Andrew D. Huberman

How to find work that feels meaningful: – Google "VIA Character Strengths Test," take the free 24-question assessment – Identify your top "signature strengths" (bravery, humor, love of learning, etc.) – Notice which strengths feel most like *you* when you use them – Practice "job crafting": find small ways to use those strengths in your current role – Love of learning? Pick topics you know nothing about and dive in – Bravery? Take on projects or conversations that feel slightly intimidating

How much water to drink during exercise (The Galpin Equation): – Pounds: bodyweight ÷ 30 = ounces to drink every 15-20 min – Metric: 2ml per kg of bodyweight every 15-20 min – Sip consistently throughout — don't wait and drink it all at once – Adjust for your sport: runners may need different intervals than lifters

Positive doorstep footage for once. And the delivery person doesn’t selfie. Respect.

"Most people don't think of food as medicine. They don't really understand the extent to which what they put in your mouth can support you, that it really can be health promoting." "We are homeostatic systems, very complex ones. We have all these organs, all these biochemical pathways, and you have to tune all this stuff to keep it right." "We wait till things are broken and then try and fix it. What you want to do is have people as well tuned cars for their entire life." "Every person's community of microbes is different. If you eat a certain fiber, you're not as prepared to handle it as the next person." "We like to do individual fibers because ultimately I want to understand the effect of every fiber and make combinations that would be personalized for people."

How to ask for space in a relationship without triggering abandonment: "Contract for it when the heat is not on." "I need to collect myself. It's in your interest to let me go collect yourself." "15, 20 minutes and then I'm back. I'm not going to leave you. It's not unilateral, and it's not forever." "What do you need in order to be calm enough to let me go?" "Our relationships are our biospheres. It's in my interest to do what the biosphere needs because I'm inside it."

What it will take to make America healthy: "93% of us have some metabolic dysfunction. Psychiatric illness is on the rise in both kids and adults. Autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing." "We're not winning on the health front in the war on chronic disease. We're losing disastrously and we have to come together as a country to solve this." "One in three dollars that you paid in taxes goes to healthcare. Of that, 80% is mostly for chronic disease that is either preventable or reversible through intensive lifestyle therapy." "There's 10,000 additives to food in America. There's 400 that are allowed in Europe." "Health isn't red or blue or purple. It's a human issue."

6x Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates' minimum effective dose for fitness: "If you could give me 45 minutes twice a week, that's all you need to do." "Eight to 10 exercises that covered your whole body, done twice a week, that would be enough for the average person." "All out, like the devil's chasing you for 20 seconds... the third one, I've never met anybody that wants to do one after the third one because literally you can't breathe." "They compared that to 45 minutes of steady cardio on a treadmill and the results are more or less the same." "You change your life literally with that and a good diet. The whole time thing, excuses, it's not relevant."

A rational approach to pre-sleep nutrition. Short take: it’s true that you don’t want to go to sleep on a stuffed belly. But going to sleep too hungry— especially if you exercised hard that day, can disrupt sleep as much as going to sleep overfed. Avoid extremes. Sleep well.

How to control your emotions: "Put words to your emotion. In order to put words to it, we have to tone it down some." "Cultivating additional emotions is a huge fundamental part of EQ." "An emotion is not a behavior. An emotion is information and motivation." "We think that feeling authentically means letting our emotion run the show. We don't want it to do that." "What is my fear telling me? What is the information and motivation that it's signaling?"

How to allocate your mind and attention: "I try to think of my mind share across a year and across a weekly time frame." "It's not real until it's in the calendar." "The urgent will crush the important." "If you cease to have the ability to be bored for 5 to 10 minutes, I think that makes you very fragile."

How to talk to strangers: "You're giving people an invitation." "Don't take your beliefs about another person for granted, but treat them as bets that might be wrong." "We have overly pessimistic expectations about how other people will respond to us when we try." "Sometimes these cues can be ambiguous. You don't know what the cue means until you test it."

Exercising when sleep deprived can offset the damage: "You can cause even acute insulin resistance after a night of sleep deprivation, certainly after two to three nights." "Exercise can help basically negate a lot of that." "I do these high-intensity interval training classes even just twice a week and it was almost completely negating what I had seen previously of my fasting glucose being really high." "People that are sleeping fewer than 7 hours a night have a higher all cause mortality than people that are getting at least 7 to 9 hours." "If people were exercising within the guideline range and weren't getting enough sleep, they basically had the same mortality rate as people that were getting enough sleep."

"All cannabis use is hugely detrimental to sperm across the board. Both the quantity of sperm, testosterone production, also the quality of the sperm." "Female partners who conceive from a male partner who's using cannabis have much higher miscarriage rates than partners who do not utilize cannabis." "For women, cannabis use in the prior year can decrease the eggs you get at egg retrieval by 25% and can decrease fertilization rates by 28%." "THC crosses the placenta directly. And THC levels in edibles are usually the highest." "Nicotine use, cannabis use, alcohol use, the data here, none of that is advantageous for your health, especially if we're looking through a fertility lens."

How you gain visceral fat and how to lose it: "Visceral fat is almost like an endocrine organ. It's secreting hormones, secreting inflammatory factors, it's metabolically active." "People that have high visceral fat have a 44% higher chance of having cancer, many different types of cancers." "You can gain visceral fat without gaining a pound. People are skinny and can have high amounts of visceral fat." "Healthy young men eating 1,200 to 1,500 more calories a day for 5 days caused their brain to become insulin resistant, they didn't gain weight, but they gained visceral fat." "Chronic elevated cortisol makes you store fat viscerally. Sleep loss also, take healthy men, sleep deprive them for a couple of weeks, they can start gaining visceral fat pretty rapidly."

How neuroplasticity works in the brain: "Mother nature's big trick with humans was figuring out how to drop a creature into the world with a half baked brain and then let the world wire it up." "Brain plasticity is the brain constantly reconfiguring itself every second of your life. You got 86 billion neurons, plugging and unplugging and searching around and finding new places to plug in." "We land when we're born and we're absorbing the outcroppings of all the neuroplasticity that came before us, then we springboard off of that and do something new." "If you devote a lot of real estate towards something, you're going to get really good at it."

Stress isn't just what happens to you, it's how you respond: "Technically it just means anytime we feel overwhelmed, that the demands are too much for our resources." "It's not the stressors of what happens to us, but really how we respond, the stress response." "Our thoughts are the most common form of stress." "We don't need to turn on that stress response all the time, but that's where we are as a society." "Doing a check-in to notice where in our body we're holding stress is step one to releasing it."

How exercise actually gives you energy: "When we move our body, the adrenals release adrenaline." "The movement of your body is creating specific neurochemical outcomes both in the body and the brain." "The specific brain areas that best activate the adrenals are the brain areas that control the muscles closest to the midline, the core musculature, and the brain areas involved in generating compound movements." "If you want energy from exercise, you want focus, you need the deployment of epinephrine and norepinephrine." "Anytime I'm feeling tired, I remind myself that if I start moving my body, in particular if I engage core muscles, the increase in energy that I'm perceiving is real."

Dopamine explained: "There's no such thing as a dopamine hit." "When you experience something really desirable, really exciting, really pleasurable, what happens afterward is your baseline level of dopamine drops." "Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure." "How much dopamine you experience from something depends on your baseline level of dopamine when you arrive there and your previous dopamine peaks." "The way that you replenish the releasable pool of dopamine is to not engage in these dopamine-seeking behaviors."

How to fall asleep faster: "It's a bit of a skill." "This practice as a zero cost practice that doesn't require any pharmacology does seem to really enhance people's ability to fall asleep more quickly and to fall back asleep if they wake up in the middle of the night." "Most people can force themselves to stay up later, but they have a hard time going to sleep earlier." "All of the things that we are describing certainly move the needle away from locus coeruleus activation." "These are practices that are really just self-directed relaxation as a practice that allows people to get better and better at directing their brain states towards more relaxation."

"Exercising after a poor night's sleep can help offset some of the negative effects of sleep deprivation on brain performance and health." "You want to be careful how you exercise so you don't get sick and you don't get injured." "After about 10 days of not doing any training, you start to see significant decrements in brain oxygenation levels." "Sleep is the thing that mediates many of the positive effects of exercise on brain performance and long-term brain health."