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

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. 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 Markell, and I'm feeling very, very blessed in this moment. It's the middle of the afternoon and I feel really happy, glad, thankful that my energy has really been very steady today. I don't know if any of you can relate to this, but, you know, typically I'll go through the usual cycles of having kind of good energy, high energy, and then other places where my energy troughs a bit and I'll think, well, maybe I need a cup of coffee or maybe I need, you know, need something to eat or what have you. But I would say I got a good night's sleep last night and it's been just consistently the case today that even though I've had a lot on my plate and it's sort of not quite the end of the day, but near end of day, to be wanting to be at my very best, both from what comes through me in the microphone and all that kind of thing, but also as an interview of someone whose message and whose work I really want to feature. We wanted to have this gentleman show up and speak and be interviewed on our podcast, and I want to be my best for that. So I think we all can identify with wanting to be our best and then finding that throughout the day, maybe we're not quite there. Like if we were Olympic athletes and we're about to run the 100 meter or do something like that, we'd be much more focused on how it would be for us to be at our best and what it would look like beforehand and all that kind of thing. And yet with our daily activities, I know in my own, I'm not always focused on running that Olympic race, let's say, in everything that I do. So I'm just remarking to myself as we begin that I'm really happy that I am where I am today and that I attribute that to a better night's sleep and taking really good care of myself today as well. Green drink and other good things. So with that said, I've Got a gentleman that was introduced to me and to our company through a mutual friend, somebody that I really love and respect. So Dr. Brandon Bieber. He has no relation to Justin Bieber, although we could talk about that. But Dr. Bieber is a board certified neurologist with a subspecialty training in multiple sclerosis. And actually it's through that Ms. Work that we met through a mutual friend and other immunological diseases. I'm going to test myself here right now of the nervous system. He is a partner in the Southern California Permanente Medical Group and practices in Downey, California, which is the Los Angeles area. He's multiple publications on Ms. Epidemiology and has participated in clinical trials for Ms. Therapeutics. He is a very interesting person, interesting history with his own pivot stories which we're going to explore and a little bit of a different kind of a guest for us. So I'm really thrilled about the fact that we can, we can dive into some things and I'm really appreciative of your time today, Dr. Bieber.

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

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

Well, 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 five seconds of me juggling. And I kind of got back into that after many, many years. I have a one year old and a three 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 and being on call. And you know, 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 do dense research and increase our understanding of the disease piece by pit 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, is there for good reason. And it's just a question of, you know, can we see the connection point? 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 fiance and 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 7am, and I mean traffic like full on, bumper to bumper, thousands and thousands of cars on the road at 7am, which was. 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 four hours, two hours each way of traffic. And just how that wore me down, really just wore me down 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 know, you do what you have to do. We're all kind of tenacious and I'm extremely resilient. I believe you. You build resilience, you create resilience before you need it. So 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? You know, whether it's in the folks that you're working with that have some, some neurological challenges. But, you know, 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 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.

So, I mean, how sleep is something, I think, you know, that it. It has kind of a. Depending on who you ask, you get different, 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 three, four hours of sleep. And we hear that kind of thing. If you're side hustling or you're creating a business or doing something, you know 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 100-1020 hours a week. And that's become sort of a standard, almost a 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? What happens if we do without it? What if we're getting five or six hours instead of seven or eight? 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 five or six hours. Most people need closer to seven or eight hours. And there are a small number of unlucky people who really can't function well unless they're sleeping a lot. Nine or ten hours. And sometimes, for unknown reason, we call it primary hypersomnia. But when people do very detailed neuropsychological testing of people, they. 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. You know, obviously I know a lot about sleep deprivation. And I remember, yeah, I remember when I was a resident, you know, we used. 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, you know, I had a list of patients and like a bunch of check boxes and 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. 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, you know, 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 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. 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 completely 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. The nervous system. And you know, 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 long standing 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 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 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 increase neurogenesis are getting good sleep, regular exercise, training the brain, stimulating your cognition, eating a healthy diet. You know, there's some evidence that antioxidants like blueberries, flavonoids and nuts are beneficial for cognitive function, for example.

So brain health is something that, 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, you know, was a little sharper, a little quicker or something like that, you know, 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, you know, whatever the cutting edge looks like. So you mentioned a couple of things 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 they're in their brain is performing optimally, or whether there are some signs that maybe there's even something that they want to get sort of look 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, you know, acute stress is sort of a natural reaction that we're supposed to have. From an evolutionary standpoint, you're facing a Saber tooth 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, you know, that people are. The ability to recover is the key to, in 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.

And there are almost no boundaries between work or business and home. So whereas 20 or 30 years ago, rest was the weekend, right. You know, like you have a weekend and that's your time to rest. That's your R and 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 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 I'm not actively working. I'm relaxing. It's a way that I relax. But that begs the question, is the, you know, consuming content online being on social media platforms? I won't name any, you know, to single them out, but whatever those platforms are, watching the news, whatever, 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. From all the troubles of the day and just appreciate what, 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. That 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 of 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 very. 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 Orozco, 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. Are you still with me, Adam?

Yes.

Sorry about that. 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 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, you know, 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, you know, importance of religion in their life. For example, kind of like what you experience, you know, 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, and I think it's pretty incredible. So in real terms, what this means is that there's something that's happened, but it's. You've. You've gained something, meaning something that you might call negative or something that's. That's, you know, sort of hit you at a left field. It could be the loss of a job. It could be a cancer diagnosis. It could be, you know, any number of things that every, you know, we all. 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 community and she's such a happy person and so productive and so fulfilled in life despite having Ms.

Yeah, the, you know, I want to just try to change the trajectory a little bit, which is that we, 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 or 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, 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, every lawyer I talk to is very unhappy, with few exceptions. So generally speaking, I'm happy with my career. And you know, don't get me wrong, I've definitely had some rough times. Not everything about my career is positive. But, you know, recently I've sort of realized that, you know, 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 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, we often will tell ourselves, I know I've done the same thing, that there's a, you know, there's sort of 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, 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 you know, part of what I think we are, we are all of us looking to do is to return to a place that feels balanced in our lives. And I don't not a big fan of that, the concept of balance. Personally, I think of it more like harmony. And how do we return ourselves to a, 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, that some of those things are being triggered within us and that that disturbs our peace. It disturbs our sense of well being, 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 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 and 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 of time and 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. You know, like for instance, if you had gotten into real love media thinking. I think there's a niche for, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

Yes. So when we think about how it is that we. We create greater resilience. And 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 forget what the third P was, it might have been personal. That there are people who, who look at things that are happening in their lives and they, they make meaning out of it. And some think that what's happening is permanent, like there's a. There's something that, that they, they're experiencing that they can't change, they've 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, this is what happens all the time to me. And, and people that also, and I believe it was personal, where they, they assume that there's something that they've done personally that's invited this thing into their life. And, and in each of those cases, we have this, this choice that we can make in terms of how we, we frame that story and what we take away from it. What you said earlier, I think is very important is that, that we have this opportunity when we're making meaning of things to tell ourselves that this is, that there, there is, There is meaning in it. It's like man's search for meaning. And the, The. The idea that, you know, Viktor Frankl's book, that there's meaning in everything. In fact, he created meaning therapy out of. 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. There would be something good that could come out of it somehow inconceivable as it was, and without. 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 some. Someone else. So that. That idea of how we, how we look at the story, that we're not necessarily seeing things as being permanently wrong or pervasively wrong or, you know, personal, like as though we deserve it or we are being judged or something like that, but rather seeing that anything that's happening is on some level happening to our. To our benefit and potentially to the benefit of many, many other people. It seems to be a concept that's more. More on the. More on the mindset side. But yeah, I, I'd love to get your thoughts on. On how much of the, The Work that you do with. With people who have. 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. What's actually kind of going on inside of their. 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. You know, what sort of diet should I consume, what medication should I take, how often do I need an MRI scan? You know, 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 a 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 true, 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. 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 good, happy life, you know, and, you know, 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. You know, 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, you know what the end result is going to 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 want to 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. 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, is that, you know, he's going to be delivering a TED Talk pretty soon. And part of what I, I know is on his heart when he delivers that talk, is this message about your mindset, his message about just how you approach things. But. So you didn't really answer my question.

Sorry.

It's okay. I'm being cute with you. But, you know, 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, you know, 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, etc. And if you say to them, well, you know, 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, you know, what's. What's your process for thinking through things? What, 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, you know, the grievances of the past, or feeling guilty or feeling resentment or any of those kind of things. I mean, I don't, I don't suspect that that's something that's really a, A, you know, addressed in medical school. That much I know. There was lots, too many things to count that weren't addressed in law school that didn't prepare me to do as. What I, What I ultimately learned how to do as a lawyer, I learned on the job in managing so many aspects of the client relationship. 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, you know, 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, 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 regiment, 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 that. And you're right, you know, 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, you know, give us a little bit of extra time and attention to those areas.

Is meditation, 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. What do you. I mean, the. The visualization component of. Of the healing process, of the process of, you know, turning. Turning around some physical challenge that people are having medical. Medically. Do you. Do you. Do you believe that visualization is a. Is a helpful tool?

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

Yeah. Good. All right. Because if there's There's a. You know, there's a number of people out there that talk about being able to turn around some pretty serious physical injuries through. Through their visual, you know, visualization process. And I don't. I don't know if it's. It's something that you've had any experience with or seeing good results from, but is. 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. I don't think it can hurt. And if it gives you a positive mindset and makes you more vigilant about other things, then you can do, then. 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. That is true. Well, you know, when it comes to resilience, I think it's, it's important for me to have rituals that help me to take better care of myself, be kind to myself. All, 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 out, 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 of my day, you know, doing whatever chores I need to do. I try to take at least five minutes to take a break and sort of separate the two 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? You know, 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 could 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.

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

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

Yeah, yeah. I find that everything, everything that I can put on a calendar these days I have time for. It's, it's one of the, it's probably more of a, 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 didn't, I felt like a calendar was, I didn't want to live by a calendar was restrictive, 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 in the calendar, I might do them, but I also might forget about them because she said 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. We're planting a seed that 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?

You know, 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, you know, I take a little bit of time. If I'm, you know, 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 quality time there.

Yeah, 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, 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, you know, eating in the car, shaving. I never shaved in the car, but eating in the car, I've done it many times in the morning. You know, we absolutely can sort of kind of put ourselves, you know, 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, you know, five days out of the week that you're heading to the office and you're. You're eating in the car, you're shaving in the car, 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. They had a little more time for themselves, a little more peace and quiet, or, you know, just a better, better diet even to begin the day?

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 trip treadmill desk at work. And you know, I had used a standing desk for years. And there are all kinds of benefits to standing up. But, you know, 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 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, 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 when 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, you know, big investment type changes. It just brings up a lot of fear. You know, anytime you kind of feel like you're pushing all your chips into the. Into the table. You talk about that. That. That old. Old, you know, the. The triggering of our. Of our medulla, to feel like, you know, our lives are at risk. That'll stop us. That'll stop us so often. So it's the. The antidote to that, if you will, I find, is just to chunk it down into some tiny, you know, what's the tiniest little step? What's the tiniest little domino that might start things on a different. You know, on a different trajectory? 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. 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, you know, on Facebook or in other communities let us know that it works. Is the sort of the first words you say upon waking. What's the first words that come out of your mouth? And, you know, for some reason, it's like, I'm late. Or they pick up their phone right away, and the first message that they see is the. The thing that triggers their mind going in a certain direction. So 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, you know, a concoction or whatever, or 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. So. And those words are, I love my life. They're forced. Four 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 know, 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 4:30am and worked long hours and frequent call. And one of the guys who was rotating with us, whenever we were gonna go for lunch, he would say, hey, guys, let's go eat some delicious food. You know, let's go eat some delicious food. 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 a 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 Caloriedense.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 randonbieberg, or you can search my name on YouTube. I make videos about multiple sclerosis. May not be too interested to a lot of your videos. They're a little more technical. But, you know, 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.

Beautiful. Thank you for filling in that blank for me and for our community. We love to get your comments and 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@adammarkelle.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 two. 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.

Yeah, 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 in 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 dinner time here, so I'm going to go get some delicious food right now. Ciao ciao.

Sounds good.

Thanks for listening everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@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@pivotfb.com.