Andrew David Huberman is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford School of Medicine.
He’s also the Head of Huberman Lab at the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford.
In wider circles, Andrew Huberman is known for his Huberman Lab Podcast, where he offers scientific explanations and research insights on various topics, including:
His podcast episodes, alongside his website, share nutritional, sleep, exercise, endurance, and other protocols that anyone can choose to incorporate into their daily routines.
Andrew Huberman’s research on different protocols was incorporated into his recent book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.
Andrew typically wakes up around 6:00–6:30 AM. He may stay in bed until 7:00 AM but doesn’t typically sleep past that time.
Right away, he records the time when he got up, which informs him about his minimum temperature.
Next, Andrew takes a cold shower for 1-3 minutes immediately after getting out of bed.
“Deliberate cold exposure […] triggers the release of catecholamines (dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine that increase alertness) for many hours,” he says.
Andrew is a proponent of light exposure.
He usually does it in one of the following ways:
For how long?
How to optimize your morning light exposure?
After a light exposure session, Andrew drinks a glass of room-temperature water with half a teaspoon of sea salt.
Typically, he drinks somewhere from 16 to 32 oz of water.
To feel focused during work, Andrew optimizes his workspace by:
You can also purchase a ring light or a light drawing pad or simply position your table near a window (if possible).
Andrew starts working mid-morning and sets the timer for 90 minutes.
The first five to 10 minutes of that 90 minutes are a transition time; it's like the warm-up for focus, but I do include it in that 90 minutes. And then I really try and drop into doing focused mental work or learning of some sort (...) across the full 90 minutes, again accepting the fact (...) that occasionally our focus will flicker, it will jump out of focus.
How to get the most out of your 90-minute bout of work?
After Andrew finishes his 90-minute cognitive work session, he does some physical exercise for about an hour.
Note: Sometimes, he works out before work to get more energetic and alert.
Andrew eats his first meal around 11:30–12.00 after fasting for the first part of the day.
After that, he takes a brief walk.
After his first meal, Andrew experiences what he calls a post-lunch low productivity-wise.
To reset his energy levels, he follows a Non-Sleep Deep Rest protocol, or NSDR (a term he coined himself).
Your options for a daily NSDR protocol
Around 2:00–3:00 PM, Andrew starts his second 1.5-hour work bout, during which he mostly focuses on creative work.
There's a 90-minute work block in which I drop in again in a no-internet- connection, no-phone kind of way to complete some work that's important to me. So combined, that's just three hours of focused work.
Andrew starts his evening routine by getting outside to view sunlight for the last time during the day (the first two were in the morning and during a midday walk).
If you want to keep your schedule on a normal routine, on a regular 24-hour cycle, and not have your circadian rhythms of sleep and wakefulness drifting all over the place and you want some predictability to how your mind is going to work in order to optimize learning and performance (...) you need to get morning light and evening light. The morning light is going to advance my clock. Make my system wanna get up earlier. And the evening light is going to delay my clock a little bit so that, on average, it kind of bookends my circadian mechanisms. And I'll basically wanna go to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up, more or less at the same time each morning.
An hour or two before sleep, Andrew engages in activities around the house or organizational tasks to overcome the peak of alertness.
Andrew takes a hot shower or bath right before going to bed to further improve his chances of getting a good night’s sleep.
The idea is to cool your body temperature so that it goes into a sleepy state faster.
Andrew has a four-step routine to prepare his bedroom for sleep.
Andrew shares that he sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night.
Here are the methods he uses to counteract that.
Andrew Huberman’s workout routine follows a dual schedule structure.
“I generally follow a program where, for about a month or three to four weeks, I will do all my resistance training in the repetition range of about four to eight repetitions. It might be anywhere from three to four sets per exercise. Again, it’s still just two exercises. And longer rest between sets, anywhere from two minutes to maybe even four minutes if it’s really heavy leg work.
And then for the next month, switch to a repetition range that’s closer to 8 to 12, maybe even 15 repetitions per set, but do fewer sets overall, so maybe just two to three sets per exercise.
Again, just two exercises per muscle group typically. And I shorten the rest between sets so that it’s more in the 90-second [range], maybe even as short as a 60-second rest between sets, but typically 90 seconds to about two minutes or two and a half minutes.
So basically, it’s one month heavier, and the next month, it’s slightly lighter.”
He begins his protocol on Sunday, but it’s not mandatory to start it on this day.
Activities in the protocol differ based on the muscle groups Andrew works on on a given day.
Below is an overview of Andrew Huberman’s daily workout sessions, based on his Fitness Toolkit podcast episode and Foundational Fitness Protocol.
To maximize the positive outcomes of his workout bouts, Andrew Huberman sticks to the following recommendations.
Huberman’s daily routine involves regular consumption of supplements divided into three categories based on their function.
Electrolytes and hydration products:
Supplements for sleep:
Cognitive enhancement and focus supplements:
Mood, endurance, and metabolic support supplements:
Andrew Huberman plans his daily nutrition based on three main components:
Andrew doesn’t eat anything for approximately five hours after waking up and follows a 10-hour feeding window.
But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule.
Fasting means not consuming any food or liquid calories within a certain period.
It is often synonymous with the term time-restricted feeding, which refers to limiting food intake to just several hours a day.
6 pillars of fasting
The six pillars of fasting are as follows:
When you eat, your blood glucose (sugar) levels go up, as well as your insulin levels.
When you fast, your blood glucose (sugar) levels go down, giving you a sense of mental clarity. At the same time, the levels of GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide) go up, which results in mobilizing your stores of fat and carbohydrates and sometimes even your muscle fibers and converting all of that into energy.
During the 6-hour period of fasting, Andrew hydrates with electrolytes (sodium, magnesium, potassium) required for neurons to work properly.
Andrew delays his caffeine intake for 90–120 minutes after waking up.
He usually doesn’t ingest caffeine before his morning workout but sometimes does it during his morning work bout.
Andrew breaks his fast around noon.
For his first meal, he usually eats protein.
The idea is to avoid a steep rise in blood glucose, which can cause energy levels to crash.
After his afternoon NSDR session, Andrew makes sure he hydrates before starting his second work bout.
“Hydration, again, is vitally important for brain function (…) and for all bodily functions. And I often forget to do it, so I’ve just sort of linked the drinking of water to my hypnosis practice. As soon as I’m done, I hydrate.”
For dinner (the second meal of the day), Andrew chooses carbohydrates.
Carbs spark the production of serotonin, which improves the quality of sleep.
Yes, he can snack on berries, nuts, and cereal, particularly from the company Magic Spoon (according to this source), or consume bars from Munk Pack (according to this source) which allow him to maintain a ketogenic diet.
Given Andrew Huberman’s online popularity, many creators took on a challenge to try his routine and validate it through their experience.
Cam from Goal Guys, whose video collected over 4m views, tested Andrew’s morning routine for 30 days.
To measure the effects of the routine, Cam did the following:
In the first week, Cam saw no change.
However, towards the end of his experiment, he noticed the following perks:
An important takeaway Cam recognized is that using a phone throughout the day is a major distraction that does not allow him to focus.
Once he removed this distraction, his productivity levels went up.
Another blogger who tried Andrew Huberman’s entire daily routine for a month was Laura Try, although she adapted it a bit to her needs.
Laura’s main objective was to see if this routine, particularly viewing sunlight early, could help improve her sleep.
What she found was that, by the end of the challenge, she started falling asleep faster, and her sleep got deeper.
Another goal was to improve focus levels, which Laura struggled with at first.
Undistracted 90-minute work bouts, of which Laura had three every day, helped her start work on the project she had been delaying for months.
However, she did decide to modify her work sessions and move the first one to later in the day to fit her schedule better.
Both these experiments by Cam and Laura lasted only for 30 days yet still showed promising results.
But what if you kept up with Huberman’s routine for longer?
Keltie O’Connor tried it for an entire year but in a particular way.
For every month of 2022, Keltie adopted a new Huberman protocol.
Keltie’s monthly breakdown of Huberman’s routine gave a full overview of the benefits of each activity involved.
Although she found some protocols (like cold and heat exposure) harder to complete, they proved their value during one-month trial runs, and she admitted that doing them daily resulted in pivotal changes, improving her overall quality of life.
