Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How Changing Your Lifestyle Can Fix Your Mental Health & Why Depression and Anxiety Are Not Disorders with David Bidler #408

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

“It’s not that exercise is an antidepressant, it’s that not exercising is a depressant.” So says this week’s guest – and he’s redefining youth mental health education for the 21st century in line with this powerful belief. David Bidler is a social entrepreneur dedicated to reinventing education for the 21st century. In 2019, he founded Physiology First University a non-profit education centre, which teaches the latest science of the brain and body by offering classes - in neuroscience, exercise physiology, sauna and cold exposure, to all ages but with a particular focus on teenagers and adolescents.   David’s core belief is that if we could teach all the kids around the world the fundamental skills of breathing, nutrition, movement and rest, as a priority over the current education system, we could see a huge change to the rates of poor mental health.   He believes that we’re often doing young people a disservice by labelling them with mental health disorders, instead of looking at their lifestyles and giving them the tools to feel better. His facility teaches students about anxiety by helping them experience it in a controlled setting, so they know exactly what the fight-or-flight response feels like. They increase their own heart rate, through exercise and then lower it, through breathing techniques. And so, because they know what anxiety feels like, they can ‘reclaim’ agency over their anxiety, by realising it’s not a loss of control and by learning - through first-hand experience - how they can navigate their own nervous systems to effectively manage it.   David’s goal is to put Physiology First campuses all across the globe - he wants to create a healthy alternative to the current educational system - one that integrates an academic curriculum alongside a health one.    This is a fascinating conversation that will give you a fresh understanding of your own physiology. Ever since I came across David on Instagram, I have been inspired by his work and what he is trying to do. He is a passionate individual, trying his best to make the world a better place. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://vivobarefoot.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/408 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What are the physical prerequisites for mental health to even be possible? If a young person is diagnosed with a mental health disorder, are their metabolic needs being met? Are their sleep needs being met? Are their exercise needs being met? Are their nutritional needs being met? Because if those needs aren't met, then the response of anxiety and depression,

that's not a disorder, that's order. We're seeing this chronic, numbing overstimulation. A generation of young people who are culturally exhausted, malnourished, sedentary at an increased rate. We're in a digital carnival. If these are natural responses

to an increasingly unnatural environment, then what you will do is pathologize kids for actually exhibiting these urges for health. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. It's not that exercise is an antidepressant, it's that not exercising is a depressant. Those are the words of this week's

guest, someone who, in my opinion, is redefining mental health education in line with this powerful belief. David Bidler is a social entrepreneur dedicated to reinventing education for the 21st century. In 2019, he founded Physiology First University, a non-profit education centre which teaches the latest science of the brain and body by offering classes in neuroscience, exercise physiology, sauna and cold exposure to all ages, but with a particular focus on teenagers and adolescents. David's core belief is that if we could teach all the kids around the world the fundamental skills of breathing, nutrition, movement, and rest as a priority, we would immediately make a huge impact on rates of poor mental health. He believes that we're often doing young people a

disservice by labeling them with mental health disorders instead of looking at their lifestyles and giving them the tools that they need to feel better. For example, his facility teaches students about anxiety by helping them experience it in a controlled setting, so they know exactly what the fight or flight response feels like. They increase their own heart rate through exercise, and then lower it through breathing techniques. And so, because they know what it feels like, they can reclaim agency over their anxiety by realizing it's not a loss of control, and by learning through first-hand experience how they can navigate their own nervous systems to effectively manage it. How empowering does that sound? David's goal is to put physiology

first campuses all across the globe. He wants to create a healthy alternative to the current educational system, one that integrates an academic curriculum alongside a health one. This really is a fascinating conversation that I'm certain will give you a fresh understanding of your own physiology. Ever since I came across David on Instagram, I've been inspired by his work and what he is trying to do. He's a passionate individual, trying his best to make the world a better place. I hope you enjoy listening. Why should a parent or somebody who is considering becoming a parent care about the topic we're about to

discuss? Well, you know, Rangan, we have a mental health crisis in the US, in the UK, all across the globe. Yet mental health is a term from 1908 and it's 2023. So if we are calling natural physical responses, natural physiological responses to a very unnatural environment, a psychiatric disorder, we're going to have a very hard time solving the problem of increasing anxiety and depression among youth. When the term mental health was coined, we couldn't look at physiology first. We couldn't look at your sleep quality, your exercise levels, your nutrition quality. We didn't have these tools in the wheelhouse. Now we do. So if we're going to look at a generation of young people who are culturally exhausted, malnourished, sedentary at an increased rate,

and we're going to talk about the natural response to lifestyle and behavior as a mental health disorder, we're not going to be able to solve this problem proactively. But if we can look at physiology first and give these kids skills and tools, and we can build skills and tools to improve our brain and body health, I think we're going to have a very new conversation that's rooted in physiology and not this more abstract concept of mental health. Ultimately, we need to ask, what are the physical prerequisites for mental health. Ultimately, we need to ask what are the physical prerequisites for mental health to even be possible? So much there, David, to cover.

We're constantly being told that there's a mental health epidemic. Right. And we could cite all kinds of research about the statistics in adults, but also in children. And I think one of the things that really has attracted me to your work and the incredible work and education you're providing to students and children is that ultimately a lot of these things that we call mental health problems are really just symptoms that are

downstream of improper physical health. I think that that's becoming more glaringly obvious. You just nailed it. So why do we have this problem? Well, I think that what we have is a sort of jurisdiction problem among practitioners, right? If a young person is diagnosed with a mental health disorder, regardless of whether that so-called disorder is rooted in their physical health, they are guided towards practitioners who may not have the background in physiology necessary to say, are sleep needs being met? Are their exercise needs being met? Are there exercise needs being met? Are there nutritional needs being met? Are there metabolic needs being met? Because if those needs aren't met,

then the response of anxiety and depression, that's not a disorder, that's order. That is the alarm system of the human body saying, act, step back into your power. You can take your health back. And what we always say, Rangan, is if there's a smoke alarm on the wall here and there's actually a fire, we do not want to rip the alarm off the wall. If anxiety and depression is an alarm system to put us back to a position of optimal health

and we don't listen to it, or if we act as if it somehow shouldn't be going off, you're going to pathologize a generation of kids who, again, they don't need pathology. They need physical education that empowers and engages and actually excites them. And if we can do that, I think we can actually solve the problem, Rangan. I think we can solve the problem

of declining health among youth by simply putting health at the foundation of the learning process. Some of what you are saying is reminding me of previous chats I've had with Dr. Gabor Mate, trauma expert, addiction expert, and he will often talk about the fact that the way many of us feel is an appropriate response to an inappropriate environment, a natural response to a dysfunctional environment. You just nailed it.

And that's essentially at the heart of physiology first. What we're asking is if these are normal responses, natural responses to an increasingly unnatural environment, then what you will do is pathologize kids for actually exhibiting these urges for health. How should it feel when you're sleeping three hours a night? How should it feel if you haven't exercised in a month? How should it feel if you're living on monster energy drinks and Red Bulls and caffeine? Well, anxious, and that's order physiologically.

Maybe a bias towards depression, and that's order physiologically. And I can tell you Rangan from working with so many youth, when you call that response a disorder, you do them a disservice. You put a sort of a label on them and you act as if it's unnatural to feel unhealthy when your health needs aren't being met. Yeah. Look, I mean, so much there for me, this idea of labeling children, labeling adults, frankly, is something that I've always been slightly uncomfortable with throughout my career as a doctor. I get that people want a diagnosis because they're feeling a certain way. They feel out of control. They don't know what's causing things in their body. they feel out of control they don't know what's causing things in their body and so yes going to see a healthcare professional and being told that oh yeah you've got anxiety oh you've got depression or whatever it might be I can see why on one level it could potentially

be helpful but the downside with labeling people in my view, and this has been my experience as a clinician for over two decades now, the downside is that we disempower individuals, we disempower children, we disempower patients because they feel that this is something that I've got now. I'll carry it around with me for my life without realizing that, wait a minute, maybe you're exhibiting certain symptoms at the moment, but why don't we teach you what you might be able to change in your life that will lead to different symptoms perhaps? Well, 100% wrong. And the fact that we're using the word disorder is a fundamental problem. Because again, we have to ask, what is the natural order of the body? How should I feel if I'm exhausted? How

should I feel if I'm not moving? When you tell a young person at 14 that they have a disorder, I've seen that really have a damaging effect on young people because they can't figure out, are these responses appropriate? If they're appropriate, that's not a disorder. We can talk about why that language exists. We can talk about the history of the mental health industry, which is being disrupted right now in the most positive and optimistic way. I think everybody in this movement, I think we're having a revolution in evolution. We really are, Ankit. We are learning more about the brain and body than we ever have. And I think everybody in this movement wants to see a healthier future. They want to see kids thrive. But we have to be able to sort of dive into some of the different

business elements here, the different models, and understand why such an unintegrated approach to health is creating a lack of communication between practitioners. And it's creating a generation that are becoming fundamentally strangers to their own physiology. If I were to drink a lot of caffeine and feel overstimulated, I would feel what is being labeled anxiety. Not a disorder, just physiology. If I were to miss sleep all night, I would feel a bias towards depression,

lethargy, a lack of cognitive clarity. Not a disorder, it's physiology. And when you use the word disorder to pathologize normal physiology, not only does it confuse a generation of kids terribly and makes them think that there's something wrong with them, but then what is the proactive path that you've given them to optimize around their actual health? Because they don't realize that that root cause, the root cause, is in their physiology. Let's talk about anxiety. It's come up a couple of times,

right? And anxiety rates, if we're to believe the statistics, are exploding. And yesterday, I spent the day researching you, David. I went through pretty much all of your posts on Instagram, which are fantastic and very, very educational. Anxiety comes up a lot and you have a very novel way of teaching children and teenagers about anxiety. So perhaps we could start there. How do you see anxiety and how do you teach your students to manage it better? Well, I'll give you an example. I've presented to hundreds of students of all different ages and I've asked them, who here thinks that anxiety is a big problem? All hands go up every single time. So, okay, who here can define anxiety? And there's almost this universal quiet in the room. We have this big problem, this global

healthcare crisis of anxiety. When you ask someone to define it, they often can't figure out how they're even thinking about a term that's now very culturally loaded. When anxiety means everything and anything, it means worry, worry about actual issues in my life. It also means stimulation of the autonomic nervous system beyond what allows us to feel homeostasis or resonance. Over-caffeination does that. Over-stimulation does that. Technology does that. Then we really are having a very abstract conversation around a very, very tangible response in the human body. The way that we teach this to young people is we say,

who wants some anxiety? Who wants to get some? Because if you get some, you can learn how to train it up, right? You're not waiting for it to happen to you. Who wants to step into the arena here and learn anxiety management through your physiology and build a skillset now so that when you need the skillset, you have it. Kids are like, yeah, give me some anxiety.

Now you have young people saying, give me some anxiety. Now you understand, they can understand. Anxiety is something that you can bring on yourself, something you can engage with proactively, something you can experience. It doesn't just happen to you. And something that you can build a proactive skill set to manage. So what we do is now they've admitted, I want some anxiety. I want a skill set and we'll put them on a Airdyne bike. It's old school fan bikes. Okay. It's just an indoor exercise bike. Yeah, just indoor exercise bike.

We'll throw them on a bike. And often it's important to realize that the set and the scenario has already been created. They're hanging out there with their friends because access to our campus is always free for teens. They've often, we've allowed them to pick their own music. We say, hey, who's going to DJ this place? Here's the Bluetooth, you know, go for it. Right. So now their music is on and they're with their friends.

And now they're walking into an arena to experience anxiety on purpose. Okay. And, and, and there is nothing about this environment that is clinical because when we only teach these concepts in clinical environments, I feel like it, it creates a clinical framework for our health. Our health is, should be a 24 seven exploration of our potential. And so all these things are going on. They're in an environment they think is cool. They're with their friends. They're on an air bike. They're about to get some anxiety.

And I'll say, okay, I want you to just bike at an easy pace for one minute and breathing only through your nose. Now we're actually warming up the pulmonary system, which is kind of cool, but we're also getting them ready to execute on a series of exercises. And you can watch them getting more engaged by the process. They're already barefoot because we don't wear shoes in the gym.

They're feeling how their body works, right? Then I'll say, okay, after a minute, what I want you to do is that we're going to start to practice some breathing exercises on this bike. Can you breathe to a five-second inhalation and a five-second exhalation? And go as fast as you can, keeping those two rules in mind, breathing through my nose and breathing to a count. All of a sudden the bike slows down. You see their eyes engage, right? They're feeling CO2 levels rise in the body. They're feeling what anxiety feels like and they're initiating it themselves. After they've done this for a minute,

I'll say, okay, what if we change the count a little bit? What if I breathe to a five second inhale, but I exhale for 10 seconds. Now you really see the body come alive. You see the person realizing like, wait a minute, this feels this. I feel anxious, but I'm laughing and I'm having fun with my friends and there's music on. And when you, by the time they come off the bike, I'll say, how did that feel? Oh God, what did it feel like? Well, it felt like anxiety. Okay. Well, anxiety is a physical response to the body and you can build a skillset around managing that response. You just brought it on yourself. Let's talk about how to get out of the anxiety response. We'll show them a different breathing exercise. And often we'll even have them wear a heart rate monitor. And I'll ask them who here can lower can raise your heart rate on command? I'll show you how to do that in one minute. We show them how to get the

heart rate up and lower the heart rate. And they're learning how to explore their physiology with agency. And I think what it does in the first session is it debunks this idea that anxiety is a disorder, that anxiety means anything and everything. Because worry and anxiety are not the same thing. One is a physiological response of the body. The other is a process of the mind. And when we meld those two things together, we have a very hard time separating the necessary skill sets to help young people understand the origins of anxiety at a physiological level. It's interesting that we can read about stuff. We can read hundreds of books. We can listen to

thousands of podcasts. But until you go and experience this stuff for yourself, nothing really changes. And what you just described there was really quite wonderful where you're taking a term that all of these children and teens have heard before, and maybe some have been diagnosed before, maybe some are scared of the term. And in a supportive environment, you've helped them experience what that feels like. And you've shown them how you can amplify it, how you can reduce it. Because something we forget is that, you know, let's say someone was about to attack you on the street, right? To feel anxious in that moment is completely normal. It's not a disorder, right? In fact, did I not read something yesterday that a gun was pulled on you when you were 15 years old? Is that right?

I did. I've had a gun pulled on me more than once in my life. I grew up in the streets of New Jersey. And the way that my body responded to that scenario was very instinctual and very intuitive. I slowed my breathing. have taught me breathing exercises at that point, I have become kind of equipped with this physiological skill set, right? For high stress situations, survival situations. I think in today's world, we've become disconnected from the skill set. But to your question, I sort of knew what to do in that instance. And if I was not in tune to my body to some degree, and if I didn't take control of my physiology through breathing, what if I just jumped at the person? What if I had no state control skills built in? I could have been shot. And so these things really do matter in the life or death, in the crux moments in life. And if we can train the skills outside of high consequence environments, that's what our campus is. It's a place to train skills. The consequence is low. You have fun, you learn.

But when something like that happens, now you're giving kids what could potentially be a life or death skill set in scenarios that are out of their control. Okay, David. So at the age of 15, you have a gun pulled on you. Okay. So the way I was brought up in the nice middle-class suburb where I grew up, that didn't happen to me, right? Now, I imagine if that did happen to me, I would feel scared. I would feel anxious. My heart rate would start to go up. I'd start to have a really,

really narrow focus. You know, the stress response basically would have kicked in. Now, I don't know what would happen today if that happened to me, because I do feel I know how to regulate my internal state. I do lots of work on this, have done for many years. But if it happened when I was 15 or 20, I imagine I wouldn't have known what to do. You're saying that without any training at all, you instinctively knew what to do. Why? I think that that's true for many of us, and we just don't realize it. I can ask the audience, when's the last time you've been in a life or death situation? And the ones that we seem to talk about often are culturally potential car accidents, where people say time slowed down.

I took the wheel. I did the right thing. I made the right set of maneuvers, complicated maneuvers. If you've ever done anything like mountain running or mountaineering, you're sliding on ice. We have an innate skill set within us. It seems like we really, really, really are equipped for the life and death. It seems like we really, really, really are equipped for the life and death.

What we're not equipped for is the chronic, everyday, all day, ongoing inundation of stress and anxiety. I think that's what's catching up to us culturally. If someone pulled a gun on me today, I would know what to do, I think, intuitively again. But if I spent the next month, again, just banging back an exorbitant amount of caffeine, not sleeping, not moving, and taking in so much stimulation, we're in a digital carnival. My body doesn't know what to do with that. Yeah. We talk a lot about acute stress is something we can handle super well. You know, we are wired to do so.

It's the chronic, unrelenting stress that happens day in, day out that's the problem for our physical health, for our mental well-being. And that's really what you're speaking to, isn't it? In those kind of extreme situations, yeah, you really should get anxious. You maybe need to learn how to calm yourself down, but you probably would do that naturally. But we don't realise that the minute we wake up and we start getting this constant stream of noise from our phones and social media and a feeling that we're not good enough and that other people are doing more than us, then we sort of are having caffeine and sugar and energy drinks or whatever it might be. We don't quite yet realize, I don't think children and teenagers, but frankly, I would say adults as well, don't realize the impact that is having on our physiology. understand that. And I think that the interesting thing is that we come with instinct. We have instinct, but we can't domesticate the instinct away. If you look at any animal in the animal kingdom and you put it in a life or death fight scenario, you're going to see the instinct and

the will come out of the animal. It knows how to defend itself. And even a domesticated animal will do that. But the more removed from those instinctual necessities, we don't hunt for our own food. I don't. I don't have to fight for my dinner every night. The more that we get removed from these instinctual necessities, the more that we sort of can become domesticated and numb to our physiology. That's what we're seeing happen with young people. We're not seeing them being put in life or death situations every day, and that's what we're seeing happen with young people. We're not seeing them being put in life or death situations every day. And that's why they're anxious. We're seeing this chronic numbing overstimulation, maybe even a removal of some of those life or death situations

that are part of our evolutionary past. Those moments where you had to be peak on or else. And I think we really need to not only provide the education, but we need to inspire a generation to be stepping back into higher risk environments. Because that's how we actually reclaim our instinctual capacity to deal with risk, to survive. Do you mean higher risk environments in a controlled manner? Higher risk environments in a controlled manner to prepare for the moments when high risk

environments are out of our control. Yeah. So you keep talking about this campus. are out of our control. Yeah. So you keep talking about this campus. What is this campus? What goes on there? And how do you manage to get children and teenagers coming in voluntarily to learn all these incredible lessons

about their physiology? Well, you know, the cool thing is you almost can't keep them away. And I really want to highlight that. If you build cool things, kids will come. I don't think that we have an education, an information problem right now. Like there is so much health information

that you and I and the audience can Google or YouTube. It is overwhelming. I think that we have an infrastructure problem. Where can a young person walk into in their community and find that learning about your health and fitness is the coolest thing going on in town. If we can make that reality happen and we can make it happen at scale, we can make that happen. We can put these in communities around the globe. You're suddenly creating an

environment that feels like, I think, when we were kids and we found something that nobody knew about. You find a little record shop, you know, and you walk downstairs and you go, oh, this place is cool. It doesn't feel clinical as far as the opposite of clinical. It's really exciting. Or you find a little, a cool little bookstore, whatever it might be, a hangout. We're at an age right now where health is becoming the counterculture. And we should talk about that because health is becoming the counterculture. And what are young people like?

Countercultural things. They're born rebels. That's cool. So they come into this place where the adults are training their body and mind every day, where they're invited into that process with a lot of mutuality, a lot of responsibility,

a lot of respect, and a lot of agency. And I can share a few stories as the conversation goes on of agency there. But the campus that we built for these kids to come to for free is a working model of a new approach to education that lives at the convergence of health, fitness, and education. Where is it? It's in Freeport, Maine is our flagship campus.

So if I was just to be transported there now and be inside, what would I see? Would it feel like a gym? Right now, there's probably a lot going on at the campus. And I'm proud of that because it's a place that runs very well without me. When you give people agency and access, everybody there has a key. I bet you there's something cool going on right now. I bet you actually right now there are probably two 84-year-olds by the name of Ed and Jan, who I've been working with for about a decade. They're probably throwing medicine balls and they're probably doing deadlifts and they're probably doing squats with each other. Later on today, there will definitely be a group of 14 year olds coming in, maybe to ice bath or to sauna or to design their own strength and conditioning programs based on

what we've already taught them or to simply sit and read. And on a normal day that I was there, you would see everything from metabolic assessments to VO2 max testing, to us building strength and conditioning programs for athletes, and more importantly, building strength and conditioning programs for the sport of life

with this intergenerational community that's united around their own health, the health of one another, and ultimately the health of our larger community in general. around their own health, the health of one another, and ultimately the health of our larger community in general. From what you described, help me understand what the difference is between this campus and a regular gym. You know, the purpose of our campus is learning. Learning. Okay, so gross generalization, but I imagine most people would say a gym is somewhere we go, often reluctantly, to get fit, to burn off calories every class. And what I try to do in every class is share one critical skill. And then we put the skill into motion

and movement. But I'll often ask people, especially when new people come, I'll say, why do you come to this place? Why are you here? It's nice to be reminded of that. Why are we all here? What are we doing? And one of the biggest things I hear is, ah, because I don't like gyms. I don't like how they make me feel. I don't like that I'm, I don't like the cultural associations with the way that the traditional fitness industry has approached health. Health is about the brain first. It's about the spirit. It's about the learning process. It's about reclaiming a relationship to our body. It's about learning together in community, at least in our view. And so everything is experiential learning. Everything is rooted in

principles that we can have a conversation about. Because if I rooted them in a methodology, now we're incredibly limited. We're limited by my methodology and my scope. Now there's not room for you to ask critical questions. Why are we doing this this way? What might be a better way? Also, this approach doesn't actually make me feel amazing, and I just haven't said anything because I like the community. I actually feel like I'm getting my teeth kicked in every time I come here, but I'm coming back for friendship and for community. Or I feel completely isolated in this place and judged. And this isn't to critique other models. It's to say that I think the future of fitness is learning about our

physiology first. And when you do that, man, the most exciting conversations come up. The most in-depth learning experience happens collectively. And then what you find are people start to say to you, you know where I used these skills? I had a really stressful conversation with my partner, but I was able to take control of my state. I was giving a presentation at school and I felt my heart rate racing, but I was able to take control of my physiology. That's where the training I think evolves from the sport of fitness to the sport of life. This idea of taking control of our state is something I love, this idea of taking control of our state is something I love, but I believe that some people won't fully understand what that means. What do you mean when you say control our internal state?

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limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Well, I think I'll give an example for the audience. I always ask people, can you wiggle your ears? I see you trying right now. I was trying on my jaws. So, you know, I ask people, can you wiggle your ears? Can you do yours? Oh yeah, you can. So, you know, can you wiggle your ears is a fun question because it

for one inevitably like 10 or 20 of the people in a given group will be able to and the rest will just kind of move their jaw yeah it's a fun question but but it asks it begs a deeper question it's like okay so you appoint to the person who could do it you have access to that dial you can turn that dial your physiology you can wiggle your ears right maybe not that important a skill but you know how to do it. And ultimately, we can teach more people how to access that dial. Well, who here can lower their heart rate? Now we start to get to something maybe a little less novel. Maybe one or two people can. They can use a breathing exercise to lower their heart rate from whatever it is to lower. It's like, oh, that's interesting.

You can turn that dial. Well, there are so many dials within our body. And when you can turn those dials of your physiology, when you can take control of your mental focus, your clarity, your cognition, your energy levels, that's what I mean by learning to control your state. It's seeing the dials that may appear invisible until you begin to explore through training how much you're capable of. So let's bring it back to anxiety. Okay. So, and the reason I want to focus here for a short while is because it is that common and we hear that term constantly being used. It's funny. I spoke to a neuroscientist, Wendy Suzuki, maybe six or nine months ago or so on the show. And I think in her latest book, she talks about anxiety as a

superpower. You know, basically, I think quite a similar ethos, which is anxiety is there for a reason. Everything is, everything in physiology is. It didn't just happen. And we need to understand the reason. And I guess you're helping children and teenagers understand to experience that. So let's go back to that bike. So you've got them on the bike. You're teaching them about nasal breathing. I know sometimes you get them to sprint maybe whilst holding their breath. Yeah, we'll practice a lot of different things that will put the nervous system in a very sympathetic environment. Sympathetic meaning ramped up. Ramped up. If we think about the nervous system having a parasympathetic element and a sympathetic

element, we love rhymes, right? So we think about rest and digest for the parasympathetic, and we think of fight or flight for the sympathetic. So you're amping up their nervous system with a variety of different methods. Absolutely. To get that fight or flight response going in their body, which might feel uncomfortable, but then you're teaching them how to come out of it as well. That's where the magic has to happen because it's almost like every fitness environment will do that. It'll put you in an uncomfortable environment. Discomfort is necessary for adaptation, right?

But without giving people the skills and tools to enter and exit those environments. Otherwise, I'm the puppet master. I'm ultimately controlling your physiology. I say, warm up. I say, do this. I say, do that. I want you to show me that you can design the warmup, that you can execute the challenge that helps you adapt, and that you can exit the environment and go home and go to sleep, get a great night's rest. I mean, it sounds like you're giving kids a lot of responsibility. There's a lot. Which is, I think, a really great thing. But do you ever have a scenario whereby, let's say there's a 14-year-old teenage girl and you put her on the bike and you've got her to experience this feeling of anxiety. Does it ever happen where they go, I don't like that feeling. I don't know how to get out of it. No, you know, the interesting thing is it hasn't because we won't do that without

preparing them with an entrance and an exit. And so I think that preparation is so important. And we've had kids come from multiple different school districts. Kids, we've had kids come. I can't highlight the role of coming to a place like this volitionally, but we've had kids come in a scenario that was not volitional. The school made them come.

We've had more kids than I can count in this place. And if they understand, it shouldn't feel comfortable. Discomfort shouldn't feel comfortable. People sometimes ask, they go, what if these exercises make kids uncomfortable? Well, then good, because you can't grow without discomfort. The difference is that they're expecting a volitional engagement with discomfort

and a skill set to practice. So because we've given them a strategy to increase their heart rate gradually, instead of taking it from 60 beats a minute to 160, which so often happens in traditional sport, the poor young person is like now almost immediately in this anxious state where they're not operating with great agency.

It's like they're being thrown into the game. And then, oh, afterwards, it just ends on the spot and they're given no strategy to come back to their homework or their nightly routine because we've prepared them. What we've built, and I can't illustrate the value of this enough, is trust.

We've built trust. We've said, I'm not going to throw you in this environment unprepared. I want you to talk me through it. I want to know what you're feeling. I want us to explore, but I'm going to prepare you. And that level of trust is critical

for the learning process. So let's say that 14 year old is feeling anxious because of what they have just done on the bike. Now you've prepared them. What are some of those tools? For example, if someone's listening to this, who thinks, okay, well, I kind of often feel anxious or my daughter or my son often does. Are you able to share some of the tools that you teach them that can help bring them out of that state? Well, first it begins with the reframing. I'll ask them the same question that we asked, you know, who here thinks anxiety is a big problem? Okay. Who can define it?

Then we'll look a little bit about into the physiology of the anxiety. And Dr. Andrew Huberman did this great job. I was out at his lab years ago and working in this VR environment that he'd created. Virtual reality. Yeah, virtual reality environment. In this virtual reality environment, and we often show this video to the kids before we've even done this work. In the virtual reality environment, I'm facing these different physiological stressors, VR scenarios. So for example, there's a virtual attack dog and it starts to get gradually more aggressive and then it attacks. So you've got a headset on. I have a headset on. But you believe that there's a dog trying to attack you.

The interesting thing about VR is that you, it's like you believe both things at once because you know that you're at Stanford University. I know that I'm not in a junkyard with a pit bull, but yeah, the brain really can't tell the difference, especially in depth perception. In the sense that, okay, something's happening here. This animal is getting more aggressive. It's growling. Something's going to happen. And it's the anticipatory physiological response. Something's going to happen. I don't know what it is. I mean, you're wired up. Heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen, everything. So you're seeing, well,

they're monitoring what's happening. Yes, so they're monitoring what's happening. They're looking at my heart rate, my respiratory rate. They're looking at pupil dilation. They're watching the stress response. They're watching the anxiety response and the fear response.

And then I'll show this video to the students. And I'll say, what do you think is happening in my body during this scenario? Which is a safe scenario, by the way. I know I'm in virtual reality. I know this dog can't hurt me, but my body's responding as though it will. And then I'll give another example. I like to give this one to kids because it really relates to their school life. I'll say in another example, I'm playing this game. It's a digital sort of set of blocks. And as you click one block, the block next to it dissipates.

Think of like a Tetris style game. And it's testing my accuracy, by the way. What's my accuracy at performing this task? All of a sudden the wall disappears and I feel this cold air at my back. So I turn around and the board is now on the other wall, but there's a very narrow bridge separating me from the game. And below it is a city street hundreds of feet below me. So I have to traverse this narrow bridge.

Now they're monitoring my stress, my anxiety, my fear. And the question becomes when I get to the other side, is my accuracy compromised? Because that's all of life. That's every kid walking down a hallway right now who just got the Instagram DM from a friend that did something not kind or we could talk about the role of social media

on youth mental health, right? But they've been exposed to stressors that fundamentally challenge them and put them in a state of sympathetic nervous system dominance. Then they walk in to take a test and they go, I studied all night and didn't sleep. And I bombed on the test.

This is a spiral of unpreparedness. It's not a critique. It's an opportunity. So to answer your question, if the framework is that anxiety is a natural physiological response of the body for the sake of preparedness, and if that's happening 24 seven

due to overstimulation and lifestyle, I have to address those factors first. But if we have that framework, then we can ask, okay, how do we practice anxiety? So I'm gonna put you on this bike. Where is your heart rate right now? It's a very cool question because it gives you as a coach or parent or educator

an insight into somebody's level of, you can call it introspective or interoceptive sensitivity. Some kids will say, my heart rate's probably in the 80s right now, and they're right. Some will say, I have no idea. I'm very disconnected from my body. They won't say that, but they are.

Okay, well, what heart rate do we want to maybe enter this exercise setting at? Maybe a little bit higher. Well, how do we actually elevate our heart rate? Maybe what I'll have them do is I'll say, I want you to take an inhalation, your nose, an exhalation through your nose. And now without breathing again, I just want you to jog back and forth across the room. Now they'll come back. Their heart rate's elevated a little bit. They just did a slight jog on a breath hold. What I'd like to do now is I'll take a pulse oximeter. This measures blood oxygen.

And I'll say to the group, let's do the exercise again. Let's measure this person's blood oxygen levels. So their blood oxygen levels are at 98%. Their blood is packed with oxygen. Do you all think that as this person runs back and forth, that they're going to run out of oxygen? Will it lower the blood oxygen level? Some students, they think it will. Some say that they're going to run out of oxygen? Will it lower the blood oxygen level? Some students, they think it will. Some say that they think it won't. I'll say,

do you think it'll lower or increase the heart rate to run with no breath? They all understand that it will probably increase the heart rate. Well, we do it. Heart rate's increased. Blood oxygen is exactly the same. Now I'll say, okay, I want you to do it again, but I want you to run across the room twice. And what I'll do is I'll show them how hard it is to run out of oxygen. And when they understand that that feeling of anxiety, that sensation, that breathlessness isn't me running out of oxygen, it's me running into rising CO2 levels in my body. By the time that they practice that in exercise, and I could share 50 ways beyond a bike that you can do that, they're engaged in this very, very in-depth physical learning process because no

one's ever taught them how breathing works. I imagine it's fun for kids. It's massively fun. I can't tell you how much fun, Rangit. There's music bumping. Kids are doing jump rope and jumping jacks, and we have a free class called Student Strong that kids come to every day. they're learning this skillset, this anxiety management skillset, this stress management skillset, and even a depression management skillset. Because fundamentally, regular exercise is a critical driver

for us not to be in a state of depression. It's not just regular exercise though, is it? You know, you did a brilliant post on Instagram recently. It's not that exercise is an antidepressant, it's that not exercising is a depressant, which I loved. We have to put that narrative back out there. We have to ask what is our natural state? Is it to be sedentary and exhausted and depressed? Well, then I need an antidepressant. No, our natural state is to feel alive and engaged and powerful. And when young people come into our center, I think the big driver to your point of how is it different than just exercise,

what they tend to comment on is the level of energy of the people around them. People are lit up all day long. It's a very motivating environment. But what is different about it being just exercise? I mean, exercise is incredible, right? So let's say the whole youth population of the world became more active. It's highly likely that anxiety and depression rates would go down. Without a shadow of a doubt. Just from that. Just from that.

But you guys are adding on an educational component to that, which it goes beyond just exercise, right? Education is agency. Education is physical and physiological agency. And without that, you're simply, you're training the mechanism, but you're not giving people mastery of the mechanism. So let's say, I'm guessing that some people who come are already pretty sporty. So maybe they are in a school team or a college team and they play basketball or football or soccer, whatever it might be, right? So they know how to sprint. They know how to throw a ball. Well, not necessarily. To be honest, that skill component has often been so underdeveloped or completely ignored.

I'll give an example. I'll ask young people, I'll get a lot of runners in, okay? And I'll ask them, everybody, show me your boxing pose. Like if you were a boxer, what are you going to do? Everybody puts up two fists and takes one step back. And I'll say, show me your baseball batting pose. Everybody puts one foot back and they hold an imaginary bat. I'll say, show me your running pose. and they've never even been taught to think about the biomechanics of running there's not a universal thing that they do they just look at you like you have uh three heads and so the skill component there's a way to break down running there's a way to break down weight lifting and i think the greatest driver the biggest skill that I can share with anybody is rejecting cynicism and

embracing deep curiosity around every element of the skill development process. Because when you do that, I've had adults say to me early in my career as a running coach when I was coaching running, I've been running for 40 years. You think I don't know how to do it? No, I think I can do everything that I currently do better. I think that I can embrace the learning curve, be humble and build skills. And so when you can get young people to think breathing is a skill, walking is a skill, skate, running is a skill, sleeping is a skill, nutrition is a skill. Now you're not saying you should be healthier. You're saying you could be unstoppable. Yeah. It's not this that you're running or you're not running. It's how are you running? What's your heart rate? What's your

breathing rate? How does it feel at gear one? How does it feel at gear two? How does it feel when you're sprinting? How does it feel when you're sprinting and you're holding your breath, which I saw you do sometimes on your Instagram page? Well, it's time. We love to do that. So what happens then is that you're experiencing this full range, right? Rather than just black or white on or off. Yeah. And critically, fundamentally at the foundation is the question of why are we doing this? Why are we doing this?

I care very little about sports performance. It's the least important part of this process. Getting a kid to, I don't know, win a trophy or to put their health in the box of sport instead of the box of self-development is not what we're doing. Now, all of these things will inevitably make them powerful athletes, like powerful, unstoppable athletes. So it's a secondary benefit. But at the end of the day, the framework of why are we learning about our physiology? Well, because you'll be a powerful animal.

You will be an unstoppable human being. You will have a skill set to thrive in a very demanding environment. And why is that important? Is it because achievement and success is everything? No, it's because you have personal goals and they mean a lot to you. I don't know what they are yet, or maybe I do. But if you think that meeting your deepest goals is easy, think again. Everyone would just meet them. You're going to go through hell. You're going to run into barriers and barricades on the path to your goal achievement. And this is the skill set that will help you traverse that terrain. That's why we're doing this. And now the framework has suddenly shifted fundamentally to self-empowerment and goal-directed behavior based on their goals, not mine. And that I think is where the magic happens.

Why do you use cold plunge and saunas to help kids with anxiety? Well, it's an immediate teacher. It's an immediate teacher. When we have schools come, one of the first things we'll do is put them in a cold plunge and a sauna. And let me rephrase that because we don't put them in anything. You know, grab them by the scruff of the neck here and throw them in. We invite them to explore. But what we do first is we show them some of the science behind this. And I'll give an example. I asked a group of students recently, I said, who here has heard of the Adderall shortage? There's a shortage of the stimulant drug Adderall,

which has been prescribed massively for young people to treat ADHD, which we could talk about forever. They had heard of it. You could see a kind of subtle awareness of that they were deeply familiar that there was an Adderall shortage. I said, who here knows what Adderall does? They probably hadn't thought of it. I'm like, it's not a magic bean or something, right? It's triggering specific neurochemicals. That's what

does. I said, well, the ice bath does the exact same thing. And I showed them the comparison in the brain chemistry and the mechanism, the mechanism behind the medicine, right? I said, so there's not a shortage of those neurochemicals. There's a lack of understanding of how to master the mechanism and access it yourself for free. So when you go in that ice bath, I want you to tell me how focused, I want you to, I'm very careful about not framing the outcome.

I won't say, tell me how focused you feel. I'll say, I want you to tell me how you feel. When you go to that sauna, I want you to tell me how you feel. And I want to ask you all, are any of you right now prepared with a skillset to go into either the ice bath or the sauna? They're like, no. So do you think we should build one?

Yeah, let's do that. And then I'll prepare them to enter those environments with agency. And a story I'd love to share is I had a group of kids recently. This is great. This is a couple of weeks ago. They'd come from school on a big bus

and they walked in and man, they were dejected. They were heads down. They hadn't been here before. This is their first time this year. Were they told they had to come? Well, no, no, no. The interesting thing is they signed up for a class around brain science and human performance run by one of our board of directors, Ian Ramsey, who, no, no. The interesting thing is they signed up for a class around brain science

and human performance run by one of our board of directors, Ian Ramsey, who's an incredible educator. They wanted experiences like this. I don't think what they wanted was the five hours prior of sitting in a chair doing these sort of rote memorization drills. Now, these kids are brilliant and they were exhausted by the midpoint of the day from school. From school. From school. And they came in. I mean, man, if you want to look at what you would, if the audience could think of a caricature of a bunch of exhausted, depressed, depressed in the sense that their heads are down, their eyes are lifeless, they're not engaged with their day.

They came in, they barely said hi. And I said, whoa, I said, where have you been all day? They were like, school. I was like, well, this might be the opposite of that. Cause we're going to be awake. We're going to be present with each other. We're going to have a lot of fun. Like we're going to, we're going to, you come, just came to a party. So let's rock and roll, right? Take your shoes off and sit down for a sec. They take their shoes off. Now, as soon as they take their shoes off, their feet are on the floor. You can see a level of body awareness. You can actually see their heads perk up a little bit.

Autonomic nervous system expression through things like postural flexion and extension. When my head is down, I am defeated. As soon as you see them kind of stand up, now they're looking you in the eyes and I start to ask them some questions about their goals and also telling them why we have this place. I said, you know,

what if we just learned about ourselves first? Would we be in a better position to learn anything? If I learned how my brain and body worked, would that fundamentally reshape the learning process? But by the time, and only 10 minutes had passed, by the time that they're barefoot walking in the mud up to a path that's gonna put them in access to a cold plunge and a 190 degree sauna. They're laughing. They're asking good questions. They're alive.

Within 20 minutes of having them there, they're in an ice bath practicing state regulation. I taught them how to lower their heart rate. These kids are alive and awake and in it. Before you go on, how do you teach them to lower their heart rate? We'll use something called the physiological sigh. This was popularized by Dr. Andrew Huberman. Yeah. And essentially it's an inhalation through the nose followed by a second inhalation,

a fuller inhalation. Then it's an exhalation through your mouth very long and slow, like you're fogging up a glass or a mirror that's moving away from you. Can you demonstrate? We're gonna go i'm not sure if the audience did that with me but if you do you'll feel a perceptible shift in your state if you if you're wearing a heart rate monitor, you'll see heart rate go down and where you'll see it

dramatically go down. Cause right now you and I were sitting here having a good conversation. I don't think our heart rates are up, but imagine that someone just came off of a bike sprint and their heart rates at 160. And you can say to the student, let's inhale, inhale through the nose. The audience can do this again. If they're listening, inhale through the nose. The audience can do this again if they're listening. Inhale through the nose. Then inhale just a little more. Really fill up those lungs. And now I'm going to exhale through my mouth long and slow, like I'm fogging up a glass that's moving away from my mouth. When they see their heart rate go from 160 to 148, and then we do it again, it's down to 124. We do it again, it's down to 115. So you just lower your heart rate in three breaths. Where else would that be important? It's the contextualization. Understanding your physiology,

learning about your physiology. This is where it goes beyond just exercise, isn't it? Mastering your physiology. I really don't like the word exercise. We've never used it. We haven't used it in the campus. I'll use it in a post, like I wrote, to get a larger point across. But that doesn't sound like a very empowering word to me. That sounds like obligatory.

That sounds like maintenance, like it's brushing your teeth. This is training for your life. Yeah, what's so important, I've always felt as a doctor that the most important thing I do with any patient is to make sure they walk out of the door with a degree of agency. Beautiful. Where they feel that there's something that they can do to influence their health.

something that they can do to influence their health. And I think unwittingly, we have not recognized how often we take that agency away from a patient. A friend of mine, literally in the last few days said to me, they've just been put on a blood pressure, a blood pressure lowering medication by their doctor here in the UK. And my friend is probably late forties. And we just had a quick chat. And again, this is not to be judgmental about anyone involved in that interaction. But the impression I got from my friend was that he was told he had high blood pressure and he has to go on a medication to lower it in order to reduce his risk of a heart attack or stroke in the future. There wasn't any education given to him about what else he could do himself. And I know most health professionals will do that, right? The degree to which we do it, I think, will change depending on the education

and the passion of that individual, of that healthcare professional. But even, I would say, amongst doctors, we're not really trained that your blood pressure going up is an appropriate response to stress. And to exhaustion. And to exhaustion, right? That's what should happen, right? If you are under threat,

if there's someone about to attack you, your blood pressure going up is what you need to happen. And nature's blood pressure medication is sleep. And when you look at sleep statistics, you realize that we're having a very, very backwards conversation as to what regulates blood pressure. And most people don't know that. And if you normalize it, if you normalize exhaustion, you've literally normalized the, you've taken out the ability to want to solve

the problem through at its root cause because the person doesn't understand that it is not their body betraying them. It is their body urging them to optimal health. Yeah. It's the body saying, hey, something in your life, your lifestyle, your environment has resulted in your blood pressure being up. It's an alarm system. Now, yes, medication may be an option for some people, but it would have been good for my friends to have been educated on all the things in their lifestyle that may be contributing. Because often what doctors are trained to say is exercise will help, which it could do. But again, exercise is such a broad term. What does that mean? At what speed? At what intensity?

Very good question. How many people have been taught how to develop an optimal exercise program for brain and body health? And so the educational component just isn't there. Yeah. And they might've been told to reduce salt intake or whatever it might be, but there's so much more than that. There's so much more. I mean, David, I want to put something to you. if we think about the foundational pillars of health, food, movement, sleep, stress management, good quality hydration, the ability to use your breath properly, whatever it might be, if we were able to teach all the kids around the world about how important these basics are, and they were able to implement those basics, how impactful would that be on rates of anxiety and depression? You would see a massive paradigm shift that fundamentally

challenged the proposition that these kids were disordered to begin with. A fundamental paradigm shift. Because we have to realize, Rangan, that we're using a framework from the 20th century to assess a 21st century health crisis. And when you put the word mental in front of health, that does not change the root cause

of the drivers for these symptoms. It just doesn't change it. What we have is a health crisis. Seven in 10 kids in the US are getting insufficient sleep. Well, sleep is the foundation for what we're calling mental health, but what we're referring to as having control over depression and anxiety rates and stress rates. It would fundamentally show that we are built to thrive. We are built to feel incredible. that we are built to thrive. We are built to feel incredible. And these kids that have not been given that foundational education,

to label them as disordered instead of to admit that we've just done a disservice and we can course correct, we can put health first. That's what our campuses are doing is putting health at the foundation of education. If we don't do that, if we don't do that,

the question is, what do our communities look like in 10 years? When we start to look at the rising rates of anxiety, depression, in the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death among kids. That should stop the entire country. The whole country should pause and say, wait, we have to solve this problem. So do young people know how to manage stress, anxiety, and depression? Do they understand the physical prerequisites for what we're calling mental health? If we don't solve this problem now, I ask the audience to look 10 years into the future. What is the health of your

community? Fundamentally, the social health, the economic health, what is the lifeblood of the community? And if we do solve it now, because we can. One thing I always say to our audience on Instagram is this work is easy. You asked me earlier, how do you get kids to come? You build an infrastructure that invites them and you make it free. And when you do that, you'll realize that if you're providing, if you're solving a health,

if you're addressing the health crisis in your community in an innovative, proactive, engaging way, money will not be an issue. You will have a thriving business. And I ask myself every day, you know, I hold myself to a standard. If I can't give one hour back to my community every day, I'm not living to my standard. So opening the door to these kids for free is an honor and I'm grateful and it's part of my own code of leadership, self-leadership. But when you do that, they continue to show up. They continue to learn. They invite their friends who are not inherently athletic. How many kids right now have been pulled into the idea,

the cultural assumption that sport is for jocks and then you have, I don't know, brains, right? You have intellectual kids. And I don't want to reinforce that assumption. It's just a cultural idea, right? And so you have these incredibly bright kids who reject sport from a cultural sort of perspective. They're not weightlifting. They're like, I'm not into sport. I'm not a jock, right? But when you can make a free educational infrastructure rooted in health education, that's experiential and fun. Even if

someone came in through the lens of sport, they'll invite their friends who haven't. even if someone came in through the lens of sport, they'll invite their friends who haven't. And now you start to hear from the parents, wow, this work is working. This work is making an impact. My kid is sleeping better. They're feeling better.

Their mood is better. Some of these different symptoms have gone away. Until we can have an honest conversation about what is a psychiatric disorder and what is a natural physiological response to an unnatural environment, we will not solve this problem. It will accelerate. But if we can be honest and direct about that, we can put physiology-based education first. Make sure every kid has these skills and tools. There's a lot of trade mental health care professionals out there. And some of them

might say, look, we're having success with people who are being referred to us. You know, there's a kid who's struggling with anxiety. I'll come and assess them. I'll give them some techniques. I'll maybe refer them for some CBT. You know, I'll help them reframe certain things in their life, whatever it might be. They'll say that they're making a good impact. What would your perspective be on that? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can

break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there.

This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way

of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out,

all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. That why don't we just raise the bar higher a good impact is is is not as high as the best that we can do we can make an exceptional life-changing difference where this kid is an unstoppable human on the path to their goals and they are thriving by what teaching physiology at the same time as all the other techniques well Well, doing it first. That's the reason we call the organization Physiology First, is let me give it an example. If we do something like a basic blood test,

and you understand that you and I have genetic differences, maybe you're predisposed to metabolizing caffeine a lot faster than I am. And maybe we're both drinking the same amount of caffeine, right? Maybe that elevates my heart rate consistently. It elevates my breathing rate. It puts me in a state where I'm not sleeping. There's a physiological driver for what you're calling anxiety, and we've never assessed it. Then you're going to try to talk me through ignoring that

response in my physiology. We have to assess physiology first in the 21st century to understand if the root cause is rooted in the physical. Otherwise, what you're going to do is numb people to the drivers to address the issue. Yeah, and it makes complete sense. Let's sort out the physiology first, right? Let's sort out the nutrition, the hydration, the sleep, the movements, the stress management. At the foundational level.

Teach them how to breathe properly through the nose or whatever it might be, certain techniques, and then see what's left over. And then, yes, there may still be certain people who need extra help beyond that, but you may well sort out a lot of kids, a lot of teenagers, frankly, a lot of adults when you take care of those basics. And that disrupts an entire industry. And we really have to talk about that. That disrupts an entire industry because if you don't assess physiology first, that person is going to look at everything in their life as a threat. If they're dealing with a physiological issue that you've left unresolved, then maybe you get to be their

therapist for 10 or 15 years. Well, that's a problem if the driver was physiological and unassessed. If you assess physiology first and the issues go away, fantastic. And if they don't and they need more of a coaching and therapeutic perspective, then you have this entire field ready to execute. It's that duality. It's that combination. But if you don't put those in the correct order, if I don't level out the baseline physiological needs of my body, I will respond to everything in my life from simple engagements with friends and family to tasks at a heightened level of sympathetic nervous system dominance. And anyone would call that a disorder. Yeah. It's just not known enough.

Can I share a quick example, Ron? Please. There was a study in the 1960s where they sleep deprived a group of adolescents. They sleep deprived them of REM sleep. Not all sleep, but REM sleep, which is a specific part of the sleep cycle. Every time they would fall into REM sleep, they would wake the kids up. So let them get non-REM sleep. By day three,

these kids were demonstrating signs of psychosis and schizophrenia. They were hallucinating. And what the researchers determined through the study is, well, wait a minute, REM sleep is the bridge between sanity and insanity. It's the bridge between being able to make sense of the world. Now, if you didn't know that those kids were part of the sleep deprivation experiment as a psychiatrist, you'd assume they'd be schizophrenic.

That assumption is what's happening at a larger scale when we take the issue of anxiety and we say these kids have not been taught how to manage anxiety and they've been put in an environment that is literally a digital carnival. They should be anxious, but you call it a disorder

and you put them on benzodiazepines. What you're going to have is a drug crisis, Rangan, that's already developing in the States exponentially. Yeah. I mean, there's other studies, isn't there, on sleep? I mean, that's very powerful. Like if you're sleeping five hours a night compared to eight hours a night, your amygdala, the emotional center of your brain, can be up to 50% more active. That's an incredibly powerful statistic. You would see everything as a threat. Yeah. And we all know that, right? We all know how we feel when we're sleep deprived, right? We feel a bit moody, a bit low. We're really hungry. We have an apathy about life. We can feel a little

bit anxious. These are appropriate feelings. Appropriate physiological responses to lifestyle and behavior that we cannot afford to pathologize. Yeah. And if I think about my sons at secondary school now or high school and at the bus stop in the morning, I'm often there. The amount of kids who look exhausted. And we've normalized that. We've normalized that. And they're yawning and rubbing their eyes. And I'm thinking, oh man,

these kids are starting their day in a sleep deprived state. It's all downhill from here. It is all downhill. It's whether it's education, concentration, focus, moods, relationships with friends, getting upset by something a teacher says because you've got a heightened emotional state, whatever it might be. And one of my frustrations at the moment is the amount of homework being

given to children on screens. I can see that happening at our campus more than I can possibly express the detriment of health is cultural. If you normalize exhaustion, you normalize a complete sort of physiological depression. That's the archetype. When kids come into our space, why is everybody so excited? Because we're alive, we're grateful, we're training, we're human, we're here, we're present. We're grateful, we're training, we're human, we're here, we're present. And when you normalize exhaustion, then kids won't know that something's wrong. That's a driver to act on. That's number one. But number two is the idea that fundamentally, we're at an intersection where we need to be asking what the educational system of the future looks like. And by the nature of it being the future, it does not look like the present or the past. It's brand new. It's innovative. It's exciting, right? If we're not teaching more efficiently, if the school day is not getting shorter because we're getting better

at understanding the neuroscience of learning, then you're going to continue to send kids home after eight hours of sitting with four hours of homework and wonder why they're not at the gym. That happens to kids at our center. I want to come tonight. I just have too much homework. If we can reshape, you know, Norman Doidge, who wrote The Brain That Changes Itself, a brilliant neuroscientist, he said, neuroscience should change everything we think about education. We should be getting more efficient, allowing more time for sunlight and for movement and for brain health. And I think the audience may appreciate that if we put brain health at the foundation of learning,

you're gonna unlock the potential of a generation. So how do we do that? We actually have to act on that. We can't wait for a system that isn't incentivized. We need to create these new systems and we can. And I think that we can demonstrate the efficacy of that. I will not point the finger at anything in this world that I'm not actively engaged in changing and understanding that these

are hard problems. If you want to think that building a new system of anything is easy, you have learning ahead of you. These are hard. Building new alternatives is hard. Building things is messy. But at the end of the day, if you had kids learning in a four or five hour window, everything that they needed to know in the 21st century by updating the educational system, now you're going to incorporate in the day, walking and movement and sunlight and maybe sauna, maybe cold plunging. Two full body strength and conditioning sessions per week is the bottom line physical requirement, the minimum by the CDC in the United States. Kids aren't meeting that minimum even by a long shot.

So you would put more than the minimum. You would have basic movement training, state regulation. And if we could do that, you'll realize there's plenty of time in the day to learn, to get strong to build your brain and body to build your community to build your relationships if you disproportionately allocate that time eight hours of sitting in memorization four hours of reading and memorization you're gonna have it you're gonna normalize this kind of workaholism that isn't

leading to a society of thriving people let's say there's a parent who's listening, David, and is inspired by what you're saying, but thinking, you know what? David lives a million miles away from me. That campus isn't available to my children. What's one thing that parent can start to do today with their children that's gonna help them improve their health?

Learn about breathing. Learn about breathing because it is the pathway to learning about our physiology. It is the door. It is the door, but it isn't the room. Don't get fixated on breathing. Don't get fixated on any of these things. Learn about breathing, and you'll notice that everybody's a little more, their shoulders drop.

Everyone's a little more relaxed at a nervous system level. Everyone's a little more attentive. I tell people, breathe through your nose 90% of your life, unless you absolutely have to revert to mouth breathing. And we can talk about the health benefits, but that ignores the why. The why is you'll become more self-aware of your state, your emotional reactivity, your body, one another. If we can get people out of this hyper-stressed, hyper-anxious mode through something as simple as breath awareness and breath control and breath practice, that's the doorway. The doorway to further learning. Yeah. And then at that point, you can say, okay,

I want to learn. We have a program for parents. We teach parents and we start with breath. We move into exercise. We move into, I'm sorry, we actually start with sleep because it's a more in-depth program. We've already done some breath education at that point. Breath, then we can talk about sleep and exercise and technology and nutrition, but you need a foundation to learn from. Imagine that every kid in the school right now understood how their breathing affected their cognition, affected their anxiety and affected their mental focus. Man, it's such an easy driver to move. It's interesting that you answered the breath. I was invited to a school last year

to talk about stress management because um one of the teachers was saying the kids are getting really really stressed about exams can you come in and give them some tips now if we ignore the elephant in the room for just a moment which is it's a hard elephant to ignore which is why on earth is there this much pressure on children at such a young age in the first place to warrant the need for stress management techniques. If we just park that for a second, I also went to the breath.

I thought, I don't have long with these kids. What can I teach them that works, that they can feel straight away? They have to be able to feel it. And I think that's the key, isn't it? It's experience. You feel it for yourself. And something you regularly comment about on your Instagram is that everyone responds differently to different breathing techniques. It is so important to recognize that element alone, and then to recognize as well that I've seen nothing positive come out of an over-fixation on breathing. So the reason that we're very, very clear in our program with people is I've seen people get lost in rabbit holes and echo chambers, where breathing's a component. Start there. Then you have to master your sleep, because if your sleep's all over the place, you're going to be using self-regulating breathing exercises. The goal of these exercises from a self-regulation perspective is that you

need them a lot less because you've identified dysfunctional breathing and addressed it. So we're always making sure that when we work with young people, we're zooming out and we're saying all of these skills, everything has a place. Start with breath. Learn how your feet work. You're standing on them. Learn how to sleep. It's how you learn. But if we stay too long in any one domain, we start to overvalue it. We start to get fixated on it. And then we start to say, it didn't work. It's like, well, okay, are you a purpose-driven human with clear and intentional goals that fulfill and inspire you in the support of a community that you love and that loves you

back, that's critical to our health. And so we're always trying to get to the basics of physiology, start here, but ultimately our goal is to build a deeper 21st century skills curriculum. Because here's what we don't want. We don't want a bunch of kids who have no skills in navigating a 21st century economy, navigating a rapidly changing world, in their bedrooms alone doing self-regulating breathing exercises. That is not a good future. The idea is that we teach them how to, when we talk about breathing, we try to address dysfunctional breathing so they're not mouth breathing all day long. Then if they need one or two simple exercises, there you go, that's done. Now in the strength development world,

we get a little more biomechanics specific, but we live in an age of the niche right now, right? People are told to find their niche and you find your niche in health and fitness. The problem is you're going to go so far down that rabbit hole that it will become almost irrelevant and incommunicatable to anybody. So with young people, we really try to get to a zoom out perspective. Why are you doing this to rock and roll in the world in a way that aligns with your goals? Where do you start? Here, then go here, then go here. And at the end of the day, more valuable than the protocol is the community that you're doing the protocol with. see on a given Monday night, our sauna packed with 10 people every Monday night talking about their goals and their challenges and their lives. No, it'll be adults and a couple of teenagers. The teenagers generally will go to the sauna after our student strong class. And then we have our

adult class. Every now and then it intermixes in a very, very cool way. Often it is intergenerational, but whether it's students alone, students with adults or adults with adults, generational. But whether it's students alone, students with adults or adults with adults, what people comment on as having been deeply powerful, it wasn't, hey, you showed me that little hack. It was like, man, thank you for being there for me last week. Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for this community. And so what I would like the audience to know is that one of the things we do in all of our programs is we help people build physical community. You can have all the education in the world in this stuff.

You don't want to be self-regulating alone in a basement. We have to build infrastructure for health that's intergenerational and ongoing and deep. And you'll realize that it's the relationships, it's the communication, it's that is where the magic actually happens. And without it, we'll keep chasing the next solution. What if I just optimize my diet 10 ways from Sunday

and I just try this new type of intermittent fasting mixed with, and it's like, these are all just fundamentals. The depth is reclaiming the essence of what it means to be human in the 21st century. And if we forget that, we'll try to self-optimize ourselves into purpose, and it doesn't work that way. What if there's someone listening to this, David, who's a personal trainer or a teacher at their school who says, you know what, you're onto something but I don't know what to do like I'm a personal trainer in a gym and there's no infrastructure set up for this or let's say that teacher is saying well this all

sounds great but we've got the school curriculum we're in this system that I don't particularly like which we hear every single yeah so let's mean, maybe we can take these two as scenarios because I'm absolutely certain that will be happening for that teacher. What is one small thing you think they can introduce into the school day that would make a meaningful difference? Embodying these principles through their own actions and the way that they show up. Co-regulation is the conversation that isn't happening right now. You're regulating my state wrong

and by being such a wonderful, genuine, you know, thoughtful host here. And if you weren't, if you were angry or anxious or exhausted, I would feel it off of you and it would change my behavior and my level of comfort here. And the same is true in every single environment. As the leader, you regulate the environment.

You set the temperature, you're the leader. If you're up in front of the class, if I'm leading a seminar, that person is regulating the state of the room. And the simplest thing, because we can do the most complex thing, the simplest is when somebody is able to reclaim the relationship with their physiology necessary to master themselves and show up with some level of that mastery intact when the day begins to, fall apart, all the kids, their nervous system will fundamentally respond to that. You are regulating the nervous system of the entire class. And if that sounds like a lot of responsibility, it's the most beautiful kind because health has to be modeled in order to be taught. Otherwise, it's a charade.

I love that, David, right? Because I was thinking you might talk about sleep or breathing or whatever. You have to live it. Yeah. And it makes complete sense that if that teacher, and listen, I get it that teaching is stressful. It's such an important job. It's underpaid. There's a huge amounts of stress.

So I do acknowledge all of that. We have so many amazing teachers in our network and what they're doing, what we're working with them to do is three things. One is to be in control of their own physiology. That's a very empowering journey. You know, it's not a, you have to, it's a, you can be unstoppable in this profession that you've chosen to make an impact in.

How do we teach them how to communicate this to young people? Because there's a set of skills that is necessary to not. Otherwise, you would just put up a chart and say, here's 10 ways to be healthier. That's not how we learn. So we have to get to buy in and trust. But at the end of the day, we're challenging them to ask the tougher question, is this institution healthy? But at the end of the day, we're challenging them to ask the tougher question, is this institution healthy? Because if this place isn't healthy, this isn't going to work.

You have to put health in healthy environments. And the idea that we have to hold on to the institution as the archetype. Our place doesn't look the same year to year. We've had our campus in its current form for six years. We had a smaller one before that. Every day I go home and I say, well, how can I improve it? How could it evolve? It's massively different. Now, is it easier to massively change a small campus than a big institution? Sure. But it forces us to ask the question, if sitting kids for eight hours a day is impacting their health adversely, why don't

we just stop? You can stand and move. That's free. If the way that we're teaching kids, everything from homework distribution to causing the kid to be up till 10, 11 at night when sleep actually happens, when learning actually happens during sleep, if the institution isn't embodying health, the kids will not trust the health education. And if you want to really quickly make this uncool,

put it in a school that has not put health first. Because not only is the information uncool, you can't trust it. Yeah, because there's a- You can't trust it. Dissonance. It's a dissonance. It's a dissonance.

I will tell the audience this. We're at an age where, this might be the first age, where I meet 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds who are so much more knowledgeable than many of the adults in their lives because they've learned exponentially through technology. Someone gave them an iPad, and we can argue with that. We can talk about the nervous system implications. We can have our pros and cons. But what they engaged in is something I've engaged in all my life as somebody who didn't go to school, is volitional learning. And when you look at the neuroscience of learning volitionally, because we care about the material, you learn exponentially quickly.

So you have a generation of kids who've been learning volitionally on this thing called Google, finding things that interest them. Maybe it's music, art, and creativity, whatever it is, right? Maybe it's gaming. Maybe it's just scrolling TikTok all day. People choose what to do with this massive tool called the internet. But you're meeting kids who are sophisticated. And often the adults have underdetermined the sophistication. So they invited them into conversations

that did not allow it to be expressed. When you realize how quick these kids are, you realize that the dissonance of teaching health in an unhealthy environment, they just tune out. Yeah. I don't trust this. They're so fast. We spend so much time building the trust because that's the foundation for communicating these principles. Otherwise, to your point, I would say to parents and coaches, just put up a chart of the 10 best health tips. That's not how we learn. We have to learn through experience. So that teacher, the best thing they can do

is to embody these principles themselves, right? Nourish themselves properly, move regularly, sleep appropriately, come into class calm, present, having embodied those things. Is that what you're saying? Recognizing it can be difficult.

Yes, but i would ask people to do something even far more difficult which is and come into disrupt disrupt the current archetype if sitting is healthy for kids eight out for eight hours a day have them sip if it isn't healthy have them stand because that's actually how you would address that situation and say although we've normalized an unhealthy behavior, we're going to be radically different. Disrupt. When you do that, you want to invite kids into something exciting. You know, what's really interesting is you look at the neuroscience of learning and we learn far more effectively when we can change our vantage point throughout the conversation. So I was working with someone once who was taking neuroscience classes

and asked, why can't I just stand and walk around the room? Because I'll see the speaker from different vantage points and that'll actually over-represent the information. I'll learn it more effectively. The answer was something, because we don't do that. Like kids are like, give me a better answer. Why is standing free? Is moving free? It is free.

When we do our work, I've never had a chair in the place. So kids sit and they're barefoot and they're crossing, you know, they're moving their body in a way that is like posturally like supportive of the expression of the full range of motion of our hips. So what I would say to the adult is, this goes maybe one level deeper into dissonance. You don't want to pretend that this environment is okay by being so relaxed within it because you'll become numb to the fact

that it has room for great improvement and that these improvements are in fact free. Incorporating simple exercises that help foster the learning process, like taking a break from learning to breathe and actually assimilate the information. I have, I think, what is this 12 ounce glass in front of me? I can't fit 40 ounces of water in it

I can't just keep dumping it in and saying i'm exhausted and out of water, right? So most of these physiological disruptors they're free But it's going to take the educator to either say this school supports health. So i'm allowed to have kids move and breathe Or this school doesn't support health in which case we can create new schools. What are my bugbears since my children have been at school is this idea that when kids, I'm not talking about my kids, but when kids at school have been deemed to have done something wrong, the punishment at some schools is often you don't get to go out for your break you don't get to go out for your morning break or your lunch break now i also i want to acknowledge that i'm not a teacher so i don't know the pressures that may be on certain teachers in certain schools right i i

i'm putting that out there on the table but i do know know health. Yes. I do know neuroscience. I do know how the brain and body functions well. And it seems very short-sighted to me if you have a kid who, let's say, is being disrupted, whatever that means, right? Maybe it's the wrong environment for them or whatever, but not allowing them then to go and move their body and get exposed to natural light. I just can't see how that is going to be helpful when class resumes 20 minutes or an hour later.

Well, I guess the question, this is an important distinction, is obedience the point or is education the point? Because we have to make a decision. If you undermine the fundamental neurology, the neuroscience of learning, you say, okay, this is what this kid needs to learn from a brain health perspective, and I'm going to take that away. Okay, so why are we here then? If we're not here to learn, this is a power game, and this is about obedience. In which case, the parent can say, okay, I'm okay with that, or I'm not okay with that. The teacher can say I'm okay in this environment, or I'm not. But the idea The teacher can say I'm okay in this environment or I'm not.

But the idea that we're not building new learning environments as fast as we're building other sectors of our economy and our industries is ultimately the problem that's going to catch up with us. Because not only do you have a system that's not incentivized to change radically and put health first, but you have the deeper question, which is what is school for in the 21st century? If it's a daycare, that's one perspective. If it's an obedience training center,

that's another perspective. But if you want to build passionate, fiery leaders who are capable of innovating and solving difficult problems, and you're going to punish them by taking away the brain health requisites that make effective learning impossible, then you're doing something very different than education. And I think we need to have an honest conversation about that. I think we need to have a national and global conversation on what skills and tools kids need to thrive in the 21st century. And if the environment is not conducive to the health of the student and the teacher, let's build new ones. That's what we're doing at our campus, is building a new alternative. And new things are very build new ones. That's what we're doing at our campus is

building a new alternative and new things are very, very exciting. I think that we need a new perspective on the future of education. That should be the most exciting conversation of our time. Some of the kids who come to your campus and learn about their physiology through some of the methods you've already discussed on this conversation, some of the methods you've already discussed on this conversation, some of the things you've not spoken about, whether it's cold plunge, sauna, on an exercise bike, whatever it might be, they're learning how they can bring on anxiety, and they're learning how those symptoms can also go down very fast. They can take the wheel.

Yeah, and they're in control of that. What has been reported back to you in terms of how that translates to out of the campus? Have you had kids, for example, where their anxiety symptoms have gone, their depression has gone? Absolutely. Maybe you share some of those stories. Absolutely. And it happens all the time because we haven't asked what are the physical prerequisites for mental health? And when we use the term mental health, I want to keep going back to that because you have an abstract,

a cultural abstraction from the 20th century. Define that in an actionable, tangible way, the same way that you can define physiology in an actionable, tangible way. Well, you can't. I can measure your heart rate variability wrong and I can look at your sleep for the past year. I can look at your micronutrient intake.

I can take a blood panel. I can see if you're meeting the basic physical activity needs for your body. I can look at all that stuff. And when you do the shift in these kids, because you've contextualized it, I wanna separate that out. I could just say, hey, we're gonna do squats

and deadlifts and pushups and then jump in the cold plunge. I've seen adults for whom that has been the model who've either come to hate fitness. They've come to reject it. They were sort of just punished into physical fitness. And as soon as they said, I don't have to do this, they opted out.

And I meet adults who go, yeah, my coach used to put me through all this stuff and it sucked. It's like, okay, well, what level of skills put me through all this stuff and it sucked. It's like, okay, well, what level of skills did you gain from the process? Like none. I think when we think about the idea of symptoms of anxiety, when a kid is engaged in anxiety producing behavior and they understand the behavior to be anxiety producing, now they have agency in refraining from the behavior or understanding that they've engaged in it. I stayed up way too late drinking espressos with my friends. Okay, now you have a root cause. You have an issue, right? So they learn how to address the drivers for anxiety.

They learn how to manage the physiology on the spot and then long-term, right? And what I mean by that is if a kid is suddenly having a panic attack, they know what to do. But if a kid understands that drinking a cup of coffee at 4 p.m. is going to affect their sleep and their nervous system, and they refrain from that behavior, you've given them an anxiety management skill set for the acute and the chronic. How much of a problem is caffeine and energy drinks? I'm a huge caffeine connoisseur. I love caffeine. Caffeine has a lot of neuroprotective benefits. We're not here to demonize caffeine or anything. What we're here to do is say, understanding the timing and the science of caffeine might be one of the most critical skill sets of the century, right? Because our sleep chemical in our brain is called adenosine.

Adenosine levels rise. It creates a sleep pressure like Dr. Matt Walker talks about. Eventually the pressure gets very high. I fall asleep. When I drink a cup of coffee, what it does is the caffeine kind of pushes adenosine off of the receptor site and it takes its place. It just boots it out, right?

I have caffeine blocking adenosine. I feel amazing. I feel awake. On the spur of the moment, I can wake up and be energized and focused. When that caffeine wears off, the adenosine didn't disappear. You've created a dam that floods the brain. I crash. What do I need more caffeine? The problem with that is A, if a young person metabolizes caffeine very slowly, genetically, that's going gonna impact them a lot more

than somebody who metabolizes it much faster. It's in and out of their system quicker. B, it's gonna impact their sleep fundamentally. And so their entire night, where the learning that took place in school, taking information from day one and making it to long-term storage, emotional regulation, all of that is compromised.

So an example that I'll give, like a story that I'll share with a set of practical examples on how caffeine impacts mental health, or again, see, I use the term myself, it's almost become interchangeable, but physiological health in relation to the brain, which ultimately does affect

how our mental landscape functions. These aren't black and white. There's a reason that there's so much confusion in this space. The mind and body are in fact connected. I had a young woman come in, she's 14 years old, and she was having panic attacks on the soccer field. So let's think about this for a minute. Summertime soccer. She would have panic attacks when she'd rush off into the field. I thought to myself, okay, well, you know, are you trained for heat? Have you done any heat acclimatization training? Because it's a very hot sport in a hot environment. She hadn't. So we started to do regular sauna.

I said, do you're doing any kind of like warmup for the lungs and a warmup that gets your heart rate to come up gradually under your control versus going from very low to very high. She hadn't done any of that. I said, well, how CO2 tolerant is she? CO2 is what drives the urge to breathe. It's produced in our body. It's what allows us to effectively use oxygen. We did a basic test. She's very intolerant to carbon dioxide. So we have three drivers right there. We put saying we put her in and get in there, kids. We allowed her to use the sauna regularly. We trained her in how to bring up her own heart rate in case the coach didn't and said, hey, we're going to go from zero to 100. And then we got

her massively CO2 tolerant through breathing exercises. So breath holds. Yeah, breath holds, breath hold training, working out with nasal breathing. So we solve for those three things. Like breath holds. Oh yeah, breath holds, breath hold training, working out with nasal breathing. So we solve for those three things. And the impact of that alone, she's like, this, my panic attacks are gone.

She's like, this is incredible. This changed my life. So one night we're hanging out and she's with her mom. One of the coolest things about having infrastructure, and that's why I keep coming back to infrastructure, not just information, is we'll have parents hanging out with their kids in an ice bath talking about health.

That's pretty cool. It happens all the time. Yeah, all the time. So her mom's in the ice bath. She's in the ice bath with her mom. And she says, hey, mom, we're going to Starbucks after this. Now it's four o'clock in the afternoon. And without any judgment or being critical, I said, oh, what do you get at Starbucks? Oh, I get some type of frappuccino. I mean, picture the mostly sort of like late day caffeine bomb. And I asked her, I said, you know, would you be open to talking more about caffeine in relation to sleep and anxiety? Well, the next day we had her at the next session, we had a deep dive. She's like, I never knew. I never knew the role that this nervous system stimulant plays in stimulating my nervous system. And when we got her to get rid of that late day

coffee, it's got to push it out. That was the, we gave her the strategy for the acute, but the chronic anxiety management is not living in a permanently anxious state. David, this is awesome education for kids. It's pretty good for adults as well, this education. Well, we all learn through experience with each other. Yeah. And I love that you have these intergenerational relationships there. We had Professor Roseanne Kenny on the podcast recently, longevity professor. She was sharing about the importance of these intergenerational relationships.

And it sounds like your campus has that. But also what you said about that teenager with panic attacks when they went out to play sports, it's so, so important because you can broaden that out beyond panic attacks. You can broaden that out to so many of the problems, whether we call them mental health problems or physical health problems, these are symptoms. These are downstream symptoms, right? That person wasn't carbon dioxide tolerant enough, right? So a very glaring driver for anxiety. Very simply, because you're skilled and you know how to do that,

you help build up their CO2 tolerance. That's their physiology. And you introduce them to anxiety volitionally often. So I said, okay, this is going to be anxiety provoking. She's like, oh, well, yeah, I get it. How else would I learn the skill? So you've given this volitional engagement with physiology. Because the reason I make the distinction is a coach can listen to this and go, okay, I don't know, kids. there are 30 of you here, just hold your breath and run around. Is your heart rate up?

Yeah. Okay, lesson learned. No. The lesson that you've learned is, this is going to suck when we do warmups like this now. It has to be this volitional learning environment where it's like, hey, we're going to build a skill around this

and the skill will help you be a more powerful human being. Because the reason I want to make that distinction is the last thing I would want is for coaches to hear this and think, okay, well, hold your nose, don't breathe, run around, better heart rate, better performance. It's another way to miss the mark. Yeah, just by addressing,

obviously volitionally from her, she engaged with this, those three areas, the downstream symptoms, her panic attacks went away. And David, I just want to make the point here because I think it's so important that people understand this, that our health system is set up around diagnosing disease and treating disease. It is not set up around creating health. It isn't, right? You are helping the kids and the teenagers create

health. So the downstream problems often labeled as mental health disorders, many of them, not always, but a lot of the time are no longer there. My first book, David, which came out five or six years ago, it was called The Four Pillar Planner in the States, was called How to Make Disease Disappear. And in that, I outlined a very simple framework to health over these four pillars, food, movement, sleep, and relaxation. Still to this day, I get messages from people saying, that book's helped me get rid of anxiety. That's got rid of my depression. That's helped me be pain-free from my fibromyalgia. That's helped me put my type 2 diabetes into remission. And what I still don't think people fully understand is that a lot of these diseases and symptoms are downstream. So

when you take care of the upstream physiology, right, because it doesn't say on it it's a diabetes book or an anxiety book or a panic attack book or a fibromyalgia book. No, it's a foundational book on the basic principles of health, just like you're teaching your adults, your teenagers, your kids. It's amazing how many of those downstream symptoms just fall away. They fall away. And again, that disrupts an industry. And it's important to understand the incentivization mechanisms here to keep a current model that seems to be working because it isn't working for kids. Let's take that young woman I talked about. What if I had said, well, I don't know, take her to a traditional therapist? Now, what if the therapist didn't have a background in physiology and started to ask, well, how do you feel about soccer in your

life? What is your relationship with your mom like, your sister? You could ultimately end up with that young woman being placed on an anti-anxiety medication, which is extremely addictive. I want to just make this point because I don't think it's well known, how addictive benzodiazepines are. So imagine, just let the audience take the different scenario, that young woman didn't come to us and she pursued a route that didn't address those fundamental underlying causes. And she was put on a benzodiazepine prescription. When does she come off of it? Especially given that the issue still exists and the prescription is for a medication that's addictive.

Is she on this for 10 years? Well, you could change, if you're listening to this, you can change a kid's life, the course of their life by teaching them about their physiology first. Yeah. Let's just make sure we cover something you just mentioned there,

because there are some brilliant therapists out there. Of course, amazing human beings in this field. Sometimes it's very important for a therapist to help an individual, whether it's a teenager or an adult, understand what their relationship was with their parents, how they feel about certain things in their life. So I don't think you're trying to give off the impression that that's not valid. I think what you're saying is,

let's bring in a basic understanding of physiology alongside that. And that you have to, because, you know, Occam's razor is a principle of looking at the simplest solution, the simplest, obvious solution first, for a reason. If I am an over-caffeinated 14-year-old who's not sleeping and feeling not only anxious on the soccer field, but anxious about soccer because I think I'm going to have a panic attack, put all that together and then say, how do you interrelate with your family? Are you a little bit edgy, moody? Are you argumentative? Are you a little bit edgy, moody? Are you argumentative? Physiology will drive behavior in every vector. So if we don't assess the physiology first and we just look at the behavior, we're going to think, okay, well, this is an issue between a mother and daughter. Well,

maybe if you didn't have this young person on the verge of a panic attack 24-7, that relationship might improve by the sheer nature of addressing physiology first who here has done a done a workout and felt amazing afterwards are you more or less likely to argue with your loved ones in that state right so you just you just went for a run you come back i'm on cloud nine yeah a small dispute something happens hey i can't do this with you later oh i totally understand thanks for considering um that's a lot different than I'm on the verge of a panic attack. I've slept for two hours. I'm heading into the school day and I'm going to explode on you because this small thing that I didn't have the state regulation skills to navigate has exploded before me. So I do say,

of course, it's critical. We all need guidance. We need mentors. We need help in life. We need tools to navigate the world outside of our body, our relationships, and our goals. But when you're talking about something that can have a medical implication, putting someone on medication that is extremely addictive is a medical practice. And the idea of making a health diagnosis without health data in the 21st century should be obsolete. If we can do that, then we can say, did the problem go away? And if it didn't, we can take all the next steps to treat it. Why do you care so much about the health of teenagers? I think, you know, I've been asked that quite a few times and I think to me it's so critical that we retain the ability

to be something other than a spectator in the act of building the future we're not spectators we're building the future of our species of our nation, of a society we're collaboratively doing that I train a lot of high performers, Rangan, in different realms. And at some point I tell them, sport is not where you're going to execute your

high performance. It's just a training ground. Your performance is, how did I leave the world a better place for having been in it? Did I set goals that were ambitious and hard? And did I work with great people to try to achieve them? Did I move the future forward in some generative way? And so I ask myself, what is the biggest problem of the future that we can be working on together, building a movement to work on together? Well, it's the declining mental health

of our future problem solvers. That's the biggest problem of the future. These are the kids who are going to ultimately navigate the greatest challenges of our time. And then when you take that word mental health and you remove mental and add health, the greatest problem is the declining health of our future generation. Extrapolate that out for a few decades. So I think the greatest challenge that we can solve is getting the minds who are going to face the biggest challenges of the future physically and mentally and emotionally ready to head into a wild storm of change

and build a future that inspires. I think it's our legacy that we can leave is saying we're at an intersection in evolution right now. This is a big one. This is an intersection. We're seeing health drop off the cliff for a generation. If we act in this intersection, we shape the future fundamentally. I appreciate you sharing that david i really do before when we were talking about that hypothetical teacher i also mentioned a hypothetical personal trainer who may want to try and implement or integrate some of these principles into what they do let's say at a gym and i'd love to get your view on what they could do potentially. One thing

I try and do as a parent is more and more, I really want my children to understand and feel the difference when they do things a certain way and when they do other things a different way. So when we're out for walks, sometimes we all do nasal breathing walks or mouth breathing walks, or we'll do breath holds for 20 paces. Who can get to 30 paces? And it will always be, well, how do you feel now? How do you feel? Or just last Saturday, it was raining. It's definitely autumn stroke winter in the uk now it's dark it's wet and there was a bit of reluctance about park run on saturday morning which is this 5k community event that that is all over the uk and many many places around the world anyway we all went as a

family and afterwards i asked them hey guys know, how do you feel now? Because for me, it wasn't important what their time was. I celebrate the fact that they're showing up each week. But the real connection I wanted them to draw, which they did draw last Saturday, was an hour ago, I felt lethargic. I wanted to stay at home and just snuggle in the warmth. But now that I've moved my body over 5K, I feel great. I feel sharp. I'm ready to take on the day. I feel energized because I believe that that realization is what I hope they'll take with them when they become adults. Yeah. God, I remember as a kid, I used to feel really sluggish. Then I moved my body and I felt great. Right? So I don't know if

that feeds in at all to how you would advise that personal trainer or suggest to that personal trainer, how can they integrate some of your principles when they're with clients in the gym? What a great question. What a great story. I mean, that's what you're doing is it, you know, and it's so cool. And it's a really cool opportunity for the personal trainer, the person who works with people's physiology every day to show them how much you care about their individual physiology and that you aren't building generic programs. And I'll share two pragmatic examples because I can't illustrate enough that trust is the missing ingredient in deep learning.

If I show you in the first 10 minutes that I care about whether you get hurt or not or whether this is optimal or not, you're gonna trust me more. And now we can do deeper work. But if I don't show you that, if we don't have a foundation of trust, we have nothing to build from. So let me give two quick examples. For one, I always tell people when they walk in, kick your shoes off. It has never occurred to me, Ron, ever to train human beings in shoes when their feet are the foundation for human movement. You're leaving the foundation, not only weak, but you're leaving the person unfamiliar

with the foundational contact point of their body and the ground. They're like a deer on ice skates. And I mean that fundamentally in that you can get them to execute a lot of work. You can have them do lots of squats and deadlifts and lots of stuff. But the deep sensory learning hasn't happened.

And as a coach, you're gonna have a hard time seeing some very obvious things. So here's an example that I'll give very, very quickly. So everybody's barefoot, right? Now, sometimes I'll ask people, can they lift their big toe, but not the small toes? Can they put the big toe down and lift the other toes? Can they drop into a squat and do that?

Like, do we have facility over our feet? Can we use them? Like saying, kind of like the wiggle, can you wiggle your ears question, right? Can you do these things? But here's where people's self-interest comes into play. And you have to speak to people's self-interest. You have to take the thorn out of the proverbial paw here, the lion's paw. If someone's getting hurt all the time, knee issues and back issues, solve that problem. And then they'll trust you. Now you can talk about higher order things like state control. So here's an example. Barefoot, I want you to stand on one foot. Okay, you're barefoot, you're standing on

one foot. Okay, where is your weight distributed? Is it distributed to the outside of your foot? Or are you able to let your arch relax? That's a good question. Or are you grabbing the ground with your toes like a koala? Okay, well, do you feel how your femur, your big thigh bone, orients internally or externally based on whether the arch of your foot is supinated or pronated? Can you feel that one simple thing? Because your foot is a pump system. Think of Tigger the tiger and springs, having like springs when he bounces, right? One of those springs not working alters gait. So if the person can understand that how they orient their foot has a relationship to where their tibia, their shin bone, and their femur is oriented in space, then you can ask, well,

which one of those orientations do you want when you're lunging or deadlifting or running or walking? And now you're getting them to critically think, oh, that actually matters. I can feel what you're lunging or deadlifting or running or walking, and now you're getting them to critically think, oh, that actually matters. I can feel what you're saying. I can move my foot in certain ways that are fostering supination or pronation. It affects how my body absorbs pressure

because I don't want it to go slamming into my joints. And you're saying to them, I care about this element that no one's talked to you through yet. So when we teach you to lunge later, we're going to do this in the way that's optimal for your muscular development and optimal joint health. The other very short example would be to ask somebody to think about their breathing, whether they're more biased to breathing front to back or side to side. If you have somebody whose rib cage is compressed front to back and they're by nature then breathing

side to side, I'm going to ask them, should I pick exercises for you that further squash you into a pancake-like shape? And they'll say, no, I'd prefer you didn't. It's okay, because I don't want you to lose shoulder mobility. What if I pick exercises for you based on how you're breathing and how that's changed your ribcage function, and we restore it to optimal, would that be better or worse? your ribcage function and we restore it to optimal, would that be better or worse? It would be optimal. Of course, you've made two simple diagnostic assessments that are going to help you program. But what you fundamentally did is you say, I actually care. I actually care if this works and doesn't hurt you. I actually care if you succeed and feel better. If you have that

kind of trust and you've put that eye on things that others haven't, now talking about stress and anxiety management, the physiology, neuroscience, you opened the door. You can't just kick it in. You have to gently open this door. Yeah. Man, I just love that so much. So many powerful lessons there. Trust, of course, being the foundation of any successful relationship, whether it's trainer, client, doctor, patient, parent, child, partner, partner. Trust is the foundation, right? But it's also that extra piece there, which I've got this wonderful running movement coach called Helen, and her approach is always about me feeling the difference. She could tell me the correct way for me. And I've tried this approach, but it will only go so far because if you're not engaged with it, you don't continue. When there's

an obstacle, you stop. But when you're engaged, when you're like, yeah, I know that because last time I was out with Helen, I realized that when my vision is peripheral rather than narrow and focused, there's more rotation in my upper body. And when I get stressed and tired towards the end of a run, it all comes in and I've lost that mobility. You've then made those connections which help you.

Yes. And you've done something even fundamentally at an equal or deeper level of long-term engagement depth, which is you've tied this into the dopaminergic cycle. Dopamine is what drives me to do things. I say to people, what motivates you? Dopamine motivates you. You have a massive, massive neurotransmitter that's also a neuromodulator that's responsible for how motivated we feel about our lives. And so when we think about, there's an interesting experiment where you have one rat that will exercise volitionally. It jumps on the treadmill. And it gets a pretty interesting increase in dopamine in relation to the desire to go on the treadmill. But you have a rat that has to go on the treadmill when rat number one does. It's unvolitional. And you don't have that dopamine

increased to the same degree. So when things are volitional and they're about deep learning and you're excited, because I can hear when you talk about your trainer, I can actually hear the excitement in your voice. You can't wait to go see her. When that dopaminergic response is not present, when you think, I have to work out later, or I'm going to practice later, but I don't actually want to be here, you're having kids further fight their physiology when you could say, I can't wait to get there later. A conversation we recently had at the campus, they said, maybe a good way to know if a learning environment is a positive future-focused deep learning environment is whether people want it canceled on a snow day.

So when it snows, people text me. I get a storm of texts. Is class still on? Is class still on? We can carpool. We can get there. Is class still on? Are we still on tonight? They wake up and go, oh, it's snowing. I hope we still have class. Now, if you wake up and you go, fingers crossed, toes crossed, man, just somebody cancel this thing. That's an indicator that you can improve the thing. And you can, if you're listening to this and you think at any level that we're critiquing an educator, no, we're inviting you into a revolution in evolution, a revolution in education. And we should be asking, well, what does education look like in 10 years? Ideally, hopefully, we've evolved it significantly, right? Well, can we shorten that 10-year timeframe?

Because kids are hurting now. Yeah. And educators that I talk to are hurting now. They need a new system. Well, let's just move that goalpost a little bit. Start with basic movement, but make it something that you want to happen on a snow day and you're heading in the right direction. I love that. The fact that kids want to come on a snow day is definitely saying something about the impact you're having and how enjoyable and how much benefit they're getting from it.

They're looking forward to it. And that's everything is that they're actually expecting it to be a great learning experience where they feel mentally and physically awesome. They want that. Yeah. So for anybody, whether they're a parent or a teacher or a trainer, or just, you know, I don't know, an interested individual, someone who's retired maybe, who goes, I want to give back, but I don't know how. It's a non-profit physiology. We are a non-profit organization, yes. Where can they land? What can they go and do? I know you have all kinds of, as well as your campus, where kids and adults come, which of course is ideal. You're

also training people all over the world online, I believe. And I hope there's people on the back of this conversation who go, David, you know what? I want to learn some of that stuff and bring it to my community, to my school, to my children. what are these courses and where can people find them? So you can find everything that we do at physiologyfirst.org. So if you're somebody who wants to support the work, if you want to get involved and be trained, you can find us there. And these courses are working to pull together leaders in these various sectors that I think we all feel should be integrated. Education, health, we have physical therapists, we have traditional educators,

we have people in the traditional mental health world. When you say traditional educators, you mean teachers? Yeah, teachers that are teaching in schools right now and maybe have a vision for a new kind of educational system that does empower, that is exciting, and that puts health first. So it's an online course that they can do and learn about physiology.

Well, essentially we're preparing them to teach. We're preparing them to take our approach into the heart of their community and execute on it because we learn together through experience. We're teaching them how to do basic physiological assessments, which are currently not present in most of these kids' lives who are being pathologized and diagnosed. No one has assessed these basic biomarkers that we're training people to assess and we're doing that at global scale so that by the time that we can build our second campus and our third we have a team ready to go and if there is no campus you can create in a park at a school at a community organization the future of learning by teaching the community about their physiology first.

What about if there's a teenager listing, let's say 15, 16 years old and go, you know what? I'm not getting that from my parents. I'm not getting that from my school. Have you got something for me? Do you have anything for that teenager? Send us a DM on Instagram. We'll invite you to our Discord channel where you can learn and engage with an intergenerational mentorship community, and we'll ultimately work to connect you to our growing network of practitioners that we're training to work with you one-on-one or to help build a community. I want to illustrate this one point. We invite young people into so many entrepreneurial opportunities because we want them to be thinking about taking ownership of their future and of the future of the community. We call it physiology first, but not physiology only. We need a 21st century skill set. So when you invite young people and you say, hey,

we have this idea. What do you think? How should we do this? What would you do? What should we do? how should we do this? What would you do? What should we do? Oh my, you get the gears going and you get some of the best ideas. So the reason that I say that is get a young person, get a passionate, interested 14 year old connected with a passionate, interesting coach and say, how do we build a thriving health community with weekly workouts and breath education classes and deep learning and community building and put your heads together and listen to that young person because they're gonna have insights that will blow you away.

The reason I can't illustrate this point enough, I'm trying to remember how many gyms in the US closed in 2020. I don't have the stat. I mean, it was enormous. As fitness infrastructure goes away from our community and we're all pulled online, we're doing everything online, the most valuable practitioners and leaders of the 21st century are those who are putting brick and mortar, real things, or something that isn't brick

and mortar, but it's ongoing enough. Think of the weekly group run that you know is going to be there. It's ongoing enough that humans come together with humans to retain the essence of being human. We have to build that. So young people can DM us, they can work with our coaches, and they can work to build things in their community that are really cool. So basically, whoever you are, no matter where you live in the world, if people want to get involved with your mission, they can either go to physiologyfirst.org or find the Physiology First Instagram page and DM you, and you'll be able to show them where to go next. Absolutely. And we're currently building a global directory of practitioners. We have our level two certification happening on January 8th,

which will be a very, very in-depth exploration of the future of at-home health testing, how you can help guide people into learning about their physiology with agency and how we can make some critical changes in how we're talking about youth mental health. You can always find us there. And what we'll do if you DM us is we will invite you to be a participant

in building the future of learning together. David, I honestly love it. I think what you're doing is game changing. Ever since I came across it, I was keen to invite you to come to the studio because I want to help amplify your work around the world. It really has the potential to transform how we educate the next generation, how we teach them how to stay healthy in an ever-changing world. It's phenomenal. I want to do everything I can to support that. To finish off then, a lot has been said about the current educational system. I don't mean just in this conversation, just broadly speaking.

And a lot of teachers feel under pressure. A lot of teachers don't like some of the things they've been asked to do at schools because they don't believe that this is the best thing for kids, but they feel that they have no choice. Let's say there's a headmaster or a headmistress of a school and they've heard this conversation, and they say, David, what are three or four things that I could change in my school that would immediately impact the children's physiology and therefore their health? What would those three or four things be? The first one to go back to the role of co-regulation is you have to get everybody on your staff these skills.

Okay. You have to get everybody on your staff the skill set to show up and model state regulation, optimal mental and physical health, invest in that. Okay, that's the first thing. The first thing. Number two is do things differently. And what I mean by that is if you want to pique the curiosity,

and curiosity is critical to the learning process, you have to create dynamism in your learning environment because kids will come in and say, oh, I expected this, but you're brave and courageous enough and innovative enough to do something slightly differently. Now you've recaptured my engagement. So train your staff. brave and courageous enough and innovative enough to do something slightly differently, now you've recaptured my engagement. So train your staff, be thoughtfully disruptive,

to reclaim engagement. Number three, show that you're willing to put help first, because if it isn't first, everyone notices. Get kids moving, prioritize sunlight, prioritize outdoor time. get kids moving, prioritize sunlight, prioritize outdoor time. If you're ready to show a deep commitment to putting the health of your students and your staff first, you will be the health pioneer of the 21st century. People will remember you because they will look back at this intersection and evolution and say, while everybody was doing the same thing that is producing massive rates of anxiety, depression, obesity, exhaustion, you were ready to do something different by putting health first, by making it a priority. And then the final thing would be to say to institute a deep physiologically oriented educational curriculum. The body is a complex system. We don't want to overcomplicate it because you can act and do simple things that are big movers for mental and physical health. But when you begin to teach humans how to navigate their

nervous system, remember that the nervous system is evolving. We are in evolution right now. We've never been in a world like we are in the 21st century. The amount of screen time fundamentally impacts the brain. It fundamentally impacts the body. Our modern lifestyle changes our physiology. So when you can put an in-depth curriculum for navigating your nervous system in a complex environment at the foundation of education, you will change the future. David, I've been a big fan of your work for years. I've loved talking to you. Thank you for coming on the show. Such an honor.

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. To check out more of David's incredible work, including the certification program for coaches, educators, and allied health professionals, which is launching in January 2024, and his Physiology First for Parents course, which is launching in March 2024, all you have to do is go to the website physiologyfirst.org or David's Instagram, which is at physiologyfirst.

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