Recently some friends and Silver Core Club members have reached out to me about doing
a Live Silver Core Podcast Club event.
They asked my thoughts on this, and I'll read you a text message that I sent.
It says, I want the Silver Core Podcast live event to support the mission of
the Silver Core Club by helping people deepen their connection with nature,
build confidence in the outdoors and in life, and foster a sense of
community among like-minded individuals.
The podcast serves as a platform to share inspiration, positivity, and real
world experiences centered on growth, resilience, and personal development.
For the live event, I'd like it to be revenue neutral, attract a strong and
diverse audience, and provide meaningful value to attendees through engaging
content and opportunities for connection.
I also want the event to offer clear benefits to any participating club
partners who align with our values.
While the format of the podcast can be wide ranging, every episode is rooted
in themes of positivity, grit, and growth, and I want the live experience
to reflect that same spirit in a way that it's welcoming and impactful.
So here's my request to you.
Is that something that you would be interested in attending
or even being involved with?
Let me know on social media, or you can email me podcast@silvercore.ca.
Another really fun Silver Core Club thing is the Outpost, and that's the Private
Silver Core podcast that comes out every single week, and I'm seeing more and
more members taking advantage of that.
If you're not aware of the Outpost and you're a Silver Core Club member, just log
into your portal and you're gonna have a unique RSS feed that's specific for you.
You can download that, plug it into most major podcast platforms, and every
single week, you're gonna be getting short form key takeaways to deal with
the outdoors, with resilience, with all the different things that the Silver Core
Podcast talks about, but in condensed ways, as well as some behind the scenes
with some of our guests and myself.
Now, without further ado, let's get on with this episode.
The last time we recorded together for the Silver Core Podcast,
it was at his kitchen table.
Since then, he's launched the collective with Chance Burs and cranked out hundreds
of episodes, one a day for a year.
Before that, he was a JTF two operator, a world champion, 24 hour solo mountain
bike racer, and a high performance coach.
With over 15 years of experience, his insights on wellness mindset
and pushing limits are hard earned.
And his podcast, the Collective, is a veritable goldmine of practical wisdom.
Welcome back to the Silver Corp podcast, Sean Taylor.
Thanks for having me, Travis.
It's always a pleasure to hang out with you and have deeper conversations on any
subject that, uh, fascinates both of us.
And, um, it has been a little while since we did one of these, but it
feels like we spend a fair bit of time on the collective together.
So I appreciate you coming over and supporting us on
our podcast, uh, chance Burs.
And I always love, uh, having you over for your, uh, insight and, uh, the way
you view the world, uh, to some degree is something that I've always treasured.
So, thanks for having me on.
We'll see what, where we go with this
one.
I really appreciate that, and I love the collective.
There's gonna be links in the description for anybody who hasn't
heard of the collective or, uh, wants to learn more about it.
You'll see the website where you can download it, where
you can watch it on YouTube.
Uh, it, it really is something special.
For this episode, I was really excited.
So it all started essentially from an Instagram post.
Sean, you were just giving her on your mountain bike and you
filmed yourself just flying up the mountainside on your mountain bike.
And people are like, just looking at you at amazement, like, holy crow,
you got the turbo water, or what?
And, and then you film yourself afterwards and you're just kind of
talking to yourself through the process.
And what struck me was one of the people who commented on that post, and he says,
serious question with all the new quote, load management around performance.
Have you done anything differently for recovery as you continue
to push hard as you've aged asking for a friend Winky face?
And of, of course, to me, I am 46, turning 47, and I've got a plethora of
injuries from not having properly taken care of myself and my mindset's shifting.
And when I read through what you have here, and I'll just kind of high note
it, you're saying, you know, top of the list sleep, not just quantity, but more
correctly, quality, kneeling macros, hydration supplementation, stress
management mindset, routines, being comfortable in intensity, et cetera.
And you go on.
And so I thought, holy crow, I mean, somebody with your background and
your both trial and error in your research and seeing what works.
Anybody who's got just half of an interest in wellness, physical,
mental, emotional, longevity is gonna get a lot out of this podcast.
So, um, I am, I'm stoked.
I'm really excited to get this conversation rolling.
Right on.
You know what, Mike, what is interesting is that that video that
you're referring to is a video that.
You know, that's the kind of stuff that I do on a regular basis.
The how hard I ride or how hard I train or how hard I engage in life is
generally speaking, in a daily practice.
And I don't think too much about it because I've just been doing
it for so long and, and I, quite frankly, I'm reluctant to put up
videos that show me like deep, deep, deep into the hurt locker.
Uh, because I don't think everyone needs to see that on a regular basis.
But more importantly, I never, ever, ever want anyone to misconstrue
or misunderstand the intent of why I put any videos up on Instagram.
It's not to, uh, demonstrate how hard I can go or how deep I can go, um, because
to some degree that makes me feel like, um, uh, I'm flaring out or that I'm trying
to, I'm dressed to impress, as it were.
Um, and I don't care for that, um, feeling.
Uh, I don't like to have anyone misunderstand anything that I'm doing
on social media, so I don't put those kind of videos up on a regular basis.
I. But after I put that video up and I started getting the comments, I thought,
man, I should have been doing this sooner.
I should have illustrated to others how freaking hard I train, or how deep I go,
or how much in the hurt locker, or I put myself in willingly in order to experience
the growth that I like to see in my life.
And so the video was kind of like almost a casual, um, effort to
just put something up on my feed.
But then when the comments started rolling in, and I believe, uh, the comment came
in from Sergeant Hazzard, uh, and then of course you jumped in on that comment
and said, uh, you know what you said?
I thought, man.
I should have done this ages ago because look at the dialogue that is
going on now, uh, that I could have addressed ages ago, because the reply
that I gave to him, I typed that out in like 90 seconds with like mm-hmm.
Almost no thought.
And, and I hit send.
And it was just kinda, uh, classic case of I'll just try to be a
little bit helpful in this moment.
Tap, tap, tap, and hit send.
And that was it.
And I never thought much more about it until you hit me up.
And, and I realized that I have been underserving in this area.
I certainly could have addressed this a long time ago, uh, given a
lot more value, uh, in these matters.
And thanks for picking up on that comment and engaging in this.
And now look at where we're at.
So that's well done on your behalf.
So thanks.
Well, I guess it's a fine line between, you know, people will look
at social media posts and thinking someone's being braggadocio or
they're, they're just showing off, or are they leading by example?
Are they showing what they do on the daily and providing a framework that
other people can look at and say, Hey, that, that might work for me too.
And I think you have a framework that could work for a lot of people.
Not everybody, not everyone's gonna have the mindset or the, um, uh, the
ambition to follow such a framework, but maybe they might modify it.
And, and when I talk about this framework, so Craig Weller, Jonathan Pope.
W wrote a great book, building the Elite, and it's just this bible of information.
And I was talking with Craig and I'm like, okay, Craig, I don't
know if you heard this one before, Sean, but I I brought you up.
I said, uh, so you, you work with a lot of, uh, listen, be good or bad.
Well, we'll find out in a second.
Um, they said, you work with a lot of high performance athletes, a lot of,
um, special forces, both individuals in special forces or who are trained to be in
special forces to reach their peak optimal physical, mental, emotional, uh, value.
And I said, well, you and I, we, we know Sean, what advice would you give Sean if
looking at what he does, if you wanted to make a few tweaks here or there?
And Craig's response was, I wouldn't be able to make any advice.
I can't, I can't find any areas where I'd be picking away at what Sean does.
So, so, um, for somebody who does it, some
Craig, but he, he, he could have,
he
could've done
better than that, I'm pretty sure.
Yeah, no, I, I ribbed him.
I said, look, you took the easy way on that one for sure.
But, um, but you do, you've, you've got a process that you put in place
and I'm sure it wasn't by accident.
And, uh, I thought maybe if, if we approach it, I sent you
over just 'cause I was having a little conversation with AI here.
I. And, um, figured if we kind of approach it from, uh, five different points, if
we looked at sleep, the foundation of wellness, stress management, the invisible
weight, uh, nutrition and macros.
Of course, I learned what macros are now, so that's good.
It's more than just macaroni, um, hormonal optimization, uh, routines and mindset.
So if we looked at sleep, 'cause that was where you started, can you
tell me, uh, what you do for sleep, what role it plays in, in your life?
Sure can.
So before I dive into any further material that will, uh, engage in throughout the
pro this podcast, um, I just want to state the, oh, I, I should state a few things.
Uh, first of all, I am not a medical professional, so anything that I say,
if I make any recommendations or if I have an any opinion on anything,
it's always worthwhile doing a cold eye review on anything that you
hear, hear with someone else, with your doctor, or with a naturopath or
whoever you get medical advice from.
Always check in with someone else who has some form of professional designations.
The second thing is the, um, things that I've learned throughout my
life are an n equals one experiment.
And so I've treated myself like the.
The lab rat as it were, where I have deeply considered Sean.
And then through that process, learning everything about me as much as I can.
Uh, I then try to apply it within anyone that I've worked with in the past.
Uh, either as a high performance coach with athletes or anyone
that I have any dealings with.
I try to pass on my n equals one to them, but always with the provision
that this is your n equals one.
Now you need to pay attention, much like I'm going to describe
throughout the rest of this podcast.
So there's a couple of things to think about medical.
And, uh, uh, a professional medical opinion.
And then of course, you are your own and equals one.
The next thing I'd like to say is, uh, because I, this, this podcast came
together in, in fairly short order over a couple of days kind of thing.
Um, I, in preparing for the podcast, in fact, I prepared more for this podcast
than I prepare for my own podcast.
So what's going on there?
But, uh, as I was preparing for this podcast, I thought I would,
um, start capturing some of my thoughts, my opinions, my ideas,
my processes, protocols, as it were the n equals one of Sean.
Throughout my life, that has taught me quite a lot in respect
to what works for others as well.
So, uh, as I just mentioned to you before we went live or before we
started recording this show, what I did do is I've got, um, a document
here that is about when you condense it down into kind of like the size of
a standard issue book that you would read, uh, this afternoon kind of thing.
It's about a 70 page book, and so it's pretty solid.
There's a lot of information in there that I feel would be extremely helpful
to, well, literally anyone who reads it.
And so, um, uh.
I, I, I need to segue into also, currently I'm writing a book or co-writing
a book with my very good friend, a friend of ours, of course, EB Levo.
And, uh, we're several chapters deep into that, uh, process right now, and
things are going exceedingly well.
I'm really stoked about that book.
So what I've just described is not that kind of a book.
It is not in competition to that book.
It is not really a book per se, other than it's a really valuable
resource that I should probably make available to the general public.
In fact, maybe as a general offer, I'll throw this out there to your audience.
Uh, I'm sure Travis, you can find a way to use this book as a resource, however
you feel, uh, maybe, uh, within your inner circle or whatever the case is.
We can talk about that, uh, once we're off the recording.
But I'd like to make that available to you for your general purposes as well.
It sounds amazing.
That sounds amazing.
So with that in place, um, as I said, uh, I created quite a bit of notes and each,
each of the topics that you had suggested that we cover, I I dove down pretty
deeply into each of these pillars, if you will, and the first pillar being sleep.
And so, um, as, as I said in my comment on Instagram, I feel that sleep is
the most important thing a person can focus on for their overall, not
just longevity, but their physical performance, their mental performance,
their sense of ease with who they are.
As a human in this moment, a lot of it is driven by sleep.
So with that in place, the importance of sleep, I'll just throw some context out
there right now to establish how important sleep is and how I learned this over
multi decades of not getting good sleep and then getting good sleep and realizing
the delta between those two positions.
So of course, as a young man in my first military career, a lot
of my career trajectory was, um, driven by a lack of sleep.
The, uh, it was a fairly robust pipeline that I was in, and that
pipeline required not a lot of sleep.
And I'm not talking about in selection courses or in, uh, any
form of, uh, testing as it were.
This was just the day-to-day regular.
Tempo typically had you always lacking sleep, now lacking
sleep, how much lacking sleep?
Um, that could be anywhere from, uh, only getting five or six hours
a night all the way through to, well, just no sleep for some days.
And if you got an hour or two here over the period of three or
four days, then that was bonus.
That was gravy.
But back, back then, as a young man, I simply accepted those terms
and conditions of that lifestyle.
And so there's, there's a cost to that.
Nothing is free in life.
And so that lack of sleep or poor amount of sleep, or poor quality of sleep, which
I'll get into momentarily, really had a impact on me, has an impact on everyone.
If you're not getting enough quantity, that's a thing, but if
you're not getting enough quality, that's a whole different thing.
So if you choose to go to bed at whatever time and you think I'm gonna get seven
hours sleep, you wake up seven hours later and think, oh, that was great.
I got seven hours sleep off to have a great day.
That may not be the case because those seven hours.
Are determined as to how you'll feel the next day based on quality of sleep.
And so there are a number of sleep cycles that ebb and flow throughout the night.
Uh, I'm not talking about now a circadian rhythm per se.
I'm talking about the regular ebb and flow as you move out of light
sleep to rem sleep, to deep sleep.
These various phases of sleep are critical for you to be able to, uh,
consolidate memory, consolidate, thought, remove, brain fog, uh, human growth
hormone release, and various hormonal releases and et cetera, et cetera.
A bunch of science that actually have in the, uh, small book
that, uh, I'm gonna send to you.
Uh, all of these things impact us, uh, while we're sleeping.
And we don't, we don't realize how much impact that is until we wake up in
the morning and we throw our leg over the bed, step onto the floor, stand
up and think, oh, I feel a bit groggy.
Oh, I didn't sleep that well, but I slept seven hours.
Why is, why am I dot, dot dot?
Why am I not 100%?
And so sleep as a whole is quite a complex subject that.
Requires constant tweaking in order to be optimized.
I'm not gonna get into the real deepness of, uh, the details of the science,
but suffice to say that, um, it, it is a process that is not well understood,
and more importantly it's not focused on enough in the sense of optimizing it.
Yeah, I can see that.
I mean, when you're looking at optimizing sleep, I've got a Garmin watch and I
was using it to help track my sleep.
I was told that it's not really the most accurate.
I recently picked up this, uh, aura ring to try and track
sleep a little bit better.
Oh, I see you halfway there too.
And it's, uh, it seems to be a heck of a lot more accurate than what the, the
Garin Watch is doing, and I'm still trying to make heads or tails outta
some of the information in there.
But it's funny, some nights like I'll get four and a half hours of sleep and
it, but it says it's, I did well, I could do better on length of time, but it says
all my other metrics I did really well.
So I've got efficient sleep in there.
And I was concerned because some nights I get very little sleep.
Maybe I gotta be doing something.
I'm working hard to get more sleep.
My challenge has been a four o'clock wake up, it seems.
And I remember about half a year ago, year ago, I mentioned that to you and you
immediately you said, oh, that's liver.
I think that's what you said it was liver.
I'm like, what?
Hold on.
And then we didn't expand too much more to that.
So, um, what does that mean when you say someone's waking up in the
morning and you say That's liver.
What does that mean?
That's a great question.
So I'll, I'll back it up a sec and talk about the a ring.
Uh, because I've been wearing mine now for I think about eight years.
Hmm.
And so, um, this is my third ring.
This is the newest generation Aura ring.
And, um, and I was one of the early adopters of Aura when
they first came on the scene.
And, uh, prior to the Aura Ring, I had other devices.
I've been, um, considering data as a, generally speaking, a
data scientist to some degree.
Um, I've been thinking about this subject since, oh, I don't
know, maybe 25 years ago when I bought my first co quote unquote
smartwatch, which was a Polar watch.
They were the very, very first com public or uh, retail public
company that provided this.
Incredibly, uh, uh, useful at the time, uh, algorithm called HRV, uh, heart rate
variability and Polar, uh, got the license from another small company that I'd, I'd
started eyeballing on the side looking for all the secret sauce, uh, tools,
tips, acts, tricks, um, back in the day.
And, uh, so I bought my first Polar.
And at the time, HRV was pretty much misunderstood because the science was
so emerging or evolving that, uh, no one really had a kind of a generalized opinion
as to whether it was even good or not.
And so I, I engaged with HRV way back in the day, and like everything
I've done, and I've already mentioned, n equals one experiment.
Um, I treat my life like an n equals one.
And so once I bought that polar, it was less about what the internet said
HRV is, or what polar thought HRV was.
It was precisely for me what it meant to me, not to them.
And so the, the tools that we have, the AA ring or the polar.
Watch way back in the day.
They are useless.
In fact, they can be detrimental unless you treat them as a tool to learn
about yourself at a deeper level by almost just isolating yourself from
the rhetoric or the opinion or the, um, what, what, um, aura will tell you.
It means you have to almost read between the lines of what the data is presenting,
but really what's going on inside of you.
How, how you feel that relates to you, how you think that relates to you, how you
see it relate to you as your day unfolds.
And so if I wake up in the morning and, and I, uh, check my aura ring
using the app on my phone, it might tell me that I got six hours of sleep.
And it might tell me that I got 45 minutes of deep sleep and an hour
and 12 minutes of ram and the rest was light and I was interrupted in
my sleep pattern two times for five minutes here and 10 minutes there.
I can take a look at that data and think, huh, but then I set it to the side and
I reconsider what it actually means.
I try to synchronize up the data with my feels as I stand up.
Am I clearheaded as I walk to the bathroom to brush my teeth or whatever the case is?
I. How are things unfolding?
The moment that I wake up until the moment that I come down, grab my glass
of water, pound that stare into the sun as per the huberman and all of
the, the various sequences of events that I'll talk about, of course, as
the podcast unfolds, I am constantly checking the external world metrics
against my internal world understanding.
And my internal world understanding is a database that I have refined daily
for fricking coming up on 60 years.
And so it isn't just guesswork for me anymore.
When I see my aura data, I know what it means, not, not what the ring
is telling me, but what I know it means to Sean, his n equals one.
And so for you, relatively new to the, um, the, the science data collection game, I
will say for you and anyone it, what you need to do is establish that relationship
between the metrics of the world and the internal feelings of your n equals one
life and synchronize those two so that they generally kind of align themself
to some degree, if that makes sense.
It does make sense.
So I, I probably know the answer to this question.
I. But given the fact that you've been tracking these things for so long
through the Ora ring, do you keep some sort of a spreadsheet or some sort of
matrix where you correlate how you feel in the day with what the results of
the, these wearable devices give you?
I do.
So every, every metric that I track is, uh, established within some sort of
software, uh, where I can discover the deeper trending or the historical trending
of, um, a, a, a tool like the URA ring.
This ring in and of itself is worthless unless you take the time
to understand how it applies to you specifically as an n equals one.
Now, the, the trap or the trappings of these kind of things is, um,
you, you'll buy a tool, whether it's Aura or Garmin or whatever it is.
Whoop, it doesn't much matter what the tool is for tracking your sleep.
It, it, it can't tell you who you are.
It can't describe precisely what happened in the night.
What it, it can do is track things like your body temperature, your
respiratory cycle, your, um, your heart rate, whether it is in light
sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep.
It can tell you a bunch of things, but then it will interpret.
Those things into, generally speaking, sort of a simplistic,
uh, delivery of information.
Uh, something along the lines of, wow, it looks like you didn't
sleep that well last night.
Try and sleep better tomorrow.
And so, um, these, these simplistic sort of overviews are good for
someone who's initially getting into the data tracking world.
But what you, what we all have to do is dig deeper than that
or think deeper than that.
Not just accept the simple, almost casual observance of the
software, but apply these software observations to how you feel.
How it has impacted your life today in context of what it told you
yesterday and what it told you a week ago and what it told you a year
ago, and start forming a pattern.
So all these tools, any tool that you use to metric your life, whether it is
counting pushups, however many pushups you did today, if you put that in a
software or in a spreadsheet to kind of evaluate what did you do today?
How did you feel today?
How can you do it better tomorrow?
These kind of things are only valuable if you can gather data for a long
enough period of time that you can now start forming a pattern, not just a
data pattern, but an in felt pattern.
So to me, and you've heard me say this, uh, before Travis, that in my life I
like to pattern recognizer, pattern recognition has allowed me to survive
and it has allowed me to thrive.
And so without pattern recognition, um, I feel that there's a huge chunk
of improvement that a person is giving away by not deeply considering
the long-term patterns of life.
I'm talking a year to two, to five to 10 years worth of pattern recognition.
How am I doing now?
Versus me 10 years ago.
These are the kind of patterns that I'm talking about.
So I'm, as I look at patterns in my life as they apply to, let's say, sleep
specifically, I know about 17 years ago, I, so building my own business, uh, young
family stress associated with all of those things, being ent, an entrepreneur.
And about 17 years ago, a great deal, more stress plopped in my lap, and I
noticed it greatly affected how I slept.
And I would essentially not be sleeping, and I would hear everything that's
happening around me, even when I did have those, uh, rare times when I was sleeping.
And so I started wearing earplugs to block it out, and I could still
hear everything that's going on.
My senses were a bit heightened, my brain's going crazy.
So I would take, uh, gravel or, uh, diamond ate and,
uh, to try and knock me out.
And yeah, it gives you a bit of a sleep, but you don't feel great the next day.
I mean, sure you were sleeping, but I, it didn't feel like I was
actually properly resting and I wasn't tracking any of the stuff that these
wearables, uh, do at that point.
And then I started, okay, I didn't like that because I
don't want to have some sort of.
A, uh, a drug that I have to take in order to sleep.
And so I thought, well, melatonin, that's supposed to be natural, right?
And now I'm seeing research on melatonin that it's, uh, bad for you.
It's like a, it messes with your hormones.
So I, I came back, when I look at, uh, these measurables establishing
a baseline and, and tracking where these things are different, it comes
down to, um, for me, ensuring that my external environment matches kind
of what my internal environment is.
And if I'm living in, quote unquote the concrete jungle, if we can call latner the
concrete jungle, which if, which it feels like it to me, but, uh, um, I, I don't
sleep nearly as well as I do if I am out in the bush or if I've in a place where
there's, um, external matches a bit more.
So I've touched on a few things, but, uh, more specifically, I guess,
um, what sort of patterns have you recognized that lead to, uh, better,
more restful sleep and, um, when it comes to, let's say supplements, uh,
are there things that a person can take, like, I dunno, magnesium, I think, is
supposed to be good that will assist in a, in a better, more regulated sleep.
Yeah.
So, you know, in order to answer this question like yourself, you were given
context by stating that there was a period of time when you weren't getting
much sleep and, and you felt the obvious downside or the negatives to or sleep.
Hmm.
And so I think that's really important that anyone who listens to this
takes a moment to think, okay, I feel the way I feel right now based on
the kind of sleep that I'm getting.
How would I feel if my sleep was way better?
And until you experience that way better, this conversation is
almost like a neutral conversation.
It's almost inert.
It almost has no value until a person takes the time to think about, I
could be 10 times the person I am if I just dialed in my sleep more.
And so I know this to be true because I'd stated earlier, the, in my first
career, the tempo was such that sleep was a luxury to some degree, more so
than, um, you know, an obligated thing.
But as I continued on in my other careers, um, I had lots of moments
where I still wasn't getting good sleep because of my career demands.
But.
On top of that, I'd like to throw this other layer that I was also
dealing with that was really impacting my sleep detrimentally.
And that is I was having a lot of nightmares and, uh, I didn't realize
the, and, and I was having nightmares every night and, and I was getting
terrible sleep because of the, so I was working super hard, getting to
bed super late because the work had to be done then getting up super early
because the work was still there.
And then in the time that I was in bed, my sleep was disrupted by,
I didn't have good sleep hygiene, which we can talk about shortly.
And I was just dealing with nightmares.
And so the nightmares that I had are a result of PTSD.
And um, and I had those for over 20 years until I mentioned to my family
doctor that I was having nightmares.
Um, uh, I, I just kind of thought it was a normal thing.
I didn't talk to anyone about it.
And, uh, I just kind of put up with it.
And it's not like I had tons of conversations with tons of
friends and saying, Hey, do you have nightmares every night?
How many do you have?
And how, how bad is it?
And this just wasn't a conversation that I'd ever had until Right.
I talked with my family doctor and it was just a casual mention.
And so, uh, we found a way to sort of reduce those levels of nightmares.
And then I started applying way more sleep hygiene and way
more focus on quality of sleep.
And so.
The amount of sleep, as I said, is one thing, but the quality of
sleep is a whole different thing.
And so these sleep hygiene protocols are, you can Google sleep hygiene or
perhaps, um, in the, in the little book that I just wrote about, uh,
this subject, you'll find out a lot more about sleep hygiene protocols
and then supplementation for sleep.
So I'll start with sleep hygiene first.
Certainly one of the things that I try to control, whether I'm in my own
house or whether I'm traveling, is make the room as cold as possible.
If you can get your room to, um, like kind of chilly, uh, that's good because
that promotes, um, for, I'm not gonna get into the biological reasons, but
that promotes a deeper, faster, uh, way of sleep, uh, slipping into your sleep,
um, noise, distractions, any noises that are going on throughout the night.
If you're in the big city and you're used to all of the train noises and bus
noises and taxi noises, that's okay.
You're used to it.
But that doesn't mean that your body isn't recognizing those noises and
responding to them all the time.
And so you may feel like, well, I'm just used to big city noises, but,
but as, as, as cavemen, we don't.
Uh, we can't just say, oh, that's a taxi while we're sleeping.
What happens is we're momentarily awake because of that taxi horn.
And so I wear earplugs every night, uh, whether I'm in my own house or whether I'm
traveling and if I'm traveling overseas in an area that I think is a bit dodgy.
I'll still wear my earplugs, but I'll put other measures into
place to make sure that it's not that much of a concern for me.
Same thing with an eye mask.
Every night I wear an eye mask, a blackout eye mask, and in our master bedroom
we have, uh, blinds that pull down to reduce the light as well to the degree.
Controlling light to the degree that if I wasn't wearing an eye mask, a, a
little, uh, maybe a digital, uh, alarm or a digital clock next to the bedside
table, it, it's oriented away from me.
So it's facing away from me because even with your eyes closed while you're asleep,
light from these kind of a device can, the short wave can penetrate through.
The eyelids still hit the receptors of the eyes as you're sleeping and indicate
that there is it's time to wake up.
Those early signs of light will start to pull you out of various sleep patterns.
And so controlling for noise, controlling for temperature, controlling for light
is critical as far as I'm concerned.
Now, as part of the sleep hygiene protocol, uh, when it comes to as bedtime
approaches, of course, you can start reducing all forms of electronic devices.
And if you can't control your electronic devices, then certainly you should
have a blue light filter in place, like on your phone or on your laptop.
If you like to, uh, wind down with a little bit of a movie or some YouTube
or some Netflix or whatever the case is, you can reduce the light that
is blasting from your laptop or from your TV or whatever the case is.
When, when I'm going to bed at night, um, as I'm heading upstairs, I turn
all the lights off in the house and, and it, this is just a little routine.
And, and believe it or not, all these tiny little routines add up into a
pattern that helps you believe or helps you understand, or literally puts you
in a place where you're ready for sleep.
I kill all the lights in the house, and then from the main floor, I walk
upstairs through two flights of stairs into the master bedroom in pitch black,
open the door, stealth in like a ninja, stealth right up to my bedside table.
I put my earplugs in.
I put my night mask in, uh, on, and, and I slide into bed, uh, as quietly
as I can, so as not to disturb my wife.
But all of that is stealth.
All of that is in the pitch black.
And so I appreciate the idea of stealthing up the stairs silently and
flowing in a way that isn't janky or jerky or disconnected from the moment.
And so that simple process of ninja in my way up into bed is a way for me
to like become grounded and aware or present in the moment as to what I'm
doing in the moment as I head to bed.
And so this, these tiny little subroutines that I have in the way of
sleep hygiene are really important, uh, little protocols that help, um,
sort of build out the infrastructure.
Of preparing to go to sleep or having a good night's sleep as part of the
sleep hygiene protocol, I suppose we could talk about supplementation.
And so supplementation isn't something that you can, um, a a minute before
you go to bed, reach over, grab a little pill, throw it down your
throat, and head off to bed, and bam, you're having the best sleep ever.
These are things that you can do throughout your day, but certainly
specific to sleep, I feel that magnesium is extremely important.
There's a couple of forms of magnesium that I use.
One is magnesium, three innate, and one is magnesium bisg glycinate
or mag magnesium glycinate.
Um, the, the glycinate I can use on a daily basis throughout
the day for whatever purposes.
And magnesium is a really useful compound because there's over 300
biological processes that require, uh, magnesium throughout your day.
Uh, so magnesium glycinate or bis glycinate is something I
will use irrespective of sleep.
But then, uh, for my sleep I might use magnesium three anate, which is, is.
You know, helps cross over the blood brain barrier.
Uh, it's also more of a cognitive, um, magnesium.
And so without getting into too many details, I will say that magnesium,
those two forms are something that I take, uh, almost every single day.
Um, in respect to melatonin, as you mentioned, I'm not actually
that much of a fan of melatonin.
And if melatonin is used, it is an acute or is it is used precisely
and temporarily to offset something like jet lag as an example.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, and I would say use it as a cautionary basis because it can, uh, interfere,
interact negatively with your, uh, endogen or with your inbuilt hormonal system that
creates the melatonin for you mm-hmm.
Uh, throughout your life.
And so it's, it is something like a two to three day melatonin at very small
doses, which the doses I put in the handbook that I'm gonna send you, um,
this is something that is temporary.
And is only used as a quick fix for a acute problem, as it were, something
like traveling across multiple time zones into another country.
But it's nothing that anyone should rely on.
Um, there's a, there's a number of other things that you can use nutritionally.
Uh, certainly one of them is try not to eat two to three
hours before you go to bed.
Now, there's a whole variety of reasons for that, uh, to do with how
the gut brain, um, connection works or the, the mind gut connection.
And of course, how if you've got a big old steak in your belly, uh, that
you ate five minutes before you went to bed, there's some blood shunting
there and there's some processes that have to stay busy throughout
the night to work on them, et cetera.
Whereas those processes are better used to help clear out some metabolic waste
and are better used to blah, blah, blah.
Things that I talk about in this little book, um, these, these
choices that we make, um, I will say this as kind of a universal
statement in respect to this topic.
The choices that we make throughout our day should be driven by setting
us up for the best sleep ever.
And so at some point in the day, we all have come to that point
where I wouldn't mind a snack.
It's 10 o'clock at night.
I wouldn't mind a bag of Miss Vicky's.
It's 11 o'clock at night.
I wouldn't mind a Twinkie, whatever.
These choices where we have those little snacky moments where we have those moments
of, I wouldn't mind a bit of comfort.
I wouldn't mind a bit of calories.
I wouldn't mind a bit of, I'm bored, I need to eat.
Mm-hmm.
These choices are, as far as I'm concerned, the pivotal moments in
our day where we either capitulate to, I'm bored, I want to eat, or
more correctly, we stand up strong or fortify our position and realize,
no, that isn't gonna serve me well.
I'm gonna make the right choice and I'm not going to eat that two
to three hours before I go to bed.
Because A, I know, physiologically speaking, that's the right call.
But maybe most importantly of all, mentally I know that I am
freaking optimizing to the max.
That sense of I'm doing everything right, goes a long way to understanding
who you are throughout your life.
So these daily little giveaways where I'm, I'm just gonna eat a
bag of chips 'cause I'm hungry.
These little giveaway moments are the things that kind of
make us backslide mentally.
We know it's not right what we're doing, but we'll still do it because to some
degree we're being lazy and it's that I.
Kind of not, not giving up to the laziness of the moment.
It's being strong in understanding that what's right for you is something
that is a little bit harder to do, a little bit of discipline, a little bit
of adversity, if we can call it that.
Hmm.
Those are the right choices because even if you go to bed feeling a little
bit of hunger and a little bit of boredom, uh, good because you have
set yourself up over the long haul to realize that you're better than that.
Mm-hmm.
It's funny, whenever I go to bed feeling hungry, I don't wake up feeling hungry
and it's, it, it, it's weird how that works, but I could, like, let's say
I'm out in the bush and I had very little food and I've been pushing hard
and I'm like, man, I'm sure hungry.
I wake up the next day, I'm like, I'm good.
I can go again.
So did I really need that extra food?
Was it really something my body wanted it Sure.
The, the, uh, face mask is interesting.
I use the earplugs, use 'em every day, have for years.
I could still hear everything that's happening.
Uh, when the kids are young, I could hear them making noise.
Even with the earplugs in, it's, it's funny how your body
just adapts to these things.
Uh, face mask, I think I'll give that a shot.
I, I got blacko blinds in the room.
But, um, uh, I think, I think that makes a big difference.
'cause I, I will notice that the second that the light's out,
I'm out in a tent, lights out.
It's time to get up, light goes down, time to go to a time for me to go down.
So I, I gotta imagine that, uh, it would play a big role.
Um,
it is interesting.
Uh, so if you, what we're talking about is removing your sensory receptors.
So, you know, hearing's gone, vision's gone.
Now you're embedding still.
So we're, we're removing our sense senses, as it were.
And ultimately, what, what we are as human beings is we're sensory organisms.
We understand the world around us through our senses, and we, our consciousness, or
our mind, or our spirit then, you know, interprets that and does what it does.
That's a whole different podcast.
But in respect to the census, once you strip out the hearing
and the vision, what I've found.
Is as I'm laying there in bed, uh, even when I'm asleep, if, if someone gets
up, like my son this morning had to get up really early to go do, uh, work,
um, and to catch a bus to go to work.
I, I felt him moving in the house.
I didn't hear him.
I didn't see him, but I felt him moving in the house.
I felt the vibration of him moving in the house.
Mm-hmm.
And so as he walked across the floor, I could feel the almost
imperceptible motion of him moving.
And if not for that, stripping away of the, I'll call them really loud sensory
inputs of vision and hearing, then my sense of vibrational feeling would
be duller or wouldn't be as refined.
And so, uh, as I said earlier, and I didn't want to get too deep
into it, um, because there's many ways that you can be in a foreign
country and still wear earplugs and an eye mask and still be okay.
Mm-hmm.
Um, there's a bunch of physical things that you can do to sort
of control that environment.
But one of the things that I have and at my available, uh, as one of my
tools that I've developed over years is my sense of things when I'm asleep.
Is quite refined.
And so it's not that I can feel the butterfly flapping through the air, you
know, 12 blocks away, but what I can do is I can feel when someone walks up
to the door in a hotel and, and like just pushes against the door handle.
It's hard to describe and I don't always feel it.
It's not like it's magic, but it is, it is a sensory tool that has
developed over decades based on stripping out all of the other, uh,
extraneous, uh, stimulus as it were.
I, I know what you're talking about.
I, I feel it as well.
It's, um, and I think it, a lot of it comes down to trusting your gut
feeling and then, and then checking afterwards was my gut feeling correct?
And then you build that baseline of, okay, uh, what I felt actually was
something and you, and you move forward.
I, I use that as a technique to, uh, be present and to calm down.
Mm-hmm.
And I've used it, I've talked about it before.
I use it with my kids, uh, when they're growing up and
they're, something's happening.
They're completely overwhelmed and they're feeling really activated.
I'm like, okay, just take a deep breath.
Right.
Just sit here for a moment.
Tell me what do you hear?
Well, I don't, I don't hear anything.
Okay.
Keep listening.
What do you hear?
Oh, I heard, I heard a car outside.
Okay, good.
Now keep listening.
Do you hear the fridge?
No.
Well listen until you do.
Oh, there it is.
I can hear the fridge.
And as they start minutely looking at these little things, it calms them down.
And it's a trick that I use with myself.
And when I'm, and I don't know, it's probably as old as anything, uh, but it
never sunk in to me to use it for sleep.
People talk about counting sheep as a means to be able to, uh, fall asleep,
and that's an age old sort of thing that they talk about in cartoons.
And everyone's, everyone's seen that one.
For me, I don't learn things normally.
It's like trying to hit the baseball.
I couldn't hit the damn baseball.
Keep your eye on the ball while I'm watching it.
I'm keeping my, until somebody said, watch that baseball until it impacts the
bat and leaves, oh, now I can hit it.
Right?
I thought I was doing it, but somehow somebody says, or I learned.
Um, if you're having a hard time falling asleep, uh,
concentrate on very minute things.
For example, if you're, uh, walking out the front door, imagine yourself what
it feels like when you grip the handle, if you're barefoot, what uh, what the
concrete feels like, what the stones feel like, what the green of the wood
looks like, and try and concentrate on these tiny, tiny little things.
And I found that to be a useful tool for me anyways.
If I'm in a state where I just can't fall asleep, that's what I
have to do to shut my brain down and, and move into sleep state.
So I'm gonna jump into that, but I, I wanna make sure that before I jump into
that, that proceeding it, the things that will cause these kind of issues in
bed where someone is just laying there and can't go to sleep or is just laying
there ruminating or is just laying there and, you know, just fidgeting.
Before that happens, make sure that any stimulants that you've got in your life.
As an example, if, if you drink coffee, like I'm drinking world class coffee
right now, um, the half-life of caffeine is five to six-ish hours, depending
on your own unique physiology, uh, how you process caffeine as a molecule.
So if you're having caffeine later into the day, well congratulations, you're
gonna have a disturbed sleep cycle.
Uh, for myself as an example, my rule of thumb is I cut
coffee off from noon onwards.
I try not to drink coffee after 12 o'clock in the afternoon.
And my coffee consumption, which I have limitless ability to, I,
I, if I need coffee, I'll just go and roast some more coffee.
Mm-hmm.
And it's not for lack of coffee.
My issue is I love coffee.
I love the taste of coffee.
I'm less focused on the stimulant aspect, the stimulant properties.
I'm more interested in the beautiful notes of coffee.
And so I still.
Limit myself to just two cups of coffee every day.
And by two cups, I mean two small cups or one large, the collective mug.
So that's all I have for coffee in my day.
And if I was to drink coffee in the afternoon, again, that half life of
caffeine molecule is problematic Also from a stimulant basis, um, I'd like
to shift into, you know, it's not a stimulant, but it is sometimes used to
help with sleep, and that is alcohol.
And alcohol is problematic, uh, when it comes to sleep quality.
Um, as an example, uh, early on, uh, when I was first got my earing,
I started analyzing all of the aspects in my life as to the upside
downside in respect to the data.
And over a very short period of time, it was easy to see that alcohol had an
extremely negative impact on sleep cycle.
And so bam, there goes alcohol.
And I don't touch alcohol at all hardly ever anymore since then.
And so, uh, same for my wife.
Uh, she wasn't much of a drinker either.
Maybe a glass of wine from time to time, but she was tracking her
sleep with the neural ring and bam.
Cut out alcohol completely because of the downside or the negative impact on sleep.
Just sleep alone, nevermind all the other factors.
That was enough to cut alcohol out of.
Uh.
Our lives.
And so stimulants or, or these substances that we put into our bodies all have
impact and not all of them are upside.
So you have to consider these kind of things, uh, for sure.
Further to that, since I'm talking about stimulants, as it were, I'd mentioned
magnesium, we talked about melatonin, but there's many other, uh, things that people
will use to help support their sleep.
And that may be altheine or, or sour cherry juice or, um, there's a variety
of different things that I mentioned in the book, but, um, certainly one of the
things that gets tossed around is, um, herbal, uh, ergogenic such as ashwagandha.
And so, um, you know, or, or reishi mushroom.
Now reishi as a whole, I'm, I'm kind of positive on, but ashwagandha as
a whole, I'm not that positive on.
And the reason for that is because ashwagandha is quite a unique, um, uh,
compound or is, is quite a unique impactor because not everyone responds the same.
And so again, if, if you hear me mention ashwagandha and you
think, oh, that, that might help with my sleep, be cautious because
ashwagandha as the example can have.
Problematic, um, outcomes for individuals who are on other medications or who
are, uh, have some sort of mental, um, not instabilities, but have some
sort of mental struggles that, uh, negatively interact with ashwagandha.
There's a whole list of things that I mentioned just using ashwagandha as
the only example of how you've gotta be careful with these kind of, almost, um,
almost safe feeling herbs that aren't that safe depending on who you are.
So, as an n equals one experiment, you have to pay attention to
how these things may impact you.
So if someone's casually throwing out advice, like, yeah,
just take ashwagandha, bro.
That's the moment that you pause and go and do some research or talk to a
naturopath or to a doctor, or to friends who have experience in that area and, and,
and value those other opinions before you start pounding ashwagandha carelessly.
I think what you're touching on here will naturally segue into the next
one, which is stress management, the invisible weight, because alcohol
like you, I, it doesn't have much.
Place in my life.
And I found that the day after drinking alcohol two days after, three days
after, it was still affecting me as it affected my outlook, my mood, my stress.
Like I'd find I'd be more irritable than I would if I hadn't had any.
And that's even just a couple of drinks.
And I'm not gonna say no one should ever have alcohol.
It's terrible.
I've, I've heard people say that I do think there is something to be
said for a social aspect of going out and, uh, perhaps letting loose with
friends that it, at certain times that they might not otherwise be able
to experience that social aspect.
But by and large, I really don't see positives to drinking alcohol.
And if you could find that same social, uh, aspect without
the alcohol even better.
Um, but the idea that, um, these different supplements like
ashwagandha, like you say, well, it's is some natural occurring thing.
Well, so's so's hemlock.
So's nightshade, right?
There's a lot of things out there that are naturally occurring that
really, really are bad for you.
But they're marketed.
I think ashwagandha is marketed as a, uh, a stress management thing too, as well.
That's right.
Yeah.
What do you, what do you do to, uh, anti, anti-anxiety to some degree, that's
a, it's a, it's a stress management, uh, herb, or that's how it's marketed.
Right.
As, as all things are marketed, all things are labeled.
Mm-hmm.
Alcohol is labeled, and so, you know, I, I believe this to be true, that no
matter what's standing in front of you, even you as an example, Trav, when,
and, and we've had lots of conversations in the past on podcast, the moment
that I'm in this podcast today, I kind of tear the label off of Travis.
Hmm.
Like, I don't, I don't care for labels like this, so I'm, I'm not
reevaluating you as a person, I'm simply observing you as the new person today
in front of me that is called Travis.
That is quite, probably not much different than the last Travis I talked
to, but it's still a new Travis because you've learned things since then.
You, you probably haven't gotten any, any taller, because
that's probably not possible.
But the, the, the idea being that when it comes to herbs like
ashwagandha, the moment that someone raises that up in a conversation,
I'll look at the person differently.
I'll tear the label right off them and think, Hmm, uh, what I thought
this person knew before they said Ashwagandha is now different.
I'm viewing the person differently in this moment because if they come across
as a, basically an ill educated layman who's throwing out advice as if they're
a medical doctor, well, guess what?
I, I, I will categorize you in a different way in that moment then
perhaps last time we talked, so.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, knowledge is power, as they say, but knowledge is, is, um, also
a potent disruptor to some degree.
Um, if, if someone gets super excited about their health journey, they're now
on their own personal crusade to become the best version of themself, but this
is day two of that journey, and they just walked into a naturopathic store and
picked up a bottle of ashwagandha and, and the clerk says, Hey, good choice.
That's gonna solve your life's problems when you walk out
the door with that bottle.
If you start regurgitating in your, in your honeymoon phase of excitement
of now you're on your path to glory.
If you start talking about ashwagandha as the holy grail of supplements to
anyone who will listen, you effectively almost become like an ambassador for
the thing that you don't understand.
It's pretty typical for, it happens in everything.
Uh, Brazilian jujitsu as an example, as a new white belt.
If, if someone's been on the mats for like a week or two weeks and
they, like BJJ, all of a sudden they are the biggest proponent of BJJ.
They will tell anyone about the, the upside of BJJ, but they don't
understand the downside yet.
Mm-hmm.
They don't understand anything yet, really.
And so these, these labels that get put in front of us that try to tear them off
and re-understand them for myself with an n equals one sort of perspective.
I like that.
You know the saying, no man enters the same river twice
because he is not the same net.
He's not the same man and it's not the same river.
And I'm also reminded of, uh, do you remember that old show with Patrick
McGuin called The Prisoner Magan?
McGuin
Mcgon?
Didn't he do, uh, what other movie did he do?
Um, art movie, uh, series.
Back in the day.
That's right.
Um, the, oh my goodness, it'll come to me anyway.
I know him from,
from, and I always remember as he's driving in at the very beginning,
there's this sign, or as they go into, um, wherever the colony is, I
think it's supposed to be Australia, but wherever that colony is, that
they're all held prisoner on, they have this sign there that says, uh,
questions are a burden unto others.
Answers are Aris under oneself.
And, uh, when you, when you start looking at removing labels,
yeah, the more questions we ask, we're burdening somebody else.
But the more, the more we accept the answer is true, the less that
it opens our mind up to what other possibilities there might be.
So I, I like that idea of removing that label each time.
And I think that's really strong advice for anyone looking at any
of these supplements to dig deep, remove that label and say, why,
where, where's it coming from?
And is this gonna work for me in my situation?
But I continue.
Wasn't he also in the Saint way back in the day?
Wasn't he in that series as well?
The Saint, anyway, that's, he may, I'll figure that out later.
Yeah.
The good old saint.
So the, uh, when it comes to stress as an example, yes, of course there,
there's many biological processes.
There's the HPA axis, uh, the, the hormonal interaction, uh, throughout our
day, throughout our sleep, throughout our lives, uh, all of these things are well
understood from a science perspective.
But what they aren't well understood is through the n equals one perspective.
And so you can, you can spend the rest of today picking up a, um, a, a, a
biology book and better understanding how humans work at a biological level.
But that doesn't mean that it directly applies to you what it does mean.
It's, it's a loose framework of how you work.
But now it's for you to understand the details of the n equals
one experiment called you.
And so these general rules of thumb, I'll call them these s science-based
rules of thumb of how the body works.
They've been established a long time, but you have to understand
how you work with the science.
And so there's no escaping.
There's no ignoring, there's no pretending that the HPA axis, uh,
won't have a downside if you don't understand it and don't control for it.
And so, as an example, if you want to, if you wanna leave your house
right now and start running and, and not stop running for another four
and a half weeks, not eat, not sleep, not drink, there's downside to that.
The HPA axis will get involved, your hormonal panel will get involved.
Lots of things will get involved at a biological level.
But how it impacts you Trav and how it impacts me and how it
impacts any of the listeners is unique to them, to us to, to me.
And so I understand how I work at these biological levels because I
understand the broad science, but I also understand the experimenting with Sean
aspect, the n equals one experiences.
And so, uh, I'm just gonna throw out some terms right now that will help
with this subject of stress resilience.
So stress resilience is an example.
How you become resilient to stress is you face stress and then
you learn how to manage stress.
Your body learns how to manage the stress, your mind, your emotions.
You learn to deal with stress, but it is not a. Free ride.
It is not a no cost aspect.
As you're learning to build your stress resilience, there is cost to that.
And unless you're managing the cost by applying some recovery
protocols and other things that will get into the, you're, you're now
backsliding rather than growing.
And so, as an example, cortisol is a problem for anyone who is deeply engaged
in stress, uh, resilience building or is facing a lot of adversity on their
regular, in order to improve their stress resilience, cortisol will start
slowly impacting your physiological optimization to a degree where you may
not understand while you feel so bad.
But it is the hormones that your hormonal panel, this hormonal soup within you that
is constantly running every millisecond of your life to try to create homeostasis or
try to create a balance within your life.
Every, every aspect, every little variable, every little impactor
that that hits you from all the 360 degree angles, they all have cost.
If you are out there driving hard in whatever you're doing, whether
it's your work life or your personal life or your hobby life, if you're
working really, really hard, pushing the pace, there's a cost to that.
And so that cost will come in the sense of your HPA axis, or to offset that
cost, you could improve your sleep.
So now here's the, here, here's where we put things together.
So if your stressors in life are not well managed or you can't manage them
and your sleep is terrible, now just those two things alone have almost a
inflationary or have a double dip bad sort of impact that both though both
things are were controllable by you, you haven't controlled for them, and
now it's not just like twice as bad.
What it is is a bunch of things bad because those two, stress and poor
sleep exacerbate themselves to a degree where it should start to be
notable, but it doesn't become notable.
If you're not forming a pattern, you just act.
Simply accept that every day you wake up feeling worn out.
No energy, no spark in life.
You feel like drudgery day after day life shouldn't feel that way.
And there's reasons why it shouldn't feel that way, and they are all controllable.
Do you, do you meditate?
Do you have a process for, um, sort of emotional, mental regulation
for, for stress management?
For sure.
Uh, so I maybe now's a good time to separate the two worlds that I, uh,
I like to think of that I operate in.
There's the external world and there's the internal world.
And I truly believe that our internal worlds, my internal world that I
have is not just the foundation of how to live a good life, but it is
literally my life, the internal world.
If I am a peace, if I'm stable, if I'm functioning well internally, then
the external world is quite easy.
But if my internal world is not settled, if I am not applying all of my inner work,
then my external world doesn't fall apart.
But it shows signs of cracks, of fractures, of not
going as well as it should.
And so my inner world, when it's good to go.
Assures me that the external world is gonna be good to go.
And so how do I maintain a, a, a, a good inner world?
Mm-hmm.
Well, first of all, I'm, I'm literally doing it right now.
I am very present in this moment.
I, I don't know what I said a second ago, and I don't know what,
I'll say a second from now because I'm not concerned about that.
I am comfortable with podcasting enough now after hundreds of them, that I just
simply slip into this moment that we're sharing together, this conscious sharing
moment that I don't have to sweat the details of what's gonna happen next.
'cause I'm so centered and grounded right now, and I know that sounds like
maybe boastful or whatever, but I'm so centered and grounded right now that I
feel very at peace inside, which reflects externally to the world as I'm doing okay.
And it's all very manageable.
And I quite like my external world.
That's how I feel about things when my inner world is good.
And so how do I get my inner world?
That good?
Well, I couldn't, when I first started podcasting, and as you know, you,
you saw it yourself when, when people started asking me to begin podcasting.
Oh my goodness.
I was so reluctant.
Mm-hmm.
And of course you were in my kitchen when, uh, when you came out to Roslyn, and that
was one of the first sort of, I would say, big podcasting moments that I had.
And I was sweating bullets.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
And maybe, maybe externally it looked okay, but internally I was in turmoil.
And, uh, I, I didn't know how podcasting worked.
I didn't know what I was supposed to even be doing in the moment.
I didn't know what I was supposed to deliver.
There was a lot of, not just unknowns, but there was a lot of personal doubts.
Like I, I, you know, how bad my imposter syndrome is, but like, it was
warp factor three bad in that moment.
And so I just wasn't settled.
I wasn't grounded, I wasn't centered.
Hmm.
And so, though, I though, before podcasting, I understood mindfulness.
And before podcasting, I understood meditation.
And before podcasting, I understood a lot of things academically, and I
was applying a lot of them in my life.
But podcasting as a. Um, we'll call it a crucible, for lack of a better
term, has obligated me to refine things several hundred podcasts later,
so that this, this moment that we're in together right now just feels
like a normal extension of my life.
That is a normalization or a pattern structure that I've created for me
to be able to offload all of the, um, mechanics of things, offload all
of the details of things, and simply trust myself to exist in this moment
peacefully and calmly, and let it unfold.
That's mindfulness to me now, and the mindfulness that I understand today
is different than the mindfulness I understood two years ago, as an example.
So yes, mindfulness is a huge part of my life right now.
I said this to someone just the other day, the I, I'm seeking a existence in
life where I only exist now, not, not 10 minutes ago, not 10 minutes from now.
Those things are inconsequential to me.
That's what I'm trying to seek is way less about if this than that, and more
about the right now, of the moment, man, it makes things way easier for me.
But that took a long, long, long, long time, and I had
to baby step my way into it.
Like grabbing 10 seconds of mindfulness here and 15 seconds of mindfulness
there over a period of years until now.
Uh, I don't always manage to do it, be present all the time, but when
I'm in my flow state, like now, this flow state is not only good for
me, but it is actually appealing.
Like it's, it's, it's something that I really love.
I love the flow state.
Mm-hmm.
I, I love it on my mountain bike.
I love it on the bj j mats, but I love it in these moments where I can simply
almost drop out of my ego existence as, as weird as that may sound to some
listeners, and simply be with you in this moment without sweating the details.
So mindfulness is very important to me.
Meditation is also important.
I do it every day.
Typically first thing in the morning, uh, I'll get out of bed, drink my
water, stare at the sun, sit down in my chair, take a moment and drop into
some meditation from, from an external perspective, from the outside world.
Uh, an outside observer looking at me.
They might just see me chillaxing in a chair and maybe doing whatever.
But what I am engaged in in that moment is a deep practice called meditation.
Meditation is what I would define as the functional structure or the discipline
of a framework, discipline of applying a process to get closer to being mindful or
being present and grounded in the moment.
So again, meditation is not necessarily mindfulness.
Meditation is the practice to move you more towards mindfulness.
That's a loose framing of the subject.
So, to your point or your question, a hundred percent meditation is
a part of my life, and it doesn't require like statues and candles
and, and someone dinging bells.
It doesn't require any of that.
I can meditate.
I can go for a ride, uh, later today, flow across the planet in a mindful
state, get off my bike, sit on a tree, log and drop into some meditation out in
nature, or standing on a log on one leg.
I. Meditate.
The meditation is the formal structure to get me back into the moment of being
mindfully present as I stand on the log.
And so those two things play together well.
But ultimately I believe that the, the overarching theme should
be seeking to be more mindful.
I hope that answers your question.
It does.
And one of the big takeaways that I see in that, that I like how you, uh, touched
on how the internal affects the external.
So you have stress that's happening.
Is that an external stress is at an internal stress?
Well, prob probably.
It might be both, but probably the biggest portion of it's gonna be
an internal mindset or perspective.
And some people are really smart and they can learn from other people's mistakes
or they can listen to a podcast like this and they can just leapfrog ahead years
in their journey of becoming mindful and being present and shifting their
perspective on what might be ailing them or stressing them in the moment.
Other people like myself, not so much, they have to learn through the school
of hard knocks, and they actually have to go in and, um, experience things
over and over until you start figuring a better way, a better way through it.
But the, um, and I've always wondered, you know, people
say you manifest your destiny.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
I get it right.
I've heard this a lot and what a man thinks he will do.
Okay, sure.
Uh, but there is some sort of secret sauce to that.
There is a reality to that, to what you think and what's going on in
your head will actually manifest itself physically around you.
And whether that's because you thought of something you vibed, you got
on a frequency and things unfolded in that fashion, or whether it's
because our brains are really good at kind of piecing things together.
If afterwards you look at it and you say, oh, it's because I vibed
that this ended up happening.
I think the end result of how you feel and how your external world feels
around you, it's gonna be the same.
So doesn't matter how you want to ascribe to that thought process.
Really addressing mindfulness, uh, shifting that perspective.
Like, okay, I'm doing something hard right now, but what's hard for
me today isn't gonna be the same of what was hard for me yesterday.
What's hard for me yesterday is no longer hard.
That's easy.
It's like that Homer Simpson quote when Bart got caught out naked
and everyone's laughing at him.
He's like, this is the worst day of my life.
He's like, Uhuh, it's the worst day of your life so far.
Right?
Um, I, I like how you separate that.
'cause I, I think, uh, having a perspective shift will really
help people When it comes down to the stress management, what
is it that's stressing me?
What control can I have or is it that I have no control and I shouldn't
be stressing about this thing, the universal unfold as it should.
So,
you know, let me throw out an example.
Uh, we were talking about sleep earlier and the rumination of, or
maybe someone's laying in bed, they wanna go to sleep, they can't go to
sleep 'cause they're thinking so much about going to sleep, whatever the case
is, half an hour later they're still laying there staring at the ceiling.
Or if they've got an eye mask on, they've, they're just laying there thinking about
the same thoughts over and over again.
I wish I could go to sleep, uh, a thousand times.
And so, pattern interrupt the what, whatever your routine is being,
whatever your pattern has been up till now, if it isn't working for
you, gotta do it a different way.
And so, as you said, the idea being what you ascribe to or what
you, what you believe to be right.
How the world works, how your life works, how this all works.
If you believe the, that's how it's works, but it isn't working for you, then
find a different way to make it work.
Mm-hmm.
And I would ask anyone right now to just for the moment, put aside your
disbelief about what I'm gonna say.
I'm not suggesting that this is right or wrong, I'm just saying put aside your,
your disbeliefs and just hear me out and then maybe you can use it later.
Tonight or in your own life years from now, when you lay down in bed, there
is one way to think about things.
And, and, and it's this, the, if, if we all exist in a field of consciousness
that is in real time, so you can't control the past or the future.
We simply all exist.
Now, as you climb into bed, you lay down you, you can't shape the future and you
can't shape the past that's gone by.
You only have the moment as you lay there in bed.
And if you kind of think of it abstractly as you, you have personal
agency, but you have no control of this moment, this moment that we're in,
it is simply the universe unfolding.
And if you accept that the universe is unfolding and you
can't control the way the universe unfolds, it's just gonna unfold.
It takes sort of the pressure off you of thinking that you can control this
game all around you, which you can't.
You are simply a participant in a game that you have certain personal agency in,
but you can't make the impossible happen.
What you can do is you can give up to what's happening.
Mm-hmm.
You just simply have to accept that things are going to unfold the way they unfold.
So with that in place, as you lay there in bed, you know that you can't solve.
Tomorrow's problems as you lay there in bed that night, you've just gotta simply
accept that you need some sleep so that you can deal with the day tomorrow.
You can't deal with it now.
You'll be dealing with it tomorrow.
So give up tomorrow and simply be in the moment that night and chillax,
because you can't control tomorrow.
Just let it unfold.
Let your sleep cycle initiate.
Don't keep asking yourself the same questions or working on the same
problems that won't be solved that night.
They'll be solved tomorrow.
Don't worry about all the past mistakes that you made throughout the
day or the day before they are gone.
Just simply accept that you're existing right now.
The universe is unfolding.
You're a witness to the universe unfolding.
And just be okay with that.
Now you find a way to just drop into sleep and do better the following day.
That's your job.
Get some sleep, do better tomorrow.
I like that.
I, uh, had a, uh, so when I got married, people are writing in the registry a bunch
of well wishes and, uh, different ideas.
And one person, a number of people, put the tried and true, never go to bed angry.
And one person wrote in.
Don't be afraid to go to bed angry.
Sometimes things look better in the light of day.
And sort of like with your, uh, what problems are we gonna solve
right now in the dead of the night?
Maybe it's okay to, maybe we'll just go to sleep right now.
Don't try and control this one.
It might look better tomorrow.
And you know, by the way, I'm going to, I'm gonna throw a curve ball at you.
Just like you throw the curve ball on, uh, the collective podcast from
time to time, you, you're a person who likes to quote Viktor Frankl.
Yes.
And so, um, you know, that's all about context.
So as you climb into bed with your tiny little problem of your car has some
sort, has a flat tire that needs to be changed tomorrow, you know, now you don't
get any sleep because you know you've gotta change the flat tire tomorrow in
context of how big of life's problems can be in context of Viktor Frankl's
problems in a concentration camp, like our problems to some degree are minor.
When we contextualize them against.
Really, truly big problems.
And so these things as we climb into bed can be exacerbated into, you
know, the car won't start, is now the new Mount Everest of the night.
And you're trying to climb Mount Everest in your mind when really
all it is is just a flat tire.
Mm-hmm.
And so how we build things up in our lives, or more correctly, how we crush
them down into non-important factors, that's kind of a secret sauce, as it were.
Well, what about, uh, nutrition?
We, uh, touched a little bit about on it with, uh, not eating before
sleep, but, uh, nutrition for your daily life, for longevity for, um,
uh, operating at your, your optimal.
How do you approach that?
Well, I'll give it in the simple terms.
You know, when we're talking about macros, really what we're talking
about is protein, fats, and carbs.
And so first point of importance is protein.
So I always try to hit my daily protein intake, fats and carbs.
I can screw those up, but I cannot screw up protein.
Mm-hmm.
Now, of course, I don't screw up fats and carbs because I've been
at this game a long time and I understand how important they are.
But first, in order of priority, much like sleep within our
lives is super high priority.
Protein is super high priority.
Now, I'll talk about two things.
The amount of protein and the timing of protein.
So the amount, generally speaking, I try to get two grams to 2.5 grams
of protein per lean body mass.
So as an example, I weigh, um, I'll do it in pounds for anyone in pounds.
So I weigh 170 pounds.
Right now, my lean body mass is about 160 pounds, so I'm stripping
out any additional fat, as it were.
And the reason I say lean body mass, it's important because if I had an extra
200 pounds of fat on me, that sort of isn't, isn't really a great equation
to run your protein needs off of.
So lean body mass, now I've got 160 grams of protein.
I need one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass.
If it's in kilos, then it's two to 2.5 grams per lean body mass.
Now that's an amount of grams of protein I need each day.
That can shift depending on how much output I have in a day.
So my bare minimum.
Is that if I go out and I do a really destructive workout that really tears
up my muscles or really creates a lot of hurt locker on me, then I'm
gonna increase my protein for that day for a couple of days, by the way.
But generally speaking, my baseline as suggested, I always hit it.
Now, timing with protein, I believe you need to get about 30 grams
of protein per meal, per feeding.
And so let's say you only eat three meals a day, now you're
at about 90 grams of protein.
Where does all that other protein come from?
As an example, Sean needs about 160 grams of protein, 150 grams depending,
so I'm short on protein, so I'll have to supplement throughout the day, either
through protein powder or supplement through snacking that is protein driven.
And so there's many ways to do that.
I'm not gonna describe all the various foods or the combinations of beans
and rice and all of that good stuff that's for you to, uh, take into
consideration based on how you've.
Normally eat and what your budget is, but I've found invariably that I have
to take on some form of protein powder.
Now, the protein part powder that I would take on, I'm not gonna mention any brands,
but there's many ways to slice that down.
It could be whey protein isolate, it could be whey concentrate, it could be caffeine,
it could be vegan protein powder.
There's many forms of it, and it's quite a science to being specific
about which one works best when, but forget about all of that for right now.
Just understand that nearly every single person I talk to
doesn't get enough protein.
And I mean like line a hundred people up against a wall and maybe only one of
them is getting enough protein that day.
And if you're running a protein deficient life.
It is negatively impacting your entire lifestyle.
And so protein is critical.
Next fats, there's many forms of healthy fats.
In the book that I'm gonna send you, it talks about how you can get
those from food sources such as like avocados or olive oil or coconut
oil, or these various types of things, nuts, seeds, and et cetera.
But, uh, you can also supplement that with things like Omega-3
fish oil or et cetera, et cetera.
So you can get it from natural sources or you can get it from supplementation.
Either way.
Fats are important, not just for how your body works physiologically,
but for your freaking brain.
Uh, and again, that's discussed in the book.
And then finally, the, the last piece is carbs.
Carbs are important of course, as a, as an athlete, as as a ultra endurance athlete.
Or someone who, who rides long period of time or anyone who
has any sort of long term.
You know, when you go out hunting Trav, uh, if you're out multi hours,
well that is a car preferential.
Uh, activity.
And so there's a number of reasons, biologically or physiologically,
why carbs are important in these kind of, uh, endeavors.
But again, that'll be discussed in, in the little handout
that I'm gonna shoot your way.
Carbs are also important, um, to take into account your hormonal profile.
So, as an example, when I was coaching athletes, uh, around
the world for my male athletes, I would have them do carb refeeds at
least once a week and buy refeed.
I mean, like really push their carb intake that day in order to offset some of the,
excuse me, hormonal damage that may have occurred through all of the stressors.
But for my female athletes, I would ask them to do two refeeds per week simply
because of the specifics of the female hormonal pattern, how important it is,
or how negatively impactful it can be.
If a female athlete who's pushing really hard isn't getting enough carbs,
and so protein is, is non-negotiable.
You gotta, you gotta hit your bare minimums.
Fats are something that you inject throughout your day, and then carbs is
something that you use, like a lever or a modulator all the way up to a 10, all
the way back to a three on a scale of 10, depending on how your day has gone,
what you are gonna do later that day.
And.
How to set yourself up for the following day.
That may be like a big hunt or a big effort.
And so carbs are modulated depending on the day's needs and the days upcoming.
I hope that makes
sense.
It does make sense.
So, uh, I've, I've heard people talk about cutting carbs out altogether because
they're trying to lose weight or some ketogenic diet, and I've also heard people
say that protein shakes and these mixes aren't really the best way to be able to
get protein into the body, like maybe I think amino acids, I, from my layman's
perspective, and I have done very little, uh, research on there, but do amino
acids somehow convert into a protein?
I, I've heard chatter about both of these.
Well, so, you know, I'll, I'll refer back to generally what I said at the start, and
that is I'm an n equals one experimenter.
And so, um, you know, when I started getting into ultra endurance
racing, like that was back in 2007, my wife will attest to this.
She came in one day and she said the only thing I was missing was a white lab
coat because I had a variety of different powders all over the kitchen counter.
And I was like on a scale, mixing them into little capsules, my
own little specific boutique, uh, supplementations that I was creating.
And based on my own curious mind and my, um, my desire to better
understand context on my n equals one.
And so what I had done is I had purchased a bunch of isolated amino acids where
I was, you know, of course your branch chain amino acids are critical, but
then some of the other essential, uh, aminos, I was taking amino acids,
isolating them, and combining two or three aminos into a cap, and then
playing around with those to see if it would improve my vision, imp improve my
hearing, improve my all kinds of things.
And so I played around with supplementation and with food for so
long, the, I have dialed in Sean, but for anyone who's listening to this right
now, you could do the exact same thing.
But what it does require is some curiosity and it requires some intentionality as to.
Your n equals one experimentation.
These things were, you're dabbling with this and dabbling with that
and not really paying attention to its impact or its long-term sort
of pattern that's worthless to me.
These are little band-aids that you're spending money on and never learn anything
from the moment that you take on anything.
Like, if you start playing around with, uh, amino acids, they're expensive and
they should be treated like, um, oh, it's time to start paying attention now and
developing the pattern on this stuff.
Hmm.
Stepping back from the specifics of that, I'd say that in my opinion, this is just a
general opinion for any general listener.
Unless they have really specific needs for certain amino acids, I'd stay
away from that particular trajectory.
You're better served to buy a high quality, uh, whey protein isolate,
preferably something like a New Zealand whey protein isolate because the New
Zealand, uh, cattle or milk is, doesn't really have a lot of growth hormone
and it's, it's really clean grass.
It's really yada, yada yada.
So get yourself a high quality whey protein isolate that has a really
good amino acid profile on any jug of amino acid that you buy, or,
sorry, uh, protein that you buy.
You'll see an amino acid profile on the label now.
Interesting side note, you can buy really good, uh, protein, and then
that protein manufacturer can do what is called amino acid spiking.
So they will insert aminos into the jug in order to bump up the profile.
So it looks really appealing to the, um, the purchaser.
And so like anything, when you're out there at a, if you're buying a car, you
should never just walk onto a car lot and say, I'll take the first car that I see.
What you should do is be in a, in whatever store, looking at the supplementation
with your smartphone and just checking out is this generally suited to my needs?
And how I've done it in the past is, um, something that is certified for sports.
So as an a competitive athlete, I never wanted any product in my body
that was spiked or was adulterated with some trace elements of
steroids or whatever the case is.
I wanted super clean food that was reliably certified so that
it wasn't negative to my body.
It didn't make me feel like I was cheating.
Mm-hmm.
So there are ways that you can do that.
There are brands, there are standards here in Canada and North America around the
world that meet a competitive athletes.
Needs to stay clean.
And if you are buying that kind of a product, then generally speaking,
it's a high quality product.
It's where you start getting into relabeled brands that may be coming
from other countries that aren't quite as tight on, uh, standards that
you're ingesting things that quite frankly you don't know anything about.
It's, uh, it's a good point you're bringing on about, um, competitive
athletes needing to stay clean.
And there's a lot of, uh, negative chatter.
In the past I've seen about, um, testosterone replacement therapy
or testosterone supplementation.
Years ago I worked in a, uh, in a gym and you could, you could see the
people who were abusing the, uh, the steroids and the te testosterone.
But recently there's been a lot of, um, I've, I've noticed a shift
in the way that's approached.
And even in your response in that Instagram post you mentioned as you're
getting older, you had blood work done and there's some TRT at a very
mild dose that you're looking at.
That's interesting to me, just from the mindset shift of so much negativity,
always growing up, testosterone's bad.
You never want it to, this new way of thinking of, well, hold on a second May.
Maybe it's not as bad as we're saying, and maybe there's a way to be able to use it
in an effective format so people can live.
A, well, a well-rounded, fulfilling life.
So this is a great subject that we should probably just take a few minutes
to dive into a little bit based on my own personal experience, of course,
all of my research, uh, over the years and having dealt with athletes who are
sensitive to these kind of subjects.
So my stance on, um, steroids or any artificial or an endogenous aid or
anything that is, um, I'll, I'll call it not natural, for lack of a better
term, um, I was never a fan of it.
Um, as a competitor, I always wanted to be standing on a start line, looking
to my left and right, and knowing that everyone's competing cleanly or
more correctly, I will say competing on a level playing field, Hmm.
That's really important to me.
Fairness is a central tenant of my life.
Things have to be fair in order to evaluate myself against someone else.
And so if I step up on a start line and I'm clean and I'm stepping next
to someone who isn't clean, as long as I feel like I'm, I'm doing it right.
Mm, it's now on them that they have to deal with their own nonsense rather than
me have to worry about their nonsense.
So, as a competitive athlete, like competing at world championship levels.
I always wanted to make sure that I didn't feel like I was
cheating, for lack of a better term.
Mm-hmm.
However, I'm not competing anymore in anything, uh, at a high level.
And so I switched to TRT when I was 59 and a half.
Now, interestingly enough, that number is important.
59 and a half, because right about the time I was 56, 57, my family doctor
was telling me, Sean, you're your, your testosterone levels are concerningly low.
And I just looked at her and I said, Andrea, I wanna make it to 60.
I'd set this arbitrary number in my head where I thought,
I'm just gonna make it to 60.
I'm gonna stay clean till I'm 60.
I just wanna earn it myself.
Mm-hmm.
I had this number that I'd put in my head many, many years ago,
and at 59 and a half, my family doctor finally said, that's it.
You know, you gotta get on it.
And I said, okay.
And so the moment that I did, I just shook my silly head and thought, man,
I should have done this ages ago.
Not because all of a sudden I realized that, uh, I turned into like Captain
America or anything like that.
What I was doing was gaining access to the amount of testosterone that I
need for my lifestyle that supports my needs, the way I like to live my life.
And so my levels were super low.
I. The moment that I jumped on TRTI am now on, I don't mind giving my values for
anyone who's listening right now as sort of context, I self-inject subcutaneously
twice a week and uh, I try to do one on Tuesday and I try to do one on Saturday.
And so I self-inject 0.35 milliliters of testosterone recipient eight, so
0.35 ml, so a total of 0.7 ml per week, which if anyone knows anything about
anything, that's a really low dose.
Mm-hmm.
And so I wanted to use the various very lowest dose I could in order to
feel the way I wanna feel and perform the way I wanna perform and recover
the way I need to recover and sleep the way I wanna sleep, and have the
libido that I want to have, have the energy that I feel is important.
Certainly as a man, testosterone is effectively fuel energy.
Mm. And so I wanted to have all of the things that I wanted
that I had kind of forgotten.
That is normal.
Um, I wanted all of that back, but I didn't want.
An extra milliliter of testosterone that would make me feel like now
I'm taking advantage of the system.
Mm-hmm.
Now I'm into an area where I'm focused on taking more testosterone
to have bigger muscles or et cetera.
Mm-hmm.
Like, I'm not interested in the aesthetics of my body.
What I am interested in is the performance of my body.
And it just so happens that my lifestyle, uh, as, as some, some dudes who track
me on ig, friends of mine, people who pay attention, they, they've said, dude,
you're looking like kind of jacked.
You've got some muscles.
You're doing that whole thing that's got nothing to do with testosterone.
That's got everything to do with every single day.
I'm freaking hammering on things.
And so mm-hmm.
What I do in this, in the shadows, in the background that is out of sight of the
internet, is fricking pushing the pace.
Like I am pushing my body hard and the resulting outcome is I've got
muscles, but it's not because I'm in front of the mirror flexing.
I'm not, I'm not lifting or I'm not functionally training
to be aesthetically pleasing.
My life is all about performance rather than aesthetics.
And so the muscles that show up are just a result of my lifestyle.
Um, not a result of all the bicep curls that I do.
So when you started the, the TRT, how long did it take to start noticing
positive results, uh, that week?
What really and what, what were the positives and are there cons to it?
There
are, so the positives for me were, bam, sleep was improved.
Uh, attitude.
My sense of, um, like my positive drive, uh, positive outlook on life
was improved My sense of, um, being a man, as crazy as that sounds Hmm.
Was improved.
My libido increased.
My wife is thankful for that.
And so just saying, I mean, it's a, it would be wrong if I didn't
mention it because I mean, it is thing for sure, for sure.
Yeah.
And so, um, within the first week, right away I was like, oh, I had forgotten.
That's what Testone feels like.
'cause I had been so medically, chronically low.
I. For, for so long that I'd forgotten what like that little feels like.
Mm. Now when I do this, that could be misconstrued as all of a sudden because
I'm taking a little bit of testosterone.
Now all of a sudden, I'm all agro.
I'm all voiding, raging out.
That is so not the case.
'cause again, the amount that I'm taking is quite low.
It gives me enough drive that my, my testosterone supports my
lifestyle that I've had all my life.
That sort of sense of aggressive purpose, that drive that will to win,
that will to create an outcome that, as you mentioned, Trav, that you know,
manifestation of the life that you want while testosterone is actually a
manifestor of the life in front of you.
If I see something now that I wanna make happen to some degree, and I mean a small
degree, like all things, the sleep, the food, the this, the that, and the, the
TRT, all of these things are synergistic.
It's not just one thing makes it all happen.
It is all things make it happen.
And TRT is just that extra little nudge for me to target, lock
something and think, oh, that's done.
That's already done.
And that could be something in the future weeks from now.
But I, I know that when I target lock it, it's done.
So that had kind of started to slip a little bit as I entered
into my fifties, late fifties.
And it's not that I wasn't producing outcomes, it's that I didn't have
that same target lock on things.
And so I'll even go so far as to say that to some degree TRT reduced some
brain fog that I had going a little bit of, um, lack of clarity as it were.
So it did many things within that first week.
Now looking back at it, I guess I've been on almost like two years now.
Over that period of time, I have better refined my understanding of it.
I, like I said, I've dialed in my dosing so that it's the absolute
minimum that I, I want to use.
Uh, I haven't explored anything more.
I, I never entered into TRT as an experi experiment to see how
much can I take per week versus how little can I take per week.
I always started with low and slow and as I low and slowed my way up,
I settled in at 0.7 ml per week.
And that works for me.
It works.
Hmm.
Physiologically, but perhaps more importantly, Trav.
It works psychologically because I, I know that like my performance
is to some degree natural.
My T levels are just out of the low range now, and I feel like that's
what I deserve, and then my outcomes are a result of my performances.
Why do you, why do you think they're low?
Just an age thing.
Declined genetic.
You put used it all up when you were younger.
I used it all in my first career.
Uh, I think that, uh, there's many things that, uh, impacted
my testosterone level for sure.
Age is a thing.
I mean, as, certainly as men, uh, as we get older, these
things start, uh, dissipating.
But without a doubt, I've been super hard on my body.
I've been super hard on my life.
Um, and even in my casual time in my sports or in my hobbies,
not career wise, but just simply sports or hobbies, like I go hard.
I mean, I did 30, 24 hour solo mountain bike races at a world championship level
to, you know, I just, I had a hard hobby.
And that hard hobby is like, there's, there's collateral damage, there's
cellular damage, there is long lasting damage to all of these things.
I'm not just talking about free radicals, I'm talking about like.
Just ironic injuries that you pick up along the way that over a period of time
start impacting your hormonal profile.
And so there's many things in my life that have, uh, diminished testosterone,
not least of which was sleep, of which I was getting terrible sleep.
So all of these things add up over time.
And as a man in my fifties, I just found myself at a point where I couldn't deny
the blood panels that I was getting from my doctor, and I couldn't deny her
medical advice, and I couldn't deny the research that supported the decision
that I chose to engage in with TRT.
So on that note, for TRT, it's super important, I think, not just as an
athlete but as a human, that at least once a year you're doing a full blood
panel and preferably a, a full blood panel with a hormonal panel attached to
it so you can better understand your free testosterone, your total testosterone,
your estrogen, your blah, blah, blah.
All of the things that are important for you as a human
being to be optimally set up.
You again, like the aura ring.
If you don't have an aura ring, now you're guessing as to what your sleep.
Quality and quantity was same with when you wake up in the
morning and you're tired.
If someone says, if you take a blood panel and hormonal panel, you'll have metrics.
Why wouldn't you do that?
That's creating a baseline understanding of who you are today
versus who you were 37 years ago.
And so these things need to be tested and, and, and patronized throughout life.
So w with the TRT, once you're on it, you gotta stay on it because
your body stops producing its own testosterone, from my understanding.
Similar.
So when I was late teens, early twenties, I started getting a receding hairline
and I'm like, oh no, this is terrible.
I would, I thought it was supposed to happen when I get really old.
And, and so I, I go to the doctor, I'm like, what can I do about this?
I'm like, well, we could put you on this.
I forget what it was.
There's some expensive medication and, but they, you can also buy
this other medication, which is basically the same thing, but
it's marketed for something else.
You can cut 'em up into fours.
And I said, okay.
Um, but how long do I have to take it for?
Well, for the rest of your life.
Okay, well what happens if I stop taking it?
Oh, well all the hair that you would've lost up to that point will just fall out.
I'm like, I'm not taking this stuff for me, it didn't make sense.
I'm gonna lose my hair.
I gotta suck it up and figure it out now, uh, while I was young and, um,
because I just knew I'm gonna find myself in my later years in a situation
where I'm not gonna have this stuff and I'd have to deal with it then.
Is it similar with testosterone?
So you gotta keep taking it.
Uh, and if you stop taking it, is there gonna be like a massive, um, issue?
So, um, I, my understanding is, and this is based on research, based on Tonga,
lots of people, my my belief is that once you're on it, that's it, you're on it.
Hmm.
Uh, certainly at my age anyway, over a period of time, the testosterone that
I'm injecting, um, basically derails, for lack of a better term, derails the
natural production within your body.
And, uh, effectively you're now reliant on injecting testosterone, uh, every
week, which I accepted when I started the process, I, I thought about it and
I was like, okay, well, you know, I guess I'm gonna be self-injecting for
the rest of my life until, you know, someone invents the nano robots that,
you know, get injected into my body, and then they take care of everything.
Mm-hmm.
But until then, I'm gonna be self-injecting.
Now it's a bummer.
Like, I don't like sticking needles in myself.
It's, it's no bueno.
But I'll say this, the, the, the option is either do it or don't.
And if I don't, then my quality of life is diminished.
And so I want an optimal life, particularly for anyone who's listening
right now, once you're in your sixties.
You can see the horizon when you're in your thirties.
Yeah.
Don't see the horizon.
You don't see the, uh, light at the end of the tunnel, as it were.
But in your sixties, you do, you, you've had enough time to look
backwards and, and gain wisdom.
The clarity of wisdom, but you also realize that you're now in a phase
of life where the end is approaching.
And so what, how, how much of a quality of life do you want in that last phase?
Well, I want maximum quality.
I want to be always optimal.
I wanna be doing spinning back kicks on a tree log after hammering
on my bike for four hours.
That's what I want to do.
'cause that pleases Sean.
And that is kind of critical to this conversation over decades.
I've put myself in a position where I'm used to performing and I'm not
talking about performing little things.
I'm talking about performing big things for me.
And so these big things don't just, they don't just appear magically.
They are things that I've spent decades building up to.
Now that I'm in the position that I am where I have certain expectations
of myself, but more importantly, I love the life that I've created and
I love doing the things that I do.
If, if someone says to me, all that stuff you love doing, I. We're
gonna take that all away from you just because you're freaking old.
Or you can take two shots per week.
Where's the shots?
I'll take it.
Yeah.
Because I'm too deep into loving life to not do something like that.
I mean, you're almost giving up the opportunity to live, not just the
life you love, but maybe even deeper love for the life that you don't even
understand yet until you take some TRT.
So all that to say that there is upside downside to TRT.
It should be something discussed with your medical doctor.
It should be something that you do some self-research on.
Talk to some friends, and if you're listening to me right now, understand
that it, it can be a significant game changer if you fall within the
category of it's a good idea for you.
So
give
it some thought.
What about peptides?
I've heard people talk about them.
Are they?
Um mm-hmm.
I, I think in Canada, they're kind of a gray sort of thing in the states.
They're, um, I, I think they're, uh, regulated and accepted.
Um, I, it's just come on my radar when I started researching all
of this stuff for the podcast.
Hmm.
So, um, you know, about seven-ish years ago, I, I, I banged myself
up pretty good on the BJJ mats.
Uh, it was a, almost a chronic injury.
Uh, some muscle issues and whatever, some tearing and, um, and
I wasn't sure how to address it.
And so I started looking at peptides, which were kind of
a emerging trend at the time.
Uh, I learned about something called BPC 1 57, and, uh, for anyone who is new to
peptides, BPC 1 57 is fairly well known.
There's a number of different peptides out there that can, um, create a, a number
of different responses within the body.
So I'm not gonna say I did self-inject BPC 1 57 for a period of a couple of
months, because that may or may not be appropriate, but I do understand
BPC 1 57 for a couple of months.
And what I will say is I found that it didn't provide the, um,
outcomes that I was hoping for.
Um, and in context of something like, you know, TRT as the example, I found TRT to
be a way more efficacious or, or a much more, um, impactful modality or, or, uh.
Inject into my life.
So all of this kind of boils down into the last one I have here,
which is routines and mindset, the glue that holds it all together.
Um, can you talk a little bit about your routine and the mindset
that you have that's been employed throughout your life for the
special forces for elite performing athlete to where you are right now?
Sure.
I, I think that it's important for me to, first of all establish the, my life
Before, when, when I was in high school, I was a skinny, underperforming kid.
I weighed 135 pounds.
Uh, before I joined the military, I didn't think I amounted much.
And, uh, throughout my military career, I, I learned that that was completely
untrue, that I could amount to anything that I wanted to amount to, because the
process that the military taught me, or what I learned in my military career was
it's for me to use the tools that I've got, this body, this mind, this spirit.
It's for me to use it in ways that produce outcomes.
And so the military taught me how to do that.
And, and then once I left the military tree, not as a skinny underperforming
kid anymore, I had certain expectations of myself, we'll call them tier one
expectations, for lack of a better term.
I was introduced to the awareness.
That I am capable of nearly anything.
Now, that sounds a, like a bold claim, and it sounds braggadocious,
and I would never have believed it when I was in my twenties.
But as I moved into my thirties, I started adopting that tier one mindset.
I came to the realization that if I want it to happen, it's freaking done.
It's just whether it's important enough to me.
If my why is strong enough, if, if for the following reasons, dot,
dot, dot, I have to save the planet, consider me saving the planet.
Hmm.
And so, um, I was taught how to do it.
I came to believe in how I'm capable of doing it.
And then from that point on, it was simply a matter of me learning how to
do it through supporting structures, through better sleep, through better
nutrition, through better et cetera, things that we've talked about.
And so, to some degree, um, all of this stuff doesn't amount to anything.
NN none of the stuff that we've talked about amounts to anything unless
you start believing in yourself.
Unless you create a why within yourself, a reason for existence, a
reason for listening to this podcast.
If you're at this point in the podcast where you're starting to think about
some of the things that we've been saying, all of it is easily engageable.
Once you accept the idea that you're on this planet for a purpose, you ain't just
here to exist, you're here for a reason.
And that reason is for you to start understanding.
And also, it's important that that understanding isn't fixed.
So what you think you're here for listening to this podcast right now
is right now, but a year from now, you can be a completely different person.
You can apply some of these things that we've been talking about, and
you can be, again, comparative to now.
You could be twice the person that you are and that twice the person
that you are will have new goals, new ideas, new reasons for your existence.
And so that has been my way over the decades.
It has been a daily refining process that looks at life holistically or
synergistically as all of these various elements that I can control are all
being controlled by me for a purpose.
And without a purpose, you don't control anything.
You simply accept rather than control.
And so my why is strong, my understanding of the things
that I appreciate are strong.
Why I'm here is strong.
And so that makes me want I. To control all of the variables, to optimize all
of the variables so that when I do this, it's freaking with velocity, it's with
intentionality, it's with intensity.
And if I was getting poor sleep or I was eating poorly, or I was thinking
poorly, or if I didn't understand what box breathing is, or if I didn't understand
what psychological or physiological size are and all the little tips and
tricks and tools that I picked up along the years, if I didn't have a strong
why, none of those things would matter.
I'd simply just be existing in life and then I would die.
And that isn't enough for me.
And so to kind of conclude all of that commentary, I'd say
that, as I said earlier, my inner world drives the external world.
And the more peaceful you can be in your inner world, the more you can understand
your reason for being in this world.
The sooner that you can ize your outcomes, the the sooner you can like start shaping
the fabric of the world around you.
If you think that you're a prisoner of the world, you just haven't
learned how to be the be the jail.
Yeah.
The orchestrator, the, yes.
That's right.
I love it.
Sean, is there anything that we haven't talked about that we should talk about?
Yeah, there sure is, but I know that we've gone long on this because, you know,
because of my way, uh, I, I probably dove a little bit too deep into some things
and not deeply enough into other things.
And so there's quite a list of things that I would love to talk about.
But I know this is probably been a bit long.
So what I will say is, um, this subject, longevity fitness in,
in your later phases of your life or how to be a better performing
human being overall holistically, is a massive subject that we have.
Covered some of it, but not all of it, that's for sure.
I think it's probably best if we don't dive into all the other things that I
have in mind, and I'll simply rely on the crutch, as it were, of hopefully
the book that I'll deliver to you.
Like, uh, at the moment this podcast is done.
You'll have it in your hot little hands, then you can choose what
to do with it, uh, within your own, uh, sphere of influence.
That sounds amazing.
So there's gonna be links to the collective in the description here.
They'll have links where people can find you on social media.
If people listen to this, have questions, by all means,
throw it up into the comments.
And we still have one more thing to record for the outpost.
Just a very short, kind of deeper, more personal, a bit more intimate that's
not shared with the general public and the outpost is something that's there
for the Silver Court Club members.
Sean, thank you very much for being on the Silver Core Podcast.
I always appreciate hanging out with you.