I think it was E.B. White who said, "I arise in the morning, "torn between the desire to enjoy the world "and the desire to improve the world, "and this makes it difficult to plan the day." And I feel that every day. I think, I mean, I even, I felt it this morning. I was like, okay, it's time to leave to come to the Huberman podcast. I'm like, wait, but I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing. So what do I do? Do I show up on time for you or do I meet your criteria? The explanation "I was getti
ng my morning sunlight, "and therefore I'm x number of minutes or even hours late" would've been completely fine with me. I figured as much. Yes, absolutely. Like that's a built-in acceptable excuse with you. I think, I mean, I think everybody experiences a version of this, and it's definitely gotten worse with social media and with smartphones. I think, so one of the most startling data points for me was Gloria Mark first put this on my radar, before COVID, the average person was checking email
72 times a day. How do you ever concentrate for more than a couple minutes if you're self interrupting that often? You can't. Brigid Schulte has a great term for this. She calls it time confetti, and she says, we're taking these meaningful blocks of time, and we're slicing them up into these like tiny little dots of confetti. And not only can we not accomplish anything, we're also eroding our own sense of joy because it's really hard to enjoy the, you know, the 30-second blip of time that you g
et on a task. And I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems than how to solve them, but one thing we do know is blocking out uninterrupted time is meaningful. There's a great Leslie Perlow experiment where she takes engineers, and she has them, she sets a quiet time policy. No interruptions Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon, 65% above average productivity. Could you repeat the protocol again? Yeah, so quiet time, there are a couple iterations of it, but I think the mos
t effective one was Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, no meetings, no interruptions, no Slack, no emails before noon. And during those periods of no interruptions, one could tend to whatever their primary purpose is at work. Yeah, you have a. So for me, it might be podcasting. Obviously I don't have my phone in here and never do, but it doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else. It just means focusing on the major task. The task, exactly. And you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose, a
nd I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon. It's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to it that seems to be important. And I think, you know, when I think about this, I'd be really curious about your take on chronotypes here because I think one thing I've learned in the last couple years is that if you're a morning person, you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning. And so the quiet time block would work
very well for me as a morning person. If you're a night owl, you probably want that block in the late afternoon. And I was encouraged, there was some evidence during COVID that people have their best meetings right after lunch, that they're something like 30% less likely to multitask in an after lunch meeting. And I guess, you know, you could probably unpack like the food coma, you know, getting re-energized by other people. But it's led me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first few
hours and the last few hours of the day for deep work, and then doing our core meetings and interactions and kind of off task activities in the middle. What do you think about that as a sequence? Yeah, well, I have a lot of questions about this for you, but I love that sequence. It certainly fits with my natural rhythms. I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping well at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule. When I say standard, I mean going t
o bed somewhere between let's say 9:30 and 11:30 PM. Waking up sometime between, let's say 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM, maybe 5:30 to 7:30, something like that. So not highly unusual night owl or super early bird. For people that are following that sort of schedule, the first, let's just say from zero to eight hours after waking, there tends to be a fairly robust increase in all the catecholamines. So dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine in which generally, okay, generally speaking, lead to increases i
n alertness, attention and focus that are great for analytic work, great for implementation of strategies that you already understand and you need to churn through a lot of stuff. And of course, there's a big increase in the morning, especially if you view morning sunlight, a healthy increase, I should say in cortisol. Cortisol is not bad, folks. You want cortisol, but you want that peak early in the day. We know that. Okay, so for most people it seems, at least my understanding is that that per
iod of time, zero to eight or eight hours after waking or so, is best devoted to the quote unquote most critical tasks. But one of the common problems is that people take that ability to implement a known strategy, and they start battering back all the emails or talking to all, by the way, talking to coworkers is great, and it's often required, but it's, the question is whether or not it's productive conversation or whether or not it's just conversation. And we tend to have a lot of energy early
in the day, and I'm obsessed with the idea of neural energy as opposed to just caloric energy. So there we're talking about neural energy, and then post-lunch, so really as we get to this sort of, you know, nine to 17 hours after waking, there is a dip in autonomic arousal that during the middle of the day that post perennial dip, there's a post-lunch sleepiness that can be partially offset by delaying your morning caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash. But it's interesting that you no
te that more productive meetings and less task switching and distraction occurred in meetings set after lunch because that makes me think that perhaps being a little bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus. And indeed, that's the sort of optimal state, relaxed, but focused, you know, you're not sleepy, but you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're, you know, Bouncing off the walls. Tending to a bunch of things because I think a lot of people do feel that way. You know
, and I'm drinking, you know, double espresso right now, late mid morning, late morning, and you know, I can sit still, but I think certain Zoom meetings, how do I say this? I don't want to offend any of my colleagues. I mean, they are boring enough, like they are not content rich enough to grab all my attention. And nowadays, of course there are multiple screens. Typically I've got two phones and a computer, and you have to really spend some work to flip over those phones while I'm on a Zoom an
d things like that, so maybe. Sorry, what were you saying? I wasn't listening. So it's maybe the reduction in autonomic arousal that supports what you just described, but I don't know. My thinking or my understanding rather was that creative work and kind of brainstorming was best accomplished in the late afternoon. I've noticed when lecturing, I'd be curious what your experience is with in university lectures, when I held courses in the evening, I used to like to hold my courses five to 7:00 PM
or even seven to 9:30 PM when I was teaching undergraduates that people were much looser and more relaxed. And I always thought that that might have something to do with an increase in GABA transmission that's known to happen late in late evening. The people are just kind of more relaxed, and less social anxiety. They've been around people for much of the day. They're warmed up. I send back more reflections than answers. I don't have any firm neuroscience explanations for what you described, bu
t there are some emerging theories about how that might work. And it has this zero to nine hours phase one, nine to 17 hours, phase two. And then of course, from 17 to 24 hours, I'll call it phase three, you should be asleep. Yeah. Ideally. Well, that I think there's a confound in your teaching experience, which is undergrads often sleep in until what? Noon. True. Or they might be up until 4:00 AM. Or at least 10:00 AM seems to be a typical rise time. Yes. For the undergraduate. So a morning cla
ss might be too early for them to be fully awake, but there is, there's some brand new evidence that on, at least on creativity at work, I read a series of, I think it was three studies recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in the morning. And in part, I think, again the, I don't think any neuroscientist has touched the mechanisms on this yet, but in terms of the psychological processes, early on there's just, there seems to be a benefit of the energy level and som
e of that energy leads to more divergent thinking. And later, if you're a morning person, you might lose the ability to diverge quite as much. And so you end up in a more conventional space of thought. Does that track at all with your understanding of how it might play out in the brain? My understanding is it would be a little bit, it would be individual, but you know, there is something to these liminal states between sleep and waking. So maybe we can wrap a convenient bow around what I said an
d what you just said, which is that we know that in the transition states into and out of sleep, and it doesn't necessarily have to be within the first half hour in and out of sleep, that there seems to be more divergent thinking or at least activation of neural networks that are not as constrained as one observes when they're in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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