Modern Wisdom - #414 - Aaron Alexander - Engineer Your Body To Improve Your Mind

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Aaron Alexander is a manual therapist and movement coach, founder of the Align Method and an author. Health & fitness has been broken down into a very compartmentalised, reductionist view. Muscles are trained in isolation, mindfulness practise doesn't occur in the gym, physicality isn't thought of when you sit down at your desk. I wanted to speak to Aaron to explain how we can take a global, aligned, macro-view of our body's wellness to impact more than just how we look but how we feel, think, sit, sleep, have sex and everything else... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 days unlimited access to Shortform for free at https://www.shortform.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Aaron's website - https://www.alignpodcast.com/ Watch Aaron's Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/alignpodcast    Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Aaron Alexander. He's a manual therapist and movement coach, founder of the Align Method and an author. Health and fitness has been broken down into a very compartmentalized reductionist view. Muscles are trained in isolation, mindfulness practice doesn't occur in the gym and physicality isn't thought of when you sit down at your desk. I wanted to speak to Aaron to explain how we can take a global, aligned macro view of our body's wellness to impact more than just how we look, but how we feel, think, sit, sleep, have sex, and everything else. I've trained with Aaron a bunch of times while I was out in Austin and his

view of training being a complete modality, one way you're trying to improve how you move on a daily basis by the movements that you're doing the gym is a bit of a departure from what I'm used to and I really enjoyed it. So hopefully you take turns away from today. If you haven't already got the Modern Wisdom Annual Review Template, then you can go and pick it up right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com slash review. It is the exact process that I use every year so that I review the last 12 months, learn the lessons, and then make a plan for what is coming that's ChrisWillX.com slash review. But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Aaron Alexander. Oh yeah, PS, no episode this Saturday because it's Christmas, but Merry Christmas for me and PA Ben and video guide Dean, very Merry Christmas to you all. Hope the other great day, hope the other great weekend,

and I'll see you on Monday. It won't be a single shot where I can put my hand in all of these, will it? Oh, do you need to see it? I thought it was just an audio thing. Well no, because what you're trying to do is you're sinking, you're sinking the audio with the video. You can watch it. Oh, I thought it was just an audio blip, but yeah, you're right. God dang it.

What can I say, man? I'm not a videographer. No, no, but that's... I just like clapping. I just hate to clap. Maybe you both clap. Boom! Oh, angles!

Podcast time. We're in! Podcast time. Yeah, we're locked in. I'm Alexander. We'll come to the show. Christopher, thank you for making this happen. It's been a God goddamn pleasure getting to know you

over the last few weeks. So good, man. Yeah. Yeah, the bromance has happened quickly. Bromance is real. It's got serious. Yep, very fast. Yep, we're moving quick.

How would you describe your approach to fitness? I've been very interested since I've been out here. We've trained a fair bit. We've done some sessions barefooted in on it doing sprint training and contralateral movements and all manner of different things that as someone that spent a lot of time training, I've seen online but not really been exposed to very much and I'm quite interested to work out how you arrive at whatever view of health and fitness it is that you have. Yeah.

So my first thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. My background mostly was in manual therapy. Like my main field of specialty is working with people from hands-on bodywork. And before that, it was it was training. But my main interest really has been helping people come into alignment with their bodies so that we can get them to a point that when they move through their lives, as they are breathing, as they're just living their lives, they can be almost self-organizing into a greater place of alignment, of balance,

of homeostasis, just through their existence. And that sounds a little bit maybe like meta and out there. So specifically what that means is looking at what are the variables, the environmental conditions that are forming the body to fit into the positions that might create discomfort or disease. And so my approach to fitness isn't so much about what we're doing in a gym. It's more what we're doing for all the times that we're not in the gym. And I consider the gym to be, for me, the gyms like my buddy Kelly start who he did the the Ford for my my book coming up. He calls it like classical ballet. So when you're in the gym, you're working on these classical

forms to bring your body into balance enough that you can go out and do modern dance. You know, modern dance is the rest of your life. And so what I'm really interested with fitness predominantly is how do you start to integrate the concepts that you'd learn in a gym, any yoga studio, in a martial arts studio, into the way that you show up in business, and when you're out in a date with somebody, when you're at your house watching Netflix, all of that is fitness. And your body doesn't know the difference between, I'm in a yoga studio or I'm just, you know, at my house, my underpants. What would you say to someone that says, fitness and my training in the gym has nothing to do with

how I show up in business, fitness is for fitness and movement is for movement. Why does it matter about how I train in the gym relates to how I show up for a date? Yeah, so it's like the idea of being, you know, taking 20 years to be an overnight success. You know, we're cultivating, we're, we're grooving paths, you know, neuro, neuro, neurological paths, muscular paths, neuro muscular paths every day throughout every moment. This year, body doesn't know an off and on. Right now, as we're sitting in this position, you are generating electrical stimuli and around your hips and any place that your body's coming in contact with the chair.

So the term for that is mechanotransduction. You're squishing cells, you might be shearing cells, you might be twisting cells, and then there's gonna be a chemical cells, you might be twisting cells, and then there's going to be a chemical response, a chemical translation to that. And within that, that pushing that's happening against your hips, there's electrical charge around that space called piezoelectricity. That's going to be sending a signal to the cells that would be building connective tissue or bone tissue or muscle tissue or fascia.

And what you're sending within these signals, you're like the engineer of your body. You're saying, okay, we need to beef up in this space around maybe, you know, maybe you have bunions in your feet so you actually can see like a callous of specific tissue. That's just wear and tear in that specific range of motion. So you're sending that electricity based off of the way that you live your daily life. And then, you know, the fibro blasts and the fibro class, these little cells that either add tissue or take tissue away, they respond accordingly. And you are obstructing yourself just by sitting in a chair.

And so when you take that mindset of like, holy crap, like right now, I'm literally under a state of construction. When you get up off of this chair, you're tuned up to perform in the shape that you've been practicing most. So a thing that you might have heard is practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. So throughout the day, you're continually practicing how to engage or inhabit your physical body. And then when it does come time to show up in a meaningful way, you got to pick up a heavy

trailer or something, you got to suddenly sprint across a parking lot or whatever it may be. Your body is tuned up and queued up to be able to perform because you spent the last day, week, month, year in more of like a kind of like a ready position. And then you can be too ready, you know, where you're too queued up,

you're in like sympathetic overdrive and that's gonna be too much. If you're ready to much stiffness into the system, then the system can't rest and digest and heal and repair. So this isn't what I'm saying, doesn't mean you always have to have like a stick up your ass and have like axial extension like your spine's back. You know, you look perfectly enlightened in samadhi and spiritual and strong and stable. It's being able to relax, but being able to relax into functionality, the way that we can relax into functionality. There's specific things that we can talk about.

What would you say looking at the current trends in fitness and training? What would you say are the main areas that people are missing out on? Or what are the main problems that you're seeing with most people's training programs? Well, I mean, there's a lot of things. It really depends on what gym you're in. So if you go to a most traditional, like a 24-hour fitness type space, there's a lot of disintegration or myopic focus on specific muscles without much awareness to integrating the whole, putting the whole body together to work as one integrated body. So when you're excessively focused on myopically breaking down individual, like a muscle-by-muscle approach,

you just can't do it. Like you can't organize 640 odd muscles, depends on the specific individual, you know, 360 joints. It's just it's too much chaos So for you to be able to Go in and really think like you know joint by joint muscle by muscle I'm going to be engaging these and then I'm going to it's just going to magically all come together That can be confusing for the body. So what do you mean by confusing? Can be confusing for the body in the sense that if you don't train athleticism,

you won't just self-organize and be athletic. Okay, so breaking the component parts of musculature, apart and training biceps and triceps and overhead extensions and chest press. Yeah. La-Bla-Bla. So if you're excessively aesthetically focused, it's completely fine. There's no moralistic judgment. Juji Mufu is a good example of this where he has done a pretty good job of integrating

athleticism and calisthenics and gymnastics and powerlifting and bodybuilding. So he's a bit of an oddity in his ability to juggle a lot of variables, and it's really beautiful. He calls himself a hybrid athlete, right? He is, what he refers to. Yeah, that's what he is. Or polyathlete, I can't remember. Yeah, and then within that, I would say, athletics goes beyond just musculoskeletal integration, but also, how's your response to cold temperatures?

How's your response to heat? Why is that part of fitness? I would say, I do fitness. I've got a fitness plan. Do you do hot and cold exposure? No, I don't. Okay. What would you say to someone who says, I do fitness, I've got a fitness plan. Do you do hot and cold exposure? No, I don't. Okay. What would you say to someone who's...

The same way that your body has a physiological adaptation, you know, a hermetic stress. We were talking on my podcast before this, and I met hermetic stressors in our lives. The same way that you'd have that to develop muscle cells to be able to be stronger in a specific position as a product of going through, you know, a bicep curl or deadlift, whatever you're doing. Your body has a similar physiologic response to being exposed to cold temperatures, as a similar physiologic response to being exposed to heat, has a similar physiological response to being exposed to altitude, you know. And so, your body is continually changing, and this is the thing that we started off with.

A hundred percent of the time you were under a state of construction, and all your body knows is environmental stimuli. So you have this amazing opportunity to, through exposure therapy, you can start to make yourself stronger or weaker. So if you don't expose your body to enough exposure in the form of heat, in the form of cold, in the form of heat, in the form of some type of hermetic stressor, then the body will start to atrophy

because it's inherently incredibly lazy. And that laziness, it's like one of the key features in our capacity to survive. What would you say? Let's talk about some physical practices for a bit. What does some of the physical practices that you think, I know that you're big into groundedness and getting hips below knees, that's one of them. What about that and some of the other physical practices that you think people should just play around with a little bit more when they're in the gym. The sense of play itself is also another part

of what I've noticed in the sessions I've been with you is a rarity. So let's talk about that. So we all human beings are riding on millennia of spending time with our hips below our knees. Spending time moving along, you know, not necessarily like crawling along the ground. Oh, that's a part of your developmental patterns and depending upon your belief system, evolution that was probably a thing as well.

And you're probably swinging through trees if you believe in evolution as well, you're an arboreal creature. You know, and then that transition to being a bipedal mammal, cruising along the land. You know, but that's a lot of that's kind of, it could change a pen upon, what do you think? So it's all hypothetical, exactly where we came from.

But getting down on the ground, if you just look at present day thoughts and evolution aside, look at any child, the way that a child navigates their own physiology and their own construction of themselves is they will squat, they will sit in like a cross-legged position, maybe a straddle position, maybe at some point they'll start to kneel. And so they're spending a lot of time in that low position. And that's what you see as well, looking at hunter-gatherer tribes specifically, the Hatsa people in northern Tanzania, is where there's been research about this, from the University of Southern California, specifically where this came out of.

Researchers went out there and measured the amount of time that Hatsa people were spending in resting positions, because the big ideas like, you know, were like this culture of sedentaryism, it's killing us, it's causing all of our issues and metabolic disease and depression. But if you look at hunter-gather tribes, hotsas specifically, what you'll see is they spend about 9.82 hours was the average that they gathered in resting positions. So right now we're in a resting position. The difference is we're up on chairs. So we're forming our body into a certain way in this position. Hunter gather tribes, hot, specifically, would be in kneeling positions for a good chunk

of the day. They'll be in squatting positions for a good chunk of the day. They'll be in, essentially, all the same positions you see your child in. And when you're in those positions, one, it's just, it's helpful with circulating blood, circulating lymph. Cancels are unattractive, but they're also incredibly unhealthy.

It's an indication it's like, oh, we're in trouble. And so what that does outside of just being, making you feel energetically lighter, and more attractive, because you feel energetically lighter, you know, and, and more attractive because you don't have like big thick ankles. You're setting yourself up to stay athletic all the way through your life. And so when you start to limit range of motion, the ankles, limit range of motion in the hips, that affects your gate pattern, the way that you walk, the way that you move throughout the world. Also, elderly needing assisted living, the number one leading reason for that is they've,

you know, they fall and they can't get up. So, you know, so fall risk is this massive thing that's completely specific to westernized culture abandoning the ground. It's like unbelievable when you think about it. Like if you really give that a moment of the amount of sovereignty that's been lost and the amount of time and money and energy and worry, and it's like all of that is wrapped up

in us literally making an unconscious Move away from where we came from which is just naturally Resting in those positions throughout the day. So what would be the prescription? Let's say that someone listens and they go, okay Yeah, that that sounds good. I want to get rid of my cancels I don't want to be falling and falling and hurting myself. I'm 70 years old. What's a good way that someone can integrate these practices into the day? So just changing your environment. Have you done one with Bruce Lipton? No. Okay. I think we've talked about him. I did a podcast of Bruce Lipton a year and a half ago or so. He's big, has been massive in championing the concept of epigenetics, you know, and how our environment changes our genetic outcome. And one of the things that he mentioned to me was, you know, when he

was studying cells in in Petri dishes, if he wanted to change something about the cell, he wouldn't do anything specifically to the cell itself, it would be changing the culture that the cell exists in. So within your own body, if you're just focusing intrinsically on what's happening inside the body itself, that's a great start. It might get you somewhere, but until you actually change the environment that's forming the body and the mind and your perception of self and all that to fit that mold, you're just going to keep falling back into the same position. So you can do all the calf raises or all the couch stretches or all the different kind

of therapeutic rehab pre-heav extra as you want, but what got you into that position in the first place? And so the first place that I would start is saying, like, okay, like just create a space in your home. It could be in front of the couch, get yourself a comfortable rug, so it's inviting to get down to. You could put self-care tools in your house, have a foam roller lying around

or get one of those percussor guns or a softball to do some off-ass release stuff on, get some Moroccan poofs, or like floor cushions. So suddenly, the culture that your cell is inhabiting itself within is shifted to invite the cell to create change in itself just with these really basic visual cues. So you walk into a space with a pull-up bar hanging through some doorway, just naturally and...

Everyone's totally... You will have the urge to... Your arms suddenly levitate over your head. You're like, I'm on the bar! I'm like, what? How do they know? It's like, it's magic! The bar is there, hands on the bar. Yeah. I didn't have to give you any reps or sets or tell you

got, and that's the element of play. So if we can start to make the movement landscape, you know, the environment that we inhabit ourselves in, suddenly it's like we become moved by the environment. Right. So when you walk outside, if it's kind of cold, and you say, you know what, I'm gonna do a little cold thermogenesis here, I'm not gonna put like all of the layers on, you know, you go out there and you get moved by the cold. Suddenly, you know, you have this herpulation

and your hair kind of sticks up and your body activates its own insulation system by causing your hair to raise up. It's like a down sleeping bag on top of your body. Like, whoa, it's pretty cool that we have that capacity. We just need to place ourselves into the environmental conditions in order for our body to show up. But inherently, your body wants to show up. It's just we have done such a tremendous job at outsourcing our bodies necessity to show

up to, you know, to machine or to Amazon. Nothing wrong with that. It's actually brilliant. It's like, it's freaking amazing that the human mind has been able to outsource almost everything to the point that you can lay on a couch, press buttons on your phone and have food delivered to your face, have sex delivered to your face. Like, it's pretty freaking impressive. Like I'm not mad at it.

I'm really just like in awe, like, whoa, starting from like, whacking rocks together to create fire. Sex in the face. Sex in the face. To sex in the face. To sex in the face off of your blueless scream. Like, good effort. Good effort. And those parts that we've outsourced,

not only is it work, but work is therapeutic. And so we can experience that or witness that in the physical body and your biology. But you can also experience that just in your day-to-day life. And in my podcast before this, we were talking about purpose, you know, and like the pressure to have purpose. You know, when a person feels like they are living an hour on purpose or a day on purpose or a life on purpose,

it's gratifying. Usually what that is, it's like you did work. You know, you were here and you moved yourself to there. You're like, I feel better. I did a thing. I did a thing. Yeah, this is something increasingly that I've realized is an important,

an important consideration when doing any sort of practice. And especially since we've been out here, me and you have spent a lot of time at Kuyya, which is a hot and cold exposure place next door, but even training as well, that if you do a training session or any sort of physical practice, the best judge of whether or not it was right for you

is whether you feel good afterward or not. Yeah. Do I feel good after I've completed this? Because if I don't, then why am I doing it? We go out of next door having done three rounds of what, 20 minutes, hot, three minutes cold-ish, something like that, on average. And I feel on top of the world.

Like I feel phenomenal. Like the best pulse sex glow without having to find someone else to do it with. In the great. Outstanding. And you haven't put anything in your body, haven't taken anything, this is completely internally generated from doing that. And then the same with some of the sessions of training, I came up with this thing called the Manopause, right, which was the, to what the end of their 20s, I saw a lot of guys, myself included, having trained, doing, like, bro split, lifting for a decade, maybe, because we wanted to get big and be attractive to girls or whatever. And then you'd realize, oh, I get out of breath going a percent of stairs and I can't touch

my toes anymore. And I'm pretty sure that my body is meant to do more than just bicep curls and you start to revert back to other modes of training. So maybe you do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Thai boxing or yoga or crossfit or functional fitness or fucking running or athletics whatever right. Yeah, um and I found that my satisfaction After doing those sorts of sessions was so much higher, so much higher after doing that kind of a workout. And it just made me think how many people are doing a training modality that they really genuinely don't enjoy and that the body is telling

them that they don't enjoy, but that they just stick at it because, and this is probably correct, it's something that's better than nothing, but that if the end goal of your fitness is to make you be like a happier, healthier, stronger human being, then you can just use how do I feel post-workout as a pretty good judge of whether or not my trading modality at the moment is working? Yeah, once like we were talking about before as well, it's like you don't know what you don't know. You know, so if you have been, you know, whatever workout, dogma or regimen you've subscribed to over the years, you kind of have your just like getting work in, just like getting it

done. That's great. I'd rather someone have, oh, thanks for your turn again up. Yeah, just a little bit. It's a little low on this side. It's a little bit quiet. It's fine. Damn, I was noticed that the whole time.

Yeah, so some work is better than no work. But you can paint yourself into a corner with your work that eventually you might have to reverse engineer to get yourself out of that corner. So say Ronnie Coleman would be a great example of this. Have you watched any Ronnie Coleman stuff? Kind of sad to say him now, yeah. Super sweet guy. Really beautiful heart, I don't know him personally, but I spend enough hours watching like, yeah, exactly. I'm like, he's like a sweetie.

But he would be a great example. He did it. He like, like, goal arrived at. You know, smashed the goal. The only thing that he ever regretted in his entire bodybuilding career was not doing 800 for five. Right. He did it for two and he was adamant that he could have backscorted 800 for five instead.

I knew I had another three in me. Ronnie, you're bedbound with 75 steel screws in your spine and you live on the highest dose of painkillers that is legally allowed. Your one regret is that you didn't do 800 for five instead of 800 to two. So for him, he won. Ultimately, it's all perception and filters and you know, how we, it's like, what are your goals? So I think the first thing for someone is to have a definitive goal

of what it is that you, where do you want to arrive? And I think it would, it would behoove people to draw beyond just where do I want to arrive aesthetically, but also coming from a place of feel. So how do you want to feel in one week, one year, 30 years? You know, what are the values that are actually, in fact, the most important for you?

You know, and I think if people are, a lot of people are honest, or really feel into that question, you probably want to, you know, be, you don't want to feel a bunch of pain. You know, you want to feel light in your body, you want to feel flexible in your body, you want to be, you know, maybe adaptable, you want to feel strong, you want to feel confident, you want to be able to play with your kids or your grandkids or be able to get down and

pick up a dog. Like those things matter. You know, so I would, I would think about how do we start to reverse engineer a program to make sure that we have some of those staples ingrained into the system. And what that's going to look like is you're probably going to be walking, probably maybe going to be like lunging, you know, keeping that space, that's open and around the ankles and around the hips, keeping flexibility and adaptability throughout the spine. And when the spine is impinged,

or impinges the fine word for it, or off neutral, be another way of saying, it feels unstable, it feels unsafe. It doesn't trust you to be strong. And so if you're moving through the world and say like a forward head posture type position or your shoulders are collapsed forward or you have excessive extension in the lower back and the lumbar spine, that's sending the signal to your central nervous system that it's not safe to go deliver power through this system.

Yep. Just switches it off. It just switches it off. Super amazing. Like you're like, thank you. Because I'd much rather you have some type of parent figure for my, the function of my nervous system. Yep. Because I'm not responsible enough for that. So it's the same thing with breathing, it's same thing with cardiac function, it's same thing with lymphatic function, you're not responsible enough to govern all of these systems. So you have to have the quality control manager that oversees it all.

Yeah. So if you're wondering why maybe you feel stiff chronically, or maybe you feel like, man, I've like reached this plateau and I just can't go beyond it. There could be a conversation around joint balance or centration, centration just being a 50 cent word for balance, really. Having maximum range, having joints oriented so that I have maximum capacity to move in all directions.

That's athleticism, that's adaptability. If my joints are pinned up to, you know, the edge, they're on like the precipice of disaster. If I go any further in this one direction, but then I have excessive mobility in the other direction, then inevitably your body, because it loves you, it's going to put you into bracing and tension. Now, all of a sudden, an analogy for that would be like, it's like you left your house with the lights on. So now throughout the day, your lights are just, you got the air conditioner running at the lights on, vacuum cleaner, just, just vacuum in nothing. Because your body's like, you're like, it's holding that, it's holding itself together. Because ultimately, it's received the message

that if it let's go, that would be unsafe. There's a good story that Stu McGill uses about one of the world's strongest man events from a few years ago. And I want to say it was, it was either a, there were back squatting a car or they were overhead pressing, like axle pressing a car. And he said, if you watch the event, you can see the rep before the guys about to fail. It must have been, it was back squatting. You can see the rep before

he fails. Every single person, and this is true, you can go back and check it. Every single person, when they reset from the penultimate set, penultimate rep before they fail, all of them take a big breath in and just shift their hips a tiny little bit. He's like, that is the spine saying, buddy, you've got nothing left in the time. Yep, so I'm going to kill the power. Yep. And then when they go to power out of the bottom, maybe their legs have got something in it, but the spines decided to pull the kill cord. And there's just nothing left. So let's say that somebody that's listening does a lot of training. And they think, right, okay, this sounds great. I need to be functional. I should move in a more holistic manner. I like the idea of creating an environment in my house that kind of engenders a

parasympathetic, very calm, self-love, self-work kind of environment. What else can I do? Give me some practices, give me some takeaways that I can do to encourage a more holistic aligned body protocol. Yeah, well, so two of the things we mentioned is just making, orienting your space so that you just get your damn hips below the height of your, your knees every now and again. Like just get yourself down there. So that's in that sort of upright squatting position.

And I notice that you do that. Yeah, sure, anything. You do that sometimes leaning up against the wall. So someone could just get down off the couch and then just lean up against the couch with in that bottom squat position. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just be and then so a part of that as well as as Per mentioned before, like engendering a bit more of this this nature of play into your life, you know, inviting that into inviting that into conversations and not being so damn stuffy and serious.

You know, the way that we communicate to each other, if you look at, and this is going out of like, well, this is kind of practices that are in the book, or at least conversations or philosophies of the book, different cultures just stickulate, they use their hand gestures or facial expressions more or less than others. You know, so you go to Italy suddenly, it's like, you're out here in the here, in the here, you know, so we grabbed you by the shirt like pulls you in.

You know, it's like, that's just how we communicate. Like that's, I'm just expressing, you know, and you maybe go someplace else. Maybe like, I don't know, you know, someplace in the United States, or maybe like a Muslim culture be different, like a Buddhist culture is gonna be different than a, you know, each place has their movement signature. And there are replications and repercussions of each of these. You know, and it's like the, what do they, what do they call it, the French paradox?

It's like, how are these damn French people eating all these baguettes? And there's still like pretty darn healthy. How is it, how is it that they might should be all these baguettes in the healthy? I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of elements in that. I think community is the main one.

I think people run on community. We run on purpose, we run on community, we run on the sensation that I've got your back, you've got my back. And I think that when we have that sensation of safety, again, safety, central nervous system, neutral spine, when we come into that place of feeling safe with my community, it allows me at a neuromuscular, cellular, like all the way down into ourselves level, to be able to relax, to be able to breathe, to be able to, you know, have that.

And so I think the French paradox has a lot to do with people just getting out and eating together and drinking together and smoking cigarettes and, you know, whatever brings people together, like I would take a, a, I do like some organic cigarettes that are just mostly exclusively tobacco and not a bunch of chemicals, that gets them to go outside and take a walk and connect and like, you know, have a shoulder to lean on and get some natural sunlight exposure to their eyeballs and maybe get a little cold thermogenesis or maybe a little heat.

And, you know, they have their vice quotations. I would take that person over the orthorexic person. What's that? Orthorexic person, it's like, has an unhealthy obsession with health. Okay. I'd take that person any day, for, to be on my kickball team, to be on my, you know, my, my, my, my business,

the person who's obsessed with health, but spends all of their time on their own, staring at the screen and never getting the hips below their knees and doesn't have a culture and doesn't have community and don't have support for it. Yeah. So again, I'm not advising that people take up tobacco. But if you look at that tobacco, what is it? The tobacco in the last conversation we were talking about dogs. You're moved by your dog. Dog comes into the room. You don't just sit there aimlessly, you know, kind of like monk like staring forward.

You react and engage with the dog. So suddenly your facial patterns change and suddenly your voice tonality might change. your facial patterns change and suddenly your voice tonality might change. There's a Stephen Porgis, he's the guy that came up with the concept of polyvagal theory, he calls it your voice profity. When we're communicating, we're literally tuning each other's nervous systems based off of the tone of our voices. Professor psychology in the 60s is called Albert Morabian, I don't professor from a professor's psychology in the 60s called Albert Morabian. I don't jump around a little bit, but it's going to maybe wind back to something.

Came up with a thing called the 55-38-7 principle. And what that suggests is 55% of our communication comes from body language. And then 38 is coming from the tone of our voice. And then there's the last little 7% is like the actual words that we're conveying. So if there's incongruence between what the body is saying and the words with at least, I mean, I think it's, I mean, unless you're a complete dummy, I think it's higher than 93%. But you're're gonna trust the body 93% of the time. You know, so the cigarette not condoning cigarettes, you know, but it it it it moves the person. Say, I got a cigarette. Okay, we can't smoke inside. I'm walking outside.

Ah dog comes into the room. You know, if you're like a you know a large, you know, an overweight person that's stuck in your house staring at TV all day long, stressing out about the computer. One of the healthiest things you could probably do for yourself is just start by getting a dog. I fucking dog, man. Get a dog. You're doing all this stuff. You know, you're getting your protein shakes and you got your creatine, you got your glutamine, you know, you got the trainer that you go see three times a week and none of them are going to create the difference that would manifest in your life by having that

just having that accountability and that relationship with that dog. And that's not even, it's excluding all of the immune benefits of a dog bringing, we're talking about this as well, bringing nature into the house. What about sex? What about relationships? With the work that you've done, have you seen a, what dysfunctions do you see with regards to people and their relationship to sex and to their own body and to the way that they judge other people's bodies as well. Well, definitely not my field of depth, but I think it's very an interesting conversation that is a physical conversation around that, not that sex isn't physical, but more like anatomical would be the way that shame manifests in the body. You know, so growing up in a culture that doesn't have maybe full ease around sex, you know,

or menstruation, or having a penis, or having an anus, or all of these things, like, oh, like everyone gets a little uncomfortable if you say anus. And I was like, whoa, pull it back. It was like, yeah, you got one. I got one. Like, I took a shit four hours ago, you know, but it's like to, to, to talk about that or to think about that. It's like, oh my God. It's like, what if I didn't take a shit today? It would be dramatically. What if I didn't take a shit for a week? It would be like, my whole life would be in shambles. You know, it's so I think sex is one of those things. It's like our nether regions, you know,

that part of our body, it's, we're not really inculcated for the most part, at least I wasn't into a culture that has a lot of acceptance of those spaces. You know, in the way that shame manifests in the body, just look at it physically. If you're ashamed, if you're embarrassed, you know, without getting metaphysical, you know, saying like, oh, shame, there's deep tension in the perennium and the cells and the root chakra or any kind of just kind of random bits, feel in your body, what does shame feel like? For you, if you suddenly feel...

You're in tightness. It's like a sort of a stiffness, and a tightness in the stomach, in the head. Yeah, or maybe a collapse could be a flavor of holding forward. Yeah. Right? What does pride, what does strength feel like, what does sadness feel like? You know, the whole gamut of emotions, you know, that's Sir William James, who's he's like widely known as the father of modern psychology, was one of the preeminent leaders in the conversation of not just a top-down physiology, being like the mind affects the body.

So we see a bear, I'm scared, I run, I respond. We could just as easily flip that around and go bottom up and say, I see a bear, I have a physiological response, it moves my body into this state that we seem to be fear, and that perpetuates the feeling and the emotion, and then that winds back, and it's this ping-pong, boom, boom, feedback system back and forth, mind body, mind body, mind body. It doesn't matter where it starts or where it ends, like the chicken or the egg question, it's like both, what really doesn't matter. They starts or where it ends, like the chicken or the egg question. It's like both, what it really doesn't matter.

They're inextricably tied. So if we grow up in a culture that's inherently, there's a, maybe it's not overt shame, but maybe just like shadow, you know, or blank spots, like there's some pages in our physiology, in our anatomy, that aren't as well filled out. You know, so there's a term, you ever heard the term homunculus? No, homunculus means little man. And essentially it's like, well, just flip my, my, uh, toothpick here. Homunculus means little man. It's essentially like the way that, it's like the neurological real estate

that our body has to sensation or of how different appendages experience sensation. The amount of real estate that's offered to that sensory reception in those various different parts of the body. You know, and so your fingers will have in this little man image. It's like literally, we can look it up.

It's a really interesting thing to see. They've got like really big lips, you know, and they've got like really big hands, and you know, pretty reasonably sized genitals actually. It's got a piece. Yeah, it's got a piece. You've got a piece on it. So that distribution of sensory awareness can change,

depending upon a person's life experience. And so there's some places in the body that for some people it might literally be like a shadow place. Like you could numb that space out. You know, some people don't have a lot of sensations in certain parts of their body, like maybe like they're back. You know, you could rub a paper clip or a feather or something in certain parts of the body. It's like, now I've literally shut that part down.

And then it becomes this whole process of re-engaging and reintegrating that aspect of yourself. And you think, simulically, that can happen with regards to shame around sex and our bodies, not just in terms of how we perceive them physiologically, if we can touch them and if we can get feedback, but how we see them symbolically in our minds. I think so.

What do you think? Yes, certainly, man. I mean, definitely since being out here in Austin, fuck, like people here have got a very – some people here got a very liberal, very open relationship to sex and sexual practices and talking about sex. Far more – I don't know whether it's a British thing, maybe it is a little liberal, very open relationship to sex and sexual practices and talking about sex. Far more, I don't know whether it's a British thing, maybe it is a little bit, but far more than I've been used to in the UK, and I'd say I'm relatively open about being happy to talk about things that have gone well or badly or that I'd like or don't like during

sex, but fuck out of here is another level. I don't know whether that's... Just because you talk about a thing a lot doesn't mean that you have a healthy relationship with it. Oh yeah, but I mean, just not being able to talk about it at all probably isn't a sign of a good relationship with it. Also not. Yeah, so it's been interesting being out here. It's the flexibility. Again, it comes back to adaptability and flexibility. If you're if something makes you uncomfortable If I say a word, you know any of the words I said previously and you go, whoa Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, just a little bit. You know, ah cool

That's a place that there is if you choose to take it on an opportunity, probably for you to uncover some, you know, internal impingement. You don't need to address it, but it's there. If someone pisses you off, you know, or if someone makes you feel away, it's probably some reflection back into some insecurity within yourself, or else there wouldn't be a charge around it. What are you working on at the moment, personally? Like what's the next 2022, if you were to look back at the end of 2022 and consider it a success, what would have been a development that you would have gone through?

Well, I mean, something that we've talked about previously is I have a bit of a tendency of, I don't know if I enjoy it, but I have a proclivity towards chasing. You know, and that was kind of something that we've been talking about in relation to female relationships. And something that I'm observing in myself, you know, when something is unavailable, it becomes highly prized. And when the availability begins there, sometimes, I, not sometimes, I can completely notice the opportunity to work with that for me is, is a resistance around that or a disinterest, kind of like an avoidant type pattern.

or a disinterest, kind of like an avoidant type pattern. And so for me, it's like, aha, okay, well, there's the work. So now, the onus is on me alone to engage with it or to go to the next and repurpatch weight patterns. So that for me, it's like looking in and really being honest with what that is. What do you think it is? Likely my story for that, which I think that's another thing to be cautious of, is being

attached to our stories. Yeah, over rationalizing or over narrative, narratizing whatever it is that you're supposed to do. Yeah. And that's when things, things that kind of trump our stories, like maybe some type of, you know, breathwork ceremony thing, or some life event that was like, drags you outside of the narrative that you've tried to wrap around

and rationalize a story with. Yeah, that's an interesting way. Whatever, maybe suddenly you're like, oh, okay, story out, you know, story on the side. Yes. Now here's like, oh, okay, story out, you know, story on the side. Yes. Now here's like, God, reality. Yeah, there's like a, there's like the higher purview comes in. It's like, okay, we don't need words right now, little Aaron.

Yeah. This is, we're just on truth. You know, and I think that those moments happen when they happen. But for me, the narrative that I have that I think probably has some level of sense to it is, I think that my mother was who I've done actually full like 90 minute podcast with her. And I was like, I think it's a, I know it's the only podcast that I've ever like really properly broke down wept in a couple times. And she had a background of some level of abuse. I'm not sure if I shared in the podcast notes.

I don't know if it's appropriate to share, but she learned that it's not appropriate to not be okay You know, so kind of like good vibes only type thing which is incredibly dangerous You know because then you you lack decompression. Yeah, so suddenly you look you pin it up You know any of those sensations that would be deemed unfavorable. It's just like okay those don't go out They go in and now they just sit and fester and kind of ferment. And so getting the signal that everything needs to be okay, everything needs to be like be all righty.

I think that there was a certain level of, she was very caring, very sweet, you know, always made me sandwiches and always like had my back. But I think there was a certain emotional vulnerability that was challenging for her to access. And I think I subconsciously picked that up. And so when there is emotional vulnerability specifically with a female, it's scary to me. And so I'm like, oh, this is like a lot. And so within that, I think I've adapted. And a lot of people so within that, I think I've adapted, and a lot of people have done this. I've adapted to be able to create rapport with quickness.

So because of a general avoidance of depth, I've reintroduced that bandwidth into superficial. And so I think you have this as well, probably for different reasons, but an ability to connect with new people and find common ground pretty quick. You always feel like you think is maybe part of a defense mechanism.

Yeah, for sure. That's interesting. Yeah, definitely. Fuck, that's interesting. And then when it goes to a certain level, I'm like, oh, okay. Too far. Too far. Too far. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're like, you know, like fast bros or fast, you know, bro and bro and sister, like real fast. And then there's a certain level,

because that that part's so well developed. There's a certain level that it's kind of like, okay. And as soon as you're outside of that safety position, yeah, I am. Hopefully that wasn't too much information about mine. No, no, no, it all, I think it's fucking interesting, man. Like, it's really interesting to think that you could compensate for a fear of depth or a hesitation around depth by overselling on rapport or overselling

on immediate connection. And that makes a lot of sense. It doesn't resonate with me personally, but I can absolutely see how it would happen. So getting through that, trying to get yourself past the slightly more, I guess, juvenile areas of the avoidant attachment side. I mean, I have a ton of friends. And I think that this is, I'll be very interested to find out how this relates to people that are whatever high agency or high achieving guys. A lot of my buddies that are high achievers also have that attachment style. Which is funny because people are prepared to push their limits in so many places. If we needed to do a 24 hour workout or an unbelievable sauna and cold session or whatever, pick whatever challenge it is that you want to do. And yet there are these sort of deep dark holes that sometimes don't get uncovered quite

so easily. Maybe there are a little bit more difficult to see what's going on. Maybe they're just an area of the territory that we can't get rid of as simply, but it is strange that- It's nothing to get rid of. Okay, to deal with- Another thing you've heard yourself probably, as you're saying that. Yeah.

Yeah. To come into healthier relations. To face. To face. And healthy just means whole. That's like the original meaning of health. Does it? Yeah.

Okay. So whole coming back to the body integrated. So if I disconnect the parts, you know, I got my bicep break, yalus, and I got my triceps, and I got the multiple heads of the quads, and I got really specifically breaking down those individual points that can potentially lead to a disintegration of the whole body working together. And then that creates, you know, cacophony. But there's something about the fact that a lot of my friends that can push themselves

in many other areas still have as their, one of the final bastions of challenge is their avoidant attachment. Oh, yeah, it's the big one. You think that's the, whatever, the Achilles heel? It's not the, him and him has got the right thing, you know, but it, it's the big one. You think that's the whatever the Achilles heel. That the himmere has got the right thing, you know, but it that's I think relationship is one of the ultimate reflections upon yourself. You know, and getting into deeper awareness or more authentic awareness with your relationship to your parents. I think a lot of it comes back to that. You're like, okay, interesting. And so if you do

allow, if you do play the game, you actually say, cool, all right, pushing chips in, and actually be there for it. Yeah, I mean, if you really, how many people really want to look at themselves? I think we all say that we do, but I think the only reason to be afraid of a psychedelic trip or maybe a relationship or, you know, psychedelics are another really good example of that. I think a bad trip. Most people that I've talked to that have had bad trips. Like I've had things that I've deemed to, they've had bad trips. I've had things that I deemed like, oh, that would felt pretty like bad. It was just an exposure to some aspect of myself

or my orientation to the world that I was uncomfortable with and I didn't wanna look at and I was in that time, in that moment, I was kind of almost felt like forced to be in that space to say like, okay, here you are. Here's your relationship with, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the thing is. And then wanting to get out. But the way to get to the other side of that into finding like healing and ease and, you know, all of that wholism health is through it. And you can either wrestle the relationship or wrestle the mushroom or wrestle whatever,

which you will not win. I can guarantee it with the mushroom. You will not win. The analogy that I used was it's like being sat on a firework and as you try to steer it to the left or the right it goes, yeah. It only makes it worse. It only gets bigger. Wasn't a good strategy for you.

You know, it's like the, what's the, what's the, the, the gal with the snakeheads, you chop off the snakeheads? Is that one? Which you got like tons of snakeheads? I think it's a Hydra. I think it's a Hydra when you use it. Yeah, it's the Hydra. Yeah. Yeah, it's the snakeheads. Is that one? What's it got like tons of snakeheads? I think it's a Hydra. It's the Hydra. Yeah, it's the Hydra.

Yeah. So, ultimately, I'm trying to, hopefully not getting like excessively metaphysical or esoteric, but ultimately, I think a relationship is an opportunity, just like the mushroom thing, surrender, in my experience, surrender has been the ticket to ease, not fighting. In that moment, it's cool, whatever the thing is, you don't need to fight. And it's interesting. Have you had that experience with yourself at all? Wrestling a thing and instead of fighting the thing coming to a place of just like, you know, what? Take me.

Yeah, I mean, my first ever mushroom trip was precisely this and I just refused to let go. Yeah. So for whatever, five hours, I just wrangled everything and just kept that puppy kind of as much control as I could, which should just made for a very, very uncomfortable. So it turns mechanic. So the only thing you can do, the only mistake you can make with psyched Alex is not taking enough. Well, that was five grams for my first ever time. And even with that, I was like, I'm a fucking wrap you up in a big, big prison and see if I can hold on. And I'm pretty much managed to, which is just like looking back.

But then you're not exactly super lucid at the time. Yeah, I don't know, man. I certainly resonate with when you think about being in the body, right? And you notice that you've been sat in a meeting or in a situation with someone and you've been tense and then you kind of check in with yourself and you, and everything just eases up a little bit. Or you open your gaze, the best cue that I've learned about this, I learned this this year, from an embodiment coach is about just using the peripherals of your vision. So just using that open gaze. And man, I love that cue so much. It much. It just reminds me that, like, there's so much more going on. You do not need to

focus just that. You can have all of this beautiful vision outside of you. Yeah. There's a whole chapter in the Align Method book about that. All right. Tell me. Andrew, Andrew Huberman, who he's, you know, popularized a lot of these conversation less reason. He thankfully edited through the whole thing for me and kind of like point of mean the right direction. And I just I owe so much to his mind and his research. But yeah, I mean, the way that you use your eyes, your eyes are continuous with your central nervous system. So similarly, this is one of the things I was going to eventually likely get to in relation to environmental conditions.

Changing the visual environment isn't just adding visual cues that cause you to do what would look like mobility or exercise. It's also changing the visual environment in the sense of like, you know, open some windows. ideally get full spectrum light into your eyeballs. So it's not just when you're looking at light through windows, it's gonna be blocking some percentage of either UVA or UVB spectrum out and being able to relax your eyes and awareness that when I am in that panoramic, like I'm just taking it all in,

that lensoramic, like, I'm just taking it all in, that lens of perception, it's sending a signal into the rest of your physiology, which is probably an anchored pattern for, again, millennia, back like generation, generation, like forever, that when you are just taking it all in, just spacing out, probably almost never in history, have you just spaced it out and taken it all in, just spacing out, probably almost never in history, have you just spaced it out and taking it all in and been under attack?

Right? And so, that's a similar thing to talking and then when you're myopically focused in, suddenly, okay, cool, we're taking it all in, we're just gathering information about the whole or maybe not gathering information through that. We're just, there's basking in the moment. We're fed, we've hunted, and then suddenly there is a threat.

What do your eyes do? You know, all focus is on that single point. I've been thinking about this to do with smartphones. Oh, of course. Yeah, so much about that. And you're looking down into the right. So you're looking down, or if you're lefty, which would be more rare,

but you're looking down into a specific direction. So your eyes act like rains to your neuromuscular system. So you can do this, you know, put your fingertips back the bottom of your skull. It's called the suboxypital ridge, and just look up and down, and you'll feel those muscles, it's called suboxypital muscles engaging, right? So those muscles, it's called suboxylpum muscles engaging, right? So you're all funny. So same thing in chimpanzees, this has been researched. Their cochlea and their ear will change direction with the eyes. So when you are looking to the right to some potential threat or whatever the thing is,

literally even their auditory system. So the hearing opens up as their eyes move almost. It will orient towards that thing. No way. Which is kind of an interesting thing for people that are like, you know, end of Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling, have like cauliflower, you're wondering how that affects things. But, yeah, man, your visual system is so deeply tied into your sense of either

alertness or executive function get or done or relax, digest, rest. So that's in the book and the alignment. The intention of it isn't so much to have like a step-by-step method. It's more, you know, a philosophy to reorient the way that a person engages with their body in any situation. You know, so you're from the Victor Frankel logo therapy, Mansor's remaining. One of the things that he said that I align with is that he said he's more like an optometrist than, you know, like a psychologist. You know, so he's just working with people's perception of the world, you know, the way that they process information, their filter.

You know, and so I think that that's a really valuable approach to one's fitness. You know, it's a fitness is an a thing that I do. Fitness is a thing that I am. So all the time throughout every day, they're all a bunch of opportunities if you have the education on how to engage with those opportunities. So you're just filled with these fun levers all over your body. So your eyes, they will change the way that you're your your mental emotional state based off of the way that you use them. If you have that information,

you can leverage it. Same thing with your auditory environment. Same thing with your, you know, the sense of touch. Certain sensations or textures will make you feel one way. Certain sensations of texture make you feel another way. Your visual environment. An interesting thing that you have to fact factor this one. I heard with real estate, if you're selling a place and you have like, like, pointy plants out front that sends an indication to potential buyers to stay away. No way. I mean, you gotta look it up.

There's a whole field of state you'd probably appreciate called him embodied cognition. Body cognition essentially is the way that we think and feel based off of our physical experience. So I'm sure you've heard of the clipboard studies where if you give somebody your resume and it's on a big thick beefcake clipboard, they're, oh fuck yeah, like, this guy's really knows, you know, he's serious, you know, he's stable, he's supported, I like this guy. If you, and so that's that tactile experience of like, man, this guy feels like, oh, I can trust him.

All right, same thing with people that tend to be taller, lower voices is something we were talking about before. It's like, oh, I think I think I think something trustworthy about that. Like it feels like, feel powerful. And like they might just be a tall asshole. Like it doesn't necessarily mean anything. But the way that we cognate that

or the way that you are embodied experience of that is like, oh yeah, I trust it. And the same thing with, if we're, we have a cold beverage and someone goes into a job interview or a warm beverage For right now we had icy, you know, whatever some some lemonade or something like that, but like icy cups Based off of research we would perceive this experience as being a little bit more as well I was noticing the temperature of the room we perceive this experience as being a little bit kind of like more closed,

a little bit colder. If you give me like a hot cocoa and it's warm and we got a fire going in the background and we can hear the crackling of the fire, suddenly that's changing my perception to say like, wow, man, I just feel so safe here. There's something about you, Chris, that makes me feel safe. Is it me or is it just the environment that we're having this mutual experience? Shit's crazy, man. This more holistic view of the body overall and of fitness is something that, I don't know, maybe to you and maybe the people that you're speaking to, it's kind of, how do you say?

Obviously, it makes a complete amount of sense but to me this is like an entire new world. Like a whole new world. It makes sense though. It's simple. Well, the human system is one thing altogether. It's broken up into component parts but working on each component part without taking into account all of the other things doesn't really seem to make sense. And some of the things that you've mentioned to me since we've been hanging out to do with, you can tell a lot about a person's personality by the way that they move, where they walk into a sauna or a restaurant or sit down at a date or the way that they hold themselves or the way that

they're gesture or whatever, right? Like, that why, why is that the case? If it wasn't that we were such a global system where our cognition and our Physicality and our emotions and our social status and our confidence and our blah blah if it wasn't the case that all of those were together Why would it be that from something I can Induce how somebody is in a completely unrelated area so to speak speak. It's not. It's the one closed system. Yeah. So you've got a special revised paperback edition of the Align Method coming out, where can people get that?

Yeah, hopefully your bookstore would be great. That would be a very Align Method-esque of you to take a walk outside, ideally remove sunglasses, you know, get full spectrum light. There's a lot of British people listening to them. They do these sunglasses. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's it.

It tunes your neurochemistry, you know, that light penetrating eyeballs. I'm a reason that I know that that was a cue to wrap up. So don't say, don't spout more, more factoids. Fire away, my factoids. We're here for the factoids. Fire away my factoids with the factoids. Fucking keepin' comin'. But you're a big reason that such a high percentage of people are becoming myopic, specifically like China,

something like 93%, like a really high percentage of adolescents are becoming myopic. Same thing. How do you define myopic? Near sighted. Okay. Yeah, we see near well far not so easy. So one potential conversation there would be that we're just practicing nearsighted

nests all the time. So those silly air muscles and all the muscles that help change the shape of the lens to be able to refract that light. So it comes into clear vision. We're like, well, you're only using the close ones. So you're going to have problem with the other ones But a bigger part of the conversation is the impact that natural sunlight has on the the structure and the shape and the the chemical structural makeup of your eyeballs

so Sun it literally the exact process I can't go through because I'm you know, that's not like my specialty exact process, I can't go through because I'm, you know, that's not like my, my specialty. But sun literally it changes, it's, you know, it's a physical thing. It's like a nutrient. And when it changes the structure and the makeup of, of your eyes. And so when you're going outside, it's not just like a relaxed the eyes, you know, it's an opportunity to downregulate the nervous system or calm the freak down. It's literally it's like you're you're nourishing that the structure of your eyeballs through that exposure to the sunlight You know, so sunlight it just it's so healing and so many capacities and I know I didn't you know

Break down exactly what's happening within that system. So maybe come back. I'll go deeper in the research of what that system is exactly. But experts pretty much unanimously align that sunlight, it changes the structure and the makeup of your eyeballs. And so you need it for healthy eyes. You need it for healthy everything. Doing a morning walk here in Austin because the weather tends to be,

it's a bit muggy sometimes on a morning, but maybe 50% of the day is it sunny. Yeah, a morning walk with sunshine is so good weather tends to be. It's a bit muggy sometimes on a morning, but maybe 50% of the day is it's sunny. A morning walk with sunshine is so good. I always do the walk anyway, but in the UK, if I was to do it at the time of doing it, it would still be dark. And that infrared light specifically in the morning, you're setting, and I think a lot of people are listening to this, but by now they know about this, but you're setting the circadian rhythm for the rest of the day. So when you're waking up, that light in the sun's first coming up, it's tuning your whole neurophysiology, your neurochemistry, your hormones, your endocrine system to be alert, to be up.

It's like it's a bookend start of the day. I only learned recently that the reason that we get a burst of energy after the lights go out is that that would be adaptive for our ancestors to get themselves home while the sun was setting. That's cool, I know that. So this is in Johann Harry's stolen focus, which is coming out in the New Year. It'll be really good. I've read half of it. And he mentioned that one of the reasons that we're struggling to have attention at the moment is because of a lack of sleep and the lack of sleep is partly due to the fact that we use blue screens at night. But what is the

reason that blue screens have such an effect on our energy levels and our ability to fall asleep easily? And one of the proposed reasons for this is that when we go from light to dark, our bodies get a kick of energy. Why would that be useful? Well, if you're out hunting or not in your cave or not at your camp, it would be pretty good for you to just get little extra kick. I've had that experience many times, like camping or rock climbing or something where you're out in the woods. Sunsets and you're like, we gotta go. Yeah.

Suddenly, we're running. You know, you get that full sympathetic burst. Yeah, we gotta get to where we're gonna sit. I never thought about that. What Johan's saying is that, let's say that you're using your phone and watching Netflix until you go to sleep. And then precisely at the moment when you're about to try and get a little juice up. Precisely. That's really fast.

Some interesting stats around e-readers that it doesn't seem like they have the same sort of response. Yeah, they're not a big in that light. I need to speak to Heubman about that. But I don't think that they have the same effect. The other thing that's interesting there, I wanted to mention in relation to eyes that I think is just so cool is that humans are one of the only mammals to have white sclerus, the white part. So we can see the orientation and the positioning of our eyes. It's called the eye coordination hypothesis, I think is the...

It's so that we can see... The 50 cent per cent. Other people can see what we're looking at. Yeah. I think it's the like the 50 cent per year. Other people can see what we're looking at. Yeah, and so the potential suggestion for that, like an evolutionary adaptation would be to be able to signal to each other for hunting. And so you'll see this and the reason they would suggest is you see this with certain dogs,

so like more like pack animals. They also have that indication to be able to see where their eyes are oriented. And then also to be able to see the wellness of a person. So, this becomes interesting in the whole, you know, like the year, the lockdowns and everything. It's like, we have, we're pretty good senses when someone's unwell. Like, you know, that's body language, that's voice tonality, that's reading the scleras

of somebody's eyes, that's, you know, we go Chinese medicine route and, you know, see the, what's the, they have like some furry stuff when they're tongue or they're cracks in their tongue. We have all of these millions or billions of bits of visual information and all fact, all factory information as well. No way we smell. Suggesting whether that person is healthy to be close to. Somebody has terrible breath. You're like, get the hell away from

me. Terrible body odor. Like, please don't give me a hug. No, thank you. If someone's sniffling, you're like, not interested. If someone's got bloodshot eyes or they have like yellow eyes, you're like, I don't know what's going on. Is this hepatitis? Is this like, there's something going on here. I would love for you to visit a doctor. I love you, you know, but you need to go. Like you got to sort this out and then come back to the tribe. And then even within yourself, if you are that guy

or that girl, you're like, okay, I need to pull myself out of the tribe. Self-regulatory. I need to sort this out. And so our subconscious intuition is just so fucking cool. We've just learned to kind of outsmart ourselves, and you will never outsmart yourself. It's the same concept of trying to put together your 640 muscles and your 360 joints. You will not be successful. But if you allow yourself to kind of listen to that interwistum,

the integration of the interwistum and the modern wisdom, ultimately the modern wisdom would be that that interwistum. I think suddenly it's like maybe surrendering to that, which is a surrendering term. I think that that can be kind of funny for some people. But behind that, that's, I think that's where true wisdom is. Aaron Alexander, ladies and gentlemen, a line podcast, a line method book, everything will be linked in the show notes below. Any other stuff that people should check out? No, I think that's it.

I mean, thanks again for making this happen. I really enjoy this. I was a really, really fun conversation. I appreciate the way that your mind operates, the way that you create space for other minds to turn the way that they do. So thank you for creating this space for this. Yeah, go check out the aligned podcast with you.

I really enjoy that conversation. Another one they could check out would be the Bruce Lipton conversation. They want to go deeper into some of these topics. And then the Align Method book is coming out January 11th. And so they could get it. This is before that, they can pre-order it. It's on Amazon or Barnes and Noble's or whatever.

And I think that's it, man. I appreciate you. All some dude, first of many. Yeah, let's keep doing it. All right, over and out, pop out! Pfft! you