Podbit · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Get your vitamin D blood level above 60. Take B50 for 3 months to restart the gut microbiome. Drop to a multivitamin. Track your sleep like a journal. When sleep breaks down again, your brain is asking for something specific — interpret it, don't give up.
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At 1:25:59 · chapter starts 1:25:27
Bartlett raises the practical objection: he lives in London, where sunlight is scarce for much of the year. Dr. Gominak responds by explaining the melanin-sunlight adaptation story. Melanin protects DNA by absorbing UV energy — people with more melanin are protected at high-sun latitudes but produce less vitamin D per unit of exposure. The redhead gene, which arose in northern Viking-age Scotland, reduced melanin across most of the skin, leaving only freckles, specifically to maximise D production in weak northern sunlight. Transplant those genetics to Texas, however, and the lack of melanin becomes a hazard in high-UV environments. Bartlett then cites USA Today data: 90% of Americans spend close to 22 hours indoors daily, and 20% never go outside at all. He also presents cloud-cover data: up to 80% of UV can penetrate light cloud, but dense storm clouds block 70–90% of UVB, making meaningful D production nearly impossible. Dr. Gominak confirms that windows block UVB entirely, so sitting by a window produces no vitamin D. She notes UVA tanning beds tan the skin but do not produce D — only UVB-emitting beds do. She also makes a strong point about infrared radiation: simply sitting on a porch outside, even in shade, delivers infrared energy to the mitochondria, and incandescent bulbs (now largely replaced by LEDs) replicate this wavelength in a way LED lights cannot.
Up to 80% of UV radiation can still penetrate light cloud cover, allowing some vitamin D production outdoors even on overcast days.
Spike your cortisol in the first 1–3 hours of your day — with sunlight, hydration, exercise, or caffeine — and you set up elevated mood, focus, and stress resilience for the rest of the day. Miss that spike and you get a flat cortisol curve: brain fog, poor learning, and bad sleep. The bookend is equally important: dim lights, no caffeine, and wind down the final hour.
Bottom-up impulses — just eat the cookie, keep scrolling — are driven by deep brain structures. Top-down prefrontal control is the thing that lets you wait, learn, and grow. Every small act of choosing the harder thing, from picking up trash to doing the workout you dread, greases that top-down circuit — and it transfers to everything else.
A Washington University in St. Louis study found that the attention-improvement effects of Ritalin are effectively equal to a great night's sleep. Stimulants also stunt growth and reduce sleep quality. The new direction is combining lower medication doses with genuinely better sleep — not replacing sleep with pharmacology.
Two big inhales through the nose, then a full exhale to empty — that's the physiological sigh. It fires a specific vagal pathway to slow your heart rate, offload CO2, and tip the autonomic nervous system toward calm instantly. Doing just 10 deliberate exhales throughout the day measurably elevates HRV by nighttime.
Presence isn't a state you fall into — it's something you actively produce by anchoring perception to the immediate environment. Ask 2–3 trivially specific questions about your surroundings (how many cans, what does it smell like) to pull your brain out of past/future mode. Then deliberately choose what to think or say next. That's it.
Acknowledge the thing, feel all of it, uncouple the emotion from the memory, then transmute the experience into something meaningful. Most people stall at step 2 — feeling the feelings — and never reach uncoupling. An entire generation is stuck there, confusing emotional processing for healing. Moving through all four is the actual path out.
Nicotine creates a uniquely alert-and-calm state ideal for learning — but only at low doses used occasionally. If you're using 3–6 mg pouches multiple times a day, you're not getting a cognitive enhancement, you're just rescuing yourself from withdrawal. For a genuine performance effect, use it once or twice per week at most.
Two injections of BPC-157 (100–200 mcg) eliminated shoulder pain Huberman couldn't shift for months. The peptide pinealon gave him 2.5–3 hours of REM sleep inside 6 hours — an effect that persisted into subsequent nights and scaled down to just once per week. Neither is in the book because the human data aren't there yet, but the animal evidence is strong.
Long, slow cardio builds capillary networks and mitochondrial richness; high-intensity intervals push VO2 max. You don't need huge volumes of either. Huberman's protocol: one 45–60 minute long slow session, one near-maximal effort HIIT session (Airdyne 20-on/10-off for 6–8 rounds), and one medium 30-minute effort per week. That's the complete cardio picture.
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