3 Cool things Dr. Andrew Huberman taught us that every human being needs to know.

Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscience professor at Stanford University, Director of the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford School of Medicine, neuroscience research & education and host of the Huberman Lab Podcast.

Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets.

It’s safe to say that Huberman understands the science of the brain like nobody else. We’ve been following him for a while, and there’s some things that, we believe, everybody should just know that we’ve learned from the legend that is Dr. Andrew Huberman. So, because we love ya, we’ve collected them all into this article for your reading pleasure…

happiness is a science

Happiness can be understood down to a science, and Huberman has come up with a framework that can get us as close to the state or experience of happiness as possible.
Huberman agrees with most other scientists that it’s hard to define happiness to a similar definition for any two people. But, he has come up with a framework that can get you very close to it, if you choose to live your life by taking care of each of these elements.
He doesn’t ignore the glaring humanly challenge that often the endeavours we choose to follow in order to build a life that can bring us happiness, are contradictory to the things that we’re told will make us happy: exercise, social life, sunshine, rest. If we’re pursuing money & career, and perhaps neglecting these things in the short term are we sacrificing our chances for real happiness? Huberman says that there’s a balance to it all.
The framework involves: exposure to natural or artificial, bright lights, within the first hour of waking up AND avoiding exposure to bright lights between the hours of 10pm and 4am, exercise / movement, work, sense of meaning & income / financial security, deep social connection, sleep and physical connection (which could even include a pet). In this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast he dives deep into his framework and talks about how to utilise it in your own life.
Gratitude is a practice. And it’s not what you think.
According to Huberman, gratitude is not the feeling of “I could kiss you right now” we get when the waitress puts a huge plate of carbs in front of your face and you haven't eaten all day. Huh. Who knew? Gratitude is a practice.
And it’s one that should be cultivated more because it can have real, huge, long-lasting benefits on mental, emotional and physical health, and helps us develop a resilience to both past and present effects of trauma.
He has also looked at the studies that point to the fact that traditional gratitude practices are ineffective, like writing down a few things that we’re grateful for each day. Effective gratitude practices, according to neuroscience and neuro-imaging data, are actually a completely different approach that involves teaching your mind to find gratitude daily, using storytelling and narrative.
Using a storytelling approach with gratitude can literally rewire our brain and our responses to stress. The way Huberman talks about gratitude as a practice is like talking about hardcore steroids for a persistent illness. It’s potent, powerful and life-changing. It’s not some wishy-washy, woo way of talking about our feelings. He says there are literal “gratitude circuits” in the brain, and they’re activated by receiving gratitude (hearing why someone is appreciative of something you have done for them) or hearing stories where others have experienced gratitude.
So, you can either think into a time when someone was grateful to you – and specifically how that made you feel (as a narrative), or imagining or thinking about deeply the emotional experience of somebody else receiving help. So, it’s actually nowhere near as effective to think about how great your own life is, as it is to think about others benefiting – either from you or someone else.
These short practices can literally change your physiology and your ability to feel gratitude and all of its other positive mental and physical benefits. The human mind is wiiiild.

3. the mind is powerful

OK, before you roll your eyes and think, “yeah, I knew that”, I think we often don’t even realise just how powerful and underutilised our minds really are. And, it only takes listening to one episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast to be jolted into the reality of that. Huberman has, quite literally proven, that as humans we haven’t even tapped into a fraction of the potential our minds have and this goes way beyond the basic “law of attraction” understanding, and is much more about our actual perceptions of reality and what we do with it.

Post from Andrew’s instagram account @Huberman

So, if you didn’t know, now you know. Dr. Andrew Huberman is The Man. And if you’re interested in understanding the human brain, the science of how we work and all things mindset, happiness, relationships and human understanding, be sure to follow his work.