LONGEVITY Secrets for Your Brain and Body | Dr. Halland Chen & Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. You have a very special onsite episode today and you want to take a lot of notes. We are actually at the biohacking conference and your topic for today is what are the 5 secrets, science-based secrets to be able to live longer for longevity? I think everybody wants to add years to their life and life to their years. And I'm here with a very special guest, a special friend. He's Dr. Holland Chen.

Hi, everyone.

He's double board certified. He's the co-founder of Thrive Native. He is a longevity expert and a renowned health advisor to myself. And I'm probably the least known of your clients, but I appreciate you taking the time at this event. He and I share the stage many times at anti-aging performance conferences, and you're a performance master. So, I've been a client of Dr. Holland Chen's for many, many years, and he's really dug me out of some really challenging times and also helped me not only to get to normal, but almost above and helped me to access more of my Kwik Brain. So, buddy, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having me here. It's such a pleasure to always talk about this topic. And you and I have a real deep passion for longevity and peak performance. So it's super an honor to be here, and I'm so happy to present this and share it with the Kwik Brain audience.

Yeah, we've been talking about doing this conversation for quite some time. And I don't know any more important topic than, you know, your wheelhouse, which is helping people to, to feel their best, to look their best, and also perform their best. And so when we're talking about longevity, where, where, where do we start? You know, for a lot of people, they don't, you know, there's so many different elements. They come to events or they listen to podcasts, but I love your, your frameworks, you know, the way you take people. It's not just incremental, you know, performance. I mean, you radically transform your clients', your patients' lives. Yeah.

And it's really, that's a great way to bring it up. It's a framework, right? Traditional medicine is a sick care model, right? You get sick, we do some intervention. But what do you do when you're relatively not sick or kind of healthy, right? And so there's really no framework for that. And so we came up with a few things and that's why it's like really the 5 Secrets to Longevity and they all interrelate just like our whole body interrelates with each system, there's a framework for longevity. And so, the first thing I like to call this is proactive medicine.

Right.

And so, with the proactive medicine, it's what's your why and what's your how. Probably some same questions you ask yourself when you're just trying to even find purpose. Well, in this aspect, what's our purpose when we try to find our why in our health? So, I made some cue cards. We'll probably post some larger ones for your audience on YouTube. So, if you check out that, there'll be a lot of great examples. And so, when you think about your why, that's step 1. You know, what, what can I do that's practical? What are the effects of what I'm doing? And what are some programs in what I'm doing? And what that means is if something's practical, you can actually do it.

Yeah.

Because what happens is when it's too hard, people either don't do it, they do it for a little bit, it gets lost to follow up. And then the effects. What are the short-term effects and long-term effects? These 2 things help people keep their head in the game and reinforce each other. So the effects are really important. It's hard to tell somebody, hey, you're going to be better in XYZ amount of time, but then you can't foresee it. But if you can give some short-term effects, I think you have a saying where progress— you don't have to be perfect, but progress is the most important thing, right?

And when people see that, those results in the short term, they're more likely to follow through. Correct.

Yeah, it reinforces each other. And so, I brought some biohacking devices. They're some of my favorite. And so, these are great feedback loops, but some of them also help get you that incremental progress. So, we'll cover that too. And then the last part is programs. I think a lot of times you get a diagnosis and people say, well, what do I do, doc? And some of the traditional things I hear from my clients is say, well, the doc said I was going to be on this medication forever. Or they said, well, just live with it. That to me is so frustrating when I hear that answer because there's a lot of times where you don't have to just live with it or just take a pill. You can actually do things that are very what I call proactive. So that's what I call step 1. How's the why? And then, step 2 is really, I like to break things down. I know your audience loves mnemonics. I said, what's the ABCs of longevity, right?

Right.

And so, when we think about our ABCs, longevity is a formula. Everything interrelates to each other. So, A is—

So, there's a method behind what looks like magic for people who are living longer and well.

Yeah, absolutely. And, I think a lot of people who are living a long time, they just formulaically do this stuff in their life that makes them live a long time. We've heard of these Blue Zones, But there's some very common overlapping characteristics of these Blue Zone areas. And these are places where people live a long time due to their lifestyle, the things that they eat. We know food is medicine now, and I'll kind of COVID some of these topics. But the ABCs basically stands for what are the actions you can take on your body systems? And that's divided into a thing called what I call cornerstones.

Okay.

And I'll dive into that because the cornerstones are actually the 5 keys. And so when we think about the ABCs of longevity, It's a formula. And, like any formula, you actually can reverse engineer it. And so, the more you reverse engineer this formula, you start having a better understanding of what everything is. So, actions, for example, is basically the activities that you take. And, I like to say actions over medications.

Actions over medications.

Right. So, for example, people who have a sleep problem, I know we've talked about your sleep for a while, some people might take sleeping pills. And so, benzodiazepines, you get used to it for a while and it stops working. But, What happens if you actually start doing things to affect your sleep, like from a biohacking perspective, from sleep hygiene and things that can help monitor sleep? I'm wearing an Oura Ring. It's one of my favorite sleep devices. When we talk about the B part, it's really body symptoms. And so, I say body systems over band-aid solutions.

Body systems over band-aid solutions.

Right. Because a lot of times, people are just focusing on this one symptom, but it's really not just a symptom. It's actually a body system to be affected. So, an example would be, let's say somebody had bloating or stomach pain, but it's really more the microbiome balance.

Yeah.

The issue is that your microbiome is out of balance and that's just a— the bloating and the pain is a symptom of that. And so, and the last part is the C. And this kind of was something I really had to formalize into a process. And C stands for cornerstone. And what that really means is that interrelated functional medicine systems that are physiologically related. And so, I say function over disease management.

Function over disease management.

So, for example, let's say we're handling somebody who's a little bit overweight or even obese. And so, the traditional is like, oh, diet and exercise. But, the real issue is it might be stress-related, which is affecting cortisol levels, which is causing gut inflammation. So, that's really a body system. And so, that's kind of why when I say you want to reverse engineer this, We're really reverse engineering the ABCs of longevity. And so, you know, I think the C part is the real hard part where people basically want to get into, and that's what I call the cornerstones. Okay. And so these are the cornerstones of longevity.

And I love the way we did an episode on reverse engineering, and I explained how to reverse engineer learning and studying and memory. This is wonderful, applying reverse engineering to living longer and anti-aging.

Absolutely. And, and I think for people, you know, when they say, I want to live a long time, it's hard. They don't know where to start.

Yeah, it can be overwhelming.

It's super overwhelming. And even medical professionals, you know, everyone specializes in a certain, you know, specialty, or I like to say silo, but it's all intercommunicating. So when I like to say we're functional medicine and integrative, it really means that because it really is about how everything's integrated. And so some people might say holistic, some people might say total body treatment, I like to say it's proactive because the patient does require a little bit. You have to put some energy into it if you want the results. But then also as a care provider or someone like I'm a health advisor, I really want to actually tie in everything for everybody.

Yeah.

And so when we actually talk about the 5 cornerstones, which I have here listed, there's basically 5 things that govern your overall health, right? So inflammation, stress, your immune system, detox, and mindset. And that's something you're an expert with, especially for the mindset part, especially in your book. And so inflammation is a pretty broad topic, but when we actually think about inflammation, I'm really referring to gut inflammation.

Okay.

So that can be gut health and also food sensitivities. Regarding stress, that's your nervous system, right? And so your nervous system keeps your body in this thing, what we call homeostasis, which is basically a regulation of all your bodily functions, both automatic and not automatic. Immune system is cellular. So obviously your immune system interrelates to both the above, and detox refers to tissue. So when we think of detox, something that's really common now that we're seeing is people are having heavy metal poisoning such as high levels of mercury because it's in the fish.

Right.

We're even having arsenic exposure because it actually can be found in our foods. But then also now we're getting exposed to even plastic toxins because of the microplastics in the water. But on a physiological level, We're also talking about your lymphatics. Your lymphatics actually helps drain your body of the toxins in your body. So when you get a massage, they say drink a lot of water. That's because you're actually removing all those toxins squeezed out of the muscles.

And I think a lot of people who are listening to this or watching this, and I recommend everyone watch these slides also on YouTube so they could see the full extended version, they relate to these 5 cornerstones. I mean, when you're talking about things like stress, people are in an inordinate amount of stress. Right. We live in very turbulent times. Mental health issues are, you know, on the rise. When you're talking about immunity, people feel like their immune systems are under attack, you know, through viruses and, you know, and the such. So this is a very topical conversation.

Yep. And they all interrelate. And honestly, each one of these topics can dive deeper into everything. But, you know, even from, again, like lymphatics, there is a thing called glymphatics. And so the glymphatics helps drain the brain of certain toxins. And that's why when sleep gets compromised, You have less draining in the lymphatics because it's actually occurring during deep sleep.

That's like the sewage system.

Right. It's the sewage system of the body. And so, basically, that's why people develop really early Alzheimer's or dementia. And then, the 5th one's obviously one of my favorite ones, which is what I love in your book. It's about mindset. And so, when we think about mindset, it's not only just the brain, it's the aspects of the brain, which is meditation, your belief system, your habits, spirituality. So, these 5 cornerstones really help drive a lot of this work. And so, I kind of wanted to figure out a way where people could actually then frame it for themselves and look where to start.

Yeah.

And so, it's actually a roadmap. And, I say, here's your longevity roadmap. And, that's why we call it a Cornerstone because if you arrange this into a square, which corner am I going to start, right? And so, everyone has what I think one thing that bothers them the most. And then, if you look at that one thing, it affects the other 2 things. So, if we were to take, for example, in our Cornerstone map, We take, let's say, stress, right? You're stressed out because times are challenging or you're stressed out because there's a lot of stuff going on at work that's going to obviously compromise your immune system and inflammation. Likewise, if you want to improve your immunity, you have to work on your lymphatics and your stress. Inflammation obviously will increase, gets worse by stress and then detox.

So we're going to put this image. I love this Cornerstone image about longevity in our show notes at jimkwik.com/notes. Highly recommend. Again, you can watch this on YouTube. This is an episode you want to watch on YouTube so you can see these visuals. Yeah.

And thanks for sharing that because even right in the middle, because again, if you were to visualize this, right in the middle is mindset. Because if you think about mindset, mindset is going to govern everything tied into it.

So if you have a—

It affects everything, right? So if you have great habits, you're going to do things that are going to keep your inflammation in control, your stress managed and whatnot. So, that's why when every— this square becomes out of balance when people are dominant in one level that becomes a little bit more pronounced.

And maybe neglecting something.

Yeah. And they neglect it. And so, I actually brought some biohacking equipment tools that I'll show people that they can enjoy. And, I have one small deep dive into mindset just because I know that's your Kwik Brain audience and they love this stuff. I break mindset into the 5 things. And so, these 5 things are what I call Your home, your habits, your hobbies, harmony, and hope.

We love alliteration.

Yeah. So the 5—

It's very memorable.

The 5 H's to mindset. So write your home, your mind's home, which is your emotional home, your spiritual home, your habits, daily consistent actions. And these are small steps in the right direction. Your hobbies, things that bring you balance and joy, your passions.

That light you up.

Yep, exactly. Harmony, which is basically mindfulness, Gratitude, meditation, and then hope, your self-talk, the things we tell ourselves, whether true or not true, and even the language we use. Language is so important. So, even if you fix your mindset because the other things are just so hard for you, your mindset, because it is the overarching manager of everything on this cornerstone, this longevity roadmap, you can still make headway. And so, that's kind of what I really wanted to share with everybody is that it's very manageable.

What I love about your approach also is the kind of results. I know many of your clients and patients, they're able to get these incredible results because you're addressing— if something is unseen and not made conscious, then we just feel like, oh, it's just luck. Right. And so we could do even a whole episode, you and I, on the 5 H's of home habits, hobbies, harmony, and hope. But I could see how that central mindset and how that could affect our inflammation, our stress, our immune system, and overall our overall ability to rid ourselves of toxins.

Everything. I mean, everything kind of starts up here, right, in your mind and in your brain, and it spreads throughout. And so, I mean, the mind is very powerful. And so kind of tying things in, like, let's say you want to address stress and inflammation. I'm a very big fan of the Wim Hof technique. I actually trained in Poland with the guys. with the family out there, and I loved it. And really, it decreases inflammation through the breathwork and the cold ice exposure. It decreases stress, it boosts your immune system. And that's a lot of mindset work, right? It wasn't easy climbing in -19°C weather in my swim trunks, but I did it. And it's one of the best things I've ever did.

And the results on doing that, even on take any of those on immune system, I actually I have this great photo and clip of the 3 of us at my home, and we'll insert it on the YouTube video also as well. But, he's known for with the cold and the breathing stimulating his immune system to almost superhuman levels. Yeah.

They did research studies on this, and I've actually been to some of the places where he does research studies and it's really science-based. There's a lot of great research behind it. And, I think that ties into what is all this thing about biohacking? We happen to be here at a biohacking conference. So, This is kind of what I roll around and I travel with.

And so these things are pretty portable.

Yeah, they're very portable. And that's kind of the hard thing with some of our busy lives. I travel a lot too. And so what are some things that I can do and take on the road to make this really executable? I love this new product called Cove. And they basically call it like a hug for your brain. And really what it does is it actually helps relieve stress and it helps you actually sleep better. It vibrates. And so, they've actually figured a way of certain frequencies and vibrations that stimulate a part of your brain to be more calm, more active. So, you actually just wear this right behind your ears and it's only a 20-minute session, right? And so, you do it daily.

And, it's passive.

Yeah, it's passive.

You put them on your ears and then there's vibration.

Yup.

And, is this affecting our vagus nerve or how?

So, it affects a central part of your brain. So basically, The best way to describe it, it's like we're very responsive to touch.

Okay.

And so, this vibratory touch sensation actually stimulates a part of your brain that induces a sense of calmness and stress relief. So, it's essentially training your brain to be stronger at being calm, which we all train our brain on how to be strong at being stressed out, right?

Right.

But, we don't really do things to help make it more calm. And so, there's a lot of things that are interesting that are related to this. I'm a very big fan of HRV, which basically stands for heart rate variability. And, that actually then ties into a very key longevity factor. On the aspect of passive, the great part is you can just wear this for 20 minutes. I'm a very big fan of kind of maximizing my time.

So, you're stacking all these things.

I stack. So, yeah. So, I actually like to stack even my biohacking equipment. So, this is called a CORE device and it basically helps you meditate. It vibrates to teach you how to breathe in, breathe out during certain type of cadences and frequencies. And so, while it's doing that, on here has actually these little sensors and these can actually measure your HRV.

This is called Kore?

Kore. Yep. So, while I'm doing this, I'm meditating and I'm getting stimulated with the COVID device all at the same time. And, I'm actually getting great data because this is telling me about my HRV, how relaxed would I really— this is actually doing very passively. I don't have to think about it.

And, you're using HRV as an indicator for recovery? Yeah.

It's a great indicator for recovery but also basically predictor of longevity.

Right.

And so, what HRV stands for, and we might be able to do this whole separate episode on how these tools can help be a great monitor, enhance people's lives for longevity. HRV basically tells your body how much balance do you have between fight or flight, which is the stress response, and then the parasympathetic system, which is relax and digest.

Correct.

So, HRV is a balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic. And so, people who are always stressed out have a low HRV. because they're stressed out and their body's in fight or flight. People who have a better HRV is, it's much higher than others. So, everyone wants to know what's a good HRV is. It depends on your age, right? But, I can tell you definitely anything like 15 or less is typically not a great HRV. You see that when people are sick or people who are older.

And again, there are devices like COR or your Oura Ring that can help.

Yeah, they can help you. So, Oura Ring's great. I've been such a fan of this for a long number of years. And, what you get in the mail, it's a sizing device. So, the size matters, right?

You want it to be not too tight, not too loose.

And basically, that can measure your HRV.

A nice temperature heart rate.

Temperature.

Also sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep.

Deep sleep, REM. I'm a big fan of deep sleep because deep sleep is when your body does the full recovery thing. If you really want to get deeper into the HRV, I actually do special HRV testing for my clients. And, when I try to advise them what to do for their health, this is a device that gets connected to a special computer and runs an algorithm. We can actually determine, are you on the athletic side?

This is a heart rate monitor. Correct.

Yeah, it's a heart rate monitor and this actually will start collecting data.

And again, in the show notes, we'll put links to everything that Dr. Holland is talking about as a resource.

And this heart rate monitor is great because you can actually start diving deep into sort of a lot of physiology.

And because the idea is you can't manage something unless you can measure it.

Yep. That's one of my favorite sayings. You can't manage what you don't measure. And so, a lot of these things give us a measuring tool. And then, even with stacking, this is HAPI. This is a low energetic frequency device, and they have this thing where you basically wear it and it basically emits a magnetic field for you, and you're basically feeling a frequency that you can choose. It's an app on your iPhone. They have a sleep formulation. They have a stretch formulation. So all these things kinda add up together. And so—

Yeah, that's amazing. We have Scott Donald, who's the founder of Hapbee, H-A-P-B-E-E. And every actual molecule has a magnetic signature, and they've learned how to be able to capture that signature for anything like caffeine to melatonin and then capture this device and then transfer it into your physiology without all the side effects.

Exactly.

And it's great with them.

We were talking to them about creating custom formulas as well because you can actually start blending things. Right. And so obviously, because of my years of experience, and I'm also researching as well. I'm a very big fan of regenerative medicine and all the things that help the body heal. We can actually start creating custom formulas that might be actually very hard to do in a pill format.

And so this is wonderful because people could choose the way that they feel.

Correct.

It's connected to an app and you could just choose calm or choose alert or choose focus or choose to relax.

Yep.

Where a lot of people feel like they have emotions, but here, and just hope or Or that they're lucky that they have that focus for today, they could actually— these devices support their nervous system.

Exactly. And, and the nice thing, again, back to stacking, you know, a lot of us will have 1 or 2 tools. You know, I'm a big fan of NuCalm. So NuCalm has these little patch discs that you wear, and they use a concept of binaural beats. Uh, and so obviously, these— the sound tricks your brain into a way to actually go into a deeper relaxation state. So you can just listen to NuCalm with your headphones. But, if you're actually wearing this Happy device, you can induce more of a sense of relaxation in your body. And then, you also have this auditory system from the NuCalm system that actually can relax you even further. So, for some people where let's say one thing doesn't work, you can actually start stacking these things. And so, this is what I call kind of the new fitness for your body. These are your fitness equipment for longevity.

NuCalm is one of my favorites. It's something that I do and I just will do. I'll put a patch here.

Yup.

And it has the app and I'll listen with my headphones and maybe like maybe a blindfold just to kind of keep the light out.

Yeah.

Just that could distract you. And I'll do a 20-minute session and it feels like I just had like an amazing like 2-hour nap.

Yeah. I mean, it's one of my favorite and, you know, I've been using NuCalm for years and all these other things coming out now, especially with COVID and just even this meditation device, it really, it allows the busy person to actually dial their health in. And, as they kind of navigate what I call their longevity roadmap, it's a lot easier now because there are more tools and resources.

And, that's the amazing emergence of technology. Technology, yes, potentially our phones could distract us or make us more reactive, but this is the upside. We've learned more about the human nervous system and training potential and performance in the past 10, 20 years than the previous 2,000 years combined. And while it's been aggravated more because of the way the world is. There are also ways of balancing it out and creating harmony in your system.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think as technology advances, some of these things get more compact, some of these things become more accessible, and then obviously the measuring side of things becomes more effective.

And people do not— who are watching, they don't have to do everything.

No, you don't have to do everything. This is just kind of part of my routine. But I always say, what if they just did one new thing? One new thing will help. And again, if you just pick one cornerstone, Let's say you just want to choose stress because I think that's pretty universal. Most people are affected by that. You'd be surprised how much that would actually improve your immune system, decrease inflammation, and then your mindset gets a little bit better too, right? Because it's an all interrelating basically square of how everything connects to each other. So I'm happy to chat more on each topic.

Obviously, we have to definitely have you back. I know a lot of our audience and it's very global that they want to stay connected with you and your teachings, your insights. You're working on some, some amazing upcoming projects in, in both media, you know, mainstream. And I'm really happy about that to be where this, this conversation could be more. I mean, I've seen you on HBO, just like different places. Where can people stay in touch with you? Yeah.

If they wanna stay in touch with me, you can find me on Instagram. It's @drholland. So D-R Holland, H-A-L-L-A-N-D. Okay. And we're very active there. You know, we love to connect with people and, you know, answer questions and share the latest of what we're doing. We have a lot of things that we want to bring to just everybody. We've been doing some very cool retreats to help activate people.

Yeah, I've had the opportunity to participate in some of those retreats.

Yeah, they're really fun and they're special because a lot of times, sometimes you can tell somebody something, but then you can show somebody something and have a deep immersion over multiple days. Yeah, even in multiple days, like 3 days, 5 days, that immersion really can help someone's north compass. And I think you've even said it's like One step in a different direction can lead your trajectory quite far.

Tremendously. So I challenge everybody right now who's watching this to take a screenshot of this episode, whatever platform, whether it's iTunes or Spotify, or hopefully it's YouTube so you can see the extended version there and tag Dr. Holland, post it, tag myself so we see it. And I would love for people to— one thing you're going to do for your own longevity. I find that if you just do one small, simple step, You know, all big things have small beginnings. And so share that online. Make sure you follow Dr. Holland, and I will repost some of our favorites. You know, share your anti-aging longevity tips and hacks also as well. Let us know if you use some of these resources and keep us posted to your joy stories. Dr. Holland, thank you so much for being on the show.

Great to see you.

Can't wait to have you back.

Absolutely.

Looking forward to it. Thanks, guys.

Bye for now. Hi, Kwik Brain.

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