Achieve Optimal Mental Health, with Dr. Miles Nichols

There are a number of people who say, you know, I handled stress pretty well until this year and there were some stressful things happening in this year, but like before that, I handled stress pretty well. I wasn't anxious all the time. Sure, maybe I was an anxious personality, but it wasn't getting in my quality of life, my functioning, and in my day to day experience until this year.

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Welcome to another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Look who's here with us today at Levitan, and we're delighted to be introducing and interviewing Dr. Miles Nichols. He is a functional medicine doctor who specializes in Lyme mold, gut, thyroid autoimmune disease. He's authored two books and founded the Medicine with Heart Functional Medicine clinic in Colorado, as well as the Medicine With Heart Institute, which trains other providers and doctors in functional medicine. So, Miles, welcome. We're so happy to have you here today.

Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

I was listening to an interview with Paul Stemets, who is a mycologist, and he was talking about psilocybin. And there's apparently a receptor which I'm forgetting the name of that SSRIs hit just a little bit. But if you look at psilocybin or mushrooms, magic mushrooms or whatever you want to call them, they actually hit a thousand fold more. And that's why the studies are now interesting. Studies are now being shown that only a couple of doses of psilocybin, 2, 3 doses, will actually decrease anxiety depression significantly versus just a couple of doses versus a continuous SSRI. There's some really cool studies out. That's not to take away from toxins and glyphosate or mold or anything else, but there's also. It's a complex, it's a complicated issue because the thing that I think people forget a lot of times is we can say the gut or we can say the brain, but it's not separate. Everything affects everything else.

So, Eva from Wally, your arms don't come apart, your head doesn't come up, like you're. You're connected, right?

So if your brain's not working, it's a sign of something else not working. And the other way around.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I mean, thanks for bringing that up because psychedelics are quite an interesting advent in. You know, I don't find always for it to be effective for someone to just look at the lab testing for causes and address those with diet and supplementation and medications and some lifestyle intervention. Sometimes there really does need to be a significant perspective shift from something, something like psilocybin or in other cases, breath work and cold exposure and certain brain retraining practices that work on some of the traumatic backbone and limbic system dysregulation may have some significant impact. And then there are all these studies coming out on intergenerational trauma, how that's passing down, but that maybe there's some opportunity for rewriting stories and seeing that, that intergenerational trauma can transmute into intergenerational gifts and that can start to create a new perspective in a person's life that can actually then translate into shifting the immune function, the nervous system function, the ability to maybe handle toxins and infections. And some of these gut biome changes, even some studies coming out about week long meditation intensive, significantly changing gut bacteria and gut biometric. And so it starts to become very interesting very quickly. When you look at things like psychedelics, meditation intensives, brain retraining practices, we see breath practices being able to significantly calm an anxiety response very quickly. The right breath practice and panic attacks can be calmed very quickly. So there are some very interesting ways in which there can be modulation of the physiology that can sometimes have permanent shifts. In the case of psilocybin 1, 2 sessions, potentially having a shift that lasts over a year, maybe longer. That similar MDMA studies on PTSD treatment resistant PTSD showing very strong, strong impact.

The study just came out, it was like 71%. It's ridiculous.

71% what?

Positive effect of a shift. A significant impact in the scores of PTSD scores. I mean, what drug improvement? Yeah.

In PTSD scores with what drug?

I'm not sure. What? No, it's mdma.

Mdma? Yeah.

But like what drug do we ever see doing that? Like if there were drugs that did that, everybody would be all over it.

You can't patent it, can you?

No.

MDMA is not a natural compound, but it's not patentable because it's off. It's off sort of. It's past that point.

So old.

Yeah. So it's hard to profit off of. So that's why the nonprofit MAPS is a public beneficiary company that's basically donor funded to get this phase three trial to get this through phase three trials, which is pretty incredible. It's one of the only instances in which a, a donor funded nonprofits pushed a drug through phase three successfully. And they're still, I mean it's still wrapping phase three up right now. But the second result just came out a few days ago actually a confirmatory result in their phase three trial showing significant benefit and very good safety profile.

Okay, and of the people who have mental health symptoms, when you look at your practice, what percentage of them start to improve? And I always say to people like, look, whatever symptom you're coming up with, that's your Achilles heel. That's what you're gonna. When you hit the skids and you go down and you stop taking care of yourself, that's what you're going to develop. So keeping in mind that sure you can flare again, but do you see a significant portion of people who start to have either improvement or resolution in their symptoms as you drill into this?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Some people just say that, you know, and a lot of people it's it. When I dig into it with people and really in the case history talk to people often, there are a number of people who they say, you know, I handled stress pretty well for, until you know, this year. And there were some stressful things happening in this year, you know, 10 years ago that, that you know, I just attributed it to I was going through a divorce or I was having this or I was having that or something happened and I just attributed it to that. But like before that I handled stress pretty well. I wasn't anxious all the time. Sure maybe I was an anxious personality, but it wasn't getting in my quality of life, my functioning and in my day to day experience until 10 years ago it started. And so often, especially in cases like that where it's, it's like there's a time in which it significantly shifted and amplified. Even if that seems to be connected with trauma, sometimes there's really a significant connection with also infection, toxin, gut dysfunction. And sometimes the nervous system gets put chronically into another state that also utilizing some of the mind body interventions, the breath work, the brain retraining, meditation, maybe psychedelics, that there can be this shift where people can notice and find significant differences where they feel like they're back to before that. I'll call it an amplification of dysregulated nervous system function occurred and people feel like, oh wow, now my nervous system's more like what I was used to in Most of my life, where, of course, yes, situations get bad and it's stressful and there's a little bit of difficulty sleeping or handling certain things. But for the most part, day to day, it isn't that big of an issue. And I find that a lot for people.

I had a patient yesterday who I've been seeing for years. And when she showed up in my practice, she was so sick and nothing worked for her. Right. Like she had. Had chemical sensitivities and she had mold and she had anxiety and she wasn't sleeping and she just was brittle and had histamine issues. It was just messy. And we've been doing a lot of toxins work. So Charlotte, I saw her in person yesterday and I was like, good. Like, she looked good, she felt good. And she said to me, yeah, I didn't like doing the metals treatment at the time, but she did three courses and got rid of her metals. She said, but in retrospect, it was the linchpin that had her no longer be so sensitive to histamine and no longer have. I was like, how's your anxiety? She's like, it's. It's actually gone. I'm not anxious. And like, that's so cool. Just this. And. And it's not. It's the stuff that's invisible to life. Right. Because nobody thinks they have metals, but you got it from your mama. And you live in this world and you eat fish and fillings and lead pipes, lead paint, lead gasoline. If you were born when I was. And it's just amazing and how profound the transformation is for people when you pull the right lever. Like, they get better. Yeah, it's pretty cool to watch.

Speaking of levers, what you mentioned a couple of times, breath work and cold exposure, what are the things that you recommend for people that they do outside? Is there a specific breath work that you recommend? Is there a cold exposure period of time? What kind of. What's your recipe?

And just for the record, I'm not gonna ever go in a cold plunge. Like, it doesn't call to me. I'm sure in 10 years I'll be like, oh, I did a cold plunge. But now I'm like, let's go to sauna and be nice and warm.

Yeah, we'll dump you when, when I get mine set up.

I know we gotta get a better, bigger plot of land so we can have like the self care area with that cold plunge. Yeah, right?

Yeah, I have cold plunge on my deck and it's really nice to.

When you're in Colorado, it's just like cold out there, right?

Not in the summer.

Not in the summer. But then in the winter it's winter more than summer.

So yeah, yeah, it's cold and still getting the cold plunge in the cold.

But that's the best time. I actually find having a cold plunge in summer is not as effective. Like cold in the cold is really.

You can't get it cold. But poor Ed. So we used to have this terrible patio and it was awful, but who cares? It's awful. And he would go out in the winter and pour a bucket of cold water on himself and then we redid the patio and I was like, you're not allowed to pour cold water on the patio. It's going to freeze and buckle the patio. You can't ruin the patio. So poor Ed's like, where am I going to go? Because you're not gonna walk out like.

Well, I was, I was doing ice, ice water buckets outside before the cold plunge wave happened.

He really has been doing it for years.

But I do, at some point we'll get a cold, actual cold plunge. We'll see. We have to figure out place, wire.

It up, corner of the yard.

Yeah, I can, I can talk breath work, cold exposure bit and some of those other therapeutics that are effective for breath work. It's. There's two different camps, I'm going to say, and one camp is the kind of over breathing techniques where you're actually breathing more deeper, sometimes faster than you normally. And the other camp is an under a set of under breathing techniques where you're actually intentionally generating the feeling of being a little air hungry and taking in less air per minute. So the volume of air actually per minute through the lungs decreases. And we could probably spend hours talking about each of those. But what I'll just say as a general principle is that for the most part the average, especially chronically ill person and people struggling with mental health issues, the average is breathing a little too far fast and too much air compared to what would optimally regulate the nervous system, the brain function, the mood. That being said, there's some utility still to over breathing techniques for even people who are breathing a little too fast day to day. And the way I, I like to explain this is it's kind of like lifting weights is stressful to the muscles, but it makes the muscles grow. If you do it in the right dose, if you do it, you wouldn't want to lift heavy weight all day every day. You'd never recover and your muscles would break. Down and it would be very problematic and you'd injure yourself. But if you lift the right amounts of, right amount of weight for the right amount of time to hormetic stress, it'll build your muscles back up and they'll be stronger than they were before having lifted those weights. I consider over breathing kind of like that of breathing, like the weightlifting of breathing. It is a stress on the body and for most people it's pushing them further into stress than they already are. But the right dose can be hormetic and can help regulate the nervous system function. It's important though that people know that that is a more of a sympathetic fight or flight kind of state that they're putting themselves into intentionally for a time, followed by relaxation. So when we look at a very effective and well researched breath practice like WIM HOF breathing, for example, WIM HOF breathing practice, which has been studied to reduce and almost eliminate the symptoms of endotoxemia when they inject dead E. Coli directly into the bloodstream. People, because E. Coli is a gram negative bacteria, it has lipopolysaccharide or LPS in its cell wall. You inject that into the bloodstream, it's just like a person who has leaky gut who's getting a flood of bacteria in the bloodstream, getting LPS elevations. And we even have lab tests to look at LPS antibodies and we'll look at LPS in the blood sometimes to measure leaky gut intestinal permeability. It's sort of like you're directly putting it in the vein. So no matter the gut status, you're just getting directly LPS in the vein. The WIM HOF breathing was shown to practically eliminate the symptoms that people experience. They get headaches, nauseous, feel weird, get a lot of pains, and, and, and they feel miserable for a few hours usually. But with this breathing, they didn't. And also the inflammatory elevations that occurred due to that endotoxemia were cut basically in half in the endotoxin study for the breathing group that was doing the breathing. And so cut inflammation in half and reduce the symptom of endotoxemia. That sounds really, really good. For the perspective of a lot of people who are struggling with maybe gut issues and endotoxemia or chronic infections and the byproduct of the toxin from that. It might help a lot for people. The challenge with that kind of breathing is that, is that it is hormetic stress. So someone who's really depleted, really weak, or really anxious might push their Anxiety further might go into a panic because you look at panicky breathing, it's fast, it's this kind of a fast breathing.

It's like Lamaze breathing actually.

Yeah. And when half breathing, it's a little different than that. It's like fully in, natural out. So it's not the same, but it's, it's close enough that some people get triggered into anxiety.

Yeah, but, but I'm going to actually tailor that a little bit because I think the majority of people that start out with breath work aren't. You are only breathing from the top. And until you learn to move your belly and your belly muscles are able to move and you're able to move your diaphragm down, any kind of breathing is going to be tough. And you do want to go. My recommend, my general idea is to first teach people belly breathing and then you can do the over, under, you can do a lot of things. But I do think if people are trying Wim Hof and are just breathing into their chest, which is, I think the beginners what they do, that's when you get into trouble. So making sure breathing right into your belly is going to make, is going to make the huge difference.

Like a baby breathes.

Yeah, yeah. Diaphragmatic and abdominal breathing, it's very important and, and can definitely make a big difference. And sometimes where I'll start people is if, you know, depending on their natural breathing pattern, I'll do an assessment where I'll have people breathing normally while sitting. How long can you hold your breath on the exhale before you get the first definitive desire to breathe in or an involuntary diaphragmatic contraction? And that gives me an assessment for where they're starting from. And people are starting from a certain point where they maybe can 20, 25, 30 seconds, they're fine holding on an exhale without preparing for it, without taking big deep breaths, just normal sitting inhale, exhale through the nose. For them, I think often starting right into full on. You know, Wim Hof practice is fantastic and they do really well. For the people who they're really struggling with a 5 or 10 seconds definite desire for air, they're at a different place in terms of the chemoreceptors in the brain and their sensitivity to carbon dioxide is really low threshold for carbon dioxide and desire to breathe. And the lower the threshold, the more I see benefit to under breathing training to increase that threshold prior to beginning to do some of the over breathing techniques as well. And some people do great with one, some people do great with both. Some people. Do great with some people. What them do is I'll say do five minutes of under breathing and then do the WIM HOF breathing and then go back and do five more minutes of under breathing. So you're sandwiching it in between and they do extremely well with that. There's tremendous research on WIM hof. There's tremendous research on some of the underbreathing techniques with nervous system regulation and, and anxiety and panic reduction and improvements in asthma and sleep and sleep apnea. And so there's a. It also depends on what, what are people coming in with as their picture as to how much of which would be beneficial. But I would say that just to give a couple, throw out a couple names, I think WIM HOF breathing technique is fantastic for a lot of people. Just understand the safety contraindications, et cetera. And then Buteyko breathing is really, really wonderful for people. A lot of people like box breathing as well. And then diaphragmatic abdominal breathing. These are some of the big ones that I think are highly effective. I find people getting tremendous benefit from.

Where can people find you? Because you've got a lot of information. I think it feels like you're just scratching the surface, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Best place is my clinic is called Medicine with heart. And medicinewithheart.com is the best place where there's a free blog that's available that has a lot of information that comes out. So we'll put out information about some of the topics that we've been talking about today. A variety of things related to mental health, things related to optimization, things related to infections, toxins, gut function, all that goes in there, autoimmunity. So there's lots of free information in the blog there. And if people want to get in touch with the clinic, find out more about what that's like to work in the clinic, they can book a call there with one of my staff members to discuss that. So medicinewithheart.com is the best repository in place for information and from there you can get into the blog and get into some of the other areas that we cover.

Awesome.

Now it's been very educational. Really cool. Yeah.

Miles, thank you. Thank you for being here and for the listeners, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. If you love it, give us a thumbs up and pass it forward so people can transform their health. Because you're meant to feel freaking amazing. So, Miles, thanks for being here and we look forward to chatting with you again soon.

Appreciate it. Thank you so much and take care, everyone.

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