Post Viral Immune Support To Improve Energy | Podcast #363

What you eat after a viral infection, when symptoms of fatigue persist, can have a marked impact on your speed of recovery. Dr. J and Evan discuss that specific foods need to be avoided or included in your diet to improve your immune system. So what are the truth and the evidence about diet and post-viral immune support?

The good news is that most people will benefit from some considerations when recovering from illness or infection. Having post-viral fatigue means that you will not have your usual energy to think, shop, prepare or eat as before. Be very practical and kind to yourself. Dr. J and Evan added that diet modification is vital in your recovery.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
1:57   – The role of acid-pH level in the digestive system
5:01  – The link of depression and anxiety to bloating
10:02 – The benefits of probiotics and effects of stress to digestive health
18:17 – Functional medicine strategies and testing to find the root cause of bloating

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J in the house with Evan Brand. Evan, how you doing man? How are your holidays? How’s everything going brother?

Evan Brand: Everything’s going pretty good. I’m trying to start 2022 off with a bang. I suspect it’s gonna be a better year than 2021. People are becoming smarter. They’re becoming more educated. They’re becoming more resourceful. People are waking up. There’s a lot of, we’re in the great awakening and so I think, this is an important time to be alive and an important time if you’re a parent, if you’re a husband, a wife, if you’ve got kids, if you’re a teacher. It’s important time to keep your eyes open and keep your ears to the ground because stuff changes quickly and you got to be like a little speedboot. You got to be able to take turns quick, you don’t want to be the titanic right now, you don’t wanna be slow in taking big turns, you gotta be nimble in these times and so what I’m alluding to is just you got to be able to navigate the world of health which is quickly evolving and that’s true. What we’re trying to talk about today is post viral fatigue and really that’s just the title but this really could apply to bacterial infections and parasites and mold exposure but we just wanted to try to zoom in a little bit specifically on post viral fatigue and things like Epstein Barr virus, many people are familiar with and there’s a lot of people that report their chronic fatigue, picking up after something like EBV, we’ve seen it a lot with the virus going around now which would probably get flagged and censored so we won’t say it but you know what it is and there’s a lot of post, uh, viral fatigue going on from that and so you and I have dealt with some of that, you’re still going through the thick of it right now but I think you’re coming through pretty well, you’re still working and obviously you’re on your feet right now literally standing so that’s exciting and yeah.  

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For the listeners, I had COVID last week, actually symptoms started on Wednesday. Really two hard days of symptoms, I was able to work the whole time though, I mean I think that the symptoms for my COVID that were, um, tough was I would say achiness and then like sensitivity to cold like it was like 45 degrees out and it felt like it was minus 10. So, I would say sensitivity to cold and then also getting really hot at some points, getting out where I would sweat through my shirt. So hot and cold, achiness/ headaches and then like easily out of breath but I mean for me I mean, it was still fine where I could work and still do the things I had to do. So it wasn’t that bad, I mean, I had a flu in 2013 where I was literally laid up for over two days and I couldn’t do anything so I know laid up feels like it wasn’t even close to the flu of 2013 for me, that was really hard. So, definitely, um, not as bad, I actually was my own worst enemy because on Friday I was feeling like really good like 80-90% better and did like 2-3 hours of housework like cleaning my house like doing all this different stuff because it was a beautiful day and I’m like all right let me get on top of some work, work 3 hours probably walk like 15,000 steps and that next day there was a major relapse in how I felt. It was probably like I went backwards 30-40%. Here I was at 80% probably going backwards to 50. I was like whoa what happened and so then I just kind of got in the straight and narrow and just said okay I gotta really make sure I kind of make sure I kind of keep it easy until I get back to 100% because, you know, um, it just you didn’t realize how much, uh, things could go backwards so fast so you really gotta wait till you get a 100% on things and so overall I mean the only thing lingering for me right now is a slight bit of um out of breathiness and, uh, this little lingering deep tickle cough like right now you can feel it like someone’s tickling the back of your throat with your finger and you want to cough to scratch it, kind of like that and so that’s where I’m at now. That’s like kind of makes it feel like I scratch it right there, right. So, I’m doing some ginger tea, I’m doing with the Manuka honey that soothes it like that helps with the irritation. It’s not knocking the cough down. Doing some, Elderberry, um, doing some thieves, uh, natural cough drops with essential oils, um, also doing some nebulizer so I’m doing some glutathione nebulization so those are couple of things I’m doing and then obviously sinus flushes, the amount of mucus that is coming out of me is out of control so sinus flushes are really, really important because if you do not flush your sinuses, the amount of stuff that stays inside of you, oh my God. So, flushing my sinuses out 3-4 times a day, you know, really good saline reverse osmosis with a little bit of silver in there to kind of keep things flushed out is helping a lot. So, that’s kind of where I’m at but honestly feeling pretty good, um, the whole family got it purposefully, my wife had it and I’m like come over here honey gave her a big kiss and then I kissed all my kids, I’m like we’re done. We’re gonna get this thing all together, be done with it all that way we’re not, you know, I get it next month and then I’m isolating for two weeks and then my kids get no we’re gonna get it all at the same time and surprisingly my kids’ symptoms were 80% less than the adults, super, super minor.  I couldn’t believe how minor it was for the kids, so very interesting. So, that was kind of my experience with, uh, with the big C, uh, so to speak. And also, the big correlation I was listening to someone talk about this, the, a lot of the post C symptoms that we see after, right, people that have dysglycemia, and blood sugar issues tend to be a big driving factor of a lot of these post viral symptoms afterwards. Talking about post-viral fatigue, one of the big things is make sure you manage your glycemia, meaning you’re having good protein, you’re having good fats, you’re not eating a bunch of refined sugar, grains, those kinds of things. Make sure you put good metaphorical logs on the fire, good proteins, good fats to really work on blood sugar stability. 

Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll I’m glad that you’re coming through it. Regarding the shortness of breath, I would kind of put that in the same category as the post viral fatigue because that shortness of breath can create fatigue and the best thing that’s helped me and has helped many clients is doing the color oxygen. So, ChlorOxygen, you can get that on amazon, it’s readily available. And it’s just a, it’s a liquid chlorophyll extract. So, when you do that within probably 5-10 minutes, you can feel a difference, so it’s like C-h-l-o-r-Oxygen, ChlorOxygen. I would probably do 10-20 drops up to 3 times per day. That thing is absolutely incredible. You can go as high as one tablespoon in 20 ounces of water and just sip on that throughout the day. I had one guy in New York, major, major issues with shortness of breath in the acute and the long term and that ChlorOxygen literally just turned his situation around. So, I’d get some of that stuff. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, it’s C-h-l-o-r Oxygen?

Evan Brand: Yeah, ChlorOxygen. Yeah, and it comes in a little bottle tincture and it’s incredible. Also, something I’ve used personally, I’ve used with several clients too is Ailanthus. Ailanthus is three of heaven which is an invasive tree. I see a lot of it in Kentucky but you can buy Ailanthus tincture and that one is also really, really good. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Is this the one, right here, Is the ChlorOxygen? 

Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s the one. Yep. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Cool.

Evan Brand: Get you some of that but should help because that’s the problem is, you know, the shortness of breath was pretty bad for me and I felt better, you know, I got infected a long time ago. It was like August 2020 and then six months later that’s when I started to have some shortness of breath which I was like, holy crap and so luckily, I was able to knock it out, uh, with Demectin and uh, yeah, Demectin really helped me and then the nebulizer and the ChlorOxygen, I would say that combination was an absolute game changer, luckily, I haven’t had any issues since then. But what we are seeing is that the mitochondria have a role in this and some of this post-viral fatigue we’re seeing is due to mitochondrial damage so I’ve been fortunate enough to see a few dozen people now. And in terms of organic acids testing after the virus, and we are seeing that the mitochondria definitely showed dysfunction. You and I talked about this many times on other podcast about the mitochondria. We can measure the dysfunction and so what we’re doing is we’re coming in with mitochondrial support nutrients so CoQ10, we’re coming in with carnitine, ribose, a lot of these amino acids and B vitamins like riboflavin which can help fuel the krebs cycle and then also we can use things like PQQ to help get the mitochondrial biogenesis going, meaning we’re literally making new mitochondria so we can measure this on paper. So, if you guys are suffering, you know, one of us can reach out or you reach out to us rather and then we can get the urine looked at because we can measure this. You don’t have to guess where is this fatigue coming from. If it’s a mitochondrial induced problem, we can measure that. Now, you have permission to have multiple things wrong with you so there could be a dopamine problem, there could be a mitochondrial problem, there could be toxin problem. So, rarely is there one issue causing this fatigue but the goal is for us to try to get as many puzzle pieces laid out in front of us and then make an appropriate protocol.    

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I’d say, the worst thing about COVID for me right now, coffee tastes bitter like it tastes bitter, almost a little bit sour, does not taste like coffee. I’ve almost been like I’m not even gonna drink it right now until this thing gets better because it does not taste that good but for me I’m just alright, I got, you know, 20 grams of collagen in there, I got some good fats, I kind of look at it as like a meal replacement for me. So, that’s probably the worst thing the whole time. For me, it kind of felt like a cold. I’d say a mild, mild to middle of the road cold. The only thing that really surprised me was that, that back swing where I was like 80% better and then went backwards that was the hardest thing. 

Evan Brand: And, it could have been you overdoing it for sure, I mean, 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: oh, you totally did. 

Evan Brand: Yeah. I mean I did have a little bit of that too where I kind of felt like I was better, overdid it and then I heard it again, so. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So, excuse me, anything else you wanted to highlight on that so far? I would say post-viral stuff, the things that I’m doing right now and I recommend people do, in general, are gonna be Adaptogens and I like medicinal mushrooms. So, Shiitake, Maitake, Reishi. Reishi is great. I love it because it does deactivate viruses. It does build up and support the natural killer immune cells so I do like that, uh, any type of ginseng, Ashwagandha, these are things that help support energy production, support the adrenals, help buffer the HPA excess. So, any of these types of things are gonna be, uh, helpful too.  

Evan Brand: You need to get on some Lion’s Mane too for your taste because what I’m finding is that the nerves are damaged and that’s affecting the sinus. So, the sense of smell, sense of taste, some of that is related to nerve damage. So, I would probably hit Lion’s Mane, maybe like two caps twice a day. That’s been helpful to restore the sense of smell and taste in some people. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s probably not damaged. It’s probably just more inflammation, right? 

Evan Brand: Well, the long-term stuff, I’m talking to people just long-term. I’m talking to people that you know 6-8 months later say, I still can’t taste or smell. Bringing in Lion’s Mane, like 2 caps twice a day. It takes a few months but you know it does increase nerve growth factor and so I think that’s the mechanism. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s interesting. Yeah. I do have some Lion’s Mane. I’ll definitely add that in. I mean, I think medicinal mushrooms are gonna be really good to, um, be on top of, uh, just supporting your immune system and like helping with, um, the body regenerate and heal better. 

Evan Brand: Yeah. Gabe was asking a question in the live chat on YouTube. How did you guys catch it? I don’t know, I mean I work from home. You know, I’ve got a home office, uh, Justin has a home office as well, you know, I do go out, uh. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Personally, it’s the new variant. The new variant has an R-naught of seven, which is that’s equal to, uh, measles so the delta variant had an R-naught of 2 or 3 so that means for every one person that gets it, it can be passed to 2-3 on average, right. The new omicron variant, it’s seven, so you can literally pass it to seven people so I think my wife was in a yoga class with three people and they were like spread out across that broom like they were like way you know spaced apart, you know, for just all the safety reasons and it was still able to get it so my whole take on omicron, it’s very, um, I think the symptoms are milder than delta for sure. That’s what everything’s been reported but, um, it’s way more contagious. Everyone’s gonna get it at this point, you just gotta have your plan and, um, be ready ahead of time, right? People don’t have a plan and then when they get it then they get stuck and they feel like they have to go to the hospital and you don’t have as many options there so try to have a, um, outpatient plan ready to rock and roll but yeah, you’re gonna get it because the, um, our knot on this thing, right, is that seven which is at a level close to measles so it’s right there. So, if you haven’t got it yet, you will. Anything else you wanna highlight on the immune side, on the post-viral stuff obviously I’m a big fan of ginger, I think ginger is nice because it’s anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, uh, helps with lymphatic. So, if your kind of like have a lot of like stagnant lymph in the chest area or in the neck I really keeps the lymph moving all that’s very helpful. 

Evan Brand: Yeah. There was, uh, one person that commented if you’ve had delta you should have some memory T cells that will help if you get infected. Yes supposedly. Supposedly, um.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. You definitely should have memory T cells as well as memory B cells, right? So, even if you were to get sick again, um, you’re gonna be able to recruit antibodies way faster, right? Normally when you get sick if you’re first time getting exposed to an infection it takes about a week or so to really get those antibodies ramped up and so even if you were to get sick twice, you’re gonna be able to make those antibodies inside of, you know, 24 hours or so. So, you’re gonna be able to bring those antibodies to the table a lot faster and so that’s, um, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty helpful. 

Evan Brand: Yeah. Other strategies, uh, post-viral fatigue hyperbaric oxygen has been helpful. I’ve seen several clients that luckily have lived in a city where they’ve had access to do hyperbaric oxygen. Essentially, what it is, is it’s replicating being under water under water about 10 to 12 feet so that pressure is helping to get oxygen deeper inside of you. So, some of these tissues may have been starved of oxygen. This sort of mild hypoxia or hypoxemia, you know, you can basically reverse that by getting the hyperbaric oxygen. There are some people that can do there’s oxygen cans, little portable oxygen shots, if you will but it’s nothing compared to an oxygen concentrator with the hyperbaric oxygen so that’s good ongoing, I mean, I’ve had clients with Lyme that have done hyperbaric we know that’s incredible for traumatic brain injuries and concussions and that sort of thing. So, even if this is just a long-term fatigue problem, not related to viral issues at all, you know, hyperbaric is another good tool, you’re looking at probably around 100 a session but, you know, what, what’s your health? What is your health worth? So. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. One thing I did was very helpful was use my infrared sauna the last couple of days. That was helpful, just getting a really good sweat in felt very good, you know, raising that body temperature up can be very helpful just at um at your body knocking down viruses. That’s part of the reason why you get, um, chill while you get the nutshells but, uh, why you get a fever right. It’s part of the reason your immune system is actually knocking down some of that bacteria and or viruses by doing it that way so using an infrared sauna can be helpful too. 

Evan Brand: So, look at your mitochondria, get your organic acids test done, we can measure that and look at mitochondrial function come in with specific support whether it’s B vitamins, adaptogenic herbs like Rhodiola, you mentioned, Siberian ginseng or Eleuthero. There’s medicinal mushrooms like cordyceps which there is some benefits. There are some papers on cordyceps and athletes and improving blood flow. There may be some level of oxygenation that happens with cordyceps too. So, cordyceps, reishi mushroom, I think the Lion’s mane for the brain and for the nerves would be beneficial, the ChlorOxygen for any of the shortness of breath along with the fatigue, rest, I mean just getting good quality sleep, making sure you got to do whatever you can to get good quality sleep. So, all the same sleep hygiene habits we’ve talked about for a decade together apply in regards to candling down at night if you need some passion flower. Even melatonin, there’s some really cool studies on melatonin. We know, it’s a very powerful antioxidant and we are seeing higher doses of melatonin be beneficial. So, in general, somewhere around 5 milligrams but there are some papers going wat up 30 – 40 – 50 milligrams and beyond. I don’t know a ton about the high dose so I’ll just tell you that the regular dose standard dosing is better than nothing. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It was that melatonin?

Evan Brand: Melatonin. Yes. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Usually, it’s like the higher dose is like 10 milligrams and that’s gonna help with the oxygenation and then 30 – 500 milligrams for the arginine that’s to really increase the oxygenation. 

Evan Brand: Yeah. The arginine for like nitric oxide production. Beet powder, you know, beet powder would be good too. So, anything you could do to create some vasodilation is gonna be smart. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Anything else you wanna add, Evan?

Evan Brand: I think that’s it. If you need help, reach out, get tested, hopefully you get back on the full mend here so, keep, keep rolling. You’re doing a great job and hope everybody is doing well and we’ll be in touch next week. If you need help clinically, please reach out. You can reach out to Dr. J at justinhealth.com or me, Evan Brand, at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help you guys. Keep your head up. keep moving forward.   

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think the big thing out of the gates is to make sure you have time to sleep, rest. Don’t overdo it. Just know your body still needs more time even when you, when you’ve gotten through the whole thing to recover. Don’t overdo it. That’s really important. Keep the foundational nutrients dialed in so that would be like zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, you know, you can keep those things in there. You may not have to use them at such a high level that you did with the infection but keep some of those nutrients. Don’t go from something to nothing. Keep something in there the whole time, find a medicinal mushroom that you like, find an adaptogen that you like. Maybe keep a little bit of ginger tea going. Something that has some antiviral support and um, you know, try to get a little bit of movement but if it’s making you feel winded then just try to do just enough where you can feel like you’re doing something but not where it’s overly taxing you. I think it’s really important to kind of meet that right in the middle. 

Evan Brand: Last thing, two last things, a low histamine diet is generally pretty helpful because there are a lot of issues with mast cell activation being triggered from this. So, a lower histamine diet, fresh meat, and no leftovers is very important. And then, histamine support. I’ve got a product called histamine support but essentially it’s quercetin plus some other nutrients so anything, you can do to stabilize your mast cells that’s gonna be helpful because muscle activation can cause fatigue, meaning, after the viral issue was over, the immune system can sort of have PTSD for lack of a better terminology and the immune system will go into this crazy state where it will shut you down so that fatigue trying to rebuild that energy back up is re-regulating the immune system so like the quercetin, other mast cell stabilizers are very helpful. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Love it. Love it. Makes total sense and again not everyone’s gonna have that issue but you know, it’s kind of good to know if you fit into that camp. Those are a couple of strategies out of the gates. Anything else, Evan?

Evan Brand: No, that’s it. Take it easy. If people need help, reach out justinhealth.com and evanbrand.com will be available. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’re here to help you guys. I’ll probably be back later on today here. So, keep a lookout, comments down below. Let us know your thoughts on the topic, we appreciate a review. We appreciate shares to friends and family. Really helps us get the word out. You guys have a phenomenal day. We’ll talk soon. 

Evan Brand: Take it easy. Bye-bye

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye you all. 


References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://www.evanbrand.com/

Recommended Products:

Xlear Sinus Rinse Kit

Xlear Sinus Rinse Packets

NeilMed Sinus Rinse Complete Kit

Chloroxygen Chlorophyll

Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile

Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile

Genova NutrEval® FMV

Immuno Supreme

Histamine Support

TruKeto Collagen

TRUCOLLAGEN (Grassfed)

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/post-viral-immune-support-to-improve-energy-podcast-363

 

Meditation Using Muse Device with Ariel Garten | Podcast #304

We all have thoughts, and none of us are good at meditation at first, during, or maybe at the end. Here’s Ariel Garnet, introducing us to the Muse and the use of an approach NOT to get rid of those thoughts but to help you make yourself aware of those thoughts and increase the choice of what to do with those. 

Are you doing it right? The Muse uses Machine Learning Approach, which has an algorithm that analyzes brain wave activity. There, it shows focused attention (when it’s quiet) and distracted or wandering thoughts (when there’s a storm pick-up). Also, concentrated attention and meditation have a natural anchor such as word, part of the body, or our breath, which is more accessible.  Ariel added that we have different forms of meditation and focused attention is the most common one. It puts the attention to your breath instead of following your thoughts and shifting it to yourself. 

What’s the minimum dose? Twenty (20) minutes can be heavy, so it’s acceptable to do it up to what’s bearable for beginners and usually ten (10) minutes for regulars. It also shows that there are improvements with the body’s cognitive function, inhibition, and decrease in stress. Don’t miss the full video to see how it works!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:36      Muse Meditation Device

3:49      Basics of Meditation

9:30      How Muse Gets the Data

13:34    Biofeedback Devices

21:07    How Muse Works

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Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are alive. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Ariel Garten, the founder of the Muse meditation device, really excited to have her on today we’re going to talk about this awesome new cutting edge technology. And we’ll kind of also just bring it back down to the basics of meditation. What is it? What are the benefits? What’s happening in your brain and how to actually apply it? Ariel, welcome to the podcast.

Ariel Garten: Thank you my sincere pleasure to be here. Hello, everyone.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself? And how did you make this journey into meditation and then what made you want to come up with this new technology to enhance that?

Ariel Garten: Sure. So my own background is a training in neuroscience. So I was fascinated by the brain and how it works. I then became a psychotherapist and began dealing with patients every day helping them shift their own mental state and recognized how difficult it was. And meditation was a skill that I was taught as something to use inside of my practice with my patients. But I would teach my patients to do it, and they would rarely actually start the habit. So it became this really frustrating process of teaching someone to meditate, and then not actually seeing the benefits rolling out into their life. I, at the same time was working in a research lab with Dr. Steve Mann, and he had an early brain computer interface system. So using eg electrodes, we could track your brainwaves and then turn that brainwave activity into sound. And we really had this aha moment, myself and my co founders of muse, Chris and Trevor, we had this aha moment that if we can make this invisible, intangible process, in your mind, visible and tangible, maybe we could apply that to meditation, maybe we could actually help people hear what was going on inside their mind while they meditated. And in doing so actually get people to start and maintain their meditation practice, if they could get real feedback and have real data from their brain. And that was born.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool. So you have this kind of biofeedback, that kind of help you distinguish if you were in a good kind of brain wavelength state, so to speak. And then how does that how does that sound compute? So like, is it what’s the wavelength in your brain? That’s supposedly good? And how does it know that you’re there? And how does it How does it do all that connection back and forth?

Ariel Garten: Sure. So the old school approach to doing biofeedback or neurofeedback on meditation, is just to look at your band. So if you’re in beta band, you’re thinking in your brains all over the place, you’re likely not meditating. If you’re an alpha, you’re seeing an increase in meditation. And if you’re seeing some data, then there’s even more meditation. That was the old school way of doing meditation. At this point, we’ve now taught literally hundreds of thousands of people to meditate using news. And so we use a machine learning approach. And we have an algorithm that understands when you’re in focused attention, versus when your mind is wandering. So it analyzes every aspect of your brainwave activity at that moment, and knows if you’re specifically in focused attention, which is the fundamental of a focused attention meditation, or if your mind has wandered and is distracted. And what we do is we turn that into a sound that’s very easy to understand that it’s your mind. So when you’re focused, the sound is quiet. And when you’re distracted, you hear a storm pickup, it’s like my mind is stormy. Oh, okay, let’s bring it back to calm. And when you focus a calm again. And when your mind gets distracted on a thought up mind to stormy, then bring it back down to calm.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s interesting, because I find a lot of people and even myself when they’re doing a meditation, one of the first things they kind of think to themselves is, am I doing this, right? Like, I’m not sure there’s kind of this hesitation of is this, is this all wrong? So I kind of like the fact that you get a little bit of a feedback. And so let’s say you’re using the device, right? And you get the storm clouds coming in, what should be the focus, like, what should that switch be to bring you back on track? 

Ariel Garten: Sure. So you bring your attention back to your breath. So a focused attention. Meditation always has a neutral anchor, it could be your breath, that could be a word, it could be a part of your body, breath tends to be the easiest because your breath is always there. By simply counting your breaths, you’re bringing yourself back to a neutral anchor. You’re taking your mind out of your wandering thoughts into a place that is neutral and unintentional. Because most of us spend our life just wandering in our thoughts. Most of us just spend our life with the mind with thinking that just keeps going and we assume it’s supposed to be that way. But when you actually start a meditation practice, and recognize that you can identify when you’re thinking and choose to take your mind away from there and put your attention on something else other than your thoughts. At that moment, you fundamentally change your relationship to your thinking. You fundamentally can now choose the contents of your mind. And since most of the things in our mind are negative, repetitive, not particularly helpful, when we’re able to actually have choice over the contents of our own mental space and how we attend to it, you can dramatically shift the amount of stress, negativity, anxiety etc. in your life.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, very interesting. All right, so now someone’s coming into this or like, Hey, I haven’t even started meditating at all yet. So what does meditation look like for you is it just kind of what you kind of implied earlier where you’re just bringing that anchor, bringing that focus of that anchor back to the breath. And you’re just focusing on that, while you breathe in and out throughout the nose is that pretty much it to keep it simple for the listeners?

Ariel Garten: Totally. So that is the basis of a focused attention meditation, there are lots of different forms of meditation of focused attention is the most common. And what you’re simply doing is you’re putting your attention on your breath, your mind will eventually have a thought, because all of us have thoughts, it’s okay, you then notice that you have that thought, and instead of following the thought and thinking about your grocery list, or your husband, or whatever, you choose to say, Nope, I’m gonna let that thought Go and bring my attention elsewhere. Other than my thinking, I’m going to bring my attention back to my breath. And you just do this very simple activity over and over again. And the simple activity triggers those profound results, by the fact that you are actually now shifting the relationship to your own mind.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting, okay. And so it’s okay, you shouldn’t beat yourself up, if your thoughts go off, just kind of recenter it back, be the observer of that, like, there should be no shame or any of that kind of feeling. If you can’t quite do it, or you can’t quite stick on it.

Ariel Garten: Exactly. None of us are good at meditation at the beginning, or even halfway through or even at the end. You know, we all have thoughts, and that’s okay. You’re not trying to get rid of your thoughts. You’re trying to make yourself aware of them and increase the choice about what you do with those thoughts.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. All right, interesting. So what’s the minimum dose to get some benefits? So if someone’s coming in is five minutes enough? Like what what do you recommend as a beginner to kind of see some benefit, but make the make the step to commit? Pretty easy?

Ariel Garten: Yeah, so with studies with news, we’ve looked at 10 minutes of meditation per day, and at 10 minutes of meditation, over six weeks, in trial studies, we’ve been able to see improvements in your relationship to your body, so less self reported, headache, nausea, etc, you’ve been able to see improvement in cognitive function as measured by the script task and go nogo tasks, improvement and inhibition, and obviously, a decrease in stress and improvement in calm. Okay, so in a lot of the studies in the literature, they look at 20 minutes a day, but 20 minutes a day is a lot to meditate for a novice. So the best amount of for you to meditate right now, if you’ve never meditated is whatever amount you can bear it for initially. That could be three minutes, that could be five minutes, you just want to start and try to do it consistently. Just five-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Five minutes be done twice a day?

Ariel Garten: Absolutely. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. All right, cool. And what’s the goal wavelength that we want our brain to be in during this meditation state.

Ariel Garten: So there’s, as I said, the old school way was to look at a goal wavelength. Now it’s no longer so much about the goal wavelength, it is about the state that you are in, and our brains are much more complicated than simply being an alpha or simply being in beta. Okay, what we see when you meditate is a significant increase in alpha activity. And also sometimes an increase in beta coherence. When you it’s not so just as simple as alpha, because alpha peak frequency changes as you age, okay, so when you’re young, you have the most amount of alpha at around 10 and a half hertz, let’s say, quite fast. As you age, your alpha peak, frequency slows down. So your alpha peak might be at 11 hertz, 12 hertz. And so as you engage in meditation practice, some of what might you might be looking to do is both to increase your alpha activity, and potentially to increase your alpha, decrease your alpha frequency to a faster wave. So it’s, it’s a lot more complicated once you start looking at the nuance of it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, all right, got it. And then what’s our active wavelength state when we’re just totally alert, doing stuff and working throughout the day?

Ariel Garten: Again, hard to say, when you’re active and engaged, you tend to be in beta waves when you’re thinking, but being in flow has a slightly different brainwave characteristic. And we also have different brain waves that we emit from different parts of our head. Okay, so you know, high, high, theta frontal midline, is going to be associated with really high attention, but high data from another part of your brain is also associated with mind wandering and ADHD. You know, it’s nuanced.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, got it. That makes sense. And so how is the device grabbing all this Intel? So is it I know it’s a device you put I think you guys have a Bluetooth connection or Bluetooth connection now. Correct?

Ariel Garten: Yep. So it is four channels of eg data. So it kind of slips on just like a pair of glasses. For those of you looking at the YouTube you can see the device now.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Video guys, if you’re listening on the podcast, we’ll put the YouTube link below if you want to see the actual demo.

Ariel Garten: Yep. Or you can go to choosemuse.com/welcome. We also have videos there. That shows you what the device looks like. And so there’s two channels of eg data on the forehead and two behind the ears. And so that’s enough to track your brainwaves associated with focused attention versus mind wandering. And then that data sent to your smartphone or tablet where it interprets your brain activity. And lets you know, when you’re in the meditation zone and when you’re not. So you’re getting this beautiful guided feedback during your meditation. And then after the fact you see data, charts, graphs, scores, things that actually show you moment to moment what your brain was doing, and let you see your improvement session on session.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, that’s really cool. And now when you’re doing the muse, you have the device on. Is there any concern at all from you with the Bluetooth radiation that that’s connecting the headset to the to the phone or the smart device?

Ariel Garten: So the Bluetooth antenna faces outwards? So the radiation is going out towards your phone? It’s okay, low energy. So I mean, the amount of radiation that’s coming off there is infantile asmall, relative to even having your phone on the table. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, good. That’s good. Excellent. All right. So we have this device on right we’re utilizing it. What do you notice as correlation with a device meaning like if I’m eating diet changes, certain supplementation? I’ve noticed some patients of mine that have done the Muse device before and they’ve done magnesium and l theanine and different nutrients they’ve noticed, improve Muse scores, what associations have you guys made just on your own or clinically in practice with your patients?

Ariel Garten: Oh, that’s a great question. Nobody’s ever asked me that. That’s super cool. Definitely, we notice when people start to meditate, they start to improve more habits in their life. So this is actually something that you see in the meditation literature that when somebody starts a meditation practice, it then becomes easier to adhere to the other things that you’re trying to do. Because you become more mindful, and you become more intentional. So you know, the the suggestion there is that you’re then more likely to take your supplements, you’re then more likely to help, you know, improve your sleep patterns. One of the things that we see when people start musing is that they report better sleep, and that they use Muse before they go to bed in order to improve their sleep. And so I we haven’t actually looked at what are the things that make your meditation better, but we’ve looked a fair amount at what are the things that when you meditate, also seem to be getting better in your life and in your health, and got their vast.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So you’re looking at Muse and then the effect benefits of it versus hey, these things over here may actually help make that Muse session better.

Ariel Garten: Yeah, and we have a number of studies running. So there have been over 200 published papers using Muse both as a clinical grade eg and a meditation tool. And the Mayo Clinic recently ran a study with breast cancer patients awaiting surgery. And they saw that using Muse through their surgery process was able to decrease the stress of surgery, improve their fatigue and quality of life. And now Mayo Clinic is looking at this relative to breast cancer patients going through chemotherapy, because they’re interested in understanding the impact of meditation with different forms of other interventions, be it surgery, chemotherapy, etc. And they’re also looking at a number of other disease states and studies using news to see how meditating with news can improve the outcome of those states.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. So what was your experience like with other neurofeedback devices? While you were a clinician seeing patients? We did you have a lot of experience with those devices? And then did you feel like Ah, this could be better, or we need to make something more portable for patients? What was your experience like with that early technology? And then how did it morph with the newer one?

Ariel Garten: So as a clinician, I didn’t use neurofeedback devices, but I had experience with biofeedback devices, and definitely felt that they gave interesting information, but that they didn’t actually give information about the brain. You know, they might tell you what your heart rate is doing, what your galvanic skin response is, but all of those are downstream effects of what war probably was initiated in your own mind. You know, the the anxious thoughts, the triggers that were mental that then ramp the body that then ramped the mind in this feed forward way. So, you know, we saw that there was a great opportunity. It was really at the beginning of the tracking movement, where you had wearables that track your sleep and your steps, but absolutely nothing that tracked your brain. And so we were able to develop Muse as an eg that would track your brain during meditation. And then since then, we’ve added more biofeedback methodologies to the same device. So in the Muse to you have eg degree feedback on your brain, there’s accelerometers and gyroscopes give you feedback on your body, there’s a breath sensor so you can get feedback on your breath rate and train yourself for different breathing exercises. There’s a PPG sensor to track your heart rate. And so you can actually hear the beating of your heart like the beating of a drum and learn to tune your interoception your understanding of your own internal state, and to know when your heart is increasing and decreasing can help you train your heart rate variability. So we’ve you know, pilot On a whole bunch of biofeedback methodologies on top of the neurofeedback as we’ve been on the path of creating and releasing news over the last six years.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool. So biofeedback would be more things related to heart rate breathing or neurofeedback is more biofeedback, specific to the brain wavelength, that kind of stuff. Okay, good. That makes sense. How does this correlate to like devices that are HRV heart rate variability, which a lot of people like the M wave devices that kind of connect heart connection to the brain and that coherent state of coherence we hear of that helps with with parasympathetic kind of repair and stress reduction. How does that? How do they connect? Is there a connection at all?

Ariel Garten: I can talk about that a little. It’s a cool question. So when you’re looking at your HRV, most people don’t understand what it is. So when you breathe in, your heart rate increases. As you breathe out, your heart rate decreases, this pattern is called your sinusoidal arrhythmia. And what your HRV is, is the difference between the fastest heartbeat on your intake and your slowest heartbeat on your exhale. So that’s why extended exhales actually make you more relaxed, because your heart rate is slowing more and more and more throughout the course of your exhale. And so an extended exhale is actually going to increase your heart rate variability. Now, when you’re super stressed, you have a very shallow change between your increase and your decrease of your heart, you’re probably breathing shallowly and your heart rate is going in parallel. So when you’re super stressed, you just see like a tiny wiggly line for your heart rate variability. When you’re relaxed, you have a great increase in decrease a great like up and down a nice, beautiful sinusoidal wave that goes with your HRV. And so that’s how you see the increase in your HRV. When you’re relaxed. In terms of the correlation with meditation, as you do the breathing through your meditation and relax your body and take your mind away from stressful thoughts. You are typically inherently increasing your heart rate variability, the correlation is not perfect one to one. But as you start to relax the mind and the body relaxes through deep breathing, you also see a beautiful change and shift in your HRV. And when you look at long term correlations for HRV, you see that people who are depressed for example, have very low HRV. And people who are not depressed and unhealthy states have an increase in HRV. So the kinds of effects you get with meditation also parallel the kinds of things you might see in somebody’s HRV.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s awesome. Is that a device? Or is that a biofeedback tool that you may add to the Muse at some point.

Ariel Garten: Um, so with the existing Muse Muse to and are new and Muse as you’re able to see a graph of your heart rate. So you can actually see your heartbeats like the increase in the decrease, you can visually see your HRV, we don’t give you an HRV calculation, because there’s actually a little bit of a controversy in the scientific field around how accurate instantaneous HRV is. So the pure science says that you need long term calculations of somebody’s heart rate in order to really get their HRV. So we’ve steered away from a specific HRV calculation, but you can see it on the graph like you can see actually what’s going on in your heart. And it’s quite amazing. You can see when your HRV is good, and when it’s short.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool, what other little kind of nuances with the device you can share with us that could be could apply to improve our health on top of what you already mentioned so far.

Ariel Garten: Sure. So we have a new device that just came out Muse s, and for those of you watching the video, it is right here. It is a soft, comfortable form factor, and the module just pops off, you can watch the band. And we made it specifically for people who want to track their brain overnight and help them to fall asleep. So we found a lot of people were using us to help them fall asleep. And but you’d have to take your Muse device off when you fell asleep. So we made Muse s super comfy, so you can just fall asleep with it on. And we give you these beautiful things called sleep journeys, guided sleep journeys, they’re guided meditations that lull you into sleep. And you also get a soundtrack that’s actually built from your body that’s designed to entrain you into sleep faster. So you might hear the beating of your heart like the chirping of crickets and the soundscape. Or the movements of your body like the lapping of waves, you’re literally hearing your own body. And then what we do is as you start to get into a rhythm and slow down a little bit, we actually slow down the soundtrack in a way that’s designed to train you to fall asleep faster. And so it’s a super beautiful experience. And then towards the end of this year, we’re releasing comprehensive eg sleep tracking. So you’ll be able to see all sorts of details about your night’s sleep even you know coffee details like the amount of sleep spindles you had.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s really cool. I think anytime you’re trying to teach someone to develop a new habit, especially when they don’t have a lot of confidence, it’s important to have a coach or someone to kind of pat them on the back or give them encouragement that they’re doing the right thing or, or feedback after doing the wrong thing. And I think the benefit of this device, it really provides that little bit of a meditation coach over your shoulder to give you a pat in the back or give you feedback if you’re not on the right track. So I think it’s really beneficial. Because if people can can do it and feel confident about it, they’re more likely to make it part of their kind of day in day out habits.

Ariel Garten: Absolutely. That’s literally why we built this, whether you’re somebody who’s never meditated before, and is just like what’s going on, or you’re an expert meditator who wants more insight into your process. This is a device that’s literally like a little coach or guru inside your head, encouraging you showing you what’s going on giving you your feedback, so that you can know when you can improve.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool. So how does this work? So you put the device on? Is there any way you can do it while we’re on live on the podcast here?

Ariel Garten: Not while holding my microphone simultaneously.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’d be amazing. 

Ariel Garten: So so this is the Muse here. It slips on. Great, it then would connect to the app on my phone. So here is I don’t think you can see there’s too much glare right there. There you go. There’s the Muse app. And so inside, that’s my notification that I have new content available. Inside the Muse app, you have meditations for the mind. And there you can set the length of time that you’d like to meditate for the soundscape you’d like to use what you’d like guidance or not. We also have meditations for the heart, where you’re hearing the heart like the beating of the drum, you can actually see your own heart rate variability and what it’s doing more meditations for the breath for the body. We have an entire section of guided content here. Let me open that for you. Where we have literally hundreds of meditations for stress, anxiety sleep, we say if you’ve got a problem in your life, we’ve got a meditation for that. So whether it’s performance, workplace, etc you can go in there and really find the thing that you’re trying to work on or is bothering you and get a meditation and guidance and insight to help you in that process. With or without your Muse.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. I totally love it. I’m really excited to try this out get my own device go and that’s awesome. We’ll put a link here for the listeners choosemuse.com/welcome, choosemuse.com/welcome. And the discount code will be welcome 10 we’ll put the links below. So if you guys are driving and you’re active, we’ll put that below so you can access the later areas or anything else you want to leave the listeners with right now.

Ariel Garten: Really the understanding that if you’ve tried meditation before, and you’re like, I don’t know, I’m not good at it, whatever. Put all of that behind you because literally anyone can meditate. It’s not about whether you’re good at it. Whether you feel like you did it well or not. None of that matters. Meditation is just a process that you practice a little bit every day. And when you do it you will start to see the fruits and the benefits in your life.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it is there anywhere else people can get more information about you or the device.

Ariel Garten: At choosemuse.com/welcome. There’s lots of information about the device, the neuroscience behind it and more.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Ariel, thank you so much for being part of the podcast.

Ariel Garten: My sincere pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you.


References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://www.evanbrand.com/

https://justinhealth.com/muse

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/meditation-using-the-muse-device-with-ariel-garten-podcast-304

Insomnia – Mold Toxicity and Detox Can Affect Your Sleep | Podcast #254

A healthy sleep makes a big difference in our overall health. With a good sleep, we help our body recover from all the stress as well as rejuvenate all the lost energy and repair cells.

Today’s podcast talks about insomnia and natural functional medicine strategies to get to the root cause. Dr. Justin and Evan Brand gives out information on how insomnia occurs and how we could treat it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover: 

01:46 Sleep theories

07:30 Why sleep is important

14:09 Toxic Exposure

16:36 Sleep lights, blue or red lights

22:18 Organic medicines and sleeping tips

Youtube-icon

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey there it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani I’m here with Evan brand Today we are going to be chatting about insomnia and natural functional medicine strategies to get to the root cause. We’re also going to connect in mold and insomnia to that’s a common theme that Evan is seeing. And his patients and also with himself, Evan, what’s going on man? How are we doing?

Evan Brand: Hey, not too much. You know, I’m sleeping better now that I figured out the connection. My sleep was terrible. Like a year ago, I was up 2 3 4 times a night. And of course, my daughter was young too and she was still waking up in the middle of the night. So at first I thought it was that but then I noticed is really, really interesting connection between activated charcoal and improve sleep quality. And so I had the aura ring.I don’t know what to do with I think I lost it. But I had the order ring and I was wearing it and I would notice that my deep sleep I would get 20 to 30 minutes extra of deep sleep when I would take high dose activated charcoal. So I thought okay, charcoal equals exciting to toxins equals improve sleep. What the heck is going on there? So, my, my thought is and there’s talk about mycotoxins, which are mold toxins. There’s talk about mycotoxins, impairing your sleep quality, and specifically down regulating melatonin because mycotoxins are affecting the HPA axis. So that makes sense. But to me, I think there’s probably the cortisol connection part of that HPA axis that the toxin stimulates the nervous system. Same thing with heavy metals, maybe we should tie heavy metals into because charcoal can help arguably reduce metals and we know people with heavy metals. They also have bad sleep

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% we talked about or there’s new theories. This is a sleep specialist out of university of Berkeley at Matthew Walker. He’s done a couple of podcast Joe Rogan I think Nicole was interviewed him, but he talks about the lymphatic system which is kind of this glial cell immune cell in the brain, and lymph. And this lymphatic system is really important for removing toxins and a lot of these neurotoxins, they’re going to be cleared out during sleep. So whether it’s various beta amyloid plaques or whether it’s glyphosate or various heavy metals, this lymphatic system is really ramping up during sleep. That’s part of the reason why you have this neurological neuro emotional repair because we’re getting a lot of these toxins out via the lymphatic Leo cell lymphatic system in the brain, which is really interesting.

Evan Brand: Brand new study just came out like a few days ago, October 31. I’m going to give you the link so you can have it here. It’s titled waves of fluid babe, the sleeping brain perhaps to clear waste. And basically what was done. I believe it was an fMRI or an E. Yeah, it was both so it looked like it was an eg to measure the brain. electrical activity, and then also f which is a functional MRI. And they, these researchers recorded these people while they slept in an MRI scanner, which I wouldn’t want to be exposed to that amount of magnetic fields for study but luckily somebody did that for us. And what they found was that the cerebral spinal fluid was pumping every 20 seconds, just bone and it would just pump pump pump and so of course nobody knows 100% what that means yet but the thought is that this pumping of the fluid maybe that is it lymphatic system and now we’re just now finally able to visualize it, but the pumping of that fluid they think is draining out toxins at night.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s very, very powerful. I know a lot of people that have done really good increasing lithium ion at night taking life as normal go to die am also taking glycine has been very, very helpful at night and part of I think is number one glycine is a precursor to go to file right? And also lithium is its own building block itself, which I think is going to really help up regulate this lymphatic detoxification system is the glial, the lymphatic of glial cells, and the limp interacting in the brain. And then all of these toxins that are removed via the lymphatic system, eventually reach your liver, they are going to go back to the hepatic portal vein, which is going to go back to that big filter in the liver, and then we’ll all be dumped out a lot of it will be dumped out in the kidneys, and then a lot in the stool. So that’s where a lot of my common recommendations for detox kind of go outside what most people think of as detox, meaning you need good digestion. If we have any gut issues or SIBO or slow motility or poor digestion, you may be reabsorbing some of those toxins, especially if you have slow transit time.

Evan Brand: Yeah, well said so that they call it intro hepatic recirculation, basically, it’s really energy intensive to create and manufacture new bile. So I don’t know Know what paper I looked at that said this, but it was talking about 95% of your bile being reabsorbed and 5% of your bile being freshly made. And so when you use binders, especially if you’re using like a prescription cola star mean, like I’m using that attaches to the bile to bile acid sequestering, and that’s how it works lower cholesterol, but the lot of the toxins are in the bile. So I can tell you 100% if I take binders closer to bedtime, I don’t wake up as much in the sleep is more restful, and I dream more. So I’ve noticed a lot of that with clients to using a lot of chlorella and different liver support. A lot of people will say, Hey, I haven’t been dreaming for 510 years, and now I’m dreaming again. So to me, I think dreaming is a good sign that you must be clearing out some brainwaves. What do you think?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think it definitely is make your processing a lot of the emotional stress for the day. That makes a lot of sense to me. So we’re removing toxins via the lymphatic system. We talked about glycine and we talked about you already mentioned Some of the binders, like with mold, mold could be a stressor that enters the lymphatic system. Some of these mycotoxins could cross the blood brain barrier and stress out the glial cells, and that lymphatic system may be stressed as well. And of course, we’re trying to filter all these things out, get it back to the liver and flush it out via the stool as well, hence, where the coolest ironing comes in, which is a bile salt sequestering agent, like you mentioned, 5% is new. So if you can decrease that amount down, maybe only maybe 50% new and now you’re reading, you know, your research, writing and re filtering out and making fresh file while that old files getting flushed out into the stool, which is really good. And then of course, better sleep is going to promote better memory, right? Because if we have less brain fog via the activation of the immune cells in the brain, cognitive wise, we’re going to be able to have better recall will be faster on our feet, you’ll be able to think more clearer because one of the big things in regards to brain inflammation is going to be cognitive and brain fog issues. Anything else you want to highlight there?

Evan Brand: Well, yeah, I’m going to take what you said take it a step further and people will ask us about, well, what brain supplement Can I take? What can I do to get more focus? What can I do to get more concentration? And part of that answer is to improve your sleep quality think people think about what supplement what herb, you know, what drug what stimulant, am I missing, to help increase my brain? It’s like maybe some things but if you’re not sleeping, I don’t care how much caffeine or whatever else you do, you’re not going to be optimal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. So of course, getting enough sleep is number one, trying to get sleep at the right time is important because we want to sleep within our natural circadian rhythm. So cortisol naturally drops you know, at that 10am time, and then when the cortisol drops, melatonin increases. So this is natural inverse relationship between cortisol and melatonin. And Melatonin is a very powerful antioxidant help stimulate that really good deep sleep. So you want to tap into it during that natural cortisol rhythm of the dropping cortisol. Followed by the rise in melatonin. That’s very, very important as the reason why shift workers have the highest rate of cancer, World Health Organization, put shift work in the same category as substance carcinogens as non sub OS substance carcinogens like smoking and assesses. So it’s definitely toxic to your body even though it’s a non substance, right? I mean, shift work is in the substances. It’s a it’s a lifestyle tactic, so we can shift that, that’s going to be big. And then of course, some amino acids are going to be what you use to make a lot of your sleep hormone. So the first thing I look at is how is your digestion? Are you eating enough protein? Are you vegan? vegetarian? Are you getting enough protein number one, number two, are you digesting it? Are you assimilating it? How your stools looking? Are they floating it all too? Are you processing your fat soluble vitamins as well? These are really really, really important things we want to look at when it comes to sleep. Because all of our neuro chemicals most are going to be made from amino acids, amino acid peptides, right? serotonin is going to be made from tryptophan or five HTTP, dopamine and adrenaline getting made from phenylalanine entire scene. GABAs you know itself it’s got gamma amino acid l theanine plays a big role in GABA. I’m trying to think Melatonin is also made from serotonin, which is made from five HTTP and trip the fan. Anything else you wanted to highlight on the protein connection there?

Evan Brand: Yeah, you need to B6 to–

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: B6 is a very important cofactor that’s involved in the synthesis that you have. If you have a lot of these amino acids there, but not enough B6, you’re not going to have this synthesis happens. It’s like having a whole bunch of wood. And it’s like having a whole bunch of wood that’s wet. And then you have the flame will you need dry wood, right? So it’s really important cofactor to that equation. So that spark takes.

Evan Brand: And will and we’ll ask people that too. So when we look at the urinary organic acid test, we can measure the B six levels. And I’ll ask people Hey, look, your be six is really low. How’s your sleep? And I would say nine times out of 10 people say my sleep is not good and the other brain cancers You markers may look okay, like serotonin may look adequate. But if you’re not having that cofactor I think of it like the spark plug. Really, if you don’t have the spark plug to make melatonin, then adequate serotonin may be helpful for mood but your sleep could still suffer.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. Yep. 100% So we talked about the amino acids, I would say blood sugar is a really important thing. Now, there’s a lot of people doing a whole bunch of fasting, which I think is had can have some good benefits as long as we’re getting enough nutrition. Right. There’s a fine line between fasting anorexia. I mean, you tell me, what’s the definition of anorexia? It’s essentially starving, right getting an adequate amount of calories, right? Eating Disorder? Well, if you’re fasting to the point where you’re getting an adequate amount of calories, well, that means you’re automatically getting an adequate amount of nutrition. If your calories are cut in half, how do you get enough nutrition? I think it’s impossible. Now if you’re doing lots of organ meat and lots of nutrient dense foods and bone broth and green juice, you know, really good organic green You know, you have at least a head start there, but your body still needs enough overall calories, calories or energy. And if we’re eating whole food, nutrient dense calories, calories are attached to nutrients. And this day and age though it’s possible especially with Halloween, we got a whole bunch of calories and very low amount of nutrition. So you could have a lot of calories and low nutrition. But if you don’t get enough calories, it’s going to always be difficult to have adequate amount of nutrition. That makes sense. 

Evan Brand: It does. Yeah, well, you’re pointing out the fact people will just when they go into a fasting protocol for cognitive benefits or try to lose weight, they may just pull a meal completely out so they’ll just not eat breakfast. Now they’re only eating two meals a day but they did nothing to replace those nutrients they lost at breakfast. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And especially if they’ve added in some exercise or they’re doing some resistance training, that could be an extra stressor on top of that. So you really have to look at your nutrition, run it through chronometer, just double check to make sure you’re getting enough because if you aren’t getting enough, that’s also a stressor. So you’re now trying to make your body less stressed by fasting and giving your tummy a chance to rest while at the same time you’re adding more stress. And that could create some cortisol surges at the wrong times. It may even create a little bit of a hypoglycemic drop at night. And those hypoglycemic drops can stimulate cortisol and adrenaline to pick up that low blood sugar. So that’s always a possibility. If you’re waking up in the middle of the night, so you have going to sleep and then you have waking up in the middle of the night. And so waking up the middle of night a lot of times could be a blood sugar thing. It could also be a gut or liver thing, right that liver hours between one and three it could possibly be connected with that as well.

Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve had people do this experiment where we’ll give them a liver tincture, like milk thistle Shonda berry combo or will do some encapsulated liver support before bed. And a lot of times that will improve that 1-3 am wake up time. So yeah, Chinese medicines, right Chinese medicines who said Oh, it’s got to be the liver. It has a circadian rhythm and it’s true

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean taking some activated charcoal and that liver and gallbladder pump stuff out that activated charcoal sitting in your tummy and it’s kind of soak it up. It also gives some good of iron and glycine before bed if that helps, you know, and like you mentioned giving some liver tone defying herbs like whether it should just Sondra milk thistle or artichoke or dandelion just things to naturally support the liver gallbladder that’s a good sign that there could be a toxicity issue as well.

Evan Brand: Yeah. So the blood sugar piece is great. I love how you tied it into the adrenal. So I mentioned the organic acids help. We’re looking at some brain chemistry markers there that could affect sleep. But in terms of saliva and your urine testing, we may be looking at that to measure that cortisol. Yeah, a lot of times we’ll see that inverse pattern where you’ve got that spike of cortisol at night and then it’s always up to us as practitioners to try to tease that out and determine what caused this evening spike was this someone who was looking at a bright blue iPhone screen before they collected the urine, where they you know, because the lab will tell you on the instructions if you read them correctly. It says Don’t be around a lot of bright lights at night because we want to try to get an accurate picture of whether the body’s doing this or was it some type of environmental exposure that caused the cortisol spike?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. We talked about how important the toxic exposure is. So this heavy metals are mold issues or the mycotoxins which them offer mold and there’s hundreds of mycotoxins, right. So if you have a mold issue is, it’s always pretty safe to assume it’s probably some kind of a micro toxin exposure.

Evan Brand: Would you agree? Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then we have just, you know, lifestyle strategies, like, for instance, if my son uses the iPad, we try to let him use it in the first half of the day, what we do is we put the blue light filter on, so there’s no blue light, and then we cut down the screen intensity by about 80 to 85%. So it’s like it’s really faint. You could barely see it. He doesn’t notice it. That way, if he has it a little bit closer, I don’t have to fight with him. It’s like, all right, the intensity is down. 90% we filled it out, you know, most of the blue light and it’s at least a good strategy in the meantime, while we put a timer on it. Do you have any strategies like that that you use for your kids?

Evan Brand: Yeah, so my daughter, like To watch a show that’s called Daniel Tiger, which is like a PV, my son watches that too. So, luckily, when I made a custom manufacturer of some blue light glasses, my buddy Matt, who made those, he also had access to some kids frames. So we got him to make some kids frames, kind of like hipster looking blue blockers for my daughter that fit her perfectly like toddler size. So that’s what she wears, if it’s anytime, anywhere even close to the sun going down. She’s got the glasses on, while she watches that they have TV filters that you combine. So Richard handler, the PhD guy, he’s in his 90s. Now who makes like the low blue light bulbs, they make TV filters that you can put over the screen, but our TVs like a 52 inch and they only go up to like a 45 inch or something so it just wouldn’t work and it’d be-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. Just wear glasses. It’s like you can fit these screens or you can fit these screens. Exactly. You know, with my son. There’s no way I’d ever get Keep glasses on like that would be like an absolute that’d be futile.

Evan Brand: But like my like him though he might want it

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Maybe he’s a little older-

Evan Brand: There was a little battle at first, but we just told her Hey look, if you want to watch this, you got to have these on and she was like, okay, and she was pretty compliant. But so you’re asking other strategies. We basically either use Edison bulbs like the little old school Edison-

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One like an incandescent one.

Evan Brand: Yeah, where it’s really warm, really warm color and- 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: More orange color at night. Yep. 

Evan Brand: Or just the salt lamps will just use salt lamps. So the real lamps again?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so for us, same thing, I just find it’s easier to put an app on your phone, you mean with an iPhone, you have night shift, right? And I just have night shift on all the time and then I just cut the intensity, right? Because if you have a little bit of blue light there, but then I cut the intensity down 80% Well, whatever blue light is left is now down. 80%. So I just cut the intensity down, put keep night shift on all the time. And that’s like an easy Good strategy there are other apps that you can download that would you know even knock out even more blue light like with my iPhone here I have the new iPhone 11 Pro and at nighttime if I really want I have it set up so I hit the side button now three times boom boom boom. Now I every ounce of blue light is knocked out.

Evan Brand: Yeah, people that are listening on audio they can’t see but his screen is like blood red blood red

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now is that Yeah,

Evan Brand: Is that a special app to do that little bump bump bump and then red? Is that an app or is that something built in that you can do

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s in the settings and then you can go in there and this used to be the home button down here. So the new iPhone 11 I’m not loving it yet, but there’s no home button. So the side button is the new home button essentially or it replaces it and there’s a way where you can say okay, if you triple tap the home button or the side button, then you can make the screen change colors. And I’ll try to find the article of how to do that will put it in the description. So this is nice at night. So if I’m looking at something right before bed, or if I want a nightlight for my son, right or if We’re looking at something, you know, on the on the phone, my son pictures, I can just knock out every ounce of red light. So I have a blue light. So that’s pure red light. So that’s a really nice feature. And then I want to back Boom, boom, boom, that’s back. 

Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve replaced the, you know, you shouldn’t be really eating before bed, but sometimes I have to go and get some type of drink out of the fridge at night. So I actually took the LEDs that were super, super blue and replace those with incandescent bulbs in the in the fridge and freezer. Our friend Luke story, he went like, above and beyond, he’s like, got red lights and everything like red lights in his oven, then red lights in its fridge. It’s like, Man, you shouldn’t be up that late at night anyway, so to me, I don’t care about doing that because I’m going to bed when it’s dark.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it just depends. It just depends how bad you’re in or how stressed your nervous system is. So like for me, if I get exposed to a little bit of light before bed, it doesn’t affect me whatsoever. Now I try to keep everything down. So we’ll have a fireplace on at night for most of our light. If US lights I have dimmer switches on all key rooms at night so I can knock down the light at least 80%. So at least have 20% I’ve stubbed my toe a couple times not fun. I do have the low blue light night bulbs and all of my kids rooms and our rooms. I will use that for like the bathroom. And I do have that and then my son does have a nightlight on we put it on a little bit because we have this little Baby Einstein thing, which makes pure blue light by the way. Yeah, so he loves it. But we find that if we put a nightlight in there and he’ll whack the Einstein much less than there’s less blue light coming out because it’s just a pure orange light. So we use the low Blue light.com nightlight and all the rooms and that’s just absolutely amazing. So for parents listening low Blue lights.com is going to be excellent. Get the light bulb, try to have good dimmer switches on all key rooms. And then the easiest thing is if you’re really that sensitive, just wear glasses because when you have the glasses and you’re pretty, you’re pretty dialed in now I get it there’s research showing that if it hits your skin to it could definitely you know, create some stress response, but it just depends upon how bad or how stressed your nervous system is. your nervous system is designed to adapt to stress. So if you’re really stressed, okay, fine. If you’re kind of in between, you may not need to go to all those extremes. So just do your best.

Evan Brand: Yes. And for moms listening, it’s been shown that the melatonin goes through the breast milk. So young children, they can’t manufacture their own melatonin. So they’re getting melatonin, through through through your breast if you’re breastfeeding, which hopefully you are, if you’re able to, and so I’m trying to pull it up now. But Richard handler, who we spoke about, he’s a low blue lights guy. He’s done some books on this. And he and this has been like, five, six years since I spoke with him. But he’s got books about the blue light connection to autism, bipolar disorder, reduction in cancer. We’ve already talked about that. Yeah, he just he calls it the silent killer, you know, concussions and how Avoiding blue light is super important when you’re trying to recover from concussions as well. So it’s a it’s an important topic. And this is not something that was around a long time ago like, you know, 50 years ago even there weren’t LED bulbs. He had incandescence where the blue was much, much less. I bought, you’re talking about a nightlight, I bought the little mini amber flashlight, it hooks up to a nine volt battery. So for live, I feel fine. So for trying to find a pacifier in the middle of the night, we could just turn that on instead.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I have that too. But for the most part with the iPhone doing this going all read that kind of replaces it. So I’m like, Okay, this is just really easy. That is not going to read out. So that’s not going all the blue out. So I like that. So we talked about the diet and lifestyle strategies. I think that’s really important, especially when it comes to your kids. I think some of the apps on the phones can be helpful, obviously big things like when I give my son, his iPad to watch so I can have a little bit of sanity and watch a show with my wife. We put it on airplane mode. We turn Bluetooth off, right? We try to keep a lot of the EMF out. All those things can be helpful. I try to put it on top of a pillow. So I’ll put a pillow on his lap. Yeah, then put up the iPad on top of the pillow that way, it’s not up against you know, any any private areas, you don’t want that. Those are all good, helpful strategies. Anything else you want to say about that?

Evan Brand: Just the testing piece, we hit on like organic acids, where we’re measuring brain chemistry to try to help people resolve this issue that talked about cortisol, either saliva, or urine. And then you mentioned the gut. So gut infections playing a role. I know when I had parasite infections, people say that parasites are more active at night and parasites are more active on a full moon. So if you notice that you or your kids are getting worse sleep around a full moon, it’s possible that it’s related to the gut. So we would be looking at some functional stool testing to try to investigate this problem.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, functional medicine where you’re going to plug in some of the organic acids or some of the intracellular nutrient test to assess nutrients. We’re going to look at infections that can be overly stimulating. We’re going to look at either some of the Dutch hormone testing or some of the salivary hormone testing to assess cortisol and then also women if you’re having issues especially where it’s more cyclical progesterone is a big part of Gabba Gabba really helps you shut down and relax your nervous system. So if you have a lot of stress going on there, your progesterone could be part of the problem. And part of that is progesterone is a precursor to cortisol. So if you’re under a lot of stress, your progesterone will drop and estrogen dominance is a natural side effects. So that’s a big part of the hormones and then blood sugar could be a stressor. So you mentioned not eating before bed. Some people that have blood sugar issues, they may do better eating before bed, they may do better having more carbs at night. Also, blood sugar stress can lower magnesium. Magnesium is a really important cofactor for blood sugar. So if you have a lot of up and down blood sugar fluctuations, and we’re constantly kind of react reactive hypoglycemic, that means eat some carbs, blood sugar goes up and then it crashes down with too much insulin because of the blood sugar being off with the carbs. You’re going to deplete some of your magnesium too. And magnesium is really important for promoting relaxation before bed. And during the day in general,

Evan Brand: Yeah, good point on the mineral depletion, because that’s a stress you mentioned, it’s a stress, you’re going to get to burn up those reserves because of that crisis of blood sugar getting too low. So what’s the remedy? Well, I mean, hopefully, your dreams are strong enough to handle going from say 6pm dinner to 8am breakfast, but if you’re not, then you may need to do some type of bedtime snack, a little piece of grass fed jerky, or maybe a scoop of almond butter or something like that. It’s relatively easy.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, a lot of times I’ll do some vitamin C, some powdered vitamin C and some collagen. And then I’ve been doing a little bit of brain glandular tissue. before bed. We talked about that that’s really kind of helped with dreams. That’s kind of interesting. I think dreams do have a kind of a way of processing a lot of the emotional stress throughout the day. So we’ll do some brain glandular tissue. I’ll do vitamin C in collagen before bed, sometimes they’ll take some probiotics before bed too. So I like that That’s kind of nice little cocktail for me.

Evan Brand: That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea. I usually do my brain in the morning, but I might need to try it at night because you are getting some of that pineal gland in there.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Yep. I think that’s really good. And there’s some really good. There’s some really good CDs and music you can listen to before bed too. I’m pretty sure it’s either Delta or theta. I forget which ones is the Big Sleep wavelength.

Evan Brand: I believe the delta is your deep phases where people meditate. I believe delta is like your super deep wave, not 100% Sure. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll figure it out here. But there’s lots of ways that you can download specific music even just on YouTube. And that will help promote that frequency. I’ll pull it up here in just a second. Yeah, so delta or slow wave sleep. So delta is gonna be the big one. Yeah, so delta is gonna be the sleep so you can easily go on YouTube or just go online and you can get delta wavelength is also bionic. beats you can get different bionic beats as well, which are very, very helpful for promoting relaxation. So if you’re more stressed, you can go and download some Delta type music or bionic beats that may even incorporate Delta type me that’s very helpful to promote good, parasympathetic nervous system response. And if you have a hard time going parasympathetic, be very careful with exercise to close the bed, because that will ramp up your sympathetic response. And it may take you a while to turn off so you may be too revved up with that sympathetic response. So things that I’ll do to help kind of calm down as Gabba I’ll do higher dose actual ganda higher dose phosphor, let it serene higher dose magnesium, it to accelerate it you could do a magnesium footpath like Epsom salt, which is magnesium sulfate. Then you could also do it with a foot bath or a full bath, magnesium sulfate to really stimulate magnesium absorption.

Evan Brand: Good. Yeah, I’m also a big fan of lemon balm. We’ll throw that into the mixture you can use your passion flower, you could use hops, you could use catnip you can You skullcap. Valerian is great for some not good for others. Mother Ward is my favorite I love mother work for harp helps, especially if you’ve got that kind of worried anxious mind You’re overthinking and ruminating mother Ward will settle that down, I’ve actually measured put my heart rate monitor on and measure my heart rate variability and increased about five minutes after I took a shot a mother work. So that’s they call it like bypass in a bottle because it helps so much with the heart issues and circulation problems. So that’s another side benefit and I’m glad you brought up the brainwaves because some people may benefit and they may need if the nervous system is screwed, and herbs can’t fix it alone, meditation etc. Can’t help nature walks, they may need some brain training, you know like some neurofeedback can be very helpful to try to get you more in those theta like tranquil state or more the deep Delta State.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and easy for that as you can get the inner balance the new m wave plug and then you can plug it right into your phone and that kind of gives you almost an HIV. Then you can do five seconds in, five seconds out breathing wise all to the nose can be very helpful. And you could put it on and you could just pitch it to your ear type

Evan Brand: Have you have you tried different types of breathing strategies and see which increases your HRV score the best?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I just do five in five out there are some different ones using box breathing where you do for in so it’s.. and then you hold for seven.. and then operate. So it’s a 478 and that’s been very helpful for just kind of relaxing and tranquilizing the nervous system and again, that’s seven, that’s seven hold. It does something with increasing co2. The hold is what’s increasing the co2 and then followed by the out and you try to make almost all of that you know through the nose on the outside it’s going to be probably okay going to the mall but try to go as much of the nose as possible.

Evan Brand: Yeah, tapping is good to you know, you could do some herbs, take a shot of some herbs and then tap, tap, tap calm the nervous system down, we know you can shift in a person. But the trick that way too.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, the big thing with tapping is if there’s things on your mind that are just bugging you, and you’re just you’re kind of ruminating on it, this is where tapping is the best. So I just take our I’m going to take three to five minutes, and I’m going to just think about, and maybe I’m just going to have a conversation about all the things that are bothering me. And I’m going to just talk about the emotion, hey, this conversation I had with this person today really, really pissed me off, right, I felt very irritated. I felt very anxious. And you may just talk about what happened and just talk about the emotion and then just kind of go through and tap all the major points. I double tap it because I just feel like it’s really effective. And then once I have, you know, once I have that, like, let’s say I’m at a seven once I drop a little five or four, or ideally two or three. Once I had that big drop in my emotions, and I just don’t care. It’s like, okay, whatever. That’s where I’ll kind of, you know, go into prayer, go more into meditation or go more into just gratitude and thankfulness. It’s hard It’s hard to be thankful and focus on what you want when you’re pissed off. So these are good strategies to kind of just calm down once you’re calm, then you can focus on, you know, the things you got to do tomorrow, which I’m not a huge fan of doing that too much. I think what you’re better off doing is before you go to bed, have like your little app on your phone or some paper and write down the top three things, right? Boom, than hates there, you downloaded it, it’s there. And then you can come to it tomorrow, you don’t have to worry about it. And then you go into a kind of appreciation, gratitude, and focus on what you want to manifest those kinds of things. So the more you can kind of create parasympathetic is better. So I use the tapping to decrease the stress first, and then go into what I want to manifest. If you’re too stressed. It’s too hard to do that.

Evan Brand: Yes, it is. You’re exactly right. I had a client last week told me that her husband would always get mad when he would see her tapping, because he would assume that she was tapping because she was pissed at something he did. I’m like, that guy needs to get over himself. You’re just tapping to help yourself. And so she kinda like After that,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it could be something from work it could be. And who knows, it could have been like, maybe they had a little bit of a conversation before bed. And either way, it’s not a sign of whether you’re right or wrong and an argument because you could still be stressed, you know, and you’d have to decrease that stress from whatever that conversation was. Maybe it was just a really intense conversation about, you know, family, right. Okay, let’s, let’s calm it down and get into that parasympathetic. I think it’s a good rule is just, you know, no, no strenuous conversation within an hour or two before bed. Everybody go, 

Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah, money and moving and travel and anything super intense. Yeah, I probably save you for waking hours. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s hard sometimes, though. Because if you’re waking up early, and you don’t see your wife to the next day, or vice versa. It’s like, well, you gotta put it out there because you need you know, you need to address it, but it’s tough. You try to do your best.

Evan Brand: It’s always a balance. It’d be interesting to hook ourselves up to like an EKG machine and see what our brain waves are doing while we’re doing a podcast together. I bet word and I’m sure we’re both probably in the beta state, like to fully alert awake Beta, but it’d be interesting.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I agree. Well, anything else you want to kind of dive into here I’m just trying to connect the functional medicine the nutrition, the blood sugar, trying to prime in some of the labs that we can do to dive in deeper if people are listening to this and they’re like, okay, I’ve tried some of these diet and lifestyle strategies I want to dig in deeper feel free to reach out to Evan, EvanBrand.com, reach out to me Dr. J at JustInHealth.com, feel free and schedule with us if you want to dive in deeper to address some of these root cause issues. Anything else you want to say Evan?

Evan Brand: Well, CBD since CBD so popular and trendy. I’ve used it I mean, I take CBD all the time just because I have access to a lot of different companies that have sent me stuff. I haven’t noticed a huge difference to be honest, you know, I’ve played with the dosing and and this and that, but I think if you’re just doing straight CBD without a tiny bit of THC is kind of the entourage effect which helps it work better. I just don’t think it’s a huge needle mover. If people may argue all CBD is a miracle. I mean, I’ve done a lot of high grade brands and higher doses and without the THC, I’ve just not noticed much benefits. So people that do report relief and like pain relief that allows him to sleep better, it’s always going to be more like an edible version versus like a sublingual version. So if you’re going to go for that, you know, you may want to do something that goes to the gut, as opposed to just doing like a like a soft gel versus vaping or smoking, soft gel under the tongue, those type things may work a little better.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% so CBD I find it can be relaxing for me, but not any more than like magnesium or something nutritional so I rather just use a nutrient over time I can use a nutrient nutrient over like an herb that may not be a root cause kind of thing I always stick with the nutrient. I have found a really good success like if I have you know words with my wife or getting a stressful thing before bed. Actual ganda magnesium are just like they are my jam. They work really well. And tapping can be a little bit helpful. And then of course, white noise White noise is great. For the most part, I have my Austin air, crank it up on the highest setting that makes a really good bit of white noise. I have the white noise app on my phone. This is the one that I use. I’m going to hold it up so people can see it. If you’re driving, don’t worry, look at the link later.

Evan Brand: And what’s it titled?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s actually just called white noise. So I’m going to just pull up the picture of the app. So y’all can just see what it looks like. And then I’ve tried over the years, all kinds of different noises. So I’ll tell you exactly what I use.

Evan Brand: That’s a very that’s a very astute comment that you made that you would rather use a nutrient over an herb. I love that that makes total sense because yes, you’re not just like sedating yourself. You’re actually giving the body a nutrient to calm down. For example, this magnesium versus CBD. I think that’s just wonderful.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. I totally agree, man. Glad that you appreciate that. So I do I do the paid one. The white noise here. There’s a you’ll see one in pink, red. Then one reddish pink and then one in blue. So I paid the $2. And it’s great. And that’s the one that I use. And I’ll show you the exact setting I use, I do brown noise. So the first couple of years I used it, I did white noise. Okay, here’s white, kind of a little hissy high pitch. And then I went to pink because I saw some data on pink for a while being very helpful for sleep waves, which is ok. Ok. And then I went to Brown, so just a little bit softer. So here’s Brown. The little bit softer. Like Brown. And then there’s also a violet, I think this is this is blue. Don’t do high pitch your hissy for me. And then violet was also very hissy.

Evan Brand: It didn’t really come through too good on the recording, so people have to just look up the app and check it out. That’s it. Oh, there you go. Yep. Okay. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So that’s, that’s violet.

Evan Brand: And I think your microphone switched over to your, your headset instead of your big microphone to maybe it caught your Listen here and things. No, that’s still going good. Okay, good. No, I’m still good.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s violet. That blue. That’s Brown. 

Evan Brand: Yeah, like brown less horse than paint. I hear that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. So my favorite number ones Brown. number two Pink. There’s some data. There’s some data on pink being very beneficial for sleep waves probably brown as well. I haven’t looked at it. But browns, just the nice the most softest thing. And then also, if you want to have one fans are just really nice too. So they have a-

Evan Brand: Here’s the question. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Listen to a fan to like that. And so the nice thing is if you if you sleep with your wife or a partner, guess what? You just get the same app and you synchronize it so she’ll have her phone on and in the corner across the room on airplane mode. I’ll have mine as well. And then it’s synchronize But it becomes not that big of a deal because the Austin air that loud setting is so loud and it’s so nice, but that’s enough most of the time.

Evan Brand: Exactly. So I was going to ask this to you set a timer for that, like are you noticing any benefit on leaving that on I just was curious if you’re exposed to that noise all night versus just long enough to get you to sleep all night. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All night. I keep it in my bathroom. My wife sleeping in my son’s room just because the breastfeeding and you know having to wake up a couple of times that makes it easier on her and then also a nice I’m not getting disturbed. So she’ll have it she won’t have it now because she needs to hear my son. But when she comes back to the room, she’ll definitely synchronize it up but the Austin air has been pretty darn good but when we travel for sure it’s 100%

Evan Brand: Yeah, I love the Austin too and I sound the molecules to molecule for one, it’s you got the stupid blue light your light Turn off the light and the sound it sounds more like a vacuum on a low speed rather than the Austin is just a more comforting fan sound. 

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Austin is the best sounding air filter out there. It has no light on it, which is awesome. And the next thing is the little Turner guy. I wish they made out of metal, you know, and we talked about that as plastic a little switch. But the cool thing is you can put a setting on and then pull it off. So if you have kids that are monkeying with stuff, use pull it off, put it up high, and then they can’t touch it. So that’s kind of nice, too.

Evan Brand: Yep. Cool. All right, well, let’s wrap this thing up. But I put out and reach out clinically, Justin’s website is JustinHealth.com. And we can definitely help with sleep issues. But I’m going to tell you straight up your sleep issues are going to surprise you meaning what he or I uncovers, that’s going to surprise you because you’re going to come and you’re gonna think oh, I just have sleep issues and then we’re going to reveal you know, it’s it. Yeah, you do have sleep issues, but it’s because of XYZ and that’s the fun part is getting to the root cause of this stuff. So that’s what we do. Every day all day we live and breathe this stuff literally.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And if you guys are enjoying this information, give us a share a thumbs up, put your comments below. Let us know what What you guys have done regarding sleep regarding functional medicine and nutrition for your sleep what’s worked for you and then if you guys are really enjoying this give us the share and also write us a review JustinHealth.com/iTunes, EvanBrand.com/iTunes we appreciate your feedback and getting this out there so more people can help improve their health we really appreciate y’all

Evan Brand: Yep take care my website if you want to reach out to EvanBrand.com so JustinHealth.com, EvanBrand.com and we look forward to helping you so take care.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You guys have a phenomenal day. Take care y’all. Bye.

Evan Brand: Bye bye.


References:

https://justinhealth.com/

Audio Podcast:  

http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/insomnia-mold-toxicity-and-detox-can-affect-your-sleep-podcast-254

Recommended Products:

Austin Air Health Mate Plus®

Austin Air Health Mate Junior Plus

Recommended glandular support


The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Justin Marchegiani unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked. The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Justin and his community. Dr. Justin encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified healthcare professional. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Marchegiani’s products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using any products.