Essentials: Control Your Brain Chemistry for Focus, Motivation & Well-Being

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a 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. The important thing to know is that your brain and your spinal cord and the rest of your so called nervous system control all the organs of your body and that all the organs of your body feedback, meaning they communicate through chemicals and other means, to your nervous system. And vitally important is the fact that which neural circuits are active and which neural circuits are likely to be less active at any given moment depends on two major categories of chemicals. It depends on hormones, and it depends on so called neuromodulators. And the four neuromodulators that we're gonna talk about today that are of the utmost importance for your goals are dopamine, epinephrine, also called adrenaline, serotonin, and acetylcholine. There are many features of how neuromodulators work, but for sake of today's discussion, we only need to focus on two of those features, and those are fast acting features and longer, slower features or what we call baseline features. Now perhaps surprisingly, I'd like to focus on the slow actions of the neuromodulators first because those slow actions of the neuromodulators are happening in you and in me and in everyone right now, and they set the backdrop, the context in which the various tools to manipulate dopamine, epinephrine, serotonin, or acetylcholine will work. What do I mean by the context or the backdrop or the baseline? Well, it's fair to say that most people are awake during the daytime and asleep at night. So schedules of sleep and wakefulness will vary, but in general, everybody, regardless of whether or not you're nocturnal or you're so called diurnal, you're awake during the day, pretty much everybody follows a schedule in which from zero to nine hours after waking, that is from the time you wake up until about nine hours later, the neuromodulators dopamine and epinephrine tend to be at their highest levels that they will be at any point in the twenty four hour period, in any period of the day. So we can call this zero to nine hour period phase one of the day just for simplicity. And I've referred to this before in a previous episode, but not in this exact context. From nine to about sixteen hours is what we will call phase two, and that's when dopamine and epinephrine levels tend to subside a bit compared to the earlier phase one part of the day, and serotonin levels start to increase. And then phase three of the twenty four hour cycle, which is from about and again, about these zero approximates, …