Dr Molly Maloof - On Strategies For Gut Health, Better Sleep & Stress Mastery

So my guest today is a repeat guest who I absolutely love having on, Dr. Molly Maloof. Molly is passionate about extending healthspan, and her medical practice, personal brand, entrepreneurial, and educational endeavors show this to such beautiful extent. She provides personalized medicine to world-class entrepreneurs, investors, and technology executives in Silicon Valley and worldwide at this point. Since 2012, she's worked as an advisor consultant to over 50 companies in the digital health, consumer health, and biotechnology industries. For 3 years, she taught courses on healthspan at the medical school at Stanford University before founding Adamo Bioscience, a company pioneering the science of love. Such an important topic. And this year, Molly has brought out the amazing book. If you haven't checked it out yet, please do. The Spark Factor, which we're going to be digging into today. Molly, welcome back to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I'm so excited to have you with us.

Thanks for having me, Claudia von Boeselager.

Molly, we're going to cover lots of beautiful topics. One I'd love to start with, which so many people can resonate with is this epidemic of burnout. And I'd love, from your point of view and what you've seen, and particularly things that you've wrote about in your book, if you can share a little bit about what's going on. And then after, we can look at what are ways to heal this and to deal with this in a much better, more holistic point of view.

I get asked this a lot. I got a message from a doctor recently on Instagram who was just like, I'm so burned out and I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish my fellowship. And I said Well, what are your symptoms? And a lot of people who struggle from burnout, you know, wake up in the morning with headaches. They wake up really tired. They can barely get out of bed. Burnout is not the tired and wired high cortisol state. Burnout is like, I literally cannot move my body effectively. Like, I'm really struggling to get out of bed. And so typically what's happening on a cellular level is that a person's had so much stress for so long that their cortisol has been sending negative feedback to their adrenals to the point where adrenals are like, okay, cool, I'll just like stop making so much cortisol. And so the cortisol curve will start to flatten. And having experienced this myself during the pandemic, I wasn't like fully burned out, but I was like basically this close to being like completely burned out. It can take months of recovery, but there's ways to improve the process of recovery that can make it a lot better on your body. And so the thing is, is these, these tools and tricks I'm going to be giving you are not like going to necessarily just resolve the burnout. Like, you have to actually look at the source. So first and foremost, I can help you cope with the symptoms. I can help you feel better in the process of healing, but nothing's going to fix the burnout if you don't change your life. So to me, burnout— I mean, clinically, it's considered a condition of, of literally cellular exhaustion as a result of work-related, what I would call allostatic overload, which is a stress burden that you cannot manage. You don't have enough capacity to meet your demands. Your body starts to just really slow down. It's the chronic stress over time has broken the body a bit, and the body's just saying, I'm gonna protect myself by going into shutdown mode. So it's an adaptive response. So first and foremost, everyone needs to always understand that the body's trying to protect you, and it's always trying to adapt to help you cope. So when I was going through burnout, it was isolation-oriented, it was overwork-oriented. I had had a concussion that year. My hormones were all over the place. And I was, the chronic stress that started to wear on me, the psychological stress, the level of, I mean, I was doing as, you know, you should, as a lot of people were doing during the pandemic. Some people coped by overwork. So I was coping with my emotions by working myself into the ground. And that eventually failed. My body just like, just like, okay, you can't really do this anymore. So You wake up in the morning, you're completely exhausted, and you're like— usually, there's a struggle to lose weight because your body is just holding on to every calorie it can. And when you wake up in the morning, you're just like, "Oh my God, I'm so tired," because your cortisol is low. So, also, your blood sugar is typically low. So, that's where that morning headaches come from. And if you put a blood sugar monitor on these people, you see very low blood sugar in the mornings. So, these are not people who should be fasting. These are not people who should be doing large amounts of ketosis. These are not— I mean, like, trust me, it's not going to work. You're going to try to do it and your body's going to revolt on you. And you have to get into regular meal, meal times, and you have to keep that blood sugar stable. So this is like when you want to shift towards smaller meals throughout the day, keeping that blood sugar stable, putting on a blood sugar monitor, and making sure that you get as much rest as you can. So rest is the cure. 'cause the problem is overwork. So, you actually have to rest, which means you have to reorganize your priorities in your life. Like, you can't do everything that you thought you could do before. That was a pretty big wake-up call for me. 'Cause I was like, I thought I could do everything all the time. I thought I was unstoppable. I thought I was, I literally did think I was a superhuman for at least the last decade. And, well, really last 5 years in particular. But, there's a point of, recognizing that you're human and that you're going to have a body that's designed to help you manage stress. And our modern lives are just filled with so much stress. So, what I do for the morning cortisol issues is a couple of things. There's a few products that are over-the-counter that are great called— one's called Dr. Wilson's Adrenal Rebuilder, and it's adrenal cortex from, I think, cow or pig. So, if you're a vegan, you're not going to want to take this. But, And, for me, that was one of the first things that was really helpful, but there was a point where it wasn't working as well as I would, would have liked. So, I shifted to this incredible hack that I learned from this great doctor in Silicon Valley, Richard Lee, who introduced me to low-dose hydrocortisone. So, when people go into the hospital and they get really sick, typically when they have massive illness, one of the first things doctors will do is load them with prednisone. Problem with that is that If you load a person with too much of synthetic cortisol, you're going to get really— this is what happens in autoimmune patients. They get really puffy, they retain a ton of water, their blood sugar is all over the place. It's just not good for the body long-term. But, I'm talking a microdose. So, instead of 100 milligrams of hydrocortisone, I'm talking 5 to 15. And, that's not going to shut down your natural production of cortisol, which by the way is already kind of shut down when you're burned out anyway. What it's going to do is it's going to restore the feeling of normal see in your body where you're waking up in the morning and you're not feeling completely dead. And so, I'll start people out 1 to 2 in the morning, 1 in the afternoon. And I'll usually do a cortisol test from the company Precision Hormones, which by the way is not a perfect test. You have to really try to do the test properly because a lot of things can affect the numbers. So, you just want to make it a normal day, if anything, a fairly low-stress day because you want to get an actual really good assessment of what's going on in your life. If you do it on a very high stress day, you might get surreptitiously higher cortisol. So, you want a very even-keeled, low stress day. I typically tell people to do this on a weekend because you want as few interactions as possible for the information.

I did mine on a Sunday. Exactly. But, mine at the time was just shot up. My doctor saw it, was like, "Whoa, this must have been a high stress day." I was like, "Actually, no.

This was Sunday morning." My cortisol in 2022, that was last year, right? My right before I got COVID, I had cortisol off the charts. I was like super high cortisol states. Everyone I know who's written a book has gotten really stressed. And I have a friend who's this amazing magical creature. Her name is Mia Magic. She's been writing a book and boy, she's actually writing a book on being a modern witch and she's amazing, like amazing. Woman. But even her manifestation skills could not keep her stress under control with her book. No one can escape the stress of a book if you're writing a book. Everyone's like, "Oh, writing a book is so cool." Writing a book is like building a startup. It's literally building a company basically because you are literally negotiating deals, you're doing public relations, you're doing marketing. It's a pain. So, I was really high cortisol. And I think the reason I'm telling you that is because I could see it on labs and I could feel it in my body. And I ended up getting pretty sick around that time. But anyway, going back to burnout. So a lot of people are living and working in jobs that super suck. That's part of the beauty of the pandemic is that it forced everyone to wake up to like, what really matters. And we, we often are living in this life in our minds of like, I need to do this, this, this, this, this, this, and everything to be seen worthy. And this worthiness epidemic of feeling unworthy. It's really an unworthiness epidemic. Feeling unworthy and unwanted. These are like two very core painful experiences of being human that a lot of people suffer from. I think a lot of people are like, including myself, have been in an overachievement hamster wheel and/or an underachievement hamster wheel because they're stuck in either I'm unlovable and unwanted or I'm unworthy and I must overachieve. This is something that you have to deal with on your own as a spiritual issue, right? So I I will confess I did psychedelics during the time of my burnout, and I'm not recommending— I'm not— it's a total disclaimer. That was a personal choice. I did not do it with a shaman. I did it by myself. I was at my wit's end, and I did some mushroom chocolate in bed in Florida. And I basically woke up and I was like laying in my bed crying for like half a day. And I was like, wow, I really needed to cry for like half a day.

Release. Yeah.

You know? And basically what I did was I really, really went into my soul and I asked myself, "Why are you doing this to yourself?" And I looked in the mirror and I said, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I've been so hard on you and I've expected so much from you, my body." I was really speaking to my body. And I'm like, "I promise I'm going to take better care of you. You deserve better than this." And it was a real turning point in my healing journey because I was just like, I have to change my life. Like, I can't be living like this anymore. And obviously, it wasn't really my fault completely because we're in a pandemic and everybody was really stressed. But, you know, 2020 was a rough year. And I think a lot of doctors, therapists, anybody who was in the healing profession is still recovering from a bit of PTSD, right? Like, anybody who worked— I mean, I don't think I had real— I don't think I had PTSD from the pandemic, but I did meet a lot of doctors and nurses and just healing professionals who were seeing devastating things happening to people. And, we basically went through like a collective war-like experience, right? Like a war against the virus. So, you have to heal yourself if you want to help others. If you want to change your life, you have to start with like getting in touch with yourself and getting in touch with the part of you that is like putting yourself in this situation where you're overworking yourself into the ground and you're not being able to care for your body the way you need to.

I think that's such an important point because, I mean, I'm totally guilty of this as well. Like former investment banking, tech startups, I've always had to do more, achieve more, 3 master's degrees, 4 languages. Like, never enough, never enough. Always have to do more, and but still never enough. So it's always like that. And every time you achieve something, it's moving the goalpost. Okay, what's the next thing? Always looking at the next, like forgetting to celebrate the little things. And what you were saying before about the pandemic, like that lack of self-love, like not good enough, right? And it's, it's learning to like look inside and reconnect with your heart and like, actually, who am I? And like, what an amazing human being I am. And I think what you— thank you for sharing your experience, like so beautiful to realize like Hello, body. Like, thank you so much for getting me here. And like, I've totally neglected you. And I was super guilty of this too. And I'd love to hear, like, what are some modalities that you think are really powerful in order to help people to start reconnecting with themselves? And obviously, you know, knowing that for many people that's so painful, they'd just rather be cerebral and like, I'm not even going to go there. There's so much pent-up trauma and things like that that has just not been dealt with.

I think first and foremost, we over-identify with our personalities and our identities and our work. Okay. Like, as somebody who's like, I distinctly remember creating my identity multiple times in my life. Like, when I was a child, I was going to become a doctor. When I was a high school student, I was going to be a star and everything. When I was in college, I was going to be a social butterfly. I mean, I did everything I put my mind to. When I was honestly going through a spiritual awakening and my ego was starting to dissolve a bit, I got so freaked out that I started literally building a persona of a brand in order to like claw back together my identity. But, one of the most freeing things you can do is develop spiritual practice of distancing yourself from this constant ego orientation. Because that's like, that's really deeply, it's like going through a free fall, but there's no floor. You're just like, oh, I can just let go. I'm in this like total life transformation right now because I've like built this whole identity of Dr. Molly, this achiever, you know? And now I'm like realizing very clearly that like there's a new identity forming and it's really about The Healing Power of Love. And, it's really about every human has this capacity whether you're spiritual or not. This is part of your design on purpose to help you survive, to help you last long. It's really a longevity enhancer. Love is literally the— So, I studied love for a few years, right? So, the preface of the dealing with the change in your life is first and foremost understanding who you are and understanding you are not who you think you are, but it can be very helpful to hold this paradox because there's like, okay, there's part of me that knows that I am, I'm like one with all things, right? Like there's just complete connection to unity consciousness that like I know is available. But then there's also the knowing yourself can be really amazing. And so I love astrology. I love human design. I used to think human design was complete crap. And then I realized I was just reacting to my human design, which is I'm a projector. And projectors are really not supposed to try to be generators. And I think, I think I'm a generator and a manifestor and a projector. And it's like, actually what I'm best at is directing other people's energy. And so I'm learning to lean into all these different frameworks of understanding who you are so that you can really, really enhance your strengths and not try to be everything, right? Like we try to be good at everything and we don't have to be. We need to be good at what we're meant to be good at. We're meant to find our unique purpose and our unique path. And so, you know, not everybody— like, letting completely go of your identity is very helpful for spiritual growth. But if you're trying to figure out a new path in your life and what to do with your day-to-day time, your purpose to make money, it's really helpful to look into your astrological patterns, look into your human design patterns, look into— even numerology can be helpful. Look into Chinese astrology, look into Myers-Briggs, start piecing together like who you might be based on these ancient systems of understanding humanity. I love this part of my life. Like, I can really dig into like meeting new people and understanding how they work. I just, at my boyfriend's family's Thanksgiving, we did this ritual where everybody sat around in a circle and share something that they loved about someone and about that this person they were all loving on one person. But I didn't know everybody. So my boyfriend's mom said, why don't you use that app that you showed me to give everyone— just, just give a summary of who everybody is. And so I literally laid out a summary of like 7 people and everybody's jaw was on the floor. They were like, I cannot believe that you got this from an app. Like, it was so spot on. And so there's this fun dance of like, not identifying with who you are, but also understanding who you are and using your personality, using your identity, using your ego as a tool to achieve things, but not as a master to control you. That's the real unlock is like, oh, not identifying with my job, not identifying with my persona, just trying to find out who my true essence is and being that, which is love. And then, and then like using these, these identities and these personas, these tools as what they are. They're just like ways for helping maneuver and navigate through the complexity of the world.

Like a methodology or whatever as well.

Yeah.

I love that. And I think it's really important because you say like, you know, people identify like you're like, I'm a doctor. No, it's not. You're not a doctor. Like you are a trained medical professional or you're trained doctor, but it's not who you are. And I think it's when you take a step back and realize that we are so much more powerful and creative and like these amazing, you know, abilities and talents, and we're not just the situation that we're in. We're not just one experience that we have. And it's taking off the label and sort of distancing from it and appreciate these are experiences that we go through. Life happens for you, not to you. So when you can find the gold in an experience as well, it's so soul-enriching. And then I totally agree as well as when you understand how you flow best, use that to your abilities, your power, and focus on growing your strengths more versus the model of You have to work on your weaknesses. Like, what a waste of time. This old school model of like, your teacher's like, everyone needs to be this. It's like, if you're brilliant in certain things, just focus on that.

I was just thinking about how we educate kids these days. It's like everyone has to meet a certain standard of every single thing. It's like, that's cool. But what about kids that are like off the charts good at this thing and they're terrible at this thing? What if they— Yeah, so of course you need to learn basic math. But like my sister Nikki is a world-class artist. She used to get panic attacks when she had to take calculus. And it was like, Nikki does not need to learn calculus. She's never going to use that ever in her life. She needs to be honing her best skill for her life, which is her art. And that's what she's been doing since she was in kindergarten. And now she is like world-class, like many, many thousands of hours.

Neurodiversity is in our family as well, and my, my kids too. So I've really been digging into the topic and also interviewing some experts in the space. And it's really interesting that one expert was saying that a researcher approached her and has come up with that 70, up to 70%, 7-0, of a workforce are actually neurodivergent. Yet we try to shrink ourselves into that 30% neurotypical because the spectrum is huge from OCD to dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dyslexia, autism spectrum condition, ADHD, ADD. Like, I mean, huge, huge, huge, huge variety. And I was just at a talk actually this morning at my kid's school. And, you know, even some of the verbiage and stuff was still very negative. And I was just like, it needs to change to actually— some people are just very gifted in certain things and other things they struggle with. So I I think it's really just everyone being okay with being different and embracing that. And like, take the time, as you're saying as well, to analyze your strengths. Like, who are you? How do you thrive in certain environments? And just let other people know. Be like, hey, you know, I have an issue with loud noises, or I need some decompression time because things get a bit overwhelming for me, whatever that case may be. But it's again that self-love piece, that's getting to know yourself and starting to love you for who you are and what you bring to this world. Um, so yes, what were some of the biggest insights for you when you did your deep dive into that, Molly? Like, what did you, what did you find to love even more about yourself?

What's helpful for me in a lot of these tool sets is just like, well, in particular, my favorite app is called The Pattern. I love learning about how, like, if you can actually just like look at yourself and then look at your parents, you can actually see how your parents' astrology has somehow affected your astrology, which is like you are literally this like You're like, it's not just genetics, right? There's something else going on here, like something very mystical going on. So I was looking at my boyfriend's parents and him. I was looking at him and his son. I was looking at my parents and me and just how I could see parts of myself in my parents' astrology. And I could see— and what I love about the pattern is you can actually see ways that you can relate to your partner as well.

That's very cool. So a good friend of mine, through having a Kundalini awakening, got into EFT tapping, hypnotherapy, into past life regression. So I've been Guinea pig for her sometimes. And I love the thinking around it, that like your soul picked this life journey for the lessons and for what it needed to know. And I find it's very empowering, as much trauma and issues maybe we've had in our past, that actually there is a purpose to it. And again, it's that reframing and like, what was the gold in that? And what have I learned from it? And who did it allow me to become through having survived that trauma that I wouldn't have had had I not experienced that? And it just really shifts the power from that victim mentality and these things happen to me to actually, okay, in some greater scheme of things, I've picked this and it's empowering me to realize I've become so much stronger, I've become much more compassionate, I'm able to do this or whatever it might be to just grow as a person and also spiritually as well and have this kind of more of an awoke lifestyle, which is really beautiful and rewarding in itself, I think.

Totally.

Molly, let's talk about love and spirituality, um, etc. I mean, there's so many topics I want to talk about, but, um, we touched on it just before we, we jumped on the recording. Why did you become so passionate about going down the rabbit hole of love? Which obviously everyone knows about love, but do they really know about love?

So I just felt like this human connection thing was something really profound. And we generally talk about it, right? Like all these songs are written about love, right? Like there's a reason we have so much music around love. And it's obviously been carried through culture, through our movies and our books, and relationships are so fundamental to being human. At the same time, we don't really acknowledge it in medicine. And medicine is so focused on this reductionist scientific perspective that it forgets that there's absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right? So, there's a lot of stuff happening when two people are interacting that I think science is only just now starting to understand. And, like, I regularly think about people and then boom, they text me the next day. And, people regularly tell me that I pop up in their dreams. And, I'm like, well, it's funny because I I was thinking about you. I cannot explain this collective connection, but there's also just something really potent when you're with people that you love and you feel connected and you feel seen. It's one of the most amazing healing experiences you can have. And, this is the power of oxytocin. So, one of my advisors, Sue Carter, is a world expert in oxytocin. And, she wrote a great, great paper that everybody should read called "Love and Longevity." And, it was really the underpinning science of why we need love to live long. So, we need love because it actually does heal on a cellular level. And there's a lot of people who experience love through things that are not actually what love looks like. And so what— there's a lot of confusion around love because when people are exposed to painful experiences as children, they grow up into adults that resonate with experiences that are painful through their relationships as a way of reliving their childhood and their childhood experiences. There's a really great book called Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix. It's really all about this. And so it's like disentangling this relationship to love that you have through understanding your relationships with your parents and trying— and really like looking at relationships as an opportunity to heal any wounds from your childhood that are unresolved is like, this is a very different way of thinking about love psychologically. And then there's, so there's the biological, which is the survival. This is like the sex drive, the romantic love drive, the drive to attach. And then there's a psychological, which is the relationship to our parents and relationship to ourselves, relationship to our partners. And then there's a sort of spiritual side of love, which is every single religion in the world has unconditional love in some way, shape, or form. It's all got different interpretations. But the concept is centered around selflessness. And it's really about giving of yourself in some way, shape, or form to your being, during your being of human, being human, right? So, like, the key to great relationships is about being selfless, right? There's, so there's this really beautiful, like, overarching concept, love, as, like, a fundamental part of being human that we need to live long and healthy lives. There's a Harvard study on longevity, and it was basically trying to show, like, what brings happiness. And it's, like, not fame and fortune. It's close personal relationships. This is the key to a happy, long-lived, long life. And yet, we struggle with it more than ever, right? Like, it's a really big issue. And so, when I was building my company, Adamo, I was like really still in the scientific perspective of love. I was like, "Okay, let's break it down. Let's figure out how to measure it. Let's figure out how to amplify it using psychedelics because we know psychedelics make everyone feel this sense of love." But then, I literally was commercializing like a real-life love potion. I mean, I was like, "Oh, man, this is actually kind of dangerous." Are you drinking it now, Molly? Absolutely not. Although, I have tried it. It's amazing. But it's almost too powerful and it's dangerous because love is one of the most powerful forces to get people to move, right? It's very much associated with desire and dopamine and pleasure. So, A, it would've been a highly controlled substance, and B, it just was too complex to commercialize. It was like a combination drug. So, we patented this thing and we still may find a way to reverse engineer it into a safer molecule. But as it stands, it was a really hard thing to to commercialize. So, but I still was very much interested in kind of solving some major issues in health that had not been resolved yet. So you can't— there's no diagnosis for like, your relationship sucks. No diagnosis for like, you lack community and you're lonely. But there is diagnosis. There is, there are diagnostic problems in medicine around sexuality. So I was like, well, this is probably the only area that I could potentially effect in medicine, like, because it's the only thing that you can actually see in modern medicine is like related to love, sex. I mean, we call it— sex can be profane or can be sacred, you know, it can be truly lovemaking, or it can be just friction-based animalistic sex, right? Which there's a time and a place for both. What I'm seeing in culture is that a lot of people are just having disconnected sex. They're not feeling super connected to themselves or their partners. So my company was really endeavoring to figure out, can we measure different aspects of sexuality, sexual dysfunction, sexual satisfaction, emotional closeness, which is another way of saying like love and attachment and sexual communication. So we've designed this big intake system, and then we designed a sex therapy. And the sex therapy is really designed to bring two people both closer to themselves and their, the relationship to sexuality and their relationship to their sexual sovereignty. It's your physical relationship to your sexual body. Like, you have a body and you are sovereign and you can decide what's good for you, and you get to tell others what works for you and what doesn't. There's basically erotic individuation, which is certain things that turn you on might not turn someone else on. So getting into a relationship to you and your sexuality is the first step of our protocol. But before I go into the next step, it's important for you to know that, like, sex therapy has not been largely reinvented since Masters and Johnson in the '60s. So Masters and Johnson created sensate therapy, which is a phenomenal therapy for anxiety-based sexual problems, because it takes sex off the table for a month, and you just focus on mindfulness-based sensual touch. Then there's still the act of sex, right? And a lot of people still struggle with the act of penetration. And so, um, there's a lot of pain that can come up. There's a lot of emotions that come up. There's a lot of people that have had sexual trauma, far more than the CDC numbers, as far as I can tell, because I've talked to, like, lots of men and women since I started company, and it's— I think the numbers are double what the CDC says. But the CDC says 1 in 4 girls are abused as children, 1 in 3 are assaulted in their lifetime, and 1 in 5 are raped. And the numbers on boys are a lot, a lot lower, but they're still there. And I think it's because they're reported less. So I'm both on a crusade to help resolve sexual dysfunction secondary to psychosomatic causes, but also in the process of building the sex therapy, I started using it with my partner. I started using these things that I'd learned and I realized that, oh my gosh, this is really good for enhancing sex for normal people. Like, you can actually just have better sex. So I was like, wow, we could market this to not just people with dysfunction, but people who want to have better sex. So that's where we're at now. We're running our first study. We're running our first online cohort. We're testing it all out. And we've— it's basically like a masterclass for better sex.

So I'm sure a lot of people signing up for this study as well. I've had Dr. Kat Meyer, who I'm sure you know, on who does also with ketamine-assisted therapy. She's really, really great as well around this topic. And I actually think it's really important. Like when I was at the Wonderland conference, having a conversation with a few people too, is that like part of increasing human connection is like helping people to reidentify with sex and like all understanding all these belief systems. I mean, I was brought up Catholic, right? I mean, total taboo and like women are bad and second-class citizens, all the rest of it as well. And it's learning how to break free and like see that priming, if you will, for what it is, and then choosing either to continue with that, which is fine, everyone has, you know, freedom of choice, or actually realizing there is a different way. And actually, you know, why not, um, have a better connection to self and to others as well? And part of it is of being alive is through sexual connection as well. So, so beautiful, Molly. Like, I love what you're doing because people have become so disengaged from themselves, from others. They're connecting through a phone, like a little piece of plastic. I mean, honestly, if we think about this, it's, it's really sad. And like, just think of the next generations to come. And I try to remind people, like, remember back in the day, like, people used to write a letter and be like, hey, I'd like to come visit. And they'd spend like 5 days together and like have deep connection and deep conversations. Like, how often do we do that, have these beautiful deep conversations at a regular basis and make time for it as well? So, um, you know, yes, with partners, but also just in general with, with friends or people that we love. And just to savor those moments. So this is really exciting. Where do you think it will go? What do you think you'll get out of all these clinical trials? Like, what do you think will be the big breakthroughs?

Well, we want to see how we, like, basically what I want to see is can we actually show that we can increase love between and within people? So that's the main intention is like, can we actually show a measurable improvement of the markers of love? And the markers of love are sexuality, romantic love, emotional closeness. This, um, and connection.

Part of it will be also that self-love piece, right? I'm— you said that that was part of it, and modalities to reconnect with self. How much work do you do, or, or do you work with psychedelics, or like have your patients work with psychedelics at all?

Um, small number of clients that are using ketamine-assisted therapy, and I do think it's a great tool for relationship health. And there's something about about, yeah, there's something about like the ability to break down these barriers between people and help them kind of get outside of their ego identity.

Molly, I want to jump back over to the book for a little bit. What was actually, you said because of your own burnout, was that the driver of the book or was it just because you were seeing so many people that were suffering and mitochondrial health going, you know, decreasing, et cetera? Like what was it that made you like, I have to write a book? What was that moment?

I was in a meditation retreat, you know, and I was basically trying to find myself after a major spiritual awakening, or I was kind of losing myself really. I was becoming very ungrounded. And at this meditation retreat, this woman was not able to effectively cook without recipes, so I had to step in. And you're supposed to actually sit before you serve, but I was, um, serving and sitting. And so, I was able to use a pencil because I needed something to write out the recipes in my head. So, I was meditating and occasionally coming up with recipes in my head. And, one of the things that came to me was 2 books. One was a book on just cooking without recipes really, like cooking. And, there would be recipes in the book, but it was a book on how to cook health food that tastes amazing, like really delicious food. And then, a second one was a book, it was just a book on the first principles of health, like what is health, How do you measure it? How do you improve it? How do you, like, what is it? And what is the science behind it? And that's really where, that was like 2019, September. And basically I went from kind of not sure where to take the next chapter of my life to being like, oh yeah, I'm going to write a book. And so I started working on the proposal when I was living in Maui in January of 2020. And then the pandemic hit. So I hired some help to finish the proposal and I ended up getting a book deal in January of 2021.

And so I think for people looking to understand, like, how do you stay in an optimized state? And this is obviously what you're like focused on, like what are the key biohacks? What are the— you were talking about the continuous glucose monitor also for like the monitoring. So how can people like— if you had to say the top 5 things, Molly, like what would they be between biohacks and strategies for helping people to not get into that chronic fatigue, chronic stress state, but instead actually know that if they have these modalities in place, they're actually optimizing themselves and going to be living in a better way for longer.

One of the best tips is find work that feels like play, you know, find work that feels easy, find work that's so— you're so good at it that it's like not that hard, you know. That also— I mean, arguably I took 10 years to do that, so it doesn't just happen overnight.

You don't have a magic pill, Molly, come on.

I mean, I— you do have to find mastery in something, I spent a lot of time in my late 20s, early 30s sitting with myself quietly in my loft, literally creating my life from scratch. Like, what am I going to be? Who am I going to— you can create yourself. Like, that's something that a lot of people don't realize. A lot of people are like, life is happening to me. All these things have happened to me. And this is why I am who I am. I have a completely different orientation of life. And I have for a long time. And I think that's part of the reason why my life is so great. Because I really do believe that I'm creating my existence. From inside of my mind. And that creation of my existence is, is really where I shine. I like, I, we have this creative force as women to like manifest and men do too, obviously. But like, it wasn't until like the last 5 years that I really started to hone that in a more clear way. So like, you can design your life. If what you're doing right now is not working, you can redesign it. It. So that you have to empower yourself to do that though. And even sometimes in the worst, most crappy places you've ever been is actually the perfect time to change your life.

Well, it's that surrendering, right, of just going like, I can't imagine how it could get even worse. Like, you know, let me just surrender. And then that's what I think when the universe steps in and all this beauty and magic unfolds.

Totally. So there's that. And then there's— I've been doing a ton of research on autoimmunity lately. And so So, in my book, I talk a lot about gut health, but pretty much the number one thing I optimize in every patient first and foremost is their gut. And, if you don't have a healthy gut, nothing's going to work. It's just super key. There's a lot of interconnection to your gut and your mitochondria because you're literally breaking down substrates to go into your engines of your cells. So, if you don't have a functioning gut, you're not going to be absorbing enough nutrients and you're not going to feel amazing.

What good health test— just on the point on that— what gut health test are you most happy with? I know that nothing is perfect.

I like GI-MAP and I also like Genova, but I'm trying a new company that my friend Katrine told me is amazing. So there's a new one coming out, I think it's called VitracT. V-I-T-R-A-C-T.

And it's great what you discover. I got H. pylori. I had too much of the bad bacteria when I first did my one, not enough of the good one. So gut health number one that you focus on looking at.

First and foremost, you don't need to get a stool study just to fix your digestion. So if you struggle with digestion, you've got gas and bloating, you can take digestive enzymes. The company Bio-Optimizers is phenomenal. So I recommend, and doing an HCL test to see if you need it. There's a, there's a blog post on my, on my website on all about that. And then there's digestive enzymes, which are amazing. Their mass times are awesome. If you struggle with digesting fat, there's bile acid factors. There's also one called CapEx, which is great by Optimizers. I like bile acid factors by Jarrow. And then learning what foods work for you and what don't work for you. I do do food allergy testing with Cyrex Labs. Yeah. So digestion fundamental.

Molly, quick question on that with the food sensitivities. And I've, I've had different views on this as well. So one is an allergy, which is an allergy, right? But there's food sensitivities. And I've had interesting conversations around it will depend on your gut bacteria. So basically, if you— let's say you're in a bad way with your gut health and you test and you have a plethora of things that come up as you're sensitive to, but then you're rebuilding your gut health and you're improving it. And if you retest in, let's say, 6 months' time, you might actually hardly be sensitive to anything as well. So are you seeing this as well?

First and foremost, if you have that many food intolerances, there's a really good chance you have gut dysfunction. So, it's not the food's fault, it's the gut's issues. Exactly. If you see a few that are problematic, maybe gluten, dairy, eggs, just eliminate them. And, those are the most common ones anyway. So, eliminate the most common allergens. Don't eliminate everything on the list if you're having a massive list. Fix the gut, fix and heal the gut. Get a stool study, find out if you've got parasites, pathogens, anything else growing, shouldn't be there, and, you know, systematically approach gut optimization.

Okay. So we've got the gut health as well. What else would you say is really, really important for people to assess and focus on to be in that optimized state?

I love fitness, but sleep is probably the next thing because if you don't sleep, you're not going to have any energy for fitness. So I just see a lot of clients that don't prioritize sleep and I'm like, hey, turns out you really do need to sleep. Like, it's really, really important. So that's something that I think a lot of people overlook.

Overlook as well. And would you say also with the timing? So for me, big surprise. I mean, I stupidly in my 20s thought I could sleep when I'm dead and was like, oh, 3 hours a night, no problem. Like full energy, high energy, that obviously caught up with me. But for me, one of the biggest ahas was actually particularly for women to have one extra hour in bed to have that full quality, like let's say 8 hours of sleep. And so what would you recommend for men and women for the sleep optimization?

Don't be on screens late at night. Don't be on television or screens. Just throw out your television. You don't need it. Life is way better with just books. Like, stop watching TV, stop watching the news. Pretty much disconnected from normal news for about a couple months and television. And then I went and I watched Netflix at my parents' house, and I was just like so deeply affected by the things I was watching on TV. I was like, this is really crazy. And so that was really weird. So I just recommend, like, if you can Fill your mind with things that you want that are practical and useful and interesting and new. And don't just turn to entertainment to, and like spend your evenings. You'll be way better off doing online courses and like filling your mind with useful information than watching random stuff and Netflixing and chilling. I love Netflix, don't get me wrong. There's some really fun stuff, but right now the world is filled with so much crazy that I'm just like trying to find as much peace as I can.

Or documentaries are good, I think, Gwen.

Yeah, sure. But I wouldn't recommend watching anything late at night. Do it on a weekend, on a Saturday. But your evening should be dim light, and you really need to align your brain with circadian rhythms. You need to really think about how you're going to use your brain by, like, programming the light cycles if you can. So light and dark cycle circadian rhythms are really key. I use eye mask.

Cold dark room.

Well, a big one is managing stress during the day. But yes, cold dark room, the basics of your environment. Air quality is really important for your environment too. So make sure you have clean air in your room. If you've got the environment stuff down and you still don't sleep well, It's usually due to lack of dealing with your stress during the day. So there's a great supplement that I love called— it's called NutraChill, but there's another one that you can get.

I like the name.

NutraChill. Called DHHB Day Chill Pill. But DHHB, is it like dihydroconochial? Is a legal anxiolytic and one of the best tools for dealing with anxiety I found as a supplement. It really works. You can feel it. It's awesome. And it's from, it's from Magnolia, which is a great adaptogen. So it's like an extract of adaptogen. And then journaling is really great.

Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. So we've got the gut health, we're looking at the sleep. You were saying then exercise as well. And what, what is the difference between the minimum effective dose of exercise versus overexercising, which some people are like, oh, I have to kill it at the gym every day.

So what do you say is like a good I struggled with too much intense, too much high-intensity exercise. And don't get me wrong, there's great— I mean, you do need high-intensity exercise on occasion to really build your body. Go in cycles. You know, you don't have to be doing high-intensity exercising all the time. Build up different facets of your fitness over time. Lifting weights that are lower weight but slower can be to failure. You can do a lot of like muscle growth that way. Lifting super heavy personal bests is useful sometimes, But as a woman, if you go too hard on the personal bests consistently, you're gonna burn out. So that's one of the mistakes that I've made in fitness in the past. And too much chronic cardio is not great either. Just like overdoing the cardio and underdoing the, the weight training. But then also just finding something that, something that you love to do, like yoga.

Molly, before we finish up today, where can people find out more about what you're up to? Your website, social media handles, where can people follow you?

You? @drmolly.co on Instagram and www.drmolly.co on my website. And then livingadamo.com, L-I-V-I-N-G-A-D-A-M-O.com is the Adamo Bioscience website. And then same thing for @livingadamo on Instagram. If you want to learn more about the therapist that I work with to create the sex therapy, Dr. Saida Desilets is amazing. And at— and Aaron Michael goes by @suctionsex on, on Instagram. Yeah, there's like tons to learn. Through various people online, including myself.

Absolutely amazing. Molly, do you have a final ask, recommendation, or any parting thoughts or message for my audience today?

I mean, a big piece of the Spark Factor is about metabolism. And so, you know, blood sugar monitoring, everybody should do at least once. I can put my Levels link in the show notes. It's levels.link/dr-molly if you want to get access to a blood sugar monitor. But getting control of refined carbs and sugar is a huge, huge tool in the toolbox of healing.

Molly, thank you so much for your time today. It was such a pleasure to have you back on as always, and so excited for your projects. I can't wait to find out more. Beautiful. Thanks so much, Molly.