Dr Huberman did a podcast on how the brain works and my purpose with this article is to bring his teachings to the sphere of fat loss and muscle gain.
The nervous system is what pieces together make up everything about your experience of life, from what you think about to what you feel, what you imagine and what you accomplish from the day you're born until the day you die. By the end of article, I want you to understand a lot more about how you work and how to apply that knowledge to your goals of fat loss and muscle building.
The reason Dr Huberman talks about the nervous system and not the brain is because the brain is actually just one piece of this larger, more important thing, called the nervous system.
The nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections between your brain and your spinal cord and the organs of your body. It also includes, very importantly, all the connections between your organs back to your spinal cord and brain.
What does it mean for your brain to work? Dr Huberman says that the nervous system does five things, maybe six.
Sensation is the first one. Sensation is a non-negotiable element of your nervous system. You have neuron’s in your eye that perceive certain colours of light and certain directions of movement. You have neuron’s in your skin that perceive particular kinds of touch, like light touch or firm touch or painful touch. You have neuron’s in your ears that perceive certain sounds. Your entire experience of life is filtered by these sensory receptors.
Perception is our ability to take what we're sensing and focus on it and make sense of it, to explore it, to remember it. So really perceptions are just whichever sensations we happen to be paying attention to at any moment. Perception is under the control of your attention.
Attention is something that is absolutely under your control. The nervous system can be reflexive in its action, or it can be deliberate. Deliberate thoughts are top down. They require some effort and some focus, but that's the point. You can decide to focus your behaviour in any way you want, but it will always feel like it requires some effort and some strain.
For example, if you have never counted calories before, it will require a lo of attention at first, this attention is going to require a lot of effort and focus which can feel like effort and some sort of unnatural strain. Whereas when you're in reflexive mode, just eating and doing your thing, it's going to feel very easy. And that's because your nervous system basically wired up to be able to do most things easily without much metabolic demand, without consuming much energy. But the moment you try and do something very specific, you're going to feel a sort of mental friction. It's going to be challenging.
So we've got sensations, perceptions, and then we've got things that we call feelings slash emotions. And these get a little complicated because almost all of us, have feelings such as happiness, sadness, boredom or frustration.
These feelings can lead to being on top of things and counting calories seems ok but they can also lead to the feeling of being overwhelmed which can have a terrible impact on your fat loss journey.
There's a certain category of chemicals that has a very profound influence on our emotional states. They're called neuromodulators. And those neuromodulators have names that probably you've heard of before, things like dopamine and serotonin and acetylcholine, epinephrine.
Neuromodulators are really interesting because they bias which neurons are likely to be active and which ones are likely to be inactive.
Dopamine is known as a molecule of reward or joy and it tends to create a sort of upbeat mood when released in appropriate amounts in the brain, an example of this is when you jump on the scales in the morning and your efforts are paying off.
Serotonin is known as a molecule that when released tends to make us feel really good with what we have, our sort of internal landscape and the resources that we have, whereas dopamine, being more the dopamine off reward, is more a molecule of motivation towards things that are outside of us and that we want to pursue.
We can look at healthy conditions or situations like being in pursuit of a goal such as fat loss, where every time we accomplish something in route to that goal, such as losing weight on the scales, a little bit of dopamine is released and we feel more motivation towards that goal.
Then we have thoughts. Thoughts are really interesting because in many ways they're like perceptions, except that they draw on not just what's happening in the present, but also things we remember from the past and things that we anticipate about the future. The other thing about thoughts is that thoughts can be both reflexive, they can just be occurring all the time, or they can be deliberate. We can decide to have a thought. And a lot of people don't understand or at least appreciate that the thought patterns and the neural circuits that underlie thoughts can actually be controlled in this deliberate way.
For us humans, the sensations, the perceptions, the thoughts and the feelings that we have in our lifespan, none of that is actually carried forward except the ones that we take and we convert into actions, such as exercising, cooking our meals, having a goof sleep routine and even weighing our food. And that in part is why so much of our nervous system is devoted to converting sensation, perceptions, feelings and thoughts into actions.
A good way to think about the reasons that our central nervous system, our brain and spinal cord, include this stuff in our skull, but also connect so heavily to the body is because most everything that we experience, including our thoughts and feelings, was really designed to either impact our behaviour or not. And the fact that thoughts allow us to reach into the past and anticipate the future and not just experience what's happening in the moment, gave rise to an incredible capacity for us to engage in behaviours that are not just for the moment. They're based on things that we know from the past and that we would like to see in the future.
And this aspect to our nervous system of creating movement occurs through some very simple pathways. The reflexive pathway basically includes areas of the brainstem we call central pattern generators. When you walk, provided you already know how to walk, you are basically walking because you have these central pattern generators, groups of neuron’s that generate right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot kind of movement.
However, when you decide to move in a particular deliberate way that requires a little more attention, you start to engage areas of your brain for top-down processing where your forebrain works from the top down to control those central pattern generators, like whenm you engage in exercise you haven’t done before.
So movement, just like thoughts can be either reflexive or deliberate. And when we talk about deliberate, I want to be very specific about how your brain works in the deliberate way because it gives rise to a very important feature of the nervous system, which is your ability to change your nervous system.
What does it mean for the nervous system to do something deliberately?
When you do something deliberately, you pay attention, you are bringing your perception to an analysis of three things, duration, how long something is going to take or should be done, path, what you should be doing, and outcome. If you do something for a given length of time, what's going to happen?
When you're cooking your food or you're eating or you're just talking reflexively, you're not doing what Dr Huberman calls DPO, duration, path, outcome type of deliberate function in your brain and nervous system.
For example where perhaps somebody says something that's triggering to you, such as “You look so skinny, why don’t you eat more?”
You don't like it and you know you shouldn't respond. You feel like, oh, I shouldn't respond. I shouldn't respond. I shouldn't respond. You're actively suppressing your behaviour through top-down processing. Your forebrain is actually preventing you from saying the thing that you know you shouldn't say or that maybe you should wait to say or say in a different form. This feels like agitation and stress because you're actually suppressing a circuit.
So a lot of the motor system is designed to just work in a reflexive way. And then when we decide we want to learn something or do something or not do something, we have to engage in this top-down restriction. And it feels like agitation because it's accompanied by the release of a neuromodulator called norepinephrine, which in the body we call adrenaline, and it actually makes us feel agitated.
So for those of you that are trying to lose weight and counting calories is something new or to learn to suppress your responses to the so called friend who called you skinny on your fat loss journey and you want top tell them to F**K OFF, that is going to feel challenging for a particular reason. It's going to feel challenging because the chemicals in your body that are released in association with that effort are designed to make you feel kind of agitated.
This is really important to understand because if you want to understand neuroplasticity, you want to understand how to shape your behaviour, how to shape your thinking, how to change how you're able to perform in any context, the most important thing to understand is that it requires top-down processing. It requires this feeling of agitation. In fact, I would say that agitation and strain is the entry point to making the lasting change.
What is Neuraplasticity?
Neuroplasticity is the ability for these connections in the brain and body to change in response to experience. And what's so incredible about the human nervous system in particular is that we can direct our own neural changes.
We can decide that we want to change our brain. In other words, our brain can change itself and our nervous system can change itself. It takes a lot of effort and strain, a lot more of that duration path outcome kind of thinking in order to achieve those plastic changes, but it can be done.
Plasticity in the adult human nervous system is gated, meaning it is controlled by neuromodulators. Dopamine, serotonin, and one in particular called acetylcholine, are what open up plasticity.
They literally unveil plasticity and allow brief periods of time in which whatever information, whatever thing we're sensing or perceiving or thinking, whatever emotions we feel, can literally be mapped in the brain such that later, it will become much easier for us to experience and feel that thing.
When we want something to happen, such as losing fat, or gaining muscle, we obviously want to be more motivated. What do we know for certain?
We know that that process of getting neural plasticity so that we have more focus, more motivation, absolutely requires the release of epinephrine. (Adrenaline).
We have to have alertness in order to have focus, and we have to have focus in order to direct those plastic changes to particular parts of our nervous system. Now, this has immense implications in thinking about the various tools, whether or not those are chemical tools or machine tools or just self-induced regimens of how long or how intensely you're going to focus in order to get neuroplasticity.
The dirty secret of neuroplasticity is that no neuroplasticity occurs during the thing you're trying to learn. During the gym session, during the meal prepping, during the thing that you're really trying to shape and learn. And nothing is actually changing between the neurons that is going to last.
All the neuroplasticity, the strengthening of the synapses, the addition in some cases of new nerve cells, or at least connections between nerve cells. All of that occurs at a very different phase of life, which is when we are in sleep and non-sleep deep rest.
The actual rewiring occurs during periods of sleep and non-sleep deep rest. So sleep is key. Also key are periods of non-sleep deep rest where we're turning off our analysis of duration path and outcome, in particular for the thing that we were just trying to learn.
Sleep and non sleep deep rest is very important for the consolidation, for the changes between the nerve cells that will allow what we were trying to learn to go from being deliberate and hard and stressful and a strain to easy and reflexive.
What governs the transition between alert and focused and these deep rest and deep sleep states is a system in our brain and body, a certain aspect of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system. And it is immensely important to understand how this autonomic nervous system works. It has names like the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system.
Sympathetic is the one that's associated with more alertness. Parasympathetic is the one that's associated with more calmness.
So the way to think about the autonomic nervous system and the reason it's important for every aspect of your life, but in particular for neuroplasticity and engaging in these focused states and in these de-focused states is that it works sort of like a seesaw.
Every 24 hours, we're all familiar with the fact that when we wake up in the morning, we might be a little bit groggy, but then generally we're more alert. And then as evening comes around, we tend to become a little more relaxed and sleepy. And eventually at some point at night, we go to sleep.
So we go from alert to deeply calm. And as we do that, we go from an ability to engage in these very focused duration path outcome types of analyses to states in sleep that are completely divorced from duration path and outcome, in which everything is completely random and untethered in terms of our sensations, perceptions and feelings and so forth.
So every 24 hours, we have a phase of our day that is optimal for thinking and focusing and learning and neuroplasticity and doing all sorts of things. We have energy as well. And at another phase of our day, we're tired and we have no ability to focus. We have no ability to engage in duration path outcome types of analyses. And it's interesting that both phases are important for shaping our nervous system in the ways that we want.
So if we want to engage neuroplasticity and we want to get the most out of our nervous system, we each have to master both the transition between wakefulness and sleep and the transition between sleep and wakefulness. Sleep is critically important for so many things, including wound healing, learning, consolidating learning leading to new habits, as well all aspects of our immune system. It is the one period of time in which we're not doing these duration path and outcomes types of analyses and it is critically important to all aspects of our health, including our longevity.
It is key we prioritise and get better at sleeping, get better at the process that involves falling asleep, staying asleep and accessing these states of mind and body that involve total paralysis, when our brain is in a total idle state where it's not controlling anything, it's just left to kind of free run.
And there are certain things that we can all do in order to master that transition, in order to get better at sleeping. And it involves much more than just how much we sleep. We're all being told, of course, that we need to sleep more. But there's also the issue of sleep quality, accessing those deep states of non-DPO thinking, accessing the right timing of sleep.
Sleep is clearly key and finding a routine that allows you to get a good solid 7 to 8 hours of quality sleep is going to hugely aid in the pursuit of your fat loss and muscle building goals as well as your overall health.
The other thing that is really important to understand is that we have not explored as a culture, the rhythms that occur in our waking states.
So much has been focused on the value of sleep and the importance of sleep, which is great. But I don't think that most people are paying attention to what's happening in their waking states and when their brain is optimised for focus, when their brain is optimised for these DPOs, these duration path outcome types of engagements for learning and for changing. And when their brain is probably better suited for more reflexive thinking and behaviours.
And it turns out that there's a vast amount of scientific data which points to the existence of what are called Ultradian rhythms. You may have heard of circadian rhythms. Circadian means circa about a day. So it's 24 hour rhythms because the earth spins once every 24 hours. Ultradian rhythms occur throughout the day and they require less time, they're shorter. The most important Ultradian rhythm for sake of this discussion is the 90 minute rhythm that we're going through all the time in our ability to attend and focus.
And in sleep, our sleep is broken up into 90 minute segments. Early in the night, we have more phase one and phase two lighter sleep, and then we go into our deeper phase three and phase four sleep. And then we return to phase one, two, three, four.
So all night you're going through these Ultradian rhythms of stage one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, it's repeating. Most people perhaps know that, maybe they don't, but when you wake up in the morning, these Ultradian rhythms continue, and we are optimised for focus and attention within these 90 minute cycles, so that at the beginning of one of these 90 minute cycles, maybe you prepare your meals for the week and weigh all your food, as this is something new which is a also a new challenging behaviour.
For the first five or 10 minutes of one of those cycles, it's well known that the brain and the neural circuits and the neuromodulators are not going to be optimally tuned to whatever it is you're trying to do. But as you drop deeper into that 90 minute cycle, your ability to focus and to engage in this DPO process and to direct neural plasticity and to learn is actually much greater. And then you eventually pop out of that at the end of the 90 minute cycle.
So these cycles are occurring in sleep and these cycles are occurring in wakefulness. And all of those are governed by this seesaw of alertness to calmness that we call the autonomic nervous system. So if you want to master and control your nervous system, it's vitally important to understand that your entire existence is occurring in these 90 minute cycles, whether or not you're asleep or awake. And so you really need to learn how to wedge into those 90 minute cycles. And now we know how long that focused bout of focus should be. It should be at least one 90 minute cycle. And the expectation should be that the early phase of that cycle is going to be challenging.
It's going to hurt. It's not going to feel natural. It's not going to feel like flow, but the circuits of your brain that are involved in focus and motivation can learn to drop in to a mode of more focus, get more neural plasticity, in other words, by engaging these Ultradian cycles at the appropriate times of day.
For instance, some people are very good early in the day and not so good in the afternoon. So you can start to explore this process even without any information about the underlying neurochemicals by simply paying attention, not just to when you go to sleep and when you wake up each morning, how deep or how shallow your sleep is, but also throughout the day when your brain tends to be most anxious. You can ask yourself, when are you most focused? When are you least anxious? When do you feel most motivated? When do you feel least motivated?
By understanding how the different aspects of your perception, sensation, feeling, thought and actions tend to want to be engaged or not want to be engaged. You develop a very good window into what's going to be required to shift your ability to focus or shift your ability to engage in creative type thinking at different times of day should you choose. And so that's where we're heading going forward.
It all starts with mastering this seesaw that is the autonomic nervous system, that at a course level is a transition between wakefulness and sleep. But at a finer level and just as important are the various cycles, these all trading 90 minute cycles that govern our life all the time, 24 hours a day, every day of our life.
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