Do you ever lie in bed staring at the ceiling at 2 am, desperately wishing your brain had an off switch so you could stop replaying every interaction from the day? Also read | Can weekend sleep cure weekday burnout? Doctor reveals truth about corporate job stress, shares actual recovery hacks
We’ve all been there, but Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman says the secret to mastering your brain — whether you’re trying to sleep or trying to perform under pressure — comes down to actionable biology.
During an appearance on the September 1, 2026 episode of Figuring Out With Raj Shamani, Andrew, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine, and host of the Huberman Lab, laid out the biological mechanics of mental resilience, sleep disruption , and courage.
The ability to rest is directly tied to future success: “The person that can turn their mind off in the final hour of their day and get the better, deeper sleep, I’m going to put all my money on that person.”, according to him.
Describing cortisol as an ‘energy-deploying hormone’ whose ‘main job is to deploy glucose and lipids from areas in your body that give you energy’, he offered a straightforward daily protocol to optimise it: “The best way to spike that morning cortisol is to get bright light in your eyes within the first 30 to 60 minutes of your day. When asked how someone can force their brain to power down, he shared a physiological eye-movement trick designed to interrupt bodily awareness: “The next time you have trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep , keeping your eyes closed, slowly move your eyes to one side, then to the other side. Then you’re going to move your eyes counterclockwise, then clockwise. Then kind of look towards the tip of your nose — you’re not crossing your eyes — and then exhale. Beyond nighttime rest, Andrew highlighted daytime hormonal rhythms as the bedrock of peak human performance. You can drink some water during this time, you can drink your morning tea or coffee if you like, and if you can exercise in that first hour, great. But this simple behavior is going to boost your morning cortisol levels. This is the key to long-term resilience.”
“If I only had five minutes to talk to somebody, I would say, look, this is the best thing you can do for your health and well-being and performance: high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol,” he explained.
