Conquering Anxiety, Optimal Sleep, & Cognitive Enhancers

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 3D 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 goggle, 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.

All 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, 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 and 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. So 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 know, 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.

Yeah. For, for you, though, like, I don't know. I went to University of Idaho and did exercise physiology and biomechanics and 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 neuromechanisms 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 that just like 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 for there?

Yeah, what, 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 0.01% more to maybe 1% 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 can 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 100% 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 and 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 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, 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 going to blunt it, you're going to 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 functional 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, so let, 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 move 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 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 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 the down, 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. The amount of serotonin that you can catalyze is directly correlated with the amount of melatonin you can deal with. That's why that 5 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 going to 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, 100%. So my original exposure to the concept as a whole was actually in college. Dr. 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 cord goes through and can next to you to the brain. Ultimately the Position of that in 3D 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 rib 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.

Yeah, that's. 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.

Okay, what about like, 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 4 to 6 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 80 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 360 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.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've been 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 in the rib cage?

1 million percent. So what's cool about that is you're attacking that, that it's the same anatomical approach. I just talked about 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'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 claim to fame that I've seen through social, social media and 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 tap?

Yes.

What is that?

That's the name of the technique from the Czech Republic.

Oh, okay, cool. So. So 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?

Probably not videos, but you can still find the research papers. It comes from the Czech Republic in the 90s. 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. You could have a conversation 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, 1990s. And you might. 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 diaphragm.

Okay, cool. I'm trying to note to myself. I'll hunt down some links 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. 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 the. Is the sympathetic Activity. These things arrived at my house last night. It's like this nail bed that you stand on that you know, you would use as almost like kind of like an ice bath for the feet for vagal nerve activation. And it's a proprioceptive 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 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 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 like a whole stretching routine. When you talk about return on investment per minute.

Yeah. Ever messed around with any of those vagal nerve stimulators that they use as like electrical input to the, 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 and 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, now, related to anxiety that you mentioned.

For you, like, how would you define where anxiety actually comes from? You know, and I think about this Honestly, because one thing that I talked with a guy named Dr. 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 in future processing, you ever thought about that?

100%. 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 are looking at, like, minutes to hours, tops. You know what I mean? It is funny when we talk about the best coaches 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, 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. 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 an archery. They talk a lot about, like, the.

The target panic issue, where you're anxious right before you do a high risk.

Or very important activity. What are your thoughts 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 experienced 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 on to when they're in the ocean of anxiety, 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 turn. 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 a 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 forcing yourself to feel that you know it's gonna bring you to present because that future driven perception is certainly what's driven 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 or improve your performance by using mental imagery. And you know, as we all know, probably most the of, most notably with the story of Michael Phelps, the swimmer getting the point, we could visualize like the individual drops of water coming off his goggles. You know, you, 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 metric. So how do you deal with visualization? Is that, is that something that you think is actually useful?

100%. 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 3D? If we go from white to red or whatever's on the other side, that's spatial abilities as a skill. And it's like most rudimentary sense. It's how can you manipulate these things in 3D 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, 100%, 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 3D in your head. Then we're going to do some sports psychology like work conversing, getting to know your athlete self, 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.

You ever use visualization? I guess, I guess for like a non high performance Athlete, 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 maybe you have like a real issue with like lower back on deadlifts, but literally nothing else in 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 calming 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, 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. Do you work with that much as far as, like, practical ways 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. 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 ignites the ultimate performances 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 by 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 we're really looking at is some people slip into flow state because 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 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 individual individuals.

Yeah, oh, I'm totally norepinephrine. Like for me to get into the flow sag, I'd be in a lot of pain, under a lot of pressure, or having been engaged in the activity for at least like 15 to 20 minutes before I really get into that alpha state where everything's starting to feel easy. Is that pretty typical for a norepi 100?

You see this, like whether 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, have a shit first half so he can bounce back and have a killer second, third and fourth halves. And then, 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, that could have been a layup, but you went in for a slam dunk from 8ft away 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. You know, 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 breathwork? You mess around with breath work much with your athletes?

Tons. The awesome thing about breathwork, 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 way 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 80, 20 rule. 80% allostasis, 20% 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 state. That means you can't decrease 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 that then choose more of a stimulatory form or more relaxing for breath work, depending on how you happen 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 activity 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. 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 pons does a really great job job of autoregulating sleep. So if missing one hour 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 would 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. 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, breath work, 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? 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, everything that has to do with like, there's no behavioral enzymes in your muscles. So just geographically and 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 where 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, 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 doctor ever. And the person on meth reciprocated that behavior. They were more than happy to sit 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. So it's more that we can take, you know, what was his name? I'm forgetting it. The old story where in like the 1800s, the miner who gets the rod.

Metal rod, Phineas Gage.

That guy.

I think it's Phineas Gage.

Yeah, 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, 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, his life. And everything was terrible at home after that, even though he was medically fine.

Yeah, yeah. 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, you know, take my sons out for waffles and eggs or whatever, like 10am for like a late, big 2,000 calorie breakfast. Breakfast. But like clockwork, I'll get hungry at like about 1:30, my normal eating time, no matter whether or not I've had a big breakfast, small breakfast, fasted, whatever, just like hungry at 1:30. That makes me think that the incredent 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. Is, Is there something to that idea?

100%. 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 so, if you could follow that quick sentence or two, that also tells us it's trainable. You've trained yourself at 130 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, got it. Yeah, that, that makes sense. And by the way, this just makes me think, I got to ask you about the. This. What do you think about people who say, like, you only use 10 of your brain.

Or 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, so much of this automatically happens, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in fact, it's just still 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 300% 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 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?

100. 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 I, you know, 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 5, 10% 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. My. I mean, my family knows after I've had a morning of podcasting, half of which is walking a treadmill, talk 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 fix, which if it's out in time for this podcast, I'll link to it BenGreenfieldLife.com superbrain. You talk about certain things in there, you know, one of which I think a lot of people be familiar with, such as 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 can you, this might rabbit hole a little bit, but can you talk to me about some, your, some of your favorite nootropics or your general approach when it comes to nootropics or smart drugs?

Yep. 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, 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 amine group. It has our nitrogen as our ribose. You know, we could probably clump this under amino acids eventually. Nootropics have an antioxidant function that's necessary to call it a nootropic.

Okay.

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. So that has to be present.

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. 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 ones is amoxypene Succinate is my favorite like form of it.

Amoxynamine succeed like S, U, C, C, I, N, A, T, E. Yep, exactly.

Amoxy PE is cool because its antioxidant properties actually impact cycloozygenase genes through prostaglandin. So similar to acid 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 reducing it successfully. But it's cool because it's acting on the brain. Amoxy pain 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 speech motor areas. That 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, 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 amoxepine sustenate and new pept, which is 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 enough that they, you could easily use them 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 case 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 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 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 store it in a muscle cell. That's just how you pay for lifting weights is with glucose. Right. We pay our 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, Acars carnitine. I've heard some things about 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 injectional 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 active. Not so much as far as like your actual brain stuff. It'll cause some norepinephrine, but it's not like it. 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 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 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 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 from transporting fatty acids to allowing more fatty acids to be liberated from cells, to promoting glycogen sparing, caring, 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 or increased fat utilization, I think it was you I heard talking about this idea that a very surprising number of like ultramarathon runners 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 and 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. 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 a 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 environments. 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, 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 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 triacylglycerol 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. Okay. 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 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 the. 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 10k, 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 protein, lysergamide like lsd. And then the, 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 it truly a 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 20 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 it really, really far. Liberating minimal liver glycogen.

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's pretty rare that I've had a microdose 10 to 20 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 1 ounce of that is the equivalent of about, about 10 micrograms of LSA. And I once mixed it improperly resulting in 1 ounce being 100 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 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, etc, 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've 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. It's not that they everything has a use, but we have to be very specific about why we think it's working. So the psilocybin is not a. 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 traveling to a brand new place or 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. But it would be through a different mechanism than using new PEPT 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 out.

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 you missed, like if you wanted to chill out, you could have done something else. You know what I mean? Like synergistic associations with behavior or activity is the only way to approach it.

What about kratom? What are your thoughts on Kratom?

Personally, I like Kratom. You know, I'm very sensitive to stimulants. So Kratom is like an awesome opportunity to drive glutamine and 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. So 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, I mean even if you took 200 micrograms of LSD, you're not going to die. Like, yeah, sure, you'll have a bad time, but you'll be fine. You know what I mean? And 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 dead.

So 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, well the, the, 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?

So, and it is true, I'll say that. So the paradox is when we have something like Kratom, 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 you're going to put you right there 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 100%.

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 supplement to get the sexual performance you want. Yeah. In that case you would actually want a little bit of caffeine to inhibit it. Just enough so that you know you last more than 90 seconds.

Right. If you want to go longer, you take a sympathetic nervous system stimulant that could potentially cause vasoconstriction or a slight rise in 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 fail. 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 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 again. So that would have to do with taking something that agonizes sexual desires, maybe a sobriety oxy. So oroxylen A, maybe a kratom, because that can do that as well.

PT 141 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 I said, you were just yanking on it for 78 minutes. It's just gonna happen eventually. That's gonna have to do with just going full circle with your cardiac cycle.

Yeah, that's Interesting that you say that about the, the GPT and the phosphate group groups responsible for part of the refractory period mechanisms. Kind of makes me think because just anecdotally if I've had a high amount of carbohydrates, say for dinner and am making love afterwards, I've noticed a significant reduction that refractory period, possibly because of what you've just described from a macronutrient glucose standpoint. As far as the refractory period goes, what about phosphate groups? Things like creatine phosphate or. I think you've talked about inositol triphosphate. But 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 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 P5P trimethylglycine, you know, anything like that could also be beneficial.

Interesting, Interesting. For those who are trying to keep up, I'll take some copious notes and put them in the show notes at Ben Greenfield Life Superbrain because I know we're covering a lot here at a pretty rapid pace, but what about the Microsoft 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. And first off the like, it's funny because I think I'm, I'm kind of tuned as the brain guy a lot of times I don't think there's anything more complicated than 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 fermented foods, have them in your diet often in you'll more than the 8020 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 now as part of 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 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 gut is seems to be, I should say the central governor of all the biomes. So if you take care of the 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, et cetera, like smell of your sweat even is correlative. Then you're good enough to not worry too much.

I don't know if you ever heard of Dr. William Davis. He wrote a book, I think it's called Super 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 36 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 Routeri probiotics, antibiotic and seems to just swear by that. And during our podcast he talked a lot about its impact on on mental stability, mental performance and decrease in ADD and ADHD like symptoms. Have you looked into El Ruderi or this Dr. William Davis guy at all?

I've heard of Dr. 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 and oxytocin production by the brain. Cerebrally, Lactobacillus rooteri 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 99% high functioning and 0.01% 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 100% deficient in lactobacillus reuteri. Wow. And the correlations are just not as strong, although still strong with adhd. But I mean, you know, research well enough like for someone to say 99 or 100% percent. That's basically like stone. In fact, you know, it's, it's really impossible to get that value.

Yeah. Well, I'm going to keep eating my, my 36 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 one of my, my favorite ways to snack. Do that with a little bit of dark chocolate as dessert before bed. It's amazing. Andy, you obviously put out a ton of content. You're working on a new book. Got an Instagram to channel. What's, 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, 27th April. Not sure when this will be out.

Little after that, but that's okay, I'll link to it.

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. And we, 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 professionals. But I have this burning desire to help people and that's what Go Super Brain is. So I'm making a shift from consultations. You know, this past week I just did my last 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 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 then. 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.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, three months. But right now go superbrain gmail.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.com superbrain and you can also leave your questions, your comments, your feedback and your thoughts about this episode for, 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, well 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.com have an amazing week.