 Cool, so thank you all for coming out. Everybody hear me. Okay. That's not good Perfect. All right So goals today, we're gonna talk a little bit about the effect of stress What people really care about? Framework Different types of interventions and measures That still sound okay, or if I move my head does the mic go out. It's good. Okay, fine Use more of a research-led focus Much research as I can I didn't put like slide upon slide of like 1800 references, but people need more references Let me know and if you want to copy those slides, I'll pass her on a little sign-up sheet If you want to put your name on there, I'll email them out to you So if you don't want to frantically scrabble down like hundreds of notes, I'll send them to you That does put you on my newsletter list, but if you hate it, you can just opt off then too. That's fine So I'll try to speak mostly English Probably a little bit of geek along the way though There's just quick background the PhD in exercise physiology Looking more kind of some metabolism type stuff that a master's in mechanical engineering and bunch of other stuff It's in books Bend a bunch of colleges easy thing to remember I like death metal dark coffee and So if you find me in the morning, you can buy me a dark coffee if I'm in the evening you can buy me a dark beer And that's my wife So stress Which can be in all sorts of different forms could be like this heavy dumbbell, which is fun This is a custom cast dumbbell. It's like a two and the ace inch handle. I'm trying to work up to one That's like a hundred and seventy two pounds, which is an inch dumbbell, but not there yet Could be maybe you're attacked by a alligator down in South Padre Or it could be more lifting you do in your garage Trying to run different experiments holding and flaming stuff in your hands Or I like to do a lot of kiteboarding and that's me actually wearing a lab coat kiteboarding because it's fun Maybe testing random supplements that get sent to you in the mail by people you've never met in real life That's actually what that was I went to Home Depot and spent the extra money for the nice little measuring thing there and That it was actually a ketone product But at the time when he sent it to me, I had never met the person I talked to him over the internet for about four years and There's no odor to it or anything like that. It's a clear liquid and right before I took it I'm like, oh Is this like the most elaborate like catfish scam like known to man that he's like thought about this this long to see if He could poison someone by their own free will but it wasn't was actually a ketone ester So one of the problems people are training hard a lot of times you can do that for a while and get pretty good results but what happens when your performance drops and Luckily so far. This isn't a self-portrait to me on my mountain bike. So that's good If you look in the literature, you'll see this is usually classically called overreaching if this continues over a period of time Depends on the time. You could say it's a overtraining syndrome Most time people feel tired performance is down energy levels are low A lot of times people get sick or sick more than recently Maybe you can't sleep enough or sleep is disturbed. I hear you can pester Dan party about your sleep issues He loves that hard to concentrate What I found in a lot of people was a lot of people had these similar symptoms that I was working with So I was trying to figure out, you know, what's going on. They had done All of a sudden it just felt like their their body kind of went off the cliff We look at different sources of stress Could be maybe family Could be their nutrition could be movement could be old injuries Traffic our commute each way that they hate Could be that could be a lack of movement. Maybe they just don't move that much during the day Maybe something I spent a lot of time on recently is maybe they're breathing Maybe they're breathing in a more of a stressed fashion all the time that's causing them issues and when I quote Put a death metal CD in there. So that was one of my favorite ones Or it could be just work, right? A lot of people don't really enjoy their jobs yet I'm not necessarily talking to But the people out there and the people that you probably work with So what do we use as a definition of stress What's interesting is that stress can be interpreted as either novel and or unpredictable And or have the feeling that he or she does not have control Maybe you could argue it's a little bit sort of unpredictable or Possibly a threat to the ego So definition of stress we're using for the purpose So novel or unpredictable Feeling that do not have control Possible threat to their ego What's interesting is that determinants of stress response are highly specific and therefore potentially predictable and also Measurable a lot of people tend to just think if you ask them about stress Yeah, it's just all this weird random horrible crap that happens to me, right? They usually tend to want to give up that sort of control, which I think paradoxically probably makes them Or you could be just running from a bear I'll be a lot of stress too Everybody knows a joke when you run from a bear, right? Don't have to be first is don't be last You know good versus bad stress If we think about like if we throw someone up into the space station here We're actually removing one of the main stressors in your life What stress are we mainly removing if we truck you up in the space station? Gravity right and at first thought you're like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what happens then What you see is that you lose a whole bunch of stuff if you don't do any countermeasures Initially, you'll have a rapid amount of fluid that will shift upwards what they call bird legs And then you're gonna get rid of a lot of fluid You'll see a loss of bone mass, especially in the heel There's some cosmonauts who are up early on for a long period of time that still don't have the same bone mass before they went up And they've been back for like decades So just removing that stressor that we don't really think about a lot of times can have actually more of a negative effect The other one is people don't think of maybe trees Did anyone know what happened to the trees when they made the they remember the old biosphere And they're trying to recreate this like all enclosed environment. They remember what happened initially when put trees in there How did they grow? They didn't go straight. They actually kind of grew out at like almost a flat angle. They forgot to put wind in there So there was nothing for the tree. There was no stressors for the tree to really react to So if you start removing some stressors, the body is always adapting So sometimes we think of stress as kind of quote good or bad But I'd argue it just depends on the context of what you're looking at, right? So removing gravity we do all sort of countermeasures now just to account for the fact that there isn't gravity What becomes an issue is if your stress becomes greater than your recovery a Lot of people I think have this idea that well if I just move to you know some island somewhere and Sit my ties and I'm gonna be a coconut farmer. Ah all my life issues will get better Maybe for a while, but maybe you get kind of bored and after a while you start looking to add more stress to your life The real issue is when your stress becomes higher than your ability to recover from that stress So anyone who does a lot of training will know this right so training you're actually tearing down different muscle fiber different structures So if we do a biopsy of you after just some downhill running or something to just really Eccentrically stress the crap out of your legs. We stick it under a microscope We're gonna look at that muscle fiber. We're like holy crap. This looks horrible All this fibers are all skewed everywhere and z-line streaming and all this stuff It just looks like a mess You may erroneously conclude all that exercise stuff. That's horrible. Don't do any that. Look it destroys your muscle tissue If we came back however like two or three days later after it's been repaired. Oh, wow It's actually better than what it was was both the stress and the ability to recover from that a little bit of a side note of just the framework based on physiology of what we can use this for and This is what I actually think most clients actually care about right then when you're had like an effective discussion about stress with clients It's kind of hit or miss in my experience About it, but usually they're more concerned about some type of performance or some type of vanity metric and most of time That's what they're coming to you for right? It's you know, there may be some people in here where they're coming to you for stress But not usually It's usually more for that Well, I got to thinking I'm like so is there some correlation between that and stress based on physiology And it turns out there is So it's long-winded quote But what it's saying is that there's a large individual variability in RER just a fancy word that we use What fuel you're using 0.72 to 0.93 This in the relative rate of fat oxidation range from 23 to 93 percent so if you come into the lab and I hook you up to this fancy metabolic heartless equipment and You may be using fat pretty good as a fuel source the next person comes in They may not really be using that that well at all So it turns out just at rest that should be the primary fuel that your body is using And if we look at some of the research we find that it's pretty variable, but that's not always true across the map You got another study by held. I Did actually put my own study there, so you can send me hate mail later No one else quotes my study so I might as well So while we look at physiology is kind of based on the theory of metabolic flexibility It's a capacity for skeletal muscle to acutely shift its reliance between lipids and glucose During fasting or in response to insulin such as post-prandial conditions Which is a whole bunch of ubergeeky words. We all strung together in one sentence in English What it means is can the main thing in your body that's using fuel which is skeletal muscle We had to out just one item How well does it shift between using lipids or fat and glucose? Maybe carbohydrates and then wonder what conditions so during fasting You're primarily want to be using mostly fat, right? Not much is coming in fast can be your main fuel source and Then post-prandial is just a fancy word for after you eat After you eat you want to be shifting to primarily using carbohydrates at that point So we're looking at how well your body can shift back and forth between these two states So decrease or loss is hypothesized to play a role in different diseases and again if you translate that Some people have a very impaired fat oxidation just at rest for various reasons So insulin is a nice leverage point. We do need it for survival And I think it's better to think of that as a fuel selector switch. I stole from Jeff Bullock If you have high amounts of insulin, it's pushing your body to use carbohydrates Some levels are high if you're carbohydrates. What are you not using at that time then on a scale? Fat, right? Exactly Lower-ish insulin pushing the body to use more fat The nice part about this is that we do have a lot of dietary control over insulin a lot of other hormones You don't really have a whole lot of effect on how we can change them with nutrition Which we mentioned something like fasting So fasting you're gonna have much lower levels of insulin It's gonna push your body to use more fat It's gonna increase that fatty acid oxidation I'm not talking about calories, but yes calories do matter. It's not independent of calories themselves It's based on a theory called the crossover effect and As we exercise more so this is just aerobic power. So as we get out here We switch to using more carbohydrates at rest most people should use more fat Again, we saw the previous work showing that it doesn't really line up to be this nice and pretty all the time these lines actually have a fair amount of variability in them So maybe you're just backwards So some people are burning a whole bunch of carbohydrates during low intensity exercise Now it is true that your body can aerobically use carbs and fat There may be some benefits to that But if it's low intensity, I would argue that using carbohydrates is a more inefficient form So fat's a better fuel for lower intensity work And we'll get into what happens with stress with this so In regardless of your cheat meals or whatever else you're doing So again same thing So you want to be able to transition between fat to carbohydrates and back down What we find is that how this relates to stress If your stress is higher, which end of the spectrum do you think you're going to end up going towards? The right or the left The right yep, you're going to get pushed to use more carbohydrates so the analogy that I use is Using carbs during low intensity exercise is sort of like burning nitrous to go to a Walmart, right? Don't really need to do that Anybody recognize what car this is? Ugo yeah, just see what they put on the back of it Someone stuck a spoiler on the back of a Ugo, right? So and that's what I think a lot of times we do with metabolism stuff I would just add a few little fancy things here and there, but yeah You're still dealing with the Ugo, so you should probably trade your car in So hopefully we haven't confused everybody yet so far So I think it's in your best interest to teach your body to burn fat as a fuel and stress is one of the main monkey Wrenches that screws this up Right, so if you become more and more stressed your body is going to shift away from using fat as a fuel However, this doesn't mean that you want to lose the ability to still use carbohydrates It turns out if you're very stressed or doing high-intensity exercise Carbohydrates for that are actually the preferred fuel that you want to use So again, you want to use the right fuel at the right time low-intensity work or just resting condition Mostly fat higher intensity work or higher stress. You want to use carbohydrates So what do we do about different interventions that we can do about this I? Know Dan likes this one sleep. No, he doesn't right The poster on Dan's wall So cool study they did in 2011 they took 15 subjects average body fat was about 21% So pretty good. I mean on average generally healthy They locked them up in a metabolic chamber for two days And there's a crossover design so each person served as their own control So day one they allowed them to sleep normally measure their sleep by each They too if fragmented their sleep or they broke up their sleep and they only allow them to sleep for one hour at a time Same duration of sleep though So my difference was one time was fragmented the other time was not same exact duration And they found that fragmentation of sleep was accomplished with approximately an hour wake-up calls at varied infrequency between 500 to 2,000 Hertz and intensity between 40 to 110 decibels Subject confirmed waking up by turning their alarms off after two minutes Right, so you get an idea of how horrible it is to try to write up scientific papers Because you got to quantify everything right you don't tell just how often you got to put in Hertz And you got to say how loud the lungs to wake them up got to make sure that they were actually awake So you got to verify them by you know whacking a button and some other stuff. So It makes a little bit harder, right? So we wonder if we screw up with their sleep does that mess with their ability to use carbohydrates? And it actually does so fragmented sleep had a direct impairment of fat oxidation So your body's ability to use fat was directly impaired just by literally waking you up once every hour So you burn less fat So how much less so fat oxidation with 61 grams per day in the non fragmented group and it dropped Fragmented group. So again, we're not talking about a massive amount here, but on a relative scale it dropped by half And if you extrapolate this to one months just over a very simplified linear model Which I know is not necessarily true, especially over a long period of time But it's about two months or two pounds a month of fat gain And again, these people slept the same amount of time They just had one group that was fragmented in sleep and the other group was not I'd like sharing that study with clients too because the biggest complaint with clients is oh You're gonna tell me to go to bed earlier. I just don't have time to go to bed earlier Which again a whole different discussion if you can do things just increase their quality of sleep You may be able to again indirectly or directly affect their metabolism What are some things to do? Mostly as you've seen before Sleep in a dark cave nice and cool minimize electronics Less blue light before bed, right? So flux program. I Told my wife. I called my mr. Mole yellow glasses, right? Do you have these little yellow glasses you can wear at night? Supplements can help Melatonin being one of them One tip with melatonin if you take too high of a dose of melatonin If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night actually try to reduce your overall amount What can happens is you take melatonin it peaks up and then it drops relatively fast Your body sees that decay and thinks oh time to get up So paradoxically if you find that you're waking up in the middle of the night Or earlier than you think from melatonin Try to go less on a dosage instead of higher Unfortunately a lot of the ones are sold are like three milligram. I've had people go down to as low as even like point five milligrams, so One of the one that's kind of surprising I've had more recently is less water before bed So a couple clients are like oh, I always have to get up in the middle of the night to go pee I'm like well how much water did you drink before I go to bed? Well, I was told to drink a lot of water Maybe you should drink less water before you go to bed. Oh, wow crazy Use your plugs keep down the noise. I usually travel with your plugs in a sleep mask, too the one-on-one I see a lot is caffeine and I'm not gonna tell you that you could never have coffee again because that would just be very cruel So I stuck it in here anyway, I said caffeine is a credit card to sleep and When you do a PhD you find out how true that actually is and Then how horrible it is to pay that back once you're actually done And you know you're screwed when you keep a pillow in the back of your little Volkswagen Jetta To go out and take caffeine power naps at 9 in the morning because you're at the lab at 5 in the morning So caffeine power nap is to take like some caffeine and then go sleep for about 45 minutes So when you wake up, you've got peak blood levels of caffeine and you had a light night little nap Again do that all the time So there's some stuff on energy drinks, too. I won't talk too much about them. I was one of the authors on that But they are kind of a sneaky source of caffeine because I've asked clients and I'll say hey Do you drink much coffee or consume caffeine? Oh, no not much at all And so I look at their dietary intake and said oh what says you had like three energy drinks They're like oh, there's not much caffeine in there like really it's an energy drink. What do you think they put in there? so Any like different effects of that, too They find that many will actually substitute caffeine for sleep and they don't even really Realize it until they actually start to slowly remove caffeine and then they're amazed at how much they actually have to sleep and This seems like incredibly redundant more tired you have a loss of awareness of being tired Dance and some very interesting talks on this, too. So if you pull people when they're really tired over time They're just so used to being tired. They can't really accurately tell you how tired they actually are Caffeine is actually not a requirement and hard to believe for some Can interfere with sleep? They're slow versus long metabolizers of caffeine. I have one guy once who came to me He's like ah, I took this new pre-workout at like three in the afternoon He's like I couldn't sleep forever Then like all right, you know you're probably you know not very good at metabolizing caffeine and staying higher in your blood and Just you know how much caffeine was in it. It's like oh, there's no caffeine in it I'm like what I'm like there has to be caffeine in it So I said take a picture send me a picture of the label Send me pictures of the label and they actually put the sort of chemical IU package name for caffeine as the list of Ingredients to a one three blah blah blah So it didn't look like there was caffeine in there actually used a different name So you sometimes have to watch for them being sneaky If you're really curious, you can get a genetic test They'll kind of roughly tell you are you a fast or slow metabolizer There's new data showing that this is probably a little bit of an over simplification. There's multiple ranges within there Simple tolerance test works well You can get in to talk about different dopamine effects and there's some really interesting stuff now on Genetic research looking at dopamine receptors how well they work don't work If you're someone like me and you tend to find that you're Borderline addicted to adrenaline type hobbies and you love coffee. Yes, you probably have a broken dopamine receptor Which I'm sure I do Has been used for performance enhancement, but the doses are pretty high So if you have athletes that are using it before lifting you want to check with them to see how much they're actually taking So three to six megs per kg and that's probably a pretty good range So if you're 220 pound athlete even on the low end, we take three milligrams You're looking at about a 300 milligram dose or like one and a half of a was capsule So it's usually pretty high to see an effect But again, this will vary a lot from one person to the next I Didn't put a slide in here But there's another study that if you have people using coffee for caffeine the caffeine amount and coffee will vary dramatically Cool study they did going to Starbucks three times over the course of three different days Same coffee is same brewing same time same everything the caffeine content varied by well over 30 to almost 50% in some cases So for people are like, well, I just have you know one cup of coffee a day The amount of caffeine in that can be pretty variable So caffeine is an antagonist of dentistry receptors. She won't talk much about The one thing I've used for people who like caffeine, but maybe you're trying to cut back a little bit I've used green tea with like two tea bags, which has less caffeine but still has some Do you sell someone? Okay, no more coffee. They're probably not going to follow that. I know I sure saw one follow that But if they need something in the afternoon You can put the the two tea bags in there and just brew it for only like about 30 to 60 seconds And then just take them out So that'll actually get out most of the caffeine at that time So the caffeine is more water soluble than the other compounds in there So they can drink that and have their higher amount of caffeine or if they're trying to really reduce caffeine They can just throw that part out and then re-brew it for about five minutes Again, is it perfect? No, but it will give you a way to kind of adjust how much caffeine you want in it So I'm gonna spend too much time on those So most of caffeine will go into solution in about 90 or 60 seconds So what would you do try to limit it mostly to the AM even if you're Taking a long time to metabolize caffeine if you have it first thing in the morning Probably unlikely to really mess with your sleep You can check to see if you're fast or slow metabolizer Don't necessarily need a genetic test. Most people will be able to tell you if they are or not Just move their caffeine back up to the morning and see how they feel You can use a quick brewing method if you're trying to play around with that I do like some of the mushroom coffees if anyone's played around with this This is one from FourSigmatic The nice part about this one in particular is there's only 40 milligrams of caffeine Just in the particular coffee that they use They can bind it with some other mushroom extracts too So it's another way because I found that sometimes decaf coffee tastes like crap That this actually tastes pretty good. There's not too much caffeine There's a link if you want more information We'll have time for questions on this at the end too The other one I found is meditation How many in here actually do some type of meditation raise your hand? Couple you all right nice So practice of meditation reduce physiologic stress response and improve cognitive function And the effects were pronounced within a practice of meditation for a longer duration. It's about one month. I Kind of like to highlight this that it's not like you're gonna meditate and oh wow I fixed all my stress. Oh, that was good, right? So for this one they saw about one month in duration before people started to see an effect This is another one looking at that to improve cognition This one was interesting. This was probably one of the biggest studies I could find and what they did over 17,000 citations 47 trials over 3,000 participants and then mindfulness meditation programs had moderate evidence to improve anxiety There's all the stats if you're only get crazy with that maybe depression and Lower evidence to improve stress or distress and mental health related quality of life so when you look at the data on meditation, it's Hard to really come to I'd say a huge consensus. I Personally think that it's probably very beneficial But again, you're also trying to look at what type of meditation how I do it what population are you looking at? There's just so many variables to look at it gets to become kind of messy We go back to physiology and we go, okay Hmm, what would be the basic thing of how some of these may work? We find that Breathing is highly related to heart rate So if you're all just sitting here and you start breathing real fast, even though you're not exercising your heart rate will actually go up And if we start slowing your breathing rate down your heart rate will go down What's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia or RSA? So we know that just by playing around with any type of breathing pattern Which is in general one of the basis of meditation that we can have effects upon heart rate and different tone related to that So I put these in here mainly just so you have Reference if you wanted to play around with some stuff The one that I've done that I like a lot is from Wim Hof people heard of What I liked about it is for people who try to meditate like myself who are way too neurotic about it They gave me something to think about I looked at my notes the other day and I had been trying to meditate off and on since 2011 probably haven't been able to do it successfully until about a year and a half ago and What I did was I kept trying to shorten and shorten in the time frame And I would get to the point that I'm like, okay I got five minutes to meditate and I'd set my watch and I'd go out into my little favorite tree or whatever I would do I lay down and I'm like, okay, I'm meditating like oh, there's a squirrel I hear a squirrel He has rape. He's gonna attack me. I should probably look to see where the squirrel went. I'm like, oh, he's over there No, I'm not supposed to think about it. I'm supposed to relax. I'm not supposed to think about squirrels or anything else Oh, I was judging myself because now I was thinking about the squirrel and I was pissed that I was not doing my meditation Like crap now. I got like two minutes left. Oh, so That didn't work so well as you can imagine But with the Wim Hof I found that it gave me brain something to think about and something to always do so I won't go through these individual just sort of take a time, but it'll be there so that you have them and So he's having you do is do breathing in a specific rate in specific times and Then at the end what I found that worked best for me is that I kind of modified it I found that to a client's first thing in the morning was usually the easiest So just making time to do it. There's some people who do it at the end of the day It's better for them Outside if you can I find that that works a little bit better The biggest thing found 20 minutes for 20 to 30 days in order to start I found by making the time longer I was actually able to feel like I had accomplished something and I wasn't so worried about the stress And it took me a while to actually feel a difference doing it. Ah, okay So at the end of the 20 minutes, I had like 30 seconds where I felt. Oh, kind of relaxed. Oh, cool Okay, so that gave me a little bit of a kick in the butt to do it again You can use something called a bioral beats that has different tones it plays on each side of your ears with headphones You can do some specific stuff on breathing points. This is a reflexive performance Long the stern on the ribs back of the head So you're just trying to work on some of that fascial area that's connected to breathing And I sort of modified it so I do 30 fast inhales through my nose Basically just better biomechanics for breathing and then just let out the air After I hit 30, I'll do a very hard exhale. So I got this from James Anderson Basically, just exhale your soul, right? You should be breathing really hard get as much air out as you can And then just hold there for 40 to 160 seconds. I just count in my head And then once you can't hold your breath any longer and an exhale inhale all the way and hold That would include one round and then just repeat The nice part I find is that it gives you something to kind of think about and to do all the time And the short version if you're breathing in and out really fast these times Most people will feel a little bit fuzzy and a little bit light-headed Which is actually I think to your benefit you actually kind of feel something going on Instead of I've tried some Zen meditation which I like but it was literally I went to the retreat and the guy's like All right, you sit there. You stare you look down there go I'm like, well, whoa, hold on hold on. Do we do anything else? Whatever you want Okay So just sitting and trying to do nothing I found was was much harder This gives you something to think about and to do and after that I'll go in a period of you know Relax breathing or there's a whole bunch of different methods you can play around with So mostly slides in here are just for your reference so that you have them My whole point with this last part over the next three minutes It's just that if you're doing some type of intervention to measure changes in stress You should probably have a way to actually measure it. So what gets measured gets managed? Rucker and you can do this by doing what's called the variability analysis on Your heart or heart rate or HRV you guys in here heard of heart rate variability before cool awesome and What you find is by doing a variability analysis of a complex system You can get more information about the underlying part of that system And I won't go into how we actually measure it is one of the old units I had in the lab that unit there which is old was 10 grand and The newer sensors are like under a hundred bucks So it's gotten to be pretty inexpensive, which is nice Just need a heart rate strap or even a little finger sensor That's the system that I use I fleet system And what allows you to do is to look at your sympathetic? Which is fight or flight or your parasympathetic rest and digest so by doing HRV? Which is done just once in the morning? It'll give you a range a number of one to a hundred how parasympathetic to how sympathetic you are That's just how you would act So the nice part is you're looking at the response of your body If you started doing meditation or some of the other nutrition stuff that we've learned here or you start cutting back on caffeine It's kind of human nature to want to feel like super different right away, and you probably won't If you look at a number you see overall. Oh My marker of stress the thing that I'm actually trying to change is showing me that each day I'm getting a little bit better. That's kind of cool. I'm more likely to probably keep continuing As opposed to I don't know I don't really feel that much better and Everything tends to slide backwards at that point So what do you do? So body is not a linear accumulation of stressors Some of this can be related to your metabolism, right? So if you're more stressed, you're going to start using more carbohydrate You will not be using fat as much of as fuel I can't quite show that that goes the other way But my guess is that it does if we can do things to increase your body's ability to use fat at rest I think that'll actually work to help reduce your overall stress Couple things to do work on your sleep quality of your sleep Menin caffeine. Maybe I like having something to measure so using heart rate variability as your measure for stress and Over time the side benefit that most clients probably care about is you get to use fat as a fuel My last slide. So if you've seen me speak before it's the same slide all the time. I hate the word optimal I know what it means, but it drives me bonkers Because I can't test any But to me it's like unicorns and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow and jackalopes and all that other kind of stuff However, I can test if something is better, right? So you always get those clients who are like, whoa, what's the optimal thing for me to reduce my stress? I Don't know they could always say and ask about something else if it's more optimal But I can tell them that hey if you measure your stress you reduce some of your caffeine Do some better sleep habits. Maybe do some type of meditation practice. You'll be moving to getting better So I always like to look at what is actually better if you give me two protocols in a lab A and B I can tell you which one's probably better. I couldn't tell you which one would be optimal for either one So if you just keep thinking of what's actually going to be just a little bit better Then you're going to be moving in the right direction So we'll take questions there's my email address there's around here somewhere with my favorite pen So someone bring it back up to me There's my email address newsletter there And I'll answer any questions you guys have Got one over there Don't all run at the same time Enjoyed your talk Mike. Oh, thanks Todd. Yeah, so um, yeah I think HRV is a great measure one other one I didn't hear you talk about and you talked about the other hormones you talked about where it was mainly insulin What do you think about cortisol and cortisol pattern as a measure of stress do you use that? What's your view there? Yeah, so you can get a saliva test of cortisol, which I've had done in the past a four-point test. I Don't know. I think it's okay, but the downside is it's kind of spendy and You're only getting a snapshot of that one day So I think if you're like completely Disregulated then yeah, your cortisol is going to be flipped and it's going to be all wonky Yeah, I think it's probably useful to know that but the thing I don't like about it is it's hard to do that and measure day in and day out Right, so you're taking that one snapshot and you'll go all you got to do this nine-month protocol or whatever Yeah, I think if you do that to maybe show the patient that yeah, you are really messed up and you need some help Okay, and then I would still like to have like an HRV measure of each day So that they know are you going in the right direction that what we have you do actually help And then also for the reinforcement on more of the the client or the patient side But they can see that oh, yeah, this this month compared to last month. I'm actually doing a little bit better So as I'm doing better, I'm more likely to keep doing those behaviors and that type of thing So that's my bias good question though So besides limiting caffeine what sorts of what other interventions to use to repair broken dopamine receptors? Oh what a I Don't know to be honest I had a buddy who did us this whole magnificent talk on that and at the end of the talk I texted him and I was like hey your talk was awesome, and I'm like I'm pretty sure judging by all my behaviors and stuff that my dopamine receptors broken and he writes back Of course it is. That's what makes you you And I'm like yeah, you're right so I I There's a whole bunch of stuff you can look at but I don't know There's anything you can change it nor would you necessarily want to change it I think just as long as it doesn't become kind of sort of the main overriding thing, right? So there's a lot of positives from that But I also look at what is the cost associated with that too as long as your cost is not getting too high I think you're probably gonna be okay. So the short answer is I don't have a good answer. So Ah Email me and I'll check. I don't I don't know but yeah, I can check if he wants it released or not. So Yeah, good question. I measure my HRV every day nice and One interesting thing I found was I go to an acupuncturist mm-hmm and besides treating my sore muscles weightlifting She treats What they call kidney points and Chinese medicine kidney is support of energy mm-hmm and By doing that a once a week my HRV is up an average of ten points. Nice. Do you have an explanation for that? Oh? Or is it magical thinking I'm not sure which The honest answer is for a mechanism. I have no idea I have done some stuff on myself with Dolphin microcurrent point stimulator is Primarily for scar release. So they're two handheld devices that put across small amounts of electricity And they actually will go through and use the same acupuncture points at the end So I've played around on that on myself doing my own scar release. I had open-heart surgery I was four and a half. So I've got a massive mid-line scar I've done some scar stuff on other people and some of the acupuncture points with that Most of the time their HRV will go up five to ten points for like one to three days As to why that is I have absolutely no idea If you ask them you're moving more chi around that type of thing I Think you're looking at a scar is a sympathetic stressor somehow to the nervous system And by getting, you know, better communication across that scar it reduces stress But there's only you can email me. There's like one or two pieces of literature now from them That's that shows a little bit of that stuff But it was mostly just an intervention and then we measured HRV There's not much on a mechanistic side on that that I've seen so Anyone else has any other ideas on that by all means let me know the good question though But if it's better, it's better. So yeah, go for it Yeah, my good talk quick question I recently moved from the southeastern United States where it's warm and the winners are relatively mild to New York state and I moved there in the middle of January and it's quite a different climate and you're used to the north It was a stressor just dealing with always being cold and having limited, you know access to outdoor Exercise activities maybe in the same way or as easily, you know You have to go to the rigmarole of bundling up and dealing with rain and snow What do you do you think about that or? Yeah, just from a standpoint. I know you spend time at the beach a lot, but how do you feel about the weather or? How's that a component and lack of sunshine? Yeah, I am so I think a lot about how How your body can respond to two different things, right? So you think about that metabolism here carbohydrate metabolism here cold adaptations warm adaptations right from ice baths on one end to heat shock protein up regulation in a sauna right and My gut feeling is that the the more you can go from one of those extremes to the other and still be quote-unquote healthy And not have a high cost. I think as a human you're probably going to be better now The hard part is how far on those extremes you have to go to get a benefit, right? Do I have to you know hang out and meditate in a sauna for an hour at 200 degrees to get a benefit or can I Do something Walk it around on the summer where it's hot out. So the answer is I don't know There's some interesting literature on humans as like homeo therms and looking at Like bears that hibernate so for whatever reason I've been fascinated by bears that hibernate I'm not a bear researcher at all, but especially living in Minnesota I'm just like well how cool is that just to eat a bunch of stuff in fall and it's winter So it's cold So you just go sleep all winter and what's fascinating about bears is that when you wake them up They'll actually regulate their breathing super fast. So they could literally come out after you even though they were in deep hibernation And at the end when they do studies, there's almost no muscle loss at all It's almost all fat loss and they're not in their den like doing push-ups like in the middle They're hibernation or anything either so all that to say I Not really sure but I think the more extremes you can get used to from a temperature standpoint You're probably going to be better off But I don't really think we have any handle at least on literature in terms of what that looks like in practice Do we have time for another one? Okay, really quick you we do so So we talked about metabolic flexibility But one thing I don't hear talked about very much is a flexibility to go between parasympathetic and sympathetic on a snap Yeah, for instance going to a locker room in a football locker room before the game People would think that that would be a very tense place and I can tell you it is Zen Total Zen, but these are the exact people who when they need to can immediately turn it on and then go right back to the Zen state so I was just Maybe the chemical makeup that allows for that or the genetic makeup that allows for that I've just never really seen much on it Yeah, so I agree 100% so in terms of the analogy I use it's really gonna metabolic flexibility Right, so you've got fat use on this and carbohydrate use on this and how far can you go to both extremes? And then what I didn't get into here and I've done another talk says how fast can you switch back and forth? Right, so if you go to weight training how fast can you use carbohydrates the highest degree and then during your resting time? How fast can you switch back to use fat metabolism? Same thing in elite athletes, right? So how fast can you go from zero to high speed, right? So Usain Bolt could go from no speed at all to super high speed very fast In terms of state, how can you do that? Also, right? Like I love like the old films of like the old old school Russian weightlifters where they like walk out to the platform And I'm like oh man this guy looks like he's gonna fall asleep He's gonna do horrible and the second he picks up the bar. It's like oh new world record drops it down Wonders off stage like he's gonna go take a nap again, but super parasympathetic Extremely sympathetic like only at the time that it mattered and then extremely parasympathetic again And so what you'll find is just anecdotally and a lot of athletes are very good to that can do that Usually those are the ones like if you talk to coaches that have like probably the greatest longevity So buddy of mine who I won't name his name trains a lot of NHL pros and he can just run down the list and tell me everyone He's done omega-wave testing hrv testing everything the guys who are very sympathetic dominant They may be pretty good players, but he said they always are have much higher rate of injuries And they don't last that long one guy. He works with has been in the league for like 12 years now He's like just a parasympathetic monster. He was on the table when I was at his place I'm doing some work on I mean the guy falls asleep like his resting heart rate is like 37 But during a game, he's you know very in tune very on and then after he can then down regulate right away So in practice what's useful out of that? For most people I work with it's they're missing that ability to down regulate almost entirely And so you have to give that back to him whether that's breathing meditation whatever it is you want to do or just aerobic training and Then you can try to teach them how to kind of switch back and forth And I think that's a skill that can be taught again once you're pretty good at both of those spectrums Once you can go from being very parasympathetic to sympathetic How fast can you switch back and forth? So yeah good question