AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More

One of the best ways to get more REM sleep is to simply add anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes to your sleep schedule, adding that 10 to 30 minutes in the morning. Most people can't do that, however. Another way to increase the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that you get is to get a bigger surge of epinephrine or adrenaline in the early day prior to that sleep. So this is a great reason to do deliberate cold exposure in your shower in the morning. You could also get it through exercise.

If you're going to do the cold plunge for the first time, maybe start it at 55/60 degrees and stay in a little longer. If you're going to be more experienced with this and you're more cold tolerant, try 45/50. And then if you're really aggressive and you want to try getting down into the, you know, low 40s or so, high 30s, well then make sure you have somebody there and make sure that you don't force yourself to do something that's going to cause tissue damage or cardiovascular damage.

Spiking your adrenaline a bit in the early part of the day with exercise and or deliberate cold exposure can help get more rapid eye movement sleep later that night.

You should never ever, ever do any kind of breathwork prior to getting into deliberate cold ... If you're doing a lot of exhaling, you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide; that will limit your gasp reflex. And there have been people who have done, you know, cyclic hyperventilation, deep breathing, then gone into water, and they didn't realize that they needed to breathe. They didn't get that gasp reflex early enough, and unfortunately, they blacked out and died.

If you want to increase your testosterone significantly, get an extra 30 to 60 minutes of sleep each night. Even a 20-minute increase in rapid eye movement sleep is going to serve your testosterone far better than taking shilajit.

It's very clear that excessive sun exposure will age skin more rapidly.

I think there's general agreement that the sunscreens... that are mineral-based, that is inorganic, meaning that the active ingredients are either zinc oxide or titanium dioxide or some combination of those up to a concentration of 25%, are generally deemed safe by most all dermatologists.

Neuroplasticity and learning is triggered by focused attention, which is supported by having slept well the night before. But the actual rewiring of neural connections occurs when? It occurs during sleep—it occurs during deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep.

If I had a magic wand, every classroom would begin a session of learning with five minutes, or maybe even three minutes, of what is typically known as third-eye or focused meditation.

It's very, very clear that physical activity—in particular, cardiovascular training—any kind of physical activity, running, jogging swimming, etc. is going to facilitate learning, especially if the learning is done immediately after that activity.

There's some data that support the use of shilajit for testosterone increase, but I would place it on the low end of the effectiveness scale in terms of things to increase testosterone.