2024-12-05
30 分钟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, 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, etc.
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, a group of neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
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, our mood, 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.
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.