Your Body’s Operating Manual: Andrew Huberman on the Mind-Body Connection

Even though our experiences are shaped by unconscious patterns and bodily sensations, we have the agency to actively transform them simply by staying present and aware. Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch sit down with Stanford neuroscientist and “Huberman Lab” host Andrew Huberman to explore the science of how your brain and body talk to each other, and how you can use that conversation to your advantage. Huberman shares his evidence-based solutions for optimizing brain function, mood, energy, and physical performance in order to learn new skills and behaviors that can transform your life. Huberman’s exploration of the brain-body connection speaks to a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world. Andrew Huberman is a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and host of the “Huberman Lab” podcast. His newest book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body publishes in September 2026 and culminates years of research, lab work, and conversations with scientists. Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend! Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information. Chapters: 00:00 Opening 06:33 Yoga Nidra and Tactical Breathing 09:25 What Helps Addiction 14:18 Physiological Sigh 17:37 Naming Shapes Adoption 23:05 Alcohol Health Consensus 26:20 Gut Microbiome and Nutrition 27:42 Sex and Wellbeing 30:56 Sleep, Aging and Melatonin 32:42 Protocols Book Overview 35:18 Letting Go and Faith 37:56 Psychedelics 39:44 Perception Box Questions

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Knowing that you have the tools or the hardware already installed in you, and you just need to know how to operate that, it can be very reassuring to people.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a perception box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder, or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger. In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I'd like to introduce our esteemed hosts, Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Christoph Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  This week, our guest is Dr. Andrew Huberman. Much of what we experience is shaped by what lives well beneath our conscious minds and the physical sensations in our body. But this doesn't mean we have no agency. According to the Perception Box framework, once we become aware of those physical sensations and stay present with the feelings, we can actively transform our experience. Christoph, have you ever used a tool or a protocol to expand your perception box?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  As you may know, I now live on a small island in the Pacific Northwest, just south of Vancouver Island. And to get, just last week, to get to here, I had to take one of these tiny planes, and it was very windy. You're in the small plane, you go up and down, and the only thing I did, I did

• 2:08Speaker 02

  I did that, and I was totally fine. It worked.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Luckily, we have someone who's really been thinking about this issue for a long time. So, welcome to the podcast, Andrew Huberman.

• 2:19Heather Berlin?

  Thank you.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  So, you know, you've trained as a neuroscientist. What got you personally interested in getting more involved in different wellness tools or exploring that, you know, in a deeper way?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  I'm a formerly trained neuroscientist.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  Undergraduate, graduate, school, postdoc, and running a lab and so forth. But my interest in biology started long before that, when I was a kid. And my interest in what we now call health and wellness, biohacking, et cetera, started when I was in my mid-teens. I was always a seeker of information and reader. So, early on, I started seeking out information about meditation. And that took me down the path of wanting to understand other ways that I could regulate what I now know as my nervous system. But back then, I was also very interested in sports. I got involved in skateboarding, martial arts. I got badly injured skateboarding. And then I was interested in how I could heal more quickly. It was prior to me starting the podcast, we started in 2021. But that's when things really started to converge,

• 3:17Speaker 00

  where we started hearing about breathwork, meditation, discussions about psychedelics were really starting to surface for the first time. Every time I would try something, regardless of what it was called, and regardless of the community that was doing it, I would glean some piece of information that I found helpful. I never really bought into anything wholesale. I didn't join the meditation community. I wasn't, you know, a psychedelics devotee or anything like that. And then, because I'm a scientist, I would try and look at those things through the lens of physiology first. But rather than think about meditation as some sort of mystical thing that gives you a, you know, insight into consciousness, I thought, this is kind of a perceptual exercise. By that time, I was a vision scientist, studying how we encode photons in the world

• 4:02Speaker 00

  and make sense of them into images and so forth. And I thought, oh, when you close your eyes, you remove a lot of sensory input. You devote your focus, your attention to your internal state. Let me just think about this as a perceptual exercise. Why would that change the way I feel when I open my eyes and start to think about it through the lens of neuroscience and physiology? And eventually, my laboratory did, in collaboration, a clinical trial, looking at how different patterns of breathing impact immediate and long-term, what we call autonomic states, how relaxed or stressed you are.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  This was David.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  This was with my colleague, David Spiegel, who, you know, he's one of the most unusual and, I think, interesting psychiatrists in the world because he's a card-carrying psychiatrist and believes in all the general tools of psychiatry. But he's also really championed the use of hypnosis, clinical hypnosis, as a tool for accelerating plasticity. The way I categorize the different tools for mind-body connection are as follows. First of all, I think of respiration or breathwork of any kind that's done deliberately, deliberately hyperventilating, deliberately doing long exhale breathing, box breathing, whichever you choose, as a deliberate way of trying to shift one's autonomic state, how much level of alertness versus calmness one has.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Hypnosis is designed to solve a particular problem, which is different than meditation, which I view as a perceptual exercise. You're deliberately placing your perception, usually internally, sometimes open-monitoring meditation, but usually internally. And the goal there is manifold. It can be to lower stress. It can be to get a better insight into thoughts and what they are and what they aren't. Over a long period of time, it can alter one's own perception of consciousness and thoughts. But it's a perceptual exercise. And then, of course, I think about psychedelics, the classic psychedelics, as tools for neuroplasticity.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I think the common theme, though, is, you know, taking things that were outside, typically outside the realm of science, like whether spiritual or, you know, consciousness, that's something we're both interested in. But Christoph was really at the forefront of that field of saying, we can study this through the lens of science. And taking that a step further, you're saying all these other spiritual practices that people have known for, you know, hundreds of years, meditation and yoga and breathwork. What's the underlying physiology of that? And then, once we understand that, can we tap into it and get there quicker and use these tools to help enhance our well-being?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. And for me, you know, now as a public science health educator, it was very clear to me that the things that I found most useful, things like yoga nidra, which I've found to be an extremely powerful tool that we could talk about.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And can you tell us a little bit about it?

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. I took the liberty of doing something, which is a little bit heretical and I felt like was indeed unfair to the people who developed yoga nidra, which means yoga sleep, doesn't actually involve any specific movement. And I started calling it non-sleep deep rest. I didn't do that to try and rob the traditional view of it and creation of anything. But I knew, about a year into doing the podcast and being a public educator, that people hear yoga nidra, and they think downward dog, I don't want to do yoga, eastern, and Americans and Western Europeans just run from it. So, how something arrives, the packaging and the naming is extremely important. Yoga nidra, I learned about first in 2017.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  I went out, I was interested in stress and trauma for studies I was doing in my lab, and frankly, from my own life and experience.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  You've had stress?

• 7:40Speaker 00

  I've had a little bit of stress, yeah. You know, fortunately, I never had to compete with Christoph because I selected different topics to work on. But, you know, science is a brutal game. I was fortunate that I was able to keep my lab funded consistently. I mean, it's sadly never enough to do all the experiments you would like to do, but that's also probably a good thing. Science is one of those, research science is one of those places where you have to work almost as hard to get the resources to do the work as you do to do the actual work.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  In any event, the

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Yoga.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so yoga nidra was introduced to me by a very talented addiction-trauma therapist. He's licensed, his name is Ryan Suave, and he's out in Florida. And they, I observed him working with heroin addicts and other drug addicts. I fortunately have never had substance abuse issues, but I think we all have dealt with challenging compulsions and stress, et cetera. And he said, one of the reasons they're so successful in his clinic is they have them do an hour of yoga nidra every morning. So, I started joining them for this. And yoga nidra is an ancient practice where you lie down. Typically, it lasts anywhere from 10, 20, or 30 minutes, but up to an hour. And you do long exhale breathing. Humans deliberately inhale.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  We actively inhale, and we passively exhale. Reptiles do the opposite. So, when you consciously exhale, it activates this respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds like a bad thing, arrhythmia, but it slows your heart rate down through the vagal system. So, they do that. And then typically, it involves a body scan. And the beautiful thing about yoga nidra is that people are instructed to try and stay awake while being deeply relaxed. It's a wonderful thing because people feel like there's less of a struggle to get to a certain place.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  So, Andrew, how would that help somebody who's addicted to some substance get rid of their, or reduce their craving?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Great question. So, first of all, doing yoga nidra has the benefit that it makes you a better sleeper because it is self-directed relaxation. Sleeping better turns out to be the most important thing for our mental health, physical health, and performance, if you will, as well as for overcoming any challenge. And for all addicts, they're in the stress of trying to not use the substance, remove their, you know, context-dependent memories, all the kinds of things that benefit from being relaxed. We know that stress drives relapse. The other thing that yoga nidra does is that many people, most of us probably, are not sleeping as much or as well as we would like. When people do yoga nidra, pockets of the brain are going into a deep sleep-like state.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  You mean, it's like local sleep?

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Local sleep. And so, it's very restorative. Yoga nidra restores levels of dopamine to very high levels that are only present typically after waking up from a good night's sleep. So, this might, here, it's conjecture, but that this restoration of dopamine levels might be one of the reasons why, let's say, an addict or someone else who's dealing with trauma or stress, or just any person wakes up, you've slept six choppy hours, not the eight you would love. Now, you're into the day. If you do 10 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes of non-sleep deep rest, yoga nidra, If this result turns out to be true, in every case, dopamine gets topped off. And now you're in a better position for deliberate action, but also withholding action.

• 10:57Heather Berlin?

  So I have a question. So, so I want to get into it because there's, this is one technique. There's a lot of other things that we can get into, health-related things that can help us in our daily lives. So you had mentioned that, you know, like we all have struggled with compulsions. So we're not all, some people have, I've studied impulsive and compulsive behaviors and addictions. And it's not just the substances. There are behavioral addictions as well. Shopping, gambling, and you know, the internet addiction. Have you ever struggled with any challenging compulsions in your life that you, that some of these practices have, might have helped you with?

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. Where would you like to begin?

• 11:37Heather Berlin?

  We can make a list.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I, I think I'm like a, a good number of people out there in the sense that I both have had aspects of my life that are incredibly regimented and, and organized. And then aspects of my life where I felt I just, I wasn't completely dysregulated, but that I wasn't able to manage my, my behavior as well as I would have liked. I, I will say, over the last five years, it's been both embarrassing at some level, but also kind of surprising to me just how powerful of a draw the phone really is. I mean, I now have a, what I call a super max prison lockbox that I put my phone in that you, where you can't code out. And I'm somebody who can get up and get through a workout

• 12:22Speaker 00

  when I don't feel like I want to. I can sit down and write a grant when I don't necessarily want to. I can force my behavior and I can withhold behavior, but I think that either the algorithms are so good, or I am so bad, one or the other, that it takes an immense amount of effort at times to really resist the temptation to get that in.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I would say the algorithms are made to get us hooked.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  But that's what social media and the phone does.

• 12:48Heather Berlin?

  But so have any of the techniques that you've discovered in terms of managing your own physiology helped with your compulsion?

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, tremendously. And I would say overwork and, and workaholism has been a, on the one hand adaptive, but on the other hand, a somewhat destructive force in my life over the years. And I think that's true for many people. Again, I've been very fortunate that I haven't had substance abuse issues. Ultimately, what I discovered early on, and say through the meditation practice, and then much later yoga nidra, and in between, through what would be called like running martial arts, lifting weights and things like that, is that we need two kinds of practices. And the two kinds of practices are real-time tools that you can use in the moment. You study impulsivity, so I'd be curious what your thoughts are, but things that we can use

• 13:38Speaker 00

  in the moment to regulate our autonomic arousal level, and things that we do and that have a long-lasting positive impact.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  That set our mind.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  That set our mind in a proper place, or set some court, some sort of stage for us to intervene with ourselves. Because this whole notion of stimulus-response, and the more you can generate a gap, that's all wonderful when you're coming back from esalen, and I love esalen, by the way, when you're coming back from esalen after a long weekend, or vacation, or massage, or you're like, you're great, you're blissed, and you're in control for a couple of weeks. And then everyone relapses back into this reflexive reactive state. So the things that have really helped me were the discovery of the physiological sigh. And it was named that by physiologists in the 1930s. This is this pattern of double inhale, long exhale, that Christoph was referring to earlier. It was discovered in the 1930s

• 14:32Speaker 00

  as a pattern of spontaneous breathing that people and animals, mammals, do during sleep. So it turns out that we inhale to get oxygen and we exhale largely to discard carbon dioxide. If levels of carbon dioxide get too high, we feel that as more or less a stress response. In sleep.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  With panic in extreme cases.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, panic. Yeah, you can induce panic if you have people breathe elevated levels of carbon dioxide. So what they discovered was in sleep, spontaneously, people would do this.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Okay, a dog does that before it goes down to sleep. When people are crying, they're often in a low level of asphyxiation, and then they'll do this, and then they recover their breathing.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Oh, that's cool.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's a, like, so it turns out that the double inhale, long exhale, there's a circuit for it. It's actually, not to get too technical, but our colleague, Jack Feldman, who discovered the pre-Brotzinger complex, is involved in rhythmic breathing. Anytime it's inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. A neighboring cluster of neurons, the parafacial nucleus, is involved in generating patterns of breathing, all patterns of breathing, where you double up on inhales, or you double up on exhales. I'm using them right now as I speak. Use it when you eat. You use it when you sing. You use it when you speak publicly. And when you're stressed, eventually the physiological sigh kicks in, but most people don't really allow it to happen. They override it with more and more stress.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  So it turns out that, and we tested in this study, David Spiegel and I ran this study, about 100 subjects, where people deliberately did physiological sighing. And indeed, it's very useful for lowering your level of autonomic arousal immediately, even just one physiological sigh. So big, deep inhale through the nose, a second big inhale, which turns out to be a small inhale, because your lungs are almost full, to maximally inflate the lungs, which allows you to then.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  You don't hold.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  You don't hold.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  You don't do double inhale, hold, exhale.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the reason to, you're right, you do.

• 16:37Heather Berlin?

  It's like a top-up.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  It's a top-off. And the reason is the lungs, as, as many people may know, it's not just two big bags of air. You have hundreds of millions of little sacs that, because they're a little damp on the inside, they get flat and stuck to one another. So it's like blowing up a balloon at a kid's party. The two inhales help when you're inhaling a balloon, but in this case, you're doing the two inhales through your nose. The long exhale is best done through the mouth, and that immediately lowers heart rate. And so, real-time tools like that, I found to be tremendously useful. Because going up to give a talk, I'm pretty comfortable with public speaking, but if I'm not well-slept, if I have a little bit too much coffee, I would be giving a talk at a conference. I'd notice I'm kind of quaking. What's going on?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Well, my autonomic nervous system is a little bit, the hinge on the seesaw is a little loose. One or two of those before you go on.

• 17:27Heather Berlin?

  So these are kind of like, sort of bio hacks in a way to calm, or, or at least.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I was talking recently, just a story directly related to that, and to your point, the power of marketing. I was talking recently to my brother-in-law with Special Forces, you know, in Afghanistan, and he, he told me about their anti-stress, you know, just before they go in or do something real dangerous. And I said, oh, yoga nidra. I said, no, no, tactical breathing.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Right, right, exactly.

• 17:54Heather Berlin?

  Same name, different name.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, this is interesting, because, you know, at one point in my lab, not publicly, but it's okay to talk about now, I had a few collaborations with the special operations community, some in Monterey, and some on the East Coast, and in Canada. And you can't really give those guys yoga nidra. You can, but you're going to get fewer people recruited. But if you talk to them about physiological sigh, or you talk to them about non-sleep deep breaths, they're very interested in how they can reset quickly. So there's that.

• 18:25Heather Berlin?

  But the same, I want to just get to, because there's a lot of ways that we can, by understanding our innate biology, our physiology, we can, I'm going to say hack in, but use some of these things that have naturally evolved to calm us down for when we need them in this high-stress world. But I want to talk about some other things as well, like there's breathing, there's also, you know, the mind, the mind-gut relationship. You know, how does what we ingest in our body impact us? And in a way, and, and also alcohol, like, there's all, you know, there's a lot going on in the realm of alcohol, and what is its impact on our overall health as well as it relates to this mind-gut connection?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Great question. And I will say that the physiological sigh, or any other breathing technique that emphasizes exhales and therefore calms us down, is working through the vagus nerve, which is this neural superhighway with, you know, connections from the brain outward and from the organs inward to the brain. And that is the basis, a portion of it, is the basis for the heart rate slowing that occurs with long exhale breathing and the physiological sigh. It also turns out that if you want to speed your heart rate up, it's also through that pathway. When you inhale very vigorously, you start to speed your heart rate up. People have heard of heart rate variability. Everyone wants a better HRV. They're waking up in the morning,

• 19:51Speaker 00

  what's my HRV? How's my HRV? The HRV is, the basis of it is the descending input from the vagus to slow the heart rate down through the sinolateral node and all this so forth. So to just step back from your question a tiny bit, my interest in using physiology as the entry point is deliberate, yes, from the standpoint of naming and getting things out more broadly, it's also the one that allows me to orient myself in the vast landscape of nomenclature and histories and people claiming ownership of things, which I don't, right? We have to, we have to stand someplace to make sense of all this, to see where the connections

• 20:34Speaker 00

  really exist. So I just wanted to mention that, because I think it is important for people who prefer a non-physiological view of things. You know, many times, you know, people who are practiced in yoga and its traditions will say, wait, what you're talking about is pranayama. And I'll say, great. But if I tell someone else pranayama, and explain what it is, and they're on board, great. But they, people, here's, here's my strong belief. Whether and how people use a tool strongly depends on how they learned about that tool.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  It's a narrative. It's a narrative. Pranayana for some sounds woo-woo, and eastern, and far out, and not congenial to their own tradition. But if you call it tactical breathing, then yes, I'm all in.

• 21:18Heather Berlin?

  Well, that's all about a perception box, right?

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:21Heather Berlin?

  Like how you, how you perceive something, and the way you perceive it and frame it is how you're going to experience the same, you know, the same physiologic phenomenon, right?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  One thing that's nice is to be able to talk about physiology that exists in all of us, right? The mechanism, the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve that controls diaphragmatic breathing. Knowing that you have the tools or the hardware already installed in you, and you just need to know how to operate that, it can be very reassuring to people. Because then it becomes less about what's out there, what you can afford, what you can access, you know, what something's called. And just, we all are born with a phrenic nerve and a vagus nerve, a parietal nucleus, a prebotzinger complex, and we can all do these things. And the nice thing is, they work the first time and every time. The challenge with things like meditation, which of course I subscribe to,

• 22:13Speaker 00

  is that it's hard for people to know if they did it right. And if people don't feel a big shift with something the first time, they're very unlikely to go back to it.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  They need a positive feedback mechanism, yeah, relatively quickly.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  They really need it. They really do. They need to feel differently quickly. And when they're the person generating that, and they can do it alone and not just in the context of a group, or a weekend away, I think that's really powerful. And so there's that.

• 22:42Heather Berlin?

  But the other aspects, outside of the breathing, there's other behaviors that we can do that can help with our wellbeing. But I do want to talk about other behaviors, like what we eat, what we ingest, what we drink, how we interact with other people, you know, what are other general things we can do in our life as a long-term goal that can help our underlying, you know, physiology?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  So what's your point of view, for instance, on physiology and alcohol, short-term? I mean, long-term in particular, thinking.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Okay, I've spent a lot of time with this literature because every so often you'll start to see what we heard for a while, which was that some alcohol, especially red wine, is better for us than none.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  One glass or two glass.

• 23:23Heather Berlin?

  But I don't want your personal take, I want like the scientific consensus take.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  So my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Keith Humphries, who's in our psychiatry department, and I spoke about this recently, his laboratory, and you know, he's a clinician as well, have looked at the entire literature, every which way, including the studies that concluded that some alcohol is better than none. And here's the clear takeaway, okay? So this is not just my stance, it's also what's been printed by Stanford Media and by Keith and colleagues. And he's a very objective guy. Zero is better than any if your sole interest is your biological health, okay?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Well, it's a really linear, no threshold model.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can, most adult non-alcoholics can probably have two drinks per week without significantly increasing their cancer risk or other risk. There is a significant increase in breast cancer.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Do we have to listen to this?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  No, well, people don't like this. Well, I was figuring.

• 24:25Heather Berlin?

  Go on, let's start. Zero is the best. Zero is the best.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Zero is best. Any cardiac benefit that's afforded by a couple of glasses of wine per week is greatly offset by the cancer risk.

• 24:36Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  So we need to talk about relative risk.

• 24:38Heather Berlin?

  You can have, you know, they call this respiratory, what is it? Yes, exactly. That was in the red, you know, the skin of the red, the grapes. You can just eat, you know, there are other ways to get that.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Well, you have to do it at very high doses.

• 24:49Heather Berlin?

  It's like a pill.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  You could take grape seed extract. It would have a, you'd have to ingest tons and tons of wine.

• 24:57Heather Berlin?

  What we're saying is the benefits, the negatives outweigh the benefits.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  It's classified as a class-one carcinogen over, in a lot of areas of the world.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  What about the social benefits? If we sit together here, six hours from now, we have a glass of wine, we're social, we are happier.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and marking a transition from workday to non-workday.

• 25:15Heather Berlin?

  But you can get that in other ways. You don't need alcohol to relax. That's my philosophy.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  I mean, alcohol is a very interesting one because, well, okay, there's also, you mentioned the gut microbiome. I believe that many of the detrimental effects of alcohol are not direct reflection of it as a quote-unquote poison, which it is. For instance, if you drink within six hours of sleep, you're going to have less REM sleep and deep sleep, period.

• 25:41Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Now, people always say, well, cannabis, cannabis will nuke your REM sleep. Anyone who has been a regular cannabis user, even semi-regular cannabis user, who then stops taking cannabis, their dreams are wild. They will tell you that.

• 25:56Heather Berlin?

  It's like a rebound effect.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  Their REM rebound from years of, you know.

• 25:59Heather Berlin?

  Suppression.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, for years of suppression. I also think an indirect negative effect of alcohol is on the gut microbiome. Now, all of that said, I do think that there's a, there can be a social and stress lowering benefit of alcohol. Two drinks per week, perhaps, being the upper threshold, maybe a few more for certain people, depending on what else you're doing. If you're taking great care of your cardiovascular health, if you are doing some things to support your gut health, and I'll just say the best way that we're aware of from good studies to support your gut microbiome is to ingest low-sugar fermented foods. Sauerkraut, natto, kimchi, kombucha, low-sugar versions, Greek yogurt, I'm partial to Bulgarian yogurt.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Some of them experienced big increases in inflammatory markers, big. And other people, gut reduction. So we hear that fiber, which I believe is good for us, is very good for our gut microbiome. Not everybody, that it reduces our so-called inflammatome or inflammatory markers. Turns out in some people, it doesn't. And it turns out that some people find that broccoli makes them feel not well, that they can't digest it well. It's, you have to be, you have to experiment and figure out what.

• 27:10Heather Berlin?

  It's individual differences, like with our physiology, yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  There is a phenomenon where people drink, they feel relaxed, they sleep well enough. The next day, you can see a spike in cortisol and anxiety.

• 27:22Heather Berlin?

  See, that's really interesting, I think, that it's after alcohol has come out of your, just, I mean, you know, with cocaine or other, you know, you get this high, but then you pay for it the next day with a low. And the same kind of thing with alcohol is that you get the sort of relief of the tension and the relaxation, but then you actually get an increase in stress response.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 27:41Heather Berlin?

  The next day. You know, another behavior I think we can all get behind is, you know, sex. How much does that contribute to our overall health and wellbeing? What is the relationship between frequency of sex, quality of sex? It's another dopamine-enhancing activity.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Oxytocin.

• 27:59Heather Berlin?

  Oxytocin, human touch, I mean, it checks a lot of boxes. You know, have you thought about the relationship between sex and overall wellbeing and physical health, mental health? How much should we be having? Should we be doing it all the time?

• 28:11Speaker 00

  I think the data on this, I have thought a lot about this, as I imagine most people have. Everyone talks about sex as, we all know what it is, and we have some sense of what it may or may not look like for us, but no one's really talking about whether or not, you know, despite frequency per week, I mean, are we talking about 20 minutes? Are we talking about five minutes? Are we talking about?

• 28:36Heather Berlin?

  I mean, it should be once a day, twice, once a week, but what's the recommendation? What is the scientific?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  There's very little science on this.

• 28:42Heather Berlin?

  I'm just saying, you can get highs in lots of different ways. There should be research on this.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  I get hundreds, if not thousands, of questions about pornography. You know, the easy accessibility of pornography now, and the fear of sort of post-sexual interaction shaming on social media has led young men to, so I'm thinking teens and twenties and thirties, to turn to pornography. Then we talk about sex versus masturbation, and then in the, in modern times, there's this sort of unspoken thing, like, oh, masturbation is kind of not great for guys, but might be healthier for women because they are having an opportunity to explore their bodies, they have a more complex response, perhaps. The truth is, there just haven't been very candid discussions about it because very few people are willing to reveal what they're doing, except at the extremes.

• 29:29Heather Berlin?

  But, you know, we have breath work and how we eat and how we sleep and our physical activity and human connections and social, you know, contact. And I think sex can be part of the conversation as well.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I will say this, not to bring it back to nuts and bolts physiology, but it is very clear that.

• 29:45Heather Berlin?

  No, you should bring it back to nuts and bolts physiology.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  You want your morning cortisol high. It's why you wake up in the morning. Viewing bright light in the morning, ideally from sunlight, will spike your cortisol even further. This is extremely important to do for everyone. Exercise will do it, caffeine will do it, movement of the body. If you're waking up, you're indoors, you're scrolling your phone, that's not bright enough to stimulate this response. Kind of slowly move into the day, which I often like to do. That cortisol peak shifts, you get what's called a flattening of the cortisol curve. This is why many people in the evening have a hard time falling asleep, or at night, where they fall asleep and then at 3:00 AM they're waking up. It's a shift in the cortisol curve.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  The no physical, I mean.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  The one exception is sex.

• 30:25Heather Berlin?

  Sex, yes.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  And here's the reason, there's actually good physiology on this. Post, the quote-unquote post-coital bliss or relaxation response, yes, it involves oxytocin, vasopressin, there's a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters, but it also leads to a dramatic reduction in heart rate that people generally sleep quite well after, after orgasm.

• 30:49Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  That's not, that's not.

• 30:53Heather Berlin?

  I'm sorry, I don't mean to gender stereotype or anything.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  So when you go to sleep at night, your cortisol is at its all-time low, and then it stays low through deep sleep. Somewhere around halfway through your sleep night, you transition from predominantly deep slow wave sleep to REM, as you know, and your cortisol starts to rise. Once your cortisol hits a certain threshold, you wake up.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  So what happens as we age, because typically older people get up earlier and earlier, right? Everything shifts, I mean, towards earlier times.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Well, I like the woo explanation of this, actually.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  What is the woo explanation?

• 31:26Heather Berlin?

  The woo, it's the woo.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  The woo explanation, you could actually look at it, the Allen brain, and I wish you guys would do that. So there's this theory that the pineal becomes calcified as we get older.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Which seems to be true.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  And that the melatonin, the only source of melatonin, well, not true. The only source of melatonin that makes us sleepy in the body comes from the pineal. Turns out every cell has melatonin. It acts as an antioxidant in our cells. But that the pineal is calcified. And so, while I'm not a big fan of melatonin supplementation for most people, as people hit their 70s and 80s, a half a milligram of melatonin can be very helpful to people.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  A tiny dose.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Tiny dose. Most people who take three milligrams of melatonin or something like that, they're setting themselves up for trouble. I mean, it's not gonna destroy you, but half or even, or even less of a milligram.

• 32:11Heather Berlin?

  The melatonin is not something good to take to sleep as an average.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Not regularly.

• 32:15Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Occasionally it should be fine, but most people need very, very little. And it gets into the whole thing of what's really in the bottle. But you go with a reputable brand and take half a milligram, even if you have to break a tablet.

• 32:27Heather Berlin?

  When you're older.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, or if you're, you really need to get to sleep, but.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  I mean, to help with a sleep lag, typically I take one or two.

• 32:36Heather Berlin?

  Jet lag.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, better that than an Ambien.

• 32:38Heather Berlin?

  But you wouldn't take it every night to try to sleep.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  I wouldn't do that.

• 32:41Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  I wouldn't do that.

• 32:42Heather Berlin?

  So, you know, you have a bunch of protocols, that's, you know, your new book and.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  In fact, your book, maybe you can briefly tell us about your book.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  So the book is called Protocols, a user manual for the human brain and body. And it's a chapter on sleep, chapter on stress, chapter on microbiome, motivation, neuroplasticity. And it's very straightforward. It was designed to be a lookup table type book. There's a little bit of story in there.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Also, it's really protocols, a set of protocols.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  It's really designed so that if somebody's like, I wanna get control of my stress. What can I do is real time control. I've been spending a lot of time surveying the landscape of nutrition and what the key takeaways, I believe, are, based on the science. And there's one on creativity, a section on creativity, and one on relationship to self. I taught and I still teach developmental neurobiology. And the notion that you take two cells, sperm and an egg, and it self-organizes into a nervous system that sure needs some curating once the child is born. But it is so spectacular that it, that takes us, me anyway, into the realm of, you know, almost the spiritual, like.

• 33:46Heather Berlin?

  But a very similar experience as a scientist studying the human brain and how complex it is, and that it self-organizes in such a way that it allows us to have conscious perception. I mean, then you get into the realm of like, could this have just been by accident or evolution? It gives me a sense of wonder, at least, that there might be something more. But for your, for your protocols and, you know, the, how do the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, how does that relate to this concept of the perception box? And not just the body, but the mind? You know, how can we, so we're talking a lot about the body, but how does this relate to, you know, our mental world?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, for that, I, I think about this a lot. And I, these days, I think, you know, thank goodness for the psychologists. Because even though their instruments of experimentation are different, and a lot of things are unfortunately still cloaked in naming, that's the hard part. I feel like they've chipped away at some of the key aspects of the mind that most people care about, at least at first pass. Like, for instance, in writing the book, I had a whole section on motivation. And of course, my colleague Carol Dweck has growth mindset, Ali Crumb, stress is performance enhancing mindset. You start merging these things and you see, oh, people can really learn and be better. But like, something like motivation, everyone would like to feel more of a sense of urgency around certain things.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  So when it comes to discussions around the mind, I turn, I sort of hand it over to the psychologists. When it gets to issues of, and you mentioned kind of spirituality and things beyond our control, I have to say, the biggest shift for me in the last five years has been the, I, I now thoroughly believe in God, 100% for me. And the reason is very simple, which is that I've seen so many people, including myself, struggle to engage what we, in nerd speak, call top-down regulation, to try and do something or not do something, and really, really struggle with that. But then you give over that control, you, you acknowledge, you surrender.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  I can't do it. I just can't do it on my own. I need people, I need support, but I can't do it. You surrender it, you, this is part of 12-step, you give over to a higher power.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  AA, alcoholism.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden, people are able to do it. So this, this defies logic, right?

• 36:09Heather Berlin?

  This is what I would say, and this is not to promote my, but my book is called The Fine Art of Losing Control. It's gonna come out next year. But, but the main premise of it is that we gain more control over impulses and our compulsivity by, you know, counterintuitively by letting go, by decreasing activation in the prefrontal cortex. And that's what I allude to things like AA and things where it says, let go, give up to, whatever you wanna call it, whether it's a higher power, a god, spiritual, you let go of your ego. The trying to control is the thing that actually makes you have less control. And it's the letting go. And I think from a neuroscience perspective, that it's these automatic unconscious processes that we're letting them do their job. And that's where we can heal.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  You know the Serenity Prayer?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  That's why I think that's very appropriate here. Oh, God, give me the, what is it, the courage to recognize what I need to change, the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to tell the difference, right?

• 37:09Speaker 00

  I mean, there's so much wisdom in AA and the other 12-step communities. Actually, Keith Humphries, as an addiction researcher and clinician, was quite skeptical of the 12-step thing. You know, you hear it's a cult, et cetera. So they ran a study, they did a meta-analysis of a bunch of different 12-step data sets and ran their own studies and found that it's perhaps the most effective treatment for at least alcoholism.

• 37:38Heather Berlin?

  But also, by the way, it might be one of the reasons why the psychedelics work in that it also shoots you into a place of letting go of the ego and connecting with something greater than oneself. And there might be just something in that practice, whether it's through a spiritual, religious practice, AA, or psychedelics, about the letting go of your ego.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  The more interesting question to me is, do you need the psychedelic experience to get the beneficial plasticity? I do think that there are insights that come from that exploration, but I think, I know people are trying to modify these molecules to create.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Many are trying to biohack. However, we do know, certainly for depression, that the therapeutic efficiency is directly proportional to the extent that you have a mystical experience, as assayed at least by the MOQ 30. So to the extent that people dissolve theirself and feel they become one with the universe, and that's a positive experience, to that extent, they're likely to have significant traumatic drops in their MAD-RS scale, you know, all the depression scales.

• 38:35Heather Berlin?

  But however, we had, actually, I think he's a colleague of yours, Boris, who's at Stanford.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Boris Heifetz, yeah.

• 38:39Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, Boris Heifetz, who's an anesthesiologist, who gave people ketamine under anesthesia. So they got the effect of the, you know, physiological effect of the drug without the psychological effect, and people with depression. And it was basically, the people that had the most significant positive outcome were, it was a placebo effect, that they believed, because it was a placebo-controlled trial. They believed they had the ketamine, and that really had an impact.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Partly it's a narrative. The question is, is it only the placebo effect or not? And it's very difficult, of course, to mask.

• 39:09Heather Berlin?

  But, yeah, go on.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  No, I was gonna say that with ketamine, because it's a dissociative anesthetic, or with MDMA, because it's an empathogen. And I think that, I would love more, I'm not criticizing anyone, because I, myself, am using the word psychedelics. But I think in order for it to move forward clinically and with the FDA and to be handled properly, it needs more subtle languaging around it. Because ketamine and MDMA are far and away different than ibogaine and psilocybin in LSD.

• 39:43Heather Berlin?

  On that note, on every episode, we ask one question to open up our own perception box. And this week, I get to choose the question. So neither of you know what the question is. So have you ever found yourself acting in a way, acting like the very type of person that you can't stand? And what was the circumstance?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Sadly, I have. I've been in relationship with a very intense relationship that was very volatile. And I acted very often like a complete asshole.

• 40:16Heather Berlin?

  Oh, that's a good one. And I know exactly where you're referring to.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  I didn't want to, but I found myself. And I have lastly regretted about that.

• 40:24Heather Berlin?

  Okay, that's good to know. So you can live and learn from your experiences.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  You can live and learn from your experiences.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Great answer. Thanks for saying that so that I didn't have to.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Did I ever find myself in a place acting in a way that I was surprised and later regretted?

• 40:43Heather Berlin?

  Or like acting like a type of person that you don't like?

• 40:47Speaker 00

  It's taken me a long time to sort of come to terms with it. There were times when my ambition led me to neglect people that I really care about, to the point where I kept looking at myself and like, what is going on here?

• 41:04Heather Berlin?

  I want to thank you for being open and sharing that. And I think it's important for everyone to like, learn from their mistakes and try to continually become a better person. So now we're going to lighten it up a little bit. We're going to play a little game. It's called the Huberman Toolkit, Keep or Cut?

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:24Heather Berlin?

  This is going to be like a rapid fire. We're going to ask you about different wellness tools. Then we're going to ask you whether we should cut it or keep the tool. So keep or cut? Alcohol.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Cut it. Your life will be so much better. Just, and one editorial here. Alcohol is the one substance that people give you a hard time for not using it. And that's all about them.

• 41:45Heather Berlin?

  Intermittent fasting.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  If it works for you. I don't tend to be hungry in the morning. So I'm happy to eat my first bite of food at 11 and my last bite of food somewhere around 7:30, 8:00 PM. But if you wake up hungry, that's actually kind of a good sign. And some people just don't feel well when they're trying to restrict their food window. And they're just better off distributing their food.

• 42:06Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, sometimes I can't sleep if I'm hungry. So then it, yeah, it's a balance.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  But it does work for mice in terms of their immune system. There was this nice study out of the Salk Institute that in terms of their treatment of their immune system and cytokines, et cetera, intermittent fasting.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Right. And it's nice also to be able to go some period of time without having to eat. If you're very regular with your food times, distributed through your, all your waking hours, you know, every two to three hours, and suddenly you can't eat, it can be very dysregulating at the level of blood sugar and anxiety and stuff.

• 42:38Heather Berlin?

  Supplements for sleep, keep or cut?

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Keep the right ones. Magnesium threonate or bisglycinate, a little bit of theanine, apigenin, which is chamomile extract. If you have trouble sleeping, always start with behavioral tools. But I'm always behavioral tools first. Get your nutrition timing right. And then, and only then, add supplements. But sure, they can help.

• 42:59Heather Berlin?

  Okay. Sex, keep or cut?

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Definitely keep.

• 43:02Heather Berlin?

  That's when I'm on board.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Healthy, healthy sex, healthy partnership, awesome. Sex in the context of a bad relationship? No, no, cut. Cut the whole relationship.

• 43:11Heather Berlin?

  Red light therapy, keep or cut?

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Keep. But get your red light, which is basically long wavelength light, ideally from sunlight. We're all afraid of the sun because of excess UV exposure. But keep in mind, in the middle of the day, when the sun is overhead is when you get a lot of UV exposure, when it's low in the sky. You're gleaning a lot of the medium and long wavelength light, including red light, when the sun is low in the sky without the UV.

• 43:39Heather Berlin?

  Okay, two more. Ice baths, keep or cut?

• 43:42Speaker 00

  If you want to become more resilient, keep. If you don't care to become more resilient because you already are dealing with enough stress in life, cut.

• 43:51Heather Berlin?

  Breathwork apps, keep or cut?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  I personally like to just do breathwork in my head. But if an app helps you, great.

• 43:59Heather Berlin?

  And finally, sauna, keep or cut?

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Great if you have access to a dry sauna. And if you are a male looking to conceive children in the next 90 days, bring an ice pack in and put it outside your shorts because you will dramatically deplete the number of motile sperm. What are you going to do? You know, got to live your life.

• 44:19Heather Berlin?

  On that note, got to live your life. I want to thank you, Andrew Huberman, for joining us today. And if you'd like to learn more about your own perception box, spend some time this week answering the same perception box questions that we asked our guests. And check out other questions on our website at unlikelycollaborators.com. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This has been Science of Perception Box, created by Unlikely Collaborators in partnership with Pod People. I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  And I'm Dr. Kristof Koch. Thank you.