The *Best Of* Protocols to Reset Your Brain, Boost Energy & Break Mental Limits: Best Of Optimized Living

All right, here's a doozy for you.

If you're feeling stuck, if you're battling brain fog, chronic fatigue, or just know you're capable of more, this episode is your reset button. I have pulled together the most powerful, most actionable conversations from the past year. 5 experts and 5 entry points into becoming boundless. I've got Dr. Trish Leigh on how porn rewires your dopamine system and a protocol to reclaim your focus and drive and get rid of porn in your life. I've got Leila Centner on detoxing using some pretty trendy things, uh, like grounding and rebounding. And some less trendy things like colonics. I've got Sharad Baid on the practical biohacking you can do anywhere in the world, whether you're in Mumbai or Manhattan.

So, this isn't just theory, this is a roadmap.

Listen to the whole thing or jump to whatever section is calling you right now. Go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/OptimizedLiving. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/OptimizedLiving. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield.

I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

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Alright, we're going to start off with Dr.

Trish Leigh who's going to describe the damaging neurobiological effects of porn and a practical discussion on how to use neurofeedback coaching blockers and accountability to reclaim focus, resilience, and purpose.

What are the damaging effects of that amount of neural stimuli of something that the human brain doesn't even seem to be conditioned for.

Yeah, and I love that perspective because I've thought the exact same thing, like thinking about it from an evolutionary sense, like back in the day, who could get this level of stimulation? I've thought that myself, that it was only, you know, people with harems, right?

Like freaking, like, you know, King Solomon with his, what, 700 concubines or whatever?

Exactly, that's what I thought. And it wasn't even at the level because, you know, he, you know, there's just— yes, I think about it the same way you did, you do. But you The idea is that the brain is not meant to be flooded with high levels of dopamine. And especially many people that I work with, at least, they engage in something called edging, which means they keep going back for more and more and more dopamine. So they consistently flood their brain with high levels of dopamine and it desensitizes the dopamine receptors in the reward center. And that causes— It changes the way that the brain uses electrical energy, which is what I primarily focus on. And then it does change the way that neurotransmitters cascade, hormones cascade. And, you know, men— almost every man I meet these days is on testosterone replacement therapy, and they watch porn, and they're never making the connection between the depletion. Testosterone is first made in the brain before it's made in the sex organs. So this cascading effect of how it affects basically all biological processes. Then at the same time, it affects mental health. It increases anxiety, depression, um, something I call porn-induced ADHD. Many people these days go and get an adult ADHD diagnosis without ever thinking that ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder. You had to have had it when you were a kid, but it's because porn does the same thing to the frontal lobe it's proven scientifically to decrease function and actually shrink the structure also, which then also leads to porn-induced erectile dysfunction. That's the wake-up call for most people, sexual arousal dysfunction, which I call SAD.

Ben Greenfield: Wow.

Okay. I want to double-click on a few of these things. Let's rewind back to the testosterone piece. I haven't heard this before. So, explain to me what you were just saying in a little bit more detail about the link between porn use and decreased testosterone? And, by the way, I ask this because some people might think, well, you're looking at— let's say you're a man looking at a naked woman, you'd think biologically that would cause a massive surge in testosterone.

Well, it is spiking testosterone in the moment and the same thing with dopamine. But, I call them all easy button behaviors and you're likening it to food is very similar. Porn has been very much kind of put on a parallel of junk food. So, if you're hitting that easy button, to get extra testosterone, you're depleting the system. It leads to overall depletion. And it works this way— is the way I think about it, and I talk about it with dopamine, is when you start to get a drip of it, that's extra dopamine. And the same thing might apply, and I've looked at the science, it does apply to testosterone. Then you flood your system with it, and that's why people feel numbed out after they've consumed pornography. They feel numb, dissociated, extra calm. That's a flood, a drowning of dopamine. But now you go back into your life and you're in a deficit state. That's the depletion. Because when you put yourself in a position where you're making your brain produce extra of what's not supposed to be produced at those high levels, especially frequently and consistently, and some people linger there for a really long time, now you really create deficit and depletion.

So, the way I understand from what you're saying about the dopamine is if I'm viewing porn, and this would apply whether I'm a man or a woman because I know a great percentage of women now view porn.

Yeah, there's an increase for sure.

Yeah.

So, I'm getting a surge in dopamine and then are you saying there's a subsequent drop in dopamine that would then drive me to engage in other reward-seeking behaviors and experience ADHD-like tendencies?

Yeah, that's exactly right. So what happens is once you flooded your system, then when you— so basically with continued consumption, the brain is becoming conditioned to feel okay, not even good, okay, when it has high levels of dopamine in the system. So then when you go back into your work and your hobbies and your relationships where dopamine actually should be, Now there's not as much there. And the way I characterize it is that you're conditioning your brain to need level 15 or level 20 dopamine, which then does affect testosterone. So now you go back into your life, work should be dopamine-producing. You should enjoy your work. A lot of people can't focus because now their frontal lobes are not functioning. So this is why a lot of people feel discontented in their life. So just to double down on the science for a minute, everything I'm telling you is proven by science. This isn't my, my opinion, is that people have difficulty with focus and productivity. They have decreased relationship satisfaction. They have decreased body image. They see their partners as less attractive. People stop engaging in their hobbies, and they just keep going back for the high levels of dopamine. Then, of course, That is a tolerance-building behavior that leads to escalation, which leads that person to, you know, click buttons that have more violent, you know, scenarios in it, and they— and it goes up from there.

You need a higher level of stimulation. Has anybody ever done brain scans on people who, say, view porn frequently versus those who do not?

Yeah, that's a great question. There are studies with there's two primary studies that looked at the brain scans that prove that, that function and structure had changed due to porn consumption. Um, one of them, the author is usually, uh, quoted as saying that porn creates underdeveloped brains, which is true, but I think it has a level of hyperbole to it, you know. But I can explain that one to you in a second. But the very cool thing is that I'm in the midst of doing a study that has already shown significant results with almost 400 brains. So I myself have seen this effect in, you know, probably about 1,000 brains. I've seen it in myself, and I'm in the midst of doing the study to, to prove it and to prove the correlation to erectile dysfunction too.

What do you mean about the underdeveloped brain part?

What I focus on is EEG, electrical energy in the brain. So What happens in the brain is that— and I love this stuff, I think once you know about it, it's logical— is that when you— when babies are born, you know, they sleep all the time. That's because their brains are using extra slow speed. Developmentally, that's what's supposed to happen. Then as they grow a little bit older into toddlerhood, then their brains are still using slow speed. They still sleep a lot. Developmentally, your brain is supposed to speed up to the speed of calm focus. So if porn is introduced into the system, it keeps the brain in those slower patterns. Those slower patterns are actually what is at the core of ADHD. So essentially, brains develop until the age of 28, but when a person finds porn at 10, 11, that's Actually, the average age is down to under 10. Now, their brains get stunted in this slower speed. And, you know what happens then? It requires more stimulation.

Ben Greenfield: That is super interesting. I saw an interview with an OnlyFans— I don't know what you would call a model or star or whatever named Lily Phillips. She apparently slept with 100 guys in 24 hours or something like that. She said in this interview that she started watching porn, I think, when she was 11.

Yeah.

So, you know, this is the hypersexualized brain. So the brain gets linked to sexuality, and it, it craves it. That's the way that it gets dopamine. And it becomes a maladaptive behavior. There's so many things at play here. That's why people don't understand, because there really are a lot of working parts. So in the stages of development, psychosocial stages of development that you know, are long known. We move through these stages to become more emotionally mature. But if you find porn and it becomes the thing that you use to soothe and stimulate, then something difficult comes along. And instead of being able to emotionally regulate yourself, now you turn to porn to feel better. You know, you're escaping those challenging things in life. And so we know that people's identity changes because of porn use. And I know that's a big concept to throw out there, but it's true. This maladaptive behavior makes it so that their emotional maturity doesn't develop like it would have without porn.

Ben Greenfield: Alright, next up, I've got Andrew Bustamante. What a last name.

He's a former covert CIA intelligence officer who breaks down his exact morning routine, which I thought was super interesting, different than mine. And this is something his agency uses to optimize mental clarity and recovery after high-stress operations. And this is what they actually do when an officer comes back from the field depleted and needs to get back to peak operational status fast. So, he gets into hydration timings, meditation tactics, and the specific tools he frontloads to skip caffeine dependency.

Let's go talk with Andrew.

So, what I was taught and what I still practice to this day is I wake up to no alarm. So I wake up naturally. I also have windows in my room that are, that are not blocked from the light. So there is an element of natural daylight that also comes in that engages in when I wake up. But I will wake up and then upon waking up, sitting next to my bed, I'll have 500 milliliters of water and I will sit on the edge of my bed, literally just kind of pivot from where I'm sleeping, put my feet over the edge, plant my feet solidly on the ground, and then I'll start drinking my 200 milliliters or my 500 milliliters of water. Not in any kind of rush, but in a, in a fashion that is intended to hydrate, not a fashion that is intended to just sip away at water. And during that period of time, I will just sit in a comfortable position. It's very similar to Transcendental Meditation. And then I'll personally, I will close my eyes, I'll cross my fingers so that I have connection from left hand to right hand. That's a physical connection, kind of a closed circuit of the body. And then I'll I will repeat a mantra in my head that was given to me when I learned Transcendental Meditation, and then I'll just essentially practice that transcendental mantra and constantly trying to push it further back and further back into my conscious mind. And, it's through that process that I will start to see what thoughts are dominant against the mantra, and that kind of helps me see what my mind is subconsciously stewing on and what those priorities are to me. And oftentimes I'll find myself thinking about, you know, a deep problem at work or in the business or a deep problem in the family or deep concern for a family member. But, but it gives me a chance to kind of connect at a very deep level with what is sitting on my brain, both conscious and subconscious.

I think that's a critically important statement that you made, assessing the thoughts that arise against the mantra, the thoughts that are powerful enough to seem important enough to overpower that mantra. Are you then doing any type of writing afterwards or during in a journal to capture those thoughts?

Correct, yeah. And then, I have a very light journaling process. I am not good at journaling and I am incredibly jealous of people who are good at journaling. And again, I'm using a values-based judgment to decide this, but when I journal, I don't journal in detail. I don't journal in full sentences. I kind of journal in fragments. So I'll write down whatever is at the top of my mind, right? The baby got sick last night, or I'm worried about my grandmother's health right now, or the business needs a new marketing strategy for Q3, or whatever else it might be. I'll journal in fragments, but then what it gives me a chance to do is by the end of the week, I can review the fragments of the week and I'll start to see the true anchor points and which of these are consistent patterns.

Exactly.

That's very interesting.

Okay.

So, you have this meditation component and these journals, I'm assuming you just kind of save them and come back to them or review them at a certain point.

I'll actually translate my written journals into dashboards like Excel dashboards that I can then categorize and sort over time. So, I think I have somewhere 370 or so lines of journal entries that I can then draw from for the entire year.

Yeah, it's basically working in the process of integration from an analytical standpoint, which is smart versus just having a bunch of random thoughts that you never come back to.

Right. And that's the thing that I am not jealous of people who like journaling.

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Oftentimes they don't organize their journaling notes. They have journal upon journal and they can go back and they can page through their thoughts and they can get, you know, a bit of a dopamine rush when they remember, but they lose the opportunity to apply it or actualize the ideas and the thoughts and the patterns that were in their journals.

Right. That is the one thing I like about the Kindle is all my highlights automatically get saved into my Amazon account. And then, I use a program called Readwise to send me a weekly email with the most important or memorable highlights that I've been going through in my Kindle. So, I have this weekly reminder. And, I'm not quite as systematic as you at putting those into an actual spreadsheet, but I've automated that process of bringing back top to mind those things that were most important highlighted in my Kindle reading.

So, the only thing I want to add, and it's a bit of a departure from the whole meditation practice, Ben, so feel free to bring me back in. But for a morning routine, the meditation practice was really only the beginning. And a big part of the reason that we drink water before starting the meditation is to prep the body with hydration because it's coming off of essentially an 8 to 12 hour hydration fast in the, in the sleep period beforehand. So you're, you're kind of shotgunning this water into your system. Which is lubricating your digestive system, it's lubricating your bloodstream, it's rehydrating your, your, your body, and it's also creating that more efficient blood flow to the brain in advance of the meditation practice. But then very quickly following the meditation practice, we also have a regimented, relatively regimented routine for introducing food-based calories into our system in a way that is also designed to kind of benefit and optimize our meditation practice.

Tell me about that.

So essentially, we just, we start with, uh, with easily digestible, high-fiber, um, natural sugar sources. So, uh, ideally ones with high antioxidant levels. So a lot of berries, a lot of simple fruits is the first thing that we'll put in our system after we complete our hydration. And the whole idea there is because you want to jumpstart your body with simple sugars, but you want those simple sugars to be delayed in their absorption, which is why you have fiber-based sugars, which is why we're using berries. And then on the tail end of having that fiber-based, antioxidant-heavy, essential natural sugar rush, that plus the meditation is really giving you all the energy that you need to make it through that kind of morning period. So you don't need to rely on external chemical stimulants like caffeine when you have a natural sugar-based or natural organic-based stimulant that is already merging with a more wakeful, you know, lubricated brain from the hydration practice.

Yeah, that's super interesting. I'm going to assume based on the calorie intake that some section of the morning involves physical activity, which I'll, I'll ask you about in a second here. But you're reminding me of actually a study I was reading just yesterday about fruit and berry intake and the rise in glycemic index. And it turns out it's much lower than what a lot of people would think, the rise in blood sugar that occurs in response to berry and fruit intake. But as a matter of fact, and this shocks me, if you blend your fruits and berries, you see an even lower blood sugar response, assuming these are like blended whole with the seeds and the skins and everything, apparently because the blender does a much better job masticating or chewing the food than even you can do. And all the flavonols and polyphenols and seed-based components and fibers are even better absorbed if you blend. It's very interesting. It was almost counterintuitive to me. I thought, well, if you smoothie something and you suck it down real quick, you're going to get a bigger blood sugar response, but it turns out the blender turns it into an even more nutritious approach.

Ben Greenfield: That's awesome. It's funny because when I'm living in the first world, like when I'm at my home, just out of convenience, I'll oftentimes use a blender to blend berries and cherries and you know, bananas and proteins together. But when you're actually on operation, you don't have that kind of support. You don't have a blender. You don't have a— you don't have an energy source that you can just plug in your NutriBullet to, right? Which is why we eat so many whole foods. I mean, you eat whole foods when you're on op because, one, you can get access to them, but also because you can control the bacterial foodborne illness element better because you, you touch your own food, you clean your own food. You only eat the food that you believe is going to keep you healthy. So, that's a big part of why we start with raw berries.

Ben Greenfield: It's an interesting approach. And yeah, like you noted, a lot of people will turn to coffee or a nootropic or a smart drug or something else with energy, but often all you need are some calories and some nutrients.

Now, what about the physical activity?

Are you doing any type of exercise or fitness routine, especially anything that you learned during your time in the CIA or tactics that you learned during that time?

Absolutely. The big thing with the agency, the agency isn't really actually, um, they're not very particular about what physical activity you do in the morning as much as they are focused on increasing your blood rate, your blood flow, uh, increasing your heart rate early in the morning. So whether you do that through push-ups or whether you do that through StairMaster, whether you do that through a walk or whether you do that through yoga, they— it's very much a personalized process and your exercise your assigned exercise scientist will help coach you through whatever is the most natural for you. Because for some people, it's very natural to lay down on the floor and start doing sit-ups. For other people, it's more natural to throw on a jacket and go outside for a walk. And for some people, they, they want to do a quick stretch and then go for a half-mile jog or whatever it might be, right? So everybody's a little bit different, but the main thing is they're looking for a variation in heart rate against what you had during your sleep cycle. So coming off of a 10 to 12-hour low heart rate period, What they want is to essentially stimulate the body with a spike in heart rate, not necessarily to your cardiovascular level, your cardiovascular fitness level, but a jump in heart rate to create the variance in heart rate from resting to, to active essentially every 12 hours or so.

And so for you, what does that look like?

For me, that looks like walking. It looks like running. I'll do yoga practices in the morning as well, but The yoga practices I do are generally more of a flow yoga-based practice because what I'm really trying to do is I'm looking to take advantage of lubricating my joints and lubricating my lower back and increasing my muscle flexibility because of my age. That's what it looks like for me now. When I was younger, it was much easier for me to, to get up and then go into like a push-up, sit-up, jumping jack, you know, squat jump kind of routine. But as I get older now, I'm much more interested in the longevity and the comfort level in my joints and in my muscles.

Yeah, reduced friction and low barrier to entry for that as well, meaning you're more likely to stick with it on a consistent basis.

Next up, Leela Sentner discusses the key to becoming boundless through detoxing, daily habits, and resilience practices with some practical tips towards longevity and vitality regardless of your resources.

Do all the things for free. Buy a super simple $1,000 infrared tent. You know, you don't need to have the $10,000 infrared, you know, sauna. You can— you just do whatever you can. Work out. Get one of those, um, little mini trampolines so you can shake up your lymphatic system and you can get it moving. You could bounce. You could do the rebounding 15 minutes a day. Yeah, like everybody should be doing things because if you don't out. And this is what I learned from Dr. Group, the guy that I showed you his supplements in our room.

Yeah, the guy who does like ozonated supplements.

He has a quantum in his manufacturing facility that he puts in his— yeah, but he was part of Dr. Holde Clark's team in the 1990s. He was an apprentice.

Oh wow.

And they were trying to figure out, okay, let's figure out what the cause of— what the root cause of cancer Right? She had all this data. She was working with other amazing doctors with all this data. And you want to know the root cause? You probably know what the root cause is.

I mean, I'm going to say parasites because that's—

What comes before parasites?

Your toxin exposure, your toxic load.

Yes.

Yeah.

They figured out the root cause was the person's toxic load.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

So what you're saying is by— Living clean, eating clean, moving, breathing, sweating, doing all of these things including charging the body up with light, with negative ions, with connection to the planet, with the technologies that simulate that. One of the main things that people should take into consideration when questioning how much time and money they want to spend on this stuff is the efficacy with which it is preventing a debilitating disease in the future that your body creates because you eventually reach a state where it can't clean itself up.

100%. Yeah, you said that so perfectly. We need to create—

made it up as I want—

a little 60-second of that because it's key. You will get cancer eventually if you do not clean the toxic load. Yeah, it's, it's gonna happen.

You know, people also say that if you don't take the time to slow down, your body will eventually slow you down. It kind of reminds me of that.

It's, it's—

I'm sure that people who do not take the time to slow down, who do not meditate, don't have a gratitude practice, who are constantly on planes, trains, and automobiles working 24/7, or at least many hours of the day, those people sure have a nervous system activation and amount of stress that puts the body into this fight-or-flight mode that renders it more susceptible to disease. They also, based on that fast lifestyle probably are eating more fast food, processed foods, you know, out of bars, you know, while driving down the highway, whatever. But what I'm getting at is that in addition to toxic load resulting in chronic disease, you could also argue that, that simply not taking the time to even slow down and consider doing some of this stuff is going to accelerate the onset as well because you're just in sympathetic nervous system mode. Which is not the state to be in when you want to detox. This is why— this is somebody giving a piece of advice years ago. They're like, "Well, if you're going to use the infrared sauna to detox, don't do stressful things there. Don't drag your exercise bike in there and crank out push-ups if your goal to be in there is to detox because you actually have better sweats, the pores open up more, the liver detox capacity capacities increase. I don't know if that was based on research or not, but when you're in a more parasympathetic rest or digest state, which is why of course you shouldn't eat when you're in a hurry and you should chew your food and, you know, do all those things that, that assist digestion as well.

That's why you're also going to love the chiropractic adjustment that you get from Dr.

Rob later.

Yeah, we're going to film that for you guys.

We'll show you in the parasympathetic, which whenever he adjusts me, my sleep scores are amazing.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's, it's the key. And, you know, people say, oh, I don't have time, or I can't afford it. Well, take out the can't afford it out of it because you can do it all naturally, right? But if you don't do it now, it's going to cost you a lot more time later. Yeah, because if you have cancer, you're not going to be able to work. You're, you're going to have to stop everything. Yeah, you know, there, you know, I've no people that, boom, diagnosed, 2 months gone.

Wow.

You, by the time you get cancer, your body has been a mess for 20 years. When people say, oh, the person was healthy and just got— no, no, that's not true. Yeah, it's like, what would happen if you bought a brand new car and you never got an oil change? What's gonna happen to that car? You're gonna be driving down the highway one day and you're gonna see smoke oil coming out of your car, and it's not going to work. I know this because it happened to me when I was 16, because nobody told me to get an oil change. And so I killed my first car.

Now your car will tell you when you need an oil change and where to go to get one.

Yes.

And probably drive you to the oil change.

Yes. But when I was 16, it did not, you know, and nobody explained to me why it was important. But our bodies, we need to change the filters. We need to do an oil change. We need to purge these toxins, you know, and that cell membrane is getting beat up on a daily basis, whether it's from chemtrails from the skies, whether it's the toxic pollution in our waters, it's everywhere. And so to ignore the cell membrane and just keep going, you know, it's going to keep getting hammered and hammered until it's not going to be detoxing. So not only are people not detoxing like they should be, their bodies, their cells are no longer detoxing. So then that sludge just completely takes over the body, and then all of a sudden, boom, it's not working. Wow. Parasites have taken over, everything's taken over, the cells are a mess, the cells that are supposed to die aren't dying. I mean, it's— you're just a mess.

Yeah. Wow.

And then they're like, what do I do now? Okay, great. Hey, let's do chemotherapy and just, you know, with a hose kill everything else that was good in your body. Slash and burn and burn and just hope and pray that you're going to come out of that and hope and pray that we were able to kill enough of the bad stuff and the good stuff were strong enough to survive.

Burn down the house instead of taking out the trash on a regular basis, you know.

Exactly. So let's take out the trash on a regular basis. Yeah, let's encourage the world to do something. To do jumping jacks. Like, you don't need to have this amazing facility to be healthy and well.

But if, you know, people—

Even though the Vasper and the ARX are a little more fun than jumping jacks, you are right.

They're fun. But like, I don't want to discourage— I don't want anybody watching this to think—

To think I can't get healthy unless I have all this cool stuff. Yeah, I run into that sometimes too. And this kind of stuff is totally fun. And yes, if you've dug yourself into a hole, definitely that this is the type of equipment that you really need. Or, if you really want to focus and it's high on the totem pole for you on longevity, on anti-aging, on beauty, et cetera, yes, this stuff will help that out. But, you're right. I mean, to stay clean, it can be— you don't even need a rebounder, you can bounce your body up and down. You can do jumping jacks, you can do push-ups, you can go outside in the sunlight, you can earth, you can ground, you can swim. Yeah, that's an important message for people to learn.

Um, and, and enemas are not expensive. Everybody needs to keep their colon clean. Yeah, you have to keep your colon clean. Yeah, and especially in the beginning when you, when you've never done it before. Like, inspect that toilet, see what comes out of there. Yeah, start with your water enemas, then move up to the coffee enemas. It's not something you need to do all the time. Yeah, but if you've never done a colonics or coffee enemas, you have to, because all the little bugs and stuff are hiding in your colon. Yeah, and this is how people get colon cancer.

Yeah, I do it once a week.

I have been doing it for 6 years, and it's amazing, right?

You feel pretty good.

You feel great. Yeah. Um, diverticulitis— before I started this, I had diverticulitis, and, uh, the doctor, you know, did a colonoscopy, which now that I know what I know today, I would never get one again. But I had no idea what I was getting into. Again, all of these sicknesses opened my eyes to another world. My coffee enemas got rid of it. Gone. I'm fine now. No issues.

Ben Greenfield: Next up, I've got Sherrod Bade talking about practical foundational steps for enhancing health and longevity, aka multi-stacking, biohacking, red light, cryotherapy, sauna, free and cheap biohacks like earthing and breathwork. Here we go.

It really depends on the person, right? Because I'd love to give you some beautiful answer about, oh, start by getting a whatever, a HEPA air filter and going outside barefoot and getting sunshine and, you know, adding some NAD and minerals and creatine and omega-3 fatty acids in your supplementation protocol. You know, there's all sorts of places you could start, but I think what's more important is that you, you look at what someone's objective is, right? If somebody comes to me and their number one objective is that they got a DEXA scan or some kind of in-body scan and they have a high amount of visceral fat, they want to lose weight, and they want to improve aesthetics, that person is going to focus on everything from a diet adjusted to reduce inflammation to some sort of fasting protocol to typically some kind of a cold thermogenesis to lifting weights. If someone comes to me and their goal is to put on muscle, like I'll train some Hollywood celebrity or executive who literally just wants to pack on 10 pounds of muscle, that person would be doing greater amounts protein intake and some kind of a sauna protocol because that produces heat shock proteins that help with muscle. They might be increasing their protein and their amino acid intake. They might be supplementing with collagen, creatine. Someone else, an executive who wants memory enhancement, right? So, for them, it might be some super fancy peptide protocol in which they're using things like peptides, these— Yeah, CMAX and C-Lanc and cerebral lysine and all these neuropeptides along with natural products. You talk about memory, you know, Ginkgo biloba, Bacopa monnieri, these herbs that can help with memory. And I might have them playing brain games or doing a musical instrument or doing some form of memorization or doing things that grow the brain. I personally do all of these things, right? Like, I focus on muscle gain, I focus on fat loss, I focus on hormone optimization, on gut management. But, and, and this isn't, you know, I'm I'm busy. I got a family, I got a farm, I got goats, I got chickens, I got 3 companies, I'm working 60 hours a week or more. I don't have the time to be doing this for 6 or 7 or 8 hours a day. So, for much of me, these kind of things are just woven in throughout the day. If I have a bunch of journals and research articles to catch up on, I'll go into the sauna and do my sauna session simultaneous to that. Or if I want to do red light therapy, I've got red light panels in my office and I'm flipping those on for the first 20 minutes of work. If I'm preparing for an interview with a podcast guest, I'm literally downloading their audiobook or other interviews that folks have done with them and listening to that while I'm doing my morning.

Why you multitask, basically?

Yeah, so you're basically multitasking. Not in the, you know, multitasking of course has a bad rap because of the cognitive task of switching repeatedly between tasks. That's different than what I would instead almost call multi-stacking, right? Because just doing different modalities at once, none of which detract from from the others. That's amazing.

I'm 40-something and it's so fascinating to hear that you can do all this and biohack and you can have a larger healthspan and live a quality life. You know, I also been doing certain things in biohacking. I've been doing intermittent fasting very regularly. I've been doing cryotherapy, full-body cryotherapy. I have red light therapy. I take IV drips like NAD+. Lymphatic massages, et cetera, et cetera. I've been doing that. But there are various ways of doing biohacking. So, let's start with food. Now that you're in India, and as you know that we love our food, food is a love language. We love to feed, we love to eat.

I've caught on to that.

And interestingly—

Every time I turn around, there's a chance to eat.

Yes. And if you come to India, people will offer you mithai, which is basically a sweet, Indian sweet. Which is pretty much a lot of sugar.

I know, I do it every year at the airport.

Yes, we offer mithai in every festival and we have festivals all over. So we basically as a country consume a lot of sugar. What do you think? Where are we going wrong? Because as you know that India is also deemed as the diabetes capital of the world. So what would you suggest? Indians because they consume a lot of sugar.

Yeah, I don't think that it's any secret that sugar can contribute to insulin resistance and contribute to diabetes, right? So I, I would probably be leaving a lot on the table to just say eat less sugar. No, no, I eat sugar, but it's from natural sources. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, purple potatoes. My wife's addictive sourdough bread, sometimes a little bit of dark chocolate and yogurt and blueberries for desserts and parsnips, carrots, and beets, and yams, and the natural nutrient-dense sugars that you find in a lot of healthy foods. When it comes to the isolated sugars, everything from the high fructose corn syrup to the added sugars in processed and ultra-processed foods, those are obviously a little bit more of an issue when it comes to—

So, I don't need Ben's sugar.

But even those, You know, if you're exercising, you're metabolically active, right? Sugar is not that big of a deal, or as big of a deal as I think a lot of people think that it is. I mean, technically, if you wanted to lose weight, I could give you 2,000 calories of Coca-Cola a day, and if you're burning 2,100 calories a day, they can exercise and movement, you're still going to lose weight. It's not like the most nutrient-dense diet. You're going to build up amino acid deficiencies and fatty acid deficiencies and vitamin mineral deficiencies over time. But that's not enough to cause weight loss. And I'm not endorsing that. Do not say that Ben Greenfield started the Coca-Cola diet. Yeah, but I think there are other things to think about. Yeah, let's look at a couple of them. For example, if you— and I looked into this last year when I was in India— if you look at the rise in sugar consumption and the rise in diabetes, they're not correlated. There hasn't been a steep rise in sugar intake. However, there has been a rise in the substitution of natural oils like ghee, extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, et cetera, with seed oils that are more processed.

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Do it now. When you consume a processed seed oil, this means an oil that has been heated once or heated multiple times, a high intake of fried foods, right? These oils that have a low smoke point, right? You tend to see an inflammatory response in the body. Right, so you think they're more absolute? These fats can comprise your cell membranes and be a part of your body for, depending on the research you look at, 3 months and up to 2 years after you consume them. So you literally are what you eat ate, more in the case of oil than in sugar, because sugar can have a pretty short transient time in the body, right?

I could have a candy bar to go burn it off at the gym, right?

So with the oils, when you create inflammation, you also induce a resistance of fat cells to mobilize fatty acids to be burnt as energy. Right. So you also create a state of insulin resistance because you get more resistant to insulin in a state of inflammation. Right. Which is what these rancid processed seed oils can cause.

That's very interesting because in India, I mean, vegetable oils and seed oils are very, very popular. Yeah, it's ironic.

Yeah, that's why I tell you, I mean, we were eating a healthy meal last night. And there was millet and quinoa and amaranth and all these lovely vegetables. They were cooking them in sunflower oil, which is one of the rancid seed oils. And it's not as though you can't say, "Hey, could you prepare this in ghee?" Like, for instance, this morning I had a dosa and I asked for them to prepare it in ghee. Yesterday, I had a piece of chicken and I asked them to cook it in ghee or olive oil. Most of the time they have those fats and oils around. It's simply a matter of asking for them and then at home stocking your pantry with those same options.. Let's look at another factor in addition to seed oils. Air quality index. Yeah.

So, I want to talk to you about air quality index since you've been in India for the last 9 days. So, how has it been?

So, it's a topic of discussion. It's definitely something that needs to be addressed not only in India but anywhere where there's a high pop— I think in India, it's a little bit worse because of vehicle emission standards and rapidly growing population and crowded streets. But when you look at what's going on when, let's say, even if you're staying in a nice hotel and it's 500 meters from a busy highway, you've got carbon monoxide, right, which binds to oxygen and— or binds to the, to the cells that would normally carry oxygen. So you're using oxygen delivery cells, that's affecting cellular metabolism, right? You've got nitrogen dioxide, right, which is also toxic. You've got volatile organic compounds, yeah, uh, which can build up in the body and reduce metabolism and cause the same type of inflammation that induces resistance to fat loss and insulin resistance. Right. You've got, um, what do we say, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, volatile organic compounds, metals, and microplastics, both of which are now associated with insulin resistance and inflammation.

Next up, Maria Anzabala explores the comparison between cold water immersion and cryotherapy and how to practically deploy either for maximum effect for energy, for pain reduction, for longevity. And resilience.

I want to talk about cold water immersion here in a little bit, but sometimes when I'm in cold water, I'll move my hands and my legs and my arms. I know some of those cold tubs now, they actually have jets that keep the water circulating with the idea being that the longer the water is against the skin, the more your body warms the water, the easier it becomes. So, anybody who wants to last a long time in a cold plunge knows to stay just as still as possible. And, anyone who wants bigger effects from cold, you kind of thrash the limbs around a little bit. In a cryotherapy chamber, is this similar? Because a lot of times when I'm in there, I don't know if you remember when I was at your facility, I'm doing torso twists and some punches and air squats because I feel like when I move my body, I'm almost getting a little bit more of the cold effect. Is there something to that idea?

What we know is the difference between cold water immersion and when you do a cryotherapy session, the heat actually pulls— the water pulls away the heat from the body at a much faster rate, at 23.5 times faster than it does with air. So, and when you're in cold water immersion, your blood is fighting to stay close to the surface so that, you know, because your whole body is getting really cold. So you do feel like your whole body's freezing, and that's why you move around more, right? So, so that the blood keeps pumping through. Um, and but you can't stay in, in a, in cold water for longer than they recommend, 10 minutes, because then it starts to have negative effects after that.

Yeah, obviously that's temperature dependent.

It is temperature dependent, you're right.

Yes. Okay, so, so basically, are you saying, and I guess what I'm trying to ask is Will I get more effects from a cold or from a cryotherapy chamber or better effects if I move around in there versus standing still?

No, I think because I still think it's all triggered by how cold it gets in the cryo cabin. Right. So if you're still going down to -110 degrees, it's not going to have— like if you're moving around, you're going to start warming up a little bit. Right. But what we want to do is make sure we get enough cold exposure so that you're getting, the more benefits. If you start heating up, then you're sort of stopping the benefits from happening. So, we do recommend that you stay still while you're doing your cryotherapy session.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, got it. Let's say you're sitting next to somebody on an airplane and they want to know what's better. What is the research shows? What are the implications of cold water immersion versus cryo? I realize it's a loaded question, but we have plenty of time. Can you go into comparing and contrasting those two and what you like about each?

Yeah, of course. So there's a place, in my opinion, for both— to do both cold water immersion and to do cryotherapy. But they have different benefits. I think with cold water immersion, it's great for boosting your immune system, for building resilience. Um, it's easily accessible these days, so I think there is a place to go and do cold water immersion. Um, with cryotherapy, it's more about the benefits that come from lowering inflammation. It's more if you're dealing with any pain, if you're— if you have any problems sleeping, then I would recommend that you do cryotherapy. If you need an energy boost, although you could get that as well from an ice bath, but you know, if you're looking for a boost of energy, then I would definitely recommend doing cryotherapy. So I think they can both coexist into someone's lifestyle. But like I say to everyone that comes into London Cryo, Everybody has their own cryo journey. So, it depends on what you're trying to achieve and what you're going through yourself as to which way you would go.

Ben Greenfield: Now, there's a lot of research that's done on cold. Are you saying that there's certain research that shows that a cryotherapy chamber could be better, for example, one of the things that you listed was pain or inflammation than cold water immersion? Do you see that broken out in the literature at all?

We do. So, um, I still think there's enough research to say that if you do do cryotherapy, then it is really reducing inflammation in the body. And once you're reducing inflammation in the body, then you're going to get so many more benefits. You're going to be sleeping better, you're going to get rid of brain fog. Um, so, uh, you're going to, you know, if you're suffering with autoimmune disease, which we have a lot of clients that come into London Cryo who suffer from autoimmune diseases. So, we know that we're helping people like that. There is research studies showing that when you do 10 or more sessions of cryotherapy that you're going to start getting those benefits.

Ben Greenfield: That's interesting. So, kind of like hyperbaric oxygen chamber use, which I know you guys have one of those there too, there seems to be a cumulative use effect. You're saying there's a cumulative use effect demonstrated in exercise science or cold science on doing it multiple times.

Correct. I mean, if you just do one session of cryo, you're going to have a great night's sleep. That's something that, you know, in nearly a decade of having London Cryo and putting our clients through, everyone reports after one session they have a great night's sleep. But it's when you do, for example, 8 to 10 sessions over a 4-week period, we say that awakens the internal doctor in you, and that's when you're going to get the most benefits from doing cryo. That's when you start lowering the inflammation in the body, that's when you start lowering your cortisol levels so you feel less stressed, that's when you speed up your recovery when you're training for like a race that's coming up. So it is like, as you say, hyperbaric, it needs to be front-loaded so you get the benefits.

Yeah, probably some kind of like a, like a microvasculature effect in, in terms of, you know, genesis of new blood vessels or capillarization of tissue that results from repeated exposure, I would imagine.

That's right, you know, increase blood circulation, better circulation, Activation. So yeah, all those benefits come from doing it repeatedly. But, yeah, do it once, you're going to have a great night's sleep, but we want people to be doing it more than just once.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Well, I plan on doing it again this summer, but last summer I did a 30 days within 20 minutes of waking 33-degree cold plunge, 33 Fahrenheit for 2 minutes. And, it was rough, but I will admit that by week 2, it definitely got easier and I'm sure part of it was due to the vascularity effect.

Yes, and you do find— I mean, there is a thing that, you know, too much exposure and your body's going to get used to it and you're not going to be getting those benefits anymore. So we would always recommend that you do like a course of treatments, take a little bit of a break, see how your body's feeling, um, and, and then you get back to it. Because, because by then you'll realize whether you're still getting the benefits from that cold exposure or not, um, and, and then you come back and then you get back on another course, um, depending on what you've coming for.

Okay.

So, back to the piece of inflammation, for example, when you're saying that cryotherapy, you would consider that to be a better tool than something like cold water immersion for inflammation, I assume you're not saying that you don't see a lot of these benefits from CWI, but the literature seems to dictate that you have a better effect from cryo?

That's what the literature is showing at the moment that you do, that there are more benefits coming from cryotherapy. I mean, there's still so much more research and testing that needs to happen. So, I assume that that's going to happen over the next few years as this becomes more mainstream now. But, from what we've seen today that yes, cryotherapy does have more benefits than cold water immersion, but there is a place for both.

Yeah. There's a sentence in your book. So, you have this section in the book. I'm going to read it because I underlined this part. So, you have this part where it says, that cold water immersion is not just an ice bath on steroids, but there's a sentence in here and it says, "In some ways, the processes in response to cold air exposure are the opposite of those triggered by cold water immersion," which I thought was interesting. Can you explain what that means?

So, when you're doing cold water immersion, it's like the body just freezes because you're exposed to a prolonged period of being in that cold water. So, the body just freezes. You know, it gets to the cold, gets to the muscle, and then you sort of like freeze and you can't really do anything because you're just trying to concentrate. And the blood rushes to the surface area to try and keep your extremities warm with the blood flow, right? But when you go into cryotherapy, it's, you know, you go into survival mode. It's just 3 minutes. The blood rushes to the core, it oxygenates it, and then flushes back out. So that's why— that's what the difference is there. And that's why they have different effects. I mean, they feel different and they have different physiological physiological effects on the body.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

So, if I understand properly, if I'm in cold water, I've got this hydrostatic pressure of the water against my skin cooling my skin even more intensively than it might in a cryotherapy chamber, but the result of that is more blood stays in the extremities to avoid something like, let's say, frostbite when you're in cold water immersion versus in a cryotherapy chamber the blood more quickly rushes to the core for a lot of those benefits in addition to the postvasodilatory benefits that occur when you get out. So essentially, a cold water immersion, I don't think anybody would argue with this, you get colder assuming it's cold enough water in cold water immersion, but that doesn't mean you're getting the same blood flow effects to the internal organs.

Correct, correct. Even though the cold water will feel more harsh and stuff. And, it's because the heat pulls away, so the water pulls away the heat from the body in an ice bath faster than it does when you're just exposed to the air than when you're in a cryo cabin.

Okay. So, based on that, it sounds like if I wanted, I don't have a cryotherapy chamber at my house, a lot of people don't. They have cold water. But, it sounds to me like if you're looking for some of the anti-inflammatory or pain-reducing benefits contrary to what I was talking about earlier where some people have a jet in there or move around, you'd actually want to stay still to allow the blood to not rush out to the extremities and to instead get shunted to the core. So, you kind of allow your skin to warm the water that's around you while you're sitting in cold water immersion if you're looking for those effects of of, you know, some of the physiological benefits you might get in, let's say, a cryotherapy chamber.

Yeah, but I don't think the cold water gets cold enough for you to still get those benefits. I think you still need to be going into the cryo cabin to get down to a proper cold temperature, more than you would in an ice bath, even if you're just sitting there.

My cold water is pretty cold.

Okay, okay.

I think it depends on the cold.

Yes, yes.

Okay, so, and cold water immersion, when you say things like 10 minutes Correct me if I'm wrong, and again, my apologies, I'm not going to do the Celsius conversion in my head, but I think a lot of these studies are done at around upper 40s to mid-50s Fahrenheit.

I think, yeah. So, I think you're talking between 5 and 10 degrees, and I think that's correct. That's where the studies are done.

Okay. All right. You mentioned that you do your morning workout, you hit the infrared, and then you hit the cryo. What do you think about the idea that if you get cold after workout, it could excessively blunt the inflammatory response, the natural inflammatory response, and you'd see something like less mitochondrial biogenesis or lower amounts of, say, satellite cell proliferation because the body responds to that hormetic stress of exercise with mild inflammation. And, if you shut it down, you don't mount your own responses effectively.

I think that you should The only time you shouldn't do cryotherapy after training is if you're trying to build muscle, because you need to have a little bit of muscle tear, build up the inflammation. So then we would say, don't do a cryotherapy session after that, come the next day. But if you're just generally training, then it's okay to go and do a cryotherapy session, 'cause you're going to get the benefits from doing that.

Yeah, and it's not all or nothing, black or white. I mean, the studies I've seen that show that cold can blunt the inflammatory response to exercise, and potentially would do something like muscle hypertrophy, they're allowing for a drop in core temperature that is significant. I think it's above 1 degree Celsius, which means you're looking at a 10 to 20-minute ice bath soak in many of these studies, which is way different than, let's say, hitting the gym in the morning, finishing up with a quick cold shower so you're not sweating at work and so you cool the body back down. Or doing a workout in the evening, cooling the body quickly, and then getting on with your life. So I think the dose is the poison when we're talking about something like this.

Yes, it is. Yeah, I would agree with you there, Ben. Yeah.

Okay. So the sleep thing is intriguing, and I've heard this many times. People are like, I do the cryo, I sleep great that night.

How close to bed are we talking about to get an effect like that?

We always recommend the clients come in in the afternoon to do a cryotherapy session. Because it will give you a release of endorphins, you'll have a bit more energy, and it's obviously everything else that you do during the day leading up to when you go to sleep that will impact you having a great sleep. So, but we do recommend to clients if they do have a sleeping issue that they do come in the afternoon, and then they're guaranteed to have a great sleep that night. And, and I, and I can just speak from my own personal experience having done cryo, and I wear an Oura Ring. I'm sure you do as well, Ben. And my sleep is always in the 90s. And I feel like incorporating cryo and the impact on sleep is just huge. But if you're someone who has trouble sleeping, then we do recommend that you come in in the afternoon. And then you're— that's one thing everyone walks away with is they have a great night's sleep that night.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. And remember, all of the show notes will be at bengreenfieldlife.com/optimizedliving. That's bengreenfieldlife.com/optimizedliving. To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks, and content to become the most complete boundless version of you, visit bengreenfieldlife.com.

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