Andrew Huberman on Focus, Energy, and Performing at Your Best
- For founders, Huberman’s central performance recommendation is to protect the hours when their minds work best. His own windows are 9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and roughly 4:30–5 p.m. through 7 p.m. He says exercise before 9 a.m. gives him more energy and focus for the day, while exercising at 11 a.m. leaves him exhausted at 3 p.m. “I, like most founders, don’t get paid to exercise.”
- His health hierarchy is morning bright light, resistance training and maximizing the quality of available sleep. He recommends light within 30–60 minutes of waking, using a 10,000-lux lamp if sunlight is unavailable. The sleep objective accommodates imperfect circumstances: “find a way in your current circumstances each night” to improve whatever five, six or ideally eight hours are available.
- His lifting program concentrates effort into a small number of demanding sets. Three weekly sessions lasting approximately 45–60 minutes use light and moderate preparation sets, then two work sets to momentary muscular failure with perfect form and 3–4 minutes’ rest. A former Division I soccer player told him the approach worked at “a third of the volume” she previously performed.
- His own social-media struggle illustrates the value of physical constraints on attention. X and Instagram now live on a separate phone that goes into a lockbox between designated sessions. He describes the enclosure as a “supermax prison” and cites research suggesting an inaccessible phone frees cognitive resources otherwise spent maintaining focus.
- The supplement discussion combines precise personal dosing with explicit uncertainty about some supporting evidence. Huberman describes prescription omega-3s, blood-work-informed supplements and hormone/peptide experimentation beginning at 45. His recalled flu-study figures for N-acetylcysteine carry a qualification worth retaining: “We’ll have to double check on those numbers.”
- Sleep transitions are his clearest initial product opportunity for neurotechnology. He expects sleep and waking to advance before complex cognitive enhancement because the desired states are clearer. He reports falling asleep in six minutes with an eye-movement-controlling mask, while acknowledging that for specific work tasks, “we’re still not clear what the patterns of brain activity that you want really are.”
- Sustainable capacity matters more than bursts that create a subsequent crash. Wolf recounts neurologist Bob Knight’s advice to find a repeatable maximum workload and a weekly non-destructive reset; she says she maintained her work rhythm for 25 years and warns that stimulant-fueled blitzers “crash and disappear.” Huberman separately says a day of complete disengagement can help re-engagement, echoing his father’s advice to treat work as an endurance event.
1. Light and low-volume training anchor his health hierarchy
When Wolf demands three ranked health priorities, Huberman chooses morning bright light, his resistance-training program and improving whatever sleep is available. Light belongs within the first 30–60 minutes after waking; a 10,000-lux artificial light substitutes until sunlight becomes available. He also corrects a misunderstanding about caffeine delay: before morning exercise, he drinks it immediately. “I’m not waiting even 30 minutes.”
His lifting framework, followed for 35 years, comprises three weekly sessions: legs, torso push/pull movements, then arms, calves and abdominals. Leg day takes about an hour and would be his choice if limited to one weekly workout. He allows one or two recovery days afterward, depending on recovery. The broader attraction is 45–60 minutes of concentrated work without leaving himself “crushed.”
The progression is specific: one light set of 10–12 repetitions, then a moderate set where a load permitting roughly 10 repetitions is lifted only three times. Two work sets follow, separated by 3–4 minutes, taken to “momentary muscular failure” with perfect form. He typically uses two exercises per body part, sometimes three. Record the results and increase weight or repetitions each workout; preparation should preserve capacity for the demanding sets.
For cardio, he recommends a safe modality permitting near-maximal effort: warm up for a minute, then alternate 20 seconds all-out with 10 seconds’ rest eight times. He also hikes with a weighted vest or backpack; a 20–30-minute run is optional when sleep permits. At 50, he credits avoiding major injury partly to refusing other people’s workout challenges: “It’s all the things I didn’t do.”
2. Food and recovery routines accommodate individual responses
Huberman favors fiber but avoids broccoli because it does not digest well for him. His recommendation is to experiment briefly with single-ingredient foods: mixed meals obscure which ingredient causes discomfort. “Find foods that are good for them, but that they feel good eating and after they eat.” After hard leg training, his own meal included fruit, whey protein, oatmeal and buttered, salted sourdough; he favors replenishing starch after training.
Dietary purity has limits in his experience: eating “really clean” for extended periods leaves him less strong, less happy and making less progress, so occasional pepperoni pizza fits. On alcohol, he says “zero is better than any,” with two drinks weekly “probably the upper limit” for a non-alcoholic adult. Marc Andreessen chose abstinence; Huberman observes that “sometimes none is easier to stick to” than some.
Huberman admits he typically gets insufficient sleep and cannot recall his last uninterrupted eight-hour night. His fallback is 10–30 minutes of non-sleep deep rest/yoga nidra, deliberately keeping his mind awake while relaxing his body. Andreessen’s teasing response—“It’s a nap”—gets a direct rebuttal: “It’s not a nap, Mark.” Huberman says it avoids sleep inertia; emerging evidence suggests pockets of deep sleep and “maybe even growth hormone release.”
His evening guardrails include stopping caffeine by 2 p.m., finishing food around 7:30–8 p.m., sleeping near 11 p.m. and dimming lights during the final hour. On nighttime light sensitivity, he stresses “huge variation”: some people respond to as little as 100 lux through closed eyelids; others are less sensitive, for reasons he says remain unknown. White and yellow lights also contain the short wavelengths meant by “blue light.”
3. His supplement regimen contains precise doses and open questions
Asked what he actually took, Huberman describes prescription omega-3 Lovaza as his preferred way to exceed 1 gram of EPA daily—not merely 1 gram of fish oil—plus 3,000–5,000 units of vitamin D3. He says heavy metals have been extracted from Lovaza and generics make it inexpensive; this is his stated regimen.
After mentioning blood work, he describes taking 400 milligrams of tongkat ali, which he says is known to help unbind sex hormone-binding globulin from testosterone, freeing up testosterone “a bit.” He also takes 50 milligrams of P5P, a vitamin B6 derivative, to slightly reduce prolactin despite not having high prolactin. He says experimentation with other hormone and peptide approaches began at 45, and leaves that fuller discussion for another conversation.
For N-acetylcysteine, he reports 600 milligrams daily, increasing to three times daily when traveling, run-down or around illness. He cites a flu-exposure study using 600–900 milligrams three times daily, thinking illness rates were in the mid-70% range with placebo versus the high 20s with treatment. “We’ll have to double check on those numbers.” He says it may help shorten a cold or flu.
For food reactions, he credits an unnamed histamine-processing enzyme with letting him eat “pretty much anything.” The suggestion came from a Stanford colleague, which he explicitly says “doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a clinical study.” He also takes desiccated liver because he dislikes eating liver, while warning that its heme iron can increase iron load.
4. Attention improves when distracting inputs become inaccessible
Huberman’s clearest admission of noncompliance concerns social media: X and Instagram now live on a separate phone, used for an hour before returning to a lockbox he cannot override. He calls it a “supermax prison” and acknowledges embarrassment about needing it. His cited study suggests even a switched-off phone in a bag requires additional cognitive resources to maintain the same focus; complete inaccessibility frees those resources.
His five-minute breathing meditation has changed purpose: he once thought meditation meant achieving peace; now the work is observing mental chaos without acting on it. He borrows “the lactate of the mind” as an analogy for the discomfort that produces adaptation. For founders, briefly withdrawing from “stimulus response” also provides a check on energy allocation, because earlier conversations and online inputs can linger into subsequent tasks.
5. Founders should treat peak work hours as scarce capacity
His protected windows are 9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and roughly 4:30–5 p.m. through 7 p.m.; different tasks suit each. He stresses this is “highly individual” and can change with life circumstances. Rick Rubin works best in an afternoon block after easing into the day. Identify your own peaks and protect them, allowing access for family or workplace emergencies.
Exercise belongs where it improves those hours. Huberman says training before 9 a.m. raises his energy and focus; training at 11 a.m. leaves him exhausted at 3 p.m. “I, like most founders, don’t get paid to exercise.” Packing in health protocols until they deplete you defeats their purpose. Morning exercise also reduces his later caffeine needs; he points to hydration and electrolytes as additional alertness tools.
He treats concentrated work as a “fight”: losing a peak block sacrifices what he calls “exponentially greater” productivity and creates catch-up work that crowds out personal life. Wolf agrees with his skepticism that people sustain eight or nine fully focused hours without being “completely shot” the next day. His operating model is two protected bouts, with recovery supporting their quality.
The enduring advice Wolf recounts came from neurologist Bob Knight: “Figure out the maximum amount of real work that you can do every day consistently,” then find “some non-destructive way to reset yourself every single week.” Wolf says she built a sustainable five-day rhythm, reset by hiking and spending time in nature with people, and maintained it for 25 years. Her warning about people who take many stimulants and blitz: they “crash and disappear.” Huberman separately says a day per week of completely disengaging can help him re-engage; his father told him this is an endurance event.
6. Sleep gives neurotechnology a clearer initial target
Huberman says moving closed eyes helps sleep onset by confusing the vestibular system and loosening awareness of body position. His proposed mask would control eye movements through electrical stimulation behind the ear, potentially measure REM and slow-wave sleep, and help with waking. He reports trying one: “for me it was 6 minutes I’m out.” He says he has no related company.
His sequencing argument is that sleep has an identifiable target—“You need to be asleep”—while the desired neural pattern for a particular work task remains unclear. Focus follows an inverted U: insufficient and excessive alertness both produce distractibility. He expects sleep and waking transitions to be where neurotechnologies first “conquer the challenge,” with AI calibrating stimulation to the user’s state.
When Wolf mentions a headband pitched for ADHD and focus, Huberman’s response centers on personalized brain-state control. He and Rubin are trying to build tools to “program your mind for what comes next”; he says task-switching needs more data. He imagines an AI coach speaking in your own voice, knowing your strengths and weaknesses, helping focus attention or decompress.
Full transcript
If you take yourself and your work really seriously, you need to organize your day that way.
If you had to recommend 3 things to people to live a healthier life, what would those be?
Do the weight-training protocol I talked about earlier. It will completely change your life. Figure out some way to make the sleep you can get the highest-quality sleep.
Did you take any supplements or medications yesterday?
Loads.
What’s something you recommend to others but aren’t that good at following yourself?
I think the social media thing might be the biggest one. I recently moved X and Instagram to a separate phone, and then I keep that phone in a lockbox. You can’t actually code out of it.
1. Protect Your Peak Hours Like a Fight
We have a lot of founders who listen to our podcast. If you had to narrow it down to 3 pieces of evidence-based habits for cognitive performance, what would those things be?
Dr. Huberman, welcome to the a16z Show.
2. Getting Marc Andreessen to Quit Drinking
Thank you. Delighted to be here.
Your podcast launched in January of 2021 and has changed the way millions of people live their lives. This morning, I got my sun. I delayed my caffeine a little bit, probably not as much as you would like. You famously got our firm’s founder, Marc Andreessen, to stop drinking alcohol. I’m not there yet. But I’m wondering if, looking back, you remember a moment when you thought, “Holy cow, people aren’t just listening to me; they’re changing their daily habits because of what I say.”
Well, it’s been a wild ride. I didn’t anticipate any of it, but I’m delighted that people are doing things for their health. I don’t know whether to accept your thanks or apologize that Marc stopped drinking. I know he enjoyed the occasional drink.
He’s grumpy about it.
Yeah. Well, I want to be very clear: The data say zero is better than any. Two per week is probably the upper limit for an adult non-alcoholic, and I don’t think Marc is an alcoholic. He could, in theory, have 2 drinks. But when I suggested that, he said no. He did what many people do: Sometimes none is easier to stick to than some. I do think alcohol can be enjoyed. If one wants to do that, they should think about doing some of the other things that can be beneficial.
To directly answer your question, I didn’t anticipate any of it. As I said, I’m delighted people are taking measures for their health. At some point, I realized, “Whoa, people are starting to do things.” I couldn’t tell whether it was because of the science we were presenting or because the protocols I know work extremely well.
The nice thing is, I don’t take credit for the actual protocols because, in most cases, with rare exceptions—like some things related to stress mitigation—the protocols come from other people’s science. Most people who’ve been out there talking about science and health education have been talking about their own science. Doing it this way affords me a certain amount of freedom. I have to be careful, too, because I’m often talking about other people’s science.
3. Meditation, Sunlight, and Morning Caffeine
I love to learn, and I love to teach. Nothing makes me happier than reading papers, sharing what I think is interesting information, trying things out, and seeing what works. The people who’ve been close to me will tell you that, my whole life, when I’ve learned something I thought was cool, I’ve been out there teaching about it, whether people wanted to listen or not. They just stuck a microphone in front of me, and here I am.
Amazing. You’ve been very transparent about your daily protocols: sun in your eyes, delaying caffeine, rotating exercise by day, cold plunging, sauna, doing yoga nidra, and taking a variety of supplements. Maybe you can walk us through yesterday. What did you eat? What exercise did you do? What supplements did you take? Which of your advice did you follow, and what did you not?
A single day. I wake up, and I use the bathroom like everybody else.
Do you get on your phone while you’re in bed?
No.
Okay.
No phones. My phone’s out of the room while I sleep. If I didn’t love my Eight Sleep so much, I would figure out a way to have no Wi-Fi on in the house at all at night.
Interesting.
I woke up groggy, like everybody else. My mind starts going places; it’s discombobulated on waking. I don’t think I’ve ever woken up, done a big yawn, and thought, “Life is so good.” I wake up and think, “Okay, I have this to do; I have that to do.” So the first thing I do is get up, use the restroom, and then I do a 5-minute meditation. I set my phone for 5 minutes and do a standard meditation of just breathing.
I think this is an extremely important practice that I haven’t talked about a lot, if for no other reason than it gets you very aware of what the inputs to your brain are about to be. It also makes you very aware of how chaotic our minds can be. After talking to a number of people who’ve worked on the science of meditation—in particular, folks at the University of Wisconsin who’ve done a bunch of brain imaging—it’s very clear that the real benefits of meditation come not from quieting the mind, but from being able to observe how chaotic it is.
You see that as something slightly separate from the so-called observer. We have circuits that we think underlie the observer, versus all the monkey-mind stuff, as they call it. I always thought meditation was about achieving a really peaceful state. It turns out it’s about observing the chaos.
The best way I can describe the utility of this practice is that, just as with exercise, if you get a burn in your legs or reach the final repetitions of lifting weights, that’s what triggers the adaptation. With meditation, in terms of consciousness, focus, and awareness, I think the “lactate of the mind”—as it was described to me; I didn’t come up with that phrase—is being able to experience that chaos, observe it, and not do anything with it. That allows you to move into your day with more awareness of what is a meaningful thought or reaction and what isn’t.
I do that for 5 minutes. These days, I find the buzzer goes off without me thinking, “When is this over? When is this over?” Then I get sunlight in my eyes. I’m absolutely religious about that. Sometimes I go up on my roof; sometimes I go for a walk.
Were you home yesterday?
I was, yeah.
Okay.
I usually take some water with me, drink some water, and get sunlight in my eyes. Today I woke up in a hotel facing east, so it was great. I actually got to see the sunrise. On a cloudy or overcast day, I’m still getting sunlight in my eyes first thing. If I wake up long before the sun is out, I have a 10,000-lux artificial light, and I’ll get in front of that thing as I make coffee in the morning or do my thing.
4. The 35-Year Exercise Program
If I’m going to exercise, I drink caffeine right away. I think I’ve tried to be clear about this, but it hasn’t always been clear: If I’m going to exercise, I need caffeine. So I’m not waiting even 30 minutes. I’m going to drink caffeine. I drink yerba mate, which has been my preferred source of caffeine for a long time now, and then I exercise.
My exercise routine is very simple, and I might share it because I’ve found it’s been very beneficial—not just for me, but for women I’ve trained with, men, and people of all ages. I’ve followed it for 35 years, and I think it’s the most time-efficient and effective exercise program.
It’s really straightforward: 3 days a week lifting weights and 2 to 3 days a week doing some sort of “cardio.” The cardio is something where you get your heart rate way, way up safely. It could be the rower, the Airdyne bike—the one with the push-pull arms while you’re pedaling—or running. Pick something where you can go close to max effort without hurting yourself.
That’s a really big deal, especially now that I’m 50. I feel quite proud that I’ve never had a major injury, and I feel great at 50 mostly because of what I didn’t do. A lot of people talk about all the things they did do. It’s all the things I didn’t do. I never hopped on someone else’s workout just because I was challenged. That’s how you hurt yourself.
I picked things that felt right to me. Cycling doesn’t feel good to me; running and the Airdyne bike do. So I warm up for a minute, pedaling easily in my case. Then I go 20 seconds with all-out effort, rest for 10 seconds, and repeat that 8 times. You’re done.
That’s one cardio workout. You’re getting your heart rate close to max. This is VO₂ max-type stuff, and it’s so fast.
Okay, so yesterday was Sunday. What is Sunday?
Day 1 could fall on a Sunday or a Monday for someone. It doesn’t matter. But the first day of the week, I train my legs with resistance training.
Mm-hmm.
It takes about an hour. That’s the hardest work of the week. If I were to do only 1 workout per week for the rest of my life, it would be that, for lots of reasons: the largest musculature, systemic effects on hormones and metabolism, et cetera.
After leg day, I typically take the day completely off. I’ll try to do some sauna-cold alternation on those days for recovery. We can talk about the details. Then, depending on how well I’ve recovered, it might be just 1 day off, or it might be 2 days off. Then I do some sort of push-pull thing for the torso: some chest presses, some shoulder presses, a pull-up or pulldown-type exercise if someone can’t do pull-ups or pulldowns, and some sort of row.
Maybe some stuff for the neck. If somebody has bad posture, or they’re noticing that their shoulders are getting wider but they’re not training their neck, it can start to look kind of disproportionate. Then they can start getting rotator cuff issues. Training the neck is very important for stability of the entire shoulder girdle.
Then I’ll take a day off, and then I’ll do some arms, calves, and abs—smaller body parts. So those are 3 separate weight-training days.
Mhm.
All of them follow the same approach. This is where I think people go badly wrong, but the data and what you’re hearing online are finally starting to catch up. You could warm up for a couple of minutes on the bike or do some jumping jacks if you wanted, but I recommend doing 1 light set: 10 or 12 repetitions, very light, just to get blood flowing for the first movement.
Then the second set—excuse me—is a moderate set. It’s a set you could probably do 10 repetitions with, but you do 3.
You’re just preparing the nervous system for the heavier load.
Then you do 2 work sets, spaced maybe 3 or 4 minutes apart, which is a long rest. But those work sets are all-out, perfect-form sets taken to momentary muscular failure. Just 2 sets.
This might be a leg extension for the quads, and then you’d move to something else—some sort of movement you can do safely, like a squat, front squat, or leg press. There are so many variations, right? Some compound movement, and then the same thing for the hamstrings.
The point is: a light set, a medium set, and many fewer reps than you could do even with the medium set. Then hard work for 2 sets. Write down what you did and either increase the weight or increase the repetitions every single workout. I do this for every single thing I just described, regardless of body part.
It ends up being 2 exercises per body part, maybe 3, so the total volume of work is very low. You leave these workouts—even leg day—feeling not completely rejuvenated, but you’re not crushed.
Your recovery is very fast. Your nervous system isn’t as taxed, and you make progress at an amazing rate.
A woman I suggested this to, who was a Division I athlete and played soccer for years, came to me the other day and said, “I can’t believe this works so well. It’s a third of the volume I was doing before.” You can just put more into these individual sets.
I could go on and on about this, but somewhere in the week I find a way to do the 6-minute workout: 20 seconds all out, 10-second rest. Then I find another day to do some sort of long hike. It used to be a jog. Nowadays, I like to throw on a weight vest or a backpack and hike, with my heart rate up and breathing a bit.
If I’m really ambitious and getting enough sleep every night, I might also do a 20- to 30-minute run in the middle of the week. But those 3 weight workouts will get most people what they want in terms of body recomposition and strength—not just offsetting muscle loss and loss of strength with age, but feeling much better posturally and mobility-wise. And of course, you can always stretch, but you can do that while you watch TV in the evening or something.
That’s the framework. I’ve been doing it for 35 years. Everyone I’ve given it to is positively shocked by how brief it is and, most importantly, by the results. They’re also shocked by the fact that it’s fun when you’re looking forward to 45 to 60 minutes of hard work. It actually starts to become a pleasure to do.
5. What He Eats (and the Pizza Exception)
Okay. Yesterday was leg day. What happened after legs?
After legs, I had some starches and fruit.
Okay. After you weight train, if you train hard the way you described, you need to replenish glycogen. People say, “Well, you didn’t deplete all your glycogen.” Ingesting some starches after you train is a good idea. What starch did you have?
I trained really hard, and I love to eat, so I had a banana, blueberries, a couple of scoops of whey protein, some oatmeal, and sourdough toast with butter and salt on it, because if something has butter on it, you’ve got to salt it too. That’s my opinion.
A few hours later, maybe 3 hours later, I had a sort of standard meal, which would be my normal lunch: some piece of meat, either beef or chicken, and some vegetables. I’m not a big fan of fish, unless it’s an ahi tuna, and that’s kind of hard to come by most days.
I’m a big believer in fiber, but I want to make a point that I don’t think gets discussed enough: many people get gastric distress from certain fibrous foods. It’s very important that people find foods that are good for them, but that they feel good eating and after they eat. For instance, you’re not going to see me eating broccoli. It makes me feel kind of unwell. It doesn’t digest well, no matter how much I chew it.
I’m not alone in this. There are some foods, like onions, that generate histamines. Some people just don’t feel good after eating certain foods. You have to experiment and see what works for you. The only way to do that, really, is to experiment for a short while with single-ingredient foods, right? Just have some broccoli. You can put some olive oil or butter on it, right? Just see what works.
If people are constantly eating sandwiches and stews and pizzas and omelets and lasagnas, they don’t know what works for them and what doesn’t. A big part of developing really healthy eating habits—with foods you love and a lot of choices—is figuring out what you can eat and feel really good after eating.
Okay. So, what protein did you have for lunch?
I had beef.
Beef. Okay.
I had some grilled steak. In my case, I had sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and I had some rice as well.
Any dessert?
Well, I’m a big fan of olive oil, so I had some olive oil. No, I don’t tend to like sweets that much. If I have sweets, it’s generally 100% chocolate, which is really boring and kind of nerdy, but you develop a taste for it.
I sort of lost my appetite for sweets. I haven’t lost my appetite for fats. To me, a treat is a chunk of really, really good Parmesan cheese.
What’s the most indulgent thing you’ve had recently?
Gosh, it’s going to sound so healthy, but I had an amazing ribeye the other day. I’m not—because I don’t like sweets and I don’t drink alcohol—indulgent for me would be, like—
Pizza.
Pizza I love, but I’m very particular about pizza. On the East Coast, in New York, I’ll get a slice or two from just about any walk-in place. On the West Coast, Arinell Pizza in the East Bay is pretty much the only thing that meets my threshold for East Coast-enough pizza.
If I were going to have ice cream, it would be chocolate chip ice cream. I’m trying to think if I have any other indulgences. I should be very clear: it’s not because I’m quote-unquote addicted to feeling good and those things make me feel bad. I do think there’s a compound effect of doing things right in terms of exercise and sleep, et cetera.
But I will say this: if I’ve ever eaten really clean for a while, I’m actually less strong, less happy, and I make less progress in general. Every once in a while, spiking my nutrition with a couple of slices of pepperoni pizza seems like a really good thing. Croissants—that’s the other thing. Anything buttery, but the combination of fat and starch is really what does it for me.
I wasn’t going to trust you if you said you didn’t like a croissant.
Croissants are amazing.
6. Yoga Nidra: "It's Not a Nap, Marc"
So that was afternoon, dinner, sleep?
Yeah. If I’ve slept really well, I don’t take a nap or do any kind of yoga nidra, but typically I don’t get enough sleep. I think people are shocked to hear this: “Aren’t you the sleep guy?” Like many humans, I struggle with getting to sleep early enough.
So I do 10 to 30 minutes of non-sleep deep rest, or yoga nidra, in the afternoon. I think it’s a wonderful way to restore mental and physical vigor without generating sleep inertia.
Your very own Marc Andreessen, who likes to take swipes at me online—it’s kind of funny on X; people think we’re enemies, but I recognize it as friendly, and I invite it. I once said that yoga nidra, where you lie still, deeply relax your body, and intentionally keep your mind awake, is not a nap. It doesn’t induce sleep inertia. It’s better than a nap. It teaches you to fall back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night.
Marc, of course, wrote, “It’s a nap.” So it’s not a nap, Marc. But I appreciated the joke. It’s very different. In fact, there’s some emerging evidence that during these non-sleep deep rest states, pockets of the brain are experiencing deep sleep and maybe even growth hormone release, which is pretty interesting.
I’m very interested in these so-called hypnagogic, or kind of liminal, states between sleep and wakefulness. It’s also just an interesting exploration of the mind. Usually I come out of that with some clarity about what I want to do.
7. Sunset Viewing and Winding Down
I should mention that after I trained legs, I read papers and worked, even on a Sunday. Then, in the later afternoon, I make it a point to get a walk before the sun goes down. If I don’t have time and I’m on a phone call, I’ll just step outside and watch the sun go down if I can, or just look in the direction of the sun in the overcast sky.
I actually learned this practice in the sleep lab at Stanford, down the road from here, when I worked there during a summer in college. This was before the discovery of the neurons in the eye that register ambient light and signal to the brain’s circadian clock. That was in the mid-’90s; those cells weren’t discovered until the early 2000s.
What’s interesting is that all the staff of the sleep laboratory would go outside from the basement and look at the sunset. I asked, “Why are we doing this?” They said, “This sets your circadian rhythm. It’s well known. Ideally, you do it in the morning as well.” That’s when I started the practice. These were serious scientists—Howard Hughes investigators, members of the National Academy. Now we understand all the mechanisms.
I point that out because I think a number of people assume you need to work out all the mechanistic science first. There are certain practices that are so clearly good for us, and the mechanistic data come later. I try to get outside in the afternoon. Sometimes I’ll stand outside with a cup of tea or something. I stop drinking caffeine around 2:00 p.m.; that’s about the latest, or I have trouble falling asleep.
Usually, I do a bit more work when I go inside. In the evening, I eat dinner. On a day when I resistance-train, I’m generally pretty hungry for dinner, and I’ll have something like lunch, but not exactly the same. On a day when I didn’t exercise, it tends to be a smaller meal, usually with less protein.
My last bite of food is typically around 7:30 or 8:00, but I’m not nuts about that because I tend to go to sleep around 11:00 p.m. In the last hour before sleep, I dim the lights and try to transition my day down. I put my phone away because it’s very easy to get into text conversations late at night.
Mm-hmm.
8. The Truth About Blue Light
I do like to be on the computer fairly late, and sometimes I’ll get some entertainment in by watching something, but these days I mostly just read.
Do you use blue-light glasses or anything?
I do. I have the red-lens glasses. We designed some of those with Roka. I think there’s an important point that also came out of a conversation online between Elon and Mark—actually, no, it was Lex and Mark, and Elon jumped in. Mark said, “I stopped drinking because of Huberman, but I’m not going to do any of that blue light.” Those were his words.
There’s huge variation in people’s sensitivity to blue light at night. A lot of people think the lights have to appear blue, but bright white and yellow lights have short-wavelength light. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about blue light. Some people are very sensitive to it; it spikes their cortisol and disrupts their sleep, even at just 100 lux, which is very dim, through closed eyelids. Other people are less sensitive to it. We don’t know how that works, and it doesn’t seem to be related to how light or dark somebody’s eyes are.
My eyes are very sensitive to light. At night, if I get a lot of bright overhead light, I have trouble falling asleep, or I fall asleep and wake up in the middle of the night. If I dim the lights or wear my wind-down glasses, I feel much better. I think there’s a split, and we don’t really know the underlying reasons.
I was upsold on blue-light-blocking contact lenses the last time I got my contacts prescribed. My husband says they make my eyes look freaky, but I was like, “I’m not going back to—”
So they blue-light—
—the ophthalmologist.
Yeah, you need some short-wavelength light during the day on your skin and in your eyes to generate vitamin D, for instance. UV light is not bad across the board. I should mention that when the sun is low in the sky, the UV index is very low. One reason you can look at the rising or setting sun without it hurting your eyes is the phenomenon of atmospheric Rayleigh scattering, where the short wavelengths, like UV, are filtered out.
9. Everything in His Supplement Stack
When the sun is overhead, it’s extremely bright and painful to look at. That’s because a lot more of the shorter-wavelength light is reaching your eyes. If people are concerned about UV exposure, morning, evening, or late-afternoon light exposure is very low in UV, or you can just look at the UV index with a Google search or something.
Totally. Did you take any supplements or medications yesterday?
Loads, but I’ll quickly tick them off.
Sure.
I’ve been doing most of these things since 2012. I take AG1 twice a day, in the morning, usually right before my first meal, and in the evening. This isn’t promotional. People say that’s because they’re a sponsor of the podcast. I use it as a nutritional cover, so if I didn’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, I can cover any gaps. I like it, and I’ve been doing it long before I knew what a podcast was.
I take fish oil. I’m a big believer in high doses of EPA, omega-3s. There’s a whole debate about omega-6-to-omega-3 ratios. These days, I find the most efficient way to get above a gram of EPA per day—not just a gram of fish oil—is to take Lovaza, which is a prescription omega-3. The heavy metals have been extracted, so you don’t have to worry about that. There are generic versions, so it’s pretty inexpensive now. I take Lovaza.
I take vitamin D. I take 3,000 to 5,000 units of vitamin D3. Based on my blood work, I also believe in some herbal supplements. I take 400 milligrams of Tongkat ali, an Indonesian herb. There are a couple of different versions, but I take Tongkat ali because it’s known to help unbind sex hormone-binding globulin from testosterone, freeing up testosterone a bit. Men and women can take this. I have no financial relationship with the companies that sell it. I take the Solaray version; it’s also the least expensive.
I take P5P, a vitamin B6 derivative. I take 50 milligrams to slightly reduce prolactin. I don’t have high prolactin, but I take it in the morning. You want to amplify cortisol and the so-called catecholamine milieu—dopamine or epinephrine—and it can assist with that a bit.
I also take N-acetylcysteine, 600 milligrams a day. It’s a glutathione precursor. There’s a really nice study showing that N-acetylcysteine, taken at 600 to 900 milligrams 3 times per day, can reduce the likelihood that you’ll catch the flu. They did the study by exposing people to others with the flu.
I only take it if I feel like I’m getting sick.
Great. It can make your nose run a little bit; it’s a mucolytic. It’s used in other contexts and dosages for cystic fibrosis, which involves a buildup of fluid in the lungs. It’s a pretty powerful tool. I take it once per day, and if I’m feeling run down, traveling, or around somebody who’s sick, I’ll take it 3 times a day.
It may also help shorten the course of a cold or flu. I learned this trick from an ER doctor who was working through the pandemic and needed to stay healthy. The data in that paper are pretty interesting, and I can provide you a link if you want. I think the percentage of people who took the placebo and got the flu after being exposed to the virus was in the mid-70s. I think that number dropped to the high 20s in the group that took N-acetylcysteine. We’ll have to double-check those numbers. It’s pretty impressive. I figured it was safe, it increases glutathione, so why not? I have no financial relationship with any company that sells it, and they’re all pretty much equivalent.
With lunch, I take a multivitamin and 2 digestive enzymes. I definitely think that can help. If somebody gets itchy after eating or thinks they have food allergies, before running off to get an expensive food allergy analysis or treatment, I recommend an enzyme you can take before eating histaminergic foods. It completely transformed my relationship with food because I can eat pretty much anything now. This was a tool suggested to me by a colleague at Stanford, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a clinical study, but it makes sense. If you’re not making enough of the enzyme to process histaminergic foods, you might get uncomfortable symptoms.
I’m a very allergic person. I feel like I need to know that.
This is great. I used to get sleepy after eating certain foods. I’d wonder, “What is this?” It was often dairy foods that would make me sleepy. I thought it was tryptophan, but that turns out to be nonsense. There isn’t enough tryptophan in dairy or turkey compared with other things.
I get kind of itchy around my eyebrows.
People who are prone to autoimmune conditions, or who have a little bit of psoriasis, often find that these foods are irritating to them.
So I do that, too. What I’m describing here probably costs less than a penny a day for this enzyme, so it’s a trivial cost.
Um, let’s see. In that meal, that’s when I take the Lovaza and multivitamin. I do take desiccated liver. People have to be careful about increasing their iron load because it’s high in heme iron. But I don’t want to eat liver. I have no interest in eating liver; it doesn’t appeal to me. I take it for some of the nutrients that are there.
In the evening, again, not as a promotion, the sleep supplement that’s been far and away the best thing for me is AGZ, which is a cocktail of things that I helped them create. It’s got magnesium L-threonate, tart cherry, and all the extracts and things combined. I take that, and my sleep is spectacular. It actually allowed me to stop carrying around a bunch of different pills.
I’ve experimented with peptides, and I’ve been open about my experimentation with some other things in the hormone and peptide area. Maybe we should separate that conversation, because I want to be very clear: what I just described is basically what I did between age 20, plus or minus—I mean, AG1 didn’t exist, and some things like that—and 45. At 45, I started to experiment with a few other things.
10. The Phone in a Lockbox
I will say, if you want to have a conversation about some of the tools people are experimenting with for focus, especially here in Silicon Valley, and some of the stimulant and non-stimulant approaches to focus, I’ve spent a lot of time researching that, and I’ve spent some time experimenting with that, too.
What’s something you recommend to others but aren’t that good at following yourself? Or what do you do that you know is bad for you?
11. His Top 3 for a Healthier Life
I think the social media thing might be the biggest one. I recently moved X and Instagram to a separate phone, so if people send me things, I can’t open them. I keep that phone in a lockbox so I can say, “Okay, for an hour I’m going on there,” and then it goes back in. This is a supermax prison lockbox, so you can’t actually code out of it. That’s a little bit embarrassing for me because I can control my behavior, but I did find that time would pass.
You’re human. You’re just like us.
Well, the algorithms have gotten so good, and it’s so entertaining. It’s also a little different because I’m on there interacting with it in a pretty active way. It’s a weird experience to go online and see people saying stuff about you, and then you’re trying to explain things and figure out if they’re in good faith or not. It can really suck up a lot of time.
Totally. I think that’s probably the biggest one, and it’s the one that carries a little bit of shame, right? We should all be able to control our behavior, so why should I need a lockbox for my phone? On the other hand, I feel like when it’s in the lockbox—and data support this—if the phone is out of the room or completely inaccessible, cognitive resources become available to you that aren’t available if it’s even in your bag, turned off under your chair.
This was a study that was done. People can focus just as well, but they need to use additional cognitive resources to have that level of focus. This was looked at in a pretty clever way in the study. I try to keep the phone in another room, and I find that having it in the lockbox is a whole other level of inaccessibility that serves me.
That totally checks out to me. You distill health research for a living, and it’s resulted in a lot of recommendations and protocols. If you had to recommend three things, ranked, no more than three, to live a healthier life, what would those three things be?
Great. Morning bright light, ideally from sunlight, in the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking. If you can’t get it from sunlight, get a 10,000-lux artificial light, then get some sunlight if and when you can. That’s number one.
Next, do the weight-training protocol I talked about earlier. It will completely change your life. If women are concerned about being too bulky, it’s not going to do that. In terms of body recomposition, mood, and brain health, you’re not going to find a more potent stimulus.
The last one would be to figure out some way to get the highest-quality sleep you can. I sometimes get appropriately attacked for this: “Hey, I’ve got kids. I’ve got a busy job. The neighbors are always making noise. What do I do?” Find a bedtime to shoot for most nights that allows you to get the most deep sleep. Don’t miss that window.
I’m lumping in a fourth here, but really learn how to get to sleep and fall back asleep. I’m not going to say, “Get perfect sleep,” because you’d have to organize your whole life around that. I’m going to say: do long-exhale breathing to slow your heart rate, and learn how to close your eyes.
This sounds so kooky, but it’s grounded in what we understand about the underlying circuitry. Moving your eyes back and forth and up and down when you’re having a hard time falling asleep because your mind is racing will greatly help you fall asleep. It’s not mysterious why: to fall asleep, you need to forget about your body position, and this confuses the vestibular system.
If I may, one of the technologies I’m most excited about—and I’m hoping a16z will make this, but I don’t have a company related to it—is sleep masks that induce sleep by controlling eye movements in certain ways.
Interesting.
How cool would that be? And they could measure rapid eye movement sleep and slow-wave sleep. I think that’s the next wave of technology that we all desperately need.
But the three things are, as I said, morning bright light—
Yep.
—the resistance training. Still do cardio if you want, but resistance training is the really sharp blade of health improvement. Find a way, in your current circumstances each night, to get the highest-quality whatever—five hours, six hours; ideally it’s eight hours. Know the things you can do in the context of the hotel room or the airplane you happen to be on, and figure those things out.
Then you’ll start to experience the flexibility that comes from not fearing that you didn’t get the perfect night’s sleep. I’m fine on six hours because I know how to regulate my energy during the day if I just got six.
I’d love to get eight, but I can’t tell you the last time I got eight solid hours without getting up once or twice. It just doesn’t happen.
We have a lot of founders who listen to our podcast. If you had to narrow it down to three pieces of evidence-based habits for cognitive performance for founders, or anyone, what would those things be?
The first one is to know when your windows of high cognitive capacity are. This is different for everybody. For me, I can feel 11:00 a.m. come around. I wish it were 7:00 a.m. when this happened. I get up pretty early. I tend to get up between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. Sometimes if I go to sleep at 9:00, I wake up at 5:00. If I go to sleep at 10:00 or 11:00, I tend to wake up at 7:00.
I wake up in the middle of the night, as I think most normal human beings do, use the restroom, and get back into bed 90% of the nights in my life. I know that in the morning I tend to have a lot of sleep inertia. I need to do these things; I’ll do the exercise, et cetera. Part of the reason I do that is I know that if I exercise before 9:00 a.m., I have a lot more energy and focus for the rest of the day. If I exercise at 11:00 a.m., which is kind of the peak of my morning energy, at 3:00 in the afternoon I’m exhausted.
This is just me, but other people might be different. Some people find that their peak for work lies at a certain time of day. For me, there are two times. The window between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. is crucial. I have to be very careful that I’m not exercising in that window because I, like most founders, don’t get paid to exercise.
This is very important: if you’re going to do things for your health, they have to support the other areas of your life in a way that feeds back into something where your company succeeds, and then you actually have the resources to maybe change your schedule someday. Otherwise, if people are trying to pack all these protocols in, they’re just going to deplete themselves.
For me, it’s 9:30 to 12:30. That’s one key window. Then I tend to have a little bit of a dip in focus and cognition. Somewhere in the late afternoon, around 4:30 or 5:00 p.m., I start to get another window that lasts until about 7:00 p.m., right before dinner. I have to capture that, and I’ve learned that my mind is better at certain things in those two windows.
Again, this is highly individual. For some people, it might be the middle of the night. I think it’s important to know yourself. This might change across stages of life or life circumstances, but you want to capture those two windows and protect those times as if they were the most important times of the day. Maybe only your family members and coworkers can access you with emergencies during those times.
For most people, it’s going to be about twice a day. You might say, “That’s not enough time. That’s three hours of focused work, and then maybe three hours again in the afternoon, or two or three.” I don’t know many people who are completely focused for eight or nine hours a day without the next day being completely shot.
I agree.
Especially if you use pharmacology—and we could talk about pharmacology. I sip caffeine throughout the day, as I said, until the afternoon. If I exercise in the morning, I tend not to need as much caffeine in the afternoon. I just hydrate with electrolytes. A lot of people find that hydrating better increases their alertness.
That’s number one: figure out when you can exercise so it gives you more energy, and protect those times. I call them work bouts. I literally think of real work as a fight. My friend Rick Rubin likes to wake up—not slowly, exactly, but to move into the day with a lot of peace and calm. His work block is generally in the afternoon. I know this because I’ve spent a lot of time with Rick. That’s when his mind is sharpest, and then he tapers off in the evening. But he works extremely hard during those hours, and he knows when they fall.
I’m a little different. My work bouts come twice a day, but they are bouts. You should think of them as a fight. Here’s the real danger: if you’re in one of those windows and allow your attention to be captured by something that isn’t worthwhile to your company’s growth, you’re not just losing those 3 or 4 hours. The productivity in those hours is exponentially greater than the productivity you’ll get by doing that work later, or by catching up. It also prevents you from having a healthy personal life.
Mhm.
So you have to protect that time as if it were the most important thing, with the exception of family emergencies. Okay, that’s number one. I think the other thing is that, when I grew up down here in the Valley, everyone used to say, “No successful founder is a non-meditator,” or that they all meditate. And I’d think, can that really be true? Are they all just meditators?
I think what that’s really about is that you need to be pretty good at being in the stimulus-response mode of living life. You have tasks, you’re handling them, you’re organized. But I do think it’s valuable, once a day, even if just for a few minutes, to get out of stimulus-response mode, go inward, and check whether you’re allocating your energy properly.
Some people are more prone to getting pulled into conversations, dramas, and what they see. Sometimes people see things online, and those things have a long tail in their nervous system. There’s data showing that your thoughts two hours later are sort of seeded by what you saw in the previous hours. But some people are more like square waves; they compartmentalize better. Other people, like myself, will find that a conversation earlier in the day that interests me lingers and impacts the next thing I do.
I think these moments when you check in and separate yourself from all the inputs allow you to pivot more effectively. We don’t really have formal protocols for task-switching, but this is extremely important for company founders and employees across the board. You have to be able to cognitively task-switch, and we need more data on how that’s done. It certainly involves returning to a state where there aren’t any inputs.
12. Programming Your Brain for Focus
I think this is very important. In fact, Rick and I have been kicking around some tools that aren’t meditations. We’ve been trying to build tools that aren’t meditations or yoga nidra, but that would allow you to program your mind for what comes next. If you think about it, it’s 2026. Why in the world are we sitting down to work and just going, “Okay, now I’m going to be focused. Now I’m going to be creative”? We should have ways to control neural activity that would allow us to access those circuits more quickly and more deeply. Daisy Wolf
I’ve been pitched a headband that reduces ADHD and helps focus by sending waves through your brain.
Yeah, I think it’s going to happen in part by controlling activity—general brain-state oscillations and things like that. I like the idea that it will be personalized, that you hear your own voice in your head, maybe through headphones, telling you what to do. It would know you, know where you’re weak and where you’re strong, and be your own AI-built coach, telling you how to create blinders around certain things, organize your focus, or decompress from the day and completely relax.
I’m very excited about these technologies, mostly in the domains of sleep and waking up, because right now we don’t have the ideal tools. Maybe this company does, but think about a sleep mask that could put you to sleep by controlling your eye movements. That’s very easy to do with a little electrical stimulation behind the ear.
What’s that, the vagus nerve or something?
Well, you have branches of the vagus nerve around the ear. There are other vestibular nerves that innervate the inner ear and run superficially enough that you can do this, as well as the extraocular muscles. I’ve actually had the chance to try one of these sleep masks. For me, it was 6 minutes and I was out. It can also wake you up, which is really interesting. Maybe it would deliver the proper lighting, too. These transitions into and out of sleep are going to be the first place where neurotechnology really conquers the challenge, because we know exactly what you need: you need to be asleep.
Mhm.
You need to be awake. You need to be alert. When it comes to sitting down and doing a particular type of task, we’re still not clear what patterns of brain activity you really want. For focus, you want to be alert, but not too alert. It’s an inverted U-shaped function. Once you get over that hump, you—
—are highly distractible, right? Too sleepy, you’re highly distractible. It’s that sweet spot.
So I think that’s a really exciting area of neurotechnology. Again, it’ll happen first with sleep. And with AI, it will be able to calibrate and say, “Oh, we need to make the eye deflections broader in order to induce sleep when you’re in this particular state.”
13. Treat Yourself Like an Athlete
So, you asked about tools for founders. I think organizing your day in a way that’s tailored to what’s most important to you is key. Setting personal-life differences aside, you need to get your best work done twice a day. You need to treat yourself like an athlete.
It occurred to me when I was running a lab, and also when I was a postdoc: if I get to bed earlier at a conference, I’m going to be sharper the next day. Conferences were really important to me then. Likewise, when doing experiments, I could get twice as many done as everybody else—not just by working really hard one day, but by getting an extra hour of work done.
Of course, I was also the person who would sometimes bring my experiments to seminars. I’d think, “This is crazy. I need to run some immunohistochemistry. Why wouldn’t I bring it to the seminar?” I’d heard someone else had done that, so I thought, “I’m just going to bring my trays and transfer.” If everyone started doing that, it’d be problematic. But the point is that if you take yourself and your work really seriously, you need to organize your day that way.
I do think having 1 day per week when you completely disengage from things can be very beneficial for your ability to re-engage. My dad’s a scientist and worked at Xerox PARC for a long time; now he’s doing other things. Long ago, he said, “You have to be a long-distance runner. This is an endurance event.”
I agree. The best advice I ever got—and this will be the last piece on this—was from a neurologist at UC Berkeley and UCSF, Bob Knight. Some years ago, I asked him for advice when I was starting graduate school. He said, “Figure out the maximum amount of real work you can do every day consistently, and then figure out some non-destructive way to reset yourself every single week.”
I thought, “Okay.” At that time, I could work very long hours. I asked him how he reset, and he said he liked fishing. I’m okay with fishing, but I know what I like: hiking, getting into nature, and spending time with people while I do it.
I figured out I could work a certain number of hours per day, 5 days a week, with sometimes a little trough in the middle of the week. I stuck to it for 25 years. People who take a ton of stimulants and just blitz are the same people who crash and disappear. You have to figure out and build your capacity. I think we don’t talk about that enough, because people really differ in this regard. You have to work extremely hard and be extremely focused, but you also have to figure out how long you can keep it up.