HealthyGamerGG - Is ADHD a Superpower?

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Today Dr. K talks about states of flow state, brains being hypo-active, slowing your mind down, and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So why is it hard to do? It's because I don't think for many people, it clicks what the cost of sleeping poorly using drugs and eating unhealthfully is. So do you have moments of your true potential? I can only explain it as a temporary and extremely inconsistent moment where I'm operating completely normal. I can converse. I have a high confidence. I'm witty. I can think sharply. I'm at complete ease and everything seems effortless and easy. It might happen one day every few weeks or even longer. It's like the stars have aligned and everything is functioning as it should. I see this state and it's both encouraging and extremely discouraging. It's a tease. It's like dangling a carrot in front of me.

This is what you could be like, but unfortunately you'll be dysfunctional again tomorrow. This is what makes the condition so tantalizing because I know what I'm capable of, but I cannot sustain the state of mind for any amount of time. and it's seemingly so completely random when it occurs. Then I'll be back in my brain fog, stuttering, unable to articulate my thoughts, unable to be present, lost in my head, incapable of making decisions, etc.

So this is the kind of thing where it's really unfortunate, but sometimes we have moments of true potential. Right? And it feels like we're trying to buy a lightning. So it's like there's this flash and then suddenly everything works the way that it's supposed to. You're talking to people. The ideas are going. You're productive. You're focused. You're witty. You're having a good time. You're feeling good. Right. It's not just about productivity.

It's also about mood. The problem is that it's like completely RNG. And we have no idea like what causes this. And this is actually what's so devastating about it is that we know, I love the way that this person kind of described it. We know it's possible. all we have to do is like figure out how. So this is the kind of thing where we can't even give up on it, right? We can't grieve it because it's not gone. It's not like it's never happening again. It's not like it happened just once.

It happens consistently, randomly, but consistently. Every few weeks you get one day where everything is amazing. And so then your mind is like, if only I could do this, then my life could be like that. Like, you know, it could be so amazing. And then what happens is you know it's like possible, but you can't figure it out. Right. And so then you get really, really frustrated with yourself because you're like, how do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? If only I could do it. Why can't I be like this all the time? These are the kinds of thoughts that your mind has. And then you're stuck because like you have one of two options, right? Either you struggle to try to

figure this out. And if you can imagine what your life would be like, or you accept that this is not something that you can control, and then all of these things that you know you're capable of, you have to like let go. Sorry, not going to be productive, not going to be confident, not going to be witty, not going to be on point. But you don't want to give that up because you know it's possible. So it's super challenging. So what's going on here? And what can we do about it. So the first thing that I want to ask y'all is, like, what do you think contributes to success? Actually, let me rephrase. What do you think contributes to successful performance? So when people are struggling in life, what are the features that they sort of think about

in terms of like whether they're successful or not? Okay, so like I'm seeing a lot of stuff about, you know, diet and karma and focus and all this good stuff. So generally speaking, If we look at how human beings conceptualize success, they think of two things. They think of traits and they think of experience. So we'll hear this a lot in our language, right? So people will say motivation, discipline. A person is motivated. Another person is lazy.

One person is disciplined. Another person is undisciplined. These are all traits, right? So these are like, even in the five-factor personality model, we'll have. things like conscientiousness. And so what this essentially means is that the future is kind of deterministic. If you were born with the laziness gene, you're screwed. If you're born with the hardworking gene and the motivation gene, you're in good shape.

I am confident or I am shy. These are traits. So a trait is an inborn kind of capacity that's like sort of like fixed. The other thing that we assume is experience. So we assume that people who do things more are going to be able to do them more and be able to be more successful. So when I do any kind of performance coaching work, right? So like I'll just use e-sports as an example, but I do this for physicians as well. Attorneys, investment bankers, whatever.

So I'll ask people, and we can have this conversation with you too. So when you play a video game, the more you play a video game, do you get better at it? Interesting question. The automatic answer may be, yes, obviously, but that may not be entirely true. Right? So people are saying not always. Because like you can play a game for a thousand hours, especially like PVP games. And it's not like you're getting better every single minute, right?

You can stick around. You can plateau it a particular rank or MMR. So the other thing that's kind of weird is, in theory, Every game you play, you have more experience. You learn something from each game you play. If you learn something from each game you play, your chances of winning the next game should increase. And when I talk to like pro-esports players, for example, what I'll ask them is like what determines like whether you're going to win a game or lose a game. And so they'll say things like, oh, it's like my game knowledge, how much I practice and stuff like that.

Okay, like, okay, fine. So like, but then if game knowledge determines whether you win a game or lose a game, what that should mean is that, My game knowledge is relatively fixed across 10 games, right? If I play like, if I'm a pro, my game knowledge is fixed across those 10 games, which means that either my game knowledge is good enough and I should win all those 10 games, or my game knowledge is bad and I should lose all those 10 games. Because game knowledge is relatively static over the course of a 10 game stretch if you're a professional player. You can also think about this in medicine.

So if I'm a doctor, like, I've been practicing for 20 years and like over a 10-day stretch, it's not like I forget a bunch of medicine. and that's why like patients do poorly. Or I remember a bunch of medicine. That's why patients do well. So it ain't experience. So this is where what most people miss is that a lot of your success or a lot of your ability to motivate or have your mind do what you want it to is not based on trait or experience. It's based on state.

So states are temporary, right? It's a state of mind, a state of health, a state of illness. So having the flu, having influenza is a state. It's not a trait. There's no influenza gene. This is like a temporary state. And in our society, we have a very, very big bias towards focusing on traits instead of states. So basically, when I work with someone, what we focus on is who is the person who sits down at the computer to play the video game?

This is really simple. How do you think of pro gamer's performances if they haven't slept for 48 hours? it's going to suck, right? Duh. But wait a minute, but like they've played 20,000 hours of the game before. Their game knowledge is still there. That hasn't gone away. It's not like they're like dementia. They're not more lazy, less lazy. There's a lot of variability within our state. And if you want to capture these kinds of moments and you have ADHD, the way to capture them is by focusing on state, not trait. because it's possible. Your brain is capable of it.

If your brain wasn't capable of it, you would have never had it happen. So this sort of feels like the stars align. Now, here's the cool thing. If you pay attention, you can figure out what the stars are and even how to arrange them. And this is how you can get consistent performance

is by focusing on state. So what we're going to do is take a look at seven or eight factors that people tend to under-emphasize when it comes to determining states. Okay? So let's take a look at this. So, just a quick recap.

State versus straight. So these are things like personality, fixed, deterministic. Why are you successful? I'm motivated. Why are you lazy? I mean, why are you unsuccessful? Because I'm lazy. These kinds of things.

Even we can think about motivation as a state as well, but oftentimes when you talk to people, they'll use motivated as a trait. This person is motivated. Right. It's like, oh, like this person must be so motivated. Another good one is smart, talented, right? This is like fixed. Like smart is fixed. It's not something that changes on an hourly basis.

So states are variable, alterable, and sort of like not. deterministic, right? So it's sort of like kind of varies. That's the key thing. But they're both very, very involved in terms of determining kind of what you accomplish. So the flow state is a really good example of like states of mind where we have productivity. So examples of state are the flow state. We also have in meditation diana, right? We have different states of consciousness. We can also call this in the zone. So we know that this is these are temporary. The question is, how do we cultivate them? The answer, there's a lot that we can do. So the first thing that we can do to cultivate a particular state of mind is control our thoughts.

So we're going to go into more detail with some of these and less detail with others. So we just talked a little bit about self-talk, but you can actually change your self-talk. And this, you can change through emotional processing. So I'll give you guys just a quick example. So let's say I'm not motivated to date, but it's really hard for me to go on a date. And as I talk to someone, so I've talked to patients, for example, and be like, yeah, it's really hard for me to go on a day. I'll talk to them. Why? Okay, what happened?

Well, I had this one relationship that lasted seven years, and then the person kind of abandoned me. And now, like, every time, like, and so I sort of feel, they don't say it this way, but they end up feeling unlovable. They end up fearing that the same thing will happen to them again. And so they don't want to invest any amount of time. and dating, they don't want to waste their time because they put seven years into this relationship and they didn't get it back. And so now they're like scared to date because I don't have another

seven years to waste. And if I don't have seven years to waste, and that's the predominant thought in my mind, when I go on a date, it's going to like, what does that create? It creates all kinds of pressure on the other person. It's a lack of confidence. You're certainly not going to have fun, right? Because you're like thinking about I can't afford to waste any time. I can't afford to waste any time. And you're sitting there, you're supposed to be trying to get to know someone like, that's not fun at all. So this can sort of be somewhat of a self-controlling, self-fulfilling prophecy. So you have to learn how to control your thoughts. And a big part of that is going to be emotional processing. Also lots of detail into how to do that in Dr. Kay's

guide to doing stuff. Second thing that we have to be really careful about is, our internal emotional state. Sort of related to number one, but what I mean by this is like processing past emotions. Okay? So this is like past emotions. And what we sort of know, if you look at studies on people who have addictions, what you discover is the part of their brain that is aware of their internal emotional state is not as robust as a healthy person. So what does this mean? If you ask people who realize, How did you relapse? Everything was going great and then I don't know what happened. They'll say things like, I don't know what happened. If you actually tunnel down, what you tend to find is that there's some

kind of subsurface powerful emotion that causes them to reach for the numbing agent. They just weren't aware of it. So you have to become aware of your internal emotional state. How are you feeling in the moment? Next thing that we're going to talk a little bit about, this is really interesting, is we don't really think about the foods that we eat is psychoactive. So we know that there are some things I can put into my body like caffeine, let's say alcohol, marijuana, even things like, you know, people will even try stuff like Thienine, Ashwaganda, there's all kinds of stuff that we can use Kava Kava. These are all herbs and stuff that are psychoactive affect the state of our mind.

but we tend to think that these things affect our mind, but we don't think about things like sandwiches or tomatoes or rice or fried chicken as psychoactive substances. But it turns out that they are. Diet in the treatment of ADHD and children, a systematic review of the literature. A total of 52 studies were identified, some investigating whether ADHD symptoms can improve by avoiding certain food elements, 20 studies, and whether certain foods may reduce ADHD symptoms. Elimination diets and fish oil supplementation seem to be promising dietary interventions for the reduction of ADHD symptoms and children. Interesting. Huh? So let's understand this for a second. What determines your motivation? Like which organ of the body determines motivation

and clarity of mind? Right? chances are it's our brain. I don't know if you guys know this, but the brain is a physiologic organ that requires like physical substances. So for example, fish oil is high in omega-3, and omega-3 is very, very important for neuronal health. So there's a decent chance that if you have trouble getting into the right state of mind, that your diet could be part of the problem.

which we don't tend to think about. And this is why if you look at yogis, so like yogis who want to meditate for 12 hours a day, they're very controlling for their diet. I've been on, I mean, not right now, but in the past I've been on something called a Satvik diet. And being on a Satvik diet for 90 days is when you truly understand.

That's when you begin to understand what meditation truly is. I don't think you can even achieve some of these higher states. of consciousness unless you're on a Sativic diet. And that's why all the yogis eat this way. They're not eating that way for their figure, and they're not eating their way out of financial reasons.

What they've actually done is looked at all of the subtle effects of food on the mind. And there's like a pro-like consciousness diet, which they adopt. Satvik. Okay? We're not going to go into that right now. But there are all kinds of food. So this is where like if you're struggling in terms of your motivation or these clarity moments, it's important, what did you eat for the 24 to 72 hours before you had that moment?

Because chances are there's something in your diet that helped a lot. Next thing that we don't really consider in terms of states is low-grade inflammation. This is somewhat related to diet. But we also know that, for example, like, when people have gluten sensitivity, it creates like a low-grade inflammation and then they have, like, trouble in their, like, because they're, your brain is like mildly inflamed. So if you think about getting over a cold and how motivated and how energetic you are, when you're like a little bit sick.

And some of our diet is actually filled with stuff that is kind of pro-inflammatory. And as there's all kinds of things like leaky gut hypothesis, and we sort of know that like low-grade inflammation is going to be bad for cognitive function. Right? I want you all to think about this. There are studies, and these studies, by the way, I've looked at a lot of them in detail. They're not very robust. So the data behind diet and ADHD is actually not that great, by the way.

I mean, there's like indications that it helps, but I just don't think that it's specific enough. But this is the kind of thing where like, what's the inflammatory state of your body? Are you eating pro-inflammatory foods? Are you getting like, and this is why, like, if we look at scientific studies on health, like, what does it take? You know, fruits and vegetables. And how much of this are you eating? And if you're not eating enough of it, chances are what you're going to do is you're going to get constipated. and as you get constipated, I don't know if you'll know this, but you start to get rotting material stuck in your intestines.

And then this stuff causes inflammation. How do you feel after you have a good poop? Right? Kind of weird. We don't really think about it very much. So if you're like wondering how to bottle this lightning of these pro ADHD, like these, like high productivity states, it involves touching on all of these things. Next thing that we don't really think about is rest quality.

So how are you sleeping? And this is where we don't really think about a couple things. So good example of this. So alcohol and marijuana both reduce your REM sleep. So this is the tricky thing about alcohol and to a lesser extent marijuana. I know the science behind alcohol a little bit better. Alcohol helps people fall asleep, but lowers the quality of their sleep. So if you drink on a regular basis or you smoke on a regular basis,

chances are the quality of sleep that you're getting overnight is like not good, or it's worse. So REM sleep generally composes of 18 to 23% of a night's sleep. The other thing about REM sleep is we're not really sure what it does. we don't really know is even despite all of our advances. It appears to be important, but we're not quite sure how or why. And we know that alcohol reduces your REM sleep. So you may still sleep for eight or nine hours if you get drunk and you pass out. You're certainly it's very easy to fall asleep, but then the quality of your sleep sucks.

So whatever your brain is trying to accomplish during sleep where it goes through these different stages and REM sleep and stuff like that, you're sabotaging it by using these kinds of things. So if your rest quality is not good, your ability to foster, cultivate that magical state of productivity is going to be hampered. Last thing that we're going to talk about is environment. So this two, we've got a lot. We're going to cover it now, but there's a lot more detail about how to structure your environment in our upcoming guide on Dr. K's guide to ADHD and doing stuff. But let's go through a couple of basics. Okay. So if you all want like worksheets and like implementation plans and stuff like that, that's all in the guide.

but we're going to cover the basics right here now. So the first thing to understand is that there are things called permissive influences. So what's an example of a permissive influence? A permissive influence is something that allows something else to happen. So for example, in the female menstrual cycle, we have estrogen and progesterone. So when my body secretes estrogen or when my ovaries secrete estrogen, it creates, progesterone receptors. So estrogen goes in and creates a progesterone receptor like this. And now when I have progesterone, which is a little cube, it has something to go and activate.

Oh, you guys can't see this. Okay? So this is where like progesterone doesn't work without estrogen. And so this is where even if you look at things like birth control for women, it involves messing with, the balance of these hormones so that you essentially don't allow for a pro-gestational, i.e. pro-pregnancy state. So what does this have to do with like cultivating these moments in ADHD? What are the permissive influences for those moments? When you hang out with a particular group of friends, do they make you more interested in working or less interested in working? And this is where there's permissive influences for procrastination as well. There are permissive influences for bad states of mind.

Sometimes you'll may have had a on-again, off-again relationship with someone who's toxic that you just can't get away from. When they enter your life, boy, is it a blast, but boy, does everything else in your life start to go to hell. So you can have people who are permissive influences for things like procrastination and toxicity. And you can have permissive influences for things like focus, ambition, and positivity. So do you go to professional networking events? Do you go to startup meets? I remember back when I was in Boston, there was this cool thing called Venture Cafe,

which was just an networking event every week where there's like someone who comes and talks about startups. And you just go and you learn what people are doing in the Cambridge area, which is near where MIT is and stuff like that. Harvard and MIT are there. So like you just go and like every week, like if you just go and you just talk to people and you just like it gets you thinking, gets the juices flowing.

Right? So for those of you that notice our touch a grass initiative, so we've like got that going on, this is a great way to get out of your house. Because if you're stuck within these four walls, what kinds of thoughts do these four walls encourage? When you're in these four walls, what do you feel like doing?

What do you end up doing? What do you end up thinking about? So if you want to capture these motivational moments of brilliance, what you've got to do is recognize, first of all, that it's not about traits. It's not about discipline. It's not about intelligence. It's not about talent. It's about states. It's recognizing that this brain, in order to create a certain state of focus, mental focus, is born of the mind.

And the mind is seeded within the brain. And we know this because if you eat particular foods or ingest particular substances like alcohol, it alters the function of your mind. What organ system is alcohol acting on? It's focusing on the brain. So as we alter the physicality of our brain, we will create particular mental states. So this is where a lot of that state work is done through things like diet, sleep, exercise, vitamin D, all that kind of stuff. And there's more to it than that. There's cultivating the right kinds of thoughts. You can certainly meditate.

There's also cultivating the right kind of environment. So if you're trying to capture those moments, it's not so much that you should not look at what to do. What you should do is look at that moment and try to look at the days before, the weeks before. What was your emotional state? Were you stressed out about something? Were you feeling really good about stuff?

like what led up to that? What was going on within your body, within your gut, within your brain, and within your mind that fostered and allowed this fertile soil for this state of consciousness to arise. And as you get into that, then you will be able to actually cultivate these states consistently. This is the wild thing.

You can absolutely do this. And for those of you that are saying, oh, I just need to like sleep well and eat healthy, right? That sounds hard. So why is it hard to do? It's because I don't think for many people, it clicks what the cost of sleeping poorly using drugs and eating unhealthfully is. They don't realize that the cost is losing out on these moments of brilliance.

What you're costing yourself is going into Super Sand mode. We just don't appreciate the cost because it never clicks with us that these two things are related. And as we start to work on these influences, you will find that this effort, over time, it takes time. You're going to plant a seed. You're going to plant another seed. It'll turn into a shrub. And then eventually it'll have flowers and then eventually it'll bear fruit. And once you sort of figure out what your internal formula is in terms of like productivity and focus, like it'll transform your life.

Questions? This is a good question. What if sleep deprivation causes, make it? you disinhibited enough to reach that state. Isn't it a slippery slope? Great question. Someone else is asking, sometimes I perform better when I'm fatigued.

So there's one really important exception to being well-rested. So when you're fatigued, your mind is a little bit exhausted and your thoughts move slower. When your thoughts move slower, if what is destroying your focus is a hyper-rength, active mind, then you will be more focused. So if I, if there's a good level of focus, this focus can be destroyed either by having a hyperactive mind or a hypoactive mind. So for example, if I feel overwhelmed and I can't focus because I have a thousand different

things going on, and my mind is all over the place. That's a hyperactive mind. So focus can be shattered by a hyperactive mind. And sometimes fatigue can be an antidote to that. Right? Because then like your mind is like operating at 80%. And so 80% of all of your stress actually puts you in a good, good space. Because you're normally like your mind is operating at like 120%. So you need some kind of fatigue to kind of calm you down and chill you out. This is also why some people will reach for substances to calm themselves down to treat their anxiety. Right?

I use marijuana for my anxiety, for example. Because it slows their mind down. So the goal is slowing your mind down. Now, you can do that through a substance. You can do it through a medication sometimes. You can do it through fatigue. Or you can do it through healthier methods than all of those, which is like training your mind to slow down. Processing thoughts, learning how to compartmentalize thoughts, learning how to set things down in your mind.

There are all kinds of different things you can do. You can also train your thoughts through your breathing. So the speed of your thoughts correlates with the speed of your exhalation specifically. So this is why, for example, when people are hyperventilating in a panic attack, we'll ask you to breathe in a paper bag. Why do we ask you to breathe in a paper bag? We don't really do that as much anymore. But that's because, like, as you breathe in a paper bag, the CO2 level within the bag starts to sort of increase. So you have to take slower, deeper breaths. So what happens is we have this thing called physiologic dead space. So I don't know if this sort of makes sense. But even when I fully exhale, my lungs are not completely empty. Right? It's not like completely empty. There's air stuck in there that keeps my lungs open. Then what happens is the air down here, let's say, like if I have air down here in my lungs, like along the bottom, all the oxygen has been removed from that air. Then when I exhale, this air goes out and ends up in my throat. Because even at the end of my exhalation, there's actually air in my throat. And then when I breathe in again, this air is the first air that goes down into my lungs. So we have this thing called physiologic dead space, which is space where there's air that has no oxygen.

So if I'm taking shallow breaths, the dead air is moving here, here, here, here, and I only get fresh air in this part. Whereas if I take a deep breath, the dead air without oxygen goes down here, and then I get all this with fresh air, if that sort of makes sense. So we want to encourage hypoventilation to calm down anxiety. It's physiologic. yogis figured this out as well. It's part of the reason that a lot of these breathing practices involve slowing the breath and thus controlling the mind. So the key thing here is that your mind can be controlled.

You can foster a particular state of mind that's incredibly productive. You just have to know how to do it. And this is the cool thing is that all of these decisions are not, don't require like willpower, right? It's not forcing yourself into the state of mind. It's actually decisions that you make the day before in the day before, in the day before. It's going to bed a little bit earlier, waking up a little bit later, potentially.

It's about processing your emotions a little bit better. It's about having, let's say, an apple before you have your pepperoni pizza, as opposed to just having pepperoni pizza. All of these things will matter, right? So giving up pepperoni pizza is, like, hard from a willpower standpoint. But if you're starving, like kind of nudging yourself towards eating an apple before you dive into the pizza is, way easier. Pisa's right there. I'm going to take two slices instead of three. I'm just going to have an apple first. As you start to cultivate these sorts of changes, your mind will improve. And when your

mind improves, you'll find yourself in these states more often. So someone's asking, does this mean I should go for a crazy run in the morning to control ADHD a bit? That's where I would say, you should try it and see what happens. Right? You should try it. So that's where like you're going to figure out. This is where the right answer is not something that I'm going to tell you, because I don't know what your body is precisely. I don't know what your brain is precisely. I don't know what your mind is precisely. These are the major factors that people tend to miss.

Thank you very much for the donations, by the way. Okay, so I see other questions. What if your mind is hypoactive? So that's where, so our mind becomes sort of hypoactive, especially through technology use. It becomes kind of dulled, right? Where then what happens is we need the technology to like artificially ramp it up.

So an engaging TikTok or an adrenaline, inducing video game takes a baseline hypoactive mind and amplifies it to a normal level, which is why it's so damn addictive. And then once we stop playing the game, we go back to the hypoactive mind, right? And we don't like being in that state. So we need the adrenaline to like build up. And the other problem is that as we get more and more adrenaline through the game, we actually downregulate some of our receptors in our brain. Not really adrenaline receptors. This is sort of an extrapolation here. Then what happens is we sort of become dependent. dependent on it, almost like caffeine. So if your mind is hypoactive, that's where we look at some

of these permissive influences. Like, what are you eating? Who are you spending time with? Who are the people that stimulate your thoughts in the right direction? Thank you for the donation, Nicholas. So GDOM 2000 is saying, I can confirm that exercise and diet helped with my ADHD. The worst I eat, the worst my symptoms tend to get. And then if you go into Ayurveda, so we don't really have great scientific evidence for this, but if you go into Ayurveda, even say there are particular foods that fruits and vegetables are not all the same, that particular fruits and particular vegetables will be good at cultivating particular mental states. Now, we have some evidence of this sort of, right? So Irovede that goes as far as saying particular foods are good

for particular mental states, but they start by saying that that presumes that all of the foods are unique. And generally speaking in Western medicine for a long time, we've said five servings of fruits or vegetables, doesn't really matter what you eat. Whereas now we know that there are some things like cruciferous vegetables that have particular effects on your cytocrine P450 enzymes. We know that grapefruit can do that as well and will actually cause particular alterations. So we now are starting to see that there's a lot more specificity to fruit and vegetable than we originally realized. Even if you look at some of these things like the FODMAP diets, these are good examples of like how particular food, Not all fruits and vegetables are made the same.

And there's an intersectional component between foods that we eat as well as someone's individual digestion. These are concepts that Ayurveda has been hypothesizing or proposing for thousands of years. Okay, so Fractaloupe has a great question. I've heard probiotics have positive effects on mental health due to gut health. What do you think? So, very good question. We go into a lot of detail in this in Dr. Kay's guide so you all can watch it. There's a lot more detail, but we'll like it.

answer it here. So gut bacteria has definitely a strong impact on your mental health. So we know this because we know this from a lot of different ways. So we know that gut bacteria can sometimes cause inflammation or be healthy and have less inflammation. So inflammation in the gut leads to inflammation in the brain. Inflammation in the brain tends to negatively impact things like mood. This we know. Second thing that we know, certain kinds of gut bacteria are more symbiotic than others. So some gut bacteria will make neurotransmitter precursors. So they'll produce tryptophan. So here's the relationship you have with your gut bacteria. You give it food, it breaks down the food, keeps some for itself, and gives you what's left over. And your brain

takes triptophan, which is made by some gut bacteria. and turns it into serotonin, which, by the way, is what we supplement when people are depressed or have anxiety disorders. Okay? So we know that gut creates neurotransmitter precursors. Next thing that we know, so those are like basic science kind of things. The question, though, is that do those actually lead to clinical benefits? Sure, it causes inflammation. We can measure that.

Sure, they create neurotransmitters, but does it actually make a difference clinically? The answer is yes. We've done studies on stool transplants, which is exactly what we're. it sounds like. They will take stool from one person or rat and implant it into another person or rat, and they will see improvement in conditions like major depressive disorder. So it appear, and stool, by the way, is 50% bacteria. Okay. So we've tested it. Seems to work. Take the poop from a depressed rat, stick it into, I'm sorry, take the poop from a healthy rat, stick it into a depressed rat and the depressed rat gets better.

we also know that there are particular strains of bacteria that are more common in people who have bad anxiety. There are two strains of bacteria that are tightly associated with bad anxiety, and there are two strains of bacteria that appear to be anti-anxiety. What we mean by that is if you look at people who have low anxiety scores and you check their gut, there are two bacteria that they have that people have high anxiety don't have. In fact, people who have high anxiety have these two different kinds of bacteria. So there seems to be a lot of connections between gut bacteria and mental health. The question, though, was probiotics and mental health.

Now, this is where the marketing gets tricky. So if you take a probiotic, how long are you supposed to take it? People usually say take it every day. Why do you have to take probiotics every day? They have CFUs, colony forming units. They're living bacteria. Why do you have to take probiotics all day long? That's because probiotics may not affect it.

And the reason is because which bacteria grow in your gut? The ones that you feed. So this is where, like, you know, the health industry would love to say, hey, look at all this research on mental health and gut bacteria. Take this pill every day. By the way, you need to take it every day in order to get this beneficial bacteria. But what determines your gut bacteria is not whether you take a probiotic every day. It's what you feed your bacteria. So if I eat a lot of like processed foods with simple sugars, there are going to be some bacteria in my gut that digest those preferentially. Right? So I'm going to be feeding the bacteria that like processed foods and simple sugars. Whereas if I eat like oatmeal and broccoli all the time, I'm going to be feeding the bacteria that break. down complex fibers and like cellulose and some of these other things that we can't digest.

So the key thing about maintaining proper gut bacteria is not taking probiotics every day. It's eating the right foods. So if I take probiotics and then I feed, I can take, I can add 50,000 units of whatever kind of bacteria you want in a col, in a probiotic bill. But 50,000 units is nothing. We have 10 times as many bacterial cells in our body as we have human cells. For every one cell inside this that is human, there are 10 cells that are bacterial. So 50,000, 100,000, 300,000 CFUs of like probiotics is like nothing compared to what you've got in there.

So this is where what I tend to find is that you can take probiotics, but you've got to eat the right foods too. And what we love to do in current developed society, we love to take pills that absolve us of behaviors. I don't want to eat broccoli. Just give me the freaking probiotic pill. And there is a whole supplement industry that loves that. So what is the role of probiotics on mental health? Short answer is we don't know. Right? At least I haven't seen overwhelming or convincing evidence that probiotics consistently help. There's some evidence that they help because you do need to populate with the right bacteria. The key thing that people miss is that once you populate with the right bacteria,

you need to support those bacteria with the right foods. And as you support those bacteria with the right foods, then you'll start to see positive effects, which is exactly how we get to this paper. Right? So if we go back to this one, elimination diets and fish oil supplementation seem to improve symptoms of ADHD. So why is the elimination diet important? Probably from the inflammatory standpoint. Okay. So people are asking what food? promote tryptophan and serotonergic precursors. So this is where our science falls short. So it's my belief that the Ayurvedic diet, the mechanism of action of Ayurvedic diets is through gut bacteria. That's my belief. We actually don't have a whole lot of strong science to support that.

And our Western conception of diet is still, I think, like very primitive. So we still think predominantly in macronutrients. We need 50 grams of protein. But as one gram of protein, the same as another gram of protein. If I get a gram of protein from a lentil, is that the same as a chicken breast? If the chicken breast is organic and free range, does that matter? So we tend to think about macronutrients. We tend to split things up and we're like grams of fiber is what's important, which is true.

But we don't really have good evidence on this. This is something that I will say is that when I work with the, Patients, right? So I don't have data to support this, but anecdotally, patients who adopt better diets can come off of medication easier. I've seen that very consistently in my practice. Now, what's going on there? Is it the gut bacteria? Who knows? Is it just eating healthy? Who knows? It could be correlational as well that people who are healthier can eat healthier, right? Because it's like harder to make yourself salad than it is to like microwave something from the freezer. So maybe there could be a correlational thing where it's not really causation. It could

be correlation. Yeah. So I think we have, we've published some of this stuff. So I definitely know there's guide supplements, I mean, dietary supplements with Dr. Kay's guide guide. I imagine that some of those are floating around on the internet. But, and you know, a lot of different people will talk about Ayurbetic diet.