Simple Tricks To Banish Anxiety & Panic, Rib Adjustments For Better Sleep, Nootropic & Smart Drug Stacks, The Science Of Being Better In Bed, LSD For Performance & Much More

My name is ben greenfield and on this episode of the ben greenfield life.

Podcast in my head i think of visualization as being your sports specific training and spatial skills are your gpp so every single day no matter what you're going to do some type of spatial game that challenges your ability to manipulate scenes in three d in your head then we're going to do some sports psychology like work conversing getting to know your athlete self and create specific visualizations that help you deal with the negative performance related things that can pop up on the field so it's maybe you realize that you just get fast and aggressive in periods of time where you don't need to be we're going to practice a visualization drill that involves speeding up and slowing down time so maybe you see the drop of water come really slowly off michael phelps's goggle and then once it leaves the goggle back to real time so there's dual training modality that i kind of bring to the table when we talk about training an athlete's brain.

Faith family fitness health performance nutrition longevity ancestral living biohacking and a whole lot more welcome to the.

Show.

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Right andy i'm pretty stoked about all the different directions we could go with this conversation today but my audience many of them are totally unfamiliar with you so tell me about how you got into all this man like what got you into the brain and mental performance and marrying it the physical performance in the way that you have so it's.

Kind of funny you know when i was in school i went to school for applied exercise science and physiology and moved on to a graduate program where i actually had quite a bad experience with what i expected as far as education as far as what people would promote and stuff and it kind of led me to take a change so after kind of leaving a graduate program i started going to seminars and i heard so often it's all about the brain it's all about the brain and like minimal was followed up with that even when i asked the question you know well what about the brain can we go more in depth there there was just so little below the surface but i did believe it was true just intuitively that i think the brain is all into this it was almost like a compensatory manner if you will that i dove into the niche i just really wanted to know more and knew there was more behind the curtain if you will and that was just kind of all the desperation inciting incident et cetera i needed to go down a rabbit hole you never go down a rabbit hole just because things are amazing it's usually something that drives you to go down a rabbit hole that.

Deep for you though i don't know i went to university of idaho and did exercise physiology and biomech kind of had a self directed master's program in that there wasn't a lot of talk about the brain and about the central governor or a lot of these neural mechanisms that i know you dig into was your education similar and where'd you go to school by the way springfield.

College for me it was my graduate level neurophysiology course that was like the original tick for it just like you know it sounded so cool i expected to hear so much about it and we talked about like peripheral spinal cord fatigue we talked about the neuromuscular junction and and that just wasn't enough for me i'm like there's still a whole nother layer so i guess norman doidge and his book which was only the first book at the time the brain that changes itself was the first time i was able to get access to research really in depth into neuroplasticity and neuroplasticity and wrapping my head around it philosophically as well as itself as a mechanism was the first time i kind of saw into the neuro performance world because it's easy to look at neuroplasticity and see it as all these excellent things but what does that mean to you as a practitioner you know can you incite it when is necessary to seek to incite it and if you did successfully incite it what do you.

Do from there yeah what is neuroplasticity.

By the way so think about like hypertrophy as like your average adaptation right meaning something gets degraded something then compensatorily restores it you know and when we talk about the building of new muscle it happens in such little amounts micrograms when we look in the brain from this typical degradation adaptation response like you did something that was neurochemically taxing for a while you have your metabolic wastes you have all this stuff your body heals it gets rid of it and will typically produce like somewhere from zero point zero one percent more to maybe one percent more of the necessary neurotransmitter or an enzyme that fosters that next time that is not neuroplastic adaptation that is your typical adaptation profile neuroplasticity is a novelty predicated response so similar to the newbie gains concept because something new has been introduced we can now actually structurally change neurons everything i described prior to this was functional changes their enzymes your synapse all these little things are molding and ever so slightly shaping differently neuroplasticity has to do with actual structural changes it could even have to do with responsibility role changes like this neuron now does something else compared to this neuron so neuroplasticity is describing something that's far greater than your average adaptation curve.

Okay now it's my understanding that a lot of those adaptations and i could be totally wrong about this occur during sleep cycles and that sleep deprivation could pretty significantly hamper neuroplasticity is that true and kind of like secondarily is there anything you can do to kind of like stave off some of the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation when it comes to neuroplasticity i would one hundred percent.

Agree with you if we change the word happens to predicated okay everything is predicated on the sleep cycle because the problem is when you look at biology not the problem but the paradox rather is we only really have sympathetic ligands we don't have a ton of things that bring us back to parasympathetic states we basically just wait for the neurotransmitter the hormones half life to run out and then you hope hopefully go back to normal now the caveat is when we do get back to normal we can then start recovering it's more of a circular process when we talk about neuroplastic adaptation or any type of adaptation as a whole when it comes to brain centric change we actually don't get a ton of downtime when we're sleeping we have cells called glia that move around and do most of the magic so if you're not giving them enough time to do their work as employees you are certainly going to not just you're gonna have maladaptive responses so everything is predicated on the ability you get to sleep because that's the time under tension time of the curve of functionality for glia to do their job and without glia and glia derived nootropic factors you're not going to do a whole.

Lot of brain changing okay got it so let's say you're working with one of your golfers because i know you work with a lot of golfers you're just telling me before we start recording that you actually like moved to jupiter florida because apparently i don't that's like a golfing mecca or something yeah pretty.

Much it's the golf capital of the.

World out here okay so let's say you got a golfer and and they have a tournament coming up and they are sleep deprived or they need to work on neuroplasticity or learning or memory consolidation or whatever during a sleep cycle is there anything you particularly focus on when it comes to that aspect of.

Things so if it's a kind of an emergency situation like it's the week out and we have stuff to fix which is something i do quite often consultation wise for professional athlet athletes like hey you know andy everything's wrong can you help me out i got five days you know it's going to be the type of thing where all of your training effort quote unquote is going towards getting to sleep now we can talk about the typical sleep hygiene stuff like temperature darkness et cetera et cetera but what we're really going to be looking at is maximizing the opportunity for glia which actually starts with lion's mane the early morning before and anecdotally i think selenium is a great compliment for that so when we actually look at what puts you to sleep as far as the serotonin melatonin cycle it's starting the morning prior so the amount of serotonin that you can catalyze is directly correlated with the amount of melatonin you can deal with that's why that five hydroxy tryptophan enzyme works so well but if you're not cleaving stuff in the first place you're never going to fall asleep ultimately so what we're really looking to do is make sure that from the start of that morning you have an opportunity to go to sleep so after the sun goes down we've hopefully already gotten this stuff in play now we're looking at making changes that get the heart rate down as low as possible through vagus nerve activation turning on vagus tone and that's gonna give you the best chances to fall asleep tonight but in reality your whole day can be structured around falling asleep tonight yeah.

I think i heard you talking with mark bell about this type of rib reset or rib work that you'll do with athletes to help them get to bed at night is that true yeah.

One hundred percent so my original exposure to the concept as a whole was actually in college doctor pat davidson was a professor of mine and he exposed us to research from the czech republic that incorporated something called a rib tack and this is my initial introduction to the world that anatomy influences your brain directly so foramen magnum not to get off track at all is the hole where your spinal spinal cord goes through and connects you to the brain ultimately the positioning of that in three d alone can impede your vagus nerve because it's going to go through interventions of the vagus nerve it's pretty crazy so when we look at the diaphragm now the rip tack is going to allow that to have a normal rhythm if you will and the rip tack was the first manual technique i was exposed to that directly influenced the vagus nerve and we see this all the way through small intestine changes because we're going to see blood rush to the gut as well as cardiac and respirations per minute so the heart and lungs as well which are the three caveats to the vagus nerve being turned on so i was like wow there's a whole world of this stuff and i've been able to migrate and navigate my way around to finding sternocleidomastoid and anterior neck techniques as well as supra occipital nerve and greater trochlear nerve techniques that do the same thing so we can kind of look at this axial skeleton from the belly button up as an opportunity to change the vagus nerve and it's not a coincidence that that's actually where it travels through in our body that's.

Interesting not not that i want to put you out of a job or anything andy but like let's say somebody's sitting at home and they're like well i want to learn a few of these tactics i could maybe like self inflict on myself before i go to bed whether it's the rib or the sternocleidomastoid or the temporal area or something like that to be able to kind of like modulate the vagus nerve before sleep is there any resources or any particular tactics that you think would be useful that people could just like try.

Right away so the cool thing is that all the typical like meditative yoga like tactics are attempting to poke at this so my you know i'm a teacher and mentor by trade that's mostly what i do besides this pro athlete stuff i teach people things so my initial thought is just look at the anatomy and the muscles in the trunk and the thorax how they connect to your head and have an understanding how when you breathe stuff is changing on both sides and if you can kind of imagine in your own head we want ribs that go down and away and dissociate from our skull as long as you can get into that anatomical position at all you're going to start poking the bear at vagus nerve intervention much more so whether you're the type of person that wants to lay on the floor and meditate or maybe you want to do a walk or maybe you want to do some yoga or anything like that getting into a position where you get slack at the back of your neck and where your skull is getting far away from your sternum you're going to automatically poke at the.

Bear here let's say i were to keep like a foam roller or something like that up in the bedroom or in an area where i wanted to do more vagal nerve stimulation or some type of deep tissue therapy device are there particular areas that you would target if you didn't have a practitioner like you there to actually work on the ribs or something like that totally so.

With the foam roller what you can start by doing is laying on your back toss your calves up on the couch or a table and put the foam roller at the bottom of your sacrum so that you're spine round at the bottom and you can gain a little bit of length then support the back of your head with a small pillow a magazine a notebook and just breathe aim to getting long low and slow exhales with at least a four to six second pause before you inhale but not a contractory like squeezing holding on for dear life drowning pause a true passive relaxed pause and just breathe in that cycle for quite a bit and you'll get at least eighty or more percent of all the stuff i just mentioned doing that if you wanted to use like a pemf monitor i've used the omni pemf brand and i know you've experienced with a couple of those as well you can just kind of do something meditative in nature have that on and breathe in that same manner or even just kind of sit up and keep that same alignment and breathing slowly letting those ribs dissociate from the head there's a lot more that you can do even just like massaging the nerves in your eyebrows and stretching out your neck three hundred and sixty degrees makes a huge difference what about.

Like deep tissue therapy for for kind of like the serratus and the rib muscles because there's one move that i'll do sometimes i have this thing called a rumble roller you seen that thing it's like the super hard roller with the ridges and i'll lay my body over it if people want to see the video you could go to bengreenfieldlife dot com superbrain because i'm trying to demonstrate here while i'm walking on the treadmill but basically i'll lay my body over it and just like roll the entire right side of the rib cage and kind of like like roll over as i get to the top and there's a ton of tightness and tenderness all along there in the serratus and the rib cage and then i'll move over and do the same thing on the left side doing like five to six passes so about two minutes on each side of the rib cage and it's even an area that you know i guess i've worked with a few like rolfers who will sometimes go like deep into the ribs but most massage therapists really aren't doing a lot of that like deep rib tickling type of activity for me when i do those rib rolls and then sometimes i'll have them finished by just literally like almost like a like a penguin going up and down on the foam roller from the sternum all the way down to the belly button and doing a few passes there i feel incredibly relaxed after i've done something like that is there something to that technique of like self inflicted deep tissue work on the on the serratus muscles and the rib cage.

One million percent so what's cool about that is you're attacking that it's the same anatomical approach i just talked the ribs and sternum depressing and creating space from the occiput you're looking at it and attempting it from a muscle length tension orientation standpoint by like causing direct stress to the muscles and the nerves and motor units it intervenes with you get golgi tendon organs that shut off and you get length the rib tack is an anatomical manual technique that's inducing through a little bit of local hypoxia and anatomical changes manually the same golgi tendon release so absolutely whether it's massaging underneath your pec minor and in your armpit and just down with your hands rpr does an excellent job of just releasing the sternum and certain of these key fascial landmarks with just oscillating knuckle bones and it actually works quite well what what's rpr rpr is oh i don't remember exactly what it stands for i haven't attended anything from them i just know a few friends who have gone but their main like claim to fame that i've seen through social media everything else and friends who have been to it are there sternal and rib and neck oriented releases where they just do intense oscillation to one of these like fascial landmarks like your sternum like for example we have two torpedoes of fascia in our thorax one on each side and then obviously a larger one where the actual skeleton superficially lies but the left and right have a little bit of their own fascial dynamics and they kind of meet in certain areas like the sternum where you can release both sides from the center and that's what they're looking to do there okay.

That'S super interesting rpr is just like a manual manual therapy type of form like it's an acronym for some form of manual therapy what about what about the the rib are you saying rib.

Tack yes what is that that's the name of the technique from the czech.

Republic oh okay are there like videos that one could find online if they were to like google rib tack of what some of those techniques look like.

Like probably not videos but you can still find the research papers it comes from the czech republic in the nineties just look for manual changes to the diaphragm if you i think google scholar is the best thing on the planet you know like growing up coming through school i'm sure it was the same everyone was all big on bibliographies but just like the lemon problem kind of dissipates with the internet the more research and publications get out into the world the less validity you have to things like that so you can have a conversation where where you tell someone exactly what to research the key terms and you use key things like parentheses or plus and minuses in your google search box and you can actually find the paper faster almost than sorting through anyone's.

Bibliography nowadays yeah and is ribtech r a b t a c i believe.

So yeah czech republic nineteen nineties i'm not sure if that term will come up in your search engine because i don't know how search engines work with sorting through the paper that's the term in the paper but the title of the paper has to do with the manual restoration of the diaphrag frame okay.

Cool i'm trying to note to myself i'll hunt down some leaks and put them in the show notes for people i gotta ask you by the way i'm gonna i'm gonna disappear here for a second and reach down by my by my office because i was standing on these this morning while i was working and this kind of reminds me what you're talking about as far as like vagal nerve activation and potential downregulation of some of this the sympathetic activity these things arrived at my house last night it's like this nail bed that you stand on that you would use as almost like kind of like an ice bath for the feet for vagal nerve activation and it's appropriate receptive input and you've no doubt seen a lot of these acupressure mats and things like that that folks will lie on what do you think about using that as a tactic to kind of like downregulate sympathetic you know whether a nail bed or an acupressure mat or something like.

That mark had something similar to that when we did the podcast recently i think it's essentially the modern day grounding indoors i just had a conversation and a consultation with someone earlier today who had vision problems where we talked about grounding and doing some vision training outside is a massive return on roi for something that you could just do inside these types of things it's really the increase in afferent and efferent signaling through our hands and feet that's the nature's way of ameliorating anxiety you can view anxiety as like spilling over electrical input into brain areas that don't need to be active right now and mindfulness is using the five senses to quiet those so when you get outside and ground obviously you're doing more than just getting afferent efferent signaling from your feet but additionally you're getting light and all this stuff but let's say you're just like at the desk or doing whatever bringing something like that inside i think is honestly better than doing a whole stretching routine when you talk about return on.

Investment per minute yeah you ever messed around those vagal nerve stimulators that they use as like electrical input to the to to the size of the neck or sometimes like back behind the ears they're typically like these wearable devices that will vibrate or produce almost like you know very similar almost like a tens unit like a mild electrical sensation over the vagal nerve area i haven't personally.

But one of my best friends in the uk shane germain has with tons of success i've seen his biometrics and know his routines in life really well he loves it i've experimented with the pemf monitors that go through like actual vibrational frequencies that resonate but very similar.

Concepts yeah yeah those things are super interesting they seem to relax you pretty well now related to anxiety that you mentioned for you how would you define where anxiety actually comes from and i think about this honestly because one thing that i talked with a guy named doctor peter martone about several podcasts ago was he said that he'll relax himself and fall asleep a lot faster if he avoids future processing and thinks instead like back to things that have happened in the past as almost the way to kind of like shift a lot of activity in the frontal cortex i suppose away from that and away from dwelling upon the future making me kind of wonder your whole take on anxiety and future processing you ever thought about.

That one hundred percent so we don't have a center in our brain for the future the most sophisticated anticipatory center we have is probably the hypothalamus with like anticipatory insulin secretion and stuff like that and we're looking at like minutes to hours tops you know what i mean it's funny when we talk about the best coaches like that are just known they're planning one to two maybe three four years tops in advance our ability as a human brain to go into the future is frankly trash but our ability to be present is quite good so if you look at anxiety from like a philosophical perspective a psychology first perspective i would say it's putting too much blood flow to future processing using centers that we don't have available for that and if i was to look at it from a neurological perspective i would describe it electrically like i just did a few minutes ago of being surplus electricity into unnecessary places in your brain but we're always coming back to the concept of white noise or sacrificing electricity and blood flow to the key brain areas for it being turned on and inappropriate ones so what do.

You do about that like obviously like golfing has a great deal of potential for anxiety or panic to cause issues you know i do a lot of bow hunting and you know shooting in archery they talk a lot about like you know the the target panic issue where you're you're anxious right before you do a you know like a high risk or very very important activity what are your thoughts on on management of anxiety and panic based on what you.

Just described the first thing i would tell anybody is recognize it's never going away it's a good thing and even the best athletes on the planet the best businessmen on the planet signing the biggest deals still experience it and just being at peace with that sometimes sometimes gives people a lot of like support because it's easy to believe that like oh you know like the walter paytons of the world they were never anxious like they just did what they did and they're tough blah blah blah and that's that's an appropriate mindset to have but i promise you every single great athlete and businessman ever felt just as nervous if not more nervous than you did the difference was they had strategies and what i call buoys of objectivity to hang onto when they're in the ocean of anxiety drowning and they were just able to survive so when you have these anxious moments the first thing you need to do is re engage with the world around you from your five senses anxiety often has to do with losing touch especially like that term i just mentioned is a golf term it's losing touch of how hard these fine motor skills things are happening or we talk about it in wrestling too did you push someone so far that it actually negated the setup of what you were trying to do the concept of touch goes a long way in every single sport across everything so if you lose mindfulness your five senses your ability to interact with the world around you you're inherently going to lose vision peripheral vision and behavioral decisions and the five senses are all little triangle if you will in their ability to function so being aware and accepting being mindful and present are the two easiest concepts to chase after if you want to do something like maybe pull out a few arm hairs or just lightly and gently stroke your hand and give yourself a light sensation i talk about the world's smallest violin rubbing your thumb nail over the little fingerprint ridges of your index finger and force yourself to feel that you know it's going to to bring you to present because that future driven perception is certainly what's driven in.

Anxiety how do you tackle the idea of like you know visualization and motor imagery and i've come across a ton of really interesting research lately on you know kind of like those old what was it like the psychosomatic books like the like the inner game of golf or the inner game of tennis where you could actually improve your stroke stroke or improve your performance by using mental imagery and you know as we all know probably most notably with the story of michael phelps the swimmer got getting the point we could visualize like the individual drops of water coming off his goggles you say that we have a very difficult time future processing or imagining what would happen in the future i imagine that's a little bit different than visualizing what it is that you want to accomplish or an ideal performance metrics so how do you deal with visualization is that is that something that you think is actually useful one hundred percent.

The research proves it is and there's a balance between spatial ability that's the skill to participate in visualizations and the quality of the visualization drill itself you need to be skillful enough so when we look at what that is on simplest terms it's like rubik's cubes it's like can you do it in your head do you know what to do next can you see in three d if we go from white to red or whatever's on the other side spatial abilities as a skill and it's like most rudimentary sense it's how can you manipulate these things in three d in your head now when you add that to michael phelps's visualization drill that we just talked about you're actually decreasing the need to anticipate in the future because you're seeing right here in the present what you believe is about to happen because we understand that faith and belief are inherently actually tied to reality you would love to believe that there's no research behind faith prayer and hugs but there is very legitimate research behind all three of those things we've seen so not only are you using an actual tangible skill you're actually able to process something that's about to happen better and get ready for it better because you have inherent belief that it's about to.

Happen so from a practical standpoint how do you use visualization or use it with your athletes or your clients so.

Right away one hundred percent no matter what you're starting a spatial skill training regime and that's separate from visualization in my head i think of visualization as being your sports specific training and spatial skills are your gpp so every single day no matter what you're into some type of spatial game that challenges your ability to manipulate scenes in three d in your head then we're going to do some sports psychology like work conversing getting to know your athlete self and create specific visualizations that help you deal with the negative performance related things that can pop up on the field so it's maybe you realize that you just get fast and aggressive in periods of time where you don't need to be we're going to practice a visualization drill that involves speeding up and slowing down time so maybe you see the drop of water come really slowly off michael phelps his goggle and then once it leaves the goggles boom back to real time so there's a dual training modality that i kind of bring to the table when we talk about training an.

Athlete'S brain let's talk glutathione glutathione is what's called a tripeptide tripeptide three amino acids what that means three peptides glutamic acid cysteine and glycine your liver makes it it's found in almost every cell of your body it's a very powerful antioxidant helps to protect cells from damage caused by things like free radicals and oxidative stress it also plays a pretty significant role in detoxification meaning it helps to eliminate harmful toxins from the body and supplementing with it is a good idea for many many people problem is it's very difficult to make it bioavailable but this company run by my friend doctor chris shade has a form of liposomal glutathione and it is extremely powerful very bioavailable they made it essentially for mercury detoxification but it does of a lot a lot more than just mercury detox it's kind of a super molecule because it allows for oxidative stress control immune competence longevity and of course metal detox it is an amazing form of glutathione and you get fifteen percent off of it you go to quicksilverscientific dot com ben and use code greenfield fifteen for fifteen off your purchase at quicksilverscientific dot com ben use code greenfield fifteen for fifteen percent off bubs bubs buzz just fun to say bubs that's the sponsor of today's podcast now what is bubs sounds like a shrimp restaurant but no actually bubs makes truly exceedingly soluble and bioavailable collagen collagen the best collagen on the planet twenty grams of protein seven essential amino acids one single ingredient collagen is kind of like the glue that holds your body together and bubs uses a super pure form sustainably sourced grass fed and pasture raised cows in southern brazil and uruguay you can literally eat collagenous compounds from brazil and uruguay how sexy is that and they also have these amazing apple cider vinegar gummies which i'm addicted to pop them before a meal great for glycemic control they have mct oil powder which you could add as like a functional coffee creamer to your coffee along with their fantastic collagen then they have kids of like a more upgraded version of their collagen called youth collagen it's got vitamin c in it it's got biotin in it ten times the daily recommended value of biotin and mackey berry which is a chilean berry high in antioxidants geez all these crazy sexy superfoods from rare countries so anyways bubs naturals was actually formed as a tribute to former navy seal glenn bubb doherty who was a natural hero who laid down his life saving americans and later on what happened was his friends went on to form bull bubs and make collagen to help you recover faster and feel better and also to take ten percent of any profits from this collagen and donate it to charity in glenn's honor the glen doherty memorial foundation and on veterans day one hundred of proceeds go to that foundation so great company love what they're doing and it's great collagen go to bubsnaturals dot com use code beng to save twenty percent that's bubsnaturals dot com and you use code beng to save twenty.

Percent you ever use visualization i guess i guess for like a non high performance athlete but let's say the average person like going to the gym hitting the weights you know just just pursuing better health and fitness in general from preventive standpoint anything that you would use with visualization when it comes to to those type of folks who might think this is just for the pro athletes.

Yeah i use a drill that i call the chalk outline drill and i force you to be able to manipulate your brain space related to what you're doing so may like a real issue with like lower back on deadlifts but literally nothing else and your back never hurts we can approach that from a neurology perspective and look you've had so many hippocampal memories associated with this part of your sensory motor cortex that we have substance p just kind of slip into this motor pattern now because it's happened so many times so what i want you to do is make this chalk outline and envision the lower back portion of your chalk outline in a complex purple or blue and allow yourself to disengage feelings of vigilance aggression pain or whatever negative you have pent up in that low back then open your eyes get ready and perform a successful deadlift and then do it again back and forth until that pain degrades interesting.

You know part of the performance piece that you hear thrown around a lot that i'm sure you've come across is this idea of getting into the flow state state do you work with that much as far as like practical ways to to increase someone's ability to be able to get into flow state yeah.

It'S fun for me because you have to reverse engineer it where the research ends on flow state is the different flow states for different people in different sports i've kind of come to my own categorization of we have dopamine and norepinephrine driven flow states for individuals some rare people do both but people are usually one or the other the type of person where it's like having your best friend there and the euphoria of your friends and i made it that ign night the ultimate performance is in you and we see these people are anticipatory in nature just like dopamine tends to be but we also see people that function under the i need to get punched in the face first and then i'm amazing mindset these are the norepinephrine people because when we look at like adderall like drug studies we see norepinephrine always comes to the party late and that's because it's a constituent of dopaminergic activation so what we're really looking at is some people slip into flow states could slip into is actually the terminology they use in the research because that's what happens some people slip into flow state as things are beginning and the environment related to it causes it to them and some people attain flow state after that's already begun and they've stabilized and norepinephrine as a neurotransmitter has to do with focus these tend to be your somewhat aggressive stoic face very kind of goal oriented individuals where the dopamine people tend to be the types of carefree fun loving flow state individuals.

Yeah oh i'm totally norepinephrine like for me to get into the flow state i'd be in a lot of pain under a lot of pressure or having been engaged in the activity for at least like fifteen to twenty minutes before i really get into that alpha state where everything's starting to feel easy is that pretty typical for a norepi one.

Hundred you see this like whether it's it's baseball football or golf this is the guy that needs to strike out once to hit a home run the guy that needs to bogey the first hole the guy that needs to have a shit first half so that he can bounce back and have a killer second third and fourth halves you know there's pros and cons to everything right so we see the norepinephrine people tend to have less control over their flow state because they're typically responding to something that needs to happen whereas we see dopamine people oftentimes have work capacity and behavior efficiency issues like oh that could have been a layup but you went in for a slam dunk from eight feet out when you just didn't need to you needed to take a bunch of caffeine and get all hyped up and get crazy sweaty just to actually ignite what you need to do all these different things play into the strategies that you nutritionally training wise and psychologically need to employ even supplement wise yeah.

Yeah and i want to talk about supplements at some point because i know you have some very unique angles on that but what about breath work you mess around with breath work much with.

Your athletes tons the awesome thing about breath work you know i'm a big allostasis guy meaning homeostasis has to do with the seven key variables that will essentially kill you if they come out of whack you know stuff you'd expect blood ph oxygen calcium in the myocardium you know all the things you just never mess with right you know that's homeostasis it's actually a much smaller world allostasis makes room for everything else adaptationally emotionally under the sun and everything that's kind of related to being altered defended states meaning the what if scenarios so you can think of it as like the eighty twenty rule eighty percent allostasis twenty percent homeostasis the awesome thing about breath work is it actually successfully plays on homeostasis no matter how you breathe breathe we're going to maximize oxygen efficiency and utilization the best way we can if you breathe through your mouth it's kind of like driving that ferrari where you're able to get a ton of oxygen influx and you're going to need to be able to utilize these large changes that's why mouth breathing and sharp exhales like in boxing and fighting are always correlative with like high amounts of force production and being sharp whereas nasal breathing you're straight up getting less oxygen oxygen in so it's correlated with low blood pressure efficiency of oxygen uptake phosphodiesterase enzymes all these cool things on both ends are actually trainable through breath work.

In fact now is there any particular form of breath work that that you like that you favor whether it's like wim hof or alternate nostril or anything like that or do you use multiple.

Tactics i think they're all like circle goes with circle triangle goes with triangle stuff like if you want to improve how much force you can produce on an exhale and you notice that when you exhale hard you just go kind of like that quintessential old person we hear in our head it's like you need some help with your sympathetic interventions maybe we're going to do wim hof breathing and try to get like a manly forceful exhale out of you sometimes or maybe you're the opposite maybe you're the person that you just for the love of god you cannot get out of a hyperventilatory state that means you can't decrease increase the legitimate pressure on your vessels enough to slow hemodynamics and everything flowing through your blood down so you should probably be the person to practice nasal breathing so it's more like what do you want to change what what wire goes where to get what.

You want yeah it sounds to me like maybe you could use heart rate variability as like a self quantifying method to kind of like look at your sympathetic parasympathetic balance then choose more of a stimulatory form or more relaxing form of breath work depending on how you have to be wired generally or wired for that given day totally let's say.

You do like the hardest workout ever and whenever we talk about difficulty and training sessions i always instantly think multi variables so it's not just creatine not just heavy breathing not just aerobic it's some form of the three is what everyone says is hard so let's say you did something crazy like that and your hrv actually went up the next day you're probably someone who could benefit from some wim hof breathing if something that sympathetic and that difficult difficult you know obviously hrv values are an algorithm but pretty much made you quote unquote healthier in a sense you probably need some more of that in your life whereas maybe one bad night of sleep or even just missing out on an hour of sleep absolutely trashes your hrv you should probably be a relaxed meditation nasal breathing guy because our palms does a really great job of autoregulating sleep so if missing one hour actually actually quantifiably messed up your hrv score that's probably where you should put your effort.

Okay so basically looking at sympathetic versus parasympathetic dominance it sounds to me like what you're saying is that if you find yourself excited or stabilized by high intensity activities then maybe more of that stimulating breath work will be beneficial for you whereas if you find yourself just super triggered and stressed out by those type of activities maybe more of a relaxed parasympathetic breath work approach yeah absolutely.

You know it's just like back in the day looking at like fiber type dynamics to figure out how you should train you know charles poliquin was big into that it's just like looking at your individual specificity and then properly supplementing whether it's training breathwork vitamins whatever with.

Your individual specificity okay that makes sense now stepping back big picture i mean this might be asking somebody who holds a hammer whether or not the world looks like a nail but how true is it this idea that the brain kind of like runs everything from a pattern or a habit cycle cycle and like do you have any examples of how it is that the brain is so in control if it is i.

Think you could say that accurately for two reasons one there's no behavioral enzymes in your muscles so just geographically in real estate wise you know it is running the show it doesn't mean that it could run the show without the muscles but just as far as like where all the employee important employees all the important employees are up north is what i call it like north or south of the neck up north of the neck just happens to be remote most of the important employees business buildings all that stuff lives now you can also say that because you know there's plenty of cool research studies that show us it's cortical areas of your brain being inhibited or disinhibited that really modulates behavior and you can't step too far outside of that so for example we have famous research that was done with legitimately meth and they were put in a doctor's office waiting waiting you know while on meth double blind they didn't know they took meth put in a doctor's office waiting and the doctor was never going to show up there was one other person with them in the doctor's office and in you know both independent variables one of them was so happy with the doctor this guy is just amazing i'll wait for him for three days if i have to he's the best doctor ever and the person on meth reciprocated that behavior they were more than happy to sit there there then on the other independent variable group it was very agitated the person was banging at the door this guy's a scumbag he's always late he's not worth it the person on meth also reciprocated that behavior now it's a little convoluted to initially deconstruct in your head but recreational drugs something as potent as meth is just going to promote whatever is instinctually going to happen it's going to make you less hesitant and it's going to make you just kind of go with the flow easier now what it shows is that when that amygdala is turned on because of the environment and your amygdala in any area is going to be sensitive when you're on recreational drugs it's going to automatically incite aggressive behavior whereas in the other one we're inciting our anterior cingulate which is a really important part of the prefrontal cortex where empathy is specifically processed so it's more that we can take take you know oh what was his name i'm forgetting it the old story where in like the eighteen hundreds the miner who gets the rod metal rod through his.

Frontal cortex phineas gage that guy yes.

Phineas gage right so the stories you know we don't know how true they are but the stories were at his wife always said he was the most docile amazing guy ever they had a perfect marriage after this tragic incident which no one thought he was going to survive which also shows us how cool the brain is he literally had an iron rod go through perfectly the front of his frontal cortex obviously and it changed his behavior because his frontal cortex obviously was atrophied and died neurologically because of the metal rod so his amygdala took over as his primary behavioral complex and i actually believe not only did he die young of like essentially high blood pressure like symptoms he actually divorced his wife and everything was terrible at home actually after that even though he.

Was medically fine it's kind of interesting because the way i think about this about the brain being in control and i'd be actually super curious to hear your thoughts on this is like i can have a massive breakfast like totally go outside the norm of my normal calorie controlled smoothie and take my sons out for waffles and eggs or whatever like ten am for like a late big two thousand calorie breakfast but like clockwork i'll get hungry hungry at like about one thirty my normal eating time no matter whether or not i've had a big breakfast small breakfast fasted whatever just like hungry at one thirty that makes me think that the incretin hormones in the gut and the pancreatic enzyme output and all that isn't necessarily in charge and that there's there's something going on with like insulin in the in the brain or some of these some of these you know ghrelin or leptin hormones or something like that at is is there something to that idea one.

Hundred percent whether it's the chicken or the egg scenario that we see people that are obese over time have hypothalamic signaling issues or hypothalamic signaling issues cause you to be you know more easily obese we know for sure that it's hypothalamic signaling that is responsible for the amount of insulin you anticipatory secrete and if you can do so or not not so if you could follow that quick sentence or two that also tells us it's trainable you've trained yourself at one hundred thirty through your discipline over time to have that hypothalamic response and the sensitivity of your hypothalamus can directly be correlated to the metabolic flexibility you.

Have okay that makes sense and by the way this just makes me think i gotta ask you about this what do you think about people who say like you only use ten percent of your brain not the people but the.

Theory yeah yeah so it's funny like if you wanted to be like a con artist you could kind of potentially sway something saying like oh well like so much of this automatically happens blah blah blah blah but in fact it's just so wrong the brain is the most efficient organ in on earth period like it's not even close like our liver is quite amazing especially when we look at what happens to your liver with exogenous growth hormone on research studies when they correlate the liver changes even with ped studies in research it's always muscle cell hepatic or prostate and the brain and they measure all this stuff together the liver is an amazing organ amazing it is not even a third of as miraculous as what the brain can do so in fact we use three hundred percent of our brain the mass and the neurons in our brain alone is not enough to describe how cool and how advanced the things that actually go on up there are yeah.

I love the idea and i came across this a few months ago about the actual increase in metabolic rate calorie burn and glucose burn even you're engaged in high intensity mental activities such as chess or working hard on a project you actually upregulate brain metabolism pretty significantly in terms of either glucose or ketone utilization so it just goes to show like that that organ is definitely using a lot right one hundred percent it's.

Funny i used to be quite competitive and strong man and i'm hoping the next year or two i can have a couple of one or two more fun stabs at the high level but just like you i always have my nutrition in check i keep tabs i like to know what's going on and the days where i'm coaching in person whether it's for golf or whatever professional sport i'm not eating much less to recover from it you know maybe less than five ten percent than i was recovering from strongman competitions and stuff it's pretty crazy the amount of food i need to eat after being emotionally invested in watching and obviously walking a ton is the same as putting my body through the wringer in a competition for.

The most part oh yeah i mean my family knows after i've had a morning of podcasting half of which is walking a treadmill talking with super smart people like you trying to keep up with them that they better be the first to to grab the food at the dinner table buffet because i'm i'm coming up and i'm punishing a lot of food for dinner after a day of podcasting and i don't think it's just due to the physical activity i think it's part of the mental activity as well and yeah you know when it comes to fueling the brain you sent me your fantastic new book on nootropics which if it's out in time for this podcast i'll link to it bengreenfieldlife dot com superbrain you talk about certain things in there one of which i think a lot of people be familiar with such as cold choline you talk about new pept which i'd love to hear you touch on because that's one that perhaps not as many people know about but you have some really interesting ideas when it comes to particularly supplement stacks and nutrients for mental performance so this might rabbit hole a little bit but can you talk to me about some of your some of your favorite nootropics or your general approach when it comes to nootropics or smart drugs.

My general philosophy here is ameliorate inhibition first hit the gas pedal second what i've seen from just like prescribing things and recommending things to people over time is that the amount of performance increase you can get from stopping shooting yourself in the foot whether it's conscious or not is just so much greater than the amount of like increase in performance you can get through pushing yourself further over time especially because most of the time i talk to people like this are highly motivated individuals who are already pushing themselves so far so the reason i love nootropics and their effectiveness is because you know the same way like if i know a lot of people who listen to are super intelligent when they see like the breakdown of what an amino acid is like you have your amine group your nitrogen group your ribose group we have groupings together that allow us to say something is x so if you see a brand new molecules formed and it's like well this we don't know what it is but it has an amino it has our nitrogen it has our ribose you know we could probably clump this under amino acids eventually nootropics have an antioxidant function that's necessity to call it a nootropic they also need to have some type of association between some cortical area being turned on and all cortical areas being turned on reciprocally shut something else off.

Off so that's your definition of a nootropic those two variables yep and they.

Always encompass a perk so there's always something special about this guy versus this guy right so when i look at picking a nootropic i want to make sure that we're using the antioxidant for the right reason bolstering the immune system i want to make sure we're targeting the right brain areas and lastly i want to make sure that i'm picking this for a synergistic reason i think one of the coolest things oldest ones is amoxypene succinate is my favorite like.

Form of it amoxepine succinate like s u c c i n a t.

E yep exactly amoxepine is cool because its antioxidant properties actually impact cyclozygenase genes through prostaglandin so similar to advils we've seen it in research actually be the first nootropic that can be used for like mechanical lumbar non specific low back pain and reduce successfully but it's cool because it's acting on the brain amoxypene is also going to drive blood flow to the vagus nerve and the capillaries in the eyes which is really really cool and it's got tons of other small little perks as far as altering the gaba receptors and acetylcholine receptors so it's got this widespread conglomerate whereas neupept also has the antioxidant portion but it's doing it in a different manner it's relieving glutamate toxicity which is excess calcium now when we look at the brain cortical area function neupept is biased to the sensory motor cortex and broca wernica and our arcuate fasciculus or our speech motor areas too and its perk is that it really does a great job of incorporating memories via the hippocampus with these two areas so there are two compounds that are similar in what they do do but also vastly different at the same time and that's why in my mind it's proper categorization of antioxidant plus brain plus a perk based on.

The slight differences between amoxapine sustenate and new pept would you potentially stack the.

Two you easily could and that's what also makes it in my mind a proper definition for categorizing nootropics because they can be in the same category but be different in enough that they you could easily use them for the same day twice different parts of the day and have no inhibition or interference or you could take them at the same time and they end up being synergistic which means they are properly placed in.

This category now it's my understanding that that both of those would to a certain extent potentially deplete the brain's choline levels more quickly and correct me if i'm wrong on that but based on that would it be wise to if you're taking a nootropic or for a smart drug supplement with additional choline in.

Some form yeah and they do and that's the same thing as saying like exercise like improves glycogenolysis like the release of glycogen from a cell it's like well yeah because that's that's what we're paying for it with you pay for lifting weights with glucose straight up whether it's from your liver or your mouth food or stored in a muscle cell that's just how you pay for lifting weights is with glucose right we pay are communication brain to brain neuron to neuron and even neuron to muscle with choline so it is wise whether it's so little that you just ate a couple eggs that were good quality and you only wanted or needed a little bit or we're looking at an acetylcholine donor like acar or alpha gpc which is raw choline it's usually worth your money especially because acetylcholine products are typically.

Pretty cheap yeah acar is carnitine i've heard some things about a lot of a lot of folks really getting into injectable forms of carnitine what do you think of that and what will be the efficacy of something like that so.

Acetyl l carnitine is super different from the injectable carnitine okay view it as acetyl l carnitine is going to be the carnitine up north north of the neck active in the brain the carnitine you inject is fully myotropically and biologically physically active not so much as far as like your actual brain stuff it'll cause some norepinephrine but it's not like it's actually intervening the same way so oral carnitine typically does not work well in the muscles in biology acetyl l carnitine goes up in the brain and it allows for acetyl group reformation so when we use up acetylcholine in the synapse we have an acetate group left over and we can actually recycle choline with a new acetate acetate group so acetylcholine production is actually a little smoother with fresh new acetate that we can cleave off the carnitine upstairs so you.

Could potentially if you were really pushing your brain or even using nootropics or smart drugs do something like take alpha gpc and acetyl l carnitine and both of those would help to replenish the brain's fuel levels a little bit more.

Readily yep that's how we talk about increasing time to fatigue like when they say creatine you know monohydrate increases time to fatigue eating carbohydrates hydrates before the gym taking caffeine all typically in what they do it's called ttf increased time to fatigue that means you can participate longer before you have to stop participating okay it doesn't mean that you break down differently you know it's you just go longer for the same amount of money spent if you will and what.

Would be the main benefits of the.

Injectable carnitine now injectable carnitine is doing what the research hyped up oral carnitine to do originally it's going to go go from transporting fatty acids to allowing more fatty acids to be liberated from cells to promoting glycogen sparing which means you could do a little bit more work and you know save like it sounds glycogen a little more you can use those fatty acids a little more you can participate in glycolysis for longer at higher heart rates that type of.

Stuff okay you know speaking of glycogen sparing bearing or increased fat utilization i think it was you i heard talking about this idea that a very surprising number of like ultramarathoners and endurance athletes not only will sometimes use something like thc for either some of the pain killing or the focus enhancing effects but possibly also lsd for its shift of the body in the beta oxidation or something like that is that true like is it actually something that's beneficial for endurance athletes lsd probably the most common.

And maybe not the but like everyone in the ultra marathoning world maybe they don't all use it the day of but they've used it at some point because the potential for extreme aerobic adaptations that intervene with something that happens at lsd at an incredibly low dose it's even sub micro dose sub therapeutic dosing is like the research term meaning it's you would take such little of it you won't even theoretically notice its activity but when we see it present two cool things happen through lsd's dopamine and dopamine receptor driven environment we get more protein kinase a which allows us to do more of actual adp to atp the actual making and recycling of energy it's facilitating that through dopamine what's even cooler is through serotoninoergic receptors and it's fostering phospholipase a and c activity differently phospholipase a is essentially going to cleave it in a position where you get rid of the backbone and have one free fatty acid attached to it still and you just have another one that's free floating afterwards because we can have two fatty acids attached to a full what we call a triassylglyceride that's like the full big ass fatty acid you're going to have two that get liberated and one's going to hang on serotonin via lsd novelly favors phospholipase c phospholipase c is really novel because it's going to be kind of the inverse we're going to have the tail which is glycerol base completely separated from the free fatty acid acids so we're going to get all of these free fatty acids at once to be used for atp recycling and they'll also be used right away because of what i just said about protein kinase a so it's just novel in that you can't really take another supplement especially saying it's just one supplement to do that and it's novel in the sense of how essential that mechanism is for super physiological running if you're running even a ten k you could do this on your own but if you're trying to do some crazy stuff it's something you realistically can't get.

Anywhere else to be honest yeah theoretically from a glycogen sparing effect then you've already named three things that particularly for endurance might be beneficial the injectable l carnitine lysergamide like lsd and then the one that i think of is potentially something like ketone esters which of course also have a pretty significant glycogen sparing effect and some good mental application as well have you messed around with those.

Much yeah well you could do all three of those at the same time in fact for ultramarathon running because glycogen sparing is like a biological skill if you will and every skill you want to train in the gym or in life you can skin that cat in multiple vectors and what makes a truly effective protocol is you can use multiple supplements to impact one vector properly and make one plus one equals three so when you do maybe a low dose carnitine with a twenty microgram dose of lsd which again is sub therapeutic you'll never feel it with a little bit of ketone ester and you're already obviously fat adapted whether you're keto or not you just use fatty acids very well that's going to be an insanely potent way of running as really really far while liberating minimal liver correct glycogen yeah.

Yeah i mean it's pretty rare that i've had a micro dose ten to twenty micrograms of lsd and not had a fantastic workout afterwards of course you need to be very careful with dosing it's very easy to overdose i happen to have a jar of liquid it's actually lsa not lsd i actually think lsa gives you a little bit more of a stable mood when using but one ounce of that is the equivalent of about ten micrograms of lsa usa and i once mixed it improperly resulting in one ounce being one hundred micrograms and i sometimes do some deep thinking during my evening massages and i took an ounce and laid down on the massage table at about a half hour into the massage felt as though i was going insane and of course had these complex geometric figures forming inside my head and finished up the massage and went up and laid by my wife in bed and i kept saying babe i think i'm going insane every time i close my eyes i'm seeing cartoons and and yeah so so you definitely want to be careful with with something as potent as that as would be the case with i think any of these kind of like plant medicine type of compounds but that that actually leads me someone wanted to ask you what what about things like you know dmt psilocybin some of these popular things that folks are claiming to be using for neuroplasticity mental performance et cetera any application for that in a similar novel fashion is like something you've described the lsd.

I think this is the perfect time to bring it up especially because now because of what we talked about so far we can talk about is it neuroplastic or not is it a true nootropic or is it nootropic like effect which you saw me go quite in depth to into the book because i believe that delineation matters everything has a use but we have to be very specific about why we think it's working so the psilocybin is not a nootropic it has nootropic like effect which is still excellent but it's not in itself a nootropic what you can aim to do with any of these types of new wave behavior modulating compounds even though they're not new but they're seen as new for the purpose these new wave compounds if you will what they're doing is they're giving you a novelty response that you might not normally get through having blood and electricity in a key brain area that's not normally there and you really can't find an environment besides tracking traveling to a brand new place getting married like you'd have to do something that big to induce a response similar to a psilocybin microdose so that's why they're novel tools you can use it to overcome traumas and to do all this stuff but it would be through a different mechanism than using new pep to overcome a trauma so let's say you have a fear based response in my world of sports it's sports every time i set up to do x i just get this rush of fear and anxiety and that's not me nupept would allow you to get a better hippocampal response to success and drilling it properly whereas psilocybin would alleviate the emotional response to it you'd be able to be there mindfully better and dissociate from that memory so one's a lot more hard and tangible and the other is more metaphysical they're both incredibly useful but they're totally different avenues to get to the same end outcome okay so.

Could you therefore say that some of these things that present the novel stimuli to the brain such as dmt or psilocybin could be paired quite well with tasks of creativity learning or memory to enhance your ability to be able to engage in those tasks i think in.

My mind that's like the only use for them because if you just take it and do nothing i mean like sure it might be fun to chill out but like if you wanted to chill out could have done something else you know what i mean like what.

About kratom what are your thoughts on.

Kratom i like kratom you know i'm very sensitive to stimulants so kratom is like an awesome opportunity to drive glutamate in a not so brutal fashion for me but i think it's a lot more potent than people think i don't think it's anecdotally in behavior as close to an opioid but when we look at what it's actually doing it is relatively close i think kratom's an awesome tool because the problem with opioids is they're so much more detrimental to work with than lsd lsd is just math but worst case scenario even if you took two hundred micrograms of lsd you're not going to die yeah sure you'll have a bad time but you'll be fine you know what i mean not that it won't be psychologically brutal but there's just no risk there however if you accidentally mess up the math on an opioid you're doing day with kratom.

I think something that some people might not know about is it seems to have some enhancement of sexual performance or particularly the ability of a guy to get hard and i've seen the same set of something called inositol triphosphate is that actually true and if so what exactly is going on there it is.

True i'll say that so the paradox is when we have something like crazy freedom we're getting sympathetic and this is using them in the wrong terms you're getting excitatory through what's typically a non excitatory means the gaba receptor has a u shaped function in behavior meaning low activation of the gaba receptor will make you sleepy medium to high levels of the gaba receptor will put you up through the roof even cardiovascularly and then like a mega mega mega dose is just going to put you right to bed again so what we see happening with something like kratom is it's putting you in a really optimal range as a male for excitatory activation neurochemically but it's not putting you over the edge from an adrenal or glucocorticoid aspect or from a blood pressure aspect for a guy to get super hard you need an excited brain and a chill blood pressure which is easier said than done and that's why kratom ends up being such a good supplement for that pair.

Okay gotcha versus something like say nicotine which we call vasoconstriction increased blood pressure but a simultaneous increase in the risk of something like erectile dysfunction because of the blood pressure effects one hundred percent.

But the funny part about sexual supplementation is it's incredibly individual if you're someone that has a problem with getting erect and finishing too soon you would take the wrong supplements to get the sexual performance you want in that case you would actually want a little bit of caffeine to inhibit it just enough so you know you last more than ninety.

Seconds right if you want to go longer you'd take a sympathetic nervous system stimulant that could potentially cause vasoconstriction or a slight rise in blood blood pressure.

Yes just to extend it that makes.

Sense what about the refractory period about you know coming back again after an orgasm or something like that is there anything one could do to decrease the.

Refractory period time so there's obviously like an atp cost what's funny is sperm actually runs on what's called gtp it's a slightly different energy source but something that agonizes sex hormones with glucose tends to go really well for this as far as just pure energy mobilization but that's not the big problem the big problem is what happened when you finished was it so depolarizing to these sexual brain areas that the amount of electrical stimulation needed is crazy high now or was it simply because we just had a rushing of excitation to the nerves that intervene with you coming there's a difference so so you know not to be crude but if you just yank on yourself long enough and you're hard enough you'll come eventually just because you were there long enough whereas if something was so mind blowing that's a very different finishing of the orgasm and that's what you need to identify if it was something that was just on the mind blowing end that's so depolarizing it messes with the chemical electro electrochemical gradients to get that thing going you again so that would have to do with taking something that agonizes sexual desires maybe a so oro xylen a maybe a kratom because that can do that as.

Well pt one hundred forty one would be another one that comes to mind.

Exactly exactly that type of stuff it's a true desire driven but if it was just like chemically driven like like i said you were just yanking on it for seventy eight minutes you know it's just going to happen eventually that's going to have to do with just going full circle with your cardio cycle.

Yeah that's interesting that you say that about the the gpt and the phosphate groups responsible for for part of the the refractory period mechanisms kind of makes me think because it just just anecdotally if i've had a high amount of carbohydrates say for dinner and making love afterwards i've noticed a significant reduction in that refractory period possibly because of what you've just described from a macronutrient you know glucose standpoint as far as the refractory period goes what about phosphate groups you know things like creatine phosphate or or i think you've talked about inositol triphosphate before anything to be said for that as far as something like sexual.

Performance is concerned especially if like you were on like a specifically low carb diet for whatever reason yeah that would be a great way to turn that around because like the hypothalamic response with it's whether it's exogenous or endogenous insulin takes care of a lot of those phosphate groups for you especially if you're eating like a high carbohydrate dehydrate whole food meal like the beauty is that it's taken care of for you but let's say you're specifically on a low carb diet and you want to look into something like that like creatine phosphate through whatever supplement you want is going to support that along with methyl donors a little bit of folate a little bit of p five p trimethylglycine anything like that could also be beneficial interesting.

Interesting for those of you who are trying to keep up i'll take some copious notes and put them in the show notes at bengreenfieldlife superbrain because i know we're covering a lot here at a pretty rapid pace but what about the microbiome do you take that into account much when it comes to of course the gut brain access and particular you know hacks or nutrients or things that folks could use to modulate the microbiome in such a way that it either decreases distractibility or add like symptoms which some people talk about being a gut issue or increases mental performance in.

General yeah it tends to be a criterion based thing it's funny because i think i'm kind of tuned as the brain guy a lot of times i don't think there's anything more confident complicated in the bacterial microbiome and we have a skin microbiome a mouth microbiome a sexual microbiome for your organs which is different than the local skin on your quad which is different than your gut you know we have a intestinal microbiome which is different than your gut microbiome so like the bacterial world is super super not my like forte but i know enough to tell you that if you take care of kefir your fermented foods have them in your diet often you'll more than the eighty twenty rule you'll have pretty much everything you need what seems to be the deal with bacterial biomes as a whole is their resistance to change so an unhealthy biome is going to encompass any new bacteria into the biome with predatorily low exposure and it's not as part of the the biome a quote unquote strong biome it's almost like it has a powerful shield where you can be exposed to you know streptococcus and it's not part of your biome now it's not going to get into the cells because we know that the way you get viruses is through mrna trna basically dna transferring from the bacterial cell to your cells so the microbiome as a whole is your shield really to the world around you and the good gut seems to be the central governor of all the biomes so if you take care of that and notice that you don't get sick often you can eat high carbohydrate or low carbohydrate meals or just high calorie low calorie or shit food good food meals and have minimum dysregulation in skin hrv energy etcetera like smell of your sweat even is correlative then you're good enough to not work worry too.

Much i don't know if you ever heard of doctor william davis he wrote a book i think it's called super gut i had a fantastic interview with him about this yogurt that he uses for a wide variety of issues you know managing cardiovascular disease modulating the microbiome improving sleep increasing oxytocin levels etc and it's basically like a thirty six hour fermentation recipe without a goat's milk or cow's milk or there's like a plant based option with coconut milk but he uses primarily a significant amount of l rooteri probiotic and seems to just swear by that and during our podcast he talked a lot about its impact on mental stability mental performance and decrease in add and adhd like symptoms have you looked into el reuteri or this doctor william davis guy at all i've heard.

Of doctor william davis i haven't read the book but i'll definitely tune into that episode lactobacillus reuteri is actually the only commonality amongst children on the autism spectrum disorder realm so it's such a wide spectrum of things there's really only three variables that we tend to see repeat lactobacillus reuteri glutathione production endogenously by the liver noxytocin production by the brain cerebrally lactobacillus ruderi has the strongest correlations it's pretty much every single kid on the spectrum not that they're all kids they turn to adults eventually but you get what i mean every single person on the spectrum whether they're ninety nine percent high functioning and zero point zero one percent not or like you know the autistic children who benefit from charities tend to be on the lower functioning scale because they need the most help everyone on that spectrum and everywhere in between is close to one hundred percent deficient in lactobacillus reuteri wow and the correlations are just not as strong although still strong with adhd but like i mean you know research well enough like for someone to say ninety nine or one hundred percent that's basically like stone in fact you know it's it's nearly impossible to get that value yeah well.

I'M going to keep eating my my thirty six hour fermented yogurt i throw a little gelatin in there a little grass fed gelatin at the end it gets all thick and creamy almost like jello it's it's so good it's like creamy rooter eye rich jello so it's it's one of my my favorite ways to snack do that with a little bit of dark chocolate as dessert before bed it's amazing and you obviously put out a ton of content you're working on a new book got an instagram channel channel what's the deal with the.

Book so the nootropics ebook is going to be released on mark bell's website it's going to be live tomorrow the twenty seventh of april not sure when this will be out a little after.

That but that's okay i'll link to.

It oh yeah yeah for sure you know we both have access to mark so you can just grab the link but i'll send it to you personally but my career is taking a change where i just have more and more in person time that i need to dedicate to athletes and professional else but i have this burning desire to help people and that's what goes super brain is so i'm making a shift from consultations you know this past week i just did my last you know real consultation for a while because i just need more time and help more people so i'm going to be creating a course that's going to be eight weeks taken through people with a facilitator i'm going to be hiring two to facilitate the eight week course and it's going to be on the three topics i did consultations on on the most which are blood work cognitive fitness and lifestyle and supplement acts for being great so i'm going to put that together to kind of ameliorate the need for consults i'm going to be doing a lot more like so the nootropics ebook i shared with you is a user manual i'm going to make other user manuals where they're like ebooks dedicated to using x compounds the best so i'm going to do a lot more of like sharing my theories now because i feel like i've been in the game long enough where i can do that and say i have my own theories yeah.

That'S obviously when i was reading the ebook you could totally be part of a bigger series like you could do one on blood work on lifestyle on other stacks etc so and and you're you're very good at writing or or at least expressing your thoughts and having it put together so is it instagram dot com gosuperbrain yeah yeah so instagram's.

Go super brain i'm developing a new website at the moment that'll be up in the next two or three months but right now go superbrain gmail dot com and the instagram is the only.

Way to find it cool good follow on instagram you guys if you're listening in and all again link to all the resources all andy's stuff his new book and plenty more if you go to bengreenfieldlife dot com superbrain and you can also leave your questions your comments your feedback and your thoughts about this episode for andy or i or anyone else who cares to read andy thanks so much man you're just a wealth of information it was super cool to get to chat with you and pick.

Your brain dude likewise pleasure hopefully we can keep in contact in the future certainly honored to be on the show.

Yeah we'll we'll keep in touch for sure you'll probably be a repeat guess i'm guessing but we'll we'll see what the listeners think all right well folks i'm ben greenfield along with andrea andrea andy triana sign out from bengreenfieldlife dot com have an amazing week all right.

Folks it's coming up quick vip event with me that occurs during the time that i am in london for the health optimization summit i'm throwing in a private vip meetup at hum two n labs with doctor e over there this is one of the most advanced biohacking facilities i've ever stepped foot into we're opening up to a select group of vip's very small group you could be one of them kicks off at five thirty pm in london on monday june nineteenth you're going to get to network with me and a bunch of the other biohacking enthusiasts and physicians there we will do a special talk on age related universal there'll be a q a a variety of healthy organic foods biohack cocktails a swag bag where you get to try iv cryotherapy red light therapy hyperbaric oxygen different types of of nootropics and smart drugs that they have there so it's going to be a pretty cool event and you can get in now if you go to bengreenfieldlife dot com hum two n learn london that's bengreenfieldlife dot com hum two n london if that's too much for you to remember just go to bengreenfieldlife dot com calendar and everywhere that i'm going that i'm speaking where you can join me all the events are also there on the calendar at bengreenfieldlife dot com calendar but this hum two n event monday june nineteenth is going to be a good one more than ever these days people like you and me need a fresh entertaining well informed and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave so i hope i've been able to do that for you on this episode today and if you liked it or if you love what i'm up to then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel wherever that might be and just find the ben greenfield life episode say something nice thanks so much means a lot.