The whole series so far has been about pushing the right levers: breathe this way, time your light, read your data well. In its final stretch in London, Andrew Huberman turned the argument inside out. There is, he said, a second kind of brain change that we barely have words for — one you reach not by trying harder, but by deliberately letting go.
It is a fitting place to end In the Time of Principles. Because the deepest principle in the talk was not a protocol at all. It was the recognition that effort has a complement, and that knowing when to come off the gas is as much a skill as knowing when to press it.
Two Kinds of Plasticity
The familiar model of neuroplasticity is a model of effort. You focus, you make errors, you generate what Huberman calls limbic friction — the agitation of adrenaline and noradrenaline that flags to the nervous system that something here needs to change. Then you sleep, and during sleep the circuits rewire. Push, rest, adapt. That is real, and it is the basis of almost everything in the optimisation world.
But Huberman insisted there is another route to change that runs in the opposite direction — accessed not through friction but through release. We have rich language for the effortful kind and almost none for this one, which is part of why it gets ignored. He even offered the gap as an invitation: maybe someone in the room, he said, could give the protocol a name.
There's the other kind of neuroplasticity, which is the type that you access through letting go, through coming off the gas.
Coming Off the Gas
What does letting go actually look like? Huberman described it in plain terms: the moment you notice you have been gripping — trying to control a situation, to show up a certain way — and you simply loosen the bolts. You step back, widen your attention, and appreciate what is around you without needing to manage it. Playing with a child or a dog, out with friends: the split-attention of trying to optimise the moment dissolves, and you drop back into it.
This is not soft consolation. It is, he argued, one of the most robust findings in all of wellbeing science, and it runs against intuition. We assume happiness comes from accumulating pleasant experiences. The data say something stranger: the single biggest predictor is simply being present to whatever you are doing — even when what you are doing is unremarkable, or uncomfortable.
If you want to be a happier person, the data are very clear: be present to whatever it is you're going through. Those studies are so robust, repeated over and over, huge data sets.
Stillness and the Wandering Idea
The same letting-go state, Huberman noted, is also where ideas come from. He pointed to two very different people who have stumbled onto the same practice. The producer Rick Rubin spends long stretches simply lying down, body still and eyes closed; the neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth sits motionless for an hour or two, trying to think in complete sentences. Both report the same thing: when the body goes quiet, the mind generates and structures ideas more freely.
When your body is still and your mind is very active, ideas come to you. And this is exactly what happens in rapid eye movements — your brain is very, very active and your body is still.
That parallel to REM sleep is the clue to making this trainable. The deliberately cultivated version of "body still, mind alert" is the practice of non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR — the modern label for what the yogic tradition calls yoga nidra. You lie down, relax the body completely, and let the mind hover in the liminal zone between waking and sleep without dropping off.
NSDR: The Practice
NSDR is the rare tool that is genuinely free, needs nothing, and trains the very state we have been describing. A ten- to twenty-minute session is enough to restore alertness, calm the nervous system, and — Huberman argues — open the same plasticity window that effortful learning relies on, by giving the brain the quiet it needs to consolidate. There is even direct evidence that the deeply relaxed, body-still state changes brain chemistry: a controlled imaging study found a substantial rise in endogenous dopamine during yoga nidra.
The same stillness has a practical, almost mischievous use Huberman shared for the small hours. If you wake from a dream you want to keep, lie completely still with your eyes closed and you can often slip back into it; move your body, and the dream is gone. And for the more common problem — waking at 3am and needing to get back to sleep — he offered a specific trick that, he admitted, looks faintly ridiculous.
- Lying down, eyes gently closed, breathe slowly.
- Move your eyes slowly to one side, then the other, a few times.
- Then circle them slowly — clockwise, then anticlockwise.
- Finally, gently converge them inward toward your nose.
- Let them rest, and lengthen your exhale (the calming lever from Part 2).
Huberman's explanation: these patterns scramble the oculo-vestibular system — the link between eye movement and balance/orientation — which helps switch off the sense of bodily position that keeps you awake. Nothing mystical; just a quirk of how the nervous system lets go.
The Greatest Power: Where You Put Your Mind
Underneath all of it sits the principle that ties the whole series together. Whether you are pushing or releasing, breathing or measuring, the one lever you always hold is where you place your attention. That, Huberman said, is probably the greatest power we have as a species — and, crucially, it is a practice, not a fixed trait. You can train the capacity to decide what you attend to, and that single capacity sits upstream of every protocol in this series.
Which is exactly why the series has argued, from Part 1, for principles over techniques. A principle is a way of directing attention: it tells you what to notice and what to ignore amid the infinite supply of tools. Learn the few that matter — the exhale, the bookends, the honest weekly look, and now the deliberate release — and you stop drinking from the firehose. You choose.
Sometimes the work
is to stop working.
Progress is not only a matter of effort. There is a second kind of change that arrives through stillness, presence and release — measurable in the brain, trainable through NSDR, and as important as anything you push toward. Across five parts, the argument has been the same: the techniques are many, the principles are few. Learn the principles, and you can direct your attention deliberately rather than chase every new protocol that appears.
That is what The Intelligence is for — the unhurried, physician-curated reasoning that turns noise into a few things worth doing. If this series was useful, the rest of it works the same way.
- 01Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010;330(6006):932.
- 02Kjaer TW, Bertelsen C, Piccini P, Brooks D, Alving J, Lou HC. Increased dopamine tone during meditation-induced change of consciousness. Cognitive Brain Research. 2002;13(2):255-259.
- 03Diekelmann S, Born J. The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2010;11(2):114-126.
- 04Brown KW, Ryan RM. The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2003;84(4):822-848.
- 05Quotations are drawn from Andrew Huberman's on-stage conversation with Alexia Demetriades (Head of Content, Healf) at Healf's HX26 conference, London, June 2026. The eye-movement technique reflects a method Dr Huberman described at the event; it is offered as an educational tip, not medical advice. Research findings are sourced independently to the literature above.