In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain strategies for managing stress, both in the short and long term, to enhance overall well-being. I explain how the mind and body respond to stress and how acute stress has immune-boosting benefits. I discuss science-supported tools and supplements to better manage stress in real time and protocols for raising one's stress threshold to build resilience to life’s inevitable challenges. I also describe practices to reduce chronic stress and maintain a balanced, healthy life. 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 episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Emotions & Stress 00:02:37 What is Stress? 00:04:23 Short-Term Stress Response 00:06:49 Breathwork to Reduce Stress; Tool: Physiological Sigh 00:11:52 Physiologic Sigh, Carbon Dioxide & Rapid Stress Reduction 00:13:30 Sponsor: Function 00:15:18 Short-Term Stress, Positive Benefits, Immune System 00:18:22 Tool: Deliberate Hyperventilation, Adrenaline & Infection 00:22:49 Sponsor: AG1 00:24:25 Raising Stress Threshold, Tool: Eye Dilation 00:28:24 Mitigating Long-Term Stress; Tool: Social Connection, Delight 00:32:22 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:33:52 Melatonin, Caution 00:35:00 L-theanine, Ashwagandha 00:36:13 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the science behind stress?
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 episode is going to be all about the science of emotions.
And today we're going to talk in particular about something that most often is called stress. And you might be thinking, wait, stress isn't an emotion, but stress really lies at the heart of whether or not our internal experience is matched well or not to our external experience or the events that are happening to us and around us.
And as you'll soon see, those converge or combine to create what we call emotions. I'd like you to come away from today's episode with what I call an organizational logic, a framework for thinking about these things that typically we just call happy or sad or depressed or anxious.
And I'm going to make sure that you have tools that are grounded in physiology and neuroscience that will allow you to navigate this otherwise complex space that we call emotions, that will allow you to ground yourself better when you're feeling
Chapter 2: How does short-term stress affect our bodies?
like life is weighing on you or you're kind of being pulled by the currents of life, as well as to support other people, whether or not that's in a psychological practice, if you're a practitioner, or you have clients or children or spouses, really to be able to support other people in your environment better.
And as you may recall, the nervous system, which includes the brain and the eyes and the spinal cord, but also all the connections with the organs of the body includes the brain and body. And those organs of the body, gut and your liver and your spleen, they're also communicating with the brain.
Chapter 3: What tools can help reduce stress immediately?
So I look forward to a day, in fact, when we no longer think about neuroscience as just the brain and many neuroscientists now also think about the body, of course, the brain controls the body, but the body is also having a very profound and concrete influence on the brain. Today, we're going to talk about objective tools that match the brain body experience or separate
the brain-body experience in ways that leverage your ability to lean into life better, to feel better, literally to just feel better about what you're experiencing, and believe it or not, to be able to control your emotions when that's appropriate. Okay, so what is stress? We hear all the time that stress is bad. We hear people saying they're really stressed out. What is stress?
Chapter 4: How does breathwork help manage stress?
Stress at its core is a generalized system. It wasn't designed for tigers attacking us or people attacking us. It's a system to mobilize other systems in the brain and body. It wasn't designed for one thing.
And that gives it a certain advantage in taking over the state of our brain and body, but it also gives you, all of us, an advantage in controlling it because it's based on hardwired biological mechanisms. And there are hardwired biological mechanisms, meaning cells and chemicals and pathways and tissues that exist in you right now
that require no neural plasticity that allow you to put a brake on stress. And so we're going to talk about those. So let's talk about the stress response. And by doing that, you will understand exactly why the tools I'm going to give you work. For those of you that are saying, wait, I just want the tools, just give me a summary.
Trust me, if you understand mechanism, you are going to be in a far better position to incorporate these tools, to teach these tools to others, and to modify them as your life circumstances change. Let's be clear about what we already know, which is that Stressors can be psychological or they can be physical.
If I put you outside on a cold day without a jacket for a very long time, that is stressful. If I have you prepare for too many exams at once and you can't balance it all with your sleep schedule and your other needs for comfort and wellbeing, like food, rest, sleep, and social connection, that is stressful. So what happens when the stress response hits?
Let's talk about the immediate or what we call the acute stress response. We could also think of this as short-term stress. So you have a collection of neurons that start right about at your neck and run down to about your navel, a little bit lower, and those are called the sympathetic chain ganglia.
When something stresses us out, either in our mind or because something enters our environment, that chain of neurons becomes activated like a bunch of dominoes falling all at once. It's very fast. When those neurons are activated, acetylcholine is released, but there are some other neurons for the aficionados out there. They're called the postganglionic neurons.
Those ones respond to that acetylcholine, and then they release epinephrine, which is the equivalent to adrenaline. So we have this system where very fast, whenever we're stressed, the core of our body, these neurons down the middle of our body release these chemicals, and then there's adrenaline or epinephrine released at particular organs and acts in particular ways.
Some things like the muscles of your legs and your heart and other things that need to be active when you're stressed, they have a certain kind of receptor, which is called the beta receptor, and that beta receptor responds to epinephrine and blood vessels dilate. They get bigger and blood rushes in to our legs. The heart rate speeds up. Lots of things happen that get activated.
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Chapter 5: What are the long-term effects of chronic stress?
Chapter 6: How can social connection mitigate stress?
Here's how it works. When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, which makes the heart a little bit smaller. It actually gets a little more compact. Blood flows more quickly through that compact space.
The sinoatrial node registers that blood is going more quickly, sends a signal up to the brain and the parasympathetic nervous system, some neurons in your brainstem, send a signal back to the heart to slow the heart down. So if you want to calm down quickly, you need to make your exhales longer and or more vigorous than your inhales.
Now, the reason this is so attractive as a tool for controlling stress is that It works in real time. This doesn't involve a practice that you have to go and sit there and do anything separate from life.
The physiological sigh is something that people naturally start doing when they've been crying and they're trying to recover some air or calm down, when they've been sobbing very hard, or when they are in claustrophobic environments. However, The amazing thing about this thing that we call the diaphragm, the skeletal muscle, is that it's an internal organ that you can control voluntarily.
So this incredible pathway that goes from brain to diaphragm through what's called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C, phrenic. The phrenic nerve innervates the diaphragm. You can control it anytime you want. You can double up your inhales or triple up your inhales. You can exhale more than your inhales, whatever you want to do. Such an incredible organ.
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Chapter 7: What are effective supplements for managing stress?
And the physiological sigh is something that we do spontaneously, but when you're feeling stressed, you can do a double inhale. Now I just told you a minute ago that if you inhale more than you exhale, you're going to speed the heart rate up, which would promote more stress and activation. Now I'm telling you to do a double inhale exhale in order to calm down.
And the reason is the double inhale exhale, which is the physiological sigh,
takes advantage of the fact that when we do a double inhale, even if the second inhale is sneaking in just a tiny bit more air, because it's kind of hard to get two deep inhales back to back, you do big deep inhale and then another little one sneaking it in, the little sacks in your lungs, the avioli of the lungs, your lungs aren't just two big bags, but you've got millions of little sacks throughout the lungs that actually make the surface area of your lungs as big as a tennis court.
Chapter 8: What are the key takeaways for managing stress?
It's amazing. If we were to just spread that out, those tend to collapse. as we get stressed. And carbon dioxide builds up in our bloodstream, and that's one of the reasons we feel agitated as well. But when you do the double inhale exhale, the double inhale reinflates those little sacks of the lungs.
And then when you do the long exhale, that long exhale is now much more effective at ridding your body and bloodstream of carbon dioxide, which relaxes you very quickly. When you're feeling stressed, the physiological sigh done just one to three times, so it'd be double inhale, exhale, double inhale, exhale, maybe just two times, will bring down your level of stress very, very fast.
And as far as I know, it's the fastest way to accomplish that. Be aware that if you're going to use the physiological sigh or exhale emphasize breathing to calm down, that your heart rate will take about 20 to 30 seconds to come down to baseline. And you may need to repeat the physiological sigh a few times. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function.
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