Pod Insights Modern Wisdom How To Maximise Your Brain's Performance - Louisa Nicola About this episode Louisa Nicola is a Clinical Neuroscientist, Neurophysiologist and high performance coach.
Maximising performance isn't just about being as physically fit possible, it's ensuring that your brain is operating at its peak condition all the time. Louisa works with NBA superstars and trading floor managers to refine and enhance their brain function using the latest research.
Expect to learn Louisa's non-negotiable supplements for brain health, how to get to sleep more quickly at night, why throwing a tennis ball at a wall is good for your mind, the impact of sleep on brain performance, Louisa's training protocol for maximising cognitive function, how to stay calm under pressure and much more...
Sponsors:
Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/
Get 20% discount on Mission’s high performance teas at https://missionuk.com (use code MW20)
Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15)
Extra Stuff:
Check out NeuroAthletics - https://www.neuroathletics.com.au/
Sign up to Louisa's Newsletter - https://neuroathletics.substack.com/
Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/
To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom
#brain #performance #mindset
-
00:00 Intro
00:29 NeuroAthletics
05:51 What is a High-performing Brain?
09:52 Principles for Maximising Brain Performance
16:06 Exercises to Improve Mental Capacity
21:56 Impact of Sleep on Brain Performance
32:20 Optimal Pre-bed Routines
38:04 Practices for Better Sleep
42:04 How to Stay Calm under Pressure
47:10 Protocols for Cold & Heat Exposure
54:32 Can Psychedelics Enhance Sport Performance?
1:00:32 Where to Find Louisa
-
Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/
Listen to all episodes on audio:
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn
-
Get in touch in the comments below or head to...
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx
Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/
Transcript 11,807 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 There's many studies that have been done on basketball players. A lack of sleep can go through and interfere with reaction time. It can interfere with visual acuity, their ability to see the ball at the speed of light and react to it. So that's the software things, their ability to think fast, that really goes down and that's diminished. One second for LeBron James can mean the difference between winning and losing, right?
0:24 Chris Williamson? Louisa Nicola, welcome to the show.
0:26 Speaker 00 Chris, so happy to be here.
0:29 Chris Williamson? How would you describe what you do for work?
0:32 Speaker 00 Well, my company, NeuroAthletics, is literally the intersection of neuroscience and athletic performance. Around six years ago, I would say, six years ago, 2016, I saw a gap in that market where I was looking at athletes, I was training athletes, I had a neuroscience background and I thought, why is everybody obsessed with making these athletes better by just working on their speed and agility? Why are we not working on their brains? The brain is the powerhouse of the entire system. So that's what I did. I just started my company and started working on the brain.
1:06 Chris Williamson? Okay, but you don't just work with athletes, right?
1:09 Speaker 00 Correct. So right now, so at the start, the conception, NeuroAthletics was purely athletes and then we moved into an only Major League Soccer, NFL and NBA pathway. And then just by chance, two years ago, we got the attention of the finance world. And let me tell you, their brains are, their brains are in dire need of NeuroAthletics. So we now service some of the financial world.
1:34 Chris Williamson? What's the similarities between a portfolio manager and an athlete?
1:38 Speaker 00 Lack of sleep, first and foremost. Secondly, competitiveness. Thirdly, they've got that ability to do whatever it takes. They're not just getting up for a, for a day job at nine AM and putting their suit on. They have to train like athletes to get the best results. Some of the guys I'm working with tell me, Louisa, if I don't make this trade tonight, if I'm not in the peak state to make a good trade, I could lose $30 million.
2:04 Chris Williamson? Okay, so slightly high stakes. When you actually put it like that, you think, oh, he's kicking a ball about, you know, he's kicking a ball into a goal. What does it matter? It's not 30 million.
2:14 Chris Williamson? You said that both of them were underslept. Do you find that your athletes on average are underslept? Is that something specific to athletes? Or do you think that this is just the entire world is underslept and athletes are a subsection of the world?
2:27 Speaker 00 Very good question. So I think everybody, not just athletes and portfolio managers, I think everybody is underslept. Now, just 12 hours ago on Twitter, I posted a tweet saying, guys, I think I have it all wrong. I've been talking about sleep deprivation, but instead, why don't I talk about, why don't we say REM sleep deprivation or slow wave sleep deprivation? I think, I think we've got it all wrong when we talk about sleep deprivation. Now, a lot of people in society are sleep deprived. Now, sleep deprived is classified as six hours or less. I live in New York City. Almost everybody in the city is sleeping six hours or less. It's a hustle
3:08 Speaker 00 city. But then also now because of technology, because of what we're eating, because of how we're going out, the fact that the pandemic has brought us inside, we are being exposed to things that are keeping us up longer throughout the night, but also disrupting our patterns of getting into deep sleep and slow and REM sleep. So I coined this, this new phenomenon, I think of 2022, instead of somebody saying I'm sleep deprived, I'm going to say, well, what part of sleep deprived are you? Are you lacking REM sleep or you're lacking deep sleep?
3:39 Chris Williamson? Yeah, well, most people aren't tracking on average. You know, there's some freaks amongst us that are, that have got a whoop strap or that wear an Oura ring, but not many people are. And it was only when I started wearing a whoop strap that I realized time in bed doesn't equal time of sleep and time of sleep doesn't always equal the same amount of quality of sleep. Even though you, you wake up in the morning and you realize there's something good, right? Wrong side of the bed syndrome. But
4:09 Chris Williamson? The fact that even about whatever 85% efficiency or a 90% efficiency, say, which is pretty good, like it's, that's, that's all right. Um, you need to be in bed for nine hours to get eight hours. And the number of people that are in bed for nine hours is basically zero.
4:24 Speaker 00 Yeah. And sometimes that's a struggle for me, especially now being in Australia. But here's the thing, you're wearing a whoop strap. So I wear all three. Now, what we know, when we're talking about sleep physiology, in order to really understand sleep apnea, okay, or go through a sleep study, you have to go into a lab and they hook you up with all of these machines. They start with the head, the eyes, you've got an oximeter, a nasal cannula. Now, that is, that, that gives you a very precise measurement, okay, of your sleep stages. How can we possibly mimic that outside of the lab? Well, companies such as Aura, Whoop, other companies have now invented these wearables. But the accuracy is where I, I, I think we need to talk about. You're wearing a
5:06 Speaker 00 Whoop, I'm wearing an Aura right now. Uh, studies show that the Aura has a better PSG reading, sleep study reading.
5:14 Chris Williamson? What's PSG?
5:15 Speaker 00 Oh, it's a polysomnography. That's basically a sleep study.
5:19 Chris Williamson? Okay.
5:19 Speaker 00 When you go into a lab. So it kind of mimics, I, I think it was, the statistics are around 87%. It mimics what's happening in the lab. Whereas the Whoop strap is a bit different. It's more so better for exercise and performance and HRV tracking.
5:33 Chris Williamson? Do you know what the percentage was for the Whoop?
5:36 Speaker 00 I don't, but my thing is, when I wear the Whoop, sometimes at night, it can be, it slides around on your hand. Sometimes you wake up and it's like misfolded. So maybe that's the, uh, maybe that's what's happening.
5:48 Chris Williamson? Getting back to brain health, we'll talk about sleep in a bit, but what, what do you mean when you talk about a high performing brain? What, what is that?
5:56 Speaker 00 So we've got, when we look at the brain, we've got both the software and the hardware, the hardware being the actual brain itself. Okay. And we can have many problems wrong with that. For example, when an NFL player has a concussion, it's really messing with the hardware. Okay, they could have a dent in their brain, they could build up tauopathies within that area. But then there's the software, which is how are you thinking? How are you feeling? What are your thoughts doing in your brain? It's like the cognitive part of it, how's your reaction time? So I work with both of those. Now, with anything in terms of progression, how are we meant to measure things? So what we do with all of our athletes is we measure them in month one. They come into, they come and see us, whether it's in person or whether it's online. And we do an actual EEG scan.
6:40 Speaker 00 So we put a cap on them, we're measuring their brain waves. We're understanding what's happening with both the software and the hardware. And then from that, we then put in a, a performance program. And that could consist of upping their vitamins or upping their EPA, DHA, which is known as fish oil. We look at sleep because sleep has an impact on the brain. We look at reaction time, we look at visual acuity. And we even do breath work because breath work is another major factor affecting the hardware and the software.
7:10 Chris Williamson? Hmm.
7:12 Speaker 00 So if I, I would say if you've got a high performing brain, there's probably about ten different set points. And if you're at ten, ten, ten out of ten for all of those set points, then that would be a high performing brain.
7:23 Chris Williamson? What does it look like on a biological level?
7:27 Speaker 00 You're a bit, so do you mean like?
7:29 Chris Williamson? What's the, when you go inside of a scan, what do you see? Do you see more connections? Is it to do with the speed of the synapses firing? What's it actually mean?
7:37 Speaker 00 So it's the speed, okay? It's the speed we look at, um, we look at information processing speed. Your ability for your eyes to perceive a stimulus, relay it back to your brain and for your brain to understand what it is. So that speed, it could be zero point four, it could be one point four. So obviously the zero point four would be better. And this is measured in milliseconds. So why do we want that? Well, you think of driving, a lot of traffic accidents happen on the road because of reaction time or sleep deprivation. So we're looking at everything, your ability to make a decision at work, whether to make the trade or not make the trade, to make the phone call or not make the phone call is all dependent on your information processing speed. And then there's also decision making skills.
8:19 Speaker 00 So when they're doing the scan, they're looking at, it's not just a scan, like it's a hospital grade EEG. But you're not just sitting there, you're doing a task that can have them reacting to something on the screen. So it measures that in real time.
8:34 Chris Williamson? What sort of things are you getting them to do? What are the tasks?
8:38 Speaker 00 Look, I spent 16 hours with that EEG on watching one of our NBA players just do jump shots. It was a very hard day.
8:48 Chris Williamson? Hang on, he's got the cap on while he's training?
8:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, we just had him doing jump shots and I was literally measuring what is happening when he's getting the ball in the basket. And I don't speak technical when I'm talking about sports because I just don't know the technicality of it.
9:03 Chris Williamson? Right, I understand. That must be, so there'll be a particular pathway, right? There'll be a sequence, a common sequence of particular neurons that need to fire in order for the throw the ball toward the basket action to be deployed.
9:19 Speaker 00 And we can put this on a trader, for example, for an entire month. And we can measure at what time, what was his brain doing at the time he made a good trade, what was his brain doing at the time he made a bad trade. So then we can then predict, we can then pull the software and predict when he's going to make a good trade or not.
9:37 Chris Williamson? Hmm. What are the main principles that people should consider when they're trying to maximize their brain's performance?
9:43 Speaker 00 Oh gosh, do you have a few days?
9:46 Chris Williamson? Yep.
9:47 Speaker 00 Yes. So first one that I, and I'm going to talk about the ones that I think are not spoken about, okay, that are looked over. First one is hydration. Chris, you've been drinking some water. I've only been on this call for 15 minutes. Okay, you're hydrating. It's so important for the brain to be hydrated. Now, we have anywhere from 80 billion neurons in the brain, nerve cells. In order for them to think, react, produce a movement, or do anything, those two brain cells need to synapse together. You mentioned that earlier. It's when they fire together. In order for them to fire together, we have a pump called the sodium potassium pump. So literally our brain, where have you heard sodium or potassium?
10:28 Speaker 00 Electrolytes, right? So our brain really needs to be hydrated to literally do anything. When we're dehydrated, we're not thinking straight, we're not being able to produce many things. So I always say, keep hydrated, not just with water, but with electrolytes too. So we have an electrolyte protocol in NeuroAthletics. We do sweat tests. So some of our athletes are sweating a lot more than the others. And we determine that sweat test, we think, okay, if you're sweating this much, this is how many electrolytes you're losing. So we dose them for that, pre-game, post-game and throughout the day. So that's number one. Okay. The second thing is consistency. Your brain is actually pretty dumb. Okay, it's just this hunk of meat sitting inside your skull, but it likes consistency.
11:13 Speaker 00 It likes to wake up at the same time every day and go to sleep at the same time every day. It also doesn't like to be shocked. When it's shocked, it doesn't, it's not really prepared for anything. So consistency with sleep routines, morning routines, eating habits, et cetera. Now we can move on to more of the pharmacological aspect. Now, outside of normal pathologies, if you've got any diseases, et cetera. There are certain nutrients that our brain likes. Our brain is literally made of D H A. And if you look at an omega three supplement of fish oil. Okay, omega threes consist of EPA, D H A and A L A. So I'm always supplementing with EPA, D H A. I do two milligrams in the morning, two milligrams at night.
11:57 Speaker 00 There's so many benefits. You're not just feeding your brain, but you're also lowering inflammation. We know that inflammation in a chronic state is bad for us, both neurally and physiologically. So one of the utmost biggest protocols that we do with our athletes is you've got to be having EPA, D H A. I would urge, you know, everybody out there to be looking at the, the scientific literature on that.
12:21 Chris Williamson? Do you have any brands that you suggest particularly? Cause I'm going to guess that there's some changes in the quality.
12:27 Speaker 00 Oh yeah, I speak about that as well. Manufacturing right now is that it's a scary thing out there. You don't know sometimes what you're buying. You know, some of the, some of the drugs that they're selling just at the supermarket, you know, you don't know what they're laced with. So manufacturers matter. Now, the brand that I use is Thorn, T H O R N E. Why? Well, they've got so many certifications. I know them. Uh, like I've gone in, I've really researched, I've done my research on them. Manufacturing is clean. And you also want, when you're having an EPA, D H A, sometimes you know that the quality of an, of a fish oil when you have it and you feel that you can taste the fishiness of it. Have you ever felt that? And it's like, this is disgusting.
13:08 Chris Williamson? Yes.
13:09 Speaker 00 Yes, so that's how you know the quality of it. So it really matters what you're having. Okay, if when you're ingesting it, and if you're when you're ingesting the EPA, DHA, if it smells and it's got that fishy smell or taste, you know it's not of good quality. So everything else, you know, when we're talking about supplementation, we do that, okay, but then there's also what are you supplementing at night to get a good quality sleep? Okay, because we know that sleep is one of the determining factors of brain performance. So what are you doing at night to get yourself into deep sleep stages? Now, I have a, I have a sleep stack, I would say, a sleep protocol. And it consists of, the first one is magnesium L three and eight.
13:55 Speaker 00 I take this every night. First and foremost, magnesium. Okay, we know magnesium that to be good for the body. There's three types of magnesium. We have it when we want to stress relief and have, you know, better functioning muscles, recovery, et cetera. But there's one magnesium out of those three that crosses the blood brain barrier. And that is magnesium L three and eight. So once it crosses the blood brain barrier, it's going to calm down your nervous system. It's going to get you into deep sleep. So that's one of the, the sleep protocols that we have, magnesium L three and eight. And then for some of our athletes or clients, some of them are feeling as if they've got a racing mind at night. So we may get them to supplement with GABA, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter.
14:39 Speaker 00 So these are the things that, um, you know, without wafting on too much, that you can be doing at night or during the day.
14:45 Chris Williamson? What's your thoughts on five HTP?
14:50 Speaker 00 I don't supplement with it, but I'm noticing a lot of men asking me this question, not women for it. So I can't comment on it because I don't have it, but I have noticed that Andrew Huberman talks about that a bit.
15:02 Chris Williamson? Okay, what about dosage for the magnesium? What would you aim for?
15:07 Speaker 00 Um, it's a, so the one that I get is from Pure Encapsulations or Life Extension. It's a blue bottle and you have to take three at night. So.
15:16 Chris Williamson? So you're just following the recommended dosage based on whatever it says on the bottle?
15:20 Speaker 00 Well, yeah.
15:21 Chris Williamson? Cool. Okay, yeah, there's Jigsaw Health do a Mag SRT and that's one that's pretty well touted. Ben Greenfield's a big fan of that. That's pretty good.
15:32 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, it is. They have a magnesium chelate pre-bed drink thing, which is okay. But because it's, it must have some sort of bicarb in it or something to help it mix with the water. And if you have that last thing before you go to bed, I always end up finding myself needing to sit up and burp. It's like the most weird byproduct of having a sleep drink. Do you think, oh yeah, but the fact that it's fizzy means that I need to, so anyway, what about exercises? So let's say that that's some of the principles behind making your brain healthier. What about things that people could do? Exercises that you take your athletes and your traders through to try and improve their mental capacity?
16:13 Speaker 00 Oh, so many. So one thing that we focus on is zone two training. And that's when you're, you know, we've got different zones of training, obviously. Maybe zone five would be at maximum. Zone two is that comfortable pace where you can talk, but you're also exercising. Okay. And we measure this through our VO2 max testing. So we do a lot of zone two and the reason being is that this area of exercise is the most efficient to be training the quality of the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. So once we get out of a zone three, once we get into zone three and zone four, we're training outside of that mitochondria. So that's one area that we train because we also focus on longevity.
16:57 Speaker 00 Okay. Everyone knows that an athlete has an expiration date. So we're focusing on longevity as well. But the next part of it is, so the reason why neuroathletics really came into play or existed was because I was doing a lot of reaction training. You know, I was working just with a tennis ball and a couple of lights back in 2016, just getting them to throw the ball to the wall. And what I found this was doing was it was training different areas of the brain. We're working on hand-eye coordination, so their ability to see a target, catch a ball, use reflexes. And then I started working from there. I got them to stand on one foot, throw the ball to the wall, contralateral movements with the brain. So we were doing so much with hand-eye coordination and that's how neuro athletics
17:42 Speaker 00 really came into play. So if you want to do any, anything for your brain in terms of exercise and train it to its fatigue, you want to be doing, you just want to get a tennis ball. We're actually going to bring out some neuro balls, but I'm trying to figure out a way to, to, to name that better.
17:58 Chris Williamson? Yeah, neuro, anything with balls in is, is going to be difficult. Just going back to the zone two.
18:04 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
18:04 Chris Williamson? Duration and frequency per week, what would you say?
18:08 Speaker 00 Three times per week for one hour or around 50 minutes at minimum.
18:12 Chris Williamson? Okay. So it's a big commitment for this, especially if you're an athlete, you've got your other training to do, skills and work and stamina and blah, blah on top.
18:22 Chris Williamson? But I suppose that's probably not a bad active recovery day.
18:27 Speaker 00 Exactly.
18:27 Chris Williamson? Is that how you try to use it?
18:29 Speaker 00 I use it like that depending on who I'm talking to, because some of the, um, I've got, you know, a 56 year old male who's in the trading business and I, he's, he may be very unhealthy. So I'll just get him to do zone two, yeah, three hours a week. And he does that on a stationary bike. It's so easy. He's got one set up in the living room. He's got kids, so he's just on that, no hard.
18:50 Chris Williamson? What's the heart rate range that people should be aiming for to hit zone two-ish?
18:55 Speaker 00 Well, see, this is the thing, the, the, the science suggests that you shouldn't just work on heart rate. But for my athletes, we do, okay? Because I do a VO2 max test for them.
19:05 Chris Williamson? Yours is always rated against what their max is.
19:08 Speaker 00 Exactly. Everybody's different. But if you want to measure it, it's really around 65% of maximum HR, which you know, is really easy. It's just walking around really.
19:19 Chris Williamson? Am I right in thinking that zone two, for that sort of duration, for that sort of frequency is also what would be prescribed if you wanted to raise the ceiling on your HRV as well?
19:30 Speaker 00 Well, yeah, look, so HRV is another, it can, it can raise HRV values, yes. And that's purely because you're working within that space, you're working on the mitochondria. If you really want to get technical, you want to measure your blood lactate. And that's what we do. The only caveat on that is who wants to pinprick themselves every time they're riding, right?
19:51 Chris Williamson? Okay.
19:51 Speaker 00 And measure blood.
19:52 Chris Williamson? Let's say that someone does want to take the ceiling of that HRV up. What would your prescription be for that person?
19:59 Speaker 00 Well, we know that HRV or heart rate variability reflects how adaptable your body can be. It measures the specific changes in time between successive heartbeats. So we know that we've got resting heart rate, we've got, we've got our actual heart rate. We know that it's measuring the time between those two heartbeats. Okay? And it's basically, basically a measure of your autonomic nervous system, which is everything that is happening automatically. So we know it's a good measurement of health and recovery. So if we want to be working on that, then we know that, okay, first and foremost, we need to really have a recovery day. Okay? Or we need to be doing recovery things during the day. Second thing is it's dependent on food intake. Okay?
20:43 Speaker 00 Or the quality of if you're having alcohol or any type of drugs per se, that's going to go in and mess with your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Okay, so we, we want to, we want a way to stabilize everything. So sleeping well, sleeping consistently, hydrating, getting adequate exercise, all of these things are going to eventuate into a higher or more stable HRV.
21:09 Chris Williamson? That is keeping HRV more stable and also acutely making it as optimal as possible. How about raising the ceiling of HRV overall? Taking it from a hundred or a maximum green recovery on your whoop being seventy to a maximum green now being able to be eighty or ninety or a hundred? What are some of the things that you could do to raise that ceiling?
21:32 Speaker 00 Well, it's measured during sleep. Okay, so that's, I don't know if you know that, but it basically goes in, whether it's an ordering or whether it's a workshop, you're basically going in and it's taking a two minute, two to four minute measurement during your sleep. So if we're not in a deep sleep stage, or we're not, we haven't recovered properly, you're not going to get a high enough value. So if we really want to raise the roof, then I would say the number one thing you need to work on is sleep.
21:56 Chris Williamson? Okay, cool. What about the impact of sleep on brain performance then? What are the, what are the impacts that you see there?
22:07 Speaker 00 Look, it's not just brain performance, it's also immunity. Okay, so sleep or sleep deprivation plays a number of key roles. Okay, now I've pulled up, if you don't mind, I've pulled up a study that I reference a lot, but I really want to get it right for you and your audience. Okay, there was a really very famous study and it was done in the Journal of PNAS. What they did was they took a group of healthy adults and they limited them to six hours of sleep a day for one week. They found a change in the activity of seven hundred and eleven genes. Okay, so we've got a gene, our genes, our epigenetic pool, we've got, the human genome is around twenty thousand genes.
22:50 Speaker 00 From getting lack of sleep of six hours a night resulted in the change of seven hundred and eleven genes. That's around three percent of our entire genome. What they found was out of that seven hundred and eleven, about half of the genes were upregulated and half of them were downregulated. Okay, the ones that were impaired, when we say downregulated, that means impaired. The genes that were downregulated were the ones associated with the immune system. Okay, and the ones that were upregulated were the ones associated with tumor production, long-term chronic inflammation, cardiovascular disease.
23:30 Speaker 00 So that's really important to know that only after one week, you're changing your epigenetics, you're changing your human, you're changing the genes. That's it. That's insane to think about, right? Because we're all sleeping. Sometimes we've gone through a week. I'm sure you've gone through literally seven days of sleep deprivation somewhere in your life, especially for, for new parents out there. And in that time, you're probably finding that, you know, when you're working so hard and then all of a sudden, when you stop, you get sick. It's the same thing. So it's pretty much the same thing. So sleep deprivation of sleep impacts immunity. Okay. But then let's go into more of another thing and I'll, I'll give you the link to that, um, to that article. Let's talk about why athletes need sleep.
24:15 Speaker 00 First of all, back to the software. Okay. What we see, there's many studies that have been done on basketball players. What we see that a lack of sleep can go through and interfere with reaction time. It can interfere with visual acuity, their ability to see the ball at the speed of light and react to it. Okay. So that's the, that's the software things, their ability to think fast. That really goes down and that's diminished, which one second for LeBron James can mean the difference between winning and losing, right?
24:47 Speaker 00 That's the first thing. But then let's look at more of a hardware thing. Okay. When we fall asleep, we go through three stages of sleep in the first, in the first third of the night. Okay. We go through stage one, two, and three. That's comprised of deep sleep. Okay. Slow wave sleep. During these stages, there's one really critical thing that happens and that's hormone secretion. Hormones are released during that stage. Okay. It's predominantly in stage three, which is slow wave deep sleep. These hormones are human growth hormone and testosterone. So for yourself, Chris, if you're not getting into those deep sleep stages, you're not going to be getting the adequate release
25:31 Speaker 00 of human growth hormone or testosterone. So human growth hormone is responsible for protein synthesis and recovery and a whole bunch of other things. Babies sleep a lot and that's why they grow fast because they've got a lot of human growth hormone. And then have you ever heard of the saying, um, or maybe seen men that have got
25:52 Speaker 00 breasts?
25:55 Chris Williamson? Man titties, call them what they are, Louisa.
25:58 Speaker 00 Well, whatever you want to call them, you could say that it's a buildup of estrogen and a lack of testosterone. Okay, maybe because they're not getting into that deep sleep stage.
26:08 Chris Williamson? Do you see a typical, before you start working with the guys that you're floor traders, do you see a particular body style? I mean, are they built like bags of milk mostly?
26:17 Speaker 00 Yes, I do. And I, that's the first thing I say and they get really upset.
26:21 Chris Williamson? But hey. Tell them that you tell these guys that are making thirty million dollar trades that they're built like bags of milk?
26:27 Speaker 00 I go, too much estrogen, you don't sleep. And they're like, how did you know?
26:32 Speaker 00 And they're not really coming to me with their shirts off either. I can just see it. I'm like, no, no, leave your shirt on. It's fine.
26:37 Chris Williamson? Please, for the love of all that is holy.
26:41 Speaker 00 So so many different things happen during deep sleep and then we move on to REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. Now during this time, your body is completely paralyzed, but your brain is still active. It's what we call it the dream sleep state. But what else happens during this stage? Well, we get things such as learning, so learn, like memory consolidation and all of the learning takes place during REM sleep. So if we're not getting into these, these two stages, it's really going to mess us up the following day. We're going to wake up with brain fog. We're going to wake up feeling irritable. We're not going to be remembering things and we're also not going to be able to execute to the best of our abilities. So we really need to be optimizing for sleep and that's a, that's a really big thing that we focus on at NeuroAthletics.
27:24 Speaker 00 Because there's coaches out there, so we work with one particular NBA team. And I'm actually going through and coaching the trainers and the coaches because they're like, well, we didn't know this. Everyone's just working on the, on the ball skills, you know?
27:38 Chris Williamson? No one thinks about what's happening when they go home at night? How long did you play Xbox for? What time did you get up? What's your pre-bed routine? Like, yeah, it's um. What, how does, how does sleep debt and sleep repayment work? Is that a thing?
27:52 Speaker 00 No, sleep is not like a bank. So if you're going to debt, you can't go through and pay it back. So, once you lose sleep, that's it. You're done. That's why I don't like binge sleepers, people who are like, that's okay, I'll sleep. Five hours during the week, maximum productivity and then just, you know, build it up on the weekends. It doesn't work like that.
28:12 Chris Williamson? That's a shame.
28:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:14 Chris Williamson? Because that would be, well, I mean, what can you do? Let's say that you do have a bad night's sleep. Presumably, sleeping a little bit more the following night isn't a bad idea.
28:23 Speaker 00 Well, no, of course not. There was actually, I just put out, um, two weeks ago, there was a, a study that was just, um, that's just come out in very high stringent journal that says, there's no such thing as, as too much sleep.
28:34 Chris Williamson? Okay.
28:35 Speaker 00 Meaning, sorry, meaning that we know what happens. We know the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain and the body. But when you have too much sleep, there's not really much that happens. You just, maybe you're, you might get a bit fatter over the course of.
28:51 Speaker 00 There's nothing bad that happens, which I think is great, but that doesn't mean.
28:54 Chris Williamson? That would be a good study to run. You know, if you could try and somehow get people to sleep. 12 hours a night or 14 hours a day, I guess, for seven days or 14 days and try and record the changes there. That'd be really interesting.
29:09 Speaker 00 I'd be more interested in finding out why they have time to sleep that much.
29:14 Chris Williamson? Because they're not high-powered floor traders. That's why. They're not selling, selling their soul to Goldman Sachs. That's the reason why. But I mean, so here, here's another thing that I've got in my mind. There must be a tension. You go into these high-powered trading floors. I think that athletes on the whole probably would be more accommodating to, I understand that I need to sleep. This is my entire life. It's geared around performance, but not many people treat their output at work on a trading floor with the same level of rigor that athletes do, right? They're not going in to get a massage, to loosen off whatever it is, or the equivalent mentally. How do you get someone who isn't bought into the world of, I need more sleep than I'm getting?
29:59 Chris Williamson? High-powered, go-getting type A people with massive ties and pinstripe suits. How do you get them to?
30:07 Chris Williamson? Let go of that sort of hustle and grind mentality.
30:10 Speaker 00 Well, actually, I find the reverse. Okay, I find, and I didn't ever think this, I see the sporting world as, you know, I've got some athletes who say to me, well, Louise, I'm, I am number one. Or I'm in the NBA. What's the, you know, I don't, I don't want to be like LeBron. I'm already in the NBA. I'm doing better than 99% of the world. I don't really need to get better. They're the ones that annoy me. Whereas the traders are the ones who say, well, if I'm not at that state, then I'm going to lose $30 million. So they do everything they can. Actually, they're more coherent and obedient to the method than your athletics method than the athletes.
30:47 Chris Williamson? That's surprising.
30:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, both of them do, do go through jet lag. A lot of them are, both groups are flying. Okay. So that's another thing that, you know, the athletes are getting on and off planes, especially during the playoffs. Some of them are doing three planes, three flights a week. And they're feeling it. And they're just a bit, you know, like, so we've got jet lag protocols as well. Whereas the, there's more consistency in the finance world.
31:13 Chris Williamson? Yeah, that's interesting. I suppose the markets are always going to open at the same time, which is going to give them that sort of rigidity that they need.
31:19 Speaker 00 But also you think, if a player is going to play mediocre, okay, let's just say he's in Miami, he, he plays mediocre, he's not going to lose $30 million. He might just, just not play as well, but he's got the team carrying him. If the day trader needs to make a trade on Saturday at 3am, you make some mediocre trade, he can lose a lot of money.
31:39 Chris Williamson? Okay, so the pressure on a trading floor is much more on the individual and the changes in his performance are a lot more acute. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I suppose specifically with basketball, it is such a team sport, you know, you could have, you could probably have a player that has an absolute stinker of a game and the team still win. And maybe the coaches think, oh, he had a bad day, but they'll probably forget about it because the team won, as opposed to the accountability that you get being on a trading floor. And if you make that bad decision and you're 30 grand in the red, someone somewhere is going to come and shout at you.
32:14 Speaker 00 Oh yeah, or you've like lost the life savings of a family.
32:19 Chris Williamson? Or that, yes. What are, talk me through your pre-bed or your optimal pre-bed routines. You know, I know that everyone that's listening will be familiar with the digital sunset, but realistically, what's the sort of minimum viable dose or the most compliant, easy routine that somebody could go through before they go to bed on a night?
32:41 Speaker 00 Well, the first thing I start with, don't make it lore. Just do it as many times throughout the week that you can. If you knock off three nights a week, great, next week we'll work on four. The first thing is not eating three hours prior to falling asleep.
32:55 Chris Williamson? Anything at all?
32:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, we don't want any activity. We don't want any raises in cortisol. And that's what happens when you eat. We don't want anything digesting. That's the first thing. Okay? The second thing is obviously, we're not going to be having any caffeine past the, the caffeine has a half-life of 12 hours. We don't want caffeine past 12pm. Okay? That's the first thing. I always say that you're preparing for sleep the moment that you wake up. Okay? Now, one really important one, I struggle with this every day. And that's eliminating, like you said, digital light, but it really is bad. So I know for some people, they say, well, Louise, I can't do that. So I do get them to wear blue light blocking glasses, although I don't particularly believe in them 100%, but it has some small effect.
33:36 Chris Williamson? I've seen some mixed studies about them.
33:41 Speaker 00 Well, it's, it doesn't block out all of the blue light. That's what the promise is, but it's not that. So if we just treat it as if it blocks out some, that's a better thing to say, because it's true. Doesn't block it all out. So, but we do, you know, if we could be walking around with x-ray vision at night, then that would be great. So that is eliminating light. Okay? Especially don't, you don't want to be looking at light between the hours of 10pm and 4am. Now, that's that. But then it's about, there's always two complaints that you have, and you have to figure this out. Do you have a problem falling asleep? Or do you have a problem staying asleep? So these two things offer different prescriptions. If you have a problem falling asleep, that means your brain's just... Going at a million miles an hour. So you may be wanting to supplement with GABA,
34:26 Speaker 00 gamma amino butyric acid. But around a year ago, I caught on to the fact that there was a lot of research that was being brought out about temperature. Okay. And the ability to manipulate your core body temperature to get into sleep. So in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. Okay. So that's great. So we can get cold. But then I realized that it's not about ambient temperature. It's not about, you can't just put the thermostat on or the air conditioner and get really cold. It's about core body temperature. The only real way to do that is via two things. First one is sleeping on a temperature controlled mattress. Or hiring somebody throughout the night to just cool you down with with ice packs.
35:11 Speaker 00 The latter probably isn't feasible. So you have to look at a cooling bed. And around a year ago, I, somebody said, have you seen Eight Sleep? They're a sleep fitness technology company. I don't know if you've heard of them. But I in, I invested in one of their mattresses. And I had the best quality of sleep that I've ever had. And so I now sleep on an Eight Sleep temperature controlled mattress. So basically, it, it locates your heart rate. Okay. And it gets you, once it figures out, oh, Louise is in deep sleep. It gets you into that, it drops your core body temperature down by dropping the temperature of the mattress. And you're able to get into those deep sleep stages.
35:51 Chris Williamson? How does it detect that?
35:53 Speaker 00 It's actually, you've got a, you've got an app, okay. But also the bed, because it's technology driven, it's picking up on your heart rate. So in the morning, the app actually shows you-
36:04 Chris Williamson? Your bed can pick up on your heart rate through the mattress?
36:07 Speaker 00 It gives you HRV metrics in the morning. It says, Louise, you slept in your deep sleep. You did. The exact same things that you see with your whoop, it does the same thing.
36:17 Chris Williamson? Wow. Okay, that's pretty impressive.
36:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, oh, it's amazing. And so I partnered with the company because I harassed them. I said, I need to be part of the movement that you're doing. So now I have all my athletes sleeping on that.
36:29 Chris Williamson? So I got a Chili Pad mattress topper, which is very, very similar sort of thing, although it doesn't know when I am, where I am. And I took it off because it was winter and I was using it to cool me down. But now maybe I'm thinking that you're probably right because the house is quite warm. It's cold in the UK at the moment. Then ambient temperature is okay ish, but in the bed is completely different to what you have going on outside. The same as whatever, being in a hot country and thinking that blasting the air con and changing the temperature of the room is going to change what happens underneath the covers.
37:05 Speaker 00 Exactly. I don't know with the Chili Pad though, it doesn't do heating, does it?
37:10 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It goes both ways. Yeah. So the two, the second one, which I've got is the
37:17 Chris Williamson? they've given it a stupid name and I can't remember it. So sorry, Chili Pad. Anyway, it's the small one that goes underneath. It's like the Oro or something. And that comes with an app and the app you can change temperature throughout the night. It'll cool down to just below 16 degrees Celsius and it will heat up to 40 degrees or something unbelievably hot. And it'll move you throughout the night. It also has, I think Eight Sleep has this as well, where it can wake you up with, is it heat? But it does vibration as well, right?
37:45 Speaker 00 It does vibration. It's very annoying because it doesn't, it's so irritating because it doesn't stop until you get out of bed. So it's like
37:55 Chris Williamson? What a bastard.
37:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. So sometimes like on a Saturday, I'll just, I'll jump up and then I'll jump back into bed.
38:01 Chris Williamson? Outwitted your bed. You've done well. What about reducing sleep? Sorry, in reducing the amount of times that you wake up throughout the night then. So that's sleep latency, maybe some gabber. Make sure that people are feeling a little bit. What about deep breathing and stuff like that actually for sleep latency? Any other tips?
38:18 Speaker 00 Well, let's just define sleep latency is your time that it takes you to fall asleep. Okay, but when we're, you know, when we're getting up throughout the night. Okay, so that's a different thing and some people are waking up to go to the bathroom. Usually with men over the age of, um, I think it's around sixty five to seventy, they're waking up at four A M. It's like a thing, okay, and they go into the bathroom.
38:40 Chris Williamson? All men world worldwide or nationwide are getting up to go and have a whiz at the same time.
38:45 Speaker 00 Exact same time, it's funny. Um, but what can we be doing? Well, you've got to figure out why it is that you're waking up. But in order to, like I said to you, to decrease that sleep latency. That comes down to not having a lot of activity happening in your brain and body. Breathing exercises, okay, breathing exercises are amazing. It calms down your sympathetic nervous system, activates the parasympathetic rest and digest nervous system. So you're calmer.
39:11 Chris Williamson? What would be a protocol for that, like box breathing or something?
39:16 Speaker 00 I like box breathing, but I actually have a, a, a one P M and like a four P M protocol, which is literally being silent for ten minutes. That's all it is. Because I noticed that if you put in too many protocols, like sit there, put candles on, do this. Um, things like this, it doesn't really work out. So all it is, it's about ten minutes of silence. It's very hard. If you close your eyes and you try and keep that, um, keep that notion happening, it's very hard. But you can try it and start off with that. One thing that I woke up this morning and one of my, um, she's a portfolio manager, she messaged me, she's like, had the best sleep of my life and my H R V increased because of this one technique. And I'll tell it to you. Have you ever taped your mouth during the night?
40:00 Chris Williamson? I've tried it. I've, I've tried it, yes. Um, it's a bit weird. It never really seems to stay in my mouth. I don't know whether I'm I'm trying to talk in my sleep or something, but yeah, I've tried.
40:12 Speaker 00 Or the sweat may have, um, ripped it off.
40:14 Chris Williamson? Not that hot, come on.
40:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, I don't know, but I got that. Um, but you, that's a great little hack.
40:25 Speaker 00 Okay, taping the mouth, mouth breathing is um is bad. We don't want to be mouth breathing. So in order to really breathe through your nose through night, the night, you want to tape your mouth. Just make sure that you don't have any breathing issues. We don't want you.
40:38 Chris Williamson? Mm hmm. I've used, so I've just started using this year nasal strips to open my airway up on my nose. So you'll have seen athletes use these before. That's really, really nice, especially if you have like narrow nasal passages. That makes, oh, it's such a difference. Yeah, it's literally like constantly having your nostrils flared. So there's so much more room. It feels really lovely. It's really satisfying. I have no idea. I haven't done it for long enough. I've only done it for maybe a week, so I haven't been able to compare. But I've tracked it on my Whoop because you can give custom inputs about what you did during the day. So I've got days when I did and days when I didn't, and we'll see if that makes any difference.
41:17 Chris Williamson? But I mean, by the end of the night, I asked Ben Greenfield about this because I think his wife is the most normal person on the planet. And Ben Greenfield is like the complete opposite. And I asked him, what does she think? He's getting into bed. He's got the blue light blockers on. He's got something stuck up his nose. He's got his finger on a HRV monitor, all of this crazy technology. And apparently his wife just like reads a Dan Brown novel and falls and has the perfect eight hours sleep that nobody ever needs to to try and alter. Um, so yeah, I think there it well, yeah. But there are going to be a lot of very odd or disgruntled partners after someone just decides to go to. But whatever, you know, you're already married. They can't leave now, now that you've decided to adopt a weird bedtime habit.
42:03 Chris Williamson? Um, I want to talk about the guys that you're dealing with, whether it be athletes or floor traders, about how you instruct them to stay calm under pressure.
42:12 Speaker 00 Oh, well, that's, that's hard. And um, to do it in a healthy way, it's all about consistency and protocols. So we have this one protocol, which literally every time you think a bad thought, every time you're freaking out, you have to perform a drill. It might be a clicking drill, which anchors your thought. Okay. Or it might be practicing a double inhale exhale, like a physiological sigh to calm down the nervous system. But what I find is no matter how many. How many protocols you put in place for that moment? It's how strong are you and how strict are you to activate them during that stressful moment? Okay, so I've got one player on the Miami Heat who I talk to every time he goes on, before he goes on the actual court because he freaks out too much.
42:55 Speaker 00 Okay, and we do video calls, so.
42:58 Chris Williamson? And you're talking this guy through some cues. What do you mean when you say either a clicking or a double breath inhale to anchor their thoughts? What do you mean?
43:07 Speaker 00 Because when you're freaking out, you're anxious, your mind is going at a million miles an hour. You're thinking so many things. So if you just stop it, okay, and change direction. Literally, what do you have to do when you're going down a highway and you want to change direction? You have to stop eventually. And once you stop, you can stop by doing. So clicking is like a form of your brain is like, okay, I'm going to click. And they know through their protocol that in order to click, they have to anchor their thought into something else.
43:33 Chris Williamson? Okay, so that's kind of like noting in mindfulness meditation.
43:37 Speaker 00 Yeah. It's in sports psychology, there's one method where they get you to wear an elastic band around your wrist. And every time you have a panic, you slap your wrist. That's very old school, though.
43:50 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I've seen people doing that.
43:52 Speaker 00 So that's one. But also, sometimes if I'm talking to someone, it's just about they're making things up in their head. Everything that can go wrong. Okay, I'm going to go on the court, I'm going to lose this. I'm not going to get the ball. I'm not feeling good. So it's just calming that down.
44:06 Chris Williamson? Hmm. It's strange to think that players that are professional athletes and do it week in, week out, still have the same sort of nervousness that a normal person would do before they go and give a talk or whatever. It is, it gives a different perspective when you see, a good example might be someone like Jake Paul, who is very new into the sport of boxing.
44:28 Speaker 00 Putting him in the athletics.
44:30 Chris Williamson? I'm trying to be delicate here, but my point is that you have someone who isn't a trained athlete, who hasn't gone through years, decades, several iterations of walking out in front of a huge crowd. And yeah, I, I don't know, I have a friend who's a very high level DJ. And he, every single time before he steps behind the decks, throws up every single time. Every single one of them, because that's how nervous he is, because he wants to do well. And he is playing in front of 10,000 people at Madison Square Garden or whatever it might be. And every single time before he goes out, he throws up.
45:08 Speaker 00 Wow, that's, yeah, no, look, anybody, I, I say athlete, but I mean, anybody performing at a high level, and he obviously is too.
45:18 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it's scary. What about research on heat and cold exposure? Is there any new cool stuff that you've seen recently on that?
45:25 Speaker 00 I'm actually about to get, I, I love cold immersion. I speak about it. I've got a podcast dedicated to it. I'm actually getting my first ice bath. It's going to come here to Sydney because I can't fit it in the New York City apartment, but it's absolutely incredible. Okay, there's so much research around this to suggest that this is so important to do to literally bring down the, the inflammatory biomarkers responsible for inflammation. That's the first thing, okay? Immersing yourself in cold water. We know that there is a pathway now where you get into cold water and these, the pathway can go up to your brain and have a really good effect of decreasing neural inflammation. But one thing that I love about
46:07 Speaker 00 it is that once you get into cold water, within about five minutes, you get this massive release of not just cold shock proteins, but we get a massive release of norepinephrine. And that is that, it's both a hormone, okay, and a neurotransmitter. And as a neurotransmitter, it is responsible for focus and vigilance. So if you want to get that, if you, I think everyone, everyone should be doing some form of cold therapy. I absolutely love it. I do it. You've just got to be really, really strict to not do it straight after training. Because once we do that, what we do is we, we block the hormetic response of hypertrophy. So when we go and work out, okay, and we're working out our muscles, we're strengthening
46:51 Speaker 00 them, we want them to create a bit of inflammation so they tear a bit and rebuild. That's what makes them stronger. And if we go and stop that rebuilding by blocking those pathways through cold, we're not going to get the effects. So cold immersion, love it. Everybody should get a cold bath.
47:07 Chris Williamson? Give me your optimal cold immersion protocol across a week. What would you prescribe to someone?
47:14 Speaker 00 I don't do it for less than 12 minutes and that's really hard depending at the temperature. So I'm not going to speak Fahrenheit because it's not my first language. But in terms of I do, I've got a, I've got a thermometer inside the bath and it drops to around 12 degrees, which is freezing.
47:30 Chris Williamson? Celsius or?
47:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
47:32 Chris Williamson? Right, okay. Um, and you're doing that for, you said 12, no less than 12 minutes?
47:37 Speaker 00 No less than 12 minutes. Sometimes it goes down to nine.
47:39 Chris Williamson? How many, how many times a week?
47:42 Speaker 00 I try and do this five times a week.
47:44 Chris Williamson? Wow. So I saw Huberman had posted not long ago saying that the most recent research suggested uh nine minutes of cold exposure a week and you're doing what 60? So there seems to be a big disparity between those two. What's the reason for choosing 12 and five times?
48:02 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, I, that's what, when I found this, you know, in the scientific literature, it said you've got to be doing this at least once, once a day, really. It's like when people say, well, why can't I just get into a, what's the cryotherapy chamber? It's not going to do you any, oh yeah, it's not going to do you anything. It's just, I feel like it's gimmicky. And no one's gonna, no one has $90. I think it's like $90 a session to do this every day. I think at bare minimum, the science says, okay, bare minimum, three times a week. Okay, bare minimum. I'm just crazy.
48:34 Chris Williamson? All right.
48:34 Speaker 00 Just, and I thought it's having a coffee in my mouth.
48:37 Chris Williamson? Have you had a look at contrast therapy? Um, Rhonda Patrick was talking about this. That's going from the heat to the cold. Um, is there any research about whether that's as effective, more effective, less effective?
48:50 Speaker 00 She actually says, I saw, um, she put this, she was on Joe Rogan and she said that the science, she goes, it makes her feel good. So it can have a placebo effect, but the science isn't there to suggest that you're getting more benefits from doing cold shock, heat shock, cold shock, heat shock. So they're two different, they're two different pathways. I prefer the cold, but I, you know, if I can one day get a sauna, infrared sauna, single person, then I would. Because the effects that you get on the cardiovascular system are fantastic. You know, imagine saying that you can get those effects, the heat shock proteins that are both neuroprotective and they help with the cardiovascular system. Imagine if you could do that for 20 minutes and mimic a one hour or two hour ride on the bike.
49:33 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
49:33 Speaker 00 I'd rather, I'd rather to the sauna, right?
49:36 Chris Williamson? Yeah. The, um, there's a place in Austin called Kuya, which is a wellness recovery centre, ketamine psychotherapy and vitamin IVs and stuff, but it also has a, two cold tubs and a sauna. And they do contrast therapy or they suggest contrast therapy. And it is, one of the good things about going from the sauna into the ice bath is that because you are so hot, when you get into the ice bath, the initial cold is easier to tolerate. And then if you stay in there over time, obviously that, um, what's it called? Agitator in the tank is continuing to flow cold water in, but you are, it the, it's the reverse of the frog in boiling water.
50:17 Chris Williamson? It's the man in tiny swim shorts in the ice bath, but it gets easier to do it that way. And then I also find that getting into the sauna after that as well, you've got a little bit of time to bring yourself back up. So I think your tolerance on both increases. But yeah, I'd be interested to know what research ends up coming out around contrast therapy, about whether going from the extreme of heat to cold and back again, actually is advantageous or not?
50:45 Speaker 00 Let's look at, look at it clinically, and this is why I don't think it's the best thing. If you're going, if you're putting your body into a hypo thermic, okay? And then a hyper thermic, hyper hot, hypo low cold. I don't think that's good for the systems. I don't think doing that to your heart or your body would be beneficial. I think just dropping it down and staying there and just doing that. And maybe later on, a few hours later, getting into the opposite effect would be better. I don't think going like this is necessary because I've actually tried it. I've got to tell you, I was so dizzy, I almost, I felt like I was going to faint.
51:20 Chris Williamson? What about heat exposure? What's your favourite protocol for that? Or how much would you suggest that people do?
51:28 Speaker 00 So you can also do this by getting into a hot bath, which is something that I do with magnesium. Okay. Cause I don't have a sauna.
51:36 Chris Williamson? Hang on, magnesium in the bath?
51:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, magnesium salt.
51:39 Chris Williamson? Okay, why?
51:41 Speaker 00 Calms my body down, makes me very, very sleepy. You're literally soaking in the magnesium through the largest organ in the body, which is the skin. Um, and heat makes you sleepy anyway. So prepares you for bed. That's another protocol people should try. But um, I think the, I think the protocol is to get the benefits for the cardiovascular system of the heat shock proteins. I think you've got to stay in there around 20 minutes, 23 minutes.
52:07 Chris Williamson? Okay, um, yeah. I've definitely noticed when you go into a sauna, if you're in there for about 10 to 15 minutes, it begins to get difficult. And then if you stay in for a little longer, there's a tingly sensation. It's, is that the heat shock proteins? Is that the feedback of the heat shock proteins being released? Or is there any way that you know when you've got to that? Because obviously you can be in a sauna for 20 minutes or 23 minutes or 25 minutes. But presumably if it was 20 degrees hotter, you would have hit that point after 15 minutes or whatever it is. So is there a way that people can tell when they've been in for long enough?
52:44 Speaker 00 I'll tell you something that's really fascinating. Okay, there's, have you heard of hormesis?
52:48 Chris Williamson? Yes.
52:50 Speaker 00 So it's pretty much um, when your body has to survive, so survival of the fittest. Okay. So when you feel at that moment where you're about to die, okay. That's when the effect comes in and that's the hormetic response. So if you look at longevity studies, if you look at centenarians, people who live to a hundred, it's because they've, they've gotten into that state of whatever doesn't, there we go, that's it, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That's what hormesis is. So if you can be doing this, that's why heat shock proteins and why cold shock proteins exist. To put us in that survival mode. Okay. So it's at that point, that's why I don't really believe in cold showers. To mimic this, people are like, well, I do cold therapy, I do cold showers. It's like, but it's just a cold shower.
53:33 Speaker 00 That's not shocking your body to that survival mode, right?
53:37 Chris Williamson? There's a big difference between immersing yourself for five minutes and even doing a cold shower. Because it's never, it never just sinks in through your skin for as long, right? There's not as much time that your body is being in contact with cold temperatures. You get out of the ice bath and you're shivering sometimes if you've been in for long enough.
53:59 Speaker 00 Oh yeah, and that shivering is a great response. Okay, that's that, that non-shivering thermogenesis or the shivering actually activates brown fat or brown adipose tissue.
54:10 Chris Williamson? Am I right in thinking that you're supposed to have wrists and clavicle under as well for something to do with brown tissue?
54:17 Speaker 00 It's literally neck down.
54:19 Chris Williamson? Okay. Is that just to immerse the most of you or is there something special about those areas?
54:25 Speaker 00 No, that's just to get the most of the immersion possible. Sometimes I put my feet out the end of the bath, but.
54:32 Chris Williamson? What about psychedelics and LSD for enhancing sport performance? Didn't you look at something to do with this?
54:39 Speaker 00 I did, I wrote a, I wrote a sub stack, so I have a weekly newsletter that goes out. And we tapped into this because I spoke to Dave Robin and he's, um, he's at the forefront. He's a psychiatrist, he's at the forefront of psychedelic medicine. And look, I think it's going to be great, not for sports performance. I think it's going to be great for the treatment of depression and I'm all, I'm all for it. I think it's, um, I think it's amazing. I'm excited to see how it can be done clinically, um, with a trained professional, but only in that area. I don't know if I, I would think that there's any correlation, maybe this is just me, um, correlation yet with sporting performance.
55:17 Chris Williamson? You don't think players playing off their face, imagining bright green footballs flying towards them and stuff like that? And a dragon in the sky, you don't think that's performance enhancing?
55:27 Speaker 00 Well, I wrote about this famous, I forget what his name is, I forget what year, but he had his best hit. Um, he was a baseballer, his best hit done on LSD.
55:37 Chris Williamson? No way.
55:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, I've got it on my sub stack. I, I'll send it to you, but it's, um, it's fascinating research and that could just be because maybe he was calmer and he was just, you know, apparently it's, you know, when you're dosing or microdosing with psychedelics, whichever one, maybe it's LSD or psilocybin, you are tapping into that creativity mode. Okay. So maybe that could have had an effect on it.
56:02 Chris Williamson? Well, they're definitely connecting synapses that don't usually, right? Different areas of the brain that aren't usually communicating with each other is enabled when the default mode network gets switched off. Um, it does surprise me that someone's able to do, swing anything at anything if they're on LSD, but.
56:21 Speaker 00 Well, it depends on dosage as well.
56:23 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. True. If it's whatever, what's it sub awareness, below the threshold of awareness, whatever it is.
56:31 Speaker 00 Well, you can have, you can tap into the area that's going to be clinically benef- benefit- beneficial for you. Or you can tap into that one that makes people jump off a, off a roof, right?
56:41 Chris Williamson? Get that one. Get the second one. That's the one that we want. What was the, I heard you talking about, so we've, we've spoken about throwing a tennis ball at a wall. What was the fact, something to do with standing on your left foot and throwing with your right? What was that?
56:55 Speaker 00 So, left brain and right brain. We've got two hemispheres. Okay, they're connected by a bridge. Left part of the brain is responsible for the right part of the body, right side of the body. Right side of the brain is responsible for the left side of the body. It's like this X. It's a contralateral. It's how we see as well. I love the fact that you can be working on the left brain. Okay. Your brain is having to think and see, but you're actually producing the movement with your right hand. So we do a lot of things where I'll get them to lift their leg up, their left leg up. So they're standing on their right leg and they're throwing the ball to the wall with their right hand. Also, one thing that I get all my athletes to do at some point is wear an eye patch. Literally, if you go to the pharmacy and you get an eye patch for if you've got an eye infection,
57:40 Speaker 00 put that on and it blocks out one part of their eye or it blocks out the vision of their eye. So this, that means if you're going to block out the right eye, means the left eye is going to get stronger because it's only got one, one eye to see. So it's going to have to scan everything.
57:54 Chris Williamson? So it's progressive overload for your eye. Are you familiar with slack block? Do you know what a slack block is?
58:00 Speaker 00 No, I was going to say, are they the goggles?
58:03 Chris Williamson? No. So you know what a slack line is, right? Which is kind of like a tightrope thing that you tie between trees and hippies do it in LA. So the slack block is a small, around about two feet long. And it's a kind of like a skateboard deck that's about the width of a foot and it sits on a pyramid of foam.
58:27 Chris Williamson? You have seen these.
58:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, I have seen these, yeah.
58:30 Chris Williamson? Yeah, they're dope. They're so good. Yeah, really, really good.
58:33 Speaker 00 Balancing, right?
58:34 Chris Williamson? Correct. Yeah. So what I was doing, I ruptured my Achilles about 18 months ago. And one of the things that I was advised to do was any sort of standing on one leg whilst throwing a tennis ball at the wall. So the reason to do that is that it causes you to need to readjust constantly. You know, the ball goes to the wall, you've got to readjust it, catch it again, got to readjust. And I worked up to doing it on the slack block. And what you do is you take columns of foam out. So you can imagine that there's columns cut through it. And as you take more of them out, there's less structure below the skateboard deck, which means that it becomes more and more difficult to keep your balance on. And over time, you can work, so it's in the kitchen. So a lot of the time I'll go in and one of the boys will be stood on it like trying to chop stuff. I'm like, this is a recipe for disaster.
59:18 Chris Williamson? But doing that whilst throwing a ball at the wall, the progression that you see in terms of your balance, your judgment was really, really high.
59:30 Speaker 00 Do you know what's interesting? They say that you can't have proper brain health without having good balance. Now, there, there's a little area underneath the brain. It's separate from the brain, but it's, it's called the cerebellum, literally means in Latin, mini brain, looks like a mini brain. And that's the area that's responsible for posture and balance. So you can literally train that area of the brain by standing on one leg or by standing on a balance board or by standing on a, whatever you're doing. And that's another thing that we do. But one thing, you know, I mentioned earlier was these strobe goggles. So we have these goggles, right? And if, imagine just one, one part of the, the right side and it's cut into four, it's cut in quadrants.
1:00:10 Speaker 00 So I can program it for my athletes to see all three quadrants and then block out the upper right.
1:00:19 Chris Williamson? And what does that do? Why, why, why, why do they need that?
1:00:23 Speaker 00 Well, we see in the four quadrants. So that means that they're going to be strengthening all of the areas in the eye, except for the one blacked out. Okay. To overcompensate.
1:00:32 Chris Williamson? Where can people go if they want to check out your Substack and follow more of the stuff that you do online?
1:00:38 Speaker 00 You can find me on Instagram, Louisa Nicola, or the Diamond Boss is my handle. Or if you really want to get more information on brain health, upgrading brain performance, you can go to our Substack, which is neuroathletics.substack.com.
1:00:52 Chris Williamson? Sweet. We made it. Thank you, Louisa.
1:00:55 Speaker 00 Chris.
1:00:56 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
1:01:13 Speaker 03 What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.
1:01:17 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
1:01:20 Speaker 03 I'm not the first then.
1:01:21 Speaker 02 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 middle without parent.
Previous The Problem With Trying To Be Rational - Steven Pinker Next Stop Living A Life Of Complacency - Ben Bergeron Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
