Essentials: Sleep Toolkit for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing
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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 we're talking all about sleep and how to optimize your sleep. Let's consider what the perfect 24-hour cycle would look like. Regardless of when you wake up in the morning, one of the first things that happens is that your body temperature is increasing, and that's just going to happen naturally.
That increase in body temperature in turn causes an increase in the release of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is often demonized and considered this bad thing, and indeed you don't want cortisol to be chronically or consistently elevated throughout the day or night. But you do want cortisol to reach its peak early in the day right about the time you wake up. One way that you can ensure that that cortisol peak occurs early in the day right about the time that you wake up is to view bright light, ideally from sunlight, within the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking. The reason for that is very simple.
You want to trigger that cortisol increase to occur very early in the day. in your day. And you don't want that cortisol peak to happen later, which is what will happen if you wait to get outside and see sunlight. The reason for this is that you have a set of neurons, nerve cells, in your eye. They're called intrinsically photosensitive melanopsin cells, but you do not need to know that name.
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