Latest / Gladden Longevity Podcast / Your Nervous System Has an Age and You Probably Don't Want to Know It - Episode 330
Transcript
- 0:00What do you think your nervous system age is relative to your chronological age of 29?
- 0:04With my anxiety levels, probably about 50.
- 0:07What is a stress threat test and how do you decipher it?
- 0:13He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook.
- 0:19Dr.
- 0:19Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30 and he's got the science to back it up.
- 0:24This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
- 0:27I'm Carlos.
- 0:28I'm 29 years old.
- 0:29Wow.
- 0:30Until recently.
- 0:31So is this you driving or are you just running out in front of cars or what happened?
- 0:35One was a four wheeler.
- 0:36crashed pretty nasty.
- 0:37Another one was a bike I slid on uh gravel.
- 0:42and I hit the pole going like 40 and I cracked.
- 0:45I got a concussion.
- 0:46This is a motorcycle?
- 0:47Yeah.
- 0:48Yeah.
- 0:48Cracked my head.
- 0:49got five accidents.
- 0:51Three of them were pretty bad.
- 0:52Well, all right.
- 0:54Well, we're glad you're here.
- 0:55So Carlos, let's, let's run through your report and I'm here looking at your nervous system age.
- 1:00What do you think your nervous system age is relative to your chronological age of 29?
- 1:05With my anxiety levels, probably about 50.
- 1:07About 50.
- 1:08Okay.
- 1:09Well, I have good news for you.
- 1:10It's 28 actually.
- 1:12So.
- 1:12So that's good stuff.
- 1:13So let's look at this here.
- 1:15What we're looking at is we're looking at heart rate variability.
- 1:19So this is really a very good look at heart rate variability.
- 1:22Heart rate variability is not whether your heart rate goes from 50 to 100 when you're running up the stairs.
- 1:28That's not what heart rate variability is.
- 1:30Heart rate variability is the variation in the distance between this beat compared to that beat.
- 1:36So there's a distance between these two beats, either time or distance.
- 1:40And it should be a little bit different here than it is here.
- 1:42And the more different it is, the more relaxed your nervous system is.
- 1:47So the more parasympathetic, calm, relaxed, zen tone that you have in the nervous system.
- 1:53The more sympathetic nervous system you have, the more everybody's marching in time.
- 1:58The bears coming through the door, everybody marches in time.
- 2:01When the general leaves, everybody relaxes.
- 2:03like, well, we'll beat now, we'll beat now, we'll beat when we want to, right?
- 2:07And so that's relaxation.
- 2:09So when we look at your stress index here, it falls at 94.
- 2:12Normal range would be between 10 and 100.
- 2:15So you're falling within the normal range.
- 2:17We have many clients in here that are much higher than the normal
- 2:20because they're carrying a lot of stress.
- 2:22You're carrying less stress.
- 2:23We also have people that are down to 30 or 40, which would be even better because they're actually carrying even less stress.
- 2:29And we know that stress is really an accelerant for aging.
- 2:33So the more we can actually be in a relaxed state, not only when we're meditating or relaxing or listening to music or something, but as we go through the entire day, go into
- 2:44that relaxed state, that becomes super, super helpful.
- 2:46So the flip side of that coin, stress, would be the vegetative index.
- 2:50How zen are you?
- 2:52And the heart rate variabilities get plotted here.
- 2:54So you can see the scattergram is like this, but people that are even more zen, the scatter on these distances will be even greater, right?
- 3:02You're at .32, which is in the normal range of .25 to .6, and that's great.
- 3:07We have a lot of people that are lower than that, but we also have people that are higher than that, closer to 60, okay?
- 3:12So that's what the first page is showing us.
- 3:14The second page.
- 3:15is showing us a breakdown here of the power that you have in your vagus nerve, in the nervous system to control your internal organs, to control stress if you will.
- 3:26And we know that we can increase power here.
- 3:28You're at 2272.
- 3:29We'd like to see it between 2385 and 4545.
- 3:33So you're a little bit low on vagus nerve tone power.
- 3:36And there's two ways to build that.
- 3:38One is with extended cardio.
- 3:40builds it, you know, like a marathon runner runs a really slow heart rate because they got a lot of parasympathetic vagal tone, right?
- 3:46Or meditation using a device like BrainTap with the visor and the binaural beats will actually increase this power here.
- 3:53We also have people that come in that are much lower 200, 400, 600, 800.
- 3:58And then we have people that are at 4,000, 6, 8, 10, 12, even 14,000.
- 4:03So it's possible to build massive power inside the nervous system to keep yourself calm.
- 4:08And that really slows the aging process.
- 4:11And it also works as a base from which you can rejuvenate and regenerate when you do regenerative technologies like peptides or stem cells or things like that.
- 4:19So building this becomes very important.
- 4:21This is a breakdown of your autonomic nervous system balance.
- 4:24So the red would be.
- 4:26the sympathetic, the gas pedal, the green would be parasympathetic or zen and the yellow is a mix.
- 4:31Ideally this would be a third red, a third green, and a third yellow.
- 4:34So you're carrying a little more stress than we would like to see here.
- 4:37And your balance index over here though looks quite good.
- 4:40You're at 135, you're in the normal range.
- 4:42The more blue this is, the better off you are.
- 4:45So that looks quite good.
- 4:46Neurohormonal index, so this is at 76%.
- 4:49This is having the sort of now intuiting.
- 4:52breaking into what are your adrenal glands experiencing?
- 4:55How much stress is chronic stress have you been under?
- 4:58And it's at 76.
- 4:59We have people that come in here at four, right?
- 5:01Six.
- 5:02We have people at 98 or 100 also.
- 5:04So you're at 76.
- 5:05And this is also improved with meditation, with brain tap.
- 5:09We see that improved significantly.
- 5:11And then energy resources.
- 5:12This is energy resources to control your nervous system.
- 5:15So on the sympathetic side, you have power and the parasympathetic side, you have less power.
- 5:19When you build power,
- 5:21up here these shoulders get really broad.
- 5:23It looks like you've almost got a brick wall.
- 5:26So you've got lots of power to help regulate the nervous system.
- 5:29And then your psycho-emotional state here is at 73%.
- 5:32So this is basically showing that you're able to regulate your nervous system really quite well.
- 5:38We have people that come in at 2 or 4%.
- 5:40We also have people that are at 99 or 100%.
- 5:44And then this is an EEG breakdown of your waveforms, which really looks quite good.
- 5:48You have good
- 5:49across the neurons, right?
- 5:51In every waveform, Delta for sleep, Theta for deep meditation, Alpha for meditation, Beta, what we're doing now, conversing, and Gamma would be a flow state.
- 5:59A little less Delta would be ideal, and since you've had a concussion, as you mentioned, this can be a result of that.
- 6:05Neuroinflammation, concussion, brain trauma, things like that.
- 6:08So this is something we could work on a little bit, but overall, it looks quite good.
- 6:12When we look at your fractal portrait of biorhythms here, this level of harmonization in your system's at 66%.
- 6:19Again, when you improve vagus nerve tone and increase that parasympathetic nervous system tone, this increases as well.
- 6:26This is showing that your biological age is one year younger than your chronological age.
- 6:31So that's great.
- 6:32And then cardiovascular adaptation, 66 percent, autonomic, 71 percent, neurohormonal, 76 and psychomotional, 73 percent.
- 6:40So these are the main findings that we would see.
- 6:42And what we find is that cardio exercise, meditation, using the brain tap,
- 6:48listening to binaural beats, all of those things seem to be helpful, but the brain tap itself, we see the fastest gains for people, right?
- 6:55This is where you have photobiomodulation going on in your eyes, going through the blood vessels in the ears, as well as binaural beats that actually entrain your brain into
- 7:04whatever waveform you want.
- 7:05You can put yourself in delta to fall asleep, theta for deep meditation, alpha for regular meditation, or you can put yourself in a flow state like gamma, then jump on your mountain
- 7:13bike and go for a ride and you'll be in a flow state.
- 7:16It's very, very cool.
- 7:17So really, I explain to people that all of life comes down to one thing, and it's actually optimizing the nervous system.
- 7:24What we think, what we believe is true, the stories we tell about ourselves, what we think is possible, how we move through space, our balance, how we regulate our emotions, our
- 7:35autonomic nervous system.
- 7:37Pretty much, that's pretty much the deal.
- 7:39If we control all that, then we have a beautiful life, right?
- 7:42So really, this is actually a good report.
- 7:45that you have some room to make it a great report.
- 7:48So any questions about that?
- 7:50No, this is how my nervous system is.
- 7:52Yeah, this is how your nervous system's aging.
- 7:55Yeah.
- 7:55Nice.
- 7:56Better than you thought.
- 7:57So what are some other things that people do to reduce their nervous system?
- 8:01You said meditate.
- 8:02Yeah, it's really perception, right?
- 8:05When you think about stress, stress is really a function of not feeling safe.
- 8:09You know, if you break it down, right, if you're worried about something, if you're anxious about something, if something is keeping you up at night, essentially it's about
- 8:17not feeling safe.
- 8:18So then the question becomes, well, how do I give myself safety, right, in any circumstance?
- 8:23And you have to understand that nothing external to you can ever make you feel truly safe, right?
- 8:28No amount of money, no family, no position, no business success, no education, none of that.
- 8:33All of that can be kind of erased, right?
- 8:35History shows us all that can be taken away.
- 8:37very quickly, right?
- 8:38So if that's the case, then how do we actually have ultimate safety?
- 8:42Well, actually for me, that's a psycho spiritual question, right?
- 8:45How do we feel connected?
- 8:47How do we feel connected to source?
- 8:48How do we feel good in our own skin?
- 8:50How do we understand who we are, why we're here?
- 8:53What's the meaning of all this, right?
- 8:54And once you dial into that, and then you actually learn how to meditate and regulate your nervous system, all of a sudden it's like, oh, I can go through the day and these are
- 9:04things that are happening.
- 9:06that everything is an opportunity, there are no longer any problems in my life.
- 9:10Everything is actually an opportunity.
- 9:11But when you start to look at it through a different lens, it's perception that really changes this.
- 9:16But having the power in the nervous system to back that up, it's like saying, well, I'm gonna go through life and believe that I'm a high jumper.
- 9:24Well, if you don't practice high jumping, you're not gonna be able to jump, right?
- 9:27And so you've gotta do the practice to back up the uh affirmation, right?
- 9:33And when you combine the power of the nervous system with the affirmation of the nervous system, now all of a sudden it's like, oh, I can be calm.
- 9:41Something can come, they can come in and say, look, something just happened.
- 9:44It's like, oh, well, that's an opportunity.
- 9:46Let's look at it through that lens.
- 9:47Not that's a crisis, that's a problem.
- 9:49It's not an, my goodness, right?
- 9:51And so when you start to actually work from that space, you find that you bring more creativity, more creative thought, better.
- 9:59problem solving, you actually calm the people around you simultaneously.
- 10:03You bring in energy that actually brings more relief, calm and solution solving thinking than if you come in and you're excited and everything is a hack.
- 10:13Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- 10:15Right.
- 10:15It just gets everybody revved up.
- 10:16So this is this is about controlling the nervous system.
- 10:19Yeah.
- 10:20And this is a good metric of how much power is in there, how it's impacting you.
- 10:24And then if you do the work both cognitively, how do I perceive the world?
- 10:28how am I, who am I, why am I here?
- 10:30And you do the work of, let me train the autonomic nervous system through brain tap, cardio exercise.
- 10:36Now you're putting together the pieces of the puzzle that enable you to actually develop that 300 year old mind.
- 10:42And that's magic.
- 10:43When you have a 300 year old mind, my gosh, everything else falls into place.
- 10:47It's pretty spectacular.
- 10:48It's one of the massive things that's missed in aging.
- 10:51Everybody focuses on the body when it's really the nervous system that's leading the charge when it comes to being youthful.
- 10:57Right.
- 10:58How you think I'm 27, right?
- 10:59You're 29.
- 11:00I'm younger than you.
- 11:01So, you know, my heart goes out to you, but we'll go mountain biking.
- 11:06I'll prove it to you.
- 11:08So if you're listening to this and you're intrigued by this and you'd like to try it, really have two options here.
- 11:14The first option is to do your best at home.
- 11:17Learn to meditate, transcendental meditation, maybe start to listen to some bionoral beats and do it in theta, which is a very deep meditative state.
- 11:26You can try that.
- 11:27You can start doing cardio exercise maybe five days a week to really stand for 30, 45, maybe an hour once or twice a week to really start to build that vagus nerve power.
- 11:36So you can do that at home with, you know, just almost nothing.
- 11:40On the other hand, if you really want to understand this and you really want to see what's going on, if you come to work with us, we can actually break down your genetics, how
- 11:47you're built, how you're built to handle stress.
- 11:50We can see things in your diet or whatever else, your gut biome that may be pushing you towards anxiety and towards stress that you have no clue about otherwise.
- 11:58We can see if you're a good candidate for caffeine, whether how you're affected by alcohol.
- 12:02We can see all the substrate that basically determines what we're seeing here on the paper.
- 12:07And then in addition to that, we can set you up with training tools like Brain Tap and other things that we can do here that actually we can reprogram the brain with.
- 12:15transgranular magnetic stimulation and relieve anxiety that way and stress that way.
- 12:19So there are many, many tools we have here in addition to just meditation that can be very, very effective.
- 12:25Doing what we just did here with Carlos, this is the data.
- 12:28This is really the data that you need to be able to understand where you are so that you actually have a plan to fix what's going on for you.
- 12:37And it's personalized.
- 12:38Yes, there are some general things that are for everyone.
- 12:41But when you get down into some of the other pieces, the genetics and the diet and the gut biome, those are very individual.
- 12:47And when you optimize those, you get a durable result, right?
- 12:50And that's what you're going for is something that's going to be a durable result, not just a quick fix, but how do I get something that's going to be long lasting so I can
- 12:58build on top of that for my own health and longevity?
- 13:01That's what we're going for.
- 13:02So 26, so add eight years, 34, right?
- 13:06So resilience is cut.
- 13:0842, resilience is cut.
- 13:0950, resilience is cut.
- 13:1158, 60, 66, 74.
- 13:14do you like, technically age every eight years?
- 13:17Yeah, so you're aging, but it's going down like this in an accelerating way.
- 13:23And so one of the things we want to do here is to build cellular resilience, build cellular strength.
- 13:28And so super important, so to be able to have a look at, okay, well, where are things and how much energy are your cells able to hold, which we don't get from this test, but we get
- 13:36from the in-body.
- 13:37They don't even put that on their machines anymore.
- 13:40and wanted to know if we wanted to buy a new in-body, we said, well, does it have hope?
- 13:43No, we took it off.
- 13:44It was like, well, we're fine with the one we have because it's such a nice little metric, right?
- 13:48And we combine all these things together.
- 13:50It's important to understand that each test is a lens.
- 13:53There's no one test that gives you all the answers, right?
- 13:56Each test is a lens.
- 13:57And it's a little bit like a fly with a compound eye, right?
- 14:00They have many, many lenses and they look through all those lenses and create reality.
- 14:03Medicines like that, medical testing is like that.
- 14:05We have to look through multiple lenses at each thing.
- 14:09and have it come into focus.
- 14:10So you could get a, you know, a current air calcium score and it has no calcium.
- 14:14You can't, you can't say, well, I'm fine.
- 14:16You can say, I have no calcium.
- 14:18You still could have soft plaque, right?
- 14:20Which would be even more dangerous than calcium.
- 14:22So you've got to do an anatomic testing.
- 14:24You've got to do physiologic testing.
- 14:26You've got to do biomet.
- 14:27strict testing, you've got to do metabolomic and genetic testing to really understand where you are.
- 14:32When you actually look through all the lenses and then piece it together, you can actually have the whole system come into focus.
- 14:38It's like, okay, well now I see where I am.
- 14:40Now I know what to do.
- 14:41That's the beauty of deconstruction is actually bringing things into focus from looking through it at multiple lenses.
- 14:48So that's the key.
- 14:50Wow.
- 14:50I think you just reached flow state.
- 14:53I try to live in a flow state.
- 14:55So with
- 14:57The in-body, you said that most of them aren't measuring the cellular age, or what are they not measuring?
- 15:02The cellular age is more of cellular robustness, but not an actual age.
- 15:07in-body is measuring that?
- 15:09In-body is measuring that.
- 15:09You could sort of give it an age, but we don't give it an age.
- 15:12It's really, we talk about all these ages, but really it's about also looking at the resilience of the tissue, the cell, the neurons, the energy that's generated in a neuron
- 15:22when it's...
- 15:23when it fires, that kind of thing, right?
- 15:24So we measure all these different things.
- 15:26What is that called?
- 15:27Cellular strength power?
- 15:29Well, it depends on what we're measuring, right?
- 15:32So when we look at whole body phasing, we're looking at the cell's ability to hold a charge.
- 15:37If you're doing an EEG on the brain, you're looking at the brain, the neuron's ability to generate an impulse, right?
- 15:42So you're measuring two different things.
- 15:44It's not holding the charge.
- 15:45What's the size, the amplitude of the impulse, right?
- 15:48So you're looking at that.
- 15:50So there's lots of, know, with the muscle, it's how much power can you generate with a hand grip, you know, these kinds of things.
- 15:55So lots of ways to get at different things.
- 15:56uh Biology and to balance, that's the key.
- 15:59It's an economy of balance.
- 16:01And where people go wrong is they think, well, if I have more of this, if I'm more keto, more muscle, more mTOR activation, whatever, then that'll be good.
- 16:10Then I'll be healthy.
- 16:11That'll be really the way to go.
- 16:12It's not.
- 16:13It's what we find is that biology, when it's pushed into a corner, it pushes back.
- 16:18It wants to come into a harmonious rhythmic cycling, right?
- 16:22You're awake, you're asleep, you're building, you're deconstructing inside the body, right?
- 16:27You're tearing things down with autophagy and recycling and fasting and things like that, right?
- 16:31So it's really this, it's learning to surf these waves, right?
- 16:35It's learning to sort of play this symphony, if you will, of the rhythms of the body.
- 16:40That's the key thing.
- 16:41So balance is really key.
- 16:42It's like riding a mountain bike.
- 16:43It's not how fast can you go?
- 16:46That's not what mountain biking is about.
- 16:48It's how much of a flow state can you be in to manage all the vicissitudes, right, or all the different obstacles that come in your way in a flowy way.
- 16:56That's balance, right?
- 16:58That's what the body's about too.
- 16:59It's an ecosystem.
- 17:01Another way to think of it is that the body's like a rainforest, right?
- 17:04I don't know, have you been in a rainforest before?
- 17:07The cafe.
- 17:08Okay, the cafe.
- 17:09Okay.
- 17:10Well, not quite the same.
- 17:13When you're in an actual rainforest though.
- 17:15What impressed me about being in a rainforest was that it was life on top of life on top of life on top of life on top of life.
- 17:23It was like, my gosh, life here is so dense.
- 17:26All the trees are covered in moss.
- 17:27All the moss is covered in mushrooms.
- 17:29All the mushrooms are covered in this.
- 17:30All of this is covered with that.
- 17:31It's like, wow, it's just life on top of life.
- 17:34And it's a very complex ecosystem.
- 17:37And the body is like that.
- 17:38It's a very complex ecosystem.
- 17:40When you go out and you
- 17:41kill off the mushrooms or you say, we're just, gonna, we're gonna make everything keto.
- 17:46Well, you don't, you don't realize, but you're disrupting the balance in the ecosystem and the ecosystem wants to be in balance and aging is a natural falling out of balance.
- 17:55And the idea with longevity medicine is to bring it back into balance and youthful balance.
- 17:59So you have all the faculties that you want to have, right?
- 18:03But it's not about let's push really hard here.
- 18:05We're gonna just do stem cells till we're blue in the face.
- 18:08It's not about that.
- 18:09So people get that wrong all the time.
- 18:11Comes to the gut biome, there are more bacteria than there are cells in our body.
- 18:15And so we're really living in symbiosis with these bacteria.
- 18:20And there are some viruses and some fungi and things like that.
- 18:23And those bacteria actually play a big role in our health.
- 18:25They activate the immune system.
- 18:27They actually keep the gut healthy.
- 18:29They decrease cancer risk.
- 18:30If you have the right bacteria, they decrease brain fog, they improve...
- 18:33neurotransmitter function throughout the body.
- 18:36So they're really our friends.
- 18:37But if we eat the wrong things and we don't feed the rainforest with the right foods, you know, we get these malignant bacteria in there that then make us crave sugar or decrease
- 18:48our risk for cancer or break down the integrity of the gut lining.
- 18:51We get leaky gut and now we have stuff coming into the bloodstream that shouldn't get in there.
- 18:55And that causes brain fog because there's a blood brain barrier when the guts leaky, the brain blood brain barrier is leaky.
- 19:00And so all these things tie together.
- 19:03So it becomes
- 19:03Really important to understand this ecosystem idea.
- 19:07We think it's all about us, right?
- 19:09But it's really about balance and about coming into balance with the ecosystem that lives inside of us and who we are.
- 19:17So it's a cool thing really.
- 19:19When you start to look at it through that lens, it's fun.
- 19:21Food sensitivity tests are interesting because you can test for an antibody that you may have, let's say an antibody that would react with spinach.
- 19:29But whether or not that's actually reacting with spinach or not when you eat spinach is another thing to think about, right?
- 19:36So not every antibody test really tells you what's going on.
- 19:39We tend to use a test called MRT, which looks at whether white cells actually are releasing cytokines in response to spinach, in which case it's a true reaction.
- 19:47When your body sees spinach, it's gonna react.
- 19:50So we like that test better.
- 19:51It's not perfect either, right?
- 19:53So, and food sensitivities, you know, they basically...
- 19:57move around over time.
- 19:58And if you eat the same thing all the time, you're apt to actually sensitize yourself to that.
- 20:03So most people eat about 16 foods when they sit down and count them.
- 20:06It's about 16, 18 foods maybe.
- 20:08But really what you want to do is eat 45 foods or 50 foods and you want to rotate all the time, right?
- 20:13It's not the same.
- 20:14People say, well, I have a salad for lunch every day.
- 20:16It's the same salad.
- 20:17Well, that's, they think the salad is healthy.
- 20:19Well, maybe, right?
- 20:21So you want to really rotate stuff because
- 20:24What I do when I go to Whole Foods is I try to buy different things every time I go in through the produce section.
- 20:28It's like, let me expose myself to this.
- 20:31Let me expose myself to that.
- 20:32And it ends up you end up feeling better and healthier with variety.
- 20:35Your body loves variety.
- 20:37Your body loves nutrient-dense foods and a wide variety of them.
- 20:42That's what we've discovered, right?
- 20:43So.
- 20:44So the food sensitivity test can be biased based off what you eat the most often.
- 20:49They certainly can.
- 20:50That's right.
- 20:51Yeah, if you're eating spinach all the time, likely you'll develop a food sensitivity to it.
- 20:55How do we live young for a lifetime?
- 20:57How do we make 100 the new 30?
- 21:00The answers are out there and we're bringing them to you every episode.
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- 21:12Thanks for listening.