Dr. Andrew Huberman

You don't have to do them every day, and they're very, very effective at restoring mental and physical vigor when you're feeling depleted and at getting you to be a better sleeper.

So I figure that's a zero-cost tool that is grounded in good mechanistic science and makes sense logically, so why not?

Meditation, typically, and there are many different forms of meditation, but if you're, let's just say, kind of standard, if there were such a thing, third eye meditation, closing your eyes, focusing your concentration on a point just sort of at your forehead, concentrating on your breathing, redirecting your attention to your breathing if your attention drifts.

we know based on work from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at New York University and some work out of the University of Wisconsin, can improve memory, can improve focus, and does seem to have some stress offsetting effects.

But it's more of a focus exercise as opposed to an energy replenishing exercise.

Now, some people meditate and feel better afterwards.

They have more energy, but then it sort of

Like, well, compared to what?

I don't think that's the major effect of meditation.

And while we're on these topics, I should just say that self-directed hypnosis of the sort that my colleague David Spiegel studies is more about solving a particular problem.

So hypnosis is more about engaging neuroplasticity.

Remember earlier we said that neuroplasticity in adulthood can be activated by focus followed by rest.

It seems that in the self-directed hypnotic states, the brain enters kind of pattern of activity in which neuroplasticity can be accessed more quickly, we think, because the brain is both focused and relaxed in a particular way, merging that focus and rest state.

And of course,

The hypnotic script is not about getting you to do crazy things on stage.

That's stage hypnosis.

But self-directed hypnosis is, for instance, smoking cessation.

By the way, the success with smoking cessation from hypnosis is far greater than the cessation with smoking from pretty much any other protocol.

But unfortunately, it has the name hypnosis, which makes people think about stuff that people do on stage that's kind of wacky.

So we need a new name for it because, unfortunately, names are a problem.