Forest Bathing, Sleep Hacking, Cell Phones & Water: The Underground Guide To Lowering Cortisol When Nothing Else Seems To Be Working.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, the NK killer cells and these anti cancer proteins, they were increased for more than seven days after time spent in a forest. This big stressor that is EMF and magnetic field specifically is just a huge stressor that's causing people to get sick. If you're going to go to a party, you could take a couple hundred milligrams of Phinibit as opposed to just getting trashed on alcohol. I was out in the forest all day and my recovery was great. My stress levels were low and every time I Dr. Back into the city after a work day I felt my stress come back on. You can use a vaporizer or you can just simply smoke a pipe. I don't know, you may even be able to roll like a joint of an herbal smoking blend.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And if there is one renegade, rogue pesky little hormone molecule that I have had to deal with over and over again in my life and that a lot of my clients and the athletes who I work with have also had to deal with, and that you've also probably had to deal with at some point or another. It is cortisol and it can be not only intimidating but also kind of mysterious to figure out what it is that could keep your cortisol levels elevated, how it is that you could mitigate stress when it seems like you're doing everything that there is to do, you're doing everything right, but your cortisol doesn't seem to go down. This is a topic that's not only near and dear to my heart because I spend so much time around like type A hard charging people and I kind of fall into that category myself sometimes. But it's also near and dear to my heart because literally this past week and I'm working on a blog post about this right now for BenGreenfieldFitness.com, i had a lot of my blood markers retested and I am pretty close to perfect if I don't say so myself on my bloods, except as has been shown in the past and other blood tests that I've done, my cortisol just stays up no matter what well, my guest today is a real expert when it comes to stress and nutritional therapy for things like cortisol. He's not only written a book on deep sleep called REM rehab, he also has an entire program that I just went through, and it's fantastic on stress. And that program is, it's called I've got the full title of it here in front of me that I'll give to you before I give him his official welcome here. But the name of the book is called stress. Hack your stress, calm your system, and take charge of your life. So my guest name is Evan Brand. I first met Evan down at a Paleo FX event in Austin, Texas, where he lives now, where he moved to and works. Going to talk a little bit about what happened when he moved to Austin and how that may have been a bad thing potentially. And he is a nutritional therapist. He is also a brand new featured coach at Greenfield Fitness Systems, where you're going to be able to work with Evan on things like stress and sleep and lifestyle. And you can also access everything that we talk about today@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Evan that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ev and you're going to want to remember that URL, because we are going to take the deep dive here into cortisol and stress management and all the little underground techniques that Evan has discovered to lower cortisol and stress. So, Evan, thanks for coming on, man.

Hey, Ben, I appreciate it, man. That was an awesome introduction. And yes, stress is brutal, and I pretty much destroyed myself with it. And so I think the best teachers are the ones that struggle first and then come up with the solution.

I know, it's kind of funny. It's like the people out there who have gone through things themselves and messed themselves up are often the very people that you want to be working with. And it's kind of ironic because you'd think that, well, you'd want to kind of work with somebody who seems to have everything figured out and has completely eliminated stress, or better yet, has figured out how to hack life so they never get stressed. But I think it's better to work with someone who's had to take a serious amount of time in the trenches and really fight this issue themselves. I know that both you and I have been there, and, you know, that might be a good place to jump right in here. Evan, is. You have an interesting story about what happened when you moved to Austin, Texas, and the kind of cortisol bomb that exploded in your body during that time.

Yeah. And I wasn't really aware that anything was happening until I kept stepping on the scale and the weight kept going down. I was probably close to 170 pounds when I first moved to Austin July 2013, and my weight just slowly started sliding down. And for some people, that may sound fun, but for me, it wasn't because I wasn't trying to lose weight. And I just. I was still lifting weights, but maybe not as much. Maybe I wasn't eating as much. I just kind of brushed it off and thought, oh, well, you know, the stress of moving and all that, it's just kind of. Oh, it's whatever. And then I kept dropping more and more pounds, and then I ended up close to 140 pounds. So you're talking 20 or 25 pounds dropped and, you know, less than two years. And if that's not intentional, that's a. That's a lot of weight.

You know, a lot of people say that, you know, and you hear this, I guess, more from women that they're concerned that cortisol might be causing bloating and weight gain. Do you find or have you discovered in research or anything like that that one common cause of stress and excess cortisol is actually that type of weight loss that you experienced?

Yeah, I mean, you see both sides. For me, what I figured out, I haven't actually had blood work to verify this, but what I'm assuming that's happened now that I've talked with some other people on this, is that my cortisol just went out of control in relationship to dhea. So I'm sure you've talked about dhea, but sort of thethe antithesis of cortisol. And this guy, Dr. Justin, he's one of the experts inside of the program, and he says that.

Doctor, is that. Is that Justin Marchegiani?

Yes, it is.

Yeah. He's been on our show before talking about injuries, not cortisol, but.

Oh, sweet.

Yeah. What was it that he said?

Yeah, well, he just said that you want to have a ratio of 6 to 1 for cortisol to DHEA. And like I said, I haven't measured mine with a blood test, but I would assume that mine was way above 6 to 1. And so I really think that's what started to eat my results. But, yeah, to answer your question, definitely both sides of the picture. I've seen both sides of the picture for women struggling with weight loss. They can't. They can't lose the weight or they're losing too much weight. I mean, it's just, it depends on the person.

Yeah, we actually had someone on the podcast last week, an Australian physician who does salivary testing for cortisol and dhea and he didn't actually mention the exact ratios, but that's interesting to know that that's what you found is 6 to 1 is what you should be at for DHEA to cortisol to be at that ideal anabolic catabolic balance.

Right, right. Anything over that and you're headed into catabolic territory. So I'm gonna guess mine was, you know, 10, 15, 20, 20 to 1, who knows?

Did you get any type of blood cortisol measurements taken at that time?

No, I haven't. I haven't had any blood work done since I moved here. I probably should have.

Yeah, so. So you were under a great deal of stress. Were you quantifying that in any way or was it all just kind of like the way that you looked, felt and performed and what the scale was saying?

Definitely the second one. I mean, so I got engaged too, right before I moved down here. And so the stress of that, of course, eustress for anybody. Eustress is stress too. Thethe body kinda registers that. The same way you're still gonna secrete hormones and things like that and sort of burn through your reserves with a eustress. So I got engaged, moved down here, got the new job, was still doing the podcast full time, working full time on it, ended up getting married, had to drive back to Kentucky 15 hours. So I mean, it was just a whirlwind of things that were going on, but it just started to take the toll, man, and I felt it. I couldn't focus. Brain fog was there. My sleep, my mind was racing. I was waking up in the middle of the night with heart palpitations, all of these things, and I just let it get out of control and that's my fault, you know, so that's kind of why I had to focus on how to fix it, because it sucked.

Now I had forgotten that you worked at onnit, because I know a lot of our listeners because ONNIT has been a sponsor of this podcast in the past and I've been on, for example, Aubrey Marcus, who's the CEO of onnit, I've been on his Warrior Poet podcast in the past. What do you do at onnit?

Well, I don't work there anymore, but what I did do was just work for Aubrey. I was basically a one man research and development team. So he knew about my previous history and Just love for herbs and supplements, supplements and vitamins. And he knew that I had aa pretty scientific background, just loving to dig into research studies. And so when I first moved down there, I was just helping fulfill orders. And then he eventually pulled me aside and was like, hey, man, you know, I got an opportunity for you. Here's what it is. And I said, absolutely, I wouldi would love to do it. So I just kinda worked behind the scenes to make sure things like Alpha Brain and the Shroom tech immune to make sure the studies were there and to make sure that if we're sending people to PubMed studies, that it's actually human studies, that it's actually the dosage that we use for a particular ingredient. And then I also formulated a couple substances behind the scenes that I don't know if they're gonna come out or not. I'd be happy toto see what happens in the next year or so. But I did create some different formulations for products thatthat may hit the shelves. You never know.

Nice. Put on your apron and your welding mask and just got to work welding together herbs pretty much in the Onnit labs. We'll link to Onnit in the show notes, by the way, they have some really interesting supplements and formulations. I primarily use their fitness gear, like their sandbags and their kettlebells and stuff like that, just because by the time I discovered Onnit, I kind of already had my own supplement regimen just about dialed in. But they've got some pretty cool formulations, and that's kind of related to what I wanted to ask you because. I know. And by the way, if you're listening in right now, this podcast is not all about just, like, stuff you can go buy and pills you can swallow to lower cortisol. There are in fact, a lot of other things that Evan talks about in the stress book and also that we're going to discuss on this podcast that go above and beyond that for cortisol. And, Evan, I'm curious, and this is obviously going to segue a little bit, but can you delve into some of the big tactics that you discovered to lower cortisol and stress as you started down this road? Because I've heard you talk about some of them, and they're fascinating.

Yeah, well, so the first one for me, which this is, this is kind of a controversial one, but, you know, you're the perfect guy to talk to about this is just dealing with emf. So on my podcast, I've had a guy named a few Guys, actually. But of course, Jack Cruz has been on there. But more interesting, there's a guy named Dr. Samuel Milham, and he wrote the book Dirty Electricity. Now, he's a medical doctor who, he's in his 80s now, but he wrote this book called Dirty the Diseases of Modern Civilization. And he talked all about how. How this big stressor that is EMF and magnetic field specifically is just a huge stressor that's causing people to get sick. And so I have a whole section where basically you can look at the sum of stress. And there's a map from the World Health Organization, and it shows Alzheimer's. And I'm gonna get back to how this relates in a second. But the World Health Organization has this map, and across the map you're gonna see darker sections, and the darker the section, the more rates of Alzheimer's there is on the planet. And of course, in the developed countries where all the technology is Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada, and some of Europe, it's the darkest. So, of course there's gonna be many things that are gonna play into Alzheimer's. A poor diet, chronic stress, things like that. But something that seems interesting to me is that these are all the places that have cell phone towers. These are all the places that have electricity. And. And so there's a couple research papers that I linked to where melatonin is decreased from emf. And so.

Melatonin. Yeah, I saw those research, those studies. You referenced them in your book. Yeah, because I wanted to actually make sure that this wasn't just kind of a smoking gun type of hypothesis. But it turns out that this stuff has actually been studied. EMF and melatonin particularly.

Right? Yeah. And I had to do that for my own sake, just because it's such a touchy subject for people. But I guess just to get to the actionable thing is basically you have to start mitigating EMF if you haven't focused on itif you haven't focused on it yet. So, I mean, if you just wanna turn off your wifi at night, you know, that's a good first start. But I've gone as far as even on it. You know, I talked to Aubrey about it and I said, hey, man, you know, we need to put some dirty electricity filters in this place. And so I basically went around with what's called a tri field meter and measured the magnetic fields. And you do this first to make sure there's nothing crazy. But if there's a wiring issue, you're gonna find a biga big field but if you go near a fuse box, you're going to put off tons of milligoth there. You don't want to be sleeping near a fuse box as much as possible. You don't want any wiring issues.

So anyway, one of the things that I did in my house that I lived in prior to this one was I actually put a timer on the WI fi. I bought it for like, I think it was like 15 bucks. On Amazon you can get one of these little timers that is an electrical outlet timer and it will disable whatever you have plugged into that outlet at say 10pm and then automatically re enable it at whatever time you specify, like say 6:00am And I actually had my router plugged into that and so it would automatically turn off when I needed it to turn off. And now what I do in my bedroom, I don't know if you and I have talked about this, Evan, is the one thing that I used to always have plugged in my bedroom, even though I had everything else unplugged, was my cell phone. Because I like to have it in like airplane mode, playing some nice soothing white noise or sometimes I'll do like forest sounds or rain sounds and stuff like that while I sleep. But it's still plugged in to the outlet next to my bed. So I bought one of these phone recharger boxes and I just recharge that box during the day and then plug my phone into that during the night. So now there's nothing plugged in in the bedroom.

So are you saying is that like an external battery pack?

Yeah, it's one of those little external battery packs. Yeah. And that produces way less EMF than having something plugged in plugged into the wall. So.

Yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, I have one of those too, and they're super helpful. But I know I kind ofi kind of jumped around on that topic. But basically what I'm trying to make, I'm trying to make the statement that EMF is one of those things that we're still kinda waiting for the long term evidence to come in. I mean, we've already seen that it's decreasing melatonin. Of course, melatonin's not just a sleep hormone. It fights cancer in many different ways, which tons of people are talking about that. But that's sort of one of the biggest steps that I've taken. Just because even if a lot of your listeners, they're already gonna be pretty advanced in terms of reversing their insulin resistance with diet and things like that. But EMF is kind of the missing picture. And so at the warehouse at Onnit, there's a cell phone tower right there at the base of the tower. And for some reason I was the only one. I guess I didn't do a full survey, but my brain fog always came on as soon as I got to work. And the second I left, it got better. And I have to attribute it to that cell phone tower. I mean, it was right there at the base and I mean, there was 20, 30 different little power systems hooked up to it. So I mean, I don't know how much it was pumping out, but it couldn't be good for you.

I grew up under high voltage power lines. Me and my brothers used to be able to chase each other around the house and when we'd touch each other, we could shock each other. That was the environment I grew up in. From the time I was 8 until I was about 16 years old was directly underneath these high, high voltage power lines. Looking back now, I, I wonder how much I screwed myself up by growing up in that environment, but it's pretty scary stuff.

Yeah, well, it's definitely, it's definitely stronger for a younger skull, you know, because your skull's not going to be as developed. And especially I've seen a couple, I didn't put them in the book, but I've seen a couple. I don't know if they were MRIs or something, but it was showing, you know, like a younger kid putting up a cell phone. And it penetrated much deeper than someone who had a full, aged, hardened, and, you know, developed skull.

Yeah, thinner skulls and more rapidly dividing neuronal cells. That's actually why I used to think it would be really cool to bring my kids all over the world when they were young. And I brought them to like Chile and Thailand and flew them all over the US and now I travel really minimally with my kids, even in terms of like airline radiation. And you know, we drive like we go see the great Northwest, you know, the area around Seattle and Portland and all the cool things that there are to see. You know, Montana, the area that's around us that we can drive to. But I only fly with them about once a year now just because, you know, and until they're completely developed, I'll continue to make that a strategy just because what radiation can do to kids.

Yeah, I think it's a good idea.

So you also, you talk and this fascinates me. This is one of the biggest things you do that fascinates me. And something I've tried to start implementing more Shinrin yoku. Can you explain what that is? Is it shinrin or shirin?

I call it Shinrin yoku. It seems like that's what it is. But yeah, so that's just a little, a cool little word that stands for forest bathing or the Japanese just. It's kind of translated into taking in the atmosphere of the forest. And I really had to put this in there because I used to work in Kentucky at a place called the Parklands. It's a 4,000 acre park that's still under construction. And my job was essentially to maintain and maintenance hiking trails. And so I was out in the forest all day and my stress response was incredible. My recovery was great, my stress levels were low. And every time I drove back into the city after a work day, I felt my stress come back on. So I knew there was something to it. But I hadn't seen any research until I started researching for this book. And so basically Japanese researchers have used this as sort of a therapy. I mean it literally is a therapy. It's not just something like in the United States where we just go out to the park because it's fun. You know, they actually use this in clinical settings. And so there was one study that I put in here where the researchers take salivary cortisol measures. They looked at heart rate variability, which is obviously this is a good sign of your parasympic, parasympathetic nervous system if it's engaged. And so they, so they took one group and put them in the forest and then another group and put them in the city and they made them each take a walk. And not surprisingly, you had significantly lower salivary cortisol in the forest group. You had increase in heart rate variability, blood pressure was lower, pulse rate was lower. But also even more important than that, the NK killer cells and these anti cancer proteins, they were increased for more than seven days after time spent in a forest. So I mean, if you go now.

Was that compared to the group that spent the time in the city or was that using these people as like their, their own relative control groups? Meaning? You know, I guess what I'm asking here is could there have been confounding variables in the cities like electromagnetic pollution or exposure to immune system assailants or something like that? That simply made the forest a safer place to be, whether or not there were trees or fresh air there? Or was it something about like seeing the color green in the actual forest that was making this difference?

Yeah, you make a Good point. And it's sort of a combination of both because there's another study that kind of goes beyond that where I'm talking about these little, these little, I think they're called, it's kind of hard to pronounce. It's phytoncides, but basically it's like an airborne plant chemical. And so that's kinda what you're picking up. You're not just picking up thethe sounds andand thethe looks of the trees and things like that. But I mean, you're picking up these little airborne things. Of course, negative ions, you're gonna be picking up on those too. And so even where they took some guys and they put them inside of a hotel room, they used cypress oil and put it in a humidifier. Now, I don't know why they said humidifier. I don't know if that means that they're using a cold air diffuser like what I recommend or not, but they used humidifier. So I don't know exactly what that means, but. But anyway, soso they took a couple different groups of guys here and they used cypress oil and they just sniffed it. And that was still enough to boost their natural killer cells and lower their adrenaline and noradrenaline. So, I mean, even if these guys are in a hotel room sniffing oils or you're in the forest, no matter how you're gonna get the forest, if it's in a little bottle or if it's the real thing, there's benefits both ways.

Yeah, I see this. And by the way, for anybody, this is fascinating. Everybody wants to see this study. It was a 2009 study in the International Journal of Immunopathology Pharmacology. Effective phytoncide from trees on human natural killer cell function. Amazing. Wow, that's really interesting. So there was this increase in killer cells, but they also tested salivary cortisol.

Yeah. Which iswhich is great. Cause that's sort of kinda what you wanted to focus on. And I wasn't surprised to see it go lower. I mean, I felt like my muscle, my muscle gains, they were much easier when I was in the forest 40 hours a week. And when I was in an office all day, it was so hard to put on weight. Man, I could eat a pound of bison a day and two pounds of broccoli and even some white rice to try to add in some more carbs and things like that. And it wasit was nearly impossible. And it's still been impossible for the lasti mean, I'm still here in Austin now. It's still been tough to, to get my strength back.

Yeah. Now, for people who may not have access to a forest, what about plants? I asked this question because my wife, I asked her if she could do an article for our inner circle on improving the oxygen availability and fresh air in households. And the inspiration for this came from a spa that we visited when we were in Israel, where they had all these different plants around the spa. And they purportedly said that would increase oxygen and improve your oxygenation and decrease free radicals while you were there. And we came home and my wife did some research and found that NASA has published all these studies on a variety. There's like 12 different plants that directly increase the amount of oxygen that is available to you in the air and decrease pollution. And she actually, I tried to avoid looking at the dollar signs on the bill, but she went out shopping and came back with all these different plants and just filled our house. She found as many plants as she could from this NASA study and put them all over our house. And I'm curious if that could potentially also be having an effect not just on oxygen, but on cortisol. Have you seen anything that looks into what happens if you're unable to get into the forest, but you kind of bring the forest to you doctor?

Well, yeah, I mean, that hotel study says it right there. I mean, the guys were using cypress oil, so of course this is an essential oil, so it's gonna be stronger than plants. It's gonna be, you know, an extract, of course, but I would assume you'd have the same thing. But I haven't seen any specific thing that says having plants inside is gonna lower cortisol. I haven't seen that directly, but I mean, man, it' sit' sits. It's probably no question. I have a bamboo palm myself. I have a regular bamboo here. I also have a passion flower vine that I'm trying to grow. I don't know if it's gonna flower out, but I kinda wanted to let it flower out and try to make my own tinctures. But it hasn't flowered yet. Probably not enough sunshine. But yeah, I mean, people could get the peace lily too. We had a huge one of those at the office and I loved it. And it pulls out this little white flower. It's kind of beautiful and it's got like a little comb on the inside of the flower. It's real pretty. But yeah, I mean, there's tons of, of tons of plants that people can have. And I definitely recommend that as long, you know, in a HEPA air filter, just trying to make your indoor air quality clean. Because I mean, that's, that's an invisible stressor. You know, there's the visible stressor of traffic and pollution, but there's the invisible ones inside your home too. So.

Interesting. So by the way, I'll, I'll put a link for those of you who want in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Evan I'll put a link to this study on the, the cypress oil and the natural killer cells that Evan talked about and also linked to this NASA clean air project study. So in addition to some of those steps, as well as making sure to take care of the air in your home, and that's a great point, Evan is making sure that you have some kind of a HEPA air filter. I actually put one in the central, the central filter of my home. Right. So all the filters go through this HEPA air filter. In addition to those type of strategies, another thing that you talk about in the book that I think also is more of like an underground method or things that people don't talk about a lot is eft. Can you explain how you discovered this and what it is?

Definitely, yeah. I discovered it through Dr. Mercola. I remember signing up for his newsletter and he always uses these really strong, strongly worded headlines. He was like, you're gonna go crazy if you don't do this or something.

You know what? Just, just to be. Because I do a lot of those same things when I'm writing articles or titling podcasts or whatever. In this day and age when you have literally millions of articles hitting the Internet every day, you almost have to write a headline that is attention grabbing or, you know, in some way like silly or controversial or, or just, you know, occasionally even like just blown out of proportion just to even get people to stop and read. It's not quite fair, but you almost have to do that.

Yeah, I mean, luckily we have people with attention spans that are hanging into this podcast. But I mean, for me, article writing and headline writing, it's a huge issue. But yeah, so anyway, I found it through Dr. Mercola and this guy named Gary Craig is the guy who basically proposed this idea back in the 80s. But EFT is sort of a combination of different interventions, so you're basically tapping on different points. And I'm sure people have heard of chakras and acupressure points and things like that. It sort of hits on those same ideas. But EFT is called The Emotional Freedom technique. And this is Soup for help. I actually did this because you were on a panel that I created at Paleo FX for having stress. And that was a great time, by the way. But I actually did a little round of EFT right before we went on stage because just to kinda calm my nerves a little bit. And of course, there's studies about showing a 58% decrease in anxiety, a 49% decrease in depression, and a 24% decrease in cortisol. So, and this is from EFT, and they had another group of people that were doing just regular psychotherapy, and they only saw, like, a 14% drop in cortisol. So, I mean, EFT is super helpful from a scientific level, but if you're on a school bus or you're in traffic, you can do this anytime. You can do it with one or two hands. But essentially what you do is you use your fingertips and you're gonna be tapping. You tap about seven times is kinda my favorite number. And you can tap on top of your head, and then you move down. You tap on your eyebrow. You tap on the outside of your eye bone. You tap under your eye bone. I'm doing it now as I speak. You tap right under your nose, on the bone there. Seven times. You tap on your chin seven times there.

I'm trying it, too, as you're talking.

Okay, so collarbone, seven times there. Got it down on your side like you're a monkey. Ooh, ooh, down on the side Seven times there.

Underneath your armpit.

Yeah, underneath your armpit. And then your. Your wrist. Tap your wrist together.

You tap your wrists together. You don't, like, use a finger. Tap one wrist. You just take the wrist and tap them together?

Yes, yes. Tap both wrists together on the inside. And now you're gonna say an affirmation. So mine actually, at the time was even though I'm nervous about going on stage, I deeply love and accept myself.

Nice. Nice.

And that is enough. Most people will feel a cognitive shift in the first round. And if you do, that's great. Do it again, do it a second time, do it a third time. Oftentimes you can feel a. Some sort of shift where, I mean, almost like you can breathe. Like, I feel like I can breathe better just after doing that one little round right now. And you could do it again and kind of amplify the effect. So if anybody's dealing with sort of, I don't know, a bad boss or you have to go into a meeting or you're gonna go on stage, or even for you, Ben, if you're gonna go do something intense, you, you seem to keep it pretty chill. But if you feel like now is a good time, do it and see what happens. I mean, you may be able to shave points off your race times because you got, you can quell the sort of pre race excitement, even if it's not anxiety. So I mean, this is something that is just really helpful. And adding the affirmation is sort of the golden key. I mean, you can simply just tap. Like if you're in a situation where you're embarrassed and you don't want to be seen, you can still say the affirmation in your head. But I like to say it out loud. And you have to convince yourself, even if you don't believe it, even if you don't love and accept yourself, that's sort of the best second part of the affirmation. Even if you don't believe that, just say it it and eventually your body is gonna sort of feel that you do believe that.

So, okay, so it's top of the head, above the eyebrows, outside of the eyebrows, underneath the eyes, underneath the eye bone, below the nose bone, below the chin or on the chin bone?

Yeah, right in the middle of the chin.

Right, got it.

Yeah.

Both clavicles.

Yep.

Collarbones, underneath the armpits and then the wrists. And then you say. And do you say top of the head too? Right, I said the top of the head.

Yeah, top of the head first.

Okay, gotcha. And then you say your affirmation. You can go through that a series of times.

Yeah, you could do it probably two to three times. I mean, you could do this for if you're depressed. You could do this for if you're fear. If you're fear and fear. Like even though I'm scared right now, I deeply and completely accept myself, or I deeply and completely love myself. And just kind of insert your preferred or your current emotion that you're dealing with.

Yeah.

Nice.

Even though I have to go over to my mother in law's for dinner, I deeply and completely accept myself. Is there a book on a good book on eft?

I don't have any recommendations on that. I just send people to eft.mercola.com he has tons of videos and articles and just a lot, a lot greater advice than we could fit in this podcast time.

Gotcha. I'll hunt that down and put a link in it in the show notes for folks on this. It's also called tapping, right?

Yeah, the tapping solution. I think that is actually a book or a documentary, one of the two.

The Tapping Solution. Okay, got it. So you talk about eft and I know you get into it in more detail in your book on stress. That'd be another resource for folks. And I'll put a link. Evan has a book on stress and he also has a book called REM Rehab on Sleep. Really easy to read PDFs. I think that folks should grab those as well. But anyways, the other thing that I wanted to ask you about, and you've touched on this a little bit, Evan, about your history and interest in herbs and supplements. And you mentioned how you have Passion Flower and Peace Lily. As to plants in your home, what are some herbs that people aren't talking about so much when it comes to controlling cortisol? Things that you think are really effective but that tend to fly under the radar.

I would say Skull Cap is a pretty cool one. And I first found out about Skullcap because there's a lot of herbal, like smoking blends. I've seen those that have Da Mania leaf and Skullcap in them. I haven't actually tried them out, but that's sort of my first introduction to the words.

Doctor, what do you mean smoking blends?

So you can use a vaporizer or you can just simply smoke a pipe. I don't know, you may even be able to roll like a joint of an herbal smoking blend. But for. For military people that want to chill out and they can't be tested positive for cannabis, things like that, they can go and smoke relaxing herbal blends. There's tons of them out there.

Now this. Okay, this sounds like. See, I've. I've used this stuff before. I don't know if you've heard of this, Evan. It's from this company called Vapor Boost. And I have one of these vaporizers and it is passionflower, melatonin, L Theanine, and there's one other in there that I'm blanking on now. And you smoke it. Well, you don't really smoke it. Right. You vaporize it and it gets absorbed through the mucous membranes in your mouth. And you're saying that you would use something like Skullcap in a similar manner?

Yeah, I haven't heard of that. That must be a liquid, right?

This is a liquid. You add it to a vaporizer like an E cigarette. And the one that I use is called Sweet Dreams. And it's got this really kind of nice relaxing smell. But I hadn't heard of using Skullcap before. Can you get Skullcap in like a liquid. Do you know? Or is that always in kind of like a dry herb or a capsule?

Yeah, I've always seen it in dry herbs. I mean, some of these. That's pretty funny. I'm picturing you just with blue blockers on in your bed just hitting a vape pen.

But that's funny because I actually have a video on YouTube of me sitting in bed wearing my blue blockers hitting a vape pen.

Oh God. But yeah, I mean, I've only seen it in. I've only seen in like little ziplocs that you buy at the smoke shop. It's sort of shady, but it's like a little smoking blend. But Skullcap is something that I would probably just take in capsule form. But I just put that recommendation in there under the short term stress busters because it is something that affects your basically youryour GABA receptors and so you don't wanna downregulate them over, over a long term. So that's one of the short term solutions. But also California Poppy. I have a tincture of California Poppy that's pretty awesome. If my wife or I, if we start just getting anxious or we can't sleep and the other solutions aren't working out, I'll just go pop a little tincture of California Poppy. And that's.

Does, does that work like an opioid would?

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it' sit's definitely related to thethe opium poppy. It's relative.

Now one of the concerns about opioids is their addictive potential. Are you concerned about that at all with something like California Poppy?

I definitely am, which is why I put this under the category of short term stress busters only. And I, and I put in bold, you know, this is safe for short term and acute and cycled use only. Even things like valerian or kava. I know there's some kava bars popping up. Finabit. I hadwe can go into Phinibit. I got a pretty funny story about that if you want to.

Yeah, I'd like to hear about that. After you. I wanna hear about what you feel like after you use the California Poppy. And I'd love to talk about Phinibit because that's. Are you familiar with Dave Asprey and the whole bulletproof exec movement website? He has a new supplement called gabawave and he sent some to me and I've used it once and it's like this little tincture that you put sublingually and it has like this berry like taste to it, but it has this big glaring label on it. I don't remember the exact word, so I'm hoping I don't do it injustice. But it says something like don't use this any more than three times per week or something to that effect. But finish talking about California Poppy and then I'd like to hear your opinion on this Phenibut stuff, which is what thatthat gaba wave is.

Yes, definitely. So California Poppy II Take a little tincture of it. There's actually aa pretty cool local market called Lucky's Market where I picked it up from. And it's just an organic California Poppy tincture. And you feel, you don't feel altered cognitively, you just feel a little bit sedated physically. So if anyone's had to have their wisdom teeth out and they've had to take thethe pain pills and things like that, and you just feel sort of like physically a little bit heavier, that's sorta the best way I can describe it. And that's because I'vei'm kind of an experimenting guy like yourself and I like to take a little bit more than prescribed just to see what happens. And I just felt a little bit more kinda sedated and heavy. But it's definitely something that's good for nervous tension and, and more stress, anxiety. You know, there's so many forms of stress, but this is sort of the anxious form of stress that I recommend that for.

Okay, gotcha. Interesting. So California Poppy and you use that in like a tincture Sparingly.

Very sparingly.

Okay. And then what's your opinion on this? On this Phenibut?

It's a very scary substance and.

Really?

Yes. And so if we have a couple minutes, I'll tell a pretty, a pretty good but a few minute long story. Okay, so. Okay. Okay, great. So I used to work at Lexus and the car dealership and there was a guy there that was always happy and I could not figure out why. And this was, this was probably four or five years ago now. And he said, oh, it's because I take Finnabit. I'm like, what's fine? A bit. And he's like, oh, I'll make you some right now, man. He's like, don't even ask questions, you know? So he makes me a little cup of it and some powder and I look it up on my phone real quick just to make sure it's nothing crazy. And I see that in Russia it is a prescription and I'm like, wow, this is Crazy is this, you know, is this guy buying this off the black market or what? But no, in the United States is. It's an over the counter supplement or a vitamin. You commonly see it on nootropic websites. So whatever, I take it. And my stress level is gone. My endurance is extremely long. I'm working for 10 hours helping clean up cars and do just tons of different random tasks. And usually I was exhausted at the end of the day. By the end of the day, I had zero fatigue. My colors were enhanced. All the cars paint jobs looked much more beautiful. People looked prettier. I was much more sociable. I mean, I'm a pretty social dude, but I was just talking everybody's ear off. The music in the car even sounded better. Man, I'm telling you, like, this is something that, that you could take before a concert and the music is gonna be like five times better. The bass wasthe bass was more clear. The treble was more clear. I mean, it's a very potent substance. And why it's so risky is because it crosses the blood brain barrier so easy. It's basically a GABA molecule which is supposed to be too big to fit through the blood brain barrier. If you have aa solid, you know, barrier, but you add a phenyl group to it, it phenyl Gaba, also known as Phinibit. And it sneaks right in. So this is why it's so effective. But anyway, my friend, I end up finding out that he's addicted to this stuff. He takes six grams per day, and for frame of reference, the normal dose is maybe 400, 500 milligrams max. And this guy is taking six grams per day. He can't sleep without it. And if his stash is starting to get low, he has to make sure that his UPS delivery is perfectly synchronized so that by the time he runs out of this other batch, he's got a new batch at the door. Because he's gonna be having panic attacks and having cold sweats and shaking in the bed and he can't sleep. Soso. That's the story of Phinibit. And it's very, very, very. I don't even know. I don't wanna call it fun because I don't want everybody to go out and run and start popping it. But it's a very interesting supplement. And the perception shift that you can experience from it is very, very. What do you call that, Ben? Is it. I don't know what you call it. It's sort of like going for the apple in The Garden of, Garden of Eden. It's, it's very tempting. And, and once you taste it and you get a feel for how, how it actually affects you, you just want to take it the next day because you feel so good and you're so social. I mean, so it, it's something that you're gonna see a lot on social anxiety forum websites and things like that. And it's highly beneficial, beneficial for people that just, they can't talk with others. But also it's one of those very risky, very short term only supplements. But I have another fun story, but I don't want to take up too much of your time.

No, tell it. No, I'm intrigued.

Okay. Soso my dad, he was having some brain difficulties. He just wanted to focus a little bit better at work. And so I turned him onto piracetam, which of course is, you know, one of the oldest and most researched nootropics for cognitive enhancement. And I said, well, cool, dad, now that you know about piracetam, let's kind of take some phinibit together. Cause we're gonna go to this place called Hubers, which is a winery in Indiana. And so we took some phenibit and we hit the road and we were going there for a wine tasting. And so anytime you take any GABA antagonist and you mix it with alcohol, the effects are intensified like five to ten times. So thatthat's for kava, you know, anything that, anything that hits on the GABA receptors. So we start doing this wine tasting tasting and it's hilarious. So he's taken just a little sip. I'm going to struggle not to laugh during this. So he's just taking these little sips of wine and by the end of it, I mean, he just has his perma grin like Santa Claus. And.

So.

We walk out of the barn and we're headed back to the little office where you can get some cheese and sausage plates and things like that. And my dad's just like, Evan, he's like, this is hitting me hard. And I was like, dad, I forgot to tell you, you know, you gotta go easy on the wine because you know, alcohol and phenibid don't mix. And it just, it made for just a hilarious day. I mean, we bonded so much. He was just so sociable. He opened up and was telling all these stories and oh man, we were just dying of laughter all day. It was a memorable experience. And of course there's no long term damage for that, but you know, you can take it really too far really quickly. And he would not be able to drive probably, you know, if he. If he had taken any more wine.

Do you know if it's metabolized by the liver at all? Like, is there any concern there? Is it. You know, because that's like the concern with something like Valium, for example, is not just the addictive potential and its ability to create neurotransmitter imbalances, but also the fact that it's tough on the liver. Do you know anything about that in relation to Phenibit?

I haven't seen any studies on it, but I haven't looked for them either. But. But I do also mention that there was a guy who was addicted to. He was addicted to Phinibit and basically they had to pull him off of Phinibit and put him on Baclofen. And I actually had to take Baclofen. In my past, when I injured my back, my L4, L5, I was taking Baclofen. So I was very familiar with the effects of that, which is another GABA antagonist. And so basically, Phinnabid is so powerful that it's a vitamin and you can buy it right now on Amazon. It's more powerful than Baclofen, which is a prescription muscle relaxer that you have to get from your doctor. And they had to take him off of Phinibit and put him on Baclofen to taper him off and reduce his addiction. So, I mean, this stuff is highly, highly dangerous in my opinion. But I still have some in myin. My supplements, Dash, So.

Right. It's kinda. It's kinda one. Again, what was your term for using things sparingly? You call it temporary stress reducers or.

Dr. Yeah, I just call it just an acute and cycled supplementation use only. So. Okay, so like, if you are gonna go to a concert once a month or once every six months, this would be something that is going to enhance your experience and you're not gonna have as bad of a hangover as you would with alcohol. So if you're gonna go to a party, you could take a couple hundred milligrams of Phinibit as opposed to just getting trashed on alcohol. Wow.

Interesting. That's a cool little hack. So, not that I want to overuse the word hack, which we tend to overuse anyways on the show, but that is interesting. I may have to try that at some point and hope I don't fall asleep with my face on the table. Speaking of which, I also wanted to ask you. I know we're starting to run short on time here. But I want to ask you about marijuana. It's becoming legalized in so many places. It's legal where I live in Washington state. It's obviously legal in Colorado, and there are multiple other states enacting marijuana legalization. And a lot of people using that for stress, for anxiety, whether by vaporizing it or smoking it or using edibles. Do you have any opinion on the use of marijuana for cortisol or do you know of any direct links between say, like marijuana use and salivary cortisol levels or anything like that?

Specifically on that? No, I don't. I haven't seen anything. Of course you hear the joke about, you know, guys that smoke get man boobs, but I think that's more of the dietary aspect.

I really think that the cannabinoid induced munchies.

Right, right. So I really don't think that there's a direct link there, but I haven't seen it either, so we'll just leave it at that. But I think it's a great tool, however, which I haven't been able to find anything. You know, I'm kind of a guy where I like to have a specific study that talks about this, but sort of in the research, it's kind of here.

Here we go. Evan, I just checked on PubMed. Sorry to interrupt you. 2009, it looks like there was a study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology that looked specifically at tetrahydrocannabinol or thc. And it looks like they hypothesized that it would produce dose related increases in plasma cortisol levels and decreases in plasma prolactin levels, which actually wouldn't be all the. But great for your testosterone. But their results were. Oh, looks like THC raised plasma cortisol levels. That's really interesting.

Did it say by how much?

No. Well, it probably would if I were to delve in and read this entire study, which would probably be bad podcasting. What I would be interested to see though is what the CBD component does, because I do happen to have a friend who's in the CBD oil industry. Or the cannabidiol. Right. Not like the psychoactive THC component, but the more what would be considered the more relaxing anti inflammatory CBD component. And I know that that has a beneficial effect on stress, on inflammation, that it is good for relaxation without inducing that psychoactivity. It would be interesting to see it, to see an actual study on the CBD oil rather than just the thc. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. And that's exactly what I was going to say too, is that, you know, if you're going to be doing, if you're going to be doing an edible or, you know, you're actually smoking cannabis flowers, the buds itself, then that's something that's beneficial for the short term. But you know, if it's gonna be raising cortisol, that's probably something you don't wanna be doing every day. But II also have a little bottle of the CBD drops and I'll keep those with me. And especially if I'm gonna go on the airplane, I'll take a full dropper full of CBD drops, just the pure cannabidiol. And that's super effective for stress and anxiety and you're not gonna be getting, you know, obliterated because it's not gonna have thc. But that's just anotheranother option for people. I think it's the Dixie botanicals. They make probably some of the best stuff.

Yeah, interesting. You know, when you think about it, anything that has a strong anti inflammatory or immunosuppressive effect, you know, I guess when you look at something like, you know, they say like CBD has that effect. You know, they say the same thing about curcumin. And you think about the fact that when you want to decrease inflammation in a joint, for example, you would get a cortisone injection, you would get like an injection of a derivative of cortisol. It does kind of make sense that potentially something that acts in an anti inflammatory way could actually cause a slight rise in cortisol. I guess the question is, is that rise in cortisol anything significant compared to what you'd get from being over trained or overreached with your training or being extremely stressed out or something like that. Right. Because it's not. We're not saying that all cortisol is bad. Correct?

Definitely. Yeah. Andand that was something that you kinda hinted at in the notes you were asking about, you know, if you have super high cortisol in the morning. Well, I'd rather you have high cortisol in the morning than high cortisol at night. And hopefully you do have relatively, you know, normal or maybe even slightly high cortisol in the morning so you can get up and get your stuff done. You know, commonly people are gonna have just poor cortisol in the morning and they're dragging to get it going, you know, so. Andand I guess the last thing on cannabis, thc, cbd, in general, whatever your choice is, any of those are gonna be a far safer choice every single day. As opposed to someone taking Valium, lorazepam, some of these more addicting sort of, whether it's an antidepressant, whether it's an anti anxiety medication, these are always safer. And if anybody hasn't seen Dr. Sanjay Gupta, he's got two documentaries now called Weed and Weed 2 where he's, he's documented a couple kids, several kids actually, where they're having hundreds of seizures per day and they get put on a very highly concentrated cbd. So no thc, but a highly concentrated form of CBD oil. And they've gone from hundreds of seizures a day to like one or two seizures a day. So in my opinion, and, and what I hope to see is that cannabis becomes one of the number one medicines on the planet like it was in the 1800s before Big Pharma came along.

Yeah. And the problem right now, and I know we don't want to turn this into a full on CBD podcast, but most of the oils and capsules out there, pretty much all of them on the market, if you look at the absorptability, it's extremely, extremely low. When you have like a CBD oil, especially in the absence of like the THC component, which is not good for kids, that means like kids can't use it and athletes can't use it. And so that's one of the big issues and really one of the big, I guess you would almost say, like market potentials here from a supplementation standpoint would be some way to make CBD oil more absorbable because it's almost like. What's another good example here? Curcumin would be another example. Most of the curcumin that's out there, even though it's a great molecule, it's really good for inflammation and it's, it's really good for your stomach, for example. It's not very well absorbed. Curcumin isn't. And that's another one that there's lots of good things to say about it from a molecular standpoint. But once you put it in the human gut, there are some pretty significant absorbability issues. So yeah, it's going to be interesting to see where this entire industry goes in the next 10 years as things become more legal and as the ability to research it becomes a little bit more PC and mainstream. Mm. Yeah. So, Evan, you are a nutritional therapist. What does that mean? Can just anybody be a nutritional therapist? What did you have to do to become a nutritional therapist?

Yeah, soso. I'm stilli'm still in the process of getting my official credentials for it, but it's through a schooling called the Nutritional Therapy Association. But I've been doing what I consider nutritional therapy on my own long before I started this schooling process for a few years. But I can officially represent this title here in just a couple months. And basically it's sort of a focus on like a Weston A. Price style foundational diet, where you're gonna make sure that you have your blood sugar in check, you're gonna make sure that you have plenty of all of your minerals. You know, that's kind of a big component of it. Making sure you're getting all your micronutrients, your vitamins, making sure that you're just getting a good foundation. And I'm sure you've talked about Dr. Weston A. Price before, but just some of the spark notes of him. He basically was a dentist who traveled the world and discovered that there is no one primal or Paleo or whatever diet, that there's so many different diets out there depending on what part of the planet you live in and what resources are there, but that there were some commonalities and that there was healthy animal protein in every diet. He never found a healthy vegan culture, you know, so that sort of message and his teachings are sort of the foundation of the program. And basically there's aa second half of it that's all about functional evaluation. So I could lay you down and palpate some different points and check out your, like your HCL point. You have an HCL point that's on your wrist. So if you reach down, you mean hyd hydrochloric acid? Yes, your hydrochloric acid point. So you can basically test for the status of your HCL function by. You basically reach down where your sternum is and sort of on your, on your rib, on your low right rib bone there. You can press there. Of course, it's hard to do on yourself, but if you're gonna detect sensitivities there, that means something's off. And someone may have low stomach acid, for example. So that's just like one of the functional evaluation things that I can do. And then I can also check your different points around your belly button and test for your small intestine, check out, see how your liver's doing. If I kinda get up in that area, your liver, gallbladder. So it's sort of a. I don't know exactly how you would classify that, but It'si love thethe dualistic nature where I can do the nutrition stuff, but then if I see people in person, which I'd still currently do here in Austin, that I can do the physical part of it too.

Okay, and you also work with people like via Skype, via phone, that type of thing?

Yeah, definitely. And that's probably 90% of what I do.

Okay, gotcha. Well, like I mentioned in the introduction, based on the discussions that we've had in the past, Evan and me being impressed with your holistic approach to nutrition and distress and to lifestyle management, you're one of the coaches that we have available for people to work with with through Greenfield Fitness Systems now. So at the time that you're listening to this podcast, when it comes out, you are going to be able to find Evan over at Greenfield Fitness Systems and you can get over there and you can also access Evan's book, REM Rehab on sleep, his stress solution book, which actually has way more than we even got a chance to talk about today when it comes to stress. The studies that we discussed today, the documentary on on weed, the tapping solution book. I'll link to all of this stuff over in the show notes. So you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Evan, that's BenGreenfieldFitness.come V A N and you'll be able to access all of that so that you too can go out and get overdosed on Phenibut and slam a bottle of wine and see what happens. So if you learn one thing today, there you go. Uhm, so Evan, thanks so much for coming on the call, man.

Yeah, definitely Ben, thanks man. Andand you're one of thethe guys, the few guys who I would love to spend like two or three hours, you know, on this podcast. I feel like an hour's just not enough, man. We have way too much stuff to talk about.

Yeah, well, let', slet's, let's smoke some weed and have some gaba wave and do that sometime. Alright, well we should probably stop there before this thing spirals out of control and the feds knock down our doors. So. So folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Evan Brand signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com Evan, check out the show notes. Have a healthy week and remember not to stress out too much.

Later, visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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