Optimize, Biohack Your Brain Health & Extend Your Lifespan with Dr. Julia Jones (Dr. Rock)

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My guest today is Dr. Julia Joe, who has construction going on next to her, so you will hear intermittent buzzing in the background. She is founder of Neuron Wellness. She's a neuroscientist, a smart wellness coach, biohacker, DJ, author of The Music Diet and Neuron Smart Wellness Made Easy books, and the latest book, The F-Bomb, which we will dig into today. For the past 30 years, Dr. Julia has been studying neuroscience, psychology, and physiology and showing people how to apply the science to boost their own brain and body biology. Music sound is her preferred tool biohack, which we will dig into today, which has led to her being called Dr. Rock, but we will dig into that shortly. So firstly, welcome, Julia. It's such a pleasure to have you on today.

Thank you. Lovely to be here. Lovely to catch up with you again.

Exactly. I'd love to start with, if you can share with my audience where the name Dr. Rock came from.

Well, um, my love of leather jackets, as you can see, but well, 30 years ago, actually, I was a sport and exercise science student.. And I went to California on a student exchange. And while I was there, I was invited to visit the US Navy base in San Diego with the Navy SEALs training. And the physical training instructors showed me how they were using music as a biohack. Like, this was the early 1990s. They were using music to boost endurance, lower anxiety in high-pressure situations, boost sleep quality. Boost team cohesion through singing and chanting and things like that. And I was a musician and a DJ, so this absolutely fascinated me when I saw what they were doing. And so for 30 years I've been showing people. I then qualified, started working with British Olympic teams as part of the psychology team, and was using music in the same way to show people how to boost performance. But obviously it doesn't just work in elite performance. The ears lead to the brain, music is a biohack, whoever you are, whatever age, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, just for general wellness. So I, I just became known for this. And my PhD looked at the effects of music from youth and music memories from youth, which, which really play out in late-stage dementia where, you know, those memories still remain fairly intact to a very late stage. So that I gathered that nickname eventually because I'm still in a band. I play guitar and drums. And so yeah, that's how that name evolved.

I adore that. And I'm really excited to dig into this topic today. One, because I love music. Two, as many of my audience will also know, my mother has late-stage dementia at this stage because it was caught too late, sadly, and knowing what we know now, but I'd love to understand better the music component of the brain and what is actually happening there. And I thought that what you just said was really interesting that music from childhood is one of the last things to be retained, even in Alzheimer's dementia patients. What is actually happening there in the brain and what is the positive influence that it has?

There's tons of research going on around this and it's still pretty much a mystery, but there are— music is processed differently to language than just speaking. So you often find that people have lost their speech ability, but they still have a singing ability. And you see this a lot with people who have stammers and things like that, but they can sing perfectly. And so there are different mechanisms at play when it comes to music, but when it comes to music memory, it gets even more interesting because the brain isn't just storing the music. The brain is doing a multisensory storage. So that moment, you know, everything that's involved in that memory is stored. But for some reason, these music memories are very deep. And when I was doing my PhD research, and I interviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and just observed so many different people who are now in their 50s, 60s, 70s, how they were interacting with music from their youth, those with dementia and without. And it's, it was, I also work closely with the music industry and the difference in listening. If you think about how we listened when back in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, because of the way the music industry evolved, you bought a record, you loved it, you listened to it over and over and over and over and over. We would wear those records out, right? It was repeat listening, a ridiculous level of repetition. And so I definitely think that there is a link between that because those— the memories of those songs are so strong. And also during school years where there's a lot of hormones going and your first boyfriend or girlfriend, your first kiss, your first that there is so, there's so much exciting kind of hormone-driven stuff going on during that time as well. But these songs have become like a time capsule. And when we're playing songs to people who can't recognize their family members, that they don't have much normality left in terms of how their memory is operating generally. But if you play a song from their youth, they'll be able to sing the words. In some cases, they'll be able to say where they bought the record, where they used to dance to the songs, or their memories of when they saw that band live. Or a gig, it's astonishing how deep those are. And I'm quite interested to see how we don't really listen to music like that now. We've got a million zillion songs on Spotify or whatever platform you use to listen to music.

It's—

there's just so much music and we tend to listen in a much shallower way across a lot of songs. And that was not how we— when people who are now in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s the music listening experience when they were young was very different to the way it is now. So I don't know whether music will still be as powerful a tool in 40 years' time for the people who are now coming through their youth listening in a different way.

You know, I'm going to actually test this out with my mother when I visit her later in the nursing home and put on some music from the '50s and '60s when she used to go out to dances and see what happens.

But yeah, have you been using music? Have you been using music much?

We put on like white noise and things like that at night to help her sleep also, because there might be noises in the background as well. And she sleeps really, really well because of that. There's sometimes she will hear songs and music and you can tell sort of a mood shift. Also, I adore music. We always tend to have music on as well, but obviously in the nursing home it's a little bit different. They sometimes have music on, but yeah.

There's a brilliant documentary if you haven't seen it called Alive Inside. Oh, I like this. It's superb. And Professor Oliver Sacks, who was at New York University, he did a lot of research around this, but that particular documentary, I absolutely 100%— to everyone listening, even if you're not living with dementia with family members or anything like that, it is amazing when you watch what happens to these people when you start playing the music. They just reemerge from the mist. It's really powerful stuff.

I'm excited to test this out live today. So thank you for expanding on that. And Julia, can you talk about where your interest in extending healthy longevity and lifespan and longevity came from?

Well, I was hurtling towards my own 50th birthday a couple of years ago, and my interest suddenly increased just through my, from my own experiences, because I was, I came through the sport and exercise science world. And so it was all about telling everyone to go to the gym and telling everyone to do workouts. And I became, I just noticed myself that I was fit. I could go and do 10Ks and I was going to the gym and things like that, but I was still putting on a pound a year and my sleep still wasn't that great. And my nutrition still wasn't that great because I was eating too late. So it clearly wasn't working. And then I started looking into the data, and we cannot argue that 5 or more than 5 decades of huge diet and fitness trends failed to produce healthy nations. Right? It did not. But as the diet and fitness industry revenues increased, average waistline size increased, all our health problems increased, mental health problems increased. There is not— that clearly wasn't the solution. And as a sport and exercise scientist coming from that angle, it's like this— why is this happening? And as I dug deeper into it, it was pretty obvious. The fact is that fitness and wellness are not the same thing. And so you can be very fit and not well because that is just one part of the puzzle. That's just one piece of the puzzle. And we've overemphasized that aspect and neglected the importance of being calm and breathing and just the times of day that we're eating and getting really high quality sleep and the type of light that you're pouring into your eyes at at different times of day and all of these other aspects that, you know, temperature, all of these other things and our habits that dictate what's going on at a cellular biology level. Those are what determine how long you live healthily, not what gym you're a member of and what you do. And in fact, when I started looking, a lot of my clients were senior executives, aged 40s, 50s, and they were— they would proudly tell me that they managed to squeeze in a workout at the gym 3 or 4 nights a week after work. So I say, okay, well, talk me through that. So what time do you— so you leave at 6:30, so you're traveling through rush hour to get to the gym, you check in, you go put your bag in the locker room, get changed. What time is it now? Gone 7 o'clock, 7:30 maybe. Now you're in the gym environment, bright artificial light screaming in your eyes, banging music, hyperactivating and hyperstimulating the autonomic nervous system at a time of night where you really want to be calming it down. Then you've got to have a shower, you've got to get changed, and you've got to drive home. So now it's 9 o'clock, 9:30 maybe. So now you're going to eat badly or you're going to cook something better but eat even later. So now you're eating too close to sleep. So all of that stuff has probably negatively impacted your sleep quality. And so that gym habit might be increasing their aerobic capacity and their cardiovascular function and everything else, but it's chipping away at their sleep quality. And so the next day they'll be making poor decisions around food because they haven't had restorative sleep. It just becomes this spiral of doom. Through that, but through a habit that they believe is the habit that they should be forming. So there's, there's like a whole narrative that we need to change how we've been positioning what we recommend, because I was in elite sport and the exercise industry that I was a big part of in the early '90s, they were based on elite sport protocols. So all those workouts were about how to improve your performance, how to improve knock a second off your best time. This is my dog. Also a big part of wellness, having pets. I'm just keen now to help that this communication piece, which is what you're doing amazingly well as well. It's about getting this information out to people so that there's a much clearer understanding.

So this is such an important point and I'd love to dig into it a little bit more because I think the thing that people have their checklist and as long as I pack in everything that I'm supposed to be doing and at least get 6 hours of sleep or whatever that number might be, then I'm doing really well. How would you recommend someone do an assessment of their day and their week to understand if what they're doing is actually more detrimental than good?

Well, I did a habit audit when I did— so in January 2020, this is before the pandemic, I decided I was going to do a year-long experiment on myself. To see what happened. So I canceled my gym membership and I used the money on a gut test and a GlycanAge test. Actually, I did the GlycanAge test at the end and just looked at what time I was getting up, what time I was going outside, getting daylight, what times I was eating, what I was eating, how many different types of plants I was eating. I literally went through the whole day to do like a thorough audit of what I was doing every day and then sat down and said, right, actually, which of these habits need to be adjusted a bit? And pretty much every single habit needs to be adjusted. I mean, but this, bear in mind, I have a lot of knowledge about exercise, but it was, it's not about exercise, it's about the tiny things that you do and that you simple example of this. My dog, who you've just heard, one of the first things in the day is come downstairs, let my dog outside so that he can go outside for a little comfort break. And he's down here now, which one you might hear some sniffing. But what I used to do was open the door and he would go out into the garden, and that obviously wasn't enabling me to get natural daylight onto my retinas to regulate my own circadian system. So all I changed with that habit was instead of opening the door and waiting for him to go out and come back in, is that I opened the door and started going out with him. So it meant that I was then going out at 6 o'clock in the morning instead of going out at 8:30, 9 o'clock when I used to go out to the office or to the train station. And that's a 3-hour difference in daylight exposure just through that one tiny tweak of habit.

And how long would you go outside? I mean, you're talking about a few minutes even.

Yeah, we just go out and potter around a bit, and sometimes we would do a little walk, but not always. It depended on the weather and what I had on in the day. But it's just these small things. I changed the dog walk, so instead of walking along the beach, which is on the flat, I started walking up the cliff and across and down. So I go up a super steep set of steps that, that put me to the point of failure. Like, by the time I'm at the top, I'm— it's glycogen depletion. I can hardly lift my legs, can hardly breathe by the time I get to the top. So that's a really easy way of putting in a high-intensity piece of activity within a dog walk that I do every single day. And I think that this is what I try and really encourage people to do, is to think about what changes you can make to your existing life that automatically embed these kind of things into it, because then there's no effort. Because once you've created those new habits, you never have to think about it. It's just the new normal.

I love that. So what were some of the other learnings and adjustments that you made as well from your daily routines that you saw?

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A big one was the timed eating. That was a monumental shift of coming away from the concept of, yes, I wake up, I have breakfast, and The whole fasting thing, when I was training originally, because obviously we, we did nutrition as part of our whole training, fasting didn't really— back then it wasn't really— I mean, it was a thing, but it wasn't taught as a standard practice. And when I realized, when I looked at the timings of when I was eating, I was never in a fasted state. I wasn't eating a lot and I wasn't hugely overweight, but I had been putting on a pound a year over 10 years, which had put me to the point where I— do I go up a clothing size or do I kind of address that? Because going up clothing size is like the nail in the coffin, right? It's like that's a big disastrous step when you do that. And so when I started looking at it and I changed my eating times, I wasn't even trying to lose weight, but I lost weight. I haven't been this weight since I was in my 20s. And I didn't even try. I lost 14 pounds.

Wow. Without even trying.

And that was—

without even trying.

Intermittent fasting, do you do, and what is your view also? Because for women, those, I think for men it's a lot easier because of the hormone testosterone, 24-hour cycle, whereas for women it can be a bit different. So what is your view and what has worked for you in intermittent fasting?

Yeah, this is another important point. Everyone's different. Right. We're a large number of cells. And although there are similarities between the overall infrastructure of the systems, we are all very individual. Our microbiome is like our fingerprint. It's all unique. So I, so for me, what worked is to Monday to Friday, I was just doing a 16 to 18 hour fast overnight. So I was having a later breakfast, but for other people, that just doesn't work for them and they shift it the other way. And there was an interesting study the other— a couple of weeks ago that showed how if you had plateaued, this was for weight loss, for diabetes control and pre-diabetic candidates, people who had plateaued doing the 16 hours by shifting the 8-hour window later into the day when they pivoted that and had breakfast but stopped eating so that there was a greater gap between the end of your eating window and your sleep period, then there was an even greater benefit to it and for sleep as well. So it's, it is an individual thing and I think it comes down to what realistically can you do based on your routine. And for me, Having a late breakfast is easy. I don't even have to— after a couple of weeks where I thought, oh, I'm going to have no energy, so I'm going to be, I'm going to be useless. No, I'm sharp. Really, cognitive focus is incredible. I have energy. It just works. And I think that plus the fact that I started boosting the diversity of my plant intake and started eating a lot more probiotic foods like the kimchi, sauerkraut, kombuchas, all of that. Really shifted my gut and my gut tests went— was completely transformed. My diversity was 3% when I did it first of all with a— I did Viome. It went from 3% to 80%. Wow. It's a big shift. And part of that was because I had also had antibiotics. So I had a tooth infection that had also— that had wiped it out. And in the F-bomb book, I actually show the chart because I also had a— my 12-year relationship suddenly ended last year, and I had a very traumatic, sad 12 months. And it's— it happens to us all, but it was unexpected. And the impact of that, because the impact of that on sleep, the impact of that on stress because we had to split the house, split the businesses. It was that what fascinated me was how that affected my heart rate variability and my gut health, that chronic stress across. And often we overlook these things. You don't think that these little things are having a biological impact at a cellular level, but they are. And we now know that that's what's driving biological aging, right? It's a big component of it. Because of the gut-brain axis.

I'd love to dig into that a little bit more because yesterday I also had a podcast conversation with Dr. Louise Schwarzwalter, who we were also talking about the importance of addressing and releasing trauma because it stays at a cellular level as well. I know for myself also coming out of a toxic relationship, I think at my lowest point was when it was just all— I was just ignoring it and assuming everything would be fine and it just wasn't. And my body was like, hello, yeah, I've got all these issues to hopefully wake you up as well. But the gut-brain axis. I'd love to dig into that a little bit more. What do you find, or what do you help your patients understand better in this regard, the importance of taking care of their gut?

The way that I've been teaching it is actually going to show you. I'll do the demo.

Hang on. So for those listening, she's going to do a demo for us.

So I'm going to just explain. I now use a guitar to explain the gut-brain axis. Oh, very cool. Because, so the body of the guitar at the bottom end, I describe as the gut and the top at the other end, at the end of the neck is your brain. And then in between, so the neck of the guitar is the vagus nerve and the guitar has 6 strings. So if that's actually out of tune because we hadn't prepared this since I tuned it. But that's the whole point is that what the way that what I do when I'm doing live sessions is that I play the guitar completely in tune. And we talk about these 6 strings, right? As being one of them is movement. One of them is sleep. One of them is mindset. One of them is maintenance of just nutrition. So each string is a pillar of wellness. And if one of those strings is not in tune, the whole guitar is not in tune. When I do this live, I play a chord with the guitar in tune, it sounds beautiful, and then it plays out of tune. And even when you just slightly detune one of those strings, it sounds terrible. And I think that's what we need to remember with the gut-brain axis is that Things that you wouldn't expect to impact your mental health and your gut health do, because every— the type of light that goes in our eyes, the way we breathe, the environments that we're in, every molecule of food that we put in our mouth, touch, temperature, all of these things, sleep quality, how often we stand up, all of these things impact that. And if one of them is not optimized, then it's the weakest link. It can really cause, cause problems. So I try and explain it in that way. And that's why just going to the gym isn't necessarily going to extend your healthy lifespan, because that is just one string in the guitar. That's just one thing. And it could be the case that you're doing way too much exercise. You don't need to do that much exercise. And that we've pushed this message of, oh, do as much as you can, do as much as you can, keep going for as long as possible. But actually, we don't really need to do that much exercise unless you're an athlete. We just need to stand up more. We need to move more. And so spending 2 hours going to the gym where you could have just stopped using the lift at the office and use the stairs all day long and just change that habit is potentially much more— has much more impact in terms of biological aging than stressing going to a gym and doing things like that. So the gut-brain axis is bidirectional. So it's a two-way communication channel. The gut influences cognitive function and mental health. Stress impacts the gut microbiome, definitely. But there are all the different pillars that dictate how both ends of that axis are functioning on a daily basis.

So many interesting points coming out of that, and I love the analogy with the guitar. I think that's such a beautiful way of explaining it.

I call it my gut-brain app. AXE. It's my gut-brain axe.

That's it.

Oh, I love it. You said that if one of the pillars are off and they're not optimized, obviously that will be an out-of-tune guitar, but obviously it would mean that your system is off for the individual. But for my audience listening and wondering, find out what is the optimal place for one person versus somebody else, right? Obviously if you're a performance athlete, it's going to be at one level and the other. So how do you recommend people ascertain which is the right optimal performance level for them for the different pillars?

Yeah, well, I'm a big fan of data, so that, that's why for me it makes much more sense for me to spend my annual budget on tests than a gym membership, because the movement could be done in all manner of different ways, but the tests can only be done with the companies that do the testing. And so spending money on getting that data, whether it's through a sleep tracker or Oura Ring I use, or the blood glucose monitors or the gut testing, the biological age testing, all of that stuff, because every client I work with is different. And it's fascinating seeing how it's almost impossible to predict because genetics are at play as well. When they're doing a biological age test, it's fascinating for me as it is for them, because, then it's like, wow, okay, so that's also HRT at play and they're on hormone replacement therapy. That's having an impact. They have a genetic— their family lived to this age, so there's a genetic component. Or so it's— it isn't a case of, oh, we all go to this exercise class and we all do exactly the same moves and we all get exactly the same effect, or we all go to this restaurant on and we all eat exactly the same meal and we all get exactly the same effects because that is not the way we work. We are all individual. And so the only way to really figure out how to do this for yourself is to get as much data as possible. That's why I'm a big fan of that. Mm-hmm. Superbly insightful, but also it's interesting and it's quite motivating. I've just been traveling and drinking events and conferences and things. And my heart rate variability hit the floor. Horrific. Last night I had 10 hours sleep and it is bounced back up.

Amazing. How do you actually, this is a personal question for me because I, even if I try to get more sleep, so sleep is also something I struggle with generally because of just the amount of hours. But even if I try to get more sleep, it's not always quality sleep, or do you have any hacks around getting better quality sleep if you try to get the full 10 hours? Do you take melatonin, something like that?

No, I, I tend to use music. Mm-hmm. So I have a soundscape that I use. So, so I've kind of created a sleep runway where I do certain things. So I put, there are certain, like I use candles, I use a certain soundscape. That I just, I found different ones that I like. I do some self-hypnosis audio sometimes. And having a shower, like a warm shower. I usually do, I'm a big fan of cold showers. The evening, it's good to do a warm shower because I think that natural body temperature dropping helps push you into that sleep one way because temperature obviously is a big part of sleep as well. So just creating that environment and scent. So I use a lot of different scents and oils and things like that. That says it's a multi-sensory experience. And I've really tried to make my bedroom the sleep room, not the all kinds of stuff going on in their room. It's a— that is the room I go to. My brain associates that with the soundscape, with the smells that I use, with the scented candles, with that. It's almost training is a multi-sensory training room to try and get into deep sleep. And I know that we know that sleep is so important, and I often say to people, because they neglect sleep and it's, oh, I don't need that much sleep, it's, look, we've evolved over millions of years and in a very sophisticated way. There's no way that sleep would have been kept in the blueprint if it wasn't doing something incredible, because we sleep for a third of our life. It's a complete waste of time. We're not productive when we're asleep from a normal daytime productive level where we're in danger when we're asleep. So evolution would have phased out sleep if it wasn't a super tool. I think that we really don't give sleep the attention that it needs.

I love that. A super tool. And I think that's really important as well. And I do do a lot of those tools and with the sensor, the Sense and the hot shower as well, and trying with the light exposure. I think I'm going to do a test with myself and figure out how I can once manage to sleep past 10 hours because I don't know when that's actually going to take place.

Track my sleep as well, right? Yeah. But, but I mean, that was exceptional because I've been traveling and I was jet lagged. And I've come in from LA and it was just like I've had like days of not enough sleep. And so my body just went, my body just went 10 hours. That's not, that's not my normal sleep. I mean, I usually get, I usually do get around 7 hours. Yeah.

And I think 7 to 8 is probably the right range. And it's when you, and this sometimes happens with me getting that under the 7 hours consistently is just not, not good. And I think for decision-making for so many things as well. So it's really that prioritizing it and just making it non-negotiable as well.

Yeah.

I'd love to dig into music and using it as a biohack. But first I just wanna understand where your passion for music stemmed from and what you've been doing. It sounds like you've had a beautiful bouquet of different careers within music in itself.

I, well, I started, I really got into music because my dad, so when I was very young, 7, my dad was very ill and I had to go and live with my grandparents and it was all a bit scary and I didn't really know what was going on. My dad was taken off to hospital and in a completely different city, so I didn't even see him. And suddenly I was living with my grandparents, I was being homeschooled, it was all pretty weird. And my uncle was still living at home at that time, at my grandparents' house, and he had this amazing record collection. He had a guitar in his bedroom, and I just used to kind of sneak in there and look at the records. I wasn't allowed to play them because I wasn't allowed to use the record player in case I scratched them, but I was only allowed to listen to them when he was there. But I used to try and play his oversized guitar, and I just used to find it very soothing. And in a time where it was quite a scary, weird time, that was almost like a security blanket— those, the sounds and music and learning the instruments and things like that. And I really think that had a big impact, that exposure. And then I was in a band, and then I toured America. I set up some businesses using music for elite coaching, which I still do. I also set up a music business doing experiential stuff. So we show brands how to use music in store, in restaurants, in live experience settings, the outdoors, to attract people, to get people to gather. And because we are drawn to sound as humans, the ears lead to the brain. And the really powerful thing about live music in in particular is that we don't just receive music through our ears because it's air molecules basically coming through the air, triggering the mechanisms in our ears, but we also receive it through our skin. So especially in summer festivals and things like that, when you've got a lot of exposed skin because you're in shorts and t-shirt, and the amount of that music that you're absorbing through your body as well as through your ears It's really powerful. And so live music and bringing humans together to make live music, to experience live music, is a part of our DNA. There's not a, there's not a single part of the world that doesn't have music at the core of culture. And it predated language. We were singing and dancing and making music way before we'd invented the fairly sophisticated language things. And the oldest instrument that's been found is a flute made of a bird's bone. That was about 40,000 years old. And that, that's a complicated instrument to make, to figure out how to make a flute. That's advanced. So we would have been doing body percussion way before that, and sounds and notes and making our own types of music and beating sticks and things like that. So it's really powerful and it's overlooked. I do think, and this is why I ended up with the nickname Dr. Rock, because I'm, I'm involved in a lot of government groups and championing music in care and in health and in schools and in communities because it's the music industry positions music as entertainment. And so we all started thinking of it as a product because we paid for it. It's a commercial business, but it's not. Music predates the music industry by a very long way. Music is an essential part of being human. So it's a really underutilized asset, especially for sleep, brain health. Learning a musical instrument is one of the best exercises for maintaining brain plasticity throughout life because it's a novel, complex task. Very difficult, multisensory. And so learning a musical instrument should be something that we're promoting at all ages for brain health, for maintenance of that brain tissue, and to create new neural pathways and have lots of cognitive reserve and all of that. But we tend to only teach instruments at schools. It's a young person's thing, but it's not that— it becomes more important as you get older. To go and learn a musical instrument because that's the time where you really want to be maintaining that, that plasticity.

And with the DJing, was just part of that as well?

Yeah, I love DJing. I've been doing that for a very long time, still, still do that. It's all changed, it's all digital now. So before you had your hands on the vinyl records and you had to be very precise with how you match the beats and everything, whereas now you press a button and it automatically that basically synchronizes the two songs and you just slide the fader across. Yeah, you can do it without the automated bits as well, so there is still skill involved, but it's a different— it's a different— it's just a different thing now, DJing. But it means that everyone can do it as well. That's the beauty of it, is that you can buy a little controller and you— I've got an app on my phone that you can just do whole DJing from a massive catalog of songs.

I'd love I'd love to dig into biohacking and using music to biohack health and understand also the different types of music that is good to use in different situations or for different outcomes.

Yeah. So I've just been at the biohacking conference and I was like, where are all the sessions about music? It's like, this is the ears lead to the brain. It's like one of the most powerful things, sound and music. Very instant way to release dopamine, serotonin, calm the brain, shift to sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance in the nervous system. And if you think about it as a, in a simplistic way, the brain is purely using sound to determine whether we're in danger or not. And so music that's very soothing, if you think how you soothe babies, you don't yell like thrash metal, like shaking them around and yelling and high beats and things like that to try and calm them down. You do it very slowly, very soothing, very soft, slow tones. And so music that tends to be like that, just very soothing, slow, simplistic, tends to mirror that effect. So that is sending a message to the brain that this is a safe, relaxing environment. In contrast, high-powered, very energetic, fast beats, lots of rhythms that could potentially sound— what is it? Is it thunder? Is it thundering hooves? Is it a stampede? Is it— no, it's just rock music. It's just— but the music industry has very effectively harnessed how the brain responds to music. And then just taken that and done it over and over and over and over. So if you're listening to music like that, you're not in danger, then it's very invigorating because you're getting that hit without the threat. And so it has that kind of thrilling effect. It's very invigorating. It's very energizing. So if you're tired and you're flagging and you want to quickly get an energy boost, boost, then just putting your favorite song on and singing for 3 and a half minutes or however long the song is, way more effective than reaching for a cookie, which is going to be like a quick sugar fix and then give you a crash. That's that music in between. And the same with sleep or any time that you're trying to slow down. I've just done some 4:6 ratio soundtracks, some audio tracks where the 4 beats are followed by 6 beats, followed by 4 beats, followed by 6 beats, because normally Popular music is 4 beats, so 4 beats, 4 beats, 4 beats, 4 beats, 4 beats, 4 beats. But I— to extend exhales, so you activate the parasympathetic system and push into that, lowering stress chemicals and everything else. We created these songs so you breathe in for 4 beats and then you breathe out for 6 beats, and then you breathe in for 4 beats and you breathe out for 6 beats, which is kind of like closer to that resonance frequency breathing. Where you're extending the exhales. And that becomes very hypnotic because as well as doing the breathing, you're also getting the audio effect through the ears. So it's like a double whammy. Or if you're listening to normal songs— so I really like Beyoncé, All Night Long— I do a lot of box breathing to that because that's a really great tempo to just breathe in for 4 beats, hold your breath for 4 beats, breathe out for 4 beats, hold your breath for 4 beats, and just keep circling like that through that And that song, it just, it makes me feel really relaxed, that song. And it is a good tempo for doing that kind of box breathing and using it as a metronome.

I love the idea because I do different breathwork exercises, but to couple it with powerful music that obviously matches that synchronicity. What are some other songs that you find really useful for some biohacks that you do?

So I, one of my go-tos for just a bit of a boost is Bee Gees' Staying Alive, because I think it's— yeah, we are trying to stay alive, right? That is, that's the whole point of what we're trying to do, staying alive. But it's also just got such a good groove to it. You can really walk along. If you're walking somewhere and you're listening to it, you can't help but strut to it. It gives you that kind of, yeah, I feel good. And so that's a good one. But the important thing to, to remember is that if you can match the song with your taste preferences, the effects are amplified because you're also triggering the feelings that song gives you. So for me, a child of the '80s, '80s songs are my go-to songs because they're not just the right kind of rhythm to get energized or to relax or whatever, they also bring back those memories, like flooding feelings of, yeah, when I felt I was I was 15 and I could take on the world. And, or an environment that makes you feel energized. So I do— people always say, what's the song? It's your song will be different to my song because we don't— we didn't have the same life. We all have certain songs that are our favorite songs. So I really encourage people to create their own go-to list. I've got certain songs that I go I could just create a Spotify playlist for my sleep songs, my power songs, my confidence songs, my going to a meeting song, my just, you know, relaxing, just different things that you want to achieve and then find the songs that produce that effect. And they do tend to be, and it doesn't mean that classical music, for instance, is the sleep playlist because for me it's chilled Ibiza classics. It's electronica, chilled, calm, ambient sort of electronic music. It's not classical for me, but for someone else it might be classical. But the principles are the same. They're simplistic, calming music that helps your brain know that it's safe.

I'd love to talk about brainwaves and using music to potentially activate different levels of brainwaves and what the outcomes are for that, for people maybe unfamiliar.

Well, the brain, our brainwaves and our breath tend to synchronize to music. And if you also find people in a room and in a live music experience, also their brainwaves and their breath can synchronize. So it's pulsing at the level of music and there's, there are There's lots of different aspects of the research around this, but in a basic way, what— so for sleep, for instance, what you're trying to do is to encourage your brain to slow down brainwaves down to delta wave, slow wave sleep, right? That's the objective, is that you're trying to achieve that. And so any soundscape sleep that's going to help the brain synchronize in that slowing way is going to help that. And but interestingly, it doesn't necessarily work in that way in the other direction. So say you want to— say you want to achieve something, then yes, the opposite. You want to be upright. You don't want to be in alpha waves, delta waves when you're trying to— when you need a kickstart. You want to be out of that. You want to be up, be the gamma. So high, those kind of high-intensity stuff. However, that doesn't necessarily work if you're trying to focus on something that needs a lot of thought. You need a lot of concentrated activity. Then having a song that's got lyrics in it, for instance, is not helping the brain because the brain— that's a human voice. So we need to decode what that human voice is saying in case it's information that is relevant to us. So putting songs with lyrics in when you're trying to concentrate is just putting more information into the brain that has to be decoded and has to be— so the least— and even white noise and things like that. I use a lot of white noise, basic underlying beats when I'm trying to do focus work. Sounds of nature, the sounds of running water, or the sounds of just wind, gentle wind through the leaves, things like that that are very simplistic, that don't have human voices in, tend to be much more effective for high-focus work. If you need to just shut the world out to try and figure out a problem or do a complicated task that needs a lot of creative thought or something like that. So yeah. And on the, just one more thing on that, because when you type focus music into Google or Spotify or anything like that, tons of stuff comes up and it's not necessarily focus music. It's just a playlist that the person has put focus music in the tag, in the meta tags. It's difficult to, to siphon it out, right? Because you, you'll be listening to a playlist assuming that this is helping your brain focus, but it's not. It's just some random person has put up a playlist and has called it focus playlist. So it's good to understand these basic principles to say, well, actually, this is— it's a relaxing— there's a difference between a relaxing soundtrack and a focus soundtrack. Because for me, focus soundtracks should not be busy. They should not have lots of instrumentation. They should not have vocals in there, because every extra layer in that music is more information that the brain has to attend to. And you really want to be putting the minimum distraction in. And what you're really trying to do with that music is block out the outside world.

With your clients, you talked about working with Olympic athletes or professional athletes to executives as well. What are some of the tools and hacks that you have recommended to them and that they're using that they've found the most valuable?

In optimizing their performance? Definitely the fasting. The fasting is a big one. I think that it fascinates me that almost everyone I see is not really aware of these basic principles around timed eating and things like that. And when you and I are in this world, right, we're seeing it, we're surrounded by it. And so you, you assume that the whole world knows about these things, and then you step into every single client office and it's just not common knowledge. So when they start doing that, they really see that it is a significant impact, that kind of thing, on a number of levels from cognitive function, focus, energy, weight management. And because, you know, also that's an easy way to do a calorie deficit is if you're taking out that extra meal that they used to have before going to the office, then they're automatically eating less. Then trying to do daily probiotics. So I'm trying to encourage people to have kombuchas and things like that in the vending machine in work instead of all the high-sugar fizzy drinks that are killing us. That kind of shift around that, the use of music, because a lot of people use music in offices and in work. Book, but they're not really using the right music in the right way, like we've just talked through, because they don't know. And so this is how music can really help. And through breathwork, because that's the beauty of breathwork, is that you can be sitting at your desk and listening to a track and doing some box breathing or doing some breathwork. You don't necessarily need to do the whole mindset element of breathwork. If you're extending your exhales, then the vagus nerve is activating and putting you into parasympathetic mode. So it is something that you can just do as you're doodling along, doing other tasks and stuff like that. So yeah, a lot of the stuff that, that's simple and they've, and it's free. These kind of hacks don't require expensive equipment or memberships or anything like that. It's a simple piece of knowledge that once you've then embedded that into your daily routine as a habit, just becomes the norm.

It's really phenomenal. I'd love to talk about your books, Julia, and the trilogy. Can you share with my audience your vision of the 3 different books and tell us a bit about them?

Yeah, never intended writing a book ever, but my PhD, the thesis was 100,000 words, which is a lot of words. And I got to the end of it and I started working with the NHS. I wrote a music strategy strategy for the NHS and the dementia, the first dementia village in the UK. We looked at how music could be embedded into the healthcare for quality of life there and to boost sleep quality and things like that. And it seemed a waste to have written this whole thesis and not get what I'd learned myself, to not then share that. And I didn't want it to be a it was a very heavy academic piece of work, so it's not going to be of interest to most people. So I rewrote it and called it The Music Diet, and that was the first book. And I knew that it— I knew that wellness was more than just music, so I knew that there just wouldn't be one book. And so I decided to write 3 books. The first was The Music Diet that showed all the different ways from birth to death that music can can positively impact our life and our health. This— the follow-up book to that was Neuron, which documented my 12-month experiment that I did on my own brain and body using the hacks. Music was one of them, but also the natural daylight exposure, the fasting, the breathwork, the timed eating, the showers, the doing different types of walking, all of that kind of thing. That Neuron documented that and became my business which is now that wellness program, which we call the SMART Wellness Program because it's about learning. So there's a big knowledge part of it. It's learn how your body works so that you can better understand how to do these habits and why they work. And the final book that's just come out is called— so Neuron was Neuron: SMART Wellness Made Easy because I tried to take all this science and make it simple and show how I had done it in my own life. It's kind of like a diary, if you like. Is that like a journal? And then the final book that's just come out, F Bomb: Longevity Made Easy, is just takes it a bit further. I've gone back millions of years and there just seem to be lots of words starting with F when I started doing the research. So when I went back to think, right, where did it all go wrong? We started off as foragers and then we learned how to control fire. So then we could cook. So we had a lot of calorific, we had a lot of nutrients, we could extract nutrients in a different way. Our frontal lobe developed, which is where we have brilliant ideas. Now, the prefrontal cortex, home of brilliant ideas. One of those brilliant ideas was we'll become farmers instead of foragers because then we don't have to run around and we can just keep animals to eat them and we can grow our own crops. And that's when things really started to change because there was a less diversity of the crops that we were growing compared to how many plants are available to eat in the wild. And we were able to eat more meat because we didn't have to go running around after it. We could just breed meat and kill it and eat it here in the field without having to go and exert effort. So then with fertilizers so that we could get more yields, then factory foods, and then we were blaming fat for it. Then we said we'd fix it with fitness. Then we said that we'd fix it with pharma. I know that doesn't start with F, but it sounds like an F, so you'll give me that one. All that failed. And so all these Fs were going through that narrative. And then the way out is also full of Fs. So it's fasting, fermented foods, fiber, the whole fun, family, my dog, but these things that frequencies, the whole factors of longevity, all the really interesting stuff that's going on around the Yamanaka factors right now, about reprogramming or partial reprogramming of the cells and things like that to rejuvenate the cells. It's all these Fs kept coming up. So the F-Bomb book took all of that and tried to make it a really easy, super easy read of this is why we got to this mess in the first place. The history, like over millions of years of little things that that changed the way we live, and then the Fs that can get us out of it. And there's also like a habit tracker in the back of that book as well that shows how I try to embed new habits into my daily routine so that they became permanent. So that's it. It's like trying to get the information out in a much more simplistic and accessible way, because I think that there's tons of amazing science out there, but if you want people to change a habit then instantly you need that person to understand why changing that habit is going to have a substantial impact on their quality of life, their healthy lifespan. And so give them— giving them a complicated— telling them all the science isn't really beneficial. And that's why I use the guitar, because people remember that. When I do sessions and I go away, they all remember the guitar. And if I had just if I'd just put up a slide with a complicated image of the lumen and the gut-brain axis, and this is where all the neurons and the neuropods, and this is where this, the gut microbiome, and that diagram would not have been remembered. But me explaining it with the guitar, people remember that and they can more easily associate it with ordinary daily life.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Analogies are so powerful and the simplicity is the beauty of it. Yeah. It was a great example and thank you for sharing that as well. Julie, what excites you most about the future of health and longevity?

I'm really fascinated to see where this cellular reprogramming is going to go. I think that's super interesting and the whole stem cell therapy and the harvesting stem cells and how they can be used moving forward to maintain our body. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening around dementia, and you wouldn't necessarily think there's a link, for instance, with, you know, dental health, for instance, or dental hygiene. The links now between gum health and the importance of maintaining good teeth and maintaining that gum barrier so that bacteria isn't getting into the bloodstream and the realization that all of these things that have been killing us start decades before the symptoms arise.. And so how to maintain and keep that chronic inflammation at bay throughout life through, through habits. And I think that a lot of the tech that's coming out that enable us to test our biological age, to monitor our sleep quality, to more easily understand, oh, I shouldn't be eating this because it whacks my blood glucose and insulin levels out of play. That is just a simple thing that's on your watch. It's— that's going to be a game changer because then we're not all eating blindly with no idea what's going on beneath. We can see exactly, it's, wow, I should not be eating carrots, kale, whatever. And it will become very personalized. And right now we've just launched a 30 Diversity Box in the UK where we're sending people 30 different fruits and vegetables every week to their home, start getting to that 30, eating minimum 30 different plants a week. But what I want to do next is then personalize it to their gut tests. So if they do a test and they say, right now you shouldn't be eating this, whatever, mushrooms, tomatoes, whatever it is, tomatoes, then we can personalize the items that get sent to their home based on what the superfoods, based on the bacteria in their gut. And I think that how personalization personalization of nutrition going forward and personalization of personal routines as opposed to in the '90s and even today where we all go to the same exercise class and we all do exactly the same thing for exactly the same amount of time, exactly the same intensity. We're individuals. And so the future is personalized and tech will, and that will enable us to more easily do that.

I agree. Very exciting. Julia, where can people learn more about what you're up to, be it on social media, websites, where can people find you?

You, and I'll link it in the notes. The, well, the website is neuronwellness.com, and I am on Instagram. I think I'm Dr_Julia_Jones, and on Twitter I am DrRockUK. So we'll link all of them in and everything. I'm on, basically, don't we just say now we're on Google? That's the, that's where we are, right? Because you find everything via that.

That's true.

Julia, do you have a final ask or recommendation or any parting thoughts or message for my audience?

I'd really encourage people to think about how to embed music in their daily life because it is an underutilized asset, really valuable asset, simple to use, and it has multiple effects. So I would definitely encourage people to think about creating their own playlist.

I love it. I'm going to create a few more myself after our conversation today.

Thank you so much.

And to learn a musical instrument. Oh yes, exactly. I'm retraining myself. My piano skills have decreased over the years, so I need to get back up there as well with my kids.

Brilliant.

So wonderful to have you on today. Thank you so much, Julia, for coming.

Thank you. Lovely to be here.

Thanks. Bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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