Kwik Brain Episode 87: Protecting Your Brain from 4 Invisible Super-Villains with Ben Greenfield

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. Here's my question for you today is, what are the invisible supervillains that are wreaking havoc on your incredible superpower, which is your brain? What are these supervillains? This is a very important topic that's near and dear to my heart because we're always talking about upleveling different things, but what are the obstacles? What are the invisible forces that are actually taking you away and holding you back? To discuss this in this show, I'm very excited to have a friend with me today.

Hi.

The New York Times bestselling author of Beyond Training and other books as well. We see each other at lots of different events.

Yeah.

And he has the incredible podcast, Ben Greenfield. Thanks for being here, buddy.

You talk about the brain and I talk about things like coffee enemas and 6-packs.

This is true.

We've got it covered.

I've had the privilege of being on your show a couple of times and we see each other everywhere from speaking at anti-aging events from Florida to Sardinia and everywhere in between.

Yeah, it is kind of funny how often we run into each other.

I love this because we get to I'm excited to jam and geek out a little bit because here we are in New York. It just started snowing. You're here with the boys.

We literally have a flurry coming down right now.

Yes. At events, we never get the chance to go deep. I want to thank you for being on the show. Let's talk about these invisible supervillains that are detracting from our superpowers of creativity, focus, and memory and all that.

Sure. Yeah. It's essentially a fabrication of living in a post-industrial society of convenience. It's the same era that has created the ironic need to need to go to the gym at the end of the day, right? Nobody went to the gym at the end of the day except the gymnasts, right, and the athletes and the warriors. But now, we all sit down in front of our computer screens and then at the end of an 8-hour day, we need to go pay money to go move things around.

Pick up heavy things and put them back down. Yeah.

And, you could say the same thing about diet as well too. I mean, so many people have even lost their taste for things like wild plants and phytonutrient-rich foods because everything is fortified. Packaged and processed foods are fortified with multivitamins, with minerals, and what happens is you actually lose your urge to eat plants, to eat salads, to eat real foods when you consume your, your morning multivitamin, your evening multivitamin, and anything else that's processed or packaged that has added vitamin D and vitamin K and anything else added to it. The problem with that is you're not getting all of the synergistic richness that comes with a whole foods diet. Living in a modern era, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but we also fight an uphill battle. One of the uphill battles that we fight, of course, in the realm of cognition and brain optimization are these invisible— I think you referred to them as supervillains.

Right. We know we geek out over superheroes.

Yes, supervillains. The 4 that are the most important, in my opinion, are air, light, water, which I know is not technically invisible, but it's clear, and electricity.

Hmm.

At least water should be clear. When it comes to these 4 variables, what I find is that people who have the perfect exercise program and the perfect nutrition program and who still do not feel as though their brains are operating properly, They get brain fog in the afternoon. They get fuzzy thinking. They can't engage in word recall, memory. A lot of the things that you teach, they really struggle with still because they're being constantly bombarded by issues with air, light, water, and electricity. What do I mean by that? Well, with air, we live in an era where indoor air pollution, even as much as outdoor air pollution, is now a growing epidemic. Everything from mold to fungi to mites to whatever someone cleaned your hotel room with, whatever household cleaning chemical your cleaner or you are using, whatever happens to be floating around in the air in addition to the brake dust outside and the particles in the subway. All these things we're constantly bombarded by, and it's aggravated by the fact that many people now, because they are stressed out, because they're in a sympathetic state, they breathe through their mouth. Now, breathing through your mouth, of course, develops a recessed jawline, and it causes chest breathing. It activates baroreceptors in your upper chest cavity that create a cortisol release. But, for the purpose of this discussion, more importantly, the nasal cavities are where all the cilia reside and where the air travels through all these tiny bones. And so, you have a built-in filter, but so many people don't use that built-in filter. And, when you combine that with all the chemicals that we're bombarded with—

Wow.

It's an issue. What do you do? There's a few things that— a few action steps you can take. A couple of my favorites would include getting a good HEPA air filter or even stepping up. There are companies like Molekule, for example, that I have no financial affiliation with, but they're developing these beautiful standalone air filters that are thousands of times more sensitive than a HEPA. In my own home, what I did was I built into the air ducts There's a unit called an AllerAir, which ozonates the air and cleans it via HEPA filtration system. There's another standalone system that's slightly more affordable than the Molekule called an Air Doctor, and that's also a very good standalone unit for cleaning the air. If you take those steps, you breathe through your nose, and then finally you introduce into your home or your office environment things that naturally clean the air and produce phenols. The 2 strategies I like for that are Number one, NASA did a study called the Clean Air Study in which they identified nearly a dozen different houseplants that naturally detoxify the air and also release a lot of those plant-rich compounds that help you to feel good, that decrease cortisol. We know this concept of shinrin-yoku, they call it in Japan, forest bathing. It's good for you. And so you turn your home and your office into that type of environment. And then the other thing that I really like in terms of scents and smells that naturally clean in the air are essential oil diffusers or essential oil nebulizers with really good high-quality oils like rosemary for memory. Peppermint and cinnamon are also very good for cognition. And then relaxing scents in the bedroom like lavender and rose and bergamot. So you need to be cognizant of air.

So you could also have those senses functionally in each room. If you need to be creative in one room, if you need to be relaxing.

The way my home is engineered is peace and calm diffuses into the living room. Lavender in the bedroom, and right now my office is rosemary.

Amazing.

So you can actually adjust the scents.

And for the plants, do you recall some of those plants? Is it like—

Peace lily is one. English ivy is another. There's many of them. I don't have them all memorized. You'd probably memorize them in about 10 seconds flat, Jim. But if you Google NASA clean air study, you'll find them.

That's great.

My wife identified about 6 that grow well where we live in Spokane.

Beautiful.

And that you can take care of indoors. And so she just selected a variety.

Amazing.

Okay.

Planted around the house. Now I see what you mean about invisible supervillains because air is invisible. You don't know what's off-gassing off of your furniture that you just bought.

Yeah, exactly. You brought up a great point. Furniture, volatile organic compounds from cupboards. I mean, we're just constantly bombarded. I mean, one of the places that happens the most ironically is the gym, right, where you're exercising and breathing these things in. I'm not saying don't go to the gym. I still think the pros outweigh the cons, especially in this sedentary society we live in that I mentioned earlier. But, uh, it is an issue that you need to be aware of. Uh, the last point I'd make would be the book by Patrick McKeown, um, about air and nasal breathing is very good. So he's got 8 books, but look up any of the work by Patrick.

We'll make sure we put all these links to everything.

How to nasal breathe.

Good.

On my website, I have an article called The Ultimate Breathwork Ninja. Okay, teach you how to breathe through your nose.

So we'll make sure we put all the links to these resources Including your sites in the show notes.

Light. Light is a biggie, and I think that most people who are kind of connected to health are no doubt aware now of things like night mode on the iPhone and like the f.lux program that you can install on a computer.

Because of the blue light.

Yeah, because of the blue light, or blue light blocking glasses. These things are kind of common knowledge nowadays, but I think the 2 areas of light that people could still do very well with adjusting in their environment are the lights in their home and their office, the actual overhead lights or the lights in the lamps, and then also computer monitors. Now, the idea here is that modern fluorescent artificial lighting is primarily composed of the blue light wave spectrum, especially about the 400 to 480 nanometer range. And what that does is that presents retinal damage. It can cause flicker. It can cause almost a distraction, a constant distraction you're barely aware of But, it's always kind of pulling you away just a little bit and reducing some of those cognitive superpowers that you talked about. And so, there are certain forms of lighting that work very well. There are companies like Philips Hue and Lighting Science creating what they call biological LED. And, these are very popular, but they're not good.

Okay.

And, I used to preach for a long time that they were, and I no longer do after further investigation because they do produce still a lot of flicker, which is damaging to the retina. And which also can still disrupt your circadian rhythm.

Yeah, this is a very important conversation because we, a lot of our viewers, they're readers. They're intense readers, and so they're studying, they're reading all the time, so their eye health is very important. Do they put a lot of these lights in schools and in offices? Yeah, they're everywhere.

Fluorescent lighting and LED lighting are the 2 most common forms of lighting now used. Because they're cheap. But the thing that comes, yeah, they're cheap. That's exactly it. Incandescent, red incandescent in any of the bedrooms or sleeping areas of your house and clear incandescent in the more wakeful areas most naturally simulates sunlight.

Beautiful.

Your power bill goes up, but your health bill in the future will go down, and I think that it's well worth the reduction in brain fog and distraction that occurs when you're actually exposed to good lighting. Of course, the problem is just like when you switch to natural personal care products and you walk through the Macy's section at the mall, all of a sudden it smells like chemicals when it never did before once you've retrained yourself. Well, the same thing when you walk into the mall, all of a sudden you feel as though you've walked into this bright lab rat environment with fluorescent lighting everywhere. So you kind of spoil yourself to a certain extent, but incandescent is the way to go. Then if you want to battle a lot of the effects of modern artificial lighting, there's this new concept in the biohacking industry of photobiomodulation, and there are companies now that They sell these red light bulbs and red light panels that produce near-infrared and red light. And, if you can bathe yourself in that at night, like have a unit in your bedroom or when you're laying on the couch at night, et cetera, that red light helps to offset a lot of the blue light artificial lighting damage.

Okay.

The other thing that's very useful to do for light if you can and circadian rhythm is get as much sunlight as you can sometime as soon as possible after you wake up in the morning. I realize it's difficult to do for a lot of people, but it makes a profound difference in terms of adjusting the amount of damage that a lot of the artificial lighting can have. Amazing.

When it comes to the red light therapy, is there a brand that you go to?

I use Joovv, and the main reason I use Joovv is not because there aren't other solutions out there, but it's the most powerful. And for me, time is money, and I can get a full exposure within 10 minutes with that unit, and some of the less powerful units will take me 30 to 60 minutes.

And then when people are moving around their environment and they're spoiled because their senses have adjusted and they go in their mall, can they wear their glasses there or?

You can, but the one problem with the blue light blocking glasses is that if you wear during the day the yellow or the orange or the red lens, which most of the ones that you get are, you disrupt your circadian rhythm because you block all blue light. So what I tell people is own 2 pairs, have a clear pair, and have a, uh, like a yellowish-orange pair. Uh, there are a variety of companies that do a really good job with their lens technology now. Um, one of the ones I really like at this point is called RA Optics. RA Optics.

Okay.

And no financial affiliation or anything. I just— they actually block the 400 to 480 nanometer spectrum. A lot of the lenses don't. Um, amber is good. Felix Gray is not bad. Those, those are some that also don't look like birth control for your head. They're actually kind of fashionable.

I love also how you have it functional per room also, how the air, the scents are changing from room to room, but then also the lighting.

You walk into my bedroom, it looks like an Amsterdam nightclub. It's just red everywhere. It smells like lavender, but I like it. You sleep really well. And then, as I mentioned, with the monitors, there is this program called Flux, but a much better program to install install on your computer is called IrisTech because Iris will reduce the blue light, it'll reduce the screen temperature, it has a lot more features than f.lux does. So I like that for any computer monitor.

Even during the day or just at night?

That would be all the time. It will automatically adjust based on the time, based on where you're at in the world. And, um, if you want to actually purchase a computer monitor that's the most eye-friendly, that doesn't have that bright LED backlit, The company EIZO, EIZO. Okay. They make a monitor series now called the FlexScan series, and that's very, very good for the eyes if you happen to be working on a monitor, not a laptop.

Nice. So the third super villain?

Electricity.

Okay.

So electricity is very difficult when you pull up your computer and there's 20 different Wi-Fi signals that you can connect to. It's staggering, you know, and then we look at Bluetooth appliances and smart homes. My whole home is a I got rid of all Bluetooth devices.

It's not a smart home, it's a stupid home.

I turned off the Wi-Fi router. The only way you can connect to the internet is you need to hardwire in with an Ethernet cable. I travel everywhere with a FireWire to Ethernet adapter and a USB to Ethernet adapter that I can use in any computer, and most hotel rooms have Ethernet cables, or you can travel with one, so you can hardwire in through the Ethernet most places. The Wi-Fi of your neighbors you don't need to worry about because the damage from that tends to exponentially decrease in terms of your distance from the router.

Okay.

But if you can keep yours in your own home off and hardwire in as much as possible, and if that's not an option, at least turn it off at night. If you can't remember to do that, you can buy for $20 on Amazon a digital wall timer that you can set to automatically shut off the Wi-Fi router at, say, 10 PM and turn it back on again at 6 AM. The same goes for Bluetooth. I don't wear technology that It tends to emit a constant Bluetooth signal. My phone, the Wi-Fi signal is always off. These modern conveniences have been shown over and over again to specifically cause issues with what are called the calcium channels on your cells. When you look at the body, the entire battery— the entire body, it's a battery, right? The human body operates on electrochemical gradients, and anytime you get exposed to any signal, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, flying in a giant metal tube from LA to New York, all of these things disrupt that electrical rhythm.

Mm-hmm.

And so, being adamant and aware of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in your environment is smart. And, if you don't need your phone to be on, keeping it in airplane mode. I know a lot of these things people are increasingly aware of, but I would say one of the better books because I could talk for an hour about this or I could recommend a pretty good resource would be The Non-Tinfoil Hat Guide to EMF. It's a great name by Nicholas Penault, and it's, it's a really good resource to be able to see some of the practical things that you can do to mitigate what they call EMF, electromagnetic fields, dirty electricity, electrical pollution in your environment. It's a biggie.

Amazing.

One of the first things you can do is just figure out how not to use Wi-Fi and not to use Bluetooth and not to use your cell phone signal unless you absolutely have to.

I love that.

Um, finally, before I go on to The last thing, you can vastly mitigate the damage of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth exposure by pushing the reboot button on your body's battery. The best way to push the reboot button is, and I do this every day, I was out there this morning on my hands dropping down in the park behind our condo here in New York doing push-ups. I get my hands or my feet in touch with the planet Earth.

Hmm.

And, the planet Earth creates a natural what's called a pulsed Electromagnetic field frequency. It's also referred to as grounding or earthing. Anytime you touch it, it reboots you. So, if you can get outside in your bare feet or your hands, obviously not right now in the snow in New York, but there are even technologies, they call them PEMF technologies or grounding and earthing mats. And, they ground in through the grounding plug in your home or your apartment or your condo and give you access to be able to touch the earth without actually touching the earth.

Amazing. Is there a brand that you recommend there?

The 2 that I like right now that would be affordable and accessible for most people would be anything designed by Dr. William Pawluk, P-A-W-L-U-K. His technology is very good. And, there's another guy named Bob Dennis. His technology is not quite as user-friendly, but I think is even better. And, those are called the ICES units that he makes. Those are good models for PEMF.

Beautiful.

Yeah. And finally—

The 4th supervillain.

The 4th supervillain, water.

Water.

The kind of sort of invisible one.

The clear.

It's clear, yeah, it's transparent. So a lot of people already know that you're supposed to drink, you know, however much you weigh in pounds, you divide that by 2, that's how many ounces of water you drink per day. You drink water and boom, that's it, you're hydrated. It's not true. You know, your body relies upon a lot more than that to stay hydrated. First of all, this idea Yeah. There's a sodium-potassium pump that drives minerals in and out of the cell. That's really kind of like old-school research. What we know now is that there's this aqueous gel matrix that the cell resides in, and that water is what helps to move nutrients and minerals in and out of the cell. The only way that happens is if the water that you consume is actually charged, actually carries a good electrical charge. Now, the 2 best ways to do that, in addition to just purifying your water, and I'll talk about the best purification here momentarily, would be to drink structured water or to drink hydrogen-rich water.

Okay.

Those are the 2 best forms of water based on the existing technology today to be able to adequately hydrate your body. Both of those technologies, structured water and hydrogen-rich water, still require you to add minerals to the water. And so, the way that I recommend people set things up is as follows. A, You filter your water. You use a reverse osmosis filter or a carbon block filter.

Okay.

Carbon block doesn't filter out quite as much as reverse osmosis, but the carbon block technology nowadays is good enough to where it's going to get most things. Both of those methods remove some minerals from the water. So after you've filtered your water, as you're going throughout your day drinking water, you need to figure out a way to get a lot of minerals into your body so that the water actually gets absorbed. The 3 best ways I like to do that are number 1, keep a Celtic sea salt shaker around your house and just put a little bit into each glass of water that you drink or each bottle of water that you drink. Number 2, there's a company called Quicksilver Scientific and they make this mineral solution. It's like a salty mineral solution. That's what I travel with and you just drink a little shot of it in the morning and in the evening. It allows your body to soak up the water more readily.

Mm-hmm.

And then there's a company— there's a few companies Yeah. There are companies that make trace mineral drops. I use the ones from AquaTru, and you can put a full dropper full of mineral drops into each glass of water that you drink. So you're essentially trying to make the water that you drink slightly salty after it's been filtered. As far as structuring it or making it hydrogen-rich, structuring requires that the water pass through almost like this— it's a series of of glass beads or minerals that it travels through that restores the same electrical structure to the water as it would have if it were traveling in springs or to the ground or if you were to harvest it from a— if you were to go to findaspring.com and find a spring, this allows you to simulate that without finding a spring. So a structured water filter is one way to go and you can buy portable structured water filters or you can install a whole house structured water filter or a kitchen sink structured water filter.

Okay.

The other one is the hydrogen-rich water. There's a variety of companies now that will sell hydrogen-rich tablets that you can drop into the water to enrich them with hydrogen. Or, there's a company called Trusi, T-R-U-S-I-I, and I have one of these in my office. They actually have a whole hydrogen-rich water generator, right?

Mm-hmm.

Just like a, just like a Colgan kind of, and you go up and you just disperse the water from that. And, that has a natural structure to it as well. So, there's kind 2 ways to tackle that. But ultimately, you want the water that you drink to be structured or hydrogen-rich, filtered and pure, and then minerals added back to it. And then when you travel, generally what I do is on my way to the hotel or the condo or the Airbnb or wherever I'm staying, I have my Uber or my Lyft or however I'm traveling, do a quick run into Whole Foods, and I just buy a bunch of glass. And glass is important because plastic particulates can can wind up in your body being stored as toxins. You create fast tissue to store them. Again, we could talk for an hour on just water, but ultimately, I buy a bunch of glass bottles. Usually, well, up until 2 weeks ago, I recommended Pellegrino or Gerolsteiner because those are the highest in minerals. The latest study showed that Gerolsteiner has a lot of these what are called microplastics in them still.

Okay.

So, I'm now just kind of recommending Pellegrino or There's some, like LA, there's one over there. I forget the name of it. They sell it at Erewhon, but it's like a natural spring water. There's a few good brands out there.

What about Mountain Valley?

Yeah, Mountain Valley's not bad. That's one as well. Okay.

But the important thing is it's coming from a glass container.

Yeah, exactly. Coming from a glass container, not plastic. Yeah, it costs you a little bit of money, but I mean, I show up to my hotels with this giant paper bag and I make sure I have a mini fridge. And that's the water that I drink the whole time.

Is there a difference between still water and sparkling water?

Sparkling water I actually like more because I get more satiated. I travel with this wonderful organic stevia made by Oh Myka Organics. I travel with vanilla or butterscotch.

I've had that with you.

Add that to Pellegrino.

You had that with me when we flew to Sardinia, I believe.

Yeah. It tastes like vanilla cream soda, but it's not because I think there's extra health benefits to sparkling water. It's not going to rot your teeth or calcify your teeth as a lot of people will say or be super acidic. I just like it because it's more fun. It's bubbly. It's satiating, and I'm just kind of addicted to sparkling water. I used to be addicted to Diet Dr Pepper, and I think that's a far healthier addiction, but still is fine as well.

Amazing.

Those are the 4 things: air, light, Water, electricity, and those are just a few of the little steps I'd take to optimize those.

Amazing, Ben. So basically how you live matters, especially to your gray matter, if you will.

It matters.

Yeah. How do people stay in touch with you, buddy?

Just Google Ben Greenfield. I have a website, podcast, book, all that good stuff.

So what I do is I challenge everybody right now. I tell people one of the fastest ways to learn something is to be able to teach it to somebody else. I'd recommend everybody screenshot this episode, tag Ben, tag myself, and share and teach your community what your big aha was from this conversation. Post that in the comments, and then I will reshare some of my favorite also as well.

Awesome.

Thanks for being on the show, buddy. Awesome. Cool.

Thanks, Jim.