Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Mental Health] A 6 Step Approach Connecting Mind, Body, and Nutrition w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Travis Mash and Dan Garner

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged we cover: A framework for understanding mental health and physiology The relationship between the mind and the body How physiology follows psychology How to turn your thoughts into character traits How come prescriptions and medications can make mental health worse How sleep is the gateway to improving mental health Blood sugar management and how it affects mood Why broad solutions to improve mental health will not work Coaching the person before you coach their mental health issues Supplementation that positively affect mental health The process of creating and excreting dopamine and serotonin The impacts of B6 and Magnesium for mental health To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthoptimization.com Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram  

Shrugged family this week on barbell shrugged physiology Friday is back and today we are talking mental health with Dan Garner as always friends Make sure you get over to rapid health report comm that is where Dan Garner and dr Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis You can access that free report over at rapid health report comm friends. Let's get into the show Welcome to barbell shrugged I'm Anders Warner Doug Larsen Dan Garner today on bar Shrugged, I'm Anders Warnor, Doug Larsen, Dan Garner. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about nutrition for mental health and Dan Garner is going to be digging into a six step process for how you can better understand mental health. But before we get into this, I'd love to hear what is your philosophy around mental health? So the philosophy on utilizing say nutrition

and physical health for mental health is it's multi-fold. I mean, I originally got into utilizing my lane of practice for optimizing brain chemistry and performance because of the demographic that I work with. So I work a lot with some of the best athletes in the world. That's like what I'm most known for. That's a lane that I've got a lot of experience in. And in that lane, everybody's physically gifted. So to a huge degree, your mindset that you show up with that day determines who wins and who loses. Because

at that level, when you're an Olympic medalist, when you're a world champion, nobody there doesn't have good genetics. Nobody there isn't already amazing at their craft. Nobody there has already done the 10,000 hour rule. Everybody there has smashed their craft. So to a huge extent, and the example I like to use is actually female gymnasts. I may have used it on this podcast before. It's an example I use a lot. If you watch the Summer Olympics and you look at female gymnasts, it's crazy. You'll see all of them lined up, say 10 to

15 of them. They're all in the low five feet in height. They're all in the low five feet in height. They're all like in the low 100s in weight. And then you kind of just, all of these have the same flexibility, the same height, same strength, the same explosiveness. Who's gonna determine who wins today? It's who's got it right upstairs. Who is mentally prepared for battle in the strongest way possible?

And you see this like Doug knows this all too well in the world of fighting. You get two athletes of equal ability, but one shows up confident and the other doesn't. Yeah. Who's gonna win 10 times? Even more specifically, Simone Biles, this past Olympics was supposed to win like 10 golds

or something like that. Like nobody was even supposed to touch her. And then she showed up and something spun in her head. And next thing you know, she's doing like seven backflips in a row and doesn't trust that she's gonna be able to land it. And that must be terrifying. And she had to pull out.

Absolutely. Yeah. And that's the mind, man. The mind follows, I mean, the body follows the mind from a health perspective, but even hormonally and chemically. And then of course the combination of these things leads to your performance.

So I always want to be a step ahead of everyone else. I want to be the guy that people copy. Like I wanna be that guy who is, cause you look at nutritionists and the way in which they practice is very muscle cell focused. It's very how do we hydrate the cell? How do we get the electrolytes?

How do we get the amino acids? How do we get the glucose? How do we get everything firing in that muscle cell? And it's so muscle cell focused that they kind of forgot how big of an impact your diet has on your mind. And I said in a post just last week, I think, I mentioned that the diet feeds the gut and the gut is like the garden at which feeds the brain. And that is, it's so huge. And people feel that like the moment you switch your diet and you stop eating like an idiot and you start eating

a lot better, you start feeling so much better naturally. So that's just how I got into the world of even studying nutrition for neurotransmitter manipulation, studying nutrition for mental health, studying nutrition and the brain anatomy and how this is largely made up of healthy fats that we freaking consume on a daily basis. These things are all very diet focused. So then from that point, I needed to create types of working philosophies that will act as the foundation of this podcast, probably several more podcasts in the future that we'll do together. But

it's the idea of- Before you go too far, immediately when someone's going to think about mental health, nutrition's not the thing they're going to pop into their brain and running labs and sending them to you is not going to be the first thing. They're immediately going to think, I need a psychiatrist. I need a sports therapist of some sort. Is that a correct path? And like what's, maybe what's missing from that on the nutrition side and kind of separating the two? Yeah. I mean, so like we'd have to riddle everything with disclaimers. Everything here is riddled with disclaimers and caveats.

Of course, see a psychiatrist. I am not a counselor. I am a high performance coach for athletes, all of that stuff, right? But I just think that the audience would probably agree with me that if you've got very poor mental health right now, but you aren't exercising and you aren't eating well, you're not giving yourself a fighting chance to win. You're just nuts. I think that if you're in a position where you are lacking, whatever it is that you're

mentally and emotionally lacking, but you aren't taking care of yourself physically, you're not really giving yourself the fighting chance. You deserve, by the way, to live a higher quality life. So I've basically just looked into the areas that are within my scope of practice that I can act upon because I don't think the I say a psychiatrist I don't think they should say now you don't want to eat well now you don't want to exercise you know what I mean that that kind of stuff that is absolutely going to be supportive for the process. So by all means, there are people out there who absolutely screw with things

that they need to see a psychiatrist for, and I'm 100% for that. I would never, ever, ever be against that. But I just think that there is an enormous percentage of the population who are unaware of actionable items in the world of nutrition and training that we can use to feel way better on a daily basis. And that kind of leads me back into my philosophy in that I think that in many ways our perspective

and this is something I discussed in the micronutrient podcast, our perspective can be a root cause problem in our physical ailments because we've seen and we can get into this as well. We've seen a ton of research that physiology follows psychology. If we think negative, angry, whatever type of thoughts, they will truly break us down physically. There's things where inflammatory markers get adjusted,

immune markers get adjusted, hormone markers get adjusted. So many things get offset in the presence of an unhealthy mindset. So I think in a lot of cases, our perspective of the world can be the root cause to our problem. And the body is the ultimate conservation machine. So it never wants to expend more energy than it needs to.

It will always expend the amount of energy required to meet the task. So let's say you've got a very poor perspective of the world, which in many ways represents low serotonin, which is why selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are so impactful, as those are a very powerful pharmaceutical drug to allow serotonin to have greater half-lives in physiology, help people feel better and improve perspective. This is very much a brain chemistry issue. But when we have a poor perspective of the world,

because the body is such a conservation machine, and this is where I'm always trying to be ahead of the pack, because the body such a conservation machine, and this is where I'm always trying to be ahead of the pack Because the body is a conservation machine. I think that it will only make neurotransmitters to match the degree of your perspective So if we have a poor perspective, we will only make Neurotransmitters in the amount and balance to meet that perspective Neurotransmitters in the amount and balance to meet that perspective But we can utilize certain training modalities certain nutritional modalities certain supplemental modalities to give yourself the precursors and

micronutrients and cofactors and coenzymes what they need to increase particular neurotransmitter status to give you the opportunity to have a new perspective. And then once we have a new perspective, that in many ways eliminates that root cause of the problem because we've given the body the chemistry it needs to understand and actually internalize and actualize a new perspective of the world. So from that point forward, physiology can follow psychology.

And then you've actually done something very phenomenal for somebody because the research is fascinating in this area. The mind-body stuff, like for example, we've seen research and you guys, I speak from the evidence I really want the listeners to go check this stuff out. We've seen research that, even following the same strength protocols, if one group does visualization plus strength training, they get stronger than the group

that only does strength training. We've seen, this is a crazy study in Japan. So what happened in this study was actually they used poison ivy. So there's 13 participants and if you rubbed these participants with poison ivy on their hand but told them it was a harmless leaf, only two out of the 13 participants got a reaction. But if you rubbed their hand with a harmless leaf and then told them it was poison ivy, 13 out of 13 participants got a reaction on their hand solely because of what they thought was

happening. There's absolutely insane research out there. There's another study on type 2 diabetics where if you put type 2 diabetics in different rooms and you actually adjust the clocks, that's one thing. The way in which your mind perceives time totally alters biochemistry. But if you put type 2 diabetics in different rooms and you adjust the clocks and you make one clock run faster than actual time, so they perceive more time has passed, their blood glucose drops 200% more than the group who is subjected to normal time status. So just the perception that they thought more time had passed, their blood glucose dropped 200%. So this is altering macronutrient status in the body.

It's altering hormone status in the body, and it's dramatically altering mental health because there isn't one nice person with low blood sugar. Everybody is angry. It's like when you're waiting to sit down at a restaurant, it's the worst thing in the world, right? So like that's another good example of a study, a very cool study on the immune system because we talk about the immune system a lot in this podcast. Salivary IGA, something that we look at in our labs at Rapid Health. Salivary IgA, so they took two groups and they measured, so salivary IgA,

just for the people listening, that's immunoglobulin A, it's a representation of immune function, and they take salivary IgA at zero minutes, and then they take salivary IgA at six hours, except group one thought only happy thoughts for five minutes, and group two thought only negative, angry, vindictive thoughts for five minutes.

Group one's happy thoughts, they actually raised above baseline. So their immune function actually was above baseline in the beginning, comparing the beginning as baseline. So their immune function actually was above baseline in the beginning, comparing the beginning as baseline. At the six hour mark, their secretary IGA was actually higher, whereas the negative, angry, vindictive group, and this is the words from the study, you're supposed to think vindictively, their salivary IGA orory IgA, exact same thing that they're measuring, that never came back to baseline.

So the study ended at six hours, and it did not come back to baseline. So just, and there's so many more studies like this. Back to the world of, we talked about strength already, you can do this with cycling as well. If you put a slow clock on a bicycle or a cycle ergometer, or you put a fast clock on, the faster clock, people actually fatigue faster

because they think more time has passed. But if you have a slow clock on it, they will extend their time to failure. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the Arte program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite

performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Arte is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation or pre and post pictures. Arate is something completely different. Arate is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature,

find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Arate isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential

and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit AreteLab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E lab dot com. Now back to the show. But if you have a slow clock on it, they will actually because they don't think as much time has passed. So like this is just stuff, but guys there's dozens of these. Affecting blood sugar, affecting hormones, affecting the immune system, affecting strength,

affecting endurance, affecting so many things. This is the mind. Like to think that this isn't a root cause is crazy. And to not utilize supplementation and dietary methods to harness that is just a huge mistake if you want to work with real high performers. I also think that there's a piece to this and we do it a lot with really like that's what the coaching side of Rep Health is because people have been dealing with a problem for

so long that by the time they come to us, they really feel like they're broken. Like they feel like there is absolutely no way they are going to get healthy. They've been dealing with this gut health thing for the last decade of their life. They've been dealing with hormone issues, low testosterone for so long that now their entire identity is wrapped around it.

Like they probably, and we only know them from the time that they meet us and then through the program, but many of these people I would imagine when they talk to their friends, like their issues are the things that they talk about a lot and in their health and how it's bothering them. And one of the hardest pieces of really getting them where they're going is reshaping the identity.

Like no matter how successful people are when you when you hear them talk You hear these stories like on I'm always the person that just does xx and x and go wait a second hold the phone Why are you always like this? Is there a gene for eating doughnuts when they're around? Oh, you got it? No one else did That's crazy. You don't have to eat the doughnut What you have to do is become the person that is able to say no because currently, you don't know who that person is. You've reached this super high level of success. You've done the whole thing but you haven't figured out how to say no to the doughnut and that's scary. You got to go and actually reshape the identity, create the mindset piece that opens the door

to be able to live the rest of their life in a healthy way. Yeah. Yeah. One framework I feel like is helpful here. I tend to think that mental health sits mostly on top of foundation of physical health. Granted, you just told us a bunch of studies where it kind of goes the opposite, where the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, where the psychology influences physiology and physiology influences psychology, et cetera.

I tend to think if someone comes to you and they are blacked out drunk they're not going to be acting normal they're not going to be thinking normal because their physiology they're chemically different at the moment until until it all wears off they're going to be a different person and so that's that's kind of how it is all the time like they consume something it changed their internal state it it changed their physiology, and then now they're thinking and behaving totally different. That's like a spike that happens from something that's abnormal.

Like if you get a bunch of broccoli, it's not gonna change your physiology enough to like totally change who you are in that moment. For regular nutrition, it's gonna take a lot longer and to change your internal physiology internal physiology for the long term. I think that's a window into how you are different when you chemically change yourself to see what someone's like when they're blacked out drunk. If you're eating healthier over the course of many, many months and now you are producing

more serotonin because you've changed your dietary habits and your lifestyle habits and maybe you're training more and getting more sunlight and having more friendly conversations with friends and family. And now you're fundamentally different as far as like your lifestyle and your nutrition, your physiology changes and that changes the thoughts that you have. And then that changed the thoughts that you have

and then the more positive thoughts then thereby change more about your physiology. And it kind of just like creates this this feed forward this feedback loop of positivity and then over time you become more and more and more mentally healthy but I tend to think if your physiology isn't on point then then your psychology since in many ways it rests upon that physiology is very hard to change but really kind of got to attack it at both sides at once. Like you got to attack the nutrition and training and lifestyle stuff at the same time that you attack the more, the deeper psychological therapy style causes.

Yeah, absolutely. That's totally, and I think that's complete coaching. Complete coaching's not one arrow pointing upwards like in linear results. Complete coaching is two arrows going in a cyclone. One is mental health and the other is physical health because those are in tandem. They are completely inseparable. You're never going to be able to separate those two because they work too close together. And like the most obvious examples are if somebody is extremely

stressed out, well, that is bad for physiology in many ways that we already understand. It's bad for the immune system. It will ruin your sleep, which will ruin everything else. Stress alone, independent of other factors, has been demonstrated to be so bad for gut health it can actually give you a bleeding ulcer. Just stress, so like the mind impacts the body

in a huge way, but then the body also impacts the mind in a huge way. Something that we discussed also impacts the mind in a huge way. Something that we discussed, I don't know if we discussed in Vegas or we discussed it on a podcast. I keep losing track of our conversations, but testosterone was actually originally prescribed for depression. So that's like an enormous reason or example rather, where the body impacts the mind as well.

Because if you have a huge hormone imbalance, it's tough to feel good. Like just an example of a post I just did a couple days ago on PMS. That's the hormone status of the body impacting the mind. That's not, they didn't think their way into a state of PMS. Is that PMS actually impacted the way in which they're currently thinking.

So that will always constantly go back and forth. And it's up to both the coach and the athlete to utilize strategies that we can absolutely get into in order to maximize both. Because what we're ultimately after is to turn your thoughts into character traits. Because when someone says, like, hey Dan, how do you never miss a workout?

Or hey Dan, how are you not cheating on your meal when you have a goal? It's like it's not a program I'm sticking to or a meal plan that I'm sticking to. It's a reflection of my character. It's just someone that I've become at this point in time. And that's what actually allows you to kind of tackle many things. You see the people who tackle many things like Joe Rogan. You see that guy's a black belt on Jiu Jitsu, but he's a fricking black belt in comedy. He's a black belt in podcasting,

and he's a black belt in being a UFC commentator. Like that's the road to mastery is through character traits because delayed gratification, discipline, dedication, these things will allow you to become a black belt in any category. So people, you can't be looking for recipes of success as much as you should just be developing character traits. Because it's the character traits that allow you

to master any craft. Any craft all requires the same amount of traits. It's just what direction you want to place those traits in. And physical health and the stuff that we can talk about here today are an enormous foundation of that. Anybody who's reached success at a high level will tell you that. Can we make an analogy between building muscle

and building whatever organ systems are needed for mental health, where to oversimplify the muscle conversation, like you need protein as the building blocks to build the physical tissue of the muscle itself to make sure the muscle is strong and healthy and then you also need carbohydrates and other things to fuel the muscle so it so actually can continue to perform at its best. So regarding mental health like you need you need a you know DHA to build to build brain tissue or neural tissue so all the different pieces and parts of your brain are Are you know as big as they need to be and have all the different pieces that they need to have to be a fully formed Quality structure and then you also need whatever's kind of interacting with that that brain tissue

Whatever is fueling that brain tissue. you need to have all the different pieces fueling the brain tissue so that brain tissue can function at its best. I don't know all the different structures of the brain and whatnot, but if you don't have all the building blocks and you don't have all the pieces that fuel those blocks, then you can't have something that functions optimally.

You can go into way more detail on that conversation than I can, but is that kind of a good framework for? fueling the body in general Yeah, I love it and fueling the mind in general. You can't expect something to perform. That's not being properly fueled Period I absolutely love that analogy Dude I want to dig into this six-step process you kind of laid out for us How do you? Take this philosophy and start to actually put it into I want to dig into this six step process you kind of laid out for us.

How do you take this philosophy and start to actually put it into tactical pieces that people can use to understand their own mental health and some of the issues they may be going through? Sure. So it's a six step process that I like to use when the mental side of the equation is like the number one thing that I like to use when the mental side of the equation is like the number one thing that I'm tackling at the time. And to remain in scope of practice, the first step is don't mess with pharmaceutical medication.

So if somebody is working with a psychiatrist or whatever it's going to be, there are many different titles. I don't know them all. But if you've been prescribed something, there are a lot of contraindicating supplements that you can take that can actually make the process worse. There's something known as serotonin syndrome that'll actually put you in the hospital. So if you're on certain antidepressants,

and then you start trying to take a bunch of supplements, or worse, if you're a coach who's prescribing supplements because you're working out of your practice, you can really mess people up and that is the number one absolute no-no. Okay, if you are not a psychiatrist listening to this podcast, the number one rule in this six-step process is don't mess with pharmaceutical medication.

To educate yourself, you can go to drugs.com and that will tell you any contraindications, both food and supplements, and also other drugs. Actually, I've mentioned it a few times on this podcast because I use it with every single client. If somebody's on a medication, there are certain foods that offset the efficacy of that medication. There are certain supplements that offset the efficacy or even make that medication more dangerous. But then there are also, like it's crazy, there's been times where I've looked up two drugs that my client is on and I don't know if like they got drug in one state or in a

drug in another state or if the doctors aren't talking, but they'd be taking two medications that have contraindications. And I'd be like, do you guys, does anybody talking to you about this? And they're like talking about what? And I'm like, holy crap, just show this to someone, please. Okay? So that's a huge one. So you can educate yourself in that area.

And about the prescription side of things, that stuff's really addictive. Like we have people that are very, very healthy on our program right now that it's taking them Nearly eight months to get off and they're still not off antidepressant meds like they still need a tiny little hit each day because The their physiology has not caught up to the detoxing process to get off of them They're down from a ton from where they were but to actually go cold turkey takes a very long time because the stuff is so addictive. Yeah, I actually have a client who I've worked with and she actually went cold turkey

off of psychiatric medication. This was many, many, many years ago, but she went through an enormous withdrawal and the reason why I'm saying her name is she wrote a book about it. So if anybody wants to learn more about psychiatric withdrawal or the impacts, it's Brooke Syene and her book is called May Cause Ed Effects.

It's, she's got a really, really, really good story and it's just a great, great thing to educate yourself on in general, okay? So that's step one. Step one is don't mess with the pharmaceutical medication. Work with your doctor as a team rather than trying to assume you're smarter than people because that never wins any battles ever.

The second step in this six step process is to improve sleep. Okay, there's a lot of really fancy stuff that we can talk about, but trying to optimize neurotransmitter status when you're sleeping poorly is a complete waste of time. So in many, many, many cases, if you have any type of mental health issue or you're struggling at all, and you recognize yourself that sleep length and sleep quality aren't optimal for you, then that's the, this is, by the way, this is an order of importance.

That I'm not, this six step process is not by mistake. This number two is sleep. And that should be kind of obvious, but people wanna over-dive in to smaller details and forget. Yeah, I'm sleeping poorly Well, if you're sleeping poorly, you're never gonna feel great ever people who don't struggle mentally feel like crap when they sleep poorly Okay, it's it's something that's enormously powerful that impacts the brain in huge ways. So I would recommend all of the type of sleeping evenings and rituals and we can do future podcasts on that in the future. We also do extensive lab analysis in our program

measuring every single component of the circadian rhythm that's currently available and correcting sleep all by itself. It's amazing how much better you feel after a good night's sleep mentally and emotionally. Yeah. I don't even set an alarm anymore because of you. Yeah. I actually had this realization the other day because I think a lot of people, especially in the entrepreneurial space or in people that are trying to play business at a high

level, they think that they can overcome it and they think that it takes discipline to get out of bed at 5 a.m. and it really does. It's hard to do that. But it also takes discipline to not wake up to an alarm and feel like that's actually making you better. The last couple months have been very strange because I've been not setting an alarm, waking up whenever my kids wake up

and getting off of the coffee is like the greatest thing in the world. If you have seen my lab video and seen how awful my cortisol was, I actually wear the badge of honor in the exact opposite way now of I need to sleep. And I go to bed sometimes, I'm like, maybe tomorrow I'll set the alarm for like 5 a.m., wake up, knock out a couple hours work, and I go, no, no, no, no, that's now off-brand. I don't do that. I will figure out a way to get the work done But I'm gonna get eight hours of sleep I'm gonna lay here in bed for at least eight hours today

Because it makes a massive difference in your ability to just be able to function and feel good about where you're going in your day And when you saw my labs, I was not the same person Yeah, a%, man. In that CEO world that you're describing right now, it's not about how many hours you sleep. It's what you do with the hours that you're awake. If you're under slept, and even you could... Everybody listening to this knows, if you have an uninterrupted two hour period of deep work, the amount of creativity, productivity, and ass whooping that you can do in business is enormous in just two hours. But if I'm under slept, then it might take me four hours to do

what I could have done in two. And that's not a stretch. I might look at my phone a little bit more, I might check email, I might be halfway through something, and then I have to, because your brain is not the same. It's just not. So getting a longer workday, it's like, I don't even care. That's why I think the 40-hour week is stupid too. Who cares how long you were there? What did you do? That's what matters most, and that's going to depend so much on sleep.

Yeah. So that alone, I mean, with your example, I like that you brought that up, improving sleep and getting off of coffee. People don't even think about either of those. Those are like pipe dreams for most people. Yeah, that's like, it's number two for a reason. That alone takes care of so much mental health stuff because now you're kicking more ass in business, kicking more ass in the gym. You feel better naturally instead of chemically with 500 milligrams of caffeine. It's a totally different game.

I think that's one of the best parts about the move to the digital world is that the 40 hour work week is kind of just going away and people are only concerned about what you got done because Because nobody sees you at your desk, like working hard, quote unquote, they just see what you got done or what you didn't get done. And so now it's like the 40 hour work week thing kind of just, it's going out the window, like people want to be able to go to their kid soccer games at any time of the day and just get their work done

whenever they have time. So now if you need your fucking dragon, and you just you're just like, God, it's one o'clock and like, I'm just like falling asleep my desk, like can't just go take a 45-minute nap or whatever you need to do. Come back and then smash the rest of the day and you're not going to get in trouble for it. It might be the best thing that you could have done that day is to take your nap and then be actually productive the rest of the day versus just grinding through it.

Yeah. One of my mentors throughout my career has been Dr. John Berardi. I looked up to that guy in so many different ways. A long time ago, really long time ago, he said to me that he set up his work week so that he would only ever work Monday to Thursday. Every week, even during the crazy building days of precision, every week, if Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we're off. And then, so if someone, the classic nine to five model, they'd be like, Brardy, you're not here Friday

from nine to five, you're underperforming. It's like, hey, I built a nine figure company. I think that I'm knowing what I'm doing here. I just, the 40 hour week is so stupid to me, but well, we should probably move on because I'll yell about that for a long Difference between like success and failure in your world if you feel like it's the difference is like just getting an extra hour of work And each day that's not gonna make that much of a difference like if that's not even a win Yeah The extra hour is not gonna do anything like if you want to really like 10 extra,

your lifestyle, your income, whatever it is, like it's really about having a better idea. It's about having a better business model or whatever it is. Like just doing the same thing you've always done with a couple of extra hours a week is not the thing that's going to get it done for you. Like if you really want to have more success,

you should spend more time thinking about what's a better idea and what's a better use of my time rather than just doing more of the same. Yeah, I read a quote. You just reminded me of a quote I read and I'll butcher it 100%. So it's funny that I brought it up. But it says something like, it's not about how hard you row, it's what boat you're in. So if the idea is your boat, like if somebody,

you guys, we were just in Vegas. Those people taking pictures on the street work as hard as us. Like those people hustle hard, but their idea gets them $10 per hustle. Like it's not about how hard you row, it's what boats you're in. The people around you and the idea that you're working with

that's a win and it has nothing to do with hours put in. None of it. Yeah, the further I go along in business, I feel like the more time I spend like purely thinking, like thinking is the activity, just undistracted thinking like in the sauna. I feel like me sitting in the sauna, just meditating slash thinking through my day and then writing down my good ideas is one of the most important parts of my

day. But like the old me from 10 years ago, would have thought that was like the lazy person. You're just wasting time by sitting and doing nothing. You should be working. And now I see that and I go, Oh, the quality of my life and the success that I have is the result of my ideas. The better my ideas, the more success I will have in the sauna or going for a walk is when I have my ideas. And so now I consider those things that I used to think were not work. I definitely didn't think going for a walk or like sitting in the sauna was work because it definitely doesn't look like work in the traditional sense. But now I think it's

like the most important part of my work in a way because those are the times where I have my ideas and then when I'm working when I'm actually sitting at my desk doing the work I'm working on a better thing and I'm spending my time working on a better idea that has more leverage and it has more more potential for long-term success that's where I'm gonna actually have the big wins. I could be working at my desk, wasting time, checking my email in the loop of check email, check social media, make a post, whatever.

I could do that all day and have almost no success, or I could actually be working on something that's higher leverage. Now, higher leverage thing is usually thought of, my case when I'm doing something like when I'm in the shower or in the sauna Or going for a walk. So the quality of the idea is is the most important thing to me I don't if I don't get the walks in I die I like I get it's like putting a rat in a cage. Like I got a breakout I got to get outside feel the sun and do the same thing.

You go crazy. Like just being in the rat race. Well, that's not the tile back into a show about mental health. Like taking the time to have uninterrupted thought or to meditate or to go for a walk outside in the sunshine and not just be on a screen the entire day, which is very easy to do these days

because we work in a digital company, we're recording this right now with our laptops. I'm alone in this room talking to you guys through the internet. Even if, it doesn't seem like it's, to me if it doesn't seem like in the moment it's affecting my mental health, when I take a break, like I just did this last week,

I went to Zion and went hiking in the mountains with Andy. After being gone and off my phone for a week, I go, oh wow, like I do, I feel so much better for not having been on screens all the time this week. And then now I'm kind of back to the grind and I need to remember, oh, I need to take more time to be outside, to be off my phone and to have that uninterrupted time just purely to think and just be myself without the distractions of life. 100%. That quiet time in the absence of screens, it's like its own little mini mental detox.

You totally need that. And then when you do, because most people don't, they don't actually think all day. It's you're on your phone or you're watching TV or you're executing attacks and you actually have no, you kind of can forget who you are sometimes and then you wake up 10, 20 years later and say,

how the hell did I get here? Like what happened to my, like these things happen over decades and we meet these people and we coach these people and they're kind of like, how did it get here? And I think a lot of that is distraction of the rat race. You kind of just get trapped in this world where you're not actually thinking anymore.

You're just executing or looking at your screen. But when you do take that time to think, to go back to what Doug said, you take that time to think and you come up with an idea that's yours, that's the only way you're gonna demonstrate the most intelligent and charismatic qualities about yourself is when you are bringing out to the world something you actually came up with.

It's not verbal copy paste. It's not someone else's recycled philosophy. It's none of that stuff. You're doing something original. That's how you stand out from the crowd and that's how you actually really create wins in life. And these wins just create more and more better mental health for you over the course of time.

What's after sleep, man? I feel like we could sit here and hammer on sleep for the rest of the show. We could get to four, five, or three, four, five, and six. Yeah, yeah. Well, number three is blood sugar management. So blood sugar management is key. If you have alterations in blood sugar,

there is no way you're not gonna have alterations in mood. When it comes to mental health, there's actually a study is amazing. And go look this up because it's gonna sound like I'm a psychopath. They gave husbands and wives voodoo dolls and the voodoo dolls Represented so the wife would have a voodoo doll of her husband and the husband have a voodoo doll of the wife and they were given like knives like little pins and You were to stab the voodoo doll based on how upset you were with your husband or wife.

And it was significant, undeniable, the lower someone's blood sugar dropped, the more they stabbed their spouse. So this is an amazing, yeah. Do you need marriage therapy or do you need to be on a blood sugar control program? Yeah, are you, do you ever, uh, are you going to see my wife's blood work and be like, damn Anders Anders struggling over there. She's got the, is this a, is this a warning for people that are like dieters, like people that are chronically like underfed and just like hypochloric and they're just not eating very much all the time. So the kind kind of irritable whether it's like a bodybuilder at like at the end of their cut or just someone who's they're in the yo-yo dieting mindset where they're just like cutting calories radically and then you know They're back they're back up and then they cut them radically again when they're and they're barely eating anything their blood sugar is

more than likely low very low at times and they get super irritable and You know in and what you're talking about with husbands and wives like you end up in a fight You don't know how you got there. Yeah, I mean something I mean, there's two things I don't want people to ever forget number one dieting is not a lifestyle It's not there are people who are chronically in a deficit and dieting is not a lifestyle That's that's not healthy. it's not the way to be. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. You will end up on that yo-yo train for life

until you finally decide to commit to do it right. So number one thing is dieting is not a lifestyle. The number two thing that I would want that same demographic to hear is that your goal body weight is not a number. It's a feeling. You're going to know when you got there. All right? Your goal body weight is not a number. It's a feeling. When you feel like you have energy throughout the day, when you feel like you're not bloated, when you feel like you have sex drive, when you feel like you're

getting good sleep, when you are productive at work, when you're happy. A lot of people lose their sex drive, lose their energy, lose their sleep quality when they get shredded. Like that's super common. I work with a ton of bodybuilders and bikini girls and stuff and they like feel really fricking good until about five weeks out. And then when you're five weeks out,

erections are few and far between, the energy's low, your ability to communicate decreases. You don't want to be around people. Sleep starts to suffer. You're hungry. And it is so common that relationships are under a massive strain when one person is dieting, let alone two. It ends up being a complete gong show and voodoo dolls get stabbed and everyone's dying. So that's a, it's something where I think that that whole lifestyle is something I'm not a part of. And I've always tried to coach people out of with labs, because it's, it's undeniable labs discipline those who refuse to discipline themselves. If you think dieting year round is healthy for you, your labs will remind you that it's

not. It's a very easy way for me to communicate to them, hey, this is why you've got no energy. This is why you're constantly getting colds and flus because you're suppressing the immune system. This is why you've got no sex drive. We need to reverse our way out of here and you're actually going to feel way better and look better because you're going to find a consistent solution rather than constantly yo-yoing. So that whole mentality of dieting is not my style and your goal body weight is not

a number, it's a feeling. I would want everybody to remember that from this podcast. But from this rule, rule number three, blood sugar management, yeah, that's gotta be in check for mental health. By the way, we haven't talked about anything too fancy yet, right, rules one, two, and three. Number one was don't mess with their meds. Number two was make sure they get a great sleep every night.

And number three is balance their blood sugar. These are very straightforward things that people kind of forget when they're on their search for very, very fancy things, which leads me into number four, which is another kind of sidebar before we get into neurotransmitters, which is number five. But number four is their individual context. So one of the reasons why I love doing so much labs or just such an extensive data collection

process, and by the way, hey, hang on, before I get into this such an extensive data collection process Um, and by the way, hey, hang on before I get into this the extensive data collection process Yeah, it can take like 30 to 60 days, but then you need one program Okay, you think hiring an expert is expensive try hiring an amateur They're gonna make you 12 programs, course correct, trial and error. You're gonna be on this frickin' yo-yo for so long. There is no such thing as high performance programming without high performance analysis. So I am actually, I am all for an extensive

data collection process in the beginning because then you make one program that's frickin' on the money. Your program isn't a shotgun that just sprays everywhere and you hope something lands. No, your program's a sniper rifle. We get all of the data we ever need on you and then you get results now, not later. Okay? So that's just a side bar. That data collection process is so key and every coach should have an extensive process So that you can identify constraints that need to be alleviated now to get results now

And when you get results, nothing's more motivating when nothing's more motivating to you to do it when you can you to do it Mental health improves period. Okay, but I digress Rule number four is is individual context um And this is why I do the extensive process because something that's impacting one's mental health may have nothing to do with the analogy that Doug made about fueling the brain comparable to fueling the muscle. Because let's say someone's mental health

might be suffering because they can't get an erection. Let's say their mental health might be suffering because they're always bloated. Let's say their mental health might be suffering because they have a hormone imbalance. Okay? You can try and, you know, increase serotonin, increase GABA, do these little fancy things, but that's not actually why they're upset. They're upset about a constraint that's elsewhere in physiology that you need to exploit that. And when that gets eliminated,

then that is actually the root cause of what was keeping them down on a day-to-day basis. So rule number four is kind of like an X factor. It really is. Because sometimes if someone says they had a lot of anxiety, sometimes the root cause of that anxiety has nothing to do with what you're fueling the brain with.

And has everything to do with the fact that they're not performing in bed or they're not performing whatever it's going to be. Okay. So rule number four is coach the person before you coach the brain. That's just an easy way to put it. Rule number five. I mean, your physiology could be a hundred percent on point point, but you've just been in a fight with your dad for the last 10 years, and so you just feel like shit all the time, because you just wish you had a better relationship with your dad, and that he respected you, or whatever it is.

And you could try endlessly to fix your hormones, and to quote unquote feel better, but it might have nothing to do with that, until you go have that hard conversation, or whatever you need to do to fix that thing that has nothing to do with that until you go have that hard conversation or whatever you need to do to fix that thing that has nothing to do with your actual genetics or physiology. Dude, totally.

And it's nothing more than being symptom-based rather than root cause-based. Because let's say behind the scenes, me and Anders really don't like each other right now. We're having a lot of problems. I could go ahead and take some things for Gaba and Saratonin to try and calm down before every call I have with Anders. It's not going to work.

Or we could have one tough conversation. I'm going to break through those supplements so easy. If you have one tough conversation with someone and here's the thing too, and I think you guys will probably agree with this too. We make things up in our mind so much bigger than they actually are. Every time I've had to have a tough conversation, it's gotten so much better than the 12 hours of torture I gave myself before the conversation. I was like, oh, that was actually all right. I didn't need to torture myself and not sleep last night.

That went way better than expected. Does that happen for you guys too? It's always better than what you thought? Yeah, that's the path to getting a terrible night's sleep is knowing you have to have a hard conversation and then playing it out 50 times in all the scenarios and everything you want to say and then you wake up in the morning you're like oh i'm just gonna like talk to my friend or my family or whatever it is like they're normal people and they want to solve the problem too yeah sometimes it goes way better than expected where like you bring it up and they're like

oh yeah i've been stressed out about that thanks for bringing it up yeah we need to do this thing and you're like, oh Okay Yeah Yes, we all agree all that stuff for nothing. I guess I didn't need to come up with my 50 comebacks that I had prepared So that's um, that is that I think that was that was wrapped into number four. Number five is now it's brain, and now it's neurotransmitter stuff. Okay? So once you've not messed with the medication and you've supported true counseling and psychiatry, and you've improved their sleep, and you've demonstrated you've improved their blood sugar

management, and you've considered the individual context of their environment and physiology, then it's time to rock and roll with some neurotransmitter stuff and start playing around with that because I'm telling you that that is powerful. One thing that I've got no research to support but I know is true in a weird way is like eggs, for example. Eggs are an awesome source of L-tyrosine, but if I take free-form L-tyrosine, it makes me feel way different. There's something different about taking free-form amino acids that we don't yet understand that I'm absolutely 100% convinced is true. Like taking free-form tyrosine, taking free-form theanine, taking free-form tryptophan, these are things your body grabs onto it and does something different to it.

That's purely anecdotal, but it's something I just know will come out eventually, the difference in metabolization between those two. But what I essentially try to do in the world of neurotransmitters is first understand that these things are physiologic pathways because like Doug was saying in his awesome analogy, I totally want to steal that in the future, of the way in which you fuel the muscle you can't expect it to perform. Well the way in which you fuel the brain you can't expect it to perform either. Much of the brain, enormous percentage of the brain is made up of healthy fats

and omega-3s. So it's of no mistake there's so much literature demonstrating the effect of omega-3s. So it's of no mistake, there's so much literature demonstrating the effect of omega-3s on life quality, on reducing symptoms of depression, on all kinds of things, because you're actually giving that organ what it's actually made up of. Like if you are breaking down muscle, what are you going to repair it with? Protein. If you are stressed and you are creating a lot of stress within your brain, it is in many ways that type of repairing mechanism. You want to give the body what it means to actually perform and have the turnover rates that it wants to have to perform at a higher level. But this works for neurotransmitters too, like dopamine. Dopamine, we're going to need some L-tyrosine

and tyrosine is going to get converted into L-dopa, and then only if we have enough vitamin B6 can we make dopamine. Now dopamine's that neurotransmitter for motivation, drive, attention span. It's also very connected to reward, but vitamin B6 is a rate-limiting step to making dopamine. So if we're not getting enough vitamin B6,

let alone enough tyrosine, then we are going to have a low amount of dopamine at no fault of your own. It's not like this psychological and emotional thing. It's not like this deep thing we need to meditate and kumbaya about. It is a chemistry problem that is preventing you from making this neurotransmitter that would otherwise improve your lifestyle. Same thing with serotonin. Serotonin's feelings of positivity, high life quality. Serotonin's what actually puts you to sleep as well

as a memory tool for the people listening. Serotonin puts you down, but melatonin keeps you down. These are like, nothing happens for free in physiology. And we actually get that from tryptophan and again vitamin b6 We're gonna have tryptophan it's gonna get converted into 5-htp 5-htp is then gonna need some b6 in order to serotonin and then serotonin is that neurotransmitter that so many psychiatric drugs are built off of but this again Like tryptophan is rich in turkey again like tryptophan is rich in

Turkey for example tryptophan is also really high in cottage cheese Tyrosine high in eggs also high in red meat vitamin b6 foods pistachios Salmon salmon is a very good one for brain health because we're getting a ton of b6 We're also getting a ton of omega-3 for our Like these things, they all come from our diet. So step five, it is step five, but it's also kind of the most fascinating one because it's the one where like, okay, I've already checked all the boxes and I still don't feel optimized.

Well, then this is kind of, this is the world of optimization. This is that last 10%. We can look at neurotransmitter metabolites within the urine. You can actually do a written test. That's actually quite good. If you guys want to learn more about neurotransmitters, there's a book called The Edge Effect by Braverman. And it came out many, many years ago,

but he's a researcher on the brain, and he came up with the Braverman test, which is just a written test for neurotransmitters, which is still quite good, because the world of actually testing neurotransmitters in labs is very tricky. You have to consider a lot of different variables and be a lab analyst that looks at the physiology as a whole rather than just in these segmented parts. But for an analogy that I like to teach people that I use myself is I look at someone like they have a brain soup when they come to me.

And brain soup when they come to me is basically just a combination of GABA, serotonin, acetylcholine, and dopamine. And it's my job to see what ingredients of the soup is not really optimized. So I could do that through a combination of lab testing to see if say they're low serotonin, or I can run them through a Braverman test to see if they are low dopamine or something like that. It's my job to identify their brain soup recipe,

because everybody who comes to you is gonna be different, everybody. So they've got their own special brand of soup. And then it's up to me to see what's high and what's low and then provide a Precursor and just get some feedback on it. Okay. I'm gonna give you a gram of Sineapon waking tell me how you feel. I am I give you you know a gram of tryptophan before bed Tell me how you feel you throw things out there and get feedback based on what happens and if they're feeling way better, you know that you've you've tell me how you feel. You throw things out there and get feedback based on what happens. And if they're feeling way better, you know that you've, you've, um, sharpened their individual

brain soup by solving the chemistry problem that they had in their physiology. I tend to think that most people just think about, they know they've heard of dopamine, they've heard of serotonin, but they tend to just think that you just have these things. You're not constantly creating new dopamine and new serotonin and constantly excreting, breaking down, excreting old dopamine and old serotonin. This constant process of making new and excreting the old is all the more reason to be eating well all the time because you constantly need to be creating new dopamine, new serotonin, new oxytocin or whatever it is. But I don't think most people think about it like that.

No, they don't. These things are manufactured and then metabolized, just like anything else. A lot of people make the same mistake with hormones. They think like, oh, this is just like my testosterone. It floats around in the body and does things. But it binds to receptors and then gets metabolized and it's out of there and it's up to your body to make more testosterone to continue that process. Nothing's free in

physiology. So we need to actually continue, like you said, to eat healthy, but more specifically to your unique brain soup so that we can optimize your physiology, whether it's for sports performance or just for the sport of life. Whatever you want, optimizing brain chemistry through these individual pathways is something that is very powerful, which then it gives one the chemistry they need to offer them the opportunity to change their perspective. And then once their perspective is changed, physiology follows psychology, and we get that beautiful cycle happening all over again.

So this stuff is super, super powerful. And in this world of replacing what you lose every day, I think a lot of people also forget that B6, I don't know how many times I've already mentioned it, it's water-soluble. That needs to be replaced dramatically too because we have no storage depot for it in the body. That needs to be replaced on a very rapid rate as well because fat soluble vitamins are A, D, E, and K. We have storage depots for those. A lot of people in Western society, we've got a little extra body fat on us, we're able to store some extra ADE and KNS, but that water soluble stuff, that's in and out. And that's why when you take a B-flex, your P will look like Vegas neon, because what's

not immediately utilized is immediately discarded. We can't store that. So then that's just got to get replaced over again. So all of this this stuff not just the raw materials of the precursor amino acids But the raw materials of the co-incorporate and coenzymes that aren't storable within physiology You know, we got a wrap here in a few minutes. What's step six? Mix well, we only got a few minutes left. Oh, yeah, it's been a while step six is easy So we'll just a step six is the cofactors and cleansants, vitamins and minerals. So just to be real quick, get on a beat complex and get some magnesium in you. From a high level perspective, that's going to solve a lot of your problems. All right. So that's step number six, nice and

quick. We could dive into all this stuff way deeper in the future, but as like a quick recap for everybody, step one, don't mess with medication and get people the help they need as far as talking to counselors and psychiatrists. Step two, optimize sleep. Step three, optimize blood sugar. Step four, consider their individual context and environment.

Step five, offer the precursors for their brain soup. Step six, give them the coenzymes and cofactors they need to use that brain soup. Fantastic. Dan Garner, where can the people find you? At dangarnernutrition. You can also get your blood work at insidetracker.com slash garner, and you can check out my courses

at coachgarner.com, where I talk about a lot of this cool stuff. Very cool. Doug Larson. You bet. I learned a lot about this in the ultimate nutrition mentorship. So I highly recommend that one.

You can find me on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. Make sure you go hang out with Mash at mashleapperformance.com as well. I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. And make sure you get over to areatelab.com. That is the signature program inside rapid health optimization

where you can go and experience all the lab lifestyle performance, testing, analysis, and coaching to help you optimize your health and performance. And you can access all of that over at areatelab.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.