How First Responders Recover From Traumatic Events With William Branum

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, way cool.

I'm excited to be here.

I would love to know what's not a part of that bio that people might be thinking to themselves, what does it take to become a Navy SEAL? I mean, if you've ever read a book or listened to another Navy SEAL talk about what that training is like, what it's like to not just apply, but to go through the process and be accepted into that service, It's pretty daunting. So developing yourself to that capacity is, is something really unknown. I'd say it's a, it's great unknown for a lot of people. So, Wilk, what can you tell us just about yourself that you want people to know at the outset that's not a part of the bio I just read?

I spent 26 years in the Navy. 95% of that time was in the SEAL Teams. Had some good times and some bad times in there. I have many failures in my life. And I love having failure because those are my most precious lessons in my entire life. Didn't matter if it was a marriage or if it was doing some sort of underwater navigation while diving. I never learned when I succeeded. I only learned when I failed. Like, oh, don't do it like that. Do it like this. And those are all my greatest lessons. So failure is really my friend, even though I don't like it. I hate failure, but I also love it.

Wow. I mean, we could probably just stop this show right now and just leave with the one, the one great lesson that your failure is your friend, but you know, you're still not happy to see that friend, right? It's like, yeah, I know you're my— I know you're my friend.

I know you're here to help me, but I don't like it.

But I really wish you weren't here right now. It's sort of first chapter of the book. It's a middle chapter. I haven't gotten to the end, so I don't know what the end chapter is, but I imagine That if history is any indication of the future, we've got— our lives are just filled with great ups and downs, moments where we feel we've succeeded, quote unquote, and moments where we have gotten the feedback that something hasn't worked according to plan or is a, quote, you know, a failure. But I've always had a sort of a personal issue with that word. And I guess this is sort of on the vein of motivation maybe. Or inspiration, but how do we reframe that word failure? I mean, the word failure itself, just like you feel, you know, you think about if you're sitting right now listening to this or you're watching it on YouTube and you think, I failed just like this guy. This guy's a 26-year veteran of the Navy SEALs and led other SEALs. You go, and he's talking about how his greatest teacher was failure. Where do we see our own lives and see our failures and give them a meaning that is all about what didn't work and what, what we wish we could have done differently and, and the regrets we've got about those things or the stories that we tell about how it stopped or, or impeded us. And what you're telling us, or at least what I'm getting out of this, is that your ability to move forward, consistently move forward, has been the result of the failures you've had. It's kind of an ironic relationship, right?

Yeah. I mean, really, you know, it comes down to resilience is another word that you can use. And, you know, when I was going through training, I didn't prepare before I went to SEAL training really at all. I was able to pass the entrance physical entrance test, but I didn't really do a lot of— I didn't work out that hard before I went. And it certainly showed when I got there because I experienced a lot of failure. However, I wasn't there to quit. I was there to become a Navy SEAL.

Hmm.

And I watched these amazing athletes, these guys that could run, they could swim, they could do the obstacle course, they could PT, they could work out. And to me, they were like leaders and inspirational. Oftentimes those were the first guys to quit because, you know, when you're going through that selection course, you're going to fail. The job is to fail and to learn and to become better. You don't show up to SEAL training knowing everything. You got to learn. They're going to break you down. There's many of these people were collegiate athletes. They were the best of the best in their circle, in their team. And they got there and, you know, they would run super fast or they would do everything better than everyone else. But you know what? Okay. You all suck. Get lock arms, get in the water, or run over this berm and get wet and come back for the next hour and a half. And to me, I was like, oh, that's just part of training. For them, they're like, I did everything right. I should not be being punished right now. And they couldn't take that. I guess the fact that they weren't number one anymore, they were just a loser like everyone else in the class. They were a failure. And they couldn't take that emotional stress on their psyche, their Like they took it personally instead of like, hey, this is a team effort. We're our job is to just suck it up and move forward. I was talking to a friend of mine, Bedros Koulian, yesterday, and we were talking about attitude and effort. And he runs a program for usually for entrepreneurs. It's very expensive to go to the program called The Project. And you know, it's a 75-hour like little mini hell week. And a friend of mine is one of the instructors there, and. They take all of the control away from you. And this is kind of important in life. There's so much around you that you cannot control. These guys that were super athletes, they couldn't control the fact that they were losing right now, they were failing right now. All you can control is your attitude and your effort. Are you going to have a good attitude and are you going to put forth the effort to do what you need to do to accomplish your goal? And I didn't realize that at the time. I was just there to finish training. And later on, as I matured, you know, I learned that, you know, it's really— it's about attitude and effort. It doesn't matter what is happening, whether you're in combat and things are blowing up around you. You put forth a lot of effort to train, to make the right decisions, to do the right things, to get out of bad situations. And you have to have a good attitude. Some people— I've seen some people, when things start going badly, they just Locked down. And that's the opposite of what you should be doing. You need to like look up and start looking around when things go bad. That's the most important time to put— to have the right attitude and to put forth the maximum amount of effort that you possibly can.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So, go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Will, it reminds me of that old Charles or Chuck Swindoll quote about attitude. I wish I could quote the entire thing. I won't right now. The sort of the penultimate line in that, in his almost like a poem, is that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. The attitude is the only thing. It's a quote about attitude, and it's the only thing. You've got to play that one string over and over and over again. Your attitude, how it is that you, that you respond to things attitudinally. And I remember when I was a kid that my dad would sometimes say to me, you know, change your attitude. And I was like, I don't even know what you're talking about. What do you mean?

Right. Yeah.

Like, if you— to have the self-awareness to go, yeah, my attitude really sucks right now. You're right. I gotta change my attitude right this second. So that word was kind of an enigma to me growing up. And to hear you talk about attitude and effort being these 2 things that were the inflection point, let's say, at the SEAL training between guys that made it and guys that didn't, and that the inflection point really wasn't as much about performance or about raw talent. Mm-hmm. Like, that you're saying these guys with just tremendous talent and ability, yet when faced with failure, you know, the failure they couldn't control, not a failure because they themselves sucked, but when you're literally only as strong as your weakest link. I know we're hitting up a couple of clichés here, right? But that's any team, whether it's a SEAL team or it's a team, you know, in your business or any, any area of your family, you're real legitimately only as strong as the weakest link is. And so if anybody fails, we all fail. And they couldn't handle the failure personally, so they couldn't ultimately be part of the team. I mean, that's pretty remarkable. So is there a way that you were able to reframe that word? I know I'm being a bit, bit semantical now, but for folks that, let's say the word failure itself Is a trigger and even an anchor, like a legit— like keeping people stuck in place. Did you in fact reframe that word and use a different word to describe what you were experiencing?

For me, it was a learning point. I mean, I learned how to be a better runner. I learned how to push my body in ways that were as uncomfortable. I don't have to go quite as hard and I'm still going to pass the run or whatever, pass the swim or not quite keep up on the run, but if I put forth just a little more effort, it's going to hurt a little bit now, but I'm going to be finished more quickly. And so the pain is going to stop. So it just kind of taught me to think about that effort. How much effort am I going to put out? You got to put the effort out. Am I going to put it out right now or am I going to extend out the amount of pain that that effort brings over time? So I learned to run faster. I learned to work just a little bit harder.

Put the effort out in the moment.

In the beginning.

Yeah. This is a really interesting thing, and I'm getting I'm getting chills here just because on a performance, like a part of what we do, what I've been doing for a while. I was a lawyer for 18 years, and I I pivoted out of that profession, and it performed quite well. You know, at least at the level of sort of at a business level, I wasn't performing well on a personal level. It was destroying my life. A great life, a great you know all this. Amazing things to be grateful for, wife, love of my life, college sweetheart, 4 kids, all that, and I'm miserable. And it's funny because I work with— our company will sometimes consult with organizations about resilience, and I'll work with individuals within those organizations, including the founders, CEOs, and stuff. And I find there are other people, too, just like me at that time in my life that have everything truly to be grateful for, but they're somehow still miserable. And I think in, in some regards it tracks back, or I'm, I'm doing my best right now to, to trace this back to what you just described, which is that a lot of people are saving. They're saving themselves, they're saving their energy, they're holding back for something they imagine they'll need that reserve for in the future. And so they're sort of not putting out their best effort in the moment.

Right.

Thinking that somehow they've got to save it for tomorrow. I'm a spiritual guy. I'm not terribly religious, but I think there's great— there's great story, great learning of failure and success in things in biblical texts and other spiritual texts. And so I love that story of the Jews wandering in the desert, and they're given enough food, you know, manna for their day, and they're told, don't save it.

Don't save it.

Don't save it. You don't need to. You're going to have some more. There'll be more tomorrow for sure. And people then, because they couldn't deal with that uncertainty, with the lack of control, perhaps the control over their destiny, they went ahead and saved it anyway. And of course it turned, you know, it was poisonous, it was toxic, and the rest is sort of history that way. And it's interesting when you think about what you just described, that the lack of control, the uncertainty that tends to produce fear in us that we then kind of go into saving mode, saving our energy, etc. And so if you'd have done that, do you think you would have succeeded if you'd just sort of been trying to save yourself in the moment?

No, not at all. No. And it's interesting, I didn't really understand what I was doing back then. And now that I'm older and I have many other lessons in my own life, I'm still trying to build resilience in myself. And so, if I go out for a run or something in the neighborhood that I live in, there's a few hills. And I have learned that if I— many, most people are just going to kind of take their time and kind of ease their way up the hill. I don't do that. A friend of mine, he calls it, I just attack the hill. So, I just attack the hill and I think about him every time. He's a former teammate of mine. And I run up the hill and once I get to the top, Then I think about slowing down, catching my breath, and figuring out what the next plan of action is. If it's whether it's keep going at the same speed or slow down, catch my breath, and then get ready for the next hill. I did that early on.

I didn't really think— well,

we're totally so much stronger. And, you know, this was something even at the end of SEAL training, we're out on San Clemente Island and you have to like earn your food every day. You know, you go and either you have to do a bunch of push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups to eat, or you run up what they called Frog Hill. And it was about a quarter mile, almost straight up. So it starts off pretty flat and then it turns into this very steep hill. And I was a, I would say, mediocre runner, middle of the class, I guess. But going up that hill, it's like this little goat trail that goes up. And if you go slower than the guy in front of you, you're pretty much screwing everyone behind you. So I thought it was my job to get out of everyone's way. So I would just run as hard as I could. And I was in the top 3 or 5 every time we did that hill. And other people would like kind of like mosey on up or whatever, but you have to get there in a certain amount of time or you have to go get in the ocean and then come back and eat, you know, your lunch or dinner soaking wet outside away from the class. So I did, I never wanted to do that. So I—

Does that sound great? Is everybody just so jealous right now? Everybody's going, sign me up, man. I want to do

that.

Yeah, it's— so we're stronger than we think.

Always. And I— that was something I learned early on. You always have a little more in the tank. It doesn't matter what it is you're working on, if it's like a paper, you're writing a book, you're exercising, you're working on a relationship, you always have more in the tank than you think you do.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively. to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Yeah. I want to transition into— and this will be simple because we're talking about it already, but What does it take to create resilience? Did you— over 26 years in that profession, in that line of work, in that service, what did you learn about what produces long-term resilience? 'Cause you obviously saw guys come in, some of them failed, and then were able to succeed because they learned from their failure. I would say that I might reframe the word failure as feedback or as finding out. You don't fail, but you find out. You find out often what's not gonna work, huh?

Right.

What didn't work in that instance, and then you can make some adjustments. So you saw that at the outset, and then through 26 years, you must have seen guys come and go, people come and go, make it, not make it at all levels. Can you draw some conclusions about resilience in the SEALs and what resilience looked like, what produced it, and how ultimately it either contributed to people being able to go the distance, or when it was lacking, they're not being able to?

A lot of it is just mindset. And in the SEAL Teams, you're, I would say, lucky because you have, you're surrounded by similar attitudes, similar mindset. And if you started to sort of dip in your resilience or dip in your performance or dip in any way, you're going to get that immediate feedback. If you don't perform, if you don't show up, if you're feeling sorry for yourself, you will get immediate feedback. It's not always positive feedback, but it's— Mm-hmm. Feedback, therefore it gives you the ability to make corrections that you need to make.

So a team, the reflection of other people around you, that maybe may not feel supportive when people are holding you accountable or giving you really rough feedback, but ultimately you can't really. Wow! The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid, and if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly. Exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new, but the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Sort of hide, I suppose, from the truth of the moment. Is that fair?

Yeah, you're definitely not hiding anything. There's no hiding. There's no real secrets. I mean, you can have secrets, but things will come out and be exposed at some point. And again, if you're not performing to the level that you need to perform, to the level of the team, the team will either bring you up or you will no longer be a part of the team. It won't be an easy path. Nothing is given to you. You have to earn it every day.

I'm thinking to myself that the name of your company, and I don't know if it's true or not, feels like it has something to do with what we just said. Because when you are that exposed, like really exposed to everyone around you for the purposes of you being better, I mean, ultimately that's the only goal. It might not feel like that to some folks, I suppose, when they're being pressed so hard, but it's for you to be better. Because ultimately the team is better as you individually are better. You're naked in that moment. I mean, you're naked that whole entire time. And so you've got a company called Naked Warrior Recovery. And I, so I wanna track both that, the name of the company and the naked, uh, you know, naked part of it, as well as the recovery piece. Because in our study and our research about resilience, a lot of it has to do with that word recovery. And so I wanna see if we can't talk in terms of the expenditure, the spending yourself in the moment part, knowing you've got more in the tank, and yet understanding that recovery is in many ways an unsung hero of resilience that doesn't get spoken about a lot. So let's start with— why don't we start with the name?

Okay, so let me back up just a little bit. So I transitioned out of the SEAL Teams on August 1st, 2018. I started another company, a consulting company, to help organizations navigate the military acquisition system. Basically, it was a kind of science and technology field where I was pretty good at getting money for other companies to develop technologies for the military. I wasn't super happy doing that. People just wanted me to sell their widget that I didn't really believe in. I also lost a family, a team that I had recently had. Once you walk out the door, You know, it's not like the Marine Corps. They're like, once a Marine, always a Marine, and you're expected to uphold all these values, and maybe you have this same support system. It's not really like that in the SEAL Teams. It's because it's not that they don't want to be helpful or they don't want to be friendly or whatever. They're busy doing other stuff. They're preparing for to go into bad situations, and they have to take care of that inner core. You're no longer part of that inner core, so we'll talk to you when we can. And so that created an incredible loss for me. I was actually in denial of getting out of the Navy. I was returning emails the day that I retired on work projects that I was working on, and I was in complete denial. I'm like, okay, I guess IT department, maybe you need my phone back. So, you know, that was very traumatic for me. Like, I lost— like, my entire adult life has been in the SEAL Teams, and now I'm a civilian. I have greatly reduced income now. I no longer have a mission, a purpose in life. I no longer have a family, a team. It was a huge traumatic transition for me. And I also have some other stuff. I will call it mental baggage from toxic relationships or work stuff or whatever, you know, life. Life. Life is fair. Life, life will beat you down. If you don't take charge

or fill your knapsack with rocks and bricks and other shit you carry around all day.

A big bag of stuff. Yeah. So, I was using alcohol for many years to kind of turn off that noise that's in my head. And, at some point, I had heard about CBD before it was cool. There's a million CBD brands out there now, but I had heard about CBD before it was cool and the guy was talking about the medicinal qualities of THC, medical marijuana. I've to this day never tried marijuana, but I'm certain that it's not as bad as the amount of alcohol that I have consumed. But he said, everyone knows about THC, but there's this other molecule called CBD and it has all these medicinal benefits and good for your central nervous system and all these other things. I was like, oh, maybe I should try that one day. And it wasn't for another year after I got out of the Navy because I'm a child of Nancy Reagan's War on Drugs, Just Say No. Yes. I'm still scared of that stuff that I finally tried CBD because a friend of mine gave it to me. He's like, here you go. Because I said I was interested, he had some bottles and he gave me a bottle. I tried it that night. I slept a little bit better. And I like to say water boils at 212 degrees. I was walking around at like 210 degrees. It didn't take long to hit that needle and have a flare up and some sort of trigger, like a small trigger, not even a big trigger. So I started coming down from 210 degrees to 208 degrees, 200 degrees. So very subtle changes, and I didn't really notice it over immediately.

So emotionally, I know people are tracking this, but your emotional stove, so to speak, ran hot as a result of the trauma, the stress, just the stuff in the bag that you're carrying around. Right. And so, you started to explore the CBD and could see that the figurative temperature of that stove was coming down?

Reducing, yeah. And then, something else I noticed was some pain was not as bad as it used to be. Normally, I would do certain movements and it would just be the stabbing pain. And so, every time I do the movement, I'm grimacing, I'm getting ready, I'm like, oh. And then, about 3 weeks after I started taking CBD, it wasn't this sharp pain that was stabbing me anymore, it was just a dull pain. I was like, oh, When did that happen? I must be getting better. And then I ran out and then I thought nothing really of it. And then things started coming back. Things started like triggers, you know, little triggers were like starting to set me off. And so I was like, maybe there was something to that CBD. So I tried another brand and things got a little bit better. So eventually I found a way to start my own CBD company because I believed in the product. I believed in what it did for me. And so I started Naked Warrior Recovery. And the reason for Naked Warrior Recovery— the Naked Warrior is the predecessor to today's Navy SEAL. So back in World War II, if you've seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, you saw the assault force in the beginning of the movie. They went ashore there at Normandy.

Amphibious.

Prior to the assault, right, that amphibious assault— prior to that assault, several days, a week, 2 weeks prior to that, these guys that the Navy got to volunteer would swim into the beach. They would measure the depth of the water with a rock on a piece of string and, you know, look for obstacles underwater. They would do 3,000 to 5,000 yards of beach a night. They would go back to the ship, they would chart everything out, and then go back out the next night. And hours before the assault, before that Saving Private Ryan, taking the beach, these guys would go out, they'd put demo on all the obstacles in the water and as many on the beach as they could. And as the assault force is coming, they're blowing the, you know, they're taking fire from the beach and, you know, the naval ships are firing at the beach to kind of give them some sort of COVID fire. And then they blow the obstacles on the beach and then the assault force comes in. That was awesome. And then in the Pacific, the Marines were doing the same thing. They were doing these amphibious assaults. They would run aground on a barrier reef around the island in those, you know, island campaign. They would run off, you know, wearing 60 to 80 pounds of gear. And they would run off the edge of the reef thinking they were in like 3 feet of water and they would drown. And so the Navy brought these underwater demolition teams, these naked warriors, because they would go into battle with basically naked, with a mask, some fins, shorts, a Ka-Bar knife, and their little lead line and slate. And that is all they wore. And so they would go in and they would clear these obstacles so the Marines could go in and move forward. So, and then in 1967, the underwater demolition team became Navy SEALs, and that's You know, today's Navy SEAL. So it's the predecessor for today's Navy SEAL. The other side of that is I was walking around, and I still do sometimes, walking around with this ego, with this armor, with this like chip on my shoulder, I guess, for the lack of a better term. And everything was an attack on me. Everything was a trigger. Everything was something that was holding me down, keeping me down, or whatever. At some point, CBD I realized allowed me to be a little bit more vulnerable so that I could face those triggers, so I could face those stressors, find a little bit more healing mentally, emotionally, psychologically. And so what I discovered is at some point, you know, in combat, you know, we put on armor to go into harm's way, and then we come back, we take our armor off, and then we go clean up and whatever. But in life, we never take that armor off. We never allow ourselves to recover. We never get naked. We never expose ourselves to healing. And so the naked warrior is really— we're all, we're all warriors in our own life. It doesn't matter if you're a soccer mom, you're a real estate agent, you're a Navy SEAL. It doesn't matter. Anything in between there, there's stress in your life. There is triggers. There's whatever. I had to learn how to expose myself to people who want to love me, who want to give me Not everyone is trying to attack me, so I need to get naked in order to find the healing that I needed, because I needed a lot of healing. And CBD was a modality that helped me get to that point.

Right. So that there's multiple meanings to the way that you're using the word as a part of your brand, as a part of the company. To me, the origin story is so important, so I'm very happy that you shared that. Thank you. And the idea that so many of us are walking around with this armor and unable or unaware of what it takes or what it could look like even for us to take the armor off at points to recover. And I gave a TED Talk, it was a little bit of a different metaphor, but so similar because I was using this metaphor of guarding. I was a lifeguard. And you imagine walking around in a guarded state all the time. And on that hypervigilant, always looking for the threat. And so lifeguard, grew up, grew up in New York, you know, was a lawyer for 18 years. It was like I had all this kindling for that sort of fire of fear. I mean, that's all that is ultimately when, when we're unwilling to be vulnerable. And by that I mean real, just real about where you're at in a moment without thinking that you make yourself the weak member of the herd. Right. And by being the weak member of the herd, you get eaten. I mean, that's ultimately,

right,

I think the way our brains work.

Just stuck in this fight or flight.

Constantly.

Parasympathetic. Yeah. Always not. Yeah. Never able to like slow down and recover.

Yeah. And so do you know, I mean, I know just as a part of putting this all together, you've become, I don't wanna use the word expert if you don't wanna use it, but you, you know, you're very knowledgeable now about how the body works biochemically and how these, you know, things are helping us. Or what modality will help us when, when our, our parasympathetic system is compromised, when our adrenals are compromised, when we're producing cortisol morning, noon, and night, you know, because we're walking around with low level and sometimes not so low level levels of anxiety. Well, how do we recover? I think what's really cool about your company is that it's one of those ways that people can recover that not everybody's considered or even just is even aware of. Right. Because there's a lot of stigma You know, you and I, before we turned on the camera, we were in the mic, we said there's just stigma associated with CBD. I mean, the other part of the plant, or at least the psychoactive component known as THC, is a Schedule I drug. I mean, it's still in, you know, in federal law, you go to prison for it. States are changing those, but yeah.

And until 2018, December of 2018, CBD was still— was a Schedule I drug. Even though there's no psychoactive effects of it at all.

Interesting. I don't want to get into politics. I know you probably don't either. Do you have a sense of why it is that something that is not dangerous and in fact is really helpful has gotten that stigma? You have a historical perspective on that?

There's some history that it was, but kind of like what you said, it was political. It was really business political, but people can frame things and make stories up to tell whatever story they want. And so marijuana, whatever you want to call it, has been around for thousands of years. People have used it for medicinal purposes. Probably when it became more recreational, there was a stigma put on it that it's going to create more crime. It was actually, it was a paper company, I think, that helped get hemp to be illegal until World War II when it became legal again. So that you could make rope and things like that, and it became illegal again until 2018. And it was really because hemp was a viable alternative to paper for— I mean, the Constitution was written on a hemp document.

Interesting. Yeah. Will, what is it about the components of CBD, do you think, or do you know, that's helped you, that's helped you to bounce back, recover,

So, for me, CBD, it's an anti-inflammatory. It's not an anti-inflammatory the same as ibuprofen, but it— which really takes into consideration acute inflammation. You stub your toe, you bump your head, you have a headache. That's kind of acute inflammation. Chronic inflammation is where a lot of disease is derived from, or it happens because of disease. So, CBD has been shown scientifically to reduce chronic inflammation. Okay. It also interacts with your endocannabinoid system. So, all mammals have this giant network of neuroreceptors throughout your entire body that's connected to your digestive system, your endocrine system, your central nervous system, your immune system. It's connected to every system in your body, and it's called the endocannabinoid system because you naturally create endogenous cannabinoids. But I didn't know that until I started researching this industry and science and how the body works and why does CBD work. And so, it turns out that CBD is a neuroprotectant, so it helps feed your endocannabinoid system. It helps to keep your endogenous cannabinoids from breaking down. It reduces inflammation. And, the reason that's important is the endocannabinoid system is because everything is connected. Yeah. When things get out of whack, that's when chronic illness happens. And you may have heard stories where people are saying, like, CBD cured my cancer, it cured my Lyme disease, it cured all these other things. It's not curing anything. It's reducing inflammation. It's kind of like a multivitamin for your endocannabinoid system, and it helps bring it back into homeostasis. So that's how sleep is—

Homeostasis is sort of a word to represent balance, right?

Equilibrium, balance. Yeah. So it brings everything back So that everything can work the way it's supposed to work, the way it was made to work, and then your body sort of heals itself.

Right. If your body is not self-fatigued or that your body isn't, isn't expending energy in ways that aren't efficient, it has the capacity to resolve things.

Right.

Without the use of drugs or certain things of that sort in cases. Right. Obviously, we're not, we're not, you know, saying across the board. Is there a particular way that you have either experienced yourself or you've seen in others, that's sort of the best way. I'm sure people who may not know much about CBD are saying, well, so do I ingest it? Is it topical? I've seen it in both forms. Is there a sort of a best practice for somebody that was curious and wanted to find out more? I know our show notes are going to have more information about you and your company, so people that go to the show notes will be able to click links and if they want to look at products and things that you're producing, they can find out more about that there. But what's the best way for somebody just getting started with this to experience CBD?

The answer I'm going to give kind of sucks, but it depends.

Okay. Yeah.

So everyone is different. Everyone's body, everyone's endocannabinoid system has different requirements, different needs. So I have gummies that are only 10 milligrams of CBD. They actually are the least efficacious product I have, but I have more positive feedback from the gummies than from any other product that I sell. The most efficacious would either be the tincture that you take sublingually or the softgels, which have a nanoemulsion technology, which makes the oil droplets much smaller, better for a better bioavailability. But, I would say if you're going to try CBD, try whatever you feel like you should try. The gummies, it's a pretty good price point to get in. It's like $40 for a jar of 30. And if that's not enough for you, maybe you move up to a soft gel or up to a tincture. Tinctures have the quickest absorption because you're pretty much getting it right into your, into your blood system, you know, kind of sublingually.

Because you go, you just drop it in under your tongue is what you're saying?

Under your tongue, you hold it there for 30 to 60 seconds. I use the tincture mostly if I have like, you know, some triggers like come in and I start getting super pissed off, I'll take a tincture in 10 or 15 minutes. I'm still mad, I'm just less mad. It doesn't make your problems go away, it just helps me to— it just takes the edge off of like, I'm not ready to come across the table and choke someone. I'm like, okay, now we can have a reasonable conversation. I'm still really angry, but we can work through this reasonably instead of me making irrational

And this is

without—

or

whatever,

kind of be repetitive about it— this is without any psychoactive component, right? This is not THC. It's not like you just went and, you know, went outside and smoked a joint,

right,

to get chill so that you weren't so angry. CBD does something different when it's working.

It does something different. It's just, it like, it just makes the bad stuff less bad. I can still perform at a very high level. It's the way that it interacts with the central nervous system, with the anger, with whatever my emotions are. So, I go to PubMed, pubmed.com, and you can just do— it's got a great search engine and you can type in there CBD endocannabinoid system, CBD anger, CBD whatever, or endocannabinoid and see any combination. And, you're going to come up with studies that are as current as November 2020 since today is December 1st, 2020. And possibly there's studies published today. Peer-reviewed studies are published on PubMed. And prior to 2018, December 2018, CBD was not studied very well because it was in that Schedule 1 class of drugs. So now that it's like there's more popularity, there's more emphasis on it, there are studies coming out every day on the effectiveness of CBD, how it's working with the body, what it's doing. And so I'll go there to get more up-to-date information. But what I know is how it affects me is it just brings me down. It brings me away from that 212 degrees, brings me down to like, oh, okay, now because I've taken enough CBD, I can come down much more quickly. Before it was like I come down 1 degree, now I can come down 10 degrees.

And there are topicals as well, right? So people that are having physical pains, aches and pains and things that are, as you say, more chronic, not acute, that the topicals work. I know I rub, I rub my, you know, I've got some knee challenges occasionally of surfing and stuff like that, shoulder. I use it topically and I see relief from that. And so you use it topically as well from time to time?

I use it topically all the time. So if I'm like working out and I'm like, have a really sore session, do squats or something, and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so hard to stand up and walk around. I'll put some CBD on and it's still pain, it's just not that stabbing me in the legs pain that it takes so much time to get over. So, I can get up and start moving a little more quickly. It's still pain, it doesn't take the pain away. You've caused that damage to your body, you've broken, you've torn muscle tissue and the lactic acid comes in and Creates that soreness. It just makes the soreness less.

Yes. Which again, studies are clear on that too, that pain management is a really big thing. I mean, that, that's probably why too many opioids were prescribed. Maybe there's other— know that you recover when you acute pain. When you're not in tremendous pain, your body will recover more fast. So it's one of those things that again, we track to the topic of resilience. One of those unsung heroes is, is recovery.

Right.

They perform better long-term when the system's in place for recovery. Like you said, taking the armor off, and that produces a period of recovery. We're walking around with our armor on, and some of us have a difficult time taking it off ever, taking it off at all. And just the exhaustion that comes from that— I, I don't have to think. I know it personally, and I know it through so many of the people we've worked with and even So I'd like to just get one ritual that you have created for yourself. And it may be that you've answered this question already. I, I just believe that the power of ritual is so important when it comes to creating a change, creating a conscious change. So what's one thing you do on a ritual basis daily, if it is daily, that helps you to recover, that helps you to create that longer-term resilience?

So, for me, and I have to work really hard at this, is just to have the same bedtime every night because I still get up at the same time no matter what time I go to bed. But I think the important part, because I'll stay up until 11, 12, 1 o'clock, whatever, doing stuff or letting my mind get in the way of sleep. And I used to use alcohol and I still do drink alcohol, not as much as I used to. I've cut it in probably— 2/3. I drink about a third as much as I used to. But if I allow myself to stay up past 10 o'clock, who knows when I'm going to go to bed? And that affects me for the next day. That affects like, oh, I don't feel like getting up. I don't feel like whatever. I'm kind of feeling sorry for myself. So I'm setting tomorrow up for failure by not just going to bed by 10 o'clock every night.

Oh, brother. You know, no, this is, I don't know, 200 and some episodes in. To this conversation about resilience with so many different people. And I had somebody actually that we did interview that was all about rest and the difference between rest and sleep, which was really cool. No one's ever said that before, that the bedtime specifically, that the ritual of going to sleep at a certain time or before a certain time is really the component of setting up their resilience or their performance for the following day. I feel the same way, man. If I stay up past a certain hour, call it 10, who knows when I'll go to sleep? I mean, I know I'm gonna go to sleep before 2 for sure, unless it's a weekend and, you know, you know, whatever, we're just hanging out. But yeah, I mean, to get interested in something and start reading or start watching or whatever it might be, you know, it could be 12:30. Yeah. And then getting less than the right amount for me. I, I'm an 8-hour guy. Love to get 8 hours of solid Sleep. And I typically, I don't know, for so many years now, just tend to get up at least once a night. You know, once I'm up for a minute, you know, a couple of minutes, I go back to sleep. But to not have that solid sleep, I think, is setting ourselves up for more feedback than we need.

Yeah.

Finding out what doesn't work for us. So I think for me personally, to hear you say that, power, really powerful, Will. And for those of you that are out there going, man, It's the same thing. I'll watch the news, I'll watch TV, I'll just, you know, do crosswords, whatever. I mean, lying in bed or elsewhere, you know, somewhere else. And you go, I could just be sleeping and resting, recovering so that the next day when I wake up, I'm not groggy, not sitting in that zone of, yeah, am I, am I okay today? Am I not okay? Am I feeling good? Am I, you know, like, cuz you can fall off the, the cliff pretty quickly, especially in the morning. You know, those first waking thoughts. And I— this leads perfectly into my own waking ritual, which is maybe a bookend to what we're talking about here, which is how you begin the day. What's the waking— what's your waking ritual like? Because my waking ritual used to be I get up in the morning, put my feet on the floor, feel kind of shitty and even anxious to start the day. What the heck? Just starting the day. What do I have to be anxious about? Right. You know, thinking about what's going on or whatever, falling into self-doubt or self-pity, even in that split second, that nanosecond energetically at the beginning of the day. And in part it was not getting enough sleep at night for sure. And also not having what is more of an automatic set my compass correctly. Or as my grandmother would say, start out on the right foot and the starting out on the right foot for me was the first thought, the first idea that I'd entertain, you know, in my head. And then,

Yep.

then physically, what am I doing? And, and then that became a, a moment to actually say something. That's my first physical act in the morning other than just swinging my legs across the bed. And sometimes it comes before that, is to feel gratitude intellectually. I, I, or mentally, I go, I'm awake, I'm alive, I'm grateful for that. There are people that went to bed when I went to bed last night Just like when you went to bed last night, Will, there were people put their head on the pillow same time as you did. Not everybody woke up today. You go, okay, I'm aware. Like, that's as real as it gets. So I'm grateful I'm awake. And then I say out loud, I say, I love my life. These 4 little words, simple words. And that's my sort of physical act at the beginning of the day that I do for Maybe it's 12 years now or something, but it's such an automatic thing. And yet it doesn't fail me in the sense of I'm recognizing how I want to experience myself and how I want to experience the day. But I will not lie and say if I've gotten a poor night's sleep because I stayed up too late or whatever might have been the case, that that's tougher. It's tougher to start out on the right foot. Right?

Yeah.

I'm super glad you brought that up, man. And I'm glad we sat with it for a while too, because It really is an unsung hero. I don't think people recognize enough. And they hear people out there who are influencers talk about how you should, you know, work, you know, work 100 hours a week.

Right.

Don't be a wimp. You know, start your, your side hustle at 7 PM, work till 1. I just talk total bullshit in my view. I don't— could care less who hears that. That's just crap, I think, except for the people outside of the bell curve, maybe. Who somehow their body doesn't require more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep. And for those folks, hey, good on you. Amen. Yeah. Well, listen, thank you for being on the show, brother. I know we'll have— again, people are going to want to have questions, or will have questions they want to get answered. You can go to adamarkel.com/podcast, leave a comment, questions there, subscribe, tell a friend, share this episode with a friend, especially if you think there's somebody that who might be open to learning about CBD. Maybe you're open to learning more about it. You can go to the show notes and click the links to find out more about Naked Warrior Recovery and the work that Will is doing in the world. I am a consumer of that product as well and have gotten to test Will's work. I'd say just higher quality is how I define what you've curated in that space. And so I appreciate you doing that. You know, there's a lot of companies out there, not all entirely reputable, not all doing the right things, just recognizing a business opportunity more than something more, more moral or ethical in, in terms of what they produce. And you're not coming from that place. So, Will, thank you again.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com/becomingchangeproof.