Control Your Brain Chemistry for Focus, Motivation & Well-Being | Huberman Lab Essentials
854 segments
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials,
[music] where we revisit past episodes
for the most potent and actionable
science-based tools for mental health,
physical health, and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor
of neurobiology and ophthalmology at
Stanford School of Medicine. Today we
are going to discuss your brain
chemistry and how to control and
optimize your brain chemistry for all
aspects of mental health, physical
health, and performance. The important
thing to know is that your brain and
your spinal cord and the rest of your
so-called nervous system
control all the organs of your body and
that all the organs of your body feed
back, meaning they communicate through
chemicals and other means to your
nervous system.
And vitally important is the fact that
which neural circuits are active and
which neural circuits are likely to be
less active at any given moment depends
on two major categories of chemicals. It
depends on hormones and it depends on
so-called neuromodulators.
And the four neuromodulators that we're
going to talk about today that are of
the utmost importance for your goals are
dopamine,
epinephrine, also called adrenaline,
serotonin, and acetylcholine. There are
many features of how neuromodulators
work, but for sake of today's
discussion, we only need to focus on two
of those features. And those are
fast-acting features and longer, slower
features or what we call baseline
features. Now, perhaps surprisingly, I'd
like to focus on the slow actions of the
neuromodulators first because those slow
actions of the neuromodulators are
happening in you and in me and in
everyone right now, and they set the
backdrop, the context in which the
various tools to manipulate dopamine,
epinephrine, serotonin, or acetylcholine
will work.
What do I mean by the context or the
backdrop, or the baseline? Well,
it's fair to say that most people are
awake during the daytime and asleep at
night. So, schedules of sleep and
wakefulness will vary, but in general,
everybody, regardless of whether or not
you're nocturnal, or you're so-called
diurnal, you're awake during the day,
pretty much everybody follows a schedule
in which from 0 to 9 hours after waking,
that is, from the time you wake up until
about 9 hours later,
the neuromodulators dopamine and
epinephrine tend to be at their highest
levels that they will be at any point in
the 24-hour period, in any period of the
day.
So, we can call this 0 to 9 hour period
phase one of the day, just for
simplicity. And I've referred to this
before in a previous episode, but not in
this exact context. From 9 to about 16
hours is what we will call phase two,
and that's when dopamine and epinephrine
levels tend to subside a bit compared to
the earlier phase one part of the day,
and serotonin levels start to increase.
And then, phase three of the 24-hour
cycle, which is from about, and again,
about, these are approximates, from
about 17 hours after waking until about
24 hours after waking, is phase three of
the day. We're not going to focus too
much on phase three today, because phase
three of the 24-hour cycle, that 17 to
24-hour period, is one in which you
ought to be deeply asleep, whether or
not you're nocturnal or diurnal. So,
we're mainly going to focus on
what we're calling phase one and phase
two. Phase one being this dopamine,
epinephrine dominated phase of our day,
and phase two being this more
serotonergic, or serotonin dominated
portion of the day. And then, you might
say, "Well, what about acetylcholine?"
Forgot about acetylcholine? Well, we
didn't forget about acetylcholine.
Acetylcholine is under control more in
terms of what we happen to be doing at
any given moment, whether or not we're
focusing or not focusing, whether or not
we're learning or not learning.
And here I'm referring to acetylcholine
specifically in the context of the brain
and thinking because as some of you are
probably shouting out there, right? If
you're exercise physiologist or you know
anything about how the brain controls
movement,
acetylcholine is used at the nerve to
muscle synapse, right? So, neurons don't
just control other neurons electrically.
The way you're able to move in fact is
because neurons are controlling the
electric activity of muscles,
literally the contraction of muscle
fibers, and that
control is exerted through the release
of acetylcholine. So, acetylcholine is
working at muscles as well, but we're
not focused on that today. We're focused
on
what we can do during phase one of the
day and what we can do during phase two
of the day to control the specific
neuromodulators, dopamine, epinephrine,
serotonin, and acetylcholine toward
particular end goals. So, again, it's
really important to understand what the
backdrop of these neuromodulators is,
the so-called baseline, and that they
vary across the day if you're going to
be able to leverage tools to optimize
your brain chemistry. Before we dive
into the more pointed directed effects
of specific tools on neuromodulators,
I'd like to have just briefly mention
hormones because they are also important
for understanding the background and the
context and these baseline levels of
neuromodulators. Hormones have many
different effects on the brain and body,
and not unlike neuromodulators, some of
those effects are very fast, some of
them are very slow. Today we want to
think about hormones as they relate to
these neuromodulators, the dopamine,
serotonin, epinephrine, and
acetylcholine. And in general,
testosterone tends to collaborate with
and increase the action of dopamine.
That's not always the case, but in
general, when testosterone goes up,
dopamine goes up.
In general, when corticosteroids like
cortisol and some related steroid
hormones increase, epinephrine levels go
up. And in general, when hormones like
oxytocin or prolactin are increased,
levels of serotonin go up. And then we
have poor old lonely acetylcholine off
on its own. But it's not poor and
lonely, it actually has incredibly
potent effects on its own. So it's
really that it just doesn't need much
help from the hormone systems, or at
least not the steroid hormone systems,
in order to have its tremendous effects.
If you understand these four
neuromodulators and you understand that
while there are many tools ranging from
pharmacologic to behavioral that can tap
into these neuromodulator systems that
can kind of press on the gas of
dopamine, pull back on serotonin, and so
on. Well, then you can create a sort of
kit, a grab bag of things that you can
use in any context, or I should say that
you can look to depending on the context
you're in, and create the states of body
and mind that you want. Now, once again,
painting with a somewhat broad brush,
but nonetheless an accurate brush, we
can say that dopamine, when elevated
above baseline,
tends to increase states of motivation,
both mental and physical motivation,
drive, and to some extent focus.
Epinephrine and a closely related
molecule called norepinephrine,
and again, I want to emphasize that
epinephrine is adrenaline and adrenaline
is epinephrine. Norepinephrine is
noradrenaline and noradrenaline is
norepinephrine, but today we're going to
just simply talk about epinephrine and
norepinephrine.
That category of neuromodulator is
mainly responsible for generating our
energy, our level of fuel and baseline
level of forward center of mass, as I
like to call it. When epinephrine levels
are high, we tend to feel agitated, we
tend to feel like we want to move, we
tend to feel like we can't shut down our
thinking and our anticipation of what's
going to happen next. And when
epinephrine levels are very, very low,
we actually have less physical energy,
we tend to have less mental energy in
terms of generating thoughts very
quickly, and so on and so forth. Now,
the neuromodulator serotonin
creates a number of different states in
the brain and body, but for sake of
today's discussion, we're going to think
about the predominant states that it
creates, and those are states of
contentness, being happy, feeling fairly
relaxed, feeling soothed, and to some
extent even some relief from pain or
lack of pain.
Serotonin is associated with a feeling
of satiety, of having enough of what we
already have. And acetylcholine, we can
say, is mainly
associated with states of focus.
And we can go a step further and say
that it's mainly associated with steps
of focus as they relate to learning and
encoding new information, so-called
neuroplasticity.
So, let's say you want to be more
motivated, you want to be more in
pursuit of goals, and you want to have
more energy and to be more focused.
There are many ways to go about that, in
fact, there's a near infinite cloud of
opportunities, everything from
prescription drugs to illicit drugs,
which I certainly do not recommend,
supplements, nutrition,
you can listen to particular music, you
can do all sorts of cognitive,
behavioral, nutritional supplementation
tricks, or
you can just understand that what you're
really after are increases in dopamine
above baseline that you control,
and there are ways to control them that
are quite potent and science tells us
which tools are going to be the most
potent and the most versatile for you.
So, I'm going to share those tools with
you now with the caveat that each one of
those tools
could be its own entire podcast episode
and that we've done near entire episodes
on each of these tools or small
collections of these tools. So, I'm
going to cover these in somewhat
superficial manner. Let's say you want
to increase dopamine for sake of
increasing motivation.
The first thing to do is to understand
what the natural behavioral tools are
for increasing dopamine and to do those
as consistently as possible. Again,
these are tools that you'll want to do
nearly every day if not every day.
And I know I'm sounding like a broken
record on this one, but here again we
come to sunlight and
I should say not just the desire to but
really the need for viewing the maximum
amount of sunlight that one can
reasonably get given schedules and
locations in the world, time of year, et
cetera. In the early part of the day.
Within the first hour of waking,
ideally, but certainly in the first 3
hours of your day, you're going to want
to maximize sunlight exposure to your
eyes. Never look at the sun or any other
light so bright that it's painful to
look at and yes, of course, blinking is
fine, but no, take sunglasses off, go
outside once the sun is out and get some
natural light in your eyes. So, if you
get sunlight exposure to your eyes and
it does have to be to your eyes in the
early part of the day, you increase the
amount of dopamine receptor that you
have, which allows whatever circulating
dopamine happens to be there to have a
greater effect on motivation and I
should say also on mood and feelings of
being in pursuit and generally in
craving and pursuit of things in life.
Now, there's another way to increase the
effect of whatever dopamine happens to
be circulating in your brain and body.
And this again relates to increasing the
number or the efficacy of the receptors
for dopamine. How do you do that? Well,
it turns out that regular ingestion of
caffeine at safe and appropriate levels
of about 100 to 250 mg
is going to increase the number of D2
and D3 dopamine receptors. When you
drink caffeine, it's going to increase
your levels of adrenaline and so-called
epinephrine, which will increase your
energy levels. It's going to decrease
levels of something called adenosine,
which builds up while you're sleepy.
It's going to make you feel less sleepy,
more alert, more energetic. That's sort
of obvious. But, what's less obvious is
that it's increasing the number and
efficacy of dopamine receptors, so that
whatever dopamine happens to be around
in your system is going to have more of
a potent effect. So, these are ways of
modulating more or less the baseline of
dopamine that you are able to produce
and the ways that dopamine can have its
action by way of binding to receptors
more potently.
Now, there are other ways to increase
dopamine in a more acute or directed
way. There ways to spike your dopamine,
to enhance your state of motivation,
mood, focus, and so on. If you're
somebody who has
or is taking drugs for depression or
mania, please be very cautious about
manipulating your dopamine in any case.
I don't just say that to protect us, I
say that to protect you.
But, if we were to look at the
supplement landscape and ask which
supplements increase dopamine, there are
a vast number of them.
But,
the three main ones, the most effective
ones that are readily available out
there without a prescription, are mucuna
pruriens. This is actually the outside
of a velvety bean that has been
extracted and put into a supplement.
Mucuna pruriens is actual L-DOPA. It's
99% L-DOPA, which is a prescription drug
that is given for Parkinson's and for
other purposes where increasing dopamine
is important.
I don't recommend mucuna pruriens. I'm
not saying that no one should take it,
but I don't take it and I don't
recommend it because it tends to so
potently and acutely increase dopamine
that there's a pretty substantial crash
afterwards. The other two supplements
that can increase dopamine in a
short-term way, but in a significant way
are L-tyrosine. So, you can buy that as
a supplemented amino acid. People vary
tremendously in their sensitivity to
supplementing L-tyrosine. I know people
that can take 2 g. I know people that
can barely take 100 mg. I know people
that the best dose for them is 0 mg. So,
there's a lot of variation there
depending on sensitivity and their
natural baseline levels of dopamine and
whether or not they're doing a lot of
other things to support dopamine. But
nonetheless, taking L-tyrosine will lead
to fairly substantial increases in
dopamine within about 15 to 45 minutes
and it lasts for about 30 minutes to 2
hours and then there's kind of a
tapering off. Some people experience a
little bit of an emotional or and/or I
should say energetic crash. Some people
don't. Then the other supplement that I
certainly use and that I know a number
of other people use is more fast-acting
but more potent, which is
phenylethylamine.
This relates to the so-called PEA
molecule.
P P E A
and
phenylethylamine increases dopamine and
some metabolites related to dopamine in
ways that really increase energy and
feelings of well-being and motivation.
And again, it's fast-acting. So, my
particular protocol, the one I use is
I'll take phenylethylamine at dosages of
about 300 to 600 mg along with some
L-tyrosine or I'll take it on its own
with a molecule or I should say a
compound that we'll talk about a little
bit later as it relates to
acetylcholine, alpha-GPC. But tyrosine
and phenylethylamine taken alone or
together will make you feel more
motivated and more alert, more willing
and able to lean into particular
motivated behaviors, whether or not
they're physical or cognitive. But
leaving that aside, there are certain
behavioral protocols that are unrelated
to your overall goals and motivations
that can increase dopamine in a very
sustained way. And without question, the
most potent behavioral tool for doing
that is going to be deliberate cold
exposure.
Deliberate cold exposure has been talked
about a lot here and elsewhere in terms
of its
ability to do things like reduce
inflammation
as a way to test and improve resilience
because uncomfortable cold, uh, provided
it's applied safely, is a great way to
learn to be more resilient because
you're essentially staying or forcing
yourself to stay in a circumstance where
your system is flooded with adrenaline.
As I mentioned before, dopamine tends to
collaborate with epinephrine and vice
versa. Many people will ask which
protocols to follow. Please see the
episode on the use of deliberate cold
for health and performance. You'll find
that hubermanlab.com. So,
the use of cold water for increasing
dopamine is a real tool. It's, I would
say, a power tool. I want to just
briefly return to the fact, however,
that all of that is riding on that phase
one, phase two background, meaning it's
probably going to take less cold water
exposure, or I should say, less time
doing cold water exposure early in the
day to get a big increase in dopamine
than it would later in the day. Because
later in the day, your baseline levels
of dopamine are lower and you've got
more serotonin circulating.
That should make sense to you now as to
why that's the case. And does that mean
that you should really modify your
protocols dramatically? Probably not,
but you might keep that in mind that if,
for instance, you need to be in a highly
motivated, focused state in the late
part of the day for whatever reason, it
might take a few or more of these tools
in combination in order to accomplish
that. Whereas if you're somebody who
feels pretty good during the day, but
you're kind of lacking motivation, you
want to increase dopamine levels and you
don't yet need to or want to resort to
prescription drugs or supplementation,
well then you might layer in and
behavioral protocols, paying attention
to, of course, the things that you might
be doing that would also potentially
suppress dopamine. So, again, that kit
of tools is designed for you to play
with if you choose, if it's safe for you
to apply them, then do that. Consider
doing them individually, not trying to
hit all the tools all at once, right? I
mean, why throw all those tools at your
dopamine system at once?
Better would be to have those tools in
your kit and be able to deploy them
depending on whether or not you're on
travel, whether or not you're eating
well or less well, whether or not you're
sleeping well or less well.
That's highly individual, and I like to
think that in having those tools in
hand, you'll be able to adjust them and
apply them in the ways that allow you to
access the dopamine increases that
you're after. So, next I'd like to talk
about epinephrine, also called
adrenaline.
I want to point out that epinephrine is
released both in the brain and the body.
In fact, there's a barrier between brain
and body that prevents the epinephrine
that's released from your adrenal glands
from crossing the blood-brain barrier.
So, your brain has a separate site
called the locus coeruleus. This is a
collection of neurons in the back of the
brain that kind of sprinkle the rest of
the brain with epinephrine
and essentially wakes up
whatever neural circuits happen to see,
or I should say, uh,
wake up any circuits where that
epinephrine happens to arrive, right?
And generally increase the excitability
of those networks. That's why we say
epinephrine
increases energy. I'm not talking about
caloric energy, although that's
distantly related to this, but really
energy and the desire to move. For many
people, increasing
adrenaline or epinephrine might seem
like a crazy idea. Most people probably
associate this molecule with stress, and
they would like to be less stressed.
But,
there are people, including me, that
want to increase our levels of
epinephrine at least early in the day.
I'm somebody who wakes up rather slowly.
In fact, I tend to be kind of thinking
about thinking about maybe being in
action early in the day, but I try and
push myself to get into action, which
itself can increase epinephrine. I
should mention that any physical
activity, any physical activity,
walking, running, weightlifting,
swimming,
even talking for that matter, is going
to increase levels of epinephrine. Locus
coeruleus is a brain structure that is
tightly coupled with behaviors in a
bidirectional way. That is, when you are
in action, you increase the amount of
epinephrine released from locus
coeruleus, you wake up the brain.
And conversely, when locus coeruleus is
active, the brain wakes up. So, it's
reciprocal, it goes both directions. So,
keep that in mind. Exercise does indeed
give you energy. It burns caloric
energy, but it gives you neural energy
by way of increasing epinephrine
transmission from locus coeruleus. So,
we have exercise and we have caffeine as
potent tools for increasing epinephrine
and thereby energy.
Another potent tool that's purely
behavioral, but it is known to work
based on excellent studies in humans, is
so-called cyclic hyperventilation. Some
of you may be familiar with Wim Hof
breathing. There's also Tummo breathing,
which is very similar, Kundalini
breathing.
All of those styles of breathing involve
cyclic hyperventilation. Deep inhales
and either passive exhales or active
exhales, but repeating inhale, exhale,
inhale, exhale in a very deep and
repetitive way. If you did that for 25
repetitions, 25 inhales and exhales, you
would feel more alert. You'd also feel
more warm. Why? Because you increased
epinephrine adrenaline release in the
brain and body. It works the first time
and it works every time to increase
epinephrine and thereby energy. If you
do that over and over, you're going to
be very alert. You're going to have more
energy, you're going to feel like you
want to move around a lot more. In fact,
you might even feel agitated. So, people
with a lot of anxiety or prone to panic
attack might want to be cautious in how
they train and embark on that type of
breathing, might want to approach it a
little more carefully or avoid it
altogether. But, for most people, cyclic
hyperventilation is simply going to get
you more energized and feeling like you
want to move, feeling like you can think
more clearly, and you will be more
wide-eyed and alert because you are
releasing adrenaline. And the cold water
exposure protocol that I talked about
earlier and that's covered in our
episode on cold and in the newsletter on
cold, well, that, as I mentioned
earlier, potently increases dopamine,
but also epinephrine. Now, we can't
really say that there are foods to
increase epinephrine. There are, of
course, prescription drugs that will
increase epinephrine.
And, of course, there are all sorts of
so-called beta blockers that will block
the receptors for epinephrine to make
you feel calm for public speaking or for
various heart conditions, etc. That's
really the domain of physicians and
should really be worked out with your
cardiologist, with a physician, etc. I
think the tools of exercise and, should
you want very potent increases in
adrenaline, high-intensity exercise, as
well as the tools of caffeine, cyclic
hyperventilation, and deliberate cold
exposure really combine to give you a
nice little kit, I would say a versatile
kit, of ways to increase epinephrine for
sake of having more physical and mental
energy. So, next is the neuromodulator
acetylcholine. And, as I mentioned
earlier, acetylcholine is associated
with states of focus. And those states
of focus can be high-energy states of
focus. So, the ones that are accompanied
by high levels of dopamine and
epinephrine, and where we're really
excited about and really lasered in on
something, or they can be the calmer,
more relaxed states of focus, like
reading a book or practicing music or
listening very carefully to somebody in
a way that's relaxed and calm. Now, ways
to increase acetylcholine in a potent
way include, again, nutrition and
supplementation. It is important to have
baseline levels of acetylcholine be
sufficiently high as well. And for that,
the ideal situation is to regularly
ingest foods that provide enough of the
precursors for acetylcholine to be made.
Eggs contain a lot of choline, beef
contains choline, soybeans contain
choline. So, there are vegan or non-meat
sources. Chicken, fish, mushrooms,
kidney beans, these sorts of things
contain a lot of choline. And there are
other vegetables that contain choline.
So, depending on your dietary
preferences and needs, you can um select
certain foods uh to ingest to get enough
choline to synthesize enough baseline
acetylcholine.
In the realm of supplementation, there
are some excellent tools for increasing
acetylcholine in the acute short-term,
meaning over the course of about 30
minutes out to about 2 hours or maybe
even 4 hours. The most common of those
molecules is actually nicotine.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors are
abundant throughout the body and brain.
They're in various brain circuits. They
are on muscle. And yes,
smoking nicotine either by vaping or
cigarette will activate those nicotinic
receptors.
But, of course, smoking is a terrible
thing. It will also activate things like
lung cancer. So, I definitely don't
recommend that. It also activates
addiction because of the ways that it
triggers activation of the dopamine
circuits. However, some people will chew
Nicorette or other nicotine type gums.
Some people are very sensitive to
ingested nicotine. Some people take it
and feel absolutely terrible. But, some
people do use them as a cognitive
enhancers. Supplements that I have used
and do use for increasing acetylcholine
are things like Alpha-GPC
or Huperzine.
Alpha-GPC
is in the choline pathway such that more
acetylcholine is synthesized after you
ingest it. That's the general logic or
framework of how it works. Whereas
Huperzine is mainly in the enzymatic
pathway. It tends to adjust how much
acetylcholine is broken down and lead to
net increases in acetylcholine.
I will often take 300 mg of Alpha-GPC
prior to workouts or prior to cognitive
work bouts. I tend to take it alongside
caffeine and phenylethylamine, so I take
that in combination either before
workouts or work bouts. It really
sharpens my focus and again, I'm doing
that three, maybe four times per week
and I'm careful to do that in the early
part of the day so that it does not
disrupt my sleep. So let's discuss
serotonin.
Serotonin, as I mentioned earlier, is
associated with brain and body states of
well-being, of comfort, of satiety and
therefore it should come as no surprise
that a lot of the prescription drug
treatments for things like depression
involve increasing levels of serotonin
in the brain and body.
That said, anytime you talk about
prescription drugs for serotonin,
we also want to acknowledge that there
are often side effects associated with
increasing serotonin. In particular, if
serotonin levels go too high, that is if
the dosages of those treatments go too
high, people will, for instance, feel
reduced appetite, reduced libido,
increased lethargy, etc.
And there's a so-called serotonergic
syndrome. That said, there are
behavioral tools, nutritional tools and
supplementation tools that can tap into
the serotonin system, not to the same
degree and potency, but nonetheless, in
ways that can still impact our feelings
of well-being in positive ways. What
sorts of things? Well, for instance,
physical contact, things like holding
hands, believe it or not, hugs,
cuddling, etc. can increase serotonin
transmission and they make people feel
good. This shouldn't really come as a
surprise. There's also gratitude and we
did an entire episode about gratitude.
There's a lot of misunderstanding about
gratitude. Turns out, first of all, that
receiving, not giving gratitude, is what
has the most potent effects on
increasing serotonin and activity of the
brain circuits that involve serotonin
and that lead to increases in feelings
of well-being. So, this is interesting.
Receiving
much more than giving gratitude
is what activates those serotonergic
pathways. The other thing about
gratitude that's somewhat
counterintuitive is that observing
others giving and receiving gratitude is
immensely powerful for evoking serotonin
and the activity of serotonergic
circuits in you, the observer. So,
receiving and observing gratitude turns
out to be the most potent way to
increase serotonin in the brain and
body. Now, what about
nutritional approaches to increasing
serotonin? Well, just as we have
tyrosine as an amino acid precursor
upstream of dopamine synthesis,
we have
the amino acid tryptophan, which is
upstream of serotonin synthesis. And one
simply has to go online and put in
tryptophan-containing foods, and you
will discover that there are a lot of
foods that are enriched in tryptophan
that can lead to net increases in the
amount of serotonin available in the
brain and body. Now, one molecule that I
found to be particularly interesting and
useful, and this is one that I haven't
talked about yet on this podcast, is
inositol, in particular myo-inositol.
Myo-inositol can have the effect of
increasing serotonin and other
neurochemicals, but primarily, at least
in terms of the neuromodulators
discussed today, serotonin. I've been
taking 900 mg of myo-inositol
every third night or so as a test of its
ability to improve sleep, and I have to
say
the depth and quality of sleep that I've
been obtaining on myo-inositol is pretty
remarkable. And of course, I should
mention that no supplement, either added
or withdrawn from your protocol, should
ever be used as a direct replacement for
prescription drug treatments that your
physician has given you. You should
always talk to your physician anytime
you remove or add something to your drug
protocol or prescription protocol, of
course. And again, this is a general
theme of all four of these
neuromodulators, dopamine, epinephrine,
acetylcholine, and serotonin.
You want to make sure that you have
sufficient baseline levels of those
things through things like diet, regular
behaviors, and then you have the
opportunity to use supplementation and
if it's appropriate for you,
prescription drugs, and certain
behavioral protocols to try and get
these potent increases, these acute
increases in whichever the
neuromodulators you happen to want to
leverage for your particular goals. So,
that brings us to the end of at least
this exploration of the neuromodulators,
dopamine, epinephrine,
acetylcholine, and serotonin.
Whether or not you're using nutritional
tools or supplementation or prescription
drugs or any other sort of protocol to
try and create a desired effect of focus
or energy, motivation, relaxation,
you're playing with the same
neurochemical ingredients. So, what I'm
hoping is that rather than decide that
anyone tool is the most useful or that
anyone neurochemical is most useful for
that matter,
that the information that I've provided
today allows you a kit of versatile
tools that allows you to figure out what
levels of dopamine and augmentation of
dopamine are appropriate and necessary
for you. What levels of acetylcholine
and tools for manipulating acetylcholine
are going to be most useful for you and
so on and so forth. So, I'd like to
thank you once again for joining me
today in our discussion about these
incredibly powerful molecules we call
neuromodulators
and the things we can do and take in
order to control them so that we can
enhance our mental health, physical
health, and performance. And last but
certainly not least, thank you for your
interest in science.
>> [music]
Ask follow-up questions or revisit key timestamps.
This episode of the Huberman Lab explores how to manipulate the four key neuromodulators—dopamine, epinephrine, acetylcholine, and serotonin—to optimize mental health, performance, and daily energy. Huberman emphasizes the importance of understanding the daily 'baseline' cycles of these chemicals and provides a versatile 'kit' of behavioral and nutritional tools, such as light exposure, exercise, and targeted supplementation, to help listeners manage these states effectively.
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