Dysregulated vs Burned Out — Do You Know Which One You Are?

At 8 years old, today's guest was pulling his hair out. And he was doing this not for attention. He was doing it because his nervous system did not know how to survive.

Sit with your emotions. Sit with the sensations of your body. Sit with the energetics of your body, the thoughts that cross your mind.

In our conversation today, we break down something that many adults still don't understand. How your sleep might be impacting your resilience. How dysregulated emotions are having an impact on your body. And yes, the why matters, but how you do something matters more. If you're someone who's building a career, raising a family, and silently are feeling dysregulated, then this one might hit home. Let's dive in. The body, the mind, the spirit. spirit, the soul. There's so much that it feels needs to be aligned for a human being to flourish. And yet I feel that in this beautifully distracted, fragmented world, we pay less and less attention to that. My assumption is that in today's episode of the Ignite Neurons podcast, we'll, we'll give you what it takes to be human, what it takes to flourish as a human being, what is resilience, and why is inner alignment important. Michael, do you think that that's a good hypothesis to have?

I definitely think it's a good hypothesis to have, and I'm looking forward to the unfolding of this conversation to answer some of those questions, or at least begin the conversation to answer some of those questions.

Absolutely. And I was talking to someone, uh, yesterday, Michael, and what it came through the podcast recording to me was that this is just the universe streaming through both of us, and, and we don't know where it'll go. But the streaming will then be spread to other listeners who then will get some neurons ignited. And it's such a, such a beautiful space and it's such an honor and responsibility for both of us to hold the space.

You know, I love the, the, I don't even say it's a metaphor 'cause I think it's a lived reality of the universe expressing through us. That's like a beautiful picture. And you can actually consider it from my perspective at different scales. Because we can go to the micro level and consider that the microbiome in our gut does have an effect on our cognition and how we experience the world and how we express ourselves in the world. So like the universe is working through us at various levels of, you know, microscopic to the macroscopic, and we don't even realize what happens in the microscopic.

Beautiful. You've taken us into the deep.

It's been 30 seconds. We got to go really deep.

Yeah, really deep. And, and I think That's why the question that we put to our guests upfront really puts us in the deep because, A, it allows us to learn who Michael is, and it also allows you to reflect upon a beautiful journey that you've had. So the first question, Michael, is if that 8-year-old little boy, 8-year-old Michael growing up wherever Michael was, were to come and meet you right now in this moment at your present state, what kind of a conversation will happen between the two of you?

I think he would be Nicely surprised at what he has been able to accomplish over those— God, how old am I? 47 years. So I'll be 55 next week, actually this coming Monday. And that despite the challenges that he was facing at age 9, which are considerable— we can get into some of those in the moment— that he was able to, he was able to learn to manage his own nervous system, master his own physiology and psychology to such a degree. degree that not only was he able to heal himself at certain levels of function in his physical and mental body and emotional bodies, but then took that wisdom and insights and was able to hopefully help tons of people, especially professionally when he became, you know, a therapist in his early 20s. And then I've been doing that for almost 30 years as a therapist/coach. So I think he'd be very pleased.

You spoke about emotions, and my recency bias is making me ask this question. I was talking to someone this morning, um, coaching them, and I ask this often, how are you feeling? Or how did you feel about the progress we make? And they're like, Utkarsh, why do you keep asking this question, feel? Like, what's the importance of emotions? And I could have explained it to them, what I know, right? But I left them with that question and query. And you're talking about this 8-year-old, 9-year-old figuring out emotions, managing the nervous system. Help us understand what is it About these emotions and how does that influence who we become?

In psychology, in some schools of psychology, there's something called the identified patient. And if you look at the family system, so if you look at a kid within a family and they're the ones having challenges, psychological challenges, one way to think about it as a possibility is they're an expression of the dysfunction in the system, that whatever's going on for them, they're merely kind of a reflection of the dynamic perhaps between the parents if it's a 2-parent household. And that, yes, you can work with the individual child and help them manage themselves and deal with their feelings and thoughts and stuff like that, but to really heal, you have to heal the whole system. Otherwise, the dynamic will keep showing up inside of that child until they can escape. So I would say if you look at my past, part of the challenges I faced as an 8-year-old There are some learning disabilities, challenges that I had I can get into. So school, although I love to learn, school was really hard for me. There were some health challenges 'cause I had an autoimmune disease as a kid, a younger kid, and I was in the hospital for a long period of time. All those things are true and express themselves in my body at age 8. But also, so there's a dynamic in my family system and I was expressing some of the tension there as well. And the way for me this all expressed itself is what would be called an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I was a hair puller. And instead of acting out and being just dysfunctional to like my family or school, I acted in. And, you know, some people cut themselves, other people consume alcohol or drugs to self-medicate. You know, at age 9 or 8 or 9, my choice— well, at some level it was always a choice.

Mm-hmm.

Some unconscious factor inside of me led me to hair pull, and that was my way to begin to expel some of the tension in my system. Now, it's much better than using drugs or alcohol or cutting or having an eating disorder, but it's also very disruptive for an 8-year-old to pull their hair and, and have all the challenges that that led to. But fortunately for me, that led to age 9, a whole world opened up for me, which I can get into. But, you know, that's one way to kind of consider some of the factors that were involved that led me to the kind of life that I needed to learn to self-regulate, self-master, manage my physiology, my psychology, my emotional body, my mental body. And I would also say that one of the limitations of what I was taught, because I was taught literally breath practices, I was taught meditation, biofeedback, guided imagery, all those things are really good. There's a way that those things can be used to also repress emotions and feelings. And I think retrospectively, although it was helpful for me to learn to manage them, at times it was more of repression. I was 9 or 10, you know, I didn't know any better, but I was doing the best I could. Repression of certain feelings, um, and, and emotions and energetics of the body, and not just learning to sit with them and healthily express them. And there's a mixture of all those things. So, I think those tools are really cool that I walk, you know, guided meditation, biofeedback, breathwork, all those things are great. But we have to be careful. Are we using them to repress things or control, which I make a distinction between like controlling and managing, and how's the dynamic balance between the two retrospectively?

I'm thinking it's such an intriguing space, right, to speak about emotions and And this person I was talking to would be about maybe 28, 32, somewhere in that range. Let's go down that path for a few minutes. And anyone who is— who does not have a constructive relationship with their emotions, how does that show up for them, Michael? How would they know that they need some work or they need to reframe how they're perceiving emotions?

So I would say, and I'm going to say one of 3 things, 2 of these 3 things, 3 of these things are possible, but there could be other answers. One is if they start noticing the feedback they're getting from people in their life, if they're able to, 'cause not, you know, a lot of people who are emotionally dysregulated are not necessarily capable of being socially aware and taking feedback from other people in their life, whether it's a partner or a spouse, a parent, a child, a coworker or friend, whatever it happens to be, constantly find themselves in a very similar situation with multitude of people and they're getting the same feedback or having the same type of experience. And I can give you some examples. Then I might suggest that they might be having Some emotional regulation problems. But it's, it's hard because a lot of people will blame the other person. It's, it's, it's my wife, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my friends. It's that person. But if you're the, if you're the, like, at the center and you keep having the same experiences with multiple people, you might want to reflect on and realize that you're playing probably a huge role, if not some role, in the dynamic itself, which probably means that you're not as emotionally regulated as you might believe yourself to be. So the other people can be reflections to you of Dysregulation. That's like one way to consider it. Another thing is if you have health problems, undigested emotions that are unhealthily expressed or contracted and held in can show up as health conditions in the long run. They're not going to necessarily show up the day that you start repressing your emotions, but they can show up down the road. So, you know, if you're dealing with like possibly, and I'm not a doctor, but possibly GI discomfort, like various GI issues. There might be an emotional component to it. If you're dealing with asthma, possibly, or breathing challenges, possibly there's an emotional component to it. I mean, if you look at Chinese medicine or even Ayurvedic medicine, you know, they clearly connect organs, disorders, and emotions together. You know, so humans have known that for thousands of years. You know, psychoneuroimmunology now, the kind of a new science came up about 20 years ago, starting to beginning to recognize from the Western scientific point of view. That emotions do have a contributing factor, maybe causal to certain health conditions. But, you know, so Western science is, yes, there's something there. There are Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, something there, there for thousands of years. And we've known that, you know, so that's another thing, like, you know, if you have health conditions. And then if you, and, or like another way of looking at it too is like passive-aggressive behavior. If you are feeling something, but for whatever reason you decide not to express it directly, but it starts coming out sideways, I mean, you'll get feedback from the external world most likely for that. But you also can start noticing it too. So that's also— and I'd say maybe even a 4th one, this is projective— projection, projective identification, I think is what it's called. If you start noticing people in your life have extremes of particular emotions, like that person's always angry, that person's always negative, whatever it is, and you keep seeing that in other people, there's a strong possibility— not to say that they're not having those emotions, But you're projecting onto them what you are not experiencing in yourself. So any of those things could play a role in helping you reflect on yourself, like, oh wait, there's some emotions I'm not dealing with in a healthy way.

Yeah, yeah. And I love what you're sharing about how these deeply undigested emotions can lead to that physiological challenges and health challenges in the long run. And it's intriguing how it does not show up on like the day that you're getting angry or the day you're starting to repress your emotions, the day It just takes a while for the body to recognize it. And in the meantime, you're, I think, even more distant from that idea of not processing your emotions in the right manner.

I 100% agree. It's almost like the body is very resilient to non-expression of emotions. And it takes time for the disorder or, and eventually a disease process might emerge. And, you know, you know, most humans don't have the long perspective. So they're not going to like go, wait, 12 years ago, this occurred and now these symptoms are arising, maybe there's a connection. You know, most people don't walk around thinking along those lines, especially here in the West, cuz we don't necessarily have the mind-body paradigm that we, you know, that other, other cultures might have more of.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's fascinating, right? You're, you're, you're in more of that recency bias. So you're looking at like symptoms and, and causatives in the same year, maybe a year ago, a few months, but you're not thinking what happened 10 years, 12 years ago.

Yeah. Exactly.

Now someone's identified it, and, and I know you talk a lot about resilience, which is a big part of your work over the last 2 decades.

Yeah.

Let's probably explore resilience and then see how these undigested emotions can be worked through using any or all of the tools that we speak about in resilience. How does that sound?

That sounds great. Yeah.

So how does Michael define resilience?

So I have 3 different definitions or 3 domains which I would use to define resilience. So we can look at emotional, mental, spiritual, and physiological resilience. And we'll start with physiological resilience. You know, if you are sleeping well, deep quality sleep, deep sleep, good REM, minimal latency, all the parameters of healthy deep sleep, If you're doing that, if you're exercising and moving— I make a distinction between exercise and movement— if you're dealing with your stress, if you're spending time outside so you're getting vitamin D and the sunlight, you know, and there are times a day that are really important to get the sunlight for sure. If you're living within the circadian biological processes within your body so you're not using a lot of exogenous chemicals to wake yourself up and put yourself to sleep, depending what those are. Or artificial lights, which disrupt melatonin production. Then if you do all those things, you're much more physiologically resilient, which means your body can take a lot more pressure or stress. If you're not sleeping, you're not eating well, you're not exercising, you're not living the circadian biology well, you're more likely to, to have negative effects of whatever the stressful things in your environment might affect you more quickly or more deeply. So physiological resilience is really important. And then psychological resilience. We, especially now with the technology we have, we have a lot of distractions.

Hmm.

Porn is really easily available. Netflix and YouTube and Instagram, drugs and alcohol are really easily available. People can go to the gym and work out extra amounts of time. They can go to work and work even longer. We have the— we have a lot of access to distractions in our world. And for me, a resilient person is someone who can limit those distractions. On occasion, I can understand why you want to be distracted, but limit those distractions and sit inside of the world that it relies— that lives inside of you. Like, sit with your emotions, sit with the sensations of your body, sit with the energetics of your body, the thoughts that cross your mind. And when they arise, if they make you uncomfortable, Okay. That's okay. It's okay to be uncomfortable. You don't have to just seek distractions. The longer you can sit in that space, the more resilient you are. And it's important because I've already shared this with you. If you don't digest your emotions or process your emotions, they come out passive-aggressive behavior. They can come out as chronic illnesses, you know, somewhere down the road. The longer— and so we don't— that's the negative consequences of not sitting with those and processing them and digesting them. But also there's wisdom. You know, I don't like the idea of good or bad emotions. Like, I can understand the positive or negative emotions as a means of communication, and we can talk about that, but like, it's just information in your system that your body-mind system, or the whatever you want to call that system, is trying to share something with you about your inner experience related to your inner experience or the outside world, the situation, the people, the environment, whatever happens to be. And it's trying to wake you up to something important for you to know. So being resilient is sitting with that as long as you can and listening deeply to the wisdom that's inside your system through the emotions. That's one way, or actually that's two, because I talked about optimizing the physical system and then kind of a psychological resilience.

Yeah, and I'm going to repeat the statement, I'll— and, and we'll come back to this: sit with the world that is within you. That's a powerful phrase. That's a powerful phrase. So now we are talking about, and, and what, what also kind of was intriguing for me is that you spoke about the physical, emotional, mental, physiological, and spiritual. How do all of these connect? Like why did you put spiritual in there as well and mental as well? Yeah. Yeah. Just help me understand that a bit.

Yeah. So I mean, you can think of like the doshas, the different bodies that we have. The way for communication purposes, I break these things apart, mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic. Somatic, I think cognitive. We're a unified whole, but for conversation's sake, let's break those apart. So just like with cognitive resilience, or mental toughness is kind of the more common phrase, are you able to focus in on what you're wanting to work on in that very moment and not be distracted by the world around you or even the world inside of you? So mental toughness is like, I'm frontside focused. This is my goal. This is what I'm going to work on. And I'm charging towards that thing. And it doesn't matter what's going on around me or in me. I'm staying focused. That's kind of mental toughness. So even if I'm tired or I'm grouchy or the world around me is on fire, not literally because it's dangerous, but you know the world around is a little chaotic. I'm like, hey, I have this goal and I'm working towards it, and I'm not going to stop until I accomplish it. That's mental toughness because you're not going to allow your physiology, your emotions, and it's a dynamic homeostasis. There are moments where you might want to consider taking your emotions in consideration, your physiology in consideration, but for the most part, like. Yeah, I'm gonna accomplish this goal. Nothing's gonna stop me. Be smart about that. But like, that's mental toughness. That's mental resilience. Emotional resilience is a couple things for me. It's like, like I said earlier, I'm able to sit with my own emotional life, the worlds that are inside of me, and allow them to unfold and take the wisdom from them. I'm also able to be in the emotional storm of another person And manage myself in such a way that I am as free from their reaction, whatever the— I'm as free from whatever they got going on so I can respond to them, not react to them. So like, if, you know, I work with couples, I'm a trained marriage and family therapist. I do coaching now. But, you know, when I work with my couples, let's just say it's a heterosexual couple, you know, if If the woman is having a series of emotional experiences, most men seem to— this is my experience, that's not universal, everyone's different— but like most men either are uncomfortable with their wife having deep emotional feelings and want to stop them from having them by fixing the problem so the problem goes away and the emotions go away. And there's nothing wrong with the desire to help your spouse if she actually wants to be helped in that particular way. But what I tell my men when I work with them is like, don't do it because you're uncomfortable. That's about you. Okay? It's okay to be uncomfortable, but to fix her, quote unquote, because you're uncomfortable is about you. It's not about helping her. I mean, you're helping her too, but it's really about you. So learn to sit in your own comfortable feelings about her uncomfortable feelings and engage in a really deep conversation to find out what she actually needs from you in that very moment. Maybe she just wants you to listen. Cool. Maybe that's hard for you, but this isn't about you. This is about what she needs from you at the moment. Maybe she wants you to ask some deep follow, you know, deep curious questions to help her unpack something. Cool, do that if you're capable of it. Maybe she wants you to help solve the problem. Cool, you're really probably good at that, do that. But it requires, you know, some really good conversations every time. There's no, there's no like Oh, when she is as that, I'm gonna do this. No, every 5 minutes might be different. She might want something different from you and vice versa. Like, both of you need to show up for the other as best as you can with what you— what the other person needs from you in that moment.

And it's interesting that you're, you're calling this out for heterosexual couple, that they're married or in, in a relationship, but this applies to everyone, right? To—

For sure.

An employee and to—

Yeah.

The boat and the sea and whatever, right? And what I'm thinking through all of that, that you're saying, we start to solve for someone else because that's our need and not them. I think I love that piece. And one thing that I heard that I've started to practice with my wife— tomorrow we complete being together for 22 years, so we've done something right.

Congratulations.

So is that I ask her explicitly, and based on how she's feeling and what is the emotion that she's going through, do you want me to hear you out? Do you want me to hug you or do you want me to help you?

That's awesome. I love that for you and her.

It just works. It just works because sometimes my assumption is that, let me fix this problem. And she's not even looking for that. And it was a problem that she even knew the solution to. But here I'm giving her my solution and she's like, what the hell, man? Like, step back, go away. I don't need your solution. Yes. And it's so important for us to recognize that, that we all are these emotional, mental, spiritual, physiological blobs walking around the planet, interacting each other's energies and auras and whatnot. Fascinating. What I'm able to connect, Michael, through this conversation is we spoke about the emotional dysregulation, right? And how that shows up. If someone were to work on their resilience in these aspects that you've just framed for us, my assumption is that that emotional dysregulation might also improve and get better. Would that be correct?

100%. So I ask 2 questions of my clients, and one's more therapeutic. Why you do what you do? And it's interesting to find out the answer, but ultimately knowing why you do what you do doesn't change your behavior. I mean, there are sometimes for some people like, you have the aha why I do it and it can change, but for the most part it doesn't. Because if it did, then Freud, like, you know, you wouldn't need any other therapeutic interventions besides Freudian psychology. Yeah, you're done. Yeah. I also asked the question how you do it. So, you know, if you came to me and you said, you know, when I have a fight with my wife, my MO, my modus operandi is to withdraw. Like, that's what I do. You know, some people become assertive, some people collapse, some people withdraw. No judgment. Like, we all do whatever we do. We learn how to do it. But you said, that's what I do. I said, that's interesting. How do you do that?

What do you mean?

Like, how do you actually withdraw? How do you know you're withdrawing? And I'll give you an example of a client I literally just had 2 weeks ago, 10 days ago. It was a couple and I've been working with them for a while and he's a withdrawer. That's his kind of MO is withdraw. And I was watching them because I do this virtually and they're sitting on the couch together, like literally next to each other and they're having a really nice conversation. An issue comes up that I know kind of triggers him, if you want to use, or activates him or triggers him, whatever word you want to use. And I'm watching him slowly disengage from her. Like he's moving away, not even like gross, like grossly, like he's moving to another room, but very subtle movements away. And he's turning away from her and he stopped touching her and he's leaning back on the couch really subtly. I'm not even doing it too much, too much, but it's like really subtle. And I'm like, oh, that, that, okay. I'm seeing how he does this. That's really interesting. So when I work with someone like that, I want him to understand what's the breathing pattern that arises inside of you when you're withdrawing. What is the posture? What's the muscle tone? What do your eyes do? Your face, what does it do? In physical proximity to your partner, what do you do? Like what I just shared, like he's actually moving away slightly, moving this way. Become so aware of how you do that thing. Is there a thought pattern that emerges? Is there a tone and volume with that voice inside your head? Do you see colors? Do you smell anything? Like the whole sensory input. What, how do you organize yourself in response? Actually, it's not response, in reaction to the conflict with your partner. Once you know how you do that, then we can begin to deconstruct it, replace it with a response, not a reaction. That takes some time. But the first step is like, how, how do I, how does my whole system organize itself? To do that thing? That's the first question. Well, the second question, because the first question is why.

And so you're building them. I think what's happening there is— and I'm reflecting on some of my behaviors or when I'm coaching someone— yeah, yeah, yeah. The how part allows you to become more aware of what's shifting physiologically in your body, because emotions are really hard to manage, right? You, you can have slight amount of— it's like a cocktail of emotions, right? You have a little bit of anger, a little bit of frustration, a little bit of joy, and it all shows up as heavy breathing. It all shows up at that shift in muscle tone. So I think that's just a powerful question to ask. How do you do it?

And you nailed it because in my mind, the way I work, I'm trained somatically, is awareness is the first step. Because once you know how you do the new breathing pattern, the posture, the muscle tone, the thinking, the tone, the volume, all the whole thing, Then we can start interdicting any, any of those things can be the first thing to interdict. We can work on the breath.

Yeah.

We can work on the muscle tone. We can work on them like a mantra, if you want to kind of use the, from the yoga tradition, or phrase or word that changes the dynamic of the mind. Like, there's lots of different things you can do that can change one's physiology, so then you can become more self-regulated. Now, when I work with couples especially, but individuals within the coupledom, You know, it's, it's great to learn how to regulate your nervous system in the middle or the beginning of a conflict. That way, you know, you have access to the prefrontal cortex. You don't say stupid shit. You can show up more loving, caring, compassionately. That's awesome. And ultimately, you want to work on the wound that caused the defense system to show up in the first place, because if you begin to heal this, you need less of the self-regulation. And then, so for me, it's like 4 different parts of the individual. Like, let's work on the wounding.

Cool.

Let's work on the self-regulation, and that's the breathwork and the posture work and the mantra, you know. Also work on the, like, what I would call the evolution of consciousness, you know, 21 lines of development. So if you look at someone emotionally or mentally or morally, like, what's the next stage of development for them? Let's help them climb up that ladder of development. That's awesome. And then on top of that, which encompasses the whole thing for the individuals, like, let's optimize the physical system. Because I'm sure you've had this experience. If your client feels like shit because they're not eating well, drink, you know, hydrating, sleeping well, dealing with stress, it's really hard to make the psychological shifts. If you feel like crap, it's kind of hard to show up for your, your spouse in a loving, caring way. So let's optimize the physical system as best as possible based on the season of their life. Let's see self-regulation. Let's evolve the consciousness and let's also heal the wounds. All those things are at play. In my perspective, in doing this for almost 30 years.

That's tiring. That's a lot of work.

That's not even the relationship stuff. That's just the individual.

Yeah, that's just the individual. So, so let's simplify it because as, as, um, and, and everything that you're saying is beautifully interconnected, but for someone who's been doing 30 years, doing this for 30 years, I understand it'll come like flawless, right? It'll come, at least the awareness and the, and the, and the experience allows you to do that. But someone who's listening to us 30, 35 minutes into the conversation, they're like, I have some of these things that Michael and Utkarsh are talking about. I've tried the breathing, breathing stuff doesn't work for me. I've tried the meditation apps, they fail. I can't go and afford a therapist right now. I cannot do that. Where do they begin?

And this is gonna sound kind of crazy— sleep. Literally, like, I, I have a friend of mine, Dr. Kirk Parsley. He's a retired SEAL. Also a medical doctor who's an expert in sleep. I actually just interviewed him for my podcast not too long ago. Great dude. And I track his work really closely because learning from him over the last longer than a decade, sleep is the key for so many things. Even just a few days of poor sleep increases your chance for diabetes, and I believe heart disease too. Cognitive capacity declines pretty quickly. I mean, it doesn't take too much lack of sleep for cognitive capacity to decline. It can contribute to emotional dysregulation. So, you know, I'm sure you know people, including maybe some of your clients, you know, they have a poor night's sleep. So what do they do the next day? They probably eat more carbs because we seem to like carbs, simple sugars, I should say, not complex carbs. When we're tired, we drink more coffee or whatever stimulant we might consume, most likely coffee. Those 2 things in themselves disrupt the whole system throughout the day, probably screwing our sleep the next night. So it's a vicious cycle. It's just getting worse and worse and worse. Our diet gets worse because we're always tired, so we're eating the not healthiest foods. You have to increase our caffeine consumption because the dose is no longer working, which disrupts our sleep. You do all those things, you're definitely disrupting cognition, so you're not thinking as clearly as you could. You're emotionally dysregulated from all those things as well, especially the carbs. Like, the dietary shifts throughout the day can throw you off, and I can give you a story around that. And it's just hard to show up in a caring, loving, compassionate way when you feel like crap and dysregulated and your mind's not working well. So, if I was going to recommend anything to anyone at first, get your dial on your sleep. And we can walk through some of the ideas I have around that, but dial in your sleep first.

It's interesting how it is like the most easily accessible tool and yet so underrated because as we're— our Netflix subscription competes with our sleep. And then for, again, not overgeneralizing it, Yeah, yeah, the phone. Uh, yeah, we— why is it hard to— for the human brain to understand this, that we need, we need proper sleep?

Well, you know, here, especially in the United States, there's kind of a common saying says you'll, you'll sleep when you die. Like, like, which is the stupidest fucking thing in the world. Sorry for cussing, but it's like, that's kind of the end. That's kind of a cultural meme, like in our country here. And I'm sure it's unfortunately probably spread to some other parts of the world. And, you know, especially in industrialized and heading into post-industrial or information age, we've broken our connection to nature. And we have the capacity through technology to even expand our disconnection from nature even, even greater. Whether it's, you know, like I said earlier, artificial lights, which disrupt melatonin production, we're on our phones, iPads, computers throughout the night, televisions, whatever they happen to be. I mean, you think about 200 years ago, we didn't have all these things. Like when it got dark, unless you had some candles— 200 years ago? Yeah, I guess it would too. I'm trying to remember when the lights came, when we first had lights, but like 250 years ago, let's put it that way. You were forced to live in circadian biology, the day-night cycles, you know? But now that we have easy access to, well, artificial lights for sure, but like the caffeine, nicotine, THC, sleeping pills, Adderall, like things to wake us up in the morning and things to knock us out at night. All those things misused disrupt our own kind of homeostatic dynamic system. And the more you disrupt it and you separate it from 24-hour day-night cycles, and including our own internal cycles, the more you'll need external chemicals to keep going. And then, and then it leads to some of the things we talked about earlier, all the chronic illnesses that we have because we're not living with, you know, within our true nature of the nature of nature. We've evolved on this planet for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, And over the last 100 years, we're like, fuck it, we're going to do our own thing. We're going to ignore nature, including our own, let alone the world around us.

I'm just thinking through including our own and the nature around us, and we are absolutely ignoring. And I'll give you a very— something that I started only a couple of weeks ago. So I have this home office where I do my work. And so when I'm on like a podcast, so I keep my window closed and some days I would just forget to open it again. Right. And so it'll stay closed. And I'm like thinking in a couple of hours, I'm either craving caffeine Or I'm feeling lethargic and low energy, and what's happening? And then I realized that as soon as I open the window, sunlight comes in. I open the window and fresh air comes in. My energy levels have been completely out of mind. Like, how does something shift so much in just such a subtle act, right, of just opening a window?

And, you know, and once again, back to kind of evolutionary biology, what we evolved to be on planet Earth, and depends where you are on the planet, so your day-night cycles are slightly different depending where you are. But, you know, for the most part, except for recently, the sun rose, we're outside. The sun set, we're inside. Why? Because it's dangerous to be outside when the sun sets.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

And when the sun rises, you need to go work, you know, wherever you happen to work before the Industrial Revolution, probably your farm or whatever it happens to be, or you're outside. We know, like, Huberman, Huberman Labs, like, like, I love listening to his show. And he talks about, like, what happens first thing in the morning if you have access to sunlight, how important it is for the evening. Like, what happened— what you do in the morning in terms of sunlight exposure has a direct effect on melatonin production late at night. That's the 24-hour day-night cycle, circadian biology. Yeah, but like, to your point, we don't think about that.

We don't think about that.

And our institutions actually oppose those things.

Correct, correct.

Or counter to those things.

I agree with that. I agree. And I think it's conversations like these that bring more awareness. And I think We need to keep having these conversations with each other, build those accountability partners. It has to shift. I mean, if we keep going down this hill, I don't know where we'll end up.

Well, I completely agree that it does need to shift or our species will go extinct.

I was reading some of your content and then you— and today also you're speaking a lot about like how do you make sure that your sleep, your movement, nutrition, all of that is taken care first. before we start to think of that deeper connection, that higher development, right? So why is it according to you that physiology and how we tackle that is first and then our philosophy and our higher consciousness is second? Do you agree with that?

Well, yes and no. Like, yes, everything is yes and for me. Yes and, yes and, you know, so it's not like I do like, hey, let's spend 6 months down your physiology and then we address your psycho spirituality.

Right.

We do them parallel, but we have to start with the physiological stuff. And I'll give you an example with a client that I'm working with, a medical professional who was skipping breakfast, drank a lot of coffee midday, crashed and needed some, something to eat. She'd go into the, to the medical center and she'd just eat donuts and, you know, all the crappy food. And she's sharing with me that like, because of this energetic going on, cuz she wasn't eating well and then she'd eat the junk food and then the sugar crash, you know, that she wasn't showing up as best as she could for her clients or patients because she's a medical professional. Patients. So literally the first thing we started working on is just like stabilizing her blood sugar, making sure she has high protein, eating consistent meals, not skipping meals. Especially as a female, you got to be really careful about intermittent fasting. It's a little different for men than women. I'm not a doctor, but you talk to your doctor before you do any of these kind of things. But like, we, we stabilized her consumption of food and she hydrated more often. And she said her energy levels were so much consistent and so much better. She was less hangry or grumpy, and she's able to show up a lot more fully from a loving, caring way with her patients and fellow staff members. If I had started with her emotions or her cognition, it would've taken a lot longer to get to the same place because it was really her physiology that was off. So let's dial that stuff in as best as possible. Then we can— then we started— we can address like your emotional dysregulation that had nothing to do with diet nutrition. But if we started with emotional dysregulation before diet nutrition, uh, it would have been really hard because it was a lot— half of it, half of it, whatever the percentage was, was really the diet nutrition stuff.

There's, there's a lot of conditioning, and I've, uh, I've been guilty of that too, where I see that Where I tell myself that I'm more aware of my body, I'm listening to my body. So my body will be okay with 6 hours of sleep or 5 hours of sleep for a few weeks till the body started to rebel and say that, Utkarsh, you've got to be in bed on time and have your full hours of sleep. How does one balance this? Because there's this idea that there's a lot of information out there. You go onto YouTube Shorts and you go onto Instagram and you become the expert of the world within like 17 minutes by watching some 40-odd clips, and, and then you're saying, well, I'm listening to my body, let me do this. How do you— yeah, how do you balance that?

So I always tell people to hold things lightly and to experiment often. I mean, obviously talk to a medical professional if you have kind of psychological or physical challenges before you experiment, but experiment and track things as closely as possible. And I, I take a very systemic Perspective. So look at all multiple different factors and how they might contribute to whatever you're dealing with. So I have my clients for the first 6 months of our work together, well, for the first 3 months of 6 months of my program, journal about their diet, their nutrition, their fitness, their movement. I make a distinction between fitness and movement, stress. Like I have them track wide variety of different things. And for some it's like, holy shit, this is overwhelming. I said, I'm doing this for a couple reasons. One, and this goes to a spiritual question, you claim that these are your values. Are you embodying them? Is it in alignment? Do you live in integrity? If this is important to you, are you living this way? So, like, if someone said to me, yeah, I eat whole foods, and I look at their journal and they're eating McDonald's every day, I'm like, either you're lying to yourself or you're not living disciplined. You know, either the one. Maybe it's not important to you.

Okay.

That's a different conversation than saying, I value whole foods. Not if you're eating McDonald's. Okay. But put that aside. So, like, are you living in alignment? Also important to me is I want people to start recognizing the contributing factors possibly to whatever they're dealing with, whether it's diet, nutrition, fitness, movement, stress, you know, circadian biological things, relationship to other human beings, the situations they find themselves in. And this will make like, you'll go, well, that, yeah, everyone should know this. I've done this for so long that I'm like, yeah, but most people don't. I'll give you the example. I have clients who, who'll, they'll, they'll, they'll drink alcohol. And now that they're tracking things, Oura Ring or an Oura Ring or Garmin watch or, you know, smartwatch, whatever it is, and they're like, oh wow, I realize that when I drink alcohol at night, my deep sleep is poor. And then my diet shifts, like I shared with you earlier, like I'm more carbs and then more coffee. And then like the next night my sleep is disrupted again. You know, this is kind of vicious cycle, but they start putting these things together and they start realizing like, wow, alcohol started this whole process. You know, hey, you're an adult. As long as you're an adult, do whatever you want to do, but make mature decisions, make adult decisions. And I had clients who are like, I'm going to stop drinking alcohol for a month. And they're like, wow, my sleep is so much better. My diet's much better. My discipline's better. I feel better. I'm showing up differently for my wife and my husband. Cool. Then you can, if you want to drink, but you'll, yeah, there's consequences. Deal with the consequences. At least be conscious of them. So like, yeah, let's, all the different factors and how they might contribute to whatever's going on in your life. I think it's important to track.

It's always a choice, right? And it is such a fine balance walking this tightrope of life that we've all been given. So you spoke about sleep. Let's give our listeners a couple of more maybe. What other pillars do you see are super critical if someone wants to, A, build resilience and then also thrive in this human body?

Well, let me just do a couple more physiological ones and then we can jump to spiritual and more psycho-spiritual ones too, and environmental ones and Social ones. Physiologically, so like I said, sleep. Diet, nutrition. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a dietitian, but what you consume has an effect on you. And I don't know that there's some universal diet for every human being. What I recommend my clients do is get tested genetically, epigenetic testing, so they can find out how their bio-individuality works. Because some people process saturated fats really well. Some people do better with carbs. Some people, how they process caffeine is different than someone else, how they process melatonin. Like, learn more about your unique system. Now you can make some broad generalities about your ethnic group. People in Northern Europeans are different than Africans or different than Asians in terms of how they might process certain things.

Cool.

But, you know, bioindividuality is really important. So find out what works for you. And this is where the experimentation comes in. Try it, see what happens. But I recommend to see— when I say see what happens, and I always recommend first, second, and third person. First person, like, let's just say for the moment I'm a, I'm in a typical American diet, the standard American diet, which is really shitty and causes all the diseases we have. And I'm going, okay, I'm gonna quit that and I'm gonna try a paleo diet.

Okay.

Paleolithic diet, or carnivore, vegan, vegetarian, whatever. I'm gonna try something different. Well, okay, first of all, first, in first person, ask yourself the question over a couple weeks and months, how do I feel? How's my energy levels? How's my digestion? How's my cognition? How's my, you know, like, do I have GI distress? Do I have brain fog? Do I have achy arms? Like, you know, do certain things disappear when I switch this diet?

Cool. Mm-hmm.

Effectively, at least in the short run. Something's working well for you.

Cool.

For now. I mean, because most people when they switch diets usually get feel better anyways if they're going from the standard American crappy diet to something else because they're not eating as much crappy food. Second person, like someone else in your life, get feedback from them how they notice you're showing up.

Hmm.

So for instance, I had a couple that I work with and I had them do a Whole30 diet. Whole30 is where you just, you get rid of grains, you get rid of simple sugars, and you get rid of dairy for 30 days. And then you bring one of those 3 back in for 4 days, see how you feel. Then you try the next one for 4 days. You just, you know, you kind of clean your system out as best as you can. So, you're eating meat, fruits, and veggies, but as organic as possible. I'm not like— you're not going to be going to McDonald's and say, oh, the McDonald's hamburger, I'm eating healthy.

No, no. Yeah.

You know, and so, what I had them do that, The inflammation was less, digestive problems were less, they're sleeping better, they had more energy.

Cool.

And they could see that within each other, like they're showing up a little bit differently because they felt better.

Cool.

So you're getting feedback from a second person. Third person is objective measurements. Go get your blood work. Hey, before you start a diet, go talk to a functional medicine doctor, or, you know, Chinese medicine doctor if you do Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic if you like Ayurvedic medicine. But also, we recommend a functional medicine doctor so you can get the blood work and find out your baselines. How are your hormones? All the different hormone panels that you can get. How's your inflammatory markers? All that stuff. Start the new diet. 3 months later, test again. Make sure you're not having any nutritional deficiencies because you've tried something that doesn't have something you might need. Then you can modify it accordingly. But you keep experimenting. Caveat, protect both you and I. Talk to your medical professional before you start a new diet.

Yeah, I love these, these 3 levels at which you spoke. I think the first person, second person, and third— I think that works really well. And experimentation with information and guidance, I think that's what, uh, is, is, is the—

Yeah, and the guidance is not necessarily influencers on Instagram.

Correct, correct. That's where we started this conversation. Absolutely. Yes, someone who's, uh, in a clinic, uh, hopefully has a degree and is wearing either a white coat or is qualified to give you right advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'll do a caveat too, because just because they have a white coat and a degree doesn't mean they're qualified to give you good advice.

That's also true.

But more likely than not, hopefully better than the influencers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think I still have this insatiable hunger of, uh, going deeper on our conversation. So what I'm gonna propose is that there'll be an episode 2 where we will— because we've not spoken about gut biome yet, the microscopic, we've not spoken about the spiritual yet, and in the interest of, uh, appeasing to the algorithms, we'll still bring our episode to a closure.

I'd love that.

We'll come back for episode 2. But in the meantime, if we go— you said Monday is your birthday. So if we go 25 years into the future, Michael, and that 80-year-old Michael, hearty and healthy, comes back to you right in this moment and gives you one piece of advice, what do you think that Michael will say?

Play more often. And part of playing is don't take life so seriously. It's serious, yes, but don't take it so seriously because the attachment to the seriousness is causing a lot of the problems that you have created for yourself— the emotional dysregulation, the mental challenges that you face, the— some of the physical challenges that you face. More flow than force, more play than seriousness.

I love that advice. I love that advice. To everyone who was listening to us about 54 minutes into the conversation, Let's listen to the 8-year-old's advice because it's good advice. So play more often. Don't take life too seriously. In life, with your physical, physiological, spiritual, and mental and all of health, go take guidance of the right professional when you need it. But otherwise, be really aware of where you are, who you are, how you're feeling, and what is it that you can do, what small experiments you can do under guidance and with measuring the right metrics to take care of yourself. You have the most easily accessible tool to yourself. Just go and sleep. Have a good night's sleep. And I think the the impact of that sleep on your every I C A L, like physiological, mental, and all of that health will be be insane. And ask yourself two questions when you're feeling the surge of emotions: why you do what you do, and how you do it. Because when you ask the how, that's when new information will be revealed to you. And resilience. My definition of resilience has evolved today, and I hope yours as well. If you have the ability to sit with the world that is within you, that truly forms resilience. And as we go up our conversation, emotions, we all have them. They have— undigested emotions have a repercussion and an impact on our systems. So work with someone who can help you digest those emotions. And if you look back to your 8-year-old self, be nicely surprised for all that you've achieved. Thank you, Michael, for that beautiful conversation. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate you. I've enjoyed this conversation.

Me too. And we'll be back for the second one. To everyone who's listening on a podcast platform, review us, send it to someone who might enjoy this deep conversation. If you're on the YouTube platform, then put your name in the comments. We'd love to see and hear from you. Michael and I are waiting. And yeah, you're here for 1 hour. If you're still listening to this, then subscribe to the channel because that's how we grow. This is Utkarsh and Michael signing off.