#1042 - Dr Andrew Huberman - How to Reclaim Your Brain in 2026

Most people treat cortisol like the villain and aim to lower it. Is that actually the right frame?

Not at all. Cortisol’s core job is to mobilize energy, and the healthy wake-up signal is the cortisol awakening response that literally gets you out of bed.

In a normal day it’s lowest at night, rises across the late night, then peaks on waking. Bright light in the first hour can amplify that peak by about half through a special circadian pathway, which sets you up for focus and calm later.

If you miss that morning spike, the system is primed for bigger, longer stress hits later, making sleep harder. Caffeine barely moves cortisol in regular users, and cold plunges actually lower it despite the internet myths.

Late-day all‑out training can push cortisol up for hours and nudge your rhythm, so the next morning may feel flat. The goal is a high morning, low evening curve; it predicts recovery and even longevity, though it can flatten with menopause.

What about burnout? I’ve heard you describe it as cortisol mistimed for too long. How should someone approach that?

Burnout shows up as either tired all morning then wired late, or revved from dawn to dusk. Treat the first three to six hours as go time with light, movement, hydration, and caffeine, then do the inverse at night with dim light, no late caffeine, less fluid, and long-exhale breathing.

Even 100 lux overhead light while sleeping can worsen morning glucose through closed eyelids, so aim for truly dark nights and bright mornings. Nail the first and last hour and the whole curve improves.

Daylight saving and Matt Walker’s work flipped my view on sleep from a nuisance to non‑negotiable. His early message scared me straight in the best way.

Sleep is the reset. A few rough nights won’t break you, but chronic late spikes bathe the hippocampus in cortisol and erode memory; Matt’s push was pivotal, and now we have more levers to help people without perfection anxiety.

Morning sunlight ties to better sleep that night, alcohol and cannabis degrade sleep quality, and safe over‑the‑counter aids like magnesium threonate, theanine, chamomile, apigenin, lemon balm, saffron, or tart cherry can help. The point is agency, not fear.

For hard chargers with a racing mind at night, what actually works once the room is cool, dark, and quiet?

Check your carbs; ultra‑low starch can leave you wired and fragment sleep, so a modest starch with your last meal often helps. Move intense workouts earlier, consider low‑dose lithium only with a doctor, and manage light.

A simple eye‑movement routine can quiet body-position awareness: slow side‑to‑side, circles, up and down, then a gentle cross‑eyed effort with a long exhale. It gives the mind something to do and helps the vestibular system let go.

Two tools have helped me: a vivid “mind walk” through a familiar route that feels like fiction, and HRV resonance breathing with a handheld stone and silent cues. Hitting resonance calms me fast.

Gaze direction maps to arousal. Looking down with heavy lids nudges the parasympathetic side and makes sleepiness easier to access.

What about raising the head of the bed for brain clearance? Is head‑above‑feet the idea?

The lymphatic system moves with muscle activity, but the brain’s glymphatic clearance surges during still sleep. In deep sleep, astrocytes widen perivascular spaces so cerebrospinal fluid can wash out metabolic waste.

Side sleeping, or slight head elevation on your back, supports clearance; a chair sleep trades brain gains for poor body drainage. Puffy eyes after a bad night are lymph; clear sleep restores the eyes’ brightness because the retina shares this clearance system.

Don’t over‑tilt the head because of apnea risk. Fix snoring, and consider nasal strips or better nasal patency solutions.

I’m trialing a mandibular device for REM‑related apnea.

Great to get expert eyes on airway and craniofacial factors; soft diets and narrow palates matter. Nasal breathing and tongue posture are real levers, even if some methods spark controversy.

What does neuroscience say about making habit formation easier?

James Clear’s playbook aligns with the brain: mechanism knowledge grants flexibility, and learning sticks through self‑testing and later reflection because learning is anti‑forgetting.

Thoughts are layered sensory traces, so what you consumed just before work shapes your focus. Use boring breaks, silence, and minimal inputs, and protect a phone‑free space to help your mind drop into the trench and stay there.

Social feeds exploit novelty like slot machines; avoid that before deep work. In a world of constant distraction, doing the simple, unglamorous focus work is now the easiest path to stand out.

Fragility is everywhere, which is bleak, but it’s also an edge if you build resilience. Can you actually unlearn bad habits, or are those neural grooves permanent?

Neuroplasticity lets us reawaken old pathways; they’re never truly gone. Many bad habits track back to hypothalamic drives, and envy stands out because it isn’t pleasurable and often blocks growth—you can test yourself by how you feel when others succeed.

Breaking habits starts with prefrontal control tamping down subcortical urges; with repetition, that restraint becomes more automatic until a lapse reopens the fight.

For the hardest changes, handing control to a higher power can lighten the load—that’s why AA centers it. Science can’t fully map it yet, but across history it works.

That flips the usual playbook of agency—billions lean on surrender to stay on track.

I’m a scientist, and nightly prayer has given me lasting peace; even if it’s “just biology,” it’s the only way I’ve carried life’s weight without breaking.

Can we revisit “it’s all internal”?

Mostly internal means training your second thought, not the first, and cutting loops that don’t serve you; sometimes the right move is to distract instead of stoking rumination.

The rewards you feel are self-made—no one’s dripping chemicals into your brain when you win or rest in the sun.

Blast dopamine with drugs and you crash hard. Today many chase variable rewards like gambling, and some even get hooked on the shame of losing.

It’s wild that gambling is so easy and legal when it wrecks so many lives.

The drive to seek isn’t going anywhere, so channel it; medicine once mocked handwashing and people paid dearly.

That’s the Cassandra complex—being right too early gets you punished.

I’ve seen it with the glymphatic system and with Wallace shadowing Darwin; power decides credit. I’d rather spotlight wins like EveryCure repurposing existing drugs to save patients now.

Science and medicine are people businesses; motives and blind spots matter. Broad life experience—like Rogan’s wide net—builds better filters, and clinicians need that.

Years in nightclubs trained my BS detector, which helps on the pod.

Long-form lets you press on ideas without playing gotcha.

I love the seamless micro-moves pros make between the big moments; shifting gears, why did protein become political?

Bodybuilding optics spooked some people, but everyone gains from resistance training; Mentzer shaped my low-volume, high-intent approach where mind–muscle precision matters more than set counts.

Legacy media needs clicks, so they bait basic nutrition. Aim roughly for a gram per pound of desired lean mass, animal protein is more efficient per calorie, and ignore the hype cycle while you build a real craft beyond “content about content.”

Art needs a life behind it, or you run out of ideas.

I seek new inputs—an octopus AI project, art—and treat social like a narrow ridge between numbing out and drama; unfollow what seeds your mind with junk and return to real work.

Drama feels like learning but it’s empty calories.

Exactly—schoolyard reruns add no data, so curate for novelty and depth.

A decade in sharpened my filter.

Notice when the apps grab you and why, then step back like you would in a chaotic club and do the job.

I use a post‑consumption gut check: after I finish a piece of content, do I feel clearer, kinder, and more open, or tight, resentful, and on edge?

I ask myself what actually stuck after scrolling, because real learning shows up later in recall and reflection, like when a run helps me process a long interview I just heard.

New ideas seem to ride the same wave every time—hype, pushback, then broad acceptance if they’re legit.

Public careers follow that arc too, and if the drama is more compelling than the value, arrogance plus scandal can clip a career fast.

Vitamin D had its moment, creatine is mid‑cycle, and protein got politicized through the meat wars.

Creatine endures, partly because women with big platforms championed it, even if the scale bumps a bit from water.

There’s also that environmental security idea: when resources feel scarce, preferences tilt toward a sturdier body size, and when times feel flush, lean looks rise; waist‑to‑hip tends to hold steady.

I remember the 90s thin aesthetic, then a shift toward more muscle in men—cultural taste really does swing.

Creatine keeps evolving into flavored chews and gummies, but I’m curious what’s next.

I still load creatine hard for a week, then run a higher daily dose and do washouts to see what strength remains without it.

So what’s the next big acceptance wave?

Magnesium, especially threonate or bisglycinate before bed, looks poised for a surge; an ENT chair explained how it can help protect hearing by supporting the inner ear fluid and hair cells.

People keep saying soil depletion means our veggies carry less now, so supplements may matter more.

Expect the magnesium cycle to run from chatter to enthusiasm to nitpicking, and while we’re revising priors, new analyses show no alcohol beats any amount for long‑term risk, even if a drink or two in a week won’t wreck you.

Elective sobriety transformed my productivity, which is why I launched Six Months Sober before the podcast; try simple experiments like delaying caffeine or walking early and feel the difference first.

I had a bro‑era routine, but the simple morning walk still hits because motion and lateral eye movement calm the system in a real, mechanistic way.

Knowing why a tool works lets you adapt when the exact protocol slips, instead of flying blind.

If late training blunts next‑morning energy, that’s cortisol timing, and knowing the feedback loops helps you stitch protocols together; Josh Waitzkin calls it grasping the principles beneath the principles.

Expertise is stacked understanding plus practice and trusted networks, which is why siloed medicine can miss repurposed treatments, and why operators like Derek from More Plates More Dates earn respect from academics.

Alright, on diet trends, I keep hearing a rising whisper about fiber making a comeback.

Fiber’s nuanced because some types inflame certain people while others soothe; meanwhile, low‑sugar fermented foods reliably lower systemic inflammation and support the microbiome.

You even ride for Bulgarian yogurt over Greek.

I drink sauerkraut brine after training and refill the jar because the store‑bought brines cost a fortune; fiber will rise, but it’ll be personalized, and carnivore voices aren’t wrong that some plants irritate some guts.

On melatonin, huge doses can dampen reproductive axes, so if you use it, keep it tiny and occasional rather than making it a nightly hammer.

I was told to take five milligrams after flights as an antioxidant play, but that’s a lot when one milligram already sits near the bottom of the effective curve.

Red and near‑infrared light from the sun supports mitochondria, and the water around them absorbs those wavelengths like the ocean absorbs red, which is wild given mitochondria’s bacterial origin.

And we inherit mitochondria through mom, which still blows my mind.

In the UK, three‑parent IVF now helps families avoid mitochondrial disease because early embryo division relies on maternal mitochondrial machinery, and many day‑three embryo fails trace back to those spindles as much as sperm.

So a donor’s healthy cytoplasm can help when maternal mitochondria or egg quality are the bottleneck, especially at advanced ages.

You can swap a mother’s nuclear DNA into a donor egg that still has its mitochondria, fertilize it, and get a baby with the parents’ nuclear genes and a third party’s mitochondrial genes; it works in a few countries and raises wild identity and ethics questions.

Learning mitochondria come from mum blew my mind; you can picture someone with race‑car energy under the hood but a basic chassis for handling, and I even sent off a cheek‑swab test wondering how that maternal power system blends with a person’s psychology.

You still inherit nuclear DNA from both parents, and studies from Catherine Dulac show some brain regions lean entirely mom or dad in expression, including areas that drive appetite, so the genetic mosaic is more complex than the neat fifty–fifty story.

About your health video, do you think stacking fixes can create new problems and muddy the trail; I tried lowering ApoB on a doctor’s advice, got side effects, stopped, and felt fine, which makes me worry when I hear about extreme cleanses.

I started with fatigue, brain fog, low mood, got a Lyme signal, ran the standard doxy and minocycline rather than jumping to crazy stuff, then had an olfactory aura mid‑workout that sent me for scans because I thought it was a stroke.

Mold was sky‑high, heavy metals and plastics showed up, and I did saunas and binders, but a giant test panel always returns oddities, which critics used to say I looked fine so it was in my head, while the ME and tinnitus crowd said, finally, someone’s describing our reality.

You’re right to share it; I’m hearing similar from men with lingering issues after hair‑loss drugs, so there should be more open talk, and did the long antibiotics actually move the needle for you.

They helped but didn’t solve it, so I dug into FISH testing and worked with top clinicians like a German specialist and Matt Cook; it’s complicated, expensive, and masked by what I call inverse pretty privilege, and for me COVID plus mold likely kicked off an autoimmune loop if you add gut permeability and genetics.

Is Austin really that moldy, and would you talk with David Fajgenbaum’s Every Cure team that repurposes existing drugs with serious science, because answers often exist but stay hidden.

Texas builds with wood that gets hot and wet during construction, then sealed, so it becomes a greenhouse for spores; as for me, last fall and spring were brutal and I chased sleep religiously because my thinking felt like wading through mud.

I don’t buy that you were just pushing too hard; you’ve got a big engine and a forward lean, and you’ve trained for it.

I dropped from a ten to a three or four at my worst, forgot how to tie my shoes one day, and now I’m mostly seven to eight, doing live shows again and feeling color return to the world.

That sounds like a temporary, cognition‑blunting state, almost a mini‑dementia window.

I even took an anticholinergic for overactive bladder, which I probably trained into myself during lockdown by peeing too often, and it wrecked my memory and vibe.

Muscarinic hits feel floaty and weird compared to nicotinic focus, which is why those old tales of flying exist; powerful drugs can nail a target yet derail the system.

Michaela Peterson called and told me to stop immediately, which I did, and the fog eased.

Treating gut bugs like H pylori often means multiple antibiotics in sequence, and if you’re the “push” type your immune system can overshoot under stress, throwing interleukins and cortisol around and even triggering scary‑looking but stress‑driven skin flares, so sleep becomes the safety valve.

I agree it’s usually under‑rested, not overworked, and I was in bed twelve hours a night and still empty; now I bounce between six and eight out of ten and can enjoy a morning even after seeing rough street scenes in LA.

We’ve got a real crisis with homelessness, mental health, and addiction playing out in front of us.

It finally felt like the world had color again. The old me kind of died, so I kept this year simple: sleep early, cut the fun, fix my health, and keep the show steady.

I’m bringing the year in for a careful landing after brutal swings between hope and letdown. Silver lining: I can now name a bunch of dead-ends and a couple things that helped, and Brian Johnson’s coming on to dig into that.

On Piers Morgan, Michaela floated everything from mold to demons for her dad; I get it, because relentless pain can feel so unfair you start calling it a curse or karmic payback.

How can I and the audience support you—prayer, ideas, or space? The urge to fix is strong, and what began as Lyme has clearly cascaded, but skip past-life or demon rabbit holes; you’re already reflective and beating yourself up won’t help.

You already do. I also had a close brush this weekend that may surface and says a lot about legacy media hitching onto hot platforms to ride momentum.

I value our friendship—the long essays and even that black-ferret saga that saved a colony actually lifted me. When’s the book coming out?

September 2026; I delayed it to add material and illustrations, and I’m sorry for the wait but I’ll make it worth it. I’ll pray, tap my medical and scientific network, and I think you’re already on the recovery slope—you’ll beat this.

Thanks for staying with a full conversation instead of bailing on a short attention span. If you liked this with Huberman, line up the Rhonda Patrick episode next.

I also put together a free list of one hundred books that changed me, with notes and links, at chriswillx.com/books.