Podcast from: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/wellness-wheel/

[0:00:00] Introduction

[0:00:56] About the Podcast

[0:01:42] Podcast Sponsors

[0:04:11] Start of Talk Format and What it’s About

[0:06:22] Diet and Micronutrients

[0:12:46] How far back in your lineage do you go to determine what diet is appropriate for you?

[0:15:36] How do you test for a leaky gut, and how do you go about fixing it?

[0:18:33] Exercise and Movement

[0:24:10] What’s the best way to recover from your workout while in a fasted state?

[0:26:27] What about the super slow approach to working out?

[0:28:13] Podcast Sponsors

[0:31:02] Sleep

[0:34:36] How do you increase your REM sleep if it’s on the low side?

[0:36:33] What are the benefits of waking up when the sun rises for your circadian rhythm?

[0:39:06] Cardiovascular Health

[0:42:47] Is there a correlation between singing and fat loss?

[0:43:49] How do you address a consistently low LF?

[0:46:58] Brain Health

[0:50:53] What “brain hacks” exist to help in a hyper-stressful environment like living in a big city?

[0:53:15] Hormone Health

[0:59:10] What did you do to repair your thyroid?

[1:02:34] Stress and Inflammation

[1:06:51] What do you think of deuterium content in foods and waters?

[1:08:50] Immunity and Cancer

[1:14:30] What do you think of exposure to dirt as it pertains to immunity?

[1:16:02] Detoxification

[1:18:24] Aesthetics, Symmetry, Beauty

[1:21:29] Longevity

[1:26:47] Closing the Podcast

Ben:  I have a master’s degree in physiology, biomechanics, and human nutrition. I’ve spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet from SEALFit Kokoro, Spartan Agoge, and the world’s toughest mudder, the 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science, search the globe for the world’s top experts in performance, fat loss, recovery, gut hormones, brain, beauty, and brawn to deliver you this podcast. Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful, and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

So, anyways, the shownotes for everything that you’re about to hear, I’m going to put those over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/wellnesswheel. That’s BenGreenfieldFitness.com/wellnesswheel. And also, you can go listen to the previous podcast that I did with Dr. Darshan Shah of the NextHealth Clinic, who’s just a wealth of knowledge. That one is at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nexthealthpodcast. So, a lot of things to remember, but it’s BenGreenfieldFitness.com/wellnesswheel is the shownotes for this podcast. BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nexthealthclinic is where you can get $500 off the MRI and all that jazz. And then BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nexthealthpodcast is where you can go listen to my previous podcast with Dr. Shah. I love what these folks are doing.

Today’s show, by the way, is brought to you by the brand-new berry aminos. Essential amino acids are something I’ve talked about a lot before for maintaining muscle mass, for maintaining anabolism even if you’re in a fasted state, for helping with sleep and transmitters, for repairing the gut, for repairing the joints. And we just launched a brand new addictively good flavor over at getkion.com. You can take one scoop, you can take two scoops. I dump it straight into my mouth because I’m a freak, but you can also mix it with water. You can mix it into a smoothie. It is one of the best ways, even more thoroughly absorbing collagen to feed amino acids into your system, [00:02:26], used to be a secret of the bodybuilding industry back when I was a bodybuilder, and now these things are hidden in the mainstream and they freaking work. So, we launched a brand-new berry flavor, tested the hell out of it, it tastes amazing. Go to Kion at getkion.com, and what you want to look for are the berry aminos. It tastes really good.

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It is one of those things that I recommend you sip at night. Mix it with some hot coconut milk or hot almond milk or rice milk or hemp milk or water or what have you. Drink this at night and that’s the time to do it, in my opinion. It just knocks you out. So, go to Organifi. That’s Organifi with an I, organifi.com, and we use code GREENFIELD. You’re going to save 20% off of anything from our friends at Organifi. So, enjoy that and enjoy this episode you’re about to hear. Again, all the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/wellnesswheel. Enjoy.

Male 1:  Bit hands to Ben Greenfield everybody.

Ben:  Thank you. Thank you, guys. This is almost like a town hall health talk, and I want this to be super interactive for you all. So, sometimes I’ll give a talk and I’ll have like a formal PowerPoint and a suit and tie and all that jazz but today, as Dr. Shah alluded to, I want to go over this big comprehensive wellness wheel, because it’s pretty sick. You guys can’t see it. They’re on that side, but basically, there’s a whole wheel here that goes over diet and micronutrients and exercise, and movement, inflammation, immunity. And what I thought would be cool, because it’s so comprehensive, is I just want to give you one or two of my top tips, and each of those categories–and I want to make this very interactive. I want to talk about what’s specific to you. Answer your burning questions as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with the strange growth on your right forearm or something like that. I will try and keep this relevant to the whole crowd.

But it’s going to be very Q&A-ish tonight. So, the way that the Q&A will work is I will dive into each topic and we’ll just dwell on that topic. We’ll open it up, we’ll ferment on, I will do some questions on it, and then kind of move on to the next topic. So, you can, at any point if you have a question, just raise your hand. We’ll run a mic out to you, answer your question, and then continue to move on through the wellness wheel. Does that sound like a plan to you guys? You just want me to talk at you for the next hour? Okay. Alright, we’ll make it more of a conversation.

And I literally just took some notes on my phone, this is very, very formal, about each of the different aspects of the wheel that I want to cover. I also put a longevity guide. I worked on like a free PDF for everybody here. So, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitnes.com/nexthealthtalk, BenGreenfieldFitnes.com/nexthealthtalk is where you can download this PDF. It’s got a whole bunch more. I made it to focus more on the longevity and anti-aging piece. So, there’s a whole bunch more content for you there too, if you guys want some extra goodies.

So, that being said, we can start wherever we want on this wheel, but I’m going to start at the top under diet and micronutrients because I get a lot of questions about this. What is the perfect human diet? What should you eat to enhance your health? Should you go keto? Should you go vegan? Should you go carnivore? Do you alternate day intermittent fast FMD, XYZ type of approach? And the fact is we live in an era of self-quantification where in my opinion, every single person in here should be on the diet that is unique for them because if you take–let’s say like a ketogenic diet. How many of you in here are on the new trendy ketogenic diet; high fat, low carb, fasting, sticks of butter in your coffee and coconut oil for dinner?

Well, the fact is, I mean a lot of people have things like a genetic variant. There’s a genetic variant, APOE44, and it would dictate that you could have a pretty deleterious response to saturated fats, and you would do better on a diet rich in Mediterranean fats that maybe only has 5% to 10% of some of those fats that are solid at room temperature. Many people get genetically tested and they’ve got something like familial hypercholesterolemia dictating that even though cholesterol is good, like I’m not shoving cluster under the bandwagon, for some people, cholesterol goes way, way up on a high-fat diet.

Some people have gallbladder issues, liver issues that limit the amount of bile that they can produce, hence, dictating that they’re not able to digest the fats as easily and it’s not genetically based. It’s just the fact that you have an organ that needs work prior to launching into something like a high-fat diet. So, in my opinion, we’re talking about the first aspects of this wheel, diet and micronutrients. You must choose a diet that’s specific to you.

Now that being said, pretty much every single healthy diet we see some of the same things over and over again popping up, right, and a lot of these blue zones. We see plant intake, high wild plant intake. I don’t care whether you’re a high fat/low carb, low fat/high carb. You must eat a high intake of wild plant matter. It appears, based on a lot of the blue zones in a lot of these areas where there’s a high number of centenarians, we see high plants intake. We see a very big focus on limitations in glucose fluctuations, something called glycemic variability, eating in a way that keeps your blood glucose from fluctuating during the day or moving in a way that keeps your blood glucose from fluctuating during the day.

I’ll give you one other example. We see that when people eat, they’re eating in a parasympathetically driven state. Like I don’t sit a lot but I sit to eat, and I chew my food for a long period of time, and I try to eat in a social setting where I’m surrounded by people and there’s talk and laughter and socializing and relationships and a lot of these things that keep you from just like stuffing food really quickly into your gaping maw and then moving on, like eating when you’re driving, eating when you’re commuting, eating by yourself when you’re touring around on Netflix or replying to emails, et cetera.

We don’t see that as a healthy characteristic of a diet that’s built for health and longevity. So, even though eating according to your genetics, your blood, your biomarkers, your unique body is important, there are also prevailing characteristics that we see over and over again in choosing a diet. That’s correct for you. And another part of this wellness wheel is of course micronutrients. And a big part of the micronutrient piece, in my opinion, is you must choose meals that are not only digestible but also nutrient dense.

What do I mean by that? Take quinoa for example. Who in here eats quinoa? Which I used to pronounce quinoa until I actually heard someone say it properly. Let’s say get a bag of quinoa from Costco and you make it. You follow the package directions and you wind up with quinoa in your turds in the toilet in an upset stomach and you think that this trendy superfruit quinoa is something that F’s up your gut when in fact, quinoa while being very nutrient dense, has to be rendered digestible. You have to soak it. You have to rinse it. In many cases, you can sprout it. And you take something that’s nutrient dense. You unlock the micronutrients by making it digestible.

You could look at other food groups that are highly digestible like sugar. A sugar digestible? Yeah. You start to digest that with the salivary amylase in your mouth as soon as it hits your mouth. But is it nutrient dense? You could argue no. I mean, there are some things like blackstrap molasses and raw honey and sugar cane. They give you some minerals and some nutrient density. But ultimately, sugar, although digestible, doesn’t fall into the category of nutrient density.

So, you choose a diet that’s right for you. You customize it based on your body. You follow these themes that we see over and over again in healthy cultures like fasting, like limitation of glycemic variability, like wild plants intake, like eating in a parasympathetic state. And then you choose foods that are nutrient dense and digestible. In my opinion, probably, if we were to choose one diet that’s pretty close to being a perfect human diet, if you could tweak it here and there for your needs, it would be something that’s very inclusive of a wide variety of food groups, something like the Weston A. Price diet where you’re eating dairy, and you’re eating grains, and you’re eating plants, and you’re eating fermented foods, and you’re eating organ meats, and eating a wide variety of foods. And sure, before embarking upon a diet like that, you might need to heal up a leaky gut, you might need to fix a gallbladder, do a liver cleanse, et cetera. But your goal should be no matter what kind of diet you’re on to get to the point where you can include as many different food groups as possible, then you treat the carb fat protein ratios based on you.

So, that’s the first part of the wellness wheel. It’s the diet and micronutrients. Now based on that, who has some questions about diet in general, choosing the diet for you, micronutrients? And let’s just run a mic to some of the folks who have their hands up. We’ll just take like two or three questions for each section here.

Male 2:  Hey. If you’ve done something like 23andMe, and mine came back like 100% European. Now, how do you–

Ben:  Well, 100%?

Male 2:  A hundred percent.

Ben:  No Asian?

Male 2:  No Asian. Surprising, or anything that’s–

Ben:  Wow. Very surprising.

Male 2:  A little boring, but how would you go about picking the diet from 100% European? Do you go back 100 years, 1,000 years? How do you figure out what they ate?

Ben:  Right. Yeah. Epigenetic mechanism starts to kick in after about two or three generations. You don’t have to go that far back. You don’t have to do like 10,000 years ago what were people eating in Northern Europe.

Male 2:  But you’re going on Google, right?

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. We know that folks in that region, they do a lot of fermenting, pickling, curing, high amount of fish intake, high amounts of fermented, like canned vegetable intake, not a lot of citrus fruits, not a lot of starches, lower levels of amylase production in the mouth. So, it’s kind of fun. It’s kind of like a little bit of detective work. And there are good books that could walk you through the process. Dr. Daphne Miller has the book “The Jungle Effect,” which talks about how to eat according to your ancestry and the type of diet she put her patients on based off of the area of the world they came from.

And when you combine that with something like a really good, say food allergy test, some blood and biomarker analysis to see what specific micronutrients or vitamins that you might be deficient in, and maybe even a gut panel, like a microbiome panel where you could look at everything from your gallbladder, your liver, parasites, yeast, fungus, et cetera. Then you could start to put the pieces together. You don’t have to go that far back in your ancestry.

Male 2:  Two or three generations.

Ben:  If you’re lucky enough to have grandparents like you could talk to them about what their diet was, and what their mom and dad ate. You really don’t have to go that far back. So, yeah.

Male 2:  Okay. Awesome. Thank you.

Ben:  Yeah. That’s actually total rabbit hole, but that’s why I’m not a huge fan. I have a lot of friends who are like families who are like–this seems like really trendy nowadays, like the nomadic homeschooling internet entrepreneur, working from the road type of life. But I think when it comes to setting up your gut microbiome, your skin microbiome, a more intimate relationship with the actual biome of the environment in which you’re living, the advantages of having like a home base, like a castle that you call home and raising your family in the same place where maybe you lived, your parents lived, thinking forward in terms of like a family trust and maybe amassing land for your children in a certain location. I think there are definite advantages to having a relationship with your local environment, your local family setting, et cetera. I think that translates the diet as well. So, yeah, good question.

Male 2:  Thank you, Ben.

Ben:  Yes, sir?

Male 3:  Hey, Ben. How do you go about testing for a leaky gut? And then how do you go about fixing it? And also specifically, what do you watch out for when it comes to insets and how those would react to the gut and the stomach lining?

Ben:  Yeah. So, in terms of identifying a leaky gut, you could get basically just a stool panel, like Genova Diagnostics, for example. They’ll let you go to Direct Labs or any laboratory testing website. That’s something you don’t even need a physician, or that you can just order test, and what it will do is test for parasites, yeast, fungus, but also a lot of inflammatory markers in the gut that could be indicative of leaky gut. If you don’t even want to test, I mean in many cases, seeing large food particles or like fatty deposits in your stool, for those of you who run an Instagram channel that shows pictures of your poop, this is something you could keep track of. I know some people that do that.

But the idea is you could pay attention to symptoms or you can also just pay attention to markers of inflammation on something like a three-day gut panel. And if you do have leaky gut, typically, the fix is combining an elimination diet, something like an SCD diet, specific carbohydrate diet, or a GAPS diet. That’s called a gut, in psychology, syndrome diet or a paleo autoimmune diet. None of which are diets unless you’ve got a full-blown celiac disease. I think anyone should be on for their whole life.

But you do a diet like that for 8 to 12 weeks. Allow your gut to heal. And you combine that with a lot of things that we know help to restore the mucosa lining of the gut and shut down inflammation in the gut like bone broth, L-glutamine, colostrum, chia seed. There are a lot of things that help to restore the lining of that. Colostrum is another really good one. At that point, you would then ideally return to a more inclusive diet after you’ve healed your gut. As far as NSAIDs, I think a lot of people are aware nowadays that ibuprofen and Advil are not God’s gift to mankind, like those things are not that great especially with what we know about the ability of curcumin and boswellia, and a lot of these more natural compounds to act in an anti-inflammatory way, in a much more natural manner.

But with NSAIDs, a lot of the research is showing that when combined with heat, when combined with movement, you get liver toxicity, kidney toxicity. It shocks me when I talk to my Ironman triathlon friends who are still popping ibuprofen during the race to quell pain. So, I’m not a fan of those in just about any circumstance when there are so many natural alternatives out there. So, yeah. You’ve got one right here. I mean, like Kion Flex, this is one of the supplements I formulated, and it’s just like curcumin and Boswellia and proteolytic enzymes and all the things you do if you didn’t want to do ibuprofen. So, thank you for throwing that softball, by the way, and putting that there.

Alright. Well, we want to make sure we hit every aspect of the wellness wheel. So, we’re just going to keep on rolling through, and I’m going to move on to exercise and movement. Again, I get a question very similar to like what’s the perfect human diet, what’s the perfect exercise program. And again, the answer is it depends. It’s highly dependent on your goals. Are you somebody who wants to do an Ironman? Are you somebody who just wants to live a long time? Are you somebody who wants to put on muscle? Are you somebody who wants to lose fat?

But ultimately, in my opinion, the perfect exercise and movement protocol should expose your body to certain physiological triggers that I think everybody will benefit from. Triggers that have been associated with things like decreased risk of mortality, improved cardiovascular status, improved performance on metabolism, et cetera. So, what would those be? There are a few of them. Number one is your maximum oxygen utilization, what’s called your VO2 max. I think everybody, every one to two weeks based on research, should do something that targets your maximum oxygen utilization. This dictates that instead of doing this very short, trendy, high-intensity interval training sessions that are like 30 seconds, 60 seconds, et cetera, you actually have to move at your maximum sustainable pace for about four to five minutes.

Now, this wouldn’t be an exercise session that you do every day, but just a couple of times–it would be a couple of times a month, up to four times a month. I do this once a week. You do interval training that’s longer intervals with longer rest periods. An example of that would be four minutes of exercise at your maximum sustainable pace followed by four minutes of recovery, like a one-to-one work to rest ratio. And you would do that like four or five times through. That’s called your VO2 max.

Another area you should target is your mitochondria. The mitochondria respond very well, the very short exercise bursts followed by long recovery periods. So, you target your VO2 max with the longer exercise sessions and the longer recovery periods. You target your mitochondria with the short intense exercise sessions and the long recovery period. So, this would be like 30 seconds hard, 2 minutes easy, 4 times through, something like that. As you begin to plan out your exercise program for the week, you’re just making sure that you check all of these boxes.

Another one that I think everybody should focus on is lactic acid tolerance, which is correlated to growth hormone and testosterone. An example of that is–and you ever heard of a Tabata set, T-A-B-A-T-A? These are very simple, the four minutes long. Everybody raise their hand, made a look of disgust because they’re difficult, they burn. But it’s 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, 8 times through. It’s a four-minute set. It’s fabulous. It’s something that you could start and end a weight training session with, for example, or start or end a weight training session with. It’s called Tabata set, very good for your lactic acid tolerance.

Okay. So, we got lactic acid. We got mitochondria. We got VO2 max. Number four would be stamina. I think that everybody, at least once a week, should get out and do something long in a fasted state. I love to do like a Saturday or Sunday morning hike where I wake up fasted, go train my body how to burn fatty acids very efficiently, train it how to go for a longer time without fuel. Sometimes this could be a bike ride. Sometimes it could be a swim, hike, walk, what have you, but the idea is you’re training your body to go for longer periods of time in the absence of trail mix and energy bars.

Okay. So, those are hitting a lot of your cardiovascular parameters. And then the only other two things to really worry about from a movement and an exercise standpoint would be the strength component, the muscle component. So, what I like is at least one to two times a week, you lift heavy stuff in a very controlled, slow, very good form fashion. This would be like a super slow exercise protocol, or a 5×5 workout where you’re doing five sets of five reps of some full body moves like a bench press, a deadlift, a squat, a shoulder press, and some kind of a core movement. You don’t have to do a lot of those, but doing a super slow strength, I like to do that about two to three times a week. And then the area you won’t hit with that is the type of muscle fiber that’s very explosive, very fast twitch. So, one to two additional times a week, you do like a very short, like New York Times had a great article on the seven-minute workout where you’re doing bodyweight training, very intense 32^nd efforts, 15 seconds off, or 32^nd efforts, 10 seconds off. Move on to the next exercise.

And when you weave all these together into a program; VO2 max, mitochondria, lactic acid, stamina, heavy lifting, and some kind of explosive movement, you’re checking a lot of the boxes that you need to be a Batman of fitness, to have multiple skills to be able to get out and play just about any sport that you want. And as long as you’re engaged in low-level physical activity during the day, as long as you’re like these people who are standing up during my talk as opposed to these lazy asses who are sitting in their chairs, then you’re probably going to check a lot of the boxes when it comes to the exercise and movement piece.

The only last thing I would say is sometimes mobility is underemphasized, like hitting a foam roller, doing a lacrosse ball on the hips, getting a massage, that type of thing. The way I do that is I just wake up for the first 10 to 15 minutes of every day. I’ll make love to a foam roller. I’ll take out some kind of vibrating exercise gun. I’ll hit my quads with a lacrosse ball, whatever. So, by the end of the week, I’ve amassed like 70 to 90 minutes of mobility work that I’ll just do in the morning while I’m breathing or listening to some morning audio or something like that. So, that’s how I weave together all the exercise in the movement component.

So, based on that, what kind of questions you guys have about movement, about exercise, about fat loss or muscle gain, or anything kind of related to this component?

Male 4:  Yeah. So, quick question. You talked about it on a podcast recently. If you are doing early morning workouts especially because you got to go to work, but you want to stay fasted, what’s the best thing to do post-workout? There are different things like EAAs and whatnot. What’s your advice for getting the best recovery from the workout and maximizing what you did?

Ben:  Yeah. Evident studies show that if you wait to eat after a workout, that you actually experience an increasing growth hormone and testosterone, the only exception to this would be if you’re getting up in the morning and you’re working out in a fasted state. In which case, since you’re already fasted during the workout, it would actually benefit you to, sometime within about 20 to 60 minutes after that morning workout assuming it’s kind of a robust challenging workout, to eat, to have breakfast.

Now, if you’re more working on the afternoon, in the evening, earlier in the day, you’ve already said, you can actually benefit from waiting one to two hours or more after your workout. And you don’t have to take in like amino acids or some kind of supplement like that even in that scenario unless your goal is muscle gain, staying in as anabolic a state as possible. So, post-workout nutrition tends to be heavily overemphasized. The only time I tell people to emphasize it is if you’ve done a hard workout in a fasted state in the morning, then it behooves you to actually prioritize getting nutrition back into your body. Otherwise, with the only exception to this rule being if you’re going to exercise hard again within about eight hours and you got to replenish your glycogen levels and your amino acids and everything, then you don’t have to drop everything and go eat after workout.

And you could actually benefit from a hormonal standpoint and a fat loss standpoint by just letting yourself go until your next meal. And I do that very, very often. My scenario is I’ll typically wake up in a fasted state, I do easy exercise, and then I’ll have breakfast sometime within the next couple of hours. And then I do my afternoon or evening workout having not eaten for four to six hours, essentially lunchtime. And then after that workout, I’ll wait one to two hours until dinner.

Are there kind of exercise questions that we got?

Male 5:  Hey, regarding the super slow approach. I’ve read Doug McGuff’s book, Body by Science, and he promotes more of a one week approach with needing six to seven days of recovery. And you’ve mentioned maybe doing two to three times a week. Can you talk about that in terms of are you changing up what you’re doing or do you think you could do the same super slow twice a week?

Ben:  Yeah. Doug McGuff wrote a good book called Body by Science in which he highlights a lot of the peripheral and central cardiovascular benefits of lifting a single set to failure, like one single set of chest press, shoulder press, pull-down, seated row, and leg press, for example. And he endorses doing that just once a week. It’s like a 12 to 18-minute workout. But he’s also working primarily with either a sick or a senior population, whose goal is to just stave off cachexia or sarcopenia, or loss of muscle. I think that in the general population, who is a little bit healthier than who he is accustomed to working with, you can see better gains in muscle and better maintenance in muscle by doing the workout more frequently than that.

In addition, we can’t necessarily deny the fact that for some people including myself, like some kind of lifting or some kind of exercise, it’s almost like meditation. It just feels good to go out and move, and sure, maybe you don’t have to lift something heavy and do an exhausting workout like that more than one time a week but, myself included, I just feel a lot better when I’m doing something like two to three times a week, and my muscles just feel more capable. So, I think that you’ve got to couch some of Dr. McGuff’s advice in light of the fact that he’s working with a population that is necessarily athletic and may not even be as robust as the general population.

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So, the next section of the wellness wheel is sleep. It’s sleep. And of course, I could talk about sleep for a long time, and there’s of course all of these rules that we know about when it comes to proper sleep hygiene. Sleep in a cool environment. Preferably, sleep with as few clothes on as possible, although you can put socks on because when you keep your feet warm, it allows the rest of your body to stay cool. It’s a good little trick, but you sleep with your socks on, wearing as little as possible.

You keep the room cold. You keep the room silent or you pump white noise in through some kind of an app or some kind of a noise player next to your bed. You keep the room dark, preferably. You wear blue light blocking glasses. You install things like red incandescent bulbs in the bedroom so that there’s not a harsh artificial light. You use the bedroom for sleep or for sex but not a lot else. You don’t do business on your bed with your laptop. You don’t lay in bed reading books about your career or about things that are going to keep you up at night thinking about them. A lot of these things are–they’re becoming increasingly common knowledge when it comes to sleep hygiene.

What I’ve found though is something a lot of people don’t go out of their way to emphasize is exposure to as much natural blue light as possible early in the day, getting your ass outdoors as soon as possible in the morning when the sun has come up and exposing yourself to sunlight early in the day. That was one of the most profound things I’ve done in the past two years to increase my deep sleep percentages is my blue light exposure early in the day, preferably to as wide a spectrum of light as possible.

Now, I understand. For me, I live on a slope in the forest. Sometimes it’s dark. I don’t have a lot of sun. You guys are in L.A. Sometimes you get this thing called smog. The first few times that I came to L.A. and I’d open up my curtains in my hotel room and look outside, I’d think it was just like a Seattle grey dreary day and I realize that’s just freaking small. But there are things like blue light producing glasses, blue light producing ear devices, blue light producing panels or just light producing panels that you can stand in front of or bathe your body in front of to get as much blue light as possible early in the day.

That I think is probably one of the top sleep tips that I think flies under the radar is getting out and getting as much light as you can. I mean, like the blue light blocking glasses. Sometimes I will see people wearing those in inappropriate scenarios, like outside in the daytime. For example, Matt, you’re wearing your blue light blocking glasses right now but it is technically, I think the sun has set outside, when the sun is set in whatever area of the world you happen to be in, that’s when you should start to limit your blue light exposure.

Furthermore, even if it’s a middle of day and you’re working on your computer or you’re underneath bright LED of fluorescent lights, that’s another appropriate scenario to wear glasses like that. Although my personal protocol is I use the clear ones during the day so I’m blocking some of those wavelengths of light. Then I’ll switch to like a red or an orange at night. So, I’ve got kind of two different lenses that I’ll use. But ultimately, the idea is that blue light gets shoved under the bus sometimes. People are like, “Oh, that’s going to keep you awake at night.” But light early in the day is actually a pretty good thing, especially natural light as much as possible.

So, what kind of questions you guys have about sleep?

Male 6:  Ben, thank you for being here with all of us. Appreciate it big time, Ben. I have a question about REM. I know you’ve talked quite a bit on your podcast about the importance of deep sleep and increasing that. And on my aura did I tend to get over two hours of deep sleep but under an hour of RAM usually. Is that a concern and what do you usually do for people in that scenario?

Ben:  That’s a good question. A lot of people, they tend to have deficits in deep sleep, not REM sleep. I think a big part of sleep architecture is related to a lot of those sleep hygiene concepts that I talked about. Being able to bring yourself through each sleep cycle is related to lights. It’s related to the sound in the room. It’s related to thoughts that might be racing through your head and not doing business in bed, et cetera.

Have you ever looked into things like sleep apnea or your oxygen utilization during sleep, anything along those lines? Because one thing that you can do is you can wear a continuous pulse oximeter while you’re sleeping, and then you can get that data. Some oximeters will give you your oxygenation during an entire night of sleep and you can look at that. And if there are certain periods where your oxygen is dropping pretty rapidly, that could indicate sleep apnea that will be pulling you out of normal sleep architecture. And that’s something that a lot of people deal with. It happens more in back sleepers and side sleepers. It happens in people who have a lot of mouth breathing or shallow chest breathing during the day. They tend to revert to that at night as well.

And there are really good books about this type of thing like Patrick McKeown’s book, The Oxygen Advantage, that teaches you how to begin to breathe through your nose. On my podcast, I’ve interviewed a guy named Dr. Joseph Zelk, and we really geeked out on sleep apnea and how big of an issue that is when it comes to sleep cycles. That’s something you could look into. Yeah.

Male 6:  Thank you.

Ben:  Yeah. So, I would consider something like that.

Male 7:  How’s it going, Ben?

Ben:  Yeah. Pretty good, man.

Male 7:  What do you think about the benefits of waking up for the sunrise to get someone’s circadian rhythm rolling in the morning versus sleeping in a little bit later until you wake up naturally or maybe trying to get to a point where you wake up naturally that early, like when you wake up?

Ben:  Yeah. If you’re lucky enough to have a lifestyle that allows you to go to bed within about two to three hours after sunset and then wake with the sunrise, that’s ideal. That’s the way that nature is supposed to operate. However, we live in a post-industrial era. I doubt any of you are going to be in bed about an hour from now. We just live in an era where stuff happens at night. We’ve got all of the magic and the convenience of artificial lighting, but of course it means we’re constantly fighting an uphill battle because, as anyone who has been camping frequently knows, you get tired like at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. and it’s pretty rare for you to be up past 10:00 p.m. when you’re camping.

But then as soon as you’re shifted back into an environment like this, it’s pretty damn hard to go to bed soon after the sunset, and it’s especially hard to go to bed at say like 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. and get up with the sunrise at 5:00 a.m., right? Not a lot of us are Navy SEALs and Jocko Willink and David Goggins and all these guys. They figure out how to do it, but some of these cats are wired up kind of differently and maybe shortening their lifespan and their recovery and their memory consolidation from some of that shortened sleep. So, in my opinion, it depends, if you can, truly. There are some people I work with, they go to bed at 8:00 p.m. and they get up at 4:00 a.m. And that’s great if your lifestyle accommodates that.

And the other issue is a lot of people will say, “Okay. Well, I’ve got four days of the week that I actually can do that, but then these three days of the week, I am not going to get bed ’til like 11:00 p.m. so I got to get up at 6:00 a.m. or 7:00 a.m.” The problem with that is the human body does very well with regular sleep-wake cycles. Like in an ideal scenario, your best sleep data, your best sleep architecture is going to come from going to bed at a frequent time and getting up at a frequent time. That’s normal. And for me personally, that’s 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 am. For you, it could be midnight to 7:00 a.m. But whatever it is, like having the normal sleep-wake cycles is very important. It’s tough, but in an ideal scenario, yeah, you go to bed soon after sunset, you get up at sunrise. I’m more of like a 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. guy, but yeah, it’s a good question.

Alright. Let’s move on to cardiovascular health. Number four, cardiovascular health. There are all sorts of things we can talk about when it comes to cardiovascular health. But in my opinion, the number one thing that you need to consider is the health of your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is what innervates the SA nodes, the electrical cells of your heart. And in an ideal scenario, you’ve got feedback from your sympathetic branch and your parasympathetic branch of your nervous system feeding into your heart, keeping your heart on cue, having a high, what’s called heart rate variability. Who in here knows about or tracks their HRV, their heart rate variability?

All that is, and there are devices now, like I’m wearing a ring that does it. A lot of these self-qualification wearables now do it. That measurement is the amount of time in between each beat of your heart. It’s not your heart rate. It’s the amount of time in between each beat of your heart. And in an ideal scenario, there are slight micro differences between each single beat. That reflects a robust nervous system, and in many cases, a healthier cardiovascular system because your cardiovascular system is responding very well to the cues that your nervous system is sending to it.

How do you increase the health of your vagus nerves that your heart rate is better able to respond to the cues from your nervous system? It actually comes down to a lot of things that are almost like a woo, kind of spiritual; chanting, singing, humming, good relationships, getting out in the cold, getting exposed to some heat every now and again, good breathwork, deep nasal breathing. There are a lot of things that enhance the help of a vagus nerve. And there’s technology too. I mean, there are companies like Fisher Wallace, for example. And I own a couple of these units that will make vagal nerve stimulators, which typically go on either side of the head. Sometimes they’ll be located closer to the neck. But these things actually stimulate the vagus nerve and increase the tone of the vagus nerves that your nervous system is speaking to your cardiovascular system in a more efficient way.

Now, in my opinion, a lot of people would experience improvements in the cardiovascular status if they were to focus on good interplay between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. And one example of that would be your heart rate slows when you breathe out and it speeds up when you breathe in. And in most scenarios, you should be taking a longer time breathing out than you take when you breathe in. And again, books like that, what I mentioned, The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown, teach you to do this. I have this little device called a Relaxator that I got out of a book I forget the name of. It’s like “The Art of Breath” or something like that by author Anders Olsson. And I’ll put this thing in my mouth and go for a walk. What it is is it’s a device that forces you to breathe through your nose and then it gives you resistance as you breathe out through your mouth. So, it teaches you how to retain oxygen and also retain carbon dioxide at the same time and breathe out very slowly.

And when I do this, my HRV goes notably higher. You can also do this when you’re meditating, sitting in the sauna, lying in bed. But knowing how to tweak your vagus nerve, and even kind of getting dialed in to some of the neural feedback apps or rings or self-quantification devices that allow you to track your HRV is very prudent when it comes to your cardiovascular status, especially when combined with some of those exercise tips I gave you, like high-intensity interval training, lactic acid training, VO2 max training. So, you’re trying to get the interplay between the nervous system and the cardiovascular system. I think that’s one of the best things you can do for your heart.

What kind of questions you guys have about cardiovascular health?

Female 1:  At one point, you had mentioned in a podcast something about fat being oxidized through breath. So, with what you’re saying here, have you ever come across any studies about like singing and fat loss?

Ben:  If you dance a lot when you’re singing, maybe. No, I have not come across any studies about singing and fat loss, but I can’t say we’re going on PubMed and look for singing fat loss. The idea that you’re alluding to is the fact that we do lose a great deal of our carbon and the fact that we’re burning through the breath. And that’s one of the reasons that exercise works as you’re breathing rapidly or you’re moving oxygen in and carbon dioxide out and it enhances fat loss. But ultimately, I can’t say that singing, although it’s wonderful for the vagus nerve, singing, chanting, humming like I was talking about, I don’t know that it would increase fat loss, but it’s great for the vagus nerve and it’s great for cardiovascular health. Yeah. Sing in the shower, baby.

What other questions about cardiovascular? Yes, sir?

Male 8:  Hi, Ben. Talking about HLV, a lot of people discuss how you can improve parasympathetic tone, but nobody talks about improving sympathetic tone. And personally speaking, this might not relate to anyone else, but if you’ve got a consistently low LF and low sympathetic tone, any thoughts what might be going on and how you might address that?

Ben:  Yeah. Clarification of a few terms, when this gentleman says HF and LF, if you were to download like a neurofeedback out for your heart rate variability, like there’s one called NatureBeat. There’s another one called SweetBeat. And these will actually give you scores for what’s called your HF which stands for high frequency and your LF which stands for low frequency. Now, your HF is indicative of your parasympathetic nervous system score, your parasympathetic nervous system health/tone. The LF is indicative of your sympathetic nervous system tone. And the idea is that you would want a high HF and a high LF, which is going to give you a high overall heart rate variability. And if you had a low LF, that would indicate a low sympathetic nervous system tone.

Now, there are certain things that stress or that train the sympathetic nervous system. Sprinting is one example, like running from the line, running from the tiger for very brief burst like 10 to 30 seconds. I’ve used these apps to track my sympathetic nervous system stress during exercise. And you know the one exercise that stresses sympathetic tone the most? It’s a back squat, a back squat, barbell on your back performing a back squat. So, I actually go out of my way to include back squats as part of my work out because that’s a great way to get your sympathetic tone going.

Basically, anything that makes you feel as though you’re being attacked by a cougar or running from a lion in moderation, not like chronically throughout the whole day running from all the lines, jumping out from the email inbox in your computer, but just brief periods of time spent doing that with long recovery periods, that’s the way that I would go after sympathetic tone. And if you do that and also combine that with some of the other exercise things I talk about like stamina for your parasympathetic tone, slow eating, relaxation, meditation breathing, you’re kind of hitting both elements of the nervous system.

Male 8:  But do you think that a lot of this sympathetic tone is indicative of any particular health concerns?

Ben:  It could be. I mean, you can always get an EKG, like a stressed EKG and a resting EKG from a physician and find out if you actually have like paraventricular contractions or other electrical abnormalities of the heart. But that’s something you actually have to have overseen by a physician. So, yeah.

Male 8:  Thank you.

Ben:  Okay.  Let’s go to number five, brain health. I suppose the soapbox that I want to get on here–how many of you in here take smart drugs, nootropics, microdose with LSD and psilocybin and lion’s mane and all this stuff? A lot of people are doing that these days but what you have to realize is that the mechanism of action for many of these compounds is they flood your synaptic clefts with dopamine and with serotonin. Neurotransmitters in increasingly high levels can render you increasingly insensitive to the action of those compounds. Meaning, cause and stimulation, even with something in a bottle that says it’s good for your brain is going to make you think faster and be smarter and improve cognitive performance, an IQ, an executive function.

The idea is still that you are robbing Peter to pay Paul. You’re still flooding yourself with neurotransmitters. And if you are depending on that for daily energy, then the world of smart drugs and nootropics is not doing you any service. And I find that myself–and probably many of you have experienced this as well. You wake up and once you’ve started to use whatever it might be; caffeine, nicotine, lion’s mane, any of these different stacks from CILTEP to Qualia to Alpha BRAIN, there’s like a million of them out there and I know a lot of people are taking them. The problem is if that becomes like your daily multivitamin, there is an issue. You are creating dopamine and serotonin excesses or deficiencies that closely mimic what you’d be getting if you were to be using like a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or some other antidepressant on a daily basis.

So, if you are finding yourself reliant upon those compounds, in my opinion, you need to back off and dial in your sleep and your energy levels first. For me, the best way to do this is–I love to camp and I love to hunt. And when I go off on a camping trip or a bow hunting trip, I go very–usually, there’s like pack weight specifications, et cetera, like my next tone is 10 days long up in Alaska. I can only have 50 pounds. And once you add up my gun and my bow and my food and my clothes, I can’t have like eight bottles of supplements in my bag. So, I got to just strip myself down and go with nothing and just focus on sleep, breathwork to control cortisol and to allow myself to relax, consumption of good plant foods or wild meat to be able to get my multivitamins and my minerals.

And ultimately, having those periods of the year where you strip down, where you switch to decaf instead of regular caffeine, where you choose times when life isn’t as busy and you’re able to wean yourself off of all these things that are stimulating neurotransmitters, that’s smart, because we live in a society that’s dependent on stimulants and it creates this scenario of uppers/downers. Maybe you’re not, whatever, doing crack cocaine during the day and taking Valium and Ambien at night, but maybe you are drinking three cups of coffee and taking some kind of a smart drug and then hitting the vape pen and taking the CBD and the melatonin at night, and that’s the roller coaster ride that you’re on.

And frankly, pardon the expression and the language, but that fucked up your neurotransmitters and it’s something that you should think about weaning yourself off of because I see this too much in the society that we’re living in where all this stuff is so readily available and so inexpensive. So, when it comes to brain health, I think that’s one of the number one things that you can do.

What kind of questions you guys have about brain? Yes, sir?

Male 9:  Well, again, thanks for being here, Ben. It’s good to have you. I guess the thing I’m just wondering, we’re in a city, for those of us who live in L.A. who don’t live in like nature and environment, we’re constantly exposed to this sort of high stress, like our nervous systems are–and peop