Why most healing advice is making you more inflamed with Dave Asprey

It kind of really just makes us aware of how many people day to day are operating with stress and anxiety. The numbers are now showing, you know, the levels of anxiety related disorders amongst adults and children, the amount of prescription drugs that are being written year after year, and it's not working like the numbers are going up. In your book, you talk about shifting from feeling anxious to this to feeling aligned. How do people shift from feeling anxious to align? And how can they use brainwave science to really understand what's happening?

Well, if you have anxiety, your F words are off. So you can have fear or peace, which is the opposite of fear. And this is the biggest source of energy. So you move out of fear by turning off your triggers with the reset process from heavily meditated. And then the next source of anxiety is food. So you might think you're eating healthy, but you probably aren't fully nourished in the right way. And you haven't trained your body to be perfectly safe and comfortable whether your stomach is full or empty. The next F word is friend. Yeah, community. Like have some friends. And if you're saying, but I'm lonely, there's an epidemic of that. People don't. They're not members of clubs anymore, right? So go to a yoga class, find a tribe and do whatever it takes to do that and serve them. And funny enough, when you serve your community, it nourishes you as well. So it's about more peace, less fear, more nourishment, less hunger and cravings and less loneliness and more connection. And that will resolve anxiety reliably. But start with fear, start with triggers.

Before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to say that wellness was never meant to be a solo journey. My name is Mona Sharma, celebrity nutritionist. And that's why I created the Rooted Academy. A space where we can cut through the noise and bring together real conversations, real support, and real healing. If you're ready to be part of a wellness movement that actually guides you towards tangible changes that last, join us inside rooted by visiting monasharma.com Dave welcome to Rooted in Wellness, Mona.

I'm super happy to be here for you.

Me too. I'm so excited to talk to you again. You've been such an inspiration to so many of the people that I've worked with. Before we dive in, you should know this podcast really is inspired from my healing journey, which you know a bit about. So I always say Western medicine really helped me, but Eastern medicine really is what saved me. So to dive in, you know, all of these Ancient wisdom practices that we have in our modern world and how we can become more rooted in them. What are some practices that you have every day? I have a feeling I know what one of them is going to be. How do you become more rooted in yourself, but mostly your inner wisdom that you have to heal?

It's all about the coffee really. Uprising, you know, having a wake up ritual is really important and some people get a little obsessive about their wake up ritual. So mine is I set aside at least an hour and usually two hours to do something to improve myself. And it might be infrared sauna, it might be a cold plunge, might be both. It might be any of the other technology around meditation or around biohacking that extends my life or increases my consciousness. Because end of the day, anyone who starts biohacking becomes a longevity advocate and someone interested in consciousness. Because if you're going to live for hundreds of years, you might want to have a lot of energy and you might want to actually be kind and just be happy instead of being an angry person. Because angry people don't live longer and life sucks anyway.

Yeah, seriously. So, you know, do you treat it like a checklist though? I have a feeling you have a couple things in, in your roster that you go to upon rising.

The only critically important thing in the morning is light exposure because it sets the timing for your mitochondria, your circadian biology. You'll sleep better at night if you get some sunlight in the morning. So the most important thing is either red light and ideally full spectrum sunlight as early as I can when I wake up. And that always happens. And coffee somehow always happens too.

I'm with you on that. I ask those things no matter who I have on the other end. The expert, the doctor that's sitting on the other side of this conversation. To date, I would say 99% of the things that they recommend have been free or they caught their nominal. And it's something that's so simple because to your point, what you just mentioned, some people treat their morning routing practice as this checklist that they might not even feel is uprooting them. So as somebody who's gone through healing journey, do you notice when there's certain practices that cause you to drift and become uprooted that maybe they're the source of your inflammation or lack of energy?

Sure. I mean, perfectionism is a major problem because you stress about it. But an un, unlisted or an unacknowledged problem is believing something works when it doesn't. And I've had lots of times like that when I was £300 in my 20s. Oh, I have chronic fatigue syndrome that I don't know about. So I'll go to the gym six days a week, 90 minutes a day, and I'll do it with all of my willpower. And I did that for a year and a half, never lost a pound. I started at 300 pounds, I finished at 300 pounds. I started with a 46 inch waist, I ended with a 46 inch waist. I did get stronger, but I was not helping my health. So believing something works without measuring it and tracking it. It's not a good idea because we have hundred plus years of people trying to sell you things that actually harm you so they can sell you other things that make you healthy. And if you just blindly believe, oh, working out more makes you lose weight, that is not the science. And there are angry influencers out there who will stand up and be like, you can cancel out your Snickers bar with a diet soda. They're angry because they think it works and they do it and it messes with their mitochondria.

It's so true. I don't think it's a surprise or coincidence. People who've built these beautiful platforms and written so many books like you, it takes really going through something and like the introspection that's required in order for you to just ask questions about your physiology to understand what you need. And I really hope that more people just start to do that. You know, I have to share a little story just in terms of my connection with you. I've always looked up to you. Your books have been like a go to for so many of my clients. And I love the science of biohacking. I really do. But I would say that after Covid, after my heart surgeries, after going through miscarriages, after mold toxicity, I don't know the word biohack for me or hacking. It just felt so aggressive. I hope that. Let's see how this lands. But it really just like, it's caused me to like, just go on this journey back into myself. And the messaging about nourishing your terrain and honoring your constitution and building your body's resilience back. And now the messaging with my clients is helping them understand that they are the healer. And what's fascinating in that, and now coming back to you and your work is that I feel that this is so beautifully aligned with your book. Like, I'm glued to every page. I feel like it aligns with me. Do you? You Know, maybe diving into this. Would you say that you've shifted from this essence of biohacking, which I know that you believe in, but there's an essence of brain peace, or, you know, through heavily meditated. Is it a journey that you've been on? I know that it's been about 10 years in the making. Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, I wanted to bring a new mindset to the world. And it came about from two things. I started getting education from my elders. The leaders in the longevity field in the 1990s were considered to be crazy, even though they were licensed doctors, just like Bobby Kennedy was considered crazy, except he was right. So they were mentoring me in my 20s, and they taught me the science of longevity. But I could get no one young to come. And at the same time, our sister organization to the nonprofit I ran was called the Institute for Noetic Sciences, which is studying esoteric phenomena. So part of my life, I'm hardcore Silicon Valley. Work my ass off. The other part of it is the part that went to remote parts of Nepal and Tibet. The idea for bulletproof coffee and biohacking came on the side of the holiest mountain in the world that takes five days driving on dirt roads to get there. I talked about ayahuasca that I did in 1999, where they're like, you're white. Why would you want to do that? Because it wasn't a tourist industry. You had to seek it out and find the shaman. So I've been on a spiritual path. But I will tell you, when I decided to start the biohacking movement, there had to be a word for people who can heal themselves but can also upgrade themselves. I don't want to just be well. I want to be so abundantly well that I am bursting with energy, and I have the power to do all the things in the world that matter and that I have the control. I have the power to do that. And it's not about willpower. The very definition of biohacking from day one, change the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology and your state. So when you talk about being your own healer, you're just getting going. I had to be my own healer, too. It cost about $300,000, maybe a half a million to really get rid of all the toxic mold and chronic fatigue and arthritis. Like, all this stuff I was dealing with. It's a long list. It shouldn't cost that much, but. And I'm lucky. I could have spent. I spent that, and I was desperate when I spent that the other million and a half, actually, it's about 2 million now that I've spent that is extending my life. It is becoming more conscious than I could have become in one lifetime. Literally. If you meditate every day for 20 or 40 years, your brain will shift in a reliable way. You can do it in five days with computers. You can show your brand new states. And I've spent six months of my life doing that. And it has changed the way I interact with. With everyone and with myself and with the world. Problem is, if I say that all at once in the biohacking movement, it. No one would trust me. When I told you, shine a laser on your brain, try earthing and put butter in your coffee. Oh, and do an ice bath. Oh, an intermittent fast. That was plenty. How many angry doctors are like, how dare. And I'm like, now that I have heavily meditated, I'm like, if you can be triggered, it means someone else has their finger on the trigger. But there's only so much people will absorb. So I put the sprinkles of spirituality in there. And Mona, I really mean this. You're talking about your healing journey. When are you done healing? And you're on another journey that's about radically expanding and improving yourself and tapping into the powers that you have that you don't know you have. Because that's not healing. That's evolving. It's transcending, it's enhancing, and it's being more than you ever thought you could be. Like, healing is where it starts, but it's not where it ends. And that I use biohacking in part because it allows consciousness and longevity to come together. It also accounts for epigenetics and creating an environment where you can heal. And it also, it gets people who would never listen to a healing journey. I come from Silicon Valley, where talk about the layers of your networking stack in your social life. And I have a spreadsheet to just like, like, these are. These are engineers, right? So you can go, hey, engineer, would you like to have a blissful healing journey? Because they're just like, no, you're dumb. Like, what's the code for that? Show me evidence that it works. I showed them all evidence. I got them to try it, and they felt different. And now they went on a healing journey and now they're all biohackers. And if you become a biohacker, you will enter the road to consciousness. It's inevitable. I just didn't tell them that upfront.

Oh yeah, that's what gets me going. I have goosebumps right now. I would say the people that I've worked with, I see the transition that goes from, you know, the doing and I have to heal and the protocol. But the people who evolve, it's almost like they're like cleaning up the tubes. They have to get through all that shit in order to make some more space for the expansion to actually happen. And even your word upgrade, like upgrade for me is a turn on. It's like you want to upgrade who you are, upgrade your life, literally. It's like the evolution that comes with that. And I know that you've really pushed the boundaries with body optimization. I think that we live in a society that like, they're turned on by that. But now the ones.

Did you see the abs on this guy? What the hell?

That's from meditating, right?

Oh yeah, totally.

But tell us like now why would you say mastering your mind and meditation in particular, like, why is this the real biohacker's edge?

I'm going to argue that having control over your state is the biohacker's edge and that meditation is a slow way to get there. Yeah, right. And what do you mean, David? Did you just say you're not into meditating? No, I am. I've meditated in caves while fast.