Why you shouldn't avoid your reading glasses: - Going without readers may exercise the lens muscles, but the data are mixed - Blurry input starves your retina and brain of the sharpest visual signal - Moving from 1.0 to 1.25 to 1.5 readers over time is not a problem - Same for distance: minus 2.00 now, minus 2.50 later - Wear the correction that gives you your best vision, for near and far Dr. Jeff Goldberg on @hubermanlab

Stop letting social media drain you: - Mute or delete the apps that push alerts at you: Nextdoor, Facebook, local feeds - Assume the worst headline was chosen algorithmically because you cannot help clicking it - Read less about what enrages you, and only from rational, intelligent sources - Channel the outrage into one practical act: donate, vote, help practically - Go macro, not micro: join a cause instead of recycling every item in your house - Work only on what you can actually control Outrage is a candy rush. It distracts you, weakens you and drains your energy. @robertgreene on @hubermanlab

Post-nap grogginess means you're sleeping poorly: - Keep naps under one ultradian cycle: 20 min, 30 min, up to an hour - Time them to the natural afternoon dip, roughly 2-4pm - Naps are optional, not required. Many people just feel the dip and want one - If you wake up groggy and disoriented, you likely dropped into REM or deeper sleep - That usually means you are not sleeping well enough, or long enough, at night - Fix nighttime sleep first, then test naps again @hubermanlab

How to beat an aggressive negotiator: - Do not go nose to nose, do not argue, do not get combative - Drop into passive aggressive behavior to slow them down - Pepper them with "how" and "what" questions - Every question forces thinking, which fatigues them - Keep going until they relent or reveal a loophole One of the great secrets of negotiation is learning how to exhaust the other side. Chris Voss on @hubermanlab

The exercise that reveals your real strengths: - Contact 10 to 20 people who know you well: family, friends, colleagues - Ask each one for a story about a specific moment when you were at your best - Collect all the stories, then run pattern recognition on them - Name the common themes across the stories - Ask what those situations had in common and create more of them - Flip it: write a best-self story to someone who matters to you Dr. Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) on @hubermanlab

You don't need to be unhappy to be driven: - Ask yourself what you're encoded to do - what lights you up, what feels like your nature - Stop measuring yourself against the final outcome - the acorn doesn't berate itself for not being an oak yet - Let growth happen because it's what you are, not because you're unhappy with where you are - Chase the feeling of the work itself, not just the result - That shift takes time - it may take years before the effort becomes its own reward @JamesClear on @hubermanlab

5 minutes a week is all the stretching you need: - Hold static stretches for 30 sec per set, limit momentum - Aim for ~5 min of static holds per week, per muscle group - Spread it out: 2 to 4 sets of 30 sec, 5 days a week - Hamstring example: 3 sets of 30 sec = 90 sec per session, 5x a week - 60 sec holds add nothing per set, but let you stretch fewer days per week - Combine muscle groups into one flexibility session @hubermanlab

Your brain filters the world down to what matters: - Attention exists because the brain has limited capacity. It cannot store the terabytes your senses take in every minute - Bottom-up attention is automatic: a building falling toward you grabs every resource you have - Top-down attention is goal directed: told to find a friend in a red dress, you filter the station down to red - Internal thoughts compete in that same system. One thought can win the competition even with your eyes open - The most effective people decide fast, then turn the volume down on the inner chatter and put all resources into the task - Keep 2-3 options in working memory, not 15-20. The more you hold, the lower the quality of each one @MasudHusain on @hubermanlab

"Work hard, play hard" mindset lowers your dopamine baseline: - Dopamine is one currency - rich food midweek, drinks on the weekend, ocean swims, a night out dancing all draw peaks from the same pool - It isn't about any single activity being occasional, it's the total number of peaks each week - The drop in baseline is subtle, even imperceptible, until you hit a threshold and nothing gives you pleasure anymore - It starts to look like acute addiction - big spikes, then a severe drop in baseline - You call it burnout and blame your age - often it's your dopamine @hubermanlab

What makes you memorable on a date: - Skip the search for common ground (major, hometown). Everyone does it - Go one layer deeper than feels comfortable - that's what makes you memorable - On a full-length date, use the 36 questions test (aka the fast friends procedure) - Ask things like: "What's one thing you've never told anyone that you've always wanted to tell them, and what's stopping you?" - Wait 60-90 min of hanging out before going there - Reciprocate. Both people disclosing is what builds trust and closeness Dr. Paul Eastwick on @hubermanlab

Extreme soreness isn't a sign of a good workout: - Even professional athletes don't use soreness as a workout metric - Aim to sit around 3 out of 10 soreness between sessions - You still want to feel you did something, because stress drives adaptation - A sore muscle can be trained again in most cases - If you can't sit on the couch without crying, that session went too far - Hedge toward less sore rather than more sore Extreme soreness costs you training days, and frequency drives almost all these adaptations. @DrAndyGalpin on @hubermanlab

How to help someone who admits they have a problem: - Normalize it first: tens of millions experience this, most stay silent - Convey rational hope: ~24 million Americans are in recovery right now - Early stage = dramatically better odds, easier to change before life falls apart - Assess resources: family support, stable housing, employment, accountability - Don't just say "great, let's quit" - ask why they want to change - Help them build their own reasons in detail (smell, money, freedom) - Make the reward concrete: "If you saved $2,000 from not smoking, what would you do with it?" Motivation has to come from them, not you - that's what makes it stick. Dr. Keith Humphreys (@KeithNHumphreys) on @hubermanlab

A wandering mind is an unhappy mind: - In this study, people reported feeling more unhappy whenever their mind was elsewhere, even when the thoughts themselves were happy ones. - Most of us were taught to think good thoughts and suppress bad ones. - -- True, but the stronger predictor of happiness is being fully engaged in what you are doing. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost." @hubermanlab

How to stop overthinking: - Thinking is useful when it serves learning, figuring things out, or doing - Planning the garden is thinking in service of the garden. The garden is the point, not the planning - Overthinking is thinking that serves nothing: repetitive, backward-looking, negative - It hardens into the narratives you tell yourself - Ask what a thought is in service of. If the answer is nothing, it is working against you - Repetition strengthens the circuit you want to atrophy, so stop feeding it Dr. Paul Conti on @hubermanlab

5-10 minutes of daily meditation improves your focus: - Sit or lie down, eyes closed, 5-10 min per day - Focus on your breathing - When your attention drifts, deliberately bring it back to the breath - Eyes-open version: pick a visual target, blink freely, keep returning attention to that same spot - Timing doesn't matter, though late at night might disrupt sleep for some - Miss a day, no big deal, just resume the next day Data from Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU: people doing this daily improved focus, memory and recall. Zero cost. @hubermanlab

Why your vitamin D supplement isn't working: - Vitamin D is a pre-prohormone. Inactive on its own. - The liver converts it to 25-hydroxy vitamin D. Still inactive. - From there, two paths. The kidney can activate it to 1,25-dihydroxy vitamin D, which drives calcium absorption from the gut and suppresses inflammation. - Or inflamed tissue (gut inflammation, sarcoid, TB) converts it to 24,25-dihydroxy D, which is inactive and gets excreted. - Soft drinks, sugared and artificially sweetened, deplete vitamin D to begin with. Deficiency is associated with chronic metabolic disease, but supplementing has not fixed it. If you're inflamed, the vitamin D you take never gets where you need it. Dr. Robert Lustig (@RobertLustigMD) on @hubermanlab

Kids are more creative because they have no baggage: - They have no belief system. They don't know how things are supposed to work. They just see what is. - What you learn about right, wrong and "how it's done" undermines the purity of the creative process. - Imitation is still a tool: copy a singer you love until you find your own voice. - Rubin started making music with no experience, so he broke rules without knowing they were rules. @RickRubin on @hubermanlab

The work starts by examining yourself: - You can read the books, watch the podcasts, and pay for the seminars, and still get no results - This isn't a hack - something in you has to wake up, and usually the only person who can wake it up is you - If there's even a small flame in there, you can work with it - if there isn't, nobody can hand you one - Examine the inside of yourself and decide what you actually want out of this life @davidgoggins on @hubermanlab

How to tell if someone will follow through: - Lead with how and what questions, not yes or no ones - Ask flat out: "How do I know you're going to follow through?" - Then: "What does implementation look like?" - Have them describe the alternative and the date out loud - If they answer fast and specific, they have already pictured complying - Brief answers, stonewalling, or the question thrown back at you means no plans to comply Vision drives decision. If they have not seen it, they cannot describe it. Chris Vonn on @hubermanlab

2 strategies to stop dwelling on a bad day: - Distraction: find something unrelated that fully consumes your attention until the failure fades into the background - Reframing: judge the slope of your performance, not the level - Then ask 2 questions: did you make yourself better today? - Even after a bad session, find the one thing that improved - Second question: did you make someone else better today? A tip to a teammate counts - Yes to either one and it wasn't a bad day Dr. Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) on @hubermanlab