Headstrong Q&A with Dr. Mark Atkinson

Foreign.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Is the air you're breathing making you sick? Just because you don't see mold doesn't mean it isn't there. My friend Jason Earle has been on a mission for over two decades to help people understand the history of hidden role of indoor air in their health. He's one of the world's leading experts on mold and indoor air quality and he created the Got Mold Test Kit to make professional grade air testing simple and accessible. It uses cutting edge air sampling tech that top inspectors trust and it's engineered for you at a fraction of the cost. It takes just minutes to get samples using the patented Biovac air sampling pump. Then you send them prepaid to one of the most prestigious microbiology labs in the world. No guesswork, no paperwork and no hidden fees. You get fast results, intuitive reports and great support. And since you keep the pump, you can retest anytime for less. It even comes with a lifetime warranty. Mold may be invisible, but its impact isn't. This kit helps you understand your environment so you can take action for your health. Go to gotmold.com and use code DAVE10 to save 10% and see what's in your air. Because the best biohackers don't guess, they test your phone screen is aging your skin and wrecking your sleep at the same time. Artificial blue light goes from your phone screen straight into your eyes and deep into your skin. That light messes with your melatonin levels, interrupts your deep sleep and speeds up skin aging by breaking down collagen. The bodyguard's Red Light Converter fixes this at the source. It's a first of its kind screen protector with real tech that converts blue light into beneficial red light before it hits your face. It turns your scrolling into a skincare routine. It supports healthier skin, reduced eye strain, improved sleep quality and fewer screen related headaches. Third party testing showed a 50% plus increase in red light exposure within the optimal range of 620-760 70nm and this comes with zero compromise on your screen. The Red Light Converter preserves your screen's true colors and full touch sensitivity. Beyond its wellness benefits, the Red Light converter provides ultra thin edge to edge protection for your device and bodyguard stands by their quality. Enjoy peace of mind with lifetime replacements, ensuring your red light converter continues to protect and support your biology for the long haul. Visit bodyguards.com and use code Dave for 25% off. That's bodyguardswithaz.com for 25% off.

Today's cool fact of the day is about mitochondria. Many people think that we get about 50% of our genetics from our mothers and 50% from our fathers. But you're actually more related to your mom than to your dad. And that's because when you're conceived, the egg and sperm each had mitochondria. But mitochondria are the part of the cell which takes the nutrients and breaks them down and creates energy rich molecules for your cells. They're basically the batteries or the power plants for your cells. And your mitochondria come exclusively from your mom. And if your mitochondria stop working, even for just about six seconds, you die. Because those mitochondria are that active, they're constantly recycling this energy for you. It's kind of like what happens when your iPhone is down at 1% charge. As soon as you lose that last percent, you're gone.

What if there was something you could add to your water to make you perform better, have more energy and protect your cells from damage? Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe and the only one that can get deep inside your cells, mitochondria, and even your DNA. It fuels energy production, crushes oxidative stress, and supports sharper brain function. Hydrogen's a gas, so you can't take it as a pill. So you either have to breathe it in or infuse fuse it into your water. But your tap bottled or filtered water doesn't have it. That's why I use the Echo Flask. Echo Flask is a hydrogen generator that uses advanced electrolysis and a proprietary proton exchange membrane to infuse your water with pure hydrogen. No chemicals, no ph change, just therapeutic science backed hydrogen. I've noticed more energy, faster recovery, less inflammation, and mental clarity that lasts all day. Go to echoater.com dave and use code DAVE.10 for 10% off your Echo flask. You'll feel the difference in days.

And today's guest is someone that you know and love. If you're a longtime listener, it is none other than Dr. Mark, the medical director for Bulletproof and the head of our coaching program. All right, Mark, how are we doing this? Are you reading the questions? Am I reading the questions? How do we decide to do that this time?

Yeah, I'll read the questions if you want. Should we do that?

All right, yeah. Okay. Why don't you read the questions and I'll answer, then you'll answer and we'll just. We'll do what we always do. People who listen to us regularly know these are kind of special shows where you learn a lot about a lot of stuff. All right, let's roll.

Okay, so actually, before we do our first question, Dave, I want to talk a little bit about mitochondria, because something that hardly anyone realizes is that at a biological level, we are fundamentally mitochondria.

You and I are in agreement there.

It sounds like a crazy thing, right? It's like people, well, aren't we human? Don't we have like 60 trillion human cells? Well, actually, we have over a quadrillion mitochondria within those cells. And so one of the themes that we're going to bring into this question and answer today is to keep relating it back to mitochondria. Because what we're starting to realize is that if you really care about your performance and if you care about your energy, you care about your health, then you need to know about mitochondria.

In fact, if you think about it, we have this great story. And if you fast forward, fast reverse, whatever you call that back to high school biology, like, oh, yeah, many hundreds of millions or billions of years ago, we harnessed some little bacteria which became our mitochondria that actually were little reddish colored bacteria at one point in evolution. And we use them for energy. Now, the flip side of that would be many millions of years ago, mitochondria saw ourselves and were like, oh, petri dishes, let's colonize those and take them over. And to this day, when people read the Bulletproof diet, or they hear me talking about the three behaviors that everyone has, the Labrador brain behaviors. These are bacteria behaviors. This is the operating system for a bacteria to be alive. And it's easy. It's eat everything so you don't starve, run away from, or kill everything so it doesn't eat you and so you can reproduce. And the third one is, make sure you have sex with everything else so that you can reproduce the species. That's all you do to become a biofilm. That's how stuff floating in the ocean or the stuff growing, frankly in the bottom of your trash can, it doesn't matter. That's what bacteria do to stay alive, and that's what plants do. That's what everything alive does. So that's what you do too. All of the behaviors that you don't like come from one of those three things. Find something you've done that you're ashamed of that didn't come from your mitochondria. It always comes from those Core urges. And our job as humans is to be able to be aware of those urges and to have control of them. And in some of the more advanced work that we do, both in the coaching program, in the new personal development series that we're running, as well as even at 40 years, as in, it's like, how do you reprogram the core behaviors that come from mitochondria so that they're less reactive? That's why Headstrong is such an important book. And that's why in every question, we'll tie this right back to mitochondria. So thanks for. Thanks for queuing it up the right way, because I was blown away. I always knew mitochondria mattered. I thought they were power plants. I didn't know they were in charge.

Yeah. And it's quite humbling. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, when you realize kind of so much of our unconscious behavior and the way we feel, the way we show up in life, the way we relate, the things we think are influenced by these primitive organs situated in our cell. So it's time we started paying a little bit more respect to mitochondria.

Yeah. And just understanding they're about 10% of your body weight, which is not that much, but they make 600 pounds of ATP every day from 50 grams of raw material. They just keep recycling it. So it's like you have your iPhone and its battery is fundamental. It doesn't work without the battery. Well, this is our battery and it's. It's looking all around like, what can I do now? Even though you don't know it's doing that. So it's fascinating.

Yeah, really fascinating. I learned a lot from reading Head Strong as well. So it's a significant contribution to the field of performance and health. So thank you for doing that.

Well, thanks for your kind comments. And I mentioned iPhones since we're getting going and people like to hear the latest biohacks. Before we get into this first question, I'm going to show off the back of my iPhone because it's cool. So if you're watching on YouTube, you go to bulletproof.com YouTube. We'll show you the channel. But check this thing out. It's a sensor from a company called Kardia and it gets a hospital grade EKG on the iPhone anytime you want. And the first one's looked at by a doctor, but after that it actually uses artificial intelligence to tell you if your EKG or your heart, basically your heart's beating. Well, normally it's for people who have heart attacks and are at risk of of things like that. I don't have any risk like that. I just like cool gadgets that monitor things. Plus my iPhone looks kind of like a spaceship now, so it's kind of cool. But you literally put two fingers on the back of it, takes 30 seconds and then it will take your EKG, send it up to the cloud. In 2003, I designed the entire backend infrastructure for the first stick on heart rate monitor to solve exactly this problem so that we could tell people, you're about to have a heart attack. Go to the hospital now, because you have 48 hours before you're probably going to die. And well, now there's a sensor. I'm not sure how much it costs because I got it at the Peter Diamandis conference, but it's not terribly expensive. And this is the kind of stuff that's completely cool for biohacking because before this was hidden data. And by the way, guess what's powering your heart? Of course, it's mitochondria. You have a mitochondrial problem. Your heart isn't going to be able to beat and you actually will have a heart attack if you don't have enough mitochondrial energy in the heart. That's where electricity comes from. This is measuring electrical output from mitochondria that is used by the heart. So it's fascinating, but even when we talk about iPhones, there's a mitochondrial connection.

Okay, okay, let's start with our first question. So this is from Rodney, age 42, from the United States of America. Dear Dave and Dr. Mark, over the last few years I've had an increasingly hard time with keeping focused and clear headed. I get brain fog and my short term memory isn't great. Caffeine helps, but it makes me anxious and jittery. What else can I do to help? So you know, when I read that question, what comes up immediately is inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction. Now we need to explain what I mean by all of those. Now if we actually had Rodney with us, we'd be asking me a whole bunch of questions. I want to know, listen, what's happened to your energy levels? Do you get forgetfulness? Do you get cravings? What's changed in your environment over the last couple of years? What are you surrounded by? A really simple, systematic way to take a look at any health issue or any performance issue is to take a look at the environment around you and the way it's influencing you. Then your internal environment, your biology and psychology, you just systematically go around it and so For Rodney, I suspect what's going to be going on is that he's got inflammation. I'd love to know how his gut health is. Are you getting any bloating, any flatulence, any kind of wind, that kind of stuff? Now, I've got a whole bunch of ideas as to how to go with this, but I just want to get your initial thoughts on this, Dave, from your perspective.

I would also look at his age because one of the variables there is time. And 42 is an interesting period. Most people under age. Well, not Most. Well, slightly most. 52% of people under age 40 have normal mitochondrial function. 48% of people have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction, according to research in heads junk. So he just crossed over 40. And pretty much everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction. We call it aging. And one of the five theories of aging is that your mitochondrial function goes down. And when you talk about inflammation, you always get inflammation when your mitochondria start leaking. The idea is a tight running motor doesn't leak oil. All of the pressure from an explosion in a motor goes into powering the car forward, and then you get leaky valve seals, and eventually some of the pressure goes into the engine. It doesn't go into the tires. And an old car just doesn't drive like a new car. It doesn't have the same power curve. Every time your mitochondria leak these high energy electrons, instead of putting them into the system, it creates inflammation directly. It's called reactive oxygen species, or free radicals. So since the brain has the highest density of mitochondria, along with the eyes, which are an extension of the brain, the brain itself, and the heart, that's where the most energy per cell lives. When someone says, I get brain fog and short term memory problems like that, I'm like, what are the mitochondria in your brain doing? And by extension, since mitochondria all talk to each other, what are the mitochondria in the rest of your body doing? And the answer is you just crossed over from probably functioning mitochondria into the realm of my mitochondria have started leaking. You're getting older. So what do we do to reverse that?

Yeah. So what we need to do to anyone who's listening to this, what I'm going to share with you are the basic principles for tackling kind of any issue like this. So, you know, apply it to your own life as well. And we want to basically start working out where Rodney's kryptonite is. So kryptonite Is essentially anything that undermines your energy, your performance, the functioning of your mitochondria, the functioning of your brain. And we have to. We have to take on the role of a detective to do that, and we've got to be systematic about it, and so we can look to the environment surrounding ourselves. So what kind of light are we being exposed to? Is it fluorescent light? Is it LED light? Are we getting enough sunlight? You know, the air around us, you know, is it full of negative ions? Is there air pollution in there? Is the mold in there? You know, what kind of people am I surrounded by? Am I near to nature? You know, what kind of water am I drinking? Is it chemically contaminated? You know, what food am I bringing in? The one thing I see often with people with brain fog, and many of my patients have brain fog issues. It correlates really closely to food sensitivities. I know that if I personally eat gluten or dairy or refined sugar, I'll have brain fog within a couple of hours, period. Some people have lectin sensitivity. So lectins are one of those. There you go. I mean, what happens when you have lectins, right? So lectins found in beans and kind of legumes and grains and nuts and seeds, it creates this inflammation inside of your body. Selectins are just proteins that bind to carbohydrates, the immune defense system for plants, but we can't digest them. And when you're sensitive, and it creates this inflammatory cascade in the body. And so you can be going along, feeling fine, you have some lectins, and then before you know it, you can't think properly. You're making bad decisions, and you become a pretty miserable person to be around. And then you're raging and you're moody and all this kind of stuff. And like an hour or two previously, you're absolutely fine.

It's interesting, too, and that sensitivity is genetic. It comes down to the way your immune system is put together. It's not about allergy at all. This is about those plants developed a system to keep animals from eating them. And that system works against you. But your spouse or the guy sitting across from you may be perfectly fine eating that plant. So it's not that the plant is good or bad. Instead, it's kryptonite for you. And most people eat the high lectin foods every single day, so your normal state is not the same. And there's at least three studies that I cited in Head Strong that talk about how lectins directly poison mitochondria if you're sensitive to that kind of lectin. So the dysfunction of mitochondria happens because you ate bell peppers or you ate potatoes and you're sensitive to the lectin in that food, even though they're not bad foods for some people. So for Rodney here, I would really want him to look at what are you doing in the meals for 24 to 48 hours before you get the worst brain fog and short term memory problems. And I also think that we would want to address blood flow in the brain. He's got to be getting what I recommend in Head Strong and what the data shows. If you move for 20 minutes a day and moving go for just a normal walk. You don't have to take the stairs every day. That might be good. You're not going to be a better person if you take the stairs. I use the bulletproof vibe usually that's my primary form of movement. Especially when I've got two feet of snow on the ground like I do right now. It's not that convenient to go for a walk in it. The other thing that can make a really big difference is in the last three years most people have added LED lights to their house and the brightness of TVs and the brightness of phones and all, it's gone crazy. I remember I got my first Mac the first time I got a job at a venture capitalist firm. This was almost 10 years ago and I wanted to work at a VC since I was 12 years old. I was like a venture capitalist. How fun. You get to see all these companies and you get to help these people who are doing all these things. I bought a new Mac and I would sit in this fluorescent lit room staring at a super bright white screen. And by 11 in the morning I felt like such a zombie and I couldn't figure it out. And I'd go outside for a little while and I'd let my eyes relax and I'd look at the sun and I'd go back in. It was draining to me. And what I figured out after actually a couple years of this was that the new bright LED illumination in laptop screens that they just added to the max, it was affecting my brain because the eyes have mitochondria that get stressed. A new study just found a 23% reduction in mitochondrial function in the macula after exposure to these bright white screens. That's a lot like you're going to get macular degeneration if you stare at a fully illuminated any kind of modern thing. Even the TV I have a new Sony big screen TV and it's so bright that the kids and Dr. Lana and I, we look at that, especially in the evening and it knocks us out and we actually have to turn the brightness down and change the color temperature. And it's because the mitochondria talk to each other. And we think we know how they talk to each other. We know they do talk. We don't know if it's chemical or. My guess is that they talk by shining photons at each other. These are little light molecules, they're called biophotons. We know mitochondria are very light sensitive and we know they make light. So the idea that they make it and then they hear it is not that uncommon. We also know that without complete darkness, that doesn't work. So for Rodney, at night when you go to sleep, you need to cover every LED in your bedroom and you need to duct tape your curtains to the window or better yet, get a proper roll down shade and curtains that cover it so that when you open your eyes at night there is no street light coming in because we've changed the spectrum of light. We have like the corn syrup of lighting in street lights and your neighbor's lights and outdoor lights. And if you don't get absolute darkness, you are going to get brain fog and you're going to get short term memory problems over time. So just controlling that less sugar and more ketones I think could make a huge difference. And there's nothing wrong with looking at the writing I've done about nootropics and smart drugs. Because for me, for 20 years I've been taking smart drugs that support my brain. Aniracetam is my favorite one, which actually lets you get your short term memory. They call it memory IO, the ability to get things in and out of memory. I don't forget words ever. Whereas before, even though I was a very successful executive in Silicon Valley, there were times when I just couldn't remember words and it would drive me nuts. At this point in my life, even though I have a very intense schedule, I'm back to back. I'm a New York Times best selling author, I run a Webby award winning radio show, I'm CEO of a rapidly growing venture backed company and I'm a dad who spends a lot of time with his kids. Like I'm all in. I don't forget words. They come effortlessly. And if I do forget even one word in a day, it's a red flag. And I say, what did I just do? What changed because that is not a normal occurrence, whereas before, dozens of times a day, it was a normal occurrence. So for you, that's a sign, and you picked it up, Rodney, that something isn't right. You've got to figure out what do you do. So when you have less of that and more of that, that's your radar map to tell you when you're doing better or doing worse.

Yeah, I just want to zoom out there. So for anyone listening to this, just bear this in mind as well, is that if you forget something, if you feel tired or you get moody, or you inexplicably get angry, if you can't find the right word, if you can't hold your focus and get easily distracted, that is a symptom of an underlying disordered biology and psychology and possible environment as well. And so what happens in society is we just normalize it. We just say, okay, this is just me. It just kind of. Kind of creeps on, right? And we're surrounded by others who are distracted and tired as well. So one thing you mentioned in your book is normal is your nemesis. And that's a phrase that kind of stuck with me. So maybe we can just talk a bit about that, because there's going to be a lot of people listening to this who have been tolerating essentially intolerable symptoms for a long time, thinking nothing of it, and yet actually, by making some adjustments to their internal environment, their external environment, not only can they resolve the symptoms, but they can actually feel really good.

You can feel really good. The problem is you don't know what really good feels like. Unless you're hospitalized or just, like, disabled. You probably think you're doing all right. And this is our own ability to deceive ourselves. I didn't know you were supposed to be able to walk without pain, because I was born duck footed, believe it or not. And I kind of learned to straighten that out. I had arthritis diagnosed in my knees when I was 14 years old. I have a screw in my right knee. And when I was about 20ish, somewhere in there, I finally got orthotics that worked. And I walked across campus at University of California, Santa Barbara, and I'm like, oh, my God. I just walked across campus without pain. I had no idea that was possible. I played soccer at a high level for 13 years. And I'm like, it's just supposed to hurt. So you just power through it. So for me, normal was. This is just a state. Like, it's not even a big deal, but it was completely abnormal. So what our goal is as biohackers is do not be normal. Like average is not what you want to be. You want to be way above average. You want to be abnormal. And what that means is, is there something you don't like, even if you consider it to be normal? And in Rodney's case, he figured out, I don't like it that I'm forgetting words, I don't like it that I'm getting tired. So that's becoming normal for you. And now you're going to reverse that and you're going to make it abnormal again.

Yeah, that's it. So just on the medical front, for people out there with brain fog as well, medications are a very common cause of, of brain fog. If you're taking beta blockers, antidepressants, sleeping tablets, you know, if you're on blood pressure meds, if you're on any medications and you're experiencing any symptoms, look at these side effects of the medications and start there. Because I've worked with quite a few people in the past who have tried everything to improve their brain fog and attention. It turns out it was a side effect of the medication. So that's really important. And if you're having a lot of alcohol as well, you're taking illicit drugs, all that can affect your focus and attention. I always ask about gut health because if you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, so you got kind of bad bacteria in the small intestine, you got candida overgrowth, you got any chronic infection, like any chronic viruses, you got dental infections, gingivitis, you know, inflammation of the gums, all of that generates inflammation, which shuts down mitochondrial energy production as well. So there's a lot to think about, but basically you go through it systematically. So you start with your external environment, then you look at your internal environment, and in head strong Dave, you offer this kind of four step process, which I really liked. The number one is you stop doing the stuff that makes you weak. It's easier that way, right? Because we always say is start with your kryptonite, because kryptonite trumps everything. You can be trying to do all the right things, take all the right supplements and stuff. But you start with your kryptonite, that's where your grade is, gain and reward is. And then you then talk about adding in energy and maybe we can explain this a little bit more. Increasing efficiency of energy production and supply and then strengthening mitochondria. And that's a really nice framework for working with someone like Rodney. So I Think we've touched on the kind of kryptonite stuff, but what can we be doing about supporting energy and mitochondrial function?

We talked about moving already, which is one of the things that causes you to grow new mitochondria. And there's sort of two types of exercise. One of them isn't really exercise, it's just moving and that's going for a walk. It doesn't do anything in terms of building muscle. It doesn't really create what we call a hormetic change. So once a week you need to lift heavy stuff and you need to do it really intensely for 10 or 15 minutes. It's not that much work. It's very efficient in terms of time. And then you want to move every day. That's going to help. And then in the bulletproof diet and certainly in head strong with the eating recommendations, getting enough polyphenols into your body really matters. And polyphenols are plant based compounds that interact with light. They're antioxidants and they're from famous sources, things like blueberries, any brightly colored vegetable, blue, purple, red, yellow, things like that. The number one source of polyphenols in the American diet is coffee. In the diet in the UK it's probably still coffee, but it may be tea. Tea is a much weaker source, but it's a different kind of polyphenol. So what I started doing after I became more aware of this is my goal is to get 2 grams of polyphenols a day. If you eat a normal high vegetable diet, which is, which actually isn't that normal, you're getting about a gram a day. So I supplement my polyphenols and I also drink two cups of bulletproof, bulletproof coffee with the mold free beans because turns out these mold toxins I've been talking about, they're mitotoxins, they harm your mitochondrial function via several different pathways. So you don't want to do that. But I also do three cups of bulletproof decaf without the butter and the brain octane because I have those with meals. And the studies on coffee show that people who drink five cups a day, decaf or not, have lower all cause mortality. And I believe the likely reason for that is these polyphenols. So I've increased my consumption of coffee or tea. Your job if you use either one of those is don't put milk in your coffee or your tea. And the reason is that milk sticks to the polyphenols so you can't use them. It takes away the benefits and it's interesting, people in the UK drink so much tea, they should have a reduction in stomach cancer, but they don't get a reduction in stomach cancer because they have the habit of putting milk in their tea. So if you change that habit, you could put butter in your tea the way Tibetans do, or you could just drink it black and you'll actually get more benefits from it that way. Your goal is a big plate of vegetables, moderate amount of fruit because fructose is bad for your mitochondria too. But some fruit's okay and it does have polyphenols in it. Fruit for dessert is a better plan. And when you put fat in your vegetables, say grass fed butter, avocados, coconut oil, olive oil, things like that, the fat allows your body to absorb the polyphenols even better. So you end up with a much more powerful, a more powerful you. To be perfectly honest, when you do this and this over time will help with brain fog.

That's great. And as you're saying that, Dave, other things are coming to mind now. And Rodney, if you're listening to this, just check in to see if this is true for you. And same for anyone who's got brain fog. Focus issues. I want to know what's happening stress wise. Are you in a lot of stress? If you are, what you can be doing to attend to that and obviously reduce and manage better. I want to know what your hormones are doing as well. And so you're kind of age 42, I want to know what your DHEA, your testosterone is. For my female clients, I'm always going to be interested in what's happening with progesterone, estrogen, pregnenolone. So thyroid hormone is massive. If you have a low functioning thyroid and your thyroid levels are low, thyroid drives the ATP production process. It is essential, it's a, it's a powerful regulator of mitochondrial function. So if you've got a low functioning thyroid and millions of Americans have, not only you're going to feel tired and depressed, not only are you going to put weight on, but you're going to have a hell of a problem trying to keep your focus and you're going to experience brain fog. So all of these things we have to kind of consider. That's why ideally you work alongside a functional medicine trained practitioner who can do the testing for you. If you do the basics and you don't get a substantial improvement and you feel you're doing all the right things, then you got to work with a health professional who can do the Testing as well.

There's also something called milli brain fog, which stands for mother in law induced. That's not really a medical term, but bottom line is if you have family stress, whether it's your mother in law or not, or if it's any other sort of emotional stress, mitochondria pick up on emotional stress. So if you have a vague sense that you're going to die or that the world's a bad, nasty place, the mitochondria actually stop doing their repair cycles and they start doing how do I have enough energy to run away and kill things right now? And if you do that persistently and consistently over time you do start to lose function in those things. So if you have a lot of emotional stress in your life, that works. And that actually leads us nicely to the question from Belinda from Australia, who's 34 and she's asking us, she says, dave and Mark, I've been anxious all my life. My mom is the same. I had some CBT a few years ago which helped a little, but I'm keen to be rid of this once and for all. Please help. What do you think there, Dr. Mark? I've got some ideas there, but yeah.

Loads of ideas and most of my clinical experience is working with people with anxiety and depression. So a lot of suggestions here. The first thing I want to invite for you, Belinda, is to, is to reframe this a little bit. So I know you want, I completely get, you want to be free from it and rid of it, but that kind of going to war stance, actually what it does in the longer term, it creates a lot more stress and tension because you're at war with your experience. And so what I want to do is reframe it to not trying to get rid of this, but trying to identify what's gone awry in my biology and psychology and environment. To create this experience, we shift our energy from going from I'm at war with this to actually we're going to detect a pattern. Now, for someone who has long standing anxiety, normally we think generalized anxiety disorder and that's disabling. It reduces quality of life. One thing we have to check in, it's probably not relevant, is in some people with anxiety, it could be post traumatic stress disorder. So you don't give any information that suggests that is the case for you. But just for anyone listening to this, if your anxiety started after traumatic event, you get flashbacks, you feel an edge all the time, you overact emotionally, you avoid certain situations, then you think ptsd, you got to Go down the work from the psychotherapist route using EMDR brain.

Spotting, and remember that's going to feel normal. If you've had PTSD for most of your life, you're not going to see those responses, but the people around you will see them. And I say this from personal experience. I had ptsd. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. I had birth related ptsd. I had no clue that I had it or that it had any bearing on my behaviors or my personality. But I had very low level beliefs, subconscious beliefs that there's always something trying to kill me because I was born into a world where my biology, my nervous system was like, wow, there is something choking you. I guess this isn't a very nice place. And if you carry that with you, it'll be very hard to see for you, but easy for the people around you who care about you to see.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm also going to assume there's no medical cause as well. So your thyroid's been checked, there's no hypothyroidism, you're not in any medication. So assuming all of that, then what can you do? Well, we start with your biology. Now we know that if someone is hypoglycemic, they will become anxious. So we need to work on your diet. So maybe, Dave, you can speak to that in a minute. But there's some very basic things you can do. You can take supplements like L Theanine. It increases the brain neurotransmitter gaba, which relaxes the brain, puts us into alpha state. Add to that things like passion flower lemon balm, those kind of, kind of calming herbs, and add in magnesium. And so what you do is you're starting to take control of your hyper aroused sympathetic nervous system. You're starting to calm it down. Dave, in the book you talk about, and I was trying this out the other night, the box breath, as a way of actually calming the nervous system. So I don't know if you want to kind of mention a bit more about that and what the idea behind it.

In fact, when people order headstrong@orderheadstrong.com, there's a few videos where I teach breathing and I just recorded the video two days ago on how to do box breath, but we'll offer it here really quick. And box breath is something that's used by military special forces in order to calm the nervous system. So when Belinda's feeling a specific anxiety, like, wow, I'm really feeling it right now you stop, take a deep breath, and you breathe in for five seconds through the nose, hold your breath for five seconds, breathe out slowly for five seconds, and then hold or just kind of stop at the bottom and leave the lungs empty for five seconds. And for most people, that five seconds of empty lungs is going to trigger anxiety at first. And that's the body going, I don't have air. I'm going to die. And when you just sit with that, and then you take another slow breath and just keep repeating this five seconds on each side of the box, what happens is the body learns it's not going to die, and it becomes calm, and it's a really powerful way to turn off the state. And there was a clue here, Mark, from Belinda, where she says she's anxious her whole life and her mom is the same. And what that means is that you learned to be anxious from your parents. We hand this off to our kids without meaning to. So you're a little kid learning how to respond to the world. And when you see anxiety in an adult as their response to the world, you will feel that and you'll learn to model it. And there's some interesting stuff that happens, too, and I don't write about it in this book, but it's called Meta anxiety. And when you're anxious about being anxious, every time you feel anxious, like, oh, no, I'm feeling anxious again, I'm going to die. And it actually doubles down, it's like an exponential worsening of this. We also see this in people with sleep deprivation. So if you're not going to get a good night's sleep, you could wake up and tell yourself, oh, God, I didn't sleep well last night. I'm going to die. It's going to be a terrible day. And then your stress over not having enough sleep is worse than the biological effects of just not sleeping. So when you realize and you shift your thinking, this is very different than cognitive behavioral therapy, which is what worked a little bit for her. In cognitive behavioral therapy, you learn to sort of feel the emotion and then think your way out of it and sort of talk to yourself about that. The problem with that is that thinking your way out of your emotions is biologically intensive. It uses a lot of electrons made by mitochondria. So you take x percent of your waking focused effort, and you start using that to put systems in place to manage the anxiety. And what Mark and I are talking about here, whenever possible, is to address core causes of the anxiety and to reprogram that with Things like EMDR or brain spotting or neurofeedback or heart rate variability training, which it's only 100 bucks for a heart rate variability device. In Australian bucks, that may be like 107 or something, but still it's relatively cheap. I like the heartmath device called inner balance. And all you do, 20 minutes a day, you breathe and make the light turn green. And when you make the light turn green, you just owned your anxiety response. Instead of thinking your way outside of it, you felt your way out of it. And feelings happen before thoughts. So when you can change the way you feel about these things, you'll find that it frees things up. And by the way, you're not alone, Belinda. I had anxiety like that. A lot of the very successful execs I've worked with, same thing. I'm like, you have to do heart rate variability breathing, and it frees up huge amounts of energy because all the cycles you went into doing to try and counter your emotions with rationality, if the emotions just calm down, all that extra energy that you were using to try and control yourself is now free for you to do whatever you want. And that's that changing the environment inside yourself. And of course, there's a mitochondrial angle to this too. When you're less anxious, your mitochondria go into repair mode more than they go into fight or flight mode.

Yeah. I'm also going to give you a couple of tools you can use as well. So, Dave, you mentioned about almost one level of the futility, eventually of just focusing on the cognitive level to deal with something that is fundamentally experienced in the body and is rooted in the emotions. And so here's a process I teach to all my patients. It's really simple. What you do is that anytime you're stressed or caught up anxiety, you take your attention off the story. There's a narrative that accompanies it. You turn your attention inside your body and you locate where the stuck emotion is, or the tension or heaviness inside your body will be in your solar plexus, your chest, or in your throat the majority of the time. Then here's what you do. You silently say to it, I'm pleased you're here. And you breathe. And what happens, you shift from fighting this emotion, going to your head to escape it, to turning towards it and opening up to it and facing it. And then this is the real key bit. You then get a sense of where that trapped energy, because that's just what anxiety is. It's just trapped energy. You Get a sense of where it wants to exit your body because all energy wants to flow through your body, doesn't want to come out your mouth, down your arms or legs, out of your head. And all you do is you just patiently stay with it, get a sense of where it wants to exit. And you can be blown away because what's going to happen is it's going to start moving and it'll probably move up and out your mouth. And what happens is you start allowing this energy to pour out of you. And then before you know, as the energy pours out, the anxiety comes out. That trapped energy no longer fuels the overthinking that perpetuates the anxieties. You've gone to some of the root source. Now here's another tool as well. It's called tension releasing exercise. We have built into our physiology a innate process for shaking off stress and trauma. It's called neurogenic tremoring. Now if you see a wild animal that has escaped being attacked, what will happen automatically is it will naturally and involuntarily start shaking. And then about a minute later, it will continue its life as though nothing happened. It basically shakes it off. We all have that within us now. This process, tension releasing exercise, you can look up that on the Internet. There's loads of videos on it.

I'll shoot a video about that. It's a good idea.

Yeah, it would be, I think that would be a really great service. And, and it teaches you how to activate this natural tremoring. And I teach a little bit to my clients, a version of it. And it just discharges all of this energy, allowing your nervous system to calm itself down. Because right now your nervous system is on high alert. And so everything was suggesting here, calming the biology, restoring mitochondrial function, providing relaxing minerals and herbs, discharging the trapped energy, coming out of unhelpful story. All of that will move you in the right direction. But here's the key. Sometimes when we feel so anxious it feels too much to do, we get overwhelmed. So start with one or two things first. Take it one day at a time. Chart your progress in terms of your mood, your energy, your focus, and what people think about you and what you'll. And you'll find. You'll start heading in the right direction and you'll feel empowered because you're going to come to realize like, wow, I can massively influence the way I feel according to how I work with my biology and my psychology, I'm in charge.

It's a powerful thing. And I believe the first Time I came across this neurogenic tremoring thing was in the book called On Combat or On Kick Killing, which is a very precise look at first responders, SWAT teams, firemen, people in the military, looking at what happens measurably in the nervous system when people are in these extreme situations. And those books have changed the lives of literally tens of thousands of first responders because they map out what happens. And there are strange things. Someone wet themselves in fear. That's actually a biological response. And soldiers, before they go in, if they don't pee before combat, there's a good chance it'll happen. And it happens for biological reasons. And one of the things that the author of that book, whose name I believe is it GROSSMAN, Is that 99% remember that I talked about not forgetting things. But remembering the names of authors of books isn't one of my strong spots. I believe it's like Lt. Col. Grossman, if I remember right. Anyhow, On Combat and On Killing are the names of those books. And he writes about how wild animals do this and how when members of the military go into a really high stress situation, that afterwards they have to go exercise or just the shaking thing can work, but sometimes they need to get on a treadmill for a little while just to dump all the adrenal hormones and to just allow their body to calm down. And that if they don't do that, they're stuck in these extreme situations. The kind of anxiety that Belinda is feeling is probably not that extreme and probably isn't going to require a workout. Just that shaking it off thing can be a really powerful releasing technique.

Great. Well, we hope that helps you, Belinda, and anyone else who also experiences anxiety. A lot of people experience anxiety, but there's so much you can do.

Well, Dr. Mark, I think we answered some really good questions. We covered a ton of things both from mitochondria all the way to how do you reprogram what's going on in your head? Which way will have an effect on the stress levels of mitochondria? Let's end the show here. And for people listening, if you haven't had a chance to pre order the book Headstrong, you can pick it up online, you can go to your favorite bookseller, and if you get it before April 4, you get access to a bunch of bonuses, including a really valuable coupon on the bulletproof store, which almost pays for the book in and of itself. So I'd invite you to check it out if this show has been helpful for you and also if you leave a five star rating, I'd really appreciate it. It just takes about maybe 10 seconds to go to itunes where you may already be listening to this, give us a thumbs up and that helps other people find it. Already 1,500 people have given Bulletproof Radio a thumbs up. We've won a Webby Award and have somewhere around 50 million downloads. This is an amazing thing for me, just because it's a sign to me that the show is doing what it's meant to do, which is to help people and to do good. It's consumed more than 100 lifetimes of human life if you just look at the number of hours of people listening to the show, which means I hope that it's really doing good for you, because if not, then I'm kind of a mass murderer and that would be bad. So if you like it, tell a friend, leave a good rating and pick up a copy of Headstrong.

Thank you, thank you.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosis in treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider, carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effect effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.

Here.