This is a podcast interview (Ben Greenfield hosting Michael Lares) about falling asleep faster. The speakers discuss anxiety tied to overtraining/adrenal fatigue, how the mind can trigger a physiological stress response that prevents sleep, and real-world cases (including corporate executives and the guest's wife). Ben and Michael describe practical nighttime strategies: Ben mentions using a bioavailable form of GABA (citing Dr. Kirk Parsley) that crosses the blood-brain barrier to induce neural inhibition, and Passion Flower extract/tincture which can promote an endogenous GABA release to help return to sleep. The tone is conversational and practical, mixing clinical-sounding explanations with personal anecdotes.
Chapters
You kind of get their history. It's all very similar, you know, really over trained, under, recovered.
Right.
You know, and the body response to that is anxiety.
You know, it's part of, part of adrenal fatigue system. Yeah, my wife went through it because hers was triggered. You know, hers has created just too much pain for too long, you know.
So I kind of, I understand that and I understand what she went through.
As far as dealing with anxiety. And it's a mental game too.
And the thing I discovered about the human body is it doesn't know the.
Difference between a thought or an actual event.
The body's going to respond to what.
The brain's feeding it, what the mind is feeding it.
And a lot of people who have.
Anxiety based on adrenal fatigue and stress, if they're laying there, you even thinking remotely about anything stressful, right. Or you know, something with work, the.
Body'S going to respond to it like it's actually happening to it, and then you're not going to sleep.
What do you tell them?
I, I bring that to the table for discussion and get them to acknowledge it, you know, based on their own experiences.
They acknowledge it. They go, oh yeah, that's me. That's what I do. You know, big businessman.
We've had Fortune 500 corporate guys.
I can't, man, I can't sleep. I wake up after three hours and.
My mind just clicks on and I cannot fall back asleep, you know, and.
That happens to me three, three or.
Four a.m. i found in my 20.
Year dive career in four and a half hours.
Yeah. No, dude, I love it because now I just push the button. Like I wake up at 3:00am, I just like, boom, push the button and it's on. And I go back and I, you know, I used to talk a lot and maybe this works for folks like I used to talk about like gamma aminobutyric acid or gaba. It's an inhibitory neurotransmitter that helps your brain to produce delta waves. That's what it does. And your brain can produce it. And we've had folks like Dr. Kirk Parsley, who's a sleep expert who works with a lot of Navy seals, He's created a really bioabsorbable form of GABA that passes the blood brain barrier. And most gamma aminobutyric acid won't pass the blood brain barrier and, and it causes that neural inhibition. And what I was doing for a while was keeping one packet of that next to my bedside. And when I would wake up at 3 or 4am I'd take Gaba. Before that, I was using Passion Flower, which is it's a little less powerful than the molecule that he created. But Passion Flower tincture or passion Flower extract induces an endogenous GABA dump, basically to help put you back to sleep. But I also I don't like to pile a bunch of supplements next to my bed before I go to sleep, and I also find that this tends to.
