 In this episode of Mind Pump, we cover a very important topic. We talk about pain. Now a lot of you listening may have some form of chronic nagging pain. We know how big of an issue that can be. It definitely reduces a person's quality of life. At the very least it can get in the way of your progress. If you're trying to improve your strength or burn body fat or sculpt your body or build muscle. Knee pain, back pain, hip pain, wrist pain. Any kind of pain can really slow things down. Sometimes it can stop or reverse progress. In this episode we cover the five most important factors that we've experienced working with clients for over two decades that really works on chronic pain. We talk about mobility of course. Everything about mobility that's the most important thing. Talk about diet. That diet can play a big role in how much pain you're feeling. We talk about sleep, sunlight and then we even mention mindfulness. Now before the episode gets going, I want to remind everybody that MAPS performance is 50% off. Now MAPS performance is actually one of our best mobility workout programs. Actually in fact MAPS performance includes mobility sessions as part of your workouts. Mobility sessions work on your ability to move through full ranges of motion which then of course alleviates or gets rid of or even prevents pain. But MAPS performance also improves overall athletic performance. It's an athletic type workout. So you are using weights in the gym but it's different from your traditional workouts. It's excellent for fat loss, performance and muscle building. Again it's 50% off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to MAPSgreen.com and use the code Green50. G-R-E-N-5-0. No space for the discount. Dude, you guys want to hear a crazy statistic? I love crazy statistics. I was writing some content for the website. You ripped a ton of blogs this weekend, didn't you? Well, from last week to the weekend I wrote about eight. But one of the articles I wrote was about pain. Our marketing team wanted me to write something about how to alleviate back pain in particular. So I'm looking up statistics and I didn't realize it was this bad. It's estimated that over 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain daily. Wow. Every single day. So that's like one fourth, one out of every four, one out of every three Americans. So take 10 people and the odds are three of them suffer from some form of chronic pain on a daily basis. You should describe chronic and acute pain because I know it may seem simple but there's a lot of people that don't know the difference between the two of them. I've said that. Acute pain is when you hurt yourself. Like a serious injury. Like a broken bone, torn muscles. Some kind of trauma. Strain ligaments. Yeah, like if you hurt right now, if your knee hurts right now and I ask you, hey, what happened to your knee? And you say, oh, I twisted it last week, you know, water skiing or whatever. That's an acute, that's from an injury. That's acute pain. Chronic pain is the kind of pain where if I were to ask you, why does your knee hurt? And you go, well, I don't know. It just kind of bothers me. I got bad knees. Yeah, 10 years ago I heard it and then it's never been the same since. Or I just have bad knees. I got to, you know, every time when I wake up, they're stiff or whatever. That's chronic pain. And the reason why that's important to differentiate is because they both have different ways of fixing them. Yeah, different treatment. Yeah, like most of the way you fix acute pain is rest. Like you tore something, you twisted a ligament, you broke a bone or whatever. Extreme case you need surgery or something. Yeah, exactly. Like sit back rest, like don't do anything. Chronic pain is not like that. In fact, most chronic pain today, it's very different today than it was 50 or 100 years ago, chronic pain in the past usually was a result of overuse. So like if someone had back pain, you know, my dad's generation, my grandfather's generation, when they had back pain, a lot of it was because, oh, you're doing eight hours or 10 hours of hard labor all day long. Today, it's the result of inactivity. A lot of chronic pain comes from the fact that we're just not moving enough. We're sitting down all day long. Gosh, I don't know what these statistics, I haven't looked them up for a long time, but majority of Americans now sit most of the day. And there's not necessarily inherently anything wrong with sitting, but if you do one thing all the time, your body actually starts to form into whatever you do because it becomes good at it. And when you become really, really good at sitting, you become bad at almost everything else. Well, I remember reading a statistic not that long ago that said if you do an hour of vigorous exercise every day, you're still considered sedentary. Totally. That's how little we're moving now that, and that to me is very eye-opening because if you ask the average person that makes effort to get to the drive to the gym, go there, get their hard one-hour workout or whatever, and then go back to work or go home, and you ask them, hey, would you consider yourself an active person? And they would say, yeah, work out every day. But our jobs today are so different to your point, Sal, than what they were 50 and 100 years ago that a lot of what we do, including ourselves, sit down at desk or sit down in chairs and are on computers or talking or doing something like this that even if you get up for an hour and you work out really hard, you're still considered a sedentary person. And I think a lot of that has caused a lot of this chronic pain. And I remember as a trainer, this used to be like the number one thing that I used to have to combat with people. They would tell me, oh, my bad, I have a bad back. I have bad knees, I have bad shoulders. And I'd ask the follow-up question, what did you do? And more often than not, it was just, oh, I'm getting old. And they would say, you'll see. You'll see, son, when you get this age, that this is just part of getting older. And it was such a hard thing for me to overcome when you're 28 years old, 25 years old, and you're training these clients that are in their 40s and 50s and they're telling you that. No matter how much I try to explain to them that it has to do with their movement or lack of movement or their bad movement that's causing this chronic pain, they would just look back at you and just kind of like scoff and be like, oh, it's because you're young. No, the movement hurts. I don't want to do that. It's asking somebody to then do something that is even more uncomfortable, but it will provide that sort of medicine and therapy that they need. Like they need to move and express this movement. Well, no, I'm glad you said that, Justin, because movement is definitely generally part of a lot of times how you solve chronic pain, but it's got to be the right kind of movement, right? Absolutely. Because a lot of people will say, well, I do try to walk, but then my ankles hurt or my knees hurt a lot. And so what a lot of people don't realize is it has to do with how you're moving has a lot to do with why you're in pain, not just the fact that you're not moving, but then when you try to move, it's how you move. If we were to narrow it down to the five most important things that you should do to help relieve chronic pain, how would you guys list those? No, and we should definitely break it all that down. I remember as a trainer, when I first became a trainer, thinking that the most value that I would bring my clients was weight loss. I thought for sure that would be the most valuable thing. All right. It was not at all. It was getting people to not have pain. If you're a trainer listening right now and you want to be a valuable trainer, that's where you should place your energy. I tell you what, you get someone to lose 30 pounds. That's great. They're going to love you. You get someone's shoulder to stop hurting that's been bothering them for 10 or 15 years. You got them for life. You're a god. Especially if it was limiting them from doing things that they love. And you know what? It's funny. You get into these patterns where you just start to mold your life around your pain, and then when it goes away, you realize how much you weren't doing. Like, whoa, I didn't realize getting out of bed. I had to move so slowly. Now that the pain's gone, I can get out of bed and I feel like I can just bounce up and down. It's funny because I remember distinctively being a trainer that was trying to solve weight issues and trying to create opportunities to gain muscle and all that. But then I transitioned into somebody that was more concerned with proper movement and alleviating pain. My business exploded. Totally. And it was so eye-opening that that, again, to those statistics that you brought up in the beginning, that's the majority of people you're going to see. Like, we need to learn how to, you know, alleviate and solve these issues for these people. It is. And if you have bad movement patterns, you have pain, you're not able to work out the way you want to. You're not able to build the kind of muscle that you want to build, which means you can't burn body fat like you want to burn. Your quality of life is reduced. You're limited in terms of your activity, what you can do, when you can do it. So this is a big, this is a very important subject for everybody. Even if you don't have pain, you have to, it's important to consider it now so that you don't get it in the future. And here's the other thing that I learned in the back half of my career. When you hurt, that's one of the, that's like, there's a lot of signals that lead up to that, by the way. Right, before that. Yeah, so it's not like- That's like the final one your body's screaming at you. That's right. It's like you've been ignoring me for the last year, two years, five years. This is me finally saying, fuck you, fix me. Right, right, right. Absolutely. So let's break it down. Now the obvious one for me, and I think probably for you guys, is to improve mobility. That's got to be the most obvious number one thing that you go to when you're trying to fix your pain problems. That covers a variety of different techniques that we should probably go into. Mobility is, I like that as a general sort of overarching sort of topic because you have static stretching in there, you have dynamic stretching in there. You have like SMR kind of techniques where you're like working with soft tissue. You have all these other like sort of ways of promoting better movement that we need to cover. Totally. And posture, right? Posture, exactly. Totally, yeah. So mobility is your ability to move through full ranges of motion with total control and stability. So that's what mobility is. So what are the components that allow you to move into full ranges of motion with control and stability? Well, first off, you have flexibility to even just get there, right? So if you can't even get, like if you think about extending your arm straight up above your head and what's preventing you from doing that are muscles that are too tight. So you're pushing, but you can't really straighten it out because there's muscles that are pulling down. They're too tight. Lack of flexibility there is causing problems with mobility. And that's also what's probably causing the chronic pain. Totally. Because the body is supposed to work together like that and this is where why mobility is so important is when you start to lose the mobility and you want to still perform certain movements, the body starts to overcompensate in other areas and that's where a lot of this chronic pain comes from is the inability for a joint to move through its fullest range of motion like it's supposed to and then you ask your body to do a movement and there's a certain pattern it should do but because we have poor mechanics, poor mobility the body still tries to do that movement but then it overcompensates from other areas and this is what normally causes it. There's a preferred position that your body wants to place your bones and your joints. There is an optimal place where it wants to be to be able to move accordingly and to be able to address that and to get access to that again is crucial. It's paramount. That's why posture is something we need to consider right away. Yeah, so when you're moving your body does a very good job of Adam used the word compensate. Your body figures out the best, easiest way for your particular body to move. So let's say you're walking. Let's say you're just doing a walk, right? And let's say you have a torn calf muscle or an underdeveloped calf muscle. My Achilles example is a, for example, what happens? Right, so let's say something there, right? There's this bad neuromuscular connection to the calf. Something's wrong with your calf and maybe you were born that way. Your body will learn how to get you to walk best with that weak calf. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a part of our body's wonderful evolution where we can continue to move. Now here's the problem. There's an optimal way to move and then there's suboptimal ways to move. So just because my body figured out a way to get me to walk even with an underdeveloped or disconnected calf doesn't mean that now other parts of my body aren't going to have to work in suboptimal ways and I can start to cause problems. There's a chain effect where problems down on my ankles can start to affect my knee which then can affect my hip which then can actually affect my shoulder and my head. So there are optimal ways to move and that's what mobility is all about. It's figuring out how to get your body to move optimally and there's different ways of doing this. One of them, the most basic one, which is what I mentioned earlier, which is stretching. Stretching improves or increases the range of motion. Now you don't have ownership over that range of motion when you stretch. It doesn't mean that just because now I can touch my toes and I couldn't before that it's safe for me to do stuff in that stretched toe touch position. It just means now I have that range of motion. So now that I have that range of motion I want to connect to that range of motion and that's where strengthening comes in. Strength is a very important part of mobility. If you get like somebody's like Gumby who's like hyper flexible and just everything's loose and you think, oh that person must have no pain. Actually not true. Some of the people who suffer from the most pain are weak hyper mobile individuals. People with hyper flexibility. Well this is why certain types of yoga is just not enough either. I mean if you're doing a certain yoga classes where you are not actively stretching and you're just kind of lying there in positions and holding positions for a long time and you're increasing range of motion and flexibility but you don't have strength in that new range of motion. It's not as beneficial as somebody who is working on mobility or staying active throughout that range. Well there's a massive difference between that active and passive flexibility and that's something that was, I mean it's very enlightening when you have somebody else or a coach to be able to take your joints through even further range than you even knew you had the capacity to do. It just sort of proves the point that there's more progress to be had in terms of like now I can connect to that part of it and build strength in that direction so if I get in a situation where I'm moving and I'm in that position I'm less likely to be hurt. Now I like static stretching for immediate pain relief. It's actually one of my favorite techniques to get someone to feel better right now. Now it doesn't produce permanent pain relief but let's just say your lower back is tight and it hurts and it's kind of chronically sore. And let's say part of the reason why your lower back is in pain is because you have these really really tight hamstrings that limit your pelvis from moving the way you want. If I took you through some static hamstring stretches like an example of that would be you lay on your back and I'd lift one leg up and hold the other one down and stretch your hamstring or you could do this on your own you could lay on your back grab a belt put it around your foot kind of straighten your leg out and pull it back and hold that stretch. What the static stretch does is it sends a signal to the central nervous system that says hey let's let's let this muscle chill out a little bit we don't have to be so tight and so tense. Now immediately what you'll notice is some pain relief like you'll stand up and be like whoa I feel less pain because now those muscles aren't so tight they're not pulling on the pelvis as much which was causing the back pain. Same thing with the hip like if you have sciatica pain for example a real easy cross leg stretch where you're sitting up real tall across your leg place one foot on your knee hold that stretch immediate pain relief but that's not enough we need to then get strong within those ranges of motion and prevent whatever was causing you to get tight in the first place. Oftentimes muscles are tight because the body is sensing some kind of danger or weakness or instability so it's keeping everything tight and although you may be in chronic pain it's actually preventing you from getting a really bad injury. Well it could be that way too because it's overactive and it's being overused because it's over compensating like the point I was making earlier and to that point you have to add if you throw that in there that static stretching is one of the best ways to relieve immediate pain I would argue that soft tissue work and foam rolling is right there also but it doesn't end there I think that's one of the things I used to always have to teach clients is I teach something like you know south mile fashion release or the foam roll right to somebody and show them how to roll their IT or something that was causing which is a common area right a lot of people pronate in their feet their femurs internally rotate which tightens up that fucking IT like crazy and then they feel that pain all the way up from their hip or down by their knee or the front of their knee and that's that IT that's all tight and you can roll that and instantly like right away feel a difference you spend 5-10 minutes rolling like your IT for a lot of people and instantly they can feel better but that's not it like you can't just stop there and then go back and then get on a treadmill and run and then call it a day it's like you're going to be constantly doing you're just putting a bandaid over something if you don't address the hip mobility and the ankle mobility that you've just now relieved some of the pain right away so you now can now go work on taking those joints through the full range of motion and strengthening the muscles that support those joints that's what's going to for a long term you want to use it as a tool to unlock better movement patterns right and then start you know really building and forging better movement patterns by first you know kind of addressing that yes this is giving me pain I can alleviate this pain but then now working towards a better direction now I remember the first time so for the listeners who didn't know what the IT was it's there's a there's a big fascia that runs along the side of your thigh okay and it starts up at the hip and it comes down it kind of wraps around your shin and if you have bad movement patterns that fascia can start to feel tight and start to get tight and the muscles that attach to it kind of get tight and so then it further causes worse and worse movement patterns and I remember for me the first time I got on a foam roller and with my legs straight and laid on the side of my thigh which is the IT band it was the most painful thing I'd ever experienced in my entire life now when I did it the second and third time it didn't hurt quite as much because things you know whatever the terminology you want to use loosened up or whatever we don't know quite what happens to tissue when we're pressing on it real hard we just know that it actually does alleviate pain and tells a central nervous system to chill out a little bit because this is a part that annoys me about our space is you know a lot of the experts like to debate over the terminology that we've used to explain a tool like that and what's happened is something that could be very useful for a lot of people is now disregarded because there's this debate and argument over the science of what's really happening there at the end of the day the relief that somebody can get by rolling instantly is incredibly beneficial especially if you do your work afterwards totally so excellent excellent point because we don't know what is really happening when we're doing deep tissue work like you go to a massage therapist you have a knot in your muscle is there really a knot there I don't know you can feel it but if we looked at it if we took that muscle off and looked at it in the laboratory it would look no different than another muscle what's probably right the CNS is what tells muscles to squeeze or relax or stay tight overbearing mother is what I call the CNS may be telling that muscle to kind of stay a little bit tense and that's what feels like a knot so then when you push on that knot by adding pressure that sends a signal to the CNS that says hey chill out a little bit and then you feel for anybody who's ever had a massage you know exactly what I'm talking about all of a sudden first off immediate pain relief yes it feels good right away but if we don't fix what caused it to get tight you gotta go you gotta go back to the massage therapist every single week so I'll give you an example let's say I'm taking somebody and I'm having them do a cable row so it's where you sit down you grab the cable and you pull it towards your midsection and the goal of the cable row or proper form part of it is to pull the shoulder blades back and down not let them shrug up near the someone who's got really really tight neck muscles near the traps or the trap muscles this is where the shoulder meets the neck which a lot of people have right let's say those muscles are really tight that means that those muscles are kinda turned on a little bit when I have that person do a row what you'll find is that they'll shrug they won't be able to pull their shoulders back really nicely they'll shrug a little bit so then what I'll do as a trainer is I'll push on those muscles get the CNS to relax a little bit then we go back to doing the row and now they have a better proper movement and the proper movement is what prevents them from getting tight in the first place this is the right way to use soft tissue work well there's another I have a personal story myself with this that was such a game changer is I had bursitis in my hips forever and I always I had the same experience as you did when I foam rolled my IT now what I did poorly was I never followed the kinetic chain all the way down to my feet and recognized that this was a breakdown from the feet that was running to my hip and what I had that's really common and I've had to fix this in many people going forward because now I'm way more aware of it because of my personal experience is when I would squat my feet would pronate in well the pronating in also rotates the femur so my thigh turns in a little bit which is twisting that IT and then it's pulling on right where the hip where it runs into and then like an asshole I was competing and trying to look amazing so I was pushing the weight of the bar and continuing to squat heavy and so this is where this bursitis started to kick up and I would just unless I would just completely stop squatting or doing leg stuff heavy I couldn't eliminate this bursitis and it wasn't until I would roll it out to get the immediate relief then I would address what was going on in my feet and start to work on my feet staying stable and then work on better range of motion and deeper squats so my hips were getting more mobile from going deeper that now it's gone it's completely gone I don't have to foam roll anymore because now I have a much better squat my feet are planted on the ground like they're supposed to I have way better depth and so that pain is completely gone away just by me continuing to squat It's important you pick up on that pain signal because if you don't if you don't like address that fact that this is a this is a sign that something is off and you're just going to go through the the movement and try and improve the movement and the technique and then load it accordingly you're just going to exacerbate the issue down the road and so that's why it's important to listen listen to your body listen to these sign signals of of pain it's trying to help correct course what your program this room so the other day I went to go replace my screen door and I you know I'm trying to it's real it slides along the track and it's really doesn't slide very well and I'm looking at the track and the track is kind of it's like grind it up a little bit not 100% so it's grinding it up so we would change the track but then it would happen over time would happen again we'd have to change the track finally I'm like let's figure out the root cause of this and so we had to look at the whole thing and it just wasn't aligned properly and so it was okay for a few months but eventually going back and forth on that track the track continues to get ruined so what mobility work does is it solves the root problem of your pain the one thing I would say or the number one factor but it's not the only thing that you can do to help alleviate pain and usually it does the job though I'll be honest usually that alone will fix it but I've had clients and I did this for long enough I'm sure you guys have too where you do the mobility work you do the corrections you're moving better the pain is you know 50% or 70% gone but it's like still there still remains yeah still there what's going on the next place I always go cause that's I think the number one that started that place the next place I typically look into if I'm not doing it at the same time cause I mean now as a trainer you probably address we've done this long enough that you know better so you probably address all these points together but if I'm still having problem it's 9 times out of 10 it's related to diet now now we probably have and that's such a controversial thing to say isn't that funny it's so controversial to say that diet could be causing your body your joints pain now I'm going to give you a very basic example that I think is more clear because we're going to start talking about diet and it's going to be a little bit more vague maybe a little bit more on the fringe although more more health practitioners are agreeing with this but I'll give you one that's more just much more clear now years ago I had a personal training facility a studio and in there I had other health practitioners and they all specialized in different things I was the fitness person so I did the exercise stuff back then I wasn't very well-versed on anything else that had to do with health besides working out and you know cutting calories and macros so I wasn't I didn't understand wellness very well I didn't understand inflammation very well meditation anything like that so I remember I had a client he had back pain and I did all the mobility work we worked on his flexibility we did I mean we did this for a while it was like six months and after about six months his pain was largely reduced but it was still there a little bit it was still kind of there now this client also had lost some weight but he always had kind of had this kind of big belly and I remember one of my staff members I was having this conversation with him about his pain he was telling me you know it's almost all gone but it still bothers me here and there and I'm like well you know my answer was well I think maybe we got it to the best that we could get we're going to continue working on mobility hopefully it'll keep getting better I mean she says you should talk to him about his diet I'm like I rolled my eyes like what the hell's diet have to do with this I mean sure if he loses weight you know maybe that'll help she goes no no no it has to do with the way he's activating his core I said what and he goes look he goes his back his pain is in his lower back what supports the spine in the lower in the lumbar region I said well the core muscles do she said that's right she goes take a muscle and stretch it out stretched out right so if you're listening right now if someone takes your arm and stretches it to its furthest you know ability try and activate your muscles in your arm and try and apply some strength you're weak your muscles are strongest in the mid range of motion when they're fully contracted or fully stretched they're not quite as strong especially when they're really really stretched you just lose connection and strength so she said his gut is constantly inflamed you can see it in his belly we would talk about his nutrition habits she says if his guts inflamed his muscles of his midsection of his core and now those muscles can't activate and stabilize well enough and it was like a light bulb went off and I said that's a hundred percent I bet you that's the issue he comes in the next time I talk to him again about his diet I said look we don't need to cut calories but there's definitely foods that cause digestive issues and bloating with you right and he goes yeah I said let's cut those out and see what happens sure enough digestion gets better bloating goes down mostly with the fact that now he was able to activate those muscles a little better this is why we actually don't talk about this very often but this is also another really cool benefit in a way that I used to use fasting with clients to prove this point to show that to him and that makes it easy makes my job easy too because then I'm not because one of the hardest parts about going the direction that you're going so is like what food is causing the inflammatory signal what is what is their body reacting to hurt even more find the needle and the haystack so one of my favorite ways to show that that's the problem or that could be the problem that we're dealing with is throwing my client on a 24 to a 48 hour fast and no exercise and then getting the feedback of how they feel and you'll be blown this is you or you're somebody who this could be the problem that's a great way to test that by fasting for 24 to 48 hours not exercising during that time and pay attention how you feel around and you'll see the people that are that's the offender of why they're having a lot of chronic pain it's normally greatly reduced or completely eliminated in a fasted state totally and I noticed too and I love that because what it does too is it promotes more hydration along that process and I've found because this kind of falls in the category of diet you know making sure that my body is properly hydrated and lubricated in the joints that by itself tends to you know bode well for like lowering the pain signal as well totally and by the way this if you're if your diet is causing you to be inflamed either through you know the systemic inflammation from eating foods that don't really agree with your body because what happens when you eat a food that doesn't really work with you is you get this like mild immune reaction you get this mild you feel like bad skin or whatever or just can feel like pain but when this immune reaction is mounted inflammatory markers go up a little bit because these inflammatory markers are signalers to the body it's a hey let's be on guard nothing wrong with that process by the way the inflammatory process is a very important process in the body but if it's too far it does it promotes muscle growth it promotes healing but too far in one direction and you start to feel more pain now here's the systemic inflammation because of your poor diet now you're not moving optimally the poor movement patterns now become your default movement patterns which then cause more pain and this is why these are both so intricately connected now there are foods that even western medicine has identified as anti-inflammatory a great example omega-3 fatty acids people who eat more have a diet that's higher in omega-3 fatty acids those are the ones you might get in fish for example tend to show systemically less inflammation heavily processed foods have also loosely been connected to more inflammation now it can either be from the foods themselves or it can be from the fact that heavily processed foods tend to make us overeat and there's the other thing that causes inflammation overeating if you're always overeating and you're obese you tend to have higher amounts of these inflammatory factors in your body so to give you an example when you take an ibuprofen or an anti-inflammatory pill and you feel less pain let's say your knee hurts and you take it now your knee doesn't hurt as much did the ibuprofen travel to the knee and work just on your knee? no no it worked systemically so that's systemic inflammation and that's what a poor diet can cause it can cause higher amounts of this kind of systemic inflammation well you alluded to obesity but I mean it's just overeating period so you could be somebody who manages your weight relatively okay or maybe you're only 15, 20 pounds of weight but if you have a habit of bench purge purge purge purge type of mentality the way you eat or restrict restrict I always say purge sorry I know it's a bad habit it's the third time it's because they don't have a great relationship with food you absolutely could be having these issues from your diet too just because you're not obese does not mean that the over consumption in a day or two could not be making some of this worse for you and then for people listening right now we're like I don't think diet's making me my back hurt or making my knees hurt look in your overall pain which then can play a role and how you move which then can cause poor mobility the reverse can also be true if you have pain because of poor mobility you could be trying to you know self-medicate with food that makes you temporarily feel better like you know cupcakes or whatever which then can cause more inflammation which then can cause poor mobility and it becomes this kind of vicious cycle so diet definitely should be the second you know most important way that you can reduce now the third one and this is another one that I didn't learn until much later but this is an obvious one poor sleep studies show conclusively that people who are even mildly sleep deprived perceive much higher amounts of pain now this is also true for your heat heat and cold tolerance if you're really tired you might find that your body gets cold easily or you can't tolerate the heat as much you may also find that you can't tolerate your friends as much or people around you as much a bit of short fuse yeah your body overall you know is just higher it's more inflamed and then studies also show that they show that inflammatory markers go up when you have bad sleep well you know it's funny you brought this one up is that this also feeds back into the food thing too I just had this experience the other the other night or the other day I had really bad sleep I mean I was exhausted you know probably got two hours of sleep one night was up all night my brain wouldn't stop had an early morning then a long day and man I had these crazy cravings for just not ideal yeah bad food you know and I was like where is that coming from and then I thought to myself oh fuck you know what I bet it has something to do with my poor sleep so it's funny as we're moving down this list and it wasn't like we ordered them like this but you talking about this just reminded me of that that you know that feeds into that you know now you didn't sleep very well and now you start to lean towards these processed foods or foods that are high inflammatory foods which then infects all connected to each other studies are pretty good at showing that too they show that sleep deprivation people just they tend to become more impulsive with their choices these are all different spirals that if you don't address it it's just going to get worse and worse and worse now here's the thing with sleep sleep is alone if you're if you're not getting good quality sleep if your sleep is below optimal levels for yourself optimizing your sleep makes a tremendous difference now if you're getting great sleep right now you get the right amount of time you know it's good quality then good for you but if you're like most people because this is a lot of people most people optimizing your sleep will make a huge huge huge difference in every aspect of your life but definitely in terms of pain now a lot of times people say well how can I optimize my sleep like I feel like I go to bed and I just crash out I think I'm sleeping good or whatever okay how much time do you put into optimizing your sleep or I should say how much value or respect do you give it do you just work and watch TV and then just jump in bed and expect yourself just fall asleep and have great sleep or do you treat it like a lot of fitness enthusiasts treat their workouts it's so funny it's like for the workouts they'll get the right clothes they'll get the right pre-workout do the stretching the warming up they know the workout ahead of time they visualize it you know there's like the 30 minute process before they actually but then when it comes to sleep it's like they just expect to turn off the computer put their head on the pillow and boom they're in this amazing slumber try this try a sleep routine this is something that I implemented myself not that long ago that's had a tremendous impact on my personal personally on my sleep and I thought I always had good sleep but I didn't realize how bad it was until I started doing this you got a cool nighty about two hours before I want to go to bed I either turn off the electronics in the house or I wear blue light blocking glasses and there's a lot of different brands out there for blue light blocking glasses we work with one called Felix Cray but any glasses that block blue light will actually do the job and what it does is it tells the brain okay it's it's nighttime or at least at the very least it doesn't think that it's as bright of a sun as it does when you're not wearing blue light blocking glasses well the closer you can get to that circadian rhythms where the sun comes up the sun comes down like that's going to be the most optimal for you right and so you do that about an hour or two before bed your brain's getting ready and studies show that you produce more melatonin which is the sleep hormone and you get better quality sleep there's another part to this by the way besides the sleep routine getting sunlight during the day has been 100% connected to getting better sleep at night which is funny because every single time I've ever been in the sun all day long I always get phenomenal sleep but I don't even I'm not even running you just crash out like immediately I'm just getting sunlight and it's because it sets that circadian rhythm this is one of those things that I think that a lot I feel like if you're in your 20s this kind of goes in one year and out the other year because you're already doing all that I mean like you're outside a lot more yeah and you just you know at that I mean I had a way with a lot more I had a mantra in my early 20s that was the same one I had yeah you know sleep is overrated or I'll sleep when I'm dead sleep is for pussies I did I said all of that stuff because you know up until that point my experience in life was I was fine I still went to work I crushed work I still worked out I still could be fit and so you know I didn't care what people were talking about sleep and the studies and the books that were being written about this this didn't impact me I didn't give a shit about it and so I moved on and then life happens you know you get a little bit older and then you start to notice things or maybe I just become doing this for a very long time now and start to pay attention to it and it's probably more so that that now in life like I'm really more in tune with my body speaking to me you know letting me know when things hurt or like just like I was mentioning you know I noticed I had poor sleep and right away my brain starts going like how is this affecting me one of the things I noticed right away was the cravings of the food that I had so I'm just more aware of that and I think when you're younger and you're at the bottom and you start noticing that I can't stress how important the sleep routine is and I love that you compared it to the getting ready for the workout because we all tend or even getting ready for your day like everybody showers brush their teeth puts their clothes on thinks you know opens their calendar looks at base camp like figures out maps like we put all this energy into mapping out and the irony is there's enough research and studies out there to show the importance of sleep that arguably the most important part of our day when it comes to recovery building muscle hormones all these things and it's like how funny is that that there's just not a lot of conversation around that because we're a sleep so it's boring it's not fun to talk about like a lot of things in modern life we have to come up with the routine and structure so you think to yourself oh you know humans when did they have a sleep routine well yeah that's because we were outside and the sleep routine was the sun the sun was up down you know here's the thing about humans we don't have good night vision and here's the other thing a lot of predators do so it's 100% pretty sure that you know ancient humans weren't like up all night doing work on computers with sun went down they're like going the cave and then they probably would you know go to sleep have some sex go to sleep or whatever well now we got electric lights so it's dark outside bright in the house but it's like the cloud for sleep so the routine silly as it sounds try it out just try it out and give it about a week and watch what happens and when it comes to pain the studies are conclusive lack of sleep causes higher amounts of pain in fact even if you don't have chronic pain when your sleep are deprived you may actually find that your body is achy and it hurts anyway you love talking about evolution all the time that we continue to evolve our technology. Like, you think about the TV lights now, like part of the advertising is how bright the LED is, and that it's pretty like, just 10 years ago, you would not have been laying, 10 years ago, I would not ever caught myself doing this bad habit that I catch myself doing all the time, which is having my phone right by my bed and picking it up because of a notification from, you know, email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, you know, and I look at it and pitch black in my room, I grab my phone and now I'm staring at this bright screen. Do you think that this is getting worse and worse as time goes on, and that's maybe why we're hearing more conversation like this, or you're seeing brands like Felix Gray that are coming out of nowhere and really blowing up because they're truly making a huge impact on people. I think people are aware now, because I remember when I was a kid, it's so funny, like, you know, mom wisdom. You gotta listen to your moms, I tell you what. I remember my mom used to be like, don't stand too close to the TV. Don't stare too close, it'll ruin your eyes. And then I remember getting a little older and reading some science articles and they're like, ah, that's a myth. And I tell my mom, ah, that's a myth. I have hairy palms. Yeah, it doesn't, that one thankfully is a myth. Like, yeah, that was a myth, yeah, whatever, you know. And then you start, that's because they didn't know the impact of blue light on the eyes. Now we're starting to learn, and I think you're gonna start to see a reversal. I think you're gonna start to see kids are gonna probably be required to wear blue light blocking glasses while they're looking at computer screens in schools, and people are now realizing its impact on sleep. And then we're also starting to realize the impact poor sleep has just on our overall health. It's actually a carcinogen. People who have like, swing shifts or whatever, they've actually labeled that as a carcinogen, like anything else, like smoking cigarettes, for example. That's how bad of an effect it has. Now the next one that goes close to it, and I kind of mentioned it earlier when we were talking about sleep, is sunlight. Sunlight, and it's so funny, you know, long time ago, one of the prescriptions for pain was to go out in the sun. That was also the prescription for illness. Oh, is that true? Yeah, I didn't know that. Well, I know talking to my wife as a pediatric nurse forever, and they were always taking their patients out to get outside in the sun as much as possible, just because of that fact that they made them feel better, their moods were elevated, all kinds of benefits. Well, I do notice that. I mean, Rachel and I were literally just talking about this yesterday, and she went out, she was like, I gotta go get out for a walk, and she was like, you know, can we talk about getting like a picnic bench outside, or do some walking meetings? And I'm like, no, we're all on the same page, because this is new to me. I've never worked in a fucking dungeon like we are now, and had days where I could be in here all day long, and I feel it. I feel after about four or five hours when we're in here, and we're under fluorescent light, that I can feel like I feel lethargic, I feel tired, and it's really hard for me to motivate to get my workout. If I go outside, literally, and just walk for 15 minutes outside, and especially on a nice sunny day here, instantly I can feel this dramatic shift the other direction. It's like I just, it almost feels like I took a pre-workout shake or something, that that's how much I was being suppressed from being in here under fluorescent lights all afternoon, and sitting there and not getting sunlight, and then all of a sudden getting sunlight. It's amazing. I have my sunroof open all the time, even if it's cloudy, whatever. I mean, I don't open the window part, but I open the shade part so the sun comes through, because we're always stuck in here. There's a couple things that we can say about sunlight. Obviously the vitamin D part. Some health practitioners will say that vitamin D deficiency is chronic in modern societies. I would agree. I would say it's probably low in most people from all the articles that I've seen. Now low vitamin D, it's well-established, is, will cause pain. Bone pain and muscle pain. That's actually one of the common signs of low vitamin D is increased inflammation, but definitely bone pain, because remember vitamin D is important for bone health, but muscle pain as well. There's some studies that show the knots that people get and the tension that people will get, increases quite high when people are low in vitamin D. So sunlight obviously gives you vitamin D. If you have an office job and you're not out in the sun, that could be one of the issues. Go out there and get some sun. Now besides that, studies actually show that sunlight, the independent of the vitamin D boosting effects has pain relieving effects. There's actually many studies. You can look them up, but they find that going out in the sun increases things like nitric oxide, there's visor dilations of the blood vessels, so it improves your heart health, improves your, it mobilizes killer T-cells, so it's got some benefits for immune system. And then there's these other studies that where people go outside and they just generally feel less pain. Now maybe from the physiology changing in your body from the sunshine. It's psychological. Or it may be your mood. That's a big one. How your mood is also dictates. Well, we talk all the time about how you perceive pain. And we had an episode not that long ago, we were talking about the monks that have trained to perceive pain differently. And just the big component. Right, just thinking of the positive effects of going out and seeing how often you hear this, the sky is clear and it's a sunny day and you go, oh, it's so beautiful out. Say that without smiling, right? How many people do that? And just that pattern of like, oh, having a positive attitude about it, I would think that in itself it would make a difference in the pain. Well, mindfulness would be the last thing that I would say. And mindfulness, and this is a tough one, that's why it's the last, because you try telling someone that their pain is not physical. In the sense that the pain is physical, but the cause is not physical. You try telling someone that. Very, very difficult discussion to be had. It's very, very hard to even comprehend. But it's very true. Sadness, depression, trauma, we can feel it as physical pain. Now, those are the extreme cases, but if you have chronic pain that is causing a decline in your quality of your life, sometimes mindfulness practice is like meditation, prayer, or a spiritual practice. By the way, I'm not making this up. Look it up, there's many studies that support this. People will actually start to feel less pain. Now, maybe that the pain itself is gone because it was manifested from their mind, or maybe that the pain's still there, they just perceive it as much less. And there's studies on monks where they do this, where they do these tests where they'll take them through different pain parameters or whatever, and they'll find that they feel their body's registering the pain just as much as a normal person. They just don't perceive it nearly as bad. It is such a hard concept to wrap your brain around. I've had clients that have still had issues with pain, but have done all the work and have gone to all these different levels and lengths to alleviate it, but have gone to body workers and therapists, and they've found a lot of that was stemming from psychological issues that they were carrying in their body. Dude, I've had one client who hurt his shoulder and it really, really had a detrimental effect on his quality of life because he was a very active individual. So he came to work with me. We worked on the mobility of the shoulder, did it for a long time. He was very, very diligent, and his mobility became excellent. For all intents and purposes, I would watch his shoulder move and everything, and I even had my physical therapist on staff look at it, and we both agreed, the kind of pain that he's feeling shouldn't be coming from the physical component. I mean, he's had images done and everything couldn't figure out what's going on. So finally I had this conversation, and luckily he's a very open-minded person. I said, do you think maybe that your body's holding onto this pain because it was such a traumatic experience for you? And so we started doing this mindfulness practice, and he said there was, now he did this for like a month or two, there was a moment where the pain literally went away. He was thinking about it, being mindful and the pain gone, and then it didn't come back. And it was so crazy for someone to experience that that I trained. Well, didn't we, didn't you talk about a study a couple of years ago that came out when we were in the middle of podcasting, it was definitely after, that talked about how they now have science to prove that memories are stored in muscle. Oh, well, I mean, it's funny that we need studies for this, but picture in your mind a depressed young lady. She has a depressed-looking posture, doesn't she? She's got her shoulders rolled forward, head down a little bit. Can her depression show up in her body? Yes, now think of someone who's happy, someone who's confident, someone who's scared, those all reflect in postures. So yes, it definitely shows up in the body. Now, maybe subtle, you might not obviously see it, someone's stress might not like obviously show, but do you think that in subtle ways their muscles are holding those memories or protecting their body from whatever they are feeling, and then that could cause mobility issues which then can cause problems? Absolutely, and then of course there's studies that show that antidepressants. There's people with, there was several studies I read where people had back pain that they could not diagnose. They did MRIs and imaging and movement specialists, and they just couldn't figure out why the hell these people's backs hurt. Then they put them on antidepressants and the back pain was gone. Absolutely, people who are depressed in fact do clinically show more pain in their bodies. Then there's the studies where they had people with knee pain where they operated on half of them, the other half of them, they just cut the knee open. Soda backup did no surgery, and the people who had the fake surgery had just as much pain relief as the people who had the real surgery. So don't knock the mindfulness part. It's definitely a very, very important component. It's just one of the more difficult ones I would say. It's to explain to people, right? Absolutely. Isn't it really just the practice and the skill and ability to reframe every situation? Make friends with it. Right, totally. I mean, I feel like it's the same thing that when I talk to people about overcoming fear or how I dealt with certain things in my life, I really think that it just, it trained me to have the skill to look and reframe the situation. Like, what's that saying? There's no such thing as big problems, only problems that we make big. And so it's that ability. And I think that's when you're learning to meditate, learning to be mindful of situations. What you're really learning to do is to look at it and just reframe it differently. Like, you get hurt somewhere and it was painful, it was an injury, it is. But learning to have a different attitude about it really makes a huge difference on how your body will then perceive it. And that practice of meditation and mindfulness, that's what you're, it's really like, that's the practice and game time is when you get hurt. I'm practicing every day to be kind of more mindful to meditate on these things, reframe all my daily stuff, have gratitude, all those things. And then those moments come where now you're challenged and that's where all that practice comes in. You gotta navigate through it. Right, that's where all that practice comes in is that I've been practicing this skill to be more mindful, to meditate, to not react right away, to learn how to reframe things for those moments in life that happened when injury occurs or shit happens. Now I have the tools in my tool belt to be able to reframe the situation. And mindfulness, I would say, is the most important for the kind of pain that you just can't seem to figure out with everything else. You know, the kind of pain where you're just like, man, I've done the mobility, I've done diet, sleep, I'm doing everything. And you know, I've made some dents in it, but it's still there. You know, the mindfulness piece, that's the piece that then starts to make a big impact. And by the way, I'm not speaking, you know, just out of the air. I've read lots of literature on this and the studies show that it actually, and that's why I would say it's one of the more important components. So if you listen to this episode and you follow some of these things and kind of maybe even follow them in order, I think we name them pretty much in the order that we think they are in terms of importance. I think many of you listening will be solving a lot of your pain issues. Now we have free resources. If you wanna read more information from Mind Pump, just go to mindpumpfree.com. You can also find all of us on social media. You can find us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.