Habits and Hustle - Episode 562: Shawn Stevenson: Why Your Relationships Shape Your Health More Than Any Wellness Trend

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

The most powerful longevity tool you have is not in a bottle or a needle. It’s in the quality of your relationships. There’s a body of data that’s been saying this for decades. Yet, the wellness industry kept focusing on the other direction of wellness. Shawn knows this not only because he read it in a study but because he lived the opposite of what healthy relationships look like first and paid for it with his health. Shawn Stevenson is the host of The Model Health Show, the no.1 nutrition and fitness podcast in the United States, and the bestselling author of Sleep Smarter and Eat Smarter. He grew up in poverty in St. Louis, was told at 20 he had the spine of an 80-year-old, and rebuilt his health from scratch with no money, no access, and no roadmap for any of it. In this episode of Habits and Hustle, Shawn makes the case that we have been optimizing the wrong thing all along. Your culture, your community, and the quality of your relationships are what the largest longevity studies keep pointing to, and almost nobody in wellness is talking about it. He also gets into why GLP-1s and peptides are a shortcut to the wrong destination, what circadian medicine is about to change, and why the healthiest thing you can do today has nothing to do with your supplement stack. If you have ever felt like your circumstances were too far gone for health to even be possible, this episode was made for you. What's Discussed: 04:12 The hidden impact of sleep on metabolism and energy 09:35 Common habits that undermine long-term health 15:48 Practical strategies to improve recovery and resilience 20:55 Final thoughts on building sustainable daily habits Thank You to Our Sponsors! AirDoctor: Head to AirDoctorPro.com and use promo code HUSTLE to get up to $300 OFF today! AirDoctor comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, plus a 3-year warranty (an $84 value) FREE! Kion: Visit getkion.com/habits for 20% OFF Momentous: Ready to try supplements that actually do what they claim? Head to livemomentous.com and use code JEN for 35% OFF your first subscription. Therasage: Visit Therasage.com and use code JEN to get 15% OFF your order. Your skin deserves this level of care. Magic Mind: Head over to magicmind.com/jen and use code JEN at checkout. Prolon: Prolon is offering listeners 30% OFF sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit prolonlife.com/JENNIFERCOHEN and use the code JENNIFERCOHEN to claim your discount and your bonus gift. Rho Nutrition: Go to RhoNutrition.com and try Rho's Liposomal Glutathione. Use code JEN20 for 20% OFF sitewide. Manna Vitality: Try it now by using the code Jennifer20 at mannavitality.com. Find more from Jen Cohen:  Website: jennifercohen.com Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Find more from Shawn Stevenson:  Website: themodelhealthshow.com   Instagram: @shawnmodel  YouTube: Shawn Stevenson  X: @ShawnModel  Podcast: The Model Health Show Book: eatsmartercookbook.com  

Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. Today we have Sean Stevenson, you guys.

He is probably an OG. You are an OG in podcasting. He has one of the top health podcasts, probably the, Is it in the U.S. or in the world at this point? You know, it's like the billboard charts, but we've been number one in the United States, like, you know, many, many weeks. Forever, like a long time. It's also could be because of your voice. He does have a really nice sounding voice, which kind of helps kind of, not to mention the science background, but the combination.

And you always give such great information. So the whole thing, it's really nice to finally have you. I can't believe how long. I'm shocked it's taken six years to have you sit here because, I feel like we should have met before. Yeah. I want you to tell me the top three biggest myths in wellness right now. Okay.

Top three biggest myths in wellness right now. Oh, you want to get controversial? Oh, my gosh. I've been waiting. Okay. I mean, the hot thing on people's tongues right now, which they might be injecting their tongues is the peptides. Yeah.

You know, that's super popping right now. And for good reason, science around this. And I'm saying this from the perspective of somebody who was unintentionally kind of saw this coming. When I was working on my book, Eat Smarter, and this was like 2018, 2019, when I first started to put the book together, I was pointing out, you know, some of the most significant, what, again, we relate to peptides, like, you know, insulin, gLP ones. Like, these are literally written in my book. It came out around, you know, in 2020. But I was talking about GLP1, but I was talking about the pathways to get these things activated in your system, right?

And I also consider like, what if we can just take these things to help, like, just like taking insulin, right? And but I kind of just like left that tab open and little did I know within the next couple of years what was going to happen with GLP1, for example, which is life transforming for many people, but also abused as well, as most things are. in this kind of pharmaceutical mindset. Are you on a GLP one? No. No. Because every single person sitting here who are thin, not thin, bulky, not, whatever, everyone's either microdosing it or taking it.

And they all just like talk, you know, kind of like just speak it away. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm just taking a microdose of Tresepotide or I'm just taking a microdose of this. I've watched all the specials with my, with my heroes growing up, Mark McGuire. Mm-hmm. Jose Canseco. You know, I didn't. Remember H.G?

Yes. Hawk Hogan. I just watched the Hulk Hogan die. How was that one, by the way? Fire. I mean, I was, I was, I was, I was, maybe that's what got me emotional, low-key. No, I love, I love, I'm very close with his agent.

And that whole thing, it was, I met him, I loved him. He was great. It was, I mean, such a big part of my childhood. Oh, it was my childhood. Yeah. By the end and just how everything unfolded on me, I was just, like, choked. He don't even tell me, because I haven't watched it yet. I'm not going to watch it yet.

I'm not going to say anything. Yeah, don't tell me. But just again, he was right there. Oh, I didn't take anything, brother. Eat your vitamins, say your prayers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have not injected a damn thing. Like, nothing.

Nothing. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, keeping that in context. But it's not that I'm against it. I'm much more on the side of like, let's stack conditions in our favor and do the things that our genes expect. First, if you're not doing those things, stop trying to take a particular, which, again, I want to say this with compassion, a shortcut in order to get a certain response.

If you're sleeping for three hours and then looking towards like, let me take this peptide in order to lose weight or in order to help to try to increase the length of my telomeres or whatever, you're burning your telomeres away by staying up and being on your phone. Like, let's address the behavior. And also we can have these other newly invented. products to support us when appropriate. And so this is another conversation about accessibility. We have access to some things that can really help to change the expression of our bodies.

Because if we're really looking at this in a more kind of holistic way and what are we actually talking about here, even when we're talking about, you know, our biological clocks, let's start there. circadian medicine is going to be growing rapidly as well. Circadian medicine, circadian nutrition. what the hell are circadian clocks? So these are functional genes and proteins that control all of our other genes and proteins, right?

And so just by changing the timing of what we're doing something can dramatically change the expression of thousands of our genes, all right? And so these particular proteins influence behavior. They influence the behavior of what our cells are doing. There are so many ways to go about doing that.

These might be some very powerful, you know, one-trick pony, like, but very effective ways of going about these things. But, again, I would much rather see people stacking conditions doing what they can do with their body and their lifestyle first before looking towards. Or they're not getting addicted and creating a panacea out of it because that's really, really what I'm saying is such a huge possibility of addiction. And that's what we're seeing with the gLP ones. It's very difficult. And I have a particular colleague that's coming to mind. She's really working to kind of buck the system and the idea that you have to be on it. You know, of course, she went to the microdosing.

She started off like with the kind of standard in microdosing. And she's attempted to get off of it. We'll see if it's successful. And she can't. She hasn't been able to thus far. She got off of it and she got back on it. But not to say that it's not possible. No, no.

I want you to do real talk here because I've had a lot of people. Like I just, I've talked to a lot of. lot of people about this. What it's scary to me is number one. It also decreased, it's not only just your lean muscle mass that you are decreasing. It's also your bones, like your bone density is getting, is getting compromised. So as you age, there's this whole like chit-chat about, oh, you know, it's great for your inflammation. It's great for your cognitive brain fog. But no one's talking about the other things that could actually be really detrimental as you age. Like that, like bone density is really important, you know. So is lean muscle mass, really important. And I think,

I think to your point with your colleague is what I've seen, people who get off of them, they're gaining all their weight back. And they're gaining it back fast, not just like in, you know, six months, like in a month. Yeah. We actually have, we actually have published peer-reviewed studies on this now, some prestigious medical journals about the weight regain. But again, there are treatments for the weight regain. There's also treatments for the loss of muscle and bone. You have to strength train. But again, this is the thing. You should be doing that anyways. Again, that's my whole point. So what if you're doing both? Does it counterbalance each other? It can definitely help to retain your lean mass and your in your bone density if you're strength

training in conjunction with the gLP one. I think matter of fact, it should be mandatory if you get on to a GLP1 with the aspiration of weight loss, you're also prescribed weightlifting. What about this whole, I'm sure you've heard this, or maybe you haven't, it's not, the GLP ones are not just suppressing your appetite, but it's suppressing everything else, like everything else that is, I guess, good in life, right?

Like your ability to have, want relationships, love, not just food, but like sex, love, everything, you're suppressing every human, not emotion, but human, what do you call it? Just desire. Desire. It just basically numbs every desire. It can make food less desirable, of course.

But makes everything else less desirable. And that is speaking to myth number two, which is there is no one size fits all. All right. Some people can be wildly successful utilizing, you know, peptides, including GLP1. But it's situationally dependent. You know, they might not lose that zest for life. and they might think that that's just totally ridiculous. Like, I love everything.

You know, it just helped me lose weight. And so it's situational, situationally dependent, but also what tends to happen is we blanket everything. Like if somebody finds success on it, they think it's good for everybody else and they'll find the same. When somebody, again, this is taking back. Well, actually, I'm going to throw in number three. I'll package it all together, myth number three.

One of the greatest mistakes that we're making right now, and I help to usher this in. Like, we've gotten to this point, and I haven't even really talked about this. And I'm grateful because I needed this conversation, obviously, and I'm so thankful for, you know, the questions that you asked. But there's a way that I went about things in the very beginning of my career. I've been working in health and fitness for 24 years, 24 years,

starting off working at my university gym all the way to, you know, everything today. But I remember the first, and my wife actually pulled it up because she was trying to, like, looking for like a trademark, copyright thing for us. and she found an email for this university lecture that I was doing for this biology department. And I remember, like, do I need the tie and the thing and all the, you know, like being this type of character that can exist in that reality?

And I'm just like, and I did that for a little bit. And I'm just like, this doesn't feel right to me. Like, I don't have to wear a lab coat in order for me to communicate science. As a matter of fact, I think that just based on what I've done so far, my greatest gift is to be myself and really connect with people, make people feel like, oh, I actually understand this stuff. I understand what the mitochondria is. And I understand that actually my nutrition, my meals are making my mitochondria. Like my cells aren't just manifesting out of nowhere.

Like this is built on the nutrients that I'm eating. Like creating more connective tissue, making it fun. Seeing people just have these aha moments of like, oh, like, I actually can influence what my blood sugar is doing, which is counter to what it was decades ago. Literally, you're a victim. Like you have insulin resistance, it just happened. Right. And so I'm saying all that to say that. My inroads was, and this is being used outside of medicine now,

as being used in personal development, is being used in, you know, real estate buying a home, but people are using peer-reviewed evidence in order to illustrate a point. I've been doing this for almost 20 years. You're following that temperament, that template, because I needed something to affirm that I know what I'm talking about, right, as a research scientist, like here's this piece of data. And then in order to communicate a message, over time I realized that there is data to affirm the exact opposite of what I'm saying.

This was years back, years ago. And so I, but already this had taken off. And, you know, a lot of my colleagues, especially on social media, is following that template of, here's this study. Let's talk about it. Oh, there's this other person saying this thing. Where's the study?

Show me the study. Right, right, right. And so we've gone to this. this other extreme to where if it doesn't have a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial or some kind of meta-analysis or whatever the case might be, then it's not valid. We swung from this is literally hearsay where a lot of the people who are propagating, you know, these studies, they didn't know shit about this. They weren't looking at these studies a decade ago when I was.

And finding the, you know, the evidence that Ashoganda could be effective or whatever the case might be, right? what we need to do is to find a place of balance, which is, yes, we want high quality studies conducted, but we do not want to negate the value of end of one because your personal experience is more instructive on what's right for you than anything else on planet Earth, right? And so the anecdotal evidence is still evidence. And so that's really what I want to say. The third myth is that everything that's effective needs to be validated. in a high quality peer-viewed study, you know, truly.

Like, if we find out today that, you know, putting, I don't know, marine phytoplankton in my water increases my one-rep max by 10%. I just experienced something. And that might be true for me. It might be true for other people. But to share that and for somebody to be like, it's not valid because it doesn't have a peer-reviewed study, we're missing the point.

We have to find out what works for us. Yes, it's true. So then your three top myths are the following. The first is, well, you can say them because I want you to say them, just so I want to have a clean piece of information here. So say what the top three are. So number one was the over-reliance on the trendy things, which this one, and that's what I should have said earlier,

this one is the peptides. That's what we're hot on right now. Hold on a second. When I talk about peptides, I should tell you, GLP one I know is a peptide, but I'm talking about the other peptides that people are like super like, my friends are all taking like stacks of like the Wolverine stack of BPC, the copper GHQ for their, for their collagen and for their skin. There's also TB 500.

Like those are the ones that I feel like a lot of people are on. Do you find those to be as similar where it's like, listen, if it's not, I think people are just overusing. everything. I mean, that's my opinion, but that's my opinion. Again, end of one matters, but also the sketchiest part, again, is the sourcing and also the validation with thoroughly researched, you know, clinical trials, not to negate the value that they might hold for us. But my point being is that, you know, in putting this in the category of a myth is that like these are some kind of panacea. Yeah. That's really the bottom line at the end of the day for me. is we want to stack conditions doing the things like if you know that you're probably you're going to take this gLP one and lose weight for example yeah

and you're going to have to lift weights lift weights anyways like you still need that input let's do that and actually see what happens yeah and being honest about it and not you know there is no thing that's just going to be this panacea so that's myth number one myth number two and three myth number two was i do not remember you don't remember could you speak you were speaking so long i couldn't I couldn't just give you, I couldn't just get the thing. Well, they can just rewind it and they can hear it. But how about the fact that you're not wearing a wearable for sleep? You're not wearing an aura. You're not wearing a woup. And you were a book called Sleep Better.

Sleep smart. Sleep smarter. Sleep smarter. But you wrote that book, what, two, three years ago? No, 10 years ago. That was 10 years ago? It was the first sleep wellness. First sleep wellness book to become an international bestseller.

Stop it. Oh my God. I thought it was like two years ago because I was like seeing all. of it like in the last couple years. I wrote the first version of it 12 years ago. Get out. Oh wow. Okay. Well, I was going to say, with the book, I mean, the information is just as good as it is back then, if not

better, you're not wearing a wearable. So what's your take on wearables? Do you think they're just overrated and silly? Same thing. You know, it can be a great, it can give us a benchmark for things, but I've seen dysfunctional behavior. You know, with people like my sleep score, whatever, but making anxious. Yeah.

And so somebody could feel like they slept great and they see their sleep score and they're like fuck like what what happened or the opposite you know like they feel like trash was like man like where it's saying that i like so it can give us a great baseline yeah of things and so we don't want to prescribe to again that one size fits all but what i'm curious about is if your sleep score is you know 91 91 and then suddenly it's like 27 one night i want to know what happened then that's really what i want to know where is the big changes happening and And so it can be great for giving us some baseline metrics, but we can create.

And this is, my wife loves them. For her, it's a gamification. Yeah, it's all gamification. You know, like she can really go after that stuff. What I want to advocate for is we pay attention to ourselves and how we actually feel, how we look, how we feel, how we perform, which is asking a lot because we're so distracted today. Oh, I'm not sleeping well at all.

I mean, so that's why when I, like, when you were coming on, I had all these questions for sleep because I know how important it is. It's the number one thing for fat loss is sleep, right? Like, you can be doing everything right. And if you're not sleeping well, the next day, I'm eating things I would never even think of eating, right? And like my whole system is off. But you said something earlier about there's going to be a big uptick on circadian, something about circadian. Not you said, circadian medicine, circadian nutrition. What do you, what does that mean? What is circadian medicine? So this is, you know, taking your medicine at certain times a day, for example, or treating you based on

your circadian ribbons. Oh, okay. Right. Which everybody has their own kind of unique template on when things are ideal based on what their biology is doing. So we have these internal clocks that are determining when you're producing your big cortisol shot in the morning, when you're producing your biggest release of human growth hormone, when you are most, you know, insulin sensitive. The list goes on and on and on based on what time of day it is. Right. Right. And so the biggest influences to these circadian clocks that control thousands of our genes are light inputs and when you eat. Those are the two primary controllers. But the light inputs are by far the most powerful. Really? Like what? Tell me. So, for example, innovations in clinical neuroscience found that exposure to early morning sunlight helps to decrease cortisol in the evening because it's creating, it's helping to set the circadian rhythm. Right. And so what. We would see, you know, clinically, and this is like a little cute term, but tired and wired, right?

So we would see people whose cortisol is too low in the morning, making it difficult to get out of bed and get going, but then they're wired in the evening, right? They're just up. Like, I know I need to get to sleep and I'm going to be tired in the morning. Like, why can't I just? And so we would implement certain things that help to kind of reset the circadian rhythm. One of those things, again, clinically proven to be effective, but also try it yourself. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. It's getting an exercise in that first hour of the day as well.

Because moving your body and having some kind of, you know, vigorous movement is going to force that cortisol rhythm, I mean, the cortisol to increase. And that can potentially help to set the rhythm for the day. So it goes down in the evening. So sun exposure in the morning, some exercise, some movement, and maybe even a little caffeine in the morning. I mean, is that what you do? Is that your routine? For some people. What's your routine in the morning?

Oh, my routine in the morning. What time do you wake up in the morning? I usually wake up before my alarm. I have an alarm as like just in case thing, but 99% of the time I wake up before the alarm, right around 5.50, 6 o'clock. Okay. You know. And what's your routine? And then the first thing that I do that I've been doing for over two decades is I go and drink about, you know, 25 to 30 ounces of water.

usually I put like some fancy salt in there you know and yeah so I do that at my inner bath to start the day your inner bath inner bath? Inner bath. What's an inner bath? So we take an outer bath or outer shower like I took a shower to come here. Thank you. But the inside is more important, you know. And so it's taking that inner bath.

And also the reason that I'm so grateful again, I have many of my colleagues who've talked about this. They put this in books that I've shared with them that I've been doing for, you know, all this time. But the primary reason is when we're asleep, this is a long stint where we're going without water. Of course, we're breathing through the night. But also, when you're asleep, your glymphatic system and your brain is 10 times more active, removing metabolic waste from your brain. All right. And the way to help to kind of flush out these, this kind of internal waste management system is through water.

Bringing in more hydration to literally flush things out of your system. So you can pee them out, breathe them out, poop them out, all those kind of things. If you're dehydrated, it just makes it harder. All right. And also, we do have this phenomenon of recirculation of things if you're not clearing there from your system. So getting up, take my inner bath first, and then I immediately go and read something. So I've usually got a book or three sitting on the arm of my couch. And so I'll do some reading probably, I'm guessing probably maybe like 20 minutes in the morning.

This morning I was reading. Walter Longo's book, you know, where we actually met. Yeah, it's hilarious. You are. Okay, it's funny. So I was reading his book this morning. And after that, I do some meditation.