Welcome to my final blog post! I think the progression of my blog posts represents the mindset shift I have had over the course of this year. Recently, I have found television shows enjoyable unless I am completely checked out for the day and in my basement. If it is during the week, I would much rather listen to a podcast before bed. In this post, I will detail a few changes I have made in my life based on what I have gleaned from Andrew Huberman podcasts. 
Deliberate cold exposure. Deliberate cold exposure’s primary purposes are to wake you up and increase dopamine for several hours following the exposure. The best way to do it is with a cold tub, but a cold shower serves the same function. Typically, I spend approximately 1 minute and 20 seconds in the cold after a warm shower. It is important to note that I only do this if I take a morning or early afternoon shower because it will be very hard to fall asleep after this. The reason is that your body’s central nervous system gets shocked by the cold water causing a spike in adrenaline. Additionally, your core body temperature drops rather quickly and dramatically in the cold shower. Then, a signal is sent to your prefrontal cortex to warm your body up. This process of warming your body up is the signal for your body to wake up. I have utilized this on seemingly sluggish days to elevate my mood because of the sharp dopamine increase that lasts for several hours. Cortisol is a stress-regulating chemical in your body. Cold exposure causes a sharp spike in Cortisol that leads to decreased stress, increased alertness, and much more. Because of benefits like these and those that I have mentioned, I will continue to do this and ideally, I will be able to increase the time I spend in the cold water. Next, we have the reverse of deliberate cold exposure.https://media.istockphoto.com/id/827324092/photo/interior-of-finnish-sauna-classic-wooden-sauna.jpg?s=612×612&w=0&k=20&c=IEwe317-7WIYWRs0cN8czl1NpfiEdsbdk9DyfXVywjs=
Sauna. I sometimes spend 10-20 minutes in the sauna following my workouts. My skin temperature is driven up and my nervous system is fighting to keep my core body temperature down because the sauna is working to heat it up. Thus, when I exit the sauna, my body will continue to drive down its temperature, and this process of cooling down aligns with the body’s process of falling asleep. I typically work out at night, so this helps me fall asleep more easily at night. Other benefits of the sauna are increased blood flow, thus enhancing recovery, and increased growth hormone production, a key element for growth and recovery. These benefits are just as available if not more so because my primary goals for working out are hypertrophy and strength gain, and the sauna assists both of these.
While it sounds like I have taken the time to optimize my life through deliberate cold exposure and exposing myself to very high temperatures, there are a few things that I have learned will further optimize my life that I have yet to incorporate due to a few factors. These things include morning sun exposure, limiting caffeine intake within 8-12 hours before, and limiting blue light exposure after 11pm assuming I go to sleep within a few hours of that time.
The primary purpose of morning sun exposure is to set your circadian rhythm for the day. Getting sufficient sunlight exposure early in the day sets you up for good sleep at night. Andrew Huberman explains all of this more clearly and in much more detail. I will link some of my favorite podcasts at the bottom of this post. Additionally, it is most ideal to have zero caffeine within 10-12 hours before sleeping. If you consume caffeine six hours prior to going to sleep, fifty percent of the caffeine will remain in your system by the time you go to sleep. For me, I consume large amounts of caffeine prior to working out around 7:00 pm each day. I am asleep anywhere from 4-6 hours after that. While I typically don’t have trouble falling asleep, caffeine operates as an Adenosine antagonist. While I may be able to fall asleep, the amount of low wave sleep I receive that night is reduced. This may not seem very important, but low wave sleep is the portion of sleep where growth hormone is produced, and that is very important to me if my goal is maximizing strength gain, hypertrophy, and overall recovery. Ideally, I would consume no caffeine that late into the night, but I have a much better workout if I have caffeine 10-30 minutes prior, so I typically do. Lastly, I look at a screen typically leading up right until I go to sleep. If I optimized my light intake, I would have zero overhead fluorescent lights before going to bed and zero blue light from electronic devices. If I were to take it to the extreme, I could buy lights that emit red light at night because it is a softer light and at the opposite end of the blue light spectrum.
I’m glad I got to take some of you on a relatively entertaining journey. Here is a list of the podcasts I have enjoyed and gleaned useful information from (I summarized the names and included the podcasts’ numbers. They are on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms):
Muscle growth and recovery – Podcast 22
Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination – Podcast.
Master your sleep – Podcast 2
Caffiene to optimize mental and physical performance – Podcast 101
What Alcohol does to you – Podcast 86
Sleep optimization and sleep-wake timing – Podcast 84
Hi Chris,
Just my luck that I’m stuck assigned to you for our last blog. Just kidding of course; sitting with you this semester has been one of my highlights for sure, and I love your stories, whether before class or here on your blog.
There’s a lot of interesting content in this blog, and I really enjoyed learning about all these “cheat codes” to optimize your body. I know I could have used a cold shower many times during 4th hour this year; something about the lighting just makes me doze off. The physiological response that you’ve outlined makes perfect sense, and it’s a really useful tip I might have to employ. I end up swimming early in the morning a couple times a week so that certainly helps me wake up, but as I move into retirement I’ll have to rethink that strategy in the likely event that my college schedule includes morning classes.
The sauna tip is one I feel like I can relate too as well. I tend to take hot showers when I get home from swim or water polo in the evenings, and I’ve also been throwing them in this week after tech rehearsals in the NPAC pit which makes me feel like I just lifted for an hour. Athletically, I could definitely use a better recovery method, as I often wake up sore, so I’ll make sure to commit to this method even though I’m not actively seeking the same fitness goals you are.
As somebody who also has been trying to optimize their body for a while, I do have some advice, although it didn’t come from a podcast. Don’t beat yourself up too hard on the caffeine and blue light thing; we all fall victim to it and while it might hurt your hypertrophy, it still has benefits. We want to optimize ourselves as much as possible, but it’s not possible to operate at peak efficiency all of the time. Your body needs rest just as much as it needs stimulation, so if that’s going on your phone a bit before bed to recover mentally from the day, so be it. You might be in your prime now, but eventually you may find yourself buckling, so efficiency will depend on those unproductive activities you do just as much the optimizations you’ve made.
That’s all from me Chris. Thanks for a great read, and I wish you all the best on your quest for peak optimization.
Hey Chris! I follow this guy on Tik tok who lives in Canada and posts a video of himself sitting in an outdoor ice bath, talking about random things, and I honestly cannot fathom withstanding that extreme of a temperature because I have difficulty icing my ankle after an injury. That is the first thing I thought of when I started reading your blog. My brother takes cold showers and loves raving about all of their benefits, but I am a person who likes the water I am showering in to be scolding, barely withstand-ably hot and I do not bode well with cold showers at all, doesn’t matter how long it is. I worry that ending a perfectly good hot shower with cold water will only cause me discomfort and is very likely to ruin my mood. A sauna is much more my style, though I cannot recall the last time I was in a sauna, I had to have been pretty young. One thing I know I could improve on is less blue light at nighttime; I am on my phone and/or my computer many late nights and not only is it detrimental to my health, it distracts me from important tasks that would be a better way of spending my time. I do wish I got more sunlight during the day but I blame school and other indoor activities that I have obligations to. I might give a few of those podcasts a listen!