278: Ben Greenfield - Elevate Your Mental Game With Better Brain Power
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Hey, welcome to Chat with Traders, episode 278. And we are so glad that you joined us today. I'm Tessa Dow, and I co-host this show with Ian Cox. Ian's the one with all the great questions and extracts those awesome insights from our guests. And I make sure that you get to hear it. So how are you? I hope you're doing well. I hope you're better than surviving and more like thriving, or at least on your way to thriving in every aspect of your life. Well,

Well, speaking of thriving, do you get stuck in brain fog, slow thinking, or having low energy when you're trading?

Okay, I admit I have found myself in that situation often. And I'm always searching for ideas that could help with that, especially now that I am trying to up my game in my own trading journey. You know, when we talk about health, we often focus on the physical side of things. But what about mental performance?

To put it simply, if our mental sharpness and power suck, it will chip away at our ability to trade well. If you think about it, trading successfully is not just about having a high probability setup or a well-defined strategy or system as an edge. Mental health and performance are equally important, if not more. It could be the edge that some of us have been trying to look for. So are there ideas and ways that we can boost our brainpower?

Well, let's find out because we have a very special guest today. His name is Ben Greenfield, a renowned health and fitness expert, biohacker, health optimizer, author, and 13-time Ironman triathlete, and more. You have probably seen or heard Ben on Joe Rogan, Impact Theory, Jay Shetty, Mindvalley, just to name a few. And we are so excited to have him on Chat with Traders today.

Please note, the topics today, including thoughts and ideas shared in this episode of the podcast, are for informational and educational purposes only and do not replace professional medical advice. Ask your doctor's advice for specific health concerns and questions. Okay, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ben Greenfield from Spokane, Washington. Hello, Ben.

How's it going? Good, good. Great to have you, get a chance to get you on the show. I've been a longtime listener of your podcast for many years and really enjoyed the benefits of all your information and wisdom and what have you. So that's awesome. I'm glad we could make this work. And thanks for the flexibility on time. How did you get into the health and fitness field, Ben?

You know, I wish that I had a sexy wounded healer story for you, Ian, but gosh, I mean, I would say that I've been immersed in all things related to the human blueprint for my entire life. But really, I would say since about the age of 14, I have been a voracious student of the human body and brain.

I just fell so in love with anatomy and physiology and biochemistry and microbiology and physics and movement and fitness and nutrition that I wound up getting a master's degree in exercise physiology and nutrition. I actually studied for the MCATs and took the pre-meds. I got accepted to six different medical schools and wound up

up deciding to take a year off to go work in hip and knee surgical sales.

That process absolutely just disillusioned me with the idea of going into modern medicine. All the doctors told me I'd be nuts to be a doctor. They all had boats and cars and big homes and seemed to have no time to enjoy any of those things. I spent a lot of time with a laser pointer showing surgeons how to put $30,000 hip implants into surgery.

obese individuals who probably would have been better served with preventive medicine and weight loss. And the whole scenario just basically left such a distaste for me for

at least modern allopathic medicine in the way I was experiencing it, that I decided I could do a lot more doing what I love, which was fitness and physiology and nutrition. So I remember one day I actually walked across the street to the gym and I slapped my resume down the front desk. And at that point, you know, I was a strength conditioning coach and a personal trainer and a nutritionist. I'd worked training people all through college.

So I had a pretty good resume and they actually brought me on as manager of this gym called the Liberty Lake Athletic Club in Liberty Lake, Washington. From there, I managed their program and developed triathlon training programs and group personal training programs and, you know, and cooking demos and nutrition and meal planning kind of made the training program there pretty successful and

And then I connected with a physician who was the husband of a client of mine. And he convinced me to partner up with him. He was the head physician for Ironman Triathlon and Rock and Roll Marathon. His name was Dr. PZ Pierce. And PZ and I launched this giant...

kind of like warehouse that was a one-stop shop for sports medicine, you know, exercise physiology and biomechanics and performance coaching and chiropractic docs and massage therapists, physical therapists, sports medicine docs. And I was the director of human performance there. And so that meant that I used interesting technologies that would probably be considered kind of biohacking before biohacking became a

you know, a more popular word. So blood injections with platelet rich plasma and high speed video camera analyses and what's called indirect calorimetry, which is like a breath based analysis of how much carbohydrate fat and calories that you're burning, like your metabolic rate. And basically ran that facility and open up kind of a sister facility over on the, uh, the Idaho side in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, uh,

And in 2008, I was nominated as America's top personal trainer. And that kind of thrust me into the limelight of speaking and traveling and doing a lot more

online consulting and coaching. That's kind of how I got to where I am now, walking on my office treadmill and talking to you, Ian. Great. Thanks for sharing that. So today, let's dive into ways to improve mental performance. Trading in the financial markets require a sharp mind. So our listeners are looking for ways to get an edge in mental performance.

Starting off with probably one of the more common ways that people are familiar with is coffee and caffeine. Can you tell us a little bit about coffee and caffeine as a mental pick-me-up? I'll give you a fun fact. You know the French philosopher Voltaire? Ever heard of him? Yes. He purportedly drank up to 60 cups of coffee a day.

And, uh, seemed to function pretty well mentally. Like, like, you know, coffee was discovered when, as the story goes, this guy's goats, some farmers goats were chewing on coffee, berry plants. And he noticed they had very robust amounts of energy as they would bound up and down the hills. And later, of course, they isolated caffeine and discovered all these other molecules in coffee, like coffee.

feel-good paroxysm and caffeic acids and all these things that actually make coffee almost like a mix between a highly stimulating acid

combined with a little bit of a psychotropic effect. Fact is, anybody who's drinking coffee and quits for about two weeks, your cell receptors actually become desaturated with the caffeine, and they become reaccustomed to operating without caffeine. Then once you start drinking coffee again, you actually realize, holy cow, I'd forgotten how much of a mental boost this stuff actually is.

actually bestows. So, you know, coffee has also been studied for its effects on staving off Alzheimer's and dementia, cardiovascular disease. It's good for the liver and glutathione production. You know, it has a host of metabolic benefits that if we're just talking about coffee, right? Not orange

orange mocha frappuccinos and half a cup of coffee with another half a cup of half and half and a few teaspoons of sugar in it. Coffee on its own is stellar as a mental enhancing agent. There are subtle nuances, right? I think a lot of people are probably aware now of some of the issues with...

beans having mold or mycotoxin or from non-organic sources or unsustainable farms. And so I'm a little bit picky about making sure that I'm choosing organic, supporting the farmer and preparing my coffee in such a way that I'm not, you know, pulling up to the drive-thru window and just getting a cup full of chemicals, but all

Ultimately, I would definitely say that coffee ranks up there as a good, it's called a nootropic agent. That means mind director, mind director. And coffee is kind of like one of the first nootropic agents. That being said, there's a lot of others out there if we're talking about

enhancing the brain from a chemical standpoint. But I give thumbs up on coffee, but I personally try to cut out coffee for about a week out of every month where I'll switch to tea or decaf coffee or something like that because you have these receptors in your nervous system that coffee binds to or the caffeine more specifically in coffee binds to.

And there's another molecule in your body that also binds to those same receptors. And that molecule is adenosine. And adenosine is what increases what's called sleep drive, meaning your ability to feel sleepy as the day progresses. So the problem is that if the caffeine is constantly throughout your whole life bound to those receptors, your body has to make more and more receptors. And it also has to make more and more adenosine to actually feel sleepy. And

And so you wind up desensitizing yourself to caffeine while at the same time, really limiting your ability to build a healthy sleep drive.

But what studies have shown is that in most people, within six to 10 days of a wash out of caffeine, of not drinking coffee, you get a restoration of the normal number of receptors and you become resensitized to adenosine. So it's really interesting how coffee is something that you could cycle. It's very simple. Like let's say, you know, you've got a lot of people's work days are,

occurring in press pulse cycles, right? There's those four to six weeks where you're working really hard and then you know you're going to have a week of easy work or you don't have a product you're launching or whatever. And I like to choose those less busy weeks to...

Try to not be on caffeine and coffee just so I reset those receptors and your sleep will thank you if you do that. Great. That's good advice. What about is there an optimum amount of coffee that people can take to get that enhanced performance without having significant side effects or is it highly individual?

We established that already at 60 cups. If you want to be a famous philosopher, 60 cups. I don't know how big the cups were, by the way, you know, you hear that a glass of wine is good for you. And then you see, you know, the average American having a fishbowl size glass of wine with dinner. And I think in the studies, it's actually something like a paltry four ounces, which for most people is just a taste with, with coffee. A lot of the studies show that you derive quite a bit of the benefits in the range of anywhere from one to four cups. And,

However, as you noted, it can be very genetically determined.

What I mean by that is that some people oxidize caffeine really quickly and some people don't oxidize caffeine as quickly. If you are a slow caffeine oxidizer, one cup of coffee could actually leave you kind of jittery and feeling as though you're excessively stimulated, give you the runs. Like there's all sorts of stuff it could do.

And then if you're a fast caffeine oxidizer, you're that person who can like have a shot of espresso after dinner and be sleeping like a baby a couple of hours later. So you can test that in the realm of DNA testing. There's a lot of companies that do it. A few of the better ones would be like the DNA company. They have a pretty good genetic test.

23 and me, I think even though they had some FDA restriction in terms of the health data they could release, I think they still do that coffee oxidizing one. Another really good company is Self Decode. And when I use terms like Self Decode or the DNA company, what that means is that you typically take a very small amount of saliva and you send it off to these companies and they analyze your genes for all sorts of stuff, really useful stuff like

Are you histamine insensitive and therefore you need to take a histamine blocker when you have, say, canned fish or wine? Or do you do a poor job detoxifying and you need to take some glutathione before you go to bed at night so your body does a better job detoxifying?

removing toxins while you sleep? Or do you have poor nitric oxide pathways? And so you need to eat a lot of foods that will help you generate more nitric oxide, like arugula or pumpkin seeds or extra virgin olive oil or something like that. So I actually think that DNA testing can give you a lot of insight as to how to eat, how to supplement, how you're wired up. And of course, the most important thing, how many freaking cups of coffee you can drink before your head explodes. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Yeah, great. So let's move on to pharmaceuticals. I was enamored with the movie Limitless because it showed the main character taking this experimental drug. And one of the several many things he became an expert at was trading in the financial markets. Do you know of any over-the-counter or prescription meds that can yield some of the mental improvement benefits that we might have seen in that film?

We could get Bradley Cooper on the phone and find out. You know, there are definitely some limitless pills out there or some things that come pretty close to the limitless pill. Now, honestly, man, I'm feeling a little bit guilty bringing this up right now because it's kind of like when a guy asks me, hey, should I get on testosterone? Well, I usually tell him, hey,

No, like first make sure you're getting enough fat soluble vitamins like vitamin D for example, and make sure you're getting enough magnesium and make sure that you're eating enough protein and that you're lifting heavy weights with your legs where a lot of the, that what are called the androgen receptors for testosterone are and make sure you're getting good sleep and low stress, right?

And there's all sorts of things that you should do before you pull out the big guns, right, of some kind of testosterone replacement therapy. And I would say that we could probably say the same for mental function, right? For example, we all have a blood-brain barrier, right?

I don't know if you've heard Ian before of the gut barrier. Like a lot of people say they have leaky gut, which is very common, especially in people who eat in a stressed out state or eat foods they might be sensitive or allergic to or have a lot of raw vegetables and raw seeds and nuts that can kind of create some inflammation in the digestive tract. And those people often benefit from eating fewer of the foods that aggravate the gut

and then healing up the gut lining with really nourishing foods like bone broth. Colostrum is another example. Glutamine is another example. In functional medicine, there are certain foods that are used to restore the lining of the gut. Well, you also have a blood-brain barrier

And if you have a permeable, or to use the highly scientific term, leaky blood-brain barrier, what that means is that toxins and chemicals that should otherwise not be in neural tissue wind up in your brain and contribute to things like brain fog, poor memory, word recall, lack of cognitive function, etc. So...

Typically, the type of things that would cause a leaky blood brain barrier would be poor sleep, high amounts of stress, high amounts of alcohol.

low intake of electrolytes and minerals. And I don't just mean table salt, which is just table salts crap. It's just sodium chloride, but like really good minerals and electrolytes like sea salt and many of these electrolyte blends that you put into water that are out there now. And so you want to take care of your brain. And that can even come down to choices such as the way that you set up your environment.

We know from a recent study last year that indoor air pollution limits cognitive performance, meaning you could really be well served by getting a portable HEPA air filtration unit for your office or for your bedroom or for multiple areas of the house. We know that bright overhead LED fluorescent light works.

can cause a low-level flicker on the retina that causes brain fog as the day progresses. And so you can switch out the lights in your light cans for halogen, or even though it's increasingly hard to find, incandescent, or what's called biological LED rather than regular LED.

We know that Wi-Fi signals and just high exposure overall to what's called dirty electricity or a high EMF environment can cause sluggish neural function in a lot of people. So you could, you know, hardwire via Ethernet cable to the router or

Or you could not have your phone's Wi-Fi on if it doesn't need to be on. Or you could even have, and this is something I've done, what's called a building biologist. Visit your home or visit your office and go through it with some different meters where they measure magnetic radiation and electrical surges and dirty electricity. And then you get

all these little things that you can put in your office or switch around to fix that, like a dirty electricity filter or, you know, moving your, your office chair to a different area where you're getting exposed to less electricity. And so,

There are variables like that, like sleep, stress, air, light, electricity, and even the health of the blood brain barrier that you want to take into consideration before you just pull out the big bandaid of the limitless pill. So I just want to get that out of the way. You know, you want to do the natural things to care for your brain before you turn to some of these other, you know, arguably more sexy items, you know. Next on Naughty Yotta Island.

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$20,000 in buying power, making it easier to pass the evaluation and speeding up the process of getting funded much faster. You don't want to miss this opportunity. Right. Right. Boy, that's quite a list that you shared with us. So transitioning to diet. We didn't even get a chance to talk about what the Limitless Pill is. I'm sure people are wondering, right? Well, yeah, that's where you can go watch the movie and find out. It's a great movie. Well,

Well, I can tell you that back to that word I used, nootropics, that's kind of like the key term when we're talking about things that would function beyond a cup of coffee, like the limitless pill. I'll give you a few examples of kind of like done for you formulas that would not be considered pharmaceuticals that you would need a prescription for, like say Adderall, but that you can buy over the counter. There's one company called Nootopia. You

You go to their website, you fill out a questionnaire that reveals what your unique neurotransmitter type is, and then you get this big black box that arrives to your house with the

different pills in it, like a pill for memory or a pill for wakefulness or a pill for higher levels of dopamine, which means you have a higher level of reward when you accomplish tasks or a pill for sleep deprivation or cleaning up the brain after a long day. And so that's one good company.

There's another company called Neurohacker, and they have kind of a shotgun formula. It's like food for your brain. It's got 30 plus different ingredients in it that act in synergy to support the brain, kind of like the limitless pill. That one's called Qualia with a Q, Q-U-A-L-I-A, and their product is called Mind. Another example would be

There's a relatively new player on the market that will give you about 14 to 16 hours of what I would consider to be pretty pure, clean focus that's similar to what you'd expect from a limitless pill without keeping up for days on end. That company is called Wukio, W-U-K-I-Y-O. They also make a pretty good product. And the reason I'm giving you specific brands is because

Part of my job is I'm constantly answering questions, digging into formulations, digging into products, seeing what works, what doesn't, what gives you explosive diarrhea, what doesn't. And so these are a few of the ones that actually work. One that Joe Rogan has made popular, Onyx AlphaBrain. That's actually a pretty good formula as well. It's not quite as effective.

powerful or as heavy a hitter as some of these others I've brought up, but it actually is a very well-formulated product for people who want to see what a nootropic feels like. And I would say the only other thing to think about that I didn't bring up with a few of those examples would be just to fill in the gaps here. I did mention that people who are slow caffeine oxidizers are

may have difficulty with some of those things I just talked about, as well as the average cup of coffee. And there is a supplement that you can buy and you can find just about anywhere over the counter. It's called L-theanine. And anytime you take one of these nootropics or smart drugs, if you feel like it wires you up too much and makes you jittery, typically if you take about 100 milligrams or so of L-theanine, that's like the pro tip, the insider hack that kind of knocks off the edge

It doesn't get it out of your system. It just causes it to kind of feel as though it's being more slowly released. And that can help out quite a bit if you find yourself jittery after using these types of things. And then the last thing I should mention, because a lot of people talk about it now is nicotine.

And that's kind of the classic smoke a cigarette, drink a cup of coffee, write a book in Paris type of scenario. And it actually is true. Nicotine, despite the bad rap that cigarettes, rightly so, get, nicotine.

Nicotine itself is actually a pretty potent mental aid, and you can now get nicotine gum, lozenges, pouches. It tends to be a little bit more addictive, but nicotine combined with caffeine can also be a decent mental hack.

One example of a way to do that and do it clean would be nicotine toothpicks. You can get, for example, stevia flavored nicotine toothpicks. Another example would be a patch, like anywhere from a one to a 10 milligram nicotine patch that you can wear. So you aren't messing with having to smoke a cigarette or maybe chew a piece of gum that has a bunch of artificial sweeteners in it or something like that. But nicotine isn't bad either. And the

And then finally, everything I just mentioned, those would be considered no tropics. There are also drugs. There are also pharmaceutical agents. I'm often asked about one called modafinil. It also goes by the name Provigil. And I actually think that was the inspiration for the movie Limitless. Now, modafinil floods your receptors with tons of dopamine. It makes checklisting, getting things done, staying up for long periods of time.

feel really good. It's actually an off-label anti-narcoleptic agent, meaning people who fall asleep in the middle of the day because they have narcolepsy, they'll get on modafinil and just be fine. They'll have to struggle with that. But in a regular person, or at least a person who doesn't have narcolepsy, modafinil is kind of close to the limitless pill. The problem with it is it can keep you up for days on end. It kind of turns you into almost like

robot without a personality who just wanders around getting things done at an extremely rapid pace. And when you stop using it, it takes a little while to like come down, start to sleep normally, et cetera. You know, I have some modafinil in my pantry and it might be something I'd use if I were to have to say like take an overnight over to Japan and

And I got to get on stage and speak after the flight. And I've gotten two hours of sleep. And I know I'm going to be at the conference all day in meeting, shaking hands in talks and then at the after party. And I'm just like, OK.

Okay. I gotta be up for 18 hours. Let's do this. But there's a, there's a definite biological cost to modafinil, but that's one that for those really hefty workloads is probably the biggest guns that you can get your hands on. So when taking a nootropics, is there a recommended reset time? Like with coffee, like to go without taking nootropics for a certain number of days, weeks, uh, to reset the body.

Because there's such a wide range of compounds and chemicals in these blends, it's highly variable. Like I mentioned, we know with caffeine that it's six to 10 days. Arguably, knowing that that's about the amount of time that would take neurotransmitters to reset, or at least the receptors to reset, you could probably say the same for a lot of these agents, but

One of the better tips I can give you is that I know I listed off a lot of stuff. Usually people who do really well with nootropics and their use, they have like three or four different things around their house and they'll cycle. Or like one day they might do one of the nootopia supplements. One day they'll have a cup of coffee and some nicotine. The next day they might do a handful of qualia mind. The body...

Kind of similar to how you build muscle when you switch up workouts and exercises frequently to throw curveballs at the body. It's kind of similar to throwing curveballs at the mind. So I'm a fan of having a few different nootropic agents around and cycling through them. And you'll find that different things work well for different tasks. You know, I'll give you an example of that by naming two things I didn't name yet.

And these would be from the realm of plant medicine. You've no doubt heard, you know, of the recent surge and popularity of microdosing. Microdosing was say, you know, psilocybin or LSD or wachuma or ayahuasca or any number of things that in a high dose would cause a disease.

what's called an entheogenic or psychedelic or hallucinogenic effect, but in very small sub-perceptual doses seem to allow for a lot of focus or creativity or productivity or wakefulness.

So, for example, if you were going to engage in a bout of creativity, maybe a business rebranding project or a book that you're working on or anything else that would require a lot of creativity and thinking in new patterns, a microdose of psilocybin is actually very good for that, like 0.25 to maybe 0.5 milligrams of psilocybin. And to put that in context, I'm

You'd have to take two plus grams to start to get to the point where you were getting a little bit psychedelic. You know, in most cases when people journey with magic mushrooms, you're talking six to eight plus grams. So it's a lot, you know, it's at least one 10th of that. And then let's say you instead just got to focus. You got to buckle down. You're in project mode. You don't necessarily have to be creative, but you're going to have to focus and work hard the entire day.

Well, that would be where something like a microdose of LSD could be used. And when I say microdose, again, like a trip dose would be, you know, 100 micrograms. So we're talking about 10, maximum 20 micrograms of LSD to allow for focus, whereas psilocybin would be more for creativity.

And so as you're playing with a lot of these different nootropics or smart drugs, you'll find that certain things lend themselves better to creativity, socializing, you know, partying, et cetera. Whereas others are better for just a day of buckling down with focus and productivity. So there's micro dosing of these different LSD or mushrooms, what have you other psychedelics, uh, that does not impair one's ability to drive, to do normal functions. It's, it's,

Like you said, it's sub-perceptual. So would you even know that you're under the influence if somebody, say, slipped one into your drink, for example? You know, both plant medicines and nootropics and smart drugs are all kind of interesting in that you need to drive them properly. It's like getting in a Ferrari and driving it properly. If you just take, let's say...

half gram of psilocybin or whatever, and just kind of sit around on the couch and maybe go for a walk and play some golf or something. You're not really going to get much out of it. Usually you pair a nootropic or a smart drug or a plant medicine microdose with a very cognitively demanding activity.

And that's when you really start to reap the benefits of what is called neurogenesis or neuroplasticity, meaning the growth and sparking of new brain neurons, the merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and that focus that you're actually looking for, that creativity that you're actually looking for. With the plant medicines and whether or not you can actually feel them,

It's sub perceptual. You know, it's it's similar to having like a cup of coffee, like, let's say, a decent 10 ounce black coffee versus a 24 ounce cold brew. Right. And most people have had the 24 ounce cold brew. No, like you're definitely on something. I would say that the properly.

administered microdose of a plant medicine, the only thing you're going to notice is that when you do get to work, you're getting more of the focus or the creativity that you're looking for, but it would in no way impair driving. You wouldn't be seeing purple fairies or psychedelic imagery or sacred geometry inside your head while you're trying to go through financials or anything like that.

For nootropics, they all have different ingredients in them. I mean, how and what ways are they similar to a pharmaceutical or are they completely different? Generally, nootropics are considered to be substances harnessed from plants

the natural plant kingdom, right? Like Bacopa, Monieri or caffeine from coffee, berry or Royal jelly from bees or, you know, choline from fish oil or something like that. Whereas modafinil Adderall and some of these smart drugs are chemically synthesized, often more powerful, but the nootropics just tend to be a little bit more natural. And so, um,

As far as the different types of them, there's just so many different variants that it's dizzying. I mean, the last paper I read on nootropics and smart drugs, and I won't get into the details here unless this is one of those bedtime podcasts that people listen to to fall asleep.

It lists about 12 different categories of nootropics and smart drugs from things that amplify choline release by limiting the rate at which choline breaks down. Choline being a key neurotransmitter for focus and for creativity. Others will clear inflammation from the brain. Others will help with the blood-brain barrier.

Others will help with the production of ATP or the protection of mitochondria in the brain. So it's really tricky. It's like, you know, it's kind of like saying, well, you know, what food do you eat for energy? I was like, well, gosh, I don't know. Some days I'll have sweet potatoes and some days I'll have carrot fries and other days I'll have a ribeye steak. So it's very, it's very complicated.

widely varied as far as the number of different nootropics out there. And that's why I do kind of like to be lazy and just go for some of these done-for-you formulas that cover a wide range of functions with the appropriate doses. But some people, I mean, gosh, man, you can take a deep dive down the rabbit hole. There are websites like, say, one popular one would be Nootropics Depot, right, where you've just got all these...

things that look like chemicals and you don't quite know how to combine them, but there's little Reddit threads that give people's user reports and you kind of piece up together and experiment. And if that's what you like to do, great. But if you just want something that's

formulated approximately close to what human dosages are and is combined in the right way. I would say some of those done for you formulas like Newtopia or on an alpha brain or quality of mind or Rukio would be good places to start if you don't want to kind of be the pioneer cowboy. Okay. Fantastic. So how about diet? How can we make

changes to help improve our mental performance? Yeah, I would think about this in two different ways. The first comes back to that blood-brain barrier that I talked about. And this is the acts of omission typically tend to be less sexy and popular for folks, but ruthlessly eliminating seed oils and vegetable oils from the diet, that's

being really careful with excessive alcohol, artificial sweeteners, colors, preservatives. Basically, the more that you're consuming a standard Western diet, the more damage you do to the blood brain barrier. So a big part of it just comes down to eating clean, real, whole food. You know, and even though based on the genetic variation that you and I were talking about earlier, the type of diet someone eats is going to be

very different amongst populations, meaning some people will do well on a paleo diet, others on a plant-based diet, others on a carnivore diet, et cetera. But generally, most of those diets seem to work pretty well

Because there is a general elimination of processed and packaged foods, artificial sweeteners, eating out of crinkly bags all the time, and a return to a more whole foods approach. Now, if you were to get your genetics tested and maybe do some blood testing,

and maybe some food allergy testing and some hormone testing, you could step back with that data. And this is a lot like I spend half my week just on phone calls with people walking them through their labs and telling them how they're supposed to eat and supplement and exercise based on their values. But you would find with testing that, oh, I'm a good candidate for a paleo diet, or I wouldn't do really well on a keto diet because I don't digest fat well and I have

you know, APOE4E4 gene that dictates higher risk for Alzheimer's when I eat a lot of saturated fat and I've got poor gallbladder function, right? And so that ketogenic diet that really helps, you know, the person sitting across from me isn't really going to help me. So ultimately though, eating whole foods and eating in a relatively unprocessed manner is how you approach the blood-brain barrier piece. And then as far as

The things that you would want to go out of your way to include for a healthy brain, first of all, would be...

what's called DHA and oleic acid. The reason I just said those two things is because the myelin sheaths that line your nerves, that allow a signal to propagate down the nerve and allow your brain to function properly, those are made up primarily of two different fats, DHA, which is dosahexaenoic acid, and oleic acid. You get DHA from...

Things like fish, seeds, nuts, avocados, et cetera, with fish probably being at the top of the totem pole, whether it be fish oil supplementation or a good clean seafood-based diet. You get oleic acid, as the name implies, from fish.

Extra virgin olive oil, that's a great source of oleic acid. Avocado oil has some in there, macadamia nut oil, any of these kind of like stable oils that aren't canola oil or safflower or sunflower oil, those tend to really do well for the oleic acid piece. So really good, clean, healthy fats in the form of fish, seeds, nuts, and vegetables.

When I say seeds and nuts, by the way, not the trail mix from the gas station that's coated with canola oil and cane sugar, just like raw seeds and nuts. And I actually go so far as to like soak them and I'll even sprout them because that's how you unlock a lot of the nutrients in them. And then fish, olive oil, avocado oil, et cetera. All of those are fantastic.

A few other things to consider with the diet would be adequate mineral intake. And so I'm a total salt nerd. I've got Florida cell salt and Kona black salt and Kalima Mexican salt and Celtic salt, which you can find at just about any grocery store. And I salt my food at every meal.

And there's a great book about this called The Salt Fix by Dr. James DeNicolantonio. Research shows that salt is not bad for you unless it's like the isolated sodium chloride I was talking about from table salt. But full-spectrum minerals spread throughout the day in the form of really good electrolytes are fantastic for brain function in addition to those fatty acids that I was talking about. And so, I'm going to talk a little bit about that.

And then the final thing I would think about that will both allow for better neural function and also for a better blood brain barrier is,

would be polyphenols and flavanols. So you hear people say, oh, eat the rainbow, eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and herbs and spices. And there's definitely something to that, right? Blueberries and black raspberries and purple potatoes and these like, you know, green juices and red powders. And a lot of these are fantastic for the brain.

A little bit of a pushback you'll often find, at least in the health sector these days, is people will say, well, I heard plants are bad for you. You know, I heard we're supposed to only eat animals. It is true that plants can be bad for you. Like I live close to the Palouse. You guys are over in Seattle, right? Yes.

Yeah, okay. So you're familiar with like the rolling wheat fields of the Palouse over by Pullman, Washington. If you're just to wander out to one of those fields and just start chewing on a stalk of wheat, you'd get tummy upset because of all the gluten, you know, the lectins, a lot of the digestive distressors that are in that plant. Because unlike animals...

Plants don't have teeth and claws and hooves and an ability to be able to defend themselves. So plants produce chemicals that irritate the gastrointestinal lining of the mammal that eats them. And that's how they survive. A lot of times that causes the mammal to poop out their seeds holes. Those seeds can then propagate. It's just a survival and a defense mechanism built into a plant.

That doesn't mean that you don't eat plants, right? We could take that same stalk of wheat and we could grind it and mill it and wash it and rinse it and soak it and even do a process of say like for sourdough bread fermentation on it. And we could render it very digestible. We could take that bag of,

quinoa from Costco and rinse it and then soak it overnight and then rinse it again before preparing quinoa the next day to get all the soap-like irritants off of the outside of the quinoa that would irritate the gut lining. You can take that giant raw kale smoothie and instead boil and mash and puree the kale to reduce a lot of the oxalates and to make it more digestible. So it's mostly about being

smarter than the plant and knowing how to do things like soaking and sprouting and fermentation to unlock a lot of the nutrients in the plant and to deactivate a lot of the plant defense mechanisms. And when you do that, a diet rich in plants, vegetables, fruits, herbs, and spices tends to be a really great way to get the polyphenols and the flavanols that you need to optimize brain function.

How about supplements? And also, what can we do to increase the absorption rate of vitamins that we do take or even the foods that we ingest so that more of it actually gets into our system? Oh, that is an interesting question. You know...

The nootropics that I talked about earlier, those are all supplements. Those would count as supplements. If you were to throw in some things that wouldn't be considered so-called mind directors, but that would be good for the brain, one I already named, and that's fish oil, anywhere from one to four grams of fish oil daily, preferably taken with a meal to allow for better absorption, that's

Another example would be creatine. Creatine for a long time was thought to be just like the supplement that strength and power athletes use to bench press more weight or something like that. But a lot of recent research has shown that creatine is fantastic for mental function and is particularly good for you if you're sleep deprived. And so about five grams or so of creatine on a daily basis is also really good for the brain.

And if I could tell you one more in addition to fish oil and creatine and some of the nootropics I talked about, you've probably heard of NAD. A lot of people talking about like NAD, also known as NR or NMN. It's a little bit difficult to roll off the tongue, but NAD is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. Okay.

NR is nicotinamide riboside. NMN is nicotinamide mononucleotide. I forget what the N is. I fail. But basically, you hear a lot of like NIA this, NIA that. Well, they're all basically derivatives of what's called niacinamide. And niacinamide

when consumed gets converted into NAD in your body. And that's a very good cellular and DNA protectant, including for the brain. As a matter of fact, it's so good at that, that if you are sleep deprived and you take NAD, preferably combined with creatine, and that's my sleep deprivation hack stack, by the way,

you find that you can perform very similarly to how you'd perform if you weren't sleep deprived. That does, that's not making a case for sleep deprivation. Cause there's all sorts of other things that happen when you don't sleep, but like your collagen degrades and your brain starts to fill with toxins and you know, you start to lose endocrine function and you make too much cortisol, you snack too much cause you have poor appetite control, et cetera. But if we're just talking about like one or two days and you got to get through it,

NAD combined with creatine is fantastic. I would say that with NAD, very similar to what I said about nootropics, there are a few brands I could vouch for out there that do a good job with NAD. There's one company called Biostack Labs. They have a good one. Qualia, that same company that makes the Qualia Mine nootropic that I talked about, they have an NAD. And then there's one that's also pretty popular. I think this is one that...

I think possibly David Sinclair was involved with the research for this one. It's called TruNiagen. That's another popular one. But basically, you're just looking for the active ingredient niacinamide. And so NAD can also be really fantastic. So I would say top three supplements would be fish oil, creatine, and NAD.

We all know that sleep's important to get enough of, but is there such a thing as getting too much sleep? And if so, would you recommend setting an alarm so that we don't sleep in too late? Well, that depends. I mean, you know, like...

Probably heard of like Tom Brady and Michael Phelps, for example, super athletes who will sleep 10 hours a night. And I used to be in, I did 13 Ironman triathlons and I was a professional Spartan racer. And I've certainly had times of my life competing as a professional athlete. I was also a collegiate tennis player where I knew that I needed a lot of sleep.

And it would take nine, 10 hours sometimes for me to wake up with that refreshed feeling. So if you're beating up your body on a regular basis, and I know your primary audience is a bunch of pro athletes, but even like somebody who's crossfitting a couple of times a day or something like that, you are going to need closer to kind of like that eight to nine hour sleep time.

Most people do pretty well on seven to nine hours. You are right that there's some data showing that exceeding nine hours can actually lead to increased all

all cause risk of mortality. Something about just laying in bed, huddled up under the sheets seems to be bad for people. You know, it's back to that, that sage verse from the Bible is it goes up to like a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the eyes and poverty comes upon you like a lion or something along this, but it's from the book of Proverbs in the Bible. I think about that sometimes when I'm laying in bed underneath the covers of

snuggled up with my wife, knowing I got enough sleep, but I kind of feel like staying in bed. I think about that verse and that usually rips me out of bed in the morning to avoid the little sleep, the little slumber and the poverty that comes along with it. But anyways,

That's why I really like a lot of these sleep trackers. You know, I wear this, the aura ring. I know we're not a video podcast, but I'm holding up this ring right now. That's on my finger. There's another one called the whoop. You know, Garmin makes one. There's there's a lot of different sleep tracking wearables out there.

And these will really allow you to know within a few weeks of use, what sleep time is allowing you to have adequate readiness, adequate nervous system repair and recovery, and an ability to be able to feel good and operate during the day. Now, so it varies. I can tell you right now that I break a lot of the rules personally when it comes to sleep.

So I only sleep about six to a maximum of seven hours a night because I like to get up very early.

before the texts are coming in, but before the rest of the world is awake and before people are emailing me, because I know that's the time when the house is quiet, that I can get deep work done, spiritual time in like prayer and devotions, you know, a sauna session, a cold soak, a workout. So, you know, I can easily, by the time I got to be on my, on my Ben Greenfield life team huddle at 945, you know, I've often gotten a good five hours of, of productivity in,

Now, my hack for that is that I'm a big fan of a nap or a siesta in the afternoon. So I actually clear my post-lunch period from about 1.30 to 2.30 p.m. to not have meetings or consults or anything like that. And I typically will duck away into the basement where I've got some relaxing materials to

to lay on. And I've usually got some kind of sounds that will lull me off to sleep or an essential oil diffuser or, you know, different meditation devices. And I always have that time carved out because I'm

If you can take a good quality nap or siesta, that can give you the equivalent of a full 90-minute sleep cycle in as little as 20 to 30 minutes. So you do the math. Like if I sleep six hours a night and I get in, let's say, like a good solid 30, 35-minute meditation session after lunch, I'm giving myself 60 to 90 minutes every day of extra time.

So that I realized not everybody can just like crawl under their desk and go to sleep after lunch. But if you have the option for an afternoon nap, come out with a slightly shorter sleep period, that works really well. If you're one of those people who just likes to crush the morning.

Is that because typically when we go into a nap mode, we go into more deep sleep than we would do at nighttime in a regular? Well, if you look at sleep spindles on a good nap, you just go through all of the different sleep cycles, but more quickly.

So rather than taking 90 minutes to get through them all, you can get through them all in 30 minutes. There are certain things that can accelerate that. I'll give you an example. I have an app called NuCalm. And NuCalm has 30, 40, 50, 60-minute sessions that will make you feel like you've slept several hours. It's spelled N-U-Calm. I have a little wearable that vibrates.

vibrates and it lulls you off into sleep. It's called an Apollo. I wear that around my ankle and it really helps me get into a relaxed state when I go from like emails and lunch to siesta. All right. I got to knock myself out fast. Another example, kind of like the opposite of smart drugs or nootropics would be a lot of times with lunch, I'll take a little bit of CBD and a little bit of reishi mushroom extract. And I've experimented with a lot of things that would allow you to have a nap and

after lunch, but not wake up groggy. And if I do a little bit of CBD and reishi with lunch, I can get a really effective nap in after lunch and then be able to get up and get back to the workday effectively.

Great. I noticed that you're wearing some yellow sunglasses. Tell us about those. Yeah, the blue light blocking glasses. I used to call them birth control for your head because they, for a long time, were not very fashionable things to wear. But there are some companies now that make them.

pretty good looking fashionable glasses that will block the bright overhead fluorescent light that I was talking about earlier that can lead to retinal irritation, brain fog, even poor eyesight and early onset of myopia. So I have two pairs of these glasses. I have the one I'm wearing right now, which is a more yellowish pair that I'll wear in the daytime to block the glare, the backlight from coming off of screens. And

And then usually during or after dinner, I put on a pair that's red light that will block a lot of the bright lights that would tend to suppress your melatonin production and result in poor sleep or poor onset of sleep. So, I mean, that's a very, very inexpensive hack, faster than fixing all the bulb cans in your entire house. And so there's lots of companies out there. These are made by RAW, R-A, RAW Optics, right?

And there's several brands out there for blue light blockers, but I think it's a pretty good investment, especially if you are working on screens or under fluorescent lights a lot.

Yeah, I have a pair of yellow blue light blocking glasses. And I definitely notice when I'm looking at the screen, it's much easier for me to doze off when I'm wearing them. Yeah, that's the problem, actually, is like I'll sometimes be like, well, I want to if I take my sons to a movie, I'm like, I want to go to sleep after the movie. So I'm wearing my red light glasses to the movie. But then you get sleepy during the movie. They're that effective. So it's surprising. Like once you get them and you put them on.

At night, you're like, oh, this is how it's supposed to feel when the sun sets and I'm not exposed to a bunch of light. And of course you can use that as a hack too, right? Like if you, um, I'll give you an example. Let's say that you are waking up way earlier than you want to wake up. Like you're one of those people who wakes up at three 45 with racing thoughts, uh,

You don't have the luxury of an afternoon nap and you know, you're going to be toast by like 2 PM. If you get up, like you're just going to be living on cold brew. Well, what you can do is you can shift your circadian rhythm forward within just about two or three days. And the way that you do that is in the morning, um,

You don't necessarily have to lay there in bed waiting until, I don't know, 5.30 or whenever you actually do want to get up. You can get up if you want to, but don't turn on any lights in your house. I actually have a red light headlamp that I'll use for this, especially when I travel and I'm in a different time zone, just a cheapo red light headlamp on Amazon. So the trick here, the idea is you're restricting how much light you're getting exposed to. You're wearing the blue light blocking glasses most people wear at night instead in the morning.

And when the actual time comes around, when you actually want to start waking up, you take off your blue light blocking glasses, you flip on all the lights, you take your computer and your phone out of night mode, and you blast yourself with light. And that actually will shift your circadian rhythm forward to allow you to start waking up

later on. It's kind of something that comes in handy, especially if, you know, like I travel a lot and sometimes I'll come home from being on the East coast and I just don't want to wake up that early. So I'll use light as a circadian cue to reshift my circadian rhythm. Wow. That's an interesting hack. Uh, speaking of which, um, the subject of biohacking is,

Do you know, are there any ways to objectively measure one's mental sharpness like we do in other areas with wearable technology, blood tests or brain scans?

Yeah, there's kind of two ways to think about this. One would be kind of the cheap at-home version. There's an app that you can get. There's a few different versions of it. It's called a CNS tap test. That will measure reaction time, central nervous system tap test. It's a series of quick taps that you do with your thumb on your phone.

There's another one for memory and recall called NBAC. You can get a free NBAC app and a free tap test app. And both of those will allow you to kind of like do a quick check-in at home.

If you want a slightly fancier version, you could make an argument that if you regularly use an app like Lumosity or Brainscape, for example, that you could engage in those brain games and see if your performance improves or decreases if you're playing them consistently. But then to actually do what would be considered more medical imaging of the brain,

There are a few things you can do. There's one test that will tell you your blood flow to the brain. Dr. Daniel Amen is a doctor who has made this test pretty well known. It's called a spec scan.

And it's interesting because that blood brain barrier I was talking about is related to the actual blood flow that's able to go into the brain. And there are areas of the brain that can have poor blood flow. THC would be an example of something that's horrific for blood flow to the brain, for example. And so a

A spec scan will show you your blood flow. That's a good test. Another really good one is a QEEG, which is an electrical mapping of the brain where you wear some electrodes on your head. There's some companies trying to do a home version of that. I haven't been impressed with many of those that I've received yet, even though they're getting closer and closer to it being just a pull-on cap where you can do an electrical test of your brainwave production, like your alpha,

your beta, your delta, and your theta brainwaves and those brainwave ratios, because that also will be a good indicator of cognitive function. So spec scan and QEG scan, both of those are pretty good for a more professional quantification of mental function.

Excuse the last interruption here. This is Tessa. We hope you're enjoying this episode so far. If you love the podcast, please give Chat with Traders the best review you can on whatever platform you're listening from. This will help us to keep the episodes coming. Also, if you haven't subscribed to our email list, please hop on to chatwithtraders.com and click on subscribe so we can keep you posted of information that may be of importance. Thank you. Now back to the chat with our guest.

Types of exercise. If one does, say, headstands or gets on the inversion table and has the blood flow all the way to the brain, does that help or have any effect? Or are there any types of exercise that would help mental performance? I love this question. It's all about popping the pills, right? And by the way, this might be the last question that I have time to go into, just so you know. But absolutely. There's actually a book.

It's a pretty, it's an older book. It's called Spark by author John Rady that talks about all the different ways in which exercise can be beneficial to the brain. Now it turns out that low intensity aerobic cardiovascular function is fantastic for mental focus and for general brain health.

However, if you look at something like strength training or high intensity interval training, that seems to be very beneficial for producing a lot of what is called brain derived neurotrophic factor and vascular endothelial growth factor. Both of these act like miracle growth for the brain. And so strength training and high intensity interval training, in addition to cardio, should be part of your brain training program.

There's even hacks that you can do. Probably the most popular is what's called blood flow restriction training. And this is where you wrap bands around the arms and the legs and

and work out and you actually concentrate a bunch of lactic acid in your muscle tissue when you do this obviously it's a little more of an advanced exercise technique but not only does it fool your muscles into thinking that they're lifting heavy weights without you having to lift heavy weights and so this is like the ultimate hotel room workout tip because you can work out with just push-ups and squats and things like that when you take the bands off

You get a rush of lactate into the rest of your body and a huge surge in that brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So I'm a fan of, oh, I should mention one other thing.

dysregulation appears to be really good for blood flow to the brain as well. And also when it comes to cold, the health of the vagus nerve, which is a very important part of your nervous system that can assist with cognitive function and stress control. And so I would say that heat and cold, like

like a sauna practice and a cryotherapy or a cold water practice would also be really good for the brain. So what this would look like is, for example, your morning could be those things that are a little less hard because the body's more primed for hard stuff later on in the day. It's actually about between 4 and 6 p.m. when testosterone peaks and grip strength peaks and reaction time peaks. So it's better to do the harder stuff between about 4 and 6 p.m. in the afternoon.

If you can. And in the morning, do like an aerobic walk or a bike ride to the coffee shop or to work or a sauna session with a quick cold plunge afterwards. And then do your work day. And then afterward, do a little bit of strength training or high intensity interval training. If,

you don't have the time to do something like that, then you could just alternate like one day, your recovery day, you could do a walk with the sauna session and some cold. The next day, do some strength training and some interval training. But there's different ways that each of these different forms of training seem to stimulate the brain. So I'm a fan of really all five low intensity cardio, strength training,

high intensity cardio intervals, sauna and cold. And those would be like the five forms of movement to engage in unless you're going to take into account sporting activities. And I'll give you a little quiz here, Ian. What do you think are the sports that you can play that lend themselves most to optimize brain function with age?

Uh, I would think something I had in coordination, I don't know, maybe tennis or, uh, I'm just guessing something that, uh, requires you to focus in on something. Okay. Well, you nailed it. I'm glad you didn't say football. I would have failed you, uh, whether European or American football is not that great for the head. Turns out that anything that merges left and right brain hemispheric activity, uh,

Like racket sports are way high up there as is swimming. So if you want to choose the two sports that would be best for your brain long-term, it would be tennis, pickleball, racquetball, any racket sport and swimming. Oh, wow. Great. So in summary, if you could only pick three actions to take to improve mental performance, which three would you choose? I would say go after the low hanging fruit.

And it would be aerobic exercise, cold, and ruthlessly eliminating vegetable oils from your diet. Those would be the top three that I think just about anybody can do. So what do I mean by that?

Get one of these activity trackers and shoot for 10,000 steps a day. A lot of people think they're very active and they look at their activity tracker and they're like, crap, I took 3,000 steps. But it's possible. Take your phone calls while you're walking. Get an office treadmill like I have here. Go for walks. It's just so good for the brain. And it also takes you away from technology quite a bit.

Cold shower, for example, every morning, just quick cold shower. Easy way to do it. You don't have to buy like a $4,000 cold tub, but get yourself exposed to the cold on a regular basis because that's fantastic for flushing the brain. And then just look at food labels and even ask at restaurants and try and avoid rancid processed seed oils because they're so bad for the cell membranes and the blood brain barrier. So canola oil would

would be the biggest, you know, safflower oil, sunflower oil, you know, French fries, fried foods, fried chicken. Be super careful with that in your diet and your brain will definitely thank you. Great. Fantastic. Well, Ben, thank you very much for coming on chat with traders. Well, thanks for having me. These are great questions. You got my brain smoking, man. So how can our listeners get in touch with you?

I'm pretty easy to find. bengreenfieldlife.com is my website. If you search for my name on Amazon, you can find any of the books I've written about a lot of these topics. And then I'm on all the socials as well. But you can find all that if you go to bengreenfieldlife.com. Great. Fantastic. Yeah, I've certainly very much enjoyed the podcast that you've done since I started listening to you seven years ago.

Oh, wow. You're loyal. You're right up there with my mom. Congratulations, man. You get the loyalty award. Great. Thanks, man. All right. Thanks. Yeah.

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