Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Biohacking Mental Health – With Ben Greenfield

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

For full show notes, resources mentioned, and transcripts go to: www.drmindypelz.com/ep102/ To enroll in Dr. Mindy's Fasting membership go to: resetacademy.drmindypelz.com This episode is all about biohacking for self-improvement, eliminating stress, and enhancing your mental health. Ben Greenfield is a human performance consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including the widely popular titles Beyond Training, Boundless, Fit Soul, the Spiritual Disciplines Journal and the Boundless Cookbook. Former collegiate tennis, water polo, and volleyball player, bodybuilder, 13-time Ironman triathlete, and professional obstacle course racer, Ben has been voted by the NSCA as America's top Personal Trainer and by Greatist as one of the top 100 Most Influential People In Health And Fitness. Ben hosts the highly popular fitness, nutrition, and wellness website BenGreenfieldFitness.com, a site with over a million monthly visitors, featuring articles, podcasts, and product reviews from Ben. Ben is an advisor, investor, and board member of multiple corporations in the health and fitness industry, and 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. Ben resides in Spokane, Washington with his wife, Jessa, and twin boys, River and Terran, where he enjoys worshiping God and praising Christ, swinging kettlebells, fiction, guitar, ukulele, spearfishing, bowhunting, plant foraging and cooking. Please see our medical disclaimer. 

Meditation is an absolute fantastic way, very similar to a yoga practice or a gratitude practice or the like to lower anxiety, lower stress, and lower blood pressure. It also seems to kind of train one to have more mindfulness and more presence and other activities in life. Hey, Resetters, Dr. Mindy here. And welcome to season three of the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about. giving you the power back and helping you believe in yourself again. Let's jump right in. From my perspective, what I'm seeing, and this isn't just, this is across many age groups. We have a lot of people dealing with high amounts of anxiety specifically right now. It's almost like a post-pandemic PTSD. And I think there's a lot of great resources when we look at the biohacking world. So I really want to dive into neutropics. I want to pick your brain on plant

medicine, breath work, what tools we have to be able to help people with anxiety. All right. Can you pick my nose too while you're at it just because I got a little congestion today and clean things up. I can't do that. So let's start with a neutropic. Give me a definition between those three. What's the difference between like a neutropic plant medicine? and then like a biohack like like ice bath or a breathing technique. Well, you know, the difference from just I guess a pure semantic standpoint is painting with a pretty broad brush. A new tropic is generally considered something that is a little bit more natural or at least naturally derived, you know, a non-synthetic or laboratory synthesized chemical. You know,

for example, there's one company up in Canada that just developed a product, I believe, is called FT 401, that is a shorter acting, faster onset, synthetically lab-created version of silicin, the active ingredient in psilocybin, which one would normally, harness from from a fungi grown in nature right and so really the mechanism of action is pretty similar when you compare the synthetic versus the the more natural substance but many people would paint the the lab based synthetic version as more of like a smart drug or a pharmaceutical and the the fungal derived version as more of a more of a neutropic or you could look at something like morning glory seeds which contain like a wasurgymide very similar to LSD or more appropriately put I guess LSA

which a lot of people would use as opposed to like psilocybin one would use that for like neurogenesis or neuroplasticity typically some would use something like LSA or LSD for like a hyper-focus hyper-productive state. And yeah, you can chew on morning glory seeds, which is actually kind of a thing. You know, people were ordering morning glory seeds at Home Depot because they couldn't afford or find LSD and doing that instead, you know, proceed at your own risk. Aska's saying, does that work? Yeah, it can with the side effects being that because, you know, a lot of plants, as you probably

know, contain different amounts of plant defense mechanisms, particularly the seeds of many plants because they want to be pooped out by mammals to be able to grow elsewhere. You know, if plants don't have teeth or hooves or claws, they've developed their own robust defense mechanisms, you have to deal with some nausea and some gasek upset if you decide to shortcut your way to an LSD experience by buying morning glory seeds at Home Depot. But that's another example.

You know, or you could look at some of the more popular versions of synthetic smart drugs like Adderall or modafinil, also known as provigil, those typically aren't classified as neutropics because, again, those are like synthetically created chemicals, whereas, you know, a similar thing in the neutropics department would be like, you know, ginkgo biloba or or cratim or, you know, certain strains of kava or even like caffeine from from coffee or coffee berry. extract. And so, you know, the one thing I should name here when comparing something like smart drugs to neutropics is just because something synthetic or lab derived doesn't mean it's unhealthy. I mean, in many cases, the molecular structure can be quite similar. It's just that for definitive

purposes, neutropics are a lot of times considered to be something that's directly derived with very little processing or or tinkering from a natural source. whereas a smart drug would be something more synthetic or, as the name implies, something one might consider to fall into the umbrella of like a pharmaceutical or a drug. And then, of course, we could basically say, well, what if you don't want to put any substance into your body or you want to experiment with methods of triggering some of the same types of like word recall, memory, focus, improve cognition, that one would normally get from a neutropic or a smart drug, and instead do so with technology, right, with biohacking, which you alluded to.

And so then we've got a whole different class of technology that's not like an oral substance or like a transdermally applied substance and is instead using a different strategy to trigger those type of cognitive responses. So examples of that would be not only like older school practices, like let's say breathwork, right, to increase oxygen delivery to the brain, something like pranayama breathwork, more popularly, I guess, known as something like a Wimhoff protocol,

or holotropic breathwork, or, you know, intermittent hypoxic training as some free divers would do, but also many people in the bioseat hacking sector will do to improve, like blood flow to the brain or oxygenation to neural tissue. And you could also consider old school tactics to also be things like playing aerobic games for the brain. There's one fantastic author goes way back named Arlene Taylor who writes books about brain aerobics or, you know, playing Todoku or crossword puzzles or, you know, this is my chosen form of, I suppose, a more old school natural form of growing or increasing brain performance, playing musical

instruments or learning new musical instruments. And you could also kind of go from there all the way up into a lot of these modern technologies with examples of those being things like haptic technology, meaning using vibration to trigger certain responses in the vagus nerve or in the brainwave. Examples of that would be like the Apollo device, which one would wear around their ankle or their wrist, which can be placed into settings like relaxation or focus or social ability. And that uses sound to trigger a certain brainwave response. other haptic-based devices such as the sensate device or the electro-core device would be placed on the temples or the side of the neck or the sternum or the collarbone to trigger the vagus nerve to allow for increased levels of focus, relaxation, or better sleep or what have you.

Another example as opposed to haptic sensation, you know, vibratory sensation would be to use something. like a magnetic impulse to trigger the brain into certain brain waves or to mimic what molecules would do on the cell receptor. Examples of that would be like the HAPB device, which is a coil that one would wear around the head or around the neck that uses a magnetic impulse to simulate the same type of molecular action that would occur on the cell in response to something like MDMA or caffeine or nicotine or CBD, which I find just fascinating that you can actually do that. And I've used that device quite successfully for those purposes and found it to not fully mimic the effects of something

like nicotine or caffeine, become surprisingly close, which is very interesting, considering you're not actually consuming said substance. Another example would be like a pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, which is traditionally used in medicine for things like inflammation or triggering of stem cell production, but basically can also elicit certain brainwaves, especially when placed near the head. There are researchers like Dr. William Pollock, who has developed a device called the FlexPolts,

which is a very small PMF device, which you could place near the occipital bone in the back of the head. And on a certain setting, it could trigger, you know, if you have it at like 10 hertz, right, it could trigger alpha brainwave activity or at a setting like,

like, you know, 20 hertz, more of a beta brainwave activity, or at a lower setting, more of relaxing data or delta frequency. And so those are just a few examples of, of biohacking technologies.

And many people, will stack or combine many of these type of things. Like, you know, this wouldn't necessarily be relevant to, let's say, focus or, or mental energy per se, but more relevant to relaxation. Like, I a lot of times will take an afternoon siesta. And I'll go as far as like put the Apollo on my ankle and put that in relaxation. So I'm getting haptic sensations that are shifting. me into a relaxing state. And then I'll put the hap-me around my neck in relaxation phase to use

more of the magnetic impulse to relax me. And then maybe I'll drink a little bit of Rishi tea with lunch as an adaptogen to shift me into relaxation. And so, and then once I, once I settled out for my siesta, I might do five minutes of like a four-count-in, eight-count-out breathwork pattern. And so I've got like basically a neutropic in the form of Rishi mushroom, a couple of biohams. acting technologies in the form of, you know, the Apollo and the HAPB, and then just, you know, an old school breathwork protocol to shift myself into relaxation. And so that's what I really like is to figure out ways to creatively stack many of these type of compounds for even more amplified effects. I love stacking biohacks. I think that's, I love, and I love the way you did it where you

do it with a neutropic and then you do it with a biohacking device. If we're talking to somebody who has anxiety and which seems to be, I feel like the majority of the people I talk to these days, where do you even start? You know, do we look at things like Kava and say, well, Kava is going to be a little more subtle. And then when you move into CBD with THC and then you can move into, you know, psilocybin, like it seems like how do you know where the door in is for you? Well, for many people, it's simply a process of combining experimentation with just taking a glance at the literature and what it has to say about the efficacy of any of these compounds for, let's say, acting as an anxiolyic or something that would de-stress you.

And it's interesting because I was just looking at a research study this morning showing that the, you know, a, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, you know, a, you know, a. a surprising amount of the information that's found. And perhaps this isn't, you know, groundbreaking news to folks on the manufacturer's website is inaccurate or overblown. And, you know, this was a pretty massive study of a whole host of different herbal compounds and supplements, many of which would fall into the category of what we're talking about. So don't just go to the manufacturer's website and see if that thing is marketed for anxiety. I instead recommend going to a more neutral third-party website, whether that be PubMed or whether that be, you know, something like examine.

Examined is a great resource for looking at what type of studies actually exist that are either peer-reviewed or done on humans or show some efficacy in terms of the appropriate dosages for getting the effects that you're looking for. there are also people who have put together really great classes you know one of my friends who's an australian natural path lucas iune he has a whole uh he calls it a master class you know i interviewed him a few months ago on my podcast and i actually after interviewing him took his so-called neutropics master class where he unpacks over a series of about like 30 different videos and modules all the different neutropics out there you know what combines well what to use for different situations etc and so there's there's some really great folks out there in our space who are just putting out really good information about this stuff not to toot my own horn but you know i do have a whole

chapter in my book boundless about neutropics and and smart drugs and biohacking technology specifically relevant to the brain but what's important to understand i would say related specifically to your question that i'd throw in there is that a More is not better. And in fact, many things that cause an anxiety reducing effect that lower dosages can actually make one either more anxious or excessively sleepy at higher dosages. Like a few examples of that would be like a 10 microgram dose of something like LSD or LSA. In many cases, we'll give people like this relaxed like alpha brainwave,

focus that isn't too jittery or excitatory and then, you know, double that a 20 microgram dose and, you know, all you want to do is like do jumping jacks and burpees and clean your house. You feel like you're on crack cocaine. You know, another example would be CBD, right? CBD and dosages of anywhere for most people from about 10 to 20 milligrams can cause you to to have that relaxed focus and have an anxiety reducing effect. But at higher dosages, it'll just kind of knock you on your ass, which is good to know, you know, for a night of sleep, typically an appropriate dose of CBD is like 200 to 400 milligrams,

whereas for daytime relaxed focus, it's 10 to 20 milligrams. So there's some subtle nuances as far as dosage is concerned. So more is not better. That's definitely something to think about when you're looking at these compounds. and then also, you know, different things will fall into different categories. I mentioned Rishi mushroom extract as being an adaptogen. And one of the characteristics of an adaptogen, like say Rishi, Kava falls into that category. Another example would be like a lion's main extract.

You know, you can actually, if you need energy, because it's an adaptogen, get energy from those type of compounds. Whereas if you're really wired up and you need more relaxation, they seem to modulate the body into a state of relaxation. And so what works for your neighbor to take an afternoon siesta might make you feel hyper-focused after lunch. You know, and so, yeah, it's interesting. And this dictates that there's a certain degree of self-experimentation that's necessary as well, preferably starting at lower dosages and or going to any of these types of, you know, master classes or online references or research-based websites. You know, if you were to go to my website, for example, and type in Rishi or type in Kava or type in Kratum, you typically find some type of long form podcast or article that I've done on a lot of these

compounds. We can kind of take a dive and look into it a little bit more. So, so yeah, getting started is, you know, it's just like a lot of fields in biohacking. Biohackers traditionally are people who do engage in a great deal of either immersive research or self-experimentation that often comes before much human clinical research has been done. And most of the biohacking websites you'll find out there are rife with anecdotal references and people's stories, but not a whole lot of actual research because A, in many cases, biohackers are considered to be like pioneers who sometimes can even be a little bit less cautious about what they're putting into their bodies. You know, they probably would have been the people back in the day who were whatever,

whatever you call, like the taste testers who were tasting the king's wine to make sure it wasn't poison so the king didn't die, you know, it's a type of job of bio-miahacker might have had back in the day. Let's see what this does. And then also, biohackers tend to, tend to stack things. And when you look at multimodal approaches and health, they're very difficult to do human clinical research on. You know, if you look at, let's give an example, not necessarily in the category that we're talking about, but say, Dale Bredesen, who wrote the book, The End of Alzheimer's, has demonstrated many, many case studies in his book of reversal or pretty significant control of the onset of something like

dementia or Alzheimer's, but the multimodal approach includes everything from like, you know, near infrared light to high-dose fish oil to ketones to hyperbaric oxygen chambers. And you aren't going to see. see that easily researched in a traditional research study simply because there's too many variables to control. And same thing for like the afternoon nap I described, right? I don't anticipate anyone anytime soon doing a relaxation study on what happens when you combine like a happy with an Apollo with Rishi with breathwork. And yeah. And so, you know, just just the fact that that biohacking also involves a lot of stacks, again, dictates that there's

there's some amount of self-experimentation and self-exploration that's necessary. Yeah, I 100% agree on the biohacking part and that you just have to under, for me, I found understanding the concept and then self-experimentation is really where it's at. Where I get stuck, and this may be something that I'm really working on opening my mind to, is something, let's take something like cannabis. So when I grew up, you know, the thought was if you smoked marijuana in the growing brain, especially that you would lose your motivation and that it was damaging to the brain. Then at 40, 45, I sat in a lecture where I learned about the endocannabinoid system.

And I was like, oh my gosh, like we're actually made for cannabis. We have cells in our body that are neurons that want cannabis. And then I started to really open my mind to understanding something like CBD and THC. Are we needing a fresh look at some of these old theories we have about what we would call your brain on drugs? Well, the war on drugs, as you probably know, and as many people are now aware of, was heavily influenced by both political and racist ideology. as well as pharmaceutical lobbying to vilify compounds such as cannabis as being something traditionally used by, you know, a crime-ridden community like as a way to, um, to, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to vilify like the, the black or the Hispanic communities, um, or as a way to

allow for the influx of pharmaceutical compounds that were more profitable for pharmaceutical Google companies than something like cannabis to be able to gain a stronger foothold. And so when you look at like the Nixon administration or the Reagan administration or the war on drugs, you know, a great deal of that wasn't necessarily based on research on the compounds themselves, but instead on political and and racist and financial influences. And so it's, it's one of those things where you are correct that. We do need to make sure that we look at the motivation behind the common beliefs about certain compounds, such as cannabis. But I do think that in the case of cannabis, it has been so heavily revisited in the past decade that it's really no secret, that it's, that it actually does have a lot of beneficial properties that high levels of isolated THC, which we most commonly associate with the use of marijuana, at least.

Right now we do, even though I think that in 10 years it'll just be considered a medicine in one's cabinet that might fall into the same category as like, you know, honey or sardines. The idea is that those high amounts of THC can be problematic for gray matter in the brain, for word recall, for sleep architecture. and that's simply a result of isolating one compound from a plant that is probably better combined in a synergistic matter with many of the other cannabinoids in the plant like CBN or CBG or CBD. And so, yeah, so the traditional use of marijuana for the high THC content simply to get high is something that I think you could justifiably say, especially it appears for people. who are under the approximate age of 18 to be not so great for the nervous system. But when properly used and combined with many of the other endocannabinoids in a more natural way,

yeah, cannabis for everything from anxiety to sleep to inflammation to even things like creativity can be fantastic. And so, yeah, I think that also alludes to the idea that, you know, back to what I was saying about synthetics versus neutropics, in some cases, the natural version that is still in as close to a state as how we would find it in nature as possible is a little bit safer and, in my opinion, more favorable than some of these synthetic derivatives or the more concentrated isolates. And so if you look at straying away from cannabis at some of these smart drugs or synthetics, like modafinil or adderol, for example, they are, they're very efficacious.

They're like sledgehammers in terms of flooding the synaptic cleft between your nerves or your nerve cells with high amounts of neurotransmitters such as serotonin or dopamine. And so they're very effective short term, but long-term use can lead to things like dopamine insensitivities or seroton syndrome or or very, very similar effects as one might experience went on a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. And so you need to proceed with caution with using things like that. And that's not to say they don't have a time and place. Right, Mindy. So if I'm going to, if I've got an international flight to Tokyo from Seattle and I need to speak at a conference in Tokyo at 9 a.m. And I'm arriving at midnight. By the time I get to my hotel,

it's 2 a.m. And I can take like a three to four hour nap in my hotel and then got to be on stage, a half hour after I get up. That's certainly a time when I'll use modafinil or I'll use a more powerful wake promoting agents. I also, you know, like I just finished recording an audio book for one of the books that's coming out for me in the spring. And I can't like fabricate extra hours in the day to record an audio book like that. And so, you know, for that book, I got up at 3 a.m. each day for a month and just spent the first couple hours of my day recording the audio book. And so, you know, I would use about a half tablet of modafinil during that period of time. But, you know, it also is something that kind of drastically affected my sleep architecture

for a week or two after that. And also resulted in things like, you know, know, irritability, dopamine and sensitivities, appetite, appetite dysregulation, et cetera. So you got to kind of rob Peter to pay Paul. But, you know, I'm not opposed to the use of synthetics or smart drugs. It's just that for those, usually you need to accept the fact that there's going to be some kind of a biological tradeoff. A downside.

Yeah. And an addictive piece. I mean, that's, I've been hearing a lot lately about people using nicotine gum for creativity. and I look at that and go, gosh, that's a highly addictive substance, and I have an addictive personality, so I'm probably going to shy away from that. Do you feel like you have to know yourself before you enter into some of these things that may have a neurochemical switch in you that you're now addicted to that new neurochemical profile? There are certain genetic snips that one can look at that would dictate.

whether or not something has high addictive potential or is going to be even effective for you. Like you can actually get a, I believe it's called a neuropharmacology analysis. I think doctors data might even do one that looks at your genetic snips in response to a wide variety of, in this case, pharmaceutical drugs to dictate whether you are a responder or a non-responder to those. and there are other tests even, you know, such as taking your 23 and me results and exporting those to a website such as, you know, genetic genie or it used to be called Prometheus. I forget what is what is called now, but you can look at your genetic snips and see if you're a responder or non-responder or two things like caffeine, nicotine, etc. The addictive potential and the research on the addictive potential from a genetic standpoint is something that's less established. things like opiates and cocaine that are more problematic from an epidemiological health standpoint

are things that you can find pretty decent data on as far as genetic sniffs that you might have that would make you more susceptible to addiction to those compounds. But then there are other things that just painting with a broad brush for most humans are just addictive, period. Nicotine, for example, would be one. caffeine, caffeine would be another. And so with compounds like that, I think that the key is awareness that something is addictive so that you can mindfully modulate your intake of that substance and recognize if you have

developed some kind of an addiction and be able to use smaller and smaller dosages over time to wean yourself off of that or just live with the fact that if you're going to use it, you know, kind of like coffee. It's like, people like, well, I'm not getting used coffee because it's addictive. And I don't think because something is addictive necessarily means it's wrong or harmful, right? And I think that, you know, for me personally, I'm, I'm okay with the fact that I feel better in the morning with a cup of coffee than I do without. And that could indicate some amount of addiction or attachment to that compound. But I'm okay with that because for me, the pros outweigh the cons.

You know, very similar with something like nicotine. Nicotine has often been thrown under the bus for, you know, the possible health risk. But that's usually because the delivery mechanism is a cigarette or, well, usually a cigarette. And there are a lot of other carcinogenic substances. You're consuming along with the nicotine. And it's not the nicotine that's harmful. It's the other things in the delivery mechanism.

Whereas just pure nicotine in isolation isn't that bad for you. but as you alluded to, it does have a certain amount of addictive potential. You mentioned that a lot of people are using it for creativity. Nicotine gum, nicotine lozenges, nicotine sprays, etc. I am not convinced that nicotine is the best neutropic to use for creativity. Nicotine is very good for focus, particularly when combined with caffeine. But I think there are better things for creativity. creativity, particularly some of these plant medicine-based substances like the LSA or the LSD I was

talking about earlier or psilocybin or silicin or a derivative of psilocybin. And obviously those can be a little bit more difficult from a legal landscape perspective, from an affordability perspective, and from a perspective of simply be able to get your hands on a safe, efficacious version of those. But yeah, I think that for creativity, there's not a whole lot that trumps the kind of the merging of the left and right brain hemispheric activity that would occur in response to something like a plant medicine. And so what do you think of things like ayahuasca and MDMA has been one that has just blown my mind in interviewing a lot of a vast variety of doctors on my podcast. there seems to be a common respect for using things like ayahuasca and MDMA for helping people overcome habitual patterns that aren't working for them and creating new neurons that will help create new behavioral patterns. What do you feel about those as a form of therapy?

Most of the research that's been done on, well, there's not actually a whole lot that's been done on ayahuasca. but let's say something like MDMA has been done in the context of a great deal of talk therapy, hypnosis therapy, and what we'd call integration, which includes like journaling, meeting with a therapist, and spending a great deal of time without the so-called medicine in your system. And so there are a lot of confounding variables. You know, I have, for example, sitting in my office the entire premise, the entire process. protocol that the folks who went through the nicotine cessation program at the Johns Hopkins

University, which used, in this case, psilocybin to reduce addiction to nicotine, particularly for cigarette smokers, and the number of things that they did outside of just the nicotine itself in terms of journaling, therapy, integration, you know, music, all. all sorts of things dictate that there's a lot of confounding variables, and they didn't really have, to my knowledge, a subset of the research participants who did everything that was in that study except the actual psilocybin, right? And you can say the same thing for MDMA. You know, it typically involves a lot of things that are occurring outside the context of the medicine itself.

And so I don't think that just taking psilocybin or just using MDMA or just using Iowa. is an effective long-term strategy for reducing addictive potential. Ketamine would also fall into that category. It is true that after going through a journey or a treatment with those type of medicines that you typically do see a reduction in desire for your substance of choice afterwards. But in many cases, that's simply because you're just, you're almost like still in hangover mode. And it's kind of like when you wake up after having partied with alcohol,

you really not only don't really want alcohol that much, but a lot of other vices aren't that appealing to you. And sometimes you just want to like eat a really healthy diet for the day so that you feel really good afterwards. Right. And a lot of these substances like MDMA, for example, they are neurotoxic. They do cause effects that feel very similar to a hangover. So it's not surprising to me that for a few days after a protocol like that, someone would not want to engage in many vices at all because they're trying to get their bodies to recover from the protocol that they just did. But most of these medicines for long-term cessation of problematic lifestyle decisions or behaviors or addictions, they have to be combined with some type of integration to be able to have that have. them be fully effective. And furthermore, my other concern is that many people will use these as a crutch and for the reasons that I've just stated, often find themselves coming back to them over and

over and over again, such as, you know, the person we all know who's trying to become woke and enlightened is on like their 38th ayahuasca retreat and if they keep going back. You know, these type of things traditionally would have been used very seldomly, often by very, very few people or chosen or select people in the population like the priest or the shaman or an oracle and not necessarily something used widely by an entire village or community or city and um and so i personally believe that one of the one of the things that should come before the medicine is used is a lot of work on on on one's own life particularly from a spiritual standpoint i think that spiritual disciplines such as fasting, meditation, prayer, worship, community, service, relationships,

and the like are often the type of things that can be far more effective than, you know, using drugs or medicines. And I think that drugs or medicines should and could be the icing on the cake when combined with spiritual disciplines and probably at the top of the totem pole would be a relationship with God and a trust in God. And people who I know who have gotten the most out of any type of plant medicine experience have been people who have a faith or a very strong spiritual relationship with God

who are members of a church community, who have a strong family, et cetera. And for those people, you know, using medicines like that, simply take them from good to great as far as giving them business insights, personal insight, spiritual growth, et cetera, but simply taking, taking one drug to reduce your dependence on another drug and expecting that to stick long term, I don't see that occurring a lot,

especially in the absence of proper integration. And I think even more importantly, in the absence of a spiritual foundation and a relationship with God. Yeah, beautiful. I knew you were the right guy to ask about plant medicine because, you know, I've been watching from the outside wondering, you know, you hear these people who have these transformative experiences with MDMA and with ayahuasca. And my brain first goes to, is it harmful? How is it damaging them? But then it also goes to, is it necessary?

And I love what you just said, is that it can't be used in a silo. It is best used when there's a good foundation. And that's any health tool, right? if you have a good foundation, then you go into the obscure, and the obscure is only going to be highlighted. And many of these things, they're not necessarily beneficial for addiction per se. But, you know, a lot of the, I actually think this is the case for more people than you might think, even in our space, like authors, researchers, creative thinkers, inventors, and the like, the use of such things like ketamine or psilocybin or LSD, etc., in higher doses due to that merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain and the personal insights that one can have when in that state of what we call ego dissolution can result in an amount of creativity that allows for hyper productivity and a unique form of hyper productivity in the sense that you create a lot of unique.

original thoughts that are quite authentic. You know, so for me, for example, if I use something like ketamine or psilocybin or LSD or something like that in high dosages and I have a digital recorder or a voice recorder or a journal with me, a lot of times something like that will give me ideas for weeks on end in terms of articles to write book chapters. I mean, I have a list on my computer right now that I had pulled up this morning of about six new articles that I want to work on that range from from from a book I'm writing on parenting right now to family and relationships to a couple of different supplement formulations.

And the only reason I documented this is to like last night, I did about 400 milligrams of ketamine and about two grams of psilocybin. And then I I laid down on my sound therapy mat and put on my voice recorder and had a massage therapist worked on me while I just basically rift about all of the all the new ideas that I develop in a state like that that normally I wouldn't really come up with and so I might do something like that about once a month and I come up with a lot of great new ideas and you know there's some biological trade off like I had to you know I slept in an extra 45 minutes or so this morning to get a little bit of extra sleep and you know started off the day a little bit more slowly than

usual. But, you know, I practice and tinker and experiment with a lot of these things. And, you know, there are benefits that go beyond just modulation of addiction. And where does meditation fit into this? You know, a lot of people, you know, meditations become more mainstream. And I hear a variety of meditators, people who actually are doing visualizations like a guided meditation, people who are doing breath work and people who are doing a meditation but suffering through it. Is the science showing that meditation is a great way to reorganize our brain? I don't know about reorganizing the brain per se, even though I could see something like that occurring. Meditation is an absolute fantastic way, very similar to a yoga practice or a

gratitude practice or the like to be able to lower anxiety, lower stress, and lower blood pressure. And it's also something that seems to kind of train one to have more mindfulness and more presence and other activities in life. You know, it's obviously something that's become almost trendy of late with acts like headspace and calm and all these, you know, 18,000 different forms of meditation practitioners that you can find now who practice a wide variety of everything from, you know, transcendental meditation to Ziva meditation to mindfulness meditation, etc. I think that meditation is one of those things that would fall into the category of something

that's fabulous to stack with some of the other things that we've talked about. I have a daily meditation practice. I gather my family at about 7.30 a.m. in the morning, and we all do about 10 minutes of meditation together. We use something called a spiritual discipline journal. And we meditate. And while we're meditating, we have a journal in front of us. And we're meditating on what it is that we're grateful for that day. The truth that God spoke to us in the Bible reading that we do prior to the meditation. And then finally, who we can pray for or help or serve that day. And then in the evening, at the end of the day,

we gather again as a family, this time for about five to ten minutes and engage in an evening process of meditative self-examination where we play our entire day using the power of visualization, like a movie in our mind. And what we're doing during that time is we're watching ourselves, like in the third person, go through our day, like a movie. and we're watching that character that is us and asking ourselves three questions,

what good have I done today, what could I have done better, and where was I most connected to my life's purpose? And that daily process of self-examination kind of allows each day of your life to gradually become better and better because you're identifying things that may not have served you or things that you failed at and learned from. Areas where you really felt as though you were contributing to the world in a positive or impactful way, and then areas in which you really felt connected to your life's purpose, which are the things that really highlight why it is you were put on this planet in the first place.

And if you're properly using your skill set in a very self-actualized way to be able to serve people and love people in the manner that allows you to do the best good with your life. And so, yeah, I mean, meditation is a formative part of both me and my family's existence and kind of bookends every day. I love that. I love that. Do you ever get to the end of the day and ask yourself those three questions and find you didn't show up the way you wanted to show up that day?

Yes, less and less, the more that I do this process, because every time you find yourself writing down, what could I have done better or what have I failed at? It's kind of almost magical because you gradually weave that practice out of your life or introduce a positive thing that you weren't doing. Like there was, you know, a couple of months ago, I think I must have written down like five evenings in a row. I didn't play my guitar today. I didn't practice my music today.

And finally, on day five, I told my sons, I was like, I'm never going to write this down again. I just don't want to get to the end of the day. And ever since then, I just, I haven't skipped a day of practicing guitar or piano or or singing. And another example would be. I've been going through a day and been in kind of like checklist mode and just gotten a lot of things done. I might in many cases under the question about what good have I done this day, write down one thing or a lot of things because I had actually been kind of like productive and focused.

But then I'll get to that purpose question, be like, gosh, I didn't really feel like any of that stuff was very purposeful or impactful as far as me really using my unique skills. set to touch people's lives. Like I didn't work on any articles or books. I didn't, I didn't have a meaningful conversation on a pie. I was just kind of like replying to emails and doing random little phone calls throughout the day. And so you can identify that. And, you know, as a result, you know, if I find myself repeatedly writing that or having difficulty identifying where I was most purpose filled for the day, then that means that I need to restructure my day. and perhaps we've in an extra 30 minutes each morning to be working on articles or working on a book. And so what happens is this practice just kind of stacked and each day becomes better because how we live our days is how we live our life.

And I think that this process of self-examination is the best way to take that principle and weave it into your life in a way that allows you to become better with each day and thus to become better with your life. in general. Oh, I love that. I love that. And is there any science on the, like neuroscience on the power of prayer? I mean, so many people believe in the power of prayer. I've heard you've mentioned it a couple of times. But what do we know about when you combine prayer with meditation in that, like at the beginning

of the day and the end of the day? Do we know the scientific validity of prayer? Yes, there's an entire emerging field called Neurotheology, which has looked at the neural mechanisms in response to prayer and communing with the divine and belief in a higher power and both speaking to and listening to that higher power. It's very similar to something like a gratitude practice in terms of lower blood pressure, better sleep, greater amounts of productivity, reduced risk of chronic disease, fewer myths. days from work and just a host of positive outcomes that seem to indicate that there's a real biological link between a spiritual practice and overall health, which of course, you know, shouldn't surprise anyone who's familiar with the power of emotions and beliefs on the biology, you know, with probably Bruce Lipton's book, The Biology of Belief or the book,

Your Body Keeps the Score, you know, as being a couple of examples of how those are tied together. Probably the oldest example of this would be Joseph Murphy's book, The Power of the Subconscious Mind, because when you are praying and engaged in a meditative practice and infusing a lot of these positive practices into your life, you tend to do a better job keeping yourselves out of spinning in cell danger response mode or keeping yourself sympathetically activated during the day.

And so even though, let's say you might pray for just 10 minutes every morning and maybe meditate for five to ten minutes in the evening, for example, what's happening is your subconscious is actually shifting in a very dramatic way that affects you the other 24 hours of the day. Amazing. Amazing. So what I'm gathering from this conversation then is if you're living in depression and anxiety, that there's this whole world that we can open ourselves up to.

And it takes routine, it takes discipline, and it takes repetition. for the brain to start to change. Would you say that's accurate? I would say that's pretty accurate, Mindy. You pass the quiz. That's awesome. Well, again, I knew you were the right guy to have this conversation because I've been watching all of these trends emerging in mental health.

And to me, I put them all under biohacks. And I've been wrestling with my own belief around each one and really wanting to stay open to this new evidence that might be helpful to us. And you just nailed it for me. So I'm just really grateful. Thank you for having the conversation. Where do people find you? I'm sure we're going to have some people going and looking up many of the things you talked about.

Sure. Yeah. My website is at Ben Greenfield Fitness.com. You can find any of my books on Amazon and for private coaching. and working with people on anything from, you know, labs to exercise to nutrition plans, etc. That's all at Ben Greenfieldcoaching.com. Awesome.

Beautiful. Okay, I got to end on this question. You've already answered it somewhat, but maybe there's a piece we've missed. What outside of the morning time and the afternoon time that you do, what kind of gratitude practice do you have that you will never miss? like it's ingrained in your habits every day. Well, I've already described that morning gratitude practice, but a subtle nuance is that when you are naming what it is that you're grateful for,

you should be attempting to identify something that you received that you didn't actually deserve, something someone gave to you or something that happened to you, that happened to you despite you not really doing anything or working, hard to actually achieve or receive that. That's one important thing. Another important thing is that you need to relive that experience because research has shown that if you visualize that experience, meaning imagine it mentally happening again while you're doing your gratitude practice, you know, let's say that, that, that some, you're a waitress at a restaurant and someone gave you a $50 tip on a, let's say, like a, you know, a $25 meal ticket,

which was amazing and out of the blue and you didn't deserve that. Well, you actually replay that entire thing in your mind. You opening the little black book and seeing the $50 bill in there and maybe imagining the face or the voice of the person who gave it to you and what meal that you brought to them. Like you actually relive that story. And that's where the power of gratitude seems to be most profound is when you visualize and relive that story.

And then also, of course, write it down. There's a power of the pen. but the process of both writing it down and visualizing it and reliving it. And then the other thing about gratitude that I'd throw in there that I often do during the day, I call it my gratitude confetti, meaning that I will sometimes if I'm just sitting there during the day or closing my eyes before a meal, just basically imagine saying thank you a million, billion times to God. Just like, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, oh my gosh, for everything, everything, everything, everything, everything. And I just light off a cluster bomb of gratefulness in my mind,

specifically to God. And it sounds kind of cheesy. No, I love it. There's something about that that's just like super uplifting when you're just like, oh my gosh, I'm just say, I don't even know where to start. I'm thankful for everything. You just basically say thank you a million times. And I'm constantly aware that I'm always thanking God, you know, when I wake up, oh, thank you, God. I woke up and taking a breath. Oh, thank you, God, for that oxygen. And so, you know, the gratitude practice can be formalized in the sense that you're writing things down in a journal and in visualizing them at least once a day during, for example, a meditative practice, but then just having this kind of mindset throughout the day of thanking God at every opportunity,

I think is another really powerful way to weave gratitude into your life. Amazing. Amazing. Well, I love this discussion, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of people heading your way to learn more and just so grateful for you. and your lovely family. By the way, we had such a blast at your house, and your family's incredible. You're incredible, and your wife is phenomenal. By the way, your wife is.

That happens to me a lot. People are like, oh, Ben, I met you. I thought you were an okay guy. Then I met your wife. And oh, my gosh, screw you. She's really cool. She's a pretty, talk about a warm, loving person. You just feel really cared for in her presence.

So tell her, thank you. And I just so enjoyed this conversation. so I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it, so please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.