Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Cindy Shaw On: The Six Pillars of Brain Health EP 71

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Brain Health Coach Cindy Shaw sits down with John R Miles to discuss the six pillars of brain health which include: Physical Exercise, Food & Nutrition, Medical Health, Sleep & Relaxation, Mental Fitness, and Social Interaction. Like this? Please subscribe, and join me on my new platform for peak performance, life coaching, and personal growth: https://passionstruck.com/. About Our Guest Cindy Shaw Thank you for listening to the Passion Struck podcast. Cindy Shaw is the founder of The Better Brain Academy, and she user her expertise as a brain health and mental performance trainer to help people transform their lives. By blending leading-edge neuroscience, brain health, and self-improvement strategies, Cindy helps others naturally improve their moods, boost their performance, supercharge their energy and focus, and optimize their well-being. New Interviews with the World's GREATEST high achievers will be posted every Tuesday with a Momentum Friday inspirational message! Cindy Shaw Show Notes 0:00 Cindy Shaw teaser and show intro 1:34 Introduction of Cindy Shaw 4:02 What led her to be a brain health coach 7:26 Why mental health Should be called brain health 13:40 Why the medical system mistreats you as a mental health patient 21:14 Why we self numb and have problems with addiction 25:57 The keys to better sleep and its link to performance 32:52 How to prevent yourself from waking up in the middle of the night 36:59 Why so many people are Magnesium deficient 38:15 The long term impact of not getting enough sleep 41:58 Importance of gut health on brain health 45:22 Hormone treatment for traumatic brain injury victims 50:46 The keys to producing more serotonin   CINDY SHAW EPISODE RESOURCES *Better Brain Academy: https://www.thebetterbrainacademy.com/ *Take a Brain Quiz: https://www.betterbrainquiz.com/ *LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindyshaw *Appollo Neuro: https://apolloneuro.com *Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/betterbrain.academy/ ENGAGE WITH JOHN R. MILES * Subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles * Leave a comment, 5-star rating (please!) * Support me: https://johnrmiles.com * Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Johnrmiles.c0m. * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles ABOUT JOHN R. MILES * https://johnrmiles.com/my-story/ * Guides: https://johnrmiles.com/blog/ * Coaching: https://passionstruck.com/coaching/ * Speaking: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking-business-transformation/ * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_struck PASSION STRUCK *Subscribe to Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-passion-struck-podcast/id1553279283 *Website: https://passionstruck.com/ *About: https://passionstruck.com/about-passionstruck-johnrmiles/ *Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast *LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/passionstruck *Blog: https://passionstruck.com/blog/

But what I realized is even though I knew all of this mindset stuff, like how to change my thinking, how to redirect it and reframe it, it still didn't help me. And I started to feel like a fraud actually. I discovered how our brain is more like the computer hardware. And our mindset is the software. So if the computer hardware is damaged in any way, or it's not functioning at its best, or it's not optimized, or has a lot of bugs, it directly impacts our software, which is our thought processes and how we think, feel, and act.

Welcome visionaries, creators, innovators, entrepreneurs, leaders, and growth seekers of all types to the Passion Struck Podcast. Hi, I'm John Miles, a peak performance coach, multi industry CEO, Navy Veteran, and entrepreneur on a mission to make passion go viral for millions worldwide. In each week, I do so by sharing with you an inspirational message, an interviewing high achievers from all walks of life who unlock their secrets and lessons to become an action struck. The purpose of our show is to serve you the listener by giving you tips, tasks, and activities, you can use to achieve peak performance and for too much of a passion driven life you have always wanted to have. Now let's become PassionStruck. Welcome to episode 71 of the PassionStruck Podcasts with

Cindy Chock. I want to start out today's episode by thanking the audience for the over 1400 five star ratings that you've given this podcast today and the countless others that we have received in other countries around the world. And I'm going to highlight one of the comments that we received this past week. It is from a listener, Lucius J Jackson, who wrote, love this. You're an amazing person, John Armiles. I've been listening to your podcast since the beginning. I can tell how much energy you put into this podcast, you created a beautiful one. Thank you, Lucius, so much for that feedback. It means so

much to us. And all these ratings mean so much in the moment we are creating to help people go from being passion stuck to becoming passion struck. Now let's start out today's episode with a quote from Professor William Alman, who said, The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. It's billions of nerve cells called neurons lay in a tangled web that displays cognitive powers far exceeding any of the silicon machines we have built to mimic it. A great lead-in for our episode today,

where we will go deep into this monstrous beautiful mess with our guest Cindy Shaw. She is the founder of the Better Brain Academy, and she uses her expertise as a brain health and mental performance trainer to help people transform their lives. And in our episode today, we discuss the six pillars of brain health.

How our brain is different than our mind and the importance of that distinction. How our brain health impacts our overall performance and achieving peak performance. The secrets to sound sleep and her advice on achieving it. The things that she has found from our brain that we need to watch out for and how we can take control of our mental health and achieve the highest cognitive results. What a great episode today. Now, let's become PassionStruck. I am so excited today to have Cindy Shaw on the Passion

Strike podcast. Welcome, Cindy. Hi, thank you so much for having me here. Well, I was so thankful that you would come on the show. I saw your profile as I was looking for podcast guests. And I know a number of the listeners on the podcast have been wanting me to dive deeper into mental health and how your brain and mental performance is so key to living a passion struck life. So,

I really want to impact that in today's episode. Awesome. Well, I thought a good starting point for the audience would be, what got you into this work? It to begin with, what was that impetus that drove you to start really looking at brain health and how that helps people achieve peak performance? Awesome. Well, you know what? I actually used to study mindset and I developed a program for women specifically on how to take control of your mindset. And so I studied amazing teachers like Tony Robbins. I did the training that he

did that all of his programs are based off of called Neuralinguistic Programming. I became a certified hypnotherapist. So I really dialed in my mindset. And it wasn't until my mid to late 30s that I started having troubles just focusing and concentrating. And it got to a point where I honestly thought I had early onset Alzheimer's. Like I would wake up and by noon I couldn't remember if I'd even had breakfast. I couldn't remember what I'd had for breakfast if I had breakfast. My husband jokes and says like I was the best wife to be married too because I didn't remember anything that he did that piss me off But you know on a more serious no I was getting really concerned

I could think of my best friend, but I couldn't remember her name and so I actually went to my doctor and I got a brain scandum They didn't MRI to see if maybe I had a tumor. I went to NACA PAS, I went to doctors, I got my DNA looked at to see if I had the Alzheimer gene and I do have one of them called APOE4. But what I realized is even though I knew all of this mindset stuff, like how to change my thinking,

how to redirect it and reframe it, it still didn't help me. And I started to feel like a fraud actually. I was like, what is wrong with me? Why can't I think myself better? And that is what really got me interested in brain health. And I discovered how our brain is normally the computer hardware and our brain is more like the computer hardware. And our mindset

is the software. So if the computer hardware is damaged in any way, or it's not functioning at its best, or it's not optimized, or has a lot of bugs, it directly impacts our software, which is our thought processes and how we think, feel and act. So I didn't want to just fight through the smoke, I wanted to get to the flame. It was like, what was the root cause of what was causing my issues? And what it led to was this understanding of the brain and this deep dive into understanding how our brain impacts how we think, feel and act and how it really is the core of who we are.

Well, Cindy, that is such an interesting background. And part of the reason I wanted to have you on your show is I am trying to use my own personal experiences and being vulnerable about them to help the audience or other listeners who may find this podcast, understand if they're having difficulties, they're not alone. Because so many people have difficulties, whether it's they've had a brain injury, they are undergoing a lot of stress and feeling anxiety, maybe they've had post-traumatic stress disorder,

and unfortunately, so many of them keep it to themselves, and it's leading to more and more suicide rates and other complications. So that is part of why I am trying to share more. So I know a lot of people today are maybe experiencing the phenomenon of having brain fog for the first time because it's a common symptom if you've had COVID. But I remember I've had a number of TBI's Starting probably in the early 1990s and since then I've had six of them and so for me I went through a period of decades where things were just not right and I found so many of the medical Professionals don't know how to treat it because most people are facing

don't know how to treat it because most people are facing a compilation of different symptoms that are hitting them. In my case, as I had TBI, I also had combat trauma, physical assault trauma and other things. So what I found is that they immediately want to treat you as a mental health patient. And what I've learned is that over time, is that so much of it is a combination of both physical elements and mental elements, and it's that polytrauma that is really hard to understand because no two people are exactly the same. So is that something that you have found as you've grown in your profession? Exactly. And what my mission is is to really educate people that mental health really should be called brain health. Because when we think of mental, there's so much stigma around it that, you know, like just suck it up, think different, get over it.

And so we think that it has to do with our thinking and our perception. And that again is software. But what the the issue lies in is the hardware. So the hardware has been damaged, the hardware has been changed, the hardware is under assault. So this is where brain health is so important to understand. And when you talk about how you experience some of your symptoms, it's going to be different for every single person, depending on where your brain is either getting too much blood flow, too little blood flow, or there's some damage that's occurred.

So for instance, a lot of head injuries occur at the front part of the brain, and that's called your prefrontal cortex. Now your prefrontal cortex is like the CEO. It is the decision maker. It is the one that controls your judgment, your thinking, your choices, and it's why kids make really dumb decisions.

Like I have some teenagers, and there are days that I'm like, why did you do that? And they're like I don't know. And it's and truthfully they don't know. And the reason is is that their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed and functioning until age 25. Now if you damage that through sports and let's think about it, Most people or most kids are involved in sports and that is the primary time that they typically can damage that part of the brain. So if you keep having repetitive damage or you have just say one bad incident, you can stop blood flow to that area, which means now when you have less blood flow, you are more likely to be impulsive, make bad choices, not think through the consequences of your actions. And so all of this can affect the rest of your life,

it can impact your life. So that's just one part of the brain. There's actually five different areas. And when, again, that area is either getting too little blood flow or too much blood flow, it's going to impact how you think feel an act. And so, you know, a perfect example is like you look at NFL players and there's a high rate of violence and suicide and or you can turn on the TV and hear every year of an NFL player killing somebody. And you think, oh, but that's just an extreme case, but it's not. What has happened is that

they've had repetitive hits to a side of their brain called the temporal lobe. Now your temporal lobe is in control of your memory and also your mood. So if you are getting less blood flow to that area of your brain, again, you are going to be more volatile. You're not going to remember things as well. You're going to have trouble coming up with words and you can easily fly off the handles. So people who experience road rage often have little blood flow to that area. And so when we start looking at the brain, it starts to take the stigma away from its you, because no one would ever shame you if you had a heart condition, no one would shame you if you if there was something wrong with your kidneys. And so this is why I think it's important to shift the discussion from mental health where there's a lot of shame

To brain health where we can say look, it's the organ But the good thing is you can fix it. You may not get it back to a hundred percent like when you were a little kid and everything was flowing perfectly But there's a lot that we can do that can impact our brain and You know when we start to deal with our trauma, when we start to look at neuroplacicity and how we can rewire it, and when we start making lifestyle changes, we can change our brain.

And when we change our brain and have a better brain, we can have a better life. Cindy, that was a great explanation. And it kind of leads me into the next topic. A couple months ago, I got to do a podcast with one of my Naval Academy classmates, Chuck Smith, and we really wanted to cover the growing issue with veteran suicides. And as we were doing that podcast, I started doing research on national suicides, which are going up.

Last year, it was over 46,500, but when you look at it globally, there were over 900,000. And when you deal with someone who has had a TBI or PTSD, it goes up 13 times the amount. And if they've had sexual assault trauma or physical assault trauma, it doubles for sexual assault trauma if you've had more than one and triples if you've had more than one physical assault. And during our discussion, we really dove deep in the military really prepares you to be physically ready to go to battle, but we wanted to unpack in that episode that they should be putting as much effort on having you being mentally health ready and giving the same conditions to both, because I can tell you, if you're there in the fight,

to me, I would rather have you have some physical impairment and be mentally there than the opposite. So why is it that the medical system either wants to over treat you for mental health or under treat you at times for the physical side? Well, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. So first off, I think that the typical medical system looks at at how can we put out the smoke? They aren't getting to the fire.

So if we can just put a bandage on things, hopefully you'll function okay and go out now you're not our problem. And unfortunately, it's not taking that deeper dive because it requires some time effort and money. And I think that we're a society that just wants it into Texas. And when it comes to our brain and to experiencing trauma and head injuries and dealing with our brain health in terms of mental health, it requires some work. Let's jump in into what happens to your brain when you experience some sort of trauma or something like that or an adverse childhood experience they're called. So basically our brain is set up to keep us safe and that's why we have a fight, flight

or freeze response. So anytime we experience something that is unsafe, what our brain does is it tries to find balance again and does what it can to protect us. So thousands of years ago, when you were hunting, you did not want a grizzly bear to come up behind you and attack you. So you either had to fight it off or you had to flee or in some cases you froze and you played debt. So our brain still is programmed that way. Our, you know, it's called evolution. It's what has created these responses in our brain, our mind, and our body to keep us safe.

So anytime we have an adverse experience, and this could be a big trauma like being in combat, but it could be also a little trauma like say you're in grade one and you go tell a teacher that Jimmy just did something that wasn't so good and the teacher turns around and chastises you. Okay, not a big trauma, but in your little brain it said, I'm not safe. Okay, telling someone or speaking up for myself did not keep me safe. So what's gonna keep me safe? Keeping my mouth shut.

So these experiences go in and it wires your brain. Now there's a specific area of our brain called the amygdala. And our amygdala is that reactive brain. Okay, and you have your prefrontal cortex, which is your smart brain. If you have, say, one experience, let's take a combat experience, you're on high alert, right? Your body is jacked up, you have all this cortisol and adrenaline running through your body, which then activates your amygdala. Now, your amygdala is on high alert. It pulls all the resources and blood from your prefrontal cortex

to feed that area of your brain to keep it strong, to keep you safe. Now, if you experience some trauma on top of that, you hurt somebody, you get hurt, whatever it is, what it does is it builds in that memory. Now, your amygdala is on high alert at all times to keep you safe. And the more comma that you experience,

the more and more it tries to keep you safe. So now it's activated a lot. So the smallest thing can set you off, a car driving by and it backfires and all of a sudden it takes you right back to that experience because your brain says, this is what you need to do. The last time this happened to keep you safe

because you obviously survived it. So when you experience these traumas, whether it's in your childhood or any other time in your life, it activates that a migtail out, which then impacts this whole cascade and flood of hormones in your body. So now your cortisol's up, your adrenaline's up,

your have less serotonin being made, which is your happiness, mood stabilizing chemical, your GABA is influenced, so your GABA is your calming neurotransmitter, and so now you can't sleep. And so this doesn't have to do with just mindset. This actually has to do with the hardware, the functioning of the organ.

So how can we take control of that? How can we heal? And this is where there's some really great tools out there that can now help your brain. And when I work with my clients, I get into the lifestyle changes that you can make. And then I may refer them out to doing something like EMDR, which is eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. And what it is, is it actually helps your neurons, it de-aftabits at a migdala, and it helps process those memories,

because those memories have an emotional charge to them. So when you reprocess those memories, and you take that emotional charge from them, the memory is still there, but it doesn't throw you into that fight-flight or freeze response anymore. And so this is that deeper work that often, you know, professionals may not know about or that they don't want to invest in. And or we just think, well, if I just took a pill, maybe it would all be better. But again, the pill is that that simple bandage when you need an actual dressing because you have a big wound there. And having those wounds, we all have them. Some may have more than others,

but it's dressing those wounds and getting to the heart of it. And there's so many things within our control and within our lifestyle that we can make changes too. And so I really covered like six key aspects of brain health that are so important. And is it okay if I just hop into those? Did I add, like, did I answer your question about what happens to the brain? Yeah, before you do, I think I want to just take it a little bit deeper, maybe through my personal example. And I think many people, I think it could be men or women try to deal with it this way. But when I was leaving the military, I only left

because I had gotten appointments to go work for the FBI and a couple other agencies. And I knew I had issues going on, but because I was trying to apply to these other agencies, My detailers told me the last thing you can do is talk about your medical issues, because if you do, you're going to get washed out and you won't be able to do these jobs. Plus, at the time I had well above a top-secret clearance, and I was also told you to lose your security clearance. So, instead of dealing with it through therapy, I tried to bury this for a long time.

And for a good period, I was still achieving what many would say would be peak performance. I was youngest senior manager at Arthur Anderson, had just put on becoming a partner when N-Run happened. I was only 29, then 32, 33. I was sea level and a Fortune 50 company. So by all matters, it looked like I was performing extremely well.

And I have to tell you, when I was at Lowe's, I had an experience I will never forget. I happened to go through an evaluation with a third party firm and they had a psychologist there who was doing the evaluations. And she said, John, you've had a brilliant career. But what got you to this point isn't going to get you to where you need to go. And it was the first time in my life, I'm like someone is seeing like through me

because so many things I was functioning well on, but when it came to emotional intelligence, I realized in the background, I was becoming more and more numb. I was having a harder time reading people, I was becoming irritable, I was having brain fog, I was having a harder time reading people. I was becoming irritable. I was having brain fog. I was having concentration issues.

So what would you recommend to someone before you get into your six that if they were in my shoes, how do you come to grips with this sooner? Because when I did go to like my primary care physician, they immediately sent me to a psychiatrist who wanted to put me on psychological cocktails. And the other issue that I've run into is CTs, MRIs, even neuropsych examinations aren't great at picking up some of this either physical or emotional trauma.

So what should a person do if they were facing that same situation? Great question. So if we go back to the beginning of your story, what you just said there, I heard some key things. So your brain kept you safe in those high intensity experiences, right? And then like you said,

it served you well going into these jobs? And then like you said, it's served you well going into these jobs. However, like you said, you started to have this whole range of experiences and symptoms. So what a lot of people do, just like you said, you were starting to numb yourself. This explains why we have a lot of addiction also. And it's again to bring your brain into balance. So this is why people drink and you know maybe they go home and they're not drinking two bottles of wine but they're drinking two glasses of wine every night because we have this what the alcohol does is it calms certain areas of your brain. People who have an overactive brain often go to marijuana and stuff because again, it calms that part of their brain.

Other people who don't feel that their brain is getting, and the truth is, the brain isn't getting enough blood flow in certain areas, go to stimulants to up that blood flow in their brain. So all of these things have to do with finding balance in our brain. And all of these things have to do with finding balance in our brain. And while some medication can be great to help achieve that balance,

like I am not against medication by any means, and I always tell people, go and talk to your doctor before making any changes. However, I look at what are the natural, non-talks, safest things that we can do now to change your brain and to get it healthier? So you listed off brain fog, lack of focus. My guess is probably you weren't sleeping a lot.

How was your diet? Diet? No, I was not. I, for decades, I haven't been able to sleep well. I wear a wop device every single day to measure it and you know I would say out of seven days I probably am lucky if I get two days that it registers a green night of sleep so there I know that can also impact your cortisol levels but at that point in time you know I was traveling a lot working 12 to 14 hour days, so diet, nowhere near what it is today.

Right. So there's a lot of things that we that are within our control. So sleep is one of the common things that people who suffer from brain fog, trauma, PTSD, and so forth really struggle with. And that is because again, your brain is always on high alert to try to pick up dangers. So that's why it has a really difficult time to bring itself down. Now, there's a device I highly recommend to people and it's on my website. You can find it and there's a discount code. And it's called an Apollo Neuro. And what the Apollo Neuro device does, it's a wearable device you can put on your wrist or your ankle, they've done clinical studies with people who've had PTSD, who have sleep issues, who deal with anxiety and depression.

And what it does is it was developed by not only a therapist, but also a neuroscientist because after, or I should say, a psychiatrist, after the sessions, what the psychiatrist found were people who do grade in the session, they discuss it, go home, and still weren't sleeping, or still were anxious. So they wanted to create something that actually kicks in your parasympathetic system. So your parasympathetic system is that rested digest. It's the bringing you off of that that body high that keeps you awake. So what the wearable device does and it just connects up to your phone and has all of these different settings that you can choose,

is it just sends a gentle message. It's these vibrations that either slow your nervous system down or it can speed it up if you want to be focused in Concentration my daughter suffers from awful nightmares and so she finds that when she wears her polo nero And you can wear it around your ankle at night her Again her parasympathetic system kicks up her Drenneling cord is cortisol go down and it starts retraining her brain and her body because think about it your brain has been trained this way now for how many years right so it's just doing what it knows to

do so it just needs to be retrained and your your nervous system needs to be retrained to naturally start to bring down those transmitters, those neurotransmitters and those chemicals and hormones that flow through your body. So that is one thing that I highly recommend. And a lot of people have just crappy sleep hygiene. And that's one thing that I work with my clients a lot is because sleep impacts all areas of your life, but it really impacts your brain. Because if you're getting under six hours of sleep a night, and this is a common thing about around high performers, they think,

look at me, I'm so awesome, I only get six hours of sleep, and that's because I am so high functioning, I can get so much other stuff done. When in reality, what is happening is you are building up something called an amyloid plaque in your brain. So if you're sleeping less than seven to nine hours a night, this plaque is not getting recycled because the time that it gets recycled out of your brain is when you sleep. So sleep is key to keeping your brain healthy. And this is why I truly feel that we are going to see this incredible onslaught of dementia in the next 5, 10, 15 years because dementia isn't something that just happens. It's kind of like when you start having symptoms,

it's like being told you have stage 4 cancer. There's not a lot you can do at that point. There are some things and the research is coming along to support that, but you have a much better chance of staving off cancer 10, 20, 30 years prior. And that's what they found with dementia. It takes decades to form in your brain. So not only is dementia a concern, but we were talking about mental health. Well, we all know that

if you don't sleep, you feel like crap. You can't focus, you can't concentrate, you're more irritable. So, turning off devices before you go to bed at least one hour, because the blue light off of the devices messes with a really important chemical called melatonin. And our body makes melatonin to help us fall asleep. So the blue light from TV's, your phone, your iPad, whatever can really mess with that. Or if you are going to watch it, you can get something called blue blocker sunglasses

that you can put on to watch your favorite show. I know for myself what I needed to do was I had to stop watching Netflix about an hour before I went to bed because it shows like the Queen of the South or something crazy, high adrenaline. What it would do was it would spike my own adrenaline in my cortisol watching it.

And so then it would impact my sleep as well. And so sleeping in a dark room or even getting eye shades, you know, for someone who has, if your brain is on high alert, you need to support it to calm down. So I even got custom made earplugs, which you can go to any hearing aid center and they're about $150 to get done and my last me 10 years has made a significant difference. So cutting out the light, cutting out the drama and anything that amps you up before you go to bed

is really significant. And doing things that are going to calm your brain, whether that means reading with an actual book in your hand, not something that's giving off blue light, whether it's meditating before you go to bed, whether it's just going out for a walk, before you go to sleep, all of these things are gonna impact how you sleep. So sleep is one thing

that is crucial in key. And that's why I also recommend getting the Apollo Nero because they've done a lot of clinical studies on veterans and just people who suffer from sleep issues. And it has really been a proven tool that just you wouldn't have to consciously try. It is doing its job and helping your brain and your body regulate and bring you down. So sleep is it. Sleep is crucial. That's great. I'm going to have to check out that device because I've one thing I have not heard of before.

But I have been trying different things because I have a journal and I am looking at what works what what doesn't so things I try to do is I try to set a set time that if I can go to sleep at that time at least six nights a week I go to bed, take melatonin, I take D3, magnesium, about an hour before I go to bed, and then I try to read until I feel tired enough. One of the things that happens to me is I'm able to to fall asleep many times, and then I wake up, and I'm up for two, three hours. Okay, I got a cure for that. Let me guess you wake up about two, three in the morning like, boom, okay. So what that is is it's a process in our body where our body is actually doesn't have enough fuel to sustain itself overnight because think about it. You eat probably pretty regularly throughout the day. So at two, three in the morning, our body just doesn't have enough energy. So it kicks us into high alert to say go find something to eat. But what

really happens is our brain starts, it turns on because we have this burst of adrenaline and cortisol. And then we just have that mine circle, right? Like it just goes on and on and on and we can't sleep. So there's a couple things that I recommend to my to my clients. First is your brain is the hungriest organ in your body. So it requires 20% of your calories throughout the day. So what you want to do is you want to feed your brain in a way that's going to fuel it and you want to also feed your body in a way that's going to fuel it. So what I recommend to people is have some nut butter, like a tablespoon of nut butter

or have some protein before you go to bed. And I know it's against like everyone's like, oh no, intermittent fasting, like don't eat for 12 hours. Listen, sleep is far more important and having a tablespoon of nut butter to help you sleep throughout the day or throughout the entire night is going to impact your day in a more powerful way than intermittent fasting ever will. I can guarantee you that. So I love the fact that you're taking magnesium. So I recommend specifically something called magnesium

by glycinate because it is something that's more bioavailable to your body. I don't recommend melatonin long-term because then your body becomes dependent on it and then it just needs more and more and more melatonin. So what you wanna do is you wanna kick in your own melatonin and that is by having that dark room, dim your lights a little when you go to bed

to read and so forth. And then what I find is that there's something great that is awesome for that anxiety, that feeling that you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and they're called L-thiening. And there's one that's called stress omental calmness. They have stress less, but mental calmness specifically has something called L-thiening.

And L-thiening is the precursor. So it's the building block of a specific neurotransmitter called GABA. And GABA is the neurotransmitter on hormone that helps us sleep and brings us down. So when I wake up at 2 in the morning, it's typically because I didn't have something to eat, you know, that was either protein or a good nut butter before I went to bed. Or if I just do wake up in the middle of the night, I'll go and chew on their tubal tablets,

the L-thiening, the stress loss, or mental calmness, and within 10 minutes, I'm back asleep. And I can guarantee you this works for about 70 to 80% of people. OK, well that's another great tip for me and hopefully many others. There's just so many natural things that we can do, because I think the statistic statistic and I may just be

awful at all, like 85 to 90% of people in the United States are magnesium deficient. And magnesium is such an important mineral that helps with the sleep cycle, that helps with all of these different functions in our bodies. So, and the reason being is our soil so depleted now. We don't have those minerals that are in our plants and vegetables and fruits anymore. So we have to supplement in order to really support our brain and our body and impact it in positive ways. So just grab yourself some good nut butter.

There's one that I love here, and I don't know if it's down in the States, but it's called that so. And I just have a tablespoon of that, and it has MCT oil. And MCT oil is the derivative of coconut oil. It's medium chain triglycerate. And what it does is it's a slow burning fuel.

So if you could have something with MCT in it before you go to bed, it's a slow burning fuel. So if you could have something with MCT in it before you go to bed, it's a slow burning fuel that's not gonna pop your body into, oh my gosh, I need to eat because I don't have enough energy to function, mode. Can you just tell the audience if you are not getting enough sleep and you're a person who's wanting

to achieve peak performance. What impact does it have on you? Because I have read that although a lot of people like to brag, they're only getting four to six hours sleep and they can function on that. Only about 1% of the population can actually do it. The other 99% is going to catch up to you at some point. So when you're in this constant state of not getting enough sleep, what impairments does it cause to you shorten long term on you achieving that performance that you want?

First off, there's a reason that they use sleep deprivation as a torture tool. Okay, like it's because you can't focus, you can't concentrate, you're emotionally, you become emotionally volatile, you are more susceptible to making bad choices, not taking action because what ends up happening is you just don't have, so let's take an example. If you're not getting enough sleep, you may wake up in the

morning and you think, wow, I only got four to six hours of sleep. So what's the first thing you do? You go to coffee. So the coffee stimulates you. So yeah, maybe it wakes you up for a little while. And then you run and you grab a donut on your way to breakfast or you even get a muffin. But what these things contain is a lot of sugar. Now what sugar does in our brain is while it may give us temporary energy, we also have that fast down, right, and that slump again. So we're not really fueling and feeding our brain in a positive way. So now that starts to impact our decision-making. So if your brain doesn't have the right kind of fuel and this comes to diet, if you're feeding it a lot of sugar, a lot of caffeine, a lot of high-carp stuff,

it is going to start impacting all the key areas of your brain. So if your brain now also is a getting enough sleep, you're not getting enough exercise, you're not managing your stress positively, maybe also you have some other issues, you might have a lot of inflammation in your body, you might have your thyroid could be off, you could be pre-diabetic. And if you don't have great solid relationships in your life, all of these things are going to impact how you think, feel, and act throughout the day. So if you want to be your best, let me tell you, you are not setting yourself up for success long-term.

Like that psychiatrist said to you, what got you there isn't going to be what takes you further. And you're going to start feeling the long-term effects of that. And so it's going to impact your relationships. It's going to impact your work. It's going to impact the choices you make and the actions you take. So this is why being really cognizant of your brain. And there's small things that each of us can do every day.

And I call them shits. Small habits I do daily. Because we all have shits. I should eat better. I should do this. I should do that and we don't do it. You have to start building some sheds in. Just small habits I do daily. That's going to really support your brain in changing because, you need to focus on that connection of the brain, body, mind, and spirit. And it doesn't have to be hard or overwhelming, it's just making some small changes

can have a huge difference. So what are some recommendations that you have, if you want to improve your performance? What are some things that you can do in your life outside of the sleep that we already talked about to help you improve your performance? So the one thing I say to people is look at what you're having for breakfast. Okay, like I said, your brain is the hungryest organ in your body and it needs a lot of good fats to really thrive. That's why MCT oil, there's

something called bulletproof coffee you can make for yourself if you're a coffee lover that really feeds your brain. Even if you like smoothies in the morning, throw some MCT oil into that. Now my only caveat about MCT oil is people think, oh geez, more is better. You actually have to start off on a very, very small dose, like half a teaspoon, because it can wreak havoc on your digestive system. So, and work your way up. But what you're doing is you're giving your brain healthy fuels, eating high protein in the breakfast,

for your breakfast. And by this, I'm not meaning a breakfast sandwich that is in between two egg muffins, you know, like Something like that because again, it's got high carb so you want to be cognizant of cutting out what I call your bad carbs, which is I have a saying if it's white, it's not right. Meaning if it's made from white flour, white sugar, if it's If it's made from white flour, white sugar, if it's white in color, like your bread, your pasta, your rice, it's just not right for your brain, mind, your body. So substitute those with whole grain, sprouted grains, whole wheat.

So you know, this is not necessarily a big change. It's just maybe swapping out one meal, or if you constantly go for a burger at one, swap it out for a salad instead with just some olive oil. So you've got your good fats that really feed your brain like avocado, salmon, olives, olive oil. Anything along that line is going to fuel your brain long-term. So those are just some small little changes you can make. Doing a meditation, I have a six-minute meditation on my website that people can go to, and you may be included in the show notes, that is just six minutes a day,

but it's all about starting to reprogram your nervous system and reprogram your brain to think in new ways, to bring that cortisol and that adrenaline down. And when people say, I don't have time to meditate, I'm like, you don't have time not to. Because that is how we retrain our brains. And you know, monks have known this for thousands of years and neuroscience is just catching up to it. And are now proving, you know, what these guys have already known is that having that state to calm and building that into your day, because each of us, if you are getting eight hours of sleep at night, gives you a thousand minutes, thousand minutes to do with whatever you need to do.

Taking six minutes is a minuscule. And if those six minutes, you know, can help you focus better, help you be more emotionally regulated, help you be more resilient, help you have that balance in your brain, mind, and body, then that's worth it, I think. Yeah, those are some great, great tips. I use many of them myself already. I am one of these people who does intermittent fasting. I probably do it six days a week. So I'll have to revisit that. But I try to eat veggies, proteins, almonds. So I try to eat healthy because I realize gut health is so important to brain health.

So the more that your gut is regulated, it's going to feed your brain better and help you perform better. But great advice on what to eat, what not to eat. One other area I did want to cover with you is I have done a lot of research over the past couple of years on how you touched on an earlier but hormone levels play such an important role with brain activity. And I've been studying a lot a doctor named Dr. Mark Gordon, who works with the Water Angels Foundation. And he and another guest that I have coming up, Dr. Michael Lewis, talk about how important omega-3s and DHA are to it, but also other vitamins that you need to look at that you may be deficient in.

But above that, I think there can be hormones, whether it's testosterone or something else, that commonly are found depleted in people who have stress or or TBI. Is that an area that you've got some expertise on? Well, I can't say I'm an expert in it, but I do have my own personal experience. And I recently sent my husband to get his hormones tested because I don't know. For some reason a lot of people think that, you know, you only have hormones when you're pregnant or younger and then you don't have them later on in life. And that's just not true. Women have, we have testosterone, we have estrogen, we have progesterone, and we have all of these other neurochemicals,

like serotonin, dopamine, GABA, nor an epinephrine in our body that all control how we think feel in that. So having them balanced is essential. And my mother-in-law's best friend is 74 years old, and she just had to get a mastectomy done because she had breast cancer. And it turned out the reason she got breast cancer was because she had super high levels of estrogen. Now she thought, huh, I'm 74 years

old. I don't have any more estrogen in my body. Well, the truth was she had an overabundance of it. So, you know, all of these hormones that we have in our body aren't just when we're young, they are with us all throughout our lives. Like cortisol is a hormone that gets you up in the morning that tells you it's time to wake up. And if it's out of balance, you know, it can stop you from sleeping, but it can also stop you from getting up in the morning and having motivation.

And you know, if we just go back to like what you said about gut health, our gut in our brain are so intimately connected. The, there's a saying that our gut in our brain are so intimately connected. The, there's a saying that our gut is our second brain. So what I recommend to the people I work with is there are some key things that everyone should take. One is a good multivitamin, okay, for your specific age range.

You know, when I buy vitamins for my husband and multivitamin, it's very different than what a multivitamin looks like for me. So I do multivitamins, omega-3s. Now there's a specific kind of omega-3 because omega-3 is neuroprotective, meaning it protects your brain from degeneration, but it also protects your heart. And there's a specific type of omega-3 that has something called max-simil in it. So M-A-X, max-S-M-I-L-L. And what max-mil does is it makes it actually more bioavailable. So your body absorbs a lot more of it. And if you want to know what your omega-3 levels are, there's a great company. I'm not affiliated with them.

It's called Omega-Quarent. You can go on for $49. They send you a little test. You prick your finger. You send it in. And it'll tell you on a range of what level of Omega-3s you have in your body. And I eat a lot of fish, walnuts, all the good fats

that have a lot of Omega-3 in it. And I was still low. My husband was really low, which put him in a category of having heart disease and having a heart attack, and he's only 55 years old. And so when you're aware of these things and where you fall on the spectrum, you can make a change. So omega-3 is super important. You're vitamin D. So vitamin D is essential no matter where you live, because now we spend most of our time indoors. We aren't getting enough vitamin D

because we also lather ourselves up with sunscreen to protect us. And vitamin D has been related to depression, to a lot of mental brain health issues or mental health issues, if you will, people who have low vitamin D levels. And I also recommend probiotics, but do it in a natural way.

So probiotics are what feed the good bacteria in your gut. So probiotics are what feed the good bacteria in your gut. Now a fascinating little fun fact here is serotonin, your mood, your happiness, mood, neurotransmitter. 90 to 95% of it is actually made in your gut. It's not made in your brain, it's made in your gut. So if your gut is unhealthy and this goes to what you were saying about this high level of suicide and depression in society, well, look at the diets most Americans eat.

And, you know, I'm in Canada and we also have poor diets. But it's called the standard American diet, which stands for sad. And it is sad because it is making people sick. And when you are not conscious of your diet and making good choices, what you're doing is you're feeding bad bacteria or harmful bacteria, which are crowding out the good bacteria. And so it's that much easier to come depressed because your body is just not

making the serotonin that it needs. But there's natural things you can do. So eating things that are fermented. So kimchi, Greek yogurt that does not have a lot of sugar in it, kombucha, kefir, sauerkraut, fermented sauerkrarow, all of these things feed the good bacteria. As does vegetables, like raw veggies and things that are high in fiber. And so the more good bacteria you have, you start to crowd out that bad bacteria, the harmful bacteria,

and you can start to see your mood improves. We live in a society where everyone wants a quick fix. But the quick fix should be proven that it's not working. Because we've had pharmaceuticals around for a long time, and what you're seeing is anxiety, depression, and suicide increasing, not decreasing. So if the quick fix worked, those numbers should be going down. And again, that's just throwing a little bit of water on a forest fire.

You have to get to the heart of what is causing, what is the root cause here? You need to weed it out, and then you need to recede. And so those are the four things that I highly recommend, you know, those four supplements that can really help your gut help, but also help your brain function better. And what I do is everybody's brain is different. What's going on in your brain because of your TBI's or your life experiences is going to be very different than my brain. So there's not a one fits all here or something like that. What it is is I take people through a specific test

based off of 180,000 brain scans that measure blood flow in somebody's brain. And over these 180,000 brain scans, what was found was that there were patterns. And there's specific symptoms that go along with either having too little breath, blood flow or too much blood flow in parts of your brain. So then we look at what are the natural ways and natural things that you can do

to balance your brain again, to bring it back into harmony. And what you do that's good for your brain is simply good for your body as well. And then that impacts your mind and your mindset. Because if you lack sleep, if you can't focus, if you fly off the handle, if you obsess about things, these are not just mental things. These actually all have to do with these core areas of your brain that can be balanced naturally. And by putting in a little effort to do it. That is amazing advice. And if someone wants to learn more about you, take your brain quiz, where can they reach you at? Yeah, so they can go to thebetterbrainacademy.com.

They can also check out, like I do corporate speaking and training as well and that website is headwaysgroup.com And if you want to take my quiz, it's called the better brain quiz.com. You can do that as well And it's going to tell you where you are in terms of how well is your brain performing and what areas you can start to make changes in as well Well Cindy, thank you so much for coming on the show. So much information here for the audience to absorb. And I wish we had another hour to talk because it's been fascinating for me. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been great. What a great episode today was Cindy Shaw. And we learned so much from her about brain health and how to achieve peak performance by training your brain, eating and sleeping in a way that helps you perform at your cognitive best. And we've done many episodes recently

on the topic of brain health, including my interviews with Dr. Bob Adams, Dr. Michael Lewis, Brad Yates, and his episode on EFT Tapping. My interview with Sanstia Lightstar, as well as upcoming interviews with Mark Divine, and my personal episodes where I'm going to discuss optimum performance through mental health. If you would like to hear specific topics, you can DM me on my Instagram page at John Armiles. You can follow us on our YouTube channel, also called John Armiles. And remember,

please share these episodes if you like them. With both my friends, it makes such a difference to the show and our global reach and mission of making passion go viral. Now go out there and ignite your passion. Thank you so much for joining us. The purpose of our show is to make passion go viral. And we do that by sharing with you the knowledge and skills that you need to unlock your hidden potential. If you want to hear more please subscribe to the Passion Strike podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcast ad. And if you absolutely love this episode, we'd appreciate a five-star rating on iTunes and you sharing it with three of

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