Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - How to Master Uncomfortable Interactions & Triumph with Jeff Krasno

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Could a little discomfort be the secret to a healthier, happier you? Join us as Jeff Krasno shares why embracing "Good Stress" might be the key to lasting well-being. We'll dive into Jeff's personal journey building his 'psychological immune system,' explore how modern comforts have led to a chronic state of ease (and why that's not always good!), and discover how reintroducing controlled stress can bring us back into balance. Plus, get practical tips for navigating stressful situations with more ease and grace. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep280 Jeff Krasno is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being, and co-creator of Wanderlust, a global series of wellness events. He hosts the Commune podcast and interviews luminaries ranging from Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Gabor Maté. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I bring you Jeff Krasno. So this conversation is so unique. We're going to talk about stress, but we're going to talk about it from a very different lens, not from avoiding it, but from microdosing it and why it is so important to put ourselves in stressful environments. This is something that I feel like the culture really needs. needs to begin to talk about. Because when we don't microdose stress, what ends up happening is we don't know how to handle the big stressors. So in training our nervous system, our psychology, our physiology,

on how we can handle the small amounts of stress when the big stressers come in, we are way more equipped. So this is really the center of Jeff's new book called Good Stress. And some of you may know, He actually was the co-founder of Wanderlust. So I don't know, I mean, I can tell you that many years ago, I went to many Wanderlusts festivals doing yoga and music. He co-founded that and he's now CEO and founder of one commune. But Jeff and I connected, what's really interesting is Jeff and I connected about a year ago and we were looking to collaborate on some projects together.

And when we first started to get to know each other, he brought forward something. that he did during the pandemic, that blew my mind. He basically started conversations with people who on social media and through his blog disagreed with him. He sought those conversations out, which I'm just going to be really transparent. That wouldn't have been in my wheelhouse to go seek difficult conversations out. But in doing that, he discovered a way in which we can psychologically and physiologically handle small amounts of stress in order to make our lives better. I'm not going to tell you anymore because we talk about these conversations. We talk about how the body is built for homeostasis. And if we're always keeping ourselves in

comfort, we are actually building dis-ease. Of course, we talk about fasting a lot because, as you all know, I'm a big fan of pulsing in all different levels of fasting. But what's really interesting in this conversation is you'll hear the psychological benefits of fasting and why microdosing different lengths of fast matter. And ultimately, where I think you're going to land, if you listen all the way through this conversation, is you're going to have a blueprint for navigating difficulties in a way that has never been told before. So I'm really proud to bring this conversation to you. I love this man. I think you'll discover what a caring human he is. His book is incredible, good stress. If you resonate

with this, please go get his book. He's got lots of bonuses for you. But most importantly, let's not shy away from difficulty. Let's use small doses of difficulty to improve our physical. emotional, spiritual, and psychological benefits. So Jeff Krasnow, I'm so excited to bring this conversation to you. Grab his book, Good Stress. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is. is the podcast for you. Okay, so first, this is where I want to start with you, Jeff.

I want to start this conversation with the first conversation I ever had with you. And I think it was around the idea of luminescence and one commune, but what stood out in that conversation to me was this process you went through during the pandemic, talking to people who disagreed with you based off of a social media post. And I want to start there in, can you explain to us what that process looked like so we can fill everybody in? And can you explain what you learned in that? And I think what happened from that is it brought you to even writing this book. So let's start there. Yeah, okay. So we have to all go back to March 2020 and put ourselves in that mindset. We were anchoring into port lockdown. There was a tremendous amount of uncertainty, a tremendous amount of fear. Obviously, the media channels were flooded with sensationalism and people were extremely triggered. And my wonderful dear partner, I call him my brother from another month,

Jacob, who you know, he urged me to begin writing a weekly newsletter that was dubiously named commusings. And so I started writing this 1,000 to 2,000-word column every Sunday and deploying it to about 1.2 million people and had the questionable idea of attaching my personal email to that missive. And of course, about three or, so. That was brave. Yeah. So the idea was, okay, in this, in this soup of uncertainty, I was going to write these missives as little, you know, buoys of hope to navigate the choppy seas of COVID, right? And it was like a service. It was people were feeling lonely. They wanted a sense of connection. And so that was the intention. But about three or four weeks in, I got myself over a bit of a bit of a little.

literary barrel having to produce that much content every week. And, you know, fortunately for me, 2020 provided plenty of compost, I suppose, in terms of incendiary issues to excavate and to write about. And I was tackling them head on. I mean, certainly COVID, you know, the development of the vaccine, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent reckoning for social justice, kind of the emanations from Trumpistan and the emergence of QAW. on and there was just so much going on. And I was really trying to take the middle path, as per my spiritual tradition, and write kind of rigorously researched, sane, middle ground essays to sort of get to ground people, help ground people, really. But of course, over 2,000

words, and tackling these incendiary issues, you're bound to affect. someone. And given that my email was attached to them, people did not hesitate for one second to let me know when I did offend them. And so Monday morning, I'd open my email and sort of the wave of opprobrium would crest to the bow of the inbox of my email. And, and, you know, many of the responses that I got were kind and encouraging, but I probably got 200 emails a week from people that strongly disagreed with something that I had said or I had written. And, you know, I think we may have talked about this offline at some point, but I was a perpetual people pleaser growing up.

And, you know, receiving all of this recrimination, I initially took it very, very personally, and I was very defensive. And I would stay up at night kind of brooding over clever rejoinders. and oh, man, I'm going to hold that ember and I'm going to throw it at them in the morning. And of course, I realized that I was getting burned that whole time. So over those first few months, I built what I called my psychological immune system. So very similarly to how we build our physiological immune system, which is through exposure to insult, through pathogens and bacteria and viruses, et cetera, such that, you know, our wonderful adaptive immune system,

spins up these proteins and then finds the right one. We call them antibodies. And then we have this memory to spin them up when we run into that insult again. And very similarly, kind of metaphorically, I built my psychological immune system where just the right amount of exposure to insult, I started to become very stoic and sort of unflappable in response to a lot of insult and recrimination. And so as I begin to center myself and develop this, emotional regulatory tools, I started to engage with my detractors, and I would email them back, and I'd say, like, hey, listen, you know, what about this nuance? And the more thoughtful ones, we would exchange maybe a volley of three or four emails. And then I would say, hey, why don't we just

jump on a Zoom call? And this is sometimes what I call my great David Copperfield routine, because I made most people disappear at this juncture. I was like, yeah, and you're gone. Yeah, I mean, that onto itself is very telling of this time that we're in right now. And I want you to finish story, but then I want to come back to that because I really do think this idea of these modern conveniences destroying us. One of them is we can just cancel you. We can just ghost you. And that's now become socially acceptable. 100%.

I mean, if you think about public discourse right now, it's largely being. waged anonymously through digital wariorship behind screens. It's not that we didn't have conflict on the Serengeti, right, when we were living in tribes of 70 or 80, but how did we solve those? We actually had to come face to face and recognize each other's common humanity

and compromise and find common ground, et cetera. But the way that we communicate now, through kind of the ease and convenience of the internet, is not at all profitable for, for common ground and compromise and solution or cooperation. So 26 brave souls took me up on my offer of having a Zoom call. And so I scheduled across the course of August and September 2020 on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, hour-long slots for these Zoom calls.

And, you know, my detractors were from all. sides of the political spectrum. It wasn't one, you know, avatar. It was, it was everything. It was like, you know, a white man should not center himself in the conversation about race at this moment. Like, okay, I hear you, except I'm also just writing a weekly column, you know, or, or, you know, and it was coming from all sides. Somehow I was both a conspiracist and a shill for Pfizer at the same time. I'm like, that's not possible. Neither of us. You know, so I was writing articles like, In August of 2020, I'll just ground it in an example. There was enough data to suggest that the people that were contracting COVID most severely

that was resulting in either hospitalization or, unfortunately, fatality tended to be those people with multiple comorbidities, with high rates of obesity and diabetes. And that data was pretty convincing relatively early on. So I spent a hundred hours collecting all of that data and then essentially trying to write a thoughtful 2,000-page or 2,000-word essay on that topic. I just, I want to tell you for a second, I wish I had known you during that time because I was doing the same thing. My husband and I spent about 20 to 40 hours a week just going through the dad. looking at what was going on. And by August of 2020, we were like metabolic health. There's a metabolic health problem. There's a vitamin D problem. But instead of writing a blog, I took it,

I took it to YouTube, which then properly got censored by big pharma, however you want to look at that. But I just want to say, I wish I'd known you because we were trying to figure out the same thing of like, what's the underlying cause here? So. Yeah, and, you know, if we go back to that time, there was also a contemporaneous body positivity movement that was very, very strong at that juncture. And I had written voluminously about my own weight struggles. I was a very, very chubby kid, obviously have tremendous compassion and empathy for those who have, you know, struggled with weight over their life because I am one of them. But that didn't ignore me from people's offense or recrimination. And so, you know, a lot of people were really insulted that I had essentially connected the severe contraction of COVID with obesity.

And so I had a whole series of calls with mostly women, candidly, about that issue, essentially people that felt that I had shamed them. Mm-hmm. And so, but what was really, really interesting is that once we actually got into these Zoom calls, the whole tenor of the exchange changed. So first of all, you remember, we weren't as fluent with Zoom back in those days. So there was a lot of, like, jabbing at buttons. And that was humanizing.

That just in itself was humanizing, right? Yeah. And then there would be the exchange of pleasantry. but it was so funny, Mindy. It's like these conversations took on almost the exact same pattern, one after the other, which was for 45 minutes, I just sat there and said nothing,

and people just gish-gallop their entire life story to me, like the problems that they were having in their relationships, a pet that they had lost, you know, issues that they were having with their kids, you know, most of the time, we actually never got around to the issue that had put us initially at loggerheads, it was really, I was just creating a platform or a container, I guess I would say, for people to be seen and to be heard.

Yeah. And, you know, I didn't have any training in nonviolent communication at that juncture. Subsequently, then I got very interested in it, and I started, you know, studying Marshall Goldberg, who, wrote this whole, he has a whole technique on non-violent communication. But I was just kind of learning as I went. And as I went, I was able really to develop a regimen or a technique, a protocol for having profitable, productive, stressful conversations. Amazing. And a lot of them, you know, I'll just share a few of those techniques because it's so important because candidly, we,

We tend in modernity to avoid these stressful conversations whenever and wherever possible, right? Yeah, yeah. But I started to ask myself, what is the possibility that exists on the other side of these hard, stressful conversations? Okay, so before you go into that, because that was the big thing that really hit with me when we first talked, and it ties so nicely into the whole concept of your book. which is we have become so conditioned to seek comfort.

And comfort is so easy for us now. It doesn't matter if it's metabolic comfort, if it's fitness comfort, or if it's relationship comfort. It's like we've lost our ability to endure, like, something difficult. And when you go through these, what I want people to hear, is that, you know, if you actually lean into this, you become a happier person,

a more well-balanced person on the other side. So I just, before you go into it, I just don't want people to lose that because what you did was very, very brave and uncharted territory. But if we could all learn to go into these conversations that are filled with some discomfort with a skill set like you're about to teach us, relationships, our own human evolution could dramatically change. So go ahead. 100%.

I mean, you totally nailed it. And, you know, many people associate use stress or adversity memetics with physiological protocols like fasting or cold water therapy or heat therapy or resistance training. Absolutely 100%. And those were key to my physiological and psychological health. candidly. But where I got interested was, is there an application of adversity memetics to the psychosocial world? And that's kind of where I started to really lean into these stressful conversations. Because again, you know, if I could have a hard, thorny conversation with someone

that I didn't even know, could I not then have it with my aging parents, you know, who are in their mid-80s or my best friends or my spouse or my kids. And again, these are the hard things that we tend to avoid. But, you know, the world that our hearts imagine is possible is right on the other side of having them. So anyway. And in that, I just want to, you said something a while back that I think is really important because a lot of women have this challenge. And then when they go through menopause, they, as our neurochemical systems, changes, we start having new behaviors and the challenge is people pleasing. So what is interesting is you have now, what you're about to share with us the way I look at this is this is like cold

plunging for people pleasing. Like you're going to put yourself in an environment so that you can overturn the people pleasing, but you're going to need to face the discomfort with a new strategy so the people pleasing stops. And the people pleasing is quite detrimental to a lot of women. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, I read Gabor Monti's book like 10 times. And, you know, he, among many other people, makes a very, very direct connection between people pleasing and autoimmune disease and all sorts of other physiological and psychological conditions. So it's a direct line there. And yeah, I mean, part of entering into stressful, difficult, thorny, is pre-gaming it with a lot of emotional regulation.

And so this is where breathwork or what I sometimes call like jumping into the ice bath of a stressful conversation, but breathwork or even ice plunges or meditation, these are all incredibly useful tools for building emotional resilience and emotional regulation. Because if you're going to enter a difficult conversation, you need to be, you need to be down here, sort of ventrally vaguely activated, if you will, in kind of a vaguely theory language.

But essentially, you need to be alert enough, kind of through your sympathetic nervous system, but calm and tranquil and relatively serene in your parasympathetic. So you need to find that dynamic homeostasis, that sort of tenuous emotional balance, before you can actually enter into a conversation. And like even physical posture is really important. But if you can maintain an energy that is both alert but tranquil, you create the possibility for coherence and attunement. And so what you're really doing is creating the set and setting of safety and trust

such that a productive conversation. can even occur. Right. So you're saying, like, somebody could apply that with a difficult conversation, with an adult child or with a parent, an aging parent, or a spouse. That is actually really brilliant because what you're saying is ground yourself with the other techniques, the breath work, the cold plunges, the fasting. I'll tell you a story about that in a moment, that if you can ground yourself in those other

hard things you already have regulated yourself with hard. So going into the relationship hard, you're less triggering. Is that how I'm hearing that? Totally. Because what happens when you get into a nice plunge, right? You have an involuntary bottom-up response, right, where your heart rate, respiratory rates start to increase. You feel this epinephrine coursing through your veins. You know, it's coming into your neck. You feel like you're going to have a panic attack. And then what? You have a moment where you can apply top-down conscious pressure on top of involuntary bottom-up response such that you can emotionally regulate. And that same exact phenomenon is happening when someone insults you or says an offhanded political comment that you disagree with or

undermines your integrity or your self-worth. You feel that same sensation. It's coming up from under the crust of consciousness. You want to scream and yell out. But then again, if you have been able to cultivate your ability to put top-down pressure on top of that involuntary response. It begins to punctuate all areas of your life, not just in the ice plunge, but when you enter into a difficult conversation with a child or a spouse. So, okay, with that, I'm going to share with you my fire story. And there's actually, people can go watch it on YouTube. But the week before the Palisades fires, I had done a three-day water fast because I was about to lead 100,000 people through a three-day water fast. And I wanted to be like have my own, like I hadn't done one in about six months.

I wanted to have my own language with it so I could lead this grip through. And in that three-day water fast, what I learned is that the hard is temporary. So it comes, but if you sit with it, it will actually dissipate. And so I had this pattern of thought. The morning I left my home in the Palisades with the canyons around me on fire and black smoke over and traffic on Sunset Boulevard, I got to the bottom of Marquez Avenue and sunset. And I had a choice if I was going to go right down towards the highlands to get to PCH, for those of you that know L.A. or if I was going to turn left to go in towards the village and then my thought was I would go down Temescal to get in.

I'm sitting at the stoplight and all of a sudden I'm looking at the cross section and I'm like, okay, nobody's going right. I should probably go right. But then my brain was like, yeah, but you're going to go down into the highlands and everybody's going to be pouring out of the highlands and the fire is heading towards the highlands. So you may end up with a problem down there. even though everything in my LA traffic brain was like, don't go into traffic, go away from traffic.

And so I sat there because I had a couple stoplights to go. I was talking to my husband on the phone. He's like, just go right, go right. It's easier. But my fasting brain kicked in. And it was like, no, left looks hard. There's a lot of traffic. But I would be going away from the direction that the fire is going.

So it will be a temporary hard. It will be a small traffic jam that's going to help me for get out of the Palisades as quickly as possible. So I went left. And if I had gone right, Jeff, I don't know if you saw the news, but all the palm trees in the highlands caught on fire and the palm fronds landed on cars. And that would have been me. And the only reason I went left was. was because I had had an experience the week before with knowing that going, that hard could be

temporary. And it allowed me to rely on a hard that I had the week before, which is exactly the point that you are stating. Yeah. Wow. Well, boy, am I glad you went left. And a lot of other people are too. Well, and, you know, you used your neo-mammalian brain. You were able to access your locus of reason in a situation that would otherwise hijack a normal person's amygdala, right? Yeah, right. But you had had that training through fasting and through other techniques that you employ in your life that you could find that space between stimulus and response, right? And take that agency and leverage this unbelievable hippocampus and prefrontal courts.

to make a very difficult decision, knowing that, yeah, oftentimes short-term stress leads to long-term gain. And we see that, of course, in our human physiology all the time, right? You know, you overload a bicep or something, and you rip the microfibers in a bicep, and then you have an immune response. So there's a short-term pain, but then what happens? Oh, well, the body then, you know, summons these structural proteins, actin and myocin or whatever, and you give enough rest and you eat enough protein and guess what happens, it grows back bigger, right? So that's like, you know, and the body is like riddled with those examples. I mean, just exercise. You have a short-term inflammatory response for a long-term anti-inflammatory response and you can literally find a thousand

different mechanisms that function that way. And but it's not always the obvious thing. Sometimes it's actually leading, you have to lean into the edge of that discomfort in order to get the real actual comfort that you're looking for long term. Oh, that's so good. So did you just cold plunge before you got on all these calls? I mean, candidly, I did. I doubled down on my cold plunge routine. And I also doubled down on my cold plunge routine before I go to the dentist. That's a whole other thing. But, but it's similar, you know, right? It's a great idea. Yeah. So, yeah, so I had to go into these conversations emotionally regulated. And just, you know, think about this in the course of your daily life. You know, you don't often plan a stressful conversation the way I was. Sometimes it just

happens at the dinner table, you know, with Uncle Frank, you know, or whatever. He says something offhanded and you're like, ugh. And but how are you going to respond in that moment? Are you going to be able to cultivate that space between stimulus and response and have a more adaptive reaction to that and this is what all these protocols help you do. So you walk in and you create a set and setting of safety and trust. And then really tip or hack number two is about listening and it's about active listening. And the way I think of it is this way. Listen to understand and not to respond.

Yeah, yeah. Listen to understand and not to respond. Yeah. And this is so difficult, Mindy, because if we really rigorously excavate how we have conversations, we're almost always formulating a rejoinder or rebuttal in our heads while the other person is still talking. And that's not necessarily a bad instinct. We will do it over the course of this conversation many times, because we're just excited and there's an idea that pops in and we want to, you know, dance in a conversation together. But when you're having a stressful, difficult conversation, I would really recommend being actively focused on listening to understand and not to respond. So the way to do that is just to literally receive all of the information, wait for that person, your partner, to stop,

then allow for a space where you actually synthesize everything that they've said and then form your response or your rebuttal. You know what's a great way to train yourself to do that is start leaving voice texts for people. I voice text. I even have a system called Voxer that I talk, you know, that a lot of people are on. But what happens is you have, you, you, It's like a walk, you know, it's like you get a voice text, you listen. You don't have, it's not, you're not on a live call. So you can actually pause for a second and then formulate yourself and then respond back. Yeah, I mean, this is something that's really baked into Japanese culture, actually.

If you ever go like I did for many years in the music industry and I was pitching bands and I would go into my big. pitch in an executive office, and then I would be met with this stultifying pregnant silence. And then, of course, as a Westerner, I would feel the need to fill that void, and I would just keep talking and pitching again until finally my interpreter explained to me, I said, no, no, no, that silence is actually a sign of respect, that they actually heard everything that you said, and then they were forming their response. So that's a big one. Then I would say, you know, the third tip towards having a productive, stressful conversation is really to seek connection and not solution. So not every stressful conversation is going to end in a kumbaya drum circle.

Yeah. And so you might not find the agreement that you want or that you're looking for. but what I began to do as I got better at having these conversations is I would notate areas of convergence between my adversary's life and my own life. So perhaps they were born in Chicago. I was also born in Chicago. Maybe they had daughters. I had three daughters. Maybe they used to drive across country every summer. So did I, et cetera. And then when they would stop, I wouldn't jump back in with a rebuttal of their position necessarily, but actually what I would do would be point out areas of consilience or convergence

between their life and mine. And it immediately allowed for this opportunity to find deeper common humanity and shared experience. And I did this on stage. As I got better at this, I actually went on stage and moderated this exercise between a Trump supporter and a Harris supporter last fall in front of 300 people. It was very, very interesting.

I can tell that maybe later. But these techniques, they work not only for you to have them, but for you to actually moderate conversations between other people. And that's a big one, that seek connection, not solution. Yeah. Oh, my God, I love that. So the three that you're giving us is regulate yourself first, you know, active listen. Listen with a pause is sort of how I.

I see that, and then look for connection, not solution. I wish there was a way, like, we could do that on social media. Like, it's really beautiful. It's like taking responsibility for that, for your reaction. And when I look at some of the things you've written in this book about these modern conveniences that are making us sick, I actually think on a personal, like, relationship level, one of the things that's destroying relationships and is making us sick is because we're not doing those three things that you just said. Are there outside of relationships?

Are there other areas that you can apply these three things to? Yeah. I mean, I think that so many of what I would call, like, stress protocols come down to, you mindset and emotional regulation. Really, I've begun to understand health as one single concept, which is balance, really. Oh, yes. And this applies beyond human physiology. I mean, if you look at like the healthiest economic system, it's generally one that has like a very thriving middle class where the distribution of wealth looks like this bell curve. Or if you look at ecology, the healthiest systems have biodiversity. So like a lot of different species finding balance,

or if you look at politics, you even find a strong middle where you can find compromise and cooperation, et cetera. You know, psychologically, we generally think of balance as the ability to find center or find the middle. But certainly in human physiology, really balance is the key. and we tend to call that homeostasis when it applies to human physiology. And our body really is seeking that balance out all of the time. I mean, it's very, very hard to disrupt your pH balance, for example. You can do it, you know, a little bit. But what happens, you hold your breath, for example, and you build up like hypercapnia

and little excess carbon dioxide. and that will make your body a little bit more acidic, but then it bounces back to center, right? You can get into an ice bath and what does that do that plummets your core body temperature, and what does your body naturally do? It has this adaptive response of thermogenesis, and it brings you back up into that warm porridge of 98.6, right?

That's right. Or you get too hot, what does the body do? It starts to sweat. It thermoregulates the other direction. So all of the, so the body is really just, engineered for homeostasis at every turn until we screw it up. And there's tons of things that we do in modern life that essentially undermines our body's ability to find that homeostasis.

And certainly as it applies to stressful conversations, we avoid having them. So we never find that social homeostasis, you know, in which we can. can actually, you know, disagree without being disagreeable or find some middle ground or compromise some points to get other points, actually live within a healthy middle ground social contract. That seems to be, you know, rarer than Stone Man's syndrome at this juncture. Yeah, so I absolutely agree with you on homeostasis. I used to, in my clinic all the time, when I would put somebody on a supplement protocol, I would always say, this is a supplement you're going to use for 30 or 90 days, and then we're going to get off of it.

Because after 90 days, your body has already integrated the information that it's bringing in, and now it's not as effective. We just want to pulse it in so that we can use it to create you, get you back to homeostasis. So I love the way you said that because I'm wondering if people could just look at their whole life, whether it was their physical health, their emotional health, and like look at what you're doing too much of and look at what you're doing too little of and see how you can start to do the opposite of that to bring to to to to now be in balance with your mental and physical health would that be one way to approach this totally and I think

the ironic thing is that in order to enhance your body's ability to foster homeostasis you actually have to push the edges of it, right? So the more that you get into that coal plunge, or the more that you have those stressful conversations, or the more that you engage in some smart, intelligent, intermittent fasting, etc., the more able the body is to bounce back. It's when you live in this totally artificial, thermoneutral environment, for example, is your body then you dull the edges of your body's ability to actually cultivate that balance. And if like I can paint like the portrait, sometimes I talk about this concept called the Big Macs. It's kind of silly, but it's like not the ones that you just, not the ones that you just eat from the from the evil M, but the big modern

American conveniences. And I think about it this way. I sort of will paint this portrait. Let's say it's like 8 p.m. You're inside in a single family house. You're alone. It's in a nice thermoregulated 72 degree environment, you're sitting in a lazy boy chair, and you're door-dashing some pizza and you're binging Netflix, right? Okay. That sounds like a totally delicious, wonderful way to spend a Friday night or a Tuesday night and certainly a very normal activity that a lot of people engage in, but every single one of those aspects that I just mentioned really erode your ability to be healthy. And so, I mean, pick any one of them, you know, the, you know, not living communally, right? Hyper individualism, like living within vertical boxes or single

family homes separated and cleaved from your community environment. Well, loneliness now, it's been, it's like from an all-course mortality perspective equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to Julia Holds-Deld London at BYU. So, you know, okay, what else? Well, eating at 8 p.m., that's probably eating outside of your desired window, and you're probably going to go to bed with your food undigested. But that's something that we do all the time. Living in a thermoregulated environment where we never have exposure to fluctuations and temperature,

like I said, will undermine your metabolic function. It limits dopamine production. And then it also makes poor advantage or takes poor advantage of these hard-wrought adaptive mechanisms that we built up over hundreds of thousands of years. It's like when we get hot, we actually activate the production of all these amazing proteins, BDNF and heat shock proteins, etc. You know, we give up our emotional resilience that is associated with getting very, very cold. So that's another one. We're probably sitting in this lazy boy chair with this like I am right now. with 90 degree kind of angles between our hips and our knees,

using no back musculature or no leg musculature, and essentially tightening up our hip joints, etc. We were meant to relax at night, sure, but we generally squatted. You know, that was our resting squat is how we actually sat. And you just go down the line, watching Netflix, I do it, I raise my hand, okay, and it's lovely and wonderful to binge Larry David from time to time.

But of course, if you're doing that late at night, you're disrupting the balance between cortisol and melatonin, basically your circadian rhythm by taking in blue light into this kind of inferior part of your retina. Not great. So essentially, we've layered on at every turn, ease and convenience and comfort, but in so many cases, chronic dis-ease

as the result of this chronic ease. Well, actually, let's break down that dis-ease because we throw out disease, like, very casually. Oh, you've got this disease. I mean, we're even throwing chronic disease out right now like that, like, oh, like just because everybody's got a chronic disease. But when you break it down into dis-ease, and then you take that and you look at the physiology of the body, the body goes into dis-ease, when it's not in homeostasis. 100%. Totally.

I mean, that's how I've begun to think of disease is the inability to actually maintain a dynamic homeostasis. So, and you can look at that. I mean, dysregulated blood sugar levels, okay, there's an obvious one, right? Disregulated lipid panels, that's another obvious one. Almost everywhere you look,

what we label is disease, is a reflection of certain imbalances in your physiology. Well, so let's use, like, what I've been teaching the world, like when I first found fasting, fasting, Jason Fung had just put the obesity code out, and fasting was taking off. And my brain has always been through the lens of homeostasis, and so I was trying to take that tool

and figure out how you go from a, you know, we've been eating all day, everybody. Now we need to go to fasting. And so what ended up happening, Jeff, is all the one meal a dayer people that fell in love with Jason Fung's book, they went from eating all day to fasting all day. And then they were fasting all day and their hair was falling out and their weight got stuck. So they went to the extreme opposite. And so on my YouTube channel, I was teaching metabolic switching.

But if you look at every organ system in the body, like we have a sugar burner, we have a fat burner. in the autonomic nervous system. We have sympathetic. We have parasympathetic. Like, yeah, I mean, we have night. We have day. But we don't look at our daily habits or our relationships in that same way, which is just mind-blowing. And then we end up with disease.

A hundred percent. I mean, and if you look, you know, with a specific microscope to our consumption of food, for example, you have a very, very sophisticated. approach to and sign an evidence-based approach to fasting, but just as a more kind of broader idea, it's like we're generally consuming food all of the time. All day long. And, you know, again, we have, you know, we tend to sanctify generally, like, growth in our society

beyond hypergraphy. Like I'm also talking about how big is the GDP and how big is the Dow Jones and how... We think more is better. More is better. How big is your house, you know, big as your car, et cetera. But if you study natural systems, all natural systems are engineered with periods of growth and then periods of repair. You know, winter promises a spring, right? And so,

you know, what we are doing when we're actually mindfully consuming food is that we're finding that tenuous balance between growth pathways and repair and restoration. pathways. And, you know, when you get like more geeky, it's like, yeah, there are these anabolic pathways and mammalian target of rapamycin and hypertrophy, et cetera. But then those are balanced by, you know, AMP kinase and autophagy processes and the breaking down of senescent cells and dysfunctional proteins, et cetera. And so finding that balance is essential. And we used to live in an environment where essentially calorie, was the norm, you know?

Yeah. And so our bodies evolved over hundreds of thousands of years as Homo sapiens and then millions of years as hominids before that in relationship to the accessibility of calories. And so it was actually totally adaptive to get like for your loincloth to be a little tight, right, in the late summer, early fall, right? And to put on a few extra pounds, because, you know, you were harvesting copious glucose, your body would store some of it as fat. Why?

Because it knew that winter's fallow was just around the corner. But fast forward, we essentially live in a society where, from a calorie perspective, winter never comes. So the body is actually just doing what it's supposed to do, right? Right, right. And so in that sense, chronic disease is really just a normal and expected result of our paleolithic genome, simply trying to cope with the way we live. Oh, my God, that's so well said.

That is so well said. And I would say that, you know, one of the things about just looking at it through that metabolic lens and looking at it through just what we do, I call it, we have, we're, we're, we're, we're, We're a culture of shiny object syndrome. We're like, I'm going to go do that. Oh, that looks really fun. And then we do it. And then we're like, wait a second.

I'm going to do that. And the shiny object syndrome is going from comfort to comfort to comfort to comfort. One of the things I used to say, and you've just expanded it beyond metabolic health, is I used to say we're at an evolutionary mismatch with the modern world has provided an evolutionary mismatch for us. And it's done it with our, you know, our, you know, our metabolic system, our hormonal system, our microbial system, our nervous system, like all of it has completely maxed out. And now we have a culture of completely disregulated humans that don't have the skill set to bring themselves back into homeostasis.

100%. I mean, evolution is slow and culture is fast. Ooh, well said. And this is creating these misdemeanor. mismatches, like you say, at every single turn. I mean, these paleolithic stressors with which we evolved, of which we've enumerated many, but calorie posity, exposure to fluctuation in temperature, living in community, immersion in nature, you know, minimal shoe wear, no, no sofas and lazy boys. That was just the norm for 99.5% of human history. And so in that last 120 years since the Industrial Revolution, really accelerating in the last 50 to 70 years, we've essentially hijacked our biology with chronic ease, period. And so now the trick is, well, there's two options, right?

We can seek some sort of technological moonshot, right? And all of a sudden we're going to turn into those Wally characters and, you know, adapt to, you. twinkies or whatever, you know, more cogently, we can self-impose the right dosage of paleolithic stress in order to realign the way we live with our biology. Right, right. And those are the protocols that I call good stress. And, you know, in the long term, they're not really that stressful. You know, you find the edge of your discomfort.

And over time, you can play, you can titrate and, you know, increased duration, decreased temperature, play with the edges of your eating windows, for example, all of this different stuff. But really what you're just doing is you're swimming with nature's current. You're swimming with your own engineering. And we've just so undermined our own. biology. And what do we do because there is a mindset that kicks in when you're at that edge of discomfort. I've seen it with fasting. I've seen it with food changes. And I've experienced it in

cold plunging. The brain goes into a place of, oh my God, this is horrible. I don't like this. And then there's like, I don't know who that voice is inside my head, but the little voice inside my head is like, well, then make it easy for you. This is why I love three-day water fast, because I have to tell that voice over and over again, remember you're not eating today. You're not eating today. But that edge is where there's something in our head that's talking to us. How do we talk back?

How do we create something to deal with that voice? Yeah. I mean, I think fasting is an interesting one versus like cold plunging where it is so acute for some people. Yeah. So, I mean, I, in my early days of really reversing my diabetes and losing a ton of weight, you know, I started a very basic 16-8 intermittent fasting protocol. And but just because I consolidated my consumption of food into eight hours didn't mean that I didn't get hungry at like 9 p.m., right?

Right. But because I became a disciple, if you will, to that practice, instead of mindlessly just wander. over to the pantry and, you know, getting a box of Tate chocolate chip cookies, you know, I actually had to stop and witness the provenance, if you will, of the hunger and really ask myself, is the origin of this hunger a biological need? Or is it a psychological desire? And the fasting protocol in some ways coerced me to find that space. And 99.99% of the time, Mindy, I was just eating my feelings, right? It was an emotional desire.

I've got plenty of warehouse energy on my old frame here to make it through some time. So it wasn't really ever a biological need. You know, maybe I was bored, maybe I was tired, maybe something wasn't going well at work. Maybe someone insulted me on Instagram before I built my psychological immune system, right? You know, maybe my kids were driving me crazy. Maybe I felt envious of someone else's achievement. Maybe I had low self-worth. And because modern culture offers us.

a surfeit of shelf-stable calories, I could go get my dopamine just right over there. And so the fasting protocol really helped me untangle that. And this is why I say that the most potent impact of fasting, for me, wasn't physiological. It was actually psychological because I found that space between stimulus and response. And that space spilled over into other areas of my life. If I could a shoe mindlessly wandering to the refrigerator, could I also resist that need to have that glass of wine or do some retail therapy on Amazon or even knee-jerk react

to something annoying that my kids might do? Could I not be a more mindful human being? and live more appropriately. And so this is why I think these protocols have, they're so protein and flexible in their utility. And you know what you do in the asking of the question, and you may have found this in all the research you did for your book, but when we ask our brain a question in a stressful situation,

you pop yourself out of your amygdala. So the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, you can't really be in both of them at the same time. You're usually running your brain from one or the other. So the amygdala is scanning for if it needs to fight or flight or tender be friend. It's like scanning for a threat. Whereas the prefrontal cortex is scanning for some kind of solution or some kind of meaning for this. So the minute you start to say, what is it?

that I want right now. Do I want to feel better or does my body need food? You've popped yourself out of your amygdala and you've gone right into your prefrontal cortex and now you're building new neurons that are going to create these new neuronal pathways. Yeah, so good. Right on. Yeah. It's brilliant. Yeah, I mean, you know, the stress response, it's important to remember, is actually adaptive, you know, but where we've gone off kilter in modern society is that it becomes chronic. So, and when you are chronically stressed, chronically having that response, that's when you see all these negative downstream psychological and physiological impacts. Like I go hiking up here in the Santa Monica Mountains all the time, you know, from time to

time I'll run into a rattlesnake on the path or something. And what happens? I have a adaptive bottom-up stress response. My heart rate and my respiratory rate start to increase. My liver secretes just the right amount of glucose and sends it to my extremities to fight or flee. And, you know, my pupils might dilate the aperture of my attention comes very, very tight. I become self-obsessed and I distrust the world for good reason because I'm trying to satisfy my biological imperative to survive. And then, of course, course what happens the snake takes a look at me is like Jeff will not be on a specials menu today he slithers off you know into the high grasses and what happens my body bounces back

it comes back to center it comes back to homeostasis my heart rate and respiratory rate decrease you know the aperture of my attention opens back up I become more creative I trust the world again I'm happy Jeff I think where we run into problems in modern society is that for so many people, the rattlesnake, just never leaves the path. Never goes away. And we lack those emotional regulatory techniques to bring us back to center, to leverage the part of your brain that you leveraged when you turned left. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's really, it's really true. And you know, people can go listen to the whole video on YouTube because I used the analogy that when we're dealing, much like what we're talking with today, that so many people when it comes to food, they go right. They go the easy way. Just give me the ease. And what I learned in the going left based off the skill set that had hit my brain from the fasting the week before is that sometimes you can look around and you could say, I want to go left, even though like there's difficulty there, but I want to go into it so that, like you said, I can get on

the other side of this as quickly as possible so that, and maybe in that, I will learn something and it became like a whole thing in my community, which was, but I think we always, I mean, my husband was like, go right. Nobody's going that way. Well, maybe he's just a nonconformist. That's okay. He and I have had a lot of conversations about it because I was like, no, I need to go into the hard because that's going to move me away from the fire. And that was, I mean, there's so much metaphor in that. Yeah. Well, I think that we as a society and as individuals really need to reframe the ease that we're truly, truly looking for in life.

I mean, that portrait of Jeff on the couch, binging Larry David and eating chubby hubby, yes, that is a form of ease, but it's not really the ease that we're looking for. I often think of that the ease that we really want, you know, doesn't taste like that ethylene gassed tomato that we buy at Vaughns or wherever. You know, it actually tastes like that juicy, sweet, bursting tomato that we grew in our own backyard. And we did so with a degree of inconvenience. You know, we had to, you know, cultivate the soil.

We had to plant the seed. We had to get enough water, enough sun on it. We had to prune the leaves. And through that discomfort, that a bit of inconvenience, we get this wonderful, faken, efflorescent fruit that we get to truly enjoy. And, you know, we know this feeling as a product of creative immersion sometimes or as a part of like deep collective enterprise when we're engaged with a group doing something that we really truly love. Or sometimes we get it in sports.

It's called, you know, flow state where we get a glimpse of it. But we, you know, linear time tends to dissipate and we have total awareness of our body and space and In fact, we kind of feel without location, and we sort of transcend this vicissitudes of our cotidian dull care. We know that ease that we're truly looking for, and it almost never comes for free. It's like the piano player

spends 10,000 hours learning his or her scales such that when she steps on the stage, she can forget it all, can forget it all and just tap into the spiritual well because that technical well through all that hard work is already there. And I try to think about that in my life with like many things that I do is that there's so much beauty in confronting the struggle and the obstacle. In fact, that is how nature progresses. Nature progresses through mistakes. Right? Nature, sometimes I think nature is a perfect architect, but an imperfect carpenter, right?

So, you know, physiologically. It needs a new PR agency, too, perhaps. For sure. But it is through, you know, we think about mutations or sometimes we call them single nucleotide polymorphisms as like, oh, yeah, well, they can predispose us to disease. And yeah, sure, okay, true. but it is through these mutations that are every once in a while adaptive that actually pushes our species forward because nature selects for the best of us

and then produces another iterative version of a better Mindy and a better Jeff. And we are just these links and this continuous chain of captured sunlight, just here and now we're like the sum total, of all of nature's intelligence experiencing itself as Mindy and as Jeff. And someday we will return to from where we came and nature will spin up a new version, a better version.

And so it's like I think about that when I kind of taught myself how to play piano. It was actually the mistakes that made me better. And, you know, after 30 times trying to play a song, I would eventually get it and I would be flush with motivation and reward such that then, oh, okay, now I've got that. Now I can continue to progress and learn. And so even our curiosity and our learning are fueled by mistakes. And mistakes are hard. We've got to lean into them.

Oh, my God. So well said, so well said. So, okay, so for people who, you know, I can imagine, like, many people listening to this, you're bringing a very courageous message to the world right now, which is so needed. And so talk to me about two things. One, in your book, do you have ideas on how we apply this? And second, where do people get a copy of your book? Because I feel like this is such an ancient message whose time has definitely come. And you put it all in one great book. Yeah. Well, thank you for that opportunity. And I love being with you. And I love the way

you move through the world. Yeah, I mean, I'm like I said, a sort of citizen scientist. I've done a tremendous amount of me search. I've applied every pill and praxis and mushroom and modality on myself. Me too. I am an end of one and I've tried to distill really the wisdom and knowledge of hundreds and hundreds of people, including yourself, who are much, much smarter than me, you know, into some form of fossil record that, that, you know, conveys my experience and how I understand how to be healthy in the world. So yeah, you know, my book, Good Stress, it's filled with like an amalgam of stress protocols. There's 10 of them from the very physiological to some of the more psychosocial as we talked about. And there's really a roadmap for how to do it and even how to

map it into a single day. And over time, like I said, it becomes less and less onerous, I would say. A life of good stress doesn't have to be a miserable life. In fact, it's a very, very fulfilling life. And I am a product of it. So. Amazing. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Where do we find you? All books, like bookstores and all the bookstores. You know, we actually share the same publisher. So that's sweet. Hey, which is a wonderful, wonderful publisher and they're everywhere. But I did scoop up the URL, goodstress.com. Woo, congrats.

Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. I was fortunate that that was available. So, yeah, if you go to Goodstress.com, you can pre-order it there. And I'm fortunate enough on the commune platform to work with so many incredible doctors, so many of our colleagues and mentors and friends. And so I have the luxury of bundling in all sorts of good online courses with the book from the people really.

Yeah. So if you go to good, goodstress.com, what Jeff's talking about is you can buy the book, you can buy a couple books, and then there's some really cool giveaways. So I don't know if like the average reader like always knows that, but it is really a cool thing that happens when you launch a book into the world. So make sure that would be on goodstress.com. Yeah. So, yeah, if you buy the book there, you know, my friends like Mark Hyman and Casey Means and Zach Bush and my wife, Skyler, my long-suffering better three quarters, and I have an online course in there, so I get to bundle all that stuff in there with a book, which is quite amazing. Great. Well, Jeff, I absolutely love what you did with this book. And, you know, pieces of it I was

teaching in my clinic, pieces of it I was teach now I teach online, but you've really brought it together in one format. And I love the psychological immunity. I learned a ton from going through it, and I've learned a ton today. So thank you for everything you're doing. Thanks, Mindy. I so appreciate this opportunity to connect with you, but also with just the unbelievable community that you've created. It's really awesome to watch. So well done. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. 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.