In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explore science-backed protocols to combat jet lag, manage shift work, and optimize sleep across different stages of life. I discuss “temperature minimum” — a simple and reliable measurement that helps you quickly adjust to new time zones and counteract the negative effects of nocturnal shift work. I also provide actionable tools for regulating sleep and wake cycles in babies and new parents. The episode emphasizes the critical role of circadian rhythms, influenced by factors like light exposure, temperature regulation, and eating schedules. Practical tools include using light to shift your circadian clock, understanding the role of temperature in sleep, and adopting strategies to improve rest without medication. Whether you’re a shift worker, a parent of a newborn, or someone facing sleep challenges, this episode offers valuable guidance for enhancing recovery and overall well-being. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman AeroPress: https://aeropress.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction to Huberman Lab Essentials 00:00:45 Understanding Circadian Rhythms 00:02:32 Optimizing Light Exposure for Better Sleep 00:04:46 Tools: Combating Jet Lag 00:05:50 Sponsor: AeroPress 00:07:15 The Science of Jet Lag & Longevity 00:10:57 Temperature Minimum: Key to Circadian Adjustment 00:16:49 Sponsor: AG1 00:19:24 Melatonin: Uses & Misconceptions 00:23:23 Sponsor: ROKA 00:24:33 Shift Work: Managing Irregular Schedules 00:26:50 Sleep Strategies for Different Age Groups 00:29:15 Conclusion & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, 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's podcast episode is about jet lag, shift work, and we are going to discuss protocols that are backed by science that can support particular tools that you can use to combat things like jet lag
Chapter 2: How can I optimize my light exposure for better sleep?
offset some of the negative effects of shift work and make life easier for the new parent, as well as for the newborn child, the adolescent, anyone that wants to sleep better, feel better when they're awake, et cetera. Let's just take a step back for a moment and remind everybody what we're talking about. The circadian rhythm is a 24 hour rhythm in all sorts of functions.
The most prominent one is a rhythm in our feelings of wakefulness and sleepiness. You also have a rhythm in sleepiness and wakefulness that correlates with that. We tend to be sleepy as our temperature is falling, getting lower, and we tend to be more awake or waking when our temperature is increasing. We have a clock over the roof of our mouth. called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Chapter 3: What tools can help combat jet lag?
That clock generates a 24 hour rhythm. And that clock is entrained, meaning it is matched to the external light dark cycle, which is no surprise, 24 hours. Spinning the earth takes 24 hours. So our cells, our organs, our wakefulness, our temperature, but also our metabolism, our immune system, all of that is tethered to the outside light dark cycle.
And if we are living our life in a perfect way where we wake up in the morning and we view sunlight as it crosses the horizon, and then by evening we catch a little sunlight, and then at night we're in complete darkness, we will be more or less perfectly matched to the external or ambient light-dark cycle.
Chapter 4: What is the science behind jet lag and longevity?
Very few of us do that because of these things that we call artificial lights and this other thing that we call life demands. So today we're going to talk about when we get pulled away from that rhythm. So what is the perfect day? What does that look like from a circadian sleep wakefulness standpoint?
You basically want to get as much light, ideally sunlight, but as much light into your eyes during the period of each 24 hour cycle when you want to be awake, when you want to be alert. And you want to get as little light into your eyes at the times of that 24 hour cycle when you want to be asleep or drowsy and falling asleep. How much is enough?
Well, a good number to shoot for as a rule of thumb is to try and get exposure to at least 100,000 lux before 9 a.m. 10 a.m. maybe, but before 9 a.m. Assuming you're waking up sometime between 5 and 8 a.m. The mechanism of circadian clock setting involves these neurons in your eye that send electrical signals to this clock above the roof of your mouth.
And that system sums, meaning it adds photons. It's a very slow system. So here we're talking about trying to get that at least 100,000 photons, but not all at once. So what do you do? You go outside. Going outside, even on a cloudy day, could be 7,000, 10,000 lux. It's really remarkable how bright it is, meaning how much photon energy is coming through.
Chapter 5: What is the temperature minimum and how does it affect sleep?
So try and get 100,000 lux before that 9 a.m. Now, if you can't do that because you live in an area of the world where it's just not bright enough, Some people have sent me pictures from Northern England. It's just not bright enough in winter. Then sure, you can resort to using artificial lights in order to get enough photons.
And I'm putting out this 100,000 lux number as a target to get each day before 9 a.m. You can, in theory, get it all from artificial lights, but there are some special qualities about sunlight that make sunlight the better stimulus. Then I've recommended based on scientific literature that you look at sunlight sometime around the time when the sun is setting.
And the reason for that, of course, is because it adjusts down the sensitivity of your eyes, because here's the diabolical thing. While we need a lot of photon energy early in the day to wake up our system and set our circadian clock and prepare us for a good night's sleep 14 to 16 hours later, it takes very little photon energy to reset and shift our clock
And that's why you want to, as much as you safely can avoid bright light and even not so bright light between the hours of 10 or 11 PM and 4 AM. So let's talk about shifting clocks because for the jet lag person, this ability to shift the clock with light temperature exercise and food is vitally important for getting onto the new local schedule.
And there's so much out there about jet lag today, I'm going to dial it down to one very specific parameter that all of you can figure out without any technology or devices, and can apply for when you travel for work or pleasure or anytime you're jet lagged. And I want to absolutely emphasize that you don't have to travel to get jet lagged. Many of you are jet lagged.
You're jet lagged because you're looking at your phone in the middle of the night. You're jet lagged because you're waking up at different times a day. You're jet lagged because your exercise is on a chaotic regime some days at this time, some days at that time. But there are some simple things that you can do. So that's where we're headed.
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Aeropress. Aeropress is personally my favorite way to brew coffee. It's similar to a French press, but it's much better. The Aeropress was designed in Palo Alto by Alan Adler, a former teacher at Stanford in the engineering department.
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Chapter 6: How can shift workers manage irregular schedules?
And that's why traveling east has a number of different features associated with it that because you're traveling east, you're trying to go to bed earlier. As a Californian, if I go to New York City, I've got to get to bed three hours early and wake up three hours earlier, much harder than coming back to California and just staying up a few more hours.
And this probably has roots in evolutionary adaptation where under conditions where we need to suddenly gather up and go or forage for food or fight or do any number of different things that we can push ourselves through the release of adrenaline and epinephrine to stay awake. Whereas being able to slow down and deliberately fall asleep is actually much harder to do.
Chapter 7: What sleep strategies work for different age groups?
So there's an asymmetry to our autonomic nervous system that plays out in the asymmetry of jet lag. All right, well, let's think about travel and what happens. Let's say you're not going eastward or westward, but you're going north or south. So if you go from, for instance, Washington, DC to Santiago, Chile, you're just going north and south. You're not really moving into a different time zone.
You're not shifting. So you will experience travel fatigue. And it turns out that jet lag has two elements, travel fatigue and time zone jet lag. Time zone jet lag is simply the inability of local sunlight and local darkness to match to your internal rhythm, this endogenous rhythm that you have.
So before we get too complicated and too down in the weeds about this, I want to just throw out a couple important things. First of all, some people suffer from jet lag a lot, other people, not so much. Most people experience worse jet lag as they get older. There are reasons for that because early in life, patterns of melatonin release are very stable and flat and very high actually in children.
Chapter 8: What are the key takeaways from this episode?
Then it becomes cyclic during puberty, meaning it comes on once every 24 hours and turns off once every 24 hours. And then as we get older, the cycles get more disrupted and we become more vulnerable to even small changes in schedule, et cetera, meal times, right? So jet lag gets worse as we age. I want to make...
changing your internal rhythm really easy, or at least as easy and as simple as one could possibly make it, I believe. What I want to talk about is perhaps one of the most important things to know about your body and brain, which is called your temperature minimum. Your temperature minimum is the point in every 24-hour cycle when your temperature is lowest.
Now, how do you measure that without a thermometer? It tends to fall 90 minutes to two hours before your average waking time. Temperature actually is the signal by which this clock above the roof of your mouth entrains or collectively pushes all the cells and tissues of our body to be on the same schedule. Temperature is the effector.
And once you hear that, there should be an immediate, oh, of course, because how else would you get all these different diverse cell types to follow one pattern, right? A pancreatic cell does something very different than a spleen cell or a neuron, right? They're all doing different things at different rates.
So the temperature signal can go out and then each one of those can interpret the temperature signal as one unified and consistent theme of their environment. Here's the deal. If you expose your eyes to bright light in the four hours after your temperature minimum, your circadian clock will shift so that you will tend to get up earlier and go to sleep earlier in the subsequent days, okay?
So it's called a phase advance, if you'd like to read up on this further. You advance your clock. However, if you view bright light in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum, you will tend to phase delay your clock. You will tend to wake up later and go to sleep later. I tend to wake up at about 6 a.m., sometimes 6.30, sometimes seven.
It depends a lot on what I was doing the night before, as I'm guessing it does for you. But that means that my temperature minimum is probably somewhere right around 4.30 a.m., which means that if I wake up at, and I were to view bright light at 4.35 AM, I'm going to advance my clock. I'm going to want to go to bed earlier the subsequent night and wake up earlier the subsequent morning.
And as I shift my wake up time, my temperature minimum shifts too, right? If I were to view bright light in the four to six hours before 4.30 AM, guess what? The next night I'm going to want to stay up later. and I'm gonna want to wake up later the subsequent morning. Your temperature minimum is a reference point, not a temperature reading.
Again, if you want to measure your temperature minimum and figure out what it is, 98 point whatever, 96 point whatever, that's fine. You can do that, but that information won't help you. What you need to know is what time your body temperature is lowest and understand that in the four hours or so just after that time, viewing light will advance your clock to make you want to get up earlier.
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