← Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD
Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD
174. Dr. Dave Rabin: Why Being Human Feels Harder Than It Should in 2026
01:01:22
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- [00:00]
A
Before we get started with this episode, I'd like to invite all of you to the first ever next Health Longevity Summit happening in Nashville, Tennessee at the Conrad Hotel on Saturday, September 12, 2026. This is an all day summit where you're going to be hearing from some of the best speakers in longevity medicine, including Dr. Vonda Wright, Dr. Luisa Nicola, many of the podcast guests that you've heard here on the Extend podcast. And of course I'm going to be there curating the entire day. We also have incredible vendors coming so that you can try the latest technologies in health, wellness and longevity. Go to next-health.com summit and buy your ticket today. We only have 400 spots and they're going quickly. That's next health.com summit. I look forward to seeing you all there. Welcome to Xtend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah. A podcast dedicated to cutting edge science research tools and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21 and trained and board certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results. When it comes to your health span. We are living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world renowned experts offering you a step by step guide to proactively avoid disease and most importantly, extend your health span. Today we're honored to have Dr. Dave Rabin here. He's a board certified psychiatrist, a neuroscientist and the co founder of Apollo Neuro. This is my second time having him on the podcast because today he's going to be sharing even more groundbreaking insights into how our nervous system processes stress and trauma. He's going to reveal why traditional approaches often fall short. He explains a critical difference between top down and bottom up learning and how understanding this can revolutionize everything from treating mental illness to improving our kids education. Get ready to rethink about how you learn, how you heal and how you connect. Dave, can't believe you're back. This is awesome. Oh actually I do believe you're back because I invited you. I just can't believe how that is taking a while. So thanks for being here.
- [02:27]
B
Of course, My pleasure. Really enjoyed our convers.
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A
I know our last conversation was so much fun and I'm just like so ready to talk to you. About this topic that we've connected with personally outside of the podcast studio. You have so much great information to share.
- [02:41]
B
Thank you. I appreciate it. And you've had a really great and very relevant podcast that came out with Rick Doblin since we last spoke, which is very important for the field, given all the new developments in psychedelic assisted therapy and how that's really teaching us that we might be able to start to cure mental illness in the next five years. And that's pretty darn exciting.
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A
Yeah. People are scared to talk. I was scared to talk about that for a long time because it's like, oh, I'm gonna get delisted from Apple and from social media. But now it's becoming so much a reality that even the FDA is looking at making it once again legal to study these drugs and also potentially put them out as drug. Put them out as drugs so people can actually buy them. And so it's a really exciting time that we're in that episode with Rick. You know, we talk so much, we had to divide it into two episodes. You listen to them.
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B
Yeah, Rick loves to talk.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
He's such a great storyteller.
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A
He's such a great. And he has so much information, so much.
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B
So much wisdom.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Really cool. And I know we're going to dive into some of those topics here today, too. So, you know, we talked last time about your wearable device, which is kind of like gives you some of that feedback from your body to your brain. Right. And now you've written this book, which I love, this simple guide to being alive. And this is kind of the opposite. So tell us a little bit about the theory behind this book.
- [04:07]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, I guess, you know, you and I both have similar experiences with extensive medical training, decades plus of medical training that is extremely exhausting and exhaustive. Right. And they cover so much material. And I think many of us that go through that training often are taught in that training. And when we leave that, that's everything that we need to know. And that obviously new information is going to come out. We need to stay up to date on our journal articles, but generally speaking, that we have all the bases covered. And I think part of, especially in mental health and psychiatry training, I think one of the things that I maybe probably more so than surgery, but one of the things that I noticed very clearly when I completed all of that work and actually started working in the clinic full time is how much I didn't know and how much was really missed in my clinical training years. Not that what I received was invaluable. It was, it was the fundamental Western understanding of how the nervous system works, which is really important. But it didn't teach me, for instance, about how we learn new things. Right. And, and one of the things I was witnessing that I looked at the literature, this is going back to like maybe 2014, 20, 2014. And I'm looking at the, I'm seeing patients who have severe ptsd. We're following every instruction by the book, and depression and anxiety. We're following every instruction by the book by the dsm, by every book that was written that we were told to read about how to treat these people and get them to respond to treatment. And it was working for like maybe 10, 20%. So most people, 80% plus are still struggling, still sick and not often not able to work, not able to engage meaningfully with their families. And I realized in that moment that if we look, because I had studied in neuroscience, my neuroscience PhD years, I had studied B.F. skinner and Pavlov and these, and Eric Kandel and these very famous neuroscientists who discovered learning and how learning works. And I realized that learning, like traumas, actually fear learning. And all of the nervous system studies going all the way back to ancient animals have shown that trauma is fear. Learning what we experience as PTSD or in cases other mental illness symptoms is learned fear over time. And the only way to get rid of learned fear is to extinguish it by relearning safety in association with the same environmental cues. And, and we've known that that works in animals and in humans for hundreds, at least a hundred years. And so seeing that we weren't doing any of that with our patients, we're just giving them medicine and numbing them to their fear symptoms. We're not actually teaching them safety, but they're not learning any of the techniques that we're giving. We're like, just breathe this way, do this thing, listen to this song when you're feeling upset, do this action plan. They just couldn't remember any of the techniques or practice them. And I started to wonder why. I'm like, why are these people, some people who were incredibly skilled military people who I was working with, right, who had gone through basic training and run and coordinated entire platoons or big team, massive teams in the field that they had performed at extraordinarily high levels and they can't follow a simple deep breathing exercise and integrate into their day to day life. And I went back and I'm like, I need to figure out what's happening. And it wasn't their fault, it was their nervous system. And the evidence shows that the nervous system, starting with the amygdala, the contrast detection, what we call the fear center, resists learning new things when we're already under stress or threat. Because it's only focused on fight, flight or freeze. Nothing else matters. All other resources go to skeletal muscle, gets 80%. Then you have 5% to heart, 5% to brain, 5% to liver and kidneys, and then 5% for the rest of the body, including reproduction, digestion, immunity, metabolism, metabolism, sleep, rest, creativity, empathy, all of it gets 5% to divide up under threat, under stress, perceived or real. So learning is completely deprioritized. It's just a resource allocation problem. So when I thought about it from like this is a resource allocation problem, I was like, oh, we just need to understand how the body learns better. And I started to go back into the learning literature and realize that we learn two ways. We learn top down, the way all of us learn in school. I'm going to teach you X, read this book, understand it, memorize it, learn that way through words. Then we also learn through experience, which is called bottom up learning, which is body to brain experiential learning. So that's how we learn to walk, how we learn to ride a bike, how we learn to play any sport or activity. It would be impossibly difficult to learn to play a sport by just reading directions, right? It's really, really really hard, if not impossible. So the experiential part of learning in a lot of ways is actually more important because it's more sticky. The things we learn through the body first are more sticky because they accompanied by a feeling. And that feeling is really accurate as a guide to help us get back there. Because if we remember the feeling, then we can do whatever we need to do to get back to that state. And so I wrote this book because after we developed Apollo. Apollo is the wearable tool that delivers sound waves to the body that improve vagus nerve activity and safety in the body and get the body primed for learning. When you're safe enough to be in your body, you're safe enough to learn. And then neuroplasticity amplifies cognition, amplifies everything. Gets easier when you're taking in new information and you don't, you don't perceive yourself to be under threat. Then I realized people still needed the map. They needed like the understanding and the, the top down information that had not been updated from our Time in school. It's still not updated with Eric Kendall's. He won the Nobel Prize 26 years ago. They still don't teach his understanding that he shared with the world. Right. They still don't teach so many other principles that were considered to be the most important discoveries of all time. And so as I was reading, you know, continuing to do this work and helping people feel safe to learn, I was like, we need to update our fundamental understanding of science because science now proves that spirituality is real and we should be addressing that. That's really cool. Science now shows how we heal from trauma. Science now shows how we learn and that it's the same as the mice and, and the, and the sea snails. And they're all, we're all learning the same way. Like we should understand that commonality. It's really important. So that's why I wrote this book.
- [10:31]
A
Wow. So let me ask you on that because, you know, we've been learning in Western civilization now for decades and decades. Right. Hundreds of years. Right. And it seems incredible to me that we are not teaching in a way that actually leads to real learning.
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B
Long term retention and recall.
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A
Exactly right. Like, I mean, you still think about learning the way kids are still learning in schools. You sit there, you're given something to memorize and you put it through your brain, you write it down on paper and that's how you learn now. Right. Or you type it in your computer.
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B
Even worse now is it's all screens.
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A
And it's all screens. Exactly.
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B
So there's no human to human mentorship interaction. And almost all of it is fast information. Click memorize, click right. Fast recall, it's not about long term recall or integration into understanding. And that's new as of Gen Z. That's true. And what's really important I think for us to recognize is that this, I think it was a Harvard professor, I don't know if you saw this, gave a testimony for Congress based on some research that was done at some other leading universities nationwide that showed that Gen Z is the first generation in recent history to score worse on standardized cognitive assessments, including math and language and reading comprehension, than the generation before, the first ever in recorded history to regress cognitively. Regress.
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A
That's incredibly concerning.
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B
That's like a societal regression signal. Right. That's like one of the worst possible things that can happen because when we're not growing, we, and we're, and if we're stagnant, at least we can maintain balance. But the environment's always changing, so we will eventually slip and now we're just outwardly regressing. Right, Right. And that means that, that means that we can't adapt to the challenges that we're facing. We're spending billions, hundreds of billions of dollars teaching people stuff that they don't know how to make use of.
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A
Right, Right. It's really scary. I mean, like ever watch a movie Wall E where all the humans don't do anything, just sit around and get, you know, get big and have no brain. It sounds kind of dystopian, but it's like that's exactly where we're headed with the, with the screens that are now becoming more and more part of our educational system. And to your point, we're disconnecting the. Getting the knowledge from the feeling of getting it by cutting out the humans from the loop that are actually doing the teaching. Right, Right. So it's, it's a really scary place to be. And you know, I have kids. I have a 12 year old and 9 year old. What do I do as a parent to enforce learning in a way that could really help them in their life and grow?
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B
It's a great question. I mean, I think so many parents are asking themselves this. Right. Like I'm even asking this of myself. My, My child is 8, 16 months.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I'm thinking about his future. Right. Of like, how is he going to learn? But I think that we really just need to get back to the basics and not overcomplicate things too much. And I see it in my son when we're, when he's learning, when he's on the, when he's around the. Because we have to be on the phone, even at 16 months, he is attracted to it like a moth to a flame.
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A
Right.
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B
Like it's so stimulating to him that he can't take his eyes or his hands off of it. He doesn't know what it's doing or what it's for or anything else about it. And that's 16 months old. Right. So for us, I think a lot of what we do is try to keep, try to keep that away from him and allow him to interact with life analog almost always. And then very occasionally, like if he wants to watch Bluey or something and like he is. There's like, you know, we don't. But we don't use it to distract him from discomfort and we don't use it to pacify him. We use analog things to do that.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I think that's what's really important is that it's intentional Use of technology is not bad. It's the unintentional use of technology that puts us in danger. And we're. Because we're forgetting how to do the things that we should all know how to do as humans, like interact and interrelate, co regulate all those basic things, feel empathy for each other, notice each other's common humanity. Those are actually skills. They're not just things that happen by default. I mean, we're born with the ability to do them, but if we don't use it, we lose it. Right. We lose our sense of humanity and mutual connection. And that's why everyone feels so alone, because they're just doing this all the time. You're not getting any more of this.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
And so I think the. That's how we teach him. Right. And I think that's what we tell parents is don't give your child a screen as a. When they are acting out, number one. Because if you give it to them when they're acting out to pacify them, they will learn a positive reinforcement loop that if they act in a certain way, which is actually undesirable to the parents, then they will get access to the dopamine hit of the screens they want. So that is a big no, no. And then the second thing is teaching organic analog de escalation tactics. So like co regulate first. Like when your baby's. When your baby or your child's upset, sit with them and talk to them, make eye contact, give them a hug, breathe together at least for three to five minutes, right? Give it at least a good three to five minutes before you go and engage a technology tool, before you shove
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A
a phone in their face.
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B
Yeah, but we even say do that before Apollo, right? You know, like breathe first. Like have the real human, any technology, have the human. Human contact first. That's co regulation in action, right? When you feel yourself calm down because there's a safe presence around you, think about how powerful that is. You probably can remember that in your life. Like, remember when you were training in the hospital and there's some crisis going on and you're like, oh my God, oh my God, what do I do? What do I do? Somebody could die or a bunch of people could die. And then you have your mentor standing there who's like the seasoned surgeon who's just like, just another day. Yeah, okay, let's do this.
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A
Right? It's okay to be calm in this situation. Yeah, right. Exactly right.
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B
And it just sets. It's like that's, that is the insulate cortex, right? The co regulating us in real time and that activates healing and it activates flow states and like peak performance states and all the cool stuff that can be challenging to get on our own. We get that through co regulation and the co regulation with another human. Helping you overcome a challenging or uncomfortable situation is training you more effectively to do it on your own. Because it trains by feeling and modeling, role modeling, not explaining to you in a book what you're supposed to do. And then you have to like understand how those terms relate to a feeling yourself without experience. That's really hard.
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A
That's really hard.
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B
It's almost impossible for emotions like trying
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A
to play a sport when you're, you know, reading it out of a book. You gotta go play it.
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B
Exactly. Inner Game of Tennis. That's an la famous one, right? You know that book, right?
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A
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, wait, the book, the book.
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B
The Inner Game of Tennis.
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A
No, I don't know that.
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B
Oh, you have to read that book.
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A
What is this book?
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B
So that book was very inspiring to me. As a young person and as a tennis player athlete, I was trying to figure out how to learn sports better. One of my friends shared with me this book by one of the most famous USC tennis coaches who looked at bottom up versus top down learning in sports. And it's a very, very short book. It's maybe like 120 pages. And he just describes watching what happens to players learning via just top down how to play better versus watching other players and learning through experience. And the people who learn through the players who learn through experience outperform the other players tremendously in speed, in accuracy, in ability and technique.
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A
So interesting.
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B
Yeah, yeah. It's like the just like musicians who learn how to play music by ear without reading music, you don't actually need to learn how know how to read to live. Exactly right. Like we make it a gateway thing for our society. Like if you can't read, shame on you. Right, yeah. In this day and age, everybody should know how to read at the same time. It's actually the other skills that are more important. Reading. Once you get the other skills down, then we can focus on the reading.
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A
Exactly right.
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B
But like, yeah, like everything else is actually more important. Feeling is more important. Right. Emotional interpretation, presence, CO regulation, solo regulation and then reading.
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A
Yes. So I'm 52 right now, but I'm still pushing all of my limits. I'm running long distances, I travel across many time zones to support my work and I just want to live my life to the fullest, staying active as I age isn't just about willpower. It's about supporting my mitochondria, the powerhouses of my cells, with the energy that they need to recharge my muscles and recharge my brain. Mitopure is a supplement that I take. It's backed by solid research and showing that it can boost cellular energy, increase muscle strength and support overall healthy aging. Personally, I take Mitopure every single day. It's helped me continue my active lifestyle, whether it's a high intensity workout or keeping up with my kids. So if you are looking to support your body and want to feel younger from the inside out, my friends at Timeline are offering you a 10% discount on your first order. Go to timeline.comdrshaw to get started. That's timeline.comd rshah. Your future self will thank you. You know, back to like kids too. Like, I think another problem with the devices is that kids like even like my son, okay, the last, he's 12 years old now and we definitely learned over the last 12 years. Just see what happened with social media and society how much of a negative influence it can be, especially for teenagers and, and younger children. So we obviously know social media, right. But I don't think we knew in the last decade how this was all going to turn out. With iPads and iPhones in front of their faces and they're like you said, they're like flies. They're like moths to light. Right. Like there's no real rhyme or reason. They're so attracted to it, they just, even if they don't know what's on it, they're attracted to it.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then what happens there?
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B
Pure dopamine, baby.
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A
Yes, pure dopamine. And then they're in front of it and they're playing who knows what. I mean, hopefully, you know what? But it doesn't seem like anything interesting when, when you're looking at the game. In fact, I would say the quality of video games have regressed to worse than they were when we were kids.
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B
I feel like the storytelling and the plot is definitely worse.
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A
Yeah, it's like no plot. Some of it's like horrible anyway.
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B
But lots of bright lights and flashing things and that constant what if maybe now thing. Maybe you're going to get the. Maybe you're going to get it now.
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A
Maybe something is going to happen that's going to make me give me more dopamine.
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B
Pure B.F. skinner.
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A
Right, right.
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B
Intermittent reward.
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A
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, they totally mastered that. But the issue there also is that there's not moments of being comfortable in stillness. Right. And so I think that's the other flip side of this, which is a big, big problem where when stillness occurs, there's an immediate draw towards something else, whether it be, have you seen all these fidget toys? Like, I can't believe the number of fidget toys out there. I never had a fidget toy when I was a kid. I don't remember those existing. Right.
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B
No, no, we. I mean, we just had our thumbs and we twiddled them.
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A
Exactly.
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B
Or we tapped our legs like. Yeah.
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A
Or we were fine looking out the window.
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B
Daydreaming. Right. Daydreaming is a thing.
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A
Right.
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B
Yeah. Now, now that's been pathologized into some kind of mental illness. ADHD or whatever Illness.
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A
Right. ADHD got mythologized.
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B
Oh, you stare out the window too long again. Better give him some Metamine.
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A
Exactly. It's really concerning. Right. And this fact that you mentioned that this latest generation is regressed in their ability to pass standardized tests. I mean, I feel like there's other regressions going on that could become a huge detriment to our society.
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B
Yeah. That's just like the first thing that we've detected that's measurable. Right. Like, there are so many other issues that we will find that. I mean, I think this, this. I want to double click on the stillness topic you mentioned, though, because I think that's really one of the single most important things that we also just teach so. So poorly.
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A
Right, right.
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B
This idea that stillness is like the original OG operating system of life. Right. Talking came after words, language came after. Right. Stillness is everything that's. You have to. Yeah. You know, you have the stillness and then you have everything that happens after to the stillness when you drop something in it.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Right, Right. So I think the, like, we teach about this so differently in Eastern and Western traditions. In Eastern traditions, the stillness is, like, prioritized in a lot of ancient Eastern cultures. And that still propagates through Eastern culture, where that's the goal. The goal is to get back to stillness. Do all the things you need to do. Chop the wood, carry the water, do the things so that you can get back to the appreciation of the still and the space between all the things that you were doing. Right. And then in Western culture, stillness is very unproductive. So it's like a. It's pathologized. And we even get to a point where we, like, fear stillness because still, when we don't learn how to be still and appreciate nothing happening and us not having to do anything. And. And life just goes on, which is what stillness is. It's just us not doing anything. It's actually. I actually joke around that patience is. Patience and stillness are some of the most elegantly simple practices because they're literally the art of doing nothing. Right?
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A
Absolutely.
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B
Like, they're so hard for us to do, but it's just sitting there and allowing things to happen without doing anything, and then noticing when you have thoughts and just allowing them to just pass by like clouds on a sunny day, but you don't actually have to engage them. And that is like, the importance of that is just not taught. But the good news is that we can teach it, right? So it's just that how do we think about our priorities? And, like, the solution for that is so simple. Like Blaise Pascal in the 16, I think it was 1600s, said, what the single biggest problem of humanity is man's inability to sit in a room quietly by himself.
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A
Right, Exactly.
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B
It's like back in the 1600s, it's like. And he was French. So it's like, you think about how long we've been saying these same things, and it really comes down to us just deciding as a community of like, well, when are we going to start teaching that? Right. That's really the question. We know what's wrong. We know what's going on. We have understood most of these problems for hundreds or thousands of years. Hundreds from the Western perspective, thousands from the Eastern perspective. Now we just need to take this knowledge and then rewrite our stories about what matters, which is the first step. And then from rewriting our stories, which is the narrative that we learn to tell ourselves about how we see ourself in the world, how we see our ability as learners or whatever we are capable of doing, being able to make change or be victims to change. Right. If we start to see ourselves as change makers and having agency, then we can actually, in our own lifetime, change the way that children are. Our children are educated so that they know this stuff because we will teach it to them and then they will teach to others and it will spread. But there is actually this thing that we were taught when we were kids that I feel like is really underemphasized but meant a lot now that I look back, that an individual human can actually make that difference.
- [26:06]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
Because we're all so interconnected just by one person recognizing, oh, the way I was looking at stillness is all wrong. Let's shift to what I now know, that this is important. Oh, now I'm just Gonna start talking about that and helping others appreciate stillness. One of my. One of my friends. You do you know Chris Shade?
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A
No.
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B
Quicksilver. Quicksilver, a great supplement company.
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A
Oh, yeah, I know Quicksilver. Yeah.
- [26:29]
B
One of Chris Shade's favorite sayings. When we're together, when we're trying to. Just because he is also like me, he just appreciates stillness so much. And he'll just like. He'll just like look around and so compassionately, he'll just look around, everybody be
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A
like, guys, shut the fuck up.
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B
Like, nailed it.
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A
Yeah. That still knows for sure, right?
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B
So funny. And then everybody just tunes back in all at once. And it's like, oh, that had a dramatic change in the environment. Everybody is all of a sudden synced up into the space between the thoughts rather than waiting to speak. Yeah, right. There's no waiting. There's no waiting to do anything. You're doing it, you're being. And you can appreciate it. So, like, that is in large part also what the book is about, because these are philosophies that are taught from ancient, ancient cultures that science is now proven matter. When we're more present, we make more meaning from experiences. And guess what? We learn faster. Right. So if we want to prevent dementia, we want to extend health span and longevity, we want to increase our recall and memory and executive function and our abilities as, you know, even in performance. We have to take care of our bodies better. And we have to understand the rules that the body follows, which is that it doesn't want to be burning the candle at both ends all the time.
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A
All the time. Right?
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B
Yeah. No, it runs out of fuel and it gets really tired and pissed off. Like it wants to be recovered as much as it's performing so that it can continue to meet demand. And. And that waste removal balances waste creation.
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A
Exactly.
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B
And if that doesn't happen, then you get sick.
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A
Right, Right. Yeah. I think it's such an important point because I think that we are taught from a very young age that the amount of productivity that you generate in your life is really a measure of the worth of your life and recovery. Sleep, stillness is all completely deprioritized because
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B
for when you're dead.
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A
Right, Exactly. It's for when you're dead. I know. And unfortunately, that's where our body revolts against us and we become sick. And that's, you know, my idea is that this, this culture we live in is what's really led to this massive explosion of chronic disease and Alzheimer's and cancer, all of it. It's because of, because of that, you know, it's not giving the body enough time to recover. And exactly like you said, you accumulate the damaging, what have you, the toxins, the, the, the mitochondrial damage, the cellular damage, it accumulates and creates disease.
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B
Yeah. The misfolded proteins, all of it.
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A
Right.
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B
Like amyloid.
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A
Exactly.
- [29:00]
B
Think about everybody who's now afraid of amyloid. It's like a household name, Amyloid beta.
- [29:04]
A
Right.
- [29:04]
B
The Alzheimer's protein and a lot of the therapies that you guys do. People come to get to accelerate their body's ability to take the amyloid beta garbage out that accumulates from neurons and heart muscles and all of it creating its constant stress load. That's just going to happen by nature of being alive. That's not getting cleared because they're not getting enough good deep restful sleep regularly. And they're or they're adding other toxins to their body. But ultimately, like the body has a pretty standard for most people, amount of toxic load that is, you know, coming in, except for extreme cases. And they're just not getting enough waste clearance. And that is mostly happening during deep and REM sleep. So if people aren't getting good deep restful sleep, then they, to get that waste clearance so they can function properly and their organ systems don't start to crap out. They need things like services like you provide. Yeah, right. Because that's what's helping to boost their antioxidant functioning, their removal of toxic waste products. The body's naturally going to produce anyway. But we also need to focus on what we do outside of the clinic, which is boosting vagal tone.
- [30:09]
A
Exactly.
- [30:09]
B
And any activity that soothes the body and boosts vagus nerve activity, whether it's Apollo or deep breathing or yoga or whatever it is you choose to do that's easiest for you. The more that you get light, gentle consistency of increasing the vagus nerve, not all at once, just for a short time, but consistency around the clock. That consistency is constantly sending signal to the nervous system says, hey, we're not under threat. Redirect blood flow back to recovery and digestion, immunity, empathy, cognition, all the good stuff immediately. And it happens when you deep breathe. Within 30 to 90 seconds, your body is just shifting from vagus nerve activity, blood flow to skeletal muscles. 80% goes down to 20%. And that other 60% feeds the whole body all the stuff it needs to. Right, right. Including takes away waste.
- [30:55]
A
Yeah.
- [30:56]
B
So this is a resource allocation, you know, blood flow regulation problem that is very easily solved. I think when we actually understand what's happening.
- [31:06]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I do feel like our human bodies from almost every human is massively actually overbuilt to clear toxins, to recover from injuries. It's extremely well evolved to heal. It's incredible, right? It really is incredible. The, the, the, you know, just being in surgery, like, like.
- [31:26]
B
Oh yeah.
- [31:27]
A
You know, when you're in surgery, like for lack of a better term, you're really like ripping people open and like moving their organs around and removing organs. Like people could not survive that without anesthesia and surgery the way it is right now.
- [31:41]
B
Right.
- [31:41]
A
But the reality is after you're done with that, people here heal so incredibly fast. It's mind blowing. Right.
- [31:47]
B
It's incredible.
- [31:47]
A
And so, but you put them in a healing state and you get them to heal from it. And there, you know, that's why people recover in hospital sometimes from surgery because it used to be that this was a non stressful environment for your body to be in while you're going through a healing process. Right. So our bodies are able to heal from massive amounts of injury. Like surgery's a massive injury. I usually do trauma, trauma, traumatic, you don't get hit by a car. That's massive. People heal from that. So just think about how overbuilt our systems are to heal. But the reality is we're constantly assaulting those systems right now. And when you never give it a chance to go into healing mode, it just can't. And that damage accumulates.
- [32:24]
B
Right. And it's not. It's not. And that's the thing, I think that a lot of people don't understand. It's not about healing when you're on vacation or healing only when you're asleep deeply.
- [32:34]
A
Exactly.
- [32:34]
B
It's about healing as often as possible around the clock. And that's what resilience is. Having a high heart rate variability and high, which means high vagus nerve activity means you're super adapter. Meaning that when stress comes like you're gonna bounce back faster and better than any, you're the next guy.
- [32:50]
A
Right.
- [32:50]
B
And it's all about how quickly do you turn ramp up and ramp down? It's not about, oh, I sleep at the exact same time every night and I wake up at the exact same time every morning and I'm stressed out all day from the moment I'm awake to the moment I asleep and then I go to sleep and I'm asleep and I get my rest. That's better than many people. But the goal is actually to surpass that and to be able to rapidly switch on and off. Somebody's like, you're in basically full recovery mode all the time, except when your friend, you're walking down the street and your friend's like race you to the end, right? It's like that. And then you just flip it on, you go. And then when you get to the end, you know you're safe and you ramp down immediately.
- [33:31]
A
Exactly right.
- [33:32]
B
And then every, all the good stuff turns back on, all the recovery and digestion immunity and then hopefully within as little as three to five minutes you can do it again and sprint again.
- [33:41]
A
Right?
- [33:41]
B
But that's how we evolved to.
- [33:44]
A
To live, right?
- [33:44]
B
To live. And that's how we evolved to adap, right. To stress the next step that's really challenging for us in our current state is that we built, we've over engineered the physical recovery side. We've completely ignored the emotional. Right. The stuff we can't see, we're just like, oh, that doesn't exist. So one of the things that I describe that I think is really important reframe for people is that when you experience an emotional or mental trauma, when any of us as human beings experience a situation that makes us feel differently about ourselves afterwards in a way where we see ourselves as more like victims or we see ourselves with an aura of like guilt or shame around us because we feel like we did something wrong, that results in this situation which usually comes from the non supportive character telling us and blaming us afterwards. Especially in childhood when those things happen, that's not just an invisible big T or little T trauma. In fact, the size of the tea doesn't matter at all. What matters is how you feel about yourself and the impact on the nervous system after the event. And those events are breaking a bone in the emotional body, that's just like breaking a leg in a car accident. To use your metaphor earlier, it's a broken trust bone. It's your self trust bone because somebody just told you or you self interpreted that you couldn't keep yourself safe in this situation and it was your fault. And so how can you know that you can keep yourself safe again in the future situations? Right? Like especially when somebody like a parent or someone you trust says why'd you let that happen to you? Isn't that like probably one of the most common responses people get after hardship?
- [35:24]
A
Sure is.
- [35:24]
B
Yeah, right. Rather than wow, you really did the best you could. That must have been really hard. If you need anything, just let me know. Right. Totally different response. That latter response creates a positive reflection of Adaptability and strength and constitution in the nervous system and resilience. I did something good. No blame, no. No shame, no fault. The other one is all about cementing victim mentality in the brain through guilt and shame. And it's not even necessarily on purpose, it's just that that's what people told them. So that's what they're telling us. Exactly right. And that's a broken trust bone. So if you don't address that right away, just like a physical injury, it starts to get, what is it like loculated. Right. And then it starts scarred in and scar starts to form. It starts to get in, infected. And when it gets infected, just like a physical injury, it hurts. Right. So the emotional pain of a festering emotional wound, it turns out, is no differently represented in the brain than physical pain of a wound. The actual brain recognizes physical pain and emotional pain very similarly.
- [36:35]
A
That's true.
- [36:36]
B
Very exciting paper that came out by Tor Wager's group that showed that. So ultimately the point being is that that emotional wound, if that's not addressed properly and quickly as a wound, it needs to be cleaned and unpacked and have the edges kind of brought together and organized. And there's a healing process around it and an aftercare plan. Just like with surgery, we treat it like surgery, people actually get better. That's what psychedelic medicine allows us to do. It's an immediate intervention and technology like some of the things you have here, Apollo.
- [37:09]
A
Right.
- [37:09]
B
That they allow us to have an interventional approach to trauma that addresses it like a wound that needs surgical repair. And we're doing, and we're doing psychosurgery. Yeah, right. And if you don't do it, if you don't do it properly, it becomes infected. It becomes so painful that the person can't deal with it. And so what do they do? They, they mentally amputate that part of their selves. It becomes inaccessible. It's so painful, but it's still there, just like a phantom limb every now and then being like, hey, remember you. Fuck you for shutting me down, ignoring
- [37:40]
A
me, you know, it's such a great analogy, actually. I think for people like myself. I would say a lot of high performing individuals, we do tend to just completely ignore these emotional wounds.
- [37:52]
B
For sure. Suck it up mentality.
- [37:53]
A
Yeah, exactly. And it's like, because they are invisible, you don't really, you know, like a broken leg, you see it, you know, it's like swollen. It feels horrible. But emotional wounds feel horrible, but you don't see them. So you just Let them heal on their own and they fester and get infected. Like all the things you're saying. And so if we treated these emotional the same way we treat our broken bones, we would have much better outcomes in the long term.
- [38:16]
B
Yeah, I think we'd probably avoid most mental illness because I think that. And this is what I think, again, what where psychedelics are teaching us is where we get from where we are to the cure Word, which we started to talk about last time, is that when we understand that hardship or challenging things that we experience don't necessarily become trauma or remembered as trauma, they become learned as either things that we grew from or things that held us back. Right. Things that made us feel more powerful and capable with our abilities and more ourselves because we learned and we grew and we became stronger. Like Obi Wan style learning right from Star wars and then. Or Nietzsche and then where that comes from. And then the other. The other side is when trauma, we get blamed or shame or guilt attached to it. And trauma actually holds us back and makes us feel unsafe in our own skin. Breaks the trust bone, and then the trust bone needs to be healed. And so when we work. When I went to study with the Shipibo indigenous tribes in Peru that have been treating trauma with ayahuasca for thousands of years, I asked them what trauma is to them and what they do with ayahuasca and how it works. And they're like, basically like. We're like. Trauma causes a fracture to a person's energy, and we are singing to it to shake that fractured space up so that it heals, so that their energy can flow freely again. Their human essence energy can just flow from, like, head to toe, as it should, cleanly, without being obstructed. They described it almost in a way of like an eventual cardiology, obstructions in a vessel, that they're clearing that out in that way with vibrational sound that is not sound, contrary to popular opinion. It's mostly not music that they have preconceived before the session that they learned. It's not like they're singing Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan. They're singing something that they're channeling to you based on what they see in the experience live. It's a live created sound which they call Icaros.
- [40:17]
A
So interesting.
- [40:18]
B
Yeah. And then we're doing the same thing in MDMA therapy, where we're helping people feel safe enough to remake meaning around past traumatic events, where they can go back safely and realize, oh, there's a broken bone here. Holy Shit, I can repair that. It wasn't my fault. Wait, that person who told me that it was my fault is actually kind of a dick. Right. And then all of a sudden you start to realize, like, it wasn't because of you, that these things happen.
- [40:42]
A
Right.
- [40:43]
B
The bone starts to naturally reappraise its own edges and come back together and then it heals. But it requires aftercare. It's not just. Right, just like a surgical procedure, if someone doesn't do the wound care afterwards, it can still get infected and come back.
- [40:57]
A
Exactly.
- [40:58]
B
And kill them. So you have to do the aftercare. And that's why I think the surgical metaphor is so important, because it's a whole thing. Right. You do pre op, you do op and then you do post op. And we're doing the same thing with psychedelics.
- [41:11]
A
Yeah. No one thinks of it this way. And it's like, it's so great to have a tool like psychedelics now finally again coming to the forefront. Because I think, you know, you were in the field, like, I think there wasn't a lot out there back then that you could do beyond therapy. Right. As far as just ketamine. Yeah, yeah, Ketamine was, is, has been used. Yeah. Which is fantastic. Hi, Dr. Shah here. I want to take a minute to talk to you about cellular health. So in my clinics, I've actually seen 30 year old people with cells that look like they're pushing retirement. And I've also seen 60 year olds with cells that look like they're 40 years old. So what's the difference? It's really about how fast their telomeres are breaking down. Your cells, you see, are like phones and they have limited cell phone battery, poor sleep, stress, processed foods, all of these things can drain that battery way faster than it should. So this is the reason why I partnered with ima. IMA powers that cellular battery. It's not just another multivitamin. It's a comprehensive 92 ingredient formula designed specifically for cellular health and longevity. I'm talking 900 milligrams of vitamin C. That's like 20 oranges worth of DNA protection, the clinical dose of CoQ10 that you need to power your cellular engine. You also get zinc, selenium, vitamin E, alpha lipoic acid. All of these work synergistically for cellular repair and protecting your telomeres. So instead of taking a handful of pills every day and all these supplements, Im8 actually gives you everything that you need in one scientifically formulated system. And this isn't just a theory anymore. Imaid had partnered with Oxford University, the International Space Station San Francisco Research Institute. And they've done studies and they've gotten this NSF certified to truly power your health. Most people are aging twice as fast as they should. Unfortunately, you don't have to be one of them. Try im8. I actually have a discount secured for you if you go to drshaw.comima or go to im8health.com discount DrShaw and you can get 20% off with my discount code. Dr. Shah, you can also find the link below. Are these tribes using the Ayahuasca, like, immediately after the trauma? Like if there's a traumatic event, you know, death of a loved one, for example, is how long do they wait before the Ayahuasca?
- [43:35]
B
I think it depends. I think I couldn't speak for all of them. So many. There's so many tribes, different tribes people, and they all have their own traditions. What I can tell you is what I know that they do in common, which is they don't label or pathologize suffering. So they don't have words for it. They don't have words that attach suffering to identity, like depressive disorder that you. That leads you to eventually say, I am depressed, which then attaches the concept of depression to your past and your future. Right?
- [44:09]
A
It does, yeah.
- [44:09]
B
Your whole identity, you're saying I am. So they don't say that. They say, I feel right now sad. Right. I'm grieving a loss now. And so that framing of language is really, really important because it helps us understand what we're addressing. We're not addressing something that's attached. We're not addressing illness, identity disorder, where the illness is now wrongfully, parasitically attached to your sense of self. It is. Which gets into another topic that I talk about the book. I don't want to spoil it, but about illness. Identity is like a real problem we face in our society because sick people get treated better than, well, people. Right. And so that's something else that's uncomfortable to talk about. But. But in indigenous cultures, they provide support initially through community. Everybody just comes together and there's support. There's like, oh, you had a loss. We've all had losses. Let's share what you're going through together so that you know that we're all here for you. And that is the single most important part of healing an individual, is the healing that the group provides as support to the individual, which I also talk about in the book that's really interesting from my research on neurons and RPE and Aging. Speaking of longevity, epithelial, quiescent epithelial cells, like neurons and cardiac myocytes, all the most important cells for longevity, sure. Are the same cells that when we die is when we're born. They don't make new.
- [45:36]
A
That's true. They're not any new ones coming out.
- [45:38]
B
Right. So there are occasional, a couple, few new ones here and there. But the cells that are fully mature, that form the entire lining of the retinal epithelium, the entire lining of the entire neural structure, and for the most part, and the entire cardiac muscle tissue and several others, are all the same as when you die, as when you're born.
- [45:56]
A
Exactly.
- [45:57]
B
Which means they have to have the robust stress response of any cell in the entire body. So we think about collaboration from a full evolved human brain perspective, where it's like we look at the insula, which is an important part of the brain for collaboration. And what other animals have it, it's us, it's dolphins, it's elephants, it's great apes, and a few other higher order, communal, community focused animals. Turns out you don't need that part of the brain to collaborate and to especially cope with stress because all of these quiescent cell types have gap junctions and tight junctions between them that literally pass stress through ions that distribute stress throughout the entire layer. That's the only reason why those entire self populations can survive our entire lives is because they're working together. What a lesson, right? Like, we struggle by ourselves. Like, can we do it? Sure, Ayn Rand can do it, we can do it. Right. But the point is that that's not how we were meant to be. Like we were meant to be able to survive, be able to survive by ourselves. We were meant to thrive in community.
- [47:02]
A
Exactly right.
- [47:03]
B
And to achieve longevity, to achieve these audacious health goals that we have of living forever, living as long as possible, healthily. We can't leave out one of the single biggest things that contributes to that, which is the togetherness part of it.
- [47:18]
A
Absolutely right.
- [47:19]
B
That's like all the good hormones get released when we are together. All the good stress response hormones, all the hormones people take any drug for, we get naturally with togetherness.
- [47:29]
A
Right, yeah, just exactly. We were built to be in community, we were built to be in tribes. And that's when the humans thrive and they actually heal faster, they actually do better. You know, I keep going back to surgery too. Like the patients that never had a single visitor, it would take them forever to get out of the hospital. Right. And the people that have visitors are Talking and bringing them food and all these things. And they had family. You could tell people cared about them. There's cards, there's flowers.
- [47:56]
B
Yeah, renewed purpose.
- [47:58]
A
Exactly. They got out of the hospital faster. What I love about you is that you base everything that you talk about in actual science. You've done the research, you know the research, and you bring the research into people's lives through these big picture ideas, but they're all tied back to actual clinical studies. And so I'm sure you reference a lot of those in the book, right?
- [48:20]
B
Oh yeah, like 400 of them. 400 studies of references took me so long to get, but it was so great because I haven't gone through a lot of those papers in a long time. So I was really dreading that reference section. And then finally when I was going through it, I was like, oh, this is actually refreshing. All of the science I haven't looked at a long time, so make sure I'm extra crisp on my accuracy. But it was, it was good. I learned a lot going back through. Learned a lot of new stuff that came out since then. Did you know we're supposed to be drinking like 11 and a half to 15 and a half cups of water a day?
- [48:52]
A
Well, I thought it was 8, 8 to 10 and a half and a half to 15 and a half. Me too. Where'd you learn that from?
- [48:58]
B
As of 2005, the National Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences. So it's like important organization that we all strive to eventually someday be a member of. Invite. Right? Invite only. So they published a thorough review in 2025 or sorry 2005, so 21 years ago that showed that we actually are under hydrated for our body's normal healthy functioning. Obviously if you're sick and you have some water restriction situation, you should not drink this much water. For the average healthy adult to function at peak, we're supposed to be consuming for the average woman, eleven and a half cups of water a day. Eleven and a half? Eight ounce cups. Wow, that's like ninety something ounces. And then for the average adult man, we're supposed to be consuming 15 and a half cups. That's inclusive of the water we get from food. So it's estimated that we get about 20% of our hydration from solid food.
- [49:57]
A
Got it.
- [49:58]
B
So if you take 20% out, we're still, if we go for eight, we're probably actually drinking six. Right, right. We're actually four to five cups under what we should be consuming for proper hydration and as we know, hydration is critically important for not just cognitive functioning and clarity and all the brain working properly, but, like, for preventing cardiovascular episodes. Right. When we're dehydrated, we're increased risk of DVT and embolus. And like, all of the cardiovascular problems that happen, a lot of them get worse because we get into hypercoagulable states when we're dehydrated. And so we need that water lubricant to make sure our organ systems are functioning. And, you know.
- [50:37]
A
Absolutely.
- [50:38]
B
So that was just another interesting thing that I learned that just again, 2005 has not been updated in our education.
- [50:45]
A
I always say, tell people, like, you know, if you think that the doctors of today are being educated in the latest science, they're absolutely not. I mean, they're still 30 to 40 years behind. And with the rate of scientific discovery now, we're learning so much faster. So being 30 years behind in this modern time is more like being 300 years behind, you know, in the old days. Exactly. Right, right.
- [51:06]
B
Oh, yeah. Just for the amount of progress we've made.
- [51:08]
A
I know.
- [51:09]
B
Yeah. It's crazy.
- [51:10]
A
Yeah.
- [51:11]
B
But that's also one of the most exciting things for us is that now we have, thank God, the Internet. Right. Like, I. You and I, I think, have a bond because we remember the world before the Internet.
- [51:20]
A
Yes, we do.
- [51:21]
B
Right. And I think that's very special because the world was a different place. Doesn't mean we're not gonna get back there. But the level of resources we have now with the Internet to help and AI to help assemble complex data sets in ways that we couldn't before allows us to actually stay updated faster. We're just not using AI for the right things. Like, the Internet's been used primarily for porn and then selling people things they don't need. We know this, right? Like, Google publishes these things every year, Right. The most popular sites or whatever that people go to. Like, like, we know it's not. It's not a guilt thing. It's just like, this is what people are using this most incredible resource ever discovered for more than anything else.
- [52:02]
A
Yeah.
- [52:02]
B
So, like, there's an education problem. Like, let's make it, like, think about behavioral economics, right? Let's just incentivize people little by little to just learn things before looking at porn. Maybe porn becomes the reward.
- [52:18]
A
There you go. That learning would definitely become a lot more ubiquitous if porn was a reward after learning.
- [52:24]
B
Right. I mean, there's like, I'm just trying to be creative here. Right. The Most important thing is people know how to learn properly. They know how to remember, not memorize, but remember for understanding. So that stuff is stored for life, not just stored for the moment when you're using it. And that people learn how to take care of themselves independent of the healthcare system with the tools that we were born having access to. Right. Breath, movement, touch, sensory experiences, technology where it's affordable and appropriate. Right. But mostly the stuff that we can do for free, that's stuff that we need everybody to learn and be rapidly updated to do. And the Internet can provide that. I did my best trying to provide that here for people, but we need to. That's why I respect what you're doing, just putting out your work, helping educate the community about. It's time for a much needed update, guys.
- [53:18]
A
Yeah.
- [53:19]
B
The world's going to be such so much better of a place when we make that update.
- [53:23]
A
Exactly. Right.
- [53:23]
B
It's like we're running like an antiquated software on 5G LTE bandwidth, but the software has been updated since a hundred years ago.
- [53:39]
A
Yeah. I think that right now in this age of AI, there's definitely a major upgrade happening, just no one knows how to use it. Right.
- [53:47]
B
That's what's so concerning.
- [53:49]
A
That's what's concerning. Right, exactly.
- [53:50]
B
Because technology is just a reflection of what we put into it. So if we put in disorganization, chaos, self hate, guess what, it's going to kill us. Right. We're going to build jealous technology. Is that what we want?
- [54:00]
A
Right.
- [54:01]
B
That's not what I want.
- [54:02]
A
It's definitely like this is what all the people in Anthropic and chatgpt and OpenAI. I mean you have people quitting these companies because they fear that what humans are putting in the technology is going to lead to the technology actually becoming dangerous.
- [54:18]
B
Right. There's an accountability issue too.
- [54:21]
A
Right. There's a major accountability because we're like
- [54:24]
B
not willing to take responsibility for the self hate that we put into our technology or for the self loathing, whatever you want to call it. The part of you that doesn't love yourself, that you're programming into the code. Right. We should be healing ourselves. First order of operations. Right?
- [54:41]
A
Right.
- [54:41]
B
Heal yourself first. Learn the techniques for doing that. Don't pass your trauma on to your children or your machines and then reward with porn or whatever it is.
- [54:53]
A
That's your thing. Whatever the reward is. Right. So I want to, you know, I know we've already been talking for a while now, but I do want to talk a little bit More about the book and why would someone buy this book? What are they trying to learn from your book?
- [55:06]
B
I think the main thing that I got out of this book, both through everything that I learned through my process of the last 20 years of learning this stuff and writing it, is I learned how to just how to like, live a happy, peaceful life without always doing. Feeling like I needed to do something or be something that I'm is different than what is right now. It just helped me understand, you know, it helped me. It helped me understand how to cope with the overwhelming stress of modernity. That we are not handed an instruction manual for that I can speak for myself also. Many of my friends and colleagues just generally felt lost. Lost because we feel like we're doing everything right. We feel like we're doing everything everybody told us to be successful based on what we were taught success is. And yet we get to the end of the game and we're still tired and unhappy and not feeling super great about ourselves. Right. And I think that so many doctors burn out because that's how it feels when you get to the end of training and then you go in and you start all healthcare providers and then they start, you know, beating on you real hard. You start actually practicing and especially if you're a surgeon, right. And like, you have to go through it. Your training was even harder and longer than mine. And so one of the hardest.
- [56:22]
A
It was pretty tough, I will say.
- [56:24]
B
Yeah, but I. But like that, I just feel like that's why I wrote this book. Because if we go into life knowing some of these concepts, these concepts that are could be taught to children. They're so fundamentally simple that some of them I learned as kids, as a kid, but most of them I didn't. If we taught these core concepts to kids and integrated them into education, or we did it to adults who are having a hard time now, then my quality of life dramatically improved and beyond words can describe. And I just feel like I can share that with my patients, but I can only see as a psychiatrist, I can see eight patients a day. So I wrote this book to share that knowledge and wisdom that has benefited me and my patients so much with everyone. Because we have the language now, we have the science. Let's try. Let's see what we can do. I don't know what the response is going to be, but it's been so helpful to me so far in all the patients that I've worked with, because this is the protocol that I use for all my patients, but for everyone. And So I think that I'm hoping it makes a dent. We'll see what happens.
- [57:35]
A
I think it definitely will. Thank you so much for putting this book out there. Of course.
- [57:39]
B
My pleasure.
- [57:39]
A
The book is called A Simple Guide for Being Alive by Dave Rabin and David Rabin and it's on pre sale at the website. A Simple guide for being alive.com a
- [57:49]
B
simple guide to Being Alive A simple
- [57:50]
A
guide to beingalive.com okay, and where else can people find you?
- [57:56]
B
You can find me on socials, instagram, Twitter. I always love to hear from everybody. Rdavidrabon. You can find me at my website Apollo Clinic, which is my clinic website. DrDave IO you could find me on the Psychedelic Report as the psychedelic news anchor and your brain explained and apolloneuro.com or wearablehugs.com love it.
- [58:17]
A
Thank you so much for joining today.
- [58:18]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [58:23]
A
That was another great conversation with Dr. Rabin. Here are my top five learnings from that episode. Number one trauma is fear learning and it's extinguished by safety. Trauma is fundamentally a form of fear learning and the most effective way to overcome it is by relearning safety in association with the same environmental cues that trigger the fear. This bottom up approach, signaling safety to the nervous system is crucial for true healing beyond symptom management. Number two, stress is hijacking learning and recovery. Under stress or perceived threat, the body diverts up to 80% of his blood flow to skeletal muscles for fight or flight and this severely deprioritizes learning, digestion, immunity and recovery. To learn effectively or to heal, the nervous system must first be signaled that it is safe. Number three, bottom up learning is more sticky. While traditional education focuses on top down word based learning, experiential or bottom up learning, body to brain is more deeply ingrained because it's accompanied by feeling. This type of learning, like riding a bike or playing a sport, is essential for true mastery and retention. Number four, stillness is still the original operating system. Modern society often pathologizes stillness, viewing it as unproductive, but it is a fundamental human state crucial for mental and physical well being. Embracing moments of quiet and non doing allows for reflection, recovery and a deeper appreciation of life. It's directly counteracting the constant stimulation of our digital world. And finally, number five, resiliency is rapid adaptability, not just endurance. True resilience isn't about constant pushing through stress. It's about the body's ability to rapidly switch between states of high performance and deep recovery. Prioritizing consistent general signals of safety and recovery throughout the day rather than just during sleep is key to maintaining optimal health and preventing disease. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you like this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.