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(Breather) Welcome to part two of the 2019 wrap up show covering 10 disparate healthy lifestyle practices that are really working for me currently.

Please listen to part one where I covered items 1-5 on the list (relationships, finances, sprinting, micro-workouts, and morning flexibility/mobility routine). In part 2, I’ll cover items 6-10 as follows:

  1. Cold plunge and hot sauna therapies: There is tons of scientific evidence that temperature therapy delivers a variety of hormonal, metabolic, and cognitive benefits.
  2. Carnivore: Eating in a more nose-to-tail carnivore style pattern helps not only with fat reduction, but enhances the nutrient density of your diet.
  3. Carbs: Intuitive carb intake eases the stress of regimented eating and might help with hormone balance and workout recovery.
  4. Avoiding chronic cardio: It’s easy to drift past that line and destroy your hormones and immune function, so be careful. Disciplined use of a heart rate monitor is key.
  5. Mindfulness: Choosing out of today’s hectic, fast-paced modern life filled with FOMO and consumerism and appreciating the present.

I have identified three needs to improve areas as follows:

  1. Hyperconnectivity/distractibility: This health challenge concerns me more than anything today. We must be highly disciplined with our use of technology!
  2. Evening artificial light and digital stimulation: I score 93% here, but I want to get to 99%, like Brian Liver King Johnson.
  3. Chronic cardio: Mirroring #9 on the good list, since I’m doing better, but still make training mistakes that dig me into a hole, needing rest and recovery.

One last note, it is never too late to make changes – don’t feel bad if it’s January 2nd, 3rd, or 4th…whatever day you start incorporating the things that you know work for you and help you accomplish your goals, is fine because the only really important thing is that you just do it. Get over any lingering negative feelings you have about what you should have done in 2019 – now that that year is gone and in the past, it’s time to focus on the present. There are a lot of corny “This is going to be MY year!” memes and messages on social media about 2020, but don’t let all the enthusiasm and excitement that accompanies a new year get you down, let it inspire you. For all of us, there is always going to be some space, large or small, between where we currently are and where we hope to eventually be. The key is letting the space/distance between your present self and your goals/dreams inspire you, not scare you. What is there to be scared of anyway? Failing? Failure isn’t scary when you realize it’s a necessary step in the path towards success. So, get over yourself, and just get moving!

TIMESTAMPS:

The first five tips from the previous show covered family and relationships, health, finances and wealth, changing workouts, continuing the morning flexibility workouts. [03:48]

Doing the cold plunge is beneficial in so many positive ways. [04:21]

Following up with the sauna, the benefits continue. [08:54]

Think nose to tail when you are thinking about eating meat. [10:56]

Many different opinions on the best diet can be very confusing. [15:38]

You don’t need to be rigid.  Maximize your healthy by eating nutritious food. [20:27]

Eating and jet travel don’t mix well. [27:05]

If you are not hungry, don’t eat. [29:04]

Avoid chronic cardio exercise. [29:20]

Deal with this stressful life by learning to let go of the hyper-connectivity. [31:13]

Your thoughts are the source of all your pain. [35:41]

Think about the artificial light you are surrounded by and realize that it is going against what is natural for your body. [38:28]

Use logic and intuition regarding your chronic cardio exercise. [40:15]

Feeling sore after a workout isn’t necessarily a good thing. [42:07]

Brad summarizes his ten tips. [42:59]

LINKS:

LISTEN:

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Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad: 00:00 Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author and athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit, and happy in hectic, high-stress, modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge and expertly balance that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go.

Brad: 03:48 Hey, welcome back to part two of 10 reasons why I’m better, stronger, and faster in 2019 with a few needs to improve as well. We covered one through five in the last show, family and relationship health, a new empowering mindset about finances and wealth. Changing my sprint workout to honor the high intensity repeat training, adding more micro workouts into the busy day, breaking up periods of stillness and number five, doing my morning flexibility routine every single day and now I get into the wonderful,

Brad: 04:21 Fantastic number six, which is doing the cold plunge and the hot sauna. How important is this? Again, we’re going back to my original inspiration for the show. My email exchange with Eddie Blau. I’m still bugging him to get a chest freezer in his backyard. Now he’s going to have huge pressure because thousands of people listening to this show are going to wonder, are you going to pop for that chest freezer? Are you going to be a bad ass? Are you going to start your day by jumping in to a tub of cold water? Mine’s heated between 34 and 38 this morning. I forgot to unplug it or I had the timer on too long. So it was literally 32 so I was sitting on a block of ice on the bottom and it’s filling into ice instead of water now. And even the difference between 32 and 38 is huge. Oh yeah. It was tough. Uh, but doing this every single morning I think has been another wonderful thing that’s going to count in the category of me feeling better, stronger, faster, happier.

Brad: 05:17 In 2019 I’ve done an entire show on the benefits of cold exposure. So there’s all the hormonal benefits. You get that boost of norepinephrine in the morning. That’s the motivation focusing hormone. So you feel great when you get out. For sure. Everyone can reference this. If you’ve ever jumped in a cold lake or cold ocean and you get out, Oh, it’s freezing. Oh, but you feel kind of buzz, you feel haven’t natural hormonal high. And it only takes a few seconds of cold exposure to get that wonderful, uh, that positive fight or flight benefit. But again, as I detail in the show about cold therapy, and whenever I get a chance to tell this, I think the psychological benefits are profound as well. So if I can jump into a cold tub every morning, I am developing more focus and resilience for all other forms of stress in my life, not only at the hormonal level, but also psychologically. A Tony Robbins motivational guru of the planet. Huge cold plunge enthusiast. You can search YouTube, Tony Robbins cold plunge, and he’s bragging about jumping into his 55 degree water. I’m like, come on Tony, how about 35, dude? But anyway, what’s cool is he has installed these special cold plunge facilities in all seven of his luxury homes across the world. So you can see him in his crib in Florida and he’s got this tiny little round pool. It’s probably like six feet circle, uh, cooled to mid fifties for him to jump in every single morning. And he calls this a regimen, uh, an example of his mind telling his body what to do and when your mind can control the actions of your body, this pervades every single thing you do in life. Uh, developing that focus, that resilience, that ability to just do stuff that you should do, that you’re supposed to do rather than getting stuck in your mind.

Brad: 07:11 And I know every single day I have a tiny, tiny little battle in my mind, and it often goes like, uh, well, should I make Mia Moore’s lunch before I jump in the cold tub? I don’t know if I’m gonna have time. Maybe I’ll do it after I sweep out the garage. You know, there’s always a little dialogue going on where I’m trying to give myself an out or at other times if it’s like pouring rain or something or I’m just not feeling super motivated for my cold plunge, I’ll tell myself, well just go in for that minimum 20 seconds that the research cited by Dr Rhonda Patrick shows is enough to boost norepinephrine by 200 to 300% for up to an hour afterwards. That is 20 second exposure into 40 degree Fahrenheit. Water has been shown to boost norepinephrine like crazy to spike it for up to an hour. So I always think 20 seconds is the minimum timeframe.

Brad: 08:01 If you’re going to take a cold plunge, at least stay in that long. Uh, I’m generally up to five or six minutes with my regime now I’ve built up from a starting point of three minutes and I feel fine. I’m doing breath control, I’m doing a meditation exercise and that’s my only chance to meditate during the day cause I just can’t seem to cross my legs in that manner. My knees hurt afterward and I’m just not inclined to sit and do a proper session. But for that five minutes in the tub, I am absolutely getting a meditative experience because I’m focusing entirely on my breath. And that’s the only way to ward off the effects of the cold. I’m overriding that sympathetic nervous system response by focusing on my breath and staying calm and relaxed. The sympathetic response would be, you know, you jump in, you can’t catch your breath and you jump right out. So that’s the, uh, the touting of the cold exposure.

Brad: 08:54 And then the sauna side, Oh my gosh, I don’t even know how I can get through winter without my Almost Heaven sauna. So commercial in the middle of the show, go look@almostheaven.com. And they make these kits. They will ship you a kit on a pallet, uh, with step-by-step easy assembly to build your own barrel sauna fits in your backyard. Mine’s six by six. That’s sort of a medium or a larger size when you can get a tiny ones like Christopher Smith speed golf champion in Eugene, Oregon. Getting through those winter months with that constant access to sauna rather than having to get in the car and drive and go to the crowded one at the health club. Oh my gosh. It’s been a absolute pleasure. And so many health benefits, they’re, uh, they talk about these heat shock proteins.

Brad: 09:40 You can search YouTube and dr Rhonda Patrick does some great videos where she hits you hard with all the science in a short duration, a narration of all the health benefits of sauna. Of course, it’s been a mainstay of Finnish culture for at least a thousand years, maybe longer. And it’s such a relaxing experience. It’s such a great way to unwind from a busy day or at any time of day. And so I’m a huge enthusiast of both cold and hot exposure, great hormetic stressors to enhance your resiliency to all forms of stress in daily life. And guess what else? When you’re going in the hot sauna, you’re doing a self care exercise. So it’s going into the category of self care, like going and getting a massage, uh, doing the morning stretches, some time where you’re looking after yourself and you’re taking the time during a busy day to relax and enjoy yourself, engage in a social experience if you go in with somebody else. And so those kinds of things are huge attributes because we often overlook those. It doesn’t quite count the same as when you’re inside watching Netflix on your earphones so as not to disturb the other person in the room watching something else on Netflix. So go take a sauna, get yourself a sauna, you deserve it. What else are you going to spend your money on that’s better than that.

Brad: 10:56 Okay. Number seven, eating in a more nose to tail carnivore style pattern and pounding my ancestral supplements. So here’s the thing. I’ve been eating this wonderful primal style ancestral style diet for 11 years. Very strictly starting with my cold Turkey adoption of the Mark Sisson plan in June of 2008 prior to beginning our work on the book, The Primal Blueprint. So I ditched grains, sugars, refined industrial seed oils, and had pretty good darn good zero tolerance for anything in those categories.

Brad: 11:38 I remember over the years, tiny little leaking ins would happen with blue corn chips, uh, popcorn and maybe the corn tortilla, uh, at the tacoria once in a while. But mainly I was on a grain-free sugar-free, a bad oil free diet thinking I was rock star right? And books about it given seminars given talks. Oh yeah, this is the way to go. But guess what? If you pick up, Dr Cate Shanahan’s wonderful book, Deep Nutrition, which was also one of the great catalysts of the ancestral health movement when it was published in 2009. Still having a great run, republished as a beautiful masterpiece of how to eat in the ancestral pattern, deep down looking at a real ancestral populations and referencing the work of Weston and Price. And she identified these four pillars of human nutrition, uh, dating to our ancestral example. And this is the categories that they ate from fresh foods, fermented foods, organ meats and meat on the bone for the collagen.

Brad: 12:39 The glycosaminoglycans, this, the agents that come in the gristle that are so good for your own connective tissue health. So you stop to reflect about these four categories and fresh foods being anything that you buy at the grocery store that has expiration dates. So we’re talking fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds to a certain extent. And of course the hamburger steaks, fish, eggs, all the fresh foods, right? So that’s one out of the four categories, pillars of human nutrition. Then we have fermented foods, organ meats and meat on the bone. And I realized that I was pretty much batting 250 which is okay for a baseball player, but not very good when you think you’re eating the absolute healthiest possible diet. Cause I had next to nothing on three of the four food categories, huh? Okay. So fermented foods, that was easy. You start picking up some sauerkraut, thrown it in there, eating more yogurt.

Brad: 13:34 I started making my own Kombucha a few years ago and had been drinking that like crazy. I drew, I make four gallons at a time at two different residences and they’re constantly going and I’m cutting it with bubbly water. So it lasts a long time and it has very, very little sugar. But I thought it really helped my digestive system, especially a recovering from some digestive illness that I picked up in Mexico a couple, few years ago. And also you’re using the flourish probiotic, the liquid probiotic that I talk about on commercials. So I got my fermented food game going, but getting more organ meats into my diet has been a long, slow process. A kind of keep forgetting it’s inconvenient. Liver maybe is not the greatest tasting food, but I’ve grown to like it, uh, over recent times where I really made a concerted effort to make myself go to the butcher and buy some fresh grass fed liver.

Brad: 14:28 Also experimenting with things like kidney, which actually tastes pretty good. Uh, I’ve had tongue, I’ve had tripe and I make this wonderful oxtail soup or I just throw it into the crockpot or the instant pot with the oxtails that you buy from the butcher. That’s the components of the spine. I throw in sweet potatoes, a can of tomatoes, onion, maybe some other vegetables. Boom, you slow cook this thing all day and you have a wonderful rich gelatinous stew for dinner. You can speed up the process with the instant pot, but getting that liver game up, upping the liver game. Thank you so much to liver king Brian Johnson, ancestral supplements for inspiring me and also Dr. Paul Saladino who delivered a life changing podcast back on this channel many months ago and he made so much sense with such a compelling argument that really the animal foods, the nutrient dense animal foods should be the centerpiece of the human diet and making an interesting argument that we may not really need to go looking for especially the vegetables that we all have agreed upon is the centerpiece of a healthy diet and he’s like an not really could be bad for some people. It could be neutral for a lot of other people.

Brad: 15:38 And ah, we’re still going to be fluid with our thinking and our experimenting and not come out with a hammer, a dogmatic camera to say, this is the way for everybody that’s getting to be a huge problem in the ancestral health movement in general. Uh, Oh my gosh, how many people are telling me about this amazing documentary called game changers where veganism should take over the planet and these wonderful athletes are performing magnificent feats, uh, eating just plants. And so you should too. And then Dr Peter Attia, who is a highly respected resource, uh, wrote a couple, uh, very thoughtful and scientifically validated, uh, emails, part one and part two, uh, taking apart the documentary piece by piece for using flawed logic and propaganda.

Brad: 16:24 Uh, there’s also a guy making a documentary that’s, uh, focused on, uh, refuting, uh, much or all of the content and game changers. Name is Brian Sanders. It’s called food and lies. So, Oh my gosh, you can get into the fray, uh, on both sides and, uh, get frustrated and even get your emotions up on wondering who’s right or you can go out and try some things and experiment and take notes and uh, adjust and see what works for yourself. So what’s worked for me, uh, starting back in April when I talked to Saladino, I said, you know, I’m going to give this carnivore thing a try. And it happened to coincide with, uh, the fatty popcorn boy era, as I talked about on a show of that title. So one thing about the carnivore is if you are concerned with dropping excess body fat and perhaps frustrated from lack of success with other types of eating patterns, I think this is going to rise to popularity because it’s such a reliable way to lose excess body fat while being highly nourished and highly satiated.

Brad: 17:26 So for say anything else about it, lots of people have said or shown that there are autoimmune and inflammatory conditions have, uh, alleviated dramatically and quickly when switching over to nose to tail carnivores style pattern. Those people happen to be highly reactive to the anti nutrients contained in plant foods. I wouldn’t myself in that category. It’s probably not a ton of people in that category, but the general premise that we can focus on the most nutrient dense foods on earth, which are the animal foods, especially the organ foods and the super foods where you could talk about pastured eggs and fresh berries will count in there too. So I’ve transitioned over from a vegetable emphasis in my plant consumption to now I’m eating more fruits and less vegetables and I’m certainly not going and looking for giant piles of vegetables as I have in years past a wanting to honor my body with the best foods and the healthiest foods and all that.

Brad: 18:27 So I’ve kind of changed my thinking in that way. So I’m not a strict anti vegetable person, but I don’t go looking for them and making giant piles of stir fry anymore. And I’ve allowed myself to, uh, include more, uh, well chosen fruits, uh, because as Dr Saladino explained on the show, the fruit is the least defensible part of the plant. So it has the fewest anti-nutrients and objectionable agents in there that could cause a reaction or be adverse to your health. So I always sort of flipped flop from we’ve been talking a long time in the primal movement about, uh, watching that fruit consumption cause I can easily turn into a lot of extra sugar, especially if you’re eating it in the off season and going to Costco in December and January and getting the pineapples and the mangoes and making giant smoothies.

Brad: 19:17 No, no, no, that’s not what we’re talking about. I’m talking more about eating the fresh in season berries and whatever else is around. Like the pomegranates are in season now in the late fall. And so that’s kind of a, I think been a dietary improvement this year. Constantly experimenting, but really zeroing in on the superfoods, upping my liver game, getting some nice bone broth into the mix. Uh, I like the, uh, bonafide provisions. Uh, Sharon Brown is on the show and talking about the importance of bone broth and how to choose a good quality product or make a good quality product at home. And then I like my man Matt Whitmore over there in England at Fitter Food, author, coauthor with his wife Karrass of Paleo Primer and Paleo PrimerII a couple of fantastic books, especially good for new people. So if you’re looking for a Christmas gift, go get somebody Paleo Primer that wants to get started and he suggests throwing the egg yolks in with your morning mug of bone broth or afternoon mug of bone broth. And that is a winning beverage right there. So that’s number seven. Uh, kind of transitioning more over to the nose to tail carnivores style. Yeah.

Brad: 20:27 Number eight, uh, speaking to sweet potatoes. Remember, I threw that into my, uh, stew with the oxtail. I would I would call this one eating carbs when I feel like it and not worrying about a strict carb restriction such as a longterm, uh, unbroken Keto pattern and fasting until noon and trying to be a 50 plus guy still performing magnificent athletic feats like sprint workouts or a high performance speed golf tournaments, which are really strenuous when you’re running at a high speed around the course. And then getting up and doing it again the next day when we have our 36 hole tournament. So I’m pushing myself with these challenging workouts. And then if you pair that with a little bit of a, uh, overly ambitious attempt to restrict carbs or an overly ambitious attempt to fast, uh, until a certain time and bank these long hours of fasting, which we are told are so healthy, I think if you throw a that triple threat into the mix, sometimes it can add up to a extra stress or an over stress pattern.

Brad: 21:35 Uh, two of my mentors on this topic, Dr Tommy Wood, and listened to his wonderful shows and my wrap-up show summarizing all the great content we got from him up at his home near Seattle. And also Dr Phil Maffetone who told me when I visited him and, uh, did some extensive interviews for our primal endurance mastery course. He said, you know what, this fasting thing for an athlete, he goes, I’d like to see you get some calories in in the morning. So Phil likes his high fat coffee in the morning. Everyone’s got a pro and con opinion about that. Uh, but it was interesting information to process for me and my particular needs. So for others, longterm, uh, unbroken ketogenic period, uh, with long fasting periods might work wonderfully. Some of my main mans who be operating in a closed loop fuel system are pretty awesome with pretty fantastic results.

Brad: 22:27 And by that I mean aggressive fasting, uh, sustained, uh, extreme restriction of carbohydrates and feeling fantastic carrying around low body fat, good athletic performance, uh, Mark Sisson would be in that category because he’s devoted to that compressed time window of eating all his calories between 1:00 and 7:00 PM and he doesn’t even eat that much food. I’ve been hanging around this guy for a long time. He’s just not a big food eater. He’s a closed loop fuel system and uh, definitely promoting longevity with his approach. Uh, Dr. Paul Saladino, of course, and William Shewfeldt, both of whom had been guests on the show are highly committed to that. Carnivores style eating pattern. Uh, Shewfeldt on his Instagram site will give you tons of details and videos discussing the intricacies of his diet and how he makes it work with a very aggressive training strategy and trying to get that, uh, really lean shredded physique where he’s got his body fat down to 3.8%.

Brad: 23:24 So if you’re into that kind of thing, check out what he’s doing. It’s working for him. Dr Shawn Baker, another great leader of the carnivore message is doing well and performing at world record level in his indoor rowing exercises in the age 50 plus. And of course doing it with uh, piles of steaks and hamburgers and not a lot of variation uh, seems to work fine for him. And of course, Brian, the liver king Johnson and ancestral supplements. Go to the website, ancestral supplements.com and look at the about us page. You will see one of the greatest, most heartfelt messages about living the dream, living the ancestral lifestyle in great detail. And you will read about this amazing workout that he does called the barbarian. You can’t even imagine how difficult it is. A look@bradkearns.com and click on mofo and you’ll see pictures of him at work doing this phenomenal workout.

Brad: 24:17 And he also engages in extreme fasting periods of five day fast every quarter. Then he completes with his wife Barbara. He doesn’t even eat his first food until 2:00, 3:00 PM routinely and very committed to that ancestral pattern. Uh, emphasizing nose to tail carnivore foods. Not a whole lot of carbohydrates, not a whole lot of snacking or any undisciplined eating. But he does do weekend carb re feeds and so forth. And so these guys that are pushing the limits of human performance and human knowledge, it’s great to uh, pick and pull what they’re doing and then try it out yourself. And so I’m going to put a plug in here on number eight for me being a little more intuitive and not worrying about perhaps a random refeed. Brian McAndrew, our wonderful camera man, uh, audio engineer and my coauthor on Keto Cooking for Cool Dudes says, quote, life will give you refits.

Brad: 25:15 So don’t really worry about it either way. You don’t have to go looking for carbs as some strategy, but if you feel like it and they’re in your face and someone made you a nice meal with sweet potatoes, Oh my goodness, go ahead and enjoy it. To what extent? Well, remember what Tommy Woods said? He said, go ahead and eat as many nutritious calories as you want to maximize your health if you’re getting nutritious food. My gosh, you’re getting a greater volume of vitamin A. If you eat more liver, if you eat three pounds of liver a week, like Brian Johnson, and to what point? To what extent that you’re going to have a free license to eat as many nutritious calories and as many carbs as you want, to the point of adding excess body fat. At that point, you know that your well fueled, your glycogen tanks are topped off and now you’re adding body fat.

Brad: 26:02 And for most people, that’s not a desirable, uh, occurrence. So this is coming from the expert himself. Fatty popcorn boy where I slowly leaked in the direction of enjoying these nutritious foods, uh, large portion sizes, lots of dark chocolate.1 Can’t go through a day without having a few squares here, there, and everywhere. And I drifted up from kind of my stable baseline weight that I’ve had for several decades since I stopped racing triathlons. And that was probably around 164 and I got up to 172. All of a sudden it looked on the scale and go, Whoa, who’s that guy? So when I did the fatty popcorn boy a journey back to a desired body composition with the two strategies in place where a fasting as a rule until 12 noon cause I wanted to have some rules and guidelines in place and get the body fat off and also drifting over to a carnivore style pattern where I of course would um, restrict my carbohydrates to the extent that I was getting back into, uh, burning off stored body fat mode.

Brad: 27:05 And it happened very quickly in a few months. I’m back to my regulated weight and now I’m going forth. I’m pretty much, I would say targeting my carbohydrate intake around, uh, my workout output. So on a day where I didn’t really do much what have you, a travel day or something, I’m probably going to be fasting for a great portion of the day, especially if it involves jet travel. I think eating and jet travel don’t mix well. Jet travel is very stressful to the body. It spikes cortisol and can promote a sustained fight or flight spike because of the stress response that occurs when you’re traveling through time zones and in a contained metal cabin like that. So a lot of fasting when I’m not exercising much. And then if I’m putting out a big time effort, like a speed golf, I will probably find myself, uh, chowing down with, uh, numerous options for healthy carbohydrate intake. Up and not popcorn interestingly, cause that’s a slippery slope downward for me.

Brad: 28:08 So in solidarity to people dealing with dependency issues everywhere, I shouldn’t make a joke about that, but I really am trying to step away and realize that the popcorn was starting to get a hold of my mind. I loved it so much. I hadn’t eaten it in what, 10 years? And Oh my goodness. Uh, I was getting out of hand. So taking a little breather on that and I guess with a concluded message here, I think it’s a good idea to take a stand against the, uh, regimentation and the mindless Muppet style eating that many people are drifting into, especially with the dogmatic food camps. And instead promote an intuitive approach where you’re making good choices. You have some rules and guidelines in place, right? So you’re not going to be drifting over to 7-11 in the name of everything in moderation and other bullshit like that, but you’re making good choices and you’re kind of going with the flow.

Brad: 29:04 If you’re not hungry, you don’t eat. That’s another great strategy for losing excess body fat, isn’t it? Oh, I forgot about that one. Hold on. Get your notepad out if you’re not hungry, don’t eat. If you’re the means you’re skipping a meal, don’t worry about it. What a concept.

Brad: 29:20 Okay, number nine on the 10 reasons why I’m better, stronger, faster. In 2019 of course we have to jump into the needs to improve really quickly at the end, avoiding chronic cardio exercise. This is an absolute brutilyzer of your general health and your hormone levels. You can get tanked so quickly and undermine all the other healthy lifestyle practices that you’re so devoted to and Oh my gosh, this is, it’s a challenge. I got to say, I have ambitious athletic goals and I’m trying to go out there and do the work and be intuitive and be smart and be sensible. And I still have occasions where I overdo it. Lo and behold, because I’m enjoying myself so much and I’m playing so many good rounds of speed golf. So I’m going to play one more and try to get some icing on the cake. Or when I’m up in Tahoe discovering these new trails and there’s fresh snowfall and it’s so fun to go out there and have that nice cushion trail under you and you can go and go and go and then get up the next day and do it again. And then pretty soon you wake up and you find yourself run down and least me because remember from earlier show, uh, I am on the Braverman test as a crash and burn kind of guy. The DNA fit genetic profile. So it’s very easy for me to push it past the red line, push it past the edge and fall into those chronic patterns where I require extended recovery time. So avoiding that chronic cardio or anything that resembles a whiff of chronic cardio is a number nine for me cause I’m doing a better job at them. Although Geez, man, I just got back from Tahoe and feeling a little bit cooked from a great binge of exercise up there where I felt great every single day. So take it easy, recalibrate. Don’t worry about taking days off. Really nice.

Brad: 31:13 Number 10, choosing out of a high stress lifestyle. WTF people, why are we stressing everything in modern life? You think it’s getting worse? I do, in a way, I guess the road rage shootings of the, uh, the nineties down in Southern California, those have been corrected. Remember when those were happening? Like every couple of weeks on the news, there’d be another incident on the road. Still get a little bit of road rage going on out there. I don’t know, maybe road rage is healthy. You can just kinda, uh, unleash a little bit of emotion and then get back to your busy day where you’re controlling yourself and controlling everything. I dunno. What do you think? How about just driving carefully in the first place. So there’s no possible road rage in either direction, but back to this stress thing and this FOMO especially and my biggest concern in modern life is this, uh, hyper-connectivity excess digital stimulation, destroying our attention spans, compromising our social relationships. We’re turning into, uh, dopamine addicts with the quick hit of pleasure, uh, washing out our potential for happiness, contentment and enjoying things like, uh, nature, the moment, the present moment rather than jumping into that FOMO thing or getting distracted and uh, moving from one thing to another so quickly that we never can settle in. Ha, I don’t even have time to read books anymore because I have too much of a digital experience, uh, an onslaught of information and content all day long.

Brad: 32:47 I’m trying to create content obviously, and I’m also processing a lot of content and, Oh my gosh, our brains are all filled up and I feel like it’s an extreme health hazard. There’s a great book by Dr Robert Lustig called The Hacking of the American Mind. I highly recommend it. I’m going to try to get this guy on the show. You might’ve heard that name because he’s a very prominent anti sugar crusader, maybe the world’s foremost expert in the huge destruction that sugar is caused, uh, not only to, uh, the individual human body, but to society the healthcare costs. He and his fellow bestselling author Gary Taubes are the guys who are really carrying the torch on this issue and the crusade against sugar as something that’s destroying our bodies, our minds, the healthcare system, and extending out with Dr Lustig’s new book, the hacking of the American mind. He’s talking about how, uh, the profit seeking interests in particular are getting very good at hijacking our dopamine pathway. So they’re giving us that quick, pleasurable hit to the extent that we become addicted to the rush, uh, at the great expense of things like happiness, contentment, and living a longterm fulfilling life, which you get through things like, uh, struggling and persevering through a problem, through a challenge, uh, staying focused on a project and completing it, taking a walk or a hike or a swim in nature, kind of these low tech, low stimulatory activities that fill you with a general sense of contentment rather than the quick hit of pleasure and Lustig details. The assorted ways that we are getting hijacked today. Starting with sugar of course. And then we have caffeine, we have alcohol, we have marijuana, we have video games, we have porn. We have, uh, sweeping, uh, swiping, social media, sex.

Brad: 34:46 We have all the superficial stuff, uh, consumerism. The list goes on and on. Uh, hyper-connectivity, uh, the, the social media applications, the text message, ding, ding, ding, ding. Dopamine all day long. And so your brain gets flooded with dopamine or with the need for dopamine to the extent that everything else is washed out and life has no meaning, no purpose, and we’re seeing this play out in so many different ways. So choosing out of that high stress life, a Dr. Bruce Lipton, Biology of Belief, I did a whole show on some of his insights. Remember that he says 95 to 98% of the time we are operating from our subconscious and flawed programming that we got in ages zero to six, largely in age zero to six in childhood. So to pull out of this zombie-like state where we’re just walking around pushing the button, like the rat going for the cocaine button on the a lab experiment, right?

Brad: 35:41 To get out of this robotic state, we need to become conscious. We need to notice things like when we’re ruminating or when our thoughts are racing instead of being present. And we need to change that, take control of it and say, ah, Dr Sinha recommends you actually say out loud. There I go, ruminating again and bring your thoughts back to present awareness. That’s what meditation is all about. Carrie Sisson likes to promote this idea that your thoughts are the source of all your pain, not what happened to you, but what you think about what happened to you. So whether it’s a traffic jam, a tough interaction in the workplace, a bad score on the golf course, all these things are under your control, your perception, and you can bring things back to making even struggling and suffering a valuable growth experience. And Oh my goodness, what does it take to get some perspective here?

Brad: 36:38 I got some good perspective watching my dad head to the finish line. You know, we’re all going to head to the finish line someday. So what are we wasting today? Ruminating and stressing about whatever it is. Write it down. If there’s 10 things on your list and one of them is whether to buy the medium size or the large size SUV, Oh my gosh, get over yourself. Get over it, smile and little bit. Get outside, get into the sun. Do things that make you happy. Do things that give you a sense of satisfaction even if they’re not completely fun and pleasurable, that’s a good message to convey to the youth when you’re get frustrated with them. Right? Hey, you know what, you’ll have a growth experience in the end. Keep going, persevere, all that great stuff. So number 10 was choosing out of this high stress lifestyle mode and that’s going to be right in my needs to improve list as well because this fricking distractability and attention diversion is really a high concern of mine.

Brad: 37:38 So it’s a constant battle. Uh, for me, I would say one of the big ones is having that email inbox open all day long and engaging on important matters because I can’t just sit here like a log. Some people are counting on me. I work in a team environment in many ways, including producing this wonderful show with all my, all my peeps working hard behind the scenes and you need to be communicative, you need to be available. But it’s so easy to get diverted all day long. YouTube is always there with cool videos about anything, including all my hobbies and interests. And how I can improve my speed golf performance and, gee, there’s a book waiting to be written, uh, on the other side of my brain. So that distractability that hyper-connectivity being really, really disciplined with my use of technology so that I can have those downtimes.

Brad: 38:28 And I was talking to my daughter about this recently. I’m like, maybe that’s why I enjoy my workout so much. I mean, I like running. It’s nice to be out there, but it’s not the most exciting of sports. I like speed golf better, but I will take off and go running down the street, uh, many days because A, I’m trying to get fitter for my competitive aspirations, but B, I’m moving my body through space and I’m outdoors, looking at scenery, engaging my senses and I’m away from the screen. And so I must be doing that for a reason. Beyond just the pure enjoyment of the run. It’s also the escape. So we gotta have these escapes when we’re so enveloped with technology and screens and distractability all day long. So number one is trying to stay focused and keep my attention on a high priority items. Number two on this needs to improve list is, uh, evening, artificial light and digital stimulation.

Brad: 39:22 All right. I would say in comparison to the, uh, the average person, I probably have a beautiful a score of 93%, uh, liver king down there in Houston, Texas is, I would say 99.7% because he and his family, man, those guys are dialed, they don’t even have wifi in their home. They have long ethernet cables to plug in so they can minimize their EMF exposure. They have the beautiful orange hued light bulbs throughout the house, so it’s never bright. It’s totally mellow and uh, sleeping on the ground, wearing the orange lenses all the time. And I got my beautiful new, uh, raw optics pair in prescriptions. Now I can look at screens with prescription, uh, orange blocking eyewear. So I’m doing really well, uh, wearing the orange lenses at night, toning down the light experience and trying to get to bed on time, which I’m shooting for 10 to 10 30.

Brad: 40:15 And I do pretty well there, but not all the time. And sometimes I drift past that and I’m staying up too late and I’m trying to get a 99% score rather than 93. We can all do better with that objective of minimizing artificial light and digital stimulation after dark to get back into our alignment with our circadian rhythm, optimize hormones, all that great stuff. And in the morning I’d say I’m same thing. I’m trying to get up at the same time every day. Get moving, get into my morning routine. So blast my face with red light, get into the stretching and uh, improve on that to where I’m, uh, even more reliable rather than, uh, being wussy boy sometimes and not getting into it right away. Okay. And then the third item on the needs to improve list is also a mirror for one of the things on the good list.

Brad: 41:06 A number nine, avoiding chronic cardio. So I’m doing much better about that, but it still leaks into the picture now and then due to my high enthusiasm for exercising and achieving these fitness goals. So it’s a slippery slope and I of course haven’t quite figured it out exactly yet here I’ve only been doing this stuff for like 40 years. I’ve only been doing endurance training and all that. So it’s a constant exercise to apply logic and reasoning to your instincts. And what I mean by that is sometimes you wake up and you feel fine, but it could be due to the effect of elevated stress hormones because you’ve been training really hard for days on end or you took a long jet travel transcontinental trip, you wake up early the next morning cause you’re still on your time zone that you came from and you go out there and bust out a nice tempo run in the morning through Central Park or something that will catch up to you later that night because you’re in a high stress period of life.

Brad: 42:07 And so we just gotta be careful, especially when you have that competitive intensity that you can easily unleash when you get to the gym. When I make the point of driving over to the gym, I end up doing a lot of hard work. And sometimes it’s a little too much and I feel sore for three or four days after. If I hit the kettlebell sideways, squats too hard and my glutes are sore and Dr Phil Maffetone reminds us that, you know, getting sore after workouts, it’s not really a good thing. I know some people like it cause they feel like, Hey, I’m working hard. I I feel like I accomplished something cause I’m sore. But that soreness, that muscle damage, something you probably want to avoid overall. So those are my needs to improve things. The distractability, the hyper-connectivity, a minimizing evening, artificial light and digital stimulation and avoiding those chronic exercise patterns.

Brad: 42:59 And a quick recap of the 10 reasons that we covered in this two shows that I split up, cause I started talking so long, I went past the time. Number one is family and relationship health. The quality of your life equates to the quality of your relationships. Number two, uh, a healthy mindset about finances rather than the FOMO mindset. Be grateful for what you have, enjoy what you have and also realize that abundance is okay too. Money’s a renewable resource. Doesn’t make you a bad person for wanting to go out there and add a zero to your income. As Mark Sisson says, so all of this stuff can work together for you. Number three, changing my sprint workout for high intensity repeat training, a very explosive, high-performance workout that’s less stressful than a workout featuring cumulative fatigue, like the classic high intensity interval training. Model number four is adding in those micro workouts throughout the day. Doing little bursts of intensity to break up periods of stillness and launch from a higher fitness platform because you’re leading this active lifestyle and you’re hauling off a set of deep squats in your office cubicle or hitting the pull up bar once or twice during your prolonged busy day. Number five, doing my morning flexibility, mobility routine every single day.

Brad: 44:30 Now I can say thank you to the world. You guys are making me accountable. I actually do it every day. I can’t believe it. I’ve got a good streak going. Oh yeah. If I miss it, like if I wake up early for a flight or something, uh, I do it in the evening or on rare occasions, I will punish myself and do a double session the next day. Okay. Number six, engaging in that temperature therapy. Being an extreme enthusiast of cold plunge every single morning when I have access to a cold plunge facility and doing the hot sauna, having that Almost Heaven sauna in my backyard for ready-made. Go look on Instagram. You can see my dope. It’s actually side yard, the world’s best side yard, uh, with the chest freezer and the hot sauna in proximity. Number seven, eating in a more nose to tail style carnivore pattern going for the most nutrient dense foods on the planet and respecting Dr Cate Shanahan’s, broad definition of healthy eating, which is the four pillars, eating those fresh foods, the fermented foods, the organ meats and the meats on the bone.

Brad: 45:33 Thank you. Liver King, Brian Johnson. Thank you Paul. Saladino. Thank you dr Kate and everybody who’s inspiring me to take those twists and turns and try to keep refining my eating patterns. And then number eight is eating the carbs when I feel like it, to make sure that I’m recovering from my ambitious workouts and also just not having a high stress approach to diet. So enjoying the heck out of everything I eat, including some well chosen delicious carbohydrate foods, especially in conjunction and in attempt to recover from, uh, high intensity workouts. Uh, number nine is avoiding anything that resembles a chronic exercise pattern. It’s a constant battle, but I have to be really vigilant and I’m doing a good job just turning down the dial and being okay backing off for however long it takes to bring the juice back and bring the full performance back. Staying away from those prolonged bouts of muscle soreness from overdoing it. And then number 10, making the conscious decision coming out of subconscious into conscious and choosing out of this high stress life that is enveloping us. Uh, featuring a hyper-connectivity distractability and especially the disease state of FOMO, fear of missing out. Be happy where you are with what you have, what you’re doing. And thank you for listening.

Brad: 46:59 Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com and we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars and it helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves cause they need to. Thanks for doing it.

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