Related Episodes for How Meditation Rewires Your Brain, Gut, & Immune System | Dr. Richard Davidson

“Timing provides a practical compromise. Dr. van Loon favors protecting the first several hours after resistance or endurance training, then placing cold exposure later in the day or on a recovery day when muscle adaptation is the priority.”

“Other hormetic responses to cold exposure include increased production of PGC1-alpha, a protein that promotes mitochondrial biogenesis, the production of new, healthy mitochondria, and the activation of brown fat – a phenomenon once thought to occur only in newborns, but now known to occur in adults, especially after cold exposure.”

“Perhaps the most clear-cut examples of cryotherapy’s beneficial effects are observed in the brain, where levels of the hormone and neurotransmitter norepinephrine – responsible for vigilance, attention, focus, and positive mood – increase markedly when the body is exposed to extreme cold.”

“A perplexing aspect of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is that people respond to it in disparate ways — some exhibiting no symptoms at all, and others experiencing life-threatening complications.”

“The most compelling human signal appears when the brain is under acute strain. In a randomized crossover study, a single dose of 0.35 grams per kilogram during 21 hours of sleep deprivation changed cerebral energy metabolites and preserved selected measures of cognitive performance.”

“A recent meta-analysis also found small benefits in selected cognitive domains, including memory and processing speed, with responses that may depend on age, diet, baseline stores, stress, dose, and the cognitive test used.”

“A separate six-week randomized study in 30 healthy young adults found that neither 10 nor 20 grams per day improved the tested cognitive outcomes compared with placebo. The result is an important counterweight to the acute sleep-deprivation experiment.”

“Acute stress may create a different context. In a double-blind crossover study of 15 adults undergoing 21 hours of sleep deprivation, a single 0.35-gram-per-kilogram dose changed brain high-energy phosphate measures and improved selected cognitive outcomes.”

“Healthy, well-nourished adults can usually synthesize enough, and athlete trials have not found consistent improvements in immune measures, aerobic performance, body composition, or intestinal permeability from routine supplementation.”

Dan Pardi: Ph.D. candidate studying sleep neurobiology at Stanford and University of Leiden, co-founder of Dan’s Plan online wellness company.