Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - How to Strengthen the Brain to Handle Stress – With Dr. Greg Kelly

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

// R E A D Y • S E T • R E S E T This episode is all about what we can do to reenergize the brain and maximize brain performance. Dr. Greg Kelly is a naturopathic physician (N.D.) and lead product formulator at Neurohacker Collective. His special interest and expertise areas include nootropics, anti-aging and regenerative medicine, weight management, and the chronobiology of performance and health. Also, Dr. Greg Kelly is the author of the book Shape Shift. Plus, he is the past editor of the journal Alternative Medicine Review. He has been an instructor at the University of Bridgeport in the College of Naturopathic Medicine, where he taught classes in Advanced Clinical Nutrition, Counseling Skills, and Doctor-Patient Relationships.                    In this podcast, we cover: How your body will focus its energy and ways to boost your energy levels The difference between fast thinking and slow thinking How to overcome mental fatigue The best ways to keep your brain healthy About supporting the body's ability to self-regulate using nootropics   // E P I S O D E   S P O N S O R S  Pre-Order a copy of The Menopause Reset book today and get the bonus ebook now, for FREE! Feel the impact of Organifi - use code PELZ for 15% off all products!    // R E S O U R C E S   M E N T I O N E D Neurohacker Supplements Use code Resetter for a discount Blue Blocker Glasses Neurotropic Energy Shot Use code Resetter for a discount Dr. Greg Kelly on LinkedIn Neurohacker Collective on Instagram   // F O L L O W Instagram | @dr.mindypelz & @theresetterpodcast Facebook | /drmindypelz & /theresetterpodcast Youtube | /drmindypelz   Please note the following medical disclaimer: By listening to this podcast you understand that this video is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you may have regarding your health or medical condition.  

We need more energy in our brain cells. And if we have that, most of what the brain has to do can be done easier. To me, that's the most finite resource. We only have so much like brain energy. And it has to get put into all these different things that we're trying to accomplish. I am a woman on a mission that is dedicated to teaching you just how powerful your body was built to be. I like to do that by bringing you the latest science, the greatest thought leaders and applicable steps that help you tap into your own internal healing

power. The purpose of this podcast is to give you the power back and help you believe in yourself again. My name is Dr. Mindy Pels and I want to thank you for spending part of your day with me. Okay, Resetters, I brought you another brilliant mind on this episode of the Resetter podcast. I got the pleasure of picking the brain of Dr. Greg Kelly. He is a natural path and he is the product formulator for neurohacker supplements, which are incredible supplements. We'll talk about it in the episode.

But what's super cool about Dr. Kelly is that he literally has over 30 journal articles that have been indexed on PubMed. That is a, aka he's a very brilliant man who spends a lot of time in science, analyzing science and doing his best to bring us the most current research. So on this episode, we dove into the brain like you've never heard before. So you will see, we ended up going down a path of what can we do to re-energize our brain. What strategies do we need to apply during the day? We talked about sleep.

We talked about food. We talked about habits that will maximize brain performance. We talked about when should you power your brain down. and how you can power your brain up. And it was one of the most fascinating conversations I've had on brain health in a really long time. So if you're looking for new strategies to keep your brain strong and you want to know how to move through 2021 with a really happy brain, this is the episode for you. So I hope you enjoy it, Dr. Kelly. Let me just start off by welcoming you.

We have had some of the greatest discussions this year with some of the best. of the greatest minds. And yet I feel like there's this gaping hole around the discussion of brain health. I have brought on experts that we talk about anxiety. We've talked about sleep. Like we've danced around this idea of brain health. But a large piece of why I wanted to bring you on is because you and neurohacker, you guys look at the brain as a whole, as a whole system that's connected to the whole body.

And I think that is something that I really want to unpack and address. But I want to start off with what can we just go right at and help people with this year? Because anxiety is just, I mean, people are feeling anxious. They're feeling hopeless. There's a lot of fear. What can we do to strengthen our brain so that we can handle this really incredibly difficult moment that we're in? So invariably for me, if I just had to cut right to the chase, It's about energy.

So even like one of the positive effects of doing the type of fast that you do every month or the ketogenic diet, those things essentially help the mitochondria that we do have. The powerhouses in ourselves make more efficient use of what we consume so that we can produce more energy. And per like proportionately, our brain, while it's a little bit of our overall weight, uses about 20% of the energy that we produce. every day. So to me, no matter what brain issue we're talking about, stress, mood things like having anxious thoughts or trouble with depressive thoughts or just wanting to perform better at our work or a great workout or have the willpower to do a monthly fast. Like all those things to me unify around this idea we need more energy in our brain cells. And if we have that,

most of what the brain has to do can be done easier. Interesting. I think to me that's the most finite resource. We only have so much like brain energy, so to speak, and it has to get put into all these different things that we're trying to accomplish. And I don't know how much you are. Yeah, you know, here's, yeah, so we know a lot because one of the things that we've done as a group, as a resetter group, is we really dive into what the needs of our mitochondrial.

are. And so when you say energy, I think mitochondria. And then my question to you is, is it true that places like the prefrontal cortex has the most amount of mitochondria or maybe just the brain in general compared to the rest of the body? I think, so I've heard different things. But I think some of the reproductive organs actually have dense, like more mitochondria per cell than other places. I've heard the retina. But we can pack a lot of mitochondria in a cell. Like in general, you know, we would have 100 to a few thousand. And people that are being more active need obviously more to produce that energy. Or if we would take something like the immune system, an immune cell may have to travel, you know,

the equivalent of you or me walking halfway across country in a really short period of time to go someplace to do their job. So what happens then is the mitochondria actually relocate. in those immune cells to propel it and then drastically upregulate the amount of energy they produce. So the same, like if our brain's more active, then it's a much higher demand on mitochondria. And that's like, I mean, in general, my sense is that often no matter what, like what issue we have from a brain perspective, if we can do a better job with brain energy, then the chances that we'll be able to accomplish what we're trying to in that cognitive domain much, much higher.

So is it fair? Go ahead. No, I was just going to say, does that make sense? But it's mitochondria. It's absolutely true. So a lot of what I think of as the neutropic substances, things that would be studied to help the brain perform better, often when you start to dig into these, you'll find that one of the research areas that they tend to help. with would be mitochondrial performance. Amazing.

Yeah, and I want to get into a little bit on neutropics because I find them fascinating and different little hacks. Here's one of the questions I have on that is, is it like the body is always assessing where it needs to focus its energy? And so if it's fighting an infection, it's going to focus its mitochondrial energy there. If it's sitting doing a podcast interview, it's going to use its mitochondrial energy there. Is it that simplistic where it's rationing where it sends the energy to? I think it's more partitioned than that.

So if you just think one of the main sources of making fuel would be sugars, basically, glucose molecules, sucrose molecules. And our brain has its own supply. Now that gets resupplied through our bloodstream eventually. But during this podcast, our visual system, our hearing, our attention, all those things are probably much more on, than like our average moment over the course of the day. So what will happen if we were measuring like an EEG scan, like the beautiful pictures of the brain, we would see some of those with a lot higher activity right now.

And what that's measuring is blood flow to those regions of the brain, and the blood flow is carrying the, basically the substrates to make ATP. And what can then happen is we cause local depletions. And when that happens, that we kind of just hit a mental block there. We don't have the energy to keep going. And so I love, have you ever read Kahneman's book,

Thinking Fast and Slow? Yep, yep. I love two characters. So he has his fast thinker and his slow thinker. And the fast thinker, that's intuition and like a fast response to something. And it's basically the low energy mode. The slow thinker is the one that takes a lot of deliberation and executive function, and that's a much more energy-intensive mode for the brain.

So what typically happens when we don't have enough energy to go around, then we default into that system one character, even when it's not the best way to approach something. And so if we find that doing that, that's almost always a sign that, okay, we need more brain energy. The other thing, like I think it's important anyways, is that the brain has, does basically a whole bunch of skills that collectively we'd call thinking. And some of those skills are grouped together into different bigger picture domains.

So we've got attention would be a classic one. Memory is another. We've got executive function, which is things like, you know, the willpower to do the fast. With our good intentions. It's also the ability not to do things that wouldn't be great for us and to plan and to put ourselves in positions where we can change our mind, quite literally. And then we have another domain that's social cognition. So that's your empathy or your ability to be aware of the emotions that are going

on in our own bodies in the moment or to be doing what you and I are doing right now, which is seeing each other's facial expressions or body languages and being able to read information from that. So that's another domain, social cognition. And what it seems like in both research and my personal experience is when we don't have enough energy, it's hard to get to the things that take more of it. So the executive function is cognition. We can still get the attention because that's a lower energy type thing. But sustained attention or avoiding distraction, those take more energy.

So when we don't have enough, it's easier to get distracted or they'll lose our focus. So to me, like I said at the beginning, what invariably you see is we've woven through all these different domains and skills is this unifying idea of there's only so much brain energy and it's easy to deplete it. And when that happened, it's just hard to be the best version of ourselves in general, but especially in that particular area. So one of my stories would be like I grew up. Boston area, super hardworking dad, executive at a big engineering company in Boston, but crazy commute. He would drive probably only 25, 30 miles as the bird flies, but probably a two-hour drive going each way during rush hour. So by the time he got home, like my story would be my dad used all his mental energy, you know, long before he walked back in that door. So we were much more likely to get a

grouchy, irritated dad. And if he, you know, could shine his shoes and read the newspaper and, you know, maybe have a drink or do something to relax a little bit to recharge the system, then we'd get a much, you know, kinder, gentler version of my dad. So the, I'm a big fan of, like, the context, the circumstances around things. Like blaming our dad at 7 o'clock at night after a long day, crazy commute for being irritated isn't really fair. That's not the cause.

For me, the cause was, like, essentially he used up all the juice and now had to recharge the battery and giving him that. Makes sense. We got, you know, that much more social cognition, which I think for most people's social cognition takes a lot of energy. Like, I've seen studies where they've had people do an empathy test. And some people are naturally good at it. Most people not so.

But the people that aren't, invariably one of the common things they said is it was just, it just felt like too much work. And when you hear that word work, you can almost bank on, okay, that's an energy issue. Okay. Yeah, that actually is the most clear way I've ever heard the brain, the way that the brain is functioning. Just the simplicity of that makes so much sense to me. A couple weeks ago, I was going through. I had a lot of interviews on different podcasts. And at the end of the day, at the end of the week, I kept saying, I feel like my brain hurts.

Like, I just can't like even put my words together. And now I could actually rephrase that and just say, I think I just used all the fuel in the brain. Would that be accurate? Yeah, I think that's much more fair. Okay. Like I think we can really, you know, like I said, it's, there's only so many resources. to go around, they'll get shifted into the part of the brain that's most important. So, like, I think of the brain's job one is keeping us safe.

So that's going to take priority over everything else. So senses, the vision, hearing, they use a lot of brain energy, even when we're sleeping. So one thing I never learned in naturopathic school was that there's a huge surge in ATP just as we start to go into deep sleep. And the reason presumably is because during that deep sleep is when things that we learn during the day get moved around in our brains so that they can be stored if they're important, integrated with other things if that needs to happen. But even during sleep, our mitochondria is still doing a huge amount of work. So, you know, I remember hearing Dave Asprey a couple years ago talking about how important he felt. metacondria were for sleep. And so my guess is we see two things move in parallel. As we get older,

mitochondrial dysfunction is way more prevalent. And as we get older, sleep becomes way more challenging. And my guess would be there's not a, that's not a coincidence. Interesting. Okay. So would it be fair to say if you wanted to get better sleep, then you need to have better mitochondria? I think that would be fair. I don't think there's been the research to say, like, for sure we know this, but my intuition would be, yes, that would be very likely to be true. And what do you feel like are like good, good old fashion strategies? I know in fasting, we talk about this a lot, how ketones, the mitochondria, love ketones. And so not that people should be in ketosis all the time, but ketones are really helpful for getting more ATP out of those mitochondria. What other should? What, what other should be in ketosis? You

strategies can we apply? If we know sleep is an issue, if we know our brain's not functioning the way we want, are there like proven scientific things we can do to start to power these up? I think it would be mostly preclinical because the way to study mitochondria is really animal experiments. But there's just a huge amount of animal experimental evidence that polyphenols from plants are really toughen up. So when I think of mitochondria, I always refer to it as a network. So each cell has their network, right? That network's constantly reshaping itself.

So there's terms like mitochondrial biogenesis and vision, fusion. But basically, long story short, is our mitochondrial network is constantly adapting itself to, in response to what we do now, I believe, so that it's better prepared to deal with something in the future. So to me, exercise would be a classic example. I don't believe our muscles get bigger and stronger because we lifted weights as much as they get bigger and stronger because they expect we may do that again. And they want to be better prepared. So to me, that's interesting. That's better prepared.

Like we're a complex adaptive system. So our system's always trying to make predictions about what it will need and adjusting. So the mitochondria within a cell. do that, but then within the muscle tissue would do that. So if we lift weights for sprinting, the mitochondrial networks will both get fitter, but in different ways. So I think it's brain, that depending on, we need to challenge it. We need the fuel like the ketones or being able to use the carbohydrates that we get in our diet efficiently. Obviously, we need air, because air is the thing that drives that the first stages of converting those fuels into ultimately ATP.

So we need all these different things. But I think challenge is one of the things that to essentially say, okay, I bet I should be more prepared and that's what this will look like. And so what polyphenols tend to do, and this is a broad generalization, right? So polyphenols tend to be, they're called secondary metabolites in plants. So there are things that plants don't use for their own fuel. They use for some other reason. But the most common one is the stress molecules plants make.

So resveratrol would be a classic polyphenol. So grapes will make that in greater concentrations if it's drier, if the sun's more intense, if they're not getting enough water. So it's a drier environment. And they concentrate it in the things that interact with the environment. So the skin and then typically the seeds. And so it's a plant adaptogen, basically, right? It's the plant's way of adapting to the stress of the environment.

Totally get it. And when we then consume that plant that has more of that polyphenol compound, the sense is that that's probably foreworns our cells, our mitochondria like, oh, the environment's tougher for this plant. That probably means I should be prepared for it to be tougher for me. So hence the mitochondrial. network toughen up in advance. So that's that would be the general sense of how polyphenols would work. So I'm wondering if you you have my wheels spinning now because I'm thinking that fasting may work the

same way. So the way that we really teach fasting in our resetter group is varying your fast. So you have your short fast, you have your long fast and you have your no fast. And that I love this idea of a hormetic stress and that if you put your body, into a little bit of stress, it builds itself stronger. So what I hear you saying is that we need to approach the brain with that same idea of little bit of stress, getting it nutrients that have like the polyphenols that have already been stressed so that we can use stress to our advantage, not something we're necessarily trying to run away from. Is that correct?

Yeah, so I tend to use challenge. So I like to go for it. So my undergraduate degree, I was in engineering. And then I was an officer in the Navy. Never really used my degree, but had the math science background. And after the Navy, I decided to take classes at the University of Hawaii, eventually got a grant where I studied. My master's degree was in essentially Thai language and culture. But my focus in my classes was nutritional and medical anthropology.

But I did a lot, you know, every day, I would spend a lot of it speaking Thai or learning Thai. And it was January 1st, I believe, of 1993. I had met a bunch of naturopathic doctors in Hawaii. I thought their life was awesome. I was trying to go to you next. And so I was just sitting on this beautiful point in Hanoahu in Hawaii, trying to decide for sure what I wanted to do and decided,

okay, I'm going to whatever I have to do, I'm going to be in naturopathic school somewhere in September. And, you know, so this was January 1st. Two days later, I couldn't remember how to write my name and tie streamed together a coherent sentence. So I went from not fluent by any stretch of the imagination, but very competent in Thai to basically being illiterate. And what I believe happened is my brain just said, okay, this math and science stuff is going to be way more important based on that. To make room for that, I'm going to like turn off all this. return that on.

And so what I know seems to work for me is convincing my brain something's important. So if I do that, it automatically then shifts the resources there. I don't really have to worry about it. My job's brilliant. So if there's something like if I decided today, I wanted to learn a second language and I went all in that might I would literally be reprimed. programming my brain to say whatever, whenever I hear this language, whatever I'm studying, that I need to pay attention and focus in on that.

Right. Is that correct? Yeah, and I believe, again, getting back to that, resources are finite. So again, like I wish I knew the book, but it was some point in the late 90s, early 2000s. I read this book, and in it there was a chapter on the person that at the time they felt had the best memory ever tested. Now, if you had asked me before reading that, I would have said, oh, like, more memory is better. Like, more is better.

Right. If the memory is already good, if it can be better, like, I'm all over. But what I left with reading that is there were certain things I take for granted that this person could not do because they require doing a little bit of forgetting and his brain couldn't do that. So it made me think like it's not, it's more of a zero-sum game, right? Like, you can get better here, but at the cost of over here. Ah, brilliant. And so, like, that seems to be how my brain works, at least that, that, you know, when I shifted from, you know, medical, nutritional anthropology, Thai language, that back to having to do basically pre-med, it just shifted where, you know, what part of my brain was getting attention and getting the resources. And so that, for me, like, language is perfect.

I'm not at all good in Spanish, but I took secures a bit as a kid. lived in Mexico when I was 14. And that summer, my Spanish was way better than it was three years later, despite continuing to take it in school. Because there's nothing like being around it every day to convince my brain that this is really important. And there's no substitute in just taking it maybe an hour a day in a class. So even today, if I'm going to, I go to Spain most years for a vacation.

And if I just start to listen to Spanish, radio in advance of that, it starts to, again, that convincing strategy. You know, this is important. We better warm up and put that part of the brain back on online. So this makes so much sense. And I feel like you're connecting dots for me because I used to always say that I have an obsessive brain where when I hook on to some new information or some new strategy, like my brain can't stop thinking about it.

It can't stop trying to learn on it. And I actually have come to learn that I actually do better if I allow this obsessive brain to unfold. So, for example, I'm in the process of writing my fourth book. And I found that the best way for me to tackle a book is to really just not stop thinking about it. Like be all in it and really get myself in the vibration, whether I'm writing or not writing, there has to be sort of this all-in experience for me. And what I'm hearing you say is that was just a way of me shifting my brain power to put it into something that's very important.

And out of that, I get better brain function. Is that correct? Yeah, because a lot of insights come out of things we're not really planning, right? Like if my brain's focused on something. Like lately I've been working on vision as the main category, but specifically things that we might be able to do as a supplement that would protect our eyes from looking at screens. Because we were on screens a crazy amount as a popular event last year. And now, you know, with education and all these things moving on the line, it's much more.

And that's a big stress. I mentioned earlier that our visual system is one of the big energy demands of our brain. And now it's just being, you know, stressed for, you know, many more hours a day with all the light from our, computer monitors or other screens. So, you know, when I'm when I shift into a project like that, it's very helpful to be able to really shift into it as opposed to, you know, like juggling three different formulas at the same time. So at least from the brain works. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So if anybody was like wanting to have maximum brain power for a specific task, then it's almost like you have to tell your brain, this is important. I'm going to go all in on.

this topic or this whatever it is. And just in acknowledging that the brain needs to prioritize that the brain will put its energy sources there. Like the other thing that we learned from fasting is it's the fasting and the refeating. They're both important. Yes, very much. And so, you know, like it's activity and recovery. So, you know, like, yes, we want to then, you know, focus. But even for me, I, like most of the my work days, I set a little, it's called Stan. up, I believe it. Yeah, but I just have it set so every 30 minutes, it reminds me to get up. And many times during the day, I'll just do a quick two or three minutes, just walk outside. But oftentimes during that walk, something will pop in. That's a better way to say something I've

been trying to ride or like, you know, like an idea will pop into my head. It's like, oh, that would be, you know, something to follow up on when I get back. So it's the little breaks, I think that are also important. I remember teaching naturopathic students. in the early 2000s. And like one classic thing that, you know, that sticks with me to the day was a student came up after class, you know, they've been really struggling and basically said, you know, Dr. Greg, I feel like I have to reread the same thing over and over. And, you know, it's hard for me to stay focused.

And my first question was, you know, how much sleep are you getting? And they said, well, I can't really afford to get more than a few hours because they have to sleep. And I said, well, you know, you're doing. something, but we're not studying, like you're not being efficient. You'd be better, sir, get the more sleep and let your brain be more efficient with this studying time that you're allocating, as opposed to thinking we have to do, do, do. But that, whether it's sleep or whether it's, you know, sitting uninterrupted for many hours a day in front of our computer or

doing our job or, you know, I remember in nature practice school and I'm sure it was the same in chiropractic school is we'd literally sit in a class during our first two years for eight or nine hours a day. Oh, yeah, it's brutal. Right. Like that's just way beyond what our short-term memory can take in and deal with. And so what ends up happening, we do all these crazy things that are inefficient that our brain just isn't designed for and then wonder why our brain is not performing the way that we hope. So neutropics, you know, the fasting, things like that, you know, they'll help, but ultimately we want to also put in place good strategies as well. Love that.

The lovely piece is the piece that seems like we're all about doing and seldom does the recovery piece get the attention that it really merits. Yeah, because if you're recovering, I'm thinking that it's a little bit like your cell phone that if you're using it all the time and you don't plug it in, eventually you're not going to get any information from it. It's going to die. Would you say that the brain's the same way? that if you've got to have some kind of recharge that's powering it up so that it can use the energy efficiently

and put it in the right locations or places that you have prioritized? I would say absolutely. And I think that's why things like walks in nature end up being very brain supportive. I think my dad's strategy of when he got home, you know, basically doing his own thing. And most of it was what I think of as ritualistic behavior. years, things that didn't take a lot of thought, right? Policing your shoes or, you know, reading the paper or he used to be a pipe smoker, this was, you know, at least at one point in his life. Yeah.

He would do something that was essentially could make that system one character be the only thing that needed to be on stage. And I think the one thing that we can all do to our loved ones is at the end of the days, give them that space to do what they need to recharge. Because I think, I think, the the expectations out of romantic relationships are a lot higher now than they were in my parents generation and you know so fortunately my mom didn't expect my dad when he came home like I remember her to this day she'll say well we had six kids so my mom you know had her hands full but she wouldn't share any problems that happened that day with my dad until after he recharged and so I think even little things like that my mom's intuition was right like my dad

if she had shared it right away, she would not have got, like I know we would have got a bad response for adding that into my dad's day, where an hour or two later, that was back on the menu to share that and get a more resourceful person. So I think just understanding how the brain works,

we can be kinder to ourselves, but also kinder to the other people and just realize that this isn't, because my partner is, you know, like mean, irritable, whatever. It's like, you know, they're just tapped out, now I need a little bit of time to recharge.

So it's fair to come home at the end of the day and just say, hey, I just need my brain to recharge. I'm going to go and sit down over here. Give me a few moments to let my brain recharge itself or amp itself back up. I absolutely think so. I love that. So remember I mentioned earlier, like the social cognition and empathy and body language. So I tend to think of these different cognitive things as a bit of a pyramid.

and the higher up things take more energy, would be the simple story. And for most people, social cognition skills sit pretty high up, if not at the top. So we just take a lot of energy for most people. Now, people that are naturally really good, maybe it's a little lower on their pyramid and logic and executive function are a bit higher.

But those system two-character type of tasks just take more energy. And so when it's already largely depleted, it's just not reasonable to expect that we're going to show up as our best version with those things that take more image. So like classically what I would see, and maybe you've seen the same, is you would, like the best version of yourself shows up at work and for strangers and the time you get home, your least resourceful version is what walks in the door. And so my story would be is that's not a character thing.

That's just that you've used up most of what allowed. you to be the best version. And if you get some recharging time, then it's much more reasonable now to expect you to be the better version of yourself you're capable of. Yeah. I wish I had this conversation with you when my kids were like five years old. They're now 20 and 18, but I remember the simple task of just reading them a book when I would come home after work was just overwhelming. And I didn't have words to put to it. So I hope every, working parent out there is giving themselves some grace on this. What do you think happens if I come home and I start going through my phone and I get on social media and I start looking at or I get on the TV,

I start looking at the news. Is that, I mean, even though it feels better on the brain, it's not as high level of an interaction, is that recharging us? Is that depleting us? Where does that fit in the spectrum? My guess is it would vary person to person. But so I'm a big fan of Han Celia's work in stress, right? He's the godfather of that domain. But one of the things that he, like I think of the principles that he was able to articulate based on his research.

But basically one of them was when a system stressed, doing anything different will tend to then decrease that stress. So he called it, I think, deviation. So when it becomes like stress to the point of exhaustion, then not deviation doesn't help. It's just an additional. So I think like my intuition is it's not the best strategy under most circumstances because it would be a similar type of stress to probably what we were doing during the day, looking at a screen for many people. So it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be much of a deviation strategy under the best of circumstances. And if we're already maxed out, then it would just be another stress added in.

Another math. Yeah. And what I think about this generation that's growing up right now and how, and especially in this pandemic where they're sitting in front of screens and then they get off their school on a screen and they get onto their phone on a screen. And I just see what my own children are going through and how demanding that has been. Do you feel like the online version of school has a different effect on the brain or is it individual? Are there individual cases? I do hear a lot of parents and I've talked to my own kids about this, that they're just not enjoying the, they want that human interaction. They want to hear from a teacher that's not on a screen. Do screens create more drain on our brain energy? I think so just because it's more stressed on our

visual system, if nothing else. I mean, I would guess there's more than that. But screen, means put a huge stress on our visual system. So we've got, and I can go into it like quick and dirty is we've got macular carotenoids. So those are things like lutein and xanthin that are found. They're, you know, pigments in plants. That those are used, essentially exhausted as our vision deals with light. You know, we've got mitochondria in our retina that are really active. But basically, screen time, like I was looking at, like, there's no agreement on eye

strain and the related things like that from screen time. But it's somewhere, this was obviously pre this last year, but it was somewhere between a third and two thirds of people that worked on a computer during the day, had one or more symptoms that would be because of excessive screen time. And I've seen, suggested that more than eight out of 10 people, if they're on a screen for more than two hours in a row, we'll have some degree of eye strain-related symptoms. So, I mean, it's ubiquitous. And one of the things that happens, I think, again, goes back to energy, is that we become less capable of concentrating. So that would be classically what you would see with children or teens now with Zoom,

is that their ability to concentrate, be focused, have attention is going to be harder when they're doing this online than it was in a classroom setting. And even in a classroom setting, it's not easy, you know, if you're being taught at for hours in a row. So yeah, yeah, that's what. My sense is that it would be more demanding on our brain and nervous system than that same education, not on screens. Yeah, that's one of the things we love to do in our family is sit down to a big meal and just sit and talk.

And I've noticed this year in 2020 that I've found that my kids are craving it more, that it's like that human interaction mixed with not like the social media of TikTok and things like that where it's really fast. Like they just seem to crave like sitting and talking to a real person. And as we're, you know, doing this interview, it's end of 2020. I think one of the things that was so interesting about 2020 is it kind of sideswiped everybody. And I think now that I'm listening to you talk, I'm wondering if we went into 2020 already with a depleted brain and we didn't control what we focused on, then what I'm hearing from what you're saying is that our brain, it would be easy for our brain to fatigue this. year, it would be easy for our brain to go into fear this year. It'd be easy to stay stuck in an anxiety loop. But if we want to change that for 2021, then we're going to have to reprioritize what we

look at. And it sounds like we're going to have to reprioritize what our daily habits are so we could power our brain up. Would that be fair to say? Yeah. Yeah. I think absolutely fair. And I think, like, I know, you know, just in friends' family that have shared with me that the number of their acquaintances that have some degree of mood challenges this year is just way higher. And so, like, I saw something, this is probably within the last two or three weeks, so it's still fairly fresh in my mind. But the gist of it was if we go on a diet, like anyone that's done this knows we're going to like hunger, we'll go up, right? We're going to increase hunger when we don't get enough food.

So basically the gist of this study was, and it varied by person, but that when we didn't get our social needs met, the brain craved that interaction in the same way appetite creates food. And so that would be, so I think of myself like a camel when it comes to social,

needs. I don't think my needs are, you know, what others are. But we all have those. And for anything that's a basic need, if it's not met, then job one of our body and our brain, basically, is to get that need met. And so the core needs are, so in the hypothalamus, there's things like appetite regulation and sleep drive and thirst regulation and body temperature regulation. Like, sex drive would be there. But I think whatever social drive we have is likely in there somewhere as well. And if one of those isn't met, then what seems to me to have been the case when I was in practice was whenever one wasn't met, the common thing was people's appetite went up.

Oh, yeah, and we're hearing that. The difference. So if you didn't get enough to meet your hydration needs, then, you know, you gained weight. appetite went up. If your romantic life was unsatisfying, then very common to see weight challenges pop up. Activities are another thing that's in their sleep. We know if someone doesn't get their sleep needs, Matt, they basically almost become hybridatory, right? They put on a lot of body fat, and I believe, again, the sense that, okay, I'm not sure when this person's going to catch up on all the sleep, that they're not getting now, so I'll be more prepared.

And prepared is more body fat stored, just like hyponatory animals. So I think a lot of these things go back to what I mentioned, this idea of our brain and body, like right down to the mitochondrial networks and cells, are always doing the best to try to match us to what they expect will happen. And, you know, the further we get from an environment or lifestyle that supports, you know, like all our needs being met and rocking health, the more they then have to adjust and cut corners in different areas to make up the difference.

So would it be fair to say that in 2021, we need to look at all our needs, our needs being met in order to get, like we need to find outlets for social. And we, you know, we need to work on thirst and appetite and sex drive. Like are all of those things going to, if we work on satisfying it to the brain,

then the brain will be more prepared to handle the day-to-day activities? Yeah, I think those basic survival things eat up. So, like, you'll see the term bandwidth a lot when it comes. And like a classic side, so we go on a diet. We decide, like, January 1st, I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to go on a, you know, 1,000 calorie diet, whatever, you know, for the month of January. So we'll get off to a great start. And, you know, three or four days in, it's just like being on Survivor.

the TV show, right? They're hungry. They want to talk about food. Our bandwidth's being consumed with thoughts about food. And that will typically just, that pressure will grow until we willpower gives out. We fall off the diet, regain the lost weight. That's the classic thing. But in the interim, we used up most, if not all the bandwidth, thinking about food. Because we just, once we made that resource scares, the brain shifted to making sure we get that. So the key thing with these basic needs is when we start ruminating about them. That's a sign that that needs not being met. And it's important to do that to free up the bandwidth so it can go into these more important areas. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. So I'm just trying to, I'm putting it in terms of

in my brain right now of fasters because one of the things we talk a lot about in fasting, is this desire to create this metabolic switch. And if we're eating all day long, we're still staying within one energy source. We haven't switched over into the ketogenic metabolic energy pathway. And I think one of the mistakes we've learned in the health movement is people think, well, if ketones are really gray and the ketogenic pathway is really wonderful, I should just be over there all the time.

But what I'm really teaching and what I see in the science is that it's the switching in and out of these two states of energy, getting glucose giving you energy and ketones giving you energy. And you want to go in and out of both of them. But to get to this place where you can thrive in the ketogenic pathway, takes some willpower. It takes some, your brain is going to have a little bit of a tantrum. Are there any hacks we can use when we're trying to make changes and the brain is chatting at us? Are there any hacks that you know of that we can use to override that?

So I think when we do need to tap our willpower more, that's when neutropics can help. Great. Tell us about that. Yeah, there. So neutropics basically are just a category of things that can help our brain perform better. So they can be doing very different things. Some might be serving as precursors to the neurotransmitters that our brain makes. Some may help us make and use those neurotransmitters. some may help our brain make more energy. They can be doing a range of things. But if we need our brain to be doing more, in general, I think our chances of being able to do that

are more likely to be optimized when we're doing some kind of a well-thought-out utropic stack. So, you know, something that typically has, you know, several to more ingredients combined. Okay. Yeah. Such as. Well, caffeine is by far the most used neotropic substance. Yes, it is. But caffeine, so when we.

when I talked about that pyramid, so the base I think of is being, you know, awake, vigilant, caffeine just rocks there. Like, that's what it excels at. But it's not typically going to make us our best social version of ourselves in terms of it may make us think we are, but, you know, we'll be irritable. We'll actually be a worse version of ourselves. So what you see is with a lot of the neutropic compounds is they're hormetic, to use the term you mentioned early, right?

that there's a Goldilocks zone where, you know, there's a just right amount where it'll help us. So caffeine as a neutropic, it tends to be somewhere between like maybe a six ounce cup of coffee and maybe like a 16 ounce. More caffeine than that will keep us maybe more awake, but it's not going to make our cognition better to the right. And then you have things like chlorine that helps our brain make acetylcholine. So coline donors, you have something called elthanein that helps the alpha brain waves, which is much more like kind of relaxing brain wave pattern that helps us with focus. So there's lots of things that can be stacked together. And what the goal should be for any of these brain supplements that you feel that your brain's able to do more. Like ultimately within the biohacking space, your mileage may vary.

that so different things can work for different people but to me a good neutropics should be subjectively felt and felt quickly definitely that day would you use it in the moment of stress like where you're like okay I know I'm I'm having I'm requiring a lot from my brain right now so when I lean into a neutropic to help me get over that hump whether it's fasting or a big work day or for a student who's studying and then I can at the end of the day go and recharge the brain. Is that how you would use a neutropic? So it depends on what's, like I category is really anything that helps the brain perform better

as in the neutropic category. So if it has caffeine in it or a caffeine-like thing, then to me, for me personally, that's an early morning thing. I do fine with caffeine. Yes, yeah. Probably about 11 to noon. And then after that, it will definitely affect me trying to sleep well that night. But there's neutropic compounds like go to cola, it's an Ayveda herb.

That's completely fine to take at dinner. We actually have it in our, we call it Qualia Night, but it's basically a neotropic stack intended to be taken at dinner to help our both sleep better that night, but to de-stress, help us move into a more relaxed space, but then help our brain work better over time. So one of the, the idea of ATP in the brain, So when I was looking into that, I was trying to find studies on things that had increased the ability for the brain to make ATP.

And one of the things I found, and again, this was an animal study. We just don't see these types of studies on humans. Yeah. Yeah. You can't measure brain ATP. Yeah. But all of polyphenols were something that I came on that really, they essentially were able, if those were fed to old mice, they could be. make the brain make the ATP levels it would have in a younger mice.

Beautiful. Right. So I think there's lots of things that can be neutropics. And it's one of the things neurohacker collective does. When we create a formula, there's almost, well, today, every product we've created has some element of mitochondrial energy support. Because whether it's for the immune system, as I mentioned, what those cells needing more energy to get to where they need to do their work or the brain or you have an anti-aging

product or something in that category. And again, like mitochondrial dysfunction just would be a common thread through most of the things I end up working on. Anti-aging one, definitely a lot more mental clarity. And so it's a mixture of mitochondrial nutrition mixed with this neutropic idea of getting the right, I don't know a better word, but hacks into the brain. Herbs, what will we call them?

Because like Lions, Maine and things like that are neutropics. If we move out of the caffeine category, those are, those are all great. And they make your brain feel great. Would you worry about taking them too much so that the brain doesn't know how to do it on its own? Is that erroneous? No, I mean, I'm, so I, like, one of my core beliefs is that the thing that our brain and body are excellent at is adapting to things.

The downside of that is if we do the same thing every day, we'll usually speed up adaptation. And if we do higher doses of things, we may speed it up really, really fast. So like my model, think of an upside down you. And the bottom would be time, so like duration. And exercise is a good example. So we decide we're going to January 1st, get into lifting weights, never done it before. pretty much anything you do over the first six weeks, you're going to improve. But if you keep doing the same thing every day, every day, don't get any recovery,

you'll plateau very quickly and then overtrained. So the thing that you were doing hasn't changed, but you track through that from poor performance to improving performance to plateau to worsening performance, to ultimately maybe back almost as poor performance as when you started. I believe that most, if not everything, will eventually track through that. And the way that an exercise that we would help someone not to track through that quickly would be to alter their workouts. So they don't do the same workout every day.

Maybe they do pushing today and pulling exercises tomorrow. And then Wednesday, they take the day off and then they repeat it. And then what you commonly see with exercises every maybe 6 to 8 weeks, you'd do a deloading week. where either you take the week off or you'll do a third or a half of what you would normally do, right, as a pseudo recovery. So I think to me with supplements and with neutropics especially, it makes a lot of sense to approach them in the same way you would exercise. So the neutropic stack, I take, call your mind.

I take Monday through Friday. I take usually personally about just over half the recommended dose. that seems to be perfect for my normal workday. But last week I was driving from San Diego to Santa Barbara. So that day I took double the dose, right? Because with the traffic, with the challenge of my brain and nervous system would face in that four hours of driving, that's not something I'm as used to. So I figure, okay, I need more support today.

And I don't get the beginning of my day because that's the time that you'll need it now ramping up. And then I said, the neutropic that we designed geared more towards the end of the day is very different. It wouldn't have anything stimulating, but has things that, again, would support the shift that our brain needs to make as it moves in tonight. Because what you really see with the brain is the pathways like acetyloline and dopamine that we need for executive function during the day, those ramp up first thing in the morning, but then they start to ramp down in the evening.

and gaba and adenosine, the things that eventually help us to move into that sleep state start to rip up, melatonin, the other ones. So the compounds that we need for support in the morning are invariably not the ones we want. One of my pet peeves is when you see a supplement, like, take this three times a day. You can almost guarantee that it's not going to work well that way.

Yeah. Or take the same one all the time. to your point, you're speaking my language because with fasting, we see so many people that get really excited about one meal a day. And they just do one meal a day over and over and over and over again. And then they get stuck because of that exact thing that you just said, where they have been doing the thing that got like the first time they entered into doing one meal a day, they got this incredible benefit. But they didn't vary it enough. And so then eventually the body gets stuck. And they're like, oh, see, it's just another diet.

it's just another fad. It's not working for me. But what I think we really need to get out into the world is that variation is what the body needs. You go into stress, like you said, you come out of stress. So I love your example of how you use those supplements, like use them here and then back away from them, up the dose, down the dose. The hard part is for the layperson to find that rhythm for themselves.

Would you say that that's accurate, especially with supplements? Yeah, it's way easier for people, you know, and this goes back to when I was in practice, just say, like, do this every day. Take this. Yep. Where when you add nuance and that becomes, you know, more challenging. But I think that nuance is ultimately where we want to get people. So to have a sense that, okay, this, you know, whatever the supplement, this is the amount I need. And I'm going to be now for the holiday is traveling across country. And it's going to be more stressful.

So, you know, maybe more support. or, you know, today, like if I'm lifting heavy, I'm going to do more supplementation in the recovery that day than I would on a weekend day when I'm, you know, going to the beach personally, right? So I think as long as we don't expect too much at the beginning of ourselves, but have these principles to work with, then we'll get there. So I think the key thing is just, you know, letting people know that very few things need to be done every day. So like going back again to vision. So the vision product that I've been working on will have a few fat soluble compounds in. So in studies, you'll usually see that was given every day. But fat soluble things bioaccumulate, right?

They build up. So if you don't take it for a couple days or a week, you're not going to go deficient that quickly, basically. And my one exception would be things like insulin or thyroid, Things like that, you know, your body's depending on that you need to do. But supplement rarely would fall into that world. They're going to be much more like exercise. Yeah, well said, well said.

So 2021, I feel a little bit like we're not going to be fooled this time. Like, fool me once, but don't fool me twice. So 2020, side swiped everybody. There was, I feel like, just between our online community, our clinic community, just chaos and a lot of brain distraction. But going into 2021, we know that this may be sort of the long haul. We may be getting these viruses more. We might be, who knows, I mean, I've got a kid that's applying to college right now,

that we have no idea what college will look like in the fall. Like there's so many unknowns. So what I'm thinking would be the way I want to approach 2021 based off of what you're saying is I want to use as many of these tools to power my brain up. So my brain is able to handle whatever 2021 throws. at me. And what I've heard you say is polyphenols. We've talked about neutropics. I want to ask you another question on that in a second. Sleep, decompressing, like the example with your dad, supplementation. What else can we do? If I want to be proactive so that I can make sure that

whatever 2020 throws at me, my brain is going to be at its best. What other habits, what other strategies can we use? So I think the like one of my so I'm a big fan of the transitions of things like our nervous system cells everything's really designed of change so one of my favorite things and I don't know why this was never in my anatomy and physiology books but I believe it's called hook weaver law but basically the gist of it was in the mid-1800s when they did experiments to see how our hearing and vision work, it's the change. It's more specifically the ratio of change that drives those. So the examples for the audience is if you walk into a completely dark room and lit one candle,

you'd notice a crazy big difference. But if there was a hundred candles lit and you'll lit one more, not so much, right? So the quantity, the one candle is not that important. It's the proportional change between that one candle and all the others that were, we're not lit. So that's why our hearing is based on like a log scale, the decibel. And so in general, to me, time periods of contrast, the beginning and ends of days, like sunrise, sunset, or things we can do to create contrast, so the fasting and the refeating. Especially like to me, long fast don't particularly make sense, but integrating lots more short mini fast through the year, absolutely do. So what I would say to me if I was like, all right, what habits?

So what can you put in place at the beginning of your day? So the, you know, a morning walk and natural light, probably I don't know of anyone personally that hasn't done that and felt better for putting that habit in place. Well said. So that could mean like super low tack, you know, maybe while I'm working for home, it's definitely easier for people to do. but even if working from the office, parking our car a little bit and walking maybe to get coffee or taking a bit longer walk. So that can be important. A huge fan again then at the transition at the end of the day.

So I think it's the musical rant. Isn't the key song there? Like measure your life in sunsets is one of their. Ah, okay. Getting to see the sunset more, right? Because that shifts our brain into essentially. oh, I need to start getting ready for nighttime. And so those are...

Do you need to go outside or can you just look out your window? Do you like actually like go walk the dog, like get outside at those times? I think it's better to be able to do that and to get into a routine in the New Year so it becomes our habit. The other thing, I'm a huge believer that don't try to start all a bunch of habits at the same time. Pick one or two, you know, do those for four, six weeks until it feels like it would be hard and not to do, then keep doing. And that's the time to put a new habit in play. So we don't want to like typically, I saw this more than I want to share in practice where someone would change

10 things at once and a month later the wheels would come off. So I'm much more selective, trying to do one or two new things, but wait until they're implemented and then do another. But yeah, natural light, I don't think we need to be outside to get a lot of that signal, but I think we get more of it outside than we would. And I live, I live in Oceanside, California, San Diego. Yeah, it's easy to say that. And the sun, so I'm staring at the ocean right now. It's right outside my window.

And in the middle of summer, the sun sets way up there. So I have to go outside to see it. Right now it's setting directly in front of me. So, you know, but I still walked outside my dorm. Most nights are over to the beach. I think it's just nicer to hear the ocean. And there's an experiential part I can't get, just looking out my window is what it boils like.

Makes sense. But if that's beginning, that'll get smoke in the way. Okay. So your body, so it's like you're telling your body it's day. Look outside. There's actually more red light in the morning in sunrise and sunset.

Is that correct? So I think of the beginning of the day is more blues, and the end of the day is more orange, reds and yellows. just because of like the colors of the sky. And most natural, if you think of a candle or a fireplace, those are going to be disproportionately yellow, red oranges and much less blues and greens. So the beginning of the day, like the time where exposure to blue and greens

is something that's alerting and essentially signals the body. It's the beginning. But at the end of the day, we want to be blocking out the blues and the greens as much as possible. think will be really helpful for our resetters. Just this, like I said, this year really sidest wiped so many people. And the human spirit is resilient. The brain is resilient.

The body is resilient. And so I just feel like understanding how our brain works is so incredibly important. If you don't train the brain, the world will train it for you. And to sort of dovetail on what you're saying, what I'm hearing is if you don't create rituals to build the brain power and energy up, you're going to find your living with a depleted brain more often than you would like. Yeah, and I think it's why we, you know, terms like brain fog and, you know, like, you know, feeling mentally exhausted.

I think it's why those are ubiquitous terms. People can relate to them because they're, you know, they're true for a lot of our population. And to me, those are all, you know, really commentary on the brain not being able to make enough energy. So like the, you know, like a bulletproof coffee or, you know, keto often will very quickly remedy those feelings of brain fog, right? Because on an energy level, we've shifted things dramatically. So, you know, so I'm, I'm a big fan of, you know, intermittent fasting, periodic longer fast, like the resetters do. I think that's. Yeah. Yeah, you really speak our language, because I, I'm all about varying everything, vary your fast, very your food. Let's not get stuck in

this rut of doing the same thing over and over again. Because if diet was meant to be done the same way over and over again, we would have figured out the most perfect human diet. And everybody would be following it. But that's not how it works. Our body is meant to be in more of a variation mode. So I love this. He's passed away now. But one of my nutrition teachers, when I was a natureopathic student, was named Ron Smith. And, you know, this goes back 25 years. But one of the few things that suck in that he taught was there can be a big difference between a diet that takes someone that's unhealthy and moves them to healthy and one that keeps them there. So one of the things at least that I try to remain focused on is that don't get attached to the tool or the dogma of something

that brought you there, but really build skills to be able to discern whether, you know, is this still supporting you or not. Because quite often, like you mentioned, the thing that will help you, if you don't vary it, will invariably move your right past helping into some other new area. Right. Oh, I love that. I love that. This was, I thought I knew a lot about brain and health and nutrition, but you just elevated my thinking on all of this. So I absolutely love this. And let me finish up. I have five specific questions to you. And then I have. I want to chat about where people can find your products and what are some of the best products for brain health you mentioned a few. So I want to make sure people understand those if that's of interest to them.

Okay, what's the one habit that you do every day for your brain that you would not give up, that you feel like this absolutely supports my healthy brain? So I don't know that I do this absolutely every day, but I talk to myself a lot. So I essentially let my brain or body know what to expect. And then, you know, so like if I was going to tomorrow be flying to Europe from San Diego, I would have already told my body like, hey, we've got this on the menu. You know better than me what you need to do to get us ready so that we can hit the ground and be, you know, as possible. And so I just don't assume that because I know something's going to happen.

happen, the parts of my brain or body that need to rise the occasion would know. So I just try to let them know. And then I'll frame things as a challenge. Like if I was cut, like, oh, you're like, how quickly can you heal this? Or can you heal this without a scar? Like, let me see. So anyways, I just think it would be the same with learning and the brain. Let it know.

Like this is what I, this would be what I would love to have. We're going to be studying Spanish language starting in January. I would really like to excel at that. You'll let me know what you need, and I'll make it a priority that we're exposed to it. Brilliant. Like that self-talk piece, I'm a big fan of, and I don't think that gets enough attention.

It's a little woo-woo, but to me it's... No, I love it. I wouldn't have ever thought to do that. It's almost like a magic, it's like a magic eight ball. You have to like shake it around. get it to have the right message. I love that. My body things when I was both in practice and teaching nature paths.

And I just think it's like there's no downside to it, I guess. No. My belief is that there's a lot of potential upside. Yeah, I love it. Okay, what's your favorite neutropic? I, for sure, I love the word neutropic that it has me all intrigued. But there are so many incredible neutropics. And I think people just don't understand them or utilize them enough other than caffeine.

We just don't think of it as a neotropic. Well, I really don't have like a favorite ingredient. But I would say that like my like if you would just say I'm going to like create like something to make my coffee work better or the caffeine I'm getting do better than it would be stacking that with althanein. It would be the thing that would be the if you're just starting out, that's where you're. should go. Like, why else? Because that, yeah,

why else in? That tends to make, what coffee doesn't do well, it does well. So like that combination of two things for many people will be felt as more focus or less distractibility where coffee on its own just would not get you there as reliably. So I'm like basically what I would say is my favorite thing.

thing with neutropics is stacking things together. And the neurohacker products, one that we created about a year and a half ago. It's a little energy shot is basically what the form factor. We call it quadunutropic energy, but that was designed from the ground up to be felt. But I remember when I was working on, I ultimately give pet names to products while I'm trying to develop them. And so that one had, for me, at least, to do with personal best. So I'm a morning workout person.

And when I would, like that, I made up just the powder and I would mix it with water before going to gym. And time after time, I was doing personal best after personal best. But I used to know of the ability to do that is mental energy. So one of the, I was interviewed about a year and a half ago. And the journalist's premise was that there'd be some exercise that benefits from being zoned out and some from being more in a flow state like zoned in or in the zone. And I say, well, that's odd because they all benefit from being in the zone. And I don't know any that benefit from being zoned up, right?

So invariably, what ends up happening physically to do our best, our brain disengages way before we reach our physical limit. And so like my favorite, you know, of anything, it's that energy shot. Like if I was going to go do a heavy leg day in the gym or do something and I wanted to make sure my brain, you know, really shifted gears quickly, that would be. So it's a newtropic energy shot. But it's like about 10 neutropics blended together in an energy shot. Love it. Could you do it before like you took a test or a speech? It's not just physical.

Or do it before podcast. It does have caffeine. So for our podcast, I didn't. But if this was in the morning, I would have done it before that. So, yeah. So I think of, you know, rather than a neutropic, it's like a stack of neutropics, right? And then find one that you feel. And that could be different for you than me.

Okay. I love it. I'm going to have to try that. And we'll, I've got a couple of patients on my mind that I think could, could really use that as well. What, talk to me a little bit. about your sleep. Do you have a ritual around the time you go to sleep, the time you get up, how you protect your sleep.

Do you feel like sleep is important for the brain? Absolutely. So I was an officer in the Navy, spent a good chunk of those six years on ships doing, like my first watch was in the engineering. There was only two of us that could stand it. So it was called Port and Starboard. So I would be on watch for six hours. Then he would replace me for six and we just cycle like that.

And then in your time off watch, you still had to do your job, eat, sleep. So during that time period, I was lucky if we were out of seat, sleep, four hours a night. And so I left the Navy already knowing how important sleep was because I spent this most of five. You got the lack of it. A degree of sleep deprivation. So for me, like my metaphor for sleep is think of it. it like sleeping like a bus that comes on a schedule. So, you know, for me, the sleep bus pulls in pretty much around 10 at night every night. So I'll usually feel it. Like I'll start to feel like,

oh, the sleep bus is coming, which for me, that signals unmissable. And whatever I'm doing at that point in time, I just stop doing and go to bed. And so on my aura ring, or if I use another app, I always am sound asleep within three to five minutes. So I have no problem falling asleep. But I I think it's because I get on the sleep bus when it pulls in. I love that. If I don't get on that bus, and then, you know,

so now I'm going to watch like another episode of something on Netflix and it's 11 and decide, okay, I want to go to bed now, but that's not my choice. I have to wait until the next bus comes. And my experience is most people, the buses come about an hour and a half to two hours apart.

So to me, the key thing is just catching that first bus, which, I love that. So that's what I give. If I had one, like, could make with my magic one, it would that everyone would be more aware of those signals that the sleep bus is coming. And then just, I don't worry about it.

I don't need to say, oh, I go to bed at 10 every night or protect anything. I just pay attention for the sleep bus. And if it came tonight at 9, I'd hop on it. Oh, my gosh. I'm going to have to start using that. Last night, we do a big family night dinner on Sunday night. And it got, it ended up, we sat down and ate like a 9. o'clock at night, which is very unusual for us. But that's when my sleep bus was coming. And so I missed

the first bus and then it took a couple more buses before I hopped on. So I'm going to start using that. I'm going to say, hey, my sleep bus is here. I love that. So for me, if I miss it, no, like, I'm not going to beat myself off. I'm just not going to expect that I can now lie down at 1030 and fall right to sleep. That's just for me, not on the venue. So when that next sleep bus comes, then I'll be able to get on it and fall right to sleep. So anyway, I love that. I would love to just talk an hour about sleep. I love things to do with sleep.

Yeah. Well, we'll bring you back to talk about sleep for sure because it's one of the number one issues that we deal with that our resetters are dealing with. So I love that concept. Okay, if you could have a conversation with one person in the world right now that you admire or you'd like to pick their brain or maybe you have something controversial you want to bring to them,

who would that person be? And what would you talk about? Wow. You know, I don't, there's no one that comes to mind, but the people that I really, you know, would love to have a drink with sometime. Malcolm Gladwell would probably be number one. Yes.

I mean, he's just, I love his work, you know, love his podcast. You know, there's a few people like that. But he would be, I don't know, like he's the one that comes to me. mind. Yeah, I love that. He would be a great mind to pick as well. So awesome. And then my last question, and we ask everybody this is if you had one message for the world that you could implant in everybody's brain, what would that message be? So I don't know the best way to phrase it, but be, you know, kinder to other people. Like, like rather than, so this would be my tendency, right? Like if, and it's one I'm trying to overcome. But if someone does something that I would judge,

it's like, well, that wasn't very nice or very friendly. I much prefer now saying, well, that person probably would have shown up better if they had more brain energy. So like the own plaque, right? Like, that's my own story. And I think that helps me. Like, whether that's true or not, I just believe that it makes me a better version of myself when I try to come up with a better. story of why someone did something that I might have judged as not, you know, not something that I loved. It's like a good twist on the, you never know what that person's been through, but I love that. Like, you don't know what that person's brain energy is right now and you may not be getting

the best version of them. This was, you know, pre this last crazy year, but maybe a year ago in the fall, I was, you know, I was meeting some friends for happy hour. in La Hoya and the you know so this was just on the road going into kind of the mall so you know like a slow moving traffic and I stopped because the car in front of me had to stop because someone was pulling out and got rear-ended not hard right but still like you know like it's inconvenient to get your car yet and the poor guy was like I could tell that he was just had a brutal day I mean he looked like that he said like like he had. So rather than being mad at him, you know, it was just like, well, you know, if I was, if I'd had his day, I might have been not so great at focusing now as well. So yeah. So anyways, I think to me, one of the things with spending a lot of time looking at the brain and energy is just

understanding that a lot of what we blame people for, it's not a character flaw. It's, you know, they, they don't have the energy to be doing what I'm expecting them to do here. And even, the energy they have, they're literally doing the best they can. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Well, Dr. Kelly, this was an incredible interview for me. If nothing else, you just really expanded my vision of the way to look at the brain. So thank you so much for taking your time. And I will bring you back to talk about sleep because that's a biggie. Tell us a little bit about where people can find neurohacker and we'll leave links in the show notes. If they go to your web page, is there a product they should start with?

How do they get into your line? Yeah, so it's neurohacker.com, and we don't have a lot of products. So I would say depending on like right now, sleep is just a huge issue. Because of the background, one of the things I saw that surprised me is that the sleep category in the dietary supplement moved in this last year from maybe eight to either one or two. It's gone way out. I think, and I've seen all kinds of, you know, surveys and statistics that is poor as sleep was before 2020. Wow.

It was a tough year. So I would say probably for, you know, a good chunk of the audience, our qualion night, which is our evening neutropic stack that for most people will subjectively be felt to something that supports better sleep. Be where I would. Now, if sleep isn't an issue and you want, you know, like more a brain product to start your day, then either qual your mind or the neutropic energy shop. It's an error. You wouldn't take quote. So I would say one of those two would be where I would encourage people to start.

Okay, beautiful. Well, we will test it out, and we will unleash our resetters on your products. And I definitely want to try the sleep one. So when you come back, I'll let you know if it, what I'm hoping it's going to do is it's going to make the bus arrive a little bit earlier. because sometimes the 9 o'clock bus doesn't always come. Sometimes it comes at 11 o'clock. Yeah, I think to me, we put a lot in it that would be more calming and relaxing,

or like a mushroom like Rishi as an example, which is something that in Chinese medicine was to calm the shed, basically to create like that peace triumph. So I subjectively feel the qualia night product as my hands almost always feel that warm, cozy feeling about an hour after I take it. So physiologically, it also usually makes my heart beat a little bit slower. So it's not dating, but it definitely seems to shift my body and brain into that more like state you need to be, that relaxed, come evening that just makes it so that you'll be more attentive to the sleep bus. Yeah, I love it. Oh, I love it. Well,

thank you again for taking your time. And I can't wait to chat, sleep with you. and get you back on my schedules. So so grateful for the work you guys are doing. And just amazing products like this just weren't around 20, 30 years ago. And so when we get brilliant minds like you working on products that the everyday person can benefit from, that is a beautiful thing. So thank you so much for joining us and for everything you're doing. Thank you for having me. Yeah, yeah, beautiful.

Have a beautiful day. Hey, resetters. I just want to start off by saying thank you so much. for all your wonderful reviews and those of you that have left me comments on iTunes. I just greatly appreciate your thoughtfulness and how much you guys are enjoying these episodes. And it seems like you're enjoying them as much as I am enjoying doing them. One of the things that I've learned in just interacting with so many people is that we've really lost the art of deep conversations.

And for me, the Resetter podcast stands for having, meaningful conversations with people who are thinking about health, about life, about mindset in a way that we may not be getting on social media or in mainstream media. And so I just want to say, give you guys a shout out and just say thank you for participating in this process with me. Because as much as I absolutely love delivering the information to you, I love even more knowing that it's impacting your life. So please let us know if, there's anything we can do to make this podcast more customized to you, to make it better, we are now officially in season two, and we are working to bring you the best conversations

that health influencers have, that mindset changers can give, and to really deliver you something that you're not able to get anywhere else. So from the bottom of my heart, as I always say my YouTube, from the bottom of my heart, I am deeply appreciative of you. I am deeply grateful to be on this journey with you, and let's get healthy together.