On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Ben Greenfield ON: How to Train Your Brain & Body for Optimal Sleep and Performance

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Ben Greenfield chats with Jay Shetty about optimizing your body to be healthy. The enormous factors, including physical, emotional, and mental presence, hugely affect our fitness. It’s no longer just about going to the gym or doing a full body workout to stay fit and attain boundless energy. You are not crushing a healthy lifestyle if you’re only focusing on one aspect of yourself.  Ben is a human performance consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of 17 books, including the widely popular titles Beyond Training, Boundless, Fit Soul, Spiritual Disciplines Journal and the Boundless Cookbook. He is also the founder of Kion, a nutritional supplements company that combines time-honored superfoods with modern science to allow human beings to achieve peak performance, defy aging, and live an adventurous, fulfilling, joyful, and limitless life.Achieve success in every area of your life with Jay Shetty’s Genius Community. Join over 10,000 members taking their holistic well-being to the next level today, at https://shetty.cc/OnPurposeGeniusWhat We Discuss:00:00 Intro01:28 The last time we spent time together08:27 This extreme love for water14:26 The positive effects of sleep architecture18:04 Your entire body is a light receptor machine24:32 Take note of ambient noises and your safe place31:19 Post-lunch siesta stimulates a 90-minute sleep cycle33:43 Simulating your body safely with technology42:02 Taking interest in physical sports50:02 Deep longing for fulfillment56:39 You cannot disentangle the body and the spirit01:01:45 Businesses built on how many people can be served01:05:04 Habit change is understanding why you’re doing something01:10:40 Ben on Final FiveLike this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally!Episode Resources:Ben Greenfield | WebsiteBen Greenfield | TwitterBen Greenfield | InstagramBen Greenfield | FacebookBen Greenfield | PodcastBen Greenfield | BooksSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jay Shetty and on my podcast on purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Hart, Louis Hamilton, and many, many more. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real-life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. What if you could tell the whole truth about your life, including all those tender and visible things we don't usually talk about?

I'm Megan Devine. Host of the podcast, it's okay that you're not okay. Look everyone's at least a little bit not okay these days, and all those things we don't usually talk about, maybe we should. This season, I'm joined by Stellar Gas like Abbermote, Rachel Cargol, and so many more. It's okay that you're not okay. New episodes each and every Monday, available on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The therapy for Black Girls podcast is your space to explore mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.

I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation every Wednesday. Listen to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Take good care realize oh crap like I'm fit on the outside But I'm dying on the inside high inflammation low testosterone Disregulated thyroid gut inflammation and gut issues and constipation all these issues that technically somebody with like got inflammation and got issues, constipation. All these issues that technically somebody with low body fat and muscles

who can run and lift weights, you wouldn't expect to have. But really true fitness is not about going to a little fake box at the beginning of the day and pushing fake heavy things around for an hour and then walking out and assuming that you're good to go. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you who come back every week to listen, learn and grow. I am so deeply grateful for our trusted committed community that shows up every week.

And today's guest is someone that I met a few years ago. Now, we've been going back and forth trying to make this happen with both of our schedules, with the pandemic, with COVID, with everything else that's been going on. And I have to say that I'm pumped and I'm so excited that we're finally in the same room together. I'm talking about none other than human performance consultant, New York Times best-selling author, self-experimenter,

and one of the most wild, crazy, interesting, curious people that I know Ben, Greenfield, Ben. Thank you for being here. Thank you for showing up. And even just a few moments we spent together, I'm already looking forward to it. It's kind of bittersweet though, because like last time we hung out, we were eating wonderful Italian buffet style, five star resort, Sardinian food, surrounded by amazing people at music. That whole, was it mind valley?

It was a mind valley university. It was, yeah, it was, it was awesomeness fest, a-f-ess. I don't think they even call it awesomeness fest, any more, because that word's dated. But yeah, they had like, it was almost like a Disney land in Sardinia, some giant resort. I'll remember the food was amazing, great parties, and then I met you, we were sitting at a table at dinner and you and I had never met before, and Vician,

Lakhani was there and he introduced us, and then we thought about doing a podcast, and that was like two years ago. Literally three, I think now. And finally, the other side of the world, we finally hook up, but yes, Sardinia, you know what was interesting about that? Like Sardinia's well known

is being a longevity hotspot, like Nikkoia and Loma Linda and Okinawa, you know one of these so-called blue zones, even though there's some controversy about the whole blue zones and whether or not the demographic data was accurate or whatever, but either way, like people live a long time. But when you look at the populations that they studied in Sardinia, it was a lot of the old people up in the dolomites, right, who were hiking up hills with their goat's milk and their wine and eating, you know, small cold water fish and herbs and spices and teas and living this like outdoor lifestyle combined with social relationships and love and all these things

that we know now feed a good, not just health span, but lifespan. And then we got to Sardinia. So that was like the picture I had painted in my mind. But then when we got to Sardinia, we weren't like up in the craggie hills with like old Italian people drinking table wine over small, you know, fish and tea up in the mountain somewhere. This was like a full-on like five-star resort with like golf carts and like man-made beaches inside giant walls.

And so it was interesting for me. I kept wanting to slip away, like up into the dollomites and be like, okay, well, this is interesting, but what's kind of like the non-tourist-y side light? Yeah. Regardless though, the food I think was amazing and probably something the longevity enthusiast up in the mountains would have killed to.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we were, I hope we were eating seasonally. I think we kind of sort of, I think it was seasonally slash what the locals there thought would kind of impress. Impress people's problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, like, you know, I've eaten in Italy

before, I guess, more like the locals. So my wife and I, early on in our marriage, we flew into Rome and didn't have a lot of money. It was either senior year of college or right after we'd both graduated. And so this was back in the day when I had to like, fax all my reservations and in my credit card number

to the different places that we wanted to stay in stuff. But our hair-brained idea was we wanted to rent bikes in Rome and just like zigzag ride them all the way to Florence. And that's what we did. We rented bikes, but I planned ahead and mapped out the whole route, and so I would fax my reservations into these agreecolas, which are like farmstays, where you stay with these Italian families out of their farm, or like little hostels, or beds and breakfasts, because that's basically we had the money to afford. like little hostels or beds and breakfasts because that's basically we had the money to afford. And so we got into our own we start writing and basically because I'd already prepaid for all these reservations by faxing them in. It was come hell or high water. We had to get where we were

going that day. And most days were like the 35 to 50 miles of writing, which isn't a whole lot, but these like heavy touring bikes with paniers on either side, these bags where you keep all of your belongings, your clothing, your toiletries, whatever, and inevitably as the trip goes on, we like buy wine and buy cheese and buy souvenirs, these bikes would get heavier and heavier as we'd go. Every city there is built on top of a hill, like an old medieval village with walls, you got to climb a hill. So every day at the end of the day,

the very last thing we do when our legs were already toast was just climb, climb, climb to the top of these hills. And then hunt down wherever we'd actually put in a reservation to stay at. But I remember the most special thing was, it was every single day, you'd finish, you were sweaty, you were tired, your legs were aching, and you knew that there was a homemade Italian meal with some table wine that rivals, you

know, a $50 glass of wine you'll buy here in the US and wonderful people and smiles and a bed to stay in. And I just remember every single day, riding up those hills Jolato homemade Ravioli red wine you got this bend And it was a cool trip. We got all of the Florence We we put our bikes on a train and then just took the train back down to Rome and flew home So now I have you know years and years later. I have twin 13 year old sons and when they're 15 So year and a half or two from now, we're going to replicate that trip.

I'm going to take them back. So now I've got them kind of starting to train and learn how to be comfortable on the roads, you know, like the Italian roads. I have no shoulder to reach. You got to know to hand you a bike on roads and know how to ride a big fat touring bike instead of a road bike. And so that's going to be really, I'm super looking forward to that as like the next trip to Italy.

And with my boys riding through the Italian fields and hunting down Florence again. That's a beautiful plan. I love hearing them and they're lucky boys. And I remember that as a young man, my parents would drive us to Italy. That was their favorite place in Europe. So we would drive from London,

would get the ferry into France. And then from France, we would drive again to Italy. So we'd drive to Venice, we'd drive to Naples, we'd drive to Rome, we'd just drive to a different place. And we'd drive across Italy because we didn't have the money to fly there and my parents preferred doing a road trip. And we didn't get on any bikes or anything like that.

But even what you were saying, that was good. I was gonna say, week family, if you guys were real, you would take in bicycles. Yeah, if you were taking a bike from London to Italy. Yeah, we were like eight years old and it up earth. But I have good memories of visiting Italy with my parents as well. So I can only imagine how your boys are going to feel when they go in here. I think they'll do. My only concern is the girls, cause I got like two, 13 year old, they'll be 15 by then, like blonde haired blue eyed,

American boys, and just having taken my wife there and seen the reaction to, you know, my wife's blonde haired blue eyed, you know, the men there are very, very forward. You can't call on if she walks down the street. Oh wow. Then when I took my sons to Thailand, a couple of years ago, same thing, like all the Thai people just flock around them

and then the women are practically swooning as these little blonde hair boys walk through the street. So we may have to bring some fly swatters to keep them going off of them. I love it, I love it. My first memory of you actually was inside, Dignia. I knew you were going to be there. We were both speaking at the conference.

And I was learning about you were going to be there. We were both speaking at the conference. I was learning about you and learning about your world. I'm not a biohacker, that's not my background in the same sense as you are. I was intrigued and I loved your sessions that you did. But my first experience of you was we had an evening party. We were on this bridge, if you remember, at the hotel. And you literally jumped in to the hotel lake slash pool. It was, and the reason why I say lake is, because it wasn't like a swimming pool, we have to, I've gonna give Ben credit. And it was evening, so it was cooler.

And you dived in and you swam and you got out and you made your, and we were just, we were all like, wow, that is the way to enter. So I remember this. You remember it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that was early on in the trip.

Oh, honestly, dude, I love water. I know you do. I'm at home in water. I competed for years in open water. So I mean, Iron Man triathlon and the biking and the running was okay, but I did, and I still do just love. You can see that. I love the water, I love the ocean, I love spear fishing.

I'm not a big water man in terms of surfing and kite boarding and things like that, because I don't really have that up in Washington state, so I can't practice it, and I tend not to really be passionate about the things I suck at, because I can't practice them. But yeah, I think water is almost like woven into my DNA somehow because my dad, you know, all of his side comes from Australia.

And I'm a big believer in the fact that we do carry a lot of things epigenetically in our DNA, not only trauma, but also the things that our ancestors were good at or love to do. My son, River, dreams a lot about snow and ice and Finland and trekking up snowy mountains and the cold. And it's interesting because my wife, Jess's whole side, is like northern European, up in the area around Finland and Estonia and Switzerland. And some of these more like snowy white places and it's funny that that's like a repeating dream that he has and I suspect that it's just it's woven into his DNA in the same way that I love for Water is woven into my DNA and I'm actually super excited because right before I left To come down here to LA I received a package in the mail. This company called a Phines sent me these headphones

that you can attach to your goggles and their bone conducting headphones, meaning that you can listen to stuff while you're swimming or while you're under the water while you're spearfishing whatever. So they conduct the sound through the bones on either side of your head rather than your ears, right? So you don't have to worry about like the wires and everything.

And then they sent me these goggles that have like an in-screen display as you're swimming that show you how many strokes you've taken and how far you've gone. So you know, perhaps it'll just suck all the enjoyment of swimming out of me because sometimes excess technology can do that. But you know, just water toys like that. That's beautiful. We love and we live, we don't live near water. We live on about 10 acres of isolated forest land up in Washington State, which is great. You know, we have, we have goats and these cute little Nigerian doorfgots and Icelandic chickens

and a bunch of garden beds and all sorts of like old-growth forest where there's all sorts of wild plant edibles, like mint and plantain and nettle and white tail deer and turkey and coyote. And it's a great place, but there's no water right there. So now I'm building this natural pond and then just to scratch my swimming itch, I got one of those swim pools that's like,

it's like 20 feet long, but it has a super hard jet. And you attach like a, it's like an elastic band to your waist and you can swim against the current. What do they call it? There's a name for those pools. My mind was called an Aqua Fitness. You know, it's the ones you see Michael Phelps advertising in the back of airplane net. That kind of thing. But then I keep mine, because I'm a huge fan of like the power of cold thermogenesis and cryotherapy for, you knowotherapy for fat loss and your nervous system health and your cellular resilience. I think most people live in the comfort of temperature too much. And when we look at longevity, data, when we look at health data, when we look at nervous system and cellular resilience,

constant exposure or regular exposure to stresses of heat and stresses of cold is so good for the human body. So I have a sauna and then I have this pool, but I keep it cold. What I mean by that is I don't heat it. So in the summer, I'll swim at like 60 degrees or whatever gets up to you. Then the winter I'll go out there and swim and it'll be like almost break through the ice temperatures, but I get in that thing almost every day and swim and that's and it just puts a big smile on my face.

Yeah, I've been going to this place called Paws in West Hollywood. Yeah, I know lots. Yeah, so I've been going there every week with my wife. They're float tanks there too. Yeah, so we go there every Saturday and we do the sensory deprivation tanks for about an hour and then we'll both go and do three cycles of the sauna and coal plants together for another hour. And it's just, we do every Saturday morning, it's our become our morning routine ritual and Saturday, we wake up, once we're done our

meditation, 10 a.m. we head over and then 10 a.m. to noon, we're there and it's just been, and you know, I've heard that for a long time and as monks we took cold showers, we're in India so it was hot plenty of the time. So you always experienced uncomfortable amounts of heat, but doing that since I've been back where my body has a climateized, a climateized to wanting a more comfortable temperature and the temperature. Home's always perfect, but also I've started sleeping at like 66, 67 Fahrenheit. And even those cooler in the beginning,

that kind of sleep temperature has really helped. And you wake up sometimes feeling cold, but I can notice that that's doing some good for my body too. Sleeping in the cold, the effects of that on, the positive effects on sleep architecture have always been surprising to me because it's such simple low hanging fruit. When you look at sleep hygiene, we have light as being one

component of sleep hygiene. So what I mean by that is your sleep cycle begins in the morning, meaning that the more sunlight, the more of these like, if you're looking at this for more of a biohacking standpoint, like the infrared light panels that you can use to simulate sunrise in your office, that you can shine on your whole body, or an infrared sauna, or these blue light boxes that they sell for desktops that are used for seasonal effective disorders, you know, or of course sunlight being, you know, the top of the totem pull for any of this stuff, blasting yourself with light in the morning, combined with turning your room into just a light cave at night.

I've replaced all the cans in our bedroom with red incandescent bulbs instead of LED or modern fluorescent lighting. That's the late evening before you turn up. That's my master bedroom, my son's bedroom, and our master bathroom are all red and condescent bulbs. No regular bulbs. Whenever you turn on the lens. Yeah, all red. No dimmers, because dimmers,

and we're kind of getting to the weeds a little bit here, but dimmer switches on lights, they cause a lot more what is called dirty EMF, or high amount of non-native electricity that doesn't jive well with human cellular function. And so we don't use dimmers, but we just replaced all the cans with red incandescent, the reason for incandescent being that even though there's slightly bigger power hogs on the electrical

supply, it's not that big of a deal. It might be an extra $10, $15 in your electrical bill. Right. So it's nothing too big to worry about. But they also, they simulate the natural red spectrum of sunlight. And the same as our ancestors might have experienced during torch light or fire light at night. So all of the bedrooms, anywhere where there would be a sleeping place or a place where

you might get up to pee at night, it's all red and condescent. And then all of the computers, like my son's computer, my wife's computer, my computer, we have a program installed on that called iris. And iris just kind of sucks all the high temperature light out of the computer screen at a specific time of day. So it's very eye-friendly as the night comes. Can you get on your phone as well? No, but for the phone. So I do iris on the computer,

and then for the television, even though we don't watch much television, I have a box installed on that called a drift box that decreases all the blue light from the television. And then for the phone, obviously a lot of phones have built-in native night mode. But for the iPhone in particular, which is what I use, you can Google iPhone red light trick

and you can actually set your iPhone so it literally just like sucks all of the blue light out of the phone in terms of dark red. Kind of like how a lot of people who will do a dopamine fast, will switch their phone to black and white for a week. Which I think is a great idea. This will switch it to red.

And so you combine all those factors along with preferably, and I'll do this a lot of time when I travel because I just don't have as much say or the light bulbs in the hotel or whatever where the blue light blocking glasses right at night especially and So basically you're just blasting yourself natural and blue light in the morning and then complete absence of that same light at night You want to get as close to just what would looking at fire look like at night? same light at night. You want to get as close to just what would looking at fire look like at night. So, so light is one and it's interesting because light can also be used to shift your circadian rhythm backwards or forwards. So, let's say we weren't sitting here in LA. Let's say we were in New York, right? And so, my wake time in New York being, you know, let's say 6am, would dictate that if I were back home on Pacific time,

that's like 3am. And if I'm in New York for a week, when I get back home to Pacific time, my body's all of a sudden waking up at 3am, which is annoying and problematic. And I don't wanna get up at 3am because there's not a lot, a whole lot going on. I'm a total fan, like I'm an early morning guy,

like I usually get up 430 or 5 But 3 is pushing the envelope 3 is like you're dead by 11 a.m Yeah, I don't want to talk to people and you didn't happen so Anyways, the trick there is when you're waking up at 3 a.m If you do wake up and you have to get out of bed and you just you just you're gonna get up You're maybe whatever go do some yoga, or read a book, or whatever. You trick your body into thinking it's still nighttime by keeping your phone in night mode,

by not turning on any lights on the house, by putting those blue light blocking glasses that most people wear at night on in the morning instead. And when the time rolls around, when you actually want to send a message to your body that this is the new time to wake up, like let's say that's 6am, then you flip on all the lights and you blast the body with light. And after two to three days of doing that, it's remarkable at how quickly you can shift

your circadian rhythms backwards or forwards using light. And again, kind of like back to the whole biohacking realm, there are even, in addition to those light producing boxes that you can put on top of your desk, they make ones that you can put in your ears, they look like headphones, they're called a human charger, and they blast your head with this blue light in either ear. What? And then there's also a pair of glasses that you can use called green tires. You don't even need to see that light. Your entire body is a light receptor machine, and that's interesting because you could wear

a sleep mask at night, but if your room's really light, like if you don't have blackout curtains, or there's lots of blinking things in the room, or you walk into a hotel and you turn off the lights and all of a sudden it looks like a spaceship because the TV and the Wi-Fi and everything, like even if your eyes are covered, all that stuff hits your skin.

So when I say dark in the room, like I make sure it's really super dark, but you were talking about temperature too. Obviously temperature is, that's like the second component of sleep hygiene. So with temperature, I think you said you're doing what like 65, 66. Yeah, yeah, I read that too.

I find, because I, you know, I coach some people still for their health and for their sleep and everything. So I get to look at a lot of data from an aura ring or from a wu, whatever wearable somebody is using. And I've identified that about 63 to 65 Fahrenheit is even better. Like if you get... So even a bit lower.

Yeah. My metric is if you're one of those people who... And I think this is a good idea for staying cold who likes to take off all their clothes before they get into bed at night or sleep in your underwear. If you have mild cognitive resistance to taking off your clothes at night before you get into bed because it's a little chilly, that's a pretty good sleep time. So for me, it's like, it's a little chilly when I take my clothes off, that's perfect. And then in addition to that, I actually have this pad underneath the top sheet of my bed. It's called a chili pad. And it circulates like 55 degree cold water under my body while I'm sleeping. My wife doesn't

do most of the stuff. So you just have a new a half? Yeah, the shoemakers wife or is no shoes do. So I just don't bug her, but I let her do her thing. She likes to garden and hang out with the goats and chickens and go on walks. And so she just does her thing. She likes to garden and hang out with the goats and chickens and go on walks and so she just does her thing and I don't force anything on her because I know what will happen down there. If I wanna give my wife health advice, I'll tell one of my friends who's a doctor. I'll be like, text this to Jessa and then they text it to her

because I just know that. She's gonna know now when she watches this. No, because that's the thing is she also doesn't teach. She's not gonna watch this. She wouldn't even know how to download a podcast. So that's just who she is. So anyways, though, I have the chili pad on my side and my sons both have one too and they love it.

We all, it's we have these big glorious family dinners at night and like right before dinner, all of this boys run upstairs and turn on our chili pads so we can sleep better. So the bed's already cold when we get into it. Another thing that you can do, and it's a little bit paradoxical, but it actually works, is you can pull on wool socks before you go to bed at night. And when you feed our warm,

there's these little vessels are called anastomosis or something like that, but it actually allows the rest of your body to stay cool when you warm some of those tiny vessels in the hands of the leg. So you think wearing wool socks to bed, keep you warm, but just like wear wool socks and little elts and you can actually cool the body

with that method too. And then finally regarding cold, you don't mind me just geeking out on it. No, this is beautiful. I love this. No, no, no, we don't need to sleep. Sleep's gonna be, everybody needs to sleep.

So I'm not gonna lie. Everyone's gonna try this out, yeah, because I mean, sleep something that everyone's struggling with. It's so's gonna try this out. Yeah, because I mean, you know, sleep something that everyone's struggling with. Oh yeah, it's, it's so critical. Please geek out. So the thing with the, the, the cold is that if you do kind of like break the rules, because there's all these rules now that all the scientists and their institutions

have come up with that are annoying us. Like you're not supposed to work out hard within three hours of bedtime, and you're not supposed to eat a heavy meal within three hours prior to bedtime, which for me can be socially problematic, because I love to have big, glorious family dinners with people and go out on the town and visit new restaurants. And I mean, how often, let's say you're going to bed 10, how often are you really going to be done with all that, like seven,

unless you're just like a total, I don't know, just boring social outcast. Sorry to all the people who aren't eating dinner. But basically, it's not that hard. You just get the body's core temp back down. So if it's the winter and I finish a dinner, I'll go for a brisk walk outside in the cold weather. And if it is the summer or warmer season, just like a lukewarm or cold shower before you go to bed, like my sons and I just went down and watched the fights down in Vegas when it was like 115

degrees on the strip and we'd walk every night. We'd walk home from the fights and the shows and everywhere we went and every night before I get into bed, there's a little bit of resistance to this, but that's okay. You can overcome the resistance, but just take a cold shower before you get into bed. And that helps to lower the core temp if you have had to exercise, or you've had a heavy meal in those three hours prior to bedtime.

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about for sleep in addition to light and cold, the first is noise. And in the city, this is a bigger issue, but I mean, even I have got roosters that like to get up kind of early because they're naturally programmed to wake you up. And I've got, I live out in the forest, but there's a road nearby that sometimes semis go down and I can hear off in the distance, like the breaking, like the,

you know, when semis go downhill. So I wear ear plugs, like just soft wax ear plugs to bed. But then they've actually done studies on the different forms of ambient noise that help you to sleep at night. You know, they make like sleep machines that will make white noise and brown noise and one of the forms of noise that they make is pink noise. And pink noise, it appears is the best background noise to have playing in the background. I've never even had it. It's just like, I don't know why they give colors to certain noises, but it's the frequency in the pitch of that noise. So I've got an app on my phone called SleepStream.

I think it was free or the cost was incidental, but it's got all these different sleep tracks on it. And I don't use anything on it except the pink noise function. So my phone goes in airplane mode next to my bed and then I push pink noise on and I put the ear plugs in and then I'm covering up all those ambient sounds. That technique works a lot better when I'm traveling, when I'm staying in a hotel and they're busy roads. When I have a roommate or something like that, if I had a conference, I'm sharing room

with somebody and they're getting up earlier, they're going to bed late. So the sound is another component, especially if you're a light sleeper. And then the final component is safety. And a lot of people don't think about the safety component. So your bed should be a place where from a nervous system standpoint, you're not wired up in work mode. Your sympathetic nervous system is not activated. If anything, the bed is almost like an anchor

that activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Well, if you are one of those people who has business books on your nightstand or maybe you open your laptop up at night or really at any other time during the day, they'll give your body the impression that the bedroom or the bed particularly is an appropriate place to work. I would say even that television

just because psychologically, you know, we as humans are still hardwired to see that television and it's as though a whole bunch of other people and other experiences are in your bedroom. Not to mention the fact that there's some really interesting data that television can replace dreaming. So essentially, we live now in an era for the past several decades where all of the colors and imagery and imagination and visualization and creativity that your brain should be churning out during sleep at night to process memories and to process trauma and to process creativity, a lot of that can be replaced by staring at a television before you go to bed at night. So I don't have a TV in the bedroom for those reasons and also for the light reasons and also for the reason that I want my body to associate the bed with pretty much nothing,

but sleep and sex and then I'll keep a boring book or a work of fiction next to the bedside. Now I used to when I'd get to a hotel room, I would just like, you know, plop on, especially a small hotel room. Like a suite, usually you've got more than enough room, but you know, the small hotel room is a little crappy workstation in the corner or whatever. If that, I'd just like plop on my stomach on the bed

and open up my laptop, you know, I think a lot of people know I'm talking about. You know, just lay there on your belly and work on the laptop, because it's a comfortable spot to do that. And the problem is that sends your body this cognitive signal that the bed is the place where you work. So now, I always make sure my laptop, even in a single room, hotel room, is not in the bed.

And that sends the body a message that the bed is a safe place, not a workplace, not a stressful place, not an email, jumping out from your computer place. And if you really want to take that safety thing one step further, this has become quite popular now, this idea of gravity blankets, meaning folks will sell like these 10, 15, 20, or 25 pound gravity blankets. And it sounds like it would be totally paradoxical to what I was saying about staying cool because it sounds heavy.

But a lot of folks are doing a good job making like a gravity blanket that will stay cool. That one company I was talking about staying cool, because it sounds heavy. But a lot of folks are doing a good job making like a gravity blanket that will stay cool. That one company I was talking about, Chilly Pad, they've been selling gravity blanket that will like circulate cold water through the blanket. But there's something about very similar to like, how when you were swaddled as a baby, you felt protected and you felt like you were in this,

this quiet cave, it's that feeling when you pull on the gravity blanket. So when you combine all that stuff, the light, the cold, management of sound, and then presence of safety in the bedroom, you create a real, a real, real nice nest for getting those hours that are arguably the only hours during your life. You know, arguably that third of your, that your nervous system should be repairing, that your body should not be wired up to have everything activated, that you shouldn't be exposed to lots of electrical signals. And I'm not one of those guys who's like, go full on, move up to the mountains, don't use internet, cut yourself off from everything, but it appears that the issue with constant

exposure to all these electrical signals that our bodies from an ancestral standpoint haven't been exposed to for thousands of years is the fact that the cells don't get a break, right? So when we're looking at Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and the constant opening of what are called calcium channels in the cell that allow a whole bunch of ions to spill into the cell that disrupt metabolism or they give you brain fog later on in the day, that's actually all pretty repairable. The body is actually pretty impressive and magical in terms of how quickly it can bounce back from certain things just in the same way they could recover from a hard exercise session and remove all those muscle fibers or repair all those muscle fibers. If you give it rest, if you give it recovery, the thing is,

it's the same thing with electrical exposures. Like if you can turn your bedroom into a safe, quiet, cool place, that also doesn't have a whole bunch of plugged in, like Wi-Fi routers and phones, et cetera, you're all of a sudden giving your cell as a chance to just go, it's like when people camp, you know, they just cut off a lot of stuff, they feel great when they come back. So it's not as though you have to live like a luttite.

It's that sometimes you have to press the pause button, give your body a chance to step away from all that electricity for just, you know, that those seven or eight hours or however long you're in there, and then emerge back out, we're paired and ready to tackle the day again. Yeah, that's it. Now you just told everyone how to make that bedroom into a sanctuary.

That was a sanctuary. Yeah, that's what it sounded like. Yeah. Where you were describing, I was just like, and that's what it has to be. A sanctuary is safe. A sanctuary is safe. It has to be. And I think a lot of people beat themselves up too, because there's a lot of really great

sleep researchers out there now. Yeah. You know, you've got guys like Matthew Walker and Nick Littlehaelz and gosh, who out there's another, another person who's been doing a lot of work on sleep. Michael Bruce is another guy. But over and over again, what you see is you're supposed to sleep seven to nine hours. Yeah. And a lot of people feel bad because they don't. Yeah. And I felt bad for the longest time because I didn't.

And I'm like, what am I going to like, I have cancer early? Or am I going to, is my body going to fall apart? Am I going to like accelerate aging? Because I just, I've got too much going on. Or my body just like my eyes open wide at like 4.30. And I just want to go crush the day, right? Which I think many people who are dialed in to perhaps some of the things that you talk about, like your eki guy, open wide at like 4.30 and I just want to go crush the day, right? Which I think many people who are dialed in to perhaps some of the things

that you talk about, like your icky guy, your life's purpose, your plan de vida, you know, speaking of Sardinia, this idea of your purpose for life. Well, if you have a really strong purpose for life, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you're just like, baby, let's go, bring it on. And for me, you know, with our big, glorious family dinners, and I read my son's stories at night,

and I play the music on the guitar, and I'll make love to my wife and read some fiction. So, you know, even with all that, I can usually do a pretty good job being close to a sleep by 10. But getting up at 4 4 30, that's six to six and a half hours. So, the thing is that if you do that, but also you take a nap like a post-lunched Ciesta, for example, the Ciesta, even if it's like 20 to 45 minutes long,

can simulate what you get out of a full 90 minute-ish sleep cycle. So the way that I live my life is I sleep six to six and a half hours a night and then like clockwork after lunch every day or if I have a meeting after lunch, sometimes it's slightly later in the afternoon. I try to push it too close to bedtime because you want some sleep drive going into the night. I take a nap. I take a C.S. for me, it's 20 to 45 minutes. I do kind of, this is where some of the biohacking comes in. I'm like, okay, I got 20, 45 minutes. I want to make this

Effective. So what I do is A, I have something similar to like that sensory deprivation float tank that you use down it pause I actually had a float tank for a while, but it was too much upkeep for me I got one of it. Yeah, my knees. Yeah, it's just like my whole basement look like a freaking pool house So I have what's called a hyperbaric chamber, which is like this chamber that they use in hospitals for repairing wounds and they'll use it for like cardiovascular problems and increasing red blood cells.

And it pressurizes you at about what's called 1.4 atmosphere. So it's like you're 23, 25 feet under the ocean, you have the pressure, but then you're breathing pure oxygen. And so the combination of the pure oxygen plus the pressure drives that oxygen into the tissue, accelerates repair, clears the brain. I mean, even if you weren't napping in it,

you feel amazing when you get out. And so I climb in that and I like it too, because I have to zip myself up. And it's kind of like nobody can get to me. It even takes like three minutes to decompress me. So if the house caught on fire, I'd be kind of screwed, but I climb into that. So I'm just like, I'm locked off from the world, right?

And then I have a couple of technologies that I use. One is called a HAPB. It's like, have you seen this. It's super cool. I've been messing around with it for like five months now. It uses a magnetic signal that simulates the same molecular signal of a few choice compounds. Like for simulating wakefulness, you could choose like the caffeine setting, the nicotine setting for it's got like an alcohol setting. What's it doing? So basically all it does is it causes

your cells to respond as though that particular molecule were attached to the cell receptor without you actually ingesting a compound or taking a supplement or consuming something that's going to stay in your system for a long period of time. So let's say I want a waky waky prior to going out to a dinner party. I could put it in coffee mode, right?

Put that around my neck or on my head, get that, that hit, wakefulness producing hit of caffeine. But then when I take it off, it's not like the caffeine still floating around in my system. Same thing with a nap. So what I like for it. So it's in your system only for as long as you have. Right, it's just, it's as though I were blasting it

with the electrical signal of coffee without you actually having to drink the coffee, which has a half life long as you have. Right, it's just, it's as though I were blasting it with the electrical signal of coffee without you actually having to drink the coffee, which has a half life of, you know, whatever, six or eight or 10 hours depending on how you're genetically wired up. So it's really cool, and I didn't really believe, you know, I'll interview a lot of people on my podcast, I'm like, yeah, that's a little woo. But then I tried it, and it actually works surprisingly well.

So I put it in my preferred mode for NAP is the one that's, it's called Relax, but it mimics CBD, which is nice for me because it just kind of settles down some racing thoughts, gets me down at the end of the day. So I put that on and then I also have this other device that works kind of similarly, but instead of using a magnetic signal, it vibrates.

And it's a tiny vibration that elicits a brainwave signal that could be like an alpha brainwave signal or a kind of like a hyped up beta brainwave signal or a deep relaxation like theta or delta brainwave signal. And that's called an Apollo. And that also, similar to the Hapbee, has like a wakefulness mode, a social mode. I even put that Hapbee one, which also has an alcohol mode on it.

I gave it to my son who wanted to try it out at dinner one night, and it was in like social alcohol mode. He got like super funny, and his joke games really relaxed. Then as soon as I took it off of him, he was just normal again. That's great. I wasn't giving my son actual of him, he was just normal again. That's cool. I wasn't giving my son actual alcohol, this was just like simulating the effects.

So I put the Apollo in relax mode, I put the Hapbee in relax mode, and I climb into that hyperbaric chamber, and then I've got like lavender essential oil in there, and I lay back, and then I play this track. And I discover a lot of things through podcasting. After stuff I learned from talking to people, I'm learning right now.

Super-duper smart who normally never give me the time of day and I get to pick the brains of these scientists. What you're doing that me today, so. Physiologists for like 90 minutes, twice a week. So it's way better than my college at UK. It's just talking to all these people and finding out what works and what doesn't. But a couple of years ago, I interviewed this guy

who has a company called Newcomme. And Newcomme has an app that plays special signals. And this sounds like eight billion other apps out there that will play like relaxing signals at night. There are dime a dozen on the app store. But this one in particular, it just seems to work for me, most notably in the way that I can put it on like 20 minutes, and I'm dead to the world within like two minutes of that thing playing. I'll wake up at the 20 minute mark and feel like a slice like an hour. This is something else. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I asked the guy when I

interviewed him, well, you know, could this just replace? Like the pink noise that I play at night, and he said, no, no, no, no, don't do that because it pushes you through a sleep cycle so well that if you put it on to sleep at night, you'd go through your sleep cycle from, let's say, like, 10 to 1130, then you'd wake up wide awake at night. Right? So this is something that's better in my opinion for naps. The other time I'll sometimes use it is if I wake up, let's say it like 3.34 and I want a snag and extra 30, 40 minutes to sleep or whatever, I'll put it on that. So I do the nap with the Apollo, the Hapbee, the hyperbaric, the oil, and then the, um, that Hapbee, and even though I'm sleeping six to six and a half hours a night, I get up from that nap and I'm kind of groggy

for like 10, 15 minutes. But what I do is I go and I jump in that cold pool, and then I'll have some kind of stimulant. Like I'll just pop a piece of nicotine gum or have a little leftover coffee from the night before, whatever, and then boom, it's like I have a second day. I feel amazing. I'm fully present with my family that night at dinner,

whereas if I push through that afternoon slog, it's just kind of like, it's a dinner and you're just kind of like, I can't wait until bedtime. And I don't like that feeling personally. I'm just impressed that your charging skills, like you must have the most organizing charging schedule for all these devices.

Oh, oh, they own a charging charge. They only have to be like, I mean, most people can't even charge their phone. You're like, here, charge, seven devices, like, so it's amazing. And I mean that genuinely, I'm not just, I'm not trying to be in the charging station in the dining room that I just kind of keep everything

plugged into. So yeah, I've got like four or five devices that I'm kind of charging during the day. Or the reason that I plug them in is not because they have a low battery life and they need to be charged. And this is important for people to know. Any of these devices or anything I try, I have a hard and fast rule that it must be able to be placed in airplane mode for the reasons that I stated earlier.

So if somebody's trying to sell me or have me try some crazy new sleep system, a mattress, self-quantification device or whatever. One of the first questions I ask is, well, can I disable the Wi-Fi or can I put it in airplane mode so that during the time I'm using it, especially for rest, I'm not getting bombarded by signals. I'm so happy you brought this up. Yeah.

And so most of them can, but the problem is when you place a device in airplane mode, typically to reconnect it to your phone, because most of these are run via some kind of app on your phone, you have to plug it back in to a charger and that like, I'm not an engineer, it takes that airplane mode basically. And so a lot of times I do have to like plug things in,

I get up from my nap, plug the HAPB and the Apollo in, so they're ready for the next day. But yeah, there are ways, especially in our day and age, that you can definitely get by without just swallowing hookline and sinker, that the eight to nine hours of sleep and night message. Like there's a lot of ways around it. Yeah, tell me about a time Ben, when like, for you, this,

you know, you've always been athletic. You are an athlete, you've been an athlete, you spoke about it before, but you also mentioned that, you know, there have been times when you didn't feel this way. And I want to hear a bit about that about how your life was

before you really understood the body as deeply as you do today. Because I feel like, for a lot of people, when they see you, like to me as well, and I really mean this in a genuine way, I see you as like, wow, these guys, just really understands the body, really understands the mind and your an expert.

So you sound like an expert, but I know for a fact that you weren't born that way. And that's not how you've always been. And I'd love for people to hear about that journey around, tell me about a time when you didn't feel boundless, when you didn't feel as, like, now it's like, you know how to turn this and you play with this. And now it's an experiment and it's fun. And you enjoy it.

Tell us about when you kind of were like, did you ever feel broken, health wise? Did you ever feel like everything was just a mess? Were you ever in the place that most of my audience may be feeling like, were they're just like, Jay, I'm just struggling to get out of bed in the morning. Like, I don't sleep. I've got like bloated, I'm feeling gassy. Like, tell me about when you felt like you were at your worst as opposed to what we see now. There's three things that I want to tell you right now.

When I was a kid, I was homeschooled K through 12. The emphasis of my homeschooling was really more on a classical education centered around Latin and logic and rhetoric and the great books and tons of reading, which I loved. I would, my happy place was the library. And my parents would have to take me out of the bedroom and almost like threaten me with punishment

if I wouldn't come out and socialize with people because I just wanted to be in there with my books. I played the violin for 13 years. I was present of the chess club. I love to take apart computers, right? And design video games and figure out how my hard drive worked and was an early adopter of a lot of these technologies in a very geeky way prior to the advent of social media, et cetera.

When it was, you actually had to kind of have a working knowledge of some of these technologies. And I was pretty much like a geeky little Christian homeschooled kid. I remember the stuff I got mad about when I was a kid was like, when some kid would quilted doily at our homeschool talent competition beat out my watercolor painting. Right? And so. Was it your mother and father that would both? Oh, what's the homeschool?

Like there was a group of kids and teachers. We had a pretty good homeschool collective so I didn't completely miss out on social life. I was a weird kid in that I was very independently driven to learn, and I am still that way now. My parents would literally just give me books and walk away. They would literally give me the whole year's math curriculum, and then just like make sure I took the test.

My siblings were not the same and needed a lot more kind of handholding, but I've always been curious and driven from an independent learning standpoint. And it really wasn't until I discovered the sport of tennis that I became interested in physical culture at all when I, my parents wanted to create a really cool environment for all of us to grow up in. So one day they announced that they were going to bring in some folks and, and we're all going to pitch in and learn a little bit of construction and lay asphalt and build a tennis court. So we built a tennis court and they hired a tennis instructor and her name was Michelle and I had a big crush on her, which helped with my motivation to play more tennis, but I also loved tennis and I got really good at it.

And it came really naturally to me and I started to run up the hills behind my house. My dad took me down to the local sporting goods store to buy a little 10 pound dumbbells. And I started to figure out how to drink milk to get strong and the kind of things that made me faster and how to stay hydrated in water and minerals. And I had a couple of mentors, a guy who was my younger brothers, best friend's dad was a bodybuilder. So all of a sudden, I'm learning about nutrition

and working out from him. So you got into head. Another friend is a power lifter. So by the time I'm like 15, I was done with high school. So I'm like, you know, I don't want to go program computers or paint watercolor. I want to go learn more about this body and tennis.

So I walked onto the local college tennis team when I was 15 and started playing tennis, started studying exercise science, got a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics and wound up opening a whole bunch of personal training studios and gyms in Washington and Idaho and just have been hardcore and the health and fitness and nutrition scene ever since then. So initially I really wasn't interested in much of this stuff at all, but at that point, I spent like 20 years competing in all these crazy hardcore, you know, obstacle course races

and Iron Man triathlons and open water swims and adventure races. That was my life. For like 20 years was using my body as a guinea pig, using all these races and events as like a battlefield to test stuff out. I was coaching, I was competing, I was traveling, and I thought I was the bees knees when it came to fitness. I would say that if you were to look at me and judge me through what our world considers to be fitness, which I think is a bastardized version of fitness, I was one of the fittest humans on the planet.

Like, I really did look good in spandex and could ride my bike really fast, you know, run up hills. And to reply to the meat of part of your question, it was about nine years ago or so, when I really got into self-quantification, testing of blood work, testing of biomarkers, sleep, nervous system, you know, all these things that we can easily test now that you normally would have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for it, you know, the Princeton longevity institute or some executive facility, you know, only available to wealthy CEO as we can get all these tests in our own home. And I got super interested in this stuff and I started to get all these tests and I realized,

oh crap, I come fit on the outside, but I'm dying on the inside. High inflammation, low testosterone, dysregulated thyroid, gut inflammation, and gut issues, constipation, and brain fog. And all these issues that technically somebody with like low body fat and muscles who can like run and lift weights, you wouldn't expect to have. Yeah, that's really hard. But really, true fitness is not about going to a little fake box at the beginning of the day and pushing fake heavy things around for an hour and then walking out and assuming that you're good to go and maybe kind of sort of eating healthy like a protein bar or Trader Joe's or whatever. There's so much more. There's so much more when it comes to the body and that's what I began to discover. My first big book that I wrote called Beyond Training was just that.

It was like, okay, so as an athlete, there's all these other things like digestion and hormones, an endocrine system, an inflammation, and blood, sugar regulation, and immune system integrity, and all these things that we don't think about when it comes to what it truly takes to have long, health span and lifespan. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of Family Secrets. It's hard to believe we're entering our eighth season. And yet, we're constantly discovering new secrets. The depths of them, the variety of them

continues to be astonishing. I can't wait to share 10 incredible stories with you, stories of tenacity, resilience, and the profoundly necessary excavation of long-held family secrets. When I realized this is not just happening to me, this is who and what I am. I needed her to help me. Something was annoying at me that I couldn't put my finger on, that I just felt somehow that there was a piece missing. Why not restart?

Look at all the things that were going wrong. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to season eight of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A good way to learn about a place is to talk to the people that live there. There's just this sexy vibe and Montreal, this pulse, this energy.

What was seen as a very snotty city, people call it Bosedangeless. New Orleans is a town that never forgets its pay. A great way to get to know a place is to get invited to a dinner party. Hi, I'm Brendan Friends' newton, and not lost as my new travel podcast, where a friend and I go places, see the sights, and try to finagle our way into a dinner party. We're kind of trying to get invited to a dinner party. It doesn't always work out. I would love that, but I have like a Cholala who is aggressive towards strangers.

I love the dogs. We learn about the places we're visiting, yes, but we also learn about ourselves. I don't spend as much time thinking about how I'm going to die alone when I'm traveling, but I get to travel with someone I love. Oh, see, I love you too. And also, we get to eat as much... I love you too. My life's a lot of therapy goes behind that.

You're so white, I love it. Listen to Not Lost on the I Heart Radio App or wherever you get your podcasts. The therapy for Black Girls podcast is the destination for all things mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. Here, we have the conversations that help Black women dig a little deeper into the most impactful relationships in our lives Those with our parents our partners our children our friends and most importantly ourselves

We chat about things like what to do with a friendship ends How to know when it's time to break up with your therapist and how to end the cycle of perfectionism. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation every Wednesday. Listen to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, take good care. And so what I discovered along the way was all of these things like not, I mean, men's health magazine or women's health magazine, whatever we'll tell you, how to exercise and

how to eat healthy. Okay, maybe sometimes they missed the mark a little bit, but for the most part, it's not rocket science where somebody go out there and figure out, okay, eat real whole food that's recognizable, that preferably is as close to earth as possible. And then like, move your body, lift heavy stuff, and occasionally breathe hard, play in tennis or soccer, high intensity, interval, trainer, whatever. Like, we've kind of cracked the code on eating healthy and moving, and most people can find that information for free pretty readily. But what most people don't pay attention to

are all the things that the body really truly needs to be optimized, to produce ATP, to produce energy. And then this is a big part of what my last book, Boundless, was about light, and how the photons of light interact with the human body to charge up the mitochondria, to allow it to be able to produce ATP, the negative ions and the electricity produced by the planet Earth, the dictate when you're outside barefoot or you're touching trees and rocks, you're soaking up all those negative ions and just restoring the natural state of electricity, the body, the body, which

is like a battery is supposed to be in. When you get exposed to stressors of heat or stressors of cold, there's enormous variants that spring up in the human body, like like like like heat shock proteins and cold shock proteins and blood flow and nitric oxide. When you drink pure clean water, that's chock full of minerals, right? Trace liquid minerals or sea salts or things like that, that carries that electrical charge through your body. And I began to realize, holy cow, I thought you're just supposed to like go to the gym and eat a protein bar to be healthy.

But oh my gosh, it's like sunlight, it's magnetism, it's water, it's earth, it's heat, it's cold. It's positive relationships and love and gratitude and all these things that we just, we forget about when it comes to being a full, complete human being. And so that was when the light bulb happened for me when I realized I'm healthy on the outside, but I'm dying on the inside. And there's all sorts of avenues that this entire fitness world has yet to explore when it comes to what it truly means to have, you know, what I talk about in the book, you book, what I call boundless energy.

So number one is, no, I didn't always like this stuff, but I gradually developed a love for it, and I think my curiosity, my independent drive to learn, and the fact that I was a real geek, just tended to fuel my drive to learn a lot of these things about how people can really feel good. And then number two, after 20 years, realized my own mistake of just like beating up the body

and expecting it to bounce back and thinking that was true fitness. And then finally see, and this is really, this is where I'm really driving a lot of my platform, my teachings, what I really want to focus, probably for the rest of my life on, is the fact that we can achieve all these things we've been talking about, Jay.

You can sleep like a champ, and you can have, you know, if it's important to do whatever six back abs or veins in your abs or, you know, be able to do a triathlon or an obstacle race or just like rule across the box or, you know, anything else that might be important. You have a full head of hair, defy aging, low wrinkles, like, like how many close to billion dollar industries

have sprung up around us trying to optimize ourselves as human beings. And yet at the end of the day, because I see this over and over again, not only in having experienced this myself, but having seen this in many of like the wealthy and successful executives I coach and pro athletes I've worked with

and people who appear on the outside to be crushing it in life. At the end of the day, none of this is fulfilling. None of this is ultimately fulfilling. Okay, like I can literally be like, pose on the cover of a magazine, whatever, with girls draped off of each arm, you know, eating $100 steaks for dinner every night and experiencing, you know, what many people would, would, would

covet as an amazing life. But I got news for you. I'm not happy in that state. And, and I've, I've seen a lot of people also not be happy in that state because there is a yearning in our soul. There is a whole in our soul. There is this deep longing for some kind of fulfillment. That in my world, we throw fitness and a healthy diet and the way you look and the way you perform into other people will throw cars, throw money, throw sex, throw homes, throw experiences, throw anything else that seems like it might be that one thing that you've finally discovered that's going to be the ultimate key to fulfillment. Right?

I've finally about to cross the finish line of that Iron Man Triathlon, oh boy, life's going to be different after this. It's going to be different. I've done it, and now I can just be on cruise control the rest of my life because I've checked that fulfillment box. But at the end of the day, none of that stuff is fulfilling because and, you know, I'm, people came before me who have identified this. This isn't new information that I came up with myself. But there is this, is, is this is a great writer and theologian named Blase Paschal would describe it as a god-shaped hole in our hearts, eternity in our hearts.

And the only thing that's going to fill an infinite abyss, an eternal abyss, a god-shaped hole in your heart is God, is some type of fulfillment that's everlasting, that's eternal. And once I realize that and realize, oh my gosh, like I could train my body all day long, but even though physical training is a little bit beneficial, it's nothing compared to training for forever. It's nothing compared to gratitude, to relationships, to sharing with others, to loving others, to volunteer, to service, to community, to worship, to having something greater outside of you and believing that a story is written for your life.

And now that I understand that all of these things I've learned, all these fun little biohacks that we talk about at the end of the day are interesting, but not going to make you ultimately happy. Well, now, if you have been doing those things, if you are taking care of your body, right, and you do have a really good body and brain, you're biohacking, you're fit, and you're healthy and you're eating well, man, when you put not what I would call the icing on the cake or the cherry on the cupcake, but really lay that on the core on the foundation of a deeply meaningful spiritual life, then you're firing on all cylinders. And so I think that's what's really important for people to understand is,

the wool socks on the chili pad and the hyperbaric chamber at the end of the day. the wool socks and the chili pad and the hyperbaric chamber at the end of the day. What you should view those as is you should view those as a way to equip yourself to be more impactful with the purpose that you've been given in life, not as your source of happiness. Man, that was so powerful. And I, you know, the way you just shared that and the way you even talk about biohacking and mastering the body from the beginning of this interview, you can tell that it's to have these beautiful exchanges with your family, to have a meaningful dinner. And, you know, when I hear you talk about these things, like, it resonates so deeply with

me because what you just set up is exactly why we do need to do these things. Who wants to be a dinner with their family and be like, have brain fog and have confusion and be stressed out and just be looking forward to bedtime or to be spending time with their partner but not having the energy to go on a beautiful walk or a hike or whatever it may be. And that's the challenge we're having that our health is negatively impact on our relationships.

Like for those of us who are experiencing fatigue, for those of us who are experiencing bloating, for those of us who are experiencing inflammation, that's leading to stress and agitation in your relationships. You think that you're just not getting along. It is, but you cannot disentangle the body and the spirit. And there are some people that have taken this to extremes. Like if you look at the the the the nostics, right?

A very very popular religion about the same time that Christianity was rising, you know, in 50, 60, 70, AD, they believe that all things fleshly and physical were evil and bad and that the only thing important was the spirit and that marriage was bad and that good food was bad and anything that even remotely reaped of Epicurianism was bad and one should be stoic, but stoic to the nth degree. And the fact is that the body is sacred. Food is sacred. It's not just this physical biological interaction with your taste, but sex is sacred. It's not just this physical biological interaction with your taste, but sex is sacred.

It's not just two bodies rubbing together in mutual masturbation, fitness and even the movement of electrons through the body, you know, in traditional Chinese medicine, and you know, they call that the Qi, the life force, the prana, the energy in Western medicine, we call it the mitochondria, but it's the same thing.

There's a deep spiritual aspect to that. And so we are bodies with spirits, and the body must be treated as a temple that is to house the spirit. And the spirit must be treated as the one part of us that we care for the most, because that's what's gonna go on for eternity. And that's what we really use our deep fuel and our fire every day.

And so, yeah, in an ideal scenario, when you wake up in the morning, in addition to impacting this world fully with whatever purpose you've been given with your life in a spirit of loving others, you should also be asking yourself, how can I equip both my body and my spirit today to be as impactful as possible? And it's both and you can have both. You don't have to be like a, no offense, Jay, but like whatever, like a skinny, yogi monk who can't hold up a heavy weight without their bones breaking. You also don't want to be in a donnis at the gym who just basically doesn't even know what a gratitude practice is or how to pray to God or anything like that. Human beings, we are some of the most complex, if not the most complex creature on the face of the planet.

Maybe a platypus or something might be up there, that kind of interesting. But we have the ability to live our lives with this amazing body and an amazing spirit. And in my opinion, there's no reason that you can't have both. And man, when you get into that state of literally having your cake and eating it too on the highest level, life is amazing. And everybody, everybody, every single person listening in right now has the capability

to get to that level as long as they realize that most people around them have settled for status quo. And if you realize that you actually can rise above and you can train your spirit and you can train your body, and all of this is learnable, all of this is teachable, All of this is practicable and habit formationable. And I'm gonna stop making up words now, but anybody has us within their power to be able to accomplish. Yeah, well said, no. And I feel the same way, you know, for years

I focused extensively on the mind, I focused extensively on intention. I focused deeply on gratitude, service, and that's where I spent most of my life because that's what I naturally gravitated towards. It's what my monk training was based on. It's what my heart was drawn to and everything you just shared. And I find myself now coming over to the other side and wanting to learn more about the body.

And so what you just said is, it sits very closely with my heart because I grew up as someone who dived deep into the spirit and the mind and the heart and the soul, which has been the foundation of anything that I do today. But I have come backwards almost, and I'm not saying it's backwards all forwards, I just think I've come to that realization that my spirit can only do as much as my body. And it's crazy because as months,

the order of our priorities were meant to be health, sadhana service. And so health is health, as you're saying, your physical, your body, your temple health. Sadhana is your daily practices of gratitude, intention, prayer, and then saver or service is you then sharing that with the world. So the pyramid was meant to be that. But some of us, including me, decided to skip that first one and do two and three. And I'm almost, you know, the reason why speaking to you is so powerful. And some of the things that I've started experimenting with and playing with, probably in the last couple of years have been totally that direction of I now want to understand my body so that I can serve better, so that I can serve for longer,

so that I can have more deep loving exchanges. That's the goal. When you come at it with love others, right? Not how do I look in the mirror or... No, that's why I never thought this was. That's kind of random. It's loving others. And in the very same way that the best businesses are not necessarily built on a monetary goal, but are built upon a goal of how many people can we serve,

how many people can we touch, how many lives can we affect, and the money will follow. I mean, for me, as a business person, I have to make a living, and I'm a content producer, kind of like you, like a lot of my business is driven by me educating people. And when I write an article, or when I record a podcast, or when I'm doing an Instagram post, or whatever it is, I tell myself, okay, my goal, even if there is a product, a solution that's offered here as part of this post

or this podcast or this story that someone can go by, my goal is that someone finishes digesting this content, listening to this audio, reading this essay, looking at this post and walks away a better person, regardless of whether or not they actually purchase anything. Right? They walk away whatever, knowing more about the gut, knowing more about the hormones, knowing more about the brain,

knowing more about gratitude, knowing more about whatever it is that I'm producing content about and I tell you what, when I write in that way and I teach in that way and I produce content in that way, I don't have to worry about money. That just kind of follows, right? And honestly, it follows in a better way because you create a more hardcore audience that trusts what you have to say because you actually care about them and that's why you're getting out of bed in the morning.

And so it should be the same way for yourself. When you go to the gym and try this, if you're listening in right now, if you go hit the gym tomorrow or you go out, you know, what are your basement and you know, your breathing hard and beating yourself up and doing your burpees or whatever the case may be, think about how you're equipping yourself to be impactful at work, to be present for your family, to have a lifespan and health spend that enables you to be passing wisdom on to your great-grandkids or your great-great-grandkids. That level of motivation that you experience when you're doing things to love others, or arguably also doing things to

equip yourself to just be able to more fully savor this amazing planet that we are on. All of a sudden, man, compared to like, what's the scale, we're gonna say today, it's just a much, much more powering way to train for health. Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more, man, I couldn't agree more. Tell me, before we get to the final five questions at the interview, we're nearly at the end. I wanna ask you, if someone, you very emphatically stated that anyone who's listening to this, anyone who's

watching can do this, can have both. I'm with you, I agree with you, I'm aligned with you. Tell me about what you said earlier, you were saying, Jay, you know, I still work with a few people on coaching and you were sharing to me, I should sleep between 63 and 65. That's going to be better for me than even 65 to 67. So much of this is habit change. You've created so many new habits in your life, experimented. For those of you who have not read boundless, when you pick it up, what I love about the

book is you break it down into tiny sections or are explaining each part of the science, but then giving a practical thing that someone can do today. You have technology that if people want to adopt it, habit change is a huge part of what you do. Where are people going wrong in their habit change? What have you seen through your extreme experimenting? Where habit change has actually worked for people? I would say what comes to mind for me first when you ask that question is for me first when I said question is a big big part of it is relevance and understanding why you're doing something. When I was in high school, I really hated math and science. And when I got to college, I just became a standout in math and science because I had a teacher first year of college who made math relevant by tying in a lot of wealth preservation and

savings and investing components that made math super relevant to me. lot of wealth, preservation, and savings, and investing components that made math super relevant to me. And so at that point, I just developed this wonderful love for math and a habit of studying math because it was relevant and I knew why I was doing it. So I understood for math and a habit of studying math because it was relevant and I knew why I was doing it. So I understand why you're doing something. I think that the importance of education when it comes to habit formation is very important.

Yeah. Another one that I rely upon on a daily basis for either stopping habits or making habits is making something as accessible and convenient as possible, meaning that I am probably, like like from a fitness standpoint and a consistency of fitness standpoint, probably just about as fit as I've ever been in terms of true health and some of those parameters we were talking about earlier,

because partially, I really haven't had to leave my house to go to the gym and was kind of forced into that because of COVID. So everything I need is, I got a step over a kettlebell to walk into my gym. I got to walk underneath the pull-up bar to go down the stairs in my house. I have to basically walk past a cold tub every day. There's just healthy food strewn all about the house. This idea of surrounding yourself

and making everything convenient down to the point where if you're gonna go for a run in the morning, having your running shoes in your shorts, right there beside the bed. So there's very little cognitive resistance to starting. That would be the second thing that I found to be really easy. Is making things convenient.

I think the last one is, for me personally, and I don't know if this is the way for everybody, but I like especially when it comes to health habits, to be able to stack things. So anytime that I'm getting healthy, I'm also making myself a better person. For example, I really rarely listen to music when I'm working out. I view my workout as also a chance for me to go to university. So it's always podcasts, audio books. When the going gets really hard, there's actually some studies that have shown this to be a cool tactic. That's when the music goes on.

When you need it the last minute, so you're saving your brain to get to the point where it really, really needs the music. And it's not just kind of used to the music at that point and can actually push past. You know, I do like the red light therapy and the grounding and the earthing mats and the essential oils and this special like water repair device called a Nanovie in my desk when but I don't go in there and just do all that stuff and have a be unproductive time. Like that's the time when I bang out my first 45 minutes of emails for the day.

So I always figure out a way to make something more palatable in terms of tying that habit into something. I mean, I even, like, I got out of the habit, you know, because I'm a big fan of reading scripture and reading the Bible every morning. And I even found myself, and this happened a few months ago, I was saying the room of my Bible, I'm like, why am I just sitting here reading the Bible? They're not there other things that I could be doing, and you'd think they'd be distracting.

But now I read my Bible while I'm sitting in a pulse-delectromagnetic field chair with a biocharger on, and it's like, I'm still reading, but my body's kind of like getting better at the same time, so I love to stack healthy habits. And it's very rewarding when you stack them all and also figure out how to still be Productive during the day. So it's not like you're having a rob Peter to pay Paul It's like you're you're paying Paul and Peter at the same time

So those are the top three things that come to mind. I'll be educate yourself about why you're doing what you're doing Surround yourself with what you need to maintain positive habits while hiding the things that would cause you to form negative habits and then basically maintain positive habits while hiding the things that would cause you to form negative habits. And then basically stack habits and make the habit fun or meaningful or productive so you don't feel like you're wasting time and getting that habit. I love that. Ben, green for everyone, Ben, that was amazing. I'm like, you need to come up for a part two

but we can't wait this long as we waited to do a part one. Well, yeah, maybe we can go to some other longevity hotspot. Yeah. Okinawa would be interesting. That would be amazing. And sushi and couple potatoes. I haven't been, I've spent a lot of time in Japan. I used to race over there a lot and I've spoken over there a couple of times, but I absolutely,

I love the, I love the food. I depend where I'm at. I like the culture. I would say probably one of my favorite places over there would be Kyoto. It's great, great touring, great box. Yeah, I'm a fan of sushi. Although now I know we're trying to wrap up, but I'll finish here. I've been making my own sushi.

I found this dish service called Cetopia. They deliver sashimi-grade fish to my house every week. Wow. And so it's kind of spoiled me. I literally just take out my sushi and I've cut it in the middle of the day. I found this dish service called Cetopia and they deliver sashimi grade fish to my house every week. Wow. And so it's kind of spoiled me. I literally just take out my sushi and I've cut it in strips, put it in a nory wrap with some sushi rice, a little mustard, and whatever I want to sprinkle on there.

And so my sons and I make Poke bowls and sushi all the time now. But I do enjoy a good actual legitimate Japanese sushi restaurant occasion. Of course. Amazing, man. Well, Ben, we end every episode with our final five, which are our fast five. So on's is after you won one word to one word to 10 words maximum. Okay.

Each answer. All right. So we're tap dashes. That's the most important. Yeah. So the question number one is, what is the worst health advice you've ever received? It would probably be, and I won't have a whole lot of time to explain this too much, but it would be,

eat a post-workout meal. Okay, we'll save that for part two. Say that for part two. Is that a boundless? Do you talk about that boundless? Talk a little bit about that boundless. All right, great. Question number two, what's the best health advice you've ever received

or given or heard? Get out in the sunlight more. Mm. Charge that. I need to do that a lot more. I was talking to someone in my health life recently and they were like, because of the color of my skin, I have to really be out there.

So I have a sun worshiper, a sun eating out there, but I'm not out there enough, even though because of my skin. We have a giant battery in the sky and really any of us use it. Yeah, love that. All right. Third question, what would you describe as your current purpose? To read and write, learn and teach, sing and speak, compete and create

in full presence and selfless love to the glory of God. Beautiful, I love that. All right. Question number four. What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do before you go to bed? I walk over to the sink and I scraped my tongue from the back to the front using a copper tongue scraping tool. Yeah. I are Iurbetic at the very end of the day. Yeah. Very end. Very, very last thing. Very last thing. Yeah. Very last thing. I put my arm around my wife and I say a prayer with her. That's beautiful.

I love that man. Bed. And you try that. That's amazing. That's great. Oh yeah, we use my wife say, I read it. That's all we do. I'll see you in a couple of days.

We do it. Coconut oil poins. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a world. All right. Fifth and final question. If you could create a law that everyone in the world

had to follow, what would it be? Every day, right down the name of one person who you are going to help and then go help them on that day. Beautiful. Actually, I actually do that every morning. I love that. Super meaningful. Thank you, Ben.

Everyone has been listening and watching. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate that every morning. I love that. Super meaningful. Thank you, Ben. Everyone has been listening and watching. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate all of you. Make sure you go and grab a copy of the book, Boundless, and Boundless Cookbook. That's how it is. We'll put the links in all of our captions. Ben, thank you so much for doing this. I think you share, I mean, there are countless parts of this episode that I'm going to use

in my own life. I'm going to go home and tell my wife straight away to switch us from 63 to 65 now. That's gonna change. We're gonna be getting a few more changes in our bedroom, I think, based on this episode. This bedroom's gonna look like a nightclub now with all the red lights. Yeah, I love it.

So thank you. And everyone's been listening or watching. Make sure you tag me and Ben on Instagram to let us know what resonated with you, what stuck out to you, and what you're going to experiment with. That's my hope. My hope is that this episode gives you a whole new list of tools to experiment with and try out to see what works for you. And of course, Ben's books are a great guide. They truly are a guidebook and a map into some of the

depths of all of this. We've just scratched the surface. If you want a foolproof plan of how to practice this, the boundless book is going to help you do that. So Ben, thank you for being here. Thank you, Mr. J. Shetty. Thank you, man. If you want even more videos just like this one, make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here. I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book, Think Like a Monk from ThinkLikeAMonkBook.com. Check below in the description to make sure you order today. What if you could tell the whole truth about your life, including all those tender and visible things

we don't usually talk about? I'm Megan Devine. Host of the podcast, it's okay that you're not okay. Look, everyone's at least a little bit not okay these days. And all those things we don't usually talk about, maybe we should. This season, I'm joined by stellar gas like Abbermote, Rachel Cargol, and so many more. It's okay that you're not okay.

New episodes each and every Monday, available on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of Family Secrets. It's hard to believe we're entering our eighth season, and yet we're constantly discovering new secrets. The variety of them continues to be astonishing. I can't wait to share ten incredible stories with you, stories of tenacity, resilience, and the profoundly necessary excavation of long-held family secrets.

Listen to season eight of Family Secrets on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts When my daughter ran off to hop trains, I was terrified. I'd never see her again. So I followed her into the train yard This is what it sounds like inside the box car and into the city of the rails There I found a surprising world, so brutal and beautiful, that it changed me. But the rails do that to everyone. There is another world out there.

And if you want to play with the devil, you're gonna find them down in the rail yard. Undenail Morton, come with me to find out what waits for us and the city of the rails. Listen to City of the Rails, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or cityoftherails.com. Listen to City of the Rails on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your

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