Andrew Huberman: The #1 Reason Why Faith-Based Practices Matter When It Comes To Your Mental Health

The world's most respected neuroscientist just admitted something LIVE at Summit of Greatness that shocked everyone: prayer saved his mental health. After decades of relying purely on science, Andrew Huberman discovered that faith-based practices don't just feel good—they literally restructure your brain for better health, clearer thinking, and deeper peace. But here's what makes this conversation revolutionary: he doesn't stop at spirituality. Huberman reveals the exact protocols he uses to hack his nervous system, from morning cortisol optimization to evening wind-down routines that guarantee better sleep. He exposes cynicism as the ultimate brain killer and shows you how curiosity becomes your superpower for lifelong learning. You'll walk away with a complete system for transforming your mind, backed by both cutting-edge science and ancient wisdom. Pre-order Dr. Huberman’s book Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human BodyHuberman Lab podcastHuberman Lab websiteIn this episode you will:Discover why prayer and faith-based practices create measurable health benefits that pure meditation cannot matchTransform cynicism into curiosity using the exact neuroscience principles that unlock lifelong brain plasticityMaster the cortisol rhythm protocol that optimizes your energy, focus, and sleep quality every single dayLearn the revolutionary "activation" technique that replaces traditional meditation with targeted brain state changesBreak through learning plateaus using the self-testing method that prevents forgetting and locks in new skillsFor more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1830For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Dr. Kevin Tracey – greatness.lnk.to/1812SCSadhguru – greatness.lnk.to/1800SCDr. Caroline Leaf – greatness.lnk.to/1785SC Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  We're gonna have a fun time. This audience has been learning tools to help them thrive for the last couple of days. People have flown from all over the world. There are a lot of locals here as well. How many from LA here? We got a lot of locals and others who have flown from other countries and all over the world. And I wanted to make sure that we created the experience for two full days to give people tools and inspiration to help them improve the quality of their life. You talk a lot about the science and the neuroscience behind health and living a healthier life, how to maximize our brain, our bodies, and ultimately, our spirit and our souls to feel more peace and harmony. You talk a lot about sunlight, getting up early and making sure you look towards the sun early on. You talk about getting

• 0:45Lewis Howes?

  quality sleep. You talk about eating well, which is a lot of what our parents or grandparents try to tell us to do as well. But sometimes we've forgotten how to do these things. But I have a bunch of questions for you here. But there's one thing we talked about backstage beforehand, which we were taking some photos backstage and before. You said you were meditating and you were praying before you came up here. And I wanted to ask you, this is not in my questions, but I wanted to ask you, is there any science or research behind prayer or faith that helps people heal their body, their mind, or their souls?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  They answered. They answered for you. Well, first of all, great to be here. Truly, it's really wonderful. And so, believe it or not, there's quite a lot of science now about prayer and meditation, but we differentiate between those two. And work by a guy by the name of Dr. David Disteno at Northeastern University and others has really identified, first of all, a number of clear health benefits to

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Acts of faith, including prayer. So

• 2:00Lewis Howes?

  Acts of faith.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Acts of faith.

• 2:02Lewis Howes?

  What does that include?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  So the mere statement that one believes in higher power or God or um, something larger of some kind is not sufficient to to glean these these health benefits. Uh, it's not a problem, but uh, you know, it doesn't get you any health benefits. However, people that engage in faith-based practices, pretty much of any kind, that get your mind outside itself to some extent and acknowledge something or other things outside of you have been shown to have uh, pretty spectacular health benefits in the short and long term. Everything from uh, reduced cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, um, uh, recovery from

• 2:47Speaker 01

  from grief, uh, recovery from addiction and on and on and on. In ways that we can separate from the social connection that often goes with faith based practices, which of course are also wonderful. Convening with people, um, in some cases praying with people. And of course, prayer and faith is a very individual thing. Um, it's something that for a long time made scientists kind of uncomfortable unless you look into the history of scientists and then you realize that many scientists actually um, had faith-based practices. And the reason I say faith-based practices is it's different to engage in actions related to one's beliefs as opposed to just thinking, yeah, like I believe in in something greater than just

• 3:26Lewis Howes?

  So not just saying I believe in God or I believe in the universe or a higher power or whatever you're saying is bigger than you. It's not enough to just say that, but it's actually having a practice of prayer or communing with people in a faith-based practice.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  That's right. And um, you know, it was, I'm a long time meditator since I was in my teens. I turned 50 in a couple of weeks. I still

• 3:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  And feeling good. Thank you. Um, and um, you know, meditation for me started off as a kind of a standard 20 minute a day or 10 minute a day. It soon went to zero minutes per day type practice as it does for many of us. It's very difficult for people to maintain a meditation practice. Very few people do that. It's a wonderful practice, as you know. For reducing stress, giving often insight, allowing more creativity. There are many, many hundreds of studies on this now. But the practice that I really embrace, starting back in 2017, that I'm a huge proponent of, is traditionally called yoga nidra. This has been something that's been known about for thousands of years and done for thousands of years. It involves lying down, doing some long exhale breathing.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  We can talk about why that's beneficial, which lowers the heart rate, among other things. Sort of body scan, getting the mind out of thinking and doing, as they say in these yoga nidra scripts, and to one of just being and feeling, one in pure sensation. Okay, so that's sort of my meditative practice. I coined that somewhat reluctantly as non-sleep deep rest, because I thought that would bring more people to the practice. But I acknowledge that's a thousands of year old practice that was not developed by me, was developed by others. That's a form of meditation, in the sense that you're not in a dialogue with anything outside yourself. Prayer, I think we all know what that is, is something quite different.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And that's something that I've always done in the past. It was somewhat covert prayer for me. I didn't really acknowledge that I pondered an existence of a higher power. I had a, I wouldn't say a religiously divided family, but their beliefs and value systems were, let's just say, very diverse within my family. So it was a point of confusion for a long time. And then, starting about a year and a half ago, I got into a regular practice of prayer. Daily, or it's actually nightly for me. And the way I do it doesn't really matter, because, again, it's highly individual. But this is, it's a communication with, you know, a non-human, you know, entity for me in, you know, praying to God.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  So, and people do this very differently. And again, I think it can make some scientists uncomfortable, because you say, well, you're supposed to be a person of science, you're supposed to be objective. And scientists and theologians have gone back and forth that, you know, can you prove, can you disprove? And as DeSteno, Dr. David DeSteno, points out, it becomes sort of irrelevant at the point where...

• 6:22Speaker 01

  You acknowledge that the human brain, I think we can all acknowledge that the human brain is spectacular, it can change itself, it can make plans, it can enact those plans. There's a reason why we are the curators of the earth. I mean, we have brains that are far more sophisticated in terms of our ability to build technologies than any other species. And here I, of course, acknowledge the incredible sophistication of other species. But humans are the ones basically in charge of taking care of this planet. And yet, human brains alone, and even in combination, are spectacularly terrible at solving certain problems. I mean, every time we see a challenge in the world, as we, you know, many challenges these days, but recently, there've been, you know, these, some of these

• 7:03Speaker 01

  have been highlighted again and again, and it's hard to not just acknowledge that and see that and think, are we, are we progressing? So then people cite statistics, right? They say, well, you know, 100 years ago, things were far more violent or difficult, infectious disease was worse, etc. But somehow, you'd think, well, shouldn't we have it right by now? I mean, I mean, shouldn't we be able to control our behavior, resolve our differences? And that, to me, personally, I'm just revealing my, my personal beliefs, is where acknowledging that humans are not equipped to have all the answers. And that's where I, I look to my training as a neuroscientist. I say, we understand a fair amount about how the brain works, certainly not everything. And I don't think that the human brain, for all its beauty

• 7:48Speaker 01

  and abilities, is capable of managing everything that life here on earth presents to us. And so for me, this notion of higher power and faith-based practice has been enormously powerful for me in terms of helping me navigate decision space, come to clear, clearer understanding about what emotions that exist in me and in others mean. And again, it's a very personal thing for each and every one of us, and I acknowledge that, but it's something that the science is really demonstrating has immense benefits as well.

• 8:26Lewis Howes?

  What have you personally gained in the last year and a half since diving deeper into the practice of faith and prayer for you? What is just, whether you've researched it or not, what has personally been supportive for you?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Um, it's a work in progress.

• 8:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Have you seen health benefits or mental benefits?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, for once, I can answer in one word, um, uh, which is, uh, peace.

• 8:52Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's, um...

• 8:55Lewis Howes?

  That's good. Wow. Wow. Did you not have a lot of peace before you started this practice?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:03Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, I could find joy, I could find happiness, I like to think I could find meaning in my work and relationships and, um, but I didn't have that notion or that's like sense, this really core belief that I now hold that I'm not supposed to have all the answers of how to bring about peace. And so I pray for, among other things, peace, uh, for myself, for others. You know, one of the things that I've found to be most beneficial, and we've heard all of this in the, in the psychology studies, is actually praying for those that you, uh, you dislike the most.

• 9:37Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I mean, so actually, I didn't think we were gonna go this direction.

• 9:42Lewis Howes?

  I didn't either, but you brought it to me last...

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'm gonna try not to take the entire hour by doing this, but when I sit up on my seat, that's, that's where I'm...

• 9:48Lewis Howes?

  Let's go, let's go.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  So, okay, may I? Okay, so yesterday, um, uh, two days ago on my podcast, I had a guy on my podcast by the name of Kristof Koch. He's a, um, he's a luminary of neuroscientists who's been studying consciousness for the longest time. And, um, that episode will come out, I believe, Monday, but the point is not to plug the episode. The point is that, um, I asked him, what is consciousness? And we have a conversation about that. Asked him about how one changes the brain, and, you know, I know a thing or two about that, and he does, and so I was learning from him as well. And then we got to this point of, you know, there seems to be two bins right now, broadly speaking, two bins of, of mindsets about the world that we see around us, which of course is filled with wonderful things, but also is filled with very troubling things, including questions about whether or not we're evolving or devolving, frankly, um, whether or not

• 10:34Speaker 01

  social media is good or bad, and, and I think we all acknowledge that these answers are somewhere in the gray zone. And we got to the point during this podcast discussion, which was... Sort of an agreement that there seem to be two stances that one could take about about life. One is live and let live. Look, as long as somebody is not harming anybody else, you know, live and let live, right? Okay, the other is one of moral judgment where we feel infringed upon by people's choices, right? And I think we all have the capability to go into either of those. And if we acknowledge that that's been the case throughout human history and very likely is going to be the case going forward, then I don't think we can expect things to get that much better, right?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  As long as those two bins exist. And so the question is how to get outside of this, what Christoph calls it, different perception boxes. He made up that term, I didn't. These are boxes of perception based on what neuroscience we call priors, which is nerd speak for your your own personal history and memories. You believe certain things based on how you were raised and your experiences. Other people believe different things. Different perception boxes. How do you, how do we get outside it? And by the end of that very long conversation, and I basically came to the conclusion that I started with at the beginning of the conversation, which is that humans don't have all the answers. We can't do it ourselves because the brain is just not equipped to do that. It's equipped to do many wonderful things, but the brain is so context dependent, it's

• 12:03Speaker 01

  so self-perception box dependent. We're all looking out at the world through these boxes that are, you know, built on our personal histories and beliefs. And unless we were to embark on a worldwide experiment where we all try and enter the minds of other people and develop empathy and make that a project, it's very, very hard. I think we can assume that some of the same, many of the same problems are going to continue to show up, but in different form. And so if we really want, I believe, if we really want to evolve our species, right? And evolution is often discussed as a cornerstone of of non-religion, right? But if you, if we want to do that, we're going to have to embrace The idea that we can't do it alone, we need some outside guidance.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  We have to, because otherwise it's gonna be human brains which are fallible, making fallible choices despite best of intentions because of these perception boxes. So it's, I don't have a stance of pessimism. And, and we also talked about, and maybe this is a segue perhaps to kind of more, you know, uh, daily life things, but on one end of the continuum, we have optimism and curiosity and neuroplasticity, right? The ability to change our minds in ways we want. And on the other end of the continuum, we have cynicism. And I think the most dangerous thing to brain change, to plasticity is cynicism. I'm absolutely convinced that cynicism is the enemy of all good things. What is that?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Cynicism is the belief like, yeah, well, people are, you know, you would fill in the blank. Any statement that dismisses the possibility of change. A negative thing? Could be a group, could be about yourself. The, the worst kind of thinking, and, and there's science to support this. I have a, um, a colleague at Stanford who studies this. Uh, you know, the worst thing for brain plasticity is cynicism. Cynicism, because by definition cynicism is anchored in the idea that things are one way and they're not gonna change. Curiosity is an interest in what might be there or could be there. Sometimes layered with an emotional hope that it might be a certain answer. But real true curiosity is about wondering and wanting to find out

• 14:18Speaker 01

  and doing the work to find out. Understanding that the answer might be one thing or another. Uh, curiosity and neuroplasticity are absolutely linked. In fact, if you look at the great minds throughout history that, um, seemed to be great learners throughout their lifespan. Uh, the great Richard Feynman among them, the great Oliver Sacks, neurologist, writer among them. They were curious about many, many different things besides science, art, animals, nature. And curiosity is something that we can breed inside ourselves. It takes more work for some than others, but curiosity is- Basically, the gateway to brain change. I'm certain of it, and the data support that. Cynicism is the way you make your brain filled with cement.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  You take what you've got now, and you kind of cap it off, and you go, I guess I'm just gonna kind of live out the rest of my years, believing this, believing that, and not just about other people, right, but about ourselves. So, I truly believe that with each phase of life, I can say these things now because I'm turning 50. With each phase of life, I think the real work for us to do is the same work we did as we were children, when we were children, which is to embrace the learning and the curiosity about what's being presented to us in this next, you know, frontier of life, the next month, week, year, and trying to evolve into it, evolve with it, as opposed to clinging to these notions of self. And the Buddhists talked about this as, you know, ego detaching from the ego, or disillusion of the ego.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  But I think ultimately, if, since simple things tend to stick with us, cynicism is the enemy, curiosity and neuroplasticity is hope, basically.

• 15:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:01Lewis Howes?

  I'm so excited about this because a lot of the things we've been talking about, you know, my man down here said he came back this year. Tell me your name again? Corpus. Corpus came back this year from last year, and I said, why'd you come back? He said, to help me overcome the negative thinking in my life, because it just keeps coming creeping back in. And what I'm hearing you say is that the cynicism sounds a lot like negative thinking. Doubting myself, doubting what's possible, doubting, uh, could I actually do this thing? Is that similar to negative thinking and cynicism?

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yes. Cynicism is sort of a, it's anchored in this core belief that things can't change, and if they do, not much, and if they do change much, then they're gonna change back. And it's work to be curious. It's, you know, this is what we forget. It's sort of like anytime we see a great performance of someone in the arts, you know, we think that it just kind of came to them, right? Virtuosity does not arrive by chance. It's built on tons of work, and we know that. So, the work to make our minds perhaps not optimize. Maybe optimistic is too lofty to really reach for. We just to just try and remain curious. You know, why the cynicism? Ask questions. I mean, the best way to to trigger brain plasticity is to ask questions of oneself.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  And, you know, going back to this this thing about prayer, um, you know, that's also something you can pray for. You know, you you can acknowledge that the brain, our brains, all of us are stuck within our own modes of thinking. I mean, think this is so wild, right? You you talked about the kids, right? The kids. Yeah. Okay, good.

• 17:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Because otherwise it's like, okay.

• 17:40Lewis Howes?

  No, we had a we had a gender reveal, the whole thing yesterday. It was a.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Because if not, I just kind of he's having twins.

• 17:45Lewis Howes?

  He talked about the kids. No, we didn't.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  So, you know, I teach I for many years I I taught uh human fetal brain development. So we could talk about that.

• 17:55Lewis Howes?

  Perfect.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  But the point here is that the most incredible thing, the most incredible thing is that all our brains built themselves. And don't get me wrong, your wife's doing a lot of the work and you're doing like this much. But um but the but the your brain built itself.

• 18:11Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  It took the genetic instructions and built itself. Sure, nutrients come in, we need to support it. There's a communication between mother's body and and fetus, of course. But it built itself. And then the brain, the human brain can self-direct its own change. Now fetal development is is a miracle, right? It's a spectacular miracle that you get you join two cells, sperm and egg, and you get a baby. Your case, you get two babies because you're ambitious and so, you know. But that but it's and I think that the most important, I'm gonna say it's the most important thing like 50 times, I realize. A key thing to understand is that we don't have infancy, childhood, adolescence, teen years, adult.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  And that's it. Development is an arc. Our whole life is a developmental progression. And some of the great psychologists like Erickson understood that at every stage of life, we're dealing with some core conflict that we need to resolve. He was smart enough to understand that it's not like you become an adult at 25 and your brain's wired up. By the way, I just found out that for men, the myelination, the ensheathing of the neurons with the tissue that allows for fast transmission between neurons doesn't occur until 50. So, um, yeah, I know. You'll notice mostly female laughter in that one. Sort of a frequency shift. Two more weeks, two more weeks. So, oh man, you got it in for you. You're so stoked. I'm so happy for him. I really am. You know, I see your friends who, obviously Louis is going to be a spectacular father.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  It's so awesome. Thank you. Thank you, brother. Thank you. It's just be so, so much fun. Um, so, brain change is not easy. And it's more and more difficult as time goes on, but it's a skill. It's a skill that can be mastered like any other. And we could talk about ways to access it. I've talked about that on various podcasts. You know, we say, you gotta be alert, you gotta be focused. Okay, you need to be alert to be focused. Then you engage in some learning process and it's going to feel hard. It's difficult. Then it turns out that the challenge, the friction of learning, the errors themselves are the signals back on the learning system that it should change. Right? Which makes sense when you hear it, but then we all are looking for flow states.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And the notion of flow states is wonderful, but this, but flow states are something that are kind of a higher order thing. And when you start reaching for them, it disappears and it's like grabbing for fog. And so you have to go back to this alertness, focus, effort, errors. That means you're doing everything right. So every time you have a cynical thought, but you're like, ah, there it is again. Actually, my, I'm going to sound like a name dropper, but he's a close friend of mine. I just spent a couple of weeks with him each summer as I do. Rick Rubin, who's a, you know, a master of, of creating things. And we talked a lot about meditation. Rick's awesome. Uh, just such a nice person too. Um, and he is a long time meditator. And his process of meditating is very simple,

• 21:08Speaker 01

  but he's, there's a very powerful tool within the meditations that he had never told me about. And, um, I'm kind of pissed that he didn't tell me about it earlier. Which was, he said, you know, when he, when he's meditating, which by the way, he does every day. I observed it. And a thought comes up, he just labels it like with a little sticky thought. Like, that's a thought. That's a thought. When we can start watching our own mental processes, we can start seeing things like, "Oh, I'm in friction. There's an error here. Um, I need to try harder." And you start to observe yourself learning, and you get better at that process. So frustration becomes the prerequisite. And all that's good and fine, and then you need to sleep at some point. And I've talked a lot about sleep and how to access sleep on the podcast.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And sometimes you actually access sleep on the podcast because they're very long. I always joke, if nothing else, I'm gonna cure insomnia. Um, but really, you know, like, serious hat tip acknowledgement to the great Matt Walker, author of Why We Sleep, because I would like to point out that 10 years ago, the mindset, you know, in the high-performance community, it was like, "We'll sleep, we'll um, dead", you know, and a lot of those people are now dead. And, um, but Matt was the first one to really start beating the drum, like, "Hey, you know, this sleep thing is important. Now, you don't want to get sleep-related anxiety, you know, about getting sleep." But during sleep, in particular the second half of your sleep night, the brain rewires, you get neuroplasticity.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Okay, all that's fine and good, but if we really think about neuroplasticity, like, how can we accelerate this process of learning? The real process of accelerating neuroplasticity and learning absolutely comes from clearing away the clutter and accessing the things that, for us, feel most true, even as we're making errors. Like, there's something really pleasurable about digging through a learning process. And it's very hard when we have to learn something we don't want to learn. And here's what's very interesting about the neuroscience literature over the last couple of years, which is that the release of dopamine actually occurs often in response to errors that we make while trying to learn. And here again, we thought dopamine was pleasure, we know it's motivation,

• 23:17Speaker 01

  we know it's a number of other things, but here it's also released in response to errors that we make, which wake up the brain that has the opportunity to change. And Rick and I were, and he gave me no permission to talk about this, but I'm just gonna do it anyway. Um, cuz we decided, um, you know, it's kind of interesting. There are all these meditations. There's love and kindness meditation. There's yoga nidra, non-sleep deep breaths. There's even forms of hypnosis out there. But you know, wouldn't it be amazing if we could place our brain into particular states to do the things that we want to do? This is my real wish and my real work over the next year or so.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  And, and so, I don't even think these are meditations, but the, the practice that I encourage you all to try is to, is very brief, is, you know, these days, we know we're being bombarded with tons of content. We essentially walk around with little TVs, like little TVs all the time. We're like, and then we're like, I don't know why I can't focus. We're watching TV all the time, you know? Um, and, you know, and, but our brains are very context dependent. The way to think about the way your brain works is that in certain states of mind, you're like, your, your mind and your focus is like a ball bearing on a flat surface. And it can go anywhere if you tilt that surface. As you get more focused, imagine little dimples in that surface and it can drop into any one of those dimples.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And the thing that we're all seeking is for the ball bearing to drop into a deep trench and be locked there for as long as we want and then out. But typically, it's the other way around. It's, we get locked into these states that are either because our emotions have been grabbed by something external, or because, you know, we're upset about something and so on and so forth. And it's very hard for us to get that ball bearing down into the trench of the thing that we know we need to do. And so, the practice that I've been developing for myself is one in which I acknowledge this. I acknowledge that the world is noisy, my brain is noisy. And I have a practice now of about one to three minutes. And believe it or not, I just scripted it out onto a voice memo. I do believe that when we do it in our own voice, and I encourage you all to do it in your own voice,

• 25:20Speaker 01

  it's more powerful than listening to someone else's voice, cuz after all, it's your voice.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  And I highly recommend recording three voice memos, or four voice memos. The first one is one that you tell yourself, "There's a lot of noise in my head, there's a lot of noise in the world, and I'm going to get distance from that noise." And for me, the visual is one thing, I can share it with you, but for you, it might be another, where I just imagine the noise moving further and further away. I'm still acknowledging I'm in the world and it's happening, but it's sort of like ripples moving further and further away. After about three minutes, I shift to a different voice memo, which is, this sounds so crazy, but knowing what I know about the brain, I figure it's, you know, not quite as crazy, which is, then I listen to a one to three-minute script about focusing,

• 26:09Speaker 01

  which is really to try and acknowledge that focus is something that constantly drifts until we're in a flow state, that focus is a process of redirecting our attention, redirecting, redirecting, redirecting. I had Alex Honnold on the podcast, right? The guy that we were all terrified to watch Free Solo up L cap, probably more than he was. Amazing. That's the craziest movie. We know he lives, like, from the first frame of the movie, and it's still terrifying. Yes. But, you know, in that state, he's got so much to anchor his mind, that I doubt he's pushing away lack of focus. But for most of us, because it's not life or death circumstances, you have to acknowledge that you're constantly pushing away things, and you have to refocus, refocus, refocus.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  It turns out, people that are very good at accessing flow states have powerful activation of what's called the no-go pathway. There are two pathways of action in the brain, in a brain circuitry called the basal ganglia, a number of different brain areas. One is go, like, to generate movements or thoughts. The other is no-go, to try and suppress movements or thoughts. Flow states are mainly accessed, mainly, by the no-go process. So the more you can shift out of your mind cynicism, and try and redirect, for instance, to curiosity, the more you're in a no-go that way, yes, that way. So this second short script is...

• 27:27Speaker 01

  What I use to visualize focus, and sometimes I actually will think about Alex's climb as a kind of a the pinnacle of an example of focus. And then I'll go into something I really need to do. And this might sound silly or overly structured, but I'll tell you what's really silly. What's really silly is that voice in my head saying, "You should do this thing. Now I gotta do this thing." "Oh, wait, there's a text message." And then three hours later, you're a little fatigued and you need lunch, and then you're a little fatigued because you ate lunch. And then the next thing you know, the thing didn't get done. So I'm talking about a one to three minute investment to clear clutter, get distance. That's it. Get distance from noise. A one to three minute script to acknowledge the focus process and get into, and then to do the thing.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  You know, that's thing about that we procrastinate, the thing that we can just avoid until it becomes a deadline or it's terrifying or it's past. Now, here's the real key to plasticity. Those steps are required, but the real key is when you finish out what you're doing. Your focused work on whatever is most important to you.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  At some point later that day, you need to reflect on what happened in that work about. And this is so important. If you remember nothing else that I said, please take this away. We know now, based on the neuroplasticity of learning literature, and how best to study, and that whole mountain of literature, that the best way to remember information is to not forget it. Which sounds like I'm joking. No, it sounds like I'm joking. I know. I was like, I have to like get in before the- How do you not forget it? So here's the thing, you self-test. Every bit of learning turns out to be anti-forgetting. And I know it sounds like it's just a twist on words, but here's the experiment that's been done many times now.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I give you a passage to read four times, or one time, or two times.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  And in some cases, I have you self-test just in your mind for a few minutes later that day. Then I wait three to six months and I come back and I test you on the material. Turns out, reading something once and self-testing later and realizing you don't remember it all, but you remember certain things, allows you to remember more, significantly more information, six months later than had you read it four times. So, it's the reflection on the thing that we did earlier that locks it in. And I'll give you an example of a ton of sensory exposure with a ton of focus and a ton of attention that you devote every single day and you remember nothing of. If you were to think, okay, last night, you're probably, yesterday, you probably scrolled social media at some point. You didn't think about it afterward.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I mean, do you know how many dog posts I look at? And I can, if I think about it now, I'm a little afraid to do this because I don't want to remember the wiener dog sleeping in first class thing that I saw yesterday. And now it's stuck in me, right? But when we were, the whole, the, the, social media is wonderful. You can learn there, you can connect there. But when we reflect on the thing that we did or that we learned, in particular, the errors that we made, you lock in the critical information. You prevent forgetting. Turns out that most information that comes in through our eyes and ears, et cetera, is designed to be discarded, which is why reading something four times doesn't allow you to remember it that well compared to reading it once. Yes, your mind will drift. And then later that day going, okay, what do I remember? Oh, darn, I don't remember that.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  I remember that piece. Okay, I'm gonna go back and look up that piece. So, testing is not just something that we should experience of others testing us. Self-testing on knowledge or skill, or this could be physical skill, musical skill, could be relational interaction. I mean, how many people after, like, couples therapy, take a walk by themselves and go, yeah, like, what did I really learn? You know? And maybe, maybe, maybe that's why I should do more of it. Um, who knows? But the point is that we don't do this. We tend to think that the experience is the experience, the learning was the learning. And it turns out you can learn so much faster. You can learn so much more durably. And there's a terrible instance in life where we know this works, which is in the case of trauma and things we don't want to think about later.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  The replay later is critical. Replay later is critical. And so if it's not happening automatically, as is often the case... You need to do that for yourself. And then the sort of fourth, so I have a one to three minute script, which reminds me of this. It says, you know, like Andrew, the data all tell you that, and I already know it, but it's useful to have a practice. This is why, dare I say, we sort of coined the word protocols, even though it existed before, because in laboratories, you would say, what's the protocol to stain these cells for dopamine or something? So, protocols to me makes sense because as a word, because it's supposed to be a list of things that you do that work the first time and every time to get you someplace.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  And so, it's critical that we acknowledge that our brains are just not good at doing all the steps without a little bit of self-guidance. Then the question becomes, what self-guidance? Then the question becomes, well, how can that self-guidance be weaved into my day in a way that's seamless and easy and quick and doesn't cost anything? And I'm giving you some examples of these. So, this is simply what I've been doing, and I've found to be very useful. And, you know, neuroplasticity does exist across the lifespan, but, you know, in a kind of, you know, acknowledgement of a reality, it's harder to learn now than it was in my twenties. But I think with these practices, I find that it's not that much harder.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  And all the data tell us that our brains are plastic throughout our entire lifespan. So, I encourage you to think about these not as meditations. The word that comes to mind is sort of activations. You're trying to place your brain into particular states that have you less noisy in your head, more focused for the second one, then you do the thing, whatever that is, and then in a state of reflection to really lock in the plasticity that you'll experience that night or the next nights when you sleep. That's basically what it is. So. So, there was probably another question, and I just kept riffing.

• 33:37Lewis Howes?

  I haven't even gotten to the first question. Literally, I haven't even.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  So, I'll stop.

• 33:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I have all the questions for a whole episode on the protocols of greatness, but you just kicked it off so beautifully that I was like, alright, we'll have to do another one later.

• 33:52Lewis Howes?

  I was just in flow state watching you, man. I'm like, it's amazing. You've got so much information. I'm curious for you, you know, when you were talking about the self-guided meditation, essentially, these voice notes. This is something I did 22 years ago when I was in college playing sports. I would record voice notes, not on a phone back then, but on a voice recorder. And I would sync music to it to create an emotional feeling for myself, kind of like a motivational song with my words over it. And I played a night and tried to anchor in this feeling of belief in myself for the next day, for practice, for games, for things like that. And you are just reminding me now that I need to do that again, like these voice notes. So is these, do you have music over them?

• 34:35Lewis Howes?

  Or is it just a voice note for like two minutes that you just say to yourself and listen to?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, it's, there's no music. It's just dialogue. And, you know, it's funny. Like 10, 15 years ago, when you were doing this, you said 20 years ago?

• 34:50Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Okay. You look so young. Hey, it was 20 years ago. You were like an infant.

• 34:55Lewis Howes?

  College.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  No? Okay. The, you know, a lot of the stuff that we now know is, is supported by science was, you know, like people were like, oh, that's kind of like

• 35:05Lewis Howes?

  Weird. Yeah, yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Breath work and, you know, and like, are you going to levitate too? And it's like, well, if I could, I would. But it's been, just a little bit of an editorial here. It's been really interesting to me. You know, my lab worked on respiration physiology. We used to call it breath work. We didn't call it that because that sounded like mysticism. And, you know, it's really interesting that science is evolving to, you know, meditation. There's tons of peer-reviewed federally funded studies on meditation. Thank goodness. Also on yoga nidra lowers cortisol, helps you sleep, helps you learn better. I mean, respiration, you know, we now, basically the breathing thing is all pretty straightforward, right? The conclusion I've come to after all these years of looking at everything from Wim Hof breathing to Kundalini breathing, to physiological sign, to box breathing, to all of it, is that

• 35:52Speaker 01

  If you emphasize the exhales, make them longer or more intense than the inhales, your heart rate slows down, you get calmer. If you emphasize the inhales relative to the exhales, your heart rate goes up, you tend to be more alert. You do a combination of the two, you can be very alert and very calm at the same time. Right? And it works through respiratory sinus arrhythmia, and the motor, and the sensory branch of the vagus, and the diaphragm, and carbon dioxide and oxygen. But basically, longer deliberate exhales calm you down. Longer, more intense inhales, wake you up. And, you know, I'm not trying to trivialize, you know, hundreds of studies, some of which I, you know, I got very involved in for a long time, but that's basically the crux of it.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  But for many years, science and my community of scientists were, they weren't disparaging of it, they're like, "Oh yeah, I don't know, you know, like, that seems a little weird." And then I'm like, "Well, you look kind of stressed, and maybe you should do it." And, you know, but, and likewise with the sunlight thing, right? People have been talking about getting morning sunlight for thousands of years. All of the circadian biology, all of it tells us that it's extremely valuable for elevating your morning alertness, which we could talk about the mechanism for that, improving your sleep and things that I've, you know, blabbed about for a long time. So when we talk about adding music, music is an incredibly powerful anchor for emotions. And there's something really special about the music that accompanied particular life events with other people we care about, right?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  I'm sure you can remember the song they played at your first dance after being married, this kind of thing, right? I mean, you'll probably play music as your babies are being born, right? That would be awesome. Every time they play music, they like start dancing and sod. It's cool, they start moving. Amazing. He's so stoked. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. I love it. You make me cry, man. Don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, yeah, don't do that. Um.

• 37:43Lewis Howes?

  Huberman never shows any emotion. He's very scientific.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a real robot.

• 37:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Actually, last year I cried on two podcasts.

• 37:52Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Steven Bartlett's podcast, I kind of welled up and I was like, and then, and then, uh, when Martha Beck was on my podcast, she made me cry.

• 37:59Lewis Howes?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, she made me cry talking about my bulldog Costello. And it was, it was, it was actually, and I told my producer, Rob, I looked at him, he's been in every podcast we've ever done. And like, when it was just me, him and Costello, my little closet in Topanga. And I looked at him after we wrapped with Martha and I go, we're not releasing that. And he goes, we're definitely not releasing that. I was like, oh man, I still can't watch it. But, uh, the, um, no, emotions are good. Emotions are good. Emotions are good. Emotions are good. Emotions are good. Um.

• 38:30Lewis Howes?

  What do you, what, what?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  I'm half Latin, man. My dad's Argentine. Like, we're used, so it's like, you know, the, uh,

• 38:36Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious, speaking of emotions, what happens to the brain or the body when we express our emotions? Whether it be through tears or crying, through, uh, physiological release of some type? What happens when we do it and when we block the flow of emotions that we want to release? But then we stiffen up?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, well,

• 39:01Speaker 01

  unless it's, um, okay, so feeling emotions obviously is healthy. Right? The ability to feel your feelings. What's probably not healthy is catharsis directed at somebody else.

• 39:15Lewis Howes?

  Like angry, you mean?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Screaming at them, you know, screaming at yourself. Um, you know, I guess there's, I mean, I've let out some pretty loud yells at myself that were pretty effective, I think. Um, you know, I think, so there's a time and a place for it.

• 39:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Um, we know that pushing down of emotion is, is not healthy. We know that. But of course, you know, we have to behave ourselves, right?

• 39:38Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  All the data tell us that, you know, this vagus nerve thing, I did an episode about this this last year that really opened up my eyes. You know, we all know the mind and body are connected. The vagus is the connection between the mind and body. More serotonin is made in the gut than the brain. But I had no idea, even though I teach neuroanatomy, I had no idea how far the research has come in the last like four years. Basically, the vagus can be summarized this way. It collects sensory information from your whole body. Heart rate, lungs, how full they are, your gut, the status of your conscious and unconscious stuff. And it's sent up to your brain. Like 85% of the vagus nerve pathway is sensory. It's stuff going up to your brain. It's feeding your information, feeding your brain information,

• 40:25Speaker 01

  excuse me, about the status of your body and what it's experiencing. And then there's about 20% that's descending information that is motor. It's controlling your heart rate. It's controlling how full your lungs get, or how not full your lungs get. And so it's a bidirectional pathway. And we've heard so much about it being parasympathetic. It's a calming system. But it turns out that it's a system that's positioned to understand when you're packing something down. You know, that packing down that we're all familiar with because it's like not the appropriate time for something, or you don't, you know, you just don't want to feel what you're feeling.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  Stuffing.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sadly, I mean, I can say, and I think I'm certainly not alone in this. I can remember one particular event in my, you know, childhood history where I remember feeling something and I was like, and I was like, wow, that's good. I can do that. I can like pack that. That turned out to be not so great.

• 41:17Lewis Howes?

  That's not good.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Not so great. But the ability to pick time and place for and way of expressing emotions is obviously key. But emotions are the gateway to plasticity. Your music experience and practice certainly acknowledges that. Any, you know, we talk about peak and awe experiences. We never forget those. And on the darker side of things, you know, traumatic experiences, we can unload the emotional component of those through things like cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR. These days, there's a lot of interest in, it's not really a psychedelic, but in empathogenic therapies like MDMA, which by the way, is still schedule one, it's still illegal. I have to point that out.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And maybe we'll get FDA approval this year. If you ask me, I'm hoping for FDA approval. But they need the proper safety checks in place. The question is, who are going to be the therapist? How is this therapy going to be done when people are in a state of vulnerability? So some really serious issues. And despite what you could say about government and the FDA under any political leadership, you know, they really do, there are good people who want to protect people from harm. So, but I think with empathogenic help, you can, you know, learn to emote more easily and have empathy for self is a big part of being able to tolerate emotion. So emotions are a wonderful aspect of life. It's about being able to control

• 42:40Speaker 01

  time, place, and way of expression. But yeah, I think crying into your pillow every once in a while is pretty healthy.

• 42:47Lewis Howes?

  Good thing.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I do. I think it's a good, I think it's a good thing to do and no one has to see it unless you do it on a podcast. So, you know.

• 42:55Lewis Howes?

  Okay, I'm gonna try to get to my first question. I still haven't gotten to the first question.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I'll keep going on. I don't care, right?

• 43:02Lewis Howes?

  This is great.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  I'm not, I mean.

• 43:03Lewis Howes?

  I love this.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  I mean, so it's, it's up to you. You probably, people probably want to go see the Canelo fight or they want to go out to dinner.

• 43:09Lewis Howes?

  Right, Canelo's fighting tonight, right?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Yeah.

• 43:11Lewis Howes?

  It's alright.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 43:12Lewis Howes?

  We're all hanging out tonight, you know, so it's going on.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  I'm perfectly happy to miss the fight.

• 43:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll see the replay, you know. This is all about the protocols to greatness. Again, I wanted to give you guys the best of the best here at Summit of Greatness. This, this man is the most popular scientist in the world, the biggest follower in the world. He's changing lives.

• 43:33Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious for you, if you had to say, these are my top three, top three science-backed protocols to support you personally, and the evidence is just abundantly clear that if you follow these science-backed protocols, you will have more peace, more clarity, more focus, more freedom, more of what you really want in your life. What would those three things be?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Alright, well, I'm gonna take a freebie and make, and tell you four.

• 44:00Lewis Howes?

  Perfect.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Cause I'll just reiterate earlier, I, it's interesting you started with prayer. You're like, let's go in the deep end here first. I mean, I do think that when we feel least able to control our mind and where it goes, that's Especially, that's an especially good time for something like prayer. Where you give it over, it's not like, it's not your task to handle everything. And it certainly isn't the task of other people in your life. I mean, that's another benefit that I've noticed is that, is like meditation, prayer, they, they unburden a lot of people in your life that you, that I was otherwise burdening. Right? To solve things or to reflect back things I want.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  I mean, we're a crazy species and we love love and we don't like to feel angry. And then we, it can get all mixed up and, and it's tough. And so when you, when you just acknowledge like, and you just ask for feelings to be taken away so that you can have more clarity and, and more depth of connection with the things in your life and the people in your life. I mean, anyone who's done this knows it works. I can't tell you why, and I kind of love that I can't tell you why. Like for once, it's a short sentence. I don't know why, but it works. Okay, the other three, the other three, the other three. You know, I talk so much about this morning sunlight thing that it's almost like a joke by now. Right? Um, it's kind of like a meme.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  I keep seeing it, the morning sunlight thing or long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate or NSDR. And I, I do think nowadays, thankfully, something that, by the way, back in the day when I was a teenager and in my twenties and thirties, resistance training, oh, it's all going to turn to fat. That's only for bodybuilders and military. It's like, no, everyone needs to do this. And now everyone knows they need to do it. So basically whatever they're saying right now is ridiculous, that's the future. I mean, have you, have you caught on to the pattern? Right? Whatever that people go, that's ridiculous. Like, well, this whole creatine craze is pretty interesting to me. I don't think everyone needs to take it, but yeah, there's some benefits for many people. It's not necessary, but creatine's been around a long time. It was just only broke through now.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Vitamin D3 made it first for some reason, then, and then magnesium will probably be next. Just remember, not everything is safe, but whatever is being kind of chuckled at now is very likely to be the thing in 10 years, five years. So I think rather than give you three protocols, I'll give you a framework. Okay. That will encompass all the protocols and I'll try and keep this brief.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  So when I was a little kid, um, my mom,

• 46:41Speaker 01

  no, seriously, my mom, bless her soul, I would, she would say to me, we'd be in the kitchen and she'd say, "Sweetie, we're just gonna take like two minutes and we're gonna stop talking." And I was like, "But why are we gonna stop talking?" You know? And when I was really little, the reason this worked is, okay, half Argentine, so we called the pacifier the chupete. So I used to have one in my mouth and I carry one in each hand, so I learned how to talk out the side of my mouth. And what they should have done is just said, "Just shut up and send the coins." So, but so, but in all seriousness, here's the deal. You want your cortisol, this so-called stress hormone, it's not a stress hormone. You want your cortisol high in the hours after you wake up. I don't care if you wake up at 5 a.m., 4 a.m., 8 a.m., noon, it doesn't matter to me.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Do what works for you and your schedule and your life, and you want your cortisol low at night. Use that as the bookends and the framework of your days, and you'll be amazed how many things go incredibly well. Here's the deal, viewing bright light, ideally from sunlight, in all the ways I've described elsewhere, I won't rattle off all the details, take off your sunglasses, put on, eyeglasses and contacts are fine, etc., blinkers need to protect your eyes, all that stuff.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  In the first hour after you wake up, doesn't matter what time you wake up, doesn't matter where the sun is, although I'll place a caveat on that. You have a unique opportunity in that first hour to amplify your cortisol levels. You wake up because your cortisol levels rise, it's called the cortisol awakening response. Okay, you actually wake up in the morning because of that. Most people are keeping themselves in environments that are too dim in that first hour, your phone won't do it. A 10,000 lux artificial light will if you don't have access to sunlight, but get outside and get just a little bit of sunlight, you'll amplify that cortisol. Guess what, after about two hours, going outside will feel nice, going outside will feel warm. That sunlight won't amplify your cortisol.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Drinking caffeine, provided you're a regular caffeine drinker, won't amplify your cortisol. It'll extend the duration of your morning cortisol. Exercise will. Get surprisingly deliberate cold exposure, won't.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Amplifies epinephrine, norepinephrine and dopamine, the so-called catecholamines, but it doesn't amplify your cortisol. Now you say, wait, cortisol is a stress hormone. I don't want to be puffy. I don't want visceral fat anymore than I already have. Like, what are you talking about? Here's the deal. Your cortisol is going to go up and it's going to go down every 24 hours. The higher it is in the morning, the lower it's going to be at night and the easier it's going to be to fall asleep. If you look at conditions like cancer, you look at conditions like PTSD, you look at anxiety, you look at mild or major depression, what you see is what's called a flattening of the cortisol response. So instead of a big peak in the morning and then it tapering off into the afternoon and at night, you see this kind of gradual tapering off. And the higher it is later in the afternoon, the easier it is for little bouts of stress

• 49:41Speaker 01

  to ride on top of that higher baseline. And then you find it typically, people can fall asleep if they're exhausted and then at 3, 2, 3 in the morning, you wake up. So get your cortisol high in the morning. There are a bunch of other things you can do. Believe it or not, eating grapefruit will double the duration of that peak in the morning. So that's cool. I like grapefruit. You don't have to do that. Licorice root with something called glycerin, greatly amplifies your cortisol, but here I have to say, be careful. First of all, don't take licorice root late in the day.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  That glycerin will greatly extend the acti- excuse me, the activity of any prescription drugs you're taking because it works on some enzymes in the cortisol, but other pathways too. So you have to be careful. You know, you could take a little bit of licorice root with glycerin. Actually, many licorice root products and teas, they have the glycerin out because it increases cortisol. So exercise, bright light, caffeine, grapefruit, licorice root, these are very basic things. People with Cushing's syndrome, be careful. There's a whole other thing. Talk to an endocrinologist, okay? Now, ashwagandha, the herb rather that everybody knows can reduce cortisol and it does have a fairly potent cortisol reducing effect. You wouldn't want to take it in the morning, would you?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  If you are going to experiment with it, it would be in the evening. I don't think you should take high dosages of it, at least not for long periods of time. It is very potent at lowering cortisol. By the way, pregnant women, the cortisol rhythm of high-low in morning versus night is maintained. Perimenopause, menopause, it's maintained, but it tends to flatten a bit around the transition between perimenopause and menopause. And so doing a few extra things to try and make the peak higher will make the trough lower later in the day. And then at night, just think about all the things you would do in the morning to increase your cortisol and do the opposite. Keep the lights dim because it doesn't take much light in the evening to raise your cortisol. Long exhale breathing. Certainly avoid things like licorice root and caffeine. We know these things.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  And so pretty soon you go, wait, the protocols just fall into these bins. And of course, you can't do all of them every day and you need to be careful about which ones you select. But if you think about cortisol, not as a stress hormone, but what its real function is, the real function of cortisol is to mobilize glucose and other energy stores to your brain and body. That's why it wakes you up in the morning. And guess what? If you sleep with too much bright light in your room, even with your eyes closed, if you don't use an eye mask, morning blood glucose is elevated. This was published last year or two years ago in a really fine journal. Makes sense, right? Cortisol is released and it causes elevations in blood glucose. So now we can regulate our blood glucose with cortisol? Yes. Yeah. This is, this is the way it works.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  And so for me, I'll continue to pursue and evolve protocols and share protocols. I mean, we talked a little bit earlier about these short one to three minute, I call them activations because they're not really meditations. I'm trying to create a certain neural state to be able to do things. I just call them that. That was Rick Rubin's idea. He's so damn smart. He's like, well, they're not really meditations and then he goes. Activation. Activation. And I'm like, damn, well, that's why you're Rick Rubin, right? By the way, he was in the Beastie Boys. You know that? He wasn't just a producer. Yeah, go back and watch the first video. Yeah, he's the big guy with the beard that back then was not a big white beard. It was a big brown beard. So if you imagine these bins for your morning and evening.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  It all falls into place and then you say, well, wait, does that mean I can't go out dancing at night? But guess what? Going out dancing at night, you're not elevating your cortisol. It's a stressful experience. And look, it's okay to get some bright light exposure at after dark every once in a while. You're gonna be getting a lot of that over there. Actually, I'm gonna encourage you. I'm gonna give you something. So we all have heard of red light therapy. It's great. Increases mitochondrial function for reasons we can talk about. By the way, you can get it from sunlight, long wavelength light from sunlight does that goes. It goes through your body. This was shown by my colleague Glenn Jeffries. And it improves your mitochondria. This, the long 850 nanometer light, which is long wavelength light. Comes from the sun, goes through your body. And charges your mitochondria.

• 53:53Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Like a battery.

• 53:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Wild. But for you, because the little ones are gonna be here soon.

• 53:58Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  At night, when you're up, you're gonna be up.

• 54:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  By the way.

• 54:02Lewis Howes?

  What do I need?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  You need red lights, like of like a Christmas tree red lights. Or any lights that where they're not very blue, not LEDs. You know, incandescent bulbs or red lights. You'll sleep better and your babies will sleep better. The other thing that I just learned, and this makes so much sense, like how stupid are we? Turns out, you know, women will, will, you know, they produce breast milk. And they'll, they'll pump and then they'll set aside milk to give their babies. Turns out the milk collected in the early part of the day, guess what? It's very high in.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  And in the evening, the opposite. And people tend to not divide them by morning collected or evening collected. And they're now looking at the, turns out babies could sleep well all the time. Like, sorry, parents. No, no, it's like, so it has a big effect. There's a big effect on improving the sleep patterns of babies. These poor babies were being blitzed with cortisol. I was probably one such baby. You know? Anyway, I'll stop there.

• 54:57Lewis Howes?

  This is amazing. I've got, uh, three, three things.

• 55:02Lewis Howes?

  Three things for you.

• 55:05Lewis Howes?

  We're gonna have to do another episode in the future because I have a lot of questions I need to get to.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  You wonder why I'm an introvert, it's because I have no friends, because I feel like if I meet up with people.

• 55:15Lewis Howes?

  Uh, two, can we put up, uh, Andrew's slide for his new book? It's not even out yet.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  It's delayed, I have to.

• 55:22Lewis Howes?

  It's delayed, but they can preorder it, right?

• 55:24Speaker 01

  You can preorder it, thank you, that's very kind of you.

• 55:26Lewis Howes?

  QR code here, so I encourage all of you, get your phones out, preorder this. This is going to be, I told this to Mel Robbins last year, mid last year, I said, "Your book's gonna be the number one book of the year." And it's been number one on Amazon, I think, for the last nine months. This is gonna be the number one book of next year, if it comes out next year, maybe it's in two years, I don't know. Whenever it comes out, it will be the number one book of the year, I guarantee it, so make sure to support this man right now.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Thank you. I should say, I didn't ask him to do that, that's very kind. And the reason it's delayed is because I decided to include illustrations and lists to make it clearer as to what was in the text, so forgive me, but, you know.

• 56:05Lewis Howes?

  And the last thing, um, the last thing.

• 56:09Lewis Howes?

  We got the book up there, we got some of the protocols here, what's the last thing I'm thinking, you know, I'm trying to.

• 56:18Lewis Howes?

  I need to recall the beginning, the first thing that we talked about was about faith. And I wanted to acknowledge you, Andrew, for starting to talk about that, and you doing this in your own practice over the last year. Because, you know, there's a lot of people that say, "Inner peace is the new rich." And you are creating more peace in your life, and I think it makes you a better person in all areas of your life. You seem healthier and happier and thriving. And it's getting, I'm sure it's many different factors, but I'm glad to know that you're bringing prayer into your life more frequently. And I think you're only gonna be a better scientist and researcher in that process by doing that, so I want to acknowledge you for that.

• 56:59Lewis Howes?

  And give it up one more time for Andrew Huberman, give it up, guys, give it up!

• 57:08Lewis Howes?

  Glad you got along. You're good. Appreciate it, buddy. One more time, guys. Andrew Huberman.

• 57:16Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And

• 58:00Lewis Howes?

  now it's time to go out there and do something great.