3 Easy Steps to Skyrocket Your Testosterone Fast | Andrew Huberman

The major effect of testosterone is to make effort feel good. That's what testosterone does. The real question is, are you enjoying what you're doing? When effort feels good, life just gets way better. There's something about these molecules that in an ancient way are linked to the will to live. They're linked to effort and making effort feel good. That's the holy grail. There's a very interesting relationship between testosterone and dopamine. So dopamine and testosterone are closely related in the pituitary system and obviously testosterone comes from the adrenals and from the testes. The testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol. Cholesterol can either be made into cortisol, a stress hormone, or testosterone, but not both. So you have a limited amount of cholesterol and it gets diverted towards stress or this pathway where effort feels good. That's the pathway you want to get into. The anger pathway, if we were to just kind of play a mind experiment here, the anger eventually is going to divert more of that cholesterol molecule to cortisol and stress and you will be slowly depleting testosterone. Now going into this you'll have plenty of testosterone, but after a couple days there have been very interesting studies showing that testosterone doesn't necessarily drop with sleep deprivation. That's a bit of a myth. The real question is, are you enjoying what you're doing? If you can just convince yourself, or ideally if you can just enjoy yourself, you are going to maintain or maybe even increase testosterone stores which will make effort feel good. And to me, aside from neuroplasticity where everything becomes automatic after this experience, to me that's the holy grail. When effort feels good, life just gets way better. And we're not talking about achieving the reward. I'm not talking about the end of this thing. I'm talking about the process of it feeling really good. And so there's something about these molecules that in an ancient way, in all organisms, all mammals as far as we know, are linked to the will to live. They're linked to effort and making effort feel good, which has been fundamental to the evolution of our species. I always say people think that the opposite of testosterone is estrogen, but it's not. The opposite of testosterone is prolactin, which makes us feel quiescent and not in pursuit of things, etc. Testosterone makes effort feel good. Estrogen makes emotions feel okay. So it is the case that increases in testosterone promote competitive and foraging type behaviors in humans and in non-human mammals. But it's also true that competition itself can increase androgen such as testosterone. And so we all know, because now we've been told a lot in the last decade or so, that getting proper sleep is important for all these aspects of health. Getting proper sleep can really offset all the reductions in testosterone and estrogen and reductions in fertility that occur if we don't get enough sleep. But seldom is it discussed how sleep actually adjusts things like testosterone and estrogen. So the simple version of this is getting your breathing right during the waking hours, meaning primarily unless you're working out really hard or there's some other reason why you're maybe eating or speaking, you need to be breathing through your mouth. You should be a nose breather. There's really good evidence for that now. And in sleep, you also want to be a nose breather because that's going to increase the amount of oxygen that you're bringing into your system and the amount of carbon dioxide that you're offloading. There are other positive effects of it as well, but you're basically reducing apnea. Breath holding in sleep leads to build up of carbon dioxide and leads to increases in cortisol, which then decrease testosterone and decrease estrogen in negative ways across all sexes. So the simple version of this is get your breathing right. And many of you have heard me talk about this before, and I'm not going to belabor the point that viewing bright light within the first hour of waking, whether or not it's from artificial light or ideally from sunlight, has these powerful effects on sleep and wakefulness. This translates to the protocol of if you want to optimize testosterone and estrogen, you need to get your light viewing behavior correct. It's not just about optimizing your sleep, which is also important. It's about getting sufficient amount of light in your eyes so you have sufficient levels of dopamine. So the simple protocols for that I've reviewed before, but it means getting anywhere from two to 10 minutes of bright light exposure in your eyes early in the day. It is not sufficient to do this with sunglasses unless you have to do that for safety reasons. It's fine to wear prescription lenses and contacts. If you can't get sunlight for whatever reason, you want to use bright artificial light. The other aspect of light viewing behavior that's extremely important is to avoid bright light exposure to your eyes in the middle of the night. If you're viewing bright light in the middle of the night, you are suppressing dopamine release. If you're suppressing dopamine release, you are suppressing testosterone levels. Heavy weight training, but not weight training to failure where completion of a repetition is impossible, but where basically people are working at anywhere from like 70% to 95% of their maximum, or sometimes even going right down to their one repetition maximum, leads to the greatest increases in testosterone. There's clearly a influence of hard work at the neural level and then at the muscular level for increasing testosterone. So now let's talk about the role of specific compounds, some of which, many of which can be taken in supplementation form or extracted from diet and nutrition in order to optimize sex droid hormones. And again, I just want to emphasize that I'm not suggesting anyone take anything or stop taking anything. This is purely for informational purposes, but some of the data on these is quite striking and impressive. It's very clear that vitamin D, which is important for so many biological functions, including endocrine functions, zinc, magnesium, creatine. It's very clear that something about creatine, although the mechanism isn't exactly clear, either increases five alpha reductase or makes the testosterone molecule more susceptible to certain enzymatic reactions that leads to increases in DHT. DHT, the hydrotestosterone, it has this dramatic role in creating a kind of masculinization of the brain prenatally. It also defines the primary sex characteristic of the growth of the penis, et cetera. And beyond infancy and early childhood and later in life, it has powerful effects in creating balding and beard growth, et cetera. And it has a much higher affinity for the androgen receptor than does testosterone. There are a few other things that can increase testosterone in particular, Tonga Ali. And another one, which is very interesting, it's a Nigerian shrub called Fidogia agrestis, and it mimics luteinizing hormone, which is the hormone that comes out of the hypothalamus that stimulates the testes. If you got those in your ovaries, if you've got those to make more testosterone or estrogen. And so those two herbal supplements together can give a significant boost in free and active testosterone. So you said Tonga Ali can give you 100 to 200. About that. What does the other one give you? Fidogia is usually taken at about 600 milligrams. And that can mean the most dramatic effect I've ever seen was somebody who had his testosterone down in the low twos, or I think it was like low twos. And he got it up to the 700 range, which, but that's it, but that's an outlier, right? Most people are going to see about a three to 400 point increase.