031: Avoiding Burn Out Through The Nervous System with Matt Gallant

More Awesome Health With Matt Gallant

We start by talking about a burnout experience I had a few years ago, and how I recovered. In essence, we’re talking about managing your nervous system. Doing so is one of the most important things you can do for your overall health and well-being.

There are phases of this experience which Matt details on this show. The first is fight, flight or freeze. The next is impaired decision-making ability and the final phase is mental and physical burn out.

Matt shares his experience with burn out and then goes on to explain his current strategy for avoiding a nervous system meltdown.

To understand his strategy it’s important to first understand some basics about the nervous system. Your nervous system is divided into two parts: the sympathetic (this is where the fight, flight or freeze system comes from) and the parasympathetic (this is where all the healing happens within your body).

Going more in-depth, in most instances exercise puts your body into fight or flight mode. This includes things like lifting and running. The exercises that are healing for your body are tai chi and yoga, they activate your parasympathetic nervous system. When you’re breathing deep and slowly that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, when your breathing is more rapid your sympathetic nervous system is engaged and you go into fight, flight or freeze mode.

Personally, I’ve been doing breath work for 20 years including meditation. Breathing can change your brain state, belly breathing is a necessary part of this. By allowing your belly to come out with your breath your lungs will open up so you can get fuller and deeper breaths. I start every day by doing a few quick exhales and then long and slow inhales. I do the 10-10-10-10 process which is 10 seconds in, 10 seconds hold and 10 seconds exhale and then 10 seconds with no breath. This is also called box breathing and you can start with just a few seconds (like 4 or 5) and work your way up to 10.

Healing The Body to Avoid Burn Out

Next, we talk about brain waves and neural feedback. Neural feedback is brain measuring feedback system that feedbacks to you what is happening. It’s like a GPS system that trains your brain to hit different states. These different states fall in one of 5 categories, three of which are healing and two of which are fight/flight/freeze.

The healing states are alpha which is when you are relaxed but alert, then there is theta which is even slower and deeper than alpha. And the last of these three is delta – that is the state we are in when we are sleeping.

On the fight, flight or freeze side, the two states are beta and gamma. Beta is when you are engaged and focused and thinking. Anxiety looks like too high levels of beta. Gamma is a very high spiritual state, it is very powerful and intense but there is a cost to it.

We also discuss dopamine levels and blue light from social media and technology, before we move into how to know we are overstimulated and heading towards burn out. One of the big X factors in avoiding burn out is resilience, there is a physical component to this. Matt has worked to increase his through neural feedback and also cleaning out his limbic system. (The limbic system is one component of our nervous systems, it is responsible for our emotions).

He has cleaned out his limbic system by facing and healing old emotional wounds. Take for example the person who was bitten by a dog and doesn’t like them, even though it’s been 40 years since they were bitten. They haven’t healed that experience and their limbic system will respond to dogs as if they were about to relive that old experience of being bitten.

One way to work on these old emotional wounds and put your nervous system in a more relaxed state is through EFT (the Emotional Freedom Technique), it is also known as tapping. EFT immediately starts to shift your nervous system into parasympathetic. When you tap the specific points in EFT your nervous system shifts over into a parasympathetic state. 

You can also do neural feedback, meditation and practicing gratitude. Pay attention to how often you laugh – if you are laughing you are probably in parasympathetic mode.

Another piece of avoiding burn out is macro and micro recovery. In general, the harder you want to drive the harder you need to focus on recovery. If you want to drive your body like a race car then you need a really good pit crew and really high-quality components to put your car back together, or you will crash and burn!

There are some supplements you can take to help with this. For the fight, flight or freeze, things like coffee, THC, caffeine, etc would fall under this category. But you can stack parasympathetic supplements with sympathetic supplements to counterbalance their effect. Matt talks about which he likes best and why, plus which essential oil has been shown to increase alpha brain waves.

You’ll also hear how we both healed ourselves with magnesium and why floating was part of that! It’s all here on episode 31 of Awesome Health Podcast with Matt Gallant.

Episode Resources

Magnesium Breakthrough
Oura ring
Biostrap
Info on EFT
The Powerful Engagement, by James E. Loehr and Tony Schwartz
PDF on Flight, Fight or Freeze
Masszymes (code cheat10)

Read the Episode Transcript :

Wade Lightheart:    Good afternoon. Good morning and good evening, wherever you are. It's Wade T Lightheart here with my cofounder of BiOptimizers Matty G. I am so pumped about today.

Wade Lightheart:    We haven't done a podcast together. We haven't done an Awesome health Podcast forever. And crime is pretty much, and we're gonna actually increase these over the next while because you know, Matt is a wealth of information. He's on the bleeding, the literally the bleeding edge. He does bleed literally to kind of optimize his health regularly by taking a variety of blood extractions and testing a lot of different things. We're going to get into that in one of the future podcasts. But today we're going to go kinda back the truck up. We're going to talk about something that every high performer deals with and everybody listening to this is going to deal with this. And that is burnout and its relation to the nervous system. What is the relationship? Because if you're kind of into by optimization, uh, or you know, you call yourself a biohacker or whatever, everybody gets pretty much into that area because their, their mind is writing checks that their body can't cash.

Wade Lightheart:    Uh, and you know, part of the, uh, pro high performer is to find that balance, that balance between am I performing at a high level and am I destroying my body to do that? And it was kind of cool in the 80s to do that. It's not cool as we move into 2020 it's about I want my cake, I want to eat it too. I want to be a superhuman. And we're on the edge of the evolutionary parts of what it takes to become a superhuman. And most people want to become a superhuman because they recognize, you know, there is that angle that we were getting. We're getting examples of people who are delivering at super high levels, but what is the, what is the components? What do you need to do? What are the daily practices? What are they, what are the things to watch out for? How do you end up in the burnout? How do you destroy yourself? Matty G, what do you gotta say about this right now I've been doing all the talking, let's say on this

Matt Gallant:    because I'm going to make a bold statement, which we both love to do, which is I think in terms of quality of life, understanding what we're going to be talking about today, probably the most important thing, and we're going to get into that. So there's my bold statement, the most important system in the by for quality of life. That's the topic.

Wade Lightheart:    All right.

Matt Gallant:    So let's, so, so wait, let me cue you what for a second. So, you know, just a little bit of background. Wait, I've been friends for what, 20 years, a long time. And uh, we went through something a couple years ago that I, I've never seen him go through that in our relationship. And it was incredible, you know, less than, I mean, I always love learning from other people's mistakes. And, uh, we had, you showed me again in a lot of things of what not to do and it was really powerful and, and, and I was thinking about that the other day in aspire, today's topic. So why don't you share what happened and the aftermath of that. And I think it'll, it's a perfect segue into the today's conversation.

Wade Lightheart:    Yeah. Great. So I'm going to talk about the deep level or the deep cost of, uh, doing more than your physiological capable or, and what are the general go to moves that people make on a consistent basis rationalize, which sets them up for a deep failure. So a few years back, um, so keep in mind, I'm kind of living the, the, what I would call the Tim Ferris lifestyle, the quote unquote four hour work week. Nobody actually works the four hour where we, but you know, I'm traveling around the world, I'm living where I want to live, I've got multiple online businesses and then everything is kind of, you know, going along and you kinda just assume, but what happens inside any business, there are certain components where you've got to get laser focused. You've got to adapt to new skills, you've got to develop new capabilities. And there's an easy assumption, especially in today's world where we kind of, we all think that we can do multiple things, you know, 50 different things because of all the digital technology.

Wade Lightheart:    But there's a certain point in our biology where we don't adapt to these, what I would call silicone brain and our carbon brain or carbon brand is the one we were born with. The silicone brain is the extension and right now there's a lot of input data that's coming in in the nervous system, especially if you're running businesses and when you go up in business there's more data coming in. So I ran into this trouble and so what my answer was is, well I'll just work more. Okay. So I can remember it started, I was in Bali and uh, you know, I'm running a company that I'm, I'm in kind of startup mode over there. I've got on one business that's kind of in steady mode and then I've got BiOptimizers which is going into grow like extreme growth mode. And as you can imagine, those are three different stages of business that don't actually match.

Wade Lightheart:    And so I'm doing mornings with one business partner, uh, early. More like I'm a meeting with him doing that stuff. I'm doing my regular business, my kind of cashflow business in the afternoons and I'm staying up till like three four 30 in the morning. So I'd sleep three hours, wake up, do one business, go for a massage in the afternoon, come back, go to work again, sleep for an hour and a half, wake up and then work the evenings. And it all looked like it would go right. So after a couple months of that, I was really starting to pay the price and what I'm doing to, to manage that. As I'm upping, I'm increasing my caffeine take, I'm increasing my new tropics so that my brain is focused. So I, I feel like I'm laser and for some things you are, and I feel like I've got the energy cause I do, but it's like paying your mortgage off with their credit card, your, your, you've got your mortgage at 5% interest, which is manageable maybe over 30 years.

Wade Lightheart:    And then you've got your credit card bill, which is at 19.99% so I'm paying the 5% with the 19.99 so that the deficit is growing. Like if you've been in New York city and you've seen that deficits sign of how much the national debt is going, that's a great example. And only you're doing this not just with money, you're doing this with your physical energy units and still kind of manageable. So I move to Panama because I'm like, you know, I can't handle it. It's the time zone. You know, if I would just in the one time zone, now keep in mind, Matt and I are living about eight and a half minute walk from each other. And over the course of, I believe it was four and a half months, Matt and I saw each other physically five times. Okay? Like we're best friends, we're hanging out all the time.

Wade Lightheart:    I only got time to see him and, and he's, and what happened is I'm, I'm still burning and I'm still going. I'm still trying to do all these things. And what happened is the unexpected happened. I had a problem in my growth business and that was a challenge with my partner. And there was a bunch of challenges that came up. And that's the piece that takes you out. It's the unexpected where you've got to go to another level and solve problems. You haven't. So, well, guess what? That's when I ran out of gas and literally physiologically I was burnout. Um, it didn't matter how much caffeine I was taking, it wasn't helping. It was also putting me in an unresourceful psychological state and unresourceful emotional and, and, and at the very low point, uh, Matt and I went for dinner at a restaurant. He like, Hey bro, how's it going?

Wade Lightheart:    And I said, yeah, you know, I'm, I'm living in hell and I can go back years and years before. Um, when I was competing, and Matt could comment on this. In 2003, I went through a similar process. I was running my personal training business. I was preparing for the Mister universe contest and I had a serious problem with the relationship with and my relationship partner was addicted to drugs and creating a lot of havoc. And even though I broke up that was dealing with all these other X factors that you can't plan, plan on. And that set me up for the big burnout after mr universe. I was able to maintain that level for nine and a half months, but eventually the wheels came off and it was another six, seven months before I recovered from that. And I had to get rid of some things.

Wade Lightheart:    And so how do you handle this? The question is, and so how do you handle this? And, and for me it involved, uh, I had to go off caffeine completely. I stopped coffee. Um, I had to stop putting hard stop times on when I was working, when I wasn't working. Uh, I had to start taking vacations. I wasn't taking vacations, you know, the, the four hour work week, it looks like you're on vacation, but you're really not, you're, you know, or that kind of digital nomad lifestyle. And, uh, and then I had to take a hard look about my own skillsets based on where the growth I wanted to experience in my own business. So how do I, how do I become more efficient and more effective at new things? How do I let go of things that I'm not good at? How do I improve the physiological recovery components in my body, which we're going to get into here.

Wade Lightheart:    And what are the things do I gotta drop that's maybe, you know, how do I get out of the credit card paying the mortgage debt from an energy kind of standpoint? So that's where I was. I implemented a lot of new things. One of the, you know, one of the big things that getting off the caffeine, cranking magnesium, uh, to, to, to, to, you know, literally the toilet, the toilet experience where you're, you're watching, you know, cause that's one of the big nervous system burners, uh, essential fatty acids and things like that. So yeah, that was, that was my perspective perspective. Quickly, we'll dive into a little bit more of a, Matt, you want to add to that from your perspective cause you're on kind of the outside looking in and you know me pretty well.

Wade Lightheart:    Yeah. You know, it was um, first of all I understood why you were doing what you were doing. Uh, I think it was again, a lot of things you could have done differently, which was pretty much we're going to talk about today. All the different things that you can do. Just to zoom out. What we're really talking about is managing your nervous system and we're gonna say managing, cause I like it better than balancing balancing. What does that really mean? So, um, managing nervous system is probably one of the most important things to avoid waiting experience or to avoid the slot zone. Cause if you go to the other mode of just, and I've got friends that are stuck in that zone too, which is not good. Um, or they're just kind of relaxing for years and they're not technically retired. But anyways, so hold on her topic. But we're really talking about managing nervous system.

Wade Lightheart:    And when I was looking at Wade, he was cranking, cranking, cranking. Then I first thing I think the first system that went offline was probably his emotions. Um, you know, again in, we're gonna talk about kind of the different set of emotions in the different parts of nervous system, but he shifted completely to fight or flight or freeze zone emotionally. And then the, the mental capacity started dropping. Just the kind of decisions you were making, waiters, the way you were thinking. I'm like, you know, I know, I know you enough to know that that's not the thought you would've had prior. And um, so that was the kind of the next phase. And then you kind of like, you described, you went to hell. And then just to make this more real on a numbers level, I have this neurofeedback system at home and at wired Wade's brain to it.

Wade Lightheart:    And the amount of electricity in Wade's brain in that moment was about a quarter of my friend who's 76 years old. Like, like he is, you know, we're not gonna say he was brain dead, but it wasn't far away. On an electrical level, literally. Um, and, and for those of you that don't understand that that's a lot of your, your states in your mind and how you think come from electrical energy. So Wade had literally like just burnt out. The electrical energy is brain plus his body weight. It took you what, like a year to bounce back from that, you know, like, like on all levels. Like you, you kind of were coming and I I was seeing you come back online again first. Uh, your, your executive functioning, your brain and then your emotions, but it took you about a year. Is that right?

Wade Lightheart:    Yeah, it uh, I would say yeah, probably a good year. Yeah, it was about, it was about 12 months to recovery and, and going back, say when I had my other burnout in 2003, that was a six month recovery period. It was actually actually if I look all told it would be nine months, cause there was the three months of catastrophic rebound rug gained all the weight and things like that, which is usually a sign of adrenal fatigue. You start just putting on weight and can't kick get it off, that's a, that's a good indication that you're, you're tracking in the wrong direction. It's kind of like the fat cat businessman image that we all have in our minds. And um, and so this time it was about a year. So you're looking at, if you look at the age difference, there was an extra three months of recovery even though I had way more tools than I had back then. So you're probably looking at a two X

Wade Lightheart:    factor just with the age. Um, and my rationalization for it. No. I want to be quick about, before we get into the mechanics, the rationalization was as it is, you know, my mentality is just go in and take on as much as you can until you blow. And when you blow, you get really laser clear with kind of painful realities of what's working and what's not working. I'm not recommending that strategy. It's a strategy that I've done to make quantum jumps and I feel I made that quantum jump now. But you can avoid that. You can avoid that. Matt, what's your, what's your comments on that as far as how you kind of look at it cause you're kind of a hyper growth oriented person and in far as burnouts in your own life of what you've had and what you and why you've kind of aggravated there the way that you approach things now.

Wade Lightheart:    Yeah, I think, um, I only really hit one burnout, which was in my twenties there was a lot of like micro things. So, but in my twenties I decided to do a crazy experiment of sleep deprivation and work a holism to the max. So I got up to, I was doing 80 hours a week in the gym, like literally 80 hours in the gym working. I was a trainer, plus I was training twice a day. Plus I was recording a hard rock album, plus I was learning marketing. So I was doing all these things at a time and I'm like, okay, well I need to sleep less. How old were you at this time? Um, was 25 photos on that later or probably had much more severe consequences. So I'm like, okay, I need to sleep less. So let me start cutting my sleep back by 15 minutes, like every week or so.

Wade Lightheart:    So starting out like seven hours and six and a quarter, six and a half and five and then I, you know, and then it got to the point where it was a really interesting thing. I think around the five hour Mark, like I had to drink water nonstop to stay awake. Like if, if I, if I got even like 1% dehydrated I would just crash. The other thing too is like you get so sensitive with food, like certain foods would make me crash instantly. So you know that was kind of interesting experiment cause every little thing would either just throw me off or keep me going. But I, I just crashed and burned and our thicker on four hours and 25 minutes or 15 minutes at four, four and a quarter is when I ended the experiment had declared unsuccessful and then read a book called power sleep and went the other way and it took me, it took, I think it took me like four months and, but I wasn't using caffeine, thank God.

Wade Lightheart:    But, um, I hadn't discovered caffeine at that point. It took me I think four months of sleeping around 10 hours a day to, of recover from that and then then my sleep kind of normalized. But that was it. So since that time, you know, I've become very, very hyper aware of, okay. You know, there's all these signs that I look for including, um, you know, my executive functioning starts dropping. In other words, my capacity, how I feel, um, I'm not enjoying work as much. And that's a classic sign too, from like over training, even in the gym, like you're training really hard and you just, it starts to feel like a chore. That's a scientifically that, okay. Time to back off. Um, so I've got all these different signals. Plus I use like the oral ring so I can see my HRV and my heart rates.

Wade Lightheart:    So, you know, that starts getting out of whack. I know my nervous system is stressed. We'll talk more about that in a second. But yeah, so, so my strategy now, and you know it, we'll talk about how to change this permanently too. Cause I used to kinda hit a red line maybe three, four times a year now. Okay. I got to go on vacation versus now, I can't remember the last time I hit, it's probably been like a year and a half, two years now. Like there's still like a yellow zone on the heart, on the RPMs that, uh, that I'll hit, you know, a couple of times. But I don't tend to get red. And like I used to. And a lot of it's because of the stuff we're going to talk about. So I just want to zoom out and break down what we're talking about.

Wade Lightheart:    So we're talking about the nervous system, which divides into two. So you have the parasympathetic system, which we're going to call the healing system of the body. Okay. And it's a very accurate description because all the healing happens in that zone as far as your body's concerned. Then there's the sympathetic nervous part of the nervous system, which is fight, flight, or freeze. So let's just go back to the caveman days. And there is a cyber saber tooth tiger chasing you. You need to activate your fight, flight or freeze system a hopefully fight or flight kicks in. Cause if you freeze your dead, um, but either you're running really fast or you're gonna fight this threat and that's a huge part of, you know, survival. Right? And really it's kept us alive. And if it wasn't for that, probably, uh, there'd be no humans [inaudible] ology these, these are, these are things that are built over millions of years in your nervous system that are intrinsic with being a human.

Wade Lightheart:    It really intrinsic with being an animal. You can see that in a dog or cat. Like, you know, the, these are all part of the animal brain. I mean really we're talking in bacteria will recoil against a toxic substance, right? It's flighting from it. You know, you took a single cell organism with mercury and it recoil. So it's built rate into every cellular system that we see today. Just kept us alive. So, so just for the purpose of this podcast, we're going to talk about the healing system and we'll just call it the fight or flight system. Um, so you know, again, when there is a threat, just to go one level deeper here, when there is a threat, there is again three potential responses, which is, you know, I'm gonna fight this thing. I'm going to run away from this thing or I'm going to freeze like a deer in the headlights, which is probably the worse option.

Wade Lightheart:    So that's again, the fight or flight. So let's go through different things in different parts of the body and we're going to kind of, uh, organize them in different categories. And by the way, there's a P O one page PDF that you can look at that'll show you this as bioptimizers.com/nervous system and you'll be able to see what I'm about to walk us through. So let's start with exercise. And exercise is primarily fight or flight. So when you're lifting weights, that's a fight or flight response. You're playing sports, it's a fight or flight response. Even things like running, I mean, you're literally like it's flight, right? Like you're running. Now on the healing side, there are some exercises and two that come to mind is, is tide CI and yoga. So Tai-Chi is this really slow type of, of movement that again, with the breathing and just this slow movement activates your parasympathetic, uh, or in your healing part of your nervous system.

Wade Lightheart:    So I haven't done Tai Chi. I've done a lot of yoga. And yoga is really interesting because it's really, you know, it kind of physically intense, but because you're breathing and really slowing down the breadth and breadth is a huge part of managing your nervous system. And we don't want you to talk about your breathing techniques in a, in a minute cause you've been a lot of that. But when you're breathing deep and slowly, that activates the healing part of the nervous system. If I start hyperventilating, that activates my fight or flight response. And that's what happens when you're fight or flight. You know, you start hyperventilating because you're trying to get more oxygen to the brain. So anyways, Wade, maybe talk about the breathing stuff and we'll, we'll get into meditation in a second. But uh, I know you've done a little bit of yoga and I know that you do a lot of breathing exercises almost every day.

Wade Lightheart:    So maybe talk about the breath and how you use it to change your nervous system. Yeah, I agree. Great points. So, and I will make one caveat in regards to yoga. Some of the newer forms of yoga are what I would stay more into the fight or flight stuff. So when you get into the stuff like the power yogas and things like that, which are outside of maybe the classical styles that were cultivated in India, cause you know, yoga has got all these branches are now moving more to an exercise format. And those, I'm not saying I'm not discounting that they're valuable as an exercise, but they will not give you that parasympathetic response the same way. So let's talk about healing. Um, with the breathwork. So I've been doing breathwork literally for the last 20 years and through meditation and you learn a lot of different things about breathwork. So the breathing is, and we talk about this in the awesome health course. If you haven't downloaded or got involved with the health of melted RV, we actually go really, really deep on this where I can share with you exactly how you do these things.

Wade Lightheart:    Breathing is the only thing that you do, both consciously and unconsciously. In other words, you can think about your breathing and change its rate either faster or slower or it happens unconsciously. And for most people it's unconscious. You don't ever think about it. It just happens unless of course you're under water and suddenly here without it, then it's like, Oh, um, so what was discovered in ancient forms of practice and going back at least 6,000 years, maybe even beyond that, is that you could change your brain state, your focus ability. And now that's all been proven through science. That was kind of a lot of thought of airy fairy ideas by these kind of mystical people that you know were funny. Beards and roads and stuff and well it actually has now been proven by science. Thank you to the Dalai Lama who I think brought a lot of advanced, uh, breathwork people are meditators to the world of science so that we could actually track and see how their brains look in their brains look very different than the ordinary person.

Wade Lightheart:    And one of the ways they do this is by practicing and breathing. So there's a couple of things to do now. What's interesting in Eastern philosophy, the exhale is the start of the breath. And what the exhale process does is it takes carbon out of the system. And by de carbonating. The blood is actually what creates the healing component. The oxygen component will come on by itself, but by starting with the exhale, a conscious exhale, then when the oxygen comes in, then you're going to load up your hemoglobin a lot more, carry more oxygen into. If you carry more oxygen inside the cell without a like a rapid kind of breathing, that's what switches you over into the healing side of the nervous system of the parasympathetic. So all breathing practice would start out with maybe some short quick breasts like and then a slow or even a double in.

Wade Lightheart:    Here we go and take us short and then a slow so that you actually start to train your body to take a deeper breath and to lower part of lungs is mostly when you're sitting, you're getting about 30% of the oxygen inside your body. The other piece that you need to learn to, which is counter to my bodybuilding world, is to learn how to belly breathe. So, fortunately when I was a kid, um, I had a world-class music teacher and they taught us how to belly breathe and belly breathing is where you actually let your belly come out even while you're sitting. And what that does is that opens up your lungs so that you can get fuller, deeper breasts. Now I know bodybuilding, which I learned years later, is you're always trying to keep your stomach in. So you think about a bodybuilder wear to the beach, right?

Wade Lightheart:    Cause he's holding that in. So practicing learning to let your belly on the inhale as opposed to inhaling through the chest, which is what most people think they do there. It's got, you know, it's kind of like this way as opposed to slower down, deeper inside your body. And even the top musical people, if you go to Roger loves a course, I think he's the best speaking a coach in the world. He spends a lot of time on teaching you how to breathe. That's how the best musicians make the best sounds and get that deep resonant voice that you hear through singing is how you belly breathe. And so what I do, I start every day. I do some quick exhales, right? I do some quick exhales and then I do long and slow inhales. I'll start off with the process. I call it the 10 10 10 10 program, which is 10 seconds in tech, 10 seconds, hold 10 seconds, exhale, 10 seconds with no breath.

Wade Lightheart:    Now when you start that out, you're probably only going to do maybe three or four seconds and what's interesting is you'll start to realize is that you don't have the lung capacity, you, it feels like you don't have the lung capacity to hold your breath. It's particularly on the exhale more than three or four seconds and there's a panic part which indicates that your in sympathetic nervous system as you go through this, and sometimes it's called box breathing, you know it's what your, each breath is the same amount. By doing that, imagine a foresight at breath that the, you know, your exhale and then your inhale and then your hold and then your exhale and leave. Each one of those are the sides of a box. Okay. Those, if you're doing five seconds or 10 seconds or however long, those are going to indicate how quickly you get into sympathetic.

Wade Lightheart:    And usually once you get over that between five and 10 seconds, if you can get into that range, you're going to be moving into sympathetic nervous system, or excuse me, parasympathetic nervous, out of sympathetic into parasympathetic, so out of fight or flight into healing. And think about this. When you're in a stressful situation, let's say something's coming up or you're going to go on stage to speak, or you've got a fight coming up or something stressful is coming in, what do people naturally do? They go, you know that you, you instantly do this. And so what you're doing is consciously leveraging that response, slowing it down so you don't go into that adrenal fight or flight vote. And now one last piece before we kick it over to Matt is there's a lot of different ways that you can do this and there's various techniques where you start actually working in feeling the energy revolve inside your system. And that's what people are talking about, chi or prana. And as you deeply meditate, you actually get to feel these systems that aren't available to us. But when I was in the middle of my fight or flight craziness was literally the first time in 20 years that I wasn't able to do my meditations.

Wade Lightheart:    I literally couldn't do my meditations because I wasn't able to escape the fight or flight mode. It was so ingrainly deep. And that was of course a extremely painful.

Matt Gallant:    So there's also, first of all there's a lot of different breeding techniques and what we do is great and it does get a lot of benefits to clearing out CO2 and and different things. Um, I got wired to a medical grade breathing HRV machine. So let me just talk about heart rate variability for a second because it's probably the most useful number to manage your nervous system, your age, your heart rate variability. HRV is the best indicator to see where you're at in which direction you're going in. So what that means, it's actually the time in between the heart beats and going back to breathing. When you inhale, you will typically see a shortening of the time.

Matt Gallant:    And then when you're exhaling that it, it goes a little longer. Now if you're stressed out, there is no, there's very little variability. That means the heartbeat is like kinda like a piston. I remember thinking is not a good thing. No, it's not means your body's stress versus if I'm breathing and I'll talk with the kind of the metric breathing naturally, I'll just call it. Uh, I should see massive variability, which by the way, a couple of tools to measure that. One is the o-ring, which I have one right here that kind of gives me my score for the night. I can see kind of a graph of what happens to my heart rate variability. Um, and another one, which is more of a real time is called the buyer strap. So we'll put a link, um, and, and the again bioptimizers.com/nervoussystem so you can see the, the links and perhaps invested in was quick, quick, quick question, which do you prefer?

Wade Lightheart:    Um, for what reason? The bio strap versus the oura ring. I think that's a good distinction.

Matt Gallant:    I like, I liked the oura ring for measuring how fried my nervous system is in the morning. I think. I think it's got a better set of metrics and algorithms, but the buyer strap, um, let's, I want to do something and just see what my HRV is or again, it's not just HRV, it's got a bunch of metrics. I can't do that with the o-ring. So the bio strap for like more real time. I, let's say you want to do an experiment, see, Hey, how did that affect my HRV? Literally two minutes you push a button and two minutes later you get a score. So I like both of them. I use them for different things. But so that's a good question. So anyways, HRV is the most important thing. Going back to this machine that I got wired to. The way it works is you, you do these different breathing times and again, it's not a box breath. It's you know, either four seconds usually starts four seconds and four seconds out, five seconds in, five seconds out. Like you fold the system and then it tells you exactly what your optimal breathing pace is to maximize HRV. In other words, to relax your body. And for me, for an example, it was like six and a half seconds. So in other words, if I just breathe like

Matt Gallant:    I mean no, no holding and no pressure, no pushing. Cause it was interesting if I, if I kind of like, cause I did, I've done a yadda, a lot of yoga and yoga you do like you kind of like, you know, kind of squeeze your throat a little bit to push the bread out a little slower. If I did that, it would actually stress out my nervous system a little bit. So again, there's a lot of different breathing techniques. I'm just sharing this one. So for most people's like five, six seconds just in out, um, no, nothing for his big belly breath like Wade said, those, those things work. So anyways, that, that I think covers exercise. There's a lot of other stuff to talk about. But this is a great segue into brainwaves.

Matt Gallant:    So both Wade and I have done several rounds of medical wiring level, neuro feedback. So what is neurofeedback? It is a brain measuring feedback system. You get these electrodes wired to your brain and they feed back to you what's happening. So if you're doing the right thing, you get a a reward in the form of these beautiful audio tones. And if you're doing the wrong thing and go silence, your brain's like, Whoa, that didn't work. Let me try something else. And when you're doing the right thing, you're like, Oh, okay, that's what I need to do. Let me do more of that. So think of it kind of as a GPS. If you're driving around and you head on on the wrong street, the GPS has a turnaround. Um, that's basically how it is. But you're training your brain to hit all these different States.

Matt Gallant:    So there's five major groups of brainwaves and there's three of them that are in the healing side, and two are more on the fight or flight side. So on the healing side, yet alpha, which is relaxed but alert. And then that's a great kind of first goal for meditators is to reach that state. Um, then if you slow your brain waves down even more to I four to seven Hertz, then you hit feta, which is a lot slower and much deeper state. And then if you slow it down even more, which is what we hit when we sleep also is about zero to four Hertz. That's Delta. So if you think about how much healing, how, like all the healing in your body pretty much happens when you're in Delta. Deep sleep, most of it, right? Your growth hormone, your testosterone, all your hormones get produced in that phase.

Matt Gallant:    So again, going back to that's the healing side now on the fight or flight side, yeah, beta. So right now we had an hour in beta, we're engaged, we're focused, we're thinking, and you know, if, if beta goes too high in the wrong places, the brain, that's what anxiety looks like. That's what happens. It's like your brain has too many, uh, the of these beta brain waves and you know, we all know people like that. They're kind of stuck in that mode. You know, the way I would describe these people is they sleep. They, you know, that's the only time they're in parasympathetic, the only time during healing and they fall asleep. And most of them actually, if you have a lot of beta usually is bad sleep. It's a whole other topic. And then they wake up, they go right to beta, have a cup of coffee, go, you know, and then they fall asleep at night and then they repeat that cycle and they, they, they're kind of stuck into those two zones.

Wade Lightheart:    Can, can you talk about, cause I see this happening so much more with the role of digital devices now, and you could talk about blue light or stimulus and, and all that sorta stuff, which is, you know, Dr. Cruz talks a lot about this stuff. What's your take on all that and, and, and the role of technology of keeping us locked into beta and also maybe people not getting out into nature.

Wade Lightheart:    Yeah. That's, um, let me just finish the fight or flight on the brainwaves and we'll, we'll segue right into that. Cause it's a perfect segue. So the last wave I'll put in fight or flight is gamma, which gamma is an incredibly high spiritual state. Like you just kinda have this universal connection with higher power would say it that way. And one of our mutual friends, um, we named his name just to protect his anonymity, but he has the highest gamma that's ever been recorded at one of these brain, uh, facilities. And, you know, it fries him. I mean, it's a very, very intense brainwave. I mean, it's very intense. It's very powerful. It's incredible spiritual, but there is a cost to it. So, so that's why I kind of put in fight or flight anyways because the, a lot of psychics and stuff in that zone, I would think.

Wade Lightheart:    Or they kind of, you know, it's kinda like the wizard on the movie that pulls off the magic spell and then they're kind of wiped out on the song. It's kinda like, well, all right. So just to be completely unfiltered, um, one of our main spiritual mentors, David Hawkins, it does a lot of stories like this. They kind of had these massive spiritual jumps. Now, in my opinion, what's happening physiologically based on what we currently know is they have this massive, massive gay gamma Brae burst like a gamma burst on stars. They're just like, they're the same GAM all the time. And what we know with these experiences is that it takes them years in order to learn how to live with that, learn how to manage that and for do a Cawkins took them about seven years, um, at cart, totally three years anyway. It was all come on him or her Rishi didn't talk for years.

Wade Lightheart:    You can look through the histories of these kind of advanced mystics who been floated. Most of them go through this period where they're just, they're just not functional in the world at all. And I think a lot of it is learning to, to function with gamma, learn it that, you know, having the nervous system respond and adapt so that it had been as back to your question, um, first of all is, so let's segue to your transmitters and then we'll segue into your question because the neurotransmitters are the explanation to your question. Correct. So on the healing side, we have four main treat neurotransmitters. We have serotonin, which gets released when you eat sugar. That's one of the reasons people eat a lot of sugar because it makes them feel a little more relaxed. We have endorphins, which, you know, if you go to the gym it's kind of the rewards you get afterwards.

Wade Lightheart:    Running long distance biking. Endorphin highs.

Matt Gallant:    We have oxytocin, which is kind of the, the love molecule. When you first started dating someone first 12 months, there's a huge, or when a woman gives birth to a baby through the birth canal is the biggest boost of oxytocin. There is, I think. Right. And also that's why women love cuddling after sex. Cause there's a big oxytocin release and then there's an end of mine, which is the bliss molecule. So all four of those are more and bliss potential, easier in fight or flight. But those are on the healing side. And then on the fight or flight side, we have adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine. So if we look at technology and you know, all the phones and all the apps, they are, they are hijacking or dopamine system. So every time you get notifications that's activating dopamine, your brain feels like, Whoa, Hey, I'm a little bit important.

Matt Gallant:    Somebody reaching out. Somebody liked something, somebody messaged me. And when people are messaging you and commenting on your stuff or liking your stuff, that is releasing dopamine every single time. So most of us, and I'm not immune to this, we're all trapped in these dopamine loops to various levels. And you know, there's a lot of things we can do to manage that. Um, and some people again are really completely lost in it. Now blue light is, is actually more fight or flight. We know this because it's designed to wake us up, right? When somebody hit our eyes, it's like go time versus you know, other colors of light like orange and the reds or more relaxation. And you know, if for those of us that wear blue light blocking glasses, we know that our brain starts just shutting down and downregulating. So that's the price on your nervous system of using these devices in a perfect world, probably three hours, four hours before bed.

Matt Gallant:    You just, you just get off the phones and the iPads. Your other thing too is that, ah, sorry, TVs, TVs. I mean old TV watching TV is an alpha. It actually increases alpha. It's where a lot of people like watching TV. I like watching TV. For me it's a good segue. Now the light is a different story, which I can hack with glasses. Now obviously depends on what I'm watching. If I'm watching horror movies and Rambo and commando and whoever, shoot, that's more dopamine, right? That's going to, so what you're watching is going to influence your neurotransmitters. Correct. But I like why wearing glasses couple of hours before bed. And that will again tell my brain to, it's nighttime, let me shut things down. But there's also the effects of wireless waves. So Bluetooth, wifi and what it seems to be doing is increasing dopamine. So even even just the, the waves that are blasting us nonstop, right. If I put my phone, probably 15 wifi that I can catch with my phone. So, and there's all kinds that I'm not seeing. Right. Um, so those waves seem to be increasing dopamine. So we have w the, the dopamine from the apps that dopamine from the blue light and the dopamine from all these singles. So it's not, it's no mystery that people are being hijacked from this stuff.

Wade Lightheart:    Yeah. Powerful information. Okay. So here's the stressors. How do we get it? So what are some physical indications that you've seen? If you could maybe walk me through some stages that people might notice when they're becoming overstimulated and headed to run down. What would you say from your observation? Cause you know, you've, you've dealt with a lot of high performers, you've coached a lot of high performers in you, you're pretty much surrounded by high performers. I was like what do you, what did you notice that they've given you feedback as well?

Matt Gallant:    So, well one of the big X factors of whether you burn out or not is resilience. So we could do a whole podcast on resilience cause it's a really interesting thing. Um, and resilience is primarily an emote. It's more of a limbic system thing. Now there's a physical component. Resilient. How tough are you in your pretty example wave? You know, you're as tough physically as, as anyone else I am that I know. But you know, one of the things that I've done, um, to to like probably increase my resilience, I'm going to say like 500%, maybe more in the last four years has been the neurofeedback but, but it's more specifically I'm cleaning out my limbic system. So you have all these,

Wade Lightheart:    when you say w when you say limbic system for our listeners, what do you mean by the limbic system?

Matt Gallant:    Okay. So the limbic system is one of the components of our nervous system. Okay. So it's kind of a sub component of it and that's where all of our emotions, so the emotional part of our nervous system is the limbic system, we'll just call it the emotional system. So we had this emotional system and when we see things that are similar to other painful experiences that we've had in the past, and if these painful experiences are not healed, okay, heal is the key word. If they're not healed, we will feel you're threatened by that experience or something similar. That experience for exactly whatever this, this thing that's in front of me that's reminding me of that thing that was painful. I go right to fight or flight, right, right. To fight, flight or freeze. I mean it's immediate because, and, and a great example, and we all know people that been bitten by dogs and you know, they're 40 50 60 years old, they'll still be scared of that, of that dog, even if it's like a small little dog.

Wade Lightheart:    A dog comes into the elevator, there's sweat, perspiration comes up, their tension comes up, the heartbeat adrenaline response. If you were to look at that, it's pretty significant. Or someone that's been in a car accident, they get in the car again and all of a sudden they start having a physiological response.

Matt Gallant:    Yeah. And it's very true even on micro levels. So for an example, you know, your mother told you, uh, you know, your grades aren't good enough. You know, like one of the things my dad told me like one time I hit like 96 and he's like, where's the other four? And that was something that I had to, to identify and heal because it was kinda driving the perfectionism in me and, and it was so, so there's a whole consequence cascade of consequences that can literally lead to character defects and sometimes character assets.

Matt Gallant:    Uh, and I love Joe Dispenza, us models on that. But going back to healing, one of the things that works incredibly well is EFT. So EFT immediately starts shifting your nervous system into parasympathetic. It's a very, very fast response because you're hitting these nine points. EFT stands for emotional freedom technique by the way. Correct. And there's probably more commonly known now as tapping. So you have these points you have, and if you're watching the video, you have this karate chop point, top of the head, top of the I side, below the eye, below the nose, below the lips, right where the crease in the chin, his collar bone, and then ribs. And when you tap these points, you're, your nervous system literally shifts over, which, so if I bring up and I like guide, I'm actually certified and I've guided people countless times to do this and I've never seen it not work.

Matt Gallant:    And I'm talking about like bringing up really painful experiences and shifting from, Oh wow, that was a really traumatic experience too. I'm at peace with it. I mean, big ones might take 15 minutes, but usually it's like five minutes. And for me, because I've done it so much, um, it's probably like 60 seconds, two minutes sometimes. So it's really good a thing. Probably one of the best sites to learn is that www, EFT, universe.com, or you can go to YouTube, just countless videos. So that's one thing. Um, the other thing you can do is neurofeedback, which again we talked about, so we don't really have time to talk with. That'd be a whole other podcast. Um, you know, meditation is definitely parasympathetic and, and you know, especially again, if you hit as soon as you hit alpha, you're in healing mode. So alpha theta you hit start handies a slower brain waves and that's the people that are stuck in beta all the time.

Matt Gallant:    If they could just learn to shift their brain waves over to a slower mode, they're are going to start healing. Um, so things you can do when you meditate that are highly effective. And again, these are different emotions that are parasympathetic, that are healing. One of them is gratitude, which is this at this point is extremely highly researched. Um, if you're actually feeling gratitude, you're in parasympathetic, you are in healing mode. You cannot, and I'm not talking about saying thank you verbally. I'm talking about feeling gratitude in your heart, in your body. If you're feeling that sensation, you are definitely in healing mode. There's no two ways about it. There's a lot of new techniques that people are talking about is starting the day by doing a gratitude list or sharing your gratitude list or what you're grateful for getting this as a practical implementation because a lot of people don't really feel gratitude, you know, in the world today, even though as humans listening to this podcast, we're in the top 1% of humans in history of the planet, most people are focusing on what they don't have as opposed to what they are.

Wade Lightheart:    And that that's the comparison problem is, is real and present and bring yourself back to that gratitude practices is a great, is a great thing. Yeah. Um, happiness in general. So you know, if you're feeling happy probably in parasympathetic joy, which you can kind of measure with laughter, which is one of the things I kind of pay attention to is like how much am I laughing? And if I, if I'm not laughing, I'm probably in fight or flight. Like, you know what I mean? Whatever. If I'm laughing a lot that I know I'm in a good space first my nervous system goes and if I notice that I haven't, I'm not really laughing. You know what I mean? Uh, and it's one of the things I look for in people too. Are they laughing a lot or do not laughing and I can kind of gauge where they're at, um, feeling, you know, peace, serenity.

Matt Gallant:    Obviously if you're feeling peace and serenity, serenity now as they said in Seinfeld, then yeah, you're in parasympathetic versus you know, fear, anger. Obviously those are total fight or flight or freeze emotions and then even drive like, you know, getting stuff done like Wade, you burn, you are burning yourself thought necessarily fear and anger for you is dry. That, that intense willingness. So you know, and I spend probably like eight hours of my day, sometimes 10, sometimes 12 in that zone. And it's just something to be mindful of. Is that, yeah, when we're driving hard on our projects or business or jobs or careers that you know, that his fight or flight like and it's a low level or fight or flight, I mean sometimes it's high level if you're really dealing with a lot of stress, which goes back to resilience, but you know, driving this is a fight or flight thing. So any comments on that Wade? Because again, that's really what took you out. Yeah.

Wade Lightheart:    I think there's also part of the representation of it comes down to what is valued in your own life and, and not understanding the recovery to drive ratio and how the, the harder you drive, the more to you need to manage your recovery. And uh, there's a great book, the powerful engagement, uh, which really breaks this down about the difference that started off with tennis players. And even though they all had relatively the same level of skills, the guys that were doing these micro arrests were actually dominating the tennis field. And it was an unconscious practice which had all kinds of applications in the business world. And one of the things that I think you were really clear about, um, is your commitment to both micro and macro recovery. You kind of went into that earlier cause you probably hit that burnout zone in your 20s and said, okay, I, and you know, we talked about how you, that became kind of like a, uh, an a breakthrough attention unit and for people who are listening to this podcast, that's what our whole point here is to create a breakthrough awareness level that the harder you want to drive, the more you need to focus on recovery and micro recovery and macro recovery as well

Wade Lightheart:    recovery components. It's like a race car and F1 formula cart. If you think about it as going around the track at 200 miles an hour and guess what? It needs to be fueled up a lot more than your regular car. It's burning through tires at a lot more than a regular car. Um, so if you wanna drive at 200 miles an hour in your life, you better have a pit crew and you better be putting all the high components or recovery on it or you're going into the wall and you're going to crash and burn.

Matt Gallant:    So we're, we're, we're about at the end of the, of the show. So I just want to start talking about, you know, supplements and different things that shifted nervous system. Let's start with the easy one. The fight or flight stuff. Um, coffee, you know, any type of stimulant, you know, even the new nicotine, I mean, all of those are, you know, we'll put cocaine, amphetamines, you know, all of that stuff is, is fight or flight or freeze, right?

Wade Lightheart:    What's your opinion on, uh, all the kind of, uh, cognitive enhancers that you see people using in the digital world. And also in, um, education universities like Ivy league schools and stuff. What would you clarify those and, and it,

Matt Gallant:    most of them are fight or flight on the Modafinil goals and which the, I would, Daphne knows probably like a two out of 10 cause there's a scale right? Like not everything is just tense.

Wade Lightheart:    Let's just talk about that because I think there's a lot of people that are using these things. I mean like Ted talk, I talk about the guys on wall street are now on cocaine, testosterone and Aderoll, you know.

Matt Gallant:    And you don't see testosterone is more of a fight or flight versus estrogen's more healing. So you know, the point is that yeah, like is probably like a seven or eight Modafinil is probably like a two on that, on that fight or flight scale. So there is, you know, again scale. But yeah, almost all the nootropics now there are some exceptions. So let's shift over drug the drug based nootropics. Yeah. But even, yeah, even some of the cleaner stuff. So if we shift over to [inaudible] and so the better blends are a combination of boats or for example LFE is parasympathetic, parasympathetic healing, which counterbalances a lot of the caffeine issues. So you can stack parasympathetic substances with stimulants and have a much more balanced nervous system response versus just going completely fighter flights would. That is a great tip for everybody. Well, just to cover some substances.

Matt Gallant:    We got reishi, I would probably rate it pretty low on healing, but you do feel a little bit of a shift. El Athenian, one of my favorites, I take about 400 milligrams before bed every night. CBD, CBN, CBG, those are three different cannabinoids. They are definitely on the parasympathetic side versus THC. More fight or flight lavender oil, one of the only oils research to show to increase alpha brainwaves, which is healing. I like taking a actually oral lavender oil before bed. Ashwagandha, I took two grams last night. I was a little wired, um, during the day. Shifted me right over and had a decent sleep. But the one I want to talk about and we'll do a whole podcast on this, uh, because they're gonna run out of time, but it's magnesium in both Wade and I uh, healed ourselves, healed our nervous system using magnesium. Like I got to the point because I was uh, you know, squeezing my drawings too much and my nervous system was literally getting raw.

Wade Lightheart:    You can burn the myelin sheet off your nerves and I couldn't drink coffee anymore. Like, if I drank coffee, I instantly felt like frazzled. I didn't get to it to the level we'd got, but I'm like, okay, I can't drink coffee anymore. I'm done. So I did a big magnesium cycle for around I think 90 days and around the 60 day Mark I'm like, I felt completely different. I felt kind of permanently relaxed. The magnesium is kind of the, the parasympathetic mineral, you know, nothing shifts you over on a mineral level or a macro. Probably the greatest deficiency out there in North Americans right now is magnesium, I think. I think it's only 32% of the population is getting the RDA levels. And that's not what the optimal level is. Yeah. Because probably there's the hard to get from food. That's the problem. It's almost impossible to eat enough magnesium. Correct. Like it's, that's, that's the fundamental challenge. So even if you're, you know, one of these, Hey, let me try to get the perfect guide going. Um, it's, it's really challenging to do that. So that is the list of, um, parasympathetic and sympathetic. Like I said, go to box.com/nervous system. I've got this entire doc including a couple of things we didn't have a time to cover.

Wade Lightheart:    We'll add them in and throw in a couple of things. So we'll go a little bit longer. What else can we do? Cause I know you've gone, you spent years in testing, literally has insurance of substance and social unload on us a little bit and give us a little extra bonus.

Matt Gallant:    Yeah. Um, so I'm going to talk about my favorite favorite thing like which this is about biohacking thing. It's not a substance, but it does relate to magnesium. The number one thing for me, like by a long shot, I've talked a lot about our guys. Joe Rogan's, a huge fan is floating. So floating is a sensory deprivation tank. You're literally floating in this salt magnesium, salt soup. It's made with Epsom salts, which is a magnesium salt and you're floating. The water is the same temperature as your body. It's pitch black. So all your senses get a reset. Like you're not getting stimuli like you normally would. Like even if I'm sitting in this chair, I'm feeling gravity right now, right? Like, my feet are feeling gravity from the floor. My butt's feeling gravity from the chair. But when you're floating, you kind of just not feeling anything.

Matt Gallant:    You're just, you're not really feeling the water. You don't have light against stimulating your brain. It's really usually completely pitch. There's no sound and you're absorbing magnesium. So I love to float for like 90 minutes. And I mean, the level of shift, like I've gone places. I remember we went in LA, I flew in Venice beach, right? Yeah. Flare crash, got the best tanks. That's the one he makes. Joe Rogan's tax. Um, float labs is a, his company. So I flew to LA. I could tell like my, you know, when I get fried, I get these swollen plans here, the lymph nodes, so I could, I was fried. I said, Hey, wait, let's go. Floats away. And I went floating and after the float, all my, you know, all my glands were, we're back to normal and I felt incredible. So there, there's one thing I could recommend is definitely floating, um, to, to shift over your, uh, nervous system.

Wade Lightheart:    Chiropractic too. I have a world-class chiropractor, which I'm actually going to go see here in about an hour and a half. Um, is also way that you're able to take relief off the nervous system if you have a really good chiropractor. Of course. Uh, I've got what we call the wizard here in Vancouver. There's a Gary down in LA that his, his whole thing at the human garage, they've got some really great things to switch you into that healing mode. And, and a really good chiropractor will be able to take load off the nervous system. And one of the things that I didn't have on those travels is I didn't have my chiropractor

Wade Lightheart:    who was always giving me that feedback of where I was. And one of the big recovery modalities that I've experienced is by using chiropractic care.

Matt Gallant:    I will call it out for a shameless pitch. We have a new product called magnesium breakthrough, which is seven different magnesiums, including cofactors in our humble opinions. It is the best bang museum out there. So what we recommend you do if you're feeling a little fried, a little bit in the fight or flight system, is to take around three doses a day. It is better to spread your dose because if you take too much magnesium at once, you may run to the bathroom because it can disaster. But however, key, powerful note, we formulated this, the minimize that effect. So when we, when we formulated this cause it goes different magnets, some magnesiums pull a lot more water than others.

Matt Gallant:    Um, we minimize the, the water pulling effect. So we recommend starting off it probably half a gram three times a day and then building up to three grams. So it'd be a grand three times a day. That's probably a good dose. Um, I mean if you really want to push it, you can try to get to like four or five, six grams. That's, that's where I ended up, uh, when I was really healing that thing and got it to five grams, um, and felt incredible. So anyways, that is our new product. Uh, magnesium breakthrough.com. You can go on our sidebar optimizer.com and check it out. So amazing product. Really excited to share this because we know both Wade and I have experienced the, the healing benefits of magnesium. Um, it's, it's incredible. It's literally one of the best supplements that I've ever experienced in terms of real world experiential benefits. And that's why we wanted to do a magnesium product and we didn't want to just do another me too. Magnesium. We wanted to do something special, which we have. So wait, maybe we'll close off your final thoughts on magnesium and your experiences.

Wade Lightheart:    Yeah, so, uh, I went the, uh, of course I'm an all in kind of guy as you imagined. And what I did is understanding when I was cooked and we talked about the magnesium thing is just so you know, different magnesiums affect different parts of the body and we don't have time to go into all the details today, but you can learn more about that on the, on magnesium, breakthrough.com. And, and the interactions between the different magnesium, some are good for your brain, some are good for your heart, some are good for your skeletal muscle, some are good for your bones. Um, and that's why we have all the inclusions. But for me, I went to, I went to a kind of using the old models that Linus Pauling and uh, these guys in orthomolecular nutrition is, I go to the point where I overwhelm tolerance and that means I dose up until I get the runs and then I would come back.

Wade Lightheart:    So when I was in deep and burnout, I went to six and a half grams before I got the runs. And that was in divided dosages. And you know, I would take, I would take, I started out at a, at a thousand at a time and then worked my way up and then I would hit at six and a half grams. I would just take them every couple of hours until I start getting ruts and then I dose back down. And even today, uh, I'm still taking two to two grams a day. And what I do notice if I, if I go to my favorite tea place and I go to the black teas as opposed to say a poor, which is where we'll have more theming and a black tea, we'll have less. Um, and I feel myself getting that kind of, I'm getting revved up again. There's kind of a sense that I get a, I come home and I extra, I add an extra gram of magnesium.

Wade Lightheart:    And what's interesting is I don't get the disaster. Like I don't, I don't have to get the runs. So there's a definite correlation between my burnout effect or my stimulation effect and how much magnesium I can tolerate. And you kind of find your own balance. It's going to vary from person to person, but a that that's how I do it. And, and that's what was one of the key factors in recovering as opposed, uh, on top of adjusting my lifestyle and my expectations as we'll be back real soon with another podcast about magnesium. It definitely warrants this entire entire episode on this. So it is, thanks for joining us. It's always fun chatting with your weight. It's always a blast. Yeah, it's always a blast. Great to have you back on the podcast. Matty G co founder of BiOptimizers. He's the guy that's often behind the scenes, but we're, we've, we've pulled them out of the out of control room here today.

Wade Lightheart:    So I want to thank everybody wherever you are. Make everyday an awesome day. Jump into the 84 steps, the awesome health course. Look for the show links of course that Matt identified so you can see what's causing the burnout in your life. But more importantly, uh, take time today to put that gratitude list, get that heart and mind in the same level. It's an amazing practice and I hope you enjoyed this. We'll hear your comments. If you like this, put a like, put a comment, share it with your friends. Look forward to hearing from you soon from all of us at BiOptimizers. All you have yourself an awesome day.