“Am I wrong to feel like everyone in the world needs to know about Andrew Huberman?” A therapist friend asked me the other day between sessions, “I mean, the man has changed my life.”
This friend is… biased. A trauma therapist and mild exercise addict, he’s prone to using words like “dysregulated” in casual conversation, and caring an above-average amount about the nervous system… pretty much the picture of a Huberman Lab target audience member. But me? How did I — English major, rom-com enthusiast, 11/10 level girly-girl — get here? How did I find myself slightly obsessed with an extremely jacked bro’s bro of a professor in an updated Steve Jobs ‘fit, gobbling up 2+ hours a week of biology content like it’s the newest Taylor Swift album?
I’ve been seduced. And not by the black Vince button-downs.
For those who aren’t familiar, Andrew Huberman is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine (#gocard, obviously) whose podcast, Huberman Lab, aims to bring “zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.” (By “zero cost to consumer,” he means that he peddles supplements and peak-wellness products on his heavily sponsored podcast - Athletic Greens (AG1), Thorne vitamins, Thesis nootropics, Inside Tracker blood tests, you name it - like every profitable podcast, but with a bit of a used car salesman vibe.) Huberman Lab launched in 2021 and skyrocketed in popularity, quickly becoming one of the most popular shows in the world. Most episodes are over two hours long, and densely packed with scientific information about the brain, the nervous system, and the body.
It is a massive amount of content. Consuming, internalizing, and really understanding everything Andrew Huberman has to say could be a part-time job. I have listened to some episodes 3-5 times, transcribing while I listen so I can regurgitate the information to my clients and sound like I know things. There isn’t enough time to fully understand it all. And yet, I download every episode, prepared to discuss it in casual conversation, almost as if I, too, believed everyone in the world needs to know about Andrew Huberman.
Let me back up…
When I applied to therapy school, I went for the MA, not the MS. Though both degrees were offered as a path to MFT licensure, I identified as a creative person and barely passed my science requirement as an undergrad, so had no interest in viewing my future career through the lens of biology. I preferred the *art* part: how to ask creative questions, how to change someone’s point of view through storytelling, how to make someone feel seen and heard by reflecting their experience back to them with precise, specific language. I read Mating in Captivity and listened to Where Should We Begin and finally started The Sopranos (lol). Likely because I was coming from a place of such insecurity, it was important to me that this new career be “a creative one.” I dug my heels in, complained in every Research Methods class, and begrudgingly took in the Psychopharmacology lessons about agonists and antagonists like my dog having meds shoved down her throat without a pill pocket, offended and resistant.
But when I started seeing clients and came face-to-face with deeply ingrained, intractable behaviors, I found myself coming up short. No matter how much people talked about changing or wanted to change, no matter how poignant my reflections of their experiences, how accurate my choice of words, some of them simply… couldn’t. And I didn’t know how to help.
I made a deliberate choice to shift my training experience in my second year. I started working at The Relational Center and leading a group called Bodies and Trauma. I began to accept that the art would have to meet the science somewhere. And that somewhere was in the nervous system — the brain, spinal cord, and extending nerves that control and interact with all of the other organs in the body. The involuntary biological control system that dictates our energy, creativity, stress levels, learned behaviors, and sense of safety. I had finally accepted that there is a fundamental neurobiological state that accompanies the feeling of safety. When we do not feel safe, we have significantly less control over our actions, no matter what changes we talked about in therapy last week.
A brief nervous system detour:
I will not dive too deeply into the nervous system in this newsletter (may I recommend this, this, or this Huberman Lab episode for that), but a few basic facts that changed my entire outlook on therapy do feel important to share.
1. The autonomic nervous system is a control system made up of two parts: the sympathetic nervous system or SNS (the inhale, the excitatory/activating system, think: accelerator) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) (the exhale, the rest and digest/calm-down system, think: brakes) which are always working in tandem to regulate the trillions of neurons in your body that allow you to be happy, in love, sad, tired, excited, stressed, relaxed, etc. What you do or feel at any moment is directly related to which neural circuits are active in the brain and body.
2. When the brain senses danger (anything from a bear chasing you in the woods, to a partner or caregiver appearing to disengage from a conversation, to an email from your boss that you weren’t expecting) the SNS kicks into gear, mobilizing the body’s resources to fight or flee from the impending threat with a rush of adrenaline. Your pupils dilate; you lose peripheral vision. Your heartbeat accelerates. The bronchi in your lungs expand to take in more air. The effort it takes to mobilize the body in these ways takes away resources from the other parts of the brain, including the pre-frontal cortex, where the brain makes language, decisions, value judgments, does math and spelling and logic and thinking. If your brain determines the threat is inescapable, the PNS will kick into gear to try and immobilize you – to help you play dead (so a predator will pass you by) or dissociate (so you don’t remember/internalize the details of the traumatizing situation you find yourself stuck in). This is called a freeze response, and it’s why people with traumatic and/or abusive upbringings have very few memories of their childhoods, why you probably don’t remember all the details if you’ve ever been in a car accident, why it is both abusive and futile for lawyers to drill down on every detail and insist on total recollection of events when interrogating victims of sexual assault in the courtroom.
(Note: if you’re on mental health TikTok or Instagram, you’ve probably also heard about something called a fawn response, but since a fawn response is actually a social coping response that uses different systems in the brain, I am excluding it from this brief and over-simplified explanation of autonomic nervous system responses to threat.)
I share this little nervous system lesson because I believe it’s important to normalize that these processes are an integral part of our biology, that feelings and sensations of anxiety produced by the SNS are not maladaptive. They are crucial and exist to keep us alive. It can relieve immense shame to learn that the reason you find yourself screaming things you don’t mean at your partner (fight), avoiding responding to a tonally ambiguous text message (flight), or drawing a blank in a moment of confrontation (freeze), only to think of the witty comeback you were looking for 20 minutes later, isn’t because you’re a monster or a coward or an idiot. It’s because your nervous system was trying to keep you safe. This isn’t to suggest we aren’t responsible for our own actions, but rather to normalize that fight/flight/freeze responses are less about character than about biology.
I also share it because it forever changed my relationship to science, and once I understood it, I found myself seeking out more neurobiological information I could share to help clients understand and therefore change their behaviors. AKA: Andrew Huberman’s beat.
The Huberman Top 10
Not only do Huberman Lab episodes contain detailed information about the brain and body, they also contain tools and tips to make use of that information. I (and many of my peers and colleagues) became addicted to this information. Here are my top 10 examples of daily protocols and tools I have learned from Andrew Huberman that have changed my life and mental health, and that my clients eat up like candy:
Tracking the time you wake up will help you identify your body’s temperature minimum, the point where your body temperature is lowest in the 24-hour cycle, which is two hours before waking. The best time to do focused, logic-based work is in a 90 to 120-minute period 4-6 hours after your body hits its temperature minimum. Do the math, and if available to you, schedule your work processes accordingly.
Forward ambulation creates what is called “Optic Flow,” also known as objects passing by your visual field. Optic flow is shown to greatly reduce activity in the amygdala, which is essentially the anxiety/fear center of the brain that triggers those SNS/PNS responses discussed above. Thus, the simple act of going on a walk shortly after waking can greatly reduce anxiety and set you up for a calm, focused day.
Viewing morning sunlight while the sun is still low in the sky (blue light) for 10-30 minutes generates alertness and helps set the body’s circadian clock. If you want to sleep better, make an effort to get outside and view bright light with no sunglasses, windows, or cars windshields between your eyes and the sun (glasses and contacts are fine). Similarly, viewing low-in-the-sky light (red light) as the sun sets can greatly improve sleep by once again providing the body with information about its circadian clock.
To leverage the body’s natural drop in temperature that is necessary to fall and stay asleep, take a hot bath, sauna, or shower at night. Exposing the body to heat makes the body begin to engage in its natural “cooling off” mechanisms which contribute to better sleep, as does sleeping in a cool room and switching to red lighting in your home at night (see above re: the red light).
Caffeine blocks the adenosine receptors in the brain that turn on when we wake up and generate natural alertness in the body. By delaying caffeine 90-120 minutes after waking, you minimize its interference with the body’s adenosine receptors and are significantly less likely to experience the “afternoon slump” of fatigue that is common for so many people.
Regarding depression: Omega 3 fatty acids support a healthy mood. If you are reluctant to get on SSRI’s but experiencing depressed mood consistently, try ingesting at least 1000 mg per day of the EPA form of omega 3 fatty acids (EPA/DHA combination fish oil or non-animal sources from algae), which can allow for lower doses of antidepressants or supplement antidepressants.
Non-sleep deep rest (NDSR) protocols like meditation, yoga nidra, and hypnosis can enhance and accelerate neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to change through growth and reorganization). So, if you’re in therapy to re-wire neural pathways, cultivating a practice in which you engage in a deliberate and directed shift toward deeper relaxation can greatly enhance the likelihood of success.
Dopamine, the neuromodulator that plays a key role in motivation, cravings, alertness, and drive, is released in the brain in patterns that essentially cause peaks and valleys. By regularly spiking your brain’s dopamine receptors with rewards (stimulants, chocolate, online shopping purchases, addictive content from social media feeds designed to exploit dopaminergic circuits), you deplete baseline levels of dopamine in your brain. Varying and occasionally withholding these rewards from yourself (think: staying off social media for as long as possible after waking up, not immediately eating something delicious after exercise) helps the body avoid the dopamine deficiencies that can lead to decreased attention spans and lack of motivation.
To avoid depleting dopamine levels far below the baselines they are supposed to exist at within the brain, make sure to occasionally and randomly force yourself into an “effort for effort’s sake” mentality in which you do not reward high-effort behaviors with whatever metaphorical “gold star” you happen to prefer, and vary the rewards you pair with different efforts (eg: sometimes avoid listening to music while exercising, skip dessert after doing the dishes, don’t smoke a bowl or pour that glass of wine the second you get home at the end of your work day every day, etc.)
My #1 Huberman tip: cold exposure has been shown to cause dopamine levels to rise slowly and steadily to as high as 2.5 times above baselines, comparable to the dopamine rise/peaks one experiences from cocaine or nicotine, but without the crash/valley that follows. Cold exposure has been shown to create a sustained rise in dopamine levels for up to three hours before coming down to (but not below) baseline. No, I am not saying cold exposure feels as good as drugs, but I am saying I’m addicted to it.
This information has changed my life. Knowing why my morning dog walks are beneficial to me (besides my dog not pooping in the house) and how to time them to improve my sleep has helped me cultivate a morning routine that supports me and has greatly reduced my anxiety. Learning to vary my rewards and indulgences has changed my relationship to motivation and also take moments I feel unmotivated with more grains of salt. I have adjusted the timing of my therapy work day to keep those peak-productivity hours for myself in the mornings, learned to tolerate discomfort for longer periods of time (see: working on this newsletter ever, at all) and learned to delay gratification to drastically improve my work ethic and discipline. And I’m not alone! My therapist and non-therapist friends alike are regularly talking to me about their Huberman-influenced wellness routines, cold exposure protocols, non-sleep deep rest preferences, and discussing dopamine and mammalian dive responses in casual conversation. And it’s never boring! I always learn something when Andrew (are we on a first name basis yet?) comes up in conversation.
Except…
All this peak-wellness-dopamine-optimization-neurobiological-non-sleep-deep-rest enthusiasm does have a catch. As the podcast has gone on, the guests and Huberman’s collaborations have become more and more… suspect. Huberman has been on Joe Rogan a couple times (ew) and has a string of guests who fall into the… uh, suspicious men category? (Peter “Delay Death!” Attia, David “Age Backwards” Sinclair, Jeff “Reddit thinks I’m a fraud” Cavaliere, etc.) He reps intermittent fasting a little too hard (yes, I see the health benefits, but I also see the direct connection to diet culture), and falls too often into the massive white male privilege bias zone. In the previously linked GQ article that describes Huberman as “extremely jacked,” he discusses his scheduled bout of 90-minute work in which he turns off all technology:
“I think one of the biggest challenges people have nowadays is to feel comfortable being inaccessible. And I work hard to defeat the anxiety of being inaccessible for those moments, those hours, for basically two hours of the day. And again, I know people with kids will say, "You can't do that." Actually, you can. Actually, there are things that you can place in your life that will allow that. And it makes the socializing and the communications by text or other form in person to be far more enriching when you have segmented portions of the day where that doesn't exist.”
Well, yes, okay Andrew, but… you are single. You don’t have kids. You don’t know what it’s like to be a mom trying to get your kids to school and have a full-time job and manage a house and also all the social and societal pressures of being a woman in the world so… maybe don’t mansplain that particular experience? What you do have, also, is a well-paid, flexible, autonomous job at a reputable research university near some of the most expensive, tree-lined-streets zip codes in the entire country, with significant control over your schedule, thus allowing you to cultivate routines and training schedules and ingest supplements, foods, and vitamins that are conducive to a maximally functioning body and brain, and wear the same black Vince button-down every single day. Also, given the success of your podcast, you have plenty of wealth to retire on if you do manage to live forever, or at least well into your triple-digit years.
My point is: as seductive as it is to talk about bio-hacking our way to health, happiness, and immortality with cold showers and well-timed sunlight and the right supplement combinations, the reality of is that these things are not entirely within our control. The flip side of the idea that we can biologically alter our way to maximal functioning and stable, elevated moods is the implication that humans who struggle with chronic health conditions, or don’t have the time or resources to plan morning routines that carve out space for Optic Flow and midday non-sleep deep rest, bear some sort of individual responsibility for their ailments. Does exalting the “tools” that Andrew Huberman doles out on a weekly basis inadvertently shame those of us who are just operating at a normal, human level of health and productivity?
I also believe the immense amount of psychological research (including research discussed on various Huberman Lab episodes) that happiness and longevity are most closely tied to community and human connection. That loneliness is just as dangerous as cannabis or alcohol. And yet the entire idea of self-optimization is inherently self-focused, and treating the body and brain like products to be iterated upon and improved until they reach “peak performance” is… a bit simplistic. Not totally dehumanizing, but right on that line where, if we aren’t careful with the lens through which we consume this kind of information, we risk flattening the deeply complex human experience, our rich and beautiful, nuance, our cultures and stories, into simple tales of neurons fired and wired, or treating serious mental health issues exacerbated by systemic societal inequality as simply failures to “learn to re-direct and control focus.”
As another friend of mine recently put it: “I certainly don’t want Alzheimer’s or cancer, and I definitely want to take actions within my power that can prevent those things, especially if they are as accessible as some of Huberman’s tools. But on the other hand, I have to wonder how far we can extrapolate these ideas before we’re treating death — the only thing that’s guaranteed to happen to literally all of us — as some sort of individual failure to mitigate risk factors through the ingestion of proper supplements.”
I recognize that Andrew Huberman, like all of us, is a product of his environment. Self-help culture will always sell as long as individualism is the de facto ideology of the western world. I don’t begrudge him his success, can’t blame him for capitalizing on his expertise, but it does feel important to name that the concept of self-optimization is an inherently individualistic one. And simultaneously, that individualism and its resulting lack of social support and community care in our culture are directly responsible for so many of the ailments Andrew Huberman is trying to help us heal our way out of in the first place. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t consume “no-cost-to-consumer science and science-based tools” to better ourselves; we show up as our best selves when we’re taking good physical care of our brains and bodies. But it’s a fallacy to think that the work stops there.
To be clear: it’s very rare I spend this much time listening to a man I’m not physically attracted to! I will be timing my dog walk to maximize my blue light intake tomorrow morning. Earlier today, I took a break from writing this to do some nasal breathing exercises. I am, in the end, a reluctant fan of Andrew Huberman’s. But as much as I want to keep up my cold exposure protocols, I also want to hold complexity around the ideas Huberman espouses, to remember to be skeptical of anything that promotes an unrealistic level of control over one’s health, happiness, or circumstances. Life is difficult and full of heartbreak; there is no optimizing our way out of pain. And: for all the grains of salt I want to (put in my water to increase its hydration potential then) ingest this content with, I am still very much wondering: do Athletic Greens taste good? Because my guy Andrew says they’ve completely replaced his need for pre- and probiotics.
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fantastic post. i knew i was going to love it when i read the title and sub-title :-)
in particular, your exploration at the end about how "me" focused this whole body of work is is really the key issue imo. i love what you wrote here
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I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t consume “no-cost-to-consumer science and science-based tools” to better ourselves; we show up as our best selves when we’re taking good physical care of our brains and bodies. But it’s a fallacy to think that the work stops there.
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i would almost go so far as to say "it's a fallacy to think the work starts there". community, fellowship, support, vulnerability, these are the nutrients we all need
you are such a fantastic writer Grace, it always brings a smile when a new post of yours drops! Sarah and i look forward to each and every one!