#397: STRESS: The Silent Accelerator of Aging (10 Free Hacks Rewiring Your Longevity) | Calm Amid Chaos With Nat Niddam

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Knidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all, from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Hot take. I don't want to get sick this season. Looking ahead at my calendar, I've got a lot of exciting things to do and places to be, and I know your calendar is no different. So I have a few key tools in my don't get sick this season stack. Notably, bioregulators. My go-to at this time of year are Thymus and the pineal gland bioregulator. This is when I do that 30-day reboot that I talk about a lot in the podcast where I'm talking about bioregulators. Why? Because the Thymus bioregulator helps to keep immune response balanced, think T cell quality control, and small human studies in older adults link it with healthier immune markers and fewer seasonal respiratory issues. Now the pineal gland bioregulator supports your natural melatonin and circadian rhythm. Key, when schedules and daylight change, so you get the kind of sleep that underpins immune resilience. In plain English, steadier sleep, steadier defenses, more fall plans kept. Whatever your health needs, there's a bioregulator for you. Now head to profound-health.com and use code NAP15 for 15% off your order. Welcome back to the show, folks. Today's episode is a little bit different than usual. Well, for starters, it's just me. It's bringing to a close one of the busiest, most intense, and in some ways, most stressful times of year. And so rather than give you another deep episode on some crazy health and longevity hack, I thought that we would do something a little bit different and talk about some of the ways and strategies that we have access to for free that can help us to mitigate the impact of chronic stress. And if you're like anybody else out there these days, you're too busy, the world is too crazy, there's too much going on, we're doing, doing, doing, even when it comes to doing, doing, doing all of the incredible health practices and biohacking practices that we've picked up along the way, trying to make it all happen. And here we are at a time of year which is even more intense, trying to manage it all. So I thought that what we would do today is just quickly dip our toe in 10 different free strategies you can use to manage your stress. And we can all agree that if I told you to start doing 10 new things tomorrow, that would stress you out insanely. And that is not by any stretch what I'm proposing here. What I'm saying is in these 10, there may be a few you're already doing, there may be something that you can add. And if you're doing none of them, then the invitation is to pick one, pick one thing to start with, and then we will build on it. And in many ways, I've been promoting this for a while now. For the last few months on my social media, if you follow me on social media, we've been talking about three free things that you could start doing today to improve your health. And that was a handout that we were sending out to people on Instagram in response to a queue. So now, I mean, I don't even know if these 10 things are exactly the things that we shared, but I'll bet you there's a lot of overlap. And why do we even want to do this? What is it about stress? That is such a problem because you know, stress is part of life, it's a normal part of life. And anybody, any physiologist will tell you that without stress, the human body wouldn't survive, nothing in nature would. But the problem is that we know that chronic stress is silently what is accelerating aging, and it can offset any of the most powerful tools that we have, whether it's a peptide, whether it's a supplement, whether it's practice, whatever it is, if we are living in a chronic state of stress, it can undo the most powerful, the most expensive things that we are implementing in our lives. We know that chronic untreated stress will shorten telomeres, it will drive inflammation in the body, and it'll weaken the immune system by driving immunosynescence, which in and of itself feeds back into that whole inflammation loop. And now we have a negative loop. So not here to stress you out about this, but really just to give you some actionable, free, easy tools that you can start to implement. And I will also say that even if you bought the latest greatest gadget, if we're not doing some of these foundational practices, if we're not doing any of this stuff, our gadgets are not possibly likely to work for us. Case in point, not even a gadget, look at bioregulator peptides. Way back in the day when I released my very first episode with Phil Lawrence on the telomere study that he was conducting with bioregulator therapy, he was talking about he had about 100 people in his first cohort, and after six months to a year, they were remeasuring telomeres. So they measured their telomeres before they started taking bioregulators. And then at six months to a year, they remeasure telomere length. And the beautiful thing is that in the lion's share of cases, everybody's telomeres got longer, except for a few people. Like there, I think there were three people where telomeres did not get any longer, they just stayed frozen. And I remember at the time, and if you listen to that episode, you may remember this, I remember asking Dr. Lawrence, like, what happened to these three people? Why didn't the bioregulators work for them? And the answer that I got was because stress, these people were under tremendous stress. And so even though these people took used bioregulators the exact same way that all the other people use the bioregulators, in their case, the bioregulators was not able to stimulate the lengthening of telomeres. Maybe they did get benefit because their telomeres didn't get shorter. So their telomeres held wherever they were, but they didn't get longer. So this is just one example to say that if we don't start to layer in some of these easy freebie practices that are so foundational to helping our nervous system calm down, all of the other fancy stuff that we're doing is not likely to give us the benefit that we want. And what I want to add to that is in interviewing all the people that I've interviewed this year, I would say that there is not a single one who deals in helping people to live longer, healthier lives or people who are dealing with helping people deal with chronic disease or chronic conditions. There is not one that did not at some point refer to the need to bring the nervous system back into balance to get the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system back into a state of balance. So that means we're not constantly operating in a fight or flight state and we're not, obviously you can't always operate in arrest and digest either. We need a dynamic between the two. We need some tension between those two. We need to have access to fight or flight for when we need it on occasion, but we can't be living in that state all the time. And the crazy thing is that, you know, I think a lot of people may be living in fight or flight without actually realizing it. How's that possible? Well, it's possible because as humans, we normalize whatever our state, our condition is. And you've probably heard me say this in the past as well, where we talk to people when we, you know, when I was practicing as a nutritionist, and I would help people and work on their digestion first, and we would go after things like bloating and gas or even, you know, maybe they, they were experiencing joint pain or pain in their body. And they wouldn't come in telling me that. But when we finally did the work and those things started to abate, they would come back and say, Oh my God, I feel so much so amazing, my pain's gone away or my bloating's gone away. They never even had, by the time they came into me, they weren't even registering the bloating was an issue for them. They had just normalized it. It was just, that's just the way they are. My point is that we could be living in a sympathetic state without actually realizing it. And some of the ways we can figure that out is we might, if we, you were aware of wearable, whether it's an aura ring or a whoop band, whatever the case is, check out your HRV, your heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is a really solid marker of the balance between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. If those HRV numbers are constantly in the tank, that's a sign that you may be operating in a sympathetic state more often than not. And we need to work, you need to work on that, you need to find a way to reduce whatever that perceived stressor is of the body. Now, we're going to talk about strategies that you can do. If you have something going on like a mold infection or a lime infection or heavy metals, the body can perceive those things also as a chronic stressor. And so what I'm going to talk about today is not really going to impact those things, but it will at least impact the things your mindset. It'll impact your, the metrics that you can affect so that if you are doing all these things and it's still not moving the needle, then you problem, you know that you're going to have to go see someone, a functional provider who's going to work with you and do some testing to figure out what are the other things that could be driving stress in your system. Okay. So this episode is not meant to replace medical advice. None of them are, but hopefully you'll find a couple of tidbits here that can give you some tools and levers that you can use yourself as you're starting, as you're figuring everything else in your world. So I'm going to make a statement and this is, this goes back to that bioregulator episode I'm talking about is that we know, and it has been established in studies now that chronic stress silently accelerates aging. It speeds up our aging. So how does it do that? It does that by shortening telomeres. It does it by driving inflammation in your body and ultimately it goes after your immune system. We know that when we're very stressed, we're more likely to get sick and that's because those elevated like the elevated cortisol, the inflammation, all those things inhibit the immune system. It stops the immune system of working the way that it needs to. We know that elevated cortisol leads to increased levels of IL-6 and inflammatory marker and CRP. So if all those things are elevated, the immune system just can't function the way it needs to. And so then number one, we're more likely to get sick. And number two, we're just accelerating aging. We're aging faster on the inside because the body can't renew itself and it can't regenerate when it's this in this constant state of inflammation and the immune system is not working properly. Okay, so that's the bad news. The good news is there's a lot we can do about this. Okay. There's so many things we can do. There's so much we can do to avoid living in this constant state of heightened cortisol. We need cortisol. Cortisol is a necessary hormone, but when cortisol is high all the time, it is what we call a catabolic hormone. It breaks things down. So we can't be building while cortisol is high. So we need that cortisol to go up when necessary, but then we need it to be able to come back down kind of like blood sugar, right? We need blood sugar to be able to go up at times, but it needs to come down in a reasonable amount of time so that we don't suffer the damage from the blood sugar floating around in the bloodstream, which we've talked about a lot. We could talk about it again in another day, but I'm not, I promise myself I'm not going down rabbit holes because I want to keep this short and actionable for you folks at a very busy time of year. All right. So here we go. So we know that there's lots of research around this. We'll link some studies at the bottom of the episode, but mostly what I wanted to do with this episode is keep it a little bit later and just give you those 10 things with a little bit of reasoning why each one of these 10 things can be helpful. Once again, I'm going to repeat. I'm not expecting you to do all 10. It doesn't mean you can't create stacks within the 10. We can talk about that, but it means that even if you picked one thing of these that really is calling to you, that really resonates for you and you started to implement it tomorrow, it would start you on this journey of learning to mitigate the impact of chronic stress and or even hopefully lowering the stress on yourself. All right. So number one, connection. We know, we know there's so many studies now that show that, look, we are meant to be pack animals. We are meant to be in a tribe, be members of a tribe. Connection is critical to humans. And so meaningful connection to friends, to family, to people who share our interests who might not even be our friends and family. Meaningful connection ultimately buffers cortisol and improves our mood. And so if you're living far away from friends and family and you're sitting there going, well, what am I supposed to do? I'm living in Australia, all my friends and family are in North America, pick up the phone and get on WhatsApp, do video calls five minutes a day is all it takes to establish meaningful connection with someone. Right. So if you don't, if that's not enough for you, what do you love? Do you love working out? Go to the, join a gym. Don't want to join an expensive gym, find a Y or a community center, any of these places where you can meet people who share your interests, you will eventually meet people that you establish a connection with. But at this point, even the barista, right? The barista at your local coffee shop, having meaningful connection with people. And this is a hard thing to say to someone who maybe is in a negative spin. And I'm going to say again, this episode is not replacing any kind of therapy or anything, but this is kind of like your friend saying, honey, you need to shake it off, walk out the door, go get a cup of coffee, go see some people, meet some people. Human connection is something that we desperately, desperately need to be happy and to thrive. So figuring out a way to do that is important. Reaching out to friends and family is a great tool, but this brings me to number two. If you're in a world where you're, for whatever reason, separated from the people that you love and you don't have ability to connect with them, volunteer. Volunteering is an incredible way to number one, create your own release of endorphins. Giving of ourselves to other people is an incredibly powerful way of releasing our own feel good hormones. And we're giving of ourselves to other people. We're also enabling ourselves to connect with other people because quite often when we volunteer, we end up connecting with people who care about the same things as we do. So if you care about the environment, get online and find, maybe there's a group of people that heads down to the local park and cleans up the garbage once a week or a couple of times a week, or maybe you want to go volunteer at a shelter with, for pets, or you want to volunteer at a shelter for humans, or you want to maybe go serve meals. Like there's a lot of these, where I live, there's a program called Out of the Cold and they run it in churches and synagogues and they get a bunch of volunteers together to come together in the evenings and they have all of these people who have nowhere to go and are needing a hot meal. They come in for the night and we would serve them as if they were at the finest restaurant. The people, the guests coming in would sit themselves down and we would be running around bringing them drinks, bringing them food. Very often there'd be clothes if people needed some clothes. Anyway, it was a very robust program, very well run. Check it out, check out your area and see where you can volunteer in an area that is meaningful to you. Right? So for me, feeding people is something that really brings me joy. So in this case, this was a great one for me, but for you, it might be volunteering in an animal shelter or something else. These acts of giving, and we're not talking about giving money here, you're giving of your time and of yourself, these acts of giving on their own are incredibly beneficial for us. We experience gratitude from other people. We are being grateful and giving of ourselves to other people. It is a super powerful hack. Okay? So number one was connecting with friends and family. If we can, number two, volunteering. Number three, this is a big one. Stop scrolling, doom scrolling on your phone. I'm telling you now, there are so many reasons to be doom scrolling these days. There are so many crazy things going on in the world and I don't care whose side you're on and what the things are that you care about, but the algorithms are designed to feed us the things that are going to keep us glued to our screens. And generally speaking, unless you're, you're going towards the comedy line, which frankly, you could sit and laugh your butt off for an hour scrolling that if that's, if you're going to do that, that's great. Do it. But if you're doom scrolling, because the algorithm is feeding you story upon story upon story of the latest crazy horrible thing that's happening in the world, I'm telling you now, take a deep breath, shut it down, step away, step away, because that doom scrolling is leading you down a path of chronic stress. Your cortisol is going up, your nothing good is happening here. So I'm your friend. Think of me as your friend or your mother or whoever, cut the doom scrolling. It's been something that I myself have fallen into over the last couple years. And I've had to really take an active role in cutting it out. So we got to cut it out. Do you need to stay informed about certain things in the world? Yes. Do you need to be doom scrolling on your phone? Absolutely not. Just stop. Here's a fun fact you'll actually want to remember. Fadi 15 started with a team of scientists working with the US Navy to keep aging dolphins healthy. That research led to a massive human health breakthrough. C15, the first essential fatty acid discovered in 90 years. C15 strengthens our cells from the inside out, protecting them from the wear and tear that drives aging. When your cells are strong, you sleep better, you think clearer, you move easier, and yeah, you actually look healthier too. C15 is three times more effective than omega three and completely vegan. Fadi 15 is on a mission to optimize your C15 levels to help support your long-term health and wellness, especially as you age. You can get an additional 15% off their 90 day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.com forward slash Nat Nidam and using code Nat Nidam at checkout. Number four, nature. Getting out of nature drops cortisol. It improves our resilience. It improves our immune function. There was actually a study that I came across where they were comparing people hanging out in a forest of purely coniferous trees versus purely broad leaf deciduous trees and then mixed environments. It was hilarious. It turned out, I can't remember exactly. If I can find the study again, I'll link it in the show notes. It's not that important. What is important though is that it is very clear that getting out into nature is unbelievably powerful healing for us humans. So that means go take a walk in a park. If you live in a big city, there's got to be a park near you somewhere. Do your best to find a park. You know what I didn't find, and I should have looked for this actually is what if you created a green room in your home? I'll bet you there would be some benefit if you had the space, even a small space and you just filled it up with plants and you went and sat there and did some breath work or some meditation or read a book. I'll bet you there'd be some benefits to that. There's something about being out in nature that it is incredibly powerful, incredibly healing and incredibly balancing for our nervous system. So getting out in nature and there was even a prescription, if you will, from this one meta analysis, 120 minutes a week drops cortisol 20 to 30%. That's insane. Even drops anxiety. So it's worth it and it's easy and it's free. And you could stack things. You could grab a friend and go for a walk in nature. Guess what? You've now done two things. 10 minutes, 20 minutes. That's all you really need. 120 minutes a week. Let's say we divide that by six days. That's 20 minutes a day. If you divide it by seven days, it's 15 minutes a day. You could actually use that as your post-prandial walk after your biggest meal. What's the value of a post-prandial walk? Post-prandial is a fancy word for saying after dinner. Well, if your biggest meal is dinner or even lunch and you go for a 15 to 20 minute walk and you're doing it with a friend, we're now triple dipping here, guys, because we're getting out in nature. We're getting the benefits of nature. We're mitigating our blood sugar spike from that meal because we're going for a walk and we're stacking it with a friend. Three things. Boom. Right there. Talk about a hack, right? Beautiful stack. What else? Exercise. So don't leave. If you're not exercising, this is not about making you feel bad. This is about reminding you that you have to move your body for your body to be healthy. So if you've not exercised in 40 years or 30 years or 20 years and you're listening to this, this is your invitation to start low and slowly. Get out for a walk. And this is where that stacking with nature is amazing. Now, is the weather is horrible outside or you can't go out. If you have access to a treadmill, I don't care. Just move your body. Try to do it 30 minutes a day. If you could do that five days a week, I can't even begin to tell you. As a matter of fact, I'm going to invite you. If you're a sedentary person right now and you start walking 20 to 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week, I want you and you do this for 30 days, I want to invite you to message me on Instagram and tell me how do you feel after 30 days? Okay. Next, if you aren't sedentary, time to step it up, friends. Okay. 30 minutes, five days a week of exercise. And if you can do two days on top of that, if you can do two more days of weight strength training, your fitness level will change 100%. So what's the 30 minutes if it's not strange training? The 30 minutes could be walking, it could be brisk walking, it could be run walking, it could be getting on a bicycle, it could be anything that you want. But it's 30 minutes of not being sitting down, of moving your body, you could be working with bands. Bands are super cheap. I know I said they would be free. If we're going to keep it to free, then you're going to walk. But strength training, if you can throw two days a week of strength training in there. Exercise is, we know that it buffer stress, it lowers our cortisol, it improves our immune resilience, it does all the things that we needed to do to keep us healthy. It improves our HRV. So that's the balance between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. It will lengthen our life, especially if you're not over exercising. So I'm not going to even talk to people who over exercise while I am. I'm going to say this to you. If you're exercising seven days a week and you get more and more and more tired with every workout, cut it out. You need more recovery. Most people need more exercise. But if you're over exercising, that will age you just as badly as being fully sedentary. Okay. So this is where we want to find a sweet spot. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing when it comes to exercise, honestly, when it comes to almost anything, but definitely get moving. If you're not moving, get moving. If you're over exercising, slow down a little bit if longevity is your goal. All right. What's next? Breathwork. A study I found somewhere, again, I'll see if I can find it again. And they actually showed that breathwork was more effective than mindfulness. And I'm not sure why that would be. But I wonder if it's because a lot of people just can't connect to mindfulness, whatever that is, right? The act of being present. And look, there's a lot of benefit in being present. But maybe it's because it's just not as active as breathwork. When I talk about breathwork, and I'm talking about five minutes a day here, you could do it when you're waking up, and you can do it before you're going to bed, like as you're going to sleep. Those two times could be your breathwork times. And all it could be, it could be just the simple act of inhaling for four counts, hold for seven, and then exhale for eight. If you can't hold for seven and exhale for eight, because that's too long for you, inhale for four, hold for five or six counts, and then exhale for five or six counts. The point is that you are inhaling, pausing, and then the exhale needs to be longer than the inhale. And that alone will drop cortisol. That alone will put you into a more parasympathetic state. That will help you to ease into your day. It will also help you to ease out of your day. It's a really nice way to fall asleep. Now, if you're in a very stressful situation, you could do little micro breathwork during the day. So let's say you're going in for a presentation and you're really nervous about it, or you're going in to have a conversation with someone that you're very nervous about. Taking a couple of minutes, just take a bathroom break, go to the bathroom, take a couple minutes, and do this breath. Inhale, hold, exhale a bit longer than the inhale. You will find that it will center you. It'll calm you down. It'll help your cortisol to physically come down, which has all those downstream benefits that we've been talking about. You will get benefit from it. All right? So breathwork, this doesn't need to add anything to the day. Like I said, when you wake up in the morning, when you open your eyes, if you can't because you've got a small child or you've got a dog that needs to get out the door like I do, maybe that first thing in the morning is in the right time. Maybe it's going to be a little later in your morning, but definitely as you're falling asleep, everybody can do this. It's one of the best ways I know to fall asleep. You will bore yourself to sleep, literally, but it will also lower your cortisol levels. Another freebie on lowering cortisol, by the way, is something called legs up the wall. I don't know if any of you've heard of this. This is when you're lying on your back and you put your legs up the wall. I learned this in CrossFit years ago after a particularly exhausting or terrible workout. They would have a slide with our legs up the wall and that will drop your cortisol levels. So that's something you can do for yourself as well. Okay. Number seven, vagus nerve stimulation. So we've all heard about vagal nerve. The vagus nerve is that big nerve. It's the biggest nerve. It goes from the brain. It hits all the organs. It's got motor. It affects your digestion. It affects your gut motility. And then it brings information back to the brain about the state and the nation in your body. That vagus nerve needs to be toned in order for us to have that parasympathetic-sympathetic balance. And it can get into a very tonic state, if you will. Now, there's lots and lots of tools out there to manage the vagus nerve. I've released a podcast not too long ago about a tool called the ZenBud, which is a really cool intervention, but it'll set you back a few hundred bucks. So if you don't have a few hundred bucks or you want to try a free way to help out your vagus nerve, I have two ideas for you. One is, and this is going to make some of you people laugh. Some of you will have probably heard of this, humming. Humming because of the vibration of the vocal cords actually affects the vagus nerve in a very beneficial way. And that helps to tone the vagus nerve. Now, you could pair this so you could walk around the house humming, you could hum while you cook or hum while you're hanging out or reading. That in and of itself is going to help the vagus nerve or you could do your breath work and hum. You could meditate and hum. There are yogic practices where that omen, right, the humming is part of the practice with the breath work in helping to tone the vagus nerve. So humming is a really cool strategy. The next one, very interesting, is putting your face in ice, in very cold water. Now, most people they'll do, they'll take a basin of water, of cold water, float some ice cubes in there and face right in there. Not great for your hair, tie your hair back for the ladies. So if you don't want to mess up your hair, but just putting your face in the water actually has a very positive impact on the vagus nerve. It's very, it's a bit of a complex cascade. It even helps with your body temperature regulation. And you don't have to stay in there for long. You're just kind of go in calmly, hold for, you know, a breath and then come back up. I remember, you know, what's interesting about this is I remember as a kid, I was always taught as a little kid when you wake up in the morning, you splash cold water on your face. Now at the time I know I remember thinking, oh, well, this is a way to wake up, which it is. But interestingly enough, whether it was intentional or not, this practice alone was a way of getting that vagus nerve going first thing in the morning. Cool, eh? And you don't even have to take all your clothes off and go for a cold plunge. Cold plunge is a different strategy. You could definitely do that. But right now I was going to, I wanted to stick to easy things and putting your face in cold water definitely feels a lot easier than jumping into a cold tub of water. Now if that's in your wheelhouse and you want to do it, by all means, go for it. All right, we're on number eight. This has gotten really big over the years. It's always been really big and you will, if you think about it, the people who you know that you can think of who practice this just because that's the way they are, are generally happier, calmer people and very often they're healthier. And that is what my friend Benazadi would call vitamin G and that is to practice gratitude. And on December 26th, for many of us, we are sitting in an excess of stuff. So gratitude might be easy for us. It might be a little bit harder for certain people if you're having a tougher holiday for whatever reason. Finding even a small thing to be grateful for will pay off in spades. So there have been multitude of studies that have been done where people just speak about something that they're grateful for, even if they're not really feeling it. But if they just articulate something they're grateful for, a small thing, I am grateful that I woke up this morning. I am grateful for my car. I am grateful for my health. I am grateful that I am here. Any kind of gratitude whatsoever, I am grateful to have this amazing book to read. Whatever it is, that act of expressing gratitude comes back into the body as physiological benefits. So practice gratitude maybe, and it doesn't have to be a big deal. I remember like there used to be this five minute journal, and you had to write down three things you were grateful for, which was great for a while. And then after a while, you were kind of like, Oh my God, this again, even one thing, right? Even when you open your eyes, if you open your eyes in the morning and talk about one thing you're grateful for, whether it's something that happened yesterday or something you're looking forward to today, or you're just feeling grateful that your room is really dark or that it's cold, whatever, that one thing will bring you benefit. And then at the end of the day, what's one thing that you're grateful for? If you happen to be have a partner, like a life partner, tell each other, what are you grateful for today? What's one great thing that happened today? These things are, they're just beautiful ways to prime the brain for a better night of sleep. And being living in a great in a state of gratitude, we know is incredibly beneficial for our health and our state of mind. So we can start first thing in the morning, and then at the end of the day, we can then bring it into our day at little moments during the day. My, my co-host who I do retreats with sometime, Dasha Maximoff did a session on microjoys. What are the little microjoys that you can celebrate during the day? Taking a moment in a day to express gratitude or joy about even the smallest thing keeps us in that state of gratitude and joy. It will show up in your metrics at some point, I promise you. All right. Number nine, getting back into more hardcore stuff, sleep. Again, it's a tough time a year for sleep. We're eating late, we're eating big meals, we have a lot of commitments, but whatever, do whatever you can, the nights that you can control, get your sleep. Sleep is the thing that allows our body, it allows our immune system to function properly. And if our immune system is functioning properly, it will automatically help to lower inflammation. It allows our cortisol to come down at night. We will, our body will rejuvenate overnight. Our minds will rejuvenate overnight. We will feel more resilient the next day. There are a million reasons why we need to prioritize sleep. We especially need to prioritize sleep at this time of year. So I'm inviting you to not forget about sleep. Finally, number 10. Number 10 might be a little tougher in some cases because again, if it's a time of year, wait a year, you've got a lot of people in your house you're not used to or you're in somebody else's house, making time for yourself. So making time for yourself, this could be taking a bath, that could be stepping outside into nature for a minute. This could be going for a walk as part of your exercise plan. This could be reading a book. It could be anything that is something that you are doing for you. We often forget about ourselves at these times. We're so busy taking care of other people, meeting other people's needs, making sure that everyone's happy and that things are just right. And you know, a lot of people say you're talking to women. I'm talking to men and women. Honestly, I know a lot of guys who run around trying to make sure everybody's happy and safe. So whether you're a man or a woman listening to this, make sure that you take a moment for yourself just to calm yourself down, appreciate yourself, appreciate something you have. Take care of yourself, get into a bath, take a hot shower, have a bath, whatever, whatever it is that allows you to come back to yourself and be present for yourself in this time. Alright, that was number 10. All of these things aren't hacks, right? These are firewalls. A lot of these are founded in physiology. All of these things is about helping your body to be in a calmer state so that all the other fancy stuff that you're doing at all the other times, whether it's peptides or supplements or protocols or medications, whatever it is, everything else will land better if we're doing the work to calm our nervous system and be in a calm state of being, right? Be in a calm state of being, wow, that's so articulate to be able to make fun of yourself. I think I would add number 11 there and comedy would be one of them. Go watch a comedy show, watch a funny movie, laugh your ass off, be silly. These are things that are so incredibly beneficial. So all of those things, and if you can combine them and create stacks for yourself that make sense and that resonate for you, all of these things will rival in many cases, pharmaceuticals for offsetting stress. Doesn't mean that if you're on an SSRI for anxiety or depression, you should throw away the bottle, but it does mean that if you start practicing some of these things, there may come a day where you can have a discussion with your doctor about reducing your dose or weaning yourself off. That's my hope for you. So my challenge to you is pick one lever today, just one, whether it's five minute breath or text a friend and reconnect whatever it is, pick one lever today and practice it and do it every day for the next, do something for the next week. See how you feel, add on another week and another. And when you're ready, maybe add a second one, but start with just one, all right? So at the end of the day, in the end, stress doesn't have to shorten your prime. Stress is going to be there, stressful things will always be there, but we have the ability to mitigate the effect of that stress and to buffer the effect of that stress on our physiology. So start small and live long. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you're having a wonderful season wherever you are, whoever you're with, whatever you're doing. Thank you so much. Thank you. We're close enough to the end of the year that I can thank you for making this an incredible year for this podcast, for me, for allowing me to serve you and in serving you to do what I love. Thank you so much for everything. And I'm looking forward to an incredible 2026 with all of you and happy holidays and be well. Thank you. Hey, folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.