#130 Dr. Ed Caddye - The Future of Medicine. A decentralized approach to health

Nobody knows what's going on. Nobody knows. Nobody has the faintest idea. The best guesses are

lies. You may be sure of it. Dr. Ed Cady, thanks for joining me, brother.

Thanks for having me. It's great to to podcast with somebody who's had so many great guests on

before. Yeah, thank you. I'm having a good time just connecting and learning and trying to share

the things that I find to be valuable and Amy, who I had on the podcast, Cartard. She did some

studies on breath work and super ventilation breath work, which is a pretty rare subject, but

she thought it would be fun for me to be connected to you. And I started listening to you on

some podcasts and we think very similarly and you seem to be a wealth of knowledge. So I just

wanted to dive into who you are and share with the audience a little bit about some of your

background and what you're currently working on. If you don't mind sharing a little bit of an

overview. Yeah, I suppose I have kind of these three pools that I put my knowledge into, which is

movement, which is a big passion of mine. It was actually kind of prior to my interest in medicine.

And then the other one is metabolism, which I got into deeply. I studied biochemistry for

four years before going to medical school, which has always kind of been my foundational

perspective on everything that I'm doing, which clients from a clinical perspective and with

health generally. And then the other one that's maybe a bit more prominent these days is mental

health and kind of merging all of these things. So the movement and the metabolism and the mental

health being the frame of which I kind of see clients through. And drawing from different

specialties and not necessarily having one field, although I'm formally trained in biochemistry

and medicine, as I said, and more recently psychiatry. But I'm also trained in this specialty

that we call health optimization medicine, which was pioneered by somebody that's infinitely

smarter than I am with an IQ of 210. And he came up with all of these amazing clinical frameworks.

So putting a lot of the complexity that we see in the health world these days in a framework that

allows ideally clinicians to make sense of that stuff in order to help the patient or the client

are sitting in front of them with the science that is available to us now. And it's maybe even

more available to everybody now with AI. And AI is amazing, but maybe AI is great if you know how

to use it and how to prompt it and ask the right questions. So having these frameworks is fantastic

because it allows me to put all of my different interest into an actionable step for whoever comes

to see me with whatever problem that they have. Yeah, who is that mentor with the huge IQ? I'm

just curious what his name is. His name is Dr. Ted Atchikoso. And not, yeah, he's not super well-known,

but if you find the podcast with him on, then you'll know why he has an IQ of 210.

Awesome. I would love to just listen to one of his after-its-over-all, make sure to look him up,

but have you always been somewhat of a person who likes to learn continuously about a lot of

range of things where you're somewhat of a decentralized thinker or a generalist when it comes to

approaching things and cross-cultural ways of learning because it seems like when I listen to you,

it's rare to find a person who studies medicine that doesn't get somewhat pigeonholed down that

specialization route. And I think that seems to be a major issue. I mean, it's beautiful to some

degree if you're looking at trauma or something like that. We really master that, but when it comes to

thinking about biology, it's very complex, as you know, better than anyone. And it doesn't seem

like many people cross-pollinate their thinking very much. And you go down to the biophysics and

you study all of it. Have you always been that way? It's a good question. I think I wasn't always

that way, but I was at medical school and having studied biochemistry, I always expected a lot of medicine

to be applied by a chemistry. And then I go into clinical medicine and I just saw a lot of blind

spots and almost a resistance of the medical establishment to want to understand those blind spots.

And there's reasons for that. They're very stressed and they have their algorithms that they follow

to make sure that they're acting in a safe way. But I actually listened to, I was talking to my

friend about this the other day, there was a podcast. It was one of the early Tim Ferris podcast

episodes. And he was kind of this human guinea pig type guy and always has been

who interviewed Charles Polakwin. And because of my interest in movement and exercise,

I kind of picked up on a few things that he said. And he was into kind of the functional medicine

approach. And he made a point that in some cases some of his athletes and clients would have an

issue with digestion and gut health. And that it wasn't that they had too much stomach acid. And

they needed a proton pump inhibitor, like everybody's given in the conventional medicine. But

actually they didn't have enough stomach acid. And they needed support with that part. And then

this light bulb went on, which doesn't seem too crazy that it's very independent for each individual.

And we need to pay attention to biochemistry. And there may be this concept of balance that comes

in, which is, are there any imbalances or deficiencies that we need to address. And that's one of

actually the frameworks of health optimization medicine that we detect and correct imbalances

and deficiencies because then we can balance the system as a network. So I think it was that

original light bulb of, oh, okay. So maybe everybody doesn't need a drug for an excess or a

deficiency, but maybe it depends on whether that person has a deficiency. And we can probably measure

that. And then I got kind of down the rabbit hole of quantified health and biohacking and all of this

work listening to pokos like Ben Greenfield. And then he would have guests on that were doctors

acting slightly outside the system and treating patients with things like chronic fatigue and other

very challenging conditions that the medical system pigeonholes as a functional or a psychosomatic

or whatever you want to call it. Don't necessarily treat those patients with compassion or are

unable to. And I got very fairly sensitive and an empathetic person. So I never like to feel like

there's some patients that we're letting down. And I saw plenty of those patients through my studies

and then when I started in the hospital as well. So I think my curiosity to different solutions grew

as I found the system. And because I went into medicine with a kind of a grounding in biochemistry

with an interest in nutrition and movement and medicine and not seeing so much of the nutrition

and the movement being recommended to people in the system. I figured that there's large gaps

that even just lifestyle advice could be given in a lot of cases that can be as simple as making

sure that you drink water first thing in the morning. And if you don't do that generally things

don't go that well on that day. But we don't really focus on those small things that can have a massive

impact as well. Yeah. And have you been well received by colleagues throughout this journey as you've

been thinking a little bit more broadly and developing your own way of thinking. I'm sure that's

different than what the traditional culture is like. I mean, I even have a lot of people here that

are very intelligent doctors, but they think I'm a little bit crazy when I talk to them about

the basic fundamentals of getting morning sunshine and how important it is not to wear sunglasses.

And things like that are very counterintuitive, unfortunately. And even though it's very basic

fundamental ways of thinking. So how has it been for you? I would say in the earlier days it was

more challenging. And I would have arguments when I was a medical student with the the diabetes

teams who would say that waking up a patient in the middle of the night to check their blood sugar

levels is safer than not waking them up. And I would argue that by waking them up we're guaranteeing

them to have abnormal blood sugar levels. To then I think the world is changing and I'm optimistic

about how health is going in that I'm a relatively young doctor and my friends and peers at medical

school were aware that I wasn't just a crazy guy at medical school, but also I'd perform fairly

well academically. And I've actually had some doctors come and see me and recommend friends

of family to come and see me when the perhaps the system isn't able to give them the answer that

they want either for physical pain or a more complex condition. So that has been reassuring

and validating in a certain way. And again a lot of my friends are kind of opening their

their eyes and minds to these alternative approaches. Not necessarily doing them themselves,

but they're aware that they're available. And now recently I've joined the London psychiatry clinic

which is kind of like a private Holly Street practice here in London that

approached me because of my skills, because of my movement-informed breathwork that I'm using

to investigate whether it can be used for kind of trauma release and they can be physical traumas

or emotional traumas. And then this whole field of metabolic psychiatry which is emerging from,

mostly from the US actually, I don't know if you've had Chris Palmer or anybody in that field

who are using for example the ketogenic diet to cure things like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

And there are some very wealthy entities and families who are pushing for this kind of treatment

because their friends and families have suffered at the hands of some of these mental health conditions.

And so in the world of mental health people just want help. And I've seen the kind of the worst

presentations and yeah when you're in that position and when you're a friends and family of

somebody that who's struggling like that you will do what you can to hopefully help them feel

better and get them back on track. So I think at least this is my experience isn't in the

in the world of psychiatry as there is a bit more openness to these newer tools and particularly

psychedelics and breathwork which is kind of our common thread through Amy has been

in fundamental in in shifting some people's perceptions because breathwork is free anybody can do it.

And it's a really powerful neuro modulator that's as potent as psilocybin in some cases according

to the data. So I think I think that's really going to get people asking the question why is that

the case and how can we use it better and how can we do it safely. And I want to be at the forefront

of this because when you're a clinician and somebody sitting in front of you and they're asking for

help then you want a tool that anybody can use anywhere as opposed to your dependent on my skills

to help you get out of that. That's amazing. Yeah I love the approach that you're taking and I'd

love to dive into some of these chains that you have you have like these three chains and to dive

into the nervous system and looking at the body as electric first and I lucked out throughout my

career I've had 21 years now as a firefighter and I got to see a lot of mental health suffering as

80% maybe more of our calls and then the culture itself a lot of guys end up having a lot of issues

down the road because of the amount of traumatic events and high stress incidents and lack of sleep

and all the things. And so I lucked out to discover a lot of this stuff early on and I was a little

bit of the weirdo seeking before it was mainstream I think plant medicines and psychedelics

before finding breathwork a little bit later but they all were doing wonders for me and I was

lucky to find good mentors and teachers and but it made me more and more curious about how to bridge

the gap between this so-called esoteric realm something that looked that as woo and look for more

scientific and medical approaches to like integrating the two and so I went to a lot of conferences and

started to find the people that had been the pioneers in the field you know

Robert Carrhart Harris a lot of the I started to read a lot of psychedelic history and I've had a

lot of the people that learn about psychedelics for 20 30 years on this podcast and I look forward

to having more but what are some of the fundamental things that you've discovered that are so

uniquely powerful for healing that you find you use and want to use throughout your career and

throughout your life for your patients that are pretty much not normally yet in our culture or

at least becoming more normal yeah so I think the the biggest one for me and the most exciting one

is using movement as a tool to allow people to change behavioral cycles or process traumas and

there are examples of this kind of EMDR would be one so I like movement desensitization therapy where

I don't know if you know much about it but you you essentially stimulate the body bilaterally

while you're kind of listing some of these things my mentor Richard Assevers who might be a good

guest for you as well he came very much from the fitness industry and was working with clients

who mostly had just physical pain or symptoms like their arm would stop working they wouldn't be

able to lift it above the head like a frozen shoulder or a loss of neural output to that part of

the body and he began piecing together specific behavioral traits and traumas linked to very

specific points of tension or muscle groups to the point where he's built up a body and he calls it

emotional mapping whereas like a library of muscles that are linked to specific traumas or behavioral

cycles and knowing this information you can see potentially where somebody needs to address

something in part of their life but from a you can see it from a physical perspective so you can

have an objective measure of potentially something that needs to be dealt with psychologically

but you can go at it through the physical body and I kind of have my own experiences of this

he runs a retreat called movement ayahuasca which there's no ayahuasca involved there's no

psychedelics involved it's just purely breathing and movement and he creates like a very personalized

workout that kind of breaks down these layers in the body which is roughly based off the work of

Wilhelm Reich who was a kind of a psychiatrist a long time ago who was one of Freud's students

who did a lot in terms of de-armoring the physical body to allow people to

integrate with society after being very unwell actually from a psychiatric perspective but having

this knowledge you can kind of see what steps somebody needs to go through in order to be able

to heal and you can give them the tools to be able to heal so rather than needing to outsource to a

drug potentially like a psychedelic they can have specific movements and sensations that they're

searching for in their own body which will create blood flow and safety in that part of the body

and then it may create an emotional expression or just a change in perspective or perception which

allows them to have less anxiety less depression feel generally better about themselves on the

performance side it can be more confidence more assertiveness more motivation these kind of things

so working with him seeing some of the changes and some of the people we've been working with and

using all of these principles myself it's that which it's my goal to kind of bring that to the

world of psychiatry but just to bring it to the world in general is we don't think of the nervous

system as something that we can kind of physically manipulate but it is what we are doing when we're

working with exercise and movement the body is always learning like a like an LLM or any kind of

active inference system I know you have Karl Friston on by giving it new experiences it can kind

of learn to recontextualize what it is experienced in the past so it's just that for me it's like a

super intriguing way of looking at the body and then being able to elicit positive changes in

somebody's nervous system which then they experience as a psychological well-being or less physical pain

and that would be number one yeah that's amazing I'd love to go a little bit deeper and hear

a little bit about I've heard you speak to this lactate metabolism and some of your research on

that but I also wanted to hear your perspective on labels like ADHD and you know anxiety and you see

a lot of people I'm sure that come to you that have these labels and have been prescribed different

medicines or given different even relational like concepts about what this means and just something

that I'd like to share is that I've seen people that have been labeled ADHD as some of the most

brilliant and amazing people and they just were in the wrong environment and I think one of the

biggest issues we have with the centralized medical model is that we look at the idea of

trying to fit this person into a sort of sick society and we're measuring them up against

something that seems a bit like a Krishna Marti would say it's no measure of health to be

well adapted to an insane society and I and I somewhat started to see that perspective years

ago and realize yeah that's probably the issue like if you see someone that needs movement and action

and sunlight and all the things doesn't mean that they're broken because they can't sit still

in a 90 degree 90 degree chair for the day so can you just speak a little bit about to some of this

issue? Yes I think it's a super topical conversation particularly at the moment and I think for

whatever reason we are seeing increased rates of these diagnoses and I think potentially it's

an adaptation to our modern environment that's occurring but I would agree I mean I would potentially

put myself in that category of having some of these neurodivergent traits that we would define

maybe more recently as ADHD which is kind of this autism ADHD combination and I would be seeing a

lot of patients and colleagues who would be similar in that they have this in some cases elevated IQ

but have never been able to almost make sense of the world around them but it's not necessarily

their fault it's the environment that they've been brought into and as you say kind of

the schooling system as it is being told that you need to sit down but again I'm going to

actually get through and do pretty well academically but but now I generally need to move my body

otherwise I sit down all day day in day out just does not allow me to function as well as I'd like to

and most of my superpowers personally are in my brain and if my brain doesn't work properly then

what's the point of me having those superpowers in the first place?

There are these neurodivergent systems are more sensitive to trauma I would say so it becomes

very difficult if somebody has like a very early life trauma or a combination of lots of early

life traumas it can add up and their picture can look very much like the same types of traits

and they may be secondary to the traumas they may be in amplified because they have this

neurodivergent trait before and then the traumas added up onto this and I think in some cases the

labels can be very helpful for an understanding oneself and I think again meditation basically means

to understand yourself or to understand your own mind and I think in that case where labels are

used as a way to understand the things that you need to do for yourself in order to function at

your best great the solutions for on the the severe side of this maybe medication maybe whatever

treatments are available or we have newer ones that are quite cool that I've been playing with

in the field of neuromodulation that maybe we can touch on as well that allow us to kind of

begin to understand a bit better where we fit in the world and if you have a kind of stable

period of not more stress coming in and this understanding of how you fit in the world you

can then begin to create the environment around you that supports you and not necessarily

represses you or makes you feel like everything is stressful and it becomes unmanageable

and I think a lot of people who are stuck with this they aren't aware of that and until you come

out of that environment and you go maybe to somewhere that's lovely and sunny and you live on the

beach for a couple of days and then you realize oh my symptoms are much better or I'm feeling

much more free much more creative that part of your brain that was stuck in kind of like a

survival mode can start to relax and then you have these kind of creative ideas coming through

I think that's a pretty good indicator that maybe you need to change something in your environment

and on the other hand there are cases where people use labels as a way to excuse them from doing

anything proactively about their health and generally they're not people I like to work with because

I think health is all of our responsibility for ourselves and if you can't put yourself first

then you shouldn't even necessarily be looking after anybody else too

so I think there's a big element of self-compassion that kind of comes through and

being able to give yourself compassion requires you to understand yourself so there's a benefit

certainly to the labeling but to be used for good rather than evil as opposed

yeah and I'm sure it's really hard to get people that have already started taking

antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds and ADHD meds at an early age I've had friends that

you know got hooked on these meds when they're early teenage years and then as they hit their

20s and late 20s if they start to try to ween off or stop that medicine their neurochemistry and

biophysiology just is so radically affected that it's not an easy process and so it's just a very

complex story but it's so quick now in our culture where people are just going to label you so

that you fit a category in the DSM and then you quickly administer a certain box and a certain

med for that for that problem without fixing any of the environmental factors like you're talking

about me I'm seeing that shift start to happen where I think because of COVID during 2020 I think

that was a really radical shift in people's perspective maybe almost the pendulum swing too far

the other way but people started to distrust and realize that the system has been broken and

incentivized and we've been somewhat bought into a narrative that's not quite true and that we

should question authority and maybe we shouldn't just trust our doctor because you know they went

to school for however many years and so I think it's actually a healthy sign that people are at least

starting to take more responsibility and to do their own self-empowerment and research and a lot

of people are starting to return to nature and I'm curious about your thoughts on light and how

much that plays a role in your thinking because I know that we talked about Dr. Jack Cruz before we

got on here and he's played a little bit of a role in your thinking so how much of a role do

you think light plays when it comes to darkness and morning light and daylight and indoor blue light

and all of these features yeah it's a it's a long time since I've been digging into the light data

just because I've had other other things more prominent but I went through a good couple of

months years looking into Jack's work and the light data I mean there's there's more coming out

suggesting that the circadian rhythms and our light dark cycle has one of the more profound

impacts on our on our mental health let alone our overall health it's linked to blue light at night

for example is linked to a number of cancers and probably all cancers and the likelihood of

them spreading after you have them paying attention to these signals that they if you don't

as you said at the start they're not necessarily intuitive but if you really start to pay attention

to them they should be intuitive because again somebody asks you how long should you spend

outside during the day I say go and ask the sheep or the cow in the field and they will tell you the

answer generally you should we should be out as much as we possibly can to be honest and it's

probably our lack of being outside that makes us fearful of being outside when we do go outside

and actually the data that Jack always likes to bring up that vitamin D levels are protective of

cancers even skin cancers and indoor working is a risk factor for developing melanoma which is a

paradox but it's likely the same with kind of binge sunning when we haven't had sun all year round

and on the kind of scientific side

Dr. Ted and health optimization medicine would suggest a vitamin D the receptor itself has been

around essentially since single organisms were around and therefore the fact that something has

been so consistently in our biology means it's very important and therefore we should pay attention

to vitamin D itself but also how evolutionarily we would create vitamin D which is getting sunlight

on our skin and our body and our skin and our eyes are all paying attention to the signals that come

through in the spectrum of light that is in the sun so just using a sad lamp and then spending

the rest of your day indoors is probably not going to be as beneficial as taking even two minutes

but ideally more in the morning to get that blast of sunlight that even if there's clouds which

we get a lot of in the UK that signal is still making it through the clouds and it's still benefiting

our brains and the hormones and the neurotransmitters and all the chemicals that come downstream of the

light signal coming in are the ones that wake us up in the day and tell us when we should go to sleep

10 14 hours later after that so a lot of people kind of get into the very nitty gritty of their

sleep routine in order to improve their sleep but it can be that they're not doing the things

that they need to be doing in the morning and during the day which is the reason that they can't

sleep at night yeah I think we're probably only beginning to scratch the surface on how important

light is for our health in terms of at the conventional level I think there's maybe a bit more

openness to that concept too um again you only have to start reading the studies

um that really tell you how important it is I just think again conventionally but we

we were never taught about light in in medical school really um although we used it to treat

certain conditions in young children um but we don't really consider why that might be important

um so yeah it's a it's a fascinating topic in health optimization medicine and practice we

have a module that's chronobiology so it kind of goes into all of these these factors that

influence the cycles in our life and those cycles are not just daily but they're seasonal and

yearly and monthly and um you know having worked with people from like a behavioral

trauma perspective sometimes again a month might be particularly difficult for somebody and they

don't realize why and then they kind of look back oh that was the month that they're

one of their parents passed away like three five years ago and again it was a it was a learned

response that again they didn't know why they were feeling low in that month but it's something that

they can then kind of begin to come to grips with and paying attention to these signals um and on

that topic I think we we generally feel lower in the winter and more happy in the summer and I think

we are very quick to judge ourselves but I think biology is there's a deliberate

feature it's not necessarily a bug in the system but I think we should be potentially more

introspective in the winter um because it's time to kind of um conserve energy and plan for the

year ahead and then when the resources are available in the summer there's more food there's more

energy available there's more light we can go and do all of the things that we want to do

to move our life forward for that year and then conserve again and and and being aware of these

cycles is super important but yes I'm generally a big proponent of getting people outdoors in the

morning making sure that they monitor their lighting solutions towards the evening and night time

and ideally not um impacting their sleep with artificial light at night and artificial inputs like

I think probably the the scrolling and the news and the the interactions that happen on

social media now are probably worse than the actual light from your phone for stimulating

an ever system and maybe even the flicker as well I've been somewhat involved in the daylight

computer company as well um I don't know if you've had any of those guys on but I um

I really like it as a way that technology is going kind of clean and more nature based into the

future and particularly focusing now on children which is really where the change is going to have to

happen because um adults like to become more stubborn and yeah it's difficult it is difficult to

change when these things are so dramatically at odds to the way that we were brought up and the

way that we thought about what's important um yeah yeah the daylight guys are awesome that's great

technology I'd love to get them on I just haven't had the opportunity yet um and I'd love to

talk a little bit about how you share breath work with people and what that even means and why

it's so important um because for me I found that I don't know in 2011 when I started diving into

that and it was probably the biggest game changer for me that I started to go to workshops and trainings

and books and went deep down the rabbit hole and I never found a bigger bang for my buck return on

just overall health and well-being and learning how to breathe nasally and just

completely thinking about the breath as the fuel source and the nervous system regulator um

and I've even done the swami technique that I think you're gonna speak to a little bit um and so

anyway I just love to hear that because I feel like the light story and the breath story are just so

free and effective yeah so I'm almost evangelical about bolts because they're so simple for people to

get so much return that 80% in like a short period of time and then they can chase that last 20%

later but it's like let's get everybody's head above water and I feel like the light and the breath

thing are the foundation so let's hear a little bit about your your approach to breath and what

you've discovered and all that yeah I um I think formally I was introduced to breath work by uh

I must have come across Wim Hof when I was at medical school and I actually remembered doing

Wim Hof breathing while I was driving into clinical placements which I don't recommend because I

was doing fairly long breath thoughts while I was driving which obviously is stupid but

I don't know why I thought that was a smart idea so don't do that anybody um

but yeah there was um something that I learned that the kind of like ability to relax your system

at will essentially and to have in some cases like a cathartic release um doing it in bigger

groups and kind of not necessarily myself but seeing other people like break it down into tears

and being curious about that um and then fast forward to working with Richard in the movement world

and using breath as a tool to cultivate awareness and so at inhale generally allows us to be more

aware of what's going on in our body and at exhale generally allows us to relax and activate more

of the parasympathetic nervous system so Richard has developed this technique where we use

the inhale to dictate the range of motion of our breath and the exhale to allow everything to

relax so it's a contraction and relaxation cycle with breathing and so if you consider

when we breathe we are breathing into our lungs but actually it's a whole body that's breathing

everything is expanding and everything is contracting because the goal is that we deliver oxygen

to every single cell in our body and then we use the oxygen and then we get rid of carbon

dioxide from every single cell in our body and that happens through the lungs and then the blood

stream happens very quickly and then kind of reverses itself and so if you can imagine that if

for whatever reason uh let's say you sprain your ankle a couple times playing football in the past

that part of the body becomes almost stagnant and is a bit um maybe scar tissue or just a bit more

resistant to the contraction and the expansion phases and it almost is protecting itself

there's a potential problem there if you're not able to deliver oxygen in order to heal that part

of the body and get rid of the waste products in the carbon dioxide through um physical training we

found that athletes um depending on how good of an athlete they were which is not necessarily what

they think but what we think is how well they were able to breathe into certain parts of their

body and how way they were able to connect to the larger structural muscles of the body

i.e. the chest, the lats, the glutes, the hamstrings, the quads with that inhale and how much awareness

they would have of that contraction gave us a very good idea of how good their breathing mechanics

were under stress and so by challenging um those breathing mechanics under stress and watching

and assessing people the way that they breathe into different parts of the body we have a very

good objective tool for seeing a how well somebody is able to breathe but that tells us about how

their nervous system is able to handle stress so it kind of goes full circle to what we were talking

about at the start um and having worked with Amy and Guy at the university so Guy Finchum

has published some large meta-analyses in breathwork is Mr. Breathwork if if it's been written on

breathwork heel of reddit um he's just about to be in a documentary that's coming out that was

filmed with Amy at the university um kind of talking about the research that we've been doing

the the breath is a very powerful neuromodulatory tool so we're doing things in the brain but we're also

getting the body to a safer place as well through activation of these very structural muscles

to allow the nervous system to oscillate in a way that it can contract and expand as a unit

as a unit in its entirety um so that's where my interest in where I've been kind of showing Guy

something new in that it's not just the diaphragm and the and the ribs and the the traps maybe

that are important for breathing but it's every single muscle in the body and if you find your weak

spots or the spots where you're a bit more deficient in strength or connection then by working those

you can build resilience in the whole system um and again it's a tool that's free essentially you

the swami technique which you mentioned you lay down on the floor and you put your fingers just

inside your hip bones where your so-as muscles would be and you can look close up and find a picture

of them and inhale and contract and almost think about pushing your fingers outwards and then

when you exhale and relax and your fingers go in just by gently starting there you'll start to

feel your body begin to work as a unit and rather than breathing in your chest maybe more of

a stress type pattern of breathing you can start to engage the diaphragm but the diaphragm with

the pelvic floor and again the the body can start to work as a unit that is not in a stressed state

because a lot of these muscles begin to shut down for example if you sit in a chair for a long period

of time the so-as muscles get very short and tight which means then they're feeding up into the

diaphragm which then gets short and tight as well and then the breathing becomes restricted and then

people talk about having a bad posture because they're sitting all day it may not necessarily

because they're short as a hunched over it maybe because the so-as is becoming so tight that the

shoulders have to hunch over in order to kind of protect the breathing mechanics to the best of its

ability and it's these areas of increased tension which I think we will come to see in a few years

time which are potentially more at risk of any type of pathology so in athletes where people

have a lot of tension they generally cause issues so maybe they tear their Achilles or they have an

ACL rupture or a muscle strain or pull but the thing that I pay attention to is

these movement patterns and the way somebody breathes potentially that leaves them open to maybe

problems with their gallbladder or problems with their stomach because they hold all of the

tension in the muscles around in that area of the body is not able to contract and expand

which then it's not able to get enough oxygen in and get rid of enough of the waist

and then over time that accumulates and accumulates and accumulates and then the cells get very

stressed and then manifestation of symptoms after that I don't have any data on that

but it's just my intuition that I think being able to breathe into different parts of our body is

a good signal that we we're healthy in that part of the body yeah I love that all good stuff and

I'm curious your perspective on fascia and now there's a lot of really incredible people that are

diving deeper and deeper into this system of fascia and how much that plays a role and how complex

and interesting that subject is compared to just 10 years ago and everywhere before that how we

looked at everything as just muscles and bone and ligaments and tendons this fascia story seems to

be pretty eye opening too and a lot of people study it from top down and then bottom up and

anyway I've been messing around with it a little bit myself and a lot of it has to do with breath

in combination with just feeling the fascia and using your own personal manipulation and massage

techniques on the feet and going upward and things like that but what do you think about fascia?

Yeah I think it is a very important sensory system and I think the environment is interacting

with us through our fascia in some way and I don't know I don't think there's good data on that but

but I almost see the muscles as the action system and the fascia is the sensory system and if the

sensory system is telling the muscles as a threat they'll begin to shut down or activate in certain

areas of the body and not others and so a good example of people that pay attention to this

would be the human garage who are getting quite popular at the moment my my concern with the fascia

is that some people go purely down the route of fascia and it becomes all about doing releases and

releases and releases and releasing but never doing the work on the other side to change the

movement pattern and so if you're just because we come from the fitness industry I suppose if

you're an athlete that squats 200 kilos and you think that a little massage and a fascia release

is going to allow you to then go back to squatting 200 kilos without back pain it probably isn't

just because the kind of the forces that you're placing in yourself you can't really recreate with

just a manual release but I think there is certainly power in in the fascia the videos I've seen

come out of the human garage with some of the emotional releases that people have and the

the tools they have that they're disposal where they almost have like five ten people working on

one person at the same time I think there is potentially a potency in that to reprogram

or a least game perspective on events from the past purely through looking at the fascia

and I published this paper that kind of talks about these two torque chains so this internal torque

chain which is the structural muscles that I've talked about so the lower part of the peck

and the upper lats and the obliques and the soes and the inside quads hamstring and the lower part

of the glutes working against but with the external torque chain and I think the fascia probably

is intertwined more so with that external torque chain which is almost the antennas for stress

and so I think a good thing to do is practically to take care of your fascia and the way that you can

do that is making sure that you're hydrated which doesn't just mean drinking water but making

sure you have minerals and all of the relevant water soluble vitamins on board to produce water

inside of ourselves exposing yourself to good light because we know that cortisol and the

response in the morning influences collagen fibers for example and collagen makes up a large

proponent of that fascia and keeping levels of inflammation low because if we have inflammation

there's almost like a stagnation and a very the body becomes very restricted and it only

starts to move when when the inflammation levels are low so that can take many forms

getting good air in and breathing is a good way to reduce inflammation quite quickly but then there's

other kind of metabolic features and nutritional factors that we can kind of incorporate and

they can be generic or they can be measured with organic acids testing or metabolic testing that

give us a more precise route in order to kind of deal with your imbalances and your deficiencies

that might be influencing your fascia for example as I if that's the perspective that I got from

Dr. Ted and health optimization medicine is if you break everything down all the way to the level

of a single cell forget well imagine the whole body is just an accumulation of cells and that as a

health optimization medicine practitioner we're focused on the health of a single cell then you

can simplify these inputs of contraction and reaction relaxation the the health of the membrane

around the cell the health of the mitochondria the health of all of these organelles in the cell

the health of the cytosol which is the water and the gel matrix and the structuring that happens

the influence of energy and light on that cell and then knowing through the work of Robert Navio

that the cell through evolution only responds in one of eight ways in response to stress and therefore

when you understand those ways of responding to stress they're likely to be the ways that we

respond on the stress and by paying attention to that which is called the cell danger response

we can then optimize the response of that cell to the cell danger response and make sure that it

resolves itself and that's essentially what we do is trying to resolve that cell danger response

so that the body has enough energy and resources and oxygen in order to heal from whatever it's

gone through in the past and only once you get to the state of having enough energy and then you

can enter that parasympathetic system then the healing could begin to take place I think

there's a lot of people that try and force the healing process but generally if you're if you're

stressed you are going to spend much less time in that parasympathetic system and therefore

all of the resources are going to be kind of directed outwardly which can be the immune system

fighting immune system can fight in woods as well if you if you take yourself down that path as well

and so it's being able to be present with yourself and again there's a lot of people I come across

that find it very difficult to be present with themselves and their thoughts and they tend to be

the ones that are very interlongivity but if you can't relax with yourself then yeah the the capacity

to heal from from stresses and traumas and and whatever is going to be fairly impaired because

there is a time for us to have to regenerate and recover and I don't think just doing it when

you're asleep is possible I think that means to kind of bleed into the rest of your day as well

yeah I find that to be pretty common with friends and people I know and just seeing it in our culture

where everything now is about going to the next optimization center or the next workshop or the next

event and the next therapist and you know you're driving in rush hour after you've been working

all day and you're doing all this extra stuff to try to bio hack or whatever it is and it's actually

funny that the thing that probably would be most beneficial is to just slow down and let go and maybe

just do a little walk with a little mindfulness of the breath or lay down on the floor and you know

or go to the park and watch the sunset that might have been far more beneficial to the nervous system

and to the mind and which would allow the body to intuitively heal itself and a lot of this ease

is caused by the constant you know fight or flight and it's really hard to get people in our culture

to get into that parasympathetic and it's just uncommon because I think a lot of times people feel

it's almost a cultural indoctrination of I should be doing more I need to be doing something

for myself and my body yet the most powerful thing you can do sometimes is to stop and to slow down

and to let go and in my little breathing groups that's 90% of what we're doing is slowing down

letting go and it's really hard for people and so sometimes that's the most difficult piece is

that just slowing down and I've just noticed that that is the medicine for at least the western

culture and I'd love to hear some of your perspective on what your work is dealing with with

lactate metabolism and what you've discovered with that and just what that even means for the

average person listening yeah I kind of comes back to the imbalance and deficiencies model that

I was saying generally if a lot of your time is go go go and very fast then on the other side

of that is the slow stuff and it could be very difficult for people to slow down and then there's

tools that can be useful to enable people to do that so I'll mention it just because in my head

at the moment we're using TMS or a specific device here called exo-mind which I really like because

in order to have the treatment you have to lie down flat and you're not allowed to have your

mobile phone in your hand and it treats you for 25 minutes and you have to kind of stay awake

ideally you don't fall asleep but it seems to really for those people that are very go go go it

seems to give them at least 25 minutes of downtime but afterwards they feel very clear and less

noisy in their head and it's something that I'm getting into more recently so maybe if I ever come

back on I can tell you about some some results with that but it seems to be very promising so far

for the people that find it very difficult to slow down and the other thing would be paying

attention to things that raise GABA so we have the on switch for a brain which is glutamate and then

off switch which is GABA one thing people can do is make sure they're taking methylated B vitamins

because one of those vitamin B6 is important for the conversion of glutamate to GABA so it can help

address that balance between the on and off switch and allowing people to wind down

there's a company called Troscriptions that semi related to in the US that make a true calm

product that contains a form of GABA that can cross the blood brain barrier which can be amazing

for some people that struggle with anxiousness and not being able to slow down

and then kind of coming into lactate so I got very interested in lactate through my interest in

movement there were studies in the 40s 50s 60s that showed that when you did exercise testing so

classically in sports and exercise medicine they'll put an athlete on a bike and they'll gradually

make it harder and harder and harder and they'll track their lactate over time and at some point

lactate loses this steady state relationship and dramatically rises and very elite athletes can

stay at very low levels for a long time and then they can produce massive amounts and maintain

that for a long time as well and it's madness but they they showed that people with a form of

anxiety a form of a member of the term that they used to describe it back then would have these

much higher resting levels of lactate and produce much more in a short period of time just doing

cycling on a bike that was comparable to people with cardiovascular disease and so it was that

response of the body of producing a lot of energy very quickly that got me very interested in

lactate as a thing and I say energy because people think lactate is this waste product that makes

our muscles burn but it's actually a fuel that our body produces so we have slow twitch and fast

twitch muscle fibers and the fast twitch muscle fibers like the ones you would do to lift a heavy

weight for example they produce lactate much more quickly and they can actually pass the lactate

to slow twitch muscle fibers so when you go for a run for example your fast twitch muscle fibers

can produce lactate and pass them to the slow switch which allows you to run for a long period of time

if you're a very good athlete you can produce the lactate efficiently and you can use it efficiently

when lactate gets locally high enough in concentration it will then go into the blood stream

and then as the stress increases and increases and increases that lactate in the blood will go

around it will start to fuel the heart and it will start to fuel the brain or at least it will go

into the brain there's a lot of controversy about whether it's actually fueling the brain

I think it probably is to an extent because at least in children lactate is one of the primary

or fuel sources for the neurons in the brain and it can be protective in in traumatic brain

injury for adults as well and so the if you kind of think of this conceptually the

poorer the quality of the mitochondria in your body the more likely that lactate is going to end

up in your brain because there's no sink for it and so if a stressful event happens it's going to

create a wave of lactate that may more likely go into your brain which can trigger panic

heightened arousal memory formation so if you can see that happening in a passive situation

so something very stressful happening in somebody's life that's a negative event

lot of lactate gets produced heart rate goes up lactate ends up in the brain and it encodes a new

memory and that memory basically says this is an adaptation that we need to have in order to

be prepared for this type of stress to happen and I think evolutionarily this came from

the classical saber-toothed tiger comes out of the bushes and you get this wave of lactate

that comes up but we use that in order to make sure that we don't build our tribe near where the

saber-toothed tiger loops or we use that fuel to run away from the saber-toothed tiger and

and escape which is the flight mechanism so my work over the last three years I was looking to see

whether I can measure lactate in a specific area of the brain called the anterior single-ate cortex

and whether like in the exercise testing where you can measure it in the blood go up over time

can I do a task with somebody in an MRI scanner expose them to an increasing demand and see

the lactate go up and then come back down and then could I eventually use that in a group of

patients and see differences maybe they produce lactate more quickly in that part of the brain or

they produce it more slowly and it's more delayed as a response or they produce it in the normal

rate but it stays there for longer and takes longer to get rid of and I think those parameters are

very important particularly with this realm of metabolic psychiatry where we see that the mitochondria

the ability to use lactate as they become more dysfunctional there's a potential behavioral

response to that in the physiology that happens and so that was that was my PhD which is still in

kind of preparation for submission but I have a preprint out and it's submitted to a journal in

terms of the the actual approach so I was able to kind of watch lactate go up and then come back

down in response to a task that gets faster and faster and it's just a cognitive task so there's

no exercise or anything that's happening in the body which was super cool because I thought

it would be the case but to actually see it was really exciting the next kind of step is to be

able to do that on an equals one basis so you could expose somebody to a specific type of stress

that might be more stressful for them and then be able to see what their brain's response is to

that and then hopefully find ways to modulate that response over time so that their less stress

whatever that thing is but I always have this framework in the back of my head when I'm working

with somebody from a movement perspective is what type of movement do they need to they need more

longer steady zone two type training to build a capacity to handle lactate or do they need more

very intense exercise to be able to produce more lactate in order to get them going more motivation

and then finding that sweet spot of how many days of the intensity how many days of the

slower pace stuff and then combining that with the targeted muscular work in order to get the whole

nervous system working as a unit saying yeah that's the lactate story in short yeah I don't

I haven't really heard anybody else speak to it the way that you do so I'm excited to see

what you keep discovering and how people can use their body and their mind and their breath and

all of these things to modulate I guess you could say lactate in a more efficient manner to have

the best outcome what are some of the most bang for your buck practices and ways that if you

if you everybody's so complex and different and everyone's environments different and we're so

unique but what are some of the biggest bang for your buck returns that you think people could do

to start with to be feeling better to minimize suffering to have a little bit healthier outcome

in their daily lives yeah I think one of them is I call them this came from a an old mentor as well

as a Disney walks what active meditation so you listen to Disney music or music that's more

instrumental with very kind of like nice nostalgic voices almost that are high pitched and this puts

the brain in kind of like a safety mode which is the work of Stephen porges and the safe and sound

protocol and you walk somewhere that's fairly familiar nasal breathing fairly briskly and you don't

let your heart rate get over 140 beats per minute you don't have to be too strict about this but

essentially just going for a nasal breathing walk for 20 to 60 minutes you can go longer as well

ideally in nature ideally first thing in the morning when the sun's coming up

out of all of the practices I would say that's the one that allows people to feel a lot more grounded

allow their brain to relax allow them to process their thoughts and get through a lot of that

background chatter and get their body moving in a bit of blood flow but nothing too intense that

builds energy as opposed to removes energy so rather than feeling kind of depleted after exercise

in invertecomas that nasal breathing walk just kind of keeps you at a sub lactate threshold essentially

that allows your mitochondria to start building we call mitochondria biogenesis

but also with the music and the breathing allows you to kind of enter this almost trance like

almost theta type brainwave pattern which when you get good at this you can start going on these

walks and you'll have creative ideas pop into your head quite quickly just through not thinking about

anything in particular and letting your brain relax I would say that'd be one so and just going

for the walk in the morning without any of that detail is probably just as good if you're like

needing excuse to not do it don't make it too complex just go for the walk yeah that'll be number one

number two is on the other side I think there's a lot of fear around physical intensity

and I don't necessarily say this or something to do every single week but one session if people can

manage it safely depending on their own personal context is some level of extreme physical

intensity so I don't know if you've ever tried an assault bike or know what I'm talking about

yeah yeah is choose a number of calories and sell me a assault bike and try and finish it

and as fast as possible and go as hard and fast as you can the goal is just to murder yourself

on the assault bike as quickly as possible you can kind of ramp up and do a few warm ups but the

goal is to basically produce as much intensity in your body as possible and have this

overwhelming physical sense of stress but you're going into the stress yourself

and then afterwards you can lay on the floor and go for a little nap or do whatever you need to do but

that exposing yourself to the extreme stress that's under your control I think also has an

extremely beneficial effect not only is it producing a large amount of lactate and you get

better at producing it but you can also deal with that stress better and your system gets

used to experiencing it we kind of call it distress tolerance and I think for a lot of people

the ice bath is almost in that realm but it can be a bit of a a blunt tool and it's quite

dependent on certain biological features like your fatty acids intake and for some people it's

not ideal but I think they're the limitation with the the assault bikers you can only push as

hard as you can physically push so it's titrated to your own ability there's there's more

specific ways to get at that through having a good coach but also you can use the sleds

so like the prowlers if you have a car park or a parking lot or whatever you guys call over there

like a 200 meter stretch and just pushing that as fast as you can for 200 meters again you'll get

cramping in your legs probably and you need to lie down for a bit afterwards it sounds miserable

but afterwards you'll feel super energized and the next day you'll have this kind of new wave of

motivation to do certain things in most cases I found they would be on the movement side

or my last one be I think with health I would argue that health is measurable now so there's a lot

of people who take a lot of supplements and they follow what their friends tell them and they do

XYZ and they spend a lot of money you can get a reasonable quality organic acids test got my

probion test food intolerance test if you have those and you can find a practitioner or you know

how to read the results yourself I would do that because you can save yourself a lot of money and

you can specifically target your own deficiencies in terms of vitamins minerals cofactors

some of them influence the neurotransmitter systems whether you need probiotics prebiotics

whether you need support with your digestion digestive enzymes more fiber in your diet

more specific fatty acids we didn't really get into that by my big proponent of checking your

omega-3 ratios and and understanding the balance of omega-3s and omega-6s obviously your vitamin D

levels are a pretty good marker of how good your environment is and whether you're able to get

outside enough and I'm more on the side of if it's deficient you should supplement with it

as opposed to some others maybe in that realm but I think it depends kind of what

capacity your client base or patient has to make a change there and then I would rather

somebody gets sufficient levels of vitamin D to protect themselves immune system XYZ we know

it's very protective in certain conditions in fact most conditions if your vitamin D deficient

you're more likely to have more symptoms and more suffering so yeah I think I would say measure

your health and correct any imbalances and deficiencies and subtle toxicities and a big one that

maybe you're not paying attention to is light and exposure to even to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all

of these tech devices even if it's just to get away from the news and the rubbish that you can

expose yourself too very easily on these devices very quickly yeah thanks for sharing that

yeah I love the intense workouts once while we use the assault bike at work or we have the

row machine that thing can do it too where you just basically deplete yourself a lot of times we

wear our turnout gear and do these little 20 minute skills courses too and those just are so

difficult but when you're done you feel incredible so I am the same way I think it's really

important to do really hard things sometimes for the body and it just wakes up the animal you know

I know you got to get going I just wanted to ask you real quick about psychedelics and your

thoughts on them and your own personal journey with them if you've had it my thoughts are that

they are very powerful tools and that they should be used with care and I think care is the important

feature that as I say to or discuss with my friend guy as well it's it's the intention that comes

way before you even use the substance and then the set and the setting of when you're going to use

it where how why that is probably 80% of what's going to happen and then the actual dosing and the

experience is very dependent on who's using it with you and the support during and then also

knowing that there's a safe place to go afterwards and having the support there for the

next and even six months depending on the level of intensity of the of the experience and I say

that through a personal experience of having a pretty intense and more on the negative side

experience twice and I've had a positive experience with another psychedelic

all done in places where it's legal to do these things and yeah I think

there's certainly tools that we need in psychiatry and in mental health and in general population

health and they need to be used in a way that is regulated by people who really care and I think

that people should take care and do their due diligence on the people that they want to support

them going through these experiences but I do think that they're valuable tools for that reason

because they build very good relationships as well between you and a therapist and that's one of

the most important things for the success of a therapy. I'm not such a big fan of using them

without therapy which seems to be it was initially a sort by and pharmaceutical companies to just

offer the psychedelic but without any talking therapy or any form of therapy afterwards I think

if you're going to use something that's giving you a period of neuroplasticity then it's probably

useful to fill that period with positivity and beneficial coping strategies and changes.

So yeah I could go on a long story about my experiences but I will save it I think.

Yeah yeah well I thank you for sharing that maybe next time we have you and we'll talk about

some of the other stuff I'm excited to talk to you again in the future but if you were going to

die today and this was the last day on earth for you what would you want to share with the world?

I would share that I believe that you should always have hope that my learning is that there

I keep finding teachers who have a different way of approaching potentially the same problem

and that if you think that you've done everything and you're finding yourself

in a place where you think that nothing can help there is somewhere somebody something that will

be able to help and that keep hope for a bit longer and it will show its face or head in a way that

you weren't expecting. Beautiful that's a powerful message and a much needed message so I appreciate

that and I appreciate your time today it was really fun chatting with you. Yeah it's been great thanks

so much I've enjoyed it and yeah it's nice to meet you and hopefully I can connect you with a

couple of cool people to have on as well. Yeah I would look forward to that there was a lot of

nuggets in this conversation and I'll be sure to refer everybody to your work and put all that in

the show notes and we'll do that through email at the end but appreciate your time. Awesome thanks

so much. Yeah thank you. Thank you for listening to the episode if you enjoyed it please share it

and subscribe to the show and rate the show that helps people to discover it and enjoy the next episode.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically

reinforced hallucination of some sort.