper comes for me. The way I think about trying to build up resilience, you know, physically or mentally or otherwise, is one of, I guess we could call it limb. I like to call it limbic friction. That's not a real scientific term, and I acknowledge that I'm making it up now because I think it captures the concept, which is that we always hear about resilience.

It makes it sound like, oh, under stress, where everything's coming at you, you're going to stay calm. But there's another. The limbic system wants to pull you in some direction, typically in the direction of reflexive behavior. And the prefrontal cortex, through top down mechanisms, has to suppress that and say, no, we're not going to respond to the banging of the coffee cups behind me, or I'm going to keep focusing. That's pure top down control. So limbic friction is high in that environment.

You've put yourself into a high limbic friction environment, meaning that the prefrontal cortex has to work really hard. But there's another side to limbic friction, too, which is when you're very sleepy, there's nothing incoming. It can be completely silent, and it's hard to engage and focus because you're drifting off, you're getting sleepy. So they're limbic for is high, but for the opposite reason. Autonomic arousal is too low. So they're turning on Netflix in the background, or looping a song might boost your level of alertness.

That will allow top down control to be in exactly the sweet spot you want it. So this is why earlier I was saying it's all about how we feel inside relative to what's going on on the outside. We're constantly in this. I guess one way you could envision it spatially, especially if people are listening to this just on audio, is, I like to think about it kind of like a glass barbell, where one sphere of perception and attention can be on what's going on with me, and one sphere of attention can be on what's going on with you or something else in the room or in my environment. But those, this barbell isn't rigid. It's not really glass. Would plasma work here? I don't know anything about plasma. Sorry. I don't know. Yeah, okay, but so imagine that this thing can contort the size of the globes at the end of this barbell can get bigger or smaller.

So let's say I close my eyes. And I bring all my experience into what's going on through interoception internally. Now it's as if I've got two orbs of perception just on my internal state, but I can also do the opposite and bring both orbs of perception outside me. I'm not thinking about my heart rate or my breathing. I'm just thinking about something I see. And what you'll start to realize as you kind of use this spatial model, is that two things. One is that it's very dynamic and that the more relaxed we are, the more these two orbs of attention, the two ends of the barbell, can move around freely. The more alert we are, the more rigid they're going to be tethered in place. And that was designed so that if I have a threat in my environment, it's tethered to that threat. I'm not gonna.

If something's coming to attack me, I'm not gonna be like, oh, my breathing cadence is a little bit quick. That's not how it works. Why? Because both orbs are linked to that threat. And so my behavior is now actually being driven by something external, even though I think it's internal. And so I don't want to get too abstract here, because I'm a neuroscientist, I'm not a theorist, but when you start thinking about models of how the brain work, I mean, brain works, excuse me, there are only really three things that neurons do. They're either sensory neurons, they're motor neurons, or they're modulating things.

And the models of attention and perception that we have now 2020, tell us that we've got interoception and extroception. They're strongly modulated by levels of autonomic arousal, and that if we want to form the optimal relationship to some task or some pressure or something, whether or not it's sleep, an impending threat, or coding, we need to adjust our internal space time relationship with the external spacetime relationship. And I realize I'm repeating what I said earlier, but we can actually assign circuitry to this stuff. It mostly has to do with how much limbic friction there is, how much you're being pulled to some source. That source could be internal. If I have pain, physical pain in my body, I'm going to be much more interoceptive than I am exteroceptive.

You could be talking to me, and I'm just going to be thinking about that pain. It's very hard. And the other thing that we can link it to is top down control, meaning anything in our environment that has a lot of salience will tend to bring us into more exteroception than interoception. And again, I don't want to litter the conversation with just a bunch of terms, but what I think it can be useful for people is to do what essentially you've done, Lex, is to start developing an awareness when I wake up. Am I mostly in a mode of interoception or extroception when I work well? Is that what is working well look like from the perspective of autonomic arousal? How alert or calm am I? What kind of balance between internal focus and external focus is there? And to sort of watch this process throughout the day.

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