Break the Stress Spiral with Dr. Scott Sherr

This episode is brought to you by Peloton.

Break through the busiest time of year with the brand new Peloton Cross-Training Tread Plus,

powered by Peloton IQ.

With real-time guidance and endless ways to move,

you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence,

helping you reach your goals in less time.

Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push, and go.

Explore the new Peloton Cross-Training Tread Plus at 1Peloton.com.

Spring is here, and the shopping list is long.

Time to make a lows run.

Buy three bags, get three free.

Stay green, one cubic foot garden soil.

Plus, right now, members can earn four times the points

on an eligible purchase.

Start spring off strong with these deals and more.

Our best lineup is here at Loads.

Balance the 3.25, while supplies last.

Soil offering scoots of Laskin and Y.

loyalty program subject to terms and conditions.

See Loads.com slash terms for details.

Subject to change.

Point booster is subject to exclusions and more terms apply.

Once I'm on the offer.

The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are built to keep going.

Back by Toyota's reputation for legendary reliability.

Step into a Tundra with the available iForce Max Hybrid Engine,

delivering impressive torque and serious towing power.

Or take a look at Tacoma with an available power liftgate.

So gear goes in fast, and the adventure keeps moving.

Toyota trucks are built to last year after year, mile after mile.

So drive one home today.

Visit Toyota.com to find out more.

Toyota, let's go places.

We're supposed to have stress.

We're supposed to be in sympathetic some of the time.

But we're not supposed to be in it all the time.

Over time, we're not even going to realize that we're in it.

Because of these small little things that continue to give us that stress response without us.

Realizing it, you have a lot of things that are happening to you on a regular basis.

That are causing sympathetic activation.

Is it your job?

Is it your kids?

Is it your spouse?

Do you have a snoring spouse?

That's keeping you up all night and you're not getting any sleep.

Talks in our environment.

Medications that we're taking.

Infections that we're getting.

I remember I was working with a couple people where actually lead athletes that had the worst looking foundational biomarkers.

But they were at the top of their game.

This is not uncommon because the body can compensate for a long time until it can't.

How many women are like, God, I'm feeling like crap.

My metabolism's tanking.

I feel like I'm aging faster.

I think it's a much bigger issue than we realize.

Even when you're doing all the right things.

Your strength training staying after prioritizing protein.

Keeping the muscle you built over a lifetime gets harder with age.

Now, our peers were told to accept that it's just getting older.

I don't buy that.

And that's why I use timeline powered by mitochondria.

Here's the real story.

Muscle isn't just about strength or looking good.

Muscle runs your metabolism, protects your balance, preserves your independence,

and determines how powerfully you age.

And what most people don't realize is that muscle loss isn't only about hormones or workouts.

It's about cellular energy.

As we age, our mitochondria, those energy engines inside our muscle cells become less efficient.

Now, when your muscles can't produce energy well, it's harder to maintain strength, function, and resilience.

That's where my peer comes in.

It's the only clinically studied form of uralith and A.

A postbiotic, showing human clinical trials to support muscle strength and function

by helping renew mitochondrial health at the cellular level.

I love this because it works with your training, not instead of it.

Now, strength training is the signal.

Protein is the building block and might appear supports the cellular energy

that allows your muscles to actually respond and adapt.

Might appear gummies make it simple.

Two a day, sugar-free, vegan, non-GMO, and independently certified for quality

and let's not forget absolutely delicious.

So it's staying strong as part of your longevity strategy.

And I sure hope it is.

Visit timeline.com forward slash JJ Virgin and get 20% off your order.

Building muscle, stabilizing blood sugar, and supporting your metabolism.

Those have been my core messages to millions of women over the years.

But you know, there's something we don't talk about enough.

And that's when you travel.

What happens?

Quite often, you experience constipation, stomachaches, bloating, and not just during your trip,

but also when you get back.

This happens because your microbiome gets exposed to lots of different stuff,

different foods, different water, different microbes.

Or it could just be the stress from all that travel.

Now, I recently traveled through the Amazon rainforest.

And even though I'm used to traveling, I made sure I had these two supplements with me

to avoid any kind of craziness.

Paraguardian and herbal power flush from bi-optimizers.

Paraguardian is a botanical formula designed to support gut balance.

Think of it as your reset tool when your system has been a little challenged.

An herbal power flush supports regularity, gently, and effectively.

Especially when your routine has been disrupted with different schedules,

different hydration, and different food timing.

And if elimination slows down, everything feels off.

You feel bloated, inflamed, sluggish.

So here's the bottom line.

Your gut is not separate from your metabolism.

If your digestion and elimination are off, even a little bit.

More than likely, everything else will be off, too.

So whether you're traveling or just feel like your system needs support,

head to bioptimizers.com for such JJ Virgin.

And use code JJ Virgin to make sure you have these two supplements on hand

for whenever you're feeling a little lost.

Hey, I'm JJ Virgin.

PhD dropout, sorry mom.

Turn four time, New York Times bestselling author.

As a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of fame

or anglobal recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions

and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies

that help you thrive.

I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show.

And here's the fun part.

When you send me your review, I'll reply you using my on-demand virtual me.

That's right.

My team and I created a virtual JJ path with my books, speeches, and wisdom

so I can personally connect with you.

Here's how you do it.

Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast.

Take a screenshot of your review.

Text it to 813-565-2627.

My virtual JJ will reply directly and trust me.

This will make your day.

So subscribe now at SubscribeToJJ.com and text me your review.

Let's keep thriving together.

Dr. Scott, so there is a lot of women listening that feel like they're doing everything right.

They're eating right.

They're exercising.

They're trying to manage stress.

But they are wired.

They're exhausted.

Their metabolism seems to have ground to a halt.

They possibly wake up in two or three in the morning, like every night.

And they just can't seem to stop their mind from racing.

I think you call this the sympathetic spiral of doom.

Is that what this is?

I do.

All right.

Tell me about that.

Sure.

The idea here is that we are overstressed.

And we're under so much stress.

And we're under so much physical emotional cognitive stress that not only is having an effect on our nervous system,

but it's also having effect on our capacity to make energy at the same time.

And so the sympathetic spiral of doom is this combination of having sympathetic nervous system that's on all the time.

So your sympathetic nervous system is the one that's supposed to be on when you're getting chased by something or something is very serious.

And you need to like get out of the way or the proverbial saber tooth tiger is running after you can deal.

But modern society doesn't really have those things anymore.

All it has now is these small, but very sympathetically active things that we're doing all the time.

It's growing on our phone, going to meetings, doing the things that we're just going, going, going, going, going.

So that sympathetic nervous system is active all the time.

And we have the mitochondria, the part of ourselves that make energy.

That part of the cell is very, very important.

We have a huge amount of energy requirements on a day to day basis.

We make about 150 pounds of the energy currency in our body called ATP.

And if we are not meeting our energy demands, the system starts going, oh, no, I need to make more energy.

You need to give me more capacity.

And so the mitochondria, when they're trying to make more energy, but can't start putting out signals and say, hey, we can't make enough energy.

You need to rev up even more than you already are.

And then you get to this place where you're revving up more, but you don't have enough capacity anymore.

Your reserve is so low because you're already at this high stress level, right?

And you know, society rewards this stuff, rewards women and men that go, go, go.

I mean, when I was in medical school, my friends and I had shirts that said sleep is for quitters, right?

We're in New York, the hustle, right?

It's all something that people want because that's what's acknowledged and rewarded in our society.

Then as a female, I mean, you're getting to admit life and your hormones are changing.

And all of a sudden, you can't meet those kinds of demands anymore because your estrogen levels are lower.

Your mitochondrial function is now lower because of that.

Your progesterone levels are lower.

And all of a sudden, you can't sleep as well.

And so you're like, why is everything kind of fallen off when I was feeling okay a couple of years ago?

And so the sympathetic spiral of doom is this chronic sympathetic activation with chronic mitochondrial dysfunction

that is happening without us knowing it.

And then all of a sudden, we feel like the wheels of fall off fall off and we don't know what to do.

I don't really know how a, especially a woman.

Now I miss speak from a women's point of view because guess what?

I know as well, but you look at it.

And not only are we, I always say, I always joke that we have, you know, two jobs or two careers

because we have our career and then we come home and we have our career.

And then we have our kids and then we have our parents.

And, you know, there's very few husbands.

I'm going to make a blanket statement, but I think most of the case, this is correct.

They're thinking about their kids' dental appointments or birthday parties or what they're going to wear to school.

It just doesn't happen.

I'm guilty of this.

I have four kids and yes, my wife is full time and yes.

But yet, you know, I was like working full time primary breadwinner and putting on the birthday parties

and like, and, and, and, and, and, you know, and I woke up at one point.

I went, I didn't decide it for this.

I don't want to be, because for a while, you feel really good about it.

Just like you said, you're like, look at all the things I can do.

And I go, I don't want to do all these things.

And I just wonder how many women are like, God, you know, I'm feeling like crap.

My metabolism is tanking.

I feel like I'm aging faster.

And it's because, and they're looking outside of all the things getting their labs done, et cetera.

And a lot of this stuff, I don't know how you'd even see it on a lab test.

A lot of it's going to look like it's normal, yeah.

So, I mean, how big of an issue do you think this is?

I think it's a much bigger issue than we realize.

And I think, you know, just to kind of reflect back what you said about women and responsibilities.

I remember when I was in California and I saw a billboard and it had a father and a son.

And all it said on the on the billboard was, dad just show up.

Like, that's all that dad's tricks.

Kind of, right?

Like, all they need to do is be there.

And then the women do everything else.

Yeah, it's like mom packed my lunch, get my clothes.

I was with my wife in the car.

She was so pissed when she saw that sign.

Yeah.

You know, and I have four kids.

And so there's a lot that I do to help the kids.

But you're right, birthday parties, dental appointments, the dermatologist, all that stuff is happening

because my wife makes the appointments.

And I just don't think about it.

I always tell her it's like doing laundry.

It's like, I think about doing laundry, but I thought about it two weeks from now,

when you thought about it today, right?

And so it's like, you know, women's minds are have amazing capacity overall.

But what is happening, I think, is that the capacity is at a certain level

that they don't realize it's such a reserve is so low as a result.

And then as a result of different changes that happen in mid life,

all of a sudden, that capacity goes down.

And then the signs become obvious in the sense that you can't recover anymore.

You're gaining weight.

Your energy is just all over the place.

Your mood is all over the place.

But that's like, it's sort of the blood sugar versus insulin thing.

Where everyone's focused on fasting blood sugar, why aren't we looking at fasting insulin?

We'll fix this, figure it out way early.

Yeah.

Yeah, I see the same challenge here.

We don't have these early warning signs as far as I can tell.

There's not a lab you're taking for it.

So, so doctors would miss it.

They're not getting trained on it.

Like, are you getting trained on nervous system regulation in medical school?

No, no, no.

Like, was it considered a woo thing?

Like, or just, I think we only learned pathophysiology.

That's all I remember.

Like, the medical school, you learn anatomy and physiology for a semester.

Like, your first semester.

So you're in the cadaver lab.

You're, you know, looking at all the organs and all the things, all the tissues.

You learn physiology, not normal physiology, maybe for a semester.

Then the rest is just disease, right?

They're not focused on keeping people healthy because the medical system is basically saying,

you know what?

We can't do anything about people getting sick.

We're just going to treat them when they're sick and then hopefully help them a little bit, right?

So what would these signs be then?

For someone since this is such a major problem that's overlooked.

Right.

What could be some of the early signs or symptoms that things are not going well that you,

because as again, like you said, it's a badge of honor to be stressed out and overworked.

Right. Yeah.

So you can look at it from an objective perspective and you look at more from a subjective perspective.

Objectively, what I typically do with patients is I work on a whole battery of things

of laboratory testing that you wouldn't get if you went to your normal doctor.

You know this very well.

It's sort of like the functional integrative world.

The framework is called health optimization medicine.

And it's a framework that was developed by a colleague and mentor named Dr. Ted,

who said, like, let's see if we can keep people healthy so that we can optimize them over the long term

and prevent a lot of these things from happening.

That's in the ideal case, of course, right?

If you look at foundational biomarkers like vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and cofactors and gut health

and your transmitters and hormones, you can get signs of things falling off the wheels or falling off.

You know, wheels falling off the truck or whatever.

Way before it actually, you actually see it.

And I remember I was working with a couple of people where actually lead athletes

that had the worst looking foundational biomarkers, but they were at the top of their game.

This is not uncommon because the body can compensate for a long time until it can't.

Yeah.

And that's what it comes down to.

It's like we have these amazing machines that compensate as long as they can until the wheels fall off.

And then I keep using that analogy.

And we're like, what just happened?

How could I feel so poorly all of a sudden?

And I think what it comes down to, JJ, is that when you're thinking about sympathetic activation

and mitochondrial dysfunction, this loop, the way I kind of approach it with my patients

is like, look, think about it from a top down and a bottom-up approach

where top down means that you have a lot of things that are happening to you on a regular basis

that are causing sympathetic activation.

Is it your job?

Is it your kids?

Is it your spouse?

Do you have a snoring spouse that's keeping you up all night and you're not getting any sleep?

Is it, you know, a bad relationship or something that happened in your past that you haven't addressed yet?

That's all the things that are coming from the outside, right?

And then you have all the things that are happening inside as well, like toxins in our environment,

medications that we're taking, infections that we're getting, insulin resistance,

you talk about high blood sugars, right?

These are all affecting our mitochondrial function.

And 94% of US adults have metabolic and mitochondrial dysfunction.

Only 6% of US adults are metabolically healthy.

So you get this stress that's coming directly at the mitochondria.

You have this, that's the sort of the bottom upside of things that I call it.

And then the top down is the stuff that's coming outside.

And then you talk to somebody and you're like, you have so many different things that are happening here,

both outside and inside that we need to address, right?

And so the key is to understand that it's happening.

And then from there, being able to see, well, where can we start bringing in more support

so you can start feeling better?

Where I always start with this is not so much on the stress side, actually.

Because if you just decrease somebody's stress, but their mitochondria and their cells,

their immune system, their hormones are already tanking,

they're not going to feel very good.

And that's because they don't have any reserve.

And you just, they've been elevated and trying to go and go, go,

to keep up with what they need to do.

But as soon as you take off the gas pedal, put on the brakes,

they're like, their system starts crashing.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's like you always get sick after exams.

Exactly, right?

It's like that stress, stress, you see the crash, right?

And it's the same thing if you don't have enough mitochondrial support.

So I'm always-

How do you know if you have enough mitochondria?

Like, where's the mitochondria test?

I know me screens trying to do it.

Yeah, there's people doing it.

Yeah.

Where is that test that can tell us this?

It would be so amazing besides a biopsy, like how do you know?

I know, yeah.

So there are a number of tests out there that have come out.

The me screens, one of them, some other mitochondrial tests.

The way I think about this is that if you can take a good clinical history as a practitioner,

you should pretty much have an idea.

I mean, it could be anything from something over it, like if you have diabetes,

high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome, you have metabolic dysfunction,

you have mitochondria dysfunction.

So if you have metabolic dysfunction, you have mitochondria.

Yeah.

And defining that is sometimes helpful for people because metabolic dysfunction sometimes

is like, well, what does that mean?

So I try to make it super simple.

I say, look, can you make energy effectively?

And then after you make energy, can you address the stress that happens when we make energy?

Because our cells are like gasoline-powered cars.

We make ATP, our energy currency.

We make a lot of it, 150 pounds every single day, a huge amount.

But we also make water, carbon dioxide, which goes to the plants.

They make oxygen, the beautiful cycle of life.

They also make reactive oxygen species.

These are small reactive molecules that come off because of oxygen.

And these are signaling molecules.

But if you have too many of them, or if they're around for too long,

and you don't have enough antioxidants to be able to neutralize them,

then you get into this place where you get a lot of stress on the system.

So metabolic health really is, can you make energy effectively?

And can you detox from the energy that you make?

You have enough antioxidant capacity.

And if you don't have either one of the other,

you don't have metabolic health.

That's why it's so important when you address metabolic health.

You have to address it both on the energy production side,

and also on the detoxification side.

And not just one of the other.

So if you give somebody glutathione, for example,

to help them with detox, but they can't make any energy,

they're still going to feel like crap.

If you give them something that's given them more energy,

but they don't give anything on the detox side of things,

they're still going to feel like crap.

That's why it's so important to think about this holistically.

The woman who's feeling exhausted and feels like her metabolism is broken,

how does she know if her hormones is a diet,

or is it nervous system, or is it just all of the above?

Do we just have to consider that nervous systems

are always this foundational piece that always needs to be addressed?

I think the nervous system is always a big foundational piece.

The question is just the sequence that's best optimized

for that particular individual.

Because as I mentioned, if you just say like,

you know what, you need to calm down.

Oh boy, does that make us mad too?

You don't want to tell a woman that she looks tired.

You don't want to let her tell her looks stressed

that she didn't sleep or something.

So you don't want to say, hey, once you just calm down, right?

That doesn't work out.

Not even just that.

You don't want to work just on working on coming down the nervous system.

I was talking to somebody a couple of weeks ago with Lyme and Mold

and what happened was a lot of stress associated with everything else too.

And she was given something by her practitioner to calm her down

and she just crashed, right?

And that's because she didn't have enough of that mitochondrial support

to really do it.

And so the way I think about this, JJ,

is like, you want to help somebody now, right?

You want to help them feel better now.

In sequencing, usually is mitochondrial support first.

And then from there looking at the nervous system and understanding

how to best downregulate that in a safe and intentional way.

Over the long term, you want to optimize their gut.

You want to optimize their hormones, optimize their neurotransmitters.

But that may not be enough, you know?

And that might not be enough right away.

Like, if I tell a patient that comes in to see me by my practice,

hey, you know what, it's going to take six months or a year

but you're going to feel great, right?

They're going to be like, next doctor, next doctor,

I want to feel it.

Where is the kill?

Same with body composition shifts.

Yeah, right.

It'll be a year.

Right. And then when I tell my patients that they're like,

well, what are you going to do now?

Right?

I'm like, well, it took you 40 or 50 years to get where you are.

Right.

At least I had a great mentor early on.

I was like, let's just take how long it took you to get here.

Eighth out.

Yeah.

And then we can take, I don't know.

We'll take like 10% of that and we'll get you better.

It's like, that's fair.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's, that's the road that we are all on.

The path to health optimization.

But it's challenging, right?

So this is where methylene blue comes in.

Very interesting.

Yes, I want to talk about methylene blue.

I keep getting this hit of all I'm hearing.

And it reminds me, I've been through some stupid stressful times.

Like, you know, a sun nearly dying who got run down by a car.

I mean, crazy, stressful things.

And what really struck me is that it's not about not having stress.

It's about how resilient you are.

Yes.

You know, and that when you build great resilience,

like if you look at people who are able to do big things,

like, you know, presence of companies or countries or whatever,

they just are very good stressed resilience.

They have really good stress tolerance.

They tend to get, or they get very, very great hair after they're forward.

Well, they all just seem to get that too, like crap.

But, you know, the reality is, if you want to really be able to do cool stuff in life,

it strikes me that building that resilience.

Yes.

And this is what I call sympathetic reserve.

Break down the parasympathetic and sympathetic.

I don't think I've had anyone do that well on the show.

Be good to do because we throw these around all the time.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's an important piece.

We have two branches of the autonomic nervous system.

We have our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system.

Our sympathetic nervous system is known as our fight and flight.

Runaway or freeze nervous system, depending on the animal,

depending on the person in the time.

This is what's supposed to get elevated when we're under significant stress.

It used to be the proverbial saber to tiger that was chasing you.

Now it's the likes and dislikes that you get on Facebook or whatever else, right?

We're supposed to have stress.

We're supposed to be in sympathetic some of the time,

but we're not supposed to be in it all the time.

And unfortunately, many of us are because of this,

these like small little things that continue to give us that stress response

without us realizing it because over time,

we're not even going to realize that we're in it.

And I can tell you, I mean, there's a good proportion of people

that I work with over the years that have no idea that they're always in stress.

Like ER docs?

Well, ER docs.

Yeah.

That's a special breed.

They're a different animal.

Yeah.

So on the other end of the spectrum is the parasympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic nervous system is our rest digest, detoxify and heal nervous system.

So if you are always in sympathetic, you're not going to digest.

You're not going to detoxify.

You're not going to heal.

You're not going to recover.

And you know, for those who care about building muscle,

you're not going to build any muscle either because you don't build muscle in the gym.

You build it after you get home and relax.

Now question on the parasympathetic.

Because it would strike me that you need both.

You do.

And that you could also be too much of a yogi.

It's a good question.

I mean, I'm sure they're rare.

Right.

It's very rare to find people that feel like blissed out on psychedelics on some island somewhere.

But it's very rare to find them.

But I call it for the most part.

So the sympathetic spiral of doom, the opposite of that is the parasympathetic edge.

Because if we can be more in that parasympathetic state, everything else is going to get easier.

It's not like you have to be a yogi all the time.

You know, living on a mountain top and have no stress at all.

The idea is that when you're in that parasympathetic mode, you have more reserve.

You have more capacity and that you are going to be able to raise your capacity.

If you're going to the gym and you're already like this and like you're trying to lift weights,

you're not going to be able to lift that much more, right?

But if you're at the gym, you're like, you know, list out.

You're going to have a lot more capacity to load your muscles.

Think about loading your stress on a day-to-day basis.

It's the same kind of I think.

Right. You're reservoirs.

But do you think though that like for so many people, they're just kind of,

they're almost addicted to this.

They're in that spiral of doom as you talk.

But it's like they're so used to being there.

That's their normal.

That they don't know quite what to do if they take that away.

It's like that.

I remember early on, I had a therapist, she goes, okay, now what?

You're going to do every day if you're going to sit quietly.

And I'm not going to sit quietly for 30 minutes with yourself.

Nope, I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that.

Have you heard of these experiments where they had people sit in a room for like,

I think it's not that long, maybe 30 minutes doing nothing.

They could either do nothing or they could shock themselves.

And give themselves shock.

And what most people choose to shock themselves.

Why?

Because they didn't want to be with their own minds.

Right.

They didn't want to have their thoughts just go crazy.

Because everybody knows if you start meditating, what starts happening,

or even not even meditating, just be alone with your thoughts for a minute,

your mind is going to give the craziest things for you to think about.

Your mind is programmed from thousands or millions of years of evolution

to keep you alive and help you procreate.

That's it, right?

Everything else, the ego, if you want to call it that or your mind,

doesn't really care about that much.

And you have to reprogram it over time and you can do this.

But in essence, so many people do not want to be with their thoughts.

Because thoughts are intrusive.

Thoughts can be really crazy.

Like, I can't believe I just thought about it.

And then one thought leads to another another another.

Somebody called it like a pancake kind of effect where you start with one thought,

go down this train and all of a sudden you're at the end of it,

you're like, how did I get it?

How did I get it?

And all of us have been in this situation.

And so I think, and we're addicted to thoughts.

We're addicted to them because they are super sticky, super fun, super.

Like, oh, I'm thinking about that vacation.

Well, I'm thinking about that new partner.

Oh, I'm thinking about this date.

Like, or I'm thinking about the past and all the stuff that I did back then.

Like, yeah, as a result, they're just so sticky and addictive.

And that's how our minds are programmed.

Just to be addicted to things that are going to keep us alive.

Like, on average, we have about 70 or 80,000 thoughts per day.

If you're anxious, stressed, depressed,

you have up to 120,000 thoughts every single day.

And I tell my patients that I'm like, well,

should you believe everything you think if you're believing 70,000

or thinking 70,000 thoughts a day?

Some of those thoughts might be the same thoughts over and over again.

They often are.

Like, no, probably not.

Like, how many should you believe?

I'm like, how many?

Five?

You know, ten?

Like, not that many.

You know, because most of it is just your mind going crazy.

Well, let's talk about what is actually happening when you were in these

this sympathetic spiral of doom, the stress state.

What is it actually doing to your metabolic health?

What's happening there?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So when you're sympathetically dominant in this fight or flight

that most of us that are in most of the day,

you're releasing hormones and neurotransmitters, including

norepinephrine and epinephrine, which are your primary

driving sympathetic nervous system.

And then you're also releasing cortisol.

The cortisol has been the ugly stepchild of the room recently.

Oh, it's ridiculous.

What's going on right now in the female exercise space?

Yeah, I haven't seen it in the female space.

Yeah.

And you can elucidate a little bit that for your audience.

But for me, what I think about here is that cortisol is your stress hormone.

It gets released naturally in the morning when we wake up.

And that's supposed to be your highest when you wake up.

And then as the day goes on, it's supposed to get less and less and less and less.

We need cortisol without cortisol.

We all will be dead.

Okay.

But the problem is that cortisol, when it's high for long periods of time,

makes those other stress hormones not work as well.

So the stress neurotransmitters.

So you have all this cortisol pumping out.

But then you're norepinephrine and epinephrine stop working over time.

So you're pumping out more norepinephrine, epinephrine,

it's not working because you have cortisol around all the time.

Cortisol also, if it's pumped up for long periods of time,

it depresses your immune system, causes cardiac and immune issues,

breaks down muscle,

breaks down muscle.

And it also stores fat in unfortunate places like around your organs,

which is called disceral fat.

Visceral fat itself has more density of cortisol receptors.

And so if you have cortisol out for a long period of time,

the organs themselves are going to pick up more and create more fat.

Because they think that you're under like stress modes, starvation,

something where you're not going to see food for a long time.

You're not going to digest your food when you have high cortisol levels, right?

And so as a result of this cortisol being elevated,

you actually get a lot more visceral fat too.

So you see the skinny fat people, right?

They look, they look okay, but they have a huge amount of visceral fat around their organs.

And this is classic for somebody that's in fight or flight all the time.

And then that cortisol, that norepinephrine and epinephrine are stimulating your mitochondria,

they're like the mitochondria of the part of your cell.

Like, oh, wow, we need to make so much energy here.

Because you're telling us that there's a lot of energy needs.

But then the mitochondria, over time, can't keep up.

And they start building up with those reactive oxygen species.

And then what happens is they go, oh, no, we can't do this anymore.

We're going to flip over and stop making energy entirely.

We're trying to protect ourselves.

And that's called the cell danger response.

CDR. And then the cell danger response is when your mitochondria

stop making energy from oxygen very effectively.

And just make a little bit of an energy just to try to keep themselves alive.

This is the classic where I'm stressed and I start putting on weight,

putting on more weight, right?

Is the body is trying to compensate for this, but it can't.

And so it tries to put you in hibernation mode.

But you're not an hibernation mode.

You're trying to do your thing.

The mitochondria and the parts of the cell that are like, well,

we need more energy, start spewing out more signals

to get more sympathetic activation,

to try to get you to get more energy,

but it's not happening, right?

And that's where this loop really, really starts spiraling out of control.

Hey, JJ here.

Okay.

A little confession.

I'm kind of a bathtub stop.

I want that hotel level ultraplush wrap yourself up in luxury kind of towel.

But I also love a good deal.

That's why my Turkish ultraplush towels from Quince had become my go-to.

They honestly feel like that fancy spa towel.

Thick, soft and super absorbent.

And they've been holding up beautifully.

I also adore their eco compression travel packing bags,

which I've now taken into the Amazon and around the world,

even to Jordan and Egypt and more.

They fit perfectly in my Quince suitcase.

What I love most about Quince is they actually make everyday luxury accessible.

You're going to have fun exploring their household goods,

their travel items, and clothing.

Think Italian wool coats,

100% silk pieces, cashmere, perfectly cut denim, and more.

Everything is made in ethical trusted factories.

They just cut out the middlemen and the retail markup.

So you get designer level quality without the designer price tag.

Finally, Quince clothing is consistently rated 4.5 to 5 stars by thousands of customers.

That's real people using real pieces every day and loving them.

And now they're available in Canada.

Just go to quince.com slash virgin for free shipping on your order plus 365 day returns.

That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash virgin all over case for free shipping quince.com slash virgin.

Have fun.

When you want your spring break to feel like...

...and your kids pool day to feel like...

...and your hotel bed to feel like...

...ooh, and room service to feel like...

...because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels?

It matters where you stay.

Book now at hilton.com, Hilton, for this day.

This episode is brought to you by Nespresso.

Introducing Virtuo Up, the latest and a long line of innovation from Nespresso.

It's innovation you can touch, sense and taste in every single cup.

With a three-second start, easy open lever and dedicated brew over ice button,

it's even easier to enjoy your coffee your way.

Sit for yourself.

Shop Virtuo Up exclusively at nespresso.com.

That's when I tended to see the most people back when I was working with people one-on-one.

In the initial stages, you didn't see them.

They're like, this is great.

It's like, I feel great.

I've got energy all the time.

More stimulants, more stimulants, more coffee.

And then all of a sudden, they crash and then they come crawling in.

I did this to myself and I remember one of my friends...

You must take in the adrenal test.

I go, I don't need...

Anyway, I took it and I was in the crash place and then I would get myself back up,

good again, and then I'd overdo it, then I crash.

I found it was like, just stop doing this.

Yes.

Stop it.

A lot of my patients that are in this spiral, they're like, Doc, I just need more stimulants.

I just need something else that's going to get me more focused.

And I'm like, what if I told you that if we calm down your nervous system,

everything would get better.

They're like, no, I can't calm down.

I can't calm down.

I'm like...

Weird though.

You got to admit.

I actually wrote down a note and I remember this from I bent to seven or eight, Dr. Joe,

dispends events now.

And it was like, I remember the first time he goes, now you need to meditate now or a day.

I go, I don't have time for this.

Like, give me a five minute one, Doc.

Yes.

But that discovery that when you quiet things down, you're actually way more productive and get more done.

It doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense for people.

Yeah.

The way I like to describe it with my patients is like, look, imagine you have a big speech

to give.

You're in front of all the people to give it and you forget all your lines.

Why?

Because your brain was so sympathetically dominant.

So in that fight or flight that you actually didn't get enough blood flow to the front of your brain

to remember what you were going to say, right?

That's what you're doing on a day-to-day basis by just sympathetically dominating yourself all

and all the time.

You may not realize this.

You probably don't.

Because you're compensating until you don't, right?

But if we can just drop you down just a little bit, you're going to see the benefit.

Because you're going to see your capacity go up, but you have to trust the process.

And that's hard for people because they think because of society that they need to keep going, going, going, going.

And this is a classic like, I can't recover.

I'm tired all the time.

I'm used to moving all over the place.

I just can't do the things I used to do.

I need more stimulants.

I'm like, no, you don't.

Let's, and I say it nicely.

Okay, look.

More caffeine is not going to do it, right?

More stimulants are probably not going to help you.

Now, do we need to support you and get your mitochondria working better?

Can we do that?

Absolutely.

That's going to help you dramatically.

It's going to get you out of that.

So danger response.

Things are going to get better on its own just by doing that off in time.

Like I had a colleague of mine a couple of weeks ago, he's like, Doc,

I started taking methylene blue, for example, which is great in the mitochondria.

And he's like, my anxiety went away.

And I was like, hmm, tell me more about that.

And he's like, well, I've had anxiety on my life.

And I've tried, you know, tried to thrive.

I started with nothing ever works.

And I hadn't really tried something specifically for the mitochondria.

And then when you give the mitochondria what it needs to help support it.

And all of a sudden, it can start actually making energy more effectively again.

And the whole system starts calming down.

You start breaking that spiral.

And I've seen this time and time again, where I give somebody somebody with mitochondrial support

in the morning in the evening, they would sleep better.

Their HIV would go up.

And they're like, I didn't take them into sleep.

And I was like, well, you didn't need to because your system wasn't overloaded all day,

trying to make more energy when it couldn't.

It had more support now.

And so by the time you get to the evening, you're not wired anymore.

Your cortisol levels aren't as high anymore.

And you can actually get to bed.

And so it's kind of a weird conversation to have with patients.

Because it's like, yeah, let's get your energy better so you sleep better.

They're like, oh, okay.

And this may not solve all of the issues for sure.

If there's a lot of that top down, if there's a lot of stress, if a storing partner,

you haven't got a sleep divorce yet, you have relationships that are tough for whatever

or even things that you said that you had some traumatic kind of things.

If you haven't addressed some of those traumatic kinds of things in your childhood,

adulthood, whatever, that's still the elephant in the room and needs to be addressed.

But you can give people an inclination, okay.

And there's another way to do this.

And it's not that you're going to crash and you're not going to have enough energy.

It's just that we're going to regulate you better.

So you get more of that, what I call that person within a cage.

And the reality with all the trauma stuff I find it is like peeling an onion.

It's not like you're going to go in and do one, you know, MDMA guided journey and fix it all.

It's going to take time after time after time to address all that trauma.

It takes time.

And there's stuff in there that you don't even remember that all of a sudden will get unpacked.

Yeah.

That's lying in those tissues.

Yeah.

I had a friend of mine.

She's an acupuncturist in a doc in in California.

She's like, we were lamenting like, she's like, Scott, all these people are going ayahuasca journeys

and they're doing their thing.

And they forget that they have to work on their physiologic optimization too.

It's not just about working on the trauma.

Like everybody thinks, oh, work on the trauma, work on the trauma.

That's all you need to do.

And like you said, it takes time.

There's layers for all of us, right?

But there's other piece of this is that if you're not working on the physiologic side of things

and optimizing there and addressing it, you're still going to feel like crap at the end of

with your trauma.

And so you might feel a little bit better for sure, but it's not going to be the whole story.

And that's where I was talking to AirNames Ashley.

I was like, Ashley, that's exactly what we're doing here.

Is that people are just doing one or the other.

Like, on the other side of things, if I just give somebody my accountal support

and give them the best diet, the best supplementation, but I'm not addressing their nervous system,

it's like the one time I agree with conventional doctors that say if you're taking supplements,

you're just making yourself expensive piss.

Because it's not going to do anything.

And we all know these people, and I've had a work with them, is that they've tried everything.

They've been to 17 doctors and nothing seems to work with them.

They're sensitive to everything, chemicals, foods, you know, whatever, light,

electromagnetic wave frequencies.

That'll exist.

But if you're one of those people that is trying the same thing over and over again

from a like a laboratory, dietary supplementation, never get better,

I promise you it's your nervous system regulation needs to address.

And I won't work with people anymore that aren't also doing that piece.

If I really get a good sense that that's really what the elephant in the room is.

It seems like with any, I have a lot of friend to treat complex cases.

Yeah.

And seems like I don't know how you would have a complex case that doesn't have this as a piece of it.

It's almost always there.

And I have a friend of mine, another friend, it's in San Francisco.

That's why he has ketamine therapy in the office, right?

He's like, yeah, we're here to treat your Lyme and your molds, but there's also ketamine.

And this is why.

And when I was in San Francisco, I referred people to him all the time.

Because it's such a big part because even if you don't think you have trauma.

How would someone not have trauma?

That's the thing, right?

But even if you have just a chronic complex medical illness and you've had it for five trauma.

There you go, right?

And people don't realize that having that condition and not having energy and not having the capacity and blah, blah, blah, blah.

These are all real, but they're also in themselves traumatic.

People don't realize if you had a traumatic hospitalization, if you had somebody close to you that almost died, like you were talking about, that's a big deal.

It may not feel like that at the time.

But it really does and have a significant impact on your nervous system.

You may not feel safe anymore doing certain things.

You may not have the capacity because your mind won't let you think certain things or you can even forget about it entirely, right?

Depending on the situation.

We all have some element of trauma and maybe mild for others and significant.

But if you have a chronic complex medical illness, you almost always have to address that aspect of it.

If you're going to see any major healing long term.

What's interesting about trauma too, I'm thinking about the ACE score.

Yeah.

I don't find that to be useful.

I'm going to say something that probably, I'm not a trauma doc.

I've got friends who are trauma docs.

But what strikes me from working with a lot of different clients was that I'd see someone who'd get so stressed out about something that wouldn't even register on my screen.

And I think about these traumas and it's like all these different things.

I go, but just one of those things could have the impact that maybe three of them could.

So every single physiology is different.

And you might have some external stressors combined with these.

You can't just go on my score on the ACE score is okay because it's that, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm 100% with you that it's really looking at the person entirely.

And the score is going to be helpful.

It can help kind of triage a little bit.

But we have a certain amount of capacity that we're born with.

Some of us have a lot of capacity.

Some of us have a little bit of capacity.

That's from toxic exposures, from stress, from trauma, all these things, right?

And once you get to the top of that bucket, things start going haywire.

That could be when you're five or it could be when you're 35 or 55, depending on the person.

So I think it's so individual.

But the key is that you can look at objective measures from a physiologic perspective at least and say,

okay, there's some stuff that needs to be done here.

Even if there's no overt issue at the time that you can potentially change their whole trajectory by optimizing now.

Or if they're already at a place where they need a lot of help, you can still do a lot within that context

and see a lot of reversals of things that you wouldn't imagine will be reversed.

You know, in our worlds of conventional medicine, you think some things you can't get better.

That's what they'll tell you, right?

You can't get better from certain things.

You have fibromyalgia, hear your drugs, right?

You have chronic fatigue, hear your drugs, like they just don't think that you have diabetes.

Hear your drugs, right?

But we know that with the right platform, the right context, the right framework,

you can really see reversals of these.

But you have to be acknowledging that all these aspects exist.

And then the person has to be ready.

Not everybody's going to be ready for doing the major trauma work.

And that's okay, right?

Sometimes it's just, can we supplement you a little bit here to make you feel a little bit better?

So you start exercising a little bit, getting a little bit of a dietary change,

maybe coming down in your stress a little bit.

And then we can have the conversation at some point in the future, like,

okay, you're ready for the next part here because this is only going to go so far.

But you do at least feel better along the way, right?

But the reality is these are things like it's just an entirely different way to look at health care.

Just like we talk about the disease care, sick care system,

just the way you describe medical school, that's all you're learning.

And it's just a different way to look at it.

It's like how we would treat our car.

Let's keep our car.

Let's keep getting it tuned up.

Keep it working well so we don't have to use as much gas or as oil.

And it's the same thing here.

It's just that people aren't trained to think this way

and to then look at their body this way and to start way ahead

so that they never never get to that point, they never get sick.

So it sounds like a lot of this just starts with some fundamentals

that would basically keep your nervous system happy.

What would those be?

So fundamentally, we have to just calm down.

JJ, just calm down.

Shut up.

So I think the first thing to fundamentally understand is that

you are most likely in fight or flight more than you realize.

How would someone know?

So typically it's symptoms that we were describing in the beginning.

So you don't, your mood is more labial.

You're kind of up and down more than you used to be.

You don't recover as well.

Like you exercise and just don't feel good for a longer than you used to.

You have like a bad night of sleep and you just, you just trashed the next day.

So that's not aging.

Yeah, that's not necessarily aging.

Aging is, you know, aging is a conglomeration of many things

but mitochondrial dysfunction and nervous system dysregulation are kind of it, right?

I mean, making energy is not free.

That's true.

So we do have rest that builds up in the system over time.

We can, we can address that though.

So for me, it's usually the looking at over signs of it, but they might be subtle.

They might not be, and hopefully it's not somebody that's, you know, crashed and burned

and you're talking about your quarters all being in the tank, right?

Like that's sort of the end.

But just the normal person kind of going through the day, noticing they're not recovering as well.

Their sleep's not quite so great.

Maybe they're getting a little fat around there.

Right.

The midsection, they haven't changed anything.

Right.

What do they do?

Yeah.

So the first step is to understand this happening.

The second step is, okay.

No, you have a problem.

Yes, exactly.

But even if you don't, like you probably know that you probably should be more...

Yeah, whether you think you have the problem or not, you still would want to do this.

Right.

Exactly.

Okay.

How can you bring in more parasympathetic time during your day?

And that could be very simple things.

It doesn't have to be crazy hour-long meditations, like Joe was asking you to do.

Oh, no.

He's done for him.

I did a six-hour mediation one.

I'm sure.

I'm sure.

I'm sure.

So what I tell my patients when I tell, you know, what I do myself is like try to break up your day

so you're not constantly on, right?

So have time when you're taking breaks from your computer.

Have time when you can get outside.

Have time when you can learn how to do like a little bit of breath work if you can.

It just learning how to prolong your exhales.

Trying to learn how to meditate.

But in my experience, I could tell people this until my eyes and my ears or whatever,

my mouth starts getting very dry.

Oftentimes it's, let's show you what this feels like.

And that's often giving you something that's going to optimize actually the GABA system in your brain.

GABA is the primary breaks of your brain.

It's the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter.

And so if I can give something that modulates the GABA system and give them the experience of like,

oh, that's what it's supposed to feel like.

Then they know where to get the next time they're doing it with breath work,

with meditation, with yoga, whatever.

But if you don't know where there is, it's very difficult to know where there is.

And so that's what I like to try to give people the experience of.

But it's how do you do that?

So GABA itself, you can take.

But I don't find it blessed.

This is important.

So GABA itself is too big of a molecule to get into the brain.

So if you take GABA and it works for you, you have a leaky brain.

Yeah, that's a great test.

It's a great test.

And so when I first started thinking about this and talking about about five years ago,

I had a number of physicians come up to me like, yeah, every time if GABA works for them,

they have a leaky brain.

And I was like, okay, this is interesting.

And then what's the correlation for that?

Well, if you have a leaky brain, you also almost always have a leaky gut.

Of course.

And so if you optimize the gut, the brain barrier also gets better.

And so I've had patients, yeah, GABA works great for me.

And then we optimize their gut and the GABA supplements stop working.

And so this is what we think about.

So if you want to take GABA supplements, if you do take them and they work for you,

okay, find a good integrative doctor to work with because there's something you can do about that,

which is good.

Because if your blood brain barrier is leaky, that means it's inflamed.

That means you have a chronic infection and you have chronic mitochondrial stress,

chronic sympathetic activation, all the things.

Do we have a way to test for leaky brain at this point?

GABA.

I mean, that's a really interesting.

Yeah, there's no direct way of looking at the blood brain barrier only to say

that certain things should not get in, right?

And certain things should get in.

How would we know?

Well, most people, so this is classic.

Like if you had a severe infection or even just getting a surgery, like long COVID,

for example, if you had COVID infection and then after COVID, you had reactivation of

Lyme, reactivation of mold, reactivation of esteem bar, that's all leaky brain.

That's all which is what happened there, right?

Because when you get a severe trauma or severe infection, your gut gets leaky almost instantaneously.

Like the good example of this in a different context is your marathon runners.

Like if you're running a marathon and you're shitting down your leg, like that's because what all just

what happened is that you were just diverting all of the fuel from your small intestine

to your muscles to try to keep them alive while you were running.

And that major fuel is actually glutamine.

Glutamine is your primary fuel of your small intestine.

And so what just happened is that the gut just got massively leaky.

And your brain got leaky too, by the way, right?

And so that's a good, like a-

No, there is not to run marathons everybody.

Yeah, yeah.

I worked with somebody recently that did the ultramarathon and let the lead fill race where I live

and close to where I live in Colorado.

And I got him to not have diarrhea for his and his face.

Wow, go you.

Yeah, I know, right?

Glutamine for every four grams every four hours.

I was also even messing with some other things.

But anyway, so we don't have a good way of looking at the blood brain barrier.

But we do know that if the gut gets leaky, the blood brain barrier is going to get leaky too.

And so you don't want to take GABA is a short story.

What you can do is modulate the GABA receptor in some different ways that are pretty interesting.

The first one I would just say to not do is drink alcohol.

Take benzodiazepines would be number two.

And number three would be take sleep drugs if you can avoid it.

Because all of those are modulating the GABA receptor for sure.

But they're depleting GABA at the same time.

So they're making GABA binds strongly to the GABA receptor.

And depleting it very quickly.

That's why you get tolerance which are all independence to those drugs.

They feel good until they don't until you need more and more.

And then you have a hard time stopping them.

So what's interesting about the GABA receptor is that you place where GABA binds.

And even all these other separate sites on it called allosteric or separate sites.

And when those other separate sites are bound, you can also increase the amount of GABA to bind to.

So alcohol, banzo, sleep drugs, they all bind to separate sites.

And they increase the affinity for GABA to binds is what happens.

So you can use other compounds.

I like a couple different ones.

Kava, you've heard of Kava before.

Kava binds to a separate site on the GABA receptor.

Increasing GABA to bind.

It gets through the blood by embryo no problem.

But if you just use Kava over time without giving it GABA source,

what can happen is you're going to actually have an issue with Kava too.

And you've probably seen this in people need more and more Kava to get the same effects.

Like Kava bars, you feel drunk and you need more.

I just stopped using Kava years ago because there was that contamination.

Only the hepatitis.

And so I just never used it after that.

It's very safe as long as you get it from a good source.

The hepatotoxicity liver issues were very, very rare and using the wrong parts of the plant.

But what I always think about in the way we typically formulate is we give something that binds to a separate site.

And also something that's going to bind and give you the GABA source too.

So what we use is something called the nicotinol GABA vitamin B3 attached to the GABA.

The B3 has a transport that gets it across into the brain with the GABA kind of taken a ride with it.

And then you have GABA and B3 in the brain.

B3 is mildly activating, which is nice.

So you don't feel tired.

And then the GABA is going to give you that GABA source.

Oh, this sounds very good.

You combine it with the B3 GABA with the Kava along with CBD and CBG and something called trocom,

which is great for calming down the nervous system without causing any sedation.

So then you also can use something like another cool compound.

The MAGRAIN is a long-acting modulator of the GABA receptor binding to where GABA binds.

Agrens from a psychedelic mushroom called the aminita, muscarium mushroom.

It's the beautiful red mushroom with white spots on it.

And it's known in Christmas lore as the maybe the reason for Christmas,

not the Christian version, but the pagan version.

But it doesn't give you a psychedelic experience like so a cyber.

It's more like a twilight kind of thing.

But the mushroom itself is toxic.

It has to be dried.

It has to be dried because it has another ingredient in there called hypotenic acid,

which is neurotoxic, causes the psychedelic experience.

But Agren is very, very safe at low doses.

And it's a long acting on the GABA receptor.

So it binds directly where GABA would bind.

And then we use something in a combination called in our product called trozziate,

transcriptions, which is for sleep.

It also has Hanakaya, Hanokaya from Magnolubar.

And that binds to a separate site.

And so the idea for me as a clinician is like, okay, you need to sleep.

You need to calm down.

But I can't tell you the latter because you can get angry with me.

You're okay if I tell you need to sleep most of the time.

So what is the lever that we need to pull here?

But typically it's, let's get your nervous system to calm down.

So you can see it.

You can feel it.

And then once you feel it, then we can go, okay.

Now how are we going to get you back here?

Is it breath work for you?

Is it meditation?

Is it yoga?

Because then you know where there is.

You know, I think that's the hard thing for all of us is that I'm fine.

I'm fine. I'm fine.

My nervous system is fine.

I'm like, no, no, no, we need to show you how to calm down.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last.

Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast.

Here's how.

First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review.

Second, take a screenshot of your review.

And third, text it to 813-565-2627.

That's 813-565-2627.

When you do, I'll reply using my brand new virtual JJ.

It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly.

You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you.

Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode.

Hey, JJ here and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information.

That's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only.

You should not rely on this information as a substitute for nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional.

Make sure that you do not disregard avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes.

The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

I'm Kyle Wood, host of Funfax Daily.

We all know the Winter Olympics have thrilling competitions, but the history of the sports is more odd and interesting than you might realize.

Like archaeologists have found skis that are over 8,000 years old, meaning that people in Russian, Scandinavia were skiing before the great pyramids were built in Egypt.

Funfax Daily is covering all the stuff you never realized you always wanted to know about the Winter Olympics and hundreds of other topics, so follow Funfax Daily wherever you get your podcasts.