Modern Wisdom - #737 - Dr Karan Rajan - Debunking The Internet’s Biggest Health Myths

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

Dr. Karan Rajan is a surgeon, clinical lecturer at The University of Sunderland and an author A lot of health advice can be extremely difficult to verify. Does this actually make me healthier? Is it grounded in science, or whimsy? Thankfully there are actual doctors we can ask who can determine science fiction from medical fact. Expect to learn why you shouldn’t hold in your farts, what Dr Karan wishes more people understood more about digestion, why the best probiotics aren't always found in the supplement section, what a day in the life of a surgeon is like, why IBS is on the rise, whether you can actually die from a broken heart and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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 Dr. Karen Rajan. He's a surgeon, clinical lecturer at the University of Sunderland and an author. A lot of health advice can be extremely difficult to verify. Does this actually make me healthier? Is it grounded in science or whimsy? Thankfully, there are real doctors, who we can ask, that can determine science fiction from medical fact.

Expect to learn why you shouldn't hold in your farts, what Dr. Karan wishes more people and disturbed about digestion, why the best probiotics often aren't found in the supplement section, what a day in the life of a surgeon is actually like, why IBS is on the rise, whether you can actually die from a broken heart, and much more. This Monday, Alex Hormozzi joins me again for a huge 3 hour long episode. This was the most shared episode of all of 2023. I'm on a wisdom so you do not want to miss this one. Make sure you hit subscribe, it's the only way you can ensure you will not miss episodes

when they go up, plus it supports the show and makes me very happy. So go and do it. Thank you. It supports the show and it makes me very happy. So go and do it. I thank you. I have ever found in my entire life. Their crest hoodie in light gray mal is what I fly in every single time that I'm on a plane, and their Geo seamless t-shirt is what I've been training in every single day for over a year now. Basically, everything they make is unbelievably well fitted, high quality, and you get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping plus a 10% discount site-wide. If you want to see everything that I wear and recommend for guys

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box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Head to www.drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavours with your first box. That's www.drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Karen Rajan. Why should you never hold in a fart? You know what? Patient did once ask me this and this was an inspiration for me to make a statement or

an explanation about this. And you know, farts is gas, you know, it's a chemical know it's a chemical it's a bunch of chemicals and when you hold in a fart there's a percentage of that fart vapor which will diffuse through the walls of the colon through the walls of the intestine and eventually it will go to your bloodstream and all the blood circulates and eventually goes to the lungs where the waste products are then exhaled out. So there's a tiny percentage of your fart, which if you hold it in, will go to your bloodstream, go to the lungs and then be exhaled out. So you will have to breathe it.

You're going to breathe it instead of farting it if you don't fart it. You will exhale fart. So you will literally breathe out fart fumes if you hold it in. It's physiology. it's science. Science, baby. This is what we're here for. I've always thought this, where does the gas from burps come from and why does it never go away? You know, like you keep needing to burp over and over again? If I'm not adding any gas in there, is that gas that you breathe in somehow? A lot of the burps are a byproduct. Well, there's a couple of ways, a byproduct of air

swallowing. So if you chew a lot of gum, you're swallowing a lot of air, you drink a lot of sodas and fizzy drinks, you're again, swallowing a lot of air and the sort of carbonated gas that you're in sort of ingesting. And lastly, there will be a lot of air and the sort of carbonated gas that you're sort of ingesting. And lastly, there will be a percentage of gas that your bacteria or the various microbes in your gut microbiome will produce and they can make their way upstream as it were. And they'll also be a result of acid reflux as well. So if you have acid reflux, there's basically a floppy sphincter between where your stomach attaches to the first bit of your small intestine and you get reflux of some of

the gases and juices and get sort of excessive burping. Yeah, it does seem, you know, if you've eaten a little bit too much or a little bit too quickly and you're a little bit full, it's like, this is just not stopping. I just keep on burping over and over again. It's just going to happen until I guess my stomach levels finally settle down. Yeah. And there's actually a couple of hormones, one hormone in particular called cholecystokinin.

We can call it CCK for short. And CCK actually delays gastric emptying and slows down how much your stomach empties into your small intestine. So that hormone is increased if you eat foods that are high in fat or spicy foods. So if you eat spicy foods, the chemical capsaicin in spicy foods or chilies actually increases the production of CCK,

cholecystokinin. So there's more stomach content and there's more likelihood that you can burp or have reflux. Same with fatty foods that stimulate CCK production, more burping or have reflux. Same with fatty foods that stimulate CCK production, more burping, more reflux. Presumably with the spicy food, that is because your body doesn't want to transport too much of a very spicy thing through your digestive system too quickly and with fat something similar? Yeah, so it's just the nature of the fat molecules which slowed down digestion,

so it has more time for your body to digest it. But the case with chili is different. Capsicin, our body reacts so weirdly to capsicin in so many different ways. So capsicin is processed by our bodies essentially as sometimes a toxin because it irritates the cells and your body doesn't realize it's just spicy food. It doesn't have a spicy receptor. You only have receptors for sweet, sour, umami, and savory. Spice is not a receptor.

So it actually interprets that as heat because capsaicin triggers and stimulates the heat receptors. So it thinks something is burning inside. So it wants to say like, oh, hang on, I'm not going to let you digest and it stays up there. And so our body is a bit of a flawed machine, you know? Yeah, that's interesting. What do you think, or what do you wish that more people knew about how digestion works? So if you think about digestion, most people just think about the stomach.

People would assume that the stomach digests everything like a big blender or a washing machine and then that's it. It's done, right? And the esophagus, the food pipe is just like a big waste pipe. Everything goes down. But actually the stomach doesn't really have much to say in digestion. The digestion mostly occurs in the small intestine and you've got a number of organs inside your abdomen from the gallbladder to the pancreas to the liver and all of these various organs

actually interplay and interconnect with each other and each step in that factory line of digestion is as crucial as the last one. So it's not just the stomach. to play and interconnect with each other and each step in that factory line of digestion is as crucial as the last one. So it's not just the stomach. In fact, the stomach is essentially a mixing bowl where things are mixed together and it's later on the enzymes and the bacteria and everything kick in to really have a role to play in your digestion. So actually digestive health or gut health as people love to talk about gut health these

days is more than just one part. actually digestive health or gut health as people love to talk about gut health these days, is more than just one part. The sum of the parts is the real thing here. What's... I keep reading about IBS being on the rise, gluten intolerance being on the rise, food intolerance is increasing. What do you think is going on from your perspective? So IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, it's surprisingly quite common and a lot of people think IBS is one thing. It's an umbrella term. IBS has lots of different subtypes.

People can have things called IBSC, IBSD, where actually they're triggered by different foods and one person's IBS trigger, for example, a type of fermented food can be non triggering for someone else. And we don't really 100% understand the causes of IBS because we don't really understand the human body to its fullest potential. And certainly there is the interplay between the microbiome and what are the symptoms and manifestations of IBS. And with that in mind, the rise for IBS, why is that happening? Certainly, there is a huge role to play in the microbiome. We know that the microbiome is influenced by the diets we ingest. So certainly, we are having increased number of ultra process foods, which can influence the microbiome negatively, maybe a more sedentary lifestyle.

We know that lower exercise, more stress, less sleep, again, these factors can have a role to play in negatively influencing the microbiome. And all of these things can trigger a number of digestive issues. And IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, is one of them. What's your thoughts on probiotics and colostrum supplements, prebiotics, all of that stuff? So, I think there's a lot of these buzzwords thrown out these days, prebiotics, postbiotics, probiotics. And as a surgeon who deals with bowel cancers and a lot of intestinal issues,

I have perhaps prescribed probiotics, medical grade probiotics, two or three times in my entire career. Probiotics, the ones you can go to supermarket, pick up off the shelf, you know, yakult, Danon, whatever it is. For the average person, it's not going to make a huge difference because the strains contained within these mostly unregulated off the counter or off the refrigerator section supplements, they're not gonna be present in high enough concentrations

or bacterial units to actually have a significant role to play, it's just like pissing in the wind, and they're not gonna be effective enough in colonizing your gut, which is what you want them to do. They will be wiped out by your digestive processes, the stomach acids, and they won't be able to compete or integrate with the existing bacteria that are in your gut. Actually, you can get more of a benefit from probiotic rich foods, foods that have natural live microorganisms, kefir, kombucha, Greek yogurt, live yogurt, which has strains, things like that, or sauerkraut, pickled vegetables.

These are more effective than supplements. Supplements do work for a narrow range of conditions, rare types of pediatric gastrointestinal issues. Someone's had antibiotic associated diarrhea, post bowel surgery sometimes. So it does work for a very limited scope of things. Yeah, it's interesting. I went to a place called Fountain Life in Dallas here in Texas about four months ago, and they were a preventative medicine clinic. And it is full body MRI, heart angiogram, brain CT scan.

I had an hour and 20 minute MRI of everything, a balance scan, gut microbiome analysis, full body dexa scan, everything, everything, everything, everything. Then they run all of that through a ton of AI to try and work out predictive factors when all of this data is put together. And that is a training set that trains everybody else's, et cetera, et cetera. And I found it really instructive. Thankfully, there was nothing dangerous or whatever in there. But they did find for me a little bit of leaky gut syndrome. And that was something that again, like, you know, that didn't exist 10 years ago. I'd never even heard anyone say that 10 years ago. So since then, I think I've been using a colostrum product, Armra, which is I actually really like. And just trying to change up the diet.

But dude, Kefia is like just upgraded yogurt drink. It's for the people that don't know. It's kind of like a milk, like a thick milkshake, I guess. Yeah, like a fermented shake. But it doesn't taste fermented. Like fermented makes you think, oh, it's going to be kind of sour, like gone off milk. But it's not. You can get some really, really nice ones. And I'm a massive fan.

So I'm team Kaffir as well for the digestive system. And you can make it at home. It's relatively easy to make at home. If you've got some Kaffir that you've bought over the counter or you've bought from the supermarket, if you save some of the Kaffir, you can use some of the old kefir to make a new batch from home where you get a bit of milk or something like that and you add the

old kefir to that and leave it to ferment overnight and you've got a new batch of kefir. Hmm, how funny. Yeah, that's like a pineapple, like chop the head off it, turn it upside down, you grow yourself another pineapple. Do you mention there the fact that you're a surgeon? I think most people's understandings of what a surgeon does will be from some combination of Doctor Strange and like, I don't know, 24 hours in A&E. What is the reality of a typical day as a surgeon like? as a surgeon like. Reality of a typical day, so I would wake up around 5.30 and I'm in work by around

7.75 because the work starts probably 45 minutes to an hour before the actual surgery happens. I need to go and see the patients, review their scans, consent the patient, so take them through what the operation will entail, tell them about the risks of the operation. And then, you know, that's not counting the night before or the day before me reviewing all of their information, their medical charts, their records, to make sure I know the exact steps of what I'm going to do for that patient specifically. They may have some complicating factors. And it's also essentially running simulations about the surgery the next

day before surgery, just like an athlete would plan whatever route they're going to take or how they're going to combat an opponent. It's sort of running through, how am I going to combat that strange anatomy for this patient? And on the day of the surgery as well, it's again, sort of briefly before knife to skin, thinking exactly what I'm going to do. And I see it as a sort of algorithm in my head, a tree of different consequences. If this happens, I do this. If that happens, I do this. And you know, have you seen the Queen's Gambit? No, I haven't, but I know that I should watch it.

So there's this weird scene in the Queen's Gambit where she essentially this prodigious chess player sees all the outcomes. She hallucinates the outcomes on the wall of all the chess pieces moving in different ways in a somewhat slightly less genius way than that. I'm envisaging what's going to happen if I do that. If I cut that there and it goes wrong, what can happen? How do I avoid that?

So I'm running all these simulations and algorithms at a very basic level in my head. And you know, you just keep doing that rinse and repeat again and again and again. And the surgery doesn't really end once you've closed up the skin. The surgery only ends once the patient goes home and is well for a few days because complications can happen anywhere from during the surgery to 10 days post-op. So there's never really respite where you're like, okay, everything's gone well. Wow. What are the most intense and long surgeries that you do?

What's the thing where it's on the docket, you go, right, okay, I need a couple of extra caffeine pills before I get started with this. Probably when you have to do bowel surgery, when someone's got bowel blockage or bowel obstruction, and they've had multiple previous surgeries, when I read someone's surgical history and they've had lots of previous abdominal surgery, that basically means it's going to be several hours of operating because they're very likely to have lots of scar tissue, what we call adhesions.

These adhesions are cobwebs of scar tissue that line the abdomen and it's a forest in there and you have to slowly unpick all the scar tissue. That is quite fraught with danger because you can accidentally nick a bit of intestine and then you need to fix that. It can take literally 10, 12 hours sometimes. That is okay. This is a big deal. Wow. Is that the longest that you've done, 12 hours? The longest surgery I've ever done was probably closer to 15 hours and it was probably one of the worst days of my life as well. I missed my birthday, missed my birthday dinner with my parents from around 9am till midnight is when I operated.

And it was when I was assisting my boss years ago. We essentially removed everything inside the person's pelvis. We removed their bladder, their ovaries, their rectum, their uterus. There's some tissue in their pelvic lining and it just took forever. 15 hours, it was brutal. What a fantastic way to spend your birthday. I know, right? And I couldn't even unscrob to tell my parents I'm not going to be there. Oh, of course.

Yeah, you don't even... I mean, it does got to be, I need a bathroom break. You've got to hold it in for 15 hours. I need... You've got to be hydrated. Someone come over with a little squirty water bottle like you're a rugby player. Yeah, they do. They will come over under your surgical mask and they'll put a straw under there and you drink it. Occasionally, they will lift your mask down and maybe pop a

Haribo or something in there just to keep your energy levels up. It'll eat nutrition for the... Yeah, right, exactly. something in there just to keep your energy levels up. It leads to nutrition for the... Exactly. Yeah, how funny, man. Yeah, we had a... When we were flying from Dubai to Vancouver,

when I was on tour with James, the videographer that James brought with us, E.T., his birthday began when we departed Dubai, so he had a 36-hour birthday, which was the opposite of you. But he also spent 17 of those 36 hours flying on a plane. So, you know, it's swings around about. Exactly. What's the truth about your gut having more serotonin in it,

more feel good chemicals being more determinant of your mood than your brain is? What's sort of real and what's BS there? There's a lot of nuance behind the gut brain axis or the gut microbiota brain axis. Your gut as you know, produces a lot of serotonin, you know, 80% or more serotonin is produced in your gut. But that serotonin doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. So that serotonin produced in the gut doesn't directly influence your mood.

So there aren't certain foods that you eat which will produce serotonin, which will then improve your mood. However, that serotonin which is produced in the gut has a role to play in how well you digest food, its peristalsis and contractability. So it sort of coordinates the contraction of the intestines. But the food you eat can influence either positively or negatively your microbiome and those gut

microbes and those gut microbes can as a byproduct of whatever you do to them can then release certain neurotransmitters which can then induce neurochemical signals via the vagus nerve, the information highway between your gut and brain, which can then influence your mood. So in the future, my prediction is that we will come up with specific medications called psychobiotics, which you can eat or you can supplement, which will directly influence your mood because of their impact on the microbiome called Mdma Karen If the NHS is listening or watching But yes, you know

There will be I think for Consumer grade for the average person, I think we're probably around 10, 15 years away from that. I remember a very traumatic New Year's Eve when I was working at one of our events in Manchester. So I was at the birdcage, we'd sold this thing out, and it's about two and a half hours to drive back home. And I noticed about an hour into the event, maybe half nine, I was being really short with everyone, super snappy, very agitated. And I took myself to one side and had a word with

myself. It's like, what's wrong with you? Like, what's going on? As I was doing that, I got a text from my business partner saying, mate, I'm trapped in the toilet in our other event, which was in Riverside in Newcastle. And he says, I like, it's not good. Things aren't pretty for me right now. And it turned out that there was norovirus going round at his son's first birthday party that we'd both attended a day before.

And I thought, oh no, this isn't good. So I'm two and a half hours from home, only one hour into a six hour event that I'm event managing and my business partner's away. He's in Newcastle strapped to a toilet. So he he's definitely can't, he can't even help the people in Newcastle, let alone the guy that's in Manchester. So I'm like, right, I'm going to be in for the long haul here. And

then all this stuff happened to when I think back to some of the things that I had to try and fix in my nightlife career, we booked this guy for New Year's Eve to come and play. It's very amongst DJs, it's very highly high demand period. Obviously, they charge a lot, the blah, blah, blah. And before he came through, he'd asked, do you have a microphone? Because we needed to make sure he's got his own PA. Yeah. And he arrived and I said, all right, mate, did you bring your own microphone? He said, yep, yep, got it here. And I started talking to him through my gritted teeth of not wanting to throw up or shit myself. I started talking to him through my gritted teeth of not wanting to throw up or shit myself.

I started talking to him about an hour before and I was like, all right, mate, can we start to spin up some of the, what we would call drops? So I hear him like, one hour until Neozeeve, it's 30 minutes. And he's like, oh, I don't use the mic. And well, hang on. I asked, could you bring your own microphone? Yes, I can bring my own microphone, but I'm not a DJ that uses the mic. Like, well, all right.

So that happened. And then, dude, the power thing that set off all of the pyrotechnics, that wasn't working. So I had to connect two 9V batteries together like that, like sort of one into the other, to get sufficient volts to like, and I'm short cutting, like trying to like... Oh, Jesus. Doing this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Try and set off all of this stuff at countdown. And I'm doing the countdown.

And then anyway, I drove home and did two and a half hours, like pinned into my seat, desperately trying to not throw up. And then got home. It was the worst way to start a new year. But my point, that disgusting story, my point is my mood knew that there was something up way before I did. I know I took myself to one side to say, why are you being so short? Like, what's up with you? And if I ever have a little bit of sort of indigestion or

some sort of digestive discomfort, the first thing that goes and the last thing that comes back is my mood. Oh, absolutely. You know, interestingly, you'll find this interesting. mode. Oh, absolutely. You know, interestingly, you'll find this interesting. At the University of Cork, they did these fecal microbiota transplant studies where basically, shit transplants, where they took the microbiome from someone who is clinically depressed and transplanted that into a normal mouse. And that mouse, after a period of time time was observed to display signs and symptoms of depression. They repeated the same thing with a human who had autism, confirmed autism, transferred the fecal microbiome to another normal mouse that didn't have any conditions, and then that mouse, that rodent study, started to display signs and symptoms of autism, which is fantastic.

So that shows you how well connected the gut is to our mood and the brain. That's incredible. That's absolutely wild. I have a friend here in Austin, who is a like poo donor, a very highly paid poo donor. Like poo donor a very highly paid poo donor. So he's had to go through I think four stages of screening genetic testing Lifestyle diet scrutiny all this stuff, but they he sends off he literally shits money I mean he sends this off and they recapsule it and people use it to help with their

they recapsule it and people use it to help with their digestion. And I don't know what is it? Is it a suppository that they do? Would they literally be eating poo capsules? What are they going to do? Either way, so you can actually get powdered poo capsules that you would just swallow like a vitamin D capsule, or it can be inserted as an enema or during a colonoscopy, they can actually put that microbiome in the colon for you, which we do medically for inflammatory bowel disease treatment. We use putransplants in the NHS. You might have used one of my friends. He might have imported it from Austin, Texas, and it could have been inserted by you.

Your friend is a unicorn because that's the 0.01% of people are the golden poopers. I've heard. And incredibly lucrative. I've heard, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he had to go through all of these tests. And now he makes, I mean, he's like a successful business guy. I'm not gonna say who it is, because he's like a guy that like a lot of my friends know.

That is the life. Yeah, dude, literally shits money. Yeah. Absolutely crazy. All right, so he talked about digestion, another horseman of the health apocalypse, sleep. A lot of conversations on the show about sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker's book, I'm a massive fan of that. And that kind of really red pilled me on the importance of focusing on sleep. But what are some of the other things? What are some of the lesser known things that

you wish more people were focused on or understood about sleep and its impact? Yeah. And similar to you, I mean, I took a greater interest on sleep because of the negative consequences of my own sleep early on in my career as a doctor. So definitely that's, you know, sparked an interest in looking into the research and evidence. And you know, there's this sort of fallacy that everyone needs to sleep eight hours. The eight hours sleep myth, everyone thinks, okay, you've got to sleep this amount of hours. And that drives a certain degree of sleep and health anxiety when you don't hit eight hours. And we have within every cell in our body, clock genes and clock proteins, which determine how much individual sleep you need as directed by your individual DNA.

So your required sleep, maybe seven hours or seven and a half hours. Mine may be six and a half or eight and a half. I think there's a spectrum in which most of the population lies somewhere probably between six, six and a half and eight, eight and a half. The mass concentration will be in there. There'll be some outliers who may get by physiologically on five hours and some may need six and a half and eight, eight and a half. The mass concentration will be in there. There'll be some outliers who may get by physiologically on five hours and some may need nine hours.

But certainly that eight hour one size fits all sleep dogma is incorrect actually and that's been proven by science. The likelihood that you have that actual gene mutation where you can survive on. I think it's like closer to four or three, three and a half hours sleep. I remember reading this a while ago, the likelihood that you have, because a lot of people go, oh no, I'm sure I haven't had my testing done, but you know, I'm fine. Four hours sleep, I'm sweet, man.

The likelihood that you have that mutation is the same likelihood as you being hit by lightning twice. That's the same number of people that have got that particular gene mutation. The DEC2 gene mutation. Very unlikely. Yeah, DEC2 gene mutation. Supposedly Margaret Thatcher had it, Nicola Tesla had it, Einstein. She slept, what's it called, poly-phily, I think, or biphasily she slept. Oh yeah, so sort of in two chunks of sleep. That's how, well, Victorians slept as well. They would have a normal sleep during the night and then they would briefly wake up

in the early hours of the night to do work and then they would sleep again. But the biphasic sleep pattern is not unusual and the modern version of the biphasic sleep pattern is probably what happens in a lot of Mediterranean countries where they have siestas because if you look at our 24-hour cycle, there is a natural dip in energy and fatigue that arises post-Prandali. So after some lunch or some food around 12, 1 o'clock, there is a dip in energy level. There's also a slight dip in our temperature levels because our sleep is very closely linked to temperature. So actually, if you do have a nap around 12, 1, 2 p.m., that is fine and that's in keeping with our normal physiology.

So naps are science. Have you got any idea about why my mood is so dysregulated when I wake up from a nap? And James, How long do you nap for? I would guess with these ones, I'm talking like more than 15 minutes. So I'm actually getting into a into a proper sleep cycle. There's been a couple of times we did it on tour, you know, when we're trying to just grab 60 minutes here or there because we know we've got to get straight off to this thing.

But there was a few times where me and James would wake up and we didn't want to speak to anyone. We're thinking, God, I got to get up on stage and actually be likeable and whatever. And you do after a little bit of time, people bring you out of yourself. But I certainly notice in myself that if I nap, I wake up and my mood can be very discombobulated. So is that the kind of like groggy, slightly hungover feeling you're describing? Yeah. And then it tends to actually impact kind of my positivity and my energy as well. And there's a, I would say kind of an electric feeling to my body that's sort of anxious in some regards, maybe. Yeah. I think, you know, whenever I've experienced that, if I've overregged the nap or underregged

the nap, it's that sleep inertia feeling where perhaps you've gone into too deep a sleep cycle or a sleep phase, and when you wake up, you're dredging yourself from the depths of a deeper sleep cycle. So there's not that gradual, gentle awakening that you'd have if you naturally woke up. And that sleep inertia where there's still some sleep hormones, percolating, slightly stressy anxiety, riddle it could have emotion. What's your protocol for naps? All that I know is once you push it past, supposedly once you push it past about 20 to 25 minutes,

you're really getting into this is actually sleep and not a nap. And if you're going to do that, if you can try and hit 90 so that you can get yourself into and back out of a phase, have I missed anything there? No, that's absolutely spot on. I mean, if I nap on a weekend, for example, that's the main time I have to nap. 90 minutes would be my go-to because I want something that's substantial enough that would help me consolidate my memory, make me feel refreshed at the end of it. I find it's easier to stick to 90 minutes than go in and out of 20 minutes because for me, my sleep induction time is longer. If I told myself I was

going to nap for 20 minutes, it would take me too long to actually get into the nap first of all. So 90 minutes is preferable for me. Yeah. My sleep latency has been all over the place this year. I don't know what it is. I think a lot of people feel this as well. If you're busy during the day and even if you try and do the digital detox thing, that 3-2-1 rule I think is really nice.

Actually, if you're familiar with that. 321. Is that the three hours before bed, two hours before bed? Yeah. Yeah. So three hours before bed, stop eating, two hours before bed, stop drinking, one hour before bed, stop using screens, which is funny that screens have been placed in with food and hydration as like, you know, like the mandatory bottom of Maso's hierarchy of needs that people

have. I think that's been really great. And it's so funny, like, I know that meming healthcare stuff is kind of a bit cheesy and it's almost a little bit juvenile and simplifying things down. But that's what helps people retain principles. So yeah one rule and i would maybe sometimes if you're really struggling with sleep at a 10 before the 321. For the coffee because the half life of coffee is upwards of eight hours so if you were a habitual coffee drinker. cups of coffee at 2, 3 p.m. and your bedtime is 11 p.m., there's still likely to be a decent percentage and concentration of coffee in your bloodstream when you're going to bed, which is gonna dysregulate your sleep.

I'm a fast caffeine metabolizer that came out from some of the tests that I did. Interesting, yeah. But I get stealth caffeine done in evening time by ordering a diet coke and forgetting. Someone will bring a diet coke over and I think it's only maybe 45 megs of caffeine. So it's not very much. But if you knock two of those back, that's, you know, not far off an espresso. And you think, fuck, it's like 7pm at night. And I've just done that.

But yeah, I can feel it, man. And here's another thing, right? Is there any evidence between phases of the moon and quality of sleep? between phases of the moon and quality of sleep? I think the evidence there for that's published, that I've not seen any evidence linking the two, but certainly if there are times when the moon is more luminous and brighter than usual, and you don't have blackout curtains, and the moon is shining through your window.

So there's enough light getting into your room that's affecting your sleep, potentially. You could see mechanistically where there could be a way that that would affect your sleep. But if you're in a blackout room, you've got blackout curtains, which I certainly do. I'm not influenced by these external light sources. So no. You would think the same thing. And yet, there's been a few times where it's... Everything is normal, routine is as normal, and I can't get to sleep until 3 or 3.30 in the morning. And there was a day when we were all in Dubai, everybody's sleep was wrecked. People that we'd been with, people that we hadn't been with,

people who'd gone to bed at 8 o'clock, people who'd gone to bed at two in the morning, everyone was fucked. And sure enough, full moon. So I'm non-conspiratorial when it comes to the horoscopes thing, but I reckon there's, I think there might be something there. One other thing, I was having a conversation with a friend this weekend who's a DJ. We were talking about hearing and improving and protecting your hearing. Is there anything that people should be aware of when it comes to that? Yeah, the hair cells which help us transduce sound and then basically translate the sound waves into electrical signals which our brain then interprets as sound, those are directed

by the hair cells in our ears. And we've got about 16,000 hair cells. You are born with all the hair cells you'll ever have once you destroy them. That is it. And they detect various frequencies. So you know that feeling where you go to, I don't know, a cricket match or a tennis match or a concert or a very busy place where there's this constant hum. And then you go somewhere quiet and there's that ringing feeling in your ears. That is your hair cells being bent by the sounds and they

are kind of unbending. That is that sound and that's the process you are experiencing. And if you party hard for long enough, you know, nightclubs and loud music all the time. You're in a band, you're singing, you're going to concerts. You can long term damage those hair cells or those old rockers of the 60s, 70s and 80s. They've got a lot of hearing impairments like Ozzy Osbourne is essentially deaf because he never wore those earplugs that would protect his hearing. That is the risk with these hair cells where unexpected sources can damage those. And once they're gone, there is no reprieve at all. That's wild. Yeah, my old business partner, my former business partner, Dave, had a hearing

assessment done. And I think he'd lost 15 dB off the bottom end and 10 dB off the top end. So he, he'd really damaged his hearing from, you know, we stood inside or outside nightclubs for a decade and a half and he's still going. And none of us had nicely molded earplugs that would not be a fuck on to take out when we went outside and whatever. And now you can get custom molded ones with a tiny little filter. It's like weenie little straw that filters through so that it means that if you do go outside to go and speak to people,

you can still quite easily hear what they're saying without it sounding like you're underwater. But yeah, yeah, I did. I mean, thinking back to my nightlife career and some of the sound booths that we used to be in, and DJs would just want more monitors. They want to hear with full richness what's happening out in the club. And also they're partying.

They're with their boys or they've got like chicks in the booth with them. And they don't want it to be, why can't we hear the music out there? Why is it only coming through your headphones? Oh, don't worry about that. I'm actually protecting your hearing. Like that's not a big rock star thing to say. Exactly. What was that thing about plucking your nose hairs speaking of hairs inside your head?

Yeah, so when you you've got different types of nose hairs, you've got the deeper longer vibrancy. And you've got other types of nose hairs, and they do a lot of jobs. The main jobs of the nose hairs, apart from looking out of place, is that they actually filter microbes, dust particles, and potentially infectious causing agents getting into your delicate moist inner linings in your airways. When you pluck those, you obviously increase the risk of things getting in and you're removing that filter system that's there, but actually you can increase the risk of microabrasions every time you pluck something. Just like when you pluck a hair on your hand or somewhere else, you create a small opening,

a microabrasion or a microcut through which things can creep in. Bacteria from your skin, you know, Staphylococcus species from your skin can creep inside the bloodstream. And that region of your face, the triangle on your face from the bridge of your nose to the tip of your top lip and a triangle which forms there, that's actually known as the danger triangle, where there's a very close association

between the drainage, the venous, the vein drainage to your brain and the nose as well. And there's something known as the cavernous sinus. And if you get a bloodstream infection in the cavernous sinus, that can lead to all sorts of very horrible things like meningitis, clots, and in rare cases death, although that is quite rare. I mean, the average person plucking their nose is not going to die, but it's not a 0% chance of that happening. I was in Dubai to do that live show a couple of weeks ago, and I needed a haircut. So I spoke to one of my friends, George, who lives out there, and I said,

who usually does your hair? So he sends this girl over, and she was perfectly nice and cutesy or whatever, but also was a boxer. So she was like kind of hardcore and she's from Lithuania. Interesting chick, interesting chick. But she had gone full Habibi mode with the, so she's getting the little like the wax, putting the wax on the inside of the eyebrows. She's got wax in the ears, like doing the wax in the ears and the wax in the nose and she's like pulling it out. And yeah, that was that was a real, a real experience. So maybe not to be done again.

And if I do have my hair cut from her, I can actually say my doctor, a doc, not my doctor, a doctor told me I'm not allowed to have this done because of my fibrales or whatever it was called. Vibrasai, yeah, you got to protect. Vibrosy. Yeah, you gotta protect the vibrosy. I am trying my best. What about people who can deal, need to deal with pain more effectively? Have you got any tips for how people can can deal with it? You know, a lot of the time in the clinic, I see people with chronic abdominal pain or other sorts of chronic pain. And I've found anecdotally and actually looked it up and it's evidence base as well, when you explain something to someone, explain how something works, for

example, in the case of pain, if you explain to a person why they're getting pain, the scientific physiological reason why they're getting it, that simple act of them understanding their pain actually increases their pain threshold and lowers their pain perception as well. It was almost like a Jedi mind trick. You just almost dampened down their pain. And the interesting thing about pain is that there isn't a direct correlate just between tissue trauma and the amounts of pain that you will perceive because a lot of the pain,

it's modulated by what you think. So if someone is getting an injection or a vaccine or whatever they're getting, if you ask them to look away from the injection, that will elicit less pain than you watching the injection go into your skin. So again, visually, you're not getting the signals and that's dampening down your pain perception because you're not getting the visual input. So there are lots of things that you can do mentally to dampen down the pain. There was an interesting case report from many years ago of a person who was admitted to the emergency room, like a

doctor wrote this case report up. He sees a man in the emergency room and he works in a construction site and he's got a big nail that's going through his boot and presumably skewering his foot. So he's screaming in agony, like, I've got this nail in my, going through my foot. I'm bleeding. I'm going to die. And what they do is they remove the boot first of all to see, you know, the damage and see what's happened. And it turns out the nail is not going anywhere near his foot. It stopped by the boot itself. So actually his foot is

completely fine. Just that perception of it was going through was enough to cause that pain. And it's almost like a placebo and nocebo effect that you create in your head about pain. So, you know, similar to cold water exposure, initially it may be painful because you're expecting it to be horrible, but if you expect it to be nice and you're gonna enjoy it, you can actually improve that experience.

There's something interesting about cold exposure I learned from Huberman that is you can be relaxed when you get into the tub and that will make your experience much more enjoyable than being stressed about it. But what you actually want to try and elicit is that stress. So his advice is to go in with a sense of aggression as opposed to a sense of relaxation. So for me, my favorite way to do it is to just slowly sort of lower myself in, get up to my neck, put my hands in, and then just very gently breathe through my nose and count down from 180. If anyone wants to know how to actually stay in about a cold tub for three minutes, just count down from 180. It'll be difficult between sort of 150 and 60.

And then after the first bit's fine. And then after that, you're fine as well. But what he's saying is that part of the cascade of responses that he wants to have happen, or that would be optimal to have happened, is something that's a little bit more fear-based and sort of activating, I suppose. And we did NAD. We did an NAD drip this week. So me, James and my housemate, Zach, have you done one? Do you know what that feels like? I've not done one. I've given NAD to someone, but not, I've not had it myself.

Okay. So it's not very comfortable. Anyone that's had OK, so it's not very comfortable. Anyone that's had it will say it's not it's not an enjoyable experience at the time. But it's a very unique category of pain. So they give you is it Zolfran, Zolfran, anti anti nausea. OK, Ian. So they give you that because you can sometimes get nausea with it. It's a unique category of pain because it's one that you think or know is making you better and it's one that is not associated with damage and is time-bounded. So you know that as soon as that bag's finished, it's done. You know that you're doing it in

service of you being better and it's not because something's snapping or breaking or going to going to be be ruptured or whatever. So your relationship and the story that you tell yourself about the pain is very unique. There's not many categories of discomfort that can be like that. You got a pain in your stomach, oh my god, like it's my appendix, it's going to blow or whatever. But yeah, I just, I really enjoy, from a mindfulness perspective, I really enjoyed playing with that sensation. What does this mean to me? What's the story I'm telling myself about this pain? Like, how can I find more intrigue in this sensation? It's a very unique opportunity for me to be able to see this and not layer it with fear and concern and worry and stuff like that.

It's very, very interesting. Yeah, that will certainly, fear will amplify your pain perception. So you yourself, it's hard to do, but especially people dealing with chronic pain, but you can up-regulate or down-regulate your perception of pain depending on how you put your spin on it. That's interesting. What about eye health? How can people keep their eye health optimized? Well, eye health now more than ever, you could say there's a myopia epidemic, a short sightedness epidemic, because people are just on screens constantly all the time. When you're on screens all the time, laptops, mobile phones, TVs, whatever

you've got, watches, smart watches, our eyes, the muscles which help our eyes focus on nearby objects are constantly activated. That actually over time changes the shape of the eyeball. It becomes less round and more rugby shaped and this can affect long-term eye health, causing eye strain, eye fatigue. So I genuinely think people do need to look up from screens a lot more. I know it's pretty ironic us saying this and us having conversations about eye health

whilst being virtually having a chat. But yeah, I think we are addicted to smartphones and constantly craning down and wearing our eyes out. What is a good protocol for people to try and offset that? Me personally, I've spent a lot of hours reading, revising full surgical exams over the years and pouring over textbooks and various things. I've found that just breaking it up and doing something called the 2020-20. Every 20 minutes, you have a break from whatever you're doing.

Just 20 minutes and you get up and you look somewhere 20 feet away and then you go back into it after another 20 minutes and you get up and you look somewhere 20 feet away and then you go back into it after another 20 minutes and just giving yourself a bit of a break. Every 20 minutes you should have some sort of eye break where you are defocusing your eyes. You're not so intently focused on one thing and you look into the distance, into a horizon, into a broader vista or a broader view, allow your eyes to almost defocus and defocusing your eyes and looking at a broader picture helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system where you're down regulating your stress response because when you are

focused on something, whether it's closely looking at a page on a piece of paper or closely looking at a moving object that's close to you, that is some sort of stress response. Your adrenaline is spiked at that point and defocusing offsets that somewhat. One of my favorite triggers is to remember that you have all of this on the outside of your vision and that if you're looking at something or anything and a really easy parasympathetic activation is to just allow your focus to kind of ease out onto the sides even if you're remaining focused on what's in front of you being short but allowing the width of your vision to kind of come into view and to be a part of your

like salience network, I guess you'd say. And that's just so nice. It's such a lovely trigger that and a nice slow breath out is about as quick of a way to just, I'm done regulated a little. Yeah. And what exactly what you're describing there is known as optic flow. So, you know, when you're cycling around and you're constantly seeing both what's in front of you, but also all these things passing you, or if you're taking a hike through nature, you've got this broad vista. So you've got both the combination of a broader view and it's a moving broader view as well,

which further stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. There's something about lateral eye movement down regulating amygdala response, isn't there? I think, I mean, I'm no expert specifically on the eye, but you know, the eye and the retina is part of the brain. So there are a lot of things to do with the eye that directly impacts the brain. And, you know, I have no And I wouldn't be surprised if there were certain triggers or certain types of movements that did influence your perception of fear or anything like that as well. I think optic flow is probably one of the big movers for what I'm talking about. But

I seem to remember learning from Hugh Boone again that there's something specific that occurs as you're moving through an environment. Things are coming past you and you're looking from left to right. And I remember it's so cool man when you test stuff in your own life and then science comes along. I guess science was probably already there you just didn't know about it someone comes along and informs you about the science. just didn't know about it. Someone comes along and informs you about the science. And for years and years, I was doing this morning walk thing. And sometimes I'd wake up and I'd feel a little bit kind of anxious in my body or in my mind, or I'd have thoughts that I just percolating in a way that I didn't want. And I'd find that after 15 minutes of

the same loop I used to do in Newcastle, I get back and I just feel a lot better. Like the world was kind of, the world was a bit rosier. I remember just really enjoying that experience to the point where I think a morning walk is the most consistent thing I've done from a habitual perspective over the last maybe 10 years. Then I hear an optic flow and this sort of damn regulation of the amygdala and I go, oh, wow, that was maybe part of what I was feeling. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the routine is key as well. I mean, it sounds like when you went on your morning walk in Newcastle, there was a moment where you were by yourself, just with your own thoughts. And I think sometimes the act of just doing nothing helps to spark creativity.

And just it's a, it's a form of mindfulness, whether you acknowledge it or not, just being with your own thoughts is quite calming. What about slowing cognitive decline? I know that Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia, general cognitive decline is kind of another hot topic at the moment. What's the 80-20 from that? Yeah, I mean, as a doctor, that is genuinely one of the diseases that scares me the most. I used to think it was cancer, and as someone who deals with cancer and removes bowel cancers and other types of cancers, I think the human race has gained some sort of put hold in the

fight against cancer with various trials and medications that we've got coming out. But Alzheimer's still seems to be the outpost that we haven't quite got to yet and figuring it out. Although there are some interesting trials about monoclonal antibodies which can reverse potentially Alzheimer's. Our brains are all slowly turning to mush whether we like that fact or not. How can we slow down the decay? And for me, it's very basic things that we need to start setting into our habits now because the clinical signs of

Alzheimer's, they don't start until maybe you're in your 60s, 70s and 80s, but the first seeds are planted in your late teens, 20s and 30s. So our sleep habits notoriously bad when people are in their teenage years or 20s and sometimes even 30s, especially nowadays with Netflix and various streaming services and endless TikTok scroll holes. So poor sleep and chronic poor sleep can prevent the amount of brain wash that happens during those sleep cycles. We have this cerebrospinal fluid which washes the brain of all the toxic protein buildup. That doesn't happen in such an efficient way if you don't sleep well.

Those toxic proteins, the amyloid beta plaques and the tau proteins can accumulate and actually cause neurodegeneration over time. Same thing with if you don't exercise enough, you don't get enough regular blood flow to the brain. Again, diet has a role to play as we know the microbiome, its interaction with the brain and the gut that has a role to play. But also social contacts as well. If you look at these blue zone areas where people live to 100 centenarians and sometimes

even longer, they have great social networks and social contacts. And we are humans, are social creatures. So we crave on a physiological level some degree of network, loyalty and community as well. One of my friends, Johnny, talks, the Keystone decisions he called them. Getting a dog is a Keystone decision for him. It's an individual decision downstream from that. There are a ton of other things that end up coming along for the ride.

So you're going to get more steps in and you're waking, sleeping wake cycle is going to be up and you're going to have to have an externalized sense of ego because something else is dependent on you and so on and so forth. And I think that, you know, pushing to spend as much time on an evening, trying not to eat on your own, trying not to eat with a screen, you know, really relatively simple rules, three to one rule, you know, this is something easy for me to follow. Sean Stevenson taught me about this this year. He has a rule where every meal that he has on an evening time

has to be with someone. It has to be with somebody, even if he's gonna call on the phone with his AirPods in or whatever because he's in the house on his own or he's traveling or whatever. And yeah, it's such a keystone decision to think downstream from the relationships that you have. What have you got? Well, you're out of your own head.

You're talking a little bit more. You're probably eating more slowly, even from a digestive perspective. Maybe the person that you would say, say, why don't we go for a walk? And you go, oh yeah, why don't we go for a walk? And going for a walk after you've eaten, fantastic for digestion, insulin response, et cetera, et cetera, blood sugar. Yeah, that's a big one. Finding people that you can eat. There's a meme going around the internet at the moment that guys can't eat lunch without YouTube on. So this dude's phone's run out of battery and he's absolutely starving, but he has to wait for the phone to boot back up before he can start the lunch, which is already in front of him. But it's true. It's a meme because it's true, because of how many people can't choose to

eat in front of screens. And I'm, you know, in my less disciplined days, I do it too. Yeah. And if you look at a lot of these Mediterranean cultures and even, you know, the sort of Asian cultures, African cultures, they're all about big shared meals, right? Whether it's lunch, breakfast or dinner, you've got the elders of the family, the grandparents, you've got the mother and father, you've got the grandchildren, you've got uncles and aunts. And it's like a big occasion where everyone is there with each other. And even in Japan, in Okinawa, the island of Okinawa, you've got people who are friends

with each other for decades. They're friends for over 50 years, and they have these little tribes called the Maui. And they help each other when they're in financial struggles, emotional struggles, stress in their lives. So that support network, even something as simple as just a meal with someone, has a significantly huge impact on your health. And this is not just wishy-washy bro science. If you actually look into the evidence of companionship and heartbreak, when someone loses someone

they loved, they can actually die of a broken heart. And this is called Takutsobo's cardiomyopathy. Your heart changes in a way where it causes such a significant, that huge negative event in your life. So your wife of 50 years passing away, the flood of stress response chemicals, adrenaline, cortisol and various other things has such a huge impact on your physiology of your heart that it causes a type of a heart attack and you die of literally a broken heart. That's wild. My mum and dad's dog two years ago, two years or three years ago, I can't remember. Passed away. It was super ill and

there was two dogs. One that was ill, another one that was old. Within five days, I think, or 10 days of the first one dying, the second one had died as well. Well, there you go, yeah. Companionship and an increase in stress and all of that. What about stress? It's kind of a gain, another buzzword that people throw around. When I think about it, I understand that chronic stress is the thing that we need to be concerned about, that stress in small doses is that. But how do people know if they are stressed on a daily basis? After a while, that's just life to you. Yeah, I think it's interesting. A lot of people do think that maybe stress is just a psychological state, that it's something to do with your mind and you'll obviously be stressed if you feel bad

or whatever. But actually, stress invokes a physiological response as well. And stress affects so many different organ systems. For example, stress can cause breakouts of various skin conditions. It can exacerbate a lot of skin conditions like eczema, dermatitis, rosacea. You can get acne breakouts with stress. It can dysregulate your gut as well. We know the brain and the gut are intricately connected and intertwined. So if someone's got certain types of inflammatory bowel disease like ulcerative colitis or Crohn's or even irritable bowel syndrome, states of stress can cause diarrhea or in some cases the other way and cause constipation or abdominal pain. A lot of autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, stress worsens

the symptoms of that. So actually, every organ system you look at from your immune system, when you're stressed, the number of natural killer cells, the type of white cells which help you fight off cancer and viruses actually plummets if you're stressed because stress itself is an immunosuppressive response. What's that? I remember reading about this that during periods of high stress, it's often, people sometimes don't get ill, but that as soon as the stress finishes, as soon as they hand in the dissertation, as soon as they complete the project for work, they rebound and find that they get incredibly ill. Have you got any idea about what the mechanism is that's working there?

If I had to have an educated guess, it would probably be some sort of compensatory response by your body that just needs to survive. It's on survival mode where you hear these reports of people being in accidents and somehow they've managed to lift a car so someone's leg can be pulled off from the car. They display superhuman strength for that particular scenario. That can be explained by increased amounts of stress response chemicals. I suspect it would be something similar in the case of you're facing a deadline or chasing a deadline. And that stress response keeps you afloat, but actually you're about to break. And as soon as that event is over, you are broken.

And those cracks, they start to appear. That's what I would... Yeah. Hypothesis. I think it's not... I seem to remember that it wasn't far off, you know, it's kind of like a protracted, hormesis response thing that you've got going on. With regards to the lifting cars off of children and legs and stuff like that, another interesting

thing that it sounds like science fiction, but we have a rate limiter on what our brain will allow our muscles to do. Because if our brain just allowed our muscles to do whatever they wanted, you would snap your shit significantly more frequently than we. And I ruptured in Achilles three years ago, so I know how frequently we snap our shit. But yeah, and if you think, Eddie Hall tells this really cool story. Have you heard him tell the story about when he first lifted 500 kilos? So he's going for the deadlift world record. And he talks about the fact that he, for however long before in his warm-up routine, envisioned

a car on his daughter. And he walks out and, you know, does this thing. But he gets, he does this one lift. It takes 10 seconds, I guess, to do this thing. And he's immediately put on a ventilator, his blood pressure's off the chart, his heart rate's through the roof, his eyes turn blue. People can go and look at the video of him.

He's got, he hasn't got blue eyes. But if you go and watch the video of him, his eyes turn blue, it's crazy. So yeah, those single, formative, extreme, sort of stress-driven, adrenaline-controlled instances of people doing stuff. Wild shit comes out of them. Yeah, I think, you know, you're right.

I mean, there is a certain degree of stress that we need and that hormesis that you mentioned. It's the same as when you're eating vegetables, right? A lot of people talk about, there are various bizarre people online who talk about how vegetables are bad for you and you should cut them out because they contain anti-nutrients or defense chemicals in the plants. And yes, they do. And technically, at a very microscopic level, they are poisonous for us because those defense

chemicals do poison us. But actually, it's such a small amount that it's actually beneficial for us because it is that process of hormesis, just like cold exposure. That small amount of stress is beneficial for us and allows the body to respond to that and eventually grow over time and improve. Talk to me about the role of awe in well-being. Awe, yeah. So I mean, this is another thing which can help to offset or delay neurodegeneration and

brain atrophy. And it's just that profound sense of potentially doing something new, seeing something new, and just experiencing new things. And that is awe. It doesn't have to be always you need to go and see a wonder of the world. It can literally be you going out into nature and being exposed to all and being inspired by something, by someone, something, an act, either yourself or seeing something else. And you know, these are all positive emotions

which ultimately are good for you. It's so strange to think about awe as an emotion. No one talks about it. People talk about all manner of emotions, but awe, dread, even dread, which is kind of, I guess, in some ways, the opposite of awe. People talk about that, I think it's kind of been repurposed as anxiety or fear or whatever. People talk about that. I think it's kind of been repurposed as anxiety or fear or whatever. But yeah, or it's just It needs a like we need to make all great again. It's it needs a rebrand there's a Part of my garden in between we have two houses here and in between the main house and the other house

When I'm walking through this this really clear view of the sky, and it was so clear in Austin here last night, even just that tiny little bit of looking up at the sky is so lovely. It's just, again, the same as the I went on a morning walk and it made me feel better. I can't explain the mechanism. I don't know why. Is this just woo? It's like, well, look, ultimately, if it makes you feel good and you know that it's not destructive, it's not making you feel good because it's crack or because it's processed foods. I reckon just like rinse and repeat. Yeah, all of these things, if you really look into it and you boil it down to something and you want something tangible to label it as, it's a meditative experience. It's a form of mindfulness or bringing calm to your body, right? Whether you're just walking, like you know your walking routine in morning walk in Newcastle or looking at that night sky,

it is a form of not focusing on nothing, but also focusing on everything at the same time. That is the art of mindfulness and that is what you're doing sometimes unintentionally. When you're awed by something, nothing else is in your field of focus except that one or inspiring act. Oh, yeah. Karen, let's bring this one home. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with you and check out all of the stuff that you've got? You could check me out. I'm like a virus. I'm everywhere. I'm on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, wherever you want to find me.

New book as well. Yeah, this book may save your life. We cover a lot of the things we talk about here and hopefully more to hopefully save your life. Amazing. Karen, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you, Chris.

Yeah, boy. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, offense. Yeah, oh yeah, offends