How to GET UP from Setbacks with Dr. Heather Smith-Fernandez & Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Quick Brain. Your question for today: How do you get back up? I remember hearing this success quote years ago saying the key to success is falling seven times but getting back up eight times, and that really, really is the key. And so, how do you get back up in a relationship, in a business, or even in your health? And speaking of health, I have a very special guest with us today. You find me in Naples, Florida today, and I am with. Dr. Heather Smith Fernandez, Dr. Heather, and she's actually the founding director here at the Regenerative Institute of Medicine, and she's the inventor of peptology. Peptology, yes. That's amazing. I love that word. I'm kind of a geek for terms. And so I happen to be here because I needed to get back up. I've had a number of, many of you know, 3 traumatic brain injuries. I have very severe sleep apnea where I Stop breathing 200+ times a night from this breathing disorder. And it has kind of impaired a lot of my health over the years, especially with my travel and the lifestyle that I have. I have actually a rotator cuff injury that really amplifies the challenge I have with sleep because the traditional medicine, they wanted to do surgery on it. And I know I could bounce back. It's tough when I'm sleeping though. I turn to my side and all this shooting pain. So I'm actually here at your clinic doing some regenerative procedures. We'll talk about that But we were talking about how do you get back up and different things. So, thank you for having me.

Oh my gosh, Jim, thank you so much for being here.

And thank you for being here on our show also as well.

Thank you. It's been such a wonderful, wonderful time and an honor for me that you're here in Naples and at my Regenerative Institute. And so, we were talking about the whole concept of get up. And that's really important because, as, as you alluded to, we're going to get knocked down, and some of us get knocked down more than others, but getting back up. And so there's a lot of areas where that can, um, be important in our life. But I'm actually going to give you what I teach my patients. So when I, when I'm doing regenerative medicine for my patients—

Now, what, what is— just for those people who are listening or watching this on— I encourage everyone to watch this on YouTube also as well. That's where we put the extended version. What is— how do you define regenerative medicine?

That's a great question. Um, regenerative medicine is harnessing the body's own innate ability to heal itself and just helping that process along. Sometimes we have things that we think should have healed on their own. And for a lot of reasons they don't, like they did when we were a kid. And there are a lot of things—

Like my shoulder.

Like your shoulder, exactly. And there are a lot of things that we can do to help that process, but just helping the body to do what it would naturally do by concentrating those regenerative factors, utilizing a whole model. I use peptides, we use IV therapy, we use a lot of different things to target all the different areas that your tissues actually need in order for them to repair.

And the human beings ourselves, we're actually doing the healing ourselves.

100%.

So you're helping us become that better version of ourselves.

Yes.

Amazing.

Yep. And your own cells are programmed to heal your own tissue. It's already there. Sometimes it just needs a little help or it needs a little concentration or it needs a little bit of direction.

Amazing. So we'll put also your contact information in the show notes. But we were talking about philosophy and mindset and a few things that people could do that don't cost anything at all.

100%.

5 things. Actually, there are 3 things to stop doing very easily and 2 things to start doing. So I love, I love acronyms.

Okay, good. So this is the acronym: GET UP.

GET UP.

GET UP. So the G stands for literally get on the floor and get back up every single day. Believe it or not, I see this with my patients all the time. We, our brain will forget how to get us up off the floor if it's not something that we do on a regular basis.

Kids are on the floor all the time.

Kids are on the floor all the time and they pop back up. And even when we're younger, we tend to be on the floor. But after we get to a certain age in adulthood, we don't electively get all the way down on the floor anymore for a lot of reasons. But usually it's not as comfortable. The floor is hard. And we don't always realize that we're losing our ability to get back up. And I actually have a story about this. One of my patients, she's about 70 years old, but she was very, very intact, very sharp mentally, had a little bit of a shoulder problem, but didn't have any other health problems per se. She was a little overweight and she wasn't really focused on, you know, keeping herself strong. Well, she had a slip and fall in her home.

Hmm.

And she didn't break anything and she didn't hit her head, but she couldn't get back up. And she laid on the floor in her house for almost 2 days. She could not get her brain to tell her body what she needed to do to get up. And then her neighbor came by after, during, at the end of the second day, because she hadn't seen her out walking her little dog and she found her.

Wow.

And it was just horrible. So she hadn't broken anything, but she was really shook up. She was dehydrated. And this is just a horrible thing. I would never want that to happen to anybody. But what you'll find is if you haven't laid on the floor in a while, you're using your thing. Well, what do I need to— how do I need to move to get back up? And one of the things that it can show you besides if you were to fall, which nobody wants to fall, but it happens in our home, we would never want that to be something that kept you stuck there. But you'll learn whether you're missing some of those components that will get you back up off the floor, whether it's strength in your legs, upper body strength, Or coordination. And keeping those things sharp is actually really good for the brain. It's learning a new way to do an old thing. So you're learning a new pattern on doing something that you've done all your life. So every single day—

I love that. Literally just go on the floor.

All the way on the floor.

And that's something anybody could do.

Yep.

And to improve your coordination, your balance, you know, also as well. People don't realize, like, the number one reason we have a brain is to be able to control our movement and be able to just get up I had a family member recently who took a bad fall and broke her hip. You know, so it is definitely, it's definitely a challenge. So it's something that if you could, if you could get able to get up and you could build strength for that.

Really build strength for that. And if you're starting to get some weakness in some core muscles, you'll be able to recognize it early enough to be able to do something about it. So keeping those muscles strong. For a lot of people, it's the legs, but a lot of women, Their upper body strength is just not there to be able to pull themselves up, especially if they did have an injury. So it's a really, really easy, and you can make it fun. You can go to every room in your house and imagine every different scenario. Go over to that corner, go over to this area, get all the way down on the floor, and then get yourself back up.

That's perfect. And so what about the letter E?

The E. So the E stands for eliminate a meal.

Okay.

Now, for some of us that have been intermittent fasting for a while, this isn't new, but if you hadn't entertained the idea of intermittent fasting, what does that do for your body and then your brain? Well, contrary to what the cereal companies told us, we will not die if we don't eat when we first get out of bed in the morning. Now, when you first start missing that meal, your brain may be telling you, oh, I'm gonna die, I need to eat something. But don't listen to that. That's actually not founded in science.

Mm-hmm.

Why is this so important? Well, What our body really benefits from a period of fasting— when we're eating throughout our— most of our waking hours, we never have a chance to start cleaning out the trash. So we don't get a chance to clean up, we don't get a chance to go into a different metabolic cycle, and we don't want that insulin being secreted all day long. It's not necessary. So when you have this period, well, a lot of people, the easiest way they do it is they, they don't eat in the morning. They just have black coffee or tea or water.

Mm-hmm.

Then their first meal is around noon and they stop eating at 8 PM. That's kind of the easiest, most commonly done intermittent fasting program. That's pretty much what I do. And that 16-hour or even a 14-hour period of fasting allows your body to start cleaning out the debris. It decreases systemic inflammation, it revives your metabolism, and it allows your brain to clean out the junk so that you have stuff in there. If you imagine if you never took your trash out in your house, How pleasant would it be to live in your house after a few weeks? It wouldn't smell very good, it wouldn't look very good. And if you let it keep going like that, even the healthy stuff is going to start to feel unhealthy. So it's that opportunity to really hit that restart.

I hear a lot about, you know, we hear a lot about time management. We don't often hear about energy management.

That's true.

And digestion takes up a lot of energy.

Yes, it really does. That rest and digest where all the blood flow and all the focus really goes to to the digestive system. And our brain can really function well in a fasted state. So there's— I recommend if you've never really tried this before, read one of the books or get some guidance on it. But it's an easy-to-adopt lifestyle and it'll help shed some of those extra pounds. If you find you're just having trouble getting some of those pounds off, you may just need an opportunity for your metabolism to start revving up a little bit better.

Amazing. So what about the letter T?

So T is turn off social media.

As people are like listening to this, maybe on YouTube somewhere or maybe on Facebook.

That's probably true. So a little bit of social media really never hurt anybody. But one of the things that we're finding, and this has actually been researched pretty, pretty well with adolescents and young adults, is that social media is starting to take the place of real social interaction. A lot of younger people, This is kind of interesting. I don't know if you've heard of the term phubbing.

Phubbing.

Phubbing, P-H-U-B-B-I-N-G. Well, it's a behavior that's starting in young people. It's phone snubbing. It's when somebody is sitting right next to you talking to you in person and one of the people just goes and literally draws their attention directly away from that person and goes to their phone. And this is becoming more problematic. And originally you think, well, gosh, that seems like kind of bad manners, but it's starting to become woven into our society because it's done so much. So there's definitely these changing dynamics with too much on social media. The other thing that happens is that social media, like a lot of media and the news, the 24-hour news cycle, is designed to hold your attention. So the sensationalism, the dopamine hits, you've probably heard about this before, but they're intending, they want you to stay on the feed. It's not their fault, that's the business model. But if they can give your brain these little hits so that you're releasing some of this dopamine over something that's not really real, You only have so much dopamine stored in your brain to begin with. And so this is probably not the best way to use your joy chemical is only on this device. So I actually think it's really healthy for people to just fast from social media, just turn it off even just for a little bit or a few, or schedule it so that you're looking at only the things you really wanna look at for a really focused period of time. And then you'll be amazed at how much time you have.

And I like that because it's moderation, right? You're not saying, take all social media off your devices and don't check in at all. You know, like technology is not good or bad. It's just fire could cook your food or it could burn down your home. It's just how it's utilized. But if sometimes you're right, it drives us to distraction. It could distract us from our goals in life or the things that give us meaning. But I think it's very important to disconnect so we could reconnect to the things that matter the most.

I think so too. And we can't see those things when we're buried in the screen. And it's not, it doesn't make us, good, bad, or smart or not smart. It's just the design of keeping your attention. And the 24-hour news cycle, while convenient for different people coming into working at different hours and things like that, I really noticed with my patients that during, especially while they were in quarantine, the news was not helping them.

Hmm.

They were, the anxiety levels, the disagreements, the personality change, the, it was very unhealthy. You can get just what you need from the news and you don't have to hear the same story 3 times Because you've got the news on all the time. Maybe just bringing that down a notch back to kind of where it was, you know, when Walter Cronkite just delivered the nightly news and then that was it. We had 1 hour of news every day, not 24.

Well, especially when there's a lot of drama or negative news, because it's like that our amygdala gets hijacked because if it bleeds, it leads. And the news stations, they definitely know that. And there's an algorithm. If you were just watching that all the time and plugged into that, then we don't have the bandwidth to focus on Gratitude, one of the things, on possibility, on the things that, on the things that opportunity.

100%.

Okay. So that's the GET, the G-E-T.

That's the T.

What about the U?

The U is get up. Unplug your Wi-Fi and turn your cell phone off at night.

Okay.

Completely off. We are unplugging. And I know that people will often think that because they're putting their phone in airplane mode, hopefully everybody's at least putting their phone in airplane mode mode and putting the do not disturb. However, as long as your phone is on, it's actually emitting. And there's quite a bit of research that's really coming out with routers that are on and some of these really, these different waves that are coming off of our devices. And there's some concern in the scientific and medical community about the constant exposure to these waves. They can vary quite a bit. The more powerful devices, the 5G that's coming has never been, you know, we're going to be the human experiment for that when it comes to our constant exposure to these waves because the towers have to go up really close to each other. So we have an opportunity. We can't disconnect from all of that. Everywhere we walk, we've got that coming at us. And most of us need to have our phone with us. Our society, you know, just expects us to be able to be reached whenever they need us to. But at night, you can actually give your body and your brain a rest.

Yeah.

And there's quite a bit of study about insomnia, Headaches, and certain mood issues that for people that are more sensitive to those waves than others, that if they get rid of that, especially when they're sleeping, their sleep cycles improve. And a lot of those things can improve. And it's simple and it'll save you some money. And it might even save your phone. There's some research that suggests if you shut your phone off at night, you actually can save the battery and save some, save some of your phone.

I have friends that actually have their Wi-Fi Their device actually on a timer, so it actually shuts off. So they're them, their kids, they can't go on the Wi-Fi from like 12 to 6 o'clock because it you know when nobody's online doing anything anyway. And it's great to be able to manage your environment. Just then, I have a video with Simon Sinek on Facebook has 37 million views, and it's just saying the anxiety that even having your phone at a dinner table. So even if it be for the sure EMFs and and certain frequencies, but also just the anxiety of just. Having to just want to reach out and grab it like you were talking about before with people in conversations. That's fantastic. And then finally, the P.

So the P, the P stands for prayer and/or heart-centered meditation. So if you're a person who prays, then you pray. And if you're a person who doesn't or does both, heart-centered meditation, this is really a fantastic thing for you to know about. it was very hard for me, the concept of meditating. I'm like a lot of people that my heart was in the right place, but I could not sit still. And because I couldn't sit still, my brain was a little all over the place. And I know that with years of practice and with the right teaching, that will get better. However, this is— heart-centered meditation is kind of taking the reverse. It's knowing that The heart rate variability, let me tell you what that is first. So we know what heart rate is. It's beats per minute. It's how many beats your heart beats in 1 minute time. Well, in between those beats, there's actually electrical activity that's happening, and that electrical activity can be measured. And that's really where the heart rate variability comes in. Why is that important? Because it's correlated with health.

Yeah.

Significantly correlated with health. We want our heart rate variability to be coherent and consistent. That means that our brain isn't overfiring. We're not dumping cortisol or leaking cortisol. We're not dumping neurotransmitters in a stress response. We're actually using nutrients and hormones and neurotransmitters the way we're supposed to be using them. And there are a lot more— some of the research is showing that there are 9 times more nervous signals going from the heart to the brain.

Yeah.

than from the brain to the heart. So how do we do heart-centered meditation? Well, it takes 5 minutes.

Everybody has 5 minutes.

Everybody has 5 minutes. So what you do is you sit all the way on the floor. We're going to combine our efforts. We're going to go all the way on the floor with the Wi-Fi off and your cell phone off and away from you. And you're going to get the drinking water that you're planning to drink 60 to 100 ounces a day. We're going to put the drinking water in the same room with us. We're going to sit down and we're going to sit in a nice comfortable place and we're going to breathe 5 seconds in, breathe 5 seconds out. But you're not going to focus on your breathing. What you're going to do is that just allows you to be in rhythm. That's going to keep your rhythm. And then you're going to put into your mind's eye a time in your life that was pure joy.

Hmm.

Pure love, pure kindness. Find a memory that is just this overwhelming feeling of joy and kindness and love. And you're going to relive that moment. Don't just think about it, relive it. You're going to smell what you could smell. You're going to see the colors, hear the sounds. For me, one of my moments is holding my newborn son and while he fell asleep, He was actually 1. He wasn't newborn. But holding him and as he fell asleep, that was just a moment of pure joy for me, feeling his little heartbeat and his breath. And that's one of— and you can have several of them that you can go to, but you're going to relive that moment for 5 minutes.

Mm-hmm.

And there are devices you can use to measure this, but you don't really need to. You can know that living in that moment is putting you in coherence. and it's helping your brain. It's helping your brain not overutilize nutrients, not feel in the subconscious that you're in this stress response. And if you do that a couple times a day, you're really gonna notice a difference. So you can combine several of these, all 3 of them. We're gonna turn the Wi-Fi off, turn the cell phone off.

No social media.

Get your 60 ounces of water because water also, it not only hydrates our body, but it holds intention. And Masaru Emoto is probably the most well-known person who photographed water in response to intention. Kind words, I love you, you're beautiful, versus you disgust me, you know, these very negative things. And the crystals in the water actually change in response to these intentions. There's actually quite a bit of work done about this, but he really has some of the most amazing pictures on that. And so thinking about that, even if you're not convinced that that's true, but what if it is?

Yeah.

And your water that's going to heal your body and it's going to carry that positive energy, you can do your heart-centered meditation over the drinking water you're going to have for the day while you're on the floor. No Wi-Fi, no cell phone, 5 minutes of your day.

And plus, we— our bodies are mostly water, our brains are mostly water. So just think about what your thoughts are, how the effects, you know, the messages like in, in ourselves. That's, that's incredible. What I like about This, you know, when you're getting up, the benefits for both our body and our brain, which our brain obviously is part of our body, but how it's benefiting our mind and our body, each of these different things. You want to review each, each of the 5 again real quick for everybody?

Yes.

I want everyone to listen because I want you to take a screenshot of wherever you're, you're watching this or listening to, take a screenshot and tag Dr. Heather, and we'll give you our social media in a moment, and myself. And share the one, one of the 5 that you're going to focus on. You'll notice that there are 3 things to stop doing and 2 things that are easy to actually start doing. So maybe you're not going to do all 5 today. You know, we'd encourage you to do more than one, but if you could just find one, one small, simple step. And so, um, you want to start with the G?

Yep. So get up to live your best life ever. G is get on the floor and get back up again every day. E is eliminate a meal. T is turn off your social media or turn off the 24-hour news cycle just for a little while. U is unplug your Wi-Fi and turn your cell— your cell phone completely off overnight. And P is pray or heart-centered meditation, 5 minutes once a day over your drinking water.

That's amazing, Dr. Heather. How do people find out more about your clinic or more about your work? Do you have a website? I do. You can go to drheather.net.

It's drheather.net, and you can find all the things that we do there. And, um, you know, these are the things that you can do. And then if you— when you come to me, then I use the, you know, the medical things and the procedures and the peptides and all of those things to help get everything really to the next level for you. So it's drheather.net, and you can see anything you need, and you can contact us there. And I hope you do.

Yeah. And so I want to encourage everybody, if you got value out of this conversation, we'll put all the links to Dr. Heather, to her social media, to her website, everything in the show notes as we usually do, including her YouTube as well. And this is actually one of the— I was talking to your team before we started recording. You know, it's amazing. Not only do you have the competence to do, you know, world-class work in the area of medicine, but also this level of consciousness. You know, for me, so I want to thank you not only for your warmth, but also your wisdom.

Oh, thank you. That means a lot to me.

So check out Dr. Heather. I'll put all the links in the show notes again. And, uh, thanks for being on our show.

Thank you so much, Jim. And thank you, Kwik Brain Community.

Hi, Kwik Brain. It's your brain coach. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make sure you share this, because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number 2, make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing, because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing: if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: 310-299-9362. Did you remember that number? 310-299-9362. Shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question, and I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video.

Bye.