#142: Developing Resilience For Achieving Optimal Brain Health With Dr. Brandon Beaber

Thank you for having me on, Adam. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, I always want to start with something that's not written in the classic introduction or bio. So what's not there that you'd love for people to know about you coming into this interview?

I have very diverse interests. I like to play chess. I do some circus arts like juggling and unicycling. If you watch any of my YouTube videos, sometimes I'll splice in just 5 seconds of me juggling, and I kind of got back into that after many, many years. I have a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old. Just like you, I also slept very well last night, but if you talked to me yesterday, I wouldn't have said the same thing because I've had some long nights both having young kids And being on call. And very recently, in the last few years, I got into the social media thing because although I don't have a particular interest in being an academic neurologist and sort of trying to advance research and increase our understanding of the disease piece bit by bit, I really have an interest in interacting directly with the community of people with multiple sclerosis and other neurological diseases and people who are interested in psychological resilience.

Yes. Well, resilience is definitely a topic I know we're going to track to today. And you know what? We started with sleep. I didn't— you know, it's one of these things that just pops up and you go, well, great. I trust that everything that's always popping up is there for a good reason. And it's just a question of, you know, can we see the connection points? So, yeah, Monday night I was out in LA, mentioning before we started the show, and out with my brother and out with our daughter Lindsay and her fiancé. And, you know, stayed out a little late. Got sort of an abbreviated night's sleep, just a few hours, got up early. I mean, like before, I was on the road in LA traffic by 7:00 AM, and I mean traffic, like full-on bumper-to-bumper, thousands and thousands of cars on the road at 7:00 AM, which reminded me of my days when I was a lawyer and I used to commute into Manhattan and would deal with that every day, sort of 4 hours, 2 hours each way of traffic, and just how that wore me down, really just wore me down on so many— In so many ways. So I didn't sleep well that night and yesterday I wasn't at my best. I really wasn't. I mean, you do what you have to do. We're all kind of tenacious and I'm extremely resilient. I believe you build resilience, you create resilience before you need it. I had a reserve tank that I could call upon yesterday, but I definitely depleted it. And last night, then I made sure I got a good night's sleep. So my question to you is, how important is sleep in this, whether it's in the folks that you're working with that have some Some neurological challenges, but just generally speaking, you know, how important is sleep to creating resilience?

It's extremely important. And I think that a lot of resilience is taking care of your physical body and being physically strong and well-rested and having good nutrition. And people have done a lot of studies on sort of regenerative capability of the nervous system. And we historically believed that the nervous system was very static. And if you have damage, maybe you get a little bit of improvement as the swelling goes down, but after that, it's very static. But in reality, we have some regenerative capability. And relatively recently, in the last 20 years, we've discovered the capability of neurogenesis, the formation of new neurons. And one of the things that promotes neurogenesis is sleep. And there are all kinds of things that are going on when you sleep. You're consolidating memories in your hippocampus. During certain forms of sleep, like rapid eye movement sleep, you're experiencing a total relaxation of all of the muscles of your body, which never occurs even at, quote, rest. And that is thought to be very important in terms of both recovery of physical muscles and metabolizing certain hormones involved in stress and just recuperating yourself in general.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience 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.

So, sleep is something I think it has kind of a Depending on who you ask, you get different viewpoints. I know there are people that are out there in social media who are pretty much— well, they're influencers and they say, hey, they only need 3, 4 hours of sleep. And we hear that kind of thing. If you're side hustling or you're creating a business or doing something that you want to be today, if you're an entrepreneur, you sort of have to do without sleep. Even Elon Musk talks about his people. He works 110, 120 hours a week. And that's become sort of a A standard, almost an aspirational milestone for many millennials, many entrepreneurs, that they have to work even farther and more in excess of what we used to call workaholism previous to this. So how important do you think sleep really is? And can we do it? You know, what happens if we do without it? What if we're getting 5 or 6 hours instead of 7 or 8? And what is that optimal sleep and how important is it, do you think?

Well, I think that everyone's a little bit different. There are definitely people who seem to do well on a relatively small amount of sleep, like 5 or 6 hours. Most people need closer to 7 or 8 hours, and there are a small number of unlucky people who really can't function well unless they're sleeping a lot, 9 or 10 hours, and sometimes for unknown reasons. We call it primary hypersomnia. But when people do very detailed neuropsychological testing of people, cognitive function does decline a little bit when people are sleep deprived. And everything that we test seems to decline slightly when you're sleep deprived. Your driving ability decreases, your ability to solve math problems, make good decisions. Obviously, I know a lot about sleep deprivation.

As

a physician. Yeah. I remember when I was a resident, there used to be a rule where you couldn't work more than 30 hours straight. That was the maximum. You have to send the doctors home after 30 hours. And I was doing a rotation, I won't name the department because I don't want to make anyone look bad, and they just abused us. I mean, we were routinely staying over 30 hours. And I just remember this one night on call, I had a list of patients and a bunch of checkboxes of things you have to do, and I just completely forgot to see this one patient. You just didn't even see them at all, forgot that they exist.

Right.

And luckily, you know, nothing happened to them. They were stable. But I mean, mistakes get made when people are sleep deprived. That's just the reality.

Yeah, exactly. Neurogenesis. Tell us a little bit more about that and things that can regenerate ourselves. Anything that we can do to regenerate ourselves in not just purely physical regeneration, but even our mental, because most of the fatigue I find with people these days Isn't like it was if we were working on the farm or they were, you know, out doing manual labor jobs where you were physically exhausted. It feels like it's more mental fatigue, even tech fatigue that people are experiencing. And that might not be your area specifically of your expertise, but what are your thoughts there? And where does the neurogenesis concept come in if it does?

Well, specifically, that is a very common complaint in people with multiple sclerosis, that they have cognitive fatigue. And a lot of people with MS, if you talk to them, you wouldn't really recognize them to have any kind of cognitive dysfunction whatsoever, because their memory may be pretty good, their intelligence may be preserved. But when it comes to things like doing multiple things at once, multitasking for long periods of time, that's when they may notice the problems. And it could be something very subtle and subjective, but it's very significant. People have a lot of problems with employment, even if they seem intelligent and smart. And what's happening is that people have sort of a metabolic failure of the brain, that you can't keep up with the pace. And if you have an injury to the brain, it's likely to make that worse. And it's seen in multiple diseases, people who've had strokes and people who have multiple sclerosis and various other degenerative diseases of the nervous system. And the thing about neurogenesis, it's very interesting, that's probably the one thing that's going to help us repair injury that has been very longstanding and appears permanent. our treatments of MS are a lot better in terms of our ability to control the immune system, because we believe MS is an immune-mediated disease. But for some people, that's not really their problem. They're sort of stable. They're not really having a lot of active inflammation, at least not that we could see, but they want to repair injury that's happened in the past. Now, some of that repair may be related to the myelin, which is sort of the fatty sheath of the nerve fibers. The sort of good thing about MS is that people may have a lot of preservation of the axons or nerve fibers, whereas they have disproportionate damage to the myelin. And so there are a lot of novel agents, drugs, therapeutics sort of geared towards treating that, none that are commercially available yet, but probably will be fairly soon. But some people have damage to the nerve fibers themselves, and that's where future technologies related to neurogenesis may come into play. But based on the current research, the things that have been shown to Increased neurogenesis are getting good sleep, regular exercise, training the brain, stimulating your cognition, and eating a healthy diet. There's some evidence that antioxidants like blueberries, flavonoids, and nuts are beneficial for cognitive function, for example.

So brain health is something I've— well, I don't know that everybody's thinking about it, but I think when you pass a certain age, maybe it's 40 or 50 or something, I don't know, when you begin first to think, geez, I was a little sharper, a little quicker or something like that earlier on in life. I know for me at my age, I'm just like, brain health is everything to me. I want to make sure that with the pace of change, the pace of everything that's being developed all around me all the time, I want to be able to keep up and not just keep up, I really want to still be on my own growth edge, whatever the cutting edge looks like. So, you mentioned a couple of things that that are brain health related, like the sleep you're getting and some of the foods you're eating. Are there other things that people should be thinking about or looking for to determine whether or not their brain is performing optimally or whether there are some signs that maybe there's even something that they want to get sort of looked into?

Well, one thing that you could do is actually test your cognitive function. And there are a lot of websites like Luminosity and NeuroBrain. I can't remember all of them off the top of my head and they can actually give you a score. And you can sort of test your cognitive function. The other thing that I should mention is chronic stress. There's acute stress, it's sort of a natural reaction that we're supposed to have from an evolutionary standpoint. You're facing a saber-toothed tiger or you need to chase down prey, and that's very normal. But like you were sort of saying before we started recording, chronic stress is a big problem. We don't get to rest a lot in our current society, and that has very deleterious effects on our overall health and our cognitive function. And probably our overall resilience.

I'm really glad you brought that up because this idea that the ability to recover is the key to much of the research to how you perform at higher levels is the amount to which you incorporate recovery into the rituals for whatever it is that you're doing. So with athletes, for example, they have a recovery regime or routines that are built into Getting back in, whether it's in the ring or it's on the field to play or whatever it is, but they are routinely recovering. In corporate America, we're constantly in a do more with less cycle. So the amount of work only increases. The resources to support that work usually decrease. The time that we're given to perform things has also shrunk. And there are almost no boundaries between work or business and So whereas 20 or 30 years ago, rest was the weekend, right? Like you have a weekend and that's your time to rest. That's your R&R time. These days, there is no end to the week. So there is no weekend for many, many people, right? So the stress and the lack of recovery, I think, is just as you say, the issue. But I'd love for you to explain if you could, what does rest really look like? Because when I ask this question to people, they say, well, If I'm home, I'm not at work, I'm resting. Well, what do you mean? I'm not on my email. It means I'm resting. Well, what are you doing? Well, I'm watching TV or I'm on my phone or I'm on my computer. And I say, well, is that resting? And they go, yeah, of course it is. I'm not actively working. I'm relaxing. It's a way that I relax. But that begs the question, is consuming content online, being on social media platforms, I won't name any, single them out, but whatever those platforms are, watching the news, whatever your brand of the news is, right, on either side of the divide. Will that equate to rest in your opinion?

Well, I think that you make a valid point that a lot of what should be our resting time is actually a very active and stimulating time. And what I would recommend is more of an active effort to specifically focus on the present and focus on rest. And one of the chapters in my book is about mindfulness meditation and sort of training your brain To specifically distract yourself from all the troubles of the day and just appreciate what's right in front of you. What can you express gratitude for? And to really try to relax your mind and relax your muscles.

You know what? We didn't at the beginning give the name of your book, but I'd love it if you'd share that with our audience.

It is Resilience in the Face of Multiple Sclerosis.

Okay. So someone that has MS or has a history in their family of MS, they probably— this is a book they'll They'll want to check out for sure. Is it also a relevant book for people that don't have a history, a family history, and don't currently have MS?

Well, I'd like to think so, because what inspired me to write the book is that I specifically tried to interview people who have a lot of problems. Multiple sclerosis is variable. There are many people who are marathon runners or high-powered CEOs, and you wouldn't know that they have MS by looking at them. But I tried to interview people who, they have MS, they have a lot of disability related to MS. Both the salient kind that you can see, like physical disability, abnormal speech, clumsiness, and also invisible symptoms like fatigue and pain that you wouldn't readily see but have a profound impact on people's lives. But I found, to my surprise, that a lot of people live great lives in the face of MS, or sometimes even because of MS. And I'll give you an example of that. One of the people I interviewed is Sandra Roscoe, and that's actually her real name. She's a fairly well-known political activist in the Tri-City area in South LA. And in the past, she was a healthcare administrator and she was lively and ambitious. She loved her career and she developed very aggressive multiple sclerosis very quickly and was severely disabled within weeks or months. And if you saw her now, it would blow your mind because now, even though she has a lot more disability, she's been using a wheelchair for many years, she's so happy and enthusiastic and productive. But at the time, she was severely depressed and was even institutionalized. She was institutionalized for depression, and she's kind of slowly recovered from that. And as you would say, she made a pivot in a different direction. And she wasn't able to go back to work, but she became a political activist, and she sort of found that she had new strengths and new abilities and new interests that she never even considered before. And there's a whole area of research related to this that they call post-traumatic growth. One of the researchers is named Tedeschi, and he studies a lot of people who experience traumatic events like losing a spouse or losing a job or coming back from war. And we all know about the negative things. We know about post-traumatic stress disorder, and we know about depression and flashbacks and all the horrible things that can happen. But it turns out that a lot of people experience something different, what they call post-traumatic growth. Where people realize that they had abilities that they didn't have before. Sometimes they appreciate the little things in life more, like their relationships with other people. And sometimes people experience a difference in philosophy or even a new religion or a new importance of religion in their life, for example. Kind of like what you experienced when you were in the emergency room with the chest pain and everything like that.

Post-traumatic growth. You know what? This is a term I've never heard before. In real terms, what this means is that there's something that's happened, but you've gained something, meaning something that you might call negative or something that's sort of hit you out of left field. It could be the loss of a job. It could be a cancer diagnosis. It could be any number of things that every— we all have happen at times in our lives. But there's a tendency toward resilience being created. Is that the kind of growth that you mean?

Exactly. And I'm not saying that multiple sclerosis is good or that this kind of adversity is good. Of course, it's bad and it may severely limit some of the things that you're able to do in life and change your plans. But you may be able to find something good in it or to sort of use it to be more flexible in life and to develop new skills and to develop— to go in a direction you never would have gone in otherwise. So, with Sandra, she got interested in politics. And she started going to city council meetings. She's very personable and she made relationships with people. And she was actually able to really help her community. And she was actually pretty famous for a period because she was protesting the City of Bell scandal. I don't know if you were in Southern California at that time, but it was a huge scandal involving city council members in the City of Bell stealing money from taxes, basically pocketing it. And she did all kinds of great things for her community and she's such a happy person and so productive and so fulfilled.

Yeah. I want to just sort of change the trajectory a little bit, which is that we often will talk about other people's pivots and they're very instructive, obviously, to look at how something's gone in someone else's life. What's something that's happened in your life where the principle of post-traumatic growth came into play? Is there something like that that is relevant for you?

Well, you know, when I read your story, it makes me think, I'm glad I didn't go into law because it's funny, every lawyer I talk to is very unhappy with few exceptions. So generally speaking, I'm happy with my career and don't get me wrong, I've definitely had some rough times. Not everything about my career has been positive. You know, recently I've sort of realized that I don't want to just be a clinician. I want to be an author and I want to write multiple books and I want to be active on social media and interact with people. And sort of contribute to the community of people with MS in that way. And I'm not going to do something like you where I try to make it my career. You know, I'll primarily be a multiple sclerosis clinician. That's what I'll do for a living for the rest of my life, I believe. But I just want to have this separate thing on the side that gives me a lot of fulfillment. And it's been an adventure. I really enjoyed the whole process. And like you talk about in your book, you turn the ship 5 degrees. Over a long period of time, it makes a big difference and you're very far from where you would have been otherwise.

Yeah. It's interesting like that. We often will tell ourselves, I know I've done the same thing, that there's a sunk cost in doing something for a length of time, whether it's to be in a job for a long time or to be working a particular business plan or business model for some length of time and thinking, you know what? I've got so much investor already. It's almost impossible for me to change or to turn the ship like you said. And so those small changes make a big difference. And part of what I think we are, all of us looking to do is to return to a place that feels balanced in our lives. And I'm not a big fan of that concept of balance personally. I think of it more like harmony. And how do we return ourselves to a state of harmony when often we're walking around with that, as you said, those more prehistoric reactions happening inside of us, this sort of cortisol pumping through us and we feel as though we're in fight or flight and even to the point where we're not recognizing that some of those things are being triggered within us and that disturbs our peace. It disturbs our sense of wellbeing. It disturbs our sense of being grounded. I'd like to— because this is a term that came up for me some time ago and I want to bring it up and get your thoughts on it, which is homeostasis, this idea that from a physiological standpoint or even a medical standpoint, that there's a balancing within our bodies, a return to something called homeostasis. Can you share a little bit about what's your understanding of that and how important is it that we ourselves are returning back to a state of, and I'll say homeostasis instead of balance, but if you could give us your take on that, I think it'd be very helpful.

Well, I think that like you said before, you have a certain amount of mental energy. And if you're trying to put excess demands on your mental energy and you're not able to fill that tank by doing things like programming in rest and doing things that you enjoy and giving your body good nutrition and exercising regularly, then you're probably not going to be able to keep up with that demand. And I think that some people are stronger than others. But everyone cracks under enough pressure. And you have your chest pain story, and a lot of other people have stories like that, but it may not necessarily be something so dramatic. It may be that your productivity is less at work over a long period. You just don't have a passion for it anymore, and you just don't enjoy it anymore. I think that people underestimate how important happiness with what you're doing is in terms of something like success in your career or in an entrepreneurial venture. Like, for instance, if you had gotten into Real Love Media thinking, I think there's a niche for transformative speaking in the business

world,

but you had no particular interest in it, I don't think that you would be able to sustain the passion for it and put in the work and sacrifice over time to really make it successful. And I think a lot of success in business and in entrepreneurial adventures is doing something that you love and that you care about and that you're passionate about. You know, in my book I talk a little bit about different schools of psychology and how they come— how they contribute to overcoming resilience. And one psychologist that really inspired me is this guy, Dr. Martin Seligman.

Yes.

You know who he is, of course, right? To those who don't know, he sort of criticized the world of psychology because it was too focused on the negative. It was focused on treating depression and anxiety and schizophrenia. But what about improving the lives of ordinary people? And so he called this positive psychology as opposed to negative psychology, treating something bad. And according to his research, there are different things that really contribute to happiness. So one of those things is simple hedonistic pleasure. Maybe this would be watching TV or eating delicious food, something that sort of instantly causes gratification that we can all understand. But he argued that this actually contributes to a small amount of happiness and that other forms of happiness are more important. So one of those things he calls engagement, which is basically being immersed in an activity. So it could be that you're playing chess or a video game or reading a book that you really enjoy or spending time with someone that you care about. And time seems to pass very quickly. And as soon as you know it, several hours have passed and you weren't even thinking about it. And this isn't necessarily through your profession. It could be Many things, volunteer work, some kind of intellectual or artistic pursuit. And then the last thing that he talks about is meaning, doing something that you know is valuable, where you believe in the cause, and that's going to make you more passionate and more productive in the long run, even if a little bit of pleasure is sacrificed in the short run.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid, and if you're a leader of 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 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.

Yes. So when we think about how it is that we create greater resilience, I think Seligman is a great example of that because he, if I'm recalling, he talked about that there's a way that we talk to ourselves, that we've all got sort of our own way of creating story or creating meaning for ourselves. And the difference between somebody that looks at the world And sees the glass as half full versus the person that might see it otherwise has to do with the way that we look at what's happening in our lives and whether we see those things as being permanent, pervasive, or— I forget what the third P was. It might have been personal. There are people who look at things that are happening in their lives and they make meaning out of it. And some think that what's happening is permanent. Like there's something that they're experiencing that they can't change. have lost a certain amount of control, that some people think that what's happening is a part of a pattern or a history that, you know, it kind of, you know, always happens. Like, this is my luck, this is my life, my lot, this is what happens all the time to me. And people that also— and I believe it was personal— where they assume that there's something that they've done personally that's invited this thing into their life. And, uh, and in each of those cases, we have this choice that we can make in terms of how we frame that story and what we take away from it. What you said earlier, I think, is very important, is that we have this opportunity when we're making meaning of things to tell ourselves that there is meaning in it. It's like Man's Search for Meaning, the idea that Viktor Frankl's book, that there's meaning in everything. In fact, he created meaning therapy out of his experiences as unfortunately surviving or being in a concentration camp and fortunately surviving that, but part of how he survived where other people didn't Was that he was thinking while he was there that someday there would be something good that could come out of it somehow, inconceivable as it was, and without even clarity about what that might look like. He just felt there would be some meaning and that ultimately if he could share that meaning, that maybe things would be better for someone else. So that idea of how we look at the story, that we're not necessarily seeing things as being permanently wrong or pervasively wrong or personal, like as though we deserve it or we— or being judged or something like that, but rather seeing that anything that's happening is on some level happening to our benefit and potentially to the benefit of many, many other people. That seems to be a concept that's more on the mindset side, but I'd love to get your thoughts on how much of the work that you do with people who have been diagnosed with MS, for example, how much of it is mindset? How much of it has to do with thinking versus— What's actually kind of going on inside of their physical bodies?

Well, you know, when people come to see me, they're mostly interested in the medical side of multiple sclerosis. What sort of diet should I consume? What medication should I take? How often do I need an MRI scan? So that's typically what people want to talk to me about when they come to see the visit. But of course, that's only one side of having multiple sclerosis. You know, another side is, are you open with a diagnosis with people, or do you keep it a secret and not make it a major part of your identity? What are you doing at work to try to stay productive, or are you on disability? Is that the best option for you, for example? Or how is it affecting your personal relationships? So it's a little bit hard to talk to people about everything, but, you know, I do try to give people some words of encouragement the best that I can, and everyone's situation is a little bit different. But I do think that's a very important part of it. And that was kind of the point that I was trying to make with the book, that the correlation between disability or severity of MS is not necessarily that highly correlated with overall happiness in life. That's just one aspect of life. It may make things more difficult, but it's amazing. People are incredibly resilient and they find a way to have a happy life. And to give the example of Sandra, For her to get up and go to a city council meeting is very difficult. She has a lot of physical disability. She has a lot of fatigue. It's hard for her to get through a whole day. She wants to take a nap in the middle of the day. So it's a big deal for her even to do that. But because it's meaningful to her, because she cares about her community, because it's very important, even those painful tasks become somewhat of a pleasure because they're part of the pursuit of success. I'm sure there are aspects of What everyone does that are not, you know, maybe the technical aspects of producing a podcast, for instance. But you get excited doing it because you know what the end result is gonna be and you care about the product, right? Or for me, it may be, you know, writing the book. A lot of technical aspects of the editing and stuff are difficult, but you get excited about it because you wanna see the finished project and you love to see how it rests. So that's what it's all about.

Yeah. And our mutual friend, he's one of the most positive people you'll ever meet. He's got nothing but energy and enthusiasm for the work he does. And his mindset, I think he's going to be delivering a TED Talk pretty soon. And part of what I know is on his heart when he delivers that talk is this message about your mindset, is this message about just how you approach things. But so you didn't really answer my question. Oh,

sorry. No, no, no.

It's okay. I'm being cute with you, but it's like a counselor. You didn't answer my question, which was, is there a— not so much is there a correlation, because I don't think anybody disputes there's a correlation now between your mindset And what's showing up physically for you. But there are still some people that just, like you say, they go to a doctor and they go, if there's something wrong with me, I want you to tell me what I can take or what I can do, what procedure, what medication, et cetera. And if you say to them, well, you may not want to hear this, but the best work you could probably do for your condition, whatever that thing is, is to examine how it is that you— what's your process for thinking through things? What's going on inside your head during the day? How much How often are you spending time in judgment of yourself or others? How much time are you not in peace? How much time are you angry? Where are you still rehearsing the grievances of the past or feeling guilty or feeling resentment or any of those kind of things? I mean, I don't suspect that that's something that's really addressed in medical school that much. I know there were lots, too many things to count that weren't addressed in law school that didn't prepare me to do Is what I ultimately learned how to do as a lawyer, I learned on the job in managing so many aspects of the client relationship. But so I'm asking you the question, what do you think is really true about the connection between the mind and what people are presenting in their bodies?

You know, there is definitely some evidence that chronic stress is related to chronic diseases, and there's a plausible physical basis of this. When you have chronic stress, you have chronically high levels of adrenaline. This has various effects on the body, on your fat metabolism, a function of the immune system, and so forth. And so I think very directly, it is a factor. Now, it's a little bit unclear from the science how much chronic stress is contributing to multiple sclerosis versus other genetic or environmental factors. But even aside from that, I think that you really have to be a strong person to do all the things that you need to do to take care of yourself. To eat a healthy diet, to exercise regularly, even to comply to a medication regimen, to show up to all of your appointments and get your MRI scans and do everything that you need to do. I mean, life is complex enough. To have a chronic disease makes it even more complex, and you really have to be mentally strong to deal with all of that. And you're right, in medicine, that we don't dedicate a lot of resources to that. But, you know, we have other people to help us. We have counselors. We can make referrals. give us a little bit of extra time and attention to those areas.

Is meditation and mindfulness— you cover that in the book as well, right? You talk about mindfulness.

I do. You know, I manage stress and to ground yourself, but I think that's very valuable for a lot of people.

Yeah. The visualization component of the healing process or the process of turning around some physical challenge that people are having medically, do you believe that visualization is a helpful tool?

I think it's a helpful tool in that it's relaxing and it will give you that optimistic attitude. And that can only be good for you.

Yeah. Good. All right. There's a number of people out there that talk about being able to turn around some pretty serious physical injuries through their visualization process. And I don't know if it's something that you've had any experience with or seen good results from, but is it more than just something that can't hurt? In your opinion?

Well, I mean, I don't think it's going to cure everything, but I don't think it can hurt. And if it gives you a positive mindset and makes you more vigilant about other things that you can do, then I think it's a good thing. I wouldn't say that I've seen anything extraordinary from people who do this, but it's not necessarily a very common thing that people do on a regular basis.

That's true. Well, you know, when it comes to resilience, I think it's important for me to have rituals that help me to Take better care of myself, be kind to myself, all the things that I know will work short and long-term for me. What's a ritual or some of the rituals that you are engaged in for yourself? And how do you see that contributing to your ability to just do more of what you want? Because as you said, you've got a full medical practice, but you also have this passion for writing books and reaching people in a different way.

Well, one thing that I do at the end of every day after my kids are asleep, I try to take a few minutes instead of moving on to the second phase phase of my day, doing whatever chores I need to do, I try to take at least 5 minutes to take a break and sort of separate the 2 sections of the day and to relax and sometimes do mindfulness meditation also. And the other thing that I do is once a day, I take a look at my electronic calendar and I think not just about what I want to do today, but also what are my long-term goals? What am I trying to do this month sort of overall? And what is going to sustain me through the month? Like maybe this month that I can get a little bit more exercise or spend a little bit more time with my wife or kids or do meditation more regularly, just as an example. And I try to do that on a routine basis so I don't forget it.

Do you calendar pretty much all those things? Is that— you want to put your meditation time on a calendar?

I don't put the meditation time on a calendar. That I try to do at a set time, like after the kids go

to sleep. Yeah. I find that everything that I can put on a calendar these days, I have time for. It's probably more of a time management tool or priority management tool than anything else, but it really helps me at a point where I used to calendar almost nothing. I felt like a calendar was— I didn't want to live by a calendar. It was restrictive, would restrict my freedom somehow or my creativity. But these days, it really is helpful. I find that the things that we want to ritualize so that we can eventually habitualize those things that are good for us, When they're on the calendar, I do them. When they're not on the calendar, I might do them, but I also might forget about them because there's just so many other competing things going on in our world. So I think the waking, the time for waking is a really important time in our lives every day if we're lucky, because it's a new beginning. It's— we're planting a seed that, you know, with those first early things that we do first thing in the morning. What's a ritual that you do upon waking? Or do you have one that you do consistently?

Unfortunately, I have to say that my mornings are quite a commotion on the weekdays. I generally eat and shave in the car on the way to work, sadly. But on the weekends, I take a little bit of time if I'm not working. I take a little time. I make some breakfast. I make some coffee. I spend a little time with my kids. Often, my wife is sleeping in. So, I do get some quality time there.

Well, you're a young guy and people who may be watching this on YouTube will see that you've done a lot in your life and you still have that very youthful appearance. So I know I took myself for granted for a long time. I'm not making this assessment of you, but I just say early morning, eating in the car, shaving. I never shaved in the car, but eating in the car, I've done many times in the morning. We absolutely can sort of put ourselves I don't want to say last, but we'll put other things, make other things a priority. So, for somebody like you, if you're going to give the advice to you or some version of you that says, hey, listen, 5 days out of the week that you're heading to the office and you're eating in the car, you're shaving in the car, you're just sort of taking on so many things. What small change could you make to that, to your own schedule if you were not you, but you were giving that advice to someone else? What would you say to them that they could do to create a new ritual so that maybe they had a little more time for themselves, a little more peace and quiet, or just a better diet even to begin the day? 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 changeproof.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 Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today.

Well, you know, sometimes you have to program in creative solutions. To give an example of myself, one thing that I wanted to do for a long time was to actually get a treadmill desk at work. Work. And I'd used a standing desk for years, and there are all kinds of benefits to standing up. And but getting that low-level exercise throughout the day, I think, is very beneficial. And that's sort of a creative solution without taking in any extra time just to get a little bit more exercise. Some other things that I do is I try to get to work a little bit earlier than is necessary and just take a little bit of time to sort of slow down and plan out my day and not be in such a rush at the very start of my day.

Good. So for you, part of the creative solution there, the creative opportunity, is to be in the office a little early so then, then you can sort of maybe ground and slow down before you have to speed up. Is that right?

Yes. Generally, I'm not in a rush to sort of see my first patient because I'm there long before and I have plenty of time to review my calendar, review the charts, and sort of feel like I'm ready to face the day once the first patient is there.

Yeah. Good, good. I know that if I were giving advice to someone like you, I'd probably say Is there a way to go to sleep a half hour earlier? I mean, I know this is always a challenge for most of us, especially when the kids go to bed, you read them a story, and now it's after bedtime and it's first time of the day where it might be like you time or you and your wife to actually look at each other, have an adult conversation, and now you're first going to unwind only to find that it's like 45 minutes later, we ought to be in bed, getting ready to go to sleep. But if it's possible to Go to bed a half hour earlier so you can wake up a half hour earlier so that potentially that breakfast can be had at your table before you get in the car. Those things can happen earlier. I'm always curious about the little changes. And even as you were making reference to my story from the book or from the TED Talk, that's really our concept of what pivoting looks like. That pivoting is about making small changes because we're convinced that we have to do something drastic like quit our job or move someplace or any of the other sort of big investment-type changes, it just brings up a lot of fear. Anytime you kind of feel like you're pushing all your chips into the table, you talk about that, the triggering of our medulla to feel like our lives are at risk, that'll stop us. That'll stop us so often. So the antidote to that, if you will, I find is just to chunk it down into some tiny— what's the tiniest little step? What's the tiniest little domino that might start things on a different So waking is a big deal, what you do when you wake. And my ritual has been the same now for more than 10 years. And it's sometimes I feel like it can seem trite even because it's so simple, it's so basic. And yet I've just found that it not only has paid great dividends for me personally, but just a lot of people who still write to us and still on Facebook or in other communities let us know that it works, is sort of the first words you say. What's the first words that come out of your mouth? And for some of us, it's like, I'm late, or they pick up their phone right away and the first message that they see is the thing that triggers their mind going in a certain direction. I keep my phone far away. I don't even bring it upstairs anymore. Keep it downstairs plugged in. I turned it to grayscale just recently. It was another little small change I made. I got rid of the color and I can always bring it back and it takes some getting used to. But it's made my phone much less attractive, a lot less attractive in grayscale mode. And I don't turn that phone on usually until after I've eaten something. I've had something to drink and that's concoction or whatever or a green drink. And then I will look at my phone after I've put something in my body. And the words that come out of my mouth, I feel like they're the first seeds of the day. And those words are, I love my life. 4 simple but yet really Powerful words. So I get to ask you this, Brennan, do you love your life?

I do. I love my life. There's some difficult parts, but I really love my life. You reminded me of something. When I was a medical student, I was doing my surgery rotation and it was a brutal rotation. I mean, we were up at 4:30 AM and worked long hours and frequent call. And one of the guys who was rotating with us, whenever we were going to go for lunch, he would say, hey guys, let's go eat some delicious food. And I just remember Food just tasted better after he said that somehow. So just having that attitude, I do think makes a big difference. And I'll definitely work on getting to sleep earlier. That's definitely good advice.

That's so great. Well, you let me know how it's working for you.

I will for sure.

Awesome. So I have enjoyed this conversation a lot and you can find more about what Dr. Beaver is doing. And Brandon, as I called him today, is just such a good guy. And I want to put out his website. It'll be in our show notes, of course. But calorie-dense.com, is that correct?

Yeah, I don't actively manage that website. That's a sort of website on nutrition. But if you want to check me out, you can follow me on Twitter @Brandon_Bieber or you can search my name on YouTube. I make videos about multiple sclerosis. May not be too interesting to a lot of your videos. They're a little more technical. But if you're interested, check it out. And you can certainly check out my book, Resilience in the Face of Multiple Sclerosis, on Amazon and other booksellers.

Thank you for filling in that blank for me and for our community. We love to get your comments. I'd love to find out if you've got questions that you would have asked if you were in my shoes. I'm just coming to that now that there's so many places we could have gone with this interview. And so anything that you would have asked Dr. Bieber, please feel free at adamarkel.com/podcast. Leave a comment. Let us know what you thought about the conversation. If there were questions you would have wanted to ask him. Who knows? Maybe we can collect those questions and have a part 2. You never know. That would be fun. There's so many things yet to discuss, and I've really enjoyed the time together, Brandon. So thank you so much.

Thank you for having me on, Adam.

Beautiful. And for everybody else, I'll say ciao for now. Remember, tomorrow do the same thing, man. Just wake up, wake up, and think about the first thing that you want to put into the soil of your mind. What thought and what words do you want to express out into the universe? And I will remember now this The story of you in medical school and that friend of yours saying, hey, let's go get some delicious food. Yeah. We're getting on dinnertime here. So I'm going to go get some delicious food right now. Ciao.

Sounds good.

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/podcasts. 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.