#109: Dr. Gregory Kelly on Food, Medicine, And Resilience

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel. I feel incredibly blessed as I'm taking this breath right now, mid-afternoon, not for you necessarily when you're listening to this, but for me in this moment, it's mid-afternoon and I'm feeling like it's already been a very active day. My eyes got tired just about half hour ago. I thought to myself, well, I've got this great podcast coming up. I'm really excited about it. What do I do to bring my energy back up? And I have a couple of things that I did. I did a little bouncing. I have what's called a Cellerciser or a rebounder. It goes by some different names, but I do a little bouncing. I got some water. I was on sort of more of a habitual or— yeah, I would say more place of habit was going to reach for coffee. I was going to go get myself another cup of coffee, even though I typically only have one a day. I was going to go get another one. And I stopped myself from doing that and I'm glad that I didn't because my energy is just fine now and I just needed to hydrate. I was dehydrated. So many times I think that's a big issue for me and for a lot of other folks that we just aren't hydrating ourselves well enough. So we'll get into that maybe during this conversation a little bit but in the moment I just feel grateful that my body feels great. My mind is open and lucid. We'll see. And my heart is open to the conversation I get to have with a wonderful new friend, Dr. Gregory Kelly, somebody I'm going to introduce you to in just a second, read a little bit of his bio to you, and then sort of dig right in. But I'll say before I do that, that the company that Dr. Kelly works with is a company I'm really familiar with. So we have common friends, and some of you may have heard there was a 2-part podcast I did several months back. With a gentleman that's one of the co-founders of the Neurohacker Collective, Daniel Schmachtenberger. And we had a really interesting conversation. I know Daniel personally. He's just a wonderful, wonderful human being and a brilliant mind is kind of putting it mildly. And so Dr. Gregory Kelly is cut from that same cloth. He's a neuropathic physician, ND as it's called. He's the lead product formulator at Neurohacker Collective. That's right. And the author of the book Shape Shift. He was the editor of the journal Alternative Medicine Review and has been an instructor at the University of Bridgeport College of Naturopathic Medicine where he taught classes in advanced clinical nutrition, counseling skills, and doctor-patient relationships. That's an interesting topic. Maybe we'll dig into that a little bit. Dr. Kelly has published numerous articles on various aspects of natural medicine and nutrition Contributed 3 chapters to the Textbook of Natural Medicine and has more than 30 journal articles indexed on PubMed. His areas of special interest and expertise include nootropics, anti-aging and regenerative medicine, weight management, and the chronobiology of performance and health. Wow, that's a mouthful. First and foremost, I'll call you Greg if that's okay. Yeah,

that's great.

Awesome. Greg, thank you so much for being on the show. It's a pleasure to have you with us.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So that's a wonderful bio. It's a lot of time invested in all the things that show up in a bio or an introduction like that. What's something that's not written in that bio that you would love for people to know about you?

So I would say, I guess what pops to mind that's not in there is I served in the military before shifting into healthcare. So I think that was definitely something that shaped both my understanding of working with groups of people, how hard it was, as an example, to get people to change their habits, to pivot into new, better behaviors. So I think that would be one thing. I think another thing is that I've always been a beach person. I grew up in a little fishing lobster town in New England and fortunately have got to spend almost my entire life somewhere close to the ocean. It's not part of the bio, but it's definitely part of who Greg is.

I didn't know that about you. Where in New England?

I grew up in a town called Scituate, which is a little south of Boston, north of Plymouth. It was transitioning from being— having a lot of like what we would think Memorial Day to Labor Day people, the summer crowd. The house that my parents bought was from my grandparents. They were classic summer people and we winterized it and were among the only people year-round in the beach neighborhood when I was a kid. So it was a great place to grow up back then.

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a

lot of New England connection, a lot of our lives spent in those parts.

And I went to my undergraduate, was at Worcester Polytech.

Wista.

Wista, yeah. And I graduated in '84, but most of the Kelly clan, all my siblings went to UMass Amherst. So I made lots of trips out there over the years.

Yeah. Did they call it Zoomass when you were back there?

They sure did, yep.

Yeah, it was in fact one of the great places to go to school and it had its zoo moments. I think that predated me. I think we're going back to the late '60s, early '70s when there was a lot of activism, radical activism and some pretty wild stuff that was happening on campus there. But the whole Amherst community is just wonderful.

Great college town.

Incredible. Let's dig into this life of yours because You've certainly both spanned these 2 coasts of growing up and being in the Northeast and then living in Southern California. There are some pivot stories along that path, I'm sure. It started in the Navy. Is that what branch of the military you were a part of?

Yes. I don't really know where it came from, but if you'd asked me as a middle— like a junior high student what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said, oh, I want to be in the Navy. So that was— I don't know where that got written in, but That was something all through high school that I was passionate about. I was fortunate enough to get a Navy ROTC scholarship at Worcester Polytech, WPI. And then when I graduated, at that point owed 4 years of active service. And the first place they sent me was Coronado, which is the little island right across from downtown San Diego. And from there to Pearl Harbor. So I got to spend a good chunk of my active duty service between San Diego and Hawaii, just lovely places.

Yeah, I was gonna say that didn't suck, at least that—

Oh no, it's really hard to go back to New England.

Yeah, destination-wise. At one point, give us a little bit of background in terms of your pivot. You're in the military. I'm not sure it sounded like you were looking to make a career of it, but you— it was a part, a slice of your life. What was happening there and how did you get into becoming a naturopathic doctor?

It was like one of those almost baby steps at the beginning and then a big, big pivot. So what happened initially, when I first, I guess, got to California in the Navy, I was for the first time in my life responsible for feeding myself at least most of the time. In college, I was in a fraternity, there was a meal plan there. My mom was a great cook, provided for all of the Kelly clan growing up. And so it occurred to me, I knew nothing about eating. I had always just eaten whatever someone had put in front of me. And at the time, I don't know if you remember the book, but I think it was called Eat to Win. I believe the author was— Haas was the last name. But one of my new friends was a weightlifter personality, and he recommended that. So it was the kind of high complex carbohydrate, low fat, lean protein type of diet, very common in the early to mid-'80s. So that became my handbook. And at the same time, I was always more of a runner build than a like a stocky build, but decided I was going to start training with weights. And so, by the time I got to my first ship six months later, I was the healthy officer. Like I cared about what I ate. I exercised most days. If I didn't go to the gym, I'd run at lunchtime, bike to work. So, from a diet lifestyle perspective, I think early on in the Navy, somehow it just. Pivoted from college, very unhealthy lifestyle, to immediately just living a more disciplined one. I would say the big pivot came towards the end of my time in the Navy. I started reading Buddhism, basically woke up one morning with low back pain and struggled to walk to the bathroom that day. And the solution from the base doctor at the time was just muscle relaxants. And I figured, well, that doesn't really make sense. Like, what caused it, that's certainly not going to correct it. So I took out a book on self-help that had chapters on chiropractic, acupuncture, herbal medicine, all kinds of things that frankly at that point I'd never heard of. That was the big pivot. It opened me up to, wow, there's this whole new world of medicine that I didn't know existed. And so that time I shifted to being a vegetarian, being somewhat of a Buddhist in terms of meditating. And the fit in the Navy just, as you can imagine, wasn't as good. So—

Probably not such a great fit at home either, right?

My poor mom, when I would come back to visit, she would always be at that time like the default was eggplant Parmesan.

Right. What do I feed my son? What's he eat anymore? Right?

Yeah.

It's so interesting. And the degree to which the medical profession itself is so behind the times when it comes to nutrition. As a— I forget who it was that's credited with saying food is medicine and goes back a ways, but I remember hearing it for the first time out of my dad's mouth, who was repeating something he heard when he was studying with somebody called— a gentleman by the name of Michio Kushi.

Mm-hmm.

Who has something— an institute he created called the Kushi Institute in Western Massachusetts, and it's macrobiotic diet. And my dad got involved in that pretty heavily for a bunch of years and was totally macrobiotic diet for a while. He's a tall guy, more than 6'1, 6'2, and always was over 200 pounds, and now he was like 175. I mean, his lean body mass and very little body fat and all that kind of thing, but he was really healthy and into his 60s, 70s, and he's now, I think, 82, and not entirely on a macrobiotic diet any longer. Mm-hmm. I mean, he lost a lot of mass from that diet, but it was great. And I just remember growing up hearing about those things. And I take it that this was not something you necessarily heard a lot about when you were growing up, right?

I would say my dad was an engineer who worked at a shipyard and then eventually a big engineering company. We were what you would think of as kind of your standard 1970s Irish Catholic Boston family. So, yeah, I think of the term mental models. Oftentimes how we think about things, like the framework that we have, is super important. And if you'd asked me when I was in my early time in the Navy, what did medicine do? I would say, oh, like, if you're sick, the pill that you take goes in and fixes something. So I had a super naive mental model about it. And I think when I read— like, my first experience really of things was when I had the backache and realized, wow, my naive idea of what was going on was completely wrong. And so I think Medicine's come a long way since then, but I think there's still a lot of people out there that would have a mental model similar to what I had back then. This idea that somehow, don't worry about it, someone will give you something, I'll fix you.

Sure, a pill or what have you. And obviously that the degree to which we're relying on pills, prescription medicines and drugs, etc., has only increased. I mean, you know, the pharmaceutical industry is doing pretty good. Nobody's going to cry for the pharmaceutical industry. And there certainly seem to be more and more medicines and more and more pills to solve seemingly every ache and pain in the human body. I'd love to go back to that statement, food is medicine. Just get your thoughts on that. How much do you believe that there is a correlation between that or there's truth in that statement? Because I've certainly grown up believing it. I don't know that I've always lived that way by what I've put in my mouth, but—

I mean, this might get a little too technical, so cut me off if it is, but in part of our brain, there's an area called the hypothalamus that regulates all our basic needs, basically survival. So our appetite, thirst, body temperature, sex drive, sleep needs, and body clock all are literally located in this tiny part of the brain. And so any of those core— so that's 6 to me would be the non-negotiables, doing essentially the foundation pieces. So Diet fits in the appetite bucket. And what I've seen and what seems to be the case in research, when we don't do a good job in any of those basic needs, then it's super hard to get what I would think of as high-level performance in life. And so diet is, to me, one of the core pillars and maybe of all of them, the most immediate in terms of its effect. Yeah. When you shift from something poor to something bad. Sleep as well, like sleep. If someone's sleep deprived like I was in the Navy and part of my early time in naturopathic school, when you start to sleep more, that one you'll also notice in a big way. Like that idea that I think it's like one man's food is another man's poison is another quote. But I believe they both go back to Hippocrates, the father of medicine.

Yes. What are the core sort of things that drive high performance? Because there's a lot of folks that are looking to get more performance out of themselves, whether it's in the sort of the strict sense of performance from a corporate standpoint or it's performance in athletics, or for me, more to the point, past the age of 40, past the age of 50 now, wanting my brain to just perform at higher levels. I think it's seemingly only natural that our brains sort of start to perform at less optimal levels as we get older. And yet I'm requiring more out of myself all the time because my goals in life and what— how I want to impact the world in a positive way just requires that because the world is spinning, seemingly changing so much faster than it was when I was 20 years younger. So

I think like for me, I like to start at the beginning of the day, which for me is what I think of as someone that's a morning person. I've never struggled really with getting up, but I think a lot of the rest of the day, including our body clock, our circadian rhythms, for lack of— I don't know how familiar your audience would be with that term, but basically the rhythm of our function across the day and night cycle. A lot of those things are really impacted heavily by what we do at the beginning of the day. So like, as an example, in the book I wrote, one of the things that's linked to obesity would be what's called night eating syndrome, but basically people that eat a lot of their food shifted into darkness hours as opposed to earlier in the day. And one of the ways that you can kind of tai chi that, so take an indirect way rather than trying to exert willpower at 10 o'clock at night when you're really hungry, the way to indirectly pivot that is to get morning sunlight and eat something early in the day, even if you're not hungry then. And that starts to drag the rhythms earlier into the day. So there's just a lot of times when the problem happens, is it when we did something that would have had the biggest impact on it?

Right. So cause and effect-wise, if you're eating later at night or you're finding yourself to be sort of the night owl person, and that might mean you're eating later at night, you're staying up later, you're working on things, you're getting active and productive later in the evening, and then of course You're getting less sleep because it might not mean that you— like in college, when you stayed up late and ate pizza at 1:00 AM as we used to do, we could skip class if we wanted to. It wasn't— nobody was going to die. You weren't going to get fired from college if you skipped your 10:00 AM class. And so you could sleep till 11:00 or noon or whatever it was. You can't really do that anymore. Most of us can't anyway. So what I guess I'm hearing you say is that if you were to get out in sunshine earlier in the morning, Day, getting some of that vitamin D and being in the sun and eating earlier in the day, even if you tell yourself, I'm not a morning eater, I don't like to eat right away, or whatever the case is, that the impact of that is that you might have less of a craving to eat later in the evening.

Yeah, I've seen that play out over and over. And also oftentimes, so like tryptophan is amino acid and it's an amino acid that in our diet, even a good diet doesn't have a huge amount of tryptophan. So a small amount supplemented can really move the needle in terms of augmenting your body stores. Having more tryptophan at breakfast with just a little bit of sunlight in studies has helped sleep at night. A lot of times what we do early in the day just has a big ripple effect and there's really 2 timekeeping hormones or what I think of as the main timekeeping. At the beginning of the day, we have a big spike in our stress hormone cortisol. Usually the spikes between 7 to 9 in the morning, and we have our darkness hormone melatonin that spikes at night, usually just prior— called dim light onset, but it would be a little bit before we start going to bed that starts to shoot way up. So those 2 timekeeping points end up being just really important in terms of ripple effect through the whole day.

Cortisol, I've heard that word before. It's usually been associated with sort of the fight-flight response and it's sort of stress-induced and I've heard it's really not a good thing, it's not a healthy thing. But you're saying that we naturally produce a certain amount of cortisol between 7 AM and 9 AM?

Yeah, we produce most of what our body makes in that window and ideally—

Naturally or as a result of outside forces?

No, naturally. Yeah, it's part of our body clock function. So what you would tend to see in— so again, if we go to like young, super robustly healthy, they would have a big spike of cortisol then, but then really low levels by midnight. And at midnight, melatonin would be really high. And but in the morning, melatonin would be low. So what we have is time function through the day. And those 2 just happen to be the ones that are— that punctuate the beginning of lightness and darkness.

So for folks that are feeling that stress at other times of the day when they have that fight or flight, whether it's they're worrying about money or they're worrying about their career or their job, Or their businesses, a lot of entrepreneurs out there obviously these days, producing more cortisol. Does that impact sleep? Does that interfere with those rhythms that you're talking about?

Sure. So what happens— so I don't know, the analogy I would use is think of all these hormones almost as waves. And ideally we get the best function when we have a big surge, but then it comes down to a low level. Cortisol being even mildly elevated at 10 at night, now we don't— the surge of the wave is less. So almost think in terms of surf. You want the right kind of wave to be able to surf on. If it's too flat, then it's not going to give the same response to your cells and tissue. So cortisol, most things aren't bad. Well, most natural molecules or hormones our body makes aren't bad. They're contextual. Cortisol to spike that time of day. And when we do stressful things at that time of day, we naturally have cortisol there already. That's when I tend to do my workout. I go to the gym most days during that time. Eating food into that. So while cortisol is part of the stress response, it's not really as much the fight or flight response as what would put out the fight or flight response.

Hmm.

It's on the scene, but it's

like the water on the flames.

Yeah,

that's what your body's producing, something that— so it's not like producing adrenaline, it's just doing something to sort of ameliorate the—

Yeah, once we produce adrenaline, the cortisol is what puts that out. So it's got it, it has anti-inflammatory, like you would use corticosteroids in a lot of autoimmune diseases, is how doctors used to treat those when they didn't have better solutions, because in general it suppresses all immunity. So doing stressful things within moderation at the beginning of our day, we're already physiologically more prepared.

Got it. So that's just the conditions are such that you, if you use the analogy, you can surf a wave when you got the waves, but you got no board.

Yeah.

You're not going to make use of it. You can body surf, I guess. But so doing front loading more of the stressful activity in life, in your business or in some other area, that's sort of stuff you can anticipate. So earlier in the day makes sense.

Right. And shifting any of that you can off the menu once it starts to get into the pre-bedtime hours.

Right.

Like what you would see is stress at night really disrupts our ability to get into and maintain good deep sleep. That's what restores us so that we can age more gracefully. Right. So I'm a bit older than you, but we're both in that same age range where when I was young in the Navy, A lot of the older enlisted officers that, you know, would be frankly much younger than either of us are now were fairly limited in terms of their mobility, their resilience, things like that. You and I have done a lot of good things over the years to get to this point and still have a lot. And I know I want to continue to have more and more resilience as I cross each decade off.

Yeah, I want to come back to that in just a second too. term resilience. Tryptophan, you brought that up earlier. So I heard that turkey is high in that particular— I don't know if that's true, but I was curious. Tryptophan is good in the morning because it helps you sleep at night. I know that at lunch when people have turkey, I used to make that joke a bit. They had turkey at lunch, then they come back from lunch and have post-lunch lethargy in part because the tryptophan's got them wanting to sleep. So is that a myth?

No. So, well, tryptophan is an interesting molecule because it can be used in a couple different ways. So one of them, and the one that gets the most attention, is serotonin would be something your audience would know that it's basically a mood neurotransmitter, something that your brain makes. And from serotonin, it can go on to make melatonin. So that's the link to sleep for tryptophan.

Mm-hmm.

But most tryptophan actually goes in a different path. And ends up— some of it makes a molecule called NAD+, which is of huge interest in anti-aging at this point. So, tryptophan, especially early in the day— Neurohacker Collective is a complex systems science company, and so one of the things that you would find biochemically is depending on what time of day it is, your body will divert tryptophan to different areas, whether you're sleep deprived, not sleep deprived. Yeah. Augmenting at breakfast, most of it tends to go towards the direction of NAD+. The same if you took some tryptophan right before exercise, it would tend to go that.

Which means better sleep at night? Is that what it translates into?

Yeah, so what happens, like, the tryptophan pool is fairly small. A good diet maybe gets a gram a day. So we're not talking multi-grams like some other amino acids. Glycine, I think we get 35, 40 grams in our diet. In a day or can get that much. So tryptophan, you don't need a big dose. And I think if you do take a big dose, then more of it can go to that sleep direction. But when I say augmenting the pool, I'm talking a couple hundred milligrams, like 100 milligrams, maybe up to 250. And that just augments the pool for your body then to shunt more towards NAD+. It tends to do early in the day. Interesting. Tryptophan right before bed, it would be different. Some would— much more would get shifted towards melatonin.

Got it. So if you were going to eat something, so we talk about food as medicine and that correlation of putting natural things into our body as opposed to necessarily taking a pill. I mean, there's times for pills, there's times for supplements. I'm taking vitamins and using things all the time. But in a perfect world, we get all that from natural foodstuffs, right? Wouldn't that be the case?

I think that's a possibility. I tend to be in mindset, someone that likes to do as much as I can through a good diet, but I don't think there's a way to optimize brain activity, brain performance as an example, through diet alone. As an example, there's a nutrient called choline. Eggs are the best food source of it and the Institute of Medicine, I've seen their statements that essentially would say they think about 75% to 80% of adults in the US don't get enough choline to meet their recommended intakes. And part of that is because relatively few people eat eggs consistently.

Right.

Certainly compared to the past. So we could get more choline by eating more eggs, but if we're not doing that, then the only way to really augment that pool would be to take a good dietary supplement source of choline. And we would find that with a lot of different things. We're huge fans at Neurohacker of polyphenols, which are plant compounds. So polyphenols would be what gives blueberries and red wine that pigmented color. You'd find more of them in coffee, dark chocolate. They're really a molecule of color in the plant kingdom. And what we find with a lot of polyphenols, like, say, the grape they use to make wine, it will make more of a polyphenol called resveratrol if the conditions are dry, if it's attacked by pests. All these things that are stresses on the plant.

Right.

And so the more stressed a food is in its environment, the more it makes of these polyphenol compounds that act as its own defenses. And when we eat those, that actually gives us resilience. But since a lot of our plants, they don't have to ever get toughened up because of the environments they're grown in, our diet's very low in polyphenols, at least experts think, compared to what our ancient ancestors would be. We've also hybridized a lot of plants to get rid of polyphenols because many of them don't taste as good. They're not— they tend to be a little bitter. So even if we're just eating a pristine diet, there's going to be things we're probably not getting enough of to optimize our performance.

Right. Something that's really hearty sometimes is really bitter.

Right. Just toughened up by life.

It's been toughened up by life. Yeah. So in some sense, that whole concept of food as medicine, yeah, food As you say, it's contextual because food 100 years ago is very different than food today. And food 1,000 years ago, again, very different than food, processed food or foods, genetically modified foods or other, even foods that just through soil depletion or what have you just aren't as rich, aren't as hearty, aren't as tough on some level as they were 50, 100, 200 years ago, that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. So that has an impact on this conversation from a context standpoint as well.

Yeah, for sure. So I think you can get a lot of the way there with a good diet, but I think if we're trying to get to that peak level of performance, then we need to do some things that are augmenting the diet.

I want to jump into that in just a second. Just to close the loop on tryptophan, is there anything— can you think of a food that people could consume earlier in the day that Would help them in that regard, help their sleep at night?

So tryptophan is going to be in most protein foods, will have some tryptophan. And since it's a small pool, like a protein shake at breakfast is going to give you enough tryptophan to move the needle there.

Good.

Like I said, because it's such a, like a modest quantity in a good diet, you don't need to do more than a couple hundred milligrams to really make an impact. So I mean, a protein shake, an egg, something with protein at breakfast would be the solution.

Good. I want to talk about resilience because you brought that word up a few times and I know just before we hit the record button, we were chatting a little bit about that. That's a big topic for us these days. So I'd love to get a sense of your, just your personal definition of what makes up resilience. We found that there's more often than not these sort of 4 Traits when it comes to resilience among people that we've worked with and researched and things that we've been looking at for a while. But I'd love to get your take on it, on resilience, and also where it is that we can supplement, use things to supplement resilience, whether it's the resilience of our brain, brain chemistry, or our fit, something else that's otherwise related to our energy or overall health, etc. But yeah, what's your take on resilience?

I tend to use a simple analogy, so we'll start there. When I was a kid in the late '60s, there was a game called The Last Straw. Your audience can imagine, it was basically a plastic camel and there was 2 baskets on either side and there was a lot of different colored straws. Each one weighed a little, so blue would maybe weigh a little more than the red straws. These were plastic straws. You would spin a wheel and whatever color it landed on, Then you had to put that straw in the basket and you just went back and forth. And eventually one of the total straws on both sides would cause the back to collapse. Right. And then you lost if that was your straw. Right. So what I would say in health, that's a fairly good analogy. Like resilience to me is whatever it is that makes that camel's back able to bear more straws in its most simple sense. And the straws are everything that could be stress in our lives. So when I think in terms of just coaching people, the goal would be identify and remove straws and do things to make the back more resilient, make it able to carry a bigger load of stress without collapsing. So that would be my complete storified version of what resilience is. But to me, that's in a real-world sense, the behaviors that would make us able to tolerate more straws.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across Across the globe have taken, and all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Exactly. So let's identify some of those. And I'm just— this is more my sort of interest, curiosity, what have you, to track and see how we line up. I just had a podcast earlier in the day with a gentleman that has MS, who was diagnosed with MS. He's been doing phenomenally well from the 5 years ago when that diagnosis was made. And then we had a woman that's part of one of our speaker training programs, and she was diagnosed with MS Almost 20 years ago. They told her within 10 years she'd be in a wheelchair and all that. And so, you know, part of her, her talk, which is going to be a TEDx talk pretty soon, she's in heels, not on— in wheels or on wheels. And in both of these cases, they didn't listen to the conventional sort of thoughts of medical professionals that said, look, this is the trajectory of MS. You're here now, and 10 years, it's just sort of a One downward slope and that's just what happens. But they didn't take that at all. They didn't take it to heart. They didn't buy into it mentally. So their mindset wasn't impacted by it, although they were depressed to hear it or saddened to hear it, et cetera, shocked to hear it. But the actions they took and who they showed up to be flew in the face of what the prognosis was. They got diagnosed, which in the diagnosis was accurate. They both have MS, but the prognosis is completely inaccurate. So yeah, if you could speak to, like you say, the behaviors or other things that create resilience in your experience, that would be great.

Sure. So I think one of the original stress researchers from a health perspective was Hans Selye, and he was of the opinion that the biggest stresses bar none were mental and emotional. So I would say there's— that's the best starting place. And so I know just in my own journey and a couple, like my, one of the big pivots I made when I was in the Navy was would use the word unresolved. So basically anything that a decision would get it off the mental table. And for me, the clue that there was something there was recurrence, right? The same, should I do this? Should I not do this? Yeah. I know for me, there was a point in the Navy where they wanted us to do something. I didn't want to do it, but I knew at some point they were going to force me to do it. So I spent all that night just churning away, churning away. The next morning I just woke up, I did it. And it was a big lesson because I felt this huge weight almost lift off my shoulders. And so to me, that's one of the most important things, whether it's should I get rid of these shoes and give them to Goodwill? Like Resolve the unresolved, to me, is one of the most important things for building resilience.

Resolve the unresolved. So it's interesting, we were in Costa Rica at a retreat center where we worked with some shamans, did different processes and ceremonies, which was truly remarkable. I'm actually going to be podcasting about that pretty soon because I got so many breaks, just things inside of me that shifted and I got Incredible new awareness. But at a certain point, the shaman was working with my wife and had a very interesting sort of thought about something. He was talking about stress and about worry, and his way of looking at worry was sort of a worthless thing— worry— when you can do something. So turning worry into taking— instead of worrying about something, just take care of it.

Mm-hmm.

So let's say you've got a toothache and, you know, worried about your tooth, and Will it mean, do I have a cavity? Am I going to need a root canal? What's it going to cost? I don't have insurance. The whole thing could be thousands of dollars. You're worrying about it. You could worry about it for hours, days, weeks even, et cetera, while you're figuring out what to do, as opposed to going to the dentist, sitting in the chair, and being told what's the story with your tooth and taking care of it. Simple as that. And as you say, I think it's that idea of resolve the resolve

Yeah, exactly. And my clue to that would be something that's eating up a lot of my mental bandwidth. It's something that keeps recurring. And so usually the simplest thing is just to deal with it, get it off the menu.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. Let's call that one characteristic.

Okay.

One trait of somebody who is resilient. They resolve the unresolved.

Yep.

And they do it more quickly. So instead of agonizing over something until you can't stand it anymore and you've already lost your hair, which is— you and I have obviously taken care of all the unresolved things in our lives because we have no hair left to pull out, right? That's good. What's another characteristic, if you will, of somebody that's developed resilience?

So I think for me, resilience also goes back to those 6 basic things that are regulated in the hypothalamus, right? I'm going to be way more resilient if I get enough sleep. Way more resilient if I'm eating a healthy diet.

Right.

There's this idea in stress research called nonspecific adaptation. So it would be another Hans Selye idea. So if you think of sports would be a good analogy, if you really wanted to perform great at golf, you've got to spend a lot of time golfing. Right. So that's building up skills in a really specific manner. Now, that's not going to create a lot of fitness to help you go ride a bike. Or maybe go lift weights. But if you do some aspect of, say, regular walking, regular training with weights, not crazy amounts, that's going to give you a much more nonspecific exercise capacity. Right. You'll be able to go in a lot of directions with that foundation you've built. Right. So that idea of nonspecific versus specific. So resilience has a lot to do with how much nonspecific adaptational powers we've built into our body. So because that to me is the key thing that makes the back stronger. So if you take exercise, too much exercise, you can overtrain, get injured. It becomes a big stress, right? There's no one that would tell you that running a marathon is not stressful.

Yeah.

But walking every day, doing yoga, things like that are the opposite. They actually prepare you to handle other stresses better. So when you think in terms of the stress response, there's certain amounts of, I would say, Different things that maybe on their own would be a stress, but they act to toughen you up for other stresses.

Yes.

So does that make sense? So that—

It does.

Those things you want to build that nonspecific toughness so that, like for me, I use exercise so that I can do whatever I need to do. I don't really invest much time into doing high amounts of specific training for one thing at this point in my life, and frankly didn't do a lot of that even when I was younger. It just wasn't my journey. And there's a group of herbal compounds that are called adaptogens, that that's what they do. So these are your ginsengs and rhodiolas. There's a few other, and it's what polyphenols tend to do, that compounds I talked about earlier. They tend to give a nonspecific ability to tolerate much more stress. So when that happens, you could get, like one of the straws might be exposure to some chemicals that you weren't expecting, or Sleep disruption. You can handle all these other unanticipated straws more readily.

Right. At the gym, it seems— well, I used to work out a lot at the gym and there was a period of time where I only worked out my upper body. And that's, I think, I was resilient in that one area, but I was top-heavy. I kind of looked like an anchor. I see some folks that still to this day, that's kind of where they spend the bulk of their time. But the more resilient athletes, they are They have 2 things. One, they're much more well-rounded, or at least there's a harmony between the work that they're doing, the stress that they're putting their muscles under in various muscle categories. So they work their shoulders, they work their abs, they work their pecs, they work their biceps, they work their legs, their calves. They are much more stable, I suppose, in that regard. They're just, you know, more in harmony. And it seems like that's an element of resilience is the

When I think of exercise, like some degree of frequent movement doesn't have to be running or can be just frequently getting up and moving around, walking stairs, going for walks, something that builds strength. So weight training would be ideal a couple of times a week and then something that works on balance. So the 3 things that we lose as we get older—

Don't say it.

Don't say it. All of those, right? So we want to work in a well-rounded way to cover all those bases.

So to repeat the 3 things, if you—

So we want to work on frequent movement.

Frequent movement.

Which can be lifestyle movement, right? Walking more, taking stairs. We want to do some kind of thing to maintain muscle size and strength, especially like the ability to move something quickly. So that would be weight training.

Like fast-twitch muscles.

Yep. And then we want to work on balance because a lot of what You would see in retiree population is they fall because they lose their balance, right? And so that's called proprioception. So that can be like walking on sand at the beach, right? Because that's going to work that all those proprioceptors in our feet that are going to work all the way up through our nerves to our brain, working balance. So we don't actually have to—

A good beach walk.

A good beach walk. We don't have to do yoga, though yoga and tai chi are great. So those to me are the 3 pillars of healthy exercise. And I would want them all covered.

Beautiful. You mentioned earlier, again, just to close the loop on this, the hypothalamus, you mentioned 2 of the 6 areas there and I heard sleep and diet. I'm going to turn this into a quiz, but do you have by recollection the other 4?

So let's see if I get them right. So sleep, sleep drive's there. Sex drive. Thirst. Body temperature regulation. So those are the core 6. And then The body clock, the central, basically your light-sensitive body clock is also located there. So I usually throw that in as well.

Got it. Beautiful. Okay. Very cool. Let's talk a little bit about rituals because we're going to wind things down here. But at least from our experience and even the research we've done, there's sort of 4 things that we found among people who are resilient. And again, let me know if you buy into this or don't, including the sort of the conclusion that resilience is not something that's necessarily genetic. Are some people more maybe genetically predisposed to being resilient? I suppose, because I certainly think that the genes are impacting us not just from a physical standpoint or that we're tall or short or have hair or don't have hair, but in other ways as well, that resilience is something that can be learned. So first of all, do you buy into that, that this is even from an epigenetic standpoint that resilience is a Trainable or learned behavior?

I would say there's like a nature-nurture component and that there's physical resilience, there's mental resilience. Those aren't necessarily always the same. What you would see for like Navy SEALs or Special Forces, those to make it through that training, they almost have a huge genetic component to be able to tolerate the degree of stress that they're put under. But that's an exceptional amount of stress. But if they break, they break really hard. Got it. But mental resilience, I think, is more in the nurture than the nature camp. And the type of physical resilience we're talking about is certainly able to be learned and built.

I'm so glad you brought this up because I just realized that that was a bit of a blind spot for me. And when we think about resilience, it's more holistic, more of a mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual spiritual, I suppose, in a lot of ways. And yet physical resilience is the sort of the first thing I think most people think of when they hear that word anyway. It's sort of that idea that resilience is endurance, that this is our ability to just keep going, bounce back, and no matter how many times we get knocked over, just keep getting up like Rocky, you know, like Rocky.

Right.

Except people are pretty— in the corporate space and in other areas, people are pretty banged up. Pretty exhausted. And so our research is showing that resilience isn't about endurance as much as it is about recovery.

For sure. And that's recovery. I know when I was young, that was the one piece of my exercise program that was horrible. I would do, do, do, do, but was horrible at getting enough recovery to benefit from the doing. I don't know if you've had any guests talk about intermittent fasting on your show, but one of the things that They've been finding in animal experiments when you intermittently fast animals. So these are short couple-day water fasts. Usually the fasting does some beneficial things, clearing up junk proteins and other things in our cells, but then the refeeding after does something as well. So you need both, like you need the fasting and the refeeding. You need exercise, you need recovery. So what ends up, I think, often underappreciated is the things that fall into that recovery. And that's where, frankly, we miss that. We probably are missing out on oftentimes close to half the benefits from the doing.

Yes. And so this may be a nice way to bridge into the work that you and the company are doing now because more than the— certainly 200, 300 years ago, we were in the fields. I mean, we were physical unless we were an aristocrat or something. Other people were farming or working our fields. We were much more physically engaged. To create our food and every other form of prosperity and security. And today that's mental. I mean, most people are not really working physically as much as they are mentally, and mental exhaustion is a real thing, mental deterioration. And becoming more mentally resilient, I think, is more difficult and is exacerbated by the fact that we have 24/7— like, we're on. Our cell phones are with us. They're by most people's bedsides. They're People are checking their social media and actively posting on things and reading other people's posts at 10, 11 o'clock at night. They wake up and it's the first thing they reach for. I mean, job-wise, your email is sort of a constant. There's no sort of end to the week. There's no weekend. So what do we do about it from a— just from the standpoint of our brain function and maybe bridge into the pivot of what Neurohacker does and what you do for them? Because I know that this is a product that I'm familiar with, at least one of the products you guys have and how it helps people to create more brain resilience, if that's even fair to say that.

Yeah, no, I think it's definitely fair. So I tend to use the term brain bandwidth. It would have some overlaps for sure with what you're talking about. Resilience, resilience would be a bit more. But like, I think of bandwidth like you would for your Wi-Fi, right? There's at any given amount of time, our brain can only handle so much things going on at a time. And as you pointed out, we're getting more and more things dumped on that compared to how things used to be. So, and then certain things, as an example, someone goes on a diet, they're going to typically be hungry a lot. So that thoughts of hunger are going to be consuming a lot of the bandwidth. They're unresolved, like the resolvable things I talked about earlier, those consume a lot of bandwidth. And so We've got all these things competing for what's finite. And so to me, there's always 2 games to play, almost like the camel game we spoke about. So we want to remove what we can, but then we want to build more capacity. And where our product comes in, Qualia is the Neurohacker Collective brain product that's been out for a few years. I think of that in the sense of that, that's building more resources so that the brain can do what it needs to do better. So I know one of my morning rituals is I take a few pills first thing in the morning before I head out the door, go into the gym. And that— what you would see with exercise is it used to be thought that with exercise, the big thing that would cause people to quit their exercise routine before they did everything that they wanted to do was physical fatigue. But now we know it's mental fatigue. And so Qualia for me seems to help give me much more ability to push mental fatigue off, right? So like that extra resources help do that. And with that, it seems like when that's the case, it's easier to get rid of some of the bandwidth issues too. So what I've seen, what a lot of our customer feedback is, is people make better decisions when they get better resource support for their brain. Yeah.

In essence, increasing bandwidth? Is that— to keep that analogy?

I would feel like there's some aspect of that going on. And so, like, for me, before Qualia, I would have said I got it covered. I eat well, I exercise, but my individual performance was vastly improved within a few weeks of starting that. And a couple things for me that I noticed that were non-obvious before was that I was procrastinating a fair amount early in the day. before getting into things. My patience and tolerance for other people at the end of the day, not so good. So both of those to me dramatically improved within a few weeks of starting Qualia.

Yeah.

And what we've found, different people is different things. I have a lifelong friend that I always think of myself as having an above average memory. He'd tell you his memory is horrible. And so about a month after starting it, he texted me like, can't believe it, remembering names, dates, appointments for the first time in decades.

Yeah.

So there's a saying in the nootropic world, your mileage may vary. The same thing may not work the same way for you as for me, but what we found with the right nootropics, so the right supplements for your brain, a lot of people will notice big improvements in performance.

Yes. A couple of quick things as well. So you notice that there are benefits on the repair and recovery side. Is that similar to what we're saying or what you're saying? Not exactly.

So I know when we designed Qualia, we designed it to do a bunch of things. So if you think in the simple terms, caffeine would be the most— like, nootropics is a term for basically things that improve brain performance. So coffee is definitely one. But what that works is really narrow. It's called arousal, right? It helps you stay alert. But we also want to support things that do much more long-term memory consolidation, building plasticity, repairing the brain. So when we designed Qualia, we designed it not to trade off things to go more arousal, arousal, but to make sure we got enough of that with the long-term things for recovery and repair.

Yeah,

because I think, like I said earlier, that's the piece that's often underappreciated. So we didn't want that to be neglected in our product.

Makes sense. Let's go back to Rituals. You shared at least one of your rituals. I'd love to hear a little if you could. Our community is always very quick to give us feedback on these are things they hear other people are doing and they try out things that they love. They're so happy to hear somebody else's ritual and then they adopt it and it works for them and they're appreciative. So what's another ritual you can share with us?

Sure. So I would say my most ritualized time of the day is the morning. Like I said, jump out of bed pretty quickly. I've never had an issue with that. But I then I'll take my whatever the supplements I'm going to take, have a big glass of water. I used to be someone that sipped water through the day and then found that, that I do better personally when I drink my water like meals. So I drink a lot of water a few times a day as opposed to a little spread out.

Drink water like meals.

Yeah. And then I go to the gym. So most, I would say at least 4 days During the work week, I'll go immediately to the gym, typically one of the weekend days. After the gym, I stop and I'm lucky I live in San Diego, so year-round I stop at a coffee shop and get to sit outside having my coffee. So those would be kind of the whatever I'm doing to kind of improve my workout, like a pre-workout thing, which for me is Qualia, getting the workout in, getting some morning sunlight and having a good cup of coffee. Would be my quick things.

Right.

And then after that, I'll usually turn to my computer and start to do what I think of as pre-work. So the things that would be more in the learning category, I like to do first thing in the morning. And then I think it's super important to take breaks to consolidate things. So after that, usually have a good breakfast and then we'll head to work. So another thing that I'm more recently working on is as a ritual and it would tie in with your idea of gratitude from the beginning. I saw a study within the last month. They basically had 4 groups of college students. One group, they said, okay, walk around for the next 10 minutes. Anyone you see, imagine wishing them loving kindness. Like you're just wishing for the best for them. That's the only thing we want you to do.

Right.

The other group, they said, okay, what we want you to do is imagine like how you're socially connected to them. So imagine, oh, this person may eventually be in a class I take or may like just imagine how there would be some link between the two of you. The third group, they said, okay, we want you to walk around and imagine how you're better than these other people, like maybe smarter, better dressed. And then the fourth group, we said, just walk around kind of as normal. And what they found is the people that did the loving kindness approach actually felt much better. had a lot more empathy for the people they saw and for other people through the day. In the post office just the other day, pretty big line, of course, right? Like, that's—

It's the post office.

But that's what I did while I was there in the line is didn't focus on like— rather than kind of zoning out or going one of those other directions in the study, did my best to just look at these people and wish them Kind, loving thoughts. So that's my— it's a new ritual. I'm not great at it yet, but I think going to be a super important one over time.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproofbook.com. And not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience For the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Yeah. Rituals are— the term itself for some people feels like there's some religious connotation to it. We use it as a consciously created habit like the conscious pivot, just the idea that we're bringing some level of awareness to what we do as opposed to I brush my teeth with this hand because this is the way I've been doing it since I'm 8 years old kind of thing. And yeah, when you adopt a new habit or a new ritual, you kind of suck at it at the beginning or at least it's uncomfortable because it's just new. So it's a perfect segue into how we will close out this conversation, which I've so enjoyed. So, Dr. Kelly, what a blast this has been. And I think the ritual that has been most consistently a part of my life for the last 10 years since the days when I was a lawyer and woke up in the morning and would feel this sense of dread at the start of the day. my feet on the floor, more typically in the morning before my wife was up or the kids were up, and I'd feel this sort of angst and even anxiety ahead of the day because I knew exactly what my day was going to be like. It was going to start in traffic, getting into Manhattan, going from New Jersey to New York City, and probably getting flipped off or flipping somebody off before, you know, within the hour and full-on just battle, really. I was kind of a paid warrior of sorts as a litigation attorney. And I was feeling that at the very beginning of the day. And now, for the better part of 10 years, I wake up in the morning and I feel very differently. So I'm going to share that ritual. And for some of you that are hearing this for the first time, know that if it's something you adopt and you try on for size for yourself, you may suck at it at the beginning. I know I did. It was uncomfortable. It didn't feel true or authentic for me. But I stuck with it. Like a lot of these kinds of things that we're talking about, whether it's Be more conscious about your diet, whether it's to treat your water intake like a meal, like meals. I think that's really a brilliant way to phrase, to language that particular thing. Or it's to take breaks, intermittent breaks, just like intermittent fasting is something that's gotten some— has been well received, intermittent break taking during the day. So you create periods of recovery. You've got lots of mental exertion happening and give yourself a commensurate period of time to relax and relax your mind, etc. So this is one of those new skills perhaps. And that is, first of all, and this is the first part, and I'll ask you, Greg, if you're willing to do this. Are you willing to wake up tomorrow?

Absolutely.

And it's funny because you ask a group of people that and they kind of look at you funny like, what do you mean? What do you mean? I said, well, first of all, was it guaranteed that you'd wake up today? Is there anything in stone? Did you get a contract that said you're going to wake up today? And the answer is clearly no. So if we get to wake up again tomorrow, it's a blessing. It's not guaranteed. And so in that first moment of awareness tomorrow is the first new awareness that you start the day, think, hmm, I remember hearing it on that podcast yesterday that I wasn't guaranteed to wake up. So I'm waking up now. That's cool. And not only that, but there's the recognition is you are aware of that. You are waking up and taking that first conscious breath. of the day that there are people all over this planet who will be taking their very last breath in that moment. So it is in fact a holy moment, a sacred moment. And if for nothing else in your life that you could be grateful for and appreciative of, that breath is a good one right then and there, that you've got a new day. And for whatever reason, whether you believe it's because you've been given an assignment— that's how I look at it, like I'm here another day for a very specific reason. Even if I'm not sure what that is. So you can be grateful in that moment and then take 10 seconds. This is a 10-second waking ritual. You can do it from bed. You can do it when your feet hit the floor. If you stumble and you forget and it's not till you're standing in front of the mirror, it's just fine. But you take 10 seconds as you're aware of what it feels like to be grateful for your life in that moment. And you could say these words out loud. I love my life. I love my life. What are the words?

I love my life.

Yeah, brother. So everybody have a beautiful, blessed rest of your day, your evening, wherever it is we're catching you. This has been a great conversation. Love for you to check out more of what Dr. Gregg Kelly has been up to, what Neurohacker Collective is up to, and that's all in the show notes. Please feel free to leave us a review as well on iTunes or go to adammarkel.com/podcast and leave a comment there. I will answer that comment. Happy to Get your feedback. It's like oxygen for us. So, thank you so much. And of course, you can join our Facebook community at Start My Pivot Community on Facebook. And it's been a blessing. So, have a beautiful rest of the day, the evening, et cetera. And ciao for now, everybody. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.