Understanding Limbic Friction and Dopamine

There's a certain friction, I actually call this limbic friction, where let's say you don't want to get out of bed in the morning. You just don't. Maybe you're tired, but maybe you're just not motivated and you force yourself to get up. What you're doing is you're using top-down control to say, oh the fatigue I feel, I'm gonna override that fatigue. And much of what's online is how you override that fatigue. that lack of motivation. And some people say, well, you got to do it out of love. And then other people say you do it out of anger. And it doesn't matter. These top-down mechanisms are very subjective. If you are going to do it because you really care about the person that you're going to pick up at the airport and you got to get up early, well. that's one mechanism if you're going to do it because um you're a person of your word and you said you're going to be there and you do it you know the the just do it mantra is top-down control okay now just the top-down control is also involved in controlling reflexes. The desire to consume something that isn't good for you, you can resist that desire through top-down control. The more rested you are generally, the easier it is to engage top-down control. So when I look at people, like I don't know Ronda Rousey, I don't know too much of her story, but I do know David. He's been to my lab and I endorsed his book and I'm obviously super impressive. David Goggins needs no introduction. Super impressive and I think one of the many important things that David stands for is the ability to override limbic friction. to talk to him to convince himself to do it anyway and there are others uh that do this i've talked about this as well that is top-down control and what they've what he's done if i may i don't i've never uh i've never actually figured this out conclusively but i have a strong sense that what he's done is he's somehow gotten very familiar with the narrative of friction or the experience of friction and the narrative of overriding friction and he knows that a win is coming later and So what happens is if you know that that? Overriding limbic friction is going to create a win down the line that win could be a sense of accomplishment that you come conquered something in this limbic friction. So you need to know what that accomplishment looks like. You need to experience, it helps to know what the win feels like, yes. And what you can do is you can start to thread back that dopamine from the future. to the idea by getting out of bed I'm already starting to experience the wind you can anticipate the wind now there's actually a paper that was just published on this as a good timing for this question which is that really points to the fact that delayed gratification is controlled by dopamine and it's a somewhat complex paper so i don't want to get into the details but what it shows is that if you know that by delaying gratification you are going to it's worthwhile you start to achieve that dopamine increase earlier so delayed gratification is as it sounds is you know resisting The chocolate bar. The urge, resisting the chocolate bar or resisting the staying in bed or whatever it happens to be. But that itself can start to evoke dopamine release. Now, I'm not David Goggins, obviously. I never will be. But the way he describes his process is a little bit different, I think, than just pure like, oh, I feel great doing it. He talks a lot of times about how it's very, very challenging for him. But when you talk to people who are very good at overriding limbic friction, you start to get the sense that even if it's very challenging for them to do, that they understand the great reward that's gonna come later. And I think for a lot of people, the challenge is they haven't experienced or they can't see the win and experience the win. And so it's very hard for them to override limbic friction. And I'm not talking about limbic friction as this mild little thing. Limbic friction, it's like a booming voice throughout your brain and body of stay in bed, sleep is important. I heard on the podcast, sleep is important, stay in bed. bed and to override that requires an immense amount of what we call willpower but willpower is top-down control it kind of is also going against what was required of us as a species like instant gratification in many ways is a survival mechanism right yeah i mean if you could get all your sustenance without having to venture out too far why would you go any further Now the evolution, the forward evolution of culture in our species and individuals has been created by people that were willing to push out further and further. I mean right now we talk a lot about Elon, right? He's the one that's sort of like, well, why limit yourself to Earth? you know, which is a cool concept. But this exists in every domain, as you know. Rich Rollhart, good friend. You know, anytime we overcome doubt, challenge, internal doubt and challenge, we're engaging these mechanisms. It's a vital part of our individual development. Would you say it's a skill? Absolutely. It's a skill and there's neuroplasticity in this circuit. That's the thing that's often not discussed is that the ability to focus is enhanced by forcing yourself to focus. The ability to sleep is enhanced by getting better at relaxing and turning off thoughts. And the ability to override limbic friction can only be created. One of two ways. One is to increase your overall levels of alertness through dopamine and norepinephrine. That's why people take Adderall and Ritalin, drink caffeine, smoke nicotine in order to get more alert. They're trying, they're biologically hacking their way into the system. I think it's beautiful when people can psychologically, I would say, I always imagine scruffing myself, you know, like you'd scruff an animal or you'd scruff, you know, scruffing myself and forcing myself into it. Because for me, it helps to third person myself too. It's very hard as it. as the you know the way the brain is and the way we identify as individuals i'm not going to refer to myself in the third person um i will not do that there's there's a name for that in psychology i won't mention it in clinical psychiatry um we had a bit of a joke before it starts with an n yeah um um it starts with an n and ends with an m um or yeah or anyway narcissists generally talk about themselves in the third person it's hilarious right because they they think so much of themselves that they talk about themselves in the third person revealing that the micro squishy inner ego of the narcissist but but what i'm talking about is third person in oneself in service to to overriding limbic friction and sometimes we we have this narrative that's so closely tied to our immediate state that we have a hard time forcing ourselves into some other action and so it can be very helpful to take on a view of yourself that's living in anticipation of the future state that you're going to be in like successfully getting out of bed in the morning i did this this morning um we just i last night i said let's um my partner i said let's go jump in the ocean tomorrow morning we got up and it was raining it kind of like the smallest matter very misty today i was like oh god it's gonna be cold and then we're driving down there and i didn't tell her because i didn't i didn't want her to know what i was thinking i hate getting in the ocean when it's cold i absolutely hate it but then we got and actually the water was just a little bit warmer than the external environment it was beautiful we had the best the best ocean dip in the morning and then a sauna afterwards and it was it was wonderful i've been feeling great all day as a consequence but you know it took a little bit of override that's a mild recreational example but i think that If we can start to see these reward systems and top-down control as things that we can modulate in real-time, and use it sparingly. I'm not suggesting people do this for everything, right? It can be very exhausting to scruff yourself into the best action all the time. But look, I mean, people are recovering from addiction. They have to do this. It's a process from morning till night. How important is tying that to sort of bed down these neural systems, this rewiring you're talking about? How important is tying that to some sense of satisfaction or celebrating? You mentioned sort of achievement earlier. Is that sort of critical to closing the loop on all that? So it's very important to experience a win at some point. But one thing that a lot of people misperceive is that we should always celebrate our wins. The dopamine system is very good at predicting wins. And when it can predict wins, it's very important. a win if those wins come on a regular basis you start reducing the amount of dopamine that's released in response to those wins it seems a little counterintuitive but the casino owners understand this the pattern of reinforcement that works best in animals and humans is intermittent random reinforcement so One thing that you can do, and I suggest to people, is that if you are working hard at something or you're really pushing yourself, sometimes reward yourself, but occasionally delete the reward because it sets up, there's something called dopamine reward prediction error. Again, we probably don't have time to get into all the, it's a computational analysis of what keeps things, people and animals motivated to continue to pursue. And random intermittent reinforcement is the opposite. optimal schedule. Have you done an episode on that? Somewhat. I did an episode on dopamine, sort of a dopamine masterclass. We got into it, but I haven't really boiled it down to a specific protocol, but it would look something like this. You're in your 90 minute learning bout or work bout of any kind. You're doing your little gap learning things. And every once in a while, you look at the clock and go, Oh, I've made it 30 minutes without looking at my phone. You think, okay, that feels pretty good. Other times you might say, you know, okay, I made it to the 45 minute mark. I'm going to go get myself a nice cup of coffee. coffee. So you have a little bit of coffee. Other times you delete the coffee and you keep working. What you're doing is you're effectively taking that goal line and you're moving, you're catching little micro. wins it's sort of like a video game where you pick up little coins i'm an old school guy i don't play video games but the ones i did play like you pick up coins you might be powered like pac-man or there's like the super mario i'm truly old and out of it in respect to this so forgive me but what you're doing is you you're picking up additional lives or points, but occasionally you don't take anything. It keeps you in pursuit. Keep it guessing. Keep it guessing. Let's see, another way to do this is, I suggest people avoid layering dopamine. You know, you have one dopamine system that fortunately can be activated by a lot of different things. So for instance, I love the feeling of being completely rested, going into the gym or going for a run mid-morning after a cup of coffee, hydrating well, using the bathroom, listening to my favorite music on a sunny day. But that's a lot of things layering in for dopamine. And what happens is that if that becomes your hope and expectation, fine. But if that becomes your requirement for actually having a great run or workout, you're in trouble because the next day, time you're it's not gonna be that exciting and you're not gonna be that motivated you actually won't perform as well so this year what I've been doing is every third or fourth workout or so I think I randomly I leave my phone in the car I don't use any music and I don't allow myself any kind of pre-workout stimulant so I have to generate all the force and energy and everything I'm gonna do from internal processes and you might say well that's kind of masochistic why would you do that supposed to be fun well I'll tell you when the next time when you bring your headphones you're listening to music you feel like a god in there there what the written why because you are secreting so much more dopamine so much more noradrenaline so much more effective at performance but then the next time you have to throttle it back and so I'm excited by all the tools that are out there all the you know it there's all this like cognitive enhancement stuff and people are you know plugging into every device and they're trying to figure out do i have white noise in the background or metronomes and all that stuff but it's good to not layer in too many things um there are other examples of this where um are a little more unfortunate. Pornography is a really good example. There's a huge issue now, right? Because pornography is so much more readily available on the internet. Now let's just remove the kind of the moral judgments about it, right? Because that's not what this is about. A scientific discussion about this would say that there's an enormous availability and range of imagery that's very powerful that feeds directly into the dopamine system. And a lot of people, young people who are growing up watching a lot of intense pornography are suffering from a lot of sexual side effects and struggles of sexual interactions in real life because those interactions are not as intense as the things that they're seeing. The other thing that's happening, which I just mentioned, is that I've got colleagues that work on this in psychiatry, that they are wiring their nervous systems to become aroused viewing other people having sex as opposed to them having it. And so they're running into a lot of trouble there. So, yeah. what's happening is that dopamine levels are so high that real life circuit. It's like, it's like eating extremely palatable foods that are just blitzing your system. Every taste bud, high salt, high sugar, high fat to the point where it's just, and let's assume delicious. I don't generally like those kinds of foods, but, and then all of a sudden it's like, here's a bowl of rice or a, or a salad. It's going to taste like garbage to you because you're at first anyway. A poor night's sleep will almost always create brain fog, if not the first day, then the second day. Brain fog could be any number of things. It could be lack of adrenaline. Some people are just not engaged enough in what they're doing. It is amazing how we can be so excited and engaged in certain things and not in others, and feel so sleepy in certain environments, and then all of a sudden we're wide awake. um, I've lectured to many students that feel this way about my material. I know the feeling there's this, there's this, I won't go into the details, but there's this, this, uh, uh, office in Sydney. And whenever I walk into this place, I literally feel so tight. And, And it might just be the types of conversations that I'm usually having in this setting and I'm not fully engaged. But something triggers me in that environment where I just feel sleepy. Well, low oxygen turnover will definitely contribute. Slightly elevated temperature, low oxygen turnover, these kinds of things. This is the post-lunch lecture phenomenon. I don't lecture undergraduates anymore, but I used to look out. I would teach at night. I actually preferred to teach at night when I was teaching undergraduates because in the evening people are a little bit more conversational. So I do these nighttime lectures, 6 to 7.30 p.m. It was great. But there were always a couple of people just dozing. And I was a student that had a hard time staying awake in class. I think being stationary, just listening to the hum of a voice, the temperature's up a little bit, and next thing I know, it's like class is over. Some of the best sleep I ever got was in classes. But please don't sleep in classes if you can't avoid it. I think that being actively engaged, And material is very key. You know that I did an episode on ADHD, and one of the things I learned in researching that episode is that people who have ADHD actually have a remarkable ability to focus if they really like the activity, which tells you that the dopamine system, which is associated with really liking and pursuing something, is really key for attention. And no surprise, Ritalin and Adderall mainly work to increase attention and focus by increasing dopamine and adrenaline. So, you know, I think if we like a place and we like a topic and we care about it, we tend to be alert for it. And when we're not, we just kind of drift off, which is sort of a, of course, answer. Yeah, right. Like it's common sense. But it sounds like the most important part of hacking focus and attention is finding something that you enjoy doing. That's right. And I would say find something that you really enjoy doing and have a tool so that when you have to engage in things that you don't want to do. you know how to go forward center of mass anyway. Because I'm not saying that people should pursue things in life they hate. But one thing that I did when I was in school, for instance, there were a couple subjects that I really didn't like. And I would try and lie to myself and tell myself that I liked it. But then I decided, well, okay, adrenaline and dopamine. Are these alertness molecules and I'm just gonna think about how much I hate this topic and then I'm like Actively hate this not bored by about how much I actively hate this topic and all sudden you get this attentional engagement I was like, you know I'm gonna defeat this topic Just to prove like I'm gonna wrestle this topic to the ground And so then I was able to do it because I had to take the course and then what you find which is kind of Ironic is then if you do well enough on a particular subject, you're like I kind of like that topic, you know It's you because you've conquered something. So I think it's good to be to engage in things and find things that you really enjoy, leverage these dopamine systems. But look, there comes a time and place where you have to lean into effort that you simply did not choose. And that's part of becoming a functional adult, I think. And it's also something that Anna Lembke, when she came on my podcast, you know a lot of younger people these days are really focused on finding their passion and they're waiting for something that engages them so completely That everything seems very facile and they're just able to be forward center of mass all the time Sometimes you have to enter things through the back door and In order to feel really excited about something you have to feel as if you worked through that friction. That's an accomplishment in and of itself If you're on social media and you're scrolling and you don't even know why you're scrolling, like you don't even know what you're looking for, your dopamine system has been tapped out and you need to take a break from it. Maybe a couple hours, maybe a couple of days. I think social media is great. I teach science on social media. I see you all the time on social media. You know, there's a lot of great social interaction. There's a lot of opportunity to learn and see things. Some are funny, some are interesting, some are disturbing. But when you're at the point where you're engaging in something and you don't even know what the win is, but you find yourself reflexively engaging in it, your dopamine system is now plummeting. And that's a serious issue. So the other thing is that a picture is worth a thousand words and a movie is worth a thousand pictures. Our visual system is so tuned. to watch motion and to see movies. So you're seeing movie after movie, after movie, after movie. What's happening is the context is switching constantly. The human brain has never been confronted with context switching at this rate. You know, television, you know, went from, you know, six channels to 12 to 200. But this is the first time that you can walk around with your television. You can have it in your car. You can have it on the phone, excuse me, on the plane. So I use social media and the internet a lot. Unlike email or reading an article online, social media is, you know, you can scroll through a thousand different or a hundred different contexts within five minutes. And that's a big override for the brain. And then the rest of the world seems kind of boring. Like, you know, you see people at dinner scrolling their phone. It's because actually the brain wants novelty. It's seeking novelty all the time. These days I'm turning off my phone in the evenings. I'm sort of, I'm on there a little bit, but I'm finding I'm kind of sick of the phone. I think a lot of people are kind of hitting this point. point where they're like, ah, I'll get on social media for an hour or two a day, but this is getting a little pointless. Yeah. But you're right. It has its place, but it's nice to be able to connect how you're engaging with it, using it and your feelings with the science. Cause then all of a sudden it's, you're in control. Yeah. And I use the phone. I try and not look at my phone for the first hour that I'm up. Usually I only make it about 30 minutes while I go do my walk. Um, I want to download whatever process, you know, processing I did in sleep and write a few things down. the phone isn't sinister it's our overuse of it and sinister it's like calories aren't bad it's over overindulgence and calories is bad it's it's not complicated but I think that knowing that the the dopamine system is what got you started with the phone but the reason you scroll is not for more dopamine it's because you are you're it's because you're seeking that big dopamine peak you don't it's subconscious but that the amount of dopamine that you're getting from any individual post and then it's more about just trying to get back to base baseline. So I say, so when you, at first, any activity that's fun, you get this huge peak and then a trough, and then it comes back to baseline. But if you engage in that activity too often, the way that the dopamine system is arranged is eventually you're just engaging in that activity to just be okay. You're just fighting for normal, fighting for neutral, as I call it. And that's addiction. That's compulsive use of something in order to just feel okay. That's not pleasure. The most important thing to understand is that for most adults, so that is people about age 18 to 20 and older, Daily caffeine consumption is not going to be a problem provided it does not induce anxiety and certainly provided that it not induce anxiety or panic attacks and provided that it does not disrupt your nighttime sleep. This is why I always recommend that if you are going to consume caffeine in any form, coffee, tea, soda, or otherwise, that you try not to ingest caffeine within the eight and ideally within the 10 or even 12 hours prior to bed. bedtime. That's because the half-life of caffeine is such that even if you are able to, for instance, have a cup of coffee around 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. and then fall asleep around midnight, the architecture of the sleep that you get is going to be disrupted. For instance, it is very important that you get sufficient amounts of both slow-wave deep sleep as well as rapid eye movement sleep each night. And if you consume caffeine too close to bedtime, and here I'm defining too close as anywhere from before going to sleep, chances are you're not going to get as much rapid eye movement sleep or slow wave sleep that you would otherwise. And it is the amount of rapid eye movement sleep and slow wave sleep that together lead to whether or not you feel you had a good night's sleep in terms of your next day alertness and cognitive abilities. Now, again, some people may find that they can drink caffeine in the late afternoon, maybe even at night and still fall asleep. But I promise you, even if you're in that category, you will sleep far better meaning the architecture of your sleep will be better and you will feel far more rested the next day if you abstain from caffeine within the eight to 12 hours prior to bedtime. And I should also say that none of us are perfect, myself included. I will sometimes have a cup of coffee in the late afternoon and sometimes that will cause me to stay up a little bit later. Sometimes it won't. I don't think you want to obsess or worry too much about having some caffeine every once in a while in the late afternoon if you are still able to fall asleep, but don't make it a regular habit. That was. As far as we know, there is no drawback to consuming caffeine on a daily basis, again, provided it does not disrupt your nighttime sleep, and provided that it does not induce anxiety. In fact, most of the world consumes caffeine every single day. The current estimates are that 90%, that's right, 9-0, 90% of adults throughout the world consume a caffeinated beverage every single day. That's a staggeringly high number, making caffeine the most popular drug on the planet. In fact, because of the way that caffeine works, and just to remind you how it works, it effectively blocks adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a molecule that builds up in your brain and body more and more. According to how long you've been awake, it makes you feel sleepy. Caffeine blocks the adenosine receptor. And then when it is dislodged from that receptor, whatever adenosine has built up and is around can then bind to the adenosine receptor and makes you feel very sleepy. That's the caffeine. crash. So if 90% of the adult population of the planet Earth is consuming caffeine every day, that means 90% of the adult population of planet Earth is blocking their adenosine receptors for some portion of their daily life, and then their adenosine is binding to the vacant receptor once the caffeine has dislodged. And why are 90% of adult humans consuming caffeine every day? Well, to feel more energized, more focused, to have more both cognitive energy and physical energy. Now, of course, most people are not walking around thinking, oh, caffeine gives me more energy, more focus, et cetera. Most people are consuming caffeine every single day and are consuming caffeine every single day in order to feel, quote unquote, normal, to be at their baseline level of cognitive ability and physical energy and so on. In fact, if you look at the data on caffeine consumption, what you'll find is that caffeine actually is a cognitive enhancer. It can improve learning and memory, it can increase physical energy, it can increase mental and physical stamina. But a feature of those studies that's not often discussed but that was however discussed in the full episode on caffeine is that studies of caffeine typically are done by taking chronic caffeine users and then having them abstain from caffeine for some period of time usually four days to two weeks in which time they undergo caffeine withdrawal they do not feel well they get foggy headed they have less energy there's some malaise sometimes even some mild depression And then what they do is they have people take caffeine and take a cognitive exam. exam or do some physical activity and compare their performance to what it was when they were in the withdrawal state. Another typical form of study on caffeine is to take people who are naive to caffeine or who never take caffeine and then have them ingest caffeine and then measure their cognitive and or physical performance. And in both cases, you see improvements. What I'm saying here is that daily caffeine consumption is not going to lead to improvements in cognitive ability or improvements in physical ability above one's baseline unless you either abstain from caffeine for some period of time, typically four days to two weeks prior. or you are not somebody who typically ingests caffeine. In other words, 90% of the world's population is drinking caffeine on a daily basis to be at their normal level of mental and physical functioning. I would say that if you are going to drink your caffeine, drink it in the early part of the day. As I mentioned earlier, I am a big proponent of delaying your first caffeine intake until at least 90 minutes after waking in order to avoid the afternoon crash. I've talked a lot about this on the podcast. There are a lot of clips on the internet. explaining the rationale behind that. And if you do experience an afternoon crash in energy, I do recommend delaying your morning caffeine intake to 90 to 120 minutes after waking. Now, for people that want to get more of a true cognitive enhancing and... performance enhancing effect from caffeine, again, you're going to have to abstain from caffeine for about four days. For regular caffeine drinkers, that's going to be difficult, right? That is going to lead to headaches. That's going to lead to brain fog. That's going to lead to feelings of malaise. In fact, the last time I took four days off or even a week off from caffeine consumption was when I was sick. I don't get sick very often, but when I am sick, I generally abstain from caffeine. And sometimes I wonder whether or not the malaise I feel from whatever, you know, you know, viral or bacterial thing I might be dealing with when I'm sick is in part the malaise of caffeine withdrawal. I certainly notice I feel much better when I return to drinking caffeine, but that tends to coincide with feeling relief from whatever sinus symptoms and other symptoms I might've been experiencing from the illness. So it's not a good experiment. I can't tease apart those variables. So the short answer is for most adults, there does not seem to be any major downside to consuming caffeine. And there have been scattered reports here and there in humans showing that ingesting caffeine can increase dopamine receptors, which will effectively allow you to get more out of the dopamine that you produce. This is why caffeine has a mood elevating as well as energy elevating effect. I should point out that some people just cannot tolerate caffeine. It makes them too jittery, too anxious. They start sweating. They get heart palpitations. It's very hard for these people to build up a tolerance to caffeine that allows them to enjoy it. These are the people that can even feel a fluttering of the heart and a lot of energy lift from decaf coffee, something that we to me is just a foreign concept, but some people are just that sensitive to caffeine that even the small amounts of caffeine in chocolate or decaf coffee make them feel too alert. And they should abstain from caffeine. I don't think they are in any way harming their health by abstaining from caffeine. I'm getting back to the original question about daily caffeine consumption. This person goes on to say that for them, okay, this is their personal experience, after a few weeks of consumption of daily caffeine, the negatives start to outweigh the positive ones. They're getting poor quality sleep, lack of appetite, anxiety, et cetera. And when they don't consume caffeine, they find it a lot easier to be mindful and their meditation practice is much better, but they're lethargic and less motivated. Okay, so what they're describing are all the classic symptoms of caffeine overuse, probably not abuse in this case. although caffeine can be truly abused, people taking caffeine pills, et cetera, in large quantities. We're not talking about that, but this person is describing the classic pattern of overuse of caffeine and the classic pattern of withdrawal from caffeine when they stop taking it. So what should somebody like this do? And I think that's an important question to answer because I think a lot of people fall into this category. they drink caffeine every day. They're no longer getting the performance enhancing effect of caffeine, so they're taking it just to be normal or feel like they can focus normally and have normal amounts of energy. But then if they try and come off, they feel worse. Okay, there are a couple of ways to do this. can taper your caffeine intake off over the course of four to seven days. But most people don't have the discipline or don't want to spend the time doing that. But if you want to, the way you would do that is you would cut it by about 10 or 15% per day. You could do that by volume, or you could do that by concentration of coffee, that sort of thing. A simpler way to go about all this that still will allow you to get some of the performance enhancing effects of caffeine and yet experience far less withdrawal would be two things. First of all, just have your amount of caffeine intake for two or three days. So again, that could be by volume or it could be by concentration, probably easiest to do by volume. And so instead of drinking an eight ounce coffee in the morning, maybe you do four ounces of regular coffee, four ounce. as a decaf, or you just have the four ounces of coffee. You do that for three or four days, and then you take perhaps one full day off from caffeine, maybe another full day off. You're going to feel a lot less bad on those two days, having cut your caffeine intake in half on the previous four days than you would if you just went cold turkey. And then you go back to ingesting caffeine, but you go back to ingesting caffeine at that 50% dose, or what used to represent that 50% dose of caffeine. for you and you just continue that way on a daily basis. And then every once in a while, when you want the performance enhancing effects of caffeine, you go back to what was your original dose, which is now double what you're taking on a daily basis. So what we're really talking about here is not going cold turkey. We're not talking about quitting caffeine indefinitely. What we're talking about is cutting the amount of caffeine that you drink in half for about four days, okay, plus or minus a day, and then taking two days off from caffeine completely. And then and then going back on that half dose of caffeine indefinitely. That's your new baseline of caffeine intake. And then every once in a while, if you need a bit more of a lift, you ingest twice as much caffeine or a coffee that's twice as concentrated. We should acknowledge that most people aren't going to be really precise about the amount of ounces and the amount of caffeine. Nonetheless, it's pretty straightforward to know that you're reducing your caffeine intake. It certainly is clear to know if you're ingesting no caffeine for a couple of days. And it's pretty clear when you're doubling the amount of caffeine. And. but you don't have to worry so much that you're exactly doubling the amount of caffeine. You could drink one and a half times as much as you happen to drink on the day before, or you could drink three times as much. You would definitely feel it if you drink three times as much. One very important thing to recognize is that on any day where you really spike your caffeine intake above baseline, no matter where that baseline is when you start, could be zero, could be 400 milligrams, could be 200 milligrams. When you double that intake, you will get a big boost of energy. And the next day? you're going to feel the crash from that you're going to feel more lethargic you're going to feel not so good this has to do with dopamine receptor modulation this has to do with adenosine receptor modulation the important thing to do is not continue to consume that elevated level of caffeine which is what most people do and then they set a new higher baseline just to feel normal the key thing is to just manage to get through that crash day manage to get through that one day where you feel a little less good or maybe even down a bit get outside a bit get some more sunshine we know that spikes your cortisol in a good way It can increase the catecholamines, dopamine, et cetera. Get a little bit more sunlight, get a little bit more movement, get outside, do something to offset those feelings of malaise, and then get right back to your original goal level of caffeine each day. There's no use in getting so quantitative that you make your life miserable, measuring things out like a laboratory chemist. If you're that type and you wanna do that, be my guest. But unless you're taking caffeine in pill form, it's very, very hard to get extremely exact about the amounts of caffeine that you're ingesting. So it is a- It's okay to eyeball it, but understand the contour of how caffeine works and what the caffeine performance enhancing effect comes from. It comes from a caffeine intake above baseline. Understand that anytime you go above baseline with your caffeine intake, there's the potential of some anxiety. Understand that there's going to be a slight withdrawal effect that lasts about 24 to 48 hours. Battle through that short period, and you'll be right back where you started and where you need to be so that you can enjoy caffeine on a daily basis and derive the benefits because there are many benefits to drinking caffeine and avoiding some of the potential hazards. Learning is a two-stage process and the learning I'm referring to is specifically deliberate learning. You know, children are learning passively all the time. They're taking in new information. Their brain is, it's not a complete tabula rasa. It's not a complete blank slate. There's some hardwired functions they show up with, thank goodness, like breathing, like heart rate, heart controlling heart rate, but that helps. I mean, you know, offload as much as you can to the genetic program to hardwire the nervous system so they can learn how to walk. And walking is a good example of a A kid learns how to walk and then walks reflexively. But of course, at any stage, you can think about how you're walking. You can do hopscotch and you have to change your cadence of jumping and walking, right? So that's this flexible transition between voluntary and involuntary movement. But you have to learn how to walk. But what we're talking about now is generally deliberate learning, language learning, skill learning, learning knowledge of any kind, learning how to... You know, navigate the emotional dynamics of a relationship, anything. Two phases. One is active engagement and focus. Much of the trigger for neuroplasticity as a process is... engaged by dopamine and norepinephrine and a molecule called acetylcholine, which is liberated from multiple sources. We always talked about how acetylcholine controls the contraction of muscles, but in the brain, acetylcholine mainly comes from two sets of neurons, one in the brainstem and another in the basal forebrain. And it serves as a kind of a highlighter, marking particular connections or neurons that later stand a chance to become stronger. So let me give an example. I don't speak a second language, but let's say I decide I was going to learn conversational French. I would learn some nouns or some verbs. I would focus on this and the greater degree of focus that I bring, the greater amount of acetylcholine is released at that time. And at the particular locations in the brain, they're involved in enunciating the words and writing the comprehension, you know, multiple spots within the brain. That kind of marks those or flags those areas as potentially changing later. But the actual rewiring of the nervous system happens during states of deep sleep or sleep-like states. And so when we say neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience, that's a two-part process. It's a process, it's not an event. We always think about things as events, but in biology, almost everything is a process. So the takeaway from this is in order to learn at any age, the most critical thing is that you bring as much focus and active engagement to the learning, the encoding of the information, bringing in the information. And then that you get into a state of deep rest as quickly as possible. Typically, that would be the night after you learn, after you have this trigger. But there are some beautiful studies published in Cell Reports last year and the year before showing that people who take a 20-minute nap within the four hours after these triggering learning or people that do a non-sleep deep rest type protocol, even just sitting there quietly and not doing anything, they learn much faster. In other words, the brain rewires much faster. That's interesting. It's very interesting in what's happening. It's very interesting. We've long known that during sleep, there's a replay of the neurons in the same sequence that they were played during the activity earlier in that day. Sometimes even backwards for some reason. It's like the songs played backwards at night. Who knows why? I don't think we should focus too much on that right now. But that replay is the consolidation of the information you learn. This is why you try something physically, try it physically. You can't do it, you can't do it, and then you come back a week later. voila you can do it you had the opportunity to change the neural circuits so that now you can do it the these non-sleep deep rest or these shallow naps of 20 to 30 minutes also create a replay or a firing of the neurons but there's an additional tool so so what sorry i should say there's a tool which is get as focused as you can but then relax as deep that the expectation is that you're going to be like a beam of focus for 90 minutes that's not the case you can flicker in and out you're going to get distracted you bring yourself back i mean focus is an active process of bringing that spotlight of attention back it's much easier without the phone much easier without the phone much easier using a program called freedom free program online we can just turn off the internet It's, I'll tell you, it's very painful as you know, and yet there's something deeply satisfying about completing one of these 90 minute bouts. You really feel good in your brain and body because we were actually designed to do this. It definitely feels like a grind at some stage. Oh yeah. And that friction and that anxiety sometimes that we feel is adrenaline. It's supposed to be stressful to learn. This idea that we just sit back and learn, or that, you know, movies have really destroyed the notion of learning. The idea that you're going to pick up the sword and suddenly have the skills. Forget it. It doesn't work that way. I mean, it's friction, And some days are good and some days are worse. If you slept better, generally it's better. People are always trying to optimize how much caffeine, background noise, yes noise, yes music, no music. You have to tweak things according to your circumstances. But you, after about 90 minutes, you should really take a break and let your mind go idle somewhat. Ideally, you would take a 20-minute nap or a 30-minute nap or do a non-sleep deep rest protocol within the first hour to four hours after that. But a lot of us have a lot of demands. You go straight from a 90-minute. bout to commuting sleep that you get that night is going to be the most powerful tool for wiring the nervous system right that's that's when it really happens so we can talk about tools to to get into deep sleep and stay asleep more if you like but there's another thing that you can do which is that there's a beautiful literature on what's called gap learning effects where let's say and this has been looked at for physical skill learning for music learning math etc where if every couple of minutes just randomly during your intense learning or focus, you pause and you just take 10 seconds and do nothing. Just let your brain idle. Eyes open or eyes closed, doesn't matter. What happens is your rates of learning actually increase. And the reason is now they've done neuroimaging on this. Really excellent studies published in great journals show that during those little gaps that you're taking, there's a replay of the neurons very fast at something like 10 or 20x the speed. Normally they would be rehearsing it. So you're getting more repetitions during the, by, by stopping every once in a while. Now you actually have to do the work. Um, and how many of these to insert and it should be random. So there are some free apps out there where you can set like a random buzzer or just every once in a while while you're writing or trying to do something, you just pause and do nothing. Where was that tool when I was going through school? Yeah, exactly. And I think that the, the science on this dates back about 20 years, but it's only now that there's an it. Enough of what I call a kind of center of mass around these studies that really point to the fact that gap learning effects are really strong. They're very beneficial. You learn faster. So it's focus, rest, focus, rest, focus, rest. And that can be done on the micro level, like within that 90 minute block. Let's just make up a number for fun. So people have something to anchor to. If you're going to sit down and do an hour of work, let's say for every 60 minutes of focus or learning that you try and do, introduce 30 gaps of 10 seconds at random. and truly at random, not on a regular interval. And then sometime later that day, if you can, do an NSDR, non-sleep deep breath. And if you can't, okay, no big deal. You won't learn as fast, but you'll still learn, provided that you get into deep sleep that night. And let's say you have a lousy night's sleep. You'll still learn, but you won't learn as well. And maybe the next night you stand a chance of encoding that information. So neuroplasticity involves a very strong trigger, and then deep relaxation is when the actual rewiring occurs. And there are exceptions to this, but I should just mention, because it brings us back to an earlier point, that when you think about the tools that people use to enhance focus, Ritalin, Adderall, L-tyrosine, excessive amounts of caffeine, nicotine, those all help with the trigger part, but they don't help with the relaxation part. And so a lot of people don't learn. They just get really good at doing, but they don't actually learn. So very effective people, regardless of workplace or activity. sport or cognitive work or otherwise perform very well because they're very good at regulating the seesaw of focus relax focus relax and in the long term it also is very health enhancing as opposed to health depleting i mean i know a dozen or more people who have done very very well in business or academia who are a mess they i mean they they're physically a mess they're emotionally a mess they're mentally a mess their relationships are a mess people that i you you know consider successful are people that are very successful in multiple domains of life and that almost always correlates with an ability to engage and disengage deliberately engage and thank you um matthew walker and others who have emphasized the importance of sleep you know i mean matthew it was really kind of first man in on trying to convince the world that this whole idea of you'll sleep when you're dead is really foolish and listen i think It's a fact that in order to get good at anything, unless you're just an absolute talent, you need to apply yourself and work hard. And sometimes work longer and harder than you feel like working or is healthy for yourself. And that's a reality. But Matt, I think, really pointed out that sleep is important for learning and a number of other aspects of health. I think that the ability to toggle back and forth between the engaged and disengaged states. And to see that whole process, engage and disengage in the dynamic control of that and deliberate self-control of that. That is a superpower and we tend to only look at one side of the equation, the leaning in. I always think, the way I like to think of it isn't so much as a seesaw is you can either be back on your heels, flat-footed or forward center of mass. I stole this from Pat Doss, the founder of MadeForce, did nine years in the SEAL teams and so I like that. That forward center of mass is great but it's energetically demanding and you need to learn how To just, you know, flat footed every once in a while. Now, when you're back on your heels, that's a sign that likely you were doing too much time forward center of mass. No one wants to talk about this, but people who grind, grind, grind rarely succeed and then just take, you know, take off and do something else. I think people, humans have mastered this process of engaging and disengaging on a. longer time scale work hard play hard or they'll take a long vacation but what I'm talking about doing this is across the day I'm talking about regulating your nervous system within the unit of the day or even within the unit of the morning or within the unit of the afternoon and I think that that's a much more useful at least to me a much more useful time bin to conceptualize this because the idea that you're gonna you know sell the company or launch the thing and then then you'll rest okay but you can be so much more effective if you know how to dynamically control your nervous system in real time and great athletes know how to do this great musicians know how to do this even within the playing of a piece of music or within a race they know how to reserve energy so that then they can kick at the end or in academics you learn i was always on the quarter system which is a 10-week system you learn how to pace yourself through the quarter because otherwise you're coming in screeching at the end And you then to get two weeks off and it's really stressful. You're just trying to recover your health and then you're back into another cycle So I think one of the reasons that I'm not superb at this but one of the reasons I've been you know, at least partially successful in maintaining a Laboratory and doing a podcast and you know, I like to think you can ask the people in my life You know decent, you know a decently effective in my personal life is that I think all the time am I pushing too hard? You know, yes or no And there are times to lean, go forward center of mass, don't get me wrong, but this can be done with forward center of mass can be done if you wanted through drinking caffeine, you know, in the supplements that we talked about earlier, pharmacology we talked about earlier. The main way to do it is to get in that kind of inspired and motivated pursuit. But then physiological size, non-sleep deep rest, reverie, all of that is very useful. But the foundation of that whole process, there's a third layer, which is sleep. when you're well rested you're able to engage this forward center of mass flat footed thing at will much more easily when sleep suffers everything suffers and so i always say when people are say come to me and they say listen i i think i have attention deficit or i've got anxiety i always just say how's your sleep you want to always start with sleep great sleep makes everything better and then once that's in place then you can start thinking about some of that Great sleep to me is you fall asleep relatively easily. You wake up no more than once. It's actually pretty normal to wake up once in the middle of the night and go use the restroom and go back to sleep. Because a lot of people freak out when they wake up and they're like, oh, my sleep's messed up or their whoop score, their aura score is off. And, you know, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I mean, ideally you don't, but, you know, a lot of people have what's called nocturia, which is nighttime need to urinate. So it happens. A couple of things that the path to a really great night's sleep starts in the morning. I've talked about this a lot, but I'll say it again. Wake up. If you want to be alert, get as much bright light in your eyes as you can. Never look at any light that's so bright that it's painful to look at because it can damage the eyes, but ideally sunlight. So if you wake up at 4 a.m. and the sun isn't out, turn on bright lights if you want to be awake. But if the sun is out, and once the sun is out, go outside without sunglasses. And yes, you have to go outside. You can't do this through a window or through a window. car windshield and get some bright light in your eyes. It doesn't have to be beaming directly at you, but indirectly or in the general direction of the sun is good. Wearing corrective lenses or contacts is fine, even if they have UV filters. That light can get to the neurons in the eye that trigger a whole set of processes. It sets in motion a big increase in cortisol, but it's a healthy increase that leads to alertness. Triggers an increase in body temperature, which is important for waking up. There's a whole set of processes there. And it sets a timer on melatonin release so that about 16 hours later your melatonin is going to go. How long to view light? Well, anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes depending on how bright it is. If you wake up and you go outside and it's 9 a.m. and it's beaming bright light and you're on a snow field, it'll probably take... 30 seconds. If you're in the depths of, you know, UK winter and you go outside and there's a lot of cloud cover, maybe 20 minutes. You can check your phone out there. You can do things out. You can take your coffee out there, but you have to get outside. The window filtration is a serious issue. Do you do that every day? I do it every day. Every day. And I don't get enough sun off my porch behind us. So I will walk up the street. My neighbor's on, you know, there and I walk up there with my coffee. I often bring my journal and just kind of write down whatever comes to mind. Get some sun in my eyes. My partner and I will walk up there and we'll just chat and you know and then we'll come back and you do that most days. If you miss a day no big deal. If you miss two days you're starting to drift and when I say drift I mean that these neurochemical systems are going to start to to to get out of sync with the daylight cycle. Shift workers is a whole other business. We don't have time. I did an episode on shift work. People can find that on a website because it's very particular to shift work and jet lag but that morning light pulse is I say light pulse light viewing is immensely important a drift in cortisol peak toward the later day is a signature of depression and waking up at 3 4 in the morning signature of depression drift in cortisol so you'll you'll get that drift if you don't get that light exposure early in the morning that's right and and so you're you're gonna get a pulse in a big increase in cortisol at some point every 24 hours you want that to be early in the day and when you want to be alert now some people wake up at 10 a.m. Right, I've got a friend who's, I consider, you know, he's kind of a mentee of mine and he likes to sleep in. He's a teenager. He sleeps in. So he's going to wake up at 10, but then he goes outside and he gets his sunlight. If you wake up at 5, again, if the sun isn't out, turn on as many bright lights as possible and then go outside once the sun is out. Why? Because early in the day you need a lot of bright light in order to trigger this mechanism. Now, the second tool is that later in the day, as the sun is heading down, it doesn't have to just be crossing the horizon. You also want to get light into your eyes for the following reason. It adjusts the sensitivity of what we call the retinal photoreceptors, the cells in the eye that detect light, and makes it such that nighttime light that you're going to get at 8 or 9 p.m. won't have as severe an effect on reducing melatonin. So I consider it kind of your Netflix in the oculation. Because when you're viewing screens at night, unless you have built your house so that all the lights are red lights and they're really dim, Most people use artificial light and that can mess up sleep. So if you're really extreme about it, you make your house a cave at night. I don't do that. I tend to dim the lights. I don't like bright lights after about 7 or 8 p.m. But getting that afternoon light is great because it sends two signals to your brain and body about where you are in time, meaning time is the rotation of the earth. So you get your cortisol pulse early, melatonin comes on. People who start waking up. late or super early and they spend all their time on their phone, it's not enough light to trigger these mechanisms early in the day. But at night, retinal sensitivity is such that if you are looking at your phone on full screen brightness or you have a lot of artificial lights on, you're going to suppress melatonin and you start disrupting these mechanisms. So bright light early, bright light in the afternoon, minimize bright light exposure in the evening, all colors and flavors of light. It's not just blue light. This has got to be responsible for a lot of sleep issues. A ton of sleep issues. A lot of people have written to me. I would say thousands of people have written to me and said, I get morning sunlight every morning as best I can, 10 to 30 minutes, and my sleep issues are resolved. Now, some people do that and their sleep issues are not still resolved. I would say, then you look to how late in the day are they ingesting caffeine? Do they have a kind of rumination issue? Are they eating enough? I mean, one thing that It is not commonly discussed is that in order to sleep well, you have to eat enough. Not necessarily right before sleep, and nowadays there's a big movement towards don't eat within two hours of sleep. And I think it's generally a good idea. Sometimes I obey that, sometimes I don't. But if you don't have enough starch in your system, sorry low-carb keto people, but if you're going to have sleep issues unless you do other things to offset that. Because starches and the whole association with the tryptophan system and the serotonin system are part of the calming system. There's a reason why we reach for certain... So-called comfort foods when we're stressed is because they increase the release of serotonin and they blunt cortisol So if you're just a bag of cortisol and adrenaline and you're fasting a long period of time It's very hard to get quality sleep now And I think intermittent fasting is terrific such in panda who really is the one that kind of popularized this at the scientific level Anyway is a friend and colleague of mine does beautiful work But you know you need to Figure out how much to eat and when to eat and what to eat in a way that still allows you to transition asleep So I'd say the light viewing early, the light viewing in the afternoon, avoid bright lights of all colors. Blue blockers are fine if you like them, but it's not just blue light that can mess up these circadian clock systems. Any bright light, any bright light will do that because of the spectrum of wavelengths of light that the neurons that are responsible for this response.

What you're doing is you're using top-down control to say, oh the fatigue I feel, I'm gonna override that fatigue. And much of what's online is how you override that fatigue. that lack of motivation. And some people say, well, you got to do it out of love.

And then other people say you do it out of anger. And it doesn't matter. These top-down mechanisms are very subjective.

If you are going to do it because you really care about the person that you're going to pick up at the airport and you got to get up early, well. that's one mechanism if you're going to do it because um you're a person of your word and you said you're going to be there and you do it you know the the just do it mantra is top-down control okay now just the top-down control is also involved in controlling reflexes. The desire to consume something that isn't good for you, you can resist that desire through top-down control.

The more rested you are generally, the easier it is to engage top-down control. So when I look at people, like I don't know Ronda Rousey, I don't know too much of her story, but I do know David. He's been to my lab and I endorsed his book and I'm obviously super impressive.

David Goggins needs no introduction. Super impressive and I think one of the many important things that David stands for is the ability to override limbic friction. to talk to him to convince himself to do it anyway and there are others uh that do this i've talked about this as well that is top-down control and what they've what he's done if i may i don't i've never uh i've never actually figured this out conclusively but i have a strong sense that what he's done is he's somehow gotten very familiar with the narrative of friction or the experience of friction and the narrative of overriding friction and he knows that a win is coming later and So what happens is if you know that that? Overriding limbic friction is going to create a win down the line that win could be a sense of accomplishment that you come conquered something in this limbic friction.

So you need to know what that accomplishment looks like. You need to experience, it helps to know what the win feels like, yes. And what you can do is you can start to thread back that dopamine from the future.

to the idea by getting out of bed I'm already starting to experience the wind you can anticipate the wind now there's actually a paper that was just published on this as a good timing for this question which is that really points to the fact that delayed gratification is controlled by dopamine and it's a somewhat complex paper so i don't want to get into the details but what it shows is that if you know that by delaying gratification you are going to it's worthwhile you start to achieve that dopamine increase earlier so delayed gratification is as it sounds is you know resisting The chocolate bar. The urge, resisting the chocolate bar or resisting the staying in bed or whatever it happens to be. But that itself can start to evoke dopamine release. Now, I'm not David Goggins, obviously.

I never will be. But the way he describes his process is a little bit different, I think, than just pure like, oh, I feel great doing it. He talks a lot of times about how it's very, very challenging for him.

But when you talk to people who are very good at overriding limbic friction, you start to get the sense that even if it's very challenging for them to do, that they understand the great reward that's gonna come later. And I think for a lot of people, the challenge is they haven't experienced or they can't see the win and experience the win. And so it's very hard for them to override limbic friction.

And I'm not talking about limbic friction as this mild little thing. Limbic friction, it's like a booming voice throughout your brain and body of stay in bed, sleep is important. I heard on the podcast, sleep is important, stay in bed.

bed and to override that requires an immense amount of what we call willpower but willpower is top-down control it kind of is also going against what was required of us as a species like instant gratification in many ways is a survival mechanism right yeah i mean if you could get all your sustenance without having to venture out too far why would you go any further Now the evolution, the forward evolution of culture in our species and individuals has been created by people that were willing to push out further and further. I mean right now we talk a lot about Elon, right? He's the one that's sort of like, well, why limit yourself to Earth? you know, which is a cool concept.

But this exists in every domain, as you know. Rich Rollhart, good friend. You know, anytime we overcome doubt, challenge, internal doubt and challenge, we're engaging these mechanisms. It's a vital part of our individual development. Would you say it's a skill?

Absolutely. It's a skill and there's neuroplasticity in this circuit. That's the thing that's often not discussed is that the ability to focus is enhanced by forcing yourself to focus. The ability to sleep is enhanced by getting better at relaxing and turning off thoughts.

And the ability to override limbic friction can only be created. One of two ways. One is to increase your overall levels of alertness through dopamine and norepinephrine.

That's why people take Adderall and Ritalin, drink caffeine, smoke nicotine in order to get more alert. They're trying, they're biologically hacking their way into the system. I think it's beautiful when people can psychologically, I would say, I always imagine scruffing myself, you know, like you'd scruff an animal or you'd scruff, you know, scruffing myself and forcing myself into it.

Because for me, it helps to third person myself too. It's very hard as it. as the you know the way the brain is and the way we identify as individuals i'm not going to refer to myself in the third person um i will not do that there's there's a name for that in psychology i won't mention it in clinical psychiatry um we had a bit of a joke before it starts with an n yeah um um it starts with an n and ends with an m um or yeah or anyway narcissists generally talk about themselves in the third person it's hilarious right because they they think so much of themselves that they talk about themselves in the third person revealing that the micro squishy inner ego of the narcissist but but what i'm talking about is third person in oneself in service to to overriding limbic friction and sometimes we we have this narrative that's so closely tied to our immediate state that we have a hard time forcing ourselves into some other action and so it can be very helpful to take on a view of yourself that's living in anticipation of the future state that you're going to be in like successfully getting out of bed in the morning i did this this morning um we just i last night i said let's um my partner i said let's go jump in the ocean tomorrow morning we got up and it was raining it kind of like the smallest matter very misty today i was like oh god it's gonna be cold and then we're driving down there and i didn't tell her because i didn't i didn't want her to know what i was thinking i hate getting in the ocean when it's cold i absolutely hate it but then we got and actually the water was just a little bit warmer than the external environment it was beautiful we had the best the best ocean dip in the morning and then a sauna afterwards and it was it was wonderful i've been feeling great all day as a consequence but you know it took a little bit of override that's a mild recreational example but i think that If we can start to see these reward systems and top-down control as things that we can modulate in real-time, and use it sparingly. I'm not suggesting people do this for everything, right? It can be very exhausting to scruff yourself into the best action all the time.

But look, I mean, people are recovering from addiction. They have to do this. It's a process from morning till night.

How important is tying that to sort of bed down these neural systems, this rewiring you're talking about? How important is tying that to some sense of satisfaction or celebrating? You mentioned sort of achievement earlier.

Is that sort of critical to closing the loop on all that? So it's very important to experience a win at some point. But one thing that a lot of people misperceive is that we should always celebrate our wins. The dopamine system is very good at predicting wins. And when it can predict wins, it's very important.

a win if those wins come on a regular basis you start reducing the amount of dopamine that's released in response to those wins it seems a little counterintuitive but the casino owners understand this the pattern of reinforcement that works best in animals and humans is intermittent random reinforcement so One thing that you can do, and I suggest to people, is that if you are working hard at something or you're really pushing yourself, sometimes reward yourself, but occasionally delete the reward because it sets up, there's something called dopamine reward prediction error. Again, we probably don't have time to get into all the, it's a computational analysis of what keeps things, people and animals motivated to continue to pursue. And random intermittent reinforcement is the opposite. optimal schedule. Have you done an episode on that?

Somewhat. I did an episode on dopamine, sort of a dopamine masterclass. We got into it, but I haven't really boiled it down to a specific protocol, but it would look something like this. You're in your 90 minute learning bout or work bout of any kind. You're doing your little gap learning things.

And every once in a while, you look at the clock and go, Oh, I've made it 30 minutes without looking at my phone. You think, okay, that feels pretty good. Other times you might say, you know, okay, I made it to the 45 minute mark.

I'm going to go get myself a nice cup of coffee. coffee. So you have a little bit of coffee. Other times you delete the coffee and you keep working.

What you're doing is you're effectively taking that goal line and you're moving, you're catching little micro. wins it's sort of like a video game where you pick up little coins i'm an old school guy i don't play video games but the ones i did play like you pick up coins you might be powered like pac-man or there's like the super mario i'm truly old and out of it in respect to this so forgive me but what you're doing is you you're picking up additional lives or points, but occasionally you don't take anything. It keeps you in pursuit. Keep it guessing.

Keep it guessing. Let's see, another way to do this is, I suggest people avoid layering dopamine. You know, you have one dopamine system that fortunately can be activated by a lot of different things. So for instance, I love the feeling of being completely rested, going into the gym or going for a run mid-morning after a cup of coffee, hydrating well, using the bathroom, listening to my favorite music on a sunny day.

But that's a lot of things layering in for dopamine. And what happens is that if that becomes your hope and expectation, fine. But if that becomes your requirement for actually having a great run or workout, you're in trouble because the next day, time you're it's not gonna be that exciting and you're not gonna be that motivated you actually won't perform as well so this year what I've been doing is every third or fourth workout or so I think I randomly I leave my phone in the car I don't use any music and I don't allow myself any kind of pre-workout stimulant so I have to generate all the force and energy and everything I'm gonna do from internal processes and you might say well that's kind of masochistic why would you do that supposed to be fun well I'll tell you when the next time when you bring your headphones you're listening to music you feel like a god in there there what the written why because you are secreting so much more dopamine so much more noradrenaline so much more effective at performance but then the next time you have to throttle it back and so I'm excited by all the tools that are out there all the you know it there's all this like cognitive enhancement stuff and people are you know plugging into every device and they're trying to figure out do i have white noise in the background or metronomes and all that stuff but it's good to not layer in too many things um there are other examples of this where um are a little more unfortunate. Pornography is a really good example.

There's a huge issue now, right? Because pornography is so much more readily available on the internet. Now let's just remove the kind of the moral judgments about it, right? Because that's not what this is about.

A scientific discussion about this would say that there's an enormous availability and range of imagery that's very powerful that feeds directly into the dopamine system. And a lot of people, young people who are growing up watching a lot of intense pornography are suffering from a lot of sexual side effects and struggles of sexual interactions in real life because those interactions are not as intense as the things that they're seeing. The other thing that's happening, which I just mentioned, is that I've got colleagues that work on this in psychiatry, that they are wiring their nervous systems to become aroused viewing other people having sex as opposed to them having it.

And so they're running into a lot of trouble there. So, yeah. what's happening is that dopamine levels are so high that real life circuit. It's like, it's like eating extremely palatable foods that are just blitzing your system.

Every taste bud, high salt, high sugar, high fat to the point where it's just, and let's assume delicious. I don't generally like those kinds of foods, but, and then all of a sudden it's like, here's a bowl of rice or a, or a salad. It's going to taste like garbage to you because you're at first anyway.

A poor night's sleep will almost always create brain fog, if not the first day, then the second day. Brain fog could be any number of things. It could be lack of adrenaline.

Some people are just not engaged enough in what they're doing. It is amazing how we can be so excited and engaged in certain things and not in others, and feel so sleepy in certain environments, and then all of a sudden we're wide awake. um, I've lectured to many students that feel this way about my material.

I know the feeling there's this, there's this, I won't go into the details, but there's this, this, uh, uh, office in Sydney. And whenever I walk into this place, I literally feel so tight. And, And it might just be the types of conversations that I'm usually having in this setting and I'm not fully engaged.

But something triggers me in that environment where I just feel sleepy. Well, low oxygen turnover will definitely contribute. Slightly elevated temperature, low oxygen turnover, these kinds of things.

This is the post-lunch lecture phenomenon. I don't lecture undergraduates anymore, but I used to look out. I would teach at night. I actually preferred to teach at night when I was teaching undergraduates because in the evening people are a little bit more conversational.

So I do these nighttime lectures, 6 to 7.30 p.m. It was great. But there were always a couple of people just dozing.

And I was a student that had a hard time staying awake in class. I think being stationary, just listening to the hum of a voice, the temperature's up a little bit, and next thing I know, it's like class is over. Some of the best sleep I ever got was in classes.

But please don't sleep in classes if you can't avoid it. I think that being actively engaged, And material is very key. You know that I did an episode on ADHD, and one of the things I learned in researching that episode is that people who have ADHD actually have a remarkable ability to focus if they really like the activity, which tells you that the dopamine system, which is associated with really liking and pursuing something, is really key for attention.

And no surprise, Ritalin and Adderall mainly work to increase attention and focus by increasing dopamine and adrenaline. So, you know, I think if we like a place and we like a topic and we care about it, we tend to be alert for it. And when we're not, we just kind of drift off, which is sort of a, of course, answer. Yeah, right. Like it's common sense.

But it sounds like the most important part of hacking focus and attention is finding something that you enjoy doing. That's right. And I would say find something that you really enjoy doing and have a tool so that when you have to engage in things that you don't want to do.

you know how to go forward center of mass anyway. Because I'm not saying that people should pursue things in life they hate. But one thing that I did when I was in school, for instance, there were a couple subjects that I really didn't like. And I would try and lie to myself and tell myself that I liked it. But then I decided, well, okay, adrenaline and dopamine.

Are these alertness molecules and I'm just gonna think about how much I hate this topic and then I'm like Actively hate this not bored by about how much I actively hate this topic and all sudden you get this attentional engagement I was like, you know I'm gonna defeat this topic Just to prove like I'm gonna wrestle this topic to the ground And so then I was able to do it because I had to take the course and then what you find which is kind of Ironic is then if you do well enough on a particular subject, you're like I kind of like that topic, you know It's you because you've conquered something. So I think it's good to be to engage in things and find things that you really enjoy, leverage these dopamine systems. But look, there comes a time and place where you have to lean into effort that you simply did not choose. And that's part of becoming a functional adult, I think.

And it's also something that Anna Lembke, when she came on my podcast, you know a lot of younger people these days are really focused on finding their passion and they're waiting for something that engages them so completely That everything seems very facile and they're just able to be forward center of mass all the time Sometimes you have to enter things through the back door and In order to feel really excited about something you have to feel as if you worked through that friction. That's an accomplishment in and of itself If you're on social media and you're scrolling and you don't even know why you're scrolling, like you don't even know what you're looking for, your dopamine system has been tapped out and you need to take a break from it. Maybe a couple hours, maybe a couple of days. I think social media is great.

I teach science on social media. I see you all the time on social media. You know, there's a lot of great social interaction. There's a lot of opportunity to learn and see things.

Some are funny, some are interesting, some are disturbing. But when you're at the point where you're engaging in something and you don't even know what the win is, but you find yourself reflexively engaging in it, your dopamine system is now plummeting. And that's a serious issue. So the other thing is that a picture is worth a thousand words and a movie is worth a thousand pictures.

Our visual system is so tuned. to watch motion and to see movies. So you're seeing movie after movie, after movie, after movie. What's happening is the context is switching constantly. The human brain has never been confronted with context switching at this rate.

You know, television, you know, went from, you know, six channels to 12 to 200. But this is the first time that you can walk around with your television. You can have it in your car. You can have it on the phone, excuse me, on the plane. So I use social media and the internet a lot. Unlike email or reading an article online, social media is, you know, you can scroll through a thousand different or a hundred different contexts within five minutes.

And that's a big override for the brain. And then the rest of the world seems kind of boring. Like, you know, you see people at dinner scrolling their phone. It's because actually the brain wants novelty. It's seeking novelty all the time.

These days I'm turning off my phone in the evenings. I'm sort of, I'm on there a little bit, but I'm finding I'm kind of sick of the phone. I think a lot of people are kind of hitting this point.

point where they're like, ah, I'll get on social media for an hour or two a day, but this is getting a little pointless. Yeah. But you're right. It has its place, but it's nice to be able to connect how you're engaging with it, using it and your feelings with the science. Cause then all of a sudden it's, you're in control.

Yeah. And I use the phone. I try and not look at my phone for the first hour that I'm up. Usually I only make it about 30 minutes while I go do my walk. Um, I want to download whatever process, you know, processing I did in sleep and write a few things down.

the phone isn't sinister it's our overuse of it and sinister it's like calories aren't bad it's over overindulgence and calories is bad it's it's not complicated but I think that knowing that the the dopamine system is what got you started with the phone but the reason you scroll is not for more dopamine it's because you are you're it's because you're seeking that big dopamine peak you don't it's subconscious but that the amount of dopamine that you're getting from any individual post and then it's more about just trying to get back to base baseline. So I say, so when you, at first, any activity that's fun, you get this huge peak and then a trough, and then it comes back to baseline. But if you engage in that activity too often, the way that the dopamine system is arranged is eventually you're just engaging in that activity to just be okay.

You're just fighting for normal, fighting for neutral, as I call it. And that's addiction. That's compulsive use of something in order to just feel okay.

That's not pleasure. The most important thing to understand is that for most adults, so that is people about age 18 to 20 and older, Daily caffeine consumption is not going to be a problem provided it does not induce anxiety and certainly provided that it not induce anxiety or panic attacks and provided that it does not disrupt your nighttime sleep. This is why I always recommend that if you are going to consume caffeine in any form, coffee, tea, soda, or otherwise, that you try not to ingest caffeine within the eight and ideally within the 10 or even 12 hours prior to bed.

bedtime. That's because the half-life of caffeine is such that even if you are able to, for instance, have a cup of coffee around 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. and then fall asleep around midnight, the architecture of the sleep that you get is going to be disrupted.

For instance, it is very important that you get sufficient amounts of both slow-wave deep sleep as well as rapid eye movement sleep each night. And if you consume caffeine too close to bedtime, and here I'm defining too close as anywhere from before going to sleep, chances are you're not going to get as much rapid eye movement sleep or slow wave sleep that you would otherwise. And it is the amount of rapid eye movement sleep and slow wave sleep that together lead to whether or not you feel you had a good night's sleep in terms of your next day alertness and cognitive abilities.

Now, again, some people may find that they can drink caffeine in the late afternoon, maybe even at night and still fall asleep. But I promise you, even if you're in that category, you will sleep far better meaning the architecture of your sleep will be better and you will feel far more rested the next day if you abstain from caffeine within the eight to 12 hours prior to bedtime. And I should also say that none of us are perfect, myself included.

I will sometimes have a cup of coffee in the late afternoon and sometimes that will cause me to stay up a little bit later. Sometimes it won't. I don't think you want to obsess or worry too much about having some caffeine every once in a while in the late afternoon if you are still able to fall asleep, but don't make it a regular habit.

That was. As far as we know, there is no drawback to consuming caffeine on a daily basis, again, provided it does not disrupt your nighttime sleep, and provided that it does not induce anxiety. In fact, most of the world consumes caffeine every single day.

The current estimates are that 90%, that's right, 9-0, 90% of adults throughout the world consume a caffeinated beverage every single day. That's a staggeringly high number, making caffeine the most popular drug on the planet. In fact, because of the way that caffeine works, and just to remind you how it works, it effectively blocks adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a molecule that builds up in your brain and body more and more.

According to how long you've been awake, it makes you feel sleepy. Caffeine blocks the adenosine receptor. And then when it is dislodged from that receptor, whatever adenosine has built up and is around can then bind to the adenosine receptor and makes you feel very sleepy. That's the caffeine.

crash. So if 90% of the adult population of the planet Earth is consuming caffeine every day, that means 90% of the adult population of planet Earth is blocking their adenosine receptors for some portion of their daily life, and then their adenosine is binding to the vacant receptor once the caffeine has dislodged. And why are 90% of adult humans consuming caffeine every day? Well, to feel more energized, more focused, to have more both cognitive energy and physical energy. Now, of course, most people are not walking around thinking, oh, caffeine gives me more energy, more focus, et cetera.

Most people are consuming caffeine every single day and are consuming caffeine every single day in order to feel, quote unquote, normal, to be at their baseline level of cognitive ability and physical energy and so on. In fact, if you look at the data on caffeine consumption, what you'll find is that caffeine actually is a cognitive enhancer. It can improve learning and memory, it can increase physical energy, it can increase mental and physical stamina. But a feature of those studies that's not often discussed but that was however discussed in the full episode on caffeine is that studies of caffeine typically are done by taking chronic caffeine users and then having them abstain from caffeine for some period of time usually four days to two weeks in which time they undergo caffeine withdrawal they do not feel well they get foggy headed they have less energy there's some malaise sometimes even some mild depression And then what they do is they have people take caffeine and take a cognitive exam.

exam or do some physical activity and compare their performance to what it was when they were in the withdrawal state. Another typical form of study on caffeine is to take people who are naive to caffeine or who never take caffeine and then have them ingest caffeine and then measure their cognitive and or physical performance. And in both cases, you see improvements. What I'm saying here is that daily caffeine consumption is not going to lead to improvements in cognitive ability or improvements in physical ability above one's baseline unless you either abstain from caffeine for some period of time, typically four days to two weeks prior. or you are not somebody who typically ingests caffeine.

In other words, 90% of the world's population is drinking caffeine on a daily basis to be at their normal level of mental and physical functioning. I would say that if you are going to drink your caffeine, drink it in the early part of the day. As I mentioned earlier, I am a big proponent of delaying your first caffeine intake until at least 90 minutes after waking in order to avoid the afternoon crash.

I've talked a lot about this on the podcast. There are a lot of clips on the internet. explaining the rationale behind that.

And if you do experience an afternoon crash in energy, I do recommend delaying your morning caffeine intake to 90 to 120 minutes after waking. Now, for people that want to get more of a true cognitive enhancing and... performance enhancing effect from caffeine, again, you're going to have to abstain from caffeine for about four days.

For regular caffeine drinkers, that's going to be difficult, right? That is going to lead to headaches. That's going to lead to brain fog. That's going to lead to feelings of malaise. In fact, the last time I took four days off or even a week off from caffeine consumption was when I was sick.

I don't get sick very often, but when I am sick, I generally abstain from caffeine. And sometimes I wonder whether or not the malaise I feel from whatever, you know, you know, viral or bacterial thing I might be dealing with when I'm sick is in part the malaise of caffeine withdrawal. I certainly notice I feel much better when I return to drinking caffeine, but that tends to coincide with feeling relief from whatever sinus symptoms and other symptoms I might've been experiencing from the illness. So it's not a good experiment.

I can't tease apart those variables. So the short answer is for most adults, there does not seem to be any major downside to consuming caffeine. And there have been scattered reports here and there in humans showing that ingesting caffeine can increase dopamine receptors, which will effectively allow you to get more out of the dopamine that you produce. This is why caffeine has a mood elevating as well as energy elevating effect. I should point out that some people just cannot tolerate caffeine.

It makes them too jittery, too anxious. They start sweating. They get heart palpitations.

It's very hard for these people to build up a tolerance to caffeine that allows them to enjoy it. These are the people that can even feel a fluttering of the heart and a lot of energy lift from decaf coffee, something that we to me is just a foreign concept, but some people are just that sensitive to caffeine that even the small amounts of caffeine in chocolate or decaf coffee make them feel too alert. And they should abstain from caffeine. I don't think they are in any way harming their health by abstaining from caffeine. I'm getting back to the original question about daily caffeine consumption.

This person goes on to say that for them, okay, this is their personal experience, after a few weeks of consumption of daily caffeine, the negatives start to outweigh the positive ones. They're getting poor quality sleep, lack of appetite, anxiety, et cetera. And when they don't consume caffeine, they find it a lot easier to be mindful and their meditation practice is much better, but they're lethargic and less motivated.

Okay, so what they're describing are all the classic symptoms of caffeine overuse, probably not abuse in this case. although caffeine can be truly abused, people taking caffeine pills, et cetera, in large quantities. We're not talking about that, but this person is describing the classic pattern of overuse of caffeine and the classic pattern of withdrawal from caffeine when they stop taking it.

So what should somebody like this do? And I think that's an important question to answer because I think a lot of people fall into this category. they drink caffeine every day. They're no longer getting the performance enhancing effect of caffeine, so they're taking it just to be normal or feel like they can focus normally and have normal amounts of energy.

But then if they try and come off, they feel worse. Okay, there are a couple of ways to do this. can taper your caffeine intake off over the course of four to seven days.

But most people don't have the discipline or don't want to spend the time doing that. But if you want to, the way you would do that is you would cut it by about 10 or 15% per day. You could do that by volume, or you could do that by concentration of coffee, that sort of thing. A simpler way to go about all this that still will allow you to get some of the performance enhancing effects of caffeine and yet experience far less withdrawal would be two things. First of all, just have your amount of caffeine intake for two or three days.

So again, that could be by volume or it could be by concentration, probably easiest to do by volume. And so instead of drinking an eight ounce coffee in the morning, maybe you do four ounces of regular coffee, four ounce. as a decaf, or you just have the four ounces of coffee. You do that for three or four days, and then you take perhaps one full day off from caffeine, maybe another full day off. You're going to feel a lot less bad on those two days, having cut your caffeine intake in half on the previous four days than you would if you just went cold turkey.

And then you go back to ingesting caffeine, but you go back to ingesting caffeine at that 50% dose, or what used to represent that 50% dose of caffeine. for you and you just continue that way on a daily basis. And then every once in a while, when you want the performance enhancing effects of caffeine, you go back to what was your original dose, which is now double what you're taking on a daily basis. So what we're really talking about here is not going cold turkey.

We're not talking about quitting caffeine indefinitely. What we're talking about is cutting the amount of caffeine that you drink in half for about four days, okay, plus or minus a day, and then taking two days off from caffeine completely. And then and then going back on that half dose of caffeine indefinitely.

That's your new baseline of caffeine intake. And then every once in a while, if you need a bit more of a lift, you ingest twice as much caffeine or a coffee that's twice as concentrated. We should acknowledge that most people aren't going to be really precise about the amount of ounces and the amount of caffeine. Nonetheless, it's pretty straightforward to know that you're reducing your caffeine intake. It certainly is clear to know if you're ingesting no caffeine for a couple of days.

And it's pretty clear when you're doubling the amount of caffeine. And. but you don't have to worry so much that you're exactly doubling the amount of caffeine.

You could drink one and a half times as much as you happen to drink on the day before, or you could drink three times as much. You would definitely feel it if you drink three times as much. One very important thing to recognize is that on any day where you really spike your caffeine intake above baseline, no matter where that baseline is when you start, could be zero, could be 400 milligrams, could be 200 milligrams. When you double that intake, you will get a big boost of energy.

And the next day? you're going to feel the crash from that you're going to feel more lethargic you're going to feel not so good this has to do with dopamine receptor modulation this has to do with adenosine receptor modulation the important thing to do is not continue to consume that elevated level of caffeine which is what most people do and then they set a new higher baseline just to feel normal the key thing is to just manage to get through that crash day manage to get through that one day where you feel a little less good or maybe even down a bit get outside a bit get some more sunshine we know that spikes your cortisol in a good way It can increase the catecholamines, dopamine, et cetera. Get a little bit more sunlight, get a little bit more movement, get outside, do something to offset those feelings of malaise, and then get right back to your original goal level of caffeine each day.

There's no use in getting so quantitative that you make your life miserable, measuring things out like a laboratory chemist. If you're that type and you wanna do that, be my guest. But unless you're taking caffeine in pill form, it's very, very hard to get extremely exact about the amounts of caffeine that you're ingesting.

So it is a- It's okay to eyeball it, but understand the contour of how caffeine works and what the caffeine performance enhancing effect comes from. It comes from a caffeine intake above baseline. Understand that anytime you go above baseline with your caffeine intake, there's the potential of some anxiety.

Understand that there's going to be a slight withdrawal effect that lasts about 24 to 48 hours. Battle through that short period, and you'll be right back where you started and where you need to be so that you can enjoy caffeine on a daily basis and derive the benefits because there are many benefits to drinking caffeine and avoiding some of the potential hazards. Learning is a two-stage process and the learning I'm referring to is specifically deliberate learning. You know, children are learning passively all the time. They're taking in new information.

Their brain is, it's not a complete tabula rasa. It's not a complete blank slate. There's some hardwired functions they show up with, thank goodness, like breathing, like heart rate, heart controlling heart rate, but that helps. I mean, you know, offload as much as you can to the genetic program to hardwire the nervous system so they can learn how to walk.

And walking is a good example of a A kid learns how to walk and then walks reflexively. But of course, at any stage, you can think about how you're walking. You can do hopscotch and you have to change your cadence of jumping and walking, right?

So that's this flexible transition between voluntary and involuntary movement. But you have to learn how to walk. But what we're talking about now is generally deliberate learning, language learning, skill learning, learning knowledge of any kind, learning how to...

You know, navigate the emotional dynamics of a relationship, anything. Two phases. One is active engagement and focus. Much of the trigger for neuroplasticity as a process is...

engaged by dopamine and norepinephrine and a molecule called acetylcholine, which is liberated from multiple sources. We always talked about how acetylcholine controls the contraction of muscles, but in the brain, acetylcholine mainly comes from two sets of neurons, one in the brainstem and another in the basal forebrain. And it serves as a kind of a highlighter, marking particular connections or neurons that later stand a chance to become stronger.

So let me give an example. I don't speak a second language, but let's say I decide I was going to learn conversational French. I would learn some nouns or some verbs.

I would focus on this and the greater degree of focus that I bring, the greater amount of acetylcholine is released at that time. And at the particular locations in the brain, they're involved in enunciating the words and writing the comprehension, you know, multiple spots within the brain. That kind of marks those or flags those areas as potentially changing later.

But the actual rewiring of the nervous system happens during states of deep sleep or sleep-like states. And so when we say neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience, that's a two-part process. It's a process, it's not an event.

We always think about things as events, but in biology, almost everything is a process. So the takeaway from this is in order to learn at any age, the most critical thing is that you bring as much focus and active engagement to the learning, the encoding of the information, bringing in the information. And then that you get into a state of deep rest as quickly as possible.

Typically, that would be the night after you learn, after you have this trigger. But there are some beautiful studies published in Cell Reports last year and the year before showing that people who take a 20-minute nap within the four hours after these triggering learning or people that do a non-sleep deep rest type protocol, even just sitting there quietly and not doing anything, they learn much faster. In other words, the brain rewires much faster. That's interesting.

It's very interesting in what's happening. It's very interesting. We've long known that during sleep, there's a replay of the neurons in the same sequence that they were played during the activity earlier in that day. Sometimes even backwards for some reason. It's like the songs played backwards at night.

Who knows why? I don't think we should focus too much on that right now. But that replay is the consolidation of the information you learn. This is why you try something physically, try it physically. You can't do it, you can't do it, and then you come back a week later.

voila you can do it you had the opportunity to change the neural circuits so that now you can do it the these non-sleep deep rest or these shallow naps of 20 to 30 minutes also create a replay or a firing of the neurons but there's an additional tool so so what sorry i should say there's a tool which is get as focused as you can but then relax as deep that the expectation is that you're going to be like a beam of focus for 90 minutes that's not the case you can flicker in and out you're going to get distracted you bring yourself back i mean focus is an active process of bringing that spotlight of attention back it's much easier without the phone much easier without the phone much easier using a program called freedom free program online we can just turn off the internet It's, I'll tell you, it's very painful as you know, and yet there's something deeply satisfying about completing one of these 90 minute bouts. You really feel good in your brain and body because we were actually designed to do this. It definitely feels like a grind at some stage.

Oh yeah. And that friction and that anxiety sometimes that we feel is adrenaline. It's supposed to be stressful to learn. This idea that we just sit back and learn, or that, you know, movies have really destroyed the notion of learning. The idea that you're going to pick up the sword and suddenly have the skills.

Forget it. It doesn't work that way. I mean, it's friction, And some days are good and some days are worse. If you slept better, generally it's better. People are always trying to optimize how much caffeine, background noise, yes noise, yes music, no music.

You have to tweak things according to your circumstances. But you, after about 90 minutes, you should really take a break and let your mind go idle somewhat. Ideally, you would take a 20-minute nap or a 30-minute nap or do a non-sleep deep rest protocol within the first hour to four hours after that.

But a lot of us have a lot of demands. You go straight from a 90-minute. bout to commuting sleep that you get that night is going to be the most powerful tool for wiring the nervous system right that's that's when it really happens so we can talk about tools to to get into deep sleep and stay asleep more if you like but there's another thing that you can do which is that there's a beautiful literature on what's called gap learning effects where let's say and this has been looked at for physical skill learning for music learning math etc where if every couple of minutes just randomly during your intense learning or focus, you pause and you just take 10 seconds and do nothing. Just let your brain idle. Eyes open or eyes closed, doesn't matter.

What happens is your rates of learning actually increase. And the reason is now they've done neuroimaging on this. Really excellent studies published in great journals show that during those little gaps that you're taking, there's a replay of the neurons very fast at something like 10 or 20x the speed.

Normally they would be rehearsing it. So you're getting more repetitions during the, by, by stopping every once in a while. Now you actually have to do the work. Um, and how many of these to insert and it should be random.

So there are some free apps out there where you can set like a random buzzer or just every once in a while while you're writing or trying to do something, you just pause and do nothing. Where was that tool when I was going through school? Yeah, exactly. And I think that the, the science on this dates back about 20 years, but it's only now that there's an it. Enough of what I call a kind of center of mass around these studies that really point to the fact that gap learning effects are really strong.

They're very beneficial. You learn faster. So it's focus, rest, focus, rest, focus, rest.

And that can be done on the micro level, like within that 90 minute block. Let's just make up a number for fun. So people have something to anchor to.

If you're going to sit down and do an hour of work, let's say for every 60 minutes of focus or learning that you try and do, introduce 30 gaps of 10 seconds at random. and truly at random, not on a regular interval. And then sometime later that day, if you can, do an NSDR, non-sleep deep breath. And if you can't, okay, no big deal. You won't learn as fast, but you'll still learn, provided that you get into deep sleep that night.

And let's say you have a lousy night's sleep. You'll still learn, but you won't learn as well. And maybe the next night you stand a chance of encoding that information. So neuroplasticity involves a very strong trigger, and then deep relaxation is when the actual rewiring occurs.

And there are exceptions to this, but I should just mention, because it brings us back to an earlier point, that when you think about the tools that people use to enhance focus, Ritalin, Adderall, L-tyrosine, excessive amounts of caffeine, nicotine, those all help with the trigger part, but they don't help with the relaxation part. And so a lot of people don't learn. They just get really good at doing, but they don't actually learn.

So very effective people, regardless of workplace or activity. sport or cognitive work or otherwise perform very well because they're very good at regulating the seesaw of focus relax focus relax and in the long term it also is very health enhancing as opposed to health depleting i mean i know a dozen or more people who have done very very well in business or academia who are a mess they i mean they they're physically a mess they're emotionally a mess they're mentally a mess their relationships are a mess people that i you you know consider successful are people that are very successful in multiple domains of life and that almost always correlates with an ability to engage and disengage deliberately engage and thank you um matthew walker and others who have emphasized the importance of sleep you know i mean matthew it was really kind of first man in on trying to convince the world that this whole idea of you'll sleep when you're dead is really foolish and listen i think It's a fact that in order to get good at anything, unless you're just an absolute talent, you need to apply yourself and work hard. And sometimes work longer and harder than you feel like working or is healthy for yourself. And that's a reality. But Matt, I think, really pointed out that sleep is important for learning and a number of other aspects of health.

I think that the ability to toggle back and forth between the engaged and disengaged states. And to see that whole process, engage and disengage in the dynamic control of that and deliberate self-control of that. That is a superpower and we tend to only look at one side of the equation, the leaning in. I always think, the way I like to think of it isn't so much as a seesaw is you can either be back on your heels, flat-footed or forward center of mass. I stole this from Pat Doss, the founder of MadeForce, did nine years in the SEAL teams and so I like that.

That forward center of mass is great but it's energetically demanding and you need to learn how To just, you know, flat footed every once in a while. Now, when you're back on your heels, that's a sign that likely you were doing too much time forward center of mass. No one wants to talk about this, but people who grind, grind, grind rarely succeed and then just take, you know, take off and do something else. I think people, humans have mastered this process of engaging and disengaging on a. longer time scale work hard play hard or they'll take a long vacation but what I'm talking about doing this is across the day I'm talking about regulating your nervous system within the unit of the day or even within the unit of the morning or within the unit of the afternoon and I think that that's a much more useful at least to me a much more useful time bin to conceptualize this because the idea that you're gonna you know sell the company or launch the thing and then then you'll rest okay but you can be so much more effective if you know how to dynamically control your nervous system in real time and great athletes know how to do this great musicians know how to do this even within the playing of a piece of music or within a race they know how to reserve energy so that then they can kick at the end or in academics you learn i was always on the quarter system which is a 10-week system you learn how to pace yourself through the quarter because otherwise you're coming in screeching at the end And you then to get two weeks off and it's really stressful.

You're just trying to recover your health and then you're back into another cycle So I think one of the reasons that I'm not superb at this but one of the reasons I've been you know, at least partially successful in maintaining a Laboratory and doing a podcast and you know, I like to think you can ask the people in my life You know decent, you know a decently effective in my personal life is that I think all the time am I pushing too hard? You know, yes or no And there are times to lean, go forward center of mass, don't get me wrong, but this can be done with forward center of mass can be done if you wanted through drinking caffeine, you know, in the supplements that we talked about earlier, pharmacology we talked about earlier. The main way to do it is to get in that kind of inspired and motivated pursuit.

But then physiological size, non-sleep deep rest, reverie, all of that is very useful. But the foundation of that whole process, there's a third layer, which is sleep. when you're well rested you're able to engage this forward center of mass flat footed thing at will much more easily when sleep suffers everything suffers and so i always say when people are say come to me and they say listen i i think i have attention deficit or i've got anxiety i always just say how's your sleep you want to always start with sleep great sleep makes everything better and then once that's in place then you can start thinking about some of that Great sleep to me is you fall asleep relatively easily.

You wake up no more than once. It's actually pretty normal to wake up once in the middle of the night and go use the restroom and go back to sleep. Because a lot of people freak out when they wake up and they're like, oh, my sleep's messed up or their whoop score, their aura score is off.

And, you know, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I mean, ideally you don't, but, you know, a lot of people have what's called nocturia, which is nighttime need to urinate. So it happens. A couple of things that the path to a really great night's sleep starts in the morning. I've talked about this a lot, but I'll say it again.

Wake up. If you want to be alert, get as much bright light in your eyes as you can. Never look at any light that's so bright that it's painful to look at because it can damage the eyes, but ideally sunlight. So if you wake up at 4 a.m.

and the sun isn't out, turn on bright lights if you want to be awake. But if the sun is out, and once the sun is out, go outside without sunglasses. And yes, you have to go outside.

You can't do this through a window or through a window. car windshield and get some bright light in your eyes. It doesn't have to be beaming directly at you, but indirectly or in the general direction of the sun is good. Wearing corrective lenses or contacts is fine, even if they have UV filters. That light can get to the neurons in the eye that trigger a whole set of processes.

It sets in motion a big increase in cortisol, but it's a healthy increase that leads to alertness. Triggers an increase in body temperature, which is important for waking up. There's a whole set of processes there. And it sets a timer on melatonin release so that about 16 hours later your melatonin is going to go.

How long to view light? Well, anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes depending on how bright it is. If you wake up and you go outside and it's 9 a.m.

and it's beaming bright light and you're on a snow field, it'll probably take... 30 seconds. If you're in the depths of, you know, UK winter and you go outside and there's a lot of cloud cover, maybe 20 minutes. You can check your phone out there. You can do things out.

You can take your coffee out there, but you have to get outside. The window filtration is a serious issue. Do you do that every day? I do it every day. Every day.

And I don't get enough sun off my porch behind us. So I will walk up the street. My neighbor's on, you know, there and I walk up there with my coffee.

I often bring my journal and just kind of write down whatever comes to mind. Get some sun in my eyes. My partner and I will walk up there and we'll just chat and you know and then we'll come back and you do that most days.

If you miss a day no big deal. If you miss two days you're starting to drift and when I say drift I mean that these neurochemical systems are going to start to to to get out of sync with the daylight cycle. Shift workers is a whole other business. We don't have time. I did an episode on shift work.

People can find that on a website because it's very particular to shift work and jet lag but that morning light pulse is I say light pulse light viewing is immensely important a drift in cortisol peak toward the later day is a signature of depression and waking up at 3 4 in the morning signature of depression drift in cortisol so you'll you'll get that drift if you don't get that light exposure early in the morning that's right and and so you're you're gonna get a pulse in a big increase in cortisol at some point every 24 hours you want that to be early in the day and when you want to be alert now some people wake up at 10 a.m. Right, I've got a friend who's, I consider, you know, he's kind of a mentee of mine and he likes to sleep in. He's a teenager. He sleeps in.

So he's going to wake up at 10, but then he goes outside and he gets his sunlight. If you wake up at 5, again, if the sun isn't out, turn on as many bright lights as possible and then go outside once the sun is out. Why?

Because early in the day you need a lot of bright light in order to trigger this mechanism. Now, the second tool is that later in the day, as the sun is heading down, it doesn't have to just be crossing the horizon. You also want to get light into your eyes for the following reason.

It adjusts the sensitivity of what we call the retinal photoreceptors, the cells in the eye that detect light, and makes it such that nighttime light that you're going to get at 8 or 9 p.m. won't have as severe an effect on reducing melatonin. So I consider it kind of your Netflix in the oculation. Because when you're viewing screens at night, unless you have built your house so that all the lights are red lights and they're really dim, Most people use artificial light and that can mess up sleep.

So if you're really extreme about it, you make your house a cave at night. I don't do that. I tend to dim the lights. I don't like bright lights after about 7 or 8 p.m.

But getting that afternoon light is great because it sends two signals to your brain and body about where you are in time, meaning time is the rotation of the earth. So you get your cortisol pulse early, melatonin comes on. People who start waking up. late or super early and they spend all their time on their phone, it's not enough light to trigger these mechanisms early in the day. But at night, retinal sensitivity is such that if you are looking at your phone on full screen brightness or you have a lot of artificial lights on, you're going to suppress melatonin and you start disrupting these mechanisms.

So bright light early, bright light in the afternoon, minimize bright light exposure in the evening, all colors and flavors of light. It's not just blue light. This has got to be responsible for a lot of sleep issues. A ton of sleep issues.

A lot of people have written to me. I would say thousands of people have written to me and said, I get morning sunlight every morning as best I can, 10 to 30 minutes, and my sleep issues are resolved. Now, some people do that and their sleep issues are not still resolved.

I would say, then you look to how late in the day are they ingesting caffeine? Do they have a kind of rumination issue? Are they eating enough?

I mean, one thing that It is not commonly discussed is that in order to sleep well, you have to eat enough. Not necessarily right before sleep, and nowadays there's a big movement towards don't eat within two hours of sleep. And I think it's generally a good idea.

Sometimes I obey that, sometimes I don't. But if you don't have enough starch in your system, sorry low-carb keto people, but if you're going to have sleep issues unless you do other things to offset that. Because starches and the whole association with the tryptophan system and the serotonin system are part of the calming system.

There's a reason why we reach for certain... So-called comfort foods when we're stressed is because they increase the release of serotonin and they blunt cortisol So if you're just a bag of cortisol and adrenaline and you're fasting a long period of time It's very hard to get quality sleep now And I think intermittent fasting is terrific such in panda who really is the one that kind of popularized this at the scientific level Anyway is a friend and colleague of mine does beautiful work But you know you need to Figure out how much to eat and when to eat and what to eat in a way that still allows you to transition asleep So I'd say the light viewing early, the light viewing in the afternoon, avoid bright lights of all colors. Blue blockers are fine if you like them, but it's not just blue light that can mess up these circadian clock systems.

Any bright light, any bright light will do that because of the spectrum of wavelengths of light that the neurons that are responsible for this response.

Transcript for:Understanding Limbic Friction and Dopamine

Transcript for:
Understanding Limbic Friction and Dopamine