Dr. Darshan Shah on AI-Powered Personalized Health

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What is a digital twin?

A digital twin basically first is created by having enough of your data so we understand what is a current state of your biology. And then the second step of digital twin is programming it with the data of what happens with specific interventions. And then we can make a prediction on how would that intervention affect you in your digital twin. I mean, I think this is something that will be a game changer for menopause, for example. So say you're having symptoms and you want to try a particular intervention. How's it going to affect you? Like, you don't know until you try it, or you can have your digital twin try it and see, and see what the data tells us.

This is wild.

Yeah, it's going to be an incredible new world that we're in in the next 5 years for sure.

What do you see the risks with all of this?

One of the biggest risks will probably be the people out there that fully transfer all of their medical care to an AI model.

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So here with me today is Dr. Darshan Shah.

You have a new book coming out.

It is called Your New Health OS, and it really is that intersection of longevity, personalized medicine, and AI, correct?

Absolutely.

All right.

Why is this important for especially women 40-plus?

Well, okay, so I think Number one, everyone's using AI already, right? And so it depends on how you use it that you get the results that you're looking for, right? And so the best thing you can do is right now you can upload your results, lab results if you have them, scans, etc., to a model like Claude, ChatGPT, and then start asking it questions, right? However, unfortunately, a lot of people don't really know what questions to ask.

Exactly.

And who to tru— and how much you should trust the AI, right? And so what we're developing is in this book we've given people advice on how to ask the right questions, how to understand if the information is correct or not. And thirdly, we're talking about a new platform that we're developing that people can upload all of their data to, and we can also scrape it from like wearables, et cetera, and put great guardrails around the system. So the chance of you getting good information is maximized, right? And so that's, I think, you know, the AI world right now, everything's built very general. It's not not specific, and we're using general tools to get specific information, and it's hallucinating and it's breaking in between.

Well, and then the other side of it, because I just loaded a gut health test into AI and then a genetics test, and Tim's like, you just loaded that into AI?

Yeah.

And anyone can get to it? I'm like, yeah, yeah. Yes. So the new system that you're doing, I would assume with the guardrails comes the guardrails that it's privacy.

Absolutely. Yeah, everything's super protected, and they're really good systems out there now to de-identify all of your data before it goes into some AI cloud bubble.

Yeah.

So right now, today, like what someone who is the typical 40-plus-year-old woman, hormones are starting to shift, is watching social media, not really sure where to go.

Where would they get started?

Like, could they do something like a function health test and use AI to help? Or would this be like a crazy thing to do at this point?

No, no. I think, I think everyone should do this. You know, I think definitely you want to go to a clinic that will test you if you have one in your area. But if not, Function Health is another great alternative. There's also Dutch testing that you can do. There's, there's different tests that you can do now, and testing is so available. But Function is a great place to start because they give you a lot of different blood markers that are very useful. And then they also tell you like kind of what they mean. But if you upload that data to an AI model, now you can ask it questions.

I find with, with anything like it's so great, first of all, to be able to get lab tests.

Absolutely.

It's just how this had to get democratized is just beyond me that it took this long.

Well, I mean, for a long time you couldn't get a lab test.

A doctor had to order it, and then you had to get the results from them, and it was this whole thing.

However, right?

Oh my gosh, right? But now you get these tests and they're giving you just points but not the relationships.

Exactly.

Yeah. And that's the issue that I see here is like, okay, well this, this high may not be an issue, but when this other thing's high alongside it, might be a problem.

Yeah. And the other, you know, just to extrapolate on that a little bit, I think is really important is when you get blood tests from like one of these services, they're very focused on the individual test results. Right. But when you look at an individual test result in a vacuum of just that result without the overall context, you can definitely go down the wrong path, I think. And so you have to be very careful about going test result first, treatments later, is to start with like an overall context of your health and how do your test results either support or deny where your health is headed.

So someone starting out, because you've talked about how your new operating system is going to also pull in labs and wearables.

Let's talk about some of the wearables because it's really easy.

I think there's two, two issues that can happen. Number one, we could get a little— I'm going to use the term orthorexia, like, but you can, like, you go, you look at your Oura Ring and you think you slept well, you wake up feeling great, and then you look at your Oura Ring and it said you had a bad night's sleep. Then you're like, should I feel bad?

You know, it's like it can get a little bit funky, right?

So there's that piece of it is that all of a sudden you're focusing too much or you just have too much information and you don't know what to do, so you don't look at any of it. Where should someone start with wearables? What do you think are the most important things?

Such a great question. So what I tell all my patients is, look, data anxiety is is a real thing if you're looking at it minute to minute, morning to morning, like what is my sleep score this morning? And that is okay if you're doing an N-of-1 experiment on something that you're trying to either to improve a particular marker, okay? So say for example, you wanna try turning your temperature of your room down to 65 degrees every night. You wanna see how it affects your sleep. Perfect time to then have a wearable and turn your temperature down and see what happened with your sleep that night. Did you get more deep sleep? Time to falling asleep, did that go down? If you're not running a none-of-one experiment at that particular moment, the best way to use a wearable is to just let it collect data for a week, a month, etc., and then look at the trend line, right? Where are you trending? Did things get worse this month, this week, or better this month and this week? And so I'm a big believer in just kind of like keeping it on and not looking at— I don't even look at my app daily. And then once a month I'll sit down and I'll look at the trends.

Which metrics are you looking at and what are you looking for?

Yeah. Yep. So on the wearable side, I definitely look at HRV. I think HRV is a critical metric that we now finally have access to.

Okay, so let's explain what HRV is for everybody.

Heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is the time in between your heartbeats and how variable it is. And it's a measure of the balance between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Humans are meant to be in balance, right? In fact, humans, if you look at the amount of times, the amount of time over the course of a day that humans spent in parasympathetic state, it was almost all day long. There was very little time that we were sympathetically stimulated.

Wow, we've really flipped that.

Totally flipped it, right? And so HRV is a measure of that. And so, you know, if your HRV is low, it means that you're spending too much time in the sympathetic state and you need to, you know, back off all this stress that you're putting your body under.

Easier said than done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are techniques and tools that we can use to make that happen, right? And then obviously it also requires a big picture mindset change too about your day-to-day habits, routines. And another thing that I found that is really, you know, kind of surprising to me, but I think it's very true and people need to focus on this is your journey through your life accumulates traumas, right? And they might have, you might have like big traumas in your life or you might have little traumas, but everyone accumulates traumas.. And those traumas can add up to a dysregulation of your parasympathetic-sympathetic balance. And so depending on how many you've had and how you've dealt with them over time, that can also depress your HRV. So I think there's a lot of like factors there that you can do to affect your HRV. Counseling, you know, some people even do psychedelic counseling. There's breathwork, there's meditation. Exercise helps your HRV. Better sleep helps your HRV. And then stress levels, right? Like, how do we start eliminating stressors from our life? All of those come together into this one metric of health.

How important do you think HRV is?

It's just as important as even your sleep score, I think, is that important.

So here's the other question on HRV. It was interesting. I've got a low HRV when I measured on Oura. Now, if I get a chest strap, so I used a Polar and H10, or I put the earpiece on for HeartMath, it's much higher. And at first I was looking at this aura and I'm like, oh my gosh. And then I talked to Molly Maloof and she's like, "Saran—" because it's low when it's your hand, it's far away from your heart. So is it more than— my assumption with the ring is I'm just looking for the changes.

You want to look at the trends and the changes. Each of you in the Oura Ring is measured at nighttime. And you're right, it is kind of a distance from the heart. And what that means is that it really needs to be very precise at picking up your heart rate using that device. And sometimes the farther away you are, the harder it is to pick that up. Obviously, the ear and putting a chest strap on is much more accurate. So, you know, I just look at the trend lines. That's the main thing I want to look at. And over the course of months and years, you want to be trending up or at least staying stable.

And is there—

if you wanted to really focus on this, is there a best time of day and a best way to measure this?

Yes, you want to definitely measure it overnight because you need to be kind of still when you're measuring it. And yeah, that's the time of day. And then, you know, I know the Oura Ring and I know the Whoop Band also, you can kind of set it to measure as you're doing breathwork or as you're doing some sort of meditative activity. And that can also give you that biofeedback of if that's working or not.

So beyond HRV, which I'm now going to even prioritize above sleep, That's really interesting.

Well, and you know, sleep and HRV go hand in hand. If you have a poor night's sleep, your HRV is going to be horrible the next day. So you got to get your sleep right too. But I would say, you know, most people by now have done a lot for their sleep already. Yeah. And then if you start prioritizing HRV, that will also have a feedback to your sleep and make your sleep better too.

Beyond trauma, what are some of the other things that really impact HRV?

So I would say, you know, we talk about sleep a lot, impacts your HRV, is the amount of time that you spend being in flight or, you know, fight or flight all day long, right? And so I don't know about you, but some days I wake up and I feel like I'm in that all day long, right? I'm just constantly like, what's the next thing I have to do? Where do I need to be, et cetera, et cetera. And what I found really breaks that kind of chain of, all day long sympathetic activity is putting in breathwork in between. Okay. A really great way to do this is before every single time you eat is take 10 deep breaths, right? So now you at least have it breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then what I like to do as well is every 45 minutes when I'm working, I like to take a break, do 5 deep breaths, and then do a physical activity like lift some weights or do some squats or something.

Some air squats. Exercise snacks. Yeah, we just need a perfect little device on our phone that's having us do these things all day long. I know, right? Yeah, because otherwise I'll write down, "Can I do this?" And I'm like, totally forget to do it. But it is amazing what breathwork can do. Yeah, it really is. Like, it's incredible. Now, I think I was asking about this. Did you try the, have you tried that Pulsetto?

I haven't tried it yet. I need to try it. Yeah. The vagus nerve stimulator.

It's so incredible. Wow. And I've tried so many different things because I am like sympathetic queen, right? And this, This is amazing. I did do a deposition the other day. I had to take it off before I went on camera because I'm like, they're going to go, what is she doing? But it is, it's incredible. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

I'm going to give it a shot.

Got to try it. Okay.

What is a digital twin? Yeah, that's a great question. So a digital twin basically first is created by having enough of your data. So we understand what is the current state of your biology. And then the second step of digital twin is programming it with the data of what happens with specific interventions, okay, to the general population. And then what we can do is now we can extrapolate what did that population data show us, pick out the, you know, 40-year-old women in that dataset and see what happened to them. And then we can make a prediction on how would that intervention affect you in your digital twin. Okay, so I can give you an example real quick. Like, say there's a study out there on, you know, 5,000 women on sauna use and how that affects their HRV. And then you're like, huh, I wonder how my digital twin would be affected by HRV. And so it would go into that study, find all the women that are close to you based on the data that it has, and say, okay, all the women that are close to your age range, maybe they have your resting heart rate in there. Sauna use for 18 minutes improved their HRV by 20%. So then we'd be like, okay, your digital twin, JJ, is going to improve your HRV by 20%.

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Could you imagine that with all— so many interventions, right?

It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

So you can just go, okay, put me on this exercise program.

Let's see what happens. And these are the things that should happen. Yes. Yeah, that's fantastic. How close are we to being able to all have a digital twin?

We're very close. I mean, it's basically— I think it's definitely available now to a certain degree. But I think as time goes on and we have more and more data, it's going to get more and more precise.

So how on— like, just that piece of it, then someone going through menopause with all the hormones and everything else, and there's so much variation. I mean, is this something that this could actually work for?

Absolutely. I mean, I think this is something that will be a game changer for menopause, for example. So say you're having symptoms and you want to try a particular intervention, hot flashes, and you want to try a new medication out for hot flashes. How's it going to affect you? Like, you don't know until you try it, or you can have your digital twin try it and see, and see what the data tells us.

This is wild. Yeah, wild. Like, would it be able to have a surgery? Would it be able to have a surgery?

Yes. I mean, I think you can look at surgical data. And see what were the outcomes after a particular surgery and see what your outcome would be after the surgery.

Yeah. This is amazing. I'm thinking of all of this because it seems like AI is, you know, making things less human, but actually it could save you a lot of time, pain, money being able to see if this would work for you or not. What is that? It sounds like you would know what the percentage likelihood that this would be an appropriate treatment for you. Exactly.

It's going to be an incredible new world that we're in. In the next 5 years for sure.

What do you see the risks with all of this? I mean, like, I'm seeing all this value, but I'm sure there's on the other side, there's some other issues. What could those be?

One of the biggest risks will probably be the people out there that fully transfer all of their medical care to an AI model and they just say, I'm never going to see a doctor, just going to do the AI, manage my health. Right. And I think, you know, it can definitely help with lifestyle. It can definitely help with helping you figure out what's going on with your bloodwork, etc., etc. But that human interaction with someone that's there to figure out like how you see things, what's your overall situation, etc., I think, you know, is definitely needed. And so to me, the best model for healthcare is going to be a very good empathetic physician or practitioner that then uses AI to give him or her the data that they need in a way that they can really utilize it at a very high level for your care. I think when you put those two things together, you have the maximum benefit of the technology and also what humans can bring to the table.

Right. Well, here's the reality. If all we needed was the data, then we would just be able to read a book and get all the results. Right. Right. And we all know that that doesn't happen, that the most important part is that accountability and implementation. I think you're still going to have that gap with those things. But it, it also leads me to think that the skill set of the physician is going to shift a little bit. They become more of a coach implementer. Yeah, absolutely.

Which, you know, I think as a physician, that sounds great to me. Like, I want to help people, you know, change their health journey and hold their hand through the process.

Yeah. Well, you're definitely doing that over there at Next Health. And I would love just for everybody listening, because you have this amazing company and clinics and their franchise clinics throughout the country. Called Next Health. And these are— now what we do is whenever we're traveling, we know where we're going and we go jump over to Next Health to be able to get a tune-up. What is Next Health? What led you to start it? And explain it for someone who is looking for that place to go, because I feel like it really gives someone a home who's looking for the perfect place to go for their healthcare, longevity, personalized medicine.

For me, you know, I've been a physician now for 30 years and I always felt like the minute people go into a doctor's office, the first thing you want to do is get out of there, right? It's not a real place you want to be or go or hang out.

I think dentists more than doctors.

Yeah, maybe that too, right? Exactly. So in my own personal health journey, because that was even my feeling being a doctor, like I don't want to go to the doctor's office. I let my health slide to the point where I became very, very sick with autoimmune diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure. All the bad stuff, multiple chronic diseases. And then when I was trying to get healthy, I realized that I had to go to a lot of different places to get the care I needed. So what NexHealth basically did— well, NexHealth does right now— is it provides all of the care that you are looking for under one roof. And what I mean by that is we focus on lifestyle, we focus on functional medicine, longevity medicine, all of it under one roof so you can go and have a place to go to really feel like you're getting taken care of and you're reversing chronic disease. And it's a fun place to be. We have lots of fun stuff on.

It is a fun place to be, right? Nothing like getting an IV and a massage chair.

Yeah, yeah. And hyperbaric oxygen treatments and sauna and, you know, cryotherapy. And we do all the— we bring all the cool biohacking technology under one roof. And that's really because, you know, a lot of people can't afford to buy this stuff and put it in their homes. I mean, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Plus you have to have the space. Exactly. But you also have a process that I think is important because what I see out there in the world of biohacking is a lot of people going for those fun, sexy things, but they've missed the foundation. It feels like they missed the plot. Like, I feel that, you know, those things are great when you have the right foundation. So I'd love to have the process because I just watched you do this. —talk at A4M where you showed this great progression. Yes, yes.

We know as clinicians, like, how this all works. Like, we know that you're going to get an outsized result by getting your foundational aspects of your health in line first. That includes your sleep, your exercise and movement routines, and your nutrition and your metabolic health. Like, you have to start there, right?

Exercise was included in that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exercise for sure.

Yeah, specifically strength training, right? And so if you don't have those foundational foundations in place first, then everything else on top of that is number one, is going to have no effect or the effect will be blunted. But also I've seen people, you know, using some of these advanced therapies and it actually has an opposite effect to what you're trying to aim for. And so first we always focus on the foundations of lifestyle medicine, then we build up from there into functional medicine. So looking at the root causes of why you could get sick, things like inflammation, poor gut health, heavy levels of toxin exposure. We can measure for all this now. So then we want to build that level of the pyramid. Then the third level of the pyramid is what I call hyper-preventive medicine. So how do we make sure that you don't die from one of the top 10 causes of death? Cardiovascular disease, cancer, liver disease, kidney disease, neurodegenerative diseases, right? And so we can be extremely preventative now with the technology that we have. And then lastly, the tip of the pyramid is Now we start adding in, once we have all that kind of solidified for you, chances are you're going to feel pretty good, right? You're going to start, you know, you're going to be the weight you want by the time we solidify all that. We're going to give you a sense of peace that, you know, that we've done everything we could to make sure that you're not going to die of a chronic disease and your lifestyle is great. Now we can start adding in the tip of the pyramid, which is longevity medicine, which is all these, you know, fun things. Yeah. Stem cells and peptides. Now, stem cells and peptides and these technologies, they do have a role. When you're trying to treat for some illnesses, right? But I think when you do them just for like, you know, advancing your longevity, if you don't have that base of the pyramid down, they're not going to work.

I tell the story of being at a party sitting next to a guy who'd gone to Mark Hyman's retreat and Dave's conference and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, that's amazing. What do you do for exercise? What do you do? Nothing. Because last week I did some yoga for 10 minutes. I'm like, gosh, buddy. Yeah. So, and it's interesting when you have that foundation. First of all, those are the least expensive interventions that make the biggest impact that then when you go to the next level up, you probably need less things and you really know how well your body's working, what really needs to be accomplished. It's fantastic. Yeah.

And the other thing I talk about with my patients all the time is like, health is a habit. This is something you have to do every single day. And if you're not doing something every day, Nothing else is going to work.

Which is crazy that you would even have to say this.

Yeah, I know.

You know, but like your friend that does yoga once in a while.

Yeah, that did yoga but was doing all the other things, spending so much time and money on the biohacking. I was like, maybe we just have to earn the biohacking. Right, exactly. What do you think is the most exciting thing coming on board now for health, especially for a woman in 40-plus? Like, what are the things she should be watching for?

Yeah, so I definitely think, you know, this, this AI intersection with your health data is going to transform the game in the next 6 months to a year for sure for most people. I also think that for women particularly is that, you know, hormone replacement therapy has now become like literally now like physicians are finally like it's not causing cancer, right? You heard some talks about that today. And so now hormone replacement therapy is coming back into the mix in a big way. And thank goodness, right? I also think, you know, and this is the simple things like stuff you talk about, creatine, building muscle, all of these things are just, they have such an outside effect. Like I love the Pareto principle. What are the 20% of the actions that we can do that'll give you 80% of the result? All that is now accepted and it's there for you to now take advantage of and you can just super accelerate your health destiny, right? But then, you know, obviously like once you're getting to the tip of the pyramid, there's gonna be more things that you can do I do think peptides are going to transform the way we think about medicine.

What are some of the ones you're seeing right now? Because it's so early and, you know, you hear the no clinical trials. I'm like, how is it going to be clinical trials on these things when, you know, it doesn't make any sense. It's just like when they say that with supplements. So what are the ones that you're seeing? Where are you using any? Yeah.

So, so I'm a big believer in the GLP-1s being very useful beyond weight loss. And so I think you know, keeping metabolic health under control, inflammation under control, I think could be extremely helpful.

Why do you think there's so much—

still so much shaming and negativity and judgment and weird stuff about something, about a peptide? I just don't get it.

It's because the way they marketed this initially was not about— was not about metabolic health. It was all about weight loss. And then it got this kind of reputation of people are cheating now, you know, And so you're cheating.

You lowered your inflammation. Bad girl. Yeah.

And so, you know, obviously, like, you're going to lose weight, you know, look better, but you can also become skinny fat if you don't do it the right way. Right.

And so just like if you want a poorly designed diet. Exactly.

Exactly right. So I think that's probably one reason why. But, you know, I think also we're getting to a point where that whole thing is shifting as well, you know. And so I think it's going to be a very useful part of just completely reversing the metabolic obesity trend in the Western world.

But it also seems like a good adjunct for any longevity program, just using very low doses of it for the inflammation part, for the insulin sensitivity, for the cognition.

And then there's some other peptides that I think are very useful that we should be keeping a close eye on, specifically the peptides that affect your immune system, because we know that aging the primary driver of aging is inflammaging or immunoaging, right? Immunosenescence. And so if we can strengthen our immune system with peptides, that can be a game changer. And so that's another peptide kind of category that I'm keeping a close eye on.

So which would that be, like thymosin alpha?

Thymosin alpha. And yeah, that whole group of thymus peptides. Yep. Okay. I did surgery for many years, 25 years, and for the last 10 years I started giving my patients BPC-157, and I did that because there aren't any big studies around it, unfortunately. But I can tell you that my patients that took it healed so much faster with less bruising, less pain, better scars, all of it. And so I, I'm a big fan of like BPC-157. And I also see it now with gut health, really helping people improve their gut health.

So with the gut health, because most of these are injections, With the gut health, is that then oral?

Because so you can take it orally, get it right to the site. Yeah, great.

Yeah, BPC-157, I've definitely— that one I've used a lot.

Yeah. And I'm looking forward to some of these newer mitochondrial tests that are coming out, like, um, you know, there's one called MeScreen, I think, and there's a few others, because I would really like to try MOTC on my patients and see kind of what it does for their— and SSRP, all these peptides that affect mitochondrial health can also be a game changer. But obviously there's no studies. We have to— and of one studies, right? And of one studies are the best study ever. Because if I do a mitochondrial panel on you today and you start taking, you know, like a peptide to affect your mitochondrial health, like MOTC, and then in a month we do another mitochondrial test and you've improved, well, there you go. This is a peptide that might be right.

And isn't that— and it seems like that might be a use for a digital twin. I mean, isn't this isn't the N of 1 the most important anyway? But it is a challenge because still for the public, mitochondria is still this amorphous thing. And all you can really do is say, well, I can work out harder. Yeah, I have more energy. So you can only do those types of— which is important too. But it would be really great if we did have a way to test besides a muscle biopsy. Exactly.

Have you used the MeScreen?

No, they just sent me one, so I'm about to send mine in.

Yeah, I did it early.

I think I was one of the very first testers, so I need to redo it because they didn't have a lot of information back then.

Yeah, no, they definitely accelerated now. So.

Okay, so we're going to do a little speed round. One AI tool every woman should try.

I would say, you know, what we talked about earlier, which is get your bloodwork and upload it to Claude. I really like Claude as far as the way it formats the results. And then, you know, I think when my book comes out, we're also going to be launching our own hyperfocus health tool. Just— I cannot wait.

And this is September. Yes. Okay. We will be doing a big promo, right? Thank you. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

It's going to be called myhealthos.ai.

Nice. Well, it just makes this so accessible.

Yeah. We want it to be super accessible. That's fantastic.

One health metric women over 40 should track.

I think I know what you're going to say. Skeletal muscle mass. Yes. So, and why would you say that?

When I look at everything that women go through when they get to their 70s and 80s, and the difference between frailty and thriving is the amount of muscle they have by far. Like I would say that muscle protects your bone, your mitochondrial health, and your metabolism depends on how much muscle you have. The muscle-brain connection is very real. The myokines that come from your muscle stimulate neurogenic activity that prevents Alzheimer's disease. So everything that you're doing to train your muscle affects all the major causes of frailty and death. Right. And so I think it's that one thing that every woman should be looking at is skeletal muscle mass.

And what are you doing since there's—

I wish we would— I want that D3 creatine test. Oh yeah. Yeah. I was like, when are we getting that? I know. And, you know, fat-free mass is going to be a predictor. Of it, but I use that because I figure if you use, if you use fat-free mass and combine it with grip strength and squat tests, that you're going to get quality muscle, and then you'll be able to see the increase in fat-free mass, and you know it came from skeletal muscle because what else would it be? Is there any other way to look at this beyond that?

The DEXA scan I think is good, but I think for home testing, I, I have people get a bioimpedance scale like a Renpho or a Hume or one of track directionality where they're going. But I love it. You know what I love when women do is they get a DEXA and they earmark like what was their DEXA score compared to their scale score. And then they follow it directionally.

You know, one thing women are overcomplicating—

don't get yourself in trouble. I know that's all. It's like, do these machines make me look— do my legs look fat? No. You're like, oh no.

What I would say is overcomplicating the decision to go on hormone replacement therapy. Right. And I think I think in my clinic, you'd have to find a reason for you not to be on hormone replacement therapy. Estrogen, just like muscle mass, is so critical, you know. And I think they're overcomplicating that decision because they're still only like, you know, what's the statistic, 10% of women are on HRT right now. Wow, really? Yeah, 10% of women.

Well, there's still this thought too. A woman came up to me after one of my talks.

She was like, I'm doing all your things, but I'm like, she was suffering so much. I Are you on hormones? She goes, no, I want to do things naturally.

I'm like, your hormones are natural. Your body, your body naturally makes hormones. So yeah, I know.

I get that a lot too. Like, stop suffering. One habit that matters more than any tech.

Yeah, it's a morning routine. I think that is like my one core fundamental messages to my patients is get yourself a morning routine. Okay.

What's your morning routine?

So my morning routine involves 3 different aspects of my wellbeing. Number 1 is getting some movement in. So I go outside because I like, you know, exposing myself to the sunlight and outside environment. And I do a quick workout. Sometimes it's only 15 minutes 'cause that's all I have, but I try to make it at least 30 to 45 minutes every morning.

Of course, sometimes when you do the 15, you go so much harder, it's even better. That's true too. We know that intensity trumps Time. Intensity does trump time.

And the second piece of done is for my brain, my brain health. And so I read also, also for like 15 minutes. And lastly is for my mindset. And so I do this thing called the 5-Minute Journal. I do some breathwork and really try to like, you know, hone in on the day and what I need to accomplish. And the thing I don't do is get on my phone until all that's done.

Cool, 'cause I was gonna say one thing to stop doing.

Yeah. I charge my phone the farthest point away me in the house, which is the coffee machine in my kitchen. It's opposite side of my house from my bedroom, and that puts physical distance between me and my phone at nighttime before going to bed, which improves my sleep, and in the morning, which reduces my stress pools.

Very smart. Yeah.

So if someone would love to learn more, where shall they go?

Oh, so I have, um, my website is drshaw.com. I have a podcast as well that you have—

you have a fantastic podcast.

Thank you. Extend is the name of my podcast. And then I'm on social media, just my name, Darshan Chandi. Yes.

And we will put all of that at jjvirgin.com/drshah, S-H-A-H, also including all the information about Next Health and your book coming out. Thank you.

You're the best. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That 816-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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