“Weave Gratitude Into Your Life”
This episode is all about biohacking for self-improvement, eliminating stress, and enhancing your mental health.
Ben Greenfield is a human performance consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including the widely popular titles Beyond Training, Boundless, Fit Soul, the Spiritual Disciplines Journal and the Boundless Cookbook. Former collegiate tennis, water polo, and volleyball player, bodybuilder, 13-time Ironman triathlete, and professional obstacle course racer, Ben has been voted by the NSCA as America’s top Personal Trainer and by Greatist as one of the top 100 Most Influential People In Health And Fitness. Ben hosts the highly popular fitness, nutrition, and wellness website BenGreenfieldFitness.com, a site with over a million monthly visitors, featuring articles, podcasts, and product reviews from Ben.
Ben is an advisor, investor, and board member of multiple corporations in the health and fitness industry, and is also the founder of KION, a nutritional supplements company that combines time-honored superfoods with modern science to allow human beings to achieve peak performance, defy aging, and live an adventurous, fulfilling joyful and limitless life.
Ben resides in Spokane, Washington with his wife, Jessa, and twin boys, River and Terran, where he enjoys worshiping God and praising Christ, swinging kettlebells, fiction, guitar, ukulele, spearfishing, bowhunting, plant foraging, and cooking.
In this podcast, Biohacking Mental Health, we cover:
- The best way to get started with biohacking
- All you need to know about upgrading your brain and your body
- How psychedelic drugs could be used in the mental health space
- About reducing stress through meditation and journaling
- Other powerful biohacks that you can start today
Examples of Biohacking Technologies
Breathwork will increase oxygen delivery to the brain. The Wim Hof protocol is something that many people will do to improve blood flow to the brain or oxygenation to neural tissue. Other brain hacks can improve your mental performance. An old-school natural form of growing or increasing brain performance is playing musical instruments or learning new skills. Haptic technology is another biohack that uses vibration to trigger specific vagus nerve responses or brainwaves. The Apollo Neuro provides scientifically sound touch therapy that you wear on your ankle or wrist; it uses sound to trigger a specific brainwave response. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy is another biohack that Ben recommends. It is traditionally used in medicine for inflammation or triggering stem cell production. This therapy can also elicit certain brain waves, especially near the head.
Where To Get Started With Biohacking
How do you get started with biohacking? Well, it’s simply a process of combining experimentation with just taking a glance at the literature. Read about what research has to say about the efficacy of any of these compounds. Usually, the manufacturers’ website is inaccurate or overblown. Don’t just go to the manufacturers’ website and see if that thing is marketed for anxiety. Instead, go to a third-party website like PubMed. Some great folks are out there in the alternative health space; they are putting out excellent information. The more of a compound isn’t necessarily better. For instance, taking more of a particular compound for anxiety may make you more anxious or sleepy.
Revisiting The War on Drugs
Both political and racist ideologies heavily influenced the war on drugs. We need to make sure that we look at the motivation behind the common beliefs about certain compounds such as cannabis. In the case of cannabis, it has been so heavily researched in the past decade that it’s really no secret it does have a lot of beneficial properties. When properly used and combined with many other endocannabinoids more naturally, cannabis is excellent for everything from anxiety to sleep to inflammation. Modafinil or Adderall are very effective; they flood your neurotransmitters with serotonin or dopamine. These pharmaceuticals are great for short-term use. Unfortunately, long-term use can lead to dopamine sensitivities or serotonin syndrome.
The Difference Between Good and Bad Addictions
People drink coffee because it’s addictive. Just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it’s wrong or harmful. Ben is okay because he feels better with coffee than he does without coffee. For Ben, the pros outweigh the cons. Nicotine has often been thrown under the bus for possible health risks. However, the nicotine isn’t harmful; instead, it’s the way you are getting the nicotine that is harmful. Nicotine is very good for focus, particularly when combined with caffeine. Pure nicotine in isolation isn’t that bad for you.
Can Psychedelic Drugs Heal?
Taking psilocybin, using MDMA, or Ayahuasca is not a compelling long-term strategy for reducing addictive potential. Ketamine would also fall into that category. After going through a journey or a treatment with those types of medicines, you typically see a reduction in desire for your substance of choice afterward. In many cases, it’s because you feel like you’re hungover. MDMA is neurotoxic, and they do cause effects that feel very similar to a hangover. Instead, these medicines have to be combined with some integration to be fully effective. Before using these medicines, people need to do a lot of work with their life. You should work on spiritual disciplines such as fasting, meditation, prayer, worship, community, service, and relationships.
Meditation and Journaling: Combine These Biohacks
Meditation is one of those things that would fall into the category of something fabulous to stack with some other biohacks. Meditation is a fantastic way similar to a yoga practice or gratitude practice to lower anxiety, stress, and blood pressure. Plus, meditation will train one to have more mindfulness and presence in other life activities. Another great biohack is journaling. The daily process of self-examination allows each day of your life to become better and better gradually.
Dr. Mindy
From my perspective, what I’m seeing and this isn’t just, this is across many age groups, we have a lot of people dealing with high amounts of anxiety specifically right now, it’s almost like a post post pandemic, PTSD. And there’s a lot of great resources when we look at the biohacking world. So I really want to dive into nootropics. I want to pick your brain on plant medicine, breath work, what tools we have to be able to help people with anxiety.
Ben Greenfield
All right, can you pick my nose too, while you’re at it, just because I get a lot of congestion today and clean things up? No,
Dr. Mindy
I can’t do that. So so let’s start with a nootropic. Give me Give me a definition between those three, what’s the difference between like a nootropic plant medicine and then like a biohack? Like, like a like ice bath or breathing technique?
Ben Greenfield
Well, you know, the difference from just I guess a pure semantic standpoint, is painting with a pretty broad brush. And a new tropic is generally considered something that is a little bit more natural, or at least naturally derived, you know, a non synthetic or laboratory synthesized chemical, you know, for example, there’s there’s one company up in Canada, that just developed a product I believe, is called ft 401. That is a shorter acting faster onset synthetically lab created version of of psilocybin the active ingredients in psilocybin, which one would normally harness from a fungi grown in nature, right. And so, really, the mechanism is pretty similar, you compare the synthetic versus the more natural substance, but many people would paint the, the lab based synthetic version as for like a smart drug, or a pharmaceutical and the fungal derived version, as more of a more of a nootropic. Or you could look get something like Morning Glory seeds, which contain like a with Serge amide, very similar to LSD, or more appropriately put, I guess, LS A, which a lot of people would use, as opposed to like psilocybin. One would use that for like neurogenesis or neuroplasticity, typically, someone use something like LSA or LSD for like a hyper focus hyper productive state. And yeah, you could chew on Morning Glory seeds, which was actually kind of a thing. You know, people were ordering Morning Glory seeds at Home Depot, because they couldn’t afford or find LSD. And doing that instead, you know, preceding YOUR OWN RISK work. It can with the side effects being that because, you know, a lot of plants as you probably know, contain different amounts of plant defense mechanisms, particularly the seeds of many plants, because they want to be pooped out by by mammals to be able to grow elsewhere. You know, plants don’t have teeth or boobs or claws to develop their own robust defense mechanisms, you have to deal with some nausea and some gastric upset if you decide to shortcut your way to an LSD experience by buying Morning Glory seeds at Home Depot. But that’s, that’s another example. You know, or you could look at, at some of the more popular versions of synthetic smart drugs like Adderall, or Modafinil, also known as Provigil, those typically aren’t classified as nootropics. Because, again, those are like, synthetically created chemicals. Whereas, you know, a similar thing in the nootropics department would be like, you know, ginkgo biloba, or, or kratom, or, you know, certain strains of Kava, or even like caffeine from from coffee, or coffee berry extracts. And so, you know, the one thing I should name here, when comparing something like smart drugs to nootropics is just because something synthetic or lab derived doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy. I mean, in many cases, the molecular structure can be quite similar. It’s just that in from for, for definitive purposes, nootropics are a lot of times considered to be something that’s directly derived with very little processing, or, or, or tinkering from a from a natural source. Whereas a smart drug would be something more synthetic or as the name implies, something might, one might consider to fall into the umbrella of like a pharmaceutical or a drug. And then of course, we could, we could basically just say, Well, what if you don’t want to put any substance into your body. Or you want to experiment with methods of triggering some of the same types of like word recall, memory, focus, improve cognition, that one would normally get from a nootropic, or a smart drug. And instead do so with technology, right with biohack, which you alluded to. And so then we’ve got a whole different class of technology, that’s not like an oral substance or, or like a transdermally applied substance, and is instead
using a different strategy to trigger those types of, of cognitive responses. So examples of that would be not only like, older school practices, like let’s say, breath work, right to increase oxygen delivery to the brain, something like pranayama breath work more popularly, I guess, known as something like a Wim Hof Protocol, or Holotropic breathwork. Or, or, you know, intermittent hypoxic training as some free divers would do. But also many people in the bio set hacking sector will do to improve
like blood flow to the brain or oxygenation to, to neural tissue. And you could also consider old school tactics to also be things like playing aerobic games for the brain. There’s one fantastic author, it goes way back named Arlene Taylor, who writes books about brain aerobics, or, you know, playing Sudoku or crossword puzzles, or, you know, this is a my, my chosen form of, I suppose, a more old school natural form of growing or, or increasing brain performance playing musical instruments or learning new musical instruments. And you could also kind of go from there all the way up into a lot of these modern technologies, with examples of those being things like haptic technology, meaning using vibration to trigger certain responses in the vagus nerve or in brainwave examples of that would be like the Apollo device, which one would wear around their ankle or their wrist which can be placed in two settings like relaxation, or or focus or social mobility, and that uses sound to trigger a certain brainwave response. Other haptic based devices, such as the sensate device, or the electro core device, would be placed on the temples, or the side of the neck, or the sternum or the collarbone, to trigger the vagus nerve to allow for increased levels of focus, relaxation, or better sleep or what have you. Another example, as opposed to to haptic sensation, your vibratory sensation would be to use something like like a magnetic impulse to trigger the brain into certain brainwaves or to mimic what molecules would do on the cell receptor. Examples of that would be like the happy device, which is a coil that one would wear around the head, or around the neck that uses a magnetic impulse to simulate the same type of molecular action that would occur on the cell in response to something like MDMA or caffeine or nicotine or CBD, which I find just fascinating that you can actually do that. And I’ve used that device quite successfully for those purposes and found it to not fully mimic the effects of something like nicotine or caffeine but come surprisingly close, which is very interesting considering you’re not actually consuming said substance. Another example would be like pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, which is traditionally used in medicine for things like inflammation or triggering of stem cell production, but basically can also elicit certain brain waves, especially when placed near the head. You know, there are researchers like Dr. William Pollack, who has developed a device called the flux pulse, which is a very small PMF device which you can place near the occipital bone in the back of the head and on a certain setting, it could trigger you know, if you have like 10 hertz, right, it could trigger Alpha brainwave activity, or at a setting like, like 20 hertz, more of a beta brainwave activity or at a lower setting, more relaxing Theta or Delta frequency. And so those are just a few examples of biohacking technologies. And many people will, will stack or combine many, many of these types of things like, you know, let this wouldn’t necessarily be relevant to let’s say, focus or, or mental energy per se, but more relevant to relaxation, like I A lot of times we’ll take an afternoon siesta, and all all go as far as like put the Apollo on my ankle and put that in relaxation. So I’m getting haptic sensations that are shifting into a relaxing state. And then I’ll put the happy around my neck and relaxation phase to use more of the magnetic impulse to relax me. And then maybe I’ll drink a little bit of Rishi tea with lunch as an adaptogen to shift me into relaxation. And so and then once I once I settled out from ICS, I might do five minutes of like, a four count in eight count out breath work pattern. And so I’ve got like, basically, a nootropic in the form of reishi mushroom, a couple of biohacking technologies in the form of, you know, the Apollo and the happy. And then just, you know, an old school breathwork protocol to shift myself into relaxation. And so that that’s what I really like, is to figure out ways to creatively stack many of these types of compounds for free, even more amplified effects.
Dr. Mindy
I love stacking bio hacks. I think that’s a love and I love the way you did it, where you do it with some a nootropic and then you do it with a biohacking device. If if we’re talking to somebody who has anxiety, and which seems to be I feel like the majority of the people I talk to these days, where do you even start? You know, do we look at things like kava and say, well, Kava is going to be a little more subtle. And then when you move into CBD with THC, and then you can move into, you know, psilocybin, like, it seems like how do you know where the door in is for you?
Ben Greenfield
Well, for many people, it’s it’s simply a process of combining experimentation with just taking a glance at the literature, and what it has to say about the efficacy of any of these compounds for let’s say, acting as an as an anxiolytic, or something that would de stress you. You know, and it’s interesting, because I was just looking at a research study this morning, showing that the, you know, a surprising amount of the information that’s found, and perhaps this isn’t, you know, groundbreaking news to folks on the manufacturers website is inaccurate or overblown. And you know, that this was a pretty massive study of a whole host of different herbal compounds and supplements, many of which would fall into the category of what we’re talking about. So don’t just go to the manufacturers website and see if that thing is marketed for anxiety, I instead recommend going to a more neutral third party website, whether that be PubMed or whether that be something like examine examine is a great resource for looking at what type of studies actually exist, that are either peer reviewed or done on humans, or show some efficacy in terms of the appropriate dosages for for getting the effects that you’re looking for. There are also people who have put together really great classes, you know, one of my friends who’s an Australian naturopath, Lucas ayun, he has a whole he calls it a masterclass. You know, I interviewed him a few months ago on my podcast, and I actually, after interviewing him took his so called nootropics masterclass where he unpacks over a series of about like 30 different videos and modules, all the different nootropics out there, you know, what combines well what to use for different situations, etc. And so there’s, there’s some really great folks out there in our space who are just putting out really good information about this stuff, not to toot my own horn but you know, I do have a whole chapter in my book boundless about nootropics and, and smart drugs and biohacking technologies specifically relevant to the brain. But what’s important to understand, I would say related specifically to your question that I’d throw in there is that a more is not better. And in fact, many things that cause an anxiety reducing effect that lower dosages can actually make one either more anxious, or excessively sleepy at higher dosages, like a few examples of that would be like a 10 microgram dose of something like LSD or LSA, in many cases will give people like this relaxed, like alpha brainwave focus that isn’t too jittery or excitatory and then, you know, double that 20 microgram dose and, you know, all you want to do is like do jumping jacks and burpees and clean your house you feel like you’re on crack cocaine. You know, another example would be CBD, right CBD and dosages anywhere for most people for about 10 to 20 milligrams can cause you to to have that relaxed focus and have an anxiety reducing effects. But at higher dosages, it’ll just kind of knock you on your ass, but it was just good to know, you know, for a night of sleep, typically, an appropriate dose of CBD is like 200 to 400 milligrams, whereas for daytime relaxed focus, it’s 10 to 20 milligrams. So there’s some, some subtle nuances as far as dosage is concerned. So more is not better. That’s definitely something to think about when you’re looking at these compounds. And then also, you know, different things will fall into different categories I mentioned reishi mushroom extract, as being an adaptogen. And one of the characteristics of an adaptogen like, say, Rishi, kava falls into that category.
Another example would be like Lion’s Mane extracts, you you can actually, if you need energy, because it’s an adaptogen get energy from those types of compounds. Whereas if you’re really wired up, and you need more relaxation, they seem to modulate the body into a state of relaxation. And so what works for your neighbor to take an afternoon siesta might make you feel hyperfocused after lunch, you know, and so, yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. And, and this dictates that there’s a certain degree of self experimentation that’s necessary as well preferably starting at lower dosages. And or going to any of these types of you know, master classes or online references or research based websites. Um, you know, if he if you were to go to my website, for example, and type in Rishi or type in kava, or type in kratom, you typically find some type of long form podcast or article that I’ve done on a lot of these compounds, we can kind of take a dive and, and look into it a little bit more. So, so yeah, getting started is, you know, the, it’s just like a lot of fields in biohacking. biohackers traditionally, or people who do engage in a great deal of either immersive research or self experimentation that often comes before much human clinical research has been done. And most of the biohacking you know, websites you’ll find out there are rife with anecdotal references, and people stories, but not a whole lot of actual research. Because A, in many cases, biohackers are considered to be like pioneers, who sometimes can even be a little bit less cautious about what they’re putting into their bodies, you know, they probably would have been the people back in the day who were whatever, whatever you call, like the taste testers who were tasting the king’s wine to make sure it wasn’t poisoned so that the Kingdom die, you know, it’s a type of Java biomar Hacker might have had back in the day, let’s see what this does. And then also biohackers tend to tend to stack things. And when you look at multimodal approaches and health, they’re very difficult to do human clinical research on, you know, if you look at, let’s give an example, not necessarily in the category that we’re talking about, but say, Dale Bredesen, who wrote the book, the end of Alzheimer’s, has demonstrated many, many case studies in his book of reversal, or pretty significant control of the onset of something like dementia or Alzheimer’s. But the multimodal approach includes everything from like, you know, near infrared light to high dose fish oil to ketones to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, and you aren’t going to see that easily research in a traditional research study simply because there’s too many variables to control and same thing for like the afternoon nap I described. Right? I don’t anticipate anyone anytime soon doing a relaxation study on what happens when you combine like a happy with an Apollo with Rishi with your breath work. And yeah, and so, you know, just just the fact that that biohacking also often involves a lot of stacks, again dictates that there’s there’s some amount of self experimentation and self exploration that’s necessary.
Dr. Mindy
Yeah, I 100% agree on the biohacking part and that you just have to under for me, I found understanding the concept and then self experimentation is really where it’s at. Where where I get stuck, and this may be something that I’m really working on opening my mind to is something let’s take something like cannabis. So when I grew up, you know, the thought was if you smoked marijuana in the growing brain, especially that you would lose your motivation and and that it was damaging to the brain. Then I at 4045, I sat in a lecture where I learned about the endocannabinoid system. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like we’re actually made for cannabis or we have cells in our body that are neurons that want cannabis. And then I started to really open my mind to understanding something like CBD and THC do are we are we needing a fresh look at some of these old theories we have about what we would call your brain on drugs.
Ben Greenfield
Well, the war on drugs, as you probably know, and as many people are now aware of was heavily influenced by both political and racist ideologies, as well as pharmaceutical lobbying, to vilify compounds such as cannabis as being something traditionally used by, you know, crime ridden community like, like, as a way to, to, to, to vilify, like the black or the Hispanic communities, or, as a way to allow for the influx of pharmaceutical compounds that were more profitable for pharmaceutical companies than something like cannabis to be able to gain a stronger foothold. And so when you look at like the Nixon administration, or the Reagan administration, or the war on drugs, you know, a great deal of that wasn’t necessarily based on research on the compounds themselves, but instead on political and, and, and racist and financial influences. And so it’s, um, it’s one of those things where you are correct that we, we do need to make sure that we look at the motivation behind the common beliefs about certain compounds, such as cannabis, but I do think that in the case of cannabis, it has been so heavily revisited in the past decade, that it’s really no secret that it’s, um, that it actually does have a lot of beneficial properties, that high levels of isolated THC, which we most commonly associate with the use of marijuana, at least right now we do even though I think that in 10 years, it’ll just be, you know, considered a medicine in one’s cabinet that might fall into the same category is like, you know, honey, or sardines. Um, the, the idea is that those high amounts of THC can be problematic for, for gray matter in the brain for word recall, for sleep architecture. And that’s simply a result of isolating one compound from a plant that is probably better combined in a synergistic matter with many of the other cannabinoids in the plant like CBN, or CBG, or CBD. And so yeah, so the traditional use of marijuana, for the high THC content simply to get high is something that I think you could justifiably say, especially it appears for people who are under the approximate age of 18, to be not so great for the nervous system. But when when properly used and combined with many of the other endocannabinoids in a more natural way. Yeah, cannabis for everything from anxiety, to sleep to inflammation to even things like creativity can be fantastic. And so, yeah, I think that that also alludes to the idea that, you know, back to what I was saying about synthetics versus nootropics. In some cases, the the natural version that is still in as close to a state as how we would find it in nature as possible, is a little bit safer, and in my opinion, more favorable than some of these synthetic derivatives or the more concentrated isolates. You know, and so if you look at
straying away from cannabis, at some of these smart drugs or synthetics, like Modafinil, or Adderall, for example, they are, they’re very efficacious. They’re like sledgehammers in terms of flooding, the the synaptic cleft between your nerves or your your nerve cells with high amounts of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, or dopamine, and so they’re very effective short term, but long term use can lead to things like dopamine and sensitivities, or serotonin syndrome, or are very, very similar effects, as one might experience went on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. And so you need to proceed with caution with using things like that. And that’s not to say they don’t have a time in place. Right, Mindy? Sophie So I’m going to, if I’ve got an international flight to Tokyo from Seattle, and and I need to speak at a conference in Tokyo at 9am, and I’m arriving at midnight, by the time we get to my hotel is 2am. And I can take like a three to four hour nap in my hotel, and then got to be on stage, you know, a half hour after I get up, that’s certainly a time when I’ll use Modafinil or I’ll use a, a more powerful wake promoting agents. I also, you know, like I just finished recording an audio book for one of the books, that’s, that’s coming out for me in the spring. And I can’t like fabricate extra hours in the day to record an audio book like that. And so, you know, for that book, I got up at 3am each day for a month, and just spent the first couple hours of my day recording the audio book. And so, you know, I would use about a half tablet of Modafinil during that period of time. But, you know, it also is something that kind of drastically affected my sleep architecture for a week or two after that, and also resulted in things like you know, irritability, dopamine and sensitivities and appetite dysregulation, etc. So you got to kind of rob Peter to pay Paul. But you know, I’m not opposed to the use of synthetics or smart drugs. It’s just that for those, usually you need to accept the fact that there’s going to be some kind of a biological trade off
Dr. Mindy
a downside. Yeah. And an addictive piece. I mean, that’s I’ve been hearing a lot lately, about people using nicotine gum for creativity. And I look at that and go, gosh, that’s a highly an addictive substance and I have an addictive personality. So I’m probably going to shy away from that. Do you feel like you have to know yourself before you enter into some of these things that may have a neurochemical switch in you that you’re now addicted to that new neural chemical profile,
Ben Greenfield
there are certain genetic snips that one can look at that would dictate whether or not something has high addictive potential or is going to be even effective for you like, like, you can actually get a, I believe it’s called a neuropharmacology analysis, I think doctors data might even do one that looks at your genetic snips, in response to a wide variety of, in this case, pharmaceutical drugs to dictate whether you are a responder or a non responder to those. And there are other tests, even, you know, such as taking your 23andme results and exporting those to a website such as, you know, genetic Genie, or it used to be called Prometheus, I forget what it’s what it’s called now. But you can you could look at your genetic snips and see if you’re a responder or non responder to things like caffeine, nicotine, etc. The addictive potential and the research on the addictive potential from a genetic standpoint, is something that’s less established. Some of the things like opiates and cocaine that are more problematic from a from an epidemiological health standpoint, are things that you can find pretty decent data on, as far as genetic snips that you might have, that would make you more susceptible to addiction to those compounds. But then there are other things that just painting with a broad brush for most humans are just addictive period. Nicotine, for example, would be one, caffeine, caffeine would be another and so with compounds like that, I think that the key is awareness that something is addictive, so that you can mindfully modulate your intake of that substance and recognize if you have developed some kind of an addiction, and be able to use a smaller and smaller dosages over time to wean yourself off of that, or just live with the fact that if you’re going to use it, you know, kind of like coffee, it’s like people like one Okay, use coffee, cuz it’s addictive, I don’t think because something is addictive, necessarily means it’s wrong or harmful. Right. And I think I think that that, you know, for me personally, I’m, I’m okay with the fact that I feel better in the morning with a cup of coffee than I do without and that could indicate some amount of addiction or attachment to that compound. But I’m okay with that. Because for me, the pros outweigh the cons, you know, very similar with something like nicotine. Nicotine is often been thrown under the bus for, you know, the possible health risks, but that’s usually because the delivery mechanism is a cigarette, or, well, usually a cigarette and there are a lot of other carcinogenic substances you’re consuming along with the nicotine and it’s not the nicotine that’s harmful. It’s the other things in the delivery mechanism, whereas just pure nicotine and isolation isn’t that bad for you. But as you alluded to, it does help have a certain amount of addictive potential. You mentioned that a lot of people are using it for creativity, nicotine gum, nicotine lozenges, nicotine sprays, etc. I am not convinced that nicotine is the best nootropic to use for creativity. Nicotine is very good for focus, particularly when combined with caffeine. But I think there are, there are better things for creativity, particularly some of these plant medicine based substances like the LSA, or the LSD I was talking about earlier, or psilocybin or psilocybin or a derivative of psilocybin. And obviously, those can be a little bit more difficult from a legal landscape perspective, from an affordability perspective, and from a perspective of simply be able to to get your hands on on a safe, efficacious version of those. But yeah, I think that for creativity, there’s not a whole lot that trumps the kind of the merging of the left and right brain, hemispheric activity that would occur in response to something like a plant medicine.
Dr. Mindy
And so what do you think of things like I would I WASPA, and MDMA has been one that has just blown my mind, in interviewing a lot of a vast variety of doctors on my podcast, there seems to be a common respect for using things like ayahuasca and MDMA for helping people overcome habitual patterns that aren’t working for them and creating new neurons that will help create new behavioral patterns. What do you what do you feel about those as a form of therapy,
Ben Greenfield
most of the research that’s been done on Well, there’s not actually a whole lot that’s been done on Ayahuasca. But let’s say something like MDMA has been done in the context of a great deal of talk therapy, hypnosis therapy, and what we call integration, which includes like, journaling, meeting with a therapist and spending a great deal of time without the so called medicine in your system. And so there are a lot of confounding variables. You know, I have, for example, sitting in my office, the entire protocol, that the folks who went through the nicotine cessation program at the Johns Hopkins University, which used in this case, psilocybin to reduce addiction to nicotine, particularly for cigarette smokers, and the number of things that they did outside of just the nicotine itself in terms of journaling, therapy, integration.
You know, music, all sorts of things dictate that there’s a lot of confounding variables, and they didn’t really have, to my knowledge, a, a subset of the research participants who did everything that was in that study, except the actual psilocybin, right, and you can say the same thing for MDMA, you know, it typically involves a lot of things that are occurring outside the context of the medicine itself. And so I don’t think that just taking psilocybin or just using MDMA, or just using Ayahuasca is an effective long term strategy for reducing addictive potential, ketamine would also fall into that category, it is true that after going through a journey, or a treatment with those type of medicines, that you typically do see a reduction in desire for your substance of choice afterwards. But in many cases, that simply because you’re just you’re, you’re, you’re almost like still in hangover mode. And it’s kind of like when you wake up after having partied with alcohol, you really not only don’t really want alcohol that much, but a lot of other vices aren’t that appealing to you. And sometimes you just want to like eat a really healthy diet for the day, so that you feel really good afterwards, right. And a lot of these substances like MDMA, for example, they are neurotoxic, they do cause effects that feels very similar to a hangover. So it’s not surprising to me that for a few days after a protocol like that, someone would not want to engage in many vices at all, because they’re trying to get their bodies to recover from the protocol that they just did. But most of these medicines for long term cessation of problematic lifestyle decisions or behaviors or addictions, they have to be combined with some type of integration, to be able to have that have them be fully effective. And furthermore, My other concern is that many people will use these as a crutch and for the reasons I’ve just stated, often find themselves coming back to them over and over and over again such as you know, the person we all know who’s trying to become woke and enlightened is on like their 38 Ayahuasca retreat. And if they keep going back, you know, these types of things traditionally would have been used very seldomly, often by very, very few people are chosen or select people in the population, like the priest or the shaman, or an Oracle, and not necessarily something used widely by an entire village or community, or city. And, um, and so, I personally believe that one of the one of the things that should come before the medicine is used is a lot of work on on one’s own life, particularly from a spiritual standpoint, I think that spiritual disciplines such as fasting, meditation, prayer, worship, community, service, relationships, and the like, are often the type of things that can be far more effective than using using drugs or medicines. And I think that drugs or medicines should, and could be the icing on the cake. When combined with spiritual disciplines, and probably at the top of the totem pole, would be relationship with God and a trusting God. And people who I know who have gotten the most out of any type of plant medicine experience, have been people who have, who have a faith, or a very strong spiritual relationship with God, who are members of a church community, who have a strong family, etc. And for those people, using medicines like that, simply take them from good to great, as far as giving them Business Insights, personal inspired insights, spiritual growth, etc. But simply taking taking one drug to reduce your dependence on another drug and expecting that to stick long term. I don’t see that occurring a lot, especially in the absence of proper integration. And I think even more importantly, in the absence of a spiritual foundation, and a relationship with God,
Dr. Mindy
Yeah, beautiful. I knew you were the right guy to ask about plant medicine. Because, you know, I’ve been watching from the outside, wondering, uh, you know, you hear these people who have these transformative experiences with MDMA and with Ayahuasca, and my brain first goes to, Is it harmful? How is it damaging them, but then it also goes to is it necessary and I love what you just said, is that it can’t be used in in, in a silo, it is best used when there’s a good foundation, and that’s any health tool, right? If you have a good foundation, then you go into the obscure, and the only going to be highlighted,
Ben Greenfield
and many of these things, they’re not necessarily beneficial for addiction per se, but you know, a lot of the the, I actually think this is the case for for more people than you might think, even in our space, like authors, researchers, creative thinkers, inventors, and the like, the use of such things like ketamine, or psilocybin or LSD, etc, in higher doses, due to that merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and the personal insights that one can have, when in that state of what we call ego disillusion, can result in an amount of creativity that allows for for hyper productivity and a unique form of hyper productivity in the sense that you create a lot of unique original thoughts that are quite authentic, you know, so for me, for example, if if I use something like ketamine, or psilocybin or LSD or something like that in high dosages, and I have a digital recorder, or a voice recorder or a journal with me, a lot of times, something like that will give me ideas for weeks on end, in terms of articles to write book chapters, I mean, I’ve I have a list on my computer right now that I had pulled up this morning of about six new articles that I want to work on that range from, from from a book I’m writing on parenting right now to family and relationships to a couple of different supplement formulations. And the only reason I document exists is to like last night I did about 400 milligrams of ketamine and about two grams of psilocybin and then I, I laid down on my sound therapy mat and put on my voice recorder and how to massage therapists work on me, well, I just basically rift about all the all the new ideas that I developed in a state like that, that normally I wouldn’t really come up with. And so I might do something like that about once a month. And I come up with a lot of great new ideas. And you know, there’s some biological trade off like I had to, you know, I slept in an extra 45 minutes or so this morning to get a little bit of extra sleep and, you know, started off the day a little bit more slowly than usual. But you You know that, you know, I, I practice and tinker and experiment with a lot of these things that, you know, there are benefits that go beyond just modulation of addiction.
Dr. Mindy
And where does meditation fit into this? You know, a lot of people, you know, meditations become more mainstream. And I’ve hear a variety of meditators, people who actually are doing visualizations like a guided meditation, people who are doing breath work, and people who are, are doing a meditation, but suffering through it is the science showing that meditation is a great way to reorganize our brain.
Ben Greenfield
Ah, I don’t know about reorganizing the brain, per se, even though I could see something like that occurring. Meditation is an absolutely fantastic way very similar to a yoga practice or gratitude practice or the like, to be able to lower anxiety, lower stress, and lower blood pressure. And it’s also something that, that seems to kind of train one to have more mindfulness and more presence, and other activities in life. You know, it’s obviously something that’s become almost trendy of late with apps like headspace, and calm and all these, you know, 18,000 different forms of meditation practitioners that you can find now who practice a wide variety of everything from, you know, transcendental meditation to Ziva meditation to mindfulness, meditation, etc. I think that meditation is one of those things that would fall into the category of something that’s fabulous to stack with some of the other things that we’ve talked about, I have a daily meditation practice, I gather my family at about 7:30am in the morning, and we all do about 10 minutes of meditation together, we use something called a spiritual disciplines journal, we meditate. And while we’re meditating, we have a journal in front of us. And we’re meditating on what it is that we’re grateful for that day, the truth that God spoke to us in the Bible reading that we do prior to the meditation, and then finally, who we can pray for, or help or serve that day. And then in the evening, at the end of the day, we gather again, as a family, this time for about five to 10 minutes, and engage in an evening process of meditative self examination, where we play our entire day, using the power of visualization, like a movie in our mind. And what we’re doing during that time, is we’re watching ourselves, like in the third person, go through our day, like a movie. And we’re watching that character that is us and asking ourselves three questions. What good have I done today? What could I have done better, and where was I most connected to my life’s purpose. And that daily process of self examination kind of allows each day of your life to gradually become better and better, because you’re identifying things that may not have served you, or things that you fail that and learn from areas where you really felt as though you were contributing to the world in a positive or impactful way. And then areas in which you really felt connected to your life’s purpose, which are the things that that really highlight why it is you were put on this planet in the first place. And, and if you’re properly using your skill set in a very self actualized way, to be able to serve people and love people in the manner that allows you to do the best good with your life. And so So yeah, I mean, meditation is a formative part of both me and my family’s existence and kind of bookends every every day.
Dr. Mindy
I love that. Do you ever get to the end of the day? And ask yourself those three questions and find you didn’t show up the way you want to show up that day?
Ben Greenfield
Yes, less than less the more that I do this process, because every time you find yourself writing down, what could I have done better? Or what have I failed at? It’s kind of almost magical, because you gradually weave that practice out of your life or introduce a positive thing that you weren’t doing. Like there was, you know, a couple of months ago, I think I must have written down like five evenings in a row. I didn’t play my guitar today. I didn’t practice my music today. And finally, on day five, I told my sons, I was like, I’m never going to write this down again. I just don’t want to get to the end of the day. And ever since then, I just I haven’t skipped a day of practicing guitar, or piano or singing. And another example would be, if I’ve, I’ve been going through a day and been in kind of like checklist mode, and just gotten a lot of things done. I might in many cases, under the question about what good have I done this day? write down one thing or a lot of things, because I had actually been kind of like productive and focused. But then I’ll get to that purpose question be like, gosh, I didn’t really feel like any of that stuff was very purposeful, or impactful as far as me really using my unique skill set to touch people’s lives. Like I didn’t work on any articles or books I didn’t, I didn’t have a meaningful conversation on a PI was just kind of like replying to emails and doing random little phone calls throughout the day. And so you can identify that. And, you know, as a result, you know, if I find myself repeatedly writing down or having difficulty identifying where I was most purposeful for the day, then that means that I need to restructure my day, and perhaps weave in an extra 30 minutes each morning to be working on articles or working on a book, you know, and so, so what happens is this practice just kind of stacks, and each standard comes better, because how we live our days, is how we live our life. And I think that this process of self examination, is the best way to take that principle, and weave it into your life in a way that allows you to become better with each day, and thus to become better with your life in general.
Dr. Mindy
I’d love that. I love that. And where is there any science on the like neuroscience on the power of prayer? I mean, you so many people believe in the power of prayer. I’ve heard you’ve met mess method mentioned it a couple of times. But what do we know about when you combine prayer with meditation in that at it like at the beginning of the day and the end of the day? Do we know the scientific validity of prayer?
Ben Greenfield
Yes, there’s an entire emerging field called neuro theology, which was looked at the neural mechanisms in response to prayer and communing with the Divine and belief in a higher power. And both speaking to and listening to that higher power, as very similar to something like a gratitude practice in terms of lower blood pressure, better sleep, greater amounts of productivity, reduced risk of chronic disease, fewer miss days from work. And just just a host of positive outcomes that seem to indicate that there’s a real biological link between a spiritual practice and overall health, which of course, you know, shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with the power of emotions and beliefs on the biology, you know, with probably Bruce Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief or the book, that your Body Keeps the Score, you know, as being a couple of examples of, of how those are tied together. Probably the oldest example of this would be Joseph Murphy’s book, The Power of the subconscious mind. Because when you are praying, engaged in a meditative practice, and infusing a lot of these positive practices into your life, you tend to do a better job, keeping yourselves out of spinning in cell danger response mode, or keeping yourself sympathetically activated during the day. And so, even though, let’s say you might pray for just 10 minutes every morning, and maybe meditate for five to 10 minutes in the evening, for example, what’s happening is your subconscious is actually shifting in a very dramatic way that affects us the other 24 hours a day.
Dr. Mindy
Amazing, amazing. So what I’m gathering from this conversation, then is if you’re living in depression and anxiety, that there’s this whole world that we can open ourselves up to, and it takes routine, it takes discipline, and it takes repetition for the brain to start to change. Would you say that’s accurate?
Ben Greenfield
I would say that’s pretty accurate. Mandy, you, you pass the quiz.
Dr. Mindy
That’s awesome. Well, again, you’re I knew you’re the right guy to have this conversation because I’ve been watching all of these trends emerging and mental health and to me, I put them all under bio hacks and I’ve been wrestling with my own belief around each one and really wanting to stay open to this new evidence that might be helpful to us. And you just nailed it for me. So I’m, I’m just really grateful. Thank you for having the conversation. Where do people find you? I’m sure we’re gonna have some people going and looking up some of the many of the things you talked about.
Ben Greenfield
Sure. Yeah. My website is at Ben Greenfield fitness comm you can find any of my books on Amazon and for private coaching and, and work with people on anything from, you know, labs, to exercise to nutrition plans, etc. That’s all at Ben Greenfield. coaching.com.
Dr. Mindy
Awesome, beautiful. Okay, I got to end on this question. You’ve our and you’ve already answered it somewhat, but maybe there’s a piece we’ve missed, what outside of the morning time and the after noon time that you do, what kind of gratitude practice Do you have that you will never miss? Like it’s it’s ingrained in your habits every day.
Ben Greenfield
I’ve already described that morning gratitude practice, but a subtle nuance is that when you are naming what it is that you’re grateful for, you should be attempting to identify something that you received, that you didn’t actually deserve, something someone gave to you, or something that happened to you, that happened to you, despite you not really doing anything or working hard to actually achieve or receive that. That’s one important thing. Another important thing is that you need to relive that experience, because research has shown that if you visualize that experience, meaning imagine it mentally happening again, while you’re doing your gratitude practice, you know, let’s say that, that that some you’re a waitress at a restaurant, and someone gave you a $50 tip on a, let’s say, like a, you know, a $25 meal ticket, which was amazing. And out of the blue, and you didn’t serve that, well, you actually replay that entire thing in your mind you opening the the little black book and seeing the $50 bill in there, and maybe imagining the face of the voice of the person who gave it to you and what meal that you brought to them. Like you actually relive that story. And that’s where the power of gratitude seems to be most profound is when you visualize and relive that story. And then also, of course, write it down, there’s a power of the pen, but the process of both writing it down and visualizing it, and reliving it. And then the other thing about, about gratitude that I’d throw in there that I often do during the day, I call it my my gratitude confetti, meaning that I will sometimes if I’m just sitting there during the day or closing my eyes before a meal, just basically imagine saying thank you a million billion times to God, just like Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, oh my gosh, for everything, everything, everything, everything. I just like laid off a cluster bomb of gratefulness, in my mind, specifically to God. And it sounds kind of cheesy. No,
Dr. Mindy
I love it.
Ben Greenfield
There’s something about that. That’s just like super uplifting. When you’re just like, oh my gosh, I’m just saying, I don’t even know where to start. I’m thankful for everything and just just basically say thank you a million times and, and I’m constantly worried that I’m always thanking God, you know, when I wake up, oh, thank you, God, I woke up and taking a breath. Oh, thank you, God for that oxygen. And so you know, the gratitude practice can be formalized in the sense that you’re writing things down in a journal and in visualizing them at least once a day during, for example, a meditative practice. But then just having this kind of mindset throughout the day of thanking God at every opportunity, I think is another really powerful way to weave gratitude into your life.
Dr. Mindy
Amazing, amazing. Well, I love this discussion. And I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people heading your way to learn more and just so grateful for you and your lovely family. By the way, we had such a blast at your house and your family’s incredible You’re incredible and your wife is phenomenal. By the way
Ben Greenfield
a lot people like that. Yeah, I thought you were an okay guy. I met your wife and yeah, my gosh, should screw you. She’s really cool. So yeah,
Dr. Mindy
pretty talk about a warm, loving person you just feel really cared for in her presence. So tell her thank you and I just so enjoyed this conversation. So appreciate your time.
// RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
- Feel the impact of Organifi – use code PELZ for a discount on all products!
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- Book: Biology of Belief
- Book: Power of the Subconscious
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