Gary Brecka, Dr. Will Cole & Dr. Tara Swart Bieber Live at the Wellness Oasis Event | TUH #238

If you don't master sleep, whole food, diet and mobility, nothing else matters. All of the chronic disease in America is preventable through diet and lifestyle changes.

So in functional medicine, we have to have a both and not either or approach. Dealing with the physical, but then dealing with the mental, emotional, spiritual, and the interconnection between both mood and emotion have.

Direct effects through the gut on how we manifest disease and pathology.

The basics like sleep and diet, particularly taking care of your gut, but also understanding where stress shows up for you.

The research is clear. Things like shame and stress, they raise inflammation just as much as a food that doesn't love the human body back.

What extends life is the absence of processed foods.

You have to be sleeping enough, eating well hydrated things like spending time in nature, immersing yourself in the arts and culture. That's gratitude to the next level.

So much could be solved in our life by just getting back to the basics.

How can our thoughts and, and our beliefs biologically impact the way our bodies heal or perform?

The single critical factor that will impact your longevity is. Huge.

Thank you to our presenting partner, Chase. So today's panel that we're kicking off with, how to achieve whole whole health. So we just learned what some of our barriers are and what stress can kind of do to our bodies in the last workshop, and now we're going to have a chance to explore that even deeper. We are ready to move into this first conversation, one that invites us to look at what it really means to feel whole in mind, in body, and in your personal energy. These three thought leaders are bringing together biology, neuroscience and functional medicine to help us rethink how we nourish ourselves from the inside out. So please join me in a round of applause, grateful hearts, and introducing Gary Brucka, human biologist, longevity expert and founder of the ultimate human. Dr. Will Cole, my favorite doctor, who is the leading functional medicine expert, bestselling author and host of the Art of being well, and Dr. Tara Swart Bieber, neuroscientist and author. Welcome, welcome. How are you?

Great to be here.

How are you?

Wonderful. I'm so excited to dive into this because I just have so much respect for each of you and I'm obsessed with optimizing my human experience and my human biology. So, Gary, I want to get started with you. You've built a career that's at the intersection of human biology and optimization. So for those in the audience that are really focused on longevity, which I think is all of us, right, like, how do we live the best, fullest life Possible that feels good. What is one daily behavior that can dramatically improve overall well being? But most people seem to overlook that or just not be able to really lock into it.

I would say the most overlooked thing on most people's longevity journey is drawing your attention to your sleep. You know, we have big data on this. We knew this from the mortality space, we know it from the blue zone studies that if you don't match master sleep, whole food diet and mobility, nothing else matters. You know, and so many people ask me where they should start their wellness journey. Should I get a red light bed? Should I get a sauna? Should I get a PMF mat? Should I do transcranial light therapy? And until you've really drawn your attention to your sleep and mastered sleep, mastered a whole food diet, not a dogmatic diet. There is no evidence that dogmatic dieting, carnivore, keto, paleo, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, raw food, extends life. What extends life is the absence of processed foods. And sleep is truly our human superpower. If you look at the correlation between sleep deprivation and early onset cognitive decline, neurodevelopmental disorders, mood disorders, hormonal disruption, so much could be solved in our life by just getting back to the basics.

What do you think? You know, collectively our beef is with sleep. Like, I think about, you know, because it's the first thing all of us want to like, take off the list. And, you know, if you're Gen Z or millennial, I think we're so used to those things, like sleep is the cousin of death. I'll sleep when I die. I'm grinding, you know, what do we have against it that kind of keeps something so easy, yet feels so far.

It's because it's the most mobile thing in our schedule, right? It's the only thing that we control that we can actually schedule around. You know, six years ago, I decided that I would schedule all of my meetings and travel around sleep and exercise. So if you actually look at my phone right now, you would see that no matter where I am in the world, first thing on my schedule is sleep and the next thing is exercise. And then everything else falls into the calendar around that. I think the majority of the reason why most people don't draw attention to their sleep is they're unaware of the impact that this has on really true human function. About half of this audience has a gene mutation called compt. And so when you go to bed at night and, and your environment quiets, your mind wakes up and you lay there, body tired, but Mind awake. And this is called rumination. These are very easy issues to solve. There's targeted supplementation that quiets these catecholamines and quiets the mind. The same neurotransmitter cascade that leads to anxiety, anxiousness, add, adhd, ocd. So I really think we haven't emphasized the importance of, of having a sleep routine. If we went around the audience and I asked you, what's your routine to go to sleep? Most people just haven't developed one. We have a routine to get our kids to school. We have a routine for exercise, but we actually don't have good sleep hygiene. I don't know if I answered your question or I just rambled for five minutes.

Yeah, no, it's important because it is one of the things we have to change it. Right. If you want better health. Dr. Cole, your work in functional medicine really emphasizes balance over bioperfection. How do you help patients shift from chasing the metrics? Because we can get obsessed with anything. Right. Chasing those metrics to cultivating actually sustainable wellness habits.

Yeah. So I also love that we talked about the calm T gene variant at 10am in the morning. It's a great way to start the day. Thanks, Gary.

We went right after.

So you're right. I love data. And a lot of my job is looking at labs and getting those labs improved, but more hyper focus on these things. I think the context and the intention around all of this stuff matters. Now. Look, there's a lot of bio individuality to how we even receive information. For some people, the biohacker, that sort of Type A, they have a big vessel to receive a lot of information. And it doesn't stress them out, it invigorates them. They come alive with that information. Some people, you get that information. Even just basic labs, it really does keep them up at night. There's a lot of rumination, there's a lot of shame and obsession. And it can become, you know, there's a term for this orthorexia. It's disordered eating or unhealthy foods. But there's a large, I think, orthorexic spectrum that happens within the wellness world where it's just data. It's like obsession about data. And they're consuming data and information. And if, like stressing about healthy things isn't good for our health. So if you've learned nothing else today, it's that and it's just having discernment and knowing when it's okay to put your phone away. It's okay to not Consume more stuff and just keeping it simple. So part of my job I guess is finding out their why and then how do they receive information and then making this fun. We've lost the plot if it's a source of dread and obsession. So there's not an easy answer to that question. But it's just, I guess on an individual level checking yourself and seeing is this healthy stuff creating an unhealthy obsession. And I think at that point less is more and in profound ways because I see people do all the things in the health that we do, but they're completely, they're, they're, they're filled with a lot of obsession and negativity and it's impacting their labs. So we have to realize that your what we eat matters, what the supplements and peptides we do matters. But what are we feeding our head and our heart on a daily basis? That's more nebulous, that's more abstract, but it's something that we need to find out for ourselves what that looks like and having discernment.

Wow, I'm grateful for the way you broke that down because I think when we talk about being whole, right, like those are the pieces that can get left on the table is the mind and the heart connection. But all of it flows when all of it is present. Dr. Bieber, as a neuroscientist, you often speak about the mind's influence on physical health. And it feels like that is, you know, such a through line here. How can our thoughts and our beliefs biologically impact the way our bodies heal or perform? What is happening when we are staying up ruminating about our health or just about the world?

Yeah. So I just want to segue on from what Will just said, which is that in terms of longevity, you can do all the good things that we know we're supposed to do and you can stop doing all the bad things that we know we're not supposed to be doing. But the single critical factor that will impact your longevity is low level chronic stress. So not having that is the single most important thing. And the answer to your question is because every thought correlates with a range of emotions and every emotion correlates with certain hormones like cortisol for the stress and survival emotions and oxytocin for the bonding emotions and serotonin also for mood, but a lot more, which I'll come to. So basically every time you have a certain thought, if it's inducing a survival emotion like fear or shame or sadness or self disgust, then that's increasing the levels of cortisol in your blood that's going around your body, corroding your immune system, creating inflammation and dehydration in your system, and obviously impairing your ability to heal or perform. On the other hand, if you have gratitude and you look at beauty and you spend time in nature and you indulge in the arts and culture, then you induce the hormone oxytocin, which helps you to build up your immunity, build up your resilience, perform better, heal quicker. There's a really important, interesting new hypothesis called the serotonin hypothesis, which is about how trauma is stored in the body. So most of you will have heard of Bessel van der Kolk's book the Body Holds the Score. And we now understand that serotonin is not just to do with mood. Actually, more than 95% of our serotonin is produced outside the central nervous system and mostly in the gut. The word itself means serum and tone. So that's your blood and plasma products. And tone means how it asks the vessels to constrict to either push more or less nutrients and oxygen into the tissues and fascia of your body, therefore creating bracing patterns in your body created by trauma or not. So I always say that serotonin could be producing the impacts of trauma in your body, or it could allow you to release hidden wisdom and intuition from your body through somatic practices like the kind of things you'll see here today.

Wow.

Wow.

Thank you, Gary. What is one misconception about biohacking that you might like to correct, especially in this, you know, truly trend driven era of wellness?

You know, I think it's obsessing on too many variables. You know, what we found in our functional medicine clinic over the course of 11 years is that very often, rarely, if ever, do multiple systems fail in human beings at one time. Usually what happens is one thing goes wrong that causes everything. You'll never get me to believe that someone has multiple autoimmune diseases in the same biome. You had one thing go wrong that caused a complete domino effect. And now we're down the road, usually chasing the symptomology from multiple issues going wrong. We have over 39,000 disease and diagnostic categories to slot you into. So if you have add, adhd, ocd, manic depression, bipolar, autoimmune, and what these do is they. They make us feel that we have individual ailments that we have to go and chase. The truth is that the vast majority of these are related back to a single variable. You know, we learned in Our functional medicine clinic, after treating almost a quarter of a million patients, that nearly every autoimmune patient that we received, had one of four things. They had mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, or heavy metals. And very often, when we eliminated those pathogenic invaders, their autoimmune disease went into remission. And so people become obsessive with the diagnosis, the category. You know, I've been told that I have attention deficit disorder. I have obsessive compulsive disorder. I've been told I have a genetically inherited disease, because this thing runs in my family. The human genome is actually specifically designed to not pass on disease. If it wasn't, none of us would be sitting here right now. So we're not as sick or diseased or as pathological as we think we are. We're not as mentally ill as we think we are. We don't have as many mood disorders as we think we do. Very often we are simply nutrient deficient. When you deprive the human body of certain raw material, you get the expression of disease. If you're familiar with something called methylation, this is the process the body goes through to take all of the nutrients and compounds that enter our body and convert it into the usable form. Very often when this process is impaired, you have a deficiency. And this deficiency maps to some of the most common ailments that we suffer from. So I recently. Well, recently, about 18 months ago, I began sitting on a complicated case committee at Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles. And what's fascinating about being on this committee looking at cases that don't make medical sense, is how over complicated many of the specialists want to make these conditions. And the truth is, what we try to do is we try to go back and find that very first domino to fall. High insulin hyperglycemia. What was the gut dysbiosis? What was the very first domino to fall? And then you see massive healing occur. We believe this in plant physiology. If there was a leaf rotting in any of these palm trees out here, and you called a true arborist, a true botanist out to look at that plant, they wouldn't even touch the leaf. They would core, test the soil, and they would say, you know what? There's no nitrogen in this soil. And they would add nitrogen to the soil, and the leaf would heal. Human beings are no different. When you deprive the body of certain raw material, you get the expression of disease. And so, again, I don't know if I answered your question or I just rambled.

I think you more than answered.

My wife Says I eat people's face. So sorry if I just ate your face.

No, it was so fascinating to hear that. And thank you so much specifically for that example, because I think, you know, for a lot of us that are even really into this space, like, it can get. We're not doctors, so it can get so overly complicated. But hearing something like that, I'm just like, oh, my gosh. Okay. So that's how I should be looking at my body.

Yeah. You know, I think it's fascinating the way that you talked about serotonin, you know, the main driver of mood, main driver of emotion. And it is. The vast majority of serotonin is made right here in our gut. And what we do is we take an amino acid called tryptophan, the famous one that makes you sleepy at Thanksgiving dinner, and we methylate that into the neurotransmitter serotonin. And serotonin is not only responsible for vascular tone. When you think about vascular tone, what is that? Well, if you realize that our heart only circulates 30% of the blood in our body, most people think our heart is circulating all of the blood in our body. It's not. 70% of your circulation is done by an activity called vasomotor. These are very small capillaries and venules. And serotonin has a distinct effect on the tone of this vasomotor activity, driving blood pressure up. So mood and emotion have direct effects through the gut on how we manifest disease and pathology. I've had so many cases of patients with chronic hypertension that we solved by calming down their resistance to serotonin and by actually fixing the methylation pathway and allowing their vascular system to relax and their pressure to return to normal. So, you know, I thank you for that explanation because we're now starting to accept the fact that mood and emotion have a real impact on physiology.

Dr. Cole, I'm really kind of excited about asking you this question because I had the privilege of being able to work with you, and it was utterly life changing for me and my understanding of myself, my body. So, you know, in your book, which I huge fan of Gut Feelings, you explore the link that's between emotional stress and. And inflammation that seems to be its own epidemic. You know, everyone I talk to, we are talking about having inflamed bodies and the effects of that. So what does emotional inflammation look like in your everyday life, and how can we begin to regulate that?

It's a concept. I made up a word called shameflammation. I just make up words all day long. But how does, how do things like shame and things that cause shame, like chronic stress and unresolved trauma, when you're not showing up as the best version of yourself, you're snapping, you're eating foods that don't love you back and you're dysregulated. Like Gary was saying, there's this, these core dysregulations. So in functional medicine, we have to have a both and not either or approach to dealing with the physical, but then dealing with the mental, emotional, spiritual and the interconnection, the bidirectional communication between both. So kind of, kind of part two of the first question that I gave was of looking at things like underlying gut problems, looking at things like nutrient deficiencies and these things that Gary was talking about, these biotoxin, bacteria, virus, mold, environmental toxins, all of that matters, right? I mean, we have. You cannot meditate or breath work your way out of these things that are on a physiological level, right? But it's just one side of the coin. And we have to look at those mental, emotional, spiritual things and metabolize stored trauma just as much as we would an environmental toxin. But it's a lot more, again, non linear abstract. Because it's more straightforward and prescriptive for me to say, eat these foods, don't eat these foods, take these supplements, do this peptide protocol to deal with the physiological. But how do you say, like, don't have that stress, don't have that trauma. You can't just drop that trauma, don't have it anymore. Today it doesn't work like that, obviously. So these are the complex things that need to be talked about but have to be part of the conversation as far as I'm concerned in functional medicine of the research is clear. Things like shame and stress, they raise inflammation just as much as a food that doesn't love the human body back. But bringing things in that are accessible of stillness, they're supportive of the parasympathetic. Like this through line of the things we're talking about is how does serotonin and dopamine, how do these neurotransmitters that are made and stored, like 95% of serotonin is made and stored in the gut. It works upon not passing through the blood brain barrier as we understand it. It's working on GI motility, it's working on connection of that vagus nerve, the largest cranial nerve in the body that's responsible for that resting, digesting that parasympathetic aspect of. So all the Physical stuff we have to look at, but then we have to look at these more nebulous mental, emotional, spiritual things. So things like breath work and meditation for the initiated here, they understand it, but a lot of the world will say that's woo woo, that's weird. Why would I give it any attention? I'm fine, I'm not that stressed. We know that we're this hyper scheduled culture, right? And just because some things are everyday doesn't mean we should settle for it. Just because something's common doesn't necessarily make it normal. And a lot of people, they're in this hypervigilant state all the time that they're not even used to a different state. They're not even used to something that's supportive of the parasympathetic, that resting, digesting state. So we prescribe, if you will, things like meditation, breathwork, somatic practices. Not that we have to do all the things, but we have to pick a consistent practice. Like the panel that was before us. Journaling is a massive way to metabolize stored trauma in the body. What does it feel like to be me today and show up and do Nicole Sacks work is a great way to start to get that mental, emotional, spiritual things that are stored in the body, like the body keeps the store, eloquently talks about and be consistent with it. But then I like wearables. I like devices like transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation devices that go on the ear, on the neck, because it's not another thing to do per se, it's just you wear it and it stimulates the vagus nerve that I find it makes the meditation or the breath work or the somatic practice a lot more effective. Because the people that say meditation's not for me are typically the people that need to do it the most. But they're so dysregulated that it's very uncomfortable. So doing some device that's stimulating the vagus nerve helps to create enough of a window to allow the breath work or the meditation to even be consistent.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Thanks guys. I didn't expect to clap, but something.

I, as a kind of foundationally meditation teacher, something I always tell people is like, you gotta have a little foreplay before you start your practice. You know, you got to let yourself kind of let your body learn to slowly relax before you get to that next stage. It's so important, you know, so much of what you were saying. I remember even in my first time working with you, the first question you asked me was so what's happened to you? Like, what are some of the hard things that have happened to you in your life? What was your childhood like? And it's been amazing that that is part of the conversations that we can now have with our doctors to get that deeper understanding.

We have to. I mean, I have every telehealth patient fill out an ACE score, which is, I think that's what we were talking about, adverse childhood experiences. And it's talking about really heavy things like sexual trauma, growing up, physical abuse, growing up, substance abuse in the home, growing up, neglect, all these type of really heavy things. But the research is clear that the higher somebody's ACE score, the more likely they're to have things like autoimmune problems, metabolic problems, hormonal problems, and of course, mental health issues. So it's not to, you know, put again, obsession or I'm screwed, there's no hope for me, I'm broken, It's okay. No, we have to know what we're dealing with to do something about it. And the human body is amazingly resilient when you start to address these things that are oftentimes overlooked.

Yeah. Thank you so much. Dr. Bieber, you teach about neuroplasticity as a foundation for well being. For someone that is trying to rewire older stress patterns, much of like, you know, what we're talking about, things that have happened, fears, what's a realistic starting point that actually, you know, kind of endures beyond the first week.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think we're so lucky to be living in an era where we have all of these technologies and AI and biomarkers and supplements and things that we can take. But I'm going to speak at the two ends of the spectrum. So I think the basics like Gary and Will have already mentioned, like sleep and diet, particularly taking care of your gut, but also understanding where stress shows up for you. So there's the gut, gut, microbiome, brain connection. So for a lot of people when they're stressed, it really does show up in their gut through bloating or leaky gut symptoms or indigestion. But there's also something called psychodermatology, which is about the connection between your mental state and your skin. So obviously, if you have a breakout, that affects your mood. But equally, the skin isn't just the physical boundary of your body, it's the psychological boundary of transgressions. So emotional, financial, sexual transgressions can actually show up as rashes on your skin. So really understanding where stress shows up for you there's also I could go into the psychoneuro, endocrino, immunology connection. But basically everything's connected. So all the systems will show some symptom of stress. Like Gary said, we don't all have every autoimmune system, but it will show up somewhere for you. And I think I love that analogy of the first domino. So I would start with the basics. If you're not creating the physical foundations for success in your body, to change something with neuroplasticity, it's like saying, I'm not going to put gas in the car, but I expect it to drive. So you do have to be sleeping enough, eating well, hydrated, not being sedentary, oxygenating your system and managing your stress. I really want to bring it back to that being very important. You can't do neuroplasticity if you're in stress. Once you think you've got that to a decent level, then there are the beautiful and ethereal things that we can do that we can learn from. Our ancestors are not luxuries. They're absolutely crucial to our survival. Things like spending time in nature, immersing yourself in the arts and culture, noticing beauty and appreciating it, that's gratitude to the next level. I mean, we're in Miami and it's Art Basel, so I'm just going to give you a few statistics about the importance of these things. So when you spend time in nature, trees actually release chemicals called phytoncides that, that trigger the release of natural killer cells in your immune system, boosting your immunity not just against colds and flus, but also against potentially heart attacks and cancers, because there are tumor cells circulating in our blood all the time and they help to kill them off. And then if you indulge in the arts and culture every two months, so that's going to a free gallery or a sculpture park or the ballet or the theater, then you have a 31% lower chance of dying compared to someone that doesn't. If you only go every two months, you have a 14% lower chance of dying than someone that doesn't indulge in the arts and culture. So, I mean, to me, that these are no brainers, you know, they're free, they're freely available. It's just about prioritizing and making the time. And we don't do that because we tend to think they might be frivolous and not essential. Essential. And it's more important to go for a run or it's more important to, you know, Take your supplements. But actually our ancestors in Paleolithic times had no spare resources for doing anything other than survival. They, they didn't give up resources for thriving. It was only for surviving. So why did they dance and drum and chant and hum and make cave paintings? We think cave paintings are the first evidence of humans making art. That's why 40,000 years ago, 10 and 25,000 years before that, we were carving into ostrich eggshells in South Africa. We were making necklaces out of shells and adorning ourselves. 80,000 years before that, we were crumbling ochre from the ground and smearing it onto our faces and our bodies. And we believed that there was a reproductive advantage to this because we would look more attractive and more creative. 500,000 years ago, we made tools that were more beautiful and symmetrical than they had to be to complete the task that they were for. So I'm just going to leave you with that. If you don't go and do something arty this week, I don't know what's going to persuade you.

Wow, thank you so much. Such great information. This next question is for each of you and Gary, I'd love to start with you. When you think of whole health, how do you define thriving versus merely maintaining?

I really define thriving versus nearly maintaining as making self care non negotiable. If you look back to the category of autoimmune, the reason why 82% of all autoimmune disease is found in women is not because autoimmune disease is, is selective by sex. It's because women have a tendency to develop something called caregiver syndrome. Because they were meant evolutionarily to bear children. They have a tendency to put the needs of others before the needs of themselves. Their spouse, their children, their career, their girlfriends, their co workers. And what this does is it keeps the central nervous system, it keeps the autonomic nervous system trapped in a sympathetic state. And very often, and there's guilt and shame around self care. And I think when you make self care non negotiable, you make yourself more available to give the balance of your day away and the balance of your time away. You know, one of the things that I've done very intentionally, as I mentioned, is I not only schedule sleep and exercise, but that first 90 minutes of every day belongs only to me. And then I give the balance of my day away. And I've done this with thousands and thousands of clients where we really begin to schedule the time for self care and release the guilt that's associated with Just simply putting yourself first and then giving the balance of your, of your day away. So someone that is thriving is someone that has accepted that self care is non negotiable. And you know, I find that the best time to do that is in the first 90 minutes of the day when you learn to talk, tolerate silence, you do round of breath work, you maybe do some gratitude journaling and you make that mobility part of your day non negotiable. It is a game changer for people that have chronic pain, chronic stress, excess rumination that suffer from anxiety. And as she mentioned before too, I mean there's, there's so many men and women that suffer from anxiety. I've never met once a patient that came through our functional medicine clinic that suffered from anxiety that did not also have gut issues. Not, not once, not a single time. If you're a chronic anxiety sufferer and you don't have gut issues, I want to study you. You're a unicorn, so raise your hand because I'd like to meet you. And all of this is preventable. You know, I also co chair the MAHA Action Committee under, under Bobby Kennedy. And one of the interesting things that came out of all the statistics from the CDC and the US federal government over the last several decades is that the vast majority, about 85% of all of the chronic disease in America is preventable through diet and lifestyle changes. And one of those would be just making self care non negotiable.

Yeah, thank you. I'm hearing boundaries.

We gotta clap too.

Definitely. Getting boundaries, I think helps us to really honor that time and space within us because it is challenging for women. We have a mentality and a programming that's drilled in us since we're little tiny girls taking care of baby dolls and feeding them, you know, it's, it's fascinating. Well, same question for you. What is the difference for you between thriving and maintaining?

I think it is kind of. I'm excited we're having this conversation because it's the antidote to the shameflammation that I talked about. How these mental, emotional, spiritual things impact our physiology. Driving, dysregulating, the neuroimmuno endocrine axis. This intersection between the nervous system, the immune system in the form of inflammation and the endocrine system or hormones. What's dysregulating that at least on a mental, emotional side for many people, we have to bring in these things like gratitude practice, self compassion practice. There's a study that people in the study did math and public speaking. Apparently that's what people hate the most is math and public speaking. But they measured interleukin 6, which is an inflammatory protein. But the people that practice self compassion the most had the lowest inflammation levels. But again, it sounds woo woo. It sounds weird. What? How can you prescribe self compassion? But it is an art. You know, there's science around it, but that's an art form of you have 30 trillion cells and they are eavesdropping on how you talk about yourself and how you think about yourself and how you treat other people as well. So start to operate from a place of grace for yourself and other people and tolerance for yourself and other people and tolerance. In our culture today, it's not tolerance when you only accept people that think like you and vote like you and look like you and all that. That's the opposite of tolerance. True tolerance is finding that thing, that spark of God that's in them, even when you find other parts unlovable or unacceptable or intolerant, to really have that. So I don't. I'm answering this question this way because I really feel like it's that perspective on the world around you that is a perspective of thriving. Because then the foods that you eat or the supplements that you take, or the movement that you do, or all the amazing biohack things that are out there, they're coming from a place of nourishment, not of. And abundance, not of restriction and like consumption and this sort of frenetic obsession. I do feel like a lot of this, like my most successful telehealth patients, not that they're perfect, but they start to realize that aha moment realization of. Of. Of abundance in their life. And I think that's what thriving looks like. And the rest is just ripple effects of that realization.

Oh, wow. Yeah. That's so powerful. I love the way you the wordage having a spark of God, like see the spark of God in the other person. Wow. Tara, same question for you. You know, difference between thriving and maintaining.

Yeah. So I agree with what all three of you said about boundaries and time and compassion. So I'm just going to bring something different to the table. I created this model when I was teaching executives at MIT Sloan about the difference between resilience and mental toughness. So across the top, there's a spectrum of motivation to addiction which comes from my background as a psychiatrist. So we all know that drugs and alcohol, you know, maybe a glass of wine makes you more sociable, but at the end, other end of the spectrum, you're drinking, you know, way Too much. And it's affecting your relationships and your work and your health, et cetera. But things like work and exercise and travel can also become addictions like that. And then the other spectrum comes from the financial engineering department at mit, which shows that increasing risk actually shows up on the same neural circuitry as disgust, usually self disgust. So if we take more and more risks with our health or our relationships, then we end up feeling disgusting, disgusted with ourselves. And that's. There's actually a neural neurobiological correlate for that. So the line that I draw between those two spectrums, on the one side is resilience, and on the other side is mental toughness. So if you go too far with anything in your life that has, you know, become no longer good for you, but you're able to bring yourself back, then that's resilience that's bouncing back from adversity. Mental toughness, which I would align with thriving rather than maintaining, is when you keep yourself on the right side of those spectrums all the time. So you know what the warning signs are. So, for example, I'm too tired to do yoga or I'm too tired to meditate today is a red flag. So you know that saying that if you're. If you don't have enough time for an hour of meditation, then you need to do two hours. It's kind of going back to what Gary was saying earlier. So I think really understanding where your line is, where you're no longer thriving and maybe even starting to struggle to maintain and making sure that you don't go past that line.

Thank you. Yeah, I would love now to kind of open it up to everyone. We can take maybe two to three questions tops, if anyone has one. And please start by sharing your name and the heart of the matter of your question.

Thank you. My name is Andrea Isaac, the mom I want to be, and I have three short questions. One, if you can kindly repeat the statistics for how many women are predominantly affected by autoimmune disease.

82%. 82.

82% of all autoimmune disease is in females. The actual number of females that have autoimmune disease. I don't. I don't know. But of the category of autoimmune, 82%.

Of those are women.

Women, yeah. 18%.

It's estimated. There's 50 million total people. Again, the predominance, it's 75. You know, it's a high percentage of people that are women. Of that 50 million.

Thank you. As a second part to that question, what recommendations would you suggest considering where research is at this point and the knowledge we have in AI tools, possibly for someone who developed rheumatoid arthritis at age 23. And the last part of the question, going back to not obsessing with healthy things, because that's not healthy in itself. How do we balance and choose the best source for food options? Because, as we know, our world is contaminated, sources are depleted, blah, blah, blah. But, like, you can't obsess. You need to go to the supermarket, go to farmer's market, and, like, do the best you can. But what would be your recommendations on that front for, like, nourishment? Thank you.

So I would say for. For autoimmune, just as a broad category, and there is obviously multiple different autoimmune conditions. So if you're.

If.

If you're diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, which about 90% of the time is idiopathic, it's of unknown origin. So you're thought to believe that you woke up one day and for no reason, your immune system turned on your colon. You have Crohn's, it's attacking the lacrimal gland of your eye. You have chagrins, it's attacking your thyroid. You have Hashimoto's. And even if it's attacking the myelin sheath of the nerve, you have multiple sclerosis. And the vast majority of time you say, well, what cause the immune system to attack my tissue? Well, we don't know. It's idiopathic. And then, God forbid, you have a relative somewhere in your lineage that had happened to have the same condition. Hashimoto's. And now they're going to tell you it's familial or it's genetically inherited, which is patently false. We have to remember that the immune system just doesn't show up to random tissues in the body for no reason. The immune system, like cholesterol and other compounds in the body, is called to that location. You know, cholesterol responds to inflammation and tissue damage. The immune system very often responds to pathogenic invaders. So I would begin if I had any autoimmune condition to look at. The big four Mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, and heavy metals. You wouldn't believe the number of times in our functional medicine clinic, we found patients with Hashimoto's that actually had massive amounts of heavy metals embedded in their thyroid. Thyroid has an affinity for heavy metals. I don't think that I saw a single Crohn's diagnosis that did not have severe leaky gut leading up. You know, preceding that diagnosis, they usually had gut dysbiosis, irritable bowel syndrome, diverticulitis, and ulcerative colitis. And it went unaddressed, and then bang, they ended up with an autoimmune condition. I often do a. Can you hold this for a second? I do a demonstration just so that you get the point. If this were a mold spore or a mycotoxin or a heavy metal or a parasite or even a virus, and this was a healthy cell, this does not hide like this. It hides like this. That's a very important distinction, because the immune system is hypervigilant and it wants to get to this. And when it reaches the wall of a cell, it doesn't have permission to come inside. And very often the way the immune system kicks down the door to get to the perpetrator is it manufactures an antibody to the exterior of that cell. No different than if somebody robbed the bank down the street and barricaded them themselves inside of this structure. The police would bust down that door to get to the perpetrator. The immune system will bust down the wall of a healthy cell to get to a perpetrator. And then we blame the immune system for crime it hasn't committed. And you spend the balance of your lifetime suppressing the immune system and treating the inflammation instead of helping it get rid of the pathogenic invader.

Wow. Thank you. Other questions? Yeah, if you'll pass. Right there. I love the razzle dazzle.

Sorry I don't have sunscreen on.

Awesome.

I'm so happy. Sorry. My name is Nicola. She asked that question. And thank you for that answer and to just. I have had an autoimmune disease 15 years ago. Went away, came back recently. I went through a very traumatic divorce, et cetera, et cetera. Have a wonderful functional medicine, doctor. And mold. I have mold in my system.

Heavy metals. Miami's the most capital of the world.

Just.

I hate to throw the news out for you.

I just moved here, though, so don't know where it came from, but it was very, very high. And that was a really. And your explanation about it being in the cell was sort of revelatory for me because I also never understood that. And I always believed that your body does not attack itself for no reason. It's the best machine that we absolutely. That exists in the world. So that was really wonderful. Dr. Will, I wanted to ask you a question about the machine or the things that you wear, what it's called, because that's something I want.

There's different ones out there. There's many ones out there. The one I believe is called neuropod. I think it's the one that attaches to the auricular branch of the vagus nerve on the ear. And there's one called pulsetto that goes on the neck. You like that one. And then there's different. Those are more like direct. As direct as you can get stimulation through the skin. But there are ones that use frequencies that work upon similar mechanisms like the Apollo. Neuro is another one that we see great success with. And these are things that we can measurably see an uptick and improvement in heart rate variability, deep sleep scores, REM scores, and then obviously the person has lower anxiety. You can. Has more resilience, really. Nervous system resilience.

Okay, thank you. Do you have any new calm. Is that something you've heard of where you listen to it?

No, I haven't heard. There's a lot of amazing ones out there. So I don't know that one specifically. Yeah.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. And we have time for one last question.

Yes, Hi.

Matthew Weiss, Randy's husband. You mentioned sleep hygiene. Can you give us details about what is good sleep hygiene?

Sure. So if you look at the statistics, probably the two most important things that will determine your circadian cycle of sleep that you have absolute control of are morning sunlight and consistent bedtimes. If you look at WHOOP data, for example, WHOOP just released a pretty large study on this, compiling all of the. All of the large data and a meta analysis. So consistent bedtime, so actually setting alarm not to wake up in the morning, but actually setting an alarm to go to bed at night so that you within 30 minutes of setting this alarm. You know, my sleep routine is very simple. If I've had a really rough day, I'll do what's called a contrast shower, which is just warm shower followed by 30 seconds short burst. And what this does is it lowers catecholamines in the brain. These fight or flight neurotransmitters that create awakened state. Keep the room as cold as you can stand it, as dark as you can stand it. Invest in a $12 full cotton eye mask that blocks out light. The typical no screen time in bed. Keep your electronics six feet away from your bed. And then I have a very consistent breathwork technique that I use when I go to sleep. It's a box breathing method. I try to get to 10 breaths. I've never once made it to 10 rests. My whoop has me falling asleep in less than three minutes. And the more consistently you do that, the more consistently your body will realize this is what we do when we go to sleep and this is what we do when we wake up. The reason why that's so important is it's also portable. If any of you follow me and you saw my recent tour of the world I just did with my wife. We did 14 cities in 18 days and we changed times time zones almost every single day. And yet my sleep score didn't drop below 88% because I bookended my sleep. I'd use the exact same routine to go to bed and the exact same routine to wake up. And I kept my digestion on the same cycle. So I never changed the time that I ate in terms of. So for example, I go to bed at 10pm usually here on the east coast, and I get up at 6am I didn't once feed myself between the hours of 10pm and 6am no matter where I was in the world. So I kept that digestive Zeit burger on the same clock. It changed my sleep wake cycle and the time that I saw sunlight and went to bed and woke up. But by not changing my digestive clock, it allowed me to adjust rapidly to a new time zone. So that's what I mean by sleep hygiene. And if you go to theultimatehuman.com on there, I actually have a whole. It's free. You can just download it. It's an entire sleep guide. I even go through sleep supplementation. And what might be right for you. Melatonin versus non melatonin.

What was that? 30 seconds after your hot shower?

So I only do cold for 30 seconds. You know, cold plunge will wake you up. 30 seconds of cold water will break the catecholamine cycle and you'll actually calm down after that.

Wow. Wow. Thank you for that like deeply detailed process. I think we can all apply, apply. One thing I'll add too, because I'm like a sleep warrior. Like that was the first thing I was trying to really change about my life. Your lighting means a lot. So like I highly recommend like amber light bulbs or some kind of like easeful regulating light in your lamps after 6pm that can kind of help your body really relax and get ready for everything else that you're going to do for your hygiene. I can't thank you three enough. Thank you for the work you do in the world. Thank you for coming today and sharing this profound wisdom with us. Please let's share hearts of gratitude for Gary Breca, Dr. Will Cole and Dr. Tara Swart Bieber. Thank you so much.