Your Nervous System Has an Age and You Probably Don't Want to Know It… | Ep. 330

What do you think your nervous system age is relative to your chronological age of 29? With my anxiety levels, probably about 50.

What is a stress threat test and how do you decipher it? He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

I'm Carlos. I'm 29 years old. Wow. Until recently. So is this you driving, or are you just running out in front of cars, or what? What happened? One was a four-wheeler. I crashed pretty nasty. Another one was a bike. I slid on gravel and I hit the pole going like 40, and I cracked— I got a concussion. This is a motorcycle? Yeah. Yeah. Cracked my head. I got 5 accidents. 3 of them were pretty bad. Well, all right. Well, we're glad you're here. So Carlos, let's, let's run through your report. And I'm here looking at your nervous system age. What do you think your nervous system age is relative to your chronological age of 29? With my anxiety levels, probably about 50. About 50. Okay. Well, I have good news for you. It's 28 actually. So, so that's good stuff. So let's look at this here. What we're looking at is we're looking at heart rate variability. So this is really a very good look at heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is not whether your heart rate, you know, goes from 50 to 100 when you're running up the stairs. That's not what heart rate variability is. Heart rate variability is the variation in the distance between this beat compared to that beat. So there's a distance between these two beats, either time or distance, and it should be a little bit different here than it is here. And the more different it is, the more relaxed your nervous system is. So the more parasympathetic, calm, relaxed, zen tone that you have in the nervous system. The more sympathetic nervous system you have, the more everybody's marching in time. The bear's coming through the door, everybody marches in time. When the general leaves, everybody relaxes. It's like, well, we'll beat now, we'll beat now, we'll beat when we want to, right? And so that's relaxation. So when we look at your stress index here, it falls at 94. A normal range would be between 10 and 100. So you're falling within the normal range. We have many clients in here that are much higher than the normal range because they're carrying a lot of stress. You're carrying less stress. We also have people that are down at 30 or 40, which would be even better because they're actually carrying even less stress. And we know that stress is really an accelerant for aging. So the more we can actually be in a relaxed state, not only when we're meditating or relaxing or listening to music or something, but as we go through the entire day, go into that relaxed state. That becomes super, super helpful. So the flip side of that coin, stress, would be the vegetative index. How zen are you? And the heart rate variabilities get plotted here. So you can see the scattergram is like this, but people that are even more zen, the scatter on these distances will be even greater, right? You're at 0.32, which is in the normal range of 0.25 to 0.6. And that's great. We have a lot of people that are lower than that, but we also have people that are higher than that, closer to 60. Okay, so that's what the first page is showing us. The second page is showing us a breakdown here of the power that you have in your vagus nerve, in the nervous system, to control your internal organs, to control stress, if you will. And we know that we can increase power here. You're at 2272. We'd like to see it between 2385 and 4545. So you're a little bit low on vagus nerve tone power, and there's two ways to build that. One is with extended cardio, but builds it, you know, like a marathon runner runs a really slow heart rate 'cause they got a lot of parasympathetic vagal tone, right? Or meditation using a device like BrainTap with the visor and the binaural beats will actually increase this power here. We also have people that come in that are much lower, 200, 400, 600, 800. And then we have people that are at 4,000, 6,000, 8,000, 10,000, 12,000, even 14,000. So it's possible to build massive power inside the nervous system to keep yourself calm. really slows the aging process. And it also works as a base from which you can rejuvenate and regenerate when you do regenerative technologies like peptides or stem cells or things like that. So building this becomes very important. This is a breakdown of your autonomic nervous system balance. So the red would be the sympathetic, the gas pedal. The green would be parasympathetic or zen, and the yellow is a mix. Ideally, this would be a third red, a third green, and a third yellow. So you, you're carrying a little more stress than we would like to see here. And your balance index over here though looks quite good. You're at 135, you're in the normal range. The more blue this is, the better off you are. So that looks quite good. Neurohormonal index, so this is at 76%. This is having to sort of now intuiting, breaking into what are your adrenal glands experiencing, how much stress is chronic stress have you been under, and it's at 76. We have people that come in here at 4, right, 6. We have people at 98 or 100 also. So you're at 76, and this is also improved with meditation, With BrainTap, we see that improve significantly. And then energy resources, this is energy resources to control your nervous system. So on the sympathetic side, you have power. On the parasympathetic side, you have less power. When you build power up here, these shoulders get really broad. It looks like you've almost got a brick wall. So you've got lots of power to help regulate the nervous system. And then your psychoemotional state here is at 73%. So this is basically showing that you're able to regulate your nervous system really quite well. We have people that come in at 2% or 4%. We also have people that are at 99 or 100%. And then this is an EEG breakdown of your waveforms, which really looks quite good. You have good power across the neurons, right? In every, every waveform— delta for sleep, theta for deep meditation, alpha for meditation, beta what we're doing now conversing, and gamma would be a flow state. A little less delta would be ideal. And since you've had a concussion, as you mentioned, this can be a result of that— neuroinflammation, concussion, brain trauma. Things like that. So this is something we could work on a little bit, but overall it looks quite good. When we look at your fractal portrait of biorhythms here, this level of harmonization in your system's at 66%. Again, when you improve vagus nerve tone and increase that parasympathetic nervous system tone, this increases as well. This is showing that your biological age is 1 year younger than your chronological age. So that's great. And then cardiovascular adaptation, 66%, autonomic 71%, neurohormonal 76%, and psychoemotional 73%. So these are the main findings that we would see. And what we find is that cardio exercise, meditation, using the BrainTap, listening to binaural beats, all of those things seem to be helpful. But the BrainTap itself, we see the fastest gains for people, right? This is where you have photobiomodulation going on in your eyes, going through the blood vessels in the ears, as well as binaural beats that actually entrain your brain into whatever waveform you want. You can put yourself in delta to fall asleep, theta for deep meditation, alpha for regular meditation, or you can put yourself in flow state like gamma, then jump on your mountain bike and go for a ride and you'll be in a flow state. It's very, very cool. So really, I explain to people that all of life comes down to one thing, and it's actually optimizing the nervous system. What we think, what we believe is true, the stories we tell about ourselves, what we think is possible, how we move through space, our balance, how we control our, regulate our emotions, our autonomic nervous system. Pretty much, that's pretty much the deal. If we control all that, then we have a beautiful life, right? So really, this is actually a good report that you have some room to make it a great report. So any questions about that? No. This is how old my nervous system is? Yeah. This is how your nervous system's aging. Yeah. Nice. Better than you thought. So what are some other things that people do to reduce their nervous system? You said meditate? Yeah. It's really perception, right? When you think about stress, stress is really a function of not feeling safe. If you break it down, right? If you're worried about something, if you're anxious about something, if something's keeping you up at night, essentially it's about not feeling safe. So then the question becomes, well, how do I give myself safety, right? In any circumstance. And you have to understand that nothing external to you can ever make you feel truly safe, right? No amount of money, no family, no position, no business success, no education, none of that. All of that can be kind of erased, right? History shows us all that can be taken away. And very quickly, right? So if that's the case, then how do we actually have ultimate safety? Well, actually, for me, that's a psycho-spiritual question, right? How do we feel connected? How do we feel connected to source? How do we feel good in our own skin? How do we understand who we are, why we're here? What's the meaning of all this, right? And once you dial into that and then you actually learn how to meditate and regulate your nervous system, all of a sudden it's like, oh, I can go through the day and these are things that are happening, that everything is an opportunity. There are no longer any problems in my life. Everything is actually an opportunity. But when you start to look at it through a different lens, it's perception that really changes this. But having the power and the nervous system to back that up, it's like saying, well, I'm gonna go through life and believe that I'm a high jumper. Well, if you don't practice high jumping, you're not gonna be able to jump, right? And so you've gotta do the practice to back up the affirmation, right? And when you combine the power of the nervous system with the affirmation of the nervous system, now all of a sudden it's like, oh, I can be calm. Something can come. They can come in and say, look, something just happened. It's like, oh, well, that's an opportunity. Let's look at it through that lens. Not that's a crisis, that's a problem. It's not an, oh my goodness, right? And so when you start to actually work from that space, you find that you bring more creativity, more creative thought, better problem solving. You actually calm the people around you simultaneously. You bring an energy that actually brings more relief, calm, and solution-solving thinking than if you come in and you're excited and everything is a hack. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It just gets everybody revved up. So this is about controlling the nervous system. Yeah. And this is a good metric of how much power is in there, how it's impacting you. And then if you do the work both cognitively, how do I perceive the world? How am I— who am I? Why am I here? And you do the work of let me train the autonomic nervous system through BrainTap cardio exercise. Now you're putting together the pieces of the puzzle that enable you to actually develop that 300-year-old mind. And that's magic. When you have a 300-year-old mind, oh my gosh, everything else falls into place. That's pretty spectacular. It's one of the massive things that's missed in aging. Everybody focuses on the body when it's really the nervous system that's leading the charge when it comes to being youthful, right? How you think. I'm 27, right? You're 29. I'm younger than you. So, you know, my, my heart goes out to you, but we'll go mountain biking. I'll prove it to you. So, so if, if you're listening to this and you're intrigued by this and you'd like to try it, you really have two options here. The first option is to do your best at home. Learn to meditate, Transcendental Meditation, maybe start to listen to some binaural beats and do it in theta, which is a very deep meditative state. You can try that. You can start doing cardio exercise maybe 5 days a week to really, and for 30, 45, maybe an hour once or twice a week to really start to build that vagus nerve power. So you can do that at home with, you know, just almost nothing. On the other hand, if you really want to understand this and you really want to see what's going on, if you come to work with us, we can actually break down your genetics, how you're built, how you're built to handle stress. We can see things in your diet or whatever else, your gut biome, that may be pushing you towards anxiety and towards stress that you'd have no clue about otherwise. We can see if you're a good candidate for caffeine, whether— how you're affected by alcohol. We can see all the substrate that basically determines what we're seeing here on the paper. And then in addition to that, we can set you up with training tools like BrainTap and other things that we can do here that actually we can reprogram the brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation and relieve anxiety that way and stress that way. So there many tools we have here in addition to just meditation that can be very, very effective. Doing what we just did here with Carlos, this is the data. This is really the data that you need to be able to, to understand where you are so that you actually have a plan to fix what's going on for you. And it's, it's personalized. Yes, there are some general things that are for everyone, but when you get down into some of the other pieces, the genetics and the diet and the gut biome, those are very individual. And when you optimize those, you get a durable result, right? And that's what you're going for is something that's gonna be a durable result, not just a quick fix, but how do I get something that's gonna be long-lasting so I can build on top of that for my own health and longevity? That's what we're going for. So 26, so add 8 years, 34, right? So resilience is cut. 42, resilience is cut. 50, resilience is cut. 58, 60, 66, 74. So you like technically age every 8 years? Yeah. So you're, you're aging. But, but it's going down like this in an accelerating way. And so one of the things we wanna do here is to build cellular resilience, build cellular strength. And so super important. So to be able to have a look at, okay, well, where are things and how much energy are your cells able to hold, which we don't get from this test, but we get from the InBody. They don't even put that on their machines anymore. They wanna know if we wanted to buy a new InBody. We said, well, does it have hold? No, we took it off. It was like, well, we're fine with the one we have. 'cause it's such a nice little metric, right? And we combine all these things together. It's important to understand that each test is a lens. There's no one test that gives you all the answers, right? Each test is a lens, and it's a little bit like a fly with a compound eye, right? They have many, many lenses, and they look through all those lenses and create reality. Medicine's like that. Medical testing's like that. We have to look through multiple lenses at each thing and have it come into focus. So you could get a, you know, coronary calcium score, and it has no calcium. You can't say, well, I'm fine. You can say I have no calcium. You still could have soft plaque, right, which would be even more dangerous than calcium. So you've got to do anatomic testing, you've got to do physiologic testing, you've got to do biometric testing, you've got to do, you know, metabolomic and genetic testing to really understand where you are. When you actually look through all the lenses and then piece it together, you can actually have the whole system come into focus. It's like, oh, okay, well, now I see where I am, now I know what to do. That's the beauty of deconstruction. Is actually bringing things into focus from looking through it at multiple lenses. So that's the key. Wow. I think you just reached flow state. Oh yeah. That was really— I try to live in a flow state. Yeah. So with the InBody, you said that most of them aren't measuring the cellular age, or what are they not measuring? The cellular age is not— it's, it's more of cellular robustness, but not an actual age. Okay. And InBody is measuring that? InBody is measuring that. You could, sort of give it an age, but we don't give it an age. So it's really, we talk about all these ages, but really it's about also looking at the resilience of the tissue, the cell, the neurons, the, you know, the energy that's generated in a neuron when it's, when it fires, that kind of thing. Right. So we measure all these different things. What is that called? Cellular strength, power? Well, it depends on what we're measuring. Right. So when we look at whole body phasing, we're looking at the cell's ability to hold a charge. If you're doing an EEG on the brain, you're looking at the brain, the neuron's ability to generate an impulse. right? So you're measuring two different things. It's not holding each other. What's the, what's the size, the amplitude of the impulse, right? So you're looking at that. So there's lots of, you know, with the muscle, it's how much power can you generate with a hand grip, you know, these kinds of things. So lots of ways to get at different things. Yeah. Biology into balance. That's the key. It's an economy of balance. And where people go wrong is they think, well, if I have more of this, if I'm more keto, more muscle, more mTOR activation, whatever, then, then that'll be good. Then I'll be healthy. That'll be really the way to go. It's not. It's what we find is that biology, when it's pushed into a corner, it pushes back. It wants to come into a harmonious rhythmic cycling, right? You're awake, you're asleep, you're building, you're deconstructing inside the body, right? You're tearing things down with autophagy and recycling and fasting and things like that, right? So it's really this, it's learning to surf these waves, right? It's learning to sort of play this symphony, if you will, of the rhythms of the body. That's the key thing. So balance is really key. It's like riding a mountain bike. It's not how fast can you go. That's not what mountain biking's about. It's how much of a flow state can you be in to manage all the vicissitudes, right? Or all the different obstacles that come in your way in a flowy way. That's, that's balance, right? That's what the body's about too. It's an ecosystem. Another way to think of it is that the body's like a rainforest, right? I don't know if you've— have you been in a rainforest before? Uh, the cafe? Okay. The cafe. Okay. Well, not quite the same when you're in an actual rainforest though. What impressed me about being in a rainforest was that it was life on top of life, on top of life, on top of life, on top of life. It was like, oh my gosh, life here is so dense. All the trees are covered in moss. All the moss is covered in mushrooms. All the mushrooms are covered in this. All of this is covered with that. It's like, wow. It's just life on top of life. And it's a very complex ecosystem. And the body is like that. It's a very complex ecosystem. And when you go out and you kill off the mushrooms or you say, well, we're just, we're gonna, we're gonna make everything keto. Well, you don't, you don't realize, but you're disrupting the balance in the ecosystem. And the ecosystem wants to be in balance. And aging is a natural falling out of balance. And the idea with longevity medicine is to bring it back into balance and youthful balance. So you have all the, you know, faculties that you want to have, right? But it's not about, let's, let's push really hard here. We're gonna just do stem cells till we're blue in the face. It's not about that. That. So people get that wrong all the time. Comes to the gut biome, there are more bacteria than there are cells in our body. And so we're really living in symbiosis with these bacteria. And there are some viruses and some fungi and things like that. And those bacteria actually play a big role in our health. They activate the immune system. They actually keep the gut healthy. They decrease cancer risk if you have the right bacteria. They decrease brain fog. They improve neurotransmitter function throughout the body. So they're really our friends. But if we eat the wrong things and we don't feed feed the rainforest with the right foods, you know, we get these malignant bacteria in there that then make us crave sugar or decrease our risk for cancer or break down the integrity of the gut lining. We get leaky gut, and now we have stuff coming into the bloodstream that shouldn't get in there, and that causes brain fog because there's a blood-brain barrier. When the gut's leaky, the brain— blood-brain barrier is leaky. And so all these things tie together. So it becomes really important to understand this ecosystem idea. We think it's all about us, right? But it's really, it's really about balance and about coming into balance with the ecosystem that lives inside of us and who we are. So it's a cool thing really when you start to look at it through that lens. It's fun. Food sensitivity tests are interesting because you can test for an antibody that you may have, let's say an antibody that would react with spinach, but whether or not that's actually reacting with spinach or not when you eat spinach is another thing to think about, right? So not every antibody test really tells you what's going on. We tend to use a test called MRT, which looks at whether white cells actually are releasing cytokines in response to spinach, in which case it's a true reaction. When your body sees spinach, it's gonna react. So we like that test better. It's not perfect either, right? So, and food sensitivities, you know, they basically move around over time. And if you eat the same thing all the time, you're apt to actually sensitize your yourself to that. So most people eat about 16 foods when they sit down and count them. It's about 16, 18 foods maybe. But really what you want to do is eat 45 foods or 50 foods, and you want to rotate all the time, right? It's not, not the same. People say, well, I have a salad for lunch every day, it's the same salad. Well, that's— they think the salad's healthy. Well, maybe, right? So you want to really rotate stuff. Because what I do when I go to Whole Foods is I try to buy different things every time I go in. Through the produce section. It's like, well, let me, let me expose myself to this, let me expose myself to that. And it ends up, you end up feeling better and healthier with variety. Your body loves variety. Your body loves nutrient-dense foods and a wide variety of them. That's what we've discovered, right? So, so the food sensitivity test could be biased based off what you eat the most often? They, they, they certainly can. That's right. Yeah, if you're eating spinach all the time, likely you'll develop a food sensitivity to it.

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