Episode 6 - ADHD, Anxiety & the Chemistry of Focus (Your Brain Isn’t Broken — It’s a Software Problem)

his athletes what is going on. ADHD, anxiety and the chemistry of focus. This is going to be a good one. This is a good one. This is one of my favorite topics by the way. That your brain is not broken. It's just under supported. And how do we optimize your brain chemistry so you can perform at a higher level consistently and not crash and burn and have mental breakdowns and have midlife crisis like so many people do. How can you have better energy, better focus, less anxiety. This is coming from someone that's got a real story around all of this stuff. So I have some show notes pulled up because there's a lot of tactical things we're going to dive into. I want to make these podcasts tactical, giving you very useful nuggets of information that you can go away and actually use. While the motivational stuff, the motivational rara, it's okay. I never feel like it's enough when you just get the pom-poms out and cheerly people, but you don't give them the levers to pull to change their situation. And so in episode six, we're going to be talking all about that. Now just to preface this conversation. So we're going to be covering ADHD, anxiety, optimizing mood, enhancing energy and focus, brain health in general, all the way to long-term brain health. So dementia, Alzheimer's, all the things that people struggle with. And this also relates to people that maybe have PTSD or a TBI, traumatic brain injury. I've worked with a number of former special operators, seals, ranges, greenbray. And obviously, some of those guys have been through the ringer. And they've come back with TBI as PTSD, that type of thing. And how do you optimize those things? By the way, there are things you can literally do that I wish the government had a better understanding of because they would help so many people who have served this country. And they just don't know. So I'm going to dive into all that stuff for you. It's going to be a packed episode with some really, really good tactics. So the first thing that I want to say is, why should you listen to me about this? Why should you listen to a nutritionist about brain chemistry and psychology and neurobiology? I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a neurobiologist. Right? Why should you listen to me? First of all, unlike a lot of people, I've actually come from a place where I had a ton of dysfunction and I fixed it. I walked this path myself. And not only that, but I've been able to replicate it in other people many times. I've seen the fruit of that process. So I'm 41 at this time of this recording. When I was in my teens, so in my sort of 12, 13, onward, young, I was diagnosed with bipolar depression, severe social anxiety and ADHD. That's a nice trifecta, isn't it? And I was heavily medicated on for all three of those diagnosis, formal diagnosis from a psychiatrist, by the way. It wasn't just an estimate that I had ADHD, a formal diagnosis. And I've been on a cocktail of different medications. So before I got my bipolar diagnosis, I was on pro-zac and all sorts of stuff. And then I got on lithium carbonate for bipolar. I was on benzodiazepines, so things like clonipin for anxiety, which are very addictive and very sedating. And I was on a high dose of ritalin. Outer all is a common one that people use too. Now, maybe you don't have any of these issues. The thing I want to tell you is you maybe you don't have any of this stuff. You're like Fraser, like, should I listen to this episode? I don't have bipolar. I'm not medicated out my eyeballs. Yeah, you want to listen, because this is not just about how to like help you go from being, like a train wreck like I was to normal. This will take a normal person's brain and turn it superhuman. Think about this. Your rate limiting factor when it comes to your business, your profession, the way you interface with the world, it's contingent on the chemical state of your brain. If your brain is all dysregulated and inflamed, you're going to be irritable, you're going to be drowsy, you're going to be tired all the time. You're not going to be able to create magic in your life when you feel that way. So you're not going to interact with your spouse or your partner very well, you're going to be irritable with your kids, you're going to have brain foil, you're going to forget stuff all the time, how you meant to lead a team, let alone lead yourself when you're in that place. So this is literally one of the highest ROI levers that you could pull paying attention to in optimizing that brain chemistry. So I was on a raft of medications for about 10 years, 10 years. And it did some long-term damage to my system. I will tell you, like it did have a long-term effect. And so that's why I'm very, very diligent now because I recognize that I have to be. If I want to perform at a high level and I want to be the person that you see me being now, I have to be. I have to cross those teas and dot those eyes. So first I'm going to talk about how I got off these things. Because for anyone that's in a position where maybe you're on substances, first of all, you have to actually decide like how you're going to reset your system. So basically I'm going to talk about this first. And then I'm going to touch on the different issues in terms of focus ADHD, concentration, anxiety and the different ways to assess where your brain chemistry is at using what's called the braveman test. So there's a test that you will be able to do after this show that's online. It can give you a subjective estimation as to your brain chemistry. And then you can literally backfill and reverse engineer aspects of your diet and supplementation based off that to change the chemical state of your system because food is like software and your body and mind are the hardware. And you're putting a good operating system update on the supercomputer. It'll be magic. And I'm telling you, she will definitely get some some some value out of this. So I when I realized that this was not the path that I wanted to walk on in terms of being heavily medicated, really sedated, I felt like crap. I wasn't performing at all well. And none of the stuff was working for me. What I realized that I had to do was I had to do a couple of things. One, I had to first of all get a baseline of my blood work. So I needed to know what's going on in my biology with my hormonal status with inflammatory markers in my system. So if you go back to, I believe it is episode three, and episode three, I talk extensively about the power of getting blood work run. You need to know your numbers. Like if you own a business or you're operating any any type of business capacity, you need to know your profit and loss balance. You need to know that the ROI of a certain like ad spend, like you need to know your data and numbers to make informed strategic decisions. And if you don't have your data with your blood work, you don't know what's what. For example, if your mood is low and you're not feeling very good and you feel kind of funky, part of it could be hormonal. You know, for the ladies, you might be going through a mental pausal shift. Postpartum is another one. So whether you've just had children or you're going through a mental pausal change, those drops in estrogen, anti testosterone and progesterone can have a real world consequence on your psychology. You might notice an increase in anxiety and your mood just starts to tank. The same thing is true for men, like it could be low testosterone. That's that's that's an obvious one. Well low vitamin D status. People don't realize how much vitamin D impacts psychology and immune system. So I say this because sex hormones is an area to focus on. I also say this because insulin sensitivity and your blood glucose metabolism has an effect. So if you're fasting insulin is really high and your hemoglobin A1C is high and I'm talking like we want it, we want your hemoglobin A1C down like 4.9 to 5. If you're at 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 plus, not good. Basically, what that is is it's a representation of the inflammation in your body. And think about this. When you have inflammation in your body, so if you have high cholesterol or high blood sugar levels, that type of thing, that's inflammation in your cardiovascular system, that's inflammation in your arterial system, veins, capillaries, that stuff. That's not localized to just your body. Your brain is getting that too. And so very, very often when you have inflammation in your blood work, you will have an inflamed brain. And so that inflammation looks like anxiety. It looks like ADHD, it looks like a mood disorder. And the same thing is true for you. We'll even touch on your gut health. I'm going to do an episode on digestive health because most people that have digestive issues, they also have psychological issues. The two come hand and hand and talk to each other via the vagus nerve. It's like a communication channel. And so if you have inflammation in the gut, you will often have inflammation in the brain. And so part of this process is knowing your blood work, working on a gut rehab protocol. Because then you can start to troubleshoot things. So what I did, that was one of the first things that I did. So I went through a nice little gut rehab process. And by the way, this is a type of thing that in my business athlete council, I can walk you through this stuff tactically. So the gut is a relatively complex system. You know, things like a good quality digest of enzyme, between HCl and Pipsin, a good quality pro or synbiotic, postbotic, gluten-mean powder, dose glutamine powder, things like aloe vera. These can be the types of things that help with status of your gut, even peptides like KPV and BPC157. So the gut was one part of it. Because I realized from all the alcohol and the end acids and junk food and distress, the gut was in a pretty, pretty dire state. That was the first thing. So I worked on the gut stuff because that way you're sending that positive anti-inflammatory signal to the brain. The other thing that I did was I got the blood work run. So I could see, okay, what is happening with my sex hormones? What's happening with my thyroid metabolism? What's happening with my insulin sensitivity and all the different inflammation markers in the body? Right. And at that time, I didn't have as extensive knowledge around blood work as I do now. So there's probably things that I could have done a lot better, but at least I had that awareness to, hey, let's get the labs run. And not just your typical insurance policy panel that you run through your MD. I'm talking like a proper comprehensive panel. Like you really want to pay a bit more to get, and I talk about the importance of why in episode three. So you really want to go back and listen to that. Now, what I did was once I knew what was happening chemically in my body, and let's say, for example, you start to work on your gut health optimization, and then you start to use some, you know, bioregulator peptides or some different herbal compounds to help improve your sex hormones. You know, for the ladies might maybe use a little bit of dim, for the guys maybe use a little bit of tonk at Ali, or you use a bioregulator to help start to normalize the sex hormones. So that improves. Maybe you supplement with a little bit of vitamin D3 and K2 to get that level up into an optimal zone. So that would be the first point of action. And then obviously alongside that, cleaning up the diet to work on the gut health, you know, taking some good quality digestive enzymes, taking something like seed symbiotic to help repopulate the gut with good flora. So you can absorb the food and things that you're actually doing. So that was the first thing. What I also did was I ran what was called the brave a braveman test. So the braveman test is it's a subjective test. It adds a lot of questions, by the way. It can feel quite repetitive, but it's extensive because they use the repetition to really nail down the approximations for the different brain chemicals. So based on your experience, like your perception, they can estimate your brain chemistry. So you don't mean you're serotonin, you're a settle colon and GABA. Think of, think of these brain chemicals like the gas pedal and the braking system of a vehicle. And so very often, a settle colon is like the accelerator of the brain. And GABA is like the braking system. And dopamine and serotonin is kind of work in the middle there. I won't go into too many mechanical details about that because that just be overwhelming for people. But I say this because a lot of entrepreneurs and type A personalities that I work with, at least, are a settle colon dominant and GABA deficient. So they're basically all gas and no brakes. And that's where you get that sort of manic frenetic energy that anxiety energy from is partly that chemical state. And that's something that you can actually improve. So I did the braverment test. And it was so long ago now, I don't remember my exact scores. But when you do that test, it will tell you what is high and what is low. Then what it does is it gives you feedback on the types of foods, vitamins and minerals and supplements that you should probably add in or leave out to optimize said neurochemicals. And so for example, there's different different things will help improve different chemicals. So for example, sweet potato will help improve serotonin. So there's different things in eggs calling helps with a settle colon. So there's different things that you can do in your diet that will literally help with the brain chemistry. And it will give you less. So these things. And there's supplements too. So like, for example, five HTP can help with serotonin production. You can use things like theanine, theanine serine or even a little bit of GABA to help with GABA production. And what I did was I started to get intentional about adding in foods that helped the different neurochemical precursors that I wanted to improve. So I would add them into my main meals. I would add them in as snacks. Intentionally, like whole food supplementation. Because remember, like I said, food is like software and your body and mind are the hardware. Now alongside that, that's where you can add in some supplementation and stuff like that. So obviously, there's a raft of supplements. You're going to have some that are herbal. You're going to have some that are like peptides and some that are mineral-based supplements. Now, what I would say is based off your data, pick one or two supplements per neurochemical or depending on the severity of it. And then you intentionally start to stack in the supplements alongside the food. So for example, think about this. Don't mean effects focus, drive, and motivation. Serotonin affects mood, calmness, and emotional stability. So it kind of regulates that state. GABA, like I said, is the brakes. So it's like an anxiety control panel. And then a settle calling is memory and learning. So these are different things that you can stack in. What I did was I started to stack in these foods and supplements first while I was still using my medication. By the way, this is not medical advice. I am not your physician. Please consult your physician if you're going to do something like this. But what I did, and I've worked with people through this before in conjunction with other experts and stuff like that. So I can help you with this in the groups if you wanted. But what I did was when I start adding in the foods and the supplements, that type of stuff, I then start to taper down on the medications. So let's say for the first week, for example, you go to like a 75% dose of your clonipin or a 75% dose of your riddlein or Adderall, right? At that time, I'm still incorporating the whole foods that help with those chemistry, that chemistry. And I am making sure that I'm adding in those herbal and base layer supplements. Then what I do is I start to taper up the dose of those supplements and foods, while at the same time tapering down the medications. So basically what I did over a four-week period was I tapered up and down on both ends of that spectrum to wean myself away from those medications, where at the end I was just using whole foods basically with a little, and I even like essentially tapered back on some of the supplements I was using. I just wanted to get the the basics locked in, and I just wanted to make sure that I was able to get that transition locked over efficiently. So once you go through that process, then the journey begins because then at that point, it's like how do we really optimize the chemistry in a high level way? So I found that that's the first step. Now, when it comes to things like ADHD, for example, most people don't realize that ADHD is not probably even the problem they have. It's insulin resistance and blood glucose instability. And what does that mean? Well, first of all, when you get your blood work run and you look at things like hemoglobin A1C, fasting glucose, fasting insulin, you'll be able to tell pretty quickly if this is an issue for you. And I would say an eight out of ten people. It is an issue in some capacity. And so first of all, you want to look at the types of supplements you can use. Easy wins. So things like burberry, chromium, salons cinnamon. So you can add salons cinnamon to your protein shakes or your fruit. I like to do burberry every day. Burberry is quite a useful supplement. It's at herb. That's also been shown to help with improving lipid profile. So cholesterol has anti-cancer properties too. And it obviously has insulin sensitizing benefits. Because think about this. If your blood sugar levels based off your diet and stress is like up and down and up and down and up and down. Every time you spike up, you crash down. That crash is what the brain fog and the low energy looks and feels like. And this is so common for people. It's so common. So obviously reconfiguring your diet is a big part of this. You want to make sure that you are sticking to a diet that's predominantly foods with one ingredient. Brown rice is just brown rice. Blueberries are just blueberries. Broccoli is just broccoli. 80 to 90% plus of your diet if you can make it foods with one ingredient. That's already a huge step in the right direction. Whole foods. The other thing that I would say is the timing of your carbohydrates. So typically when I consume fruits, I usually pile drive them into my post workout window. Because at that point, I've trained, I've depleted a lot of glycogen, aka sugar, out of my muscle cells. So my body's like a dry sponge looking to soak up the water, aka the calories, the sugar, the fructose. So I will push my fruit sugars into that window because your bodies are a lot more efficient at taking that and basically using insulin sensitivity to shunted into muscle glycogen. It's like stored muscle, stored sugar in your muscle basically. So that's one of the first things. Other things like walking, you know, in episode two, I talk about the massive effects of how walking more helps with all kinds of things. I mean, literally they've done brain tests on how walking improves blood flow to the brain. Like different areas of the brain light up, light up by just by walking. And so you can probably hear in the background, I'm on my standing desk and walking pad right now. I walk all day while I'm working. It really does help your chemistry. It will make you very, very insulin sensitive. My insulin sensitivity markers are through the roof because I'm walking at a slow pace pretty much all day. And if you can engineer your life like that, absolutely do it. Absolutely do it. Another thing that I think's really important is consistent weight training. Muscle mass is like is a very useful metabolic organ basically. It's what it's like the engine of your metabolism. And that's where you store all that sugar. And so when you train, you will push up your neurochemistry. You'll get these little releases of dopamine and serotonin. That's why training and moving your body is really, really important to improve that insulin sensitivity so you don't have those moments of fog. Another thing that I think is worth noting is food sensitivities. See, sometimes you might go phrase right, get it, you know, but I've been eating a clean diet, but I still get the fog and the issues. Well, have you done a food sensitivity test before? Because if you are eating, quote unquote, healthy foods, but you're having a reaction because you have a sensitivity to something, that in and of itself can cause the mental fog. That can cause the anxiety, by the way. So I've seen people with sticking to a pretty clean diet, they get the food sensitivity test done. It lights up like a Christmas tree and we need to go through that process of removing these things, finding replacements and food swaps, healing the gut, and then reintroducing and micro dosing them back in once the gut's acclimated. So you can handle that stuff. That way you don't get that reactivity. So not only are you cleaning up the food choices based off sensitivity, but you're cleaning up the food choices based off the blood glucose response. And when you do those two things together, you will scavenge night and the walking, you will have a nice stable blood glucose level through the day. And that's really, really powerful for enhancing that cognition, output and focus. Now, one thing that I would say, so this is a very wide topic. There's a lot of different rabbit holes we can go down. So I'm just trying to make sure that I focus on the common ones and the good ones first. What I would say also is that when you are thinking about the brain chemistry in general, energy levels, memory, output, focus, another area that is important to really try to address is your sleep cycles, your sleep patterns. If your sleep is really sporadic and you're getting low levels of RAM and deep sleep, that will absolutely have an effect on your psychology. And so I'm going to do a whole episode on sleep because it is such an important lever. But as a sort of cliff note version of things, you need to have an evening alarm like you have a morning and alarm and have that really, really regular sleep wake cycle in bed same time every day. Wake up same time every day. Have a wine down period. Make sure that you don't eat too close to bed time. So maybe finish three hours before you go to bed. At night time, turn off all the bright, interior blue light and just have hemoland salt lamps, candles, candlelit diffusers. Like red and orange tones to mimic that sunset feel so your body releases melatonin. So you start to get into that restorative state. Turn the air temperature down in your house because your body will operate better when the air temperature is lower. I even put some relaxing calming music on Spotify and play that in the background. Just like bring down that nervous system, bring down that nervous system. So I do think there's obviously more than that, but in terms of sleep and then you know, even supplements like glycine, thinning serene, magnesium L3 and 8. Those are good ones that you can start to dabble with and play with. But I would definitely say that the sleep component is a really important part of the equation. I would also say one of the other things that I think is worth playing with is your mineral and vitamin status. So I actually talked about this in episode five where I talked on the value of micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, because what you may find is that your chemistry, your psychology, like anxiety is affected by maybe you have a low magnesium status. You might have issues in your system that you don't even realize. So the first way to determine this is you can get a hair mineral analysis done or you can go through a website like Function Health where they actually do run some different mineral tests. So that way you can test the trace mineral concentrations in your body, your magnesium levels, your sodium levels, all these different things. I do think there's some value to that potentially. But an easier way to do it, a more low key way to do it, I guess, is to track your calories and your food for say three to five days, three to five days. And then look at your daily recommended intakes of all the different nutrients that you were getting. So on average, what was your salineum like every day? On average, what was your magnesium like every day? Have a look at all the different micronutrients. And if there's anything that you're consistently low in, we want to plug those holes. So that's where I'd go to something like chat GPT. And I would say give me the top 10 healthiest foods, high in magnesium. And I would start to backfill my diet with those types of things. Now in some instances, you might actually want to use a little bit of supplementation. So you do both. You use a little bit of supplementation. This comes back to the bravement test stuff. So with the bravement test, like I mentioned, the different neurochemicals will be affected by different items and minerals in the system. But alongside getting the bravement test done, which is a subjective assessment, tracking your macronutrients and calories for a few days, to literally see what's what's missing. And you can cross reference the two of them. So like a cross check. That way you get even more accurate response. You can nail down the points of contention even more. So I think it's really important to know that you have different ways you can assess and test. One thing I want to quickly pivot to a different point of view is this idea of you have to recognize that you are not your label. Don't live into these labels that they give us. I was defiantly stubborn enough to have psychiatrists tell me that I've got bipolar and all these issues. And for me to still say, watch me. Watch me. Like I don't want that to be my story. I don't want that to be my narrative because what I find for a lot of people is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, you will make it so. If you believe it's true, it is. If you believe it's not true, you can make it not true. There's a real power to that. So you do need to remember that these situations, these issues you have are a temporary state that you're in right now based off the culmination of the habits, routines and rituals and things you're doing right now that creates that chemical state that then drives that feeling, that set of emotions. And so yes, this is more of the mindset component, but you have to have a growth mindset with this stuff. Like if you just identify someone with ADHD and you can't concentrate, you're going to be, that's going to be your story. And you'll always feel like you need to take the riddle in the adderol for it. You know, whereas if you can say, you know what, this is just a state I'm in right now, I'm going to reconfigure all of this. And that's what I did. And it literally changed the game because now 12 years on, I haven't been on any psyched meds for 12 years. And one would argue that my brain and my ability to focus and think, is it a very high level? I often get people comment about my mental clarity and sort of the way I articulate things and the way I remember a lot of stuff. Like me sharing this stuff here with you now, like I'm not even looking at notes. I have a couple of bullet points to remind me of like the subtopics to cover, but that's it. So that's why you sort of hear me pausing at times because I'm just making sure I'm going through these bullet points, but all the information about, you know, acetylcholine and GABA and insulin sensitivity and hormonal status and vitamin D, it's all in there. You only get to that point, guys, when you have a brain that's really healthy with high levels of oxygen transportation and it's functioning well. That brings me to another point. Most people don't realize that blood viscosity and oxygen transportation has a real world effect. So this is especially important for a lot of the men and specifically a lot of the men that are on testosterone replacement therapy. Because what you will find is that if you get your blood work done and you're hemocrat and you're hemoglobin are elevated, that basically means that your blood is thicker. And typically what you'll find is that your blood pressure will be higher as well. And there is an absolute common thread between elevated blood pressure, hemoglobin and hematocrit and dementia and brain disorders, long term, just brain degeneration. So, and the reason why I say this is because if you can have nice, thin blood that moves through your system cleanly and transports oxygen and nutrients efficiently, not only is it more efficient on your system in general, so you have better energy, but you're nourishing the centers of your brain more consistently. And so things that help with vasodilation, for example, nitric oxide. So that's why you see me consuming pickle beats every day, beats a higher nitric oxide producing compounds. That helps with vasodilation. In your office, for example, get a little diffuser and diffuse a good quality peppermint essential oil. Did you know that peppermint essential oil is a vasodilator? So not only foods, but different types of plant compounds, you can breathe. But it's really, really important to know that blood viscosity and blood thickness is a big part of it. And so that ties into needing to adapt a TRT protocol, very often if your blood's really thick, your TRT protocol is not good, you're taking too much, the dosing is too infrequent, and one of the best ways to get it down, at least acutely, then this is not a long-term solution, but it's part of it, is therapeutic blood donations. Because you want to get that blood thinner. When it's too thick, it's like molasses. You'll feel like you're waiting through molasses, low energy, brain fog. So I would say things that can help with oxygen. So go to chat GPT. Give me all the foods that help with nitric oxide production. Give me all the foods that help with oxygen transportation in the brain. And just start incorporating those into your main meals. Because that, and that actually affects like performance with training too. So that's why a lot of the pre-workout supplements, for example, have Arginine and other nitric oxide producing compounds in them to help enhance blood flow. Now I don't think that you should be pounding a bunch of pre-workouts to try and improve your brain health though. I actually would say that that might have a negative effect long-term. But there are elements and compounds in there that can help with that stuff, citrally, Arginine. All that stuff is useful. So again, and always try and find foods that are high on these things too. It's always worth going for the foods first. Now another area that I think is really important and useful to note is peptides. Peptides is one of those areas that is less known. But I really found that for me, it was a massive component. And so there are peptides like cerebral isin, which is a BDNF peptide. So brain derived neurotropic factor. Basically, it's like fertilize the full your brain. It helps regenerate brain cells. And I've done multiple rounds of cerebral isin because I'll be the first to admit, when I was younger, I definitely abused my brain. I took a bunch of drugs, I drank all the time, my diet was terrible. I mean, a lot of people would do this type of stuff in some degree, but I was quite extreme. And I would say especially for people that have either had high levels of cholesterol, or high blood pressure for a long time, that damage on your cardiovascular system will have had an effect on the blood flow in your brain. So it's important to know that cerebral isin will be good for people in that category. It's good for people that have had TBI, so traumatic brain injury. So whether you used to play football or you've had like a concussion or you were a special operator or a veteran and you're dealing with that type of stuff, cerebral isin can be absolutely game-changing. I've run it with multiple students that were former special operators and they really did notice a difference. So cerebral isin is one of the first ones. There are other, what I said, like cognitive enhancing peptides. I won't go into this in too much detail here. I did an episode on peptides, by the way. So I can't remember what that one was. I think it was episode four, but things like dihexia, c-lank and c-max. So c-max and c-lank are really good for anxiety modulation and calm focus. So often I will use those with people to try, you know, especially if they've been on an anti-anxiety medication. We'll try using a low microdose of c-max. And the good thing about peptides guys, it's just a quick cliff note on peptides, they are basically just like signals. It's like a blueprint. It's a chain of amino acids that sends your body a blueprint, a signal of what to turn on or turn off in your system, naturally. So it's got a very good safety profile. And all in all, they do have a very useful effect. So I would say that those brain peptides are some good ones. There are others like pineleon or epitalon. But again, that's a whole other sort of discussion around different areas of the brain. They might help with sleep optimization. But it's definitely worth exploring. And even peptides that help with systemic inflammation. So TB500, GHKCU, these types of peptides can help bring down inflammation across the board. And that also pertains to your brain. So I would say that's definitely a useful area of focus. In terms of other tactics, other levers, one area that I think is worth noting is what I call priming the pump. So priming the pump, think of your physiology a bit like a, like a windmill. You know, windmill that has that creates energy. If that windmill is just sitting on the hill and there's no wind coming through it and the turbulence aren't rotating, you're not going to generate any power, any electricity. You need to move your system to pump the system. And what happens is as you walk, and this is what I mentioned before when they've done scans on the brain, the brain would just light up all these different areas just from walking. And so what I've found is that in order to get more blood flow and pump the lymphatic system and the glimphatic system through the brain, that movement is key. So what I do is like I said, I walk through the day, but what I also encourage my students to do, and I'm going to encourage you to do this too, is to get a palatine bike or an air bike and set it up in your office. I know that sounds crazy, right? But I'm telling you, business athletes in 2026, this is the way they will operate. Like using these tactics tools and techniques to prime their system, to elevate that energetic state, to get that oxygen transportation elevated so they sharper, they're more alert, they're more cognizant, and they execute at a higher level. The ROI of that is huge. So I have an air bike, and I'll jump on it multiple times through the day before I'm about to jump on a call or a Zoom meeting or a podcast to prime the pump. Matt, it's such a, I would say that's one of the most potent tools that is in the toolkit. And like I said, in episode two, I talk about it in depth. So there are other things, you know, when it comes to supplementation, I don't want you to just think, well, I'm going to pound a bunch of supplements and it's going to help fix everything. But there are some things that can be useful. So I'm just going to kind of rattle off a few that you can think about in contemplate. High dose creatine monohydrate. So in a lot of the research now, high doses of creatine monohydrate have been shown to help with brain function, cognitive output, cognitive load, under sleep deprivation. So if someone is sleep deprived and they do 10 to 20 grams, or even more of creatine monohydrate split up through the day, as long as the digestion can tolerate it, they notice a massive improvement in cognitive output. Now I'm not telling you to sleep deprived yourself and stay up all night and hit deadlines and just take a bunch of creatine. But what I am telling you is that it might be worth experimenting with 15 to 25 grams of creatine monohydrate a day for a month and see how you go, see how you feel. As long as your digestion can handle it, unless you get some blood work run and some of your kidney markers are a little bit elevated, then you might want to tape it back a touch, but you may find that that's not an issue for you. And that could be in and of itself really useful. So that's what I do. Other things that I will use in conjunction with that is a lower dose of methylene blue. So I won't go into the mechanics of methylene blue on here because I'm going to do an episode on supplementation. By methylene blue, basically it like sort of helps charge up the mitochondria and the ATP in your body. So just think of like your cells have these little batteries in them, mitochondria. And they basically drive energy in the cell. That's what gets your body moving. That's what turns your system on. Methyline blue helps charge up that battery so it doesn't lose its charge so hard and fast. Low charge equals low energy, brain fog, low output. High charge equals the opposite to that. Alongside and in conjunction with something like methylene blue, I'll use lower microdoses of MOTC and SS31 and NAD. So I actually have a stack, an energy stack. MOTC, SS31, NAD, methylene blue, high dose creatine. That five pillage process is really potent, at least for me. And I've seen it work very well in my students. So I say this because that would be a good base stack that you can use. I think if you were to run the bravement test and then backfill your diet based off any of the newer markers that are suboptimal. So that way you're intentionally adding in whole foods that address these issues. You get your blood work run so you can assess if some of these issues you're facing, like where are they coming from? You're going to solve problems in the right order. Now for example, you could do a lot of that. You could take all these supplements but if your vitamin D is terrible, all your testosterone is absolutely tanked. It's not necessarily going to be the only thing that helps you. So that's why getting the blood work done too in conjunction with assessing your diet and chronometer or my fitness pal for three to five days is a really really good base layer of how to do things. Outside of that, like I said, priming the pump. Move your body. Don't stay static. In fact, get out every day and get that light exposure too. And I'm not just talking about sitting by a window and getting sunlight through the window because very often a lot of windows have these UV filters in them, but they also filter out a lot of the near infrared spectrums. A lot of the stuff that's good for your body, good for your brain, good for recovery. That's why red light panels are so popular because they actually do have a use case. They do work. And so I think of light exposure outside as like a daily non-negotiable, like a multivitamin for your mitochondrial health. And so what I would tell you is five to twenty minutes at some point in the morning, at some point late in the afternoon, obviously weather permitting outside in the light, light on the eyes, take your sunglasses off. And or if you have a red light panel, you can turn the red light panel on in the morning while you're early in the day when it's still dark outside, you can use that too. At night time, as my family's winding down and we're in the bedroom and you're just kind of calming down the kids and getting everyone's nervous system calming down. We'll turn on the red light panel. And that has that melatonin releasing effect, but it's got that all the benefits of that sort of mitochondrial optimization. So I think that's another really useful part of the equation. You've got to realize guys that the body has like a chemical factory. And you're not broken. You are not broken. Your brain is not broken. But you probably just have a bunch of inflammation. And you're taking too many stimulants and sedatives. And you're not understanding the types of fuels and systems that you should be adding in to your diet to help you. That's why I'm so, when I talk about diet, I don't talk about whole foods from a place of me being a purist. And I'm looking down on you, on you peasants if you're eating Oreos. I recognize and understand the inflammatory effect on the brain junk food has. Pay really close attention to how you feel after. And especially the next day, after you eat a bunch of junk food, you will notice once you start to pay attention, you will notice more and more that the next day you feel quite groggy. And your energy is often quite low and you will feel anxious. I noticed that. That was one of the biggest dot connecting components for me was as I would clean my diet, I would notice in the morning, I had a bit more vitality. I felt a bit better the next day. And then any time I would deviate and I would add in processed crap, I would often feel like low energy and foggy the next day. It's not an ADHD problem. It's a blood glucose rollercoaster that you're on. And so another part of that I think is really useful is thinking about healthy food upgrades. This is one area that I talk about a lot in my anomaly project course, my signature six week course and especially in my business athlete council. So I would even tell you guys, like if this information is appealing to you, but you feel like, man, I'm drinking from a fire hose. This is so much how the heck do I remember any of this? Get into one of my coaching models. Get into my business athlete council. I talk about this stuff in depth. We talk about peptide protocols and tactics. We can review brave mintest stuff. I can give you a myriad of healthy food upgrades. So for example, one of the ones that I love is there's a brand called Macro Mike. Macro Mike is based out of Australia. So the shipping takes about one to two weeks, but they have healthy, high protein, low allergen, baking mixes, brownies, donuts, cookies, mug cakes. And so what I tell my students is rather than slamming back a bunch of donuts or a bunch of just straight processed stuff, high inflammatory load, do some Macro Mike. And not only do the kids love it, and they notice very often the kids have a bit of temperament. They have that less of that bouncing off the wall ADHD type stuff. And that's again, most children's behavioral issues, by the way, are not actually what people think. Most kids that have behavioral issues, defines disorders, ADHD, it's their diet. It's lack of minerals, and it's their blood glucose roller coaster. So I would tell you, as a parent, this stuff's fundamentally important, because I say this now, I don't even think my own ADHD diagnosis was real. I look back at my diet, then total garbage. My blood glucose level would have been all over the place, total roller coaster. That's what I was experiencing. That's what I was feeling. And by the way, my micronutrients, like all the vitamins and minerals was probably totally trashed too. And I certainly wasn't getting a good quality omega-3s in the diet. Omega-3s are another thing that help with brain function. So I do a high, a double dose of omega-3s every day for that reason. Not only to help with cardiovascular health and joint health, but brain function. So I say this because you have this amazing, amazing ability to reconfigure your chemistry. And I would say that in all of my experience, the rate limiting factor that I see with most people is the constraint of their brain. If their brain is really inflamed and just in poor health, it's really hard to stick to a diet properly. It's really hard to want to train consistently. It's really hard to produce and perform at a high level. So I would tell any of you guys at a CEO's and business owners and operators, you have a vested interest in helping your team, your co-workers, your employees to optimize their brain chemistry. So they can produce at a high level. They're more mentally sharp. They articulate better. They've better memory. Think about the benefit of having a team that are really mentally sharp and locked in. That to me is a massive, massive ROI. It's massive. And so I say all this because I know there was a lot of twists and turns in this conversation. You know, we talked about blood work. We talked about bravement tests. We talked about vitamins and minerals. We talked about different supplements and peptides. There's even more, by the way. I mean, there's things like cold exposure, cold plungers, it's sauna. But I'm just trying to stick to things that are a lower bar of entry. If you have a, if you have sauna access, that's awesome. Go use it. And then obviously, like I said, training. You cannot overlook resistance training. And even just moderate intensity cardio. Moving your body is one of the best things that you can do. I've seen people try all the other things, but they just avoided moving their body well. And it does not create the effect that you want. You will see some progress, but it won't create that overall systemic effect that you want. One other thing that I would say, just to start as we wind down, is your digital diet. You aren't just what you eat. You're what you mentally absorb through the matrix. So look at your news feeds on your social media. Look at your news feed on Instagram. Look at your news feed on Facebook. When you scroll your news feed, is it a bunch of inflammatory, agitating, stressful stuff? What does it calm your nervous system and motivate and inspire you? I would tell you, you need to aggressively curate your social media news feed. Because if you're jumping up in the morning and you're just absorbing a bunch of stressful inflammatory stuff, that will absolutely have a biological effect on your system. Cortisol increases adrenaline goes up. That cortisol will eventually lead to burning up the system very often when that's elevated. That starts to affect sex hormones, testosterone starts to tank. Resting heart rate increases, heart rate variability drops. That's when you start to feel anxious and stressed. You don't sleep well because the resting heart rate is elevated. So you're REM sleep and you're deep sleep tank. That has a massive effect on your lymphatic drainage and how your brain actually drains the metabolic byproducts out of your system each night while you sleep, like scrubbing your brain while you sleep. You lose that. So I say all this because this is coming from a guy that was severely broken. And I'm not going to tell you that I have all the answers and that I've got it all figured out, but I will tell you that these things absolutely have changed my life. So go out there today. Leverage these tools and tactics. Implement something from this conversation. Go make it real world as I say. Pick one or two things, add it in. And again and again. If you want to reach out, get in my business athlete council or get on my anomaly project course because you want to integrate all of these things together as a system. Jump on board. Because like I said, I'm not interested in just getting someone abs if their brain is a hot mess and they are not showing up and being a great partner and parent and leader a business athlete. Business athlete means that you perform at the highest level from the inside out and everything else is just a benefit. It's a ripple effect. You become that lighthouse in your life where you shine the light on the path and everyone around you is just magnetized to it. Because like man, I want more of what he has. And that's a powerful, powerful thing.