In this Episode
- [03:26]Andrew Herr shares that his jet lag platform grew from military research and executive coaching, leading him to discover that inflammation plays a major role in travel fatigue and recovery.
- [07:10] Stephan Spencer and Andrew Herr discuss life as road warriors, with Andrew explaining that his mission is to help travelers adapt faster to new time zones and sleep well even after long international flights.
- [11:09]Andrew Herr explains that blue light directly influences the brain’s circadian rhythm via non-visual receptors, making light exposure a key factor in sleep, jet lag, and overall performance.
- [15:53]Andrew Herr says he optimizes sleep by getting morning sunlight, minimizing stimulation at night with blue light–blocking glasses, and reducing evening screen exposure to support better circadian rhythm and recovery.
- [17:38]Andrew Herr says he uses an Oura Ring mainly to track sleep experiments focusing on deep and REM sleep, HRV, and trends rather than scores.
- [22:06]Andrew Herr shares sleep optimization experiments including using a warm shower or bath to trigger a cooling effect that promotes sleep, and occasional use of supplements like 5-HTP, alongside tools like blue light blocking glasses.
- [24:24]Andrew Herr suggests sleep aids like glycine, occasional melatonin, and collagen may improve sleep quality, but should be used as individual experiments.
- [28:48]Andrew Herr explains that many performance strategies used for Navy SEALs—like improving recovery, sleep, resilience, and cognitive function under stress.
- [31:22]Andrew Herr recommends high-ROI performance upgrades for everyday people such as doing an elimination diet to identify food sensitivities and improving recovery and inflammation through strategies like split-dose omega-3 supplementation.
- [35:34]Andrew Herr highlights simple high-impact fitness habits like a 10-minute kettlebell swing protocol, breathing exercises, and regular sauna use as efficient ways to improve strength, stress resilience, and overall health.
- [41:34] Andrew Herr responds that while he sees the current world as tumultuous with a spiritual dimension, he emphasizes health, gratitude, and psychological tools like the “downward arrow” and exposure therapy to reduce internal fear patterns and improve clarity, resilience, and behavior change.
Andrew, it’s so great to have you on the show.
So great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. So we know each other through Maverick. Chris Hay introduced us, and Yanik Silver has been a guest on this podcast. He’s the founder of Maverick, an amazing mastermind I’ve been in for at least a handful of years now. So how do you know Yanik and the Maverick family?
I’m aware of Maverick through other mastermind groups that, I think, you start kind of, there’s a tendency to hopscotch between them or maybe stay in other ones, but I started one in DC, a shout out to one called Cadre that introduced me to several others. And so, uh, it kind of all started from there.
Awesome. Yeah, and I know you have this platform, this tool set that helps road warriors, in particular, people who do a lot of traveling. How did that come about? How did you end up specializing in that?
Well, know, like many things, serendipity drives them or synchronicities, if you will. So I was doing some work, trying to figure out how to support Navy SEALs on long-duration dive missions. I had been connected to a Navy SEAL unit that was really thinking about human performance. And I had, by that point, spent most of a decade running human performance efforts in and out of the Pentagon for the military.
So I had some really interesting knowledge about how pressure changes when you dive affect the body, and it turns out they can cause inflammation. And then fast forward to coaching executives on the side during my military work, and a business executive, David, came to me and said, “Hey, we fly from the East Coast to Asia, close business deals. You land at 3 p.m. There’s a big business center that night, and they want to negotiate at 7 a.m. the next morning. They’re using jet lag as a negotiating tool. What should I do?”
Isn’t that clever?
I think when your body runs cleaner and with less inflammation, you pick up signals better. There’s less background noise and more clarity.
So great, when are you leaving? He said, “Tuesday, it was Sunday.” I was like, “Great, thanks for the warning. I’ll deliver something to you tomorrow.” And so I sat down and in one of those moments in life, kind of very, in a very short period of time, put together all the knowledge I had on circadian rhythms and sleep and performance under sleep deprivation and all these things.
And a couple of things that were there, and I kind of got it right for the wrong reason. and then later dovetail with the research for the seals about how inflammation can cause pressure changes and those big pressure changes in flight. And long story short, David goes to Asia and sends me an email a couple of days later saying, “Andrew, what did you do? I just slept eight hours my first night.” I’d given him a typed-out program: “At this time, do this thing; at this time, do this thing.” Here’s a box of stuff with some very ugly blue-light glasses and bottles of supplements.
But I’m a pretty skeptical guy by training, by nature. So then I was like, maybe it was a chance and then did it for some other people just kept working and so that was sort of the origin of our FlyKitt product which is now basically leveraging this insight that inflammation is is sort of the real problem behind jet lag not that circadian rhythms don’t matter it’s just the inflammation is what makes you a lot of what makes you feel so bad and then what makes it so hard to switch your circadian rhythm.
Yeah. And then some people end up getting deep vein thrombosis from flights. And does your solution help with reducing risk for that, do you think?
Well, I can’t legally probably say it does because DVTs are a medical condition, but blood clotting is a type of inflammation. And when we use a very targeted anti-inflammatory approach, you would imagine it is extremely likely to be protective, mechanistically. Yeah, I think I’ll go as far as to say mechanistically, it should be extreme, and actually, there’s some very good research showing that the pressure change is the driver behind this activation of blood clotting, because there are some people who say, “Well, you’re just sitting for a long time.”
First of all, people sit on their couch all the time and don’t get blood clots in their legs. And in the Netflix era, they sit on their couch for 12 hours, no problem. But they’ve done studies where they took people and either put them in a movie theater for the same amount of time or put them in a hypobaric chamber and took the pressure profile of a flight.
And indeed, you don’t get the blood clotting in the movie theater scenario. You do get it in the equivalent-pressure-change scenario. And so you can show that the pressure change is actually what is causing it. And then yes, our tools are, and some other studies suggest the tools we use should exactly do that, amongst other things.
Yeah, really cool. So, do you consider yourself a road warrior? Are you traveling quite a lot?
I sort of travel; for instance, I’d say I’ve been on a bunch of flights recently, which allows me to test the next generation of the FlyKitt product and what we might add to it. But I also love being, you know, based in Southern California, it’s beautiful weather here. I do love being here with friends, family and others. So, I try to balance and not travel too much. And if I’m going to travel, I really do it for something that’s really worth it.
For most people, it's easier to go from Europe to the US. Your circadian rhythm tends to naturally be a little longer than 24 hours, so staying up a little later is typically easier. Share on XYeah, I used to travel a lot. I considered myself a road warrior. And in fact, at some point, I was surprised by United Airlines when I hit 1 million miles with them, and they gave me lifetime gold status in their freaking frequent flyer program. So I’m a MileagePlus Gold for life.
I’ve had a lot of travel periods. Yeah, I mean, I think your goal is to make it much more seamless for people who travel all the time. And for people who travel intermittently, and maybe it’s their one trip a year, and they’ve saved up to go to Europe, then I want that to be a great trip. And I want them to enjoy themselves tremendously.
Yeah, what is the kind of conventional wisdom around how long it takes to acclimate to a new time zone? Let’s say that you go from the US to Europe. It’s now easier to travel to Europe from the US. So go that direction around the globe than it is to go back or not, it’s the other way around. It’s actually the other way around, right? So, going from Europe to the US is easier when it comes to acclimating to a new time zone.
For most people, it’s easier. Your circadian rhythm tends to naturally be a little longer than 24 hours if you don’t attune it to light. So, staying up a little later is typically easier for people. So, coming from Europe to the US, going west tends to be easier for people than going east. Although once you go eight or 12 hours, it’s sort of the same. Plus 12 and minus 12 are the same thing.
The conventional wisdom is that it should take 1 to 1.5 hours per day for a full circadian reset. So, you know, let’s say a typical nine-hour time zone changes from the US to the West coast to Europe, depending on the time of year or from the West coast to Asia. That should take 6 to 9 days to complete a total reset, per most published studies.
I think people generally can do it a little bit faster than that. We like, you know, our goal is that, and the majority of our clients can sleep well on their first night. And so that’s really what we’re targeting.
Yeah, amazing. I had been researching light therapy solutions for jet lag years ago, and I came across this product called the HumanCharger, which looks kind of like an iPod Nano. You remember those days, those little things. And it’s black, and it has earbuds that, instead of playing sound, shine blue light. The blue light shines into your ear canal and then penetrates your skull and directly influences your brain. Doesn’t need to get picked up by your eyeballs.
And if you follow this plan, you’ve entered your travel times, time zones and all that. And then it tells you when to do these different 10-minute sessions with the human charger. And I have found that it helps. I’m curious, are you familiar with this particular product, this technology or this approach?
You know, I’ve seen it before. I have to admit, I have not gone deep into it. But what we do know for sure is that even with your eye, we have receptors for blue light that are not visual. They are directly hardwired into your suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is part of your brain, that’s partially responsible for your circadian rhythm. And so the idea that non-visual blue light stimulation could have meaningful effects is not outside the realm.
I think light is obviously a critical component. In our program, we use blue light-blocking glass at different times. We recommend you get light. So anyone who’s not thinking about light when thinking about circadian rhythm is sort of missing, is missing a big piece of the puzzle. You know, from our standpoint, if you’re also not thinking about inflammation when you fly, then you’re also missing a piece of the puzzle. But I’ve never tried the HumanCharger piece, and it’s interesting to hear that it worked for you.
Yeah, I’ve recommended it to several people over the years, and they’ve given positive feedback as well. So speaking of just more generally blue light exposure, and you know, a lot of screen time for many of us and so forth. So what are the best practices for blue light in terms of when to get it and when not to get it, and how to navigate this in a very digital world?
Yeah, I think it’s really easy to get reductionist on light and go blue, or we need sun because we need vitamin D. I think it’s like, it’s just an easy narrative. So I think the answer is in the morning and early day, we want as much full spectrum as we can. So I am not one of these anti-sun people. Think you want the full spectrum to include probably time outside without sunscreen on every part of your body.
If you’re, you know, blessed with your own backyard space, take your shirt off if you can, or get more full-spectrum light. So that’s very, so when you’re outside, you’re getting quite bright light compared to light bulbs outside, which is pretty bright. Two, you’re getting red, blue, and everything in between, as well as UV and infrared from the sun, which we feel as warmth.
So I think you want to get a full spectrum, including blue in the morning and throughout the day. And then as you get towards the night, I think it’s pretty clear that people have different sensitivities to blue light. One of my hypotheses, and I actually don’t know what research backs this up, but it seems pretty clear to me, is that some people and maybe night owls, are more sensitive to blue light.
And so if you are a night owl and want to go to bed earlier, you probably need to start shielding yourself from blue light earlier. Now, what do I mean by shielding ourselves from blue light? Well, I said before that the sun is much brighter and the outside is much brighter than an indoor LED light bulb. But that LED light bulb was putting out a lot more blue light than was available anywhere else during man’s evolutionary history, outside the sun.
You can be rational given an assumed set of facts and truths, but if those are not true, then the whole thing is irrational. Share on XSo you got a fire at night; it was red and orange. If you see a fire today that is blue and natural gas, that’s probably not what somebody was cooking with 10,000 years ago. So all that to say, if you’re really sensitive and have a hard time falling asleep, you wanna start earlier. What does earlier mean? And what do you do to block it? Well, you can do anything from switching out light bulbs in your house to having less blue light.
And different companies make a variety of light bulbs that are either programmable or just sort of monochrome, but have less blue, so you can wear blue light-blocking glasses, which are quite effective. One, they can block 99 percent of light. And, if they’re reasonably well-fitted glasses, they’re going to block the majority of it coming in. So I think for the average person, I’ve seen tremendous benefits to wearing blue light blocking glasses for the hour before you want to go to bed.
For somebody who’s really sensitive, you might go for two. I’ve actually seen people who are too sensitive. They wear them. So somebody started wearing them for 90 minutes and found they were waking up earlier than they wanted. And they cut it down to 45 minutes and started waking up at the times they wanted. So, it’s really something, humans have a tremendous variability. And so I think it’s really worth running an experiment and seeing what helps you. Either see how you feel, or, if you use an Oura Ring, a WHOOP, or something like that, it can also help.
Yeah, and what do you do personally with your light hygiene, screen time and all that sort of stuff?
So I definitely try to get outside in the morning. I got a little backyard, so I can, you know, do my prayers in the morning outside and be in the sun. And then I absolutely wear blue light-blocking glasses at night. I’ve said this on podcasts before. When I go to hotels, you know, if I take a shower at night, which is showering at night before bed, it is one of the best sleep interventions because of what it does for thermal regulation.
I’ll just put on the blue-light-blocking glasses and get in the shower. And I’m sure to some people that sounds halfway to insane, but I sleep much better. It just calms you down. Blue light is, until you’ve really experienced it, it is, by blocking it, but it’s incredibly stimulating. And I think it is really helpful for people. Also, there’s some really interesting research that shows that bright light plus exciting content is doubly problematic.
So if you’re watching, playing video games or watching really exciting movies at night, you’re actually getting a double whammy, versus if you’re just reading a book or something. So I really, especially you, are to be doing that stuff then, then blue-eyed blocking glasses can be even more helpful. And I will wear them at night, typically for myself, for at least an hour.
So you’re wearing blue-light-blocking glasses in the shower.
Yes. Well, if I’m not at home. At home, I have light bulbs that don’t have blue in them, but in a hotel, I’m not chained to the hotel’s light bulbs.
Yeah, okay, cool. And so, where does the Oura Ring or whatever device you use to track your sleep, HRV and all that, come into play for you?
Yeah, so I think for the most part, we know whether we slept much better or much worse. We feel much better, we feel much worse. But you might not track 5, 10% that well. 5% and 10% every night are huge wins. So I will use an Oura Ring, you know, I wear it pretty much every night, especially to track experiments if I’m trying something new, whether it’s a supplement, a form of meditation, exercise or an intervention.
I don’t typically look at their scores. I’m looking at how deep and how much REM sleep I got, as a percentage of total and also as an absolute number.
And I’m honestly looking; I don’t typically look at their scores. I’m looking at how deep and how much REM sleep I got. You know, kind of looking at that as a percentage of total and also just an absolute number. And I will say, in the past, because I do wear it every night, I’ve sometimes not been thinking of sleep as an outcome of an experiment.
And, notice that it was something I started taking for in this case, workout recovery. I was like, “Wow, that really affected my sleep beneficially.” So, there you go. That’s kind of what I’m tracking, typically, as well as heart rate and HRV at night.
Yeah, and what are good numbers for the amount of deep sleep and REM sleep for just a typical person?
So first, I’m gonna give you my absolute home run numbers. An absolute home run would be four hours combined. I mean, this is very hard for most people to get to, but that’s like, you know, an incredible goal, and you know, at least an hour and a half of one, it’s a unicorn. But there are some tricks you can use to get there maybe once a week, even if you’re not there every day. You know, otherwise I’d love to see somebody getting in the 245 to three range, an hour and a half and an hour and a half.
Now, the other thing is different people are gonna feel different ways at different numbers, right? And so some people physiologically need less sleep. You have to be careful because some people have lost some of their sensitivity to feeling sleep deprived. It turns out that if you’re getting less sleep than you need, you don’t stop getting worse in your performance, but you do stop noticing it.
So you gotta be careful with that one. But I think like an hour and 20 to an hour and a half each night is a really great goal. The one thing I will say is that studies are looking at this stuff, and basically, you gotta be careful it doesn’t make you feel worse because the numbers weren’t good, right? Like you don’t wanna let the numbers dictate how you feel. Use it as an experiment and try not to look at it in a way that makes you feel bad. And then you’re gonna say, “I didn’t sleep well, and now I’m not gonna perform well today” because there are studies out there showing that that definitely happens.
So gotta be careful with the wearables in that regard. Just use it as an input source. And if you find you’re susceptible to that, but want to run the experiments, maybe don’t look at it until the afternoon, when you’re already through most of your day. So you don’t risk sort of nuking your day because it said you got too deep in the run.
Yeah, hmm. Yeah, my wife tells me to stop looking at my Oura Ring data to see if I had a good night’s sleep. And usually the numbers are terrible. And, you know, if I’m getting 45 minutes of deep sleep, that’s pretty typical.
Do you feel all right? I mean, how do you feel?
I feel all right. I don’t know what it would be like to get twice that.
True, so I mean, maybe we can talk about some interventions that might help. I think, at a minimum, if you feel pretty good, then that is really meaningful data, even if the aura ring doesn’t like how much you slept.
Yeah, I mean, I feel functional, but I don’t feel like I’m in top performance mode. Like last night, I got a 72 sleep score. Just pretty typical. I got a 73 the night before. My wife, Orion, tells me, ” This is not helpful for you to know this. It really is like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If I look at the numbers, I’m like, crap. So yeah, I’d love to hear about some of these interventions, because I have a feeling many of our listeners will get less-than-awesome sleep at least some of the time. So the tricks you alluded to would probably be pretty helpful to everyone.
Well, happy to throw them out there, but again, these are experiments to run because nothing works for everyone. But I’ll throw a few out there. One, I mentioned showering before bed. Turns out that a rapid drop in body temperature is a signal to your brain to go to sleep. And a very, very effective way to get a rapid drop in body temperature is to jack your body temperature up by being in a warm shower or bath, and then getting out, and you’ll start to cool off very rapidly.
If you looked at the most researched health interventions with the best outcomes, right after diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management is the sauna. Share on XIt has the added benefit of the fact that your body and brain are very smart, and they do not want to fall asleep if they’re cold, because if they’re cold and it’s nighttime, it’s probably gonna get colder outside, and if you get too cold, you die. So your body will stay awake until you warm the bed up sufficiently for it to feel safe. But if you just came out of a shower and your body’s warm, and you probably want to sleep in a colder room, so your bed is reasonably cold just sitting there.
Then your body heat from being warm in the shower will warm the bed up, and now your body heat’s dropping even more when you get in bed because the bed’s cool, and that can be tremendously awful. Even putting your feet in warm water for 10 minutes in Korean studies is also effective. You don’t even have to take a shower. I like showers because I think a lot of people, unfortunately, have some low-grade inflammatory stuff and allergies, and so it also washes off any allergens you have on you, things like that.
I like showers. I like blue light-blocking glasses. We already talked about that. Let’s jump to a kind of fun experiments you can run, just one-offs. I have found, especially in a lot of very successful people who burn really hard during the week, that if you take one dose of 5-HTP, that’s a precursor to serotonin, let’s say an hour before bed, on let’s say a Friday night, you’re going to maybe sleep in, and that it will dramatically improve sleep quality.
But for some people, taking it more than once a week is actually counterproductive because it makes them feel warm and a little jittery; it’s like too much air in the system. But I find for myself once a week, 5-HTP pre-bed is a tremendous benefit. ‘
Yeah, okay. And where do you get this from? Is it like from Nootropics Depot or something like that? Or is it just that you can find it anywhere on Amazon?
I’ll use somebody like Pure Encapsulations. That’s a pretty clean brand that doesn’t use a bunch of weird additives. Some other things. I think Glycine is an underrated sleep supplement. 1.5 to 2 grams per bed. Strangely enough, Glycine tastes really good. It is like an amino acid, but it is sweet and doesn’t have a weird aftertaste. It’s almost like a fake sugar, because it comes in powder form.
Glycine actually helps increase peripheral blood flow, helps you dump heat better, and helps calm down and reduce hyperactivity in the brain. And also, if you really need to get good sleep for a night, I don’t recommend taking it often, because I’ve found that people don’t seem to feel good when they take it too many nights in a row. Still, there are sustained-release melatonin formulations that, colloquially, I and others I work with refer to as a sledgehammer.
So, like that same company I mentioned, Pure Encapsulations, they make a 3-milligram sustained-release melatonin formulation that I typically take only one night in a row, but it’s also really powerful at improving my sleep quality. Anyway, that’s just a few supplement, non-supplement things. Even collagen protein at night has been shown to improve sleep quality because it contains calming amino acids, such as glycine. So lots of different options, and I think just run as an experiment. Try it with, try it without, see if it replicates, see if it doesn’t. And if it does and you feel better, fantastic.
Yeah, so as Peter Drucker proporatively quoted as saying, but it wasn’t him actually, what gets measured gets managed. So if you have an Oura Ring, a WHOOP or something, that is much better than just guessing what your sleep scores, deep sleep numbers, and everything were.
It can be as long as you are relatively consistent. Look, if you’re like six hours one night and eight the next and four the third, like, you know, there’s just so much variability that you never know if something worked. But if you can keep things pretty consistent, you find your own pattern, then see if you can find something that knocks you out of that pattern in a good way.
Being experimental with this stuff, then you end up finding, like you did, that a workout recovery was actually quite helpful in improving your sleep quality. What was that workout recovery, by the way, that you found that to be the case?
It’s a high-polyphenol fruit extract; it is still the only thing we’ve ever used that we don’t know why it works. I have a pretty good mechanistic understanding of everything else that all the other supplements we use, but I don’t know. Don’t know why it’s improving sleep, but it does improve sleep for a good proportion of people, maybe a third.
And this is part of a comprehensive regimen of supplements you give to your clients who buy your FlyKitt solution.
If you can keep things pretty consistent and find your own pattern, then see if you can find something that knocks you out of that pattern in a good way. Share on XThis is actually a separate thing. was just a, that’s something. So I used to, and I still occasionally now coach individuals. And so there we’re doing totally personalized everyday programs as well as travel, but FlyKitt is what we found to be the best program for the most people. You know, I could make a FlyKitt that’s truly custom for each person, but the costs would be totally prohibitive for almost everybody.
So what we found with FlyKitt is that we can give the same supplements to each person, vary the doses and especially vary the timing. We have an app that customizes your plan based on your flights, your circadian rhythm at home, your sleep schedule when you’re away, and other factors about your body that you input into the app.
So we found that customization by dose and timing gives us enough leverage to, you know, in our studies and retrospective analyses, about 93% of people could travel anywhere in the world with minimal to no jet lag. And we ran a study with Inter Miami, the professional soccer team where Messi plays. The group was split into people who use FlyKitt and people who don’t. And the group that used FlyKitt had 95% fewer symptoms.
Wow, that’s great. Yeah. And you’re giving a discount to our listeners as well, right? So the code GYOPod is 15% off.
Yeah, check it out and try it out. And the other thing is, I want to help people here. And if it doesn’t work for you, just email us, and we’ll give you your money back. So pretty risk-free.
Yeah, awesome. So let’s talk about some other kinds of performance enhancements you would recommend for our listeners. Now you’ve got a lot of experience working with Navy SEALs and working in the Army and so forth. I’m curious, by the way, is this something that, what is applicable in terms of high performance for a warrior, for a road warrior, just an executive, a coach consultant, or whatever, who’s pretty sedentary, how much overlap is there in the kinds of things that you would recommend for high performance to a Navy SEAL versus to just an average person?
The physiologic stuff, I always say, helps people see what they’re meant to be here to do better.
I’d say a lot of it overlaps because, you know, a Navy SEAL wants to help recover really fast from beating the heck out of their body. But, you know, even the average person who works out wants to recover faster. And two, a Navy SEAL’s body is both: like, you don’t become a Navy SEAL unless you have a tremendously resilient body. Like it just doesn’t work. Like, you can’t be a fragile person and make it through six-plus weeks of what they do.
And so they’re beating the heck out of themselves. Still, they’re so resilient that the amount they need versus the amount that a person who’s, frankly, less resilient physiologically needs, like there’s actually more similarity there than you might think. Two, they’re working on insufficient sleep a lot. Well, so are parents, and so are road warriors, and so are people. They’re traveling, and we’re thinking about traveling, and they’re flying on planes, and you’re flying on planes.
Now, you’re not trying to do a six-to eight-hour dive mission. So that is gonna be a unique set of interventions that are, frankly, probably not that relevant unless you are a scuba diver. And then there are some cool things I learned to do from that. But I’d say, for the most part, people wanna recover faster, perform with less sleep, get better-quality sleep while they’re doing it, feel better and recover from injuries faster.
And frankly, that’s generally what, and be it peak cognitive and physical performance, I think that’s generally what most people want. But yes, there will always be differences because this is a very young, very fit, very resilient population. Still, there are a lot of similarities, actually, in what people want.
Yeah. So, what are some of your favorite performance hacks we haven’t talked about yet for someone who’s just a regular person listening to this podcast?
Okay, we’ll just pick some random ones from each category. On the diet side, I think it is a tremendous value to do an elimination diet at least once in your life. If you can spend either 10 days three times or a full month, cutting out most foods that may be allergens or foods that trigger dry food sensitivities, add them back one at a time. Figure out which ones give you lower energy, give you gut issues, gas, bloating and other things. I will tell you, you know, just to take myself as an example: I have double or triple the energy every day since I cut out the things my body doesn’t react well to.
So I think that’s a huge value proposition, because we live in a world with a lot of food sensitivities, probably driven by the crappy food we eat, the level of stress people are under, and all kinds of other things. But I think on the diet side, I don’t always say it’s the highest-ROI thing I have people do because it’s a big investment of time and effort. But in terms of the highest return, the absolute amount you get back from it, it’s one of the best things you can do.
And where would somebody learn about how to do this? Like what length of time, which things to add in first and next, and how often to spread the introduction of these additional foods in?
I actually have a protocol I’d be happy to share if there’s a way you can get it to you. Happy to send it as a PDF or Google Doc, and happy to have you share it with your listeners.
If you looked at the most researched health interventions with the best outcomes, right after diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management is the sauna. Share on XThat would be wonderful.
Cool, yeah, so I think that’s a huge ROI or huge return, but hopefully ROI. On the supplement side, especially if you’re not getting enough sleep, the underrated approach is to split-dose omega-3s, meaning take them more frequently throughout the day. Omega-3 fatty acids tend to be anti-inflammatory, and one of the first-order negative effects of not getting enough sleep is inflammation. And so if you can take things that lower that inflammation, you can actually perform better.
Now, this is not a recipe for never needing to sleep again, but it can take the edge off and be quite helpful. So I do that. We use that in our jet lag programs, but I do like the split dosing of omega-3s. I think they’d be really helpful. And if you were in the Midwest, historically, most of the executives I’ve worked with live on the coast, and they eat a lot of fish. People love sushi these days. Some have low omega-3 levels, some have high.
But I recently worked in a white-collar office. We did a trade with the company. We did labs, and I kind of helped out all the team members in return for some of the work they did.
These are smart, successful people, and they have, by far, the lowest omega-3 levels I’ve ever seen. And so I think in the Midwest, probably just fewer people eat less fish. There are potentially cold-water fish, you know, not near the oceans. And so it kind of makes sense. But man, like, if your omega-3 levels are low and you restock them, your body uses them as precursors to make anti-inflammatory compounds.
It uses it as building blocks of the brain, and it lowers inflammation. Man, those people get a lot of benefits fast. So I like that. I like a very high purity, very highly concentrated Omega-3. I don’t get any money from this, but if you’re listening, for example, Carlson‘s Elite Omega-3 Gems is a product I’ve seen in labs increase people’s blood levels very quickly. So I happen to like that.
So what if you don’t eat fish? I don’t eat fish, so you don’t get much benefit from the vegan version, which is based on, I think, algae.
No, that’s fine too. Yeah, if you have a reason, know that the vegan ones tend to be smaller doses and more expensive, but if you don’t like the non-vegan ones, it’s fine. Just up the dose if you need it.
Yeah, okay. Yep. So what’s next?
Let’s see: that’s diet supplements and exercise. One of the things I like the most is a workout that can be done very quickly with minimal equipment, almost at home, for people, because let’s say you don’t have time to go to the gym or you don’t have time for a 30-minute workout, and there is a workout where you take the heaviest kettlebell you can handle. Be safe, be safe and learn your limits. And you do 10 kettlebell swings. If you don’t know what a kettlebell swing is, there are a hundred thousand videos online, so just Google it.
You might want to work with a trainer because the form really does matter, but 10 kettlebell swings per minute for 10 minutes will get you to 100 swings. It has strength in both the glutes and the hamstrings, and also really gets your heart beating very fast by the end of it, and you are done in nine and a half minutes because you don’t even need that last whole minute.
I think that’s a great workout for people. It is also just to forget it. You set a timer that, you know, feels like a Tabata timer or something that, you know, tells you you’re about to start the next minute. Boom, you bang out 10 kettlebell swings, rest till the next one comes, do it again. All you gotta do is do it 10 times, and man, it is a great workout. And I found people will do that one.
When they’re sort of like, I don’t know what to do, or I don’t have time, or that’s a great workout I like for people.
So, how many days a week do you recommend doing that?
I mean, I think, you know, it’s great to mix up your workouts, but if that’s all you did three or four times a week, you would get stronger, and you could up the weight over time, and your metabolic fitness would improve. So I think you could do that quite often. Now, if you’re, it’s also a great component of a bigger strength and endurance workout regimen, but as something to, like, do on that day when you have short, you don’t have a lot of time.
You have one calendar block, 30 minutes. But 30 minutes between meetings is not 30 minutes. Of course, it’s like 25 minutes for you to go to the bathroom, use some water or something. But in that one calendar block, even where you lose some at the beginning of the end, you could do that. And so it’s one of those, like, there’s almost no reason you can’t do it. And if you did it, you’d be much better off.
Cool. Anything else?
Meditation and breath work, I think, are fantastic. I think both can be great. I think most people who are action-oriented probably have a little easier time starting with breathwork if they’re not already. You could try Googling “4-7-8 Breathwork,” for example. That’s a breathing pattern that tends to calm the nervous system, which in today’s day and age is probably pretty good.
Sleep, I already gave you some of my favorite sleep hacks. We talked about light temperature. The sauna is just sleeping. It’s talked about more, but the fact is, if you looked at the most researched health interventions with the best outcomes, diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management would be the top ones, of course. But right after that is the sauna. It is the next best research with the best outcomes. So, dry sauna versus infrared.
We just have reams of data comparing a traditional dry-finish sauna to an infrared sauna. Maybe infrared is just as good, but we don’t have the same data. I think there are some reasons to believe that the traditional sauna is better. So if you have a choice, I prefer the traditional one. You can do only infrared, that’s probably good too. So I think sauna, totally underrated, three, four days a week can be tremendous for your health program. Okay, well, that was cherry-picking one from each category, but. I can also delve deeper into each one. I love all this stuff. It’s just ways to make people feel better and reach their goals.
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. And then do you do saunas yourself, which one, and how often?
Yeah, I just moved to a new place. So one of the things on the list is to get put into the new place. I will be getting a traditional hot sauna that reaches at least 180 degrees. 180 degrees for 20 minutes seems to be in the strike zone. And you could do two cycles of that, for example, with some rest in between, some cooling in between.
But yeah, 180 degrees for 20 minutes. In the studies, it’s 80 degrees Celsius, and it’s 176 degrees for about 15 to 20 minutes. But if you’re at 180 for 20 minutes, you are in the strike zone.
Awesome. Any other performance hacks or biohacks you want to share before we switch topics? Because I want to talk to you about something more metaphysical.
I think underappreciated, you know, they’re out there in supplements, but underappreciated classes of compounds are called polyphenols. In fruits and vegetables, you’ve probably heard people talk about antioxidants. Well, it turns out the compounds they’re talking about do not work as antioxidants in your body. In a test tube, they do, but in your body, the physics and the chemical reactivity potential of these things tell us that’s not how they work.
What are these things? The blue things that make blueberries blue, and the red things that make raspberries red, and there are colorless ones. Still, all these different compounds in fruits and vegetables actually turn on genetic switches that tell your cells to produce protective compounds, enzymes and others. And so I think, you’re experimenting with the polyphenols that work well for your body, curcumin, tart cherry extract, extracts from black currant extracts from all, know, cursitin, all these different polyphenols I think are really interesting because some of them that match your body’s needs and different types of anti-inflammatory approaches, different types of feeding your gut, I think can be really powerful. And so that’s just a class of compounds, I think, that is underappreciated in how it actually works. And that allows you, if you really know how it works, to essentially enable your body’s natural protective systems. And that’s anything you can get to work with your body is probably gonna be a good approach.
That’s awesome. Yeah, great stuff, great stuff. So let’s get a little more metaphysical. It’s a challenging time for humanity right now, let’s just say. I don’t know if you wanted to kind of share some thoughts or tools or whatever to help people who feel like they’re going into spiritual war with the systems and the dark forces and so forth that are out there. It seems like a very tumultuous, chaotic time to be alive in human history.
What would be based on, like your work with soldiers, warriors, Navy Seals and so forth and your own research and tool sets and so forth, what would you suggest for a spiritual warrior, somebody who feels like maybe they’re too empathic, or they don’t have enough kind of spiritual shielding around themselves, or they don’t have the tools. What would you advise them? And first of all, guess what, do you believe that this is kind of like a spiritual war we’re in right now?
I think it’s a tumultuous time, and I do think that there is a spiritual component to it. I’m a man of faith, and I really believe that I don’t understand everything that’s going on, but I do think it’s a challenging time, and I do think you believe in good and evil in these things. So, a couple of things.
One of the things that I think is beautiful about improving your health and supporting your body is that I think when your body runs cleaner, let’s say when it’s being more efficient, when it’s not kind of inflamed and other things, I think you can just catch the signal better. Now, the sort of signal-to-noise ratio is better. There’s less background noise, less physiologic static, if you will. And so I think it is incumbent on all of us, not only to improve our health for some longevity goal, but to improve it.
Because I think we, whether you’re trying to be a better businessman or a better person, put a bigger prayer into the world. I think by improving your health, you sleep better, and all these other things, you actually catch the signal better. So I think that’s the first part of it. The second piece for me is, this is a great question. So I think gratitude is one of the most powerful tools in the armamentarium, if you will. Even in challenging times, most of us live pretty blessed lives.
Gratitude is one of the most powerful tools in the armamentarium, if you will. Even in challenging times, most of us live pretty blessed lives.
There are obviously people out there who’ve had, who are, who have, or who will run into some really tough stuff, but finding the things we can be glad for is really, really beautiful. Um, and then I don’t know, this just comes to mind. So I’ll share it. There’s a tool called The Downward Arrow. This is a psychological tool, basically intended to help someone get to what their subconscious is, based on the information or threat it is attuning to.
And at any time, if there’s something you say, I want to do this thing: diet, pray more. There’s something, and then you just sort of keep failing at it. Man, I wanted to do that, I wanted to get to bed earlier. wanted to do whatever it is. I wanted to build my business, but I then got distracted by social media, whatever it is.
This downward arrow tool is wildly effective at least helping you understand why you are doing what you’re doing or not doing what you say you wanna do. And so here’s what you do. It’s ideal if you can get another person to do it with you. But basically, the question is, let’s say somebody procrastinates, college students procrastinate. The question is, what bad would happen if you wrote the paper now?
Well, I’m tired. So if I started now, I might not do a good job, or, let’s say, be a businessman. I’m tired. So if I start the project now for the customer, I might get tired and not do a good job. Well, what happens if you don’t do a good job? Well, if I don’t do a good job and the customer isn’t happy, what happens? Oh, well, they might not renew the contract. What happens if they don’t renew the contract? Then revenue drops. What happens if revenue drops? Then, the business might fail. What happens if the business fails? No one will love me. They’re like, wait a second.
which had a big jump there. But this is a very common kind of pattern. Or, you know, I’ll let my family down, or I’ll, you know, I’ll end up in a ditch or something, you know. And if you can understand what that means, your brain is subconsciously thinking: if I start a project now, no one will love me. Well, can you imagine your brain is very smart, not to start the project right now based on that belief? Now that belief is almost certainly not true.
But based on that belief, your brain is very smart not to start it. If there was something you were about to do that would leave you alone in the world and without love, you should probably not do it. But what’s the way out of that? Because it turns out understanding this is not a solution. Understanding this is sort of required to figure out what the heck is going on. But the way out of it is exposure therapy. So you may have heard of this. This is like what they do when somebody has arachnophobia. They’re terrified of spiders.
So what do you do first? First, you have a person in a room with a picture of a spider printed on some paper. It is not a real spider. There are no spiders around because you’re giving the brain data that they didn’t die from being near that thing. And so you might say, but that’s silly. It’s just a picture. I don’t care. Count the small wins. If you can’t go to the gym, the classic thing is to put on your workout shoes and then take them off. That’s the small win for the day. But you’ve got to code it in your brain. Okay, I did a thing.
It was helpful because you got to code as a success: you did the thing, and nothing bad happened. And then the next time, instead of a picture, it’s two pictures, it’s a video of a spider. And so maybe it’s putting your shoes on and going to the car. You don’t even go to the gym. Just put your shoes on for the gym, pack your bag and go to the car, but come back, code it as a win because you need to basically train your brain that this feared outcome is not actually gonna happen.
If we live a better, kinder, more aligned life, I think that probably helps a lot, too. The physiologic stuff helps people see what they’re meant to be here to do better.
And if you can use exposure therapy, whether it’s on procrastination for a project at work, or whether it’s going to the gym or whether it’s spiders, then you can train your brain that that feared outcome is not accurate. You can give it new data, and by then being able to do that thing you haven’t, you can start building wins and changing your life.
Do you get to the point where you actually do have the spiders in the room with the person?
Absolutely. Like those tarantulas, I think at the end of that, at the end of the tunnel for that arachnophobia treatment, there’s a tarantula, which is totally safe to be around. And people can get there because their brains are learned little by little. But if you put them in a room with a tarantula at the beginning, they will freak out and code it as a gigantic threat, disaster and failure. And it will prove to them that they cannot be around those things and they’re not safe.
I’ll have a panic attack, and then that will set them all the way back. So you’ve got to start small. And if you’re like, all right, fine, you know what, I’m going to the gym every day this week, bet you’re not. And then, when you fail, you’re just going to see, see, I knew I couldn’t do it. I know I’m a failure. And it’s probably not true. You probably just have a subconscious belief that is in your way that you can train your brain to realize it is not as big a threat. And then you can overcome it and change your life.
I have a loved one who is afraid to fly, hasn’t been on an airplane for some years now, and doesn’t plan to. I wonder if this technique would apply to this.
It could. You’d have to think about how it’s probably like, you’d have to figure out what the fear is. And then, from there, start building a plan to expose more and more. It’s packing the bag to go to the airport, but not going. It’s, you know, then going to the airport with the bag and just figuring out what the concern about the planes is. Because, deep down, humans are generally pretty smart and rational, but are often just off a set of facts and beliefs that aren’t true.
So it’s funny: you can be rational given an assumed set of facts and truths, but if those are not true, then the whole thing is irrational. But if you figure out what it is and you can design a plan, it often is. And then there’s some really weird research, cool research. You know, I haven’t tracked whatever came of it, but they were like trying to give people beta blockers. These are drugs that block the effects of adrenaline.
And so it was basically like, now you go into the situation, you don’t have as much adrenaline. And the question is, would that help it be like, I feel physiologically safer or by blocking the effects, would it feel like, well, I could only do that because I had this drug. So, there’s been some cool research, but just exposure therapy itself can be a really valuable approach.
Cool. I loved what you said earlier about catching the signal better when you… These are my words or my paraphrasing, when it’s a clearer vessel, when you’re able to, with a clean vessel that isn’t full of inflammation and sugar and junk food and all that.
And even guilt and other stuff. So, think about it: if we live a better, kinder, more aligned life, I think that probably helps a lot, too. But both, for sure, the physiologic stuff, I always say, helps people see what they’re meant to be here to do better.
Yeah, and in relation to that, from an emotional kind of mental side of it, if you are more careful about guarding your eyes, and in Hebrew the phrase is Shmiras Einayim, which means basically guard the eyes. And so if you’re careful about what you watch, avoiding spiritually harmful images and movies and stuff that’s immodest or violent or whatever, that definitely will help with keeping a clear vessel more pure and attuned to receive messages and guidance from above.
Yeah, beautiful stuff.
Yeah. All right. So if our listener viewer wants to try your FlyKitt product, the code is GYOPod for 15% off. What’s the website to go to, and how do they learn more from you?
Yeah, our website is flykitt.com. You can go there and check out all the information. If you have any questions, email us. Either my head of customer service, Blake, will respond or I’ll respond directly. And otherwise, find us on Instagram @flykitt_travel, and on Facebook as well. So follow us there. And here, as we launch new things, we now have a domestic product that’s more about flight inflammation than about circadian rhythms, and necessarily some other stuff. Yeah, really appreciate it. And if you have questions, reach out to us, and we’re happy to help.
Awesome. Andrew, this was a real pleasure and thank you for being a warrior for the good out there in the world, helping people be better, get better and perform better. Yeah, thank you, listener, also for being a force for good in the world. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.
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