Ben Greenfield ON: How to Train Your Brain & Body for Optimal Sleep and Performance

walking out and assuming that you're good to go. Hey, everyone, welcome back to you on Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you who come back every week to listen, learn and grow. I am so deeply grateful for our trusted, committed community that shows up every week. And today's guest is someone that I met a few years ago. Now.

We've been going back and forth trying to make this happen with both of our schedules, with the pandem, with COVID, with everything else that's been going on, and I have to say that I'm pumped and I'm so excited that we're finally in the same room together. I'm talking about none other than human performance consultant, New York Times best selling author, self experimenter, and one of the most wild, crazy, interesting,

curious people that I know, Ben Greenfield. Ben, thank you for being here, Thank you for showing up, and even just a few moments we spent together. I'm already looking forward. It's kind of bittersweet, though, because like last time we hung out, we were eating wonderful Italian buffet style five star resorts, Sardinian food, surrounded by amazing people at music that that whole was it Mind Valley a Mind Valley University. It was, Yeah, it was. It was awesome this fest Fest.

I don't think they even call it awesome This's fest anymore because that words dated. But yeah, they had like it was almost like a Disneyland in Sardinia, some giant resort. I remember. The food was amazing, great parties. And then I met you. We were sitting at a table at dinner and you and I had never met before, and Vision Lakhani was there and he introduced us, and then we thought about doing a podcast, and that was like two years ago. Finally the other side of the world,

we finally hook up. But yes, Sardinia, you know, what was interesting about that, Like Sardinia is well known as being a longevity hotspot, or like Nikoiza and Loma Linda and Okanawa, you know, one of these so called blue zones, even though there's some controversy about the whole Blue zones and whether or not the demographic data was accurate or whatever.

But either way, like people live a long time, they're like, yeah, But when you look at the populations that they studied in Sardinia, it was a lot of the old people up in the Dolomites, right, who were you know, hiking up pills with their goats milk and their wine and eating you know, small cold water fish and herbs and spices and teas and living this like outdoor lifestyle combined with social relationships and love and all these things that we know now feed a good not just health span

but lifespan. And then we got to Sardinia. So that was like the picture I had painted in my mind. But then when we got to Sardinia, we weren't like up in the craggy hills with like old Italian people drinking table wine over small you know, fish and tea up in the mountain somewhere This was like a full on, like five star resort with like golf carts and like man made beaches inside giant walls, and so it was

interesting for me. I kept wanting to slip away, like up into the Dolomites and be like, Okay, well this is interesting, but what's kind of like the non touristy side light. Yeah. Regardless, though, the food I think was amazing and probably probably something the the longevity enthusiasts up in the mountains would have killed take. Yeah. Absolutely, were I think we were. I hope we were eating seasonally.

I think we kind of sort of I think it was seasonally slash what the locals there thought would kind of impress. Yeah. Yeah, but but I mean, like, you know, I've eaten in Italy before. I guess more like the locals. Yeah. So, my wife and I early on in our marriage, we flew into Rome and didn't have a lot of money.

It was either senior year of college or right after we both graduated, and so this was back in the day when I had to like fact all my reservations in and my credit card number to the to the different places that we wanted to stay and stuff. But our our hair brained ideas we wanted to rent bikes in Rome and just like zig zag ride them all the way up to Florence. And that's what we did.

We rented bikes, but I planned ahead and mapped out the whole route, and so I would fact my reservations into these agricolas, you know, which are like farm stays where you stay with these Italian families out of their farm, or like little hostels or beds and breakfast, because that's basically we had the money to afford. And so we got into Rome, we start riding, and basically, because I'd already prepaid for all these reservations by faxing them in, it was come hell or high water. We had to

get to where we were going that day. And most days were like the thirty five to fifty miles of riding, which isn't a whole lot, but these are like heavy touring bikes with panniers on either side, these bags where you keep all of your belongings, your clothing, your toilet trees, whatever. And inevitably, as the trip goes on and we'd like buy wine and buy cheese and buy souvenirs, these bikes

would get heavier and heavier as we'd go. Every city there is built on top of a hill, you know, like an old medieval village with walls, and you got to climb a hill. So every day, at the end of the day, the very last thing we'd do, when our legs were already toasts, was just climb, climb, climb to the top of these hills and then hunt down, you know, wherever. We'd actually put in a reservation to

stay at. But I remember the most special thing was it was every single day you'd finished, you were sweaty, you were tired, your legs were aching, and you knew that there was a homemade Italian meal with some table wine that rivals, you know, a fifty dollar or glass of wine you'll buy here in the US, and wonderful people and smiles and um and and a bed to stay in. And I just remember every single day riding

up those hills thinking, gelato, homemade revue, red wine. You got this ben you could do this, and it was it was a cool trip. We got all over to Florence, we put our bikes on a train and then just took the train back down to Rome and flew home. So now I have you know, years and years later, I have twin thirteen year old sons and when they're fifteen, so a year and a half or two from now, we're going to replicate that trip. We're gonna take them back.

So now I've got them kind of starting to train and learn how to be comfortable on the roads, you know, like the Italian roads, have no shoulders, you got no to hand to your bike on roads, and know how to ride a big fat touring bike instead of a road bike. And so that's going to be really I'm super looking forward to that as the next trip to Italy with my boys, riding through the through the Italian fields and hunting down Florence again. That's a beautiful and

I love hearing them and they're lucky boys. And I remember that as a young man, my parents would drive us to Italy. That was their favorite places in Europe. So we would drive from London, would get the ferry into France, and then from France we would drive again to Italy. So we drive to Venice, we drift to Naples,

we drive to Rome. We just drive to a different place and we drive across Italy because we didn't have the money to fly there and my parents preferred doing a road trip and we didn't get on any bikes or anything like that. But even what you were saying that, I was gonna say, week weak family. If you guys were real, you would have taken bicycles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you would have taken a bike from London. Bike from

London to Italy. Yeah. No, we were like eight years old, and but I have good memories of visiting Italy with my parents as well, so I can only imagine how

your boys are gonna do when they goin. My only concern is the girls, because I got like two thirteen year old to be fifteen by then, like blonde haired, blue eyed American boys, and just having taken my wife there and seeing the reaction to you know, my wife's blonde hair, blue eyed, and you know, the men that are very very forward cat calling as she walks down

the street. Then when I took my sons to Thailand a couple of years ago, the same thing, like all the Thai people just flock around them, and then the women are practically swooning as these little blonde haired boys walked through the streets. So we may have to bring bring some fly swatters to keep them, keep witing off of them. I love it. I love it. My first memory of you actually was inside, didn't you. I knew

you were going to be there. We were, we were both speaking at the conference, and you know, I was learning about you and learning about your world. I was, I'm you know, I'm not a biohacker, that's not my background in the same sense as you are. And so I was intrigued and I loved your sessions that you did. But my first experience of view was we had an

evening party and it was like this. We were on this bridge if you remember, at the hotel, and you literally jumped in to like the hotel lake slash pool it was. And the reason why I say lake is because it wasn't like a swimming pool. We have to I've got to give Ben credit. It was and it was evening, so it was it was cooler, and you dived in and you swam and you got out and you made your and we were just we were all like, wow, that is that is the way to enter it. So

I always remember this. You remember it, yeah, yeah, yeah, And that was that was early on in the trip. Honestly, dude, I love water. I know you do. I'm at home in water. You know. I competed for years in open water swimming and iron Man triathlon and the biking in the running was okay, but I did and I still do. Just yeah, you could see that I love the water,

love the ocean of spearfishing. I'm not a big waterman in terms of like surfing and kiteboarding and things like that, because I don't really have that up in Washington State, so I can't practice it. And I tend not to really be passionate about the things I suck at because

I can't practice them. Um. But but yeah, I think water is almost like woven into my DNA somehow, because my dad, you know, all of his side comes from Australia, and I'm a big believer in the fact that that we do carry a lot of things epigenetically in our DNA, not only trauma, but also the things that our ancestors are good at or love to do. You know, my son River dreams a lot about snow and ice and

Finland and trekking up snowy mountains and the cold. And it's interesting because my wife, Jess's whole side is like Northern European. You know up in the area around Finland and Estonia and um and Switzerland, you know, and some of these more like snowy white places. And it's funny that that's like a repeating dream that he has, and I suspect that it's just it's woven into his DNA in the same way that a love for water is

woven into my DNA. And I'm actually super excited because right before I left to come down here to La rceived the package in the mail. This company called a Phinise sent me these headphones that you can attach to your goggles, and their bone conducting headphones mean that you can listen to stuff while you're swimming or while you're

under the water, while you're spearfishing or whatever. So they conduct the sound through the bones on either side of your head rather than your ears right, so you don't have to worry about like the wires and everything. And then they sent me these goggles that have like an in screen display as you're swimming that show you how many strokes you've taken and how far you've gone, so you know, perhaps it will just suck all the enjoyment of swimming out of me, because sometimes excess technology can

do that. But you know, just water toys like that that absolutely love. And we live we don't live near water where we live on about ten acres of isolated forest land up in Washington State, which is great. You know. We have we have goats and these cute little Nigerian dwarf goats and Icelandic chickens and a bunch of garden beds and all sorts of like old growth forest where there's all sorts of wild plant edibles like you know, mint and plantain and nettle and white tailed deer and

turkey coyote, and it's it's a great place. But there's no there's no water right there. So now I'm building this this natural pond. And then just to to scratch my swimming itch, I got one of those those swim pools that's like it's like twenty feet long, but it has a super hard jets and you attach like a it's like an elastic band and you can swim against those pots. Mine one's called an aqua Fitness, you know, it's the ones you see Michael Phelps advertising in the

back of airplane make that kind of thing. But then I keep mine because I'm a huge fan of like the power of cold thermogenesis and cryotherapy for just for fat loss and your nervous system health and your cellular resilience. I think most people live in the comfort of temperature too much. And when we look at longevity data, when we look at health data, when we look at nervous system and cellular resilience, constant exposure or regular exposure to stresses of heat and stresses of cold is so good

for the human body. So I have a sauna and then I have this pool, but I keep it cold. What I mean by that is I don't heat it right. So in the summer, yeah, I'll swim at like sixty degrees or whatever gets up to. Then the winter, I'll go out there and swim and it will be like almost break through the ice temperatures. But I get in that thing almost every day and swim, and that's and it just puts a big smile on my face. Yeah. I've been going to this place called Pause in West Hollywood. Yeah,

so I've been going there every week with my wife. Yeah. So we go there every Saturday and we do the sensory deprivation tanks for about an hour and then we'll both go and do three cycles of the sauna and cold plants together for another hour. Just we do every Saturday morning. It's become our morning routine ritue. On Saturday.

We wake up once you've done our meditation, ten am we head over and then ten am to noon we're there and it's just been And you know, I've I've heard that for a long time, and as monks, we took cold showers. We you know, we were in India, so it was it was hot plenty of the time, so you always experienced uncomfortable amounts of heat. But doing that, since I've been back where my body has a climate tie acclimatized to wanting a more comfortable temperature, and the

temperature home is always perfect. But also I've started sleeping at like sixty six sixty seven fahrenheit, and that even though it was cooler in the beginning, that kind of sleep temperature has really helped. And you wake up sometimes feeling cold, but I can notice that that's doing some good for my body to sleep sleeping in the cold. The effects of that on the positive effects on sleep architecture have always been surprising to me because it's such simple,

low hanging fruit. When you look at sleep hygiene, right, we have light as being one component of sleep hygiene.

So what I mean by that is your sleep cycle begins in the morning, meaning that the more sunlight, the more of these like you know, if you look at this from more of a biohacking standpoint, like the infrared light panels that you can use to simulate sun eyes in your office that you can shine on your whole body, or an infrared sauna, or these these blue light boxes that they self for desktops that are used for seasonal effective disorders, you know, or of course sunlight being you know,

the top of the totem pull for any of this stuff like blasting yourself with light in the morning combined with turning your room into a just a light cave at night. Like I've replaced all the cans in our bedroom with red incandescent bulbs instead of LED or modern fluorescent lighting. So that's the late evening before. That's so my master bedroom, my sun's bedroom, and ours and our master bathroom are all red incandescent bulbs. No no regular

day whenever. Yeah, all read no dimmers because dimmers and what we're kind of getting into the weeds a little bit here, but dimmer switches on lights they cause a lot more what is called dirty EMF or a high amount of non native electricity that doesn't jive well with with human cellular function, and so we don't use dimmers. But we just replaced all the cans with red incandescent.

The reason for incandescent being that even though there's slightly bigger power hogs on the electrical supply, it's not that big of there might be an extra ten fifteen bucks in the electrical bill everyone, so it's nothing too big to worry about. But they also um they simulate the natural red spectrum of sunlight and the same as our ancestors might have experienced during torchlight or firelight at night.

So all of the all of the bedrooms, anywhere where there'd be a sleeping place or a place where you might get up to p at night, it's all red incandescent. And then all of the computers, like my son's computer, my wife's computer, my computer, we have a program installed on that called Iris, and IRIS just kind of sucks all the all the high temperature light out of the computer screen at a specific time of day, so it's very eye friendly. As the night can you can have

on your phone as well. Uh No, but for the for the phone, so I do IRIS on the computer, and then for the television, even though we don't watch much television, I have a box installed on that called a drift box that decreases all the blue light from the television. And then for the phone, obviously a lot of phones have built in native night mode, but for

the iPhone in particular, which is what I use. You can google iPhone red Light trick, and you can actually set your iPhone so it literally just like sucks all of the blue light out of the phone and turns it dark red, kind of like how a lot of people who will do a dopamine fast we'll switch their phone to black and white for a week, which I think is a great idea that this will switch it

to red. And so you combine all those factors along with preferably and I'll do this a lot of time when I travel, because I just don't have as much, say or the light bulbs in the hotel room or whatever. We're the blue light blocking glasses right at night especially, and so basically you're just blasting yourself with natural and blue light in the morning and then complete absence of that same light at night. You want to get as close to just what would looking at fire look like

at night. So light is one. And it's interesting because light can also be used to shift your circadian rhythm backwards or forwards. So let's say we weren't sitting here in LA Let's say we were in New York, right, And so my wake time in New York being you know, let's say six am, would dictate that if I were back home on Pacific time, that's like three am. And if I'm in New York for a week, when I get back home to Pacific time, my body's all of a sudden waking up at three am, which is annoying

and problematic. And I don't want to get up at three am because there's not a lot, a whole lot going on. And I'm I'm a total fan, like I'm an early morning guy, like I usually get up four thirty or five. But three is pushing the envelope. Three is like you're dead by eleven am. YEH want to talk to people and you didn't happen. So anyways, the trick there is when you're waking up at three am, if you do wake up and you have to get out of bed, and you just you just you're gonna

get up. You're gonnab whatever, go do some yoga or

read a book or whatever. You trick your body into thinking it's still nighttime by keeping your phone in night mode, by not turning on any lights in the house, by putting those blue light blocking glasses that most people wear at night on in the morning instead, and when the time rolls around, when you actually want to send a message to your body that this is the new time to wake up, like let's say that six am, then you flip on all the lights and blast the body

with light. And after two to three days of doing that, it's remarkable at how quickly you can shift your circadian rhythm backwards or forwards using light and again, kind of like back to the whole biohacking realm. There are even in addition to those light producing boxes that you can put on top of your desk, they make ones that you can put in your ears. They look like headphones. They're called the human Charger, and they blast you your

head with this blue light in either ear. And then there's also a pair of glasses that you can use you don't even need to. Your entire body is a light receptor machine. And that's interesting because you could wear

a sleep mask at night. But if your room's really light, like if you don't have a black curtains or just there's lots of blinking things in the room, or you walk into a hotel and you're try off the lights and all of a sudden looks like a spaceship because the TV and the Wi Fi and everything, Like, even if your eyes are covered, all that stuff hits your skin. So when I say dark in the room, like I

make sure it's really super dark. But you were talking about temperature too, obviously temperature is that's like the second component of sleep hygiene. So with temperature, I think you said you're doing what like sixty five sixty Yeah, yeah, yeah, I find because I you know, I coach some people still for their health and for their sleep and everything. So I get to look at a lot of data from from an aura ring or from a whoop or whatever wearable somebody is using, and I've identified that about

sixty three to sixty five fahrenheit is even better. Like if you yeah, my metric is if you're one of those people who I think this is a good idea for staying cold. Who likes to take off all their clothes before they get into bed at night or sleep in your underwear if you have mild cognitive resistance to taking off your at night before you get into bed. Because it's a little chili, that's a pretty good sleep tump, right. So for me, it's like it's a little chili when

I take my clothes off. That's perfect. And then um, in addition to that, I actually have this this um pad underneath the top sheet of my bed is called a chili pad, and it circulates like fifty five degree cold water under my body while I'm sleeping. My wife doesn't do most of the stuff that Yeah, the shoemaker's wife wears no shoes, dude. So I just don't bugger about. I let her do her thing. She likes to garden and hang up with the goats and chickens and go

on walks and so she just does her thing. And I don't force anything on her because I know what what'll happen if I If I want to give my wife health advice, I'll tell one of my friends who's a doctor. I'll be like text this to Jessa and then they text it too of her because because I just I just know no, because that's the thing is she also does. She wouldn't even know how to download

a podcast, so that's that's just who she is. So anyways, though, so I have the chili pad on my side and I can and and my sons both have one too, and they love it. We all like so we have these big, glorious family dinners at night, and like right before dinner, all of us boys run upstairs and turn on our chili pads so we can sleep better. So

the bed's already cold when we get into it. Another thing that you can do, and it's a little bit paradoxical, but it actually works, is you can pull on wool socks before you go to bed at night, and when your feet are warm, there's these little vessels are called anastomosis or something like that, but but it actually allows the rest of your body to stay cool when you warm some of those tiny vessels in the hands and

the leg. So you think wearing wool socks to bed keep you warm, but just like wear wool socks and little else and you can actually cool the body with that method. Too. Um. And then finally regarding cold, you don't mind me just s geeking out at all. No, it's beautiful. I love I was going non sleep. Sleep is gonna be everybody everyone's sleep. Everyone's gonna try this out, yeah, because I mean, you know, sleep something that everyone's struggling. Oh yeah, it's I'm very happy to please geek out.

So the um, the thing with the the cold is that if you do kind of like break the rules, because there's all these rules now that all the scientists in their institutions have come up with that are annoying us, Like you're not supposed to work out hard within three hours of bedtime, and you're not supposed to eat a heavy meal within three hours prior to bedtime, which for me can be socially problematic because I love to have big, glorious family dinners with people and go out on the

town and visit new restaurants. And I mean, how often, let's say you're going to bed ten, how often are really going to be done with all that, like seven, unless you're just like a total I don't know, just boring social outcast. Sorry to all the people who aren't eating dinner, but basically it's not that hard. You just get the body'squartent back down. So if it's the winter and I finish a dinner, I'll go for a brisk

walk outside in the cold weather. And if it is the summer or a warmer season, just like a lukewarm or a cold shower before you go to bed. Like my sons and I just went down and watch the fights down in Vegas when it was like one hundred and fifteen degrees on the strip and walk every nine and we walk home from the fights and the shows and everywhere we went, and every night before I get into bed. You know, there's a little bit of resistance to this, but that's okay. You can you can you

can overcome the resistance. But just take a cold shower before you get into bed, and that helps to lower the core temp if you have had to exercise or you've had a heavy meal in those three hours prior to bedtime. So you've got the light and you've got the cold, both the ambient temperature and then your sleep surface and then your body itself that you keep cold. The other two that you want to think about for sleep, in addition to light and cold. The first is noise,

and in the city this is a bigger issue. But I mean even I've got roosters that like to get up kind of early because they're naturally programmed to wake you up. And I've got um I live out in the forest, but there's a road nearby that sometimes semis go down and I can hear off in the distance, the like the breaking, like the you know, when semis go downhill. So I wear ear plugs, like just soft

wax earplugs to bed. But then they've actually done studies on the different forms of ambient noise that help you to sleep at night. You know, they make like sleep machines that will make white noise and brown noise, and one of the forms of noise that they make is pink noise, and pink noise, it appears, is the best background noise to have playing in the background. It's just like, I don't know why they give colors to certain noises, but it's the frequency in the pitch of that noise.

So I've got an app on my phone called sleep stream. I think it was free or the cost was incidental, but it's got all these different like sleep tracks on it, and don't I don't use anything on it except the pink noise function. So my phone goes in airplane mode next to my bed and then I push pink noise on, and I put the ear plugs in, and then I'm

covering up all those ambient sounds. That technique works a lot better when I'm traveling, when I'm staying in a hotel in their busy roads, when I'm when I have a roommate or something like that, I'm not a conference, I'm sharing room with somebody and they're getting up earlier, they're going to bed late. So the sound is another component, especially if you're a light sleeper. And then the final component is safety, and a lot of people don't think

about the safety component. So your bed should be a place where from a nervous system standpoint, you're not wired up in work mode. Your sympathetic nervous system is not activated. If anything, the bed is almost like an anchor that

activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Well, if you are one of those people who has business books on your nightstand, or maybe you open your laptop up at night or really any other time during the day, that would give your body the impression that the bedroom or the bed

particularly is an appropriate place to work. I would say even that television just because psychologically, you know, we as humans are still hardwired to see that television and it's as though a whole bunch of other people and other experiences are in your bedroom, not to mention the fact

that there's some really interesting data that television can replace dreaming. Right, So essentially we live now in an era for the past several decades where all of the colors and imagery and imagination and visualization and creativity that your brain should be churning out during sleep at night to process memories and to process trauma and to process creativity, a lot of that can be replaced by staring at a television

before you go to bed at night. So I don't have a TV in the bedroom for those reasons, and also for the light reasons, and also for the reason that I want my body to associate the bed with pretty much nothing but sleep and sex. And then I'll keep a boring book or a work of fiction next to the bedside. Now, I used to when I'd get to a hotel room, I would just like you know, PLoP on, especially a small hotel room like a suite.

Usually you've got more than enough room. But you know, the small hotel is a little crappy workstation in the corner or whatever. If that, I'd just like PLoP on my stomach on the bed and open up my laptop. You know, I think a lot of people know I'm talking about lay there on your belly and work on the laptop because it's a comfortable spot to do that. And the problem is that sends your body this cognitive signal that the bed is the place where you work.

So now I always make sure my laptop, even in a single room hotel room, is not in the bed, and that sends the body a message that the bed is a safe place, not a workplace, not a stressful place, not an email jumping out from your computer place. And if you really want to take that safety thing one step further, this has become quite popular now, this idea of gravity blankets, meaning folks will sell like these ten, fifteen,

twenty or twenty five pound gravity blankets. And it sounds like it would be totally paradoxical to what I was saying about staying cool because it sounds heavy. But a lot of folks are doing a good job making like a gravity blanket that will stay cool. That one company I was talking about, Chili Pad, They even sell a gravity blanket that will like circulate cold water through the blanket.

But there's something about very similar to like how when you were swaddled as a baby, you felt protected and you felt like you were in this this quiet cave. It's that feeling when you pull on the gravity blanket. And so when you combine all that stuff, the light, the cold, management of sound, and then presence of safety in the bedroom, you create a a real, real nice nest for getting those hours that are arguably the only hours during your life, you know, arguably that third of

your life that your nervous system should be repairing. That your body should not be wired up to have everything activated, that you shouldn't be exposed to, like lots of electrical signals. And I'm not one of those guys who's like like go full on, move up to the mountains, don't use internet,

cut yourself off from everything. But it appears that the issue with constant exposure to all these electrical signals that are bodies from an ancestral standpoint, haven't been exposed to for thousands of years is the fact that the cells don't get a break, right. So when we're looking at Wi Fi and Bluetooth and the constant open of what are called calcium channels in the cell that allow a whole bunch of ions to spill into the cell that disrupt metabolism, or they give you brain fog later on

in the day, that's actually all pretty reparable. The body's actually pretty impressive and magical in terms of how quickly can bounce back from certain things. Just in the same way they could recover from a hard exercise session and remove all those muscle fibers or repair all those muscle fibers if you give it rest, if you give a recovery. The thing is, it's the same thing with electrical explorers.

Like if you can turn your bedroom into a safe, quiet, cool place that also doesn't have a whole bunch of plugged in like Wi Fi, routers and phones, etc. You're all of a sudden giving your chance, your cells a chance to just go. It's like when people camp, you know, you just cut off from a lot of stuff. They feel great when they come back. So it's not as

though you have to live like a luddite. It's that sometimes you have to press the pause button, give your body a chance to step away from all that electricity for just you know that those seven or eight hours or however long you're in there and then emerge back out repair and ready to tackle the day again. Yeah, that's it. You just taught everyone how to make that bedroom into a sanctuary. That was a sanctuary. Yeah, that's

what it sounded like, what you were describing you. I was just like, and that's what it has to be. A sanctuary is safe. A sanctuary it has to be. And I think a lot of people beat themselves up too, because you know, there's a lot of really great sleep researchers out there. Now. You know, you've got guys like Matthew Walker and Nick little Hales and um gosho who there's another another person who's been doing a lot of

work on sleep. Michael Bruce is another guy. But over and over again, what you see is you're supposed to sleep seven to nine hours a night, and a lot of people feel bad because they don't. And I felt bad for the longest time because I didn't. And I'm like, what, am I gonna like die of cancer early? Or am I gonna you know, is my body gonna fall apart?

Am I gonna like accelerate aging because I just I've got too much going on, or my body just like my eyes open wide at like four thirty and I just want to go crush the day, right, which which I think many people who are dialed into perhaps some of the things that you talk about, like your ekey guy, your life's purpose, your plan da vita, you know, speaking

of Sardinia, this idea of your purpose for life. Well, if you have a really strong purpose for life, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you're just like, baby, let's go bring it on. And for me, you know, with our big, glorious family dinners and I read my son's stories at night, and I play the music on the guitar and I'll make love to my wife and read some fiction. So you know, even with all that, I can usually do a pretty good job being close

to a sleep by ten. Yeah, but getting up at four four thirty that's six to six and a half hours. So the thing is that if you do that, but also you take a nap like a post lunched siesta for example, the siesta even if it's like twenty to forty five minutes long can simulate what you get out of a full ninety minute ish sleep cycle. So the way that I live my life is I sleep six to six and a half hours a night, and then like clockwork after lunch every day, or if I have

a meeting after lunch. Sometimes it's slightly later in the afternoon. I try to push it too close to bedtime because you want some sleep drive going into the night. I take a nap. It's a siesta for me. It's twenty to forty five minutes. I do kind of This is where some of the biohacking comes in. I'm like, okay, I goes. I want to make this effective. So what I do is a I have something similar to like that sensory deprivation float tank that you use down at pause.

I actually had a float tank for a while, but it was too much upkeep for me. Yeah, it's my

whole basement looked like a freaking poolhouse. So I have what's called a hyperbaric chamber, which is like this chamber that they use in hospitals for repairing wounds and um and they'll use it for like cardiovascular problems and increasing red blood cells and It pressurizes you at about what's called one point four atmosphere, so it's like you're twenty three twenty five feet under the ocean with a pressure, but then you're breathing pure oxygen, and so the combination

of the pure oxygen plus the pressure drives that oxygen into the tissue accelerates repair, you know, clears the brain. I mean, even if you weren't napping in it, you feel amazing when you get out. And so I climb in that, and I like it too because I have to zip myself up and it's kind of like nobody can get to me. It even takes like three minutes to decompress me. So if the house caught on fire, I'd be kind of screwed. But I climb into that, so I'm just like I'm locked off from the world, right.

And then I have a couple of technologies that I use. One is called a hap bee. Oh yeah, it's like you've seen this. It's super crummin. Yeah. I've been messing out with it for like five months now. It uses a magnetic signal that simulates the same molecular signal of a few choice compounds, like for simulating wakefulness. You could choose like the caffeine setting, the nicotine setting, for it's

got like an alcohol setting. What's it doing? So basically, all it does is it causes your cells to respond as though that particular molecule we're attached to the cell receptor without you actually ingesting a compound or taking a supplement or consuming something that's going to stay in your system for a long period of time. So let's say I want a wakey wakey prior to going out to

a to a dinner party. I could put it in coffee mode, right, put that around my neck or around my head, get that that hit wakefulness producing hit of caffeine. But then when I take it off, it's not like the caffeine still floating around in my system. Same thing

with a nap. So what I like? So it's in your system only for as long as right, It's just it's as though I were blasting with the electrical signal of coffee without you actually having to drink the coffee, which has a half life of you know whatever, six or eight or ten hours, depending on how you're you're You're you're genetically wired up. So it's really cool, and I didn't really believe, you know, I'll interview a lot of people on my podcast. I'm like, yeah, that's a

little woo. But then tried it and it actually works surprisingly well, So I put it in My preferred mode for NAP is the one that's it's called relax but it mimics CBD, right, which is which is nice for me because it just kind of settles down some racing thoughts, gets me down at the end of the day. So

I put that on. And then I also have this other device that works kind of similarly, but instead of using a magnetic signal, it vibrates and it's a it's a tiny vibration that elicits a brainwave signal that could be like an alpha brainwave signal or a kind of like a hyped up beta brainwave signal, or a DP relaxation like data or delta brainwave signal. And that's called an apollo. And that also, similar to the hat bee,

has like a wakefulness mode, a social mode. I even put that that hat be one which also has an alcohol mode on it. I gave it to my son who wanted to try it out at dinner one night, and it was in like social alcohol mode. He got like super funny and he was joke teams, really relaxed as who As I took it off of him, he was just normal again. I wasn't giving my son actual alcohol. This is just like simulating the effects. So I put

the Apollo in relaxed mode. I put the hat beat in relaxed mode, and I climb into that hyperbaric chamber and then I've got like lavender essential oil in there, and I lay back and then I play this this track, and I discover a lot of things through podcasting. Half the stuff I learned from talking to people right now, super duper smart who'd normally never give me the time of day. And I get to pick the brains of

these scientists for like ninety minutes twice a week. So it's way better than my college education, just talking all these people and find out what works and what doesn't. But a couple of years ago, I interviewed this guy who has a company called New Calm. Yes, and New Calm has an app that that plays special signals. And this sounds like like eight billion other apps out there

that will play like relaxing signals at night. There a diamond does on the app store, But this one in particular, it just seems to work for me, most notably in the way that I can put it on like twenty minutes and I'm dead to the world within like two minutes of that thing playing. I'll wake up at the twenty minute mark and I feel like I've slept like

an hour. This is something else. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I asked the guy when I interviewed him, well, you know, could this just replace like the pink noise that I play at night? And he said, no, no, no, no, no no, don't do that, because it pushes you through a sleep cycle so well that if you put it on to sleep at night, you'd go through your sleep cycle from let's say like ten to eleven thirty. Then you'd wake up wide awake at night. Right, So this

is something that's better in my opinion for naps. The other time I'll sometimes use it is if I wake up, let's say it like three thirty four, and I want to snag an extra thirty forty minutes to sleep or whatever, I'll put it on that so I do the nap of the apollo, the hat be the hyperbarrack, the oil, and then the that hat be and even though I'm sleeping six six and a half hours a night, I get up from that nap and I'm kind of groggy

for like ten fifteen minutes. But what I do is I go and I jump in that cold pool, right and then I'll have some kind of stimulant like I'll just pop a piece of nicotine gum or you'll have a little leftover coffee from the night before whatever, and then boom, like it's like I have a second day. I feel amazing. I'm fully present with my family that night at dinner, whereas if I pushed through that afternoon slog, it's just kind of like it's a dinner and you're

just king I can't wait until bedtime. Yeah, and I don't like that feeling. Person. I'm just impressed that you're charging skills, Like you must have the most organizing charging schedule for all these devices. They need to be charged, they to be like I mean, like most people can't even charge their phone. You're like here, yeah, I kind of seven devices, Like, so it's amazing, and I mean that genuinely. I'm not just yeah, I've gotten to be one charging station in the dining room that I just

kind of keep everything plugged into. UM. So, yeah, I've got like four or five devices that I'm kind of charged and during the day or the reason that I plug them in is not because they have a low battery life and they need to be charged. And this is important for people to know. Yeah, any of these devices or anything I try, I have a hard and fast rule that it must be able to be placed an airplane mode for the reasons that I stated earlier.

So if somebody's like trying to trying to like sell me or have me try like some crazy new sleep system, you know, mattress self quantification device or whatever, one of the first questions I ask is, well, can I disable to WiFi or can I put it in airplane mode so that during the time I'm using it, especially for rest, I'm not getting bombarded by signals? I'm yeah, and so

most of them can. But the problem is when you place the device in airplane mode, typically to reconnect it to your phone, because most of these are run via some kind of app on your phone, you have to plug it back into a charger, and that, like I'm not an engineer, it takes. It takes that airplane mode basically, and so a lot of times I do have to like plug things in, you know, get up from my nap, plug the hat bee and the Apollo in so they're

ready for the next day. But but yeah, it's uh, there there are ways, especially in our day and age, that you can definitely get by without just swallowing hook client and sinker. You know that the eight to nine hours of sleep a night message like, there's a lot of ways around it. Yeah, tell me about the time, Ben, when like for you this you know, you've always been athletic. You you you are an athlete. You've been an athlete.

You spoke about the before, but you also mentioned that you know, there there have been times when you didn't feel this way, and I want to hear a bit about that, about how your life was before you really understood the body as deeply as you do today, because because I feel like for a lot of people when they see you like to me as well, and I really mean this in a genuine way, I see you as like, Wow, this guy's like just you know, really

understands the body, really understands the mind. And you're an expert, so you sound like an expert. But I know for a fact that you weren't born that way and and that's not how you've always been. And I'd love for people to hear about that journey around. Tell me about a time when you didn't feel boundless, when you didn't feel as like now it's like you know how to turn this and you play with this, and now it's

an experiment and it's fun and you enjoy it. Tell us about when you kind of were like, did you ever feel broken health wise? Did you ever feel like everything was just a mess? Were you ever in the place that most of my audience maybe feeling like they're just like Jay, I'm just struggling to get out of bed in the morning, Like I don't sleep, I've got like bloated, I'm feeling ghassy. Like, tell me about when you felt like you were at your worst as opposed

to what we see now. There's three things that I want to tell you right now. When I was a kid, I was homeschooled K through twelve. The emphasis of my homeschooling was really more on a classical education centered around Latin and logic and rhetoric and the great books and

tons of reading, which I loved. I would happy place was the library, and my parents would have to take me out of the bedroom and almost like threaten me with punishment if I wouldn't come out and socialize with people, because I just wanted to be in there with my books. I played the violin for thirteen years. I was president

of the chess club. I loved to take about part computers right, and design video games and and you know, and figure out how my hard drive worked, and was an early adopter of a lot of these technologies in a very geeky way, you know, prior to the advent of social media, et cetera. You know, when it was you actually had to kind of have a working knowledge of some of these technologies. And I was. I was

pretty much like a geeky little Christian homeschooled kid. I remember the stuff I got mad about when I was a kid was like when some kid would like quilted Doiley at the at our homeschool talent competition and beat out my watercolor painting right like, and so was it your mother and father that were both oh with the homeschool, Like there was a group of kids and teachings both. We had a pretty good homeschool collective. So I didn't

come pletely miss out on social life. I was a weird kid in that I was very independently driven to learn, and I am still that way now. My parents would literally just give me books and walk away. They would literally give me the whole year's math curriculum and then just like make sure I took the tests. My siblings were not the same and needed a lot more kind

of handholding. But I've always been curious and driven from an independent learning standpoint, and it really wasn't until I discovered the sport of tennis that I became interested in physical culture at all. When my parents wanted to create a really cool environment for all of us to grow up in, so one day they announced that they were going to bring in some folks and we're all going to pitch in and learn a little bit of construction

and lay asphalt and build a tennis court. So we built a tennis court, and they hired a tennis instructor and her name was Michelle, and I had a big crush on her, which helped with my motivation to play

more tennis. But I also loved tennis and I got really good at it, and it came really natural to me, and I started to run up the hills behind my house, and my dad took me down to the local sporting goods store to buy a little ten pound dumbells, and I started to figure out, like, you know, how to drink milk to get strong, and the kind of things that made me faster, and you know, how to stay hydrated in water and minerals. And I had a couple

of mentors. A guy who was my younger brother's best friend's dad was a bodybuilder, so all of a sudden, I'm learning about nutrition and working out from him. Another friend is a powerlifter. So by the time I'm like fifteen, I was done with high school. So I'm like, you know, I don't want to go program computers or paint watercolor, like I want to go learn more about this body

and tennis. So I walked onto the local college tennis team when I was fifteen and started playing tennis, started studying exercise science, got a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics, and wound up opening a whole bunch of personal training studios and gyms in Washington and Idaho, and just have been hardcore and the health and fitness and nutrition scene ever since then. So initially I really wasn't interested in

much of this stuff at all. But at that point I spent like twenty years competing in all these crazy hardcore you know, obstacle course races and Ironman triathlons and open water swims and adventure races. That was my life for like twenty years, was using my body as a guinea pig, using all these races and events as like a battlefield to test stuff out. I was coaching, I was competing, I was traveling, and I thought I was

the bees knees when it came to fitness. I would say that if you were to look at me and judge me through what our world considers to be fitness, which I think is a bastardized version of fitness, I was one of the fittest humans on the planet, like like I really did look good in spandex and could ride my bike really fast, you know, run of pills.

And to reply to the meat of part of your question, it was about nine years ago or so when I really got into self qualification, testing of blood work, testing of biomarkers, sleep, nervous system, you know, all these things that we can easily test now that you normally would have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for it, you know, the Princeton Longevity Institute or some executive facility you know, only available to wealthy ceo as we can now get all these tests in our own home, and

I got super interested in this stuff, and I started to get all these tests, and I realize, oh crap, Like I'm fit on the outside, but I'm dying on the inside. High inflammation, low testosterone, disregulated thyroid gut inflammation and gut issues and constipation and brain fog and all these issues that technically somebody with like low body fat and muscles who can like run and lift weights you

wouldn't expect to have. But really, true fitness is not about going to a little fake box at the beginning of the day and pushing, you know, fake heavy things around for an hour and then walking out and assuming that you're good to go and maybe kind of sort of eating healthy like a protein bar Trader Joe's or whatever. There's so much more. There's there's so much more when it comes to the body. And that's what I began

to discover. My first big book that I wrote called beyond training was just that it was like, okay, so as an athlete, there's all these other things like digestion and hormones and endocrine system and inflammation and blood sugar regulation and immune system integrity and all these things that we don't think about when it comes to what it truly takes to have long health spin and life spin.

And so what I discovered along the way was all of these things like not I mean Men's Health magazine or Women's Health magazine, whatever will tell you how to

exercise and how to eat healthy. Okay, maybe sometimes they missed the mark a little bit, but for the most part, it's not rocket science for somebody to go out there and figure out, okay, eat real whole food that's recognizable that preferably is as close to Earth as possible, and then like move your body, lift heavy stuff and occasionally breathe hard playing tennis or soccer, high intensi interral training

or whatever. Like, we've kind of cracked the code on eating healthy and moving, and most people can find that information for free pretty readily. But what most people don't pay attention to are all the things that the body really truly needs to be optimized to produce ATP to produce energy. And this is a big part of what my last book, Boundless was about, like light and how the photons of light interact with the human body to charge up the mitochondria to allow it to be able

to produce ATP. The negative ions and the electricity produced by the planet Earth that take when you're outside barefoot or you're touching trees and rocks, you're soaking up all those negative ions and just restoring the natural state of electricity the body, the body, which is like a battery is supposed to be in when you get exposed to stressors of heat or stressors of cold, there's enormous variants that spring up in the human body like like like

like heat chalk proteins and cold chalk proteins, and blood flow and nitric oxide. When you drink pure clean water that's chock full of minerals, right trace liquid minerals or sea salts or things like that, that harryes that electrical

charge through your body. And I began to realize, Holy cow, I thought you're just supposed to like go to the gym and eat a protein bar to be healthy, But oh my gosh, it's like sunlight, it's magnetism, it's water, it's earth, it's heat, it's cold, it's it's positive relationships and love and gratitude and all these things that we just we forget about when it comes to being a full, complete human being. And so that was when the light bulb happened for me, when I realized I'm healthy on

the outside, but I'm dying on the inside. And there's all sorts of avenues that this entire fitness world has yet to explore when it comes to what it truly means to have. You know what I talk about in the book, You know what I call boundless energy. Number one is no, I didn't always like this stuff, but I gradually developed a love for it. And I think my curiosity, my independent drive to learn, and the fact that I was a real geek just tended to fuel my drive to learn a lot of these things about

how people can really feel good. And then number two, I after twenty years, realized my own mistake of just like beating up the body and expecting it to bounce back. I'm thinking that was true fitness. And then finally see and this is really this is where where I'm really driving a lot of my platform, my teachings. What I really want to focus probably for the rest of my life on one is the fact that we can achieve

all these things we've been talking about. Jay, you can sleep like a champ, and you can have you know, if it's important to you whatever six pack abs or veins in your abs, or you know, be able to do a triathlon or an obstacle race or just like rule a CrossFit box, or you know, anything else that might be important to you. Have a full head of hair, defy aging, low wrinkles, like like how many close to billion dollar industries have sprung up around us trying to

optimize ourselves as human beings. And yet at the end of the day, because I see this over and over again, not only in having experienced this myself, but having seen this in many of like the wealthy and successful executive It was like coach and pro athletes I've worked with, and people who appear on the outside to be crushing it in life. At the end of the day, none

of this is fulfilling. None of this is ultimately fulfilling. Okay, Like I can literally be like pose on the cover of a magazine whatever you know, with with girls draped off of each arm, you know, eating one hundred dollars steaks for dinner every night, and experiencing you know what many people would would would covet as an amazing life. But I got news for you. I'm not happy in that state. And I've I've seen a lot of people also not be happy in that state because there is

a yearning in our soul. There is a hole in our soul, right, there is there is this deep longing for some kind of fulfillment that in my world, we throw fitness and a healthy diet and the way you look and the way you perform into other people will throw cars, throw money, throw sex, throw homes, throw experiences, throw anything else that seems like it might be that one thing that you've finally discovered that's going to be the ultimate key to fulfillment. Right, I'm finally about to

cross the finish line of that iron Man trayathlon. Oh boy, life's going to be different after this. It's going to be different. I've done it and now i can just be on cruise control the rest of my life because I've checked that fulfillment box. But at the end of the day, none of that stuff is fulfilling because and you know, I'm, I'm people came before me who have identified this. This isn't new information that I came up

with myself, but there is this. As you know, a great writer and theologian named Blaze Pascal would describe it as a God shaped hole in our hearts, eternity in our hearts. And the only thing that's going to feel an infinite abyss, an eternal abyss, a God shaped hole in your heart is God is some type of fulfillment that's everlasting, that's eternal. And once I realize that and realize, oh my gosh, like I could train my body all day long. But even though physical training is a little

bit beneficial, it's nothing compared to training for forever. It's nothing compared to gratitude, to relationships, to sharing with others, to loving others, to volunteer, to service, to community, to worship, to having something greater outside of you, and believing that a story is written for your life. And now that I understand that all of these things that I've learned, all these fun little biohacks that we talk about at the end of the day are interesting but not going

to make you ultimately happy. Well, now, if you have been doing those things, if you are taking care of your body right, and you do have a really good body and brain, you're biohacking, you're fit, and you're healthy, and you're eating well. Man, When you put not what I would call the icing on the cake or the cherry on the cupcake, but really lay that on the core, on the foundation of a deeply meaningful spiritual life, then

you're firing on all cylinders. And so I think that's what's really important for people to understand, is, you know, the wool socks and the chili pad and the hyperbaric chamber. At the end of the day, what you should view those as is you should view those as a way to equip yourself to be more impactful with the purpose that you've been given in life, not as your source

of happiness. Then that was so powerful, and I you know, the way you just shared that and the way you even talk about biohacking and mastering the body from the beginning of this interview, you can tell that it's to have these beautiful exchanges with your family, to have a meaningful dinner. And you know, when I hear you talk about these things like it resonates so deeply with me, Big, because what you just set up is exactly why we

do need to do these things. Who wants to be at dinner with their family and be like have brain fog and have confusion and be stressed out and just be looking forward to bedtime or to be spending time with their partner but not having the energy to go on a beautiful walk or a hike or whatever it

may be like. And that's the challenge we're having that our health is negatively impact on our relationships, Like for those of us who are experiencing fatigue, for those of us who are experiencing bloating, for those of us who are experiencing inflammation that's leading to stress and agitation in your relationships. You think that you're just not getting along it is you cannot disentangle the body and the spirit.

And there are some people that have taken this to extremes, Like if you look at at the Nastics right, a very very popular religion about the same time that Christianity was rising, you know, in fifty sixty seventy a d. They believe that all things fleshly and physical were and bad, and that the only thing important was the spirit, and that marriage was bad, and that good food was bad, and anything that even remotely reaked of epicureanism was bad.

And one should be stoic, but stoked to the nth degree. And the fact is that the body is sacred. Food is sacred. It's not just this physical biological interaction with your taste. But sex is sacred. It's not just two bodies rubbing together in mutual masturbation, you know, fitness and

even the movement of electrons to the body. You know, in traditional Chinese medicine, and you know, they call that that the chi, the life force, the prawna the energy, and western medicine we call it the mitochondri it's the

same thing. There's a deep spiritual aspect to that. And so we are bodies with spirits, and the body must be treated as a temple that is to house the spirit, and the spirit must be treated as the one part of us that we care for the most, because that's what's going to go on for eternity, and that's what we really use as our deep fuel and our fire

every day. And so yeah, in an ideal scenario, when you wake up in the morning in addition to impacting this world fully with whatever purpose you've been given with your life in a spirit of loving others, you should also be asking yourself, how can I quit both my body and my spirit today to be as impactful as possible? And it's and it's both, and you can have both.

You don't have to be like a yeah you know, no no offense jay, but like whatever, like a skinny yogi monk, who's you know, who can't hold up a heavy weight without their bones breaking. You also don't want to be an Adonis at the gym who just basically doesn't even know what a gratitude practice is or how to pray to God or anything like that. Human beings we are. We are some of the most complex, if not the most complex creature on the face of the planet.

Maybe maybe a platypus or something might be up there kind of inter saying, but we we have the ability to live our lives with this amazing body and an amazing spirit, and in my opinion, there's no reason that you can't have both and a man when you get into the into that state of literally having your cake and eating it too, on the highest level, life is amazing and everybody, everybody, every single person listening in right now has the capability to get to that level as

long as they realize that most people around them have settled for status quo. And if you realize that, you actually can rise above and you can train your spirit, and you can train your body, and all of this is learnable, all of this is teachable, all of this is practicable and habit formationable. And I'm going to stop making up words now. But anybody has us within their power to be able to accomplish Yeah, well said no, And I feel the same way. You know, for years,

I focused extensively on the mind. I focused extensively on intention. I focused deeply on gratitude service. And that's where I spent most of my life because that's what I naturally gravitated towards. It's what my monk training was based on, it's what my heart was drawn to. And everything you just shared, and I find myself now coming over to the other side and wanting to learn more about the body.

And so what you just said is it sits very closely with my heart because I grew up as someone who dived deep into the spirit and the mind and the heart and the soul, which has been the foundation of anything that I do today. But I have come backwards almost yeah, And I'm not saying it's backwards all forwards. I just think I've I've come to that realization that my spirit can only do as much as my body.

And it's crazy because as monks, the order of our priorities were meant to be health, sadener, service, and so health is health as you're saying it, your physical, your body, your temple. Health, sadener is your daily practices of aratitude, intention, prayer, and then savor or service is you then sharing that with the world. So the pyramid was meant to be that, yeah, but some of us, including me, decided to skip that

first one and do two in three. And I'm almost you know the reason why speaking to you is so powerful, And some of the things that I've started experimenting with and playing with probably in the last couple of years, have been totally that direction of I now want to understand my body so that I can serve better, yep, so that I can serve for longer, so that I can have more loving exchange. That's that's the goal, right when you come at with love others. Yeah, right, not

how do I look in the mirror. That's why I never felt fast. It's loving others. And in the very same way that the best businesses are not necessarily built on a monetary goal, but are built upon a goal of how many people can we serve, how many people can we touch, how many lives can we affect? And

the money will follow. I mean for me as as a business person, right like, I have to make a living, and I'm a content producer kind of like you, like, A lot of my business is driven by me educating people.

And when I write an article, or when I record a podcast, or when i'm you know, doing an Instagram post or whatever it is, I tell myself, Okay, my goal, even if there is a product, a solution that's offered here is part of this post or this podcast or this story that someone can go by, My goal is that someone finishes digesting this content, listening to this audio, reading this essay, looking at this post, and walks away a better person, regardless of whether or not they actually

purchase anything, right, they walk away whatever, knowing more about the gut, knowing more about the hormones, knowing more about the brain, knowing more about gratitude, knowing more about whatever it is that I'm producing content about. And I tell you what, when I write in that way and I teaching that way and I produce content in that way,

I don't have to worry about money. That just kind of follows right, And honestly, it follows in a better way because you create a more hardcore audience that trust what you have to say because you actually care about them, and that's why you're getting out of bed in the morning. And so it should be the same way for yourself

when you go to the gym, and try this. If you're listening in right now, if you go hit the gym tomorrow or you go out, you know what are your basement and you know you're breathing hard and beating yourself up and doing your burpies or whatever the case may be. Think about how you're equipping yourself to be impactful at work, to be present for your family, to have a lifespan and help spend that enables you to be passing wisdom on to your great grandkids or your

great great grandkids. That level of motivation that you experience when you're doing things to love others or arguably also doing things to equip yourself to just be able to more fully savor this amazing planet that we are on all of a sudden, man compared to like, what's the scale, I'm gonna say it all day, it's just a much much more empowering way to train for health. Yeah, yeah,

I couldn't agree, movement, I couldn't agree more. Tell me before we get to their final five questions of the interview. Nearly at the end, I want to ask you if someone you very emphatically stated that anyone who's listening to this, anyone who's watching, can do this, can have both. I'm with you, I agree with you, I'm aligned with you.

Tell me about what you said earlier. You were saying, Jay, you know I still work with a few people on coaching, and you were sharing to me, I should sleep between sixty three and sixty five. That's going to be better for me than even sixty five to sixty seven. So much of this is habit change. You've created so many

new habits in your life, experimented. For those of you who have not read Boundless, when you pick it up, what I love about the book is you break it down into tiny sections, aren't explaining each part of the science, but then giving a practical thing that someone can do. Today, you have technology if people want to adopt it. Habit change is a huge part of what you do. Where are people going wrong in their habit change? What have you seen through your extreme experimenting where habit change has

actually worked for people? I would say what comes to mind for me first when I asked that question is a big. Big part of it is relevance and understanding why you're doing something. When I was in high school, I really hated math and science, And when I got to college, I just became a standout in math and science because I had a teacher first year of college who made math relevant by tying in a lot of wealth preservation and savings and investing components that made math

super relevant to me. And so at that point I just developed this wonderful love for math and a habit of studying math because it was relevant and I knew why I was doing it. So understand for math and a habit of studying math because it was relevant and I knew why I was doing it. So understand why you're doing something. I think that the importance of education when it comes to habit formation is very important. Yeah.

Another one that that I rely upon a daily basis for either stopping habits or making habits is making something as accessible and convenient as possible, meaning that I am probably, like from a fitness standpoint and a consistency of fitness standpoint, probably just about as fit as I've ever been in terms of true health and some of those parameters we were talking about earlier, because partially I really haven't had to leave my house to go to the gym and

was kind of forced into that because of COVID. So everything I need is I gotta step over a kettlebell to walk into my gym. I gotta like walk underneath a pull up bar to go down the stairs. In my house, I have to basically like walk past a cold tub every day, and you know, and you know,

there's just healthy feels strewn all about the house. This idea of surrounding yourself and making everything convenient down to the point where if you're going to go for run in the morning, having your running shoes in your shorts right there beside the beds, so there's very little cognitive resistance to starting. That would be a second thing that I found to be really is making things convenient. I

think the last one is for me personally. And I don't know if this is the way for everybody, but I like, especially when it comes to health habits, to be able to stack things. So anytime that I'm getting healthy, I'm also making myself a better person. For example, I really rarely listen to music when I'm working out. I view my workout as also a chance for me to go to university, right, so it's always podcasts audiobooks when the going gets really hard. There's actually been some studies

I've shown this to be a cool tactic. That's when the music goes on, like when you need it the last minute, So you're kind of like saving your brain to get to the point where it really really needs the music and it's not just kind of used to the music at that point and can actually push past,

you know. I do like the red light therapy and the grounding and the earthing mats and the essential oils and this special like water repair device called a nanovie in my desk when but I don't go in there and just do all that stuff and have it be unproductive time, Like that's the time when I bang out my first forty five minutes of emails for the day. So I always figure out a way to make something more palatable in terms of tying that habit into something.

I mean, I even like I got out of the habit, you know, because I'm a big fan of reading scripture and reading the Bible every morning. And I even found myself and this happened a few months ago. I was saying the room of my Bible. I'm like, why am I just sitting here reading the Bible? Aren't there other

things that I could be doing? And you'd think they'd be distracting, But now I read my Bible while I'm sitting in a pulsed to electromagnetic field chair with a biocharger on, and it's like I'm still reading, but my body's kind of like getting better at the same time. So I love to stack healthy habits, and it's very rewarding when you stack them all and also figure out how to still be productive during the day. So it's not like you're having to rob Peter to pay Paul.

It's like you're you're paying Paul and Peter at the same time. So those are the top three things that come to mind. Be educate yourself about why you're doing what you're doing. Surround yourself with what you need to maintain positive habits while hiding the things that would cause you to form negative habits. And then um basically stack habits and make the habit fun or meaningful or productive so you don't feel like you're wasting time engaged in

that habit. I love that Bend Green for Everyone band. That was amazing. I'm like, you need to come up for a pot two, but we can't wait this long as we waited to do a pot one. Well, yeah, maybe we can go to some other longevity hot spot. Yeah, Okinawa would be interesting and even sushi and a couple of potatoes. I haven't been. I've spent a lot of time in Japan, eased to race over there a lot, and I've spoken over there a couple of times. But I absolutely I love the I love the food depend

where I'm at, I like the culture. I would say probably one of my favorite places over there would be Kyoto, right, great great touring grit walks and yeah, I'm I'm a fan of I'm a fan of sushi. Although now I I um, I know we're trying to wrap up, but I'll finish here. I've been making my own sushi. I found this service called Stop and they deliver sashimi grade fish to my house every week. Wow. And so it's

kind of spoiled me. I literally take out my sushi knife, cut it in strips, put it in a nori wrap with some sushi risal, mustard, you know whatever I want to sprinkle on there. And so my sons and I make poke bowls and sushi all the time. Now, but I do I do enjoy a good, good, actual, legitimate Yeah, Japanese sushi restaurant. Yeah, amazing, man. Well, Ben, we end every episode with a final five, which are fast five. So onto that one word, one word, one word to

ten words maximum. All right, so we're to have dashes. That's the most important. Yeah. So the question one is what is the worst health advice you've ever received? It would probably be, and I want to have a whole lot of time to explain this too much, but it would be eat a post workout meal. Okay, we'll save that for part two. Boundless. Do you talk about them? Talk a little bit about that Boundless? All right? Great, question number two what's the best health advice you've ever

received or given or heard? Get out in the sunlight more. I need to do that a lot more. I was talking to someone in my health life recently. They were like, because of the color of my skin, I have to really be out there, a sun worshiper. I love being out there, but I'm not out there enough, even though because of my skins, we have a giant battery in the sky and early any of us use it. Yeah,

I love that all right. Third question, what would you describe as your current purpose to read and write, learn and teach, seeing and speak, compete and create in full presence and selfless love to the glory of God. Beautiful? I love that, right. Question On before what is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do before you go to bed. I walk over to the sink and I scraped my tongue from the back to the front using a copper tongue scraping tool. Yeah. Irabetic.

At the very end of the day, Yeah, very end, very very last, very last thing. Yeah, very last thing. I put my arm around my wife and I say a prayer with her. That's beautiful. I love that. Man, that's amazing. That's great. Oh yeah, we use my wife say I raved it. That's all you know. Yeah, but that's our world, all right. Fifth and final question. If you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Every day write down the name of one person who you are going

to help, and then go help them on that day. Beautiful? Actually I actually do that every morning. I love that. Super meaningful. Thank you, Ben, everyone has been listening on watching. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate all of you. Make sure you go and grab a copy of the book Boundless and Boundless Cookbook that's out as well. We'll put the links in all of our captions. Ben, thank you so much for doing this. I think you shit.

I mean, there are countless parts of this episode that I'm going to use in my own life. I'm gonna go home and tell my wife's straight away to switch us from sixty that's gonna change. We're going to be getting a few more changes in our bedroom, I think based on this episode. Now, yeah, I love it so thank you and everyone's been listening watching. Make sure you tag me and Ben on Instagram to let us know what resonated with you, what stuck out to you, and

what you're gonna experiment with. That's my hope. My hope is that this episode gives you a whole new list of tools to experiment with and try out to see what works for you. And of course Ben's books are a great guide. They truly are a guidebook and a map into some of the depths of all of this. We've just scratched the surface. If you want a full proof plan of how to practice this the bound, this book is going to help you do that. So Ben, thank you for being here. Thank you, mister Jay Shetty,

Thank you Mann. If you want even more videos just like this one, make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here. I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book Think Like a Monk from Thinklike a monkbook dot Com. Check below in the description to make sure you order today.