Huberman Lab Clips
@HLPClips
Science and science-based tools for everyday life from @hubermanlab
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Everyone carries a different piece of Neanderthal DNA:
- All of us have 2-5% Neanderthal DNA, but it's a different 2-5%
- Mine could be heart, liver, skeleton and spleen. Yours could be any other constellation
- Collect every Neanderthal fragment from people alive today and you rebuild more than 90%, possibly more than 95%, of the Neanderthal genome
- Almost none of it was maladaptive. Nearly all of it still passes on and lives in healthy humans
Dr. Beth Shapiro on @hubermanlab
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Most melatonin doses are 10 to 20 times too high:
- Optimal doses for sleep benefits are 0.1 to 0.3 mg
- Pharmacy and online supplements run 1 mg to 20 mg - 10 to 20 times what your body releases
- Dose escalation is a marketing arms race: more milligrams for the same price
- These are supra physiological levels of a hormone that is androgen suppressive when high
- Seasonally breeding animals injected with melatonin had gonads shrink from almond size to a grain of rice
- Animal data only. No specific human study on this
@sleepdiplomat on @hubermanlab
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Stretch at 30% intensity not 80%:
- Rate your stretch intensity on a scale where 100% is the point of pain
- Work at 30-40% of that - it should feel easy and relaxing, never straining
- Hold each static stretch for 60 seconds, not 30
- Stretch daily, same exercises, for six weeks
- The 30-40% group beat the 80% group on lower limb range of motion
- Their biggest gains were in active range of motion, not passive
Staying below the pain threshold also lowers injury risk.
@hubermanlab
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Why a cold towel on your head makes you hotter:
- Drape a cold towel over your head neck or torso and your core temperature goes up more than if you'd done nothing
- Your thermostat is the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus sitting just behind your nose
- Cool most of your body surface and it reads the environment as cold then sends hormones and chemicals to heat you up
- Cool the upper half of your face the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet instead
- Those are the portals that pull core temperature down fast enough to stop heat stroke
@hubermanlab
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What if a lot of exercise is placebo?
Lowering blood pressure, relieving stress: a lot of those positive effects are placebo.
Nobody thinks of it that way because we're so attached to calories burned.
What we believe has power. If we believe we can make something great, the chances that we do are better than if we don't.
@RickRubin on @hubermanlab
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The exact amount to add to your training each week:
- Intensity: go up about 3% per week
- Volume: crossing 10% per week is where problems start. 5% to 7% is better
- Running 10 miles a week as 4/3/3? Adding one mile per day puts you at 13, a 30% jump
- Same math holds for lifting weights and for adding calories
@DrAndyGalpin on @hubermanlab
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Multiple choice tests are the worst way to study:
- They let you get by on familiarity and recognition - yes this, not that, circle C, move on
- Open-ended short answer or long answer questions force you to recall the information, which takes a far greater degree of mastery
- One exception: the trick questions on the GRE, LSAT and MCAT, where the obvious answer is the wrong one unless you actually know the material
@hubermanlab
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How to plan your year with a past year review:
- Draw a line down the center of a page: plus and negative
- Go through every week of last year's calendar
- On the plus side write the people places activities and commitments that produced peak positive experiences
- On the negative side write the ones that drained you
- That 80-20 pass gives you a do more of and do less of list
- Book the do more of items now. It isn't real until it's in the calendar
The urgent will crush the important.
@tferriss on @hubermanlab
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Breaking your session drops dopamine below baseline:
- Finishing 45 min of writing with no phone and no internet gives you a dopamine reward you generated yourself
- Break your own protocol at the 50 min mark to grab the phone and dopamine drops below where it sat before you started
- Unexpected wins release the most dopamine of all but you can't surprise yourself with a behavior you planned
Finish the block. The reward is internal and you are the one making it.
@hubermanlab
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If you're only calm in a calm room you're not calm:
- You watch the online activity of people you like and dislike all day and it sets your internal state
- Getting yanked around by external events is emotional lability not control
- Calm that holds only in a placid environment breaks the second something disturbing enters it
- Regulation starts with noticing when the outside is driving the inside
@hubermanlab
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Your sense of smell is not subjective:
- Have a group of people rate a set of odorants for pleasantness and the correlation across individuals is about 0.8. That is incredibly high
- Out of 100 odorants, 90 get near total agreement, 5 land in the middle, and 5 split people
- Cilantro and guava are the famous splitters, and they are real, but they are 5 out of 100
- Nobody likes the smell of feces. Everybody likes the smell of rose
- We remember the outliers and mistake them for the rule
Dr. Noam Sobel on @hubermanlab
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How much water to drink during training:
- Take your body weight in pounds and divide by 30. Drink that many ounces every 15 to 20 min
- At 200 lbs that's about 7 oz, roughly a third of a 16 oz water bottle
- In metric it's 2 ml per kg, so about 180 ml for a 90 kg person
- Slow and steady beats one bolus. The gap is there to offset GI distress
- After training, weigh in and drink back 125% of what you lost, counting fluid you drank during
- Heat, humidity and how hydrated you started shift the number
@DrAndyGalpin on @hubermanlab
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What an entitled kid is actually afraid of:
- A 16-year-old had a full tantrum in the airport because his family wasn't boarding first class
- Entitlement isn't about money. It's the fear of frustration
- There is a healthy version: being allowed to want things and sometimes act on that want instead of asking how can I please you
- Defining it this way works like a boundary does - it gives you a pathway of what to do
@GoodInside on @hubermanlab
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The birth control pill raises your inflammatory tone:
- Depletes magnesium and certain B vitamins
- Raises high sensitivity CRP, a marker of inflammatory tone, by about 2 to 3x
- Makes the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis more rigid, so cortisol can't wax and wane the way it does off the pill
- Also affects thyroid function, with an increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease
@DrGottfried on @hubermanlab
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Table salt is fine but sea salt gives you more:
- For sodium purposes common table salt will suffice
- Sea salt can contain dozens or more minerals, some of them quite valuable to your health
- Others matter only in trace amounts
- You will get few minerals, if any, from common table salt
The pretty colors and the taste are the least of it.
@hubermanlab
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Giving advice beats asking for it:
Going to someone for guidance keeps you in a passive frame of mind and makes you feel dependent on others. Find someone with a similar challenge and give them advice instead. In research by Lauren Eskris-Winkler and colleagues, people randomly assigned to give advice ended up more motivated and more confident.
Part of feeling you matter is feeling you have something to contribute.
Ask your kid for advice on a challenge you're facing. When they hit the same one, they'll believe they can figure it out.
@AdamMGrant on @hubermanlab
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How to get your sense of smell back:
- If you have partial or complete olfactory loss start smelling a number of different scents
- Use what you already own: things from your refrigerator or your makeup cabinet
- Sniff them attentionally and constantly, not passively
- Evidence for smell training programs is stronger than for alpha-lipoic acid
- Skip the expensive kits people are already selling for this
Olfaction is a use it or lose it system. Keeping those neurons electrically active maintains their connections, otherwise they die.
Dr. Noam Sobel on @hubermanlab
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Learn the difference between your gut and your amygdala:
Both arrive as a physical sensation. One is your fear center. The other is a supercomputer running on inputs you never consciously register.
Tone of voice that doesn't match the words. A head tilt. Smells and pheromones you can't name. The great investigators say "I can just smell it."
Deception gives off something you pick up without ever consciously smelling it.
You can't explain the bad feeling at the time. Later it all comes together. Listen to your gut, not your fear centers.
@fbinegotiator on @hubermanlab
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Fermented food beat fiber in our own study:
- We expected high fiber to give the massive signal. Across the cohort we never saw it. Fiber responses were highly individualized
- Six weeks of high fermented food intake raised gut microbiota diversity, and in the industrialized world higher diversity generally tracks with better health
- A couple dozen inflammatory markers dropped in stepwise fashion, including interleukin-6 and interleukin-12, with immune cell signaling cascades less activated by the end
Dr. Justin Sonnenburg on @hubermanlab
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How cold your cold plunge actually needs to be:
There's no number. It depends on your cold tolerance and core metabolism, which nobody can prescribe for you.
The rule of thumb: get into water that's uncomfortably cold, where you want to get out but know you can stay in safely.
That point shifts across the day. Your internal temperature is low early, rises into the afternoon, drops at night, so a cold shower at 11pm takes far more willpower than one in the afternoon.
Jumping into a frozen lake untrained can cause cold shock and kill you.
@hubermanlab
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