Nobody Pushed Him. That's Why He Got This Far.

One night I strung this thing off about my bed and my nightmares went away. I spent my entire life as becoming a translational neuroscientist. What we often call chronic stress is what I describe in the book as ambient terror, because it's like your nervous system is perceiving literal terror at all times. I never knew that I could achieve at this level as a kid. Like I wasn't taught and I could do this. I was taught to be curious about whether it was possible. If you're performing from a place of fear or insecurity or anxiety, your performance is going to achieve maybe 10% of what your capacity is.

From a standpoint of safety, you can achieve 100% of your potential. We all want to be high achievers and yet not pay the price of living in a constant state of fight or flight in order to be the high achiever. You can't fight for peace. Dr. Raybin, welcome to the show today. I am very much enjoying a simple guide to being alive, your new book, and very excited to have you here today. Thanks so much for having me, Nick. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Absolutely. So let's start. Let's go way back to the beginning. Like where did you grow up? Who were mom and dad? How did all this get started?

I grew up in Mill Valley, California, which is a small town north of San Francisco. A lot of hippies in my town. I didn't interact with them that much. My parents are physicians. My mom's a neurologist, studies and treats brain disorders. My dad's an ophthalmologist and treats eye disorders. For the amount of time that they were around when I was growing up, because they worked a lot, they cultivated a really, I realize this isn't adult, of course, not as a child. But as an adult, I look back and I realize that they cultivated this really safe environment to be curious. And it was okay to ask why, even if it would normally annoy most adults to the level at which we would ask.

And they like, it was nourishing of curiosity. And that was something that I totally didn't realize was doing anything to me while I was having the experience. But looking back as an adult now and being a psychiatrist and treating people who were so, and seeing people in the world that I work with, we're so afraid to be curious. And they're so afraid to raise their hand and say the wrong thing. Even though if half the time they do it, they're going to discover something important and learn something new. Because we like haven't taught people how to learn properly. And so I learned that later, but my parents really cultivated this experience that I learned as an adult is now a state for me growing up.

Those are so valuable that led to my becoming a psychiatrist and neuroscientist where I felt safe enough to learn and safe enough to make mistakes and safe enough to be dumb sometimes. And to fail sometimes, knowing that all of it was part of a bigger learning experience of life. And so that was my upbringing. And I became, I had very dreams as a kid as well. And that kind of was interesting to me because they seemed extremely real, as real as real life. And I would reference them in my day to day life starting around. This was like between like even four and seven years old, I would be like talking about things that happened in dreams of my brothers and they'd be like, that never happened.

I'd be like, oh shit, that happened at night. That was my night person. And so I asked my mom, I started to have nightmares. After starting school, I asked my mom, mom, what are dreams? You know, because these nightmares are really scary and I don't like them. And she's like, you know, trying to settle me out and she's like, dreams are real, don't worry, they can't hurt you. Which I think is what many parents tell their kids, try to help them not be afraid of sleep. But I kept having them and they kept feeling real until I talk about this in the intro of the book, I got a dream catcher at a flea market with my dad when I was like 10 years old.

And I struggled about my bed. And within I learned about it in school, then I found in the flea market, I struggled about my bed. And it was the first time in one night nightmares went away. Yeah, well, and if I could interject into your story for a second, because I thought it was really interesting that you're in this curious environment with your parents and able to ask good questions. And you, and at that time, you discuss your dream life as being vivid and generally super positive. And it's only when you first go to school. And there are some all these new social elements that suddenly the dream world flips.

And instead of having these dreams that you're excited about, it's suddenly this, this landscape of nightmares. And that I just, I felt like that was something a lot of people, at least me, I could resonate with it, because I had a similar experience as a kid. And then when you go and find this, this, you hear about a dream catcher, you go seek one out because you're like, I got to solve this. Yeah, and how did how did that part work out? I mean, it was like astonishingly well, like it again, like one night, I strung this thing off about my bed and my nightmares went away. And I had never like again, I came from a family of scientists.

So I was taught from a very young age just to be curious, but to think about the world in a skeptical, a healthy with healthy skepticism and, and, you know, really focus on liking empirical things and measurements and like science, you know, not like, like indigenous traditions were considered like magic and not real. And so, but I was taught in school about that indigenous traditions were real and it's taught about the stream catcher. And then I, you know, I know it's end of one, but I proved it to myself to the point where I reliably didn't have nightmares anymore. And that was even crazier because it was a lasting effect.

And that was, that was powerful, right? Because I think for me, even at very young age, it, it reaffirmed that there's more to know, because at first my mom's like dreams aren't real. And so I'm questioning, will they feel real? So maybe you don't know what the word real means, maybe adults are confused, right? And then from there, it's like, Oh, wait, and by the way, the stream catcher works. And now I'm starting to become even more suspicious of what we call reality and how you interact with it based on what we're being taught in school. Because it seems like there's a lot more to this, you know, yeah, when it feels like that was the bridge for you, because to jump into the, to the book a little bit, it is this meeting of rigorous science and then looking at things that bringing in modalities and techniques that typically Western science does not rely on and look at.

Is that, is that fair? Yeah. And starting to understand for me, you know, what's interesting to me is that in particular, many of these ancient traditions that we're still learning about in school and we're still taught that exist, have existed for, thousands of years, right? Like many, many thousands of years more than all the traditions that we currently follow in Western science, Western science is relatively new, starting like 1700s, you know? So now we have these concepts that have persisted. And to me, that's interesting, because I'm like, well, there has to be some value here. If people have continued to pass this information down for that long, that's like longer than the Bible, like these traditions have existed by like three to five fold in certain cases.

And we just don't, we don't are taught that stuff. And for me, I'm like, well, that's, that's really interesting. And then I, the experience with the dream catcher, of course, reinforced that for me on a personal level. And that was my first experiment that actually worked, right? And then of consciousness, a consciousness experiment. And so yeah. So that was what I was kind of like, if this thing isn't scientifically sound, who cares? It worked for me. Right. And then, but then, and then how do you figure out how to explain how it's working? Right. So that's that that was the next logical step for me at that time, when I first started, that was 10.

But I'm like, holy shit, how do I explain what I'm experiencing internally? How do I explain that externally so that somebody else can actually understand what it was and then relate to it like you related to what I said earlier, right? And then all of a sudden it means something to you because you can connect to a personal experience you've had. And so I spent my entire life as becoming a translational neuroscientist, which is effective in a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists, I explained to everything about the nervous system in the brain, the body to my patients about how things work every single day.

And then as a translational neuroscientist, it's about it's a field that's devoted to not just bench neuroscience research, or clinical neuroscience research. It's understanding how to translate literally the discoveries, the greatest discoveries from neuroscience that have been living for decades in neuroscience language and take that information and literally translate it like you're translating a language into language that everyone can understand. And that's the areas that became so fascinating, because to me that's where we struggle the most as a scientific community and as a society, spending hundreds of billions of dollars and trillions of dollars on scientific research over the last 50 years.

And so few of those discoveries have actually changed the way that people live. So many Nobel prizes, no change in society or behavior or the way that we interrelate based on those discoveries. But we know what they're trying to say, we know what they've shown and proven and why we've awarded them a Nobel prize, because we all deem them to be really fucking important. But for some reason, we struggle to understand how to translate that meaning into action. And to me, that was like a huge gap in the field. And because I understood it now because I experienced both sides of it and I'm like, Oh, I'm starting to understand the science of that has proven that Eastern and Indigenous traditions are real, like breathing and meditation, yoga and mindfulness and acupuncture and like all these different studies have proven that these are clinically effective techniques, right?

So now we just need to translate that out to everybody else. So they understand you can heal yourself and here's how and it's actually not as hard as we thought it would be. So we start with this fascination of dreams and what they mean and that leads to going through school, getting the PhD and the MD. And then when you finish school, did you leap right into the working with veterans and the PTSD treatment? Actually, I started working with that population while I was in medical school. And it was very impactful to work with people who are, you know, the people who tend to teach medical students generally and you are really good at what they do and they enjoy teaching in the clinic.

And watching some of, you know, these great experts in their field struggled to treat some of these people with severe mental illness to the point where they were just saying these people are going to be symptomatic for life and we just have to live with it. Highly symptomatic, you know, and that was and they're now going to also have side effects from their medication that we have to manage. In addition to their mental health symptoms, not completely resolving in nearly every case. That was, it was both discouraging and because of the state of affairs of how many people are still sick, even though they're being treated with like the best practice gold standards.

And also kind of encouraged me from a research perspective to start to think about like, how could that, like maybe our cons maybe we'd have to ask different questions. Like again, going back to what I learned as a kid that I thought was really impactful, I realized I was older is how to ask good the right questions, the good questions that actually give us answers that we want. And so one of those questions that was very impactful for me was to ask maybe like, is it possible that our concept of trauma and how it relates to mental illness is incorrect because we're treating it by suppressing the symptoms and not actually getting to the root cause and yet it persists.

The root cause is still there, similar to cancer, similar to other illnesses. If you try to numb somebody's broken leg and with opiates, but you don't actually address the broken leg, the leg is still going to be broken. It's going to start to get really messed up over time. We just don't, we don't see the mental, the emotional wound from mental illness and trauma. And so we assume therefore that because we can't see it, it's not bleeding, but it's still bleeding. And it still needs to be addressed like a physical wound. And when we start to shift that ideology, which is when you as you and I are talking, right?

This is a pretty basic, simple concept to understand. Sure. But it's not taught at all that emotional wounds are the same as physical wounds and are represented the same in the brain and have the same issues long term if we don't address them. And then short term. So to seeing how much of that stuff was not taught properly and experiencing it firsthand in my own medical training, I just realized that like somebody had to write a book on this to update the way that we learn. And like you're, you're an education, buff, you know, and learning buff, like, you know, right? Like we just like learning is the most important things that we can be good at as human beings.

Absolutely. And especially in a society where things are transforming so quickly, they're the days of being able to go to school for 10 to 15 years and then you're set on that and can just do whatever it is you do for the rest of your working life or long gone. I mean, we have to be able to update our skills continually. Along those lines with the non understanding, the emotional wounds that those just because we can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. They're also you talk a lot about in the in the book here, the the state of ambient terror, I believe is the phrase you use that were in meshed in in modern society.

And that that's something that our brain has trouble distinguishing between a a an email that feels like a threat or constant updates that feel like a threat and an actual threat in in real life. And that that's a tough concept to wrap your head around as as well. But it really helps to make sense of high anxiety levels that people are constantly experiencing. Can we dive into that that piece of it a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. I love this part because this is one of the most exciting discoveries of the 20th 20th century and the 21st century. And it is that actually, no, the majority of it was 20th century.

Eric Candel will know about prize in 2000 for figuring out with some other brilliant scientists how we learn and remember stuff. And not only did he figure out the entire molecular nervous system pathway for how we learn or remember stuff from the experience all the way down to your epigenetic code and how memory is stored on your DNA. We also figured out that this is a hardwired pathway in the nervous system that has been on earth for at least 300 million years going back to like ancient sea slugs, snail things called a plesia. And that is really, really, really important because when you understand the basic hardwiring of a system and what parts of it are going to be there and you can't change them no matter what you do, you can learn to work with them, but you cannot change them.

There, you start to understand that what he was teaching, Eric Candel and his colleagues that every and and BF Skinner, by the way, and Pavlov with his dogs, all of what these scientists were teaching is that we learn and store information directly proportionate to how afraid or joyful, positive, meaningful versus negative, meaningful an event is and neutral experiences we don't really deem important enough to remember the details. Like that's why you can never remember what you ate for breakfast, right? Right. So that's because it doesn't have any valence positive or negative in any significant way.

As soon as you start to get experiences into the really safe, loving, joyful, fun experiences, they start to get more meaningful and as soon as they get into more fearful, they get more meaningful and threatening. And thankfully, and thankfully, we're not surrounded by actual survival threat, all that often anymore. Like we don't have our nervous to me volve to respond to lack of air, lack of food, lack of water, lack of physical shelter and safety, like predators chasing us, and lack of sleep at some point and lack of physical connection. That's what our nervous system responds to. And as a fighter flight signal that is designed, that our nervous system was designed to respond to by engaging in a fight or flight state to get out of that situation and back to safety.

And when we're in that state, 80% of our or more of our blood flow is going to scale the muscles. And that leaves only like 5% leftover for brain, 5% for heart, 5% for liver and kidneys, and 5% for the whole rest of the body. For the time that it takes you to fight or flee and get back to safety. And then the whole system, when soon as you get back to safety, biggest nerve activity goes up, which is signaled by safety and soothing experiences and play and joy and love and connection. And all of that just squeezes blood vessels that are going to the muscles and sends most and tightens them. So there's less blood flow going to muscles when you're safe.

And most of that blood flow is going back to the rest of the body. And now available 80% back. It's a huge amount. And the body has to balance that at all times. We don't have enough blood to equally feed every active organ system at the same time. The body has to constantly balance that. So in the short term, that's really good. It gets a safety in the long term when all your blood is in your skeletal muscles and the rest of your immune system digestion, you know, metabolism sleep, fertility and and reproductive. All of that is immediately deprioritized when your your body thinks you're in an actual survival threat situation.

So that's why those are the first symptoms when of stress, your emotional regulation goes down irritability, can't sleep, racing thoughts, insomnia, right? Low mood, low energy, right? Like it's all because all of our like GI upset from stress so common now, right? That's why IBS is through the roof, because people it's not because there's a new disorder that emerged GI disorder that people are born with. That's the misconception. What's actually happening is it's severe chronic stress depriving the gut of the blood flow that it requires to have for it to properly absorb nutrients. And so you can take all the best supplements in the world and eat the best diet in the world.

And if you are so stressed out that your gut is being deprived of nutrients, you're going to feel like shit when you eat everything and still not be and still be slightly malnourished all the time. And so the stress is what we need to tackle first and chronic stress over time is depleting all those systems over time, which leads to distress and then organ system damage and then eventually disease in those organ systems, which basically if you think about it accounts for most of the issues that many people that are increasing that we see people having these days. So the autonomic nervous system approach of looking at like the stress versus safety, vagus nerve balance is critically important to how we understand stress and how we understand learning and how memories are formed based on stress and safety and then store in our nervous system and in ourselves over time.

And we can actually pass those memories down to our children, believe it or not. So that's epigenetic. That's fascinating. I was going to say though, the image that popped into my head when you're describing this is a pop quiz in class where you didn't know you were going to be tested on something. And then even when you have a grasp of that material, the threat of the pop quiz that oh my goodness, this is for the grade right now it's all happening. Suddenly you can't remember things that concepts or ideas or whatever you're being tested on that you are fluent in because of that fight or flight system kicking in.

And just like you said, I mean, blood flow is not firing to the brain. It's firing to your limbs to get you out of this situation. And yet there you are trapped in your seat in the class and unable to think clearly. And then later, maybe an hour later when you're not in that class and where you're like, I knew all of that stuff here it is bang, bang, bang, it could come right out. Yeah, I don't know anybody who hasn't had that experience, you know, and that's it. That's a perfect example of like of stress disrupting your memory. And and like who hasn't had a hard time trying to learn something new when you're stressed out.

Right. It's so tough. It makes it so much harder and takes so much longer. It's like, so, so when I guess what I what I described in the book is if we take a nervous system first approach, then we can avoid those situations entirely by curating our environment to favor nervous system states that are more vagal, more slow, more soothing that help the body remember that it's safe enough to learn. And then all of a sudden learning becomes a flow and it's fun. And the whole point of the stuff is it's supposed to be fun. That's why we are doing it fun and useful, right? Yeah. Now to bring this back to the research that you were doing with the with the vets and and PTSD.

So a lot of these insights came from that work and what we're what were some of the the unlocks there that you saw were effective in the treatment of those patients and that you now see can be effective basically for everyone that's experiencing if if I might take the take the metaphor a step further, they were all experiencing a little bit of low level PTSD in our daily lives. For sure. Yeah. Even if just think about like the effect that COVID and social distancing had on us, right? Like that in some ways is a is a body remembering trauma response. And so yeah, I mean, it has a it has a lot of effects on us that we don't realize it affects decision making and affects how open we are and how we feel at parties.

And I think in our patients with PTSD, these people were so they've been even though they had basic training and they had these are all almost all people that served in the military even and many of them who were had incredible levels of skill that they had built up over the years to cope with stress. And then coming back home, they couldn't they couldn't adjust back to civilian life. And many of them had been struggling in like the system and thrown the kitchen sink at these people and they were still 80% of them were never achieving anything close to remission. And so I started to wonder if the you know, if we're talking about the safety and fear learning thing like PTSD, for all intents and purposes in science is considered to be a fear learning disorder.

Like that's you have a really threatening, frightening experience. And then you don't you're something about that or lack of support, re emphasizes that you weren't safe during that experience. And you probably did something to result in yourself not being safe and potentially harming yourself and or harming yourself. And then you develop victim mindset and over time that leads to can lead to symptoms of PTSD at a very high rate. And so I thought, you know, all of these illnesses have a physiological correlate, you know, these people are living in a fear state, perhaps we can just measure easily the the simple signature of what the body is saying fear looks like.

Right. And in 20 years earlier, Rachel, who had discovered this epigenetic relationship between trauma and the cortisol receptor gene that was really fascinating research and show that having traumatic experiences changes your cortisol receptor gene function, which is bad. And that's what gets passed down epigenetically over time that predicts future development of mental illness in animals and humans. And so I was thinking, well, if this, you know, this is changing the cortisol receptor system and, you know, fear and learning, fear and safety learning have variable effects like on the epigenetic code, then maybe we can track things like Vegas nerve activity, the first, you know, sign that the safety response nervous system is on or off or that the fear response for fight or flight is too high or too high and then start to track signs of that over time and in the lab.

And so we started to look at HRV heart rate variability, which is one of the early easy to measure through your to your apple watch or or ring or Fitbit or Garmin, any of these devices do it and gather data and through EKG, which is a gold standard to measure your heart rate rhythm, which is a reflection of your Vegas nerve activity. And when you're and it turned out that when I looked at the data and saw what across the board had been published around PTSD and heart rate variability, it was shown in every study that people with PTSD had super duper low heart rate variability, like the lowest of the low, other than people who were taking beta blockers where their heart is not even is biochemically being told it can't vary.

Right. So these people were like super low across the board. And that's a sign that Vegas nerve activity is low and fight or flight nervous system activity is really high all the time. And we're talking like 10 milliseconds low, like really low. And there were studies that even showed that the lower your heart rate variability, the less likely you were to achieve remission. And the worse your symptoms were likely to be. And the higher your heart rate variability and in PTSD and other conditions, the more likely you were to achieve success and treatment. And does the general population have lower heart rate variability now than they used to?

I mean, it just started being measured. So we've had this we've had this measure since the 1960s. It wasn't really it wasn't really adopted into medicine at all for decades. And then it came into cardiology, I think, in like the 1990s. And now it's finally coming into Western medicine. Now it's still not integrated yet. But now it's being talked about in the public because all the wearable trackers collect it. And there's some really great studies on it. Right. Right. Right. But that's a sign that that Vegas nerve activity is is is really, really important. And it has direct impact now on longevity, right?

Like everybody's talking about doing all these like in, you know, in some cases, a very useful, but in general, like very expensive longevity hacks and procedures. And this the one of the things that has the highest likelihood of increasing your longevity based on the clinical data we have to date is doing things that increase your Vegas nerve activity, which include soothing things, soothing smells, soothing tastes, soothing visuals, like lots of sunsets and forests and streams and and soothing sounds and listening to your nice music more often and soothing people and just doing things that generally soothe the body and remind you that you're safe is decreasing fight or flight nervous system activity, which is decreased by by reminding us doesn't need to be active, which is decreasing inflammation throughout the entire body because inflammation is how that system operates the fight or flight system and increases inflammation over time, which is what ultimately causes, contributes to disease.

And so that is, you know, effectively, how we can understand the relationship with the Vegas nerve, which is what all of these ancient traditions do. They boost Vegas nerve activity every single one. Acupuncture, yoga, meditation, mindfulness, deep slow, you know, deep breathing exercises, all of these things boosted immediately or they boosted over time. Yes. And that's because they work. Right. And so what I'm what I'm hearing to sum sum up a little bit is that the we live now, some of us feel like we're working 24 seven because we're constantly getting notifications of various kinds. And even if you're not working all the time, you're getting all these notifications from your social media, your phone is always dinging that are always pulling at your attention.

And some proportion of these are being registered as threats over time. We start to raise anxiety levels. This heart variability goes down. And that is this prevailing anxiousness that is throughout the the population due to this ambient terror. And the way to make progress counter to that are these different things that sued the body, sued the Vegas nerve to bring us back to an actual peaceful state. And this might be a good time to talk about the wellness industry, because I feel like wellness, the wellness movement started there with what you're talking about with with meditation and some of these more, more Eastern, ancient practices.

And it was about soothing, although as it got tied into optimization, personal optimization, it almost became like a I need to meditate, I need to meditate better than the next guy. And if I'm not meditating, right, then I need to meditate harder. Right. It really, it almost went 180 degrees from where the intention originally was. Yeah, let's let's go. Let's go down that track a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think the this happens a lot because we're competing on the wrong playing field, like we don't have, we need to have healthy competition in our lives. That's important. And that's what sports are about, right?

And like billiards and foosball and like all these like fun things that we do where we compete in like safe, fun ways. That's important and really healthy. That's like a don't play. This episode of the Nick Stanley show is brought to you by Zapier. If you've ever felt buried in repetitive work, copying data, moving files, sending follow-ups, you know, it's like death by a thousand mouse clicks. Zapier has always been the tool that fixes that connects over 8000 apps who will drive slack, notion, Gmail, MySpace, you name it, your tools can finally play nice together. But here's the big shift. Zapier now lets you create AI agents with their chat GPT integration.

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So if you're ready to stop wasting time on busy work, join the AI revolution and make a little automation magic of your own. Try the Zapier chat GPT integration using the link below. So that's healing in itself. That is also boosting Vegas nerve activity. And and that nervous system in balance I was talking about earlier, and which is what we often call chronic stress is what I describe in the book as ambient ambient terror, because it's like your nervous system is perceiving literal terror at all times. And well, it's white so hard to wake up most of the time, why it's so hard to wind down much of the time into focus and why ADHD is becoming one of the most commonly diagnosed things in adults and children, because stress, whether even if it comes from your iPhone, increases the likelihood of distraction and poor concentration.

And that's going to make it look like you have ADHD when you do not, you actually have a social media or smartphone addiction. But the point being that you it's not that you just developed a disorder, it's that you started interacting unintentionally with a very powerful piece of technology that if you don't use it correctly, it can hijack your attention and take over your life, right? Like social like social media is extremely powerful. We've seen it in so many children now. But yeah, I think it's the idea that like, you know, how do we do the thing? How do we remember that like the ancient origins of what it means to be human, which are still just as true now as they were 10, 30, 40, 50,000 years ago, when we first came into the earth and existence, those same rules still exist.

So the science now shows that those rules exist. And thank goodness we have the patience of Eastern and tribal traditions to help, you know, guide us along the way, despite our our resistance. But what's so cool is that today, now we are actually like so lucky and blessed to be living in a world where science has fully proven a much of spirituality and these ancient indigenous traditions to a level where we don't really need to have parts of our brains allocated to doubting those things anymore. We can start to actually engage with them meaningfully as if they are real, rather than continuing to just give them no time of day because we don't understand.

Like you don't you don't need to understand. All you need to understand is that it's real and it works if you do it correctly. You don't have to understand how a bike works to ride it. Right. So we just have to that's what we're what we're trying to get to is like the root of some of those cognitive distortions that result from a fear response because we're afraid of newness when we're stressed out, right? Our fear or our fight or flight system is is hyper sensitized because of the smart of smart phone technology and screens, which is what happens to the nervous system. And then it's more likely to miss appropriate threat or effectively perceive actual threat where there is no actual threat.

Yeah. And that's why that's a slippery slope that gets us into into illness. So when we start to it's all about noticing mindfulness, mindfulness, awareness, presence, being alive is just about noticing what's happening and without having to do anything about it. And then once you notice what happens, you can start to feel the feelings first that come up from noticing what's happening. And then feel them for a little bit, maybe 60, 120 seconds, get the message they're trying to send you, then then you can think about it and actually interpret it for what it really means. But we've been taught the fear response, which is respond with judgment.

That feeling's bad. I'm not supposed to feel that. What's wrong with me that I'm feeling that, right? It's not okay to feel that maybe because that's what we were taught. And that's not the way it is. Just because we were taught it because we didn't know at the time doesn't mean that's what science has now proven it's not consistent. So we need to update. And that particular update of experience feel, then think, then act is fundamentally important as an order of operations for human existence. That is super simple when most of our mistakes come from experience, think, act, think, act, think, act, no feel.

The feeling is just left out. And then the emotions get stuck in us. And then they can't get out and they feel terrible and that's anxiety. It's our emotions literally knocking the door trying to get our attention. You know, right. Well, and I know your friends with Dr. Michael Jove, the sports psychologist who he's been on the show as well. I'm a huge fan of his love, Michael, where he's brilliant, brilliant and just a great person. And one of the things he and I keyed on, I mentioned how it was a huge shift for me at work when I learned to make friends with anxiety, because the what I discovered was that when I was anxious at night, I needed to like sit with that feeling for a little bit.

And not so much just like you, as you just said, not think through it or solve it, just sit with it for a little bit. And when I would do that, especially if there was a little bit of meditation involved, something inevitably would pop into my head that I needed to go explore at work. And almost every time I would uncover that something was not as it was intended to be or something was wrong. And it was this real shift for me when I realized when when I feel anxiety that there's some part of my brain that has processed, hey, you have this goal here in the future. And there's this piece of it that's not moving towards that it might be moving in direct opposition to it.

And that anxiety is the way that whether that's the subconscious or how this entire mechanism works together. Again, we don't need to understand in order to respond to it the right way. It's trying to get it up into the frontal cortex. Like there's something important you need to address. And man, like any sort of chronic anxiety was no longer an issue because it was actually this way to help identify the root causes of these things and go deal with what needed to be dealt with and then experience actual peacefulness rather than trying to fight the anxiety and be like, no, no, this is wrong. I need to feel peaceful right now because that's the way I want to feel if that makes sense.

Yeah, you can't you can't fight for peace. Yeah, you have to you have to achieve peace by remembering how to how to feel it peacefully. And it's about just, yeah, that's a perfect example. And I think it's just about, you know, reconnecting with when you reconnect with the sense of self that's always that's the part of the the us the real us that's just always here without having to do anything you realize that some really important stuff like you don't you don't have to do anything to be worthy of of presence or life like we can just we just are born that way. That's actually our default state.

And the state we're in is a state that is steered by the environment that we live in, in large part. And so it actually is a very hopeful story because that science is telling because it's a story that we have tremendous amounts more control over our bodies and our nervous systems and therefore our outcomes in life than we ever worked on or thought possible. And that's really cool. Like that's really exciting to know that there's basically no upper limit to how awesome we can be. It makes life a lot more fun to explore, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, this might be a nice time in terms of of being in control of our of our bodies and mental state and feeling awesome.

This I've got a for anyone who's listening, I have a device on my wrist, which is the Apollo device that Dr. Raybin created based on all the research that we've been talking about. Let's let's get into the story of how this how this device came into being and what it can can do for people. Sure. So, so as a translational neuroscientist, one of my goals was always to figure out how to take these discoveries about how important safety learning is because if PTSD is if I was still working with veterans and people with severe trauma and PTSD is a fear learning disorder, then the way you treat a fear learning disorder in every field of science, neuroscience is with safety by relearning safety, which extinguishes the fear learning.

And this is known to be a thing that is possible and reliably occurs in animal models in humans. And we've developed therapies around it and BF Skinner's, you know, and Pavlov's work around is just so common. And so knowing this, we wanted to figure out, you know, I really want to figure out how do we translate that knowledge into something that's practical for people because my patients are using vagus nerve stimulators. And I'm teaching them the breath work and I'm teaching them the mindfulness practices. And I'm teaching them all the all the best psychotherapy tools. And yet, even though when they do them, they work and they admit that they work, they they don't get better because they don't do them.

They don't do them regularly enough. Like you have to you have to be consistent and and, you know, increase your vagus nerve activity for at least 30 minutes a day every single day for it to really start to make a huge difference. And people weren't doing that even with something as simple as breathing for five minutes a day, five minutes of just breathing and not doing anything else people can do it. And so you think about that, right? It makes you think like, okay, there's got to be, you know, we can blame people for not doing it or get upset at them. Doesn't really work. Or we can try to help them figure out ways to fit these things into our lives, which is what we're doing.

Or we could just develop technology that helped to get to the root cause of why it was so hard to learn these things. Because by hitting the nervous system first, and saying and reminding them that they're safe enough to learn. Right. And if we could boost vagus nerve activity, rather than training them top down brain to body to increase nervous system, like Vegas nervous system activity with their thoughts and their actions, which requires effort, what if we just boosted their Vegas nervous system activity first, and then they felt well enough and balanced enough to start to go and do stuff on their own.

So that was kind of the core hypothesis. Could we do that with wearable technology? Because wearable technology, this is 2016, was getting pretty advanced. And so we started experimenting in the lab at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. And we had an amazing at the time soundproof shielded electromagnetically shielded room that was built. We called it the Prince lab because it had soundproofing that was purple sparkles and spikes, just like just like Prince. And he died around the time, I think that the lab was that lab was built. And we were big Prince fans and we could measure EEG, we could measure EKG, we could measure respiratory rate, physical movements, pupils, and eye movements, which are very important.

And lots of other things, a lecture like skin conductance and also responses to stress and how the entire body is responding to stress and reward and fear and sadness and every little different thing and all different kinds of music and vibrations, we could measure people reliably and watch their nervous systems change. And that was really a great opportunity to start to study how sound waves and vibration could actually shift the nervous system into states, because those are easily delivered through wearables and shift the nervous system into states that were like increased vagus nerve states that where resources are now going to the parts of our brain that favor learning.

And music really stood out for us because we had all my research group and I would all love music. Many of us played instruments growing up. And we all had this mutual recognition that when you hear your favorite song on a bad day, you instantly feel better. And almost everyone else does too. And that's never actually been really explained to anyone how that works. But it does for everyone. And that's really powerful. And so we thought, well, if we know that music can do this, and it looks like it's doing it through the vagus nerve, what if we could compose silent music for your body that is just bass rhythm vibration that's like in the frequencies below like 200 Hertz that are touch receptors respond to, and that they feel is soothing and start to send that to the body and see if we can boost vagus nerve activity in that way and help him improve symptoms of PTSD for these veterans, right?

That was the original goal. And when we did it across double blind randomized placebo controlled cross-center studies, it actually worked to improve vagus nerve activity, heart rate variability, and many other cognitive physical performance and recovery, and many other different really interesting things like sleep that we did not expect. And that became the Apollo technology, which is now first wearable ever proven to give you 46 minutes more sleep at night in a recent study with Aura and improve REM sleep just by putting it on, which is as much sleep improvement as prescription, the best prescription medicines we have available, but with outside effects and you get REM sleep improvement, which is the most important phase of sleep to improve.

So that was really, really exciting. And it's just like, this is the power of not now we can look at, again, this is a study of like 450,000 people over three years wearing art, Apollo technology and ordering. And we're able to show that people are having this level of sleep improvement just by putting something on, no effort other than just charge it and put it on and wear it to bed. And this is how much improvement you're going to get. And that is just by calming the body and increasing base neuroactivity with ocean wave, like soothing sound vibrations that you feel that feel kind of like getting a hug or snuggling a pet.

And you just have a little bit of that gently in the background more often. And our nervous systems respond that much better over time. So that was the that's kind of the summary of the great discovery that we were very blessed to make because in research and science, almost everything you do fails. So it's really exciting to have something that actually works and it helped like hundreds of thousands of people. Yeah, no, it's incredible. Question on the on the device, because I have now been wearing it for a little while and I've gotten used to it. But at first, when I put it on, especially during the day, I felt like my phone was buzzing, right?

Because it does have a vibration, which would be like, oh, I got to check my phone. Has anyone else mentioned that that sensation? Just at least initially now, I for whatever reason, I've gotten used to it just being on my person. And I differentiate between the two the two things. And I do find it to be calming in a very subtle, subtle way that I wouldn't I wouldn't even point it out. It's just I kind of notice it. It's been on for an hour or whatever. And I just noticed I'm like, Oh, I'm in the I'm in the flow right now. Oh, I bet that's connected to just having this subtle stimulation of the vagus nerve.

But I was just curious, maybe brought up the phone connection to that. Yeah, it's just it's usually because your Apollo vibration is turned up too loud. Okay. So you just need to turn it down more. Okay, it's meant it's meant to be extremely subtle and gentle and really fade into the background. Like, it's that's what it's designed to do. Yeah, because we don't want to take you away from being present. It's not something that's suppose you're supposed to be focused on. Right. It's something that helps keep your body in in flow and supported for aligned with your goals and without you having to pay attention to it.

Because if you have to pay attention to it, then it defeats whole purpose. Right. So so you just turn it down. You won't have that experience anymore. Okay, well, good. Good to know I was I was doing it the the way the way so many of us do it, which was I was just going to power through it and got used to it. But okay, and I even know that you say that in the in the phone, you can just slide the intensity down and and with the buttons, right? Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah, my favorite is I don't even use my phone. I try not to use my phone as much as possible. Sure. I did, you know, this button turns it up, this button turns it down and you can play and pause by tapping them.

Okay, together. So then you can disconnect, you can save your smart vibes AI schedule on your wearable and just charge it once a day when you shower. And it will run automatically without your phone around wherever you are for as long as you just charge it once a day on your AI schedule. God, you can sync your data once a week if you want, and it will update the AI. Yeah, and a couple of things I really like about it. One, there's not it's not like the a lot of the wearables that come back with, Hey, we measured these 87 different metrics and and then you've suddenly you're caught up in the gamification of it of like, I got to improve all those metrics, which has the opposite effect of of what we want.

And I just thought the packaging was beautiful. I mean, you know, you naturally I hear, you know, okay, professor came up with a wearable. I imagined it to be effective, but the it felt like opening a apple product, right? Like it was just and every little word was in the right place and there was a lot of white space in it. It was just a very nice experience opening that product and then all the way through using it. And I know that is not easy to do and to end and make it just just smooth for the random customer. And so so well done there. And I just think it's a phenomenal product. My my experience with it has been has been great.

Oh, thank you. I'm so, so glad to hear that. That's why we do it. You know, this is really, really, really hard wearable, wearable hardware startup companies are so, so hard. And we do this because it helps people live better lives like it did for us. And it's just it's changed so many lives, you know, it is one of those things where I started to see the effects from for people where they were like, so, so depressed that they couldn't work. And then they start using Apollo for like a month and they're working again, you know, or spending time with their families again, or they're taking their stopping certain medications with their doctor because they don't need them anymore, including things like blood pressure medications and things that were making them so tired that they couldn't work.

And then all of a sudden they're able to get jobs again, right? And it's like seeing those actual people and then they call me and reach out and send us, you know, their, send us their their experiences and it's in my patients. It's just so rewarding to know that if we if we really use technology intentionally, like this is the proof point for me that I was trying to prove to myself as a bigger like lifelong experiment is that I don't believe that technology is actually evil or bad, you know, it's it's about it's a tool and the impact of using a tool and the outcome from using a tool is has a lot more to do with how we use that tool than we were taught.

And tools are agnostic to the outcomes. So so we really need to think about, you know, and my experiment was if you intentionally use technology that even technology already exists, like the iPhone, can you change people's lives in a healthy, exciting, healing way? Can you and so we in 2025, we spent three years at that point hacking the iPhone to deliver Apollo vibes to the iPhone. And it's a much lighter experience with no fancy AI that you get with the wearable. But when you feel Apollo vibrations coming out of your iPhone, ideally in airplane mode, you're you can just feel that for two minutes on your chest and close your eyes and you will increase your heart rate variability, you will increase your vagus neuroactivity, you will increase your mood, your energy, your focus.

And you could just give yourself a hit from your iPhone as often as you want. Now using an existing technology that actually increases your health today, you can increase your health with your phone rather than doing what most people do, which is always decrease, right? Like it's a total paradigm shift. But that's like the proof point for me is like, we can use technology to help people heal and help the world heal in an incredibly powerful way. We're not thinking about because it's long, requires long term thinking, not just like what's going to give my dopamine spike right now, it's mostly money, you know, we can actually like heal the world of technology.

And like in last year 2025, we gave the world back with Apollo 143 million minutes of sleep. So we don't track your data. That's 273 years of sleep that we gave back to the world. That is just from people using Apollo. And we don't show you data, we just show you your your sleep pattern. And we show you your and we show you how many minutes of sleep you get back every night from using Apollo, because we track your sleep. And so we can rather than just show you information that you're supposed to act on, you have to act on anything, you can just, you know, look at your app and update it and walk away with a certainty of knowing that you at least gain something by using this tool last night.

And then you can look over the week and see, you know, you can gain like a whole night of sleep back every week. Like that's what I've been getting now for the last year, which I can't tell you how life changing that is for my energy and focus and ability, you know, to do all the things that I do, which is a shit ton of things. Yeah, one year old and startups and clinics and internationally lecturing and like writing books and all of it. Like, it's a lot, but I love it. And when you're one year old at home, you kind of slipped that in there, but that's that's a full time job all in of itself right there.

Yeah, it's like, but this is I never knew that I could achieve at this level as a kid. Like, I wasn't taught and I could do this. I was taught to be curious about whether it was possible. And that was really, really important. And being safe enough to play and safe enough to be curious is all comes from Vegas nerve activating experiences. And connection is one of those things that doesn't automatically right spending quality time together with other people that you trust helps to immediately cultivate a sense of safety and not without fear that you're going to be judged for being you. Yeah. Yeah.

And so like, that's one of the biggest things that's missing from our society. And I firmly believe that if we take a nervous system approach as a community and start to understand these concepts and teach them better, we can eradicate loneliness in the next 10 years. We can eradicate loneliness like we eradicated smallpox in the 1800s. Now, what are the what are the steps there to eradicate loneliness? We have to teach people that science shows that we are all the same first before we are different. We are nine you and I are 99.9% the same. Yeah. And the audience. Yeah. We are 40% the same as banana in genetic DNA code.

Right. We're all just expression different expressions of the same code, but it's the same code. And just because we are live, we have infinitely more in common than we do different. And when we start to approach each other and the world from the perspective of and the standpoint of common ground and similarity first common ground and similarity signals familiarity to the brain. And familiarity turns the meaning and positive emotional experience parts of the brain on the whole safety part of the vagus nerve. Whereas unfamiliar signals uncertainty, which turns on the fight or flight nervous system and shuts down learning and connection and vagus nerve activity.

So these so like some of these things we've lost like connection are so, so important to bring back like division is the enemy. Division is the enemy. Any systems that are set up to divide us as human beings are antithetical to survival of the human species. They are actually, what's the word that we call like espionage, but from the inside of human society, because they are engaging in behavior that increases our likelihood of individual and collective destruction. Like our entire political system. In a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, the current state just may it feels like it's been it's it's focused on dividing us rather than bringing us together.

And I think we haven't had so it's interesting now and I don't I'm not going to lay like blame or fault. The point is that what's interesting now is that we know that science has come up with a solution for what to do about it. Yeah, right? Like we never had solutions from science for these kinds of problems before like politics, right? But when you think about science is now showing that yes, in fact, we are all coming from the same DNA. We are all more similar than we are different and we know that connection and familiarity and coming together and collective collaborative adaptation is single handedly some of the most important things required for survival of individual individually and of our species.

Then those things need to be automated as the new default that we prioritize and then everything else stems from there. And everything else is like infinite potentially self actualization and you know, all of the things that people aspire to as human beings because once you feel if you're performing from a place of fear or insecurity or anxiety, your performance is going to achieve maybe 10% of what your capacity is because you're capped by your stress response system being activated the same time. If you're performing from a standpoint of safety, you can achieve 100% of your potential. You don't have limits by your nervous system.

Your nervous system doesn't have a governor on your speed of how amazingly fast you can perform. You can potentially explore and achieve who knows what. So that's what that's what this is really about. If you find yourself guessing at your kids college odds, know that it doesn't have to be that way. There's a website you pick a college, any four-year college in the country, type in your students GPA and their SAT or ACT score, and you get to see their odds built from that college's own published admissions data. Change the score, watch the results change. You can look up any high school in the country as well to see their results at getting kids into the UCs.

It's free. It's called reach and you can get there at www high school reach dot com. Yeah, I mean, it seems that we all want to be high achievers and yet not pay the price of living in a constant SAT of fight or flight in order to be the high achiever. And what you're talking about here, I mean, really the book, I mean, a simple guide to being alive is talking about techniques to balancing those two things and how we can achieve the goals we want to go achieve while also finding a sense of peace and that psychological safety is key to bridging those two things. Well, it's psychological safety and it's also physiological safety.

Oh, that's a better way to put it. Yeah. Which is safety in your body. It's embodied safety. It's the feeling that many of us don't really remember very well, but we do remember it when we get a really nice big hug from a loved one we really trust. Or when we're like at the beach at sunset and the waves is warm out and the gentle breeze like is cooling us down at the same time that the sunlight, last of sunlight is like setting as ocean waves are gently lapping over feet. Or that you're like snuggling a pet. Or you know, those kinds of experiences, mother rocking newborn baby and nursing and you yourself as a newborn baby for the first time are like again, hard wired in trained safety response nervous system pathways that will always be there that are always there and they're never going away.

We just don't nourish them enough. We don't utilize them because we were in many cases, these nervous system pathways were discriminated against, right? Devenized and said that they're self-indulgent because they provide too much joy. We'll fuck whoever said that. We now know that joy is healing. We know now that having orgasms once a week is one of the best ways to live a long healthy life. Amen to that. Do you know that study? No, no. Tell me more. Oh my God, Nick, I can't believe more people are talking about this. I'm a psychiatrist. So for me, I just like love when interesting studies happen that talk about public health in a funny light.

So this study showed, it came out, I don't know, maybe five years ago and it was a massive population wide study and it showed that people have sex at least once a week compared to people of sex, like maybe a few times a year, have a 50% decrease in all cause mortality when they when they achieve climax as part of that, especially 50% decrease in all cause mortality. Wow. That is insane. Yeah. This should be on the news everywhere. But for some reason, it's not. Who cares? We need to be talking about it because like that's more of a longevity improvement, even the Vegas nervous system improvement activity.

That's like, and of course sex and orgasm boosts the Vegas nerve. But like that is equal to that's like 50% is across cancer, car accidents, suicide, heart disease, diabetes, everything, all costs, overdose, everything, people. And so you have to wonder like, why, how could that have such a tremendous impact? It's because it's one of the most powerful, selfless, like, you know, biggest nerve system activating experiences and safe experiences of profound vulnerability with another human being that we ever have in our entire lives, right? And it's profoundly calming afterwards as a result, which is turns out to be really important.

And that results in less impulsive decision-making when we're calm and less desire to numb or distract ourselves from our discomfort, because we're able to think more clearly, because we're calm and our nervous system is balanced by having sex once a week, right? Like public health crisis avoided, right? We can save millions, people millions of dollars, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars by just like recognizing that this is a public health message. This is not a be per miscuous message. It's a, you know, try to restructure your life, whether you have a partner or not, or to try to find a partner in such a way that you can get your minimum health needs safely.

Matt. Yeah, yeah. We're going to make that into a short and we're going to make it go viral. So everybody, here's this message. That's priority one. Why do you think that message hasn't traveled yet? Because that seems like an easy message to that people can get on board with right there. Yeah, you would think so. I mean, old habits die hard, right? Like think about the amount of generational trauma and generational learned behavior has been passed down from the church and from puritanical traditions over the last several, you know, or last couple thousand years, yeah, right? That is pervasive, pervasively demonizes sex, even though everybody accepts that we all emerged from sex, right?

We could not exist without sex, but because it's vulnerable, requires a tremendous amount of vulnerability to experience fully. It's hard to talk about it's uncomfortable to talk about it gives you like a lot of people, the willies in the belly, you know, so like, but that's something we have to learn to get to overcome and to mature, get mature enough to like talk about these hard things and medicine is as guilty as a field of struggling to talk about hard things as much as any like good doctors will do it because we're taught to, but in large cases, like sexual health is not near and nutrition, but sexual health in particular is not given like anywhere near the emphasis in training as it should given the level of importance it has in people's lives.

And I think like we need to, we need to fix that and it starts with understanding this not from like an abstinence only lens, which is kind of like the more of the ultra religious approach, because they think that's if that doesn't work and when people are gonna people are gonna fucking use drugs, like that's what they do. Like you can't stop people from doing it. It's just what they do. So rather than trying to stop it, which obviously does not work, why don't we teach them how to do it safely? So that's my motto. That's my pitch. I think that is a grounded, sensible approach in general. And I think that's what we're gonna title this episode right there.

Yeah. And yeah, I think I've got a couple of episodes coming with sex therapists. And I thought it was really interesting. I just had one conversation just, what was it, the three or four days ago? And Dr. Jen, we were talking about Perry Menopause with women in their in their 40s and their 50s and then getting into actual menopause. But like the Perry Menopause, which is this often 10 year period before actual menopause, which has been really gone unexamined by Western medicine as to as to what's happening and what we can do about it. And there are wonderful treatments for it. And one of the things that came up on the conversation was, well, hormone replacement therapy, especially with estrogen is shown overwhelmingly for women who are in the midst of Perry Menopause to improve their sex lives, which then spreads to all areas of their lives and helps reduce all of these various symptoms.

So, you know, one way or another, we're getting this message out on the health and benefits of Yeah, regular safe intimacy and sexual intercourse. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And seeing like, you know, just I just want people to take away if they take away nothing else, like the Vegas nerve activity, activities that boost that, you know, including orgasm are actually, you know, at least once a week, at least we can show that are extremely helpful to improving your health. So like, the more is is not complicated, you know, like, like the example you just gave, it's not, these are not complicated to in ideas to engage with.

Once we actually understand what they are trying to say, it's not hard, but it requires us to commit to understanding it and integrating it into our knowledge base of how we are now going to decide that we approach the world. There's an amazing movie about this called Don Juan DeMarco. Have you seen it? I am not. It is Marlon Brando's last film that is about Marlon Brando playing a psychiatrist and it's one of Johnny Depp's early films. Okay. And he plays the patient and it is just one of the most brilliant masterpieces I've ever seen. Francis Ford Coppola directed it and I can't tell you anything more.

You have to just watch it. But it really describes this idea that we're talking about very well. Oh, I love it. And it's really funny. Humor is so powerful also. Don't give that enough attention. You know, let's, let's touch on that real quick, because we're really just getting down to the, like, the basics of having an enjoyable life here is where we're ending up. I mean, what role does humor play there? I mean, humor is like the escape valve, pressure escape valve. You know, it's like, it's a, it's a moment where if you're safe, if you're safe enough to laugh, your nervous, your brain can't be confused that you're running from a lion in that moment, or you're out of air or water or food.

Like, it's a way to remind yourself and experience, or remind yourself and other people, because laughter is extremely contagious, which is awesome, right? That you're safe enough to feel good and just be present taking in the moment. And, and it's also, and then, you know, we could talk more about how we have more time, like, why, but, the, but it results in an increase also in Vegas nerve activation that is probably, you know, if considered like orgasm is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, single macarodose, natural macarodose moments of, of Vegas nerve boosting healing benefit you get, then, you know, the, what we're, the what we were just talking about, you know, is probably like, just below that level of effect, but extremely powerful.

Yeah, I thought that comes to mind, there's a gentleman that's a man, he, very successful in the world of business, especially high stakes negotiations. And he is one of the funniest people I have ever met. And I have had the pleasure of listening to him on the phone in, when dealing with major mergers where there is a lot of money on the line, there are jobs on the line. And that is when he is at his funniest, right? I mean, he can get in all the important points and then crack a joke. And it relieves all this tension. And I think that is the secret to his success is to be able to walk both of those because then everybody calms down and can think clearly again.

And it's, and they're not in that ramped up state of which way is this going to go? Is it going to be, yes, it's going to be a no, and that little bit of laughter that relief valve makes all the difference. Yeah, I haven't you had times where you've been with a group of people, maybe so if you don't know, and then you all have like a good laugh about something or a joke together, and then you're instantly, ice is broken, you feel like connected and you like more of a whole than rather than individuals. Right. Yeah, so that's like the power of laughter. All of these things, gratitude, also super powerful practice and experience that we can do all the time, starting by just saying, thank you to someone else or something else or to yourself.

Right. And that's another one that's positively retraining, rewiring your nervous system for safety, because you're taking time out to appreciate something rather than taking time out to fear that thing. Absolutely. I mean, and I know we need to wind this down in a second because you have many things going on. I'm sure you and I could easily talk all day on the gratitude thing though, because I am such a big proponent of this one. I many years ago when I had the pleasure of sitting in class for Dr. Chek sent me high, who I ended up working for for a number of years, the author of Flow, and he had a class on happiness and came to a number of similar conclusions and would love the research and the work that you're doing today, first of all.

But I asked him one of the first couple of classes, just if there's one thing everybody could do to just feel a little bit better and have a little bit happier lives. What would you say? And he thought about it for a long time. And he said, once a week at dinner, whoever you're sitting there having a meal with, I would just go around and name one or two things that you're grateful for. And if you establish that as a practice once a week, you're going to feel better. You're going to feel more calm and be able to do more of the things you want to do. Yeah. Yeah, it's proven now. Also, gratitude practice has been proven to improve your quality of life and your mood and your energy level in massive scientific studies repeatedly.

So this is like, again, no, no, no, no, no screaming here. I just I just wish I could call him and be like, and Mike, you should have said crack more jokes and have more sex. Right. Hey, better, better to know at some point than never. That's right. That's right. David Raven, the book is a simple guide to being alive. Also creator of the Apollo device. Dr. Raven, if somebody wants to find all of your work and everything you're doing online and find the Apollo device, where do we where do we go for all this good stuff? So if you can, I mean, you can find me and everything else at drdave.io, which is my personal professional website and then I'll direct everywhere else.

And you can find the book at a simple guide to being alive.com or a simple.guide should also work. And you can find Apollo at Apollo neuro.com or wearable hugs.com, which is what the kids call it. And I'm on socials at Dr. David Raven. If you check out any of my stuff and you like what I teach and you learn something new and it helps you let me know. I'd love to hear from you if there's stuff you want to hear about also let me know because, you know, teaching is something I love like you, right? It's like such a such a great way to connect with people. Absolutely. And we will put all of those links in the show notes.

So anybody that is looking for it, if you're listening to this in the car and need to find it later, it will all be there in the show notes and connect directly to all of that good stuff. Dr. Raven, thank you so much for your time and insights today. My pleasure. Thanks, Nick. Okay, everybody until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious.