How To Build An Unbeatable Brain (Ben Greenfield's Full SEALFit Unbeatable Mind Presentation)

Mr. Bing Greenfield. Sweet.

I don't know. I don't think I made much of an impression last year in terms of takeaways because Mark didn't say anything about your morning enema in his introduction, so he obviously didn't take that away. What's that?

Okay, so. Okay, we're halfway there with the squatty potties. I won't talk about poop very much today, though, I promise.

I want to focus on the brain, and I'm hoping Mark doesn't sue me for the phrase unbeatable brain. TM unbeatablebrain.com I'm going to buy it if you don't own it yet. But today, the unbeatable how to enhance your brain and hack cognitive performance. I love this stuff. I think that figuring out how to make your brain work faster and better is really cool because to me, conceptually, there's a little bit of a difference between the mind and the brain. Right? The mind is a little bit more responsible for your motivation, your internal thought patterns, etc. The brain is more of this, like, physiological, biological spark of neurotransmitters. And in an ideal situation, you've got your why and you've got your visualization, and you have your breathing. You have all of the. The crap that Mark talks about.

And then you also want to make sure that you're able to take advantage of all those components by ensuring that the physiological side of your brain is also working properly. I mean, that's the ultimate one, two combo, and that's what I want to give you guys today. I will apologize in advance. We're going to feed through the fire hose. We're going to go through a bunch of stuff over the next 50 minutes. So put on your thinking caps, take out your notepads, and let's fly through this stuff. So basically, what we're going to cover are three different concepts today. Number one, how to fix your neurotransmitters. Number two, how to fix what's called HPA axis dysfunction. And number three, how to increase your brain power. If you can nail these three variables, then I guarantee that you will walk out of here thinking faster, thinking better. And with superior mental performance, you'll be able to take the unbeatable mind concepts and meld them with the unbeatable brain concepts and really be able to get the most out of what's up inside your head. So the first thing that's very important to understand here is fatigue and where fatigue comes from in the first place. Where does fatigue come from? Anybody have any clues, like when you get tired, what is it that's getting tired? Lungs, heart, muscle, brain, Brain. Bingo. So it's the brain. The brain is responsible for shutting down all of the other important organs in your body. Your heart, your lungs, your muscles. In many cases, before those specific organs have reached true physical fatigue, there's this saying. I don't know who's responsible for it, but the idea is that when you're tired, when you're exhausted, you're really only about 40 to 50% of the way to physical fatigue. So the idea here is if we can figure out how to overcome that central governor, how to train our brains and put it in a place where we're able to push through that state of fatigue, then we'll have superior willpower, both physically and mentally. So I will have these slides available for you, by the way. So some of these nitty gritty diagrams you can delve into a little bit more deeply. But Dr. Timothy Noakes is the guy responsible for developing this idea behind the central governor model of fatigue. And the idea that fatigue starts between your ears as your brain tries to save your organs. And what happens is your brain literally will shut down blood flow to your mitochondria. It'll shut down blood flow to your muscles. And when that happens, you actually cannot get lactic acid out of your muscles as quickly as you would normally be able to. When that happens, you get the burn, you get a drop in oxygen availability, and you quit. You stop three or four reps before you'd normally be able to stop. You throw in the towel in the workout or in whatever other decision making task that you're involved in. Now, part of this can be due to low amounts of oxygen that are available to the brain. There are some theories out there that some of it may be related to glucose, some of it may be related to the ketones that Dominique talked about yesterday. One really interesting theory is that, and this is really interesting for people who are trying to figure out what to eat during exercise is that one of the main reasons that this central governor sets in and begins to shut down the muscles is low blood levels of amino acids and in many cases, a bonk. The inability to keep going during a workout isn't because of a drop in muscle glycogen and a drop in blood glucose. It's because because of a drop in blood levels of amino acids. And that's why a lot of people who are following this whole ketosis thing that I've heard folks talking about this weekend, they must Combine that with high blood levels of amino acids during exercise to shut down this central governor fatigue from actually occurring. But that's the idea behind one reason that the brain gets tired. And the reason I'm telling you guys this is so that you know what we're trying to overcome using some of the tactics you're about to learn. So there's the central governor model of fatigue, there's also the decision making model of fatigue. So the idea behind this is that there was one really interesting study that was done last year that showed that people who engaged in something that was cognitively demanding before their workout, it actually suppressed their ability. It decreased their time to exhaustion during that workout because they had decision making fatigue. They were distracted by things that they were having to think about during the actual workout. So the idea behind this is that the part of your brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, that is responsible for regulating things like heart rate and breathing during exercise, it's also responsible for making decisions. And so if you have a low ability to be able to handle making decisions while on the fly, while on the go, if your brain isn't trained to do that, your body actually gets tired more easily from a physiological standpoint in terms of your heart rate patterns and your breathing patterns. So there's this decision making model of fatigue as well. Not only is fatigue dependent on oxygen, amino acids, ketones, and glucose, but it's also dependent on how many decisions that you're having to make in the moment. It's because this cortex is responsible for both those areas. So this is why. For example, has anybody read the book Iron War about the battle between Mark Allen and Dave Scott during Iron Man? Or maybe you've seen somebody running a 5K and they're going as fast as they can, and then for those final 200 meters, somehow they kick in and they go even faster than that. The idea behind that is that fatigue is not fully physical and biological. It's also mental, it's also psychological. And a big part of that is this decision making fatigue. So the interesting thing, and what gives us more insight into this is a really interesting study that they did on cyclists using TDCs. And this is where you shock the brain. So they took this group of cyclists and they shocked them prior to exercise. They applied electrical stimulation to the brain. And this electrical stimulation specifically targets this anterior cingulate cortex, this area of the brain that is responsible for both decision making and also for heart rate and breathing patterns. And what they found was that when they shocked these cyclists prior to a time Trial they had increased time to exhaustion. They were able to produce about 4% more power. And the theory behind this study was that they were somehow distracting the brain and they were mingling the pain and the pleasure centers in the brain through this tdcs. So the idea here is that distraction, fatigue, all the things that begin to shut down the body during exercise, it's a mingling of both psychological issues as well as some of the central governor model biological issues. And if we can figure out a way to overcome both of these, by ensuring that we have adequate neurotransmitters, that our HPA axis is working properly, and that we support our brain with the right nutrients and the right supplements, we can keep both of these things from occurring and allow our brains to go for much longer periods of time and also think much faster when we want to think and do it without shocking the brain into stimulation, because nobody wants to walk around with electrodes attached to their head. So the idea here, what we're going after and what they found with these cyclists, was that they were actually getting into what's called the alpha brainwave zone. Are you guys pretty familiar with the alpha zone? This zone in which your brain creates a frequency of about 8 to 12 hertz. And when that happens, you're able to get this focused relaxation and calm that's mingled with superior levels of performance. It's the zone that, for example, you hear a basketball player go into when they're hitting every free throw and their shot percentage is going way up and the entire game goes into slow motion. That's this concept of being in the zone. Have any of you ever experienced that during a workout, during a game, during a match, all of a sudden your body just goes into like automatic mode. And that's this idea of the zone. It's alpha brainwave production. Many of the strategies I'm going to give you today are focused on helping your body get into that alpha brainwave, that 8 to 12 hertz. And you must have all these three factors that I'm about to talk about about present in order for the alpha brainwave zone to occur. So, two ways that your brain breaks and the two things that we're going to go after today, in addition to the final part of this talk that's going to focus on supplements and foods. Number one is neurotransmitter problems. That's one way that your brain can break and not function optimally. Another way is via what's called HPA axis distribution dysfunction. So we're going to tackle neurotransmitter issues first, and then we'll tackle HPA axis issues. You'll figure out how to fix both of these to optimize your brain. So before we talk about how to actually fix your neurotransmitters, it's very important for you to understand how your brain communicates with your body.

This diagram right here, and you may not be able to see it too well, but basically the idea here is you have a presynaptic neuron and a postsynaptic neuron. A signal from your brain, let's say, to your muscles will travel down this neuronal pathway and it'll arrive at this cleft that separates the axon and the dendrite, the presynaptic neuron and the postsynaptic neuron. Now, if we use an example like serotonin, let's say what happens is you've got a bunch of tryptophan, it gets converted into serotonin. Serotonin is waiting here in these vesicles to get released. When the action potential arrives, the serotonin gets released into this little cleft between the two neurons. When the serotonin passes into that cleft, it attaches to receptors on this neuron that's waiting to receive the signal. When enough serotonin gets released, the action potential, let's say, in this case, driving a signal to a muscle, passes along and continues so that your brain actually, or your body actually knows what to do with that signal. That's the way that nerves communicate. Now, once the neurotransmitters have passed here and attached to the receptors, your body has specific enzymes that act to destroy and degrade those neurotransmitters. And it will also uptake some of those neurotransmitters that are left over in this cleft and bring them back up into that presynaptic neuron. So you have enzymes, for example, one is called monamine oxidase, that will actually take serotonin, for example, and break it down after the serotonin has passed across that cleft. So that's a basic idea of how a neurotransmitter works, in case you didn't know what a neurotransmitter is. So that's how nerves communicate. Norepinephrine, epinephrine, dopamine, all of them work very, very similarly. They pass across this cleft, they go to the synaptic neuron, and that's the way that your brain will send signals. Some neurotransmitters are inhibitory. You may have heard of, for example, like.

Gamma aminobutyric acid or gaba. That's an inhibitory neurotransmitter that helps you to sleep. Some are excitatory, like dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, etc. But the idea here is that if you have a neurotransmitter deficit, whether it's serotonin, dopamine, tryptophan, many of these other neurotransmitters, you tend to get things like craving, low ability to make decisions, low ability to resist, fatigue, depression, insomnia, et cetera. There's a host of issues that can occur when your neurotransmitters are not working properly. So how do you fix neurotransmitters? How do you ensure that your nerve cells are actually communicating with optimum efficiency? Well, there's eight different things that you can do that I want to talk about today. So the first is antidepressants. Antidepressants are a big issue. And I've talked to a lot of athletes who use antidepressants, and that's why I bring them up even when I'm talking to active, healthy people, because a lot of people use them. So the idea behind antidepressants is, is most of them act as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. What that means is that when that serotonin gets released from the presynaptic neuron and crosses the cleft to speak to the postsynaptic neuron, an SSRI floods that cleft with a whole bunch of serotonin and keeps that serotonin hanging around in the cleft. So your body gets dumped with a whole bunch of serotonin, which helps you to feel good short term. What happens is that you need more and more receptors for serotonin and you eventually get desensitized to those neurotransmitters. In addition, what happens is a lot of the receptors that are responsible in this postsynaptic neuron for speaking to serotonin, they begin to degrade. And you have these receptors in your gut, in your brain, in your liver. And so, long term, use of an SSRI actually messes up your body's ability to be able to send and receive neurotransmitter signals. So when people are trying to fix brain issues, even though I'm not a doctor, I can't tell you to get off an antidepressant. But I can tell you that one of the best ways to really screw up your neurotransmitter function is to be long term on a lot of these things like Prozac, Zole, laughed, etc. Because what they do is actually alter the receptor functionality that you just learned about in that presynaptic and postsynaptic neuron. So one way to fix neurotransmitter issues is to ensure that you are not using SSRIs or any type of depressant or antidepressant that works on neurotransmitters. So that's number one, number one thing to check off is make sure you taper off or avoid antidepressants.

And like I mentioned, that last bullet there, the liver, the kidneys and the colon can become damaged by antidepressant use. Some sleep drugs can work similarly as well. Doc Parsley and I recently did a podcast on my show where we talked about this. But a lot of issues that you get in terms of like constipation, liver dysfunction, kidney dysfunction, etc. A lot of that is because of neurotransmitters, imbalances, and a lot of it can be caused by not just antidepressants, but also things like Ambien, Valium, A lot of sleep drugs that knock you out, it can affect this same receptor system. So be really careful with that stuff. Be careful with drugs. Next is to moderate stimulants. So I'm a fan of caffeine. I just had my giant ass cup of coffee during breakfast. But there's a difference between low dose versus high dose caffeine. About 100 milligrams of caffeine has been shown to have some really cool cognitive performance enhancing effects. But what happens is if you do, say 1, 2, 2 plus 3, 4 cups of coffee during the day, your body gets flooded with caffeine. Now, the specific receptor that caffeine interacts with in your brain to keep you awake is called an adenosine receptor. And adenosine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. What that means is adenosine helps you to sleep at night. But when you're constantly flooding your brain with caffeine and doing multiple cups of coffee during the day, your body has to create more and more of these adenosine receptors. And so it requires more and more adenosine in order for you to get to sleep at night. So what happens is multiple cups of coffee, even if you're getting them all done before noon or before 2pm so you sleep better at night, it's still creating a need for you to need way more adenosine. Once it is time to fall Asleep at night. So this is basically a neurotransmitter issue, drinking multiple cups of coffee or overdoing caffeine. When it comes to adenosine, what's really cool, and this is something that I personally do, is you can reset your adenosine receptors. So the way that I do this is I keep regular coffee and decaf coffee at my house. I switched to the decaf coffee for seven days out of about every month. And seven to 10 days is how long it takes for your body to reset those adenosine receptors. So you still get the taste of coffee, you still get the flavor of coffee. You can still have your piping hot beverage in the morning, but you simply switch to decaf once a month for about seven days to keep these adenosine receptors from getting flooded with caffeine. So that's another way that you can make sure that you fix, fix neurotransmitter issues or ensure you don't overload your body with caffeine. Just do this caffeine deload and then focus on getting about 100 milligrams of caffeine. That's the amount of caffeine that's been shown to give you cognitive performance enhancing effects without overloading these adenosine receptors. And that's the equivalent of about a cup of coffee a day, 12, 16 ounces. Kind of depends how big your coffee mug is, but about 100 milligrams or so of and then switch to decaf once a month. Okay. Next for neurotransmitters is to avoid toxin exposure. So toxins are basically.

Things like mold, fungi, air that you breathe, poor water, et cetera. We know now that there's things like pharmaceuticals and birth control pills and all sorts of things, antidepressants that can affect your neurotransmitter production that are in, for example, are municipal water supplies. So one of the things that you really want to do is clean up your personal environment. A few of the big things that I find that people tend to ignore when it comes to cleaning up the personal environment is air and water. So in my home, what I've done is installed a HEPA air filter in the central air unit. I use one called an aller air. There's a bunch of different HEPA air filters you can get out there. You can find them on Amazon. There are also, like vacuums, standalone filters. There's one called the rabbit filter that you can just put in your office or your bedroom if you don't want to outfit your home or you live in, like a condo or an apartment where you can't mess around with the central air unit. But a HEPA air filter is incredibly important for ensuring that neurotransmitter production is not affected during the day. So if you don't have one of those in your office or your home, I'd highly recommend. I touched on water filters the last time that I spoke here. And, and I want to touch on that again real briefly because it's super important. If you're not filtering the water that you drink, you need to be, especially if you're drinking from a municipal water supply. Last year I mentioned reverse osmosis and carbon filters. I still stand by that as two really good ways to filter water. The one thing you need to be aware of is if you use the gold standard for filtering your water, which is reverse osmosis, you do filter out a lot of the minerals, so you have to remineralize your water. So a good one, two combo is you use a reverse osmosis water filter and then you add minerals back into the water. Some of the reverse osmosis water filters that will filter all the water in your house that you can buy off Amazon, they already have remineralizers that are part of the system. And if they don't, you can actually get like trace liquid mineral drops. Use a good sea salt. You can use a mineral supplement to get the minerals back into the water. But a HEPA air filter and some kind of really good water filter should be way up there in terms of priorities when it comes to reducing a lot of the toxins that are in your home or in your environment. There's a lot of other things like using organic fruits and vegetables, natural personal care products, natural household cleaning chemicals. If you go to a dentist, you should definitely choose a holistic dentist. That's one of the number one ways that you get exposed to a lot of toxins and metals and things like that is at a conventional dentist. There's a really good website called toxicteeth.org that will help you to find a good holistic dental practitioner in your area. But these are all little things that tend to fly under the radar that go way beyond just like eating healthy and working out, that you really have to prioritize if you want to optimize brain function. So be careful with your personal environment. Avoid toxin exposure. Sensory overload. This is another biggie. Our brains get constantly bombarded with sensory stimulus. This can be computer monitors, TVs, late night movies, video games. It can be how loud. Your MP3 player is playing a podcast or an audiobook or music. I'm always careful and cognizant of where I'm bombarding my body and how much I'm bombarding my body when it comes to a sensory stimulus. So I keep my monitor and and my iPhone brightness turned down as much as possible. When I'm listening to things, I keep the volume as low as I possibly can so that I'm still able to hear what's being said, but I'm not overloading my senses. What happens is, when you're constantly getting exposed to sensory stimuli, this causes these calming neurotransmitters like serotonin and that other one I talked about, gaba, they become overloaded. They have to get released in very high amounts to be able to combat a lot of this excitatory stimulus that occurs from sensory overload. So you really need to be cognizant, especially in the evenings, of things like video games, loud music, movies, etc. I mean, even if I watch a movie at night, I wear blue light blocking glasses. I make sure the volume is turned down a little bit, the brightness on the TV is down a little bit. If I check into a hotel room at night, I unplug everything before I go to bed at night. So there's not a lot of lights, a lot of WI fi signals bouncing around the room. But this type of sensory stimulus, long term, can really overload your neurotransmitters. So be cognizant of that. Know how much your senses are being bombarded. That's another really important thing to be aware of. Just brightness, loudness, anything that stimulates the senses. Know that your body eventually can become overloaded with that kind of stuff. So your gut, I mentioned that your gut has a lot of serotonin receptors in it and produces a lot of serotonin, but your gut uses about 30 other neurotransmitters as well. So when it comes to your gut.

A few of the biggest issues in terms of neurotransmitters and optimizing your gut's ability to be able to have a good amount of neurotransmitter receptors and also produce a lot of neurotransmitters, it all comes down to bacteria. So eating a wide variety of fermented foods is really important. When it comes to optimizing your gut's ability to be able to produce neurotransmitters, I'm talking about yogurt, kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut, natto, anything that's fermented. And if you're not able to get your hands on good, high quality versions of these type of foods, using a probiotic supplement, like a good, good, high quality, full spectrum probiotic, that will help your gut to be able to have the bacteria that it needs. Because it's not your gut lining that's producing the neurotransmitters, it's actually the bacteria in your gut that produce the neurotransmitters. So this is why when I travel, for example, I don't take probiotics every day, but when I travel, I always travel with probiotics and to allow my body to get exposed to as many different bacterial strains as possible, all cycle through different probiotics. So I'll use like prescript assist caprobiotics.

V3. There's a whole bunch of different probiotic blends out there. But switching yogurt brands, switching probiotic blends, exposing your body to different bacteria throughout the year, that's a really cool strategy for ensuring that you are constantly keeping your flora built up to the point where it's able to create the amount of neurotransmitters that you need. So pay attention to your gut as well. Now remember, this seems like a lot of stuff, but if you start to check off these things one by one, you're really going to notice huge differences in terms of your awareness, your clarity of thought, your cognitive patterns, et cetera. So neurotransmitters make sure that you fix your gut. Obviously the gut is really complex. There's everything from small intestine bacterial overgrowth to bacterial imbalances, to leaky gut syndrome, to food allergies, to food intolerances. I mean, I really recommend everybody actually go out and get a test. I promise I wouldn't talk about poop, but now I'm going to talk about poop. Just like a three day stool panel. I think everybody should do one of those at least once in their life to look at like bacteria, yeast, fungus, stuff like that that's going on in your digestive tract. Because that gut brain interaction is super duper important.

Okay, Next is to replace building blocks. So neurotransmitters, when we're talking about making sure that you've got enough neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are made up primarily of amino acids. Now, in terms of your body being able to take amino acids and use them to produce neurotransmitters, there are two other components that have to be necessary, that have to be present for that to occur. Adequate B vitamins and, and adequate minerals. So you can get adequate amino acids and B vitamins from eating a diet that's really rich in like organic meats, fish, stuff like that. You can also supplement with amino acids, you can supplement with B vitamin complexes, and you can supplement with minerals. That's a really, really good 1, 2, 3 combo for ensuring that your body has what it needs to create neurotransmitters. If you deal with insomnia, cravings, brain fog, stuff like that, I, I would recommend looking into a 1, 2, 3 combo like that. Good high quality amino acid sources. Primarily you're looking at meat, meat, fish, et cetera. You can use whey proteins. Interestingly, they just did a study that showed that if you use vegan proteins like hemp, pea, rice protein, stuff like that, like if your body doesn't do well with whey, if you take digestive enzymes before you use something like a vegan protein, it actually increases the amino acid availability in the vegan protein as high as it would be if you use like a whey protein, for example. So there are different ways that you can enhance the availability of proteins but ensure that you're getting every single day a full spectrum of amino acids. Really important, especially for people who are following like a vegan or vegetarian diet. If you supplement with amino acids or if you use some kind of like a pea or a hemp or, or rice based protein and combine that with digestive enzymes, you're going to help your body have the amino acids that it needs to produce adequate neurotransmitters.

Anytime you're going through a period of life where you're getting your sense just bombarded, like if you go to Kokoro or something like that, you want to make sure that you go into a situation like that with really, really high levels of amino acids, and preferably you keep your amino acid levels topped off during that period of time that your senses are getting bombarded, because that will help you to keep up with the neurotransmitter production that you need to keep up with. So building blocks. Next is neurotransmitter repletion. So the idea behind this is that some folks actually have gone through so much stress, they've been hard charging for such a long period of time that a lot of the techniques that I just talked about sometimes are not enough to cover the neurotransmitter bases. And this is where something like neurotransmitter repletion therapy can come in handy. If You've tried a lot of this stuff and nothing seems to be working. There's a really good practitioner named Dr. Kalish who has written a really good book about neurotransmitter repletion therapy. And there's some really interesting supplements out there that are in the correct blend to be able to replenish a lot of the neurotransmitter issues people have, like low serotonin, for example. That's a big, big issue with a lot of people who are living modern, hard charging lives. I've had to deal with low serotonin levels before.5 HTP and tryptophan are two of the most important precursors for serotonin and a very, very effective blend that you can use if you deal with again, cravings, insomnia, brain fog, fuzzy thinking, lack of motivation, stuff like that is a combination of five HTP and tryptophan. It's a very simple stack. You do a 10 to 1 ratio. So you would use, for example, 1,000 milligrams of 5 HTP and 100 milligrams of tryptophan split into three doses throughout the day. There are specific supplements. A few of them are neurorepleat, cisreplete and D5 Mucuna. Those are all examples of supplements that have five HTP and tryptophan in the correct ratios. If you wanted to try out supplementation and see if that helps if this other stuff isn't helping. And I would also recommend this Dr. Daniel Kalish guy. He actually has a list on his website of Kalish practitioners that you can meet with who can help walk you through something like neurotransmitter repletion. There are also tests that you can get the top two tests that I recommend for seeing if your body is low in neurotransmitters and if this is a more serious issue for you. One is an organic amino acids test. And that's a test that a dot can run for you. It's like a urinary test. The other one is a test that you can go look at at a company called DBS Labs. DBS Labs.com that's also a urinary neurotransmitter test. And that website, DBS Labs, has a ton more information on it about neurotransmitter repletion.

And then finally, fats, the myelin sheaths via which these nerve transmissions propagate the nerves that I showed you earlier. The jumping from the presynaptic neuron to the postsynaptic Neuron. There are two types of fats that primarily make up the myelin sheaths and the nerve linings there. One is dha. So dha, a lot of people will tell you you'll get adequate amounts of that from things like chia seeds, flax seeds, nuts, things of that nature. But it's very, very poorly absorbed and poorly converted into DHA when you rely upon DHA from those sources. Really, fish is one of the primary ways that you're going to get adequate dha. The other way that you can get it is via marine based sources that are primarily algae, like chlorella, spirulina, marine phytoplankton. I use both. So I use algae sources like chlorella and spirulina and marine phytoplankton. I also eat a lot of fish so that I'm getting a really, really good one two combo of dha. And the cool thing about a lot of these algal sources is they help your body to soak up and mitigate a lot of the metals that you get in fish. That's why anybody who eats a lot of fish, I recommend you do a lot of seaweed and algae as well. It's a really good one two combo. So DHA is one thing that makes up these nerve cells. The other one is oleic acid. Oleic acid is something you would find in things like olive oil. Avocados are really high in oleic acid as well. But these type of things should be staples in your diet. Good sources of oleic acid and good sources of dha so that your myelin sheaths and your nerve cell linings are actually able to rebuild and they're able to repair. So that's another huge strategy. Food sources of omega 3 fatty acids are primarily going to be food fish. And then algae based DHA supplements would be like chlorella, spirulina, marine phytoplankton, et cetera. So if anybody in here is not yet a fan of sushi and sashimi, you probably should be. At this point, you're probably getting the idea that fish are pretty important when it comes to neurotransmitters. Fish, amino acids, dha, stuff like that. Okay, so summary here of how to fix the neurotransmitters. Avoid antidepressants, modulate stimulants like caffeine, be careful with toxins, clean up your personal environment, avoid sensory overload, and be cognizant of how many signals you're sending to your eyes and your ears. Fix your gut, so pay Attention to bacterial balance in your gut, replace building blocks, primarily making sure you get enough amino acids, enough B vitamins, and enough minerals. And then eat healthy fats. And specifically focus on oleic acid and dha. All right, so that's your homework for your neurotransmitters. That's part one. Now part two is your HPA axis. Your HPA axis is. Well, let me pull up the next slide here. HPA axis. HPA axis is your hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal axis. The way that it works is you've got your hypothalamus, you've got your pituitary, and you have your adrenal glands that sit on top of your kidneys. The idea here is that the hypothalamus produces a signal which causes your pituitary gland to release something called acth, adrenocorticotropic stimulating hormone. When that happens, your kidneys will get the signal to release cortisol. When your kidneys release cortisol, that's what's called a negative feedback loop, meaning as you produce cortisol, that causes this release of epinephrine, this excitatory response. And that excitatory response travels back to the hypothalamus and causes the hypothalamus to down regulate the signal. So you wake up your body, you get all excited, you get that cortisol and epinephrine release, and then your body naturally shuts itself down. What happens, though, is, is if you're constantly releasing cortisol and you're constantly releasing epinephrine, the HPA axis becomes desensitized, that negative feedback loop no longer works. And so your hypothalamus is unable to produce that inhibitory signal that tells your body to shut back down. So generally, what happens in people with HPA axis dysfunction is they're tired but wired. How many of you in here have felt that? So you're like, you want to go to sleep at night, but you have a hard time falling asleep. You wake up at 5am Even though you're really pissed off because you wanted to wake up at 6:30am you wanted that extra little bit of sleep, and then you're tired through the day, but you also really want to go work out because you feel like you need that cortisol release. And it's just this vicious cycle that you go through. That's HPA axis dysfunction, and that's part neurotransmitter dysfunction is one way that the brain can break. But this HPA Axis dysfunction is another way. And the two are related, because if you're overloading your body, causing it to produce one way too much epinephrine during the day, you're going to run out of a lot of the building blocks for other neurotransmitters. So HPA axis dysfunction is definitely something that we want to take care of, that we want to fix. And this slide just shows that negative feedback loop that I just talked about, just so you understand the way that the hypothalamus gets desensitized. So what do we do about this? 4 Ways to Fix HPA Axis Dysfunction. 4 Ways to do it. So the first is to de stress. There's obviously a ton of ways to de stress. If you visit the Wikipedia page for stress, there's literally like 80 things on there, from acupuncture to music therapy, to as many woo woo things as you can think of. But what you want to do is shield your brain from stress. And there's a few different ways that I recommend that you do this. These are the things that I found to work extremely well when it comes to stress. So first of all, avoid fomo. FOMO is fear of missing out. Okay? We live in an era where there is too much information produced literally every hour for you to ever keep up with in your lifetime. And you simply need to sit back and accept that fact. Okay? Focus on the things that are important to you that get you really excited and passionate and try and filter and ignore out a lot of the other things that. This is something that I constantly have to deal with because I love information and I love to learn. And I found that that tends to be a trigger for me for stress. If there's something that a book I haven't read that somebody tells me that I really need to read, that can trigger a stress response in me if I haven't read it. And that's a pure FOMO response. The most important thing you can do is identify that response, know that it's occurring, and then ask yourself how important that is versus your own happiness, your own quiet time, spending time with your family or your kids, et cetera. So FOMO is a biggie. And I especially wanted to bring that up in this crowd of folks because I know a lot of you are hard charging high achievers. So FOMO is a big one. Also, all or nothing is another big one. Like thinking that you basically have to get in your quota hour and a half workout every day or else you're not going to work out at all. And it's really going to stress you out unless you take off every single minute that you're supposed to get in. Understand that even getting a little bit is still going to do a lot of benefit for your body and it can stress you out to have that all or nothing approach. Avoid people with negative energy. I'm very careful with who I surround myself with. Avoid energy vampires, basically. And then the other thing, there's seven different things I found to work really, really well for de stressing. Number one, breathing. You've learned a bunch of that from Mark Devine. I'm not going to kick that horse to death. Meditation, same thing. I'm a big fan of Tai chi and yoga, whether that's movement in the water, above water, dry land. I've learned both those practices and they've helped me tremendously. Coherence. Coherence is another really, really cool strategy. The best way to learn it is to go to the website heartmath.org and it teaches you how to take gratefulness, place it into your heart, breathe it into your body. And that's something I'll typically do half a dozen times during the day. Is anything I'm grateful for. I take a quick 10 seconds, breathe it into my heart. It used to take me two or three minutes to do and I've learned how to do it very, very quickly. It's called coherence technique. A hobby, something to take you away from stress. For me it is music, guitar, tennis, stuff like that, and then high quality sleep. So de stress is one way to fix the HPA axis, a lot of that stuff, it's all common sense, you guys know about it. But as you're making your list of how to fix your brain, make sure that you include de stressing. Another one is excessive exercise. Because of that cortisol and epinephrine release, you really start to wear out that negative feedback loop with excessive exercise and overtraining. I use heart rate variability every morning for for this reason. So I wake up in bed, I roll over, I take my heart rate variability measurement for five minutes and it tells me how beat up my sympathetic fight and flight nervous system is and how beat up my parasympathetic aerobic more rest and digest nervous system is. And I choose how my day's training is going to proceed based on that. For example, I was not down at the beach doing the wad this morning because I knew that was probably going to be a lot of adrenal stimulus. And I did a Spartan race yesterday morning. I know that that's going to be tough on my HPA axis combined with a big day of travel today if I get out of bed and do something hard. So I spent time down by the pool doing yoga, some easy breath holding, and some underwater swimming. That's because my sympathetic nervous system score was low this morning on my heart rate variability. My parasympathetic nervous system was was ready to train. So that's an example of how you can make decisions on the fly and ensure that you're taking care of your hpa. Access hrv. I've got a ton of podcasts on that on my website. Periodization Programming.

Also, when it comes to excessive exercise, especially if you've dug yourself into an overtraining hole, there are just a couple things I want to focus on. If you are in a state of adrenal fatigue or you're overtrained, because that means that your kidneys, which have your little adrenal glands sitting on top of them, have been stressed out quite a bit. And those adrenal glands are big storehouses of vitamin C and minerals. So if you're in a state of overtraining and excessive adrenal fatigue, I'm a huge fan of higher dose vitamin C supplementation, like 4 to 6 grams of vitamin C per day. I'm a big, big fan of higher dose mineral supplementation. You using something like liquid trace minerals or a good sea salt and then also adaptogenic herbs. So if you look up Chinese adaptogenic herbs, these help your body to produce more cortisol when cortisol is low and less cortisol when cortisol is high. Those are just a few of the little nutrients that I recommend if you are in a state of overtraining or adrenal fatigue. Those aren't like daily supplements that I recommend, but they are things that can help out quite a bit. Okay. Number three is to shut down inflammation. So there's a really, really interesting study that they did in mice that showed that longevity was significantly reduced due to neural inflammation caused by stress. And that's because of this component called nfkb. And it's basically this protein that's responsible for inflammation or associated with inflammation. So for this reason, it's very important to control neural inflammation because you get decreased longevity and also a lot of these issues with fuzzy thinking, brain fog, et cetera. When you combine that with cortisol, it's a really, really significant one, two combo because cortisol increases not just neural inflammation, but overall muscular inflammation. So a few of the ways that I do this. First of all, some of the things you've already learned about fish oil. I'll talk about pulsed electromagnetic field therapy here in a second. A couple other things I'm a huge fan of for shutting down neural inflammation. Number one is cold thermogenesis. I do a five minute cold shower in the morning, five minute cold shower in the evening, and that helps a ton with decreasing inflammation, increasing nitric oxide production. The other thing that I do is I take about a gram of curcumin every single day. And that really, really helps specifically with the type of inflammation associated with neural inflammation. So curcumin, you can stir it into coffee, you can take it in supplement form. But that's really, really important if your brain is beat up and if you're having to deal with brain inflammation. So the last thing is sleep. And this is obviously something I could talk about all day long, sleep. But the idea here is that your neurons and your nerve cells are going to repair between about 2am and 6am and there's two different factors that you need to ensure are present in order for that repair to occur. Number one, you need to have been asleep for approximately three to four hours when those times of the night roll around. So you need to get in bed sometime around 10 or 11pm at the latest in order for neuronal repair to be optimized while you're asleep so that you're in your deep sleep cycles between 2am and 6am and number two, that process is enhanced when it's cold. First thing I do when I walk into a hotel room is I turn the thermostat in my room down to 66. So the rule is if you're slightly cold, if you're a little bit nervous about getting into your PJs or in your underwear to get into bed because it's a little bit cold, that's a perfect temperature. You're going to warm up a little bit once you get underneath the covers. But keeping your body slightly cold while you sleep is really, really important for nerve cell repair. So sleep in the cold and make sure you've been asleep a little while, especially between the hours of 2 and 6am so those are four ways that we can address HPA axis dysfunction. So de stress, avoid excessive exercise, take steps to shut down brain inflammation and then optimize your sleep. So you should have 12 things written down now that you can do to give yourself a better brain. These are things that you can leave here and just knock out one by one. Okay.

Last thing I want to get into are just some basic strategies that help to increase brain power. I'm going to show you just a handful of things that I do from a supplement, a nutrient and a gear and a lifestyle standpoint. Again, think about that FOMO or that all or nothing. Don't let a lot of this stuff stress you out when it comes to all the different strategies that are out there. I don't necessarily do everything I'm about to show you every day, but these are a few of the things that can help out. Nootropics Any supplement or drug or nutraceutical or functional food that can help to improve mental focus that's not harmful or unproven in long term studies. And a lot of these are fat soluble compounds or dependent upon fat for the utilization. Every single nutrient that I'm about to show you is not going to be very effective if you're on a low fat diet. So you must have adequate amounts of fatty acids circulating in your bloodstream for a lot of these to be effective. So.

Vitamin D, Huge amount of vitamin D receptors in brain and neuronal tissue. Vitamin D is not very well absorbed unless combined with vitamin K. And one of the number one places where vitamin K is found in your body is your brain. Vitamin D and vitamin k are a potent 1:2 combo for optimizing brain performance. If you look at your current diet or your supplementation protocol and you're not getting vitamin D and vitamin K2, you need to be fatty acids. I already talked about really important for neurological health and nerve transmission. I'm not going to kick that horse to death, but I do recommend about 2 grams of fish oil on any day where you're not eating fish. Sardines, sushi, sashimi, et cetera. Phosphatidylserine that's found in intense concentrations in neural tissue. You'll find it marketed in krill oil quite a bit. If you're eating fish in adequate amounts or you're taking fish oil, don't worry too much about using a supplemental form of phosphatidylserine. Just make sure that you're going out of your way on any days where you're not eating fish to get a good high quality fish oil or krill oil in your diet. Okay, so easy enough. Vitamin D, vitamin K, fatty acids. And then if you're not eating fish, phosphatidylserine or krill oil. Fish oil. Just talked about that. So that one we're good to go with. Mcts. Dominique talked about ketones yesterday. Basically your Body burns fats, generates acetyl COA as a byproduct of producing fats and you get ketones as a result of that. Ketones are used as a primary source of fuel by your brain. And ketosis, or being in a state of ketosis, is an enormously effective way to increase brain power. The way that I do it is I keep myself in ketosis all day long because I live a very, very active lifestyle. I eat about 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates at the end of the day. I'm back in ketosis within two to three hours and I rinse, wash and repeat all day long. So all my carbs are at the end of the day. Everything up till that point is all high fat, moderate protein, caffeine, more is not better, as you Learned, but about 100 milligrams a day with a deload phase every month. Huge fan of that approach. And then L Theanine, if you are going to need a pick me up in the afternoon, use something like green tea rather than caffeine because the L theanine will slow the release of caffeine. And L Theanine has also been shown to increase your alpha brainwave production. So I'm a fan of coffee in the morning and then something like green tea in the afternoon because you get the wakefulness effects without it affecting your sleep. So that's a good one, two combo when it comes to beverages. Okay, few others here.

L phenylalanine, that is an amino acid. And if you're getting a good full spectrum of amino acids, you're going to be okay with L Phenylalanine. But it is something that you're going to find in a lot of smart drugs that are out there on the market. I mean, we've got everything from like on its alpha brain to siltep to upgraded force. And you'll find L phenylalanine as an ingredient in a lot of these. Creatine. I take 5 grams of creatine a day, period. I take fish oil every day. I take creatine every day. And I take creatine because of its proven strength, power and also neuronal enhancing benefits. Creating creatine staves off a lot of the cognitive decline that occurs with aging. So I am a huge, huge fan of 5 grams of creatine a day. No loading, no deloading. I just take it all year long. Carnitine and alpha lipoic acid help to shut down brain inflammation in a very, very similar manner to curcumin These are again two supplements you're going to find in a lot of nootropic or smart drug stacks. These aren't things that I take every day, but some people like to experiment with L, carnitine and lipoic acid. The cool thing about them is if you're a strength, power or speed athlete, they can help out quite a bit in those departments as well. So those are some cool things to add into a stack if you are wanting to experiment with the supplement side of things. I personally keep things pretty simple and just do fish oil, creatine, high amount of fish in my diet, and then cyclic ketosis with a little bit of curcumin every day. That's my little stack that I found to work for me. But I want to make sure I equip you guys with some other options here too. And again, I'll make these slides fully available to you.

Last one here. For supplements there is something called Huperzine that's an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Acetylcholine is an excitatory neurotransmitter that if you keep from getting broken down, can keep you in an active state of wakefulness. I will admit that I slammed a couple of these when I took Kokoro, I think the morning of a couple of days.

That along with like eight cups of coffee at one point I think. But Huperzine is another one to look into. It comes from Club Moss. I get that in this little packet called Tian Qi. Okay, few other things here.

When it comes to hacks or little biohacks that you can use Light therapy. A lot of people use these blue light boxes that they'll put on their computer to enhance wakefulness during the day. I don't recommend those as they can cause retinal damage, but I will use especially when I'm traveling to enhance wakefulness and to get my brain firing. Especially if it's 4am where I'm from, but it's 7am where I'm at and I really need to wake up. You can use in ear light therapy or eye light therapy. That's not as harsh as a blue light box. The two products to look into. One is called a human charger for in ear light therapy. One is called a retimer for phototherapy for your eyes. These are both forms of blue light therapy that can really help with cognitive function. Cool little hack sound frequency. My favorite app for that is one called Sleep Stream because the Sleepstream app plays special binaural beats in your ears that help you to sleep at night. But you can also put it in motivation or creativeness mode during the day. And it adjusts alpha brainwave production based off of which setting that you put it in. Electrical stimulation. As you learned earlier, different forms of electrical stimulation can cause the production of different types of brainwaves. The one that I use is called pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. You can put this underneath your mattress at night or on your desk while you're working during the day. And it produces a pulsed electromagnetic field that will bring your body into alpha brainwave production. It's basically a donut shaped magnetic. It's really, really cool thing and I like it because you can travel with it. It's less clunky than a lot of these other electrical devices. And I know I'm flying through some of this stuff, but I want to at least expose you guys to some of these tactics. You can go explore them later. NeuroFeedback. We've got Dr. Andrew Hill speaking later. He's a neurofeedback practitioner. He's probably gonna get into that quite a bit. So I'm not gonna overload you guys with neurofeedback. But know that neurofeedback is an option if you visit that website I talked about earlier, the heartmath institute@heartmath.org they sell a little phone app with a device that you can attach to your ear that allows you to practice neurofeedback to train your body how to instantly get into the zone when you want it to get into that alpha brainwave zone. So that's@heartmath.org.

Okay, last couple of slides here. There are a few other things that I recommend. Number one is brain aerobics. Brain aerobics. Any game must include novelty, variety and challenge in order for brain aerobics to actually build new neurons. There are a variety of different apps out there like Lumosity, Brainscape, et cetera. Most of them don't fulfill these criteria. One that I have on my phone that I play once every couple of days when I'm standing in line, when I'm on an airplane, et cetera is the NBAC app. The NBAC app. I highly recommend you download it, learn how to use it. Chewing gum may actually increase blood flow to the brain. And since peppermint is a nootropic and it can increase your cognitive performance, I chew peppermint gum a lot during the day. I use this stuff called be fresh. Doesn't have artificial sweeteners in it, keeps blood flow going and Gets you exposed to peppermint during the day. The other trick you can use for that is a little bit of peppermint oil on your upper lip. Aerobic exercise when you do aerobic exercise, brain derived neurotrophic factor which helps your nerve cells to regenerate and new neurons to grow get released and crosses into your brain. When you do strength training, that doesn't occur. When you do strength training, the brain derived neurotrophic factor stays localized to the muscles. And this is why some form of aerobic exercise anytime before you have to do something that's very cognitively demanding is better than a strength training session. So I'm always kind of careful if I'm going to do something like speak on stage, for example, I choose something more aerobic than strength based for that BDNF release. And then music. Music can cause a dopamine neurotransmission that actually can enhance cognitive performance, but it's vastly improved not through listening to music, but through playing music. So if you can learn anything from the little phone app that you can download to your Kindle, to a guitar or what I asked for Christmas for this year was a ukulele with a travel case that I could travel with because I love to play music. It's one of the things that really gets my head spinning. But I can't travel with my big old guitar. So I go out of my way at least three or four times a week to sit down at the little electric keyboard or mess around on my guitar and throw some curve balls at my brain. When it comes to music, if that's not part of your life, I highly recommend that you use that as a way to get smarter as well. So all sorts of little things that we can do here. Basically the idea is that a typical brain hacking day in my life would include something like curcumin, some creatine, some fish oil, high fat, cyclic ketogenic diet, a little bit of music, playing the N back app on my phone, throwing some novelty, some variety and some challenge at my brain. De stressing, sleeping, using a lot of those other eight neurotransmitter techniques and those four HPA axis techniques that you learned about. Once you put all this together and you make it into a daily habit, it's not intimidating. It comes easily. You can actually put all these things into practice and just make them a habit that you kind of do on cruise control. But right now the idea is that I want to equip you with the knowledge on how to do this couple more Books the Edge Effect and Younger Brain Sharper Mind by Dr. Eric Braverman. If you dig this stuff and you want to learn more about it, those are two really good resources. How to make your own smart drugs is an article I wrote@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that if the whole supplement side of things is intimidating to you, just shows you a few different easy stacks that you can use during the day. If you just want to take the shortcut and not have your refrigerator full of like 15 different bottles of stuff that you got to blend together to get the nootropic effect effect. And I'll put a resource to that as well in the website that I'm giving you right here along with all the slides to the presentation that I just gave.

That's me. I don't know why that's on this slide, but it's there because I'm vain and I like to show pictures of me with my shirt off. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Unbeatable 15 BenGreenfieldFitness.com unbeatable 15 you can download the slides. You can dig into everything that I just talked about in more detail. Like I promised. I just wanted to feed you guys through the fire hose today and equip you with as much information as possible. Now it's your job to go out, start to implement this stuff, put it into practice in your day to day routine. I guarantee that your brain will perform more optimally once you do this and you'll have that ultimate combination of the unbeatable mind and now the unbeatable brain. TM.com.

Don'T sue me.

I don't know how we're at with time. Do I have time for any questions or. Okay, cool. I doubt there's any questions about any of this stuff, but just in case. Yes.

Red shirt? Yeah, go ahead.

I use a Bluetooth enabled heart rate monitor. The Polar H7 is a really really good one. I found that to be relatively fail proof. So that's about 60 to 70 bucks off of Amazon. And then the app that I use to talk to that monitor when I put it on, it's just a chest strap is the Nature Beat app. Nature Beat. So I combine Nature Beat app with a Polar H7 Bluetooth enabled heart rate monitor.

Yes.

Yeah, I think that's an L Dopa or a Mucuna supplement.

Yeah, you just don't want to become dependent on dopamine pills as a crutch. Kind of similar to not wanting to become dependent on SSRIs as a crutch for depression. So if you're low on dopamine, one of the issues can be in addition to needing to take a supplement like that short term is just more. Not to get too woo woo, but including more pleasurable activities in your life like learning a musical instrument, sex, funny movies, smoking weed, whatever it is that does it for you. But yeah, so trying to find out ways to stimulate dopamine production. Sometimes in situations like that, your life is just too damn boring and you got to figure out ways to make it more exciting.

Yes, sex and preferably sex that includes novelty, variety and challenge as you learn. So.

Yes, Ben, thanks for being here. The question I have for you, so you follow a high fat, moderate protein ketosis diet and then you carb up at night. Can you just give us an example of maybe some meals that you eat during the day and then what do you carb up with at night? Yeah, I eat a lot of the same meals. I don't really get flavor fatigue and I find that with my life from a decision making standpoint, I mean we talked about decision making fatigue a little bit earlier, but I'm just more productive when I keep my meals pretty simple throughout the day. So for morning I just have a shitload of vegetables in a blender with fats, coconut milk, coconut oil, seeds, nuts, etc. If it's a workout day, that'll include 20 to 30 grams of protein. No snacking all the way up until lunch, just teas, coffees, kombucha, stuff like that. And then lunch is a huge bed of vegetables drenched in oil, avocados, seeds, nuts, fish, all that. If there's an afternoon workout, I'll usually take full fat coconut milk and I'll stir that or blend that with some chocolate stevia to give it flavor and then something to give it crunch like unsweetened coconut flakes or some cacao nibs or something like that. And then dinner, I'll usually have that sometime within two to three hours after the workout. And dinner will be some kind of a good clean meat, good roasted vegetable or another vegetable source. And then the carb will be white rice, sweet potato, yam, fruit, fruit, wine, dark chocolate, 100 to 200 grams ish range. And then that's pretty much it. If I have some kind of dessert, I'll take that coconut milk thing and just do it again. But I'll freeze it or make a little ice cream. One thing I've been doing lately is a low carb ice cream where I take a food Processor, put a bunch of ice in there, chocolate stevia, little bit of protein, little bit of coconut milk.

Bunch of salt. Because that really helps with sleep at night, having it, having the extra minerals. I'll blend that until it gets super thick and creamy and then drop like unsweetened coconut flakes or cacao nibs or something like that in there. And I'll have that every night. So that's just an example. Pretty boring. But tasty. Tasty.

Yeah.

When you're taking your supplements, creatine, is there any issues with combining them together all at the same time? Have any concerns? No. I mean, the timing is important. With some supplements like a digestive enzyme, right, you want to take that 20 to 30 minutes before or after your meal. Probiotics would be better on an empty stomach. Anything fat based like vitamin D, vitamin K, fish oil you'd want to take, preferably with a fat based meal. Multivitamins, same thing. The absorption is better with the meal. Creatine, that's fine on an empty stomach. If you want to do it on an empty stomach. A little bit of carbohydrate can help with creatine. So it kind of depends. But for me, the creatine and the fish oil come right before I have that smoothie. So that's the way that I do it. And that way I've got food in my system along with it.

Yes.

Danielle.

I was curious about the two things, the creatine. And I know you were saying only 5 grams. Is there a difference? I usually kind of steer away from that. Just I don't want to build anything extra. Is that something you really recommend for both genders? And even if you're slamming something like MAP and all those other things that you're doing really well with, is that really going to add that much additional transmission for your cognition?

If you're vegan, you're vegetarian, or if you're older than 60, it's a must. Definitely do the 5 grams of creatine. If not, it's an added bonus. You can take it and see how you look, feel and perform. I noticed a huge difference being on versus off it when it comes to performance in the weight room and also cognitive performance. So I'm a fan as far as dosage. I don't think there's a difference in terms of sexes when it comes to that five gram figure.

Sorry, go ahead. And then I was just curious what your thoughts were on as we're talking about all this nootropics and stuff, the provigils and the modafidils and that type of stuff.

Yeah, Those are about 80% metabolized by the liver. And so I'm not a huge fan. I mean, they have a really, really intense cognitive effect. But I'm not a fan. I'm even careful. I've used it sometimes when I have a day in which I have a bunch of tasks, like a huge to do list, because it seems to help out quite a bit with that. Things like aniracetam or piracetam or oxiracetam. But I'm still, I'm kind of careful with that, not to use too much of it. And with that it's not because I've seen issues with danger. I haven't seen enough long term studies on it. But like Dr. Andrew Hill, who's talking later, he has a supplement called Trubrain. And usually one or two times a week I'll take something like that on a day where I just know I gotta go, go, go for hours. And I'll use that to get the same effects as something like Modafinil or Provigil with less damage to something like, like the liver. Okay.

And I just. If anyone hasn't checked out your site, like what you do with your smoothie, the gentleman was asking, he goes step by step. So look on the site and there's videos and you can watch him shirtless, making smoothies in the morning.

Playing his ukulele.

Danielle's my PR agent, by the way. Hire her.

Could talk a little bit more about the HRV measurements you do in the morning. What are the parameters you look at? How do you use them to make a choice, what your training is going to be like? Yeah, sure, in a nutshell, and I won't do this full justice because it is a pretty comprehensive discussion on heart rate variability. But what I look at is first of all, my low frequency power, which is a sign of my sympathetic nervous system strength, and my high frequency power, which is a sign of my parent parasympathetic system strength. For me to know that my body is going to optimally function that day, both of those need to be above 1000. In terms of power, that's going to vary quite a bit from person to person. But for me it's got to be pretty high for both those numbers. If those numbers are in a one to one ratio, I can get up that day and kick butt in anything I want to do. So a typical day for me in which I'm well recovered and feel good, HF will be at 8,000 LF will be at 8,000. That's a sample number. Now, on another day, my LF, my sympathetic nervous system strength after a race like yesterday, that's going to be at like 800, whereas parasympathetic nervous system might still be at 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000. And so that's a day in which I know my aerobic system is doing just fine and it's ready for a day that might include a long run or a bunch of yoga or tai chi or underwater swimming or something like that, but my sympathetic nervous system needs a day off.

And then, of course, if both are low, both are under 1000, then that's just the day where I'm going to, whatever, get high and watch Family Guy all day on the couch. So just depends. Those are some example numbers. So, yeah.

Actually, Dr. Andrew Hill and I, we just did a podcast on how that affects your brain, how marijuana affects your brain. That'd be an interesting one to listen to.

Do you need to increase your hydration when you're taking creatine?

You know, I haven't noticed issues with the 5 grams. I used to do bodybuilding and I'd go through loading phases, like where you do like 15, 20 grams a day for a couple of weeks and I would get, like, cramping issues and stuff like that. I haven't noticed any issues with the 5 grams a day approach. So, yeah, so I haven't found. I need more water or anything like that. Brands of creatine. There's three different brands I've used and had success with. One is CRE O2, made by Millennium Sports, which is creatine combined with cordyceps. One is exoskeleton creapyr, which is a powder form instead of a tablet form like the Creo 2 is. And then one is a capsule form that's combined with Himalayan sea salt. And that one is made by natural stacks. I like all three of those versions of creatine. As far as good, clean, absorbable sources. Yeah, I haven't used a chewable form before. Some of the chewables, though, they'll add crap to, like, fillers and artificial sweeteners and stuff like that. So check the label on the chewables. So, yeah, I'll keep taking questions. So you cut me off. So, yeah, maybe just one or two more questions and we'll move on. Hi. Brilliant presentation. Thanks so much. I'm just curious. We just moved from the country. We were using an RO system into the city and we've been accessing our water from a spring, A natural spring. Oh, cool. Just wondering if you find that better than using the RO.

System from the municipal water supply. I dug a well at my house. I didn't personally dig it with a shovel.

Hey, ho, hey, ho. But I've got a well. I tested it. It had high levels of bacterial iron. And then I did a hair mineral test after I'd been drinking the water from that well for about three months. And I had high levels of copper and high levels of manganese. So I actually put both an iron as well as a metal filter on that well water. And so what I'm getting at here is, even if it's from a spring, a lot of times you still need to at least test the water and test your body and see if there's things that you need to filter out. So typically, you don't need something like reverse osmosis for well or spring water, Though usually there's a benefit because. Because it's coming from the ground and the minerals and. Absolutely, yeah, you get into the whole concept. Dr. Gerald Pollock, a researcher at University of Washington, has some really interesting research on how water actually forms bonds that go above and beyond hydrogen oxygen bonding. And you get a lot of these H3O2 molecules in water. And when water sits in cisterns or pipes or doesn't flow over rocks the way that it would on a spring, you lose all that bonding. And that bonding is what allows water to pass through into your cells and hydrate you a little bit better. So the idea is that if you can ferret, that's called structuring your water. So that's. I didn't want to get too nitty gritty on the water stuff, but after my water gets filtered, goes through an iron filter and a metals filter, it also goes through a water restructuring unit, and that's when it winds up in the pipes in my house after that. So, yeah, awesome. So I'll ask the last question. I just want to try to play stump. Ben, you are wicked smart. Ben green for you guys. Give him a hand.