Dr. Wendy Suzuki

So...

Great, great things to do.

A great thing to do before you stand up and speak.

What about coffee?

Yeah.

You know, caffeine is a stimulant and people respond to that kind of stimulant in different ways.

Over-stimulation with caffeine is not good for your ability to put words together.

This is where I turn to a main theme in my book, Healthy Brain, Happy Life, which is self-experimentation.

For you, can you titrate your coffee to see what level of coffee is best for whatever, your podcast or you're giving a talk?

The other thing that can work similarly to coffee that I've started and that I do every morning is hot, cold contrast showers.

Because that cold that you

shower on yourself after the heat stimulates adrenaline in you, a natural adrenaline.

It wakes you up and okay, it was painful the first kind of few times I tried it, but then you get addicted to it.

And I have forgotten to do it and gotten back in the shower just to douse myself with cold water because I feel better when I do that for, you know, first thing in the morning.

So lots of different things that one can explore with.

Well, sedentary behavior is one of them.

Not getting enough sleep is critical.

We haven't talked about sleep yet.

Sleep is so important for normal functioning of the brain.

I like to scare my students by saying that in torture situations, if you deprive a person of sleep for too long, they literally die.