Andrew Huberman· PhD
Pretty easy to achieve with behaviors.
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Pretty easy to achieve with behaviors.
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Fail to get it and you’ll likely late shift your cortisol peak or get a second one in the pm which is not good for sleep or health.
Get the first 1-2 hours of your morning cortisol levels high (bright light, exercise, and some growth promoting stress: workout, key meeting, etc), and the last 1-2 hours of your pm cortisol low, and the rest becomes much easier.
one option is to try to spike it earlier in the day with the bright light viewing and exercise.
a useful heuristic is to get your morning cortisol peak high, which helps make your evening and nighttime cortisol levels low. (They relate to one another) and that pattern favors what most people want: focus, energy, great sleep, etc.
Spiking your morning cortisol increase (which is what wakes you up & is healthy) with bright sunlight & exercise, shortens the duration and the amplitude of the cortisol response to afternoon and night time stressors, should they happen.
So this huge release in this hormone that everyone thinks is terrible but actually sets this huge wave in motion for the rest of the day, which gives you more energy, higher levels of immune function, more focus, et cetera, and does indeed as you mentioned in your example of your daily life sets a timer so that about 14 to 16 hours later, you're sleepy, which is what you want 14 to 68 hours later, unless, of course, you're running vampire shifts in the military or you're on shift work, but most people aren't, of course.
you're teaching it so this is actually a coachable response you can coach your own body to go down in the later part of the day and go up in the earlier part of the day
cortisol starts to rise just before we wake up in the morning assuming a good night's sleep and Peaks a maybe I don't know 30 to 90 minutes after waking for you slow risers like me uh probably a little delayed by the way the height of that Peak and the acceler the uh I would say the steepness of the curve can be uh increased uh by viewing morning sunlight we know this bright light increases that cortisol Peak it'll make you a better early riser but in any typically the pattern then is that it rises um through mid morning and into the early afternoon and then starts to taper off to lower levels and as you mentioned we'll see bumps in cortisol post meal if there's a stressor we get a disturbing text we get a bump in cortisol but these aren't huge Peaks unless it's a big stressor correct and then by evening cortisol levels in healthy individuals are typically low and that allows for transition into sleep among other things allow for transition into sleep
That first hour is a very special hour because it's a time in which you can further amplify the increase in cortisol. [...] But that first hour after waking is critical.
And if you do things right in that first hour or 90 minutes of the day, you're going to set yourself up for an overall healthy pattern of cortisol release at night as well.
When you wake up, spike that cortisol using the tools we described. Then make sure that cortisol doesn't come down far too fast, right? You don't want a vertical drop in it. ... You want a relatively steep drop and you want that cortisol coming down down down down into the afternoon such that by late afternoon and evening it's down and then you want to keep it down.
And that's the first hour or two or two and a half or three after waking. So, while there's this 24-hour rhythm in cortisol, where cortisol is elevated in the morning, there's this unique opportunity of about an hour to two hours, maybe three, immediately after waking when your SCN can activate this parallel pathway down to your adrenals to cause the release of more cortisol and elevate your morning energy, alertness, mood, and so on.
When you exercise at roughly the same period of time each day, doesn't have to be right on the minute, but within the same two or three hour window each day... When you do that, pretty soon you get a cortisol increase simply in response to the timing rolling around in a very Pavlovian way.
that if we start to do that fairly regularly between the hours of 9:00 am and 11 am that we're better prepared for that battle at that time versus in the afternoon.
Bright light exposure for a few hours first thing upon waking and consistent exercise have been shown to lower cortisol.