Dr. Gregory Kelly on Food, Medicine and Resilience

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

Yeah, it's great.

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

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

Wow. You know, it's funny, interestingly enough, we have a friend that is staying with us. Actually, she's a friend and a business partner of ours and she's from Sudbury. But I know it's not long ago that she and a girlfriend of hers had a house in Scituate that they bought as an investment property and renovated and I think eventually sold. But yeah, we're big New England people ourselves. Don't we live same as you on the west coast in Southern California now, but every summer still to this day, go back to the Vineyard and spend time there. And my dad lives in Western Massachusetts, actually, Randy. My wife and I, we met, gosh, it'll be, I don't know, 34 years ago at this point, something like that, in College at UMass Amherst. So a lot of. Lot of New England connection, lot of. Lot of our lives spent in those. In those parts.

And yeah, I would have. I was. I went to. My undergraduate was at Wooster Polytech and. Yeah, and I graduated in 84. But most of the Kelly clan, all my siblings, went to UMass Amherst. So I made lots of trips out there over the years.

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

They sure did, yeah. Yeah.

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

Yeah, great college town.

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

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

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

Oh, no. Really hard to go back to New England.

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

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

So probably not such a great fit at home either.

Right? Why? Like, my poor mom, when I would come back to visit, she would always be at that time, like the default was eggplant parmesan. Right.

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

Right. Yeah, yeah.

It's so interesting. And the degree to which the medical profession itself is behind, is so behind the times when it comes to nutrition as, as a, you know, I forget who it was that's credited with saying food is medicine. And it goes back a ways, but I remember hearing it for the first time out of my dad's mouth, who was repeating something he heard when he was studying with somebody called, well, a gentleman by the name of Michio Cushy, who has something, an institute he created called the Cushy Institute in Western Massachusetts. And it's macrobiotic diet. And my dad got involved in that pretty, pretty heavily for a bunch of years and was totally macrobiotic diet for a while. He's tall, guys, more than 6162 and always was over 200 pounds. And now he was like 175. I mean his lean, you know, lean body mass and very little body fat and all that kind of thing. But he was really healthy and into his 60s, 70s, and he's now, I think 82 and not entirely on a macrobiotic diet any longer. I mean, he lost a lot of mass from that diet, but it was great. And I just remember growing up hearing about those things. And I take it that this was not something you necessarily heard a lot about when you were growing up, right?

No, I would say my dad was an engineer. He worked at a shipyard and then eventually a big engineering company. And we were what you would think of as kind of your standard 1970s Irish Catholic Boston family. So, yeah, I don't think, I guess I think of the term mental models, like oftentimes how we think about things like the framework that we have is super important. And if you'd asked me when I was in my early time in the Navy, what did medicine do? I would say, oh, like, you know, if you're sick, the pill that you take goes in and fixes something. So I had a super naive mental model about it. And I think when I read, like my first experience really of things was when I had the backache and realized, wow, they, you know, my naive idea of what was going on was completely wrong. And so I think medicine's come a long way since then, but I think there's still a lot of people out there that would have a mental model similar to what I had back then. This idea that somehow, don't worry about it, someone will give you something, I'll fix you.

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

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

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

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

Right. So cause and effect wise, if you're eating later at night or you're finding yourself to be sort of the night owl person, and that might mean you're eating later at night, you're staying up later, you're working on things, you're getting active and productive later in the evening. And then of course, you're getting less sleep because it might not mean that you. Like in college, you know, when you stayed up late and ate pizza at 1am as we used to do, you know, we could skip class if we wanted to.

It wasn't.

Nobody was going to die. You weren't going to get fired from college if you skipped your 10am class. And so you could sleep till 11 or noon or whatever it was. You can't really do that anymore. Most of us can anyway. So what I guess I'm hearing you say is that if you were to get out in sunshine earlier in the morning, day, getting some of that vitamin D and being sun and eating earlier in the day, even if you tell yourself, I'm not a morning eater, I don't like to eat right away or whatever the case is, that the impact of that is that you might have less of a craving to eat later in the evening.

Yeah, I've seen that play out over and over. And also oftentimes having a. So like tryptophan is an amino acid and it's an amino acid that in our diet, even a good diet doesn't have a huge amount of tryptophan. So a small amount supplemented can really move the needle in terms of augmenting your body stores. Having more tryptophan at breakfast with just a little bit of sunlight in studies has helped sleep at night.

Interesting.

So a lot of times what we do early in the day just has a big ripple effect and there's really two timekeeping hormones, or what I think of as the main timekeeping. At the beginning of the day, we have a big spike in our stress hormone cortisol, usually the spikes between 7 to 9 in the morning. And we have our darkness hormone melatonin, that spikes at night, usually just prior it's called dim light onset, but it would be a little bit before we start going to bed that starts to shoot way up. So those two timekeeping points end up being just really important in terms of ripple effect through the whole day.

Cortisol. So I've heard it, I've heard that word before. It's usually been associated with sort of the fight flight response and, and it's sort of stress induced. And I've heard it's really not a good thing, it's not a healthy thing. So. But you're saying that we naturally produce a certain amount of cortisol between 7:00am and 9:00am?

Yeah, we produce most of what our body makes in that window.

And ideally naturally or as a result of outside force.

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

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

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

But it's like the water on the flames. Yeah, that's what your body's producing something that, so it's not like producing adrenaline, it's just doing something to sort of ameliorate the.

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

Got it. So, so that's just your, your, your, the conditions are such that you, if you use the analogy, you can surf a wave when you, you know, if you got the waves but you got no board. Yeah, you're, you're, you're not going to mainly make use of it. You body surf, I guess. But so, so doing front loading, more of the stressful activity in life in your business or in some other area that's, you know, sort of stuff you can anticipate to earlier in the day makes sense.

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

Right.

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

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

No. So. Well, tryptophan is an interesting molecule because it can be used in a couple different ways. So one of them, and the one that gets the most attention is what would serotonin would be something your audience would know that it's basically a mood neurotransmitter, something that your brain makes. And from serotonin it can go on to make melatonin. So that's the link to sleep for tryptophan. But most tryptophan actually goes in a different path and ends up some of it makes a molecule called nad, which is like a huge interest in anti aging at this point. So tryptophan especially early in the day. Neurohacker Collective is a complex system science company. And so one of the things that you would find biochemically is depending on what time of day it is, your body will divert tryptophan to different areas, whether you're sleep deprived, not sleep deprived. So augmenting at breakfast, most of it tends to go towards the direction of nad. The same if you took some tryptophan right before exercise, it would tend to go that.

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

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

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

I think that's a possibility. I tend to be, in mindset, someone that likes to do as much as I can through a good diet. But I don't think there's a way to optimize brain activity, brain performance, as an example, through diet alone. As an example, there's a nutrient called choline. The eggs are the best food source of it. And the Institute of Medicine, I've seen their statements that essentially would say they think about 75 to 80% of adults in the US don't get enough choline to meet their recommended intakes. And part of that is because relatively few people eat eggs consistently, certainly compared to the past. So we could get more choline by eating more eggs, but if we're not doing that, then the only way to really augment that pool would be to take a good dietary supplement source of choline. And we would find that with a lot of different things. Like, we're huge fans at Neurohacker of polyphenols, which are plant compounds. So polyphenols would be what gives blueberries and red wine that pigmented color. You'd find more of them in coffee, dark chocolate. They're really a molecule of color in the plant kingdom. And what we find with a lot of polyphenols, like, say, the grape they use to make wine, it will make more of a polyphenol called resveratrol if the conditions are dry, if it's attacked by pests, all these things that are stresses on the plant, Right? And so the more stressed a food is in its environment, the more it makes of these polyphenol compounds that act as its own defenses. And when we eat those, that actually gives us resilience. But since a lot of our plants don't have to really, they don't have to ever get toughened up because of the environments they're grown in. Our diet's very low in polyphenols, at least, experts think, compared to what our ancient ancestors would be. We've also hybridized a lot of plants to get rid of polyphenols, because many of them don't taste as good. They're not. They tend to be a little bitter. So even if we're just eating a pristine diet, there's going to be things we're probably not getting enough of to optimize our performance. Right.

Something that's really hearty, sometimes it's really bitter.

Right. Just toughened up my life.

It's been toughened up my life.

Yeah.

So in some sense, that whole concept of food is medicine. Yeah, food, it's, it's, as you say, it's contextual because food 100 years ago is very different than food today. And food a thousand years ago, again, very different than food, processed food or foods. I mean, whether it's, you know, genetically modified foods or other, or even. Even foods that just through soil depletion or what have you, just aren't. Aren't as rich, aren't as hardy, aren't as tough on some level as they were 50, 100, 200 years ago, that kind of thing. So that has an impact on this conversation from a context standpoint as well.

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

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

So tryptophan is going to be in most protein. Foods will have some tryptophan. And, you know, since it's a small pool, like a protein shake at breakfast is going to give you enough tryptophan to move the needle there, like I said, because it's such as, like a modest quantity in a good diet, you don't need to do more than a couple hundred milligrams to really make an impact. So, I mean, protein shake, an egg, something with protein at breakfast.

Sure.

The solution.

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

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

Exactly. So what are. Let's identify some of those. And I'm just. This is more my sort of interest, curiosity, what have you, to track and see how, you know, how we line up. I was just. I just had a podcast earlier in the day with a gentleman that has Ms. He was diagnosed with ms, and he's been doing phenomenally well from the five years ago when that diagnosis was made. And then we had a woman that's part of one of our speaker training programs, and she was diagnosed with Ms. Almost 20 years ago. They told her, you know, within 10 years she'd be in a wheelchair and all that. And so part of her talk which is going to be a TEDx talk pretty soon, is that she's not, she's in heels, not on, you know, in wheels or on wheels. And so in both of these cases, they didn't listen to the conventional sort of thoughts of medical professionals that said, look, this is the trajectory of Ms. You're here now and 10 years, it's just sort of one downward slope. And, you know, you'll, that's just what happens. But they didn't take that at all. They didn't take it to heart. They didn't buy into it mentally, so that their mindset wasn't impacted by it, although they were depressed to hear it or saddened to hear it, et cetera, and shock to hear it. But the actions they took and who they showed up to be flew in the face of what the prognosis was. They got diagnosed, which in the diagnosis was accurate. They both have ms, but the prognosis, completely inaccurate. So, yeah, if you could speak to like you say, the behaviors or other things that create resilience in your experience, that would be. Be great.

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

Resolve the unresolved. So it's interesting, we were just, we were in Costa Rica at a retreat center where we worked with some shaman, some different processes and ceremonies, which was truly remarkable. I'm actually going to be podcasting about that pretty soon because I got so many break. Just things inside of me that, that shifted and I got incredible new awareness. But at a certain point, the shaman was working with my wife and had a very interesting sort of thought about something he was talking about, about stress and about worry. And his. His way of looking at worry was, you know, it's sort of a worthless thing, worry when you can do something. So turning worry into taking. Instead of worrying about something, just take care of it. Let's say you've got a toothache and, you know, worried about your tooth and, well, what will it mean? Do I have a cavity? Am I going to need a root canal? What's it going to cost? I don't have insurance. You know, the whole thing could be thousands. You know, you're worrying about it. You could worry about it for hours, days, weeks, even, et cetera, while you're figuring out what to do, as opposed to going to the dentist, sitting in the chair and being told, you know, what's the story with your tooth and taking care of it? Simple. Simple as that, as you say. I think it's that idea of resolving the resolve. The resolve.

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

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so that's. Let's call that one. One characteristic, one trait of somebody who is resilient. They resolve the unresolved.

Yep.

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

So I think for me, resilience also goes back to those six basic things that are regulated in the hypothalamus. I'm going to be way more resilient if I get enough sleep. I'm going to be way more resilient if I'm eating a healthy diet. There's this idea in stress research called non specific adaptation. So it would be another Hans Selye idea. So if you think of sports, would be a good analogy. If you really wanted to perform great at golf, you got to spend a lot of time golfing, so that's building up skills in a really specific manner. Now that's not going to create a lot of fitness to help you go ride a bike or maybe go lift weights. But if you do some aspect of say regular walking, regular training with weights, not crazy amounts, that's going to give you a much more non specific exercise capacity. You'll be able to go in a lot of directions with that foundation you built. So that idea of non specific versus specific, so resilience has a lot to do with how much nonspecific adaptational powers we built into our body. So the. Right, because that to me is the key thing that makes the back stronger. So like if you take exercise, too much exercise, you can overtrain, get injured, it becomes a big stress. Right. There's no one that would tell you that running a marathon is not stressful, but walking every day, doing yoga, things like that are the opposite. They actually prepare you to handle other stresses better. So when you think in terms of the stress response, there's certain amounts of, I would say different things that maybe on their own would be a stress, but they act to toughen you up for other stresses.

Yes.

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

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

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

We say it, so don't say it.

Tend to be one. Like all of those. Right. So we want to work in a well rounded way to cover all those bases.

So to repeat, the three things we.

Want to work on frequent movement. Frequent movement, which can be lifestyle movement. Right. Walking more, taking stairs. We want to do some kind of thing to maintain muscle size and strength, especially like the ability to move something quickly. So that would be weight training, like fast twitch muscles. Yep. And then we want to work on balance because a lot of what you would see in retiree population is they fall because they lose their balance. Right. And so that's called proprioception. So that can be like walking on sand at the beach. Right. Because that's, that's going to work that all those proprioceptors in our feet that are going to work all the way up through our nerves to our brain, working balance. So we don't actually have a beach walk. Good beach walk. We don't have to do yoga though. Yoga and tai chi are great. But, you know, so those to me are the three pillars of healthy exercise. And I would want them all covered.

Beautiful. You mentioned earlier, again, just to close the loop on this, the hypothalamus, you mentioned two of the six. The six areas there and I heard sleep and diet. I don't turn this into a quiz, but do you have by recollection the other four?

So let's see if I get them right. So sleep, Sleep drives there.

Yep.

Sex drive.

Okay.

Thirst.

Mm.

Body temperature regulation. So those are the core six and then the body clock. The central, basically your light sensitive body clock is also located there. So I usually throw that in as well.

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

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

Yeah. You know, I'm so glad you brought this up because I just realized that that was a bit of a blind spot for me. And when we think about resilience, it's more holistic, more of a mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual. Spiritual, I suppose on in a lot of ways. And yet physical and physical resilience is the sort of, the first thing I think most people think of when they hear that word anyway. It's sort of that idea that resilience is endurance, that this is, you know, our ability to just keep going, bounce back and you know, no matter what, how many times we get knocked over, just keep getting up like rocky, you know, like rocky, except people are pretty, you know, in the corporate space and in other areas, people are pretty banged up, pretty exhausted and so Our research is showing that resilience isn't about endurance as much as it is about recovery.

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

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

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

And that is in essence, increasing bandwidth. Is that to keep that analogy?

Yeah, I would feel like there's some aspect of that going on. And so, and I like for me, I. Before quality, I would have said I got it covered. I eat well, I exercise, but my individual performance was vastly improved within a few weeks of starting that. And a couple things for me that I noticed that were non obvious before was that, you know, I was procrastinating a fair amount early in the day before getting into things. My patience and tolerance for other people at the end of the day, not so good. So both of those to me, dramatically improved within a few weeks of starting qualia. And what we've found, different people is different things. I have a lifelong friend that I always think of myself as having above average memory. He'd tell you his memory is horrible. And so about a month after starting it, he texted me like, can't believe it. Remember names, dates, appointments for the first time in decades. So, you know, there's a saying in the nootropic world, your mileage may vary the same thing may not work the same way for you as for me, but what we found with the right nootropics or the right supplements for your brain, a lot of people will notice big improvements in performance.

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

So I think so. I know when we designed qualia, we designed it to do a bunch of things. So if you think in the simple terms coffee, caffeine would be the most like nootropics is a term for basically things that improve brain performance. So coffee is definitely one. But what that works is really narrow. It's called arousal. Right. It helps you stay alert. But we also want to support things that do much more long term memory consolidation, building plasticity, repairing the brain. So when we designed quality, we designed it not to trade off things to go more arousal. Arousal, but to make sure we got enough of that with the long term things for recovery and repair. Yeah, because I think like I said earlier, that's the piece that's often under underappreciated. So we didn't want that to be neglected in our product.

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

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

To a little spread out, drink water like meals.

Yeah. And so, and then I go to the gym. So most I would say at least four days during the work week I'll go immediately to the gym. Typically one of the weekend days after the gym I stop and I'm lucky, I live in San Diego. So year round I stop at a coffee shop and get to sit outside having my coffee. So those would be kind of the, you know, whatever I'm doing to kind of improve my workout. Like a pre workout thing which for me is qualia, getting the workout in, getting some morning sunlight and having a good cup of coffee would be my. And then after that I'll usually turn to my computer and start to do what I think of as pre work. So the things that would be more in the learning category I like to do first thing in the morning and then, and then I think it's super important to take breaks to consolidate things. So after that usually have a good breakfast and then we'll head to work. So another thing that I'm more recently working on is as a ritual and it would tie in with your idea of gratitude from the beginning. I saw a study recently, and I mean very recently within the last month and they studied three groups. They basically had four groups of college students. One group, they said okay, walk around for the next 10 minutes. Anyone you see, imagine wishing them loving kindness. Like you know, you're just wishing for the best for them. That's the only thing we want you to do, right? The group, they said okay, what we want you to do is imagine like how you're socially connected to them. So imagine, oh, this person may eventually be in a class I take or may, da da da. Like just imagine how there would be some link between the two of you. The third group, they said, okay, we want you to walk around and imagine how you're better than these other people, like maybe smarter, better dressed and then the fourth group we said. They said, you know, just walk around kind of as normal. And what they found is the people that did the loving kindness approach actually felt much better. Had a lot more empathy for the, you know, the people they saw and for other people through the day. So I was in the post office just the other day. Pretty big line, of course, Right? Like, that's what.

It's a post office.

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

Yeah, you know, rituals are the. The term itself for some people feels like it's. There's some religious connotation to it. We use it as just as a conscious. A conscious habit. It's a consciously created habit, like the conscious pivot. Just the idea that we're bringing some level of awareness to what we do as opposed to, I brush my teeth with this hand because this is the way I've been doing it since I'm 8 years old kind of thing. And yeah, when you adopt a new habit or a new ritual, you kind of suck at it at the beginning, or at least it's uncomfortable. Right. Because it's just new. But I said it's a perfect segue into how we will close out this conversation, which I've so enjoyed. So, Dr. Kelly, what a blast this has been. And I think the ritual that has been most consistently a part of my life for the last 10 years, since the days when I was a lawyer and woke up in the morning and would feel this sense of dread at the start of the day. I would put my feet on the floor, more typically in the morning before my wife was up or the kids were up. And I'd feel this sort of angst and even anxiety ahead of the day because I knew exactly what my day was going to be like. It was going to start in traffic, you know, getting into the Manhattan, going from New Jersey to New York City and probably getting flipped off or flipping somebody off before, you know, within the hour and in full on just battle, really. I was kind of a paid, paid warrior of sorts as a litigate litigation attorney. And I was feeling that at the very beginning of the day. And now, for the better part of 10 years, I wake up in the morning and I feel very differently. So I'm going to share that ritual. And for some, some of you that are hearing this for the first time, know that if it's something you, you adopt and you try on for size for yourself, you may suck at it. At the beginning, I know I did. It was uncomfortable. It was, didn't feel true or authentic for me, but I stuck with it. Like a lot of these kinds of things that we're talking about, whether it's to be more conscious about your diet, whether it's to treat your water intake like a meal, like meals, I think that's really a brilliant way to freight to language, that particular thing. Or it's to take breaks, intermittent breaks, just like intermittent fasting is something that's gotten some, has been well received, intermittent break taking during the day. So you create periods of recovery, you've got lots of mental exertion happening, and give yourself a commensurate period of time to relax and relax your mind, et cetera. So this is one of those new skills, perhaps, and that is first of all, and this is the first part. And I'll ask you, Greg, if you're willing to do this, are you willing to, are you willing to wake up tomorrow?

Absolutely.

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

I love my life.

Yeah, brother. So everybody have a beautiful, blessed rest of your day, your evening, wherever it is. We're catching you. This has just been a great conversation. Love, love for you to check out more of what Dr. Greg Kelly has been up to, what Neurohacker Collective is up to, and that's all in the show Notes. Please feel free to leave us a review as well on itunes or go to AdamMarkel.com podcast and leave a comment there. I will answer that comment. Happy to get your feedback. It's, it's like oxygen for us. Thank you so much. And of course you can join our our Facebook community @StartMyPivot community on Facebook and it's been a blessing. So have a beautiful rest of rest of the day, the evening, etc. And ciao for now everybody. Bye bye. Thanks for listening everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to to navigate your own Pivot. Help us inspire 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.