WHOOP Podcast - How To Protect Your Brain Health and Avoid Burnout with Neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

On this month’s episode of the WHOOP Podcast How To Series, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist Dr. Kristen Holmes sits down with renowned neuroscientist and author of The Stimulated Mind Dr. Tommy Wood. Dr. Holmes and Dr. Wood share the key habits to “future-proof” your brain against dementia, ensuring you stay sharp throughout all stages of life. Dr. Wood highlights the importance of activating your brain, outside of the monotonous routine of daily life through exercise, learning a language or instrument, or picking up a new hobby. This episode will provide you with the key tools, habits, and knowledge to protect your brain health, avoid burnout, and add more life to your years. Be sure to grab a copy of Dr. Tommy Wood’s new book The Stimulated Mind here.(01:01) Dr. Tommy Wood’s Inspiration Behind Writing The Stimulated Mind(05:10) How The Brain Should Work and How To Test It(08:39) WHOOP Podcast Rapid Fire Questions(10:39) What Learning Does For Your Brain(15:07) Is Your Job Impacting Brain Health?(19:59) Perceptions of Threat and Challenge and Recovering From Each(27:42) What Are The Signals of Mental Burnout? (32:05) Optimizing Cognitive Bandwidth and Avoiding Distraction(41:00) The Hierarchy of Movement(53:13) Connection Between Socialization and Brain Health(56:02) The Brain Health Dashboard: Essential Habits For Everyday LifeFollow Dr. Tommy WoodInstagramWebsiteSupport the showFollow WHOOP:Sign up for WHOOP Advanced LabsTrial WHOOP for Freewww.whoop.comInstagramTikTokYouTubeXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will Ahmed:InstagramXLinkedInFollow Kristen Holmes:InstagramLinkedInFollow Emily Capodilupo:LinkedIn 

Historically, we thought that you hit your 20s and 30s, and then after that, your cognitive function just unstoppably declines for the next six decades. And that's just, it's just not true. There are a huge number of factors that we have control over that influence our cognitive function and the amount of cognitive decline that we experience. When you look at studies on work types, people who have more monotonous, more repetitive jobs have a higher risk of dementia. What would your advice be for the knowledge worker who's in a space, specific domain doing a lot of the same things over and over and over again across an eight-hour work day. It doesn't necessarily matter what your work environment is, but as long as there's a continued

stimulus, ideally there's lots of social interaction, you're learning new skills, your problem solving as much as possible. There's lots of evidence that you can get similar stimuli or important stimuli outside of work. That's where picking up a new hobby, a new sport, especially one that requires complex motor skills, picking up a new language. All of those things can give similar benefits. The most important thing that I want people to take away. Dr. Tommy Wood, I have been following your work for a very, very long time. Thank you. You are just an exceptional communicator of very complex topics related to the brain.

So just a deep note of gratitude before we start here for all the good work that you've done in this space, helping people understand the brain, helping people understand the behavior, most importantly, that support brain health. There's really no one on the planet that I'm aware of that has been more effective at communicating this information. So thank you. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it. And you have written an amazing book called The Stimulated Mind. So we're going to talk about your framework that you develop to help people take control over

their brain health. So thank you for that work. Thanks, yeah. And I'm obviously excited to talk about it. Maybe we'll start there. You know, when you think about your motivations for for writing this book. What was that calling? So I've wanted to write a book for a long time, actually. And maybe 10 years ago, I talked about it quite a bit. And there were several people who talked me out of it.

Actually, they were like, you write a book, a year later. It's no longer relevant. Like, it's a whole bunch of time and effort. And I can kind of understand that. But then having now spent essentially 20 years, increasingly in neuroscience and science communication, I felt very strongly that there are some things that we know about the brain now that people can act upon that I am confident are still going to be relevant in 10, 20,

you know, even more years in the future. So that was really what motivated me to do it. And when I think about the landscape of books that focus on brain health or longevity, which are, you know, intertwined in a certain way. They kind of fall into two groups. One group might be sort of overly simplified and not very scientific or would just focus on one particular area. And then the other group is very dense, very difficult to read,

written by academics and doctors like we are. But for the general population, I imagine they buy those books, but I know that a lot of people really struggle to understand them. them. So I felt like there was a need for something that sort of went down the middle between those. It's very evidence-based, very sort of grounded in the science. My book has more than 2,000 citations that are sort of numerically cited throughout the test, if anybody wants to go and read them, but that is accessible and practical and that sort of anybody can dig into hopefully. So that was the balance I was trying to strike. You know, after people read the book, like, what is your hope

for them. What do you want them to take away? The most important thing that I want people to take away, and there's some point in the penultimate chapter of the book where I write this, I want people to know that they have a huge amount of control over their cognitive future. And historically, we thought, and even I thought this in medical school, even after that, there was this idea that you hit your 20s and 30s, and then after that, your cognitive function just unstoppably declines for the next six decades and there's nothing that you can really do about it. And that's just, it's just not true. And actually, there's evidence for that that goes back several decades that people just haven't always been fully aware of. We now appreciate that there are a huge number of factors that we have

control over that influence our cognitive function and the amount of cognitive decline that we experience. These are things that ultimately we can choose to engage in. And they can be fairly simple. they can be fairly fun. And I just want people to know to have a huge amount of hope about what their cognition might look like in the future. I love that. I think for, you know, we're kind of, I suppose, both in the Brazilian space, you know, and I think that's the message I tried to make too is that that we actually do really have a lot of control. But getting those baseline numbers are kind of important. Last Saturday, I spent the day in a lab and did, you know, I got my bone density, Dexa, VOT2 max. You know, just kind of did all like my kind of annual testing. They had,

an olfactory test and a cognitive test, which I had never done before. But I love the fact that these kind of longevity clinics are popping up in providing these assessments to give us a baseline understanding of our cognitive functioning. I think it was the Canadian. It wasn't the mocha? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the mocha. Yeah, I got a 29 out of 30. Well, that's great.

What I'll say is that if you want an even more in-depth cognitive function assessment, I can send it to you. You can do it at home. Okay, send it to me. There are multiple different aspects of your cognitive function over time. How many should we be tracking? I guess there's a good place to talk about all the different possible cognitive functions. There are lots of different ones that you could measure 10, 20, potentially even more,

depending on how detailed you want to get about it. And I work with cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists where they focus on just one very specific part of memory and they model it with computer models and they think about all the different things that influence it. But we might think about some of the broader cognitive functions. like memory, which has different domains, but working memories and short-term memory, you know, remembering things for very short periods of time. So we can manipulate stuff in our minds. In the book, I use the example of at one point, there was a time when somebody would tell

you a phone number, you'd have to remember it before you could, like, write it down or something, right? Yeah. That's what your working memory is for. We don't necessarily use it in the same way anymore nowadays. And then there's, you know, longer-term memory, episodic memory, remembering things that happen to us. Then we might think about things like executive function, which is our ability to make decisions in the moment, includes things like response inhibition, which is not doing something when you feel ennourged to do it. So, you know, when some like passing thought goes through your head, you're like, I really want to say this thing.

And then you're like, oh, no, no, wait, maybe I really shouldn't say that. That's a bad idea. That's your prefrontal cortex kicking in and some elements of executive function. Some people have a very underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. And then you might think about some other aspects of co-frontal cortex. cognition. And so those, so things like processing speed as well, like how quickly you manipulate information, reaction time. What part of the brain is responsible for that? So that's some of the most basic parts of the brain. So some of the deep gray matter, but then some other outer parts

of the cortex. Processing speed in particular is related to the overall structure of the white matter of the brain, which is sort of the bit in the middle. It makes up about 60% of the human brain that's responsible for very fast connections. And that's a part of the brain that's very susceptible to the aging process, but we have some control over that with various lifestyle interventions. So those ones that I mentioned already, they tend to decline with age, on average, in the population. But then there are others that may actually improve with age that sort of come under this umbrella of crystallized intelligence, which is like a fancy neuroscience word for wisdom. So it's your ability to kind of see the bigger picture, integrate lots of information,

you remember historical facts and things like that and how they kind of fit into some kind of framework that you can then apply to the world. And that's something that we tend to get better at with age. So often we just think about what gets worse, but it's not just that these functions decline. Actually, your brain just gets better at slightly different things as you get older.

And maybe that's a good thing too. Though, you know, the overall picture is that we can slow the decline of some of those other functions as well. We're going to get into exactly how to do that. All right. First, we're going to do a little rapid fire icebreaker. All right. You can go ahead and take a drink of water before we start.

Okay, I'm ready. All right. Keep the brain hydrated. This or that. Heavy dead lifts or zone two walk to clear your head. Heavy deadlift. Let's go. Cold plunge or an extra hour of sleep after a long week.

Oh, an extra hour of sleep. 100%. Yeah. Novel skill session. or mindfulness session when you feel stuck. I'll say novel skill session. Nice. That's a good one.

That's a good one. So good. Standing desk day or walking meeting day. Oh, walking meeting day, definitely. Harder to do, but excellent. And you like the treadmills under the desk. Yeah, if people can do that, even better if it's walking meetings outside with other people in real life.

Like, that's a, that is just ideal, right? A completely different thing. Yeah, yeah. I've been trying to take. more of my meetings outside. I'm like, let's just take a little walk. I bet everybody loves that. It's like I make all my colleagues take the stairs up and down the tower

at the University of Washington where we work. I love it. When we have new people join the lab or new students join the lab, they'll go to take the elevator because that's what they normally do when I'm not there. And then one of the scientists in my lab is like, we can't do that when the boss is here. And then you'll have to take the stairs. When I was at University of Iowa, our facility where basketball is housed, but where all the locker rooms were every and everything,

it's called Carver Hawkeye. there's an elevator, but if you're not, like, you're not allowed to use it. Like, you can't use it for four years. I think you can use it once you're a senior, but freshmen, sophomores and juniors are not allowed to use it. So I think we need to institute that everywhere. Like you need some sort of like status in order to use the elevator. Because clearly moving your body is going to, is helping your brain.

Absolutely, yeah. All right. Learn a language or learn a musical instrument for brain gains. Sorry, I'm going to cheat on that one because there's good evidence that you don't need to pick or you can pick whichever one you prefer. I went to a French school when I was young, and I was fluent in six months. Didn't speak a lick of French going into the school.

I was seven years old. And obviously when we were younger, we have a natural deptness, right, to kind of learn language. So is there like an age where language or music, I guess this is really individual, depending on your propensity to learn one or the other for whatever reason? But does age make a difference in terms of,

choosing which one is going to be most beneficial? Yes and no. And you'll get the typical scientist's answer of it depends. Age does affect maybe some of the effects of learning, and it may affect your ability to learn, though not nearly as much as we think it does. When you look at both music learning and language learning, some of the benefits are very similar.

And they've done studies in kids that show this, so learning a musical instrument is associated. with better focus and attention, better executive function in kids. You see similar benefits in kids who grow up bilingual. Adults who grew up bilingual then have slower rates of cognitive decline, decrease risk of dementia, or if they do experience dementia, they experience it later in life. So the benefits seem to be very similar.

And for languages in particular, it gives us a really good example of why that is. This is actually some research done by some good friends and colleagues of mine at the University of Washington. Andrea Stocko and his wife, Shantel Pratt. They're both cognitive psychologists. I love the husband-wife teams. Yeah. When I see like a paper publisher, I'm like, ah, that's so cute.

They also have my favorite podcast right now, which is called Brains for Dinner, that I encourage anybody to listen to if they're interested in those topics. But basically what they've looked at is people who grew up bilingual. And it seems that there are multiple different ways to measure this. Both you're measuring absolute cognitive function, but then also measuring some of the brainways associated with being able to control multiple thoughts or multiple streams of information. If you grew up bilingual, having to constantly juggle two languages and switch between the two of them, then makes you better at doing that with other

things in real life. Then that greater stimulus also seems to then transfer to better brain health across the lifespan. Music seems to be similar. But these are people who grew up bilingual from the beginning of life. But then when you look at studies in a number of life, older adults, both with language learning. And that's even like the duolingo app. So it's obviously immersive in-person classes would be better, but even some very simplistic language learning. And they've done this with music training as well. So you have music lessons once twice a week. You do some homework in between. You see very similar improvements in executive function, in particular in older adults. So the benefits seem to occur regardless of when in life you do them.

And you're right that when we're younger, we are basically professional learners. That's like all our job is to just like put information into our brain to shape it. Just be sponges everything around us. Exactly. And when you're older, the brain has been shaped to an extent. And we don't want it to be as easily changeable because it has adapted to you and your environment and your skills and all the things you need your brain to be good at. Right.

That's its job. So that doesn't mean it's not capable of change. just means it needs a slightly bigger push in order to do that. You need to show it that this new thing that you're exposing it to is important. One of the main reasons, I think that people struggle to learn when they're older, is not because of age, it's not because the brain is fixed. It's not because, you know, they can't do it anymore. It's because you're no longer a professional learner. You also have a job and you have kids and you have responsibilities and, like, you have stresses and you're not spending all day learning and engaging. You're not immersed full time in, you know,

at a foreign language school. So I was slightly younger, but when you're, you're not, you're I was 10, we moved to Germany, I spent, you know, I didn't speak any German. We were just like stuck in a school up in the black forest. Like the teachers didn't speak English. You have to learn German. There's just no other way to, there's no other way to survive. And you pick it up very quickly. But that's because.

That was my situation. It was survival, really. Yeah. But you're immersed in it all day every day. Yeah. And so I think the big difference between adults and kids is just the amount of time you have to engage in that process rather than that the adult brain just isn't capable of learning anymore. Yeah. I feel really fortunate to be in a job where I have to bounce around doing

different types of things over the course of a day. So I'm constantly being exposed to novel types of stimuli, I suppose. What would your advice be for like the knowledge worker who's kind of in a specific domain doing a lot of the same things over and over and over again across an eight-hour workday? There have been studies that have looked at this as well. And this is this idea of how we use our brains both in the workday and outside of the workday as adults and how that can shape our cognitive function and whether or not we experience cognitive decline is really sort of the core idea behind the stimulated mind. I talk about exercise and diet and sleep and all those other things because those are critical as well. But I think just appreciating

how you use your brain and then how that affects how your brain functions is that's the second most important message from the book. That's how you're future proof, right? That's the word that you use. Yeah. Yeah. So when you look at studies on work types and how they relate to dementia risk, and then once you account for all the confounders like socioeconomic status and all that kind of stuff

that certainly plays into that, you see that people who have more monotonous, more repetitive jobs that are less complex, people who have those types of jobs have on average a higher risk of dementia. And then like the more complex your job is, the more protective. it seems to be. There are some large like Scandinavian studies that show that. It's probably so I'm over my head every single day. So that's that I guess that's a good time. The other, the other way that they've looked at it is based on this combination of factors, which is how, like the total burden of work, like how much you feel like you have to do, how much control you have over that. So if you have a job that's very demanding, you know, often we might think, well, it's very demanding, it's very stressful.

that might be a bad thing. But if you have a job that's very demanding, but you also have a lot of control over, so you can control your workload and you can kind of engage in things as you choose. Those, again, are you seem to be protective for the brain. So it kind of tells you that it doesn't necessarily matter what your work environment is,

but as long as there's like a continued stimulus, ideally there's lots of social interaction, you're learning new skills, your problem solving as much as possible, and you have some control over that. And it's really the loss of control that is then associated with a number of negative things that might impact our health,

where we might see burnout and things like that. So then if your job isn't like that, actually you don't need to worry because there's lots of evidence that you can get similar stimuli or important stimuli outside of work. So that's where picking up a new hobby, a new sport,

especially one that requires complex motor skills, picking up a new language. All of those things can give similar benefits. So you kind of see that regardless of what you have in one area of your life, you can absolutely get similar benefits elsewhere based on how you choose to spend your time. I love it.

I think what you hit on to is really important because you actually pulled in the psychological domains, you know, that purpose, right, when you are, you know, driven, what you're doing has meaning. And there's some purpose behind it. Obviously, that's super motivating and that's going to propel you to focus

and apply your attention in ways that it wouldn't otherwise. And then you hit on control, which is a core psychological need that we have as humans, right? But I think that's important for folks to understand. Like, if you don't feel like you have control of your day over your schedule, like that is probably going to accelerate your brain aging to a degree, right? And then self-afficiency feeling like you have the skills and resources, you know,

because you can be in a very challenging work environment, right? But if you don't feel like you have the skills and resources to do what's being asked of you, I would imagine that's kind of the puzzle you're putting together here, right? Like that takes a pretty big hit quickly. Yeah, so that's exactly it. I think that that combination of either not having any autonomy over the process, you know, that loss of control. We know, like you said, based in self-determination theory, that's one of the core.

Everdessly, Richard Greene. Yeah, core like human needs. And so what a workday looks like in that scenario is either, right, you're continuously struggling and then at that point, that's a stressor in its own right, or you're unable to balance all the different things that are demanded of you, or like somebody else's timescale is imposed upon you. All of those things through a number of different studies have been shown to create some form of chronic stress, which then sort of it can impair sleep.

It can impair our ability to adapt to some of the other beneficial stimuli that we're getting. So really finding some way to have greater control over the workday, which is a significant sort of source of stress for many of us, really becomes a core part of how we can then manage our overall total burden, which we can't always get rid of. But building in some frameworks or building in some elements of control are definitely going to make that a lot easier. We published a paper in the spring in a motion. We ended up having like 10,000 people who took a survey where we asked about their perceptions of threat and challenge during the day. So the degree to which they felt threatened, the degree to which they felt challenged. And we didn't see actually any changes in their cardiovascular profile or blood pressure or anything like that.

What we did see is a clinically significant changes in sleep architecture. So if you felt threatened during the day, you got less restorative sleep that night. So it's interesting to see, you know, knowing that sleep is so critical to brain health, you know, how are just our perceptions and appraisals of how we think about our life and our day actually matter, you know? Even if you didn't see it in that study, you would expect over time that is going to affect cardiovascular risk and cardiovascular health. Exactly.

It sort of evolves over, you know, several decades if it doesn't get resolved. So on that note, how do you, so you. you talk about the stimulus recovery cycle, right? And I think that's, you know, recognizing, for example, that your day might have been threatening, like, figuring, okay, how do I actually recover from that so it doesn't creep into my sleep? Or how do you think about stimulus recovery and how does that fit into the broader framework of your book?

I have, like, there's a whole chapter on stress and the stress response, mainly because we've gotten to a point where you're like one-to-one relationship between us thinking like stress is bad. Right? Like any time I meant, you mentioned the word stress, you're like, oh yeah, that thing where I just like feel terrible

that's going to be bad for my health, right? But any time we're exposed to any kind of stimulus, we activate a version of the stress response. And that's when we're making mistakes, learning a violin. It's when we make mistakes playing a sport. It's also, yes, when we're exposed to some kind of psychological

threat or when we exercise. This is our body directing resources to adapt to the stimulus that we're being exposed to because your physiology has been challenged and you need to adapt to kind of create a bigger buffer and resilience to a future similar stress. We have kind of got to the point where this really beneficial mechanism has now been demonised when it's actually something that we need to activate in order to change and adapt. So there's a few different ways to think about this. I talk a lot about the evidence for reframing stress. A lot of this is based on Ralia Crum's work where if you go into a stressful situation, but you acknowledge that actually everybody experiences stress, stress is important because it allows you to perform at your best,

right? Stress increases arousal, arousal, arousal is essential for performance. And then, you know, stress is important for adaptation. When you go in, yes, your course is, will spike just as much, but you will also have more a greater increase of other adaptive hormones like DHEA. People who are stressed, when they're stressed, if they release more DHA, they make better decisions even when they're under pressure. So reframing those threats can be important. Of course, there are some threats that are difficult to reframe and, you know, it doesn't work in every scenario. But you're just understanding that this response is actually beneficial, can be helpful. And then you're acknowledging that if you want to,

to adapt to that stress or that stressor, you need a period of recovery afterwards, right? So you might consider stress to become a chronic stress if it's starting to impact sleep, which is probably the most important time during which adaptation occurs. I use a lot of comparisons to physical activity in the book, just because, you know, as an athlete myself, this is kind of how I understand it. If you want to be bigger and stronger, you need to go and, you know, apply a stimulus in the gym, but you don't get bigger and stronger in the gym. You get stronger when you recover, right? And so the brain is the same in sleep is the most critical time for that. So then there are a lot of different tools that you can use. And some of it involves increasing, again, increasing resilience to stress.

So exercise buffers are ability to tolerate stress through something called the cross-stress or adaptation hypothesis. So like being better at dealing with one stress makes you better at dealing with other stresses. Then there's also other ways that you can improve your ability to respond in the moment. So, you know, all the sort of mindfulness meditation techniques or just, you're using things like breathwork to kind of manipulate your arousal in the moment. So it has less of a negative effect on you than, then you might want it to. Writing for mental offloading, say before bed, that can be really helpful for some people. So often it's just the case of a acknowledging that stress isn't bad, right? It's actually a good thing. And then depending on what it is that's

causing you stress or, you know, especially if it's starting to, you know, impact other areas like sleep, then thinking about can I improve my tolerance to that stress? Can I think about tools to use in the moment to, you know, minimize that stress as much as possible? Can I use things to then, you know, improve my sleep or sort of offload some of that, you know, and then mental offloading before sleep by, you know, writing a list of all the things you need to do or all the things you're worried about. If you find yourself ruminating, for example, or you're emotionally stressed or, you know, getting the pen out and writing in a journal is one of the best things that you can do.

Yeah, exactly. So there's a ton of different tools that people can use and that just allows people to kind to kind of pick what seems to work best for them. I love that. Yeah, I think it's, um, it's one of those things when we look at, you know, the model of alistasis and you, and you kind of think about the cost, the, the physiological cost of, like, not accounting for stress with appropriate amounts of rest. Like you get into a place where you become vulnerable to disease and illness and

neurodigenative disease and this balanced kind of stimulus recovery. Mentally just kind of noting that across the day, I think is probably one of the more important skills. I think we need to develop as human beings, I would say. Yeah. Because a lot of folks don't realize, you know, don't, you know, I mean, how big of burnout, right? Like how many people are burned out? And that's essentially outside of overload.

Yeah. right? We're not mapping stress with appropriate levels of rest. Yeah. And this is really common in knowledge workers, even those who maybe understand this from an exercise perspective. Although, you know, when you work with a lot of amateur athletes, they basically just often do more and more and more and more and that's where they get overtrained and they get stress fractures and all that kind of stuff because they assume that more load is better. They don't actually take time to recover. But that's essentially how we treat our brains during the day. So like every time your task switching, multitasking, you're being forced to do something when you want to be doing something else.

All of that then builds up this cognitive load, these stress responses. And so not finding time either to change the structure so that's not happening continuously or to not take breaks in the day so that you can actually recover and go back. It's like spending all day running as hard as you can. At some point, the body's going to start to break down. So not building those things and then not acknowledging that, yeah, you know, I did all this stuff. Yes, I activate. You know, some of it was stressful.

Some of it was, you know, very stimulating. It was very hard. It was cognitively challenging, which is great. But then in order to adapt and recover and go back and do it again tomorrow, you need adequate rest and sleep the next night or, you know, the coming nights. I think we often just forget that all these different things that we're trying to do with our brains all day is this equivalent of. of overtraining that you might see in an athlete,

we're essentially just doing the same thing with our brains. Overtraining signals for an athlete are a little more obvious, right? Stuff starts to shut down. But when it comes to the brain, what are some of the signals that people would recognize as being, oh, wow, okay, I'm actually kind of close to burnout or I'm getting burned out. Yeah. So there was a recent paper that came out that the sort of went over all the different symptoms of burnout.

And they've really kind of expanded because it's very, very different from person to person. And so it's all the different things that you might expect related to, you know, changes in, like subjective cognition. So memory is not working as well. Brain fog, not sleeping well, being irritable, being depressed or down or, you know, somewhere on that kind of spectrum, you know, changes in mood, changes in appetite. That could be increased or decreased. So anything that's the sort of like changes who you are fundamentally in terms of how your brain works and how you feel could be one of those signs.

And these overlap a lot with, you know, what we might call brain fog, which does have some kind of parameters around it, what we might call subjective cognitive decline, which is now formally part of the pathway that could lead to cognitive decline dementia, though. Most people who get subjective cognitive decline or subjective quality. changes don't automatically end up with dementia. It's just kind of these, you've noticed that your brain isn't working quite as well as it did before. And that includes, right, how you feel, how you eat, how you sleep, how you interact with other people. And so this is kind of like a very vague answer because in reality that the symptoms can be quite vague, but they're very personal to you. So one thing that I think we miss out on when we spend so much time trying to really quantify everything is that we we lose the importance of the subjective but um in athletes as well as in

individuals thinking about their brains um your subjective well-being like how do i feel today um is that is one of your best is one of your best predicts of performance probably it predicts performance much better than blood tests or anything like that and i think that it's really worth thinking about like how do i feel and how has that changed or has that changed and that can be good or bad because if you think about how we might integrate all the different aspects of brain health, there's probably two levels that you might want to measure it at. There's like the most core fundamental levels. So that might be if I'm measuring like electrical activity in your brain,

or maybe I do a brain scan looking at connectivity and different aspects of function. Maybe it's certain types of cognitive function tests, although you need to be kind of good at tests in order to kind of get the best out of a cognitive function test. So there's those kind of like basic, basic levels of like, how is the substrate of the brain really functioning? The next level you really want to measure is like, well, how does all that stuff kind of integrate? And your brain is essentially constantly integrating all the information from your body, from your environment, all these other things that we can't or don't yet know how to measure. And so I think one of the most powerful ways that we can understand that is simply by trying to understand how we feel. And we don't often really spend time thinking about how we feel, right?

So there's a lot. It's getting harder and harder in modern society too. We don't take the time because we have other things to focus on. And I think just knowing how you feel, how things make you feel, how that changes can be a really good indicator of how everything's going. And it's not going to give you everything, right? There are some, you know, we should still do some tests and get some data and all that kind of stuff. But just having a better idea of how you feel and how that changes in response to things over time can. can give you a really good sort of indicator of how things are going.

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to see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. I had a really funny conversation with my son. He went off to school and he is a very challenging academic environment. And frankly, he wasn't as challenged, I think, in his kind of high school career. And so, you know, he's finding it really challenging. He's like, Mom, I think I have ADHD. And I was like, okay. And I started, I asked him a few questions. And I said, you know, learning's hard. He's like, what do you mean?

I'm like, there's a lot of friction mentally associated with like learning hard stuff. And so I guess my question is I wonder to what degree. So just talking about just modern life and how difficult it is to actually focus on things. Yeah. Right. And actually carving out the time to ask yourself, how do I actually feel? So he's, you know, backing up. He's like, how do I actually feel?

I feel like I can't concentrate. I can't focus. And gosh, learning's really hard. You know, what's, how do we think about modern life and what do we need to subtract or do less of in order to actually create an environment where learning is possible, you know, and optimizing whatever kind of cognitive bandwidth we have? Like, how do we actually optimize that? I think we're at a point now where we have to think about cognitive inputs the same way

that we've started or, you know, over the past few decades, I've had to start, you know, physical activity inputs and nutrition or dietary inputs. Because if we think about humans evolutionarily, right, we didn't need to worry about diets because there was, there were no other options. Like you ate what you had. And, you know, in most places, that was probably fairly varied. You know, you've got a good range of nutrients. Like, obviously we can improve upon some of that now with modern science, but there just wasn't really an option to eat calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods, which we now have everywhere.

So, like, because of that, we have had to invent diets. And because we've engineered movement out of our day and out of the environment, we've had to invent exercise. And so now we've got to the point where we've essentially, there's a possibility of removing, difficult cognitive tasks, and that includes anything that involves learning, but also social interactions,

you know, dealing with people that you don't agree with, and all those things that we need to learn and are actually very beneficial for our brains. Those things, we can eliminate them entirely if we want. We don't have to think. We don't have to learn new skills. We don't have to interact with the people that we don't like. Now we have to create those inputs.

We have to create those stimuli. you think about this, it probably doesn't need that much. It's probably a similar dose to what you might think about exercise, right? If you get 30 to 60 minutes of some kind of movement every day, like, that's pretty good. Like, that's better, there's way better than most people. That's going to get you most of the way. So, blocking out time to do cognitively difficult things, even if it's just like two or three times a week, it's learning a new skill, you know, going and playing a new sport. It's doing a language class, dance class. I think that's going to get you a lot of the way because that's something that most people now aren't doing.

Right. And when you think about why that could be beneficial outside of that single area, we think about it's very similar to historically what education looked like and hopefully what education is going back towards because now you know there are schools where no phones allowed at all during the day. They're getting rid of iPads and making kids right by hand again and all this stuff, which is actually really important. I don't know if every school is going to do that, but there are countries that are sort of completely shifting the education system for kids. Bringing back physical activity. Bringing back physical activity. All this stuff is really important. Yeah. And one of the reasons why actually one of the best piece of evidence for this, you know,

stimulus being the main driver of cognitive function is education as it has been historically because when you look at cognitive function on average it tends to peak later and higher in those who have higher levels of educational attainment so essentially the more time you spend as a professional learner like a professional brain stimulator which is what you are as a student the more benefits you then see for your brain and that translates into it doesn't necessarily change cognitive decline later in life, you need to continue to stimulate, right? It's just like if you're an athlete in high school, that doesn't mean that you're going to be an athlete in your 60s unless you actually keep doing it. Right. But because you start from a higher point in terms of cognitive

function, you will reach a point of dementia later because you sort of have a longer trajectory to get that. So you build like buffer in the system. You build a bigger buffer. And this translates over to other areas for a few different reasons where we think about when you learn one thing, there's this idea of transfer. So if you learn one skill or you learn what, you improve one cognitive function, does it transfer over to other cognitive functions? And one of the ways the education transfers over to other areas

is through this idea of learning to learn. Like your brain gets good at actually attending to information and engaging with it and remembering it and being able to manipulate it. You need focus and attention in order to pass the exams to reach the next level. Which is hard. Which is hard. And it should be hard, right?

That's the whole point. So anytime you're learning a new skill, you're engaging in one of these things, you are training or retraining your ability to focus and pay attention in other areas. So if you go to a dance class and you actually want to get good at that, you are also at the same time training your ability to focus at work, right? Because you have to really attend to this information. So what that means is as long as we're doing something that requires us to focus for some period of time, we are training, training, retraining, bringing back our ability to focus. But it requires us to be intentional because then we can't be checking Instagram, sending emails at the same time, because that has the opposite effect. That makes us, there are studies that show that people who are multimedia multitask,

they get better at multimedia multitasking, like attending to multiple things at the same time. But they're more distractible because their brain, instead of learning how to focus, has learned how to attend to lots of different stuff at the same time. And so you're constantly looking for the next thing. This isn't good or bad. It's just your brain responding to the inputs. giving it. Right. So you're teaching it. You're teaching it to be to be multitasking. Exactly. And so if that's, if that's important to you, then that's fine. But then you're going to find it

harder to focus and pay attention because you're spending less time on a single thing. Yeah. Because you're spending less time doing that. And do you think some of the diagnoses that are happening around ADHD are their misdiagnosis potentially? Like is there actually really something wrong with the brain? Or is it just because we have access to all the stimuli simultaneously that basically makes traditional learning in school harder. It's hard for me to comment on that really authoritatively because that's not quite my area of research, but you can understand where some of these potential diagnoses could be coming from that area. So if you've got kids who have phones or other things, or they're spending

all their time doing multimedia multitasking so they've become more distractible, it's going to be harder for them to pay attention in school. And like you said, school is hard and sometimes it's boring. Like you have to do, you have, like I, I had to sit in art class and history class that I didn't really enjoy, right? I much preferred science and math or maths as it was in the UK. And so then you're less likely to pay attention. I think that that could be exacerbated through some aspects of modern technology. I think some of it is probably also going to be related to, you know, stimulants and light affecting sleep. Kids are much more affected by that than adults are, you know, adults are as well, but the melatonin suppression caused by bright

light and evening is much greater in kids than it is in adults. And so I think all of this stuff then starts to compound. I also know lots of people who have diagnosis of ADHD and then the medications have made massive differences to their, to their ability to focus and concentrate. So this is not what is happening in everybody. But it's certainly possible that it's muddying some of the waters with kids. It's making them harder to focus in school because they're not sleeping well because they're constantly used to being distracted, therefore they're more distractible. I think that could certainly be playing a role.

Yeah. So interesting. All right. We're going to shift, talk about muscle, metabolism and the brain. So you've talked about the links between strength and movement diversity and cognitive performance. So when you kind of zoom out and. look at the current evidence, that strength and mixed modality, activity, benefit cognition, what gets you most excited?

And how do you make, how do you kind of translate that excitement to the layperson and get them excited? I sort of have like a hierarchy of movement that I think about that I have in the book, I call it the movement funnel that people can sort of like move through. When I first came up with it, it was like during my PhD and it was the ups. it was the upside down movement pyramid. And as you went down the levels, especially thinking about people

doing a lot of exercise, it gets more unstable, right, as it gets more pointy. So if you're doing like tons and tons of volume, then you need to focus much more on recovery and that kind of stuff. But essentially, if we start from a point where

you're doing very little movement throughout the day, we know that anything above what you're doing right now will be associated with improvements in cognitive function and a decreased risk of dementia. And like we're talking adding a thousand steps a day. We're talking adding five to ten minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity. And so that can literally be anything. The kind of the best zone for like biggest bang for your buck in terms of effects of movement on cognition and it's very much a intensity times time kind of thing.

So if it's more intense, you need less time. If it's less intense, you need more time. It's basically standard government guidelines for exercise. Like it's nothing fancy. Yeah. It has a measurable, significant effect on cognitive function. So a great starting. point is just like spend some time not sitting. That's it. Like start, start there. And that could be like, all right, take the stairs. Great, great start. From there, I generally recommend that people do some kind of low level aerobic activity, you know, brisk walking, mainly because if you have been previously very sedentary, then that's enough to start building muscle and strength even, just like spending time on your feet, moving your body. Or don't have to be on your feet, right? If you're

propelling a wheelchair, right, has the same effect. Then we know that some level of intensity is going to matter. So a study that lots of people talk about, there was probably the first study that showed in humans. You can actually increase the size of the hippocampus in adult humans in their 60s and 70s was a brisk walking program. 40 minutes of brisk walking three times a week for a year. Significantly improved the size of the hippocampus and they saw improvements in memory function as well, which is what the hippocampus does. There's a link between how quickly you walk and your risk for dementia, right? Just your pace of...

Yeah, so they've done like total number of steps as well as like your average speed. Okay. Some of that is probably related to muscle quality and some other things that strength training might help out with. But we have this like consistent motor. So everybody will have their own pace of walking. And there's some kind of system in the brain that sets this like consistent motor, motor pattern or motor speed. Some of that's probably going to be related to overall brain health and physical health.

But this idea actually comes from my good friend and colleague, Dr. Josh Turknet, who's a neurologist, and we've written papers and we have a podcast together. And he had this idea that one reason why brisk walking may be beneficial for the brain specifically is because it actually requires cognitive work to walk faster than the basic set pattern that you want to walk at. Right, right. So it's actually creating a cognitive stimulus just by walking a bit faster. because you're having to do cognitive work to do that,

which I thought was very interesting. And I could explain some of that. So spending time moving faster than like whatever your base is, there's a greater cardiovascular effect, of course, but it might actually be having its own kind of cognitive stimulus. So some kind of movement, you're adding some level of intensity, right? So making it brisk, you're a little bit out of breath. That's ideally where people will start.

And then on top of that, my next level would be some kind of resistance training. Because at that point, we know that from animus control trials, resistance training at least once if not twice a week, significantly improves the structure of the white matter, significantly improves executive function, and these are critical components of long-term cognitive function. And again, this is in older adults. And the minimum effective dose is very low.

It's like an hour or a week or something total. So one example is the smart trial where they had people, they did it three times a week, but it was six exercises, three sets of eight to 12, machines in the gym, right? the most basic resistance training program that anybody can do in any planet fitness or whatever. You can even, but you can do it at home with bands or whatever, had significant effects on executive function and brain structure. Once you're beyond that point, you're doing that,

you know, you're sort of not spending all day sitting, you're starting to move around, you're occasionally getting out of breath, you're doing some resistance training. Then you can start to layer on higher levels of intensity, some kind of sprint or interval training because lactate has its own very interesting beneficial effects on the brain, mainly by being a conduit to increasing the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Maybe just quickly explain lactate and its role in brain metabolism. Yeah, so people will be familiar, you know, if you do any exercise, you'd be familiar with lactate, right? You kind of associate that with the burn of doing very hard exercise.

And historically, it was kind of demonized because it's like this waste product that you produce when you're working hard. But actually, you built, you create lactate as part of a buffer against some of the buildup of acid that occurs when you're doing very high-intensity anaerobic work, so you're not getting enough oxygen to provide all the energy through aerobic activity in the mitochondria, right? So you rely on glycolysis. Then lactate helps to kind of recycle some of that and take care of some of the acid that builds up. Then lactate is a really important signaling molecule, and we haven't really appreciated that

much in the last few years. There are people who are studying it as a treatment for multiple neurological disorders, particularly traumatic brain injury. But while lactate, we think. think what it does in this setting, so when you look at how exercise intensity and sprint training improve cognitive function, it improves cognitive function both immediately, right? So you can go and do six second all-out sprints and see immediate improvements in cognitive function. A lot of that's just related to arousal, right? You've activated that stress response, like your brain's a little bit

more engaged. But it seems that generating lactate then results in greater production of something or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is a really important trophic, which essentially means just promotes growth or supports growth for your own. BDNF for people that, yeah. If you've seen that, you'll probably see that written down, write it down as BDNF. And BDNF is produced with exercise and it's more is produced with more intense exercise. But BDNF that you measure in the blood is probably having effects on muscle function and maybe on like your nerves elsewhere in the body, but it's, it's, most of it isn't getting into the

brain. And so when people talk about exercise of BDNF, actually that BDNF is not necessarily doing its thing in the brain. It's, it's beneficial, but, but not directly. The only way to get it into the brain is via lactate, which requires you to feel the burn. Yes, exactly. So there are some, there are some other molecules that do this, um, like osteocalcin for when you like load the bones with resistance training. But lactate, essentially, the more lactate you have in your blood, the more lactate gets into the brain. The brain actually likes taking up lactate.

And then lactate switches on the production of BDNF locally in the brain. So that's one reason why intensity can be really important if you're thinking about the big picture of how to support the brain with activity. So give us your minimum effective dose to make sure that we're getting that BDNF kind of activated in a way that's going to help protect our brain. Yeah, I think if you're already regularly doing other low levels of a rope exercise, then some kind of higher intensity, sprint training, interval training, it doesn't really matter that much how you do it.

So max, flat out max effort on a bike, in a pool, any modality. Yeah, and I think that when you look at the exercise literature, they'll split these up, You have sprint interval training, which is usually something less than 30 seconds, and then you have interval training, which might be up to like four or more minutes. Just because of the studies that have been done, the study that seemed to have, or the type of training that seemed to have the best effect on hippocampal function and structure in older adults was like four by, the Norwegian four by four. So four minutes are like 85 to 90 percent max heart rate, with a four to five minute rest in between.

Repeating four times. I mean repeating that four times. But in reality, I think anything that's going to generate some lactate, so any kind of repeated sprints. And so I usually have people just start at the end of any kind of other aerobic exercise session, just like run as fast as you can or as far as you can for like 10 seconds, and then rest of it bit and then do it again. But it can literally be any modality you can skip, you can run, you can bike, you can row,

whatever it is. For some people might be walking. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like we mentioned earlier, right? Yeah. If you're new to exercise, brisk walking is going to do that.

It's going to do that. Yeah. So, you know, once or twice a week is probably a great place to start. Amazing. I'm due for my four by four. I do it like every 10 to 14 days. So this protocol, they did in this study, they had them do it three times a week for six months. I am aware of that study, which blows my mind.

If someone told me how to do four, five four, three times a week, I'd be like. So I don't think you need to do that. No, I don't think that's necessary. Yeah. I feel like my view, like I've been basically doing it like every two weeks. And then obviously I do spring interval training, you know, two to three times per week on top of that. So, which is my word doable. You know, those are just, you know, interval track workouts at max, you know, 90 seconds.

The 404 is so painful. I'm just like, as you're even talking about it, I'm like, oh, God, I got to do that the next three days. But it is, you will see meaningful changes in your VO2 max. We do, we passively detect your VO2 max, which is kind of a cool feature on the WOOP platform. But yeah, I've been like actively working. on trying to improve that with the goal of preserving my brain health. When we think about your framework, when we think about exercise, you know, what do you make sure people are really aware of?

I think the final thing, this is kind of the final step of my funnel, but really it can be applied anywhere through the funnel is this idea of the importance of coordinates of exercise, which is essentially any exercise that requires you to respond or react to the environment, process information quickly includes complex motor skills. Pickle ball. Pickle. Great, great example. Pickleball is a really interesting example because the scoring system is super complicated. So you have to do like. You have to pay attention. Like you're like, and then you don't want to be that person who's like, can't fucking remember the score. You know, like. There's lots of studies now that show that if you compare a unimodal or what we might call closed skill exercise, so just like running, cycling, you know, something very basic to something else that's a similar level or the same level of.

physical difficulty, but that has a co-ordinate component on top, both are beneficial, but the latter seems to have more of an effect on the brain. So you compare circuit training to dancing or you compare jogging to table tennis or badminton. Any of those things that we mentioned, right, you'll get some sprint training if you go and play soccer, right? Plus you'll have that strategy. Strategy. The social component, you're having to constantly respond to the environment. So you don't have to do all of this in the gym, right? You can get most of these benefits by layering on these other aspects and then doing it in a social environment is going to be beneficial as well. So any of those things that sounds fun, not only you get in the

cardiovascular benefit, you're probably getting a bit of a strength component too, but then you'll layer on this additional, like cognitive component that has additional benefits. Because social connection, I mean, we'd be remiss not to mention that. I mean, that's so big, right? What is the piece of literature that stands out the most to you around the relationship or association between connection and brain health. A lot of the work that really sort of created this field was done by Julianne Holt-Lonstadt, who's faculty at BYU. And she did this classical meta-analysis published in Plos Medicine in 2010 that looked at social isolation and loneliness as a risk factor for all-cause mortality. and if anybody ever heard like loneliness is the new smoking, right?

That was from her paper, which basically showed that risk of feeling lonely was the same or maybe even greater than somebody who was a smoker. And of course, you know, then people, they get very worked up about like, what's the exact comparison and what are we looking at? But there have been more recent meta-analys looking at the benefit of feeling socially connected

and socially supported. And so that's, you know, living with a spouse, feeling like you're friends, feeling like you're supported. that's protective against dementia, whereas the opposite is also true. So if you feel socially isolated, if you feel alone, if you live alone, then you have an increased risk of dementia. And I will just say very briefly with that, it doesn't necessarily have to be a human. You get very similar benefits if you live with a pet that you look after.

And this is probably because there is some element of social connection. Women especially. Women do really well with pets, even more than a partner, apparently. Yeah. So most of the benefit of being married. is for men in terms of health than it is for women, you're right. But there's this element, a lot of it seems to come from the effects of pro-social behavior. So looking after something or someone else seems to have, you know, very beneficial effects

for, you know, overall vagal tone. We sort of activate more of these sort of like rest and recovery processes through this act of like caring for somebody else. So purpose. Yeah. And that's part of your purpose. So can be human. It doesn't have to be.

Right. But multiple different strands of evidence suggests that, you know, having other beings in your life that you care for and that care for you is a critical component of, you know, long-term cognitive health. And I'll say that, so Josh and I, who I mentioned earlier, we wrote a paper called the demand-driven theory of age-related cognitive decline. Basically, saying all of this that how we use our brains or we don't use our brains as we get older is sort of a critical determinant of how our cognitive function declines.

I have mentioned this to a friend of mine, Dr. Julian. and Abel, who's a retired palliative care physician in the UK, he was like, I'm sure this is very true, but all of it can be explained by a social connection, because that's where we get so much of our stimulus, that's like why we learn things and why we engage in the world. So I think that just becomes a really sort of core part of how all of that affects us. I love that. Thank you. That's a beautiful explanation and very clear. So when we think about a dashboard of things that we need to make sure that we're thinking about to help us ensure that we're engaging in behaviors that are going to help preserve our brain health. We obviously talked about exercise. We talked a little bit about

nutrition. I don't know. But, you know, what other things do we need to be focused on making sure that they're as good as they can be, given our constraints and, you know, our history? You know, there's obviously lots of things that influence one's ability to sleep, for example. But, you know, what would be kind of that dashboard that you would recommend people focus on? So normally when we think about this, if you go on social media and you look at even like very evidence-based brain health content, they'll give you something like, here are 30 things to do for your brain health today, which is incredibly overwhelming, right? When you think about 30 things that you have to do, 29 of which you're not doing, you will do zero additional things because you're just like

constantly overwhelmed by the number of things that you're trying to do. Yeah. So in the book, I basically build towards this model that I think gives us a framework for how to think about these things. So there's chapters on all the stuff that we've talked about. But then I bring them all together in what I call the 3S model.

So the 3S is our stimulus, which you've talked about a lot today. So hopefully you have some idea of what stimulus entails. The next bucket is supply. So when you stimulate an area of the brain and network of the brain, all those neurons and astrocytes

and things start to fire together, they draw in additional blood flow. in order to actually do that work. So this is through a process called neurovascular coupling. In order for that to work, you need a healthy blood supply, right? So cardiovascular health is really critical. You need a good energy supply, right? For most people, it's going to be glucose, could be ketones, could be lactate.

And so metabolic health is really critical, which also overlaps a lot with cardiovascular health. And then you also need a critical supply of nutrients that kind of run that whole system. They make up the synapses, make up the mitochondria. for brain health in particular, B vitamins, omega-3s, vitamin D, magnesium, iron are probably nutrient-dense foods. So then we're talking a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods that kind of get us those things. Super colorful, lots of quality protein, high-quality fat. Yeah, in addition to those vitamins, polyphenol, colorful antioxidants seem to really

beneficial for the brain. I'm a big fan of wild blueberries in particular because they're so antioxidant dense. But actually any berries, there are dozens of studies showing both acute and chronic benefits on cognitive function from consuming berries. Insane amount of blueberries. And so is my dad who just appears not to be aging. So it's pretty amazing. And it's just like a couple of two of strawberries or cranberries or whatever a day. Like something super doable.

Right, right. So that's our supply bucket. And then, right, so you've stimulated an area of the brain. You brought in all the things that you need to do the work. And then, right, you need to adapt and recover. like we've talked about. So that's support is the third S. So sleep is a critical one. We've, we've kind of talked about that already. Then you want to avoid things that impair those adaptation processes. So chronic stress, that's where our static load plays a big role. And we're not

going to avoid stress. We're just going to map it with appropriate levels of rest. Yeah. And understand that you understand where it has benefits and where we need to sort of take control of it. Then avoiding things like smoking, excessive alcohol, these can impair adaptation. We see that for environmental exposures like air pollution is another one. And then also in the support bucket you might think about trophic support, right? So we've talked about BDNF that you get from exercise, but hormonal status is going to be really important. That might be part of cognitive symptoms. So in women during the perimenopausal transition, maybe in men, if they experience significant decreases in testosterone production. So keeping track of those markers.

keeping track of those markets. Important, especially as you age and going through these various transitions for women specifically, paramedipause, and for both, a lot of it is probably exacerbating other health conditions that are kind of contributing to them. Right. Low estrogen, metabolic issue, potentially insulin resistant. Yeah. And so to think about women in the perimenopausal transition, it seems to be a time at which risk factors are magnified. So if you have metabolic syndrome during that period, you're more likely to experience cognitive changes.

If you have more vasomotor symptoms, that's associated with cognitive changes. But vasemotor symptoms can be improved with improving diet quality, with physical activity. I mean, resistance training. Those data are so exciting. Like, I feel really like there is a future where you can bypass all those gnarly symptoms. You know, women don't like to hear this. But, you know, you need to be lifting weights. Multiple reasons to do that.

You need to spread. Brain, brain, vasemotor symptoms, bones, like, all that stuff. Yeah. So that's kind of, that's the third bucket, right? That's the support bucket. And the reason why I talk about the fact that these things are connected is really important. So when you stimulate the brain, and there are actually studies where in older adults, they make them do cognitive training, when you stimulate an area of the brain, you then drive more requirement for adaptation, which actually, you have greater sleep drive.

So if you have older adults and they do cognitive training, they sleep better. Yeah. And so I think one of the reasons why we sleep less well as we get older is because we're just, just not using our brains anymore, so we're not driving or and we're not exercising and we're not driving sleep pressure. I mean, my dad, like, literally reads like, he reads so much. And he sleeps like a baby, you know? And I know I find this too, like when I'm really stimulating my brain and, you know,

if I'm working on a paper, a manuscript, like, I always just like sleep like a baby. But I think making sure, though, in those moments where you're working on a paper, for example, like you're reading a lot, like making sure you're not too sedentary because it's kind of easy, you know, like so I always think about balancing, you know, knowing if I'm going to have like a really heavy day where I have to be writing massive amounts. Like I really try to like balance it out with like enough movement, you know. And so this is then where you can start to piece these things together. And they integrate over a long periods of time, right?

So if you spend a few days being sedentary, it's not a big deal if right the rest of the time you're very active. Or you spend a few days not being very cognitively stimulated, right? You just like spend a couple of days, sit on the couch, watching movies, which I will definitely do. You know, that's fine too because you're doing this kind of stuff the rest of the time. But the reason why I talk about this is a network of all these different buckets is because when you change one thing, the whole network shifts. So when you exercise more, then you sleep better and your blood pressure improves. And then you have improved cardiovascular health and you get some more support because you have more like trophic factor production. And you're probably doing some kind of cognitive stimulus as part of that exercise.

So you've like hit all three buckets at the same time. And it's the same if you sleep better, then you feel more social. and your blood pressure and inflammation improve and you've recovered and adapted. So again, you're hitting all the buckets. So this then, just to say that you can think about these three different buckets and you can think about, well, is there one thing in each bucket that I could maybe attend to a little bit better?

But if that's too overwhelming, you might think, well, that's like one thing that I can do. Because if it's, you're getting a little bit more sleep or you're doing a little bit more movement or you don't have a very cognitively stimulating job, so you start to learn new skill, you're going to start hitting. everything at the same time because this system interacts. So that's why I don't like to think of it

as a list because it's not really a list because all these things are kind of intimately connected. I love it. It's kind of, I think how you describe it, you know, it just becomes kind of a way of being, you know, like once it's integrated into your life. But I love the idea of just starting small, you know, just 10 minutes of something. Of something. Any of those things. That's supporting your brain health and that hopefully has a flywheel effect, you know, to other other behaviors that are also supportive. Thank you, first of all, for sharing all of your wisdom today. Your book is sensational. Thank you.

I feel so grateful that I was able to get an early copy of the book to help prepare for this conversation today. But I think it's going to help so many folks. It's just come out. So where can folks find? Where can they purchase it and where can they follow your work? Thanks so much for having me. This has been fabulous and I really appreciate it.

People can follow me. Most of my stuff ends up going on Instagram. So at Dr. Tommy Wood on Instagram or my website, Dr. Tommywood.com. You can find the book there, also at the stimulatedmind.com, or wherever you buy books. The book is available. And I'd love people if they found this interesting to buy the book and then let me know what they think of it. I love it. Well, thank you, Tommy.

Thank you. Super grateful. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social. At Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us podcast at Woop.com. call us 508-443-49-2. If you think about joining Whoop, you can visit Whoop.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial membership.

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