Tommy Wood dives into dementia prevention, arguing 45–70% of cases—like Alzheimer’s (60–80%) and vascular dementia (10–20%)—stem from lifestyle, not just genetics like ApoE4. A "stimulated mind" thrives on neuroplasticity-driven challenges (e.g., learning new skills), while modern overstimulation with low-value input (social media) paradoxically weakens cognition. Elite athletes, such as Formula One drivers, optimize arousal via caffeine, cold exposure, and sprints, but prioritize sleep, nutrition (omega-3s, vitamin D), and training over untested peptides like BPC 157 or TB500. Wood’s upcoming Stimulated Mind book (March 24th) challenges Alzheimer’s protein-centric narratives, citing the Seattle Longitudinal Study’s finding that 50% of people retain cognitive function into their 80s—proof that disengagement accelerates decline, not aging itself. [Automatically generated summary]
So I've spent a long time working in a whole range of different spheres related to the brain, how to treat newborn brain injury, how to treat and maybe even prevent certain traumatic brain injuries and concussions, looking at what affects long-term cognitive decline and dementia, as well as working with elite professional athletes, particularly Formula One drivers, trying to help them stay on top of their game for as long as possible.
And I saw across all those different areas, there are these core things that the brain seems to thrive on that are required either for development or maintenance of cognitive function.
And these are things that people can apply to themselves on a day-to-day basis, improve their focus and well-being now.
And then long term, that translates to a lower risk of dementia.
Yeah, so four essentially has an effect of amplifying certain inflammatory effects in the brain.
That's probably why it makes CTE worse, makes it more likely for you to get CTE, because if you're getting repetitive impacts, repetitive injuries, then it sort of exacerbates or makes that inflammatory response worse.
But when you think about that in terms of Alzheimer's, if you have one copy of ApoE4, your risk of Alzheimer's has increased by sort of two to six times.
If you have two copies, it's six to twenty times, depending on how you look at it.
But all the data suggest that ApoE4 is a risk multiplier, right?
So it's not that if you have a copy of ApoE4, you're definitely going to get dementia.
It's that in the setting, particularly of the modern environment, risks of dementia or risk factors for dementia are amplified, like excessive alcohol intake, physical inactivity, low-quality diet.
So that also means that if you have, if you, if you then address those risk factors, you have greater benefit, right?
Because you're offsetting some of that additional risk.
So however you look at dementia from a genetic standpoint, and it can also be family history, right?
If you have a family history of dementia, you have an increased risk of dementia.
But a lot of what comes with family history is shared environment and shared lifestyle, right?
You eat and sleep and move like your parents did.
And so if they had a lifestyle that might increase their risk of dementia, you get that as well.
So even if you do have an increased genetic risk, you can offset a large part of that through lifestyle and other environmental factors.
Okay, so for some people, there's an increased genetic risk, but do some people who do not have this increased genetic risk, do they still have a possibility of getting dementia just from atrophy or just from sedentary lifestyle?
I really wonder about people today, and this is one of the reasons why I was so interested in this, because what are we just talking about before, that people are being oversaturated with nonsense but not stimulated in any way that challenges your mind.
I mean, this is a constant state today.
And then on top of that, you've got a lot of people that are using AI throughout their day to solve all their problems where they don't think at all.
So this one, maybe one of the studies you're thinking of was a study they did at MIT.
And they had students write essays and they could either just write it using whatever they had in their head already or using Google or using an LLM.
And what they showed was that as you increase the amount of outside support you got, you know, Google and then I think it was ChatGPT, then there was less activity in the brain networks associated with actually doing the task and students remembered less well afterwards.
You're not using your brain, therefore, it doesn't engage in the task.
But what's interesting is that they found a version.
So like some of the students who had previously written an essay just for themselves, then they asked them to go back and use ChatGPT on top.
And what they found was that the final output was better.
So the way that we can use these tools, rather than just asking it to do all the stuff for us, which is what most people are doing, and I think will cause skills and maybe even parts of the brain to atrophy because they're not being used, is we use them as orthotics.
Like they can expand our capacities, right?
You try writing it all first, and then you say, hey, what did I miss?
I mean, completely uncharted territory that people are staring at their hand for eight hours a day.
I mean, that's really what you're doing.
You're staring at your hand and you're hoping, usually unsuccessfully, to get something that really excites you and something that's really unique and changes your perspective on things.
I mean, I think maybe when I was using social media every day, maybe once a day I would get something that was really interested in that I would save.
I'd go, oh, that's actually interesting.
And I would think, okay, that'd be a good subject to bring up on the podcast.
Well, part of the algorithm, and this, you know, I'm not an expert in training algorithms to do this, but part of the goal of the algorithm is that you don't get everything that is perfect or that immediately captures your attention up front, right?
Because you want it to be random.
And there's like method in the randomness that keeps you scrolling.
Right.
Because eventually you'll get those small bumps that then keep you going.
But what's particularly interesting about social media is it leverages the fact that we are social beings.
So we prioritize information that is called, the acronym is Prime, prestigious, in-group, moral, and emotional.
And this is even greater in social contexts, right?
Because we are trying to learn about our social environment so that we can survive our group and be fitter.
And so social media makes us think that we will get that information whilst at the same time offering us the exact opposite, which is essentially isolation.
But it leverages that desire of the human brain to find this social information and this social connection whilst not giving us any of that.
Also, without getting any feedback from another human being while you're communicating ideas.
So you can say the most horrible shit to people in a comment or a text message and you don't think about it because it's like there's not a person there.
They're acquiring enormous wealth and also enormous influence over the just all sorts of things, politics, economics.
I mean, some of the richest corporations in the world, they gather a thing that we never thought of was valuable, which is data.
I mean, when people first started using these things, when people first started using the internet, nobody really thought that data was going to be one of the biggest commodities in the world.
Yeah, but now if they know what captures your attention and what you'll spend money on, and that's a perfect way to get as much out of you as possible.
What are the things that you think people should be doing to try to future-proof their brain, other than avoiding social media and avoiding a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here?
So for instance, social media, if you have crafted a social media that allows you to maintain connections that you wouldn't have otherwise, like the original version of Facebook as it existed 25 years ago was just like posting pictures and you could like chat with some family members, right?
So if you use social media like that, and there are studies that show that if you're using online tools, including social media, and it increases communication and connection beyond what you would have had otherwise, that can be a net benefit.
If it's all you use and it's replacing in-person human connection, then it's a net negative.
So there can be ways that it could be beneficial.
And if your Instagram feed is just like cute dogs running around in the snow, which is what most of mine is right now, that can be a nice five-minute break between cognitively demanding tasks.
That's fine.
But when you think about future-proofing your brain, this idea that there is some unknowable future, right?
We don't know what the future is going to look like.
But if we want to exist in that future, we're going to need good processing speed, good decision-making skills, good working memory, good emotional and social skills, right?
And so in order to maintain those, we need to challenge and stimulate them.
So I think the most important thing most people can do is think about new challenging and often creative skills.
And there's a lot of evidence for creative arts, music.
What they do is they improve the function of networks in the brain that are at risk during the processes of aging, particularly because they're important for attention and social connection.
And so if we really invest time in doing these things that we suck at and get better, but get better at them, we maintain these broad cognitive skills that we're going to need in the future regardless of what happens.
And some of that is also personal.
So the goal is to build as much cognitive capacity as possible.
I have this idea of headroom, which is the difference between what you need on a day-to-day basis versus what you're truly capable of.
It's the difference between, like on a day-to-day basis, your legs need to be strong enough to like get you up off the toilet, right?
But your maximum capacity is like, what's your max back squat?
The difference between those is your headroom.
And then that gives you capacity to perform when you're injured or sick or you need to like lift your car off your buddy because it got flipped in a car accident.
Like all those things.
Like when you need to draw on greater resources, you want those resources to be there.
Because we are going to be stressed, sleep deprived, sick, and we still want our brains to function.
So investing in like really challenging tasks and skills builds that capacity so that we have access to it when we need it.
What is the function and like what is the effect on the brain when you learn a new skill, like sucking at something, which I always tell people is one of the best things you can do.
A lot of people don't enjoy it because they're ego.
They don't like being frustrated that they're terrible at something.
But there's something about not being good at something and dedicating yourself to it and seeing market improvement that stimulates all sorts of areas of your mind, which I find really interesting.
It's constantly predicting what's going to happen next based on the world around you and what you're trying to do.
And so imagine that you're trying to do some kind of new move in jiu-jitsu or something.
And you have no idea how to do it.
You're going to try it and there's going to be this big gap between your expectation and reality.
That's going to be frustrating, right?
That's the feeling of failure.
But that's what diverts resources in the brain to say, hey, we need to close the gap between what we hoped would happen and what actually happened.
And that's what drives neuroplasticity.
And this is also then what drives the cementing and function of these networks in the brain associated with that.
So the idea that you start sucking at something and you get better at it over time, that is exactly the thing that the brain needs in order to improve and maintain its function.
And if you think about like one of my favorite books is Range by David Epstein, which talks about the broad range of skills that people who then really success really succeed in academia or sports have, right?
They didn't specialize really early.
They had like a broad base of talents that they can then draw upon as they specialize later in life.
And I think that's something that we can all aspire to.
But equally, what's probably more common is that we try something and we do it for a little while and then we just kind of like give up on it and we try something else.
And there's like a little bit of benefit to that.
But when you look at some of the studies that really examine the effect of learning some of these creative skills, and they've done it with tango dancers and painters and video gamers, when you compare an expert to an amateur and where you're seeing the benefits of expertise in terms of the function of some of these networks in the brain, it really is the development of some level of expertise is probably required to see the maximum benefit.
Obviously, the learning curve is steepest at the beginning, right?
Right when you're beginning to learn something, that's when you'll learn the fastest.
But there is also some benefit to expertise.
So some of that, just to say that pick one or two things that you're actually excited to continue getting better at for a long period of time.
And so then maybe you do have to try a bunch of different things until you find the thing that really gets you going.
But across all those different skills, they have similar core effects on the brain.
So you don't have to do one or both.
You can just pick the one that you enjoy the most.
And it's like, it's really interesting because she starts talking around the house in French.
And it's one of those things where you're like, I'm watching her do it.
She wasn't doing it.
And then she's been doing it over the last couple of months.
And I'm seeing this like excitement in this new project.
And we were talking about it, about how that is one of the things that's very difficult to do, but it's more complex than learning because it's learning and interacting.
It's not just learning.
You're learning, but you have to, it requires like this back and forth with another person.
You have to understand sentence structure.
It's just like calm, and especially French is so different than English.
There's so much weird shit involved in it.
But you could see, like I could see in her that like this is very stimulating to her mind.
And it made me go, oh man, I should learn a language.
But I'm like, fuck, where do you have the time to learn a language?
But then I thought about like when I was on social media all the time, I would look down at my phone some days and it would say, screen use today, six hours.
If you spent six hours just learning Spanish, you'd be fluent.
I'd be able to go to Taqueria and order in Spanish.
It's like we spend so much time doing nonsense that anything that you can do that requires your brain to be in that uncomfortable state of, what is the, oh, what is this?
I think that that thing you describe is so baked into our society that we've started to believe that it's normal.
Right.
So when you look at the trajectory of cognitive function over the over like your entire life, imagine like a graph where on the one side you have cognitive function and it could be something basic like processing speed.
How quickly does your brain process information?
And on the bottom is age, right?
It tends to peak sometime around our sort of mid-20s to early 30s.
It's usually the peak on average tends to be higher and later the more time we spend in education.
So the more time we spend essentially as professional learners, the more we can build that kind of final capacity.
After that, it's just sort of like an average decrease downwards.
And a colleague of mine, Josh Turknet, and I, he's a neurologist, we wrote a paper a couple of years ago where we theorized that the reason why we see that decline at the population level in cognitive function from about that age is because we go to work, we do the same thing again and again and again.
And then everything else in our life gets in the way.
And we never spend that same time investing in building our cognitive capacities the way we did when we were kids and when we were in school.
And so the decline is partly because we just stop doing that.
So one of the theories of aging is that it's just the continuation of development, like process of development.
And most of the processes of development in the brain are refining connections based on the environment and the stimulus the brain receives.
So if you start removing stimuli because you're no longer engaging in these like cognitively challenging things, the brain's going to start removing connections.
Hey, I don't need that, right?
I'm not using this part of my brain.
And as a result, you start to see decline.
And so there are studies that show if you have a very stimulating job, it's very complex, problem-solving skills, lots of social interactions, you have a slower rate of cognitive decline as an adult and a lower risk of dementia.
You see in individuals who continue to engage in reading, reading, writing, lectures, dancing, a whole bunch of hobbies, again, you see a slowed rate of decline.
So some of what we just expect to happen with age is because of the way we stop engaging with the world and we stop challenging ourselves.
You see, I have friends, I'm 58, which is crazy to say.
It sounds so old.
But I have friends that are 58 that are basically their skeletons with like meat hanging around various parts of it.
But my physical ability is very similar to what it was when I was in my 30s.
The only way that I could really test it was like physical competition.
And I'm not really interested in that.
I don't want to get hurt.
But my capacity for work is very similar.
And I know that because I force it.
I make myself do it.
And I would imagine the same thing is true with the mind.
I mean, it has to be.
I think it's all together.
It's a use it or lose it.
And if your mind doesn't have a need to be constantly intrigued and stimulated, like you've got to think for survival, right?
One of the things that speculated, maybe I can ask you about this because this is one of, I think about this a lot.
Like, what is ADHD?
And whether or not it's actually a problem, I think it's a superpower because I'm pretty sure I have it, you know, but yet I can focus.
I'm very functional.
I can focus on things.
And as long as I tire myself out from activity, I can relax and I can concentrate on things.
And I'm very interested in certain things and I can lock into them and concentrate.
But if I was forced to be in a classroom with a very boring teacher teaching a subject I'm not that interested in and I was a child, if I had the wrong parents, luckily I didn't, I would be medicated.
Right.
But I think that that is this ability to focus on certain things like hyper focus was probably a function of a persistent hunter, right?
Because if you wanted to catch an animal, you couldn't be a person that gives up quick.
You had to be a person that you keep looking for tracks.
You keep trying to find sign.
You're trying to figure out a way like, keep pushing one more hour.
We got 20 minutes of daylight left.
I've got to figure this out, right?
That thing had to be in you in order to be a successful hunter.
So, no, but do you know what happens in certain individuals with ADHD, when you give them stimulants, they calm down, right?
So I think there's a combination of multiple things.
Some is, yes, like these can be very beneficial traits in the right settings, but you also have to consider that we're layering on a modern environment that's like bright lights at night, a whole bunch of caffeine and stimulants.
And yeah, of course, some of it is, I think, right, the teacher is boring and they're just not engaged because the majority of people with ADHD can still focus on things that they're interested in focusing in.
So I think you can, I would expand it out even further than that because physical activity is a core requirement of our biology and physiology.
There's a nice quote by Inigo Saman Milan, who's a well-known exercise physiologist, who says that physical activity is baked into our evolutionary development so much so that now we've had to invent exercise in order to prevent what happens when we don't move.
So the lack of movement is a disease-causing pro-aging situation.
I think that that's, again, I would say that that's needed for all kids regardless of any potential diagnosis.
So of course, I think that should be taken into consideration.
Whether that's going to be enough for every kid, hard to say.
But we know that all humans require significant amounts of physical activity just for their biology to work properly.
So certainly if that's not being taken into account or it's not available or it's not encouraged, there are a whole host of conditions where that's going to become a problem.
The Stoics used to talk about it, quieting the mind.
I mean, samurais used to talk about it, like that physical activity.
One of the main benefits the Chinese used for kung fu thousands of years ago, quieting the mind.
And the propensity that we have in the society, this direction of almost immediately prescribing a medication for something, when it seems like what you're doing is you're dulling a biological requirement.
You're dulling the impact of this biological requirement that you're not needing.
Why wouldn't we prescribe exercise first and then think about those things?
Like, for instance, like hormone replacement.
If you have a good doctor, an ethical doctor that is working with someone and they find out you have low testosterone, one of the first things they do is adjust your diet.
They say, well, you have so much food in your diet that causes inflammation.
You have a very high rate of complex carbohydrates.
You have a lot of sugar in your diet.
You drink too much alcohol.
You smoke cigarettes.
Let's remove those things first and then let's see what happens.
And then you increase your protein and you start drinking water and you go, oh, look, your hormone levels are going up naturally.
Well, because you're fucking poisoning yourself, right?
So wouldn't you, I mean, why don't they prescribe exercise for kids?
Other than the fact that you can't make money off of it, wouldn't it be a good idea?
So I think that all kids should absolutely get several hours, ideally, of movement and physical activity of different kinds every day.
Part of the problem, it's not that scientists or doctors don't think that's important.
Right now, the systems that we have make it very difficult for those things to be put in place, right?
So making sure that every kid has the time and the resources to be able to exercise and the right kind of people so that they know what they're doing and they're supervised.
And it's the same with, say, with testosterone replacement if your testosterone is low.
Like most, right, the primary cause or one of the most common causes of low testosterone in men is right that combination of metabolic disease, being sedentary, poor quality diet.
We know that.
But creating the systems that allow people to change those things and then supporting them to do that is really hard.
Nobody has solved the behavior change problem, right?
If we think about the modern environment and we think about what that drives us to do and not do, but we have all this information, right?
We know how to prevent these diseases.
We know how to reverse many of them.
And a lot of it is driven by lifestyle and the environment.
But supporting people to change those behaviors and make sure they have the resources and time to do it, that's really hard.
I think that those of us for whom this has become a part of our personality and our lives, like you and me, of course, of course you just do that.
You just go for the run.
You do the 100 push-ups.
But for people who have never had anything like this, and it's never been a part of their environment, it's never been a part of who they are, changing that actually requires a ton of work and coaching.
It's difficult, but it's totally doable physically.
It's not like I'm asking you to breathe underwater.
Like people have done it and you can draw inspiration from like my friend Jelly Roll.
You know Jelly Roll, the musician?
Jellyroll was 500 pounds and he's lost 300 pounds and he did it with no Ozempic, no GLP1s.
He just started walking and started cutting sugar out of his diet and slowly but surely, not even slowly, over the course of just a couple of years, he shrunk to like a normal sized human.
It's fucking amazing.
But he drew inspiration from a lot of other people.
You know, one of them, he's good friends with my good friend Cam Haynes, who's an ultra marathon runner and endurance athlete.
And so, you know, he's taken him on runs and worked out with him and helped him and just watching YouTube videos.
And just all he started doing was just walking, you know, where he couldn't walk up hills and he would just walk around his block and walk up the hill when he didn't want to do it.
And he did it.
It's like it's not, you can do it.
You just have to start doing it.
And I think the starting doing it is the most difficult.
I don't think it's difficult to do it once you gather momentum.
But the process of trying to, first of all, understand like, how should I do that?
What should I do that?
When should I do that?
And then, right, like some people may absolutely not have the time or the environment.
Maybe they live somewhere where actually, you know what, they don't want to be walking around outside, right?
Right.
That's relatively common.
Or they don't have a kitchen, right?
So then how do you cook food?
Like, how do you navigate that food environment?
So I agree.
I completely agree with you.
All of this is doable.
It's just that different people are going to need different levels of support to do that initially, right?
Gain that momentum, understand how that feels, how it changes them.
And right now, the majority of people don't have access to that kind of support.
And I absolutely hope that that changes, right?
The food environment changes so that it's much easier to change the way that you eat and that the built environment changes so that it's much easier to go out and have a walk and do a lot of that.
So I think we just have to consider that it's both, right?
There's an individual component, right?
But there's also like a societal component where we have to make this as easy for people as possible and sort of like build it into their lives such as they are.
One great part would be to say through, you know, if you could dramatically improve quality and access of like education at all levels and make physical activity just be a regular part of that.
That has been slowly removed from many educational curriculums around the world over time.
Right.
So bring some of that back and it just becomes part of day-to-day life.
And then you would also teach people the skills involved in some of these other things.
So like teach people how to cook and how to do that within the bounds of what they have access to, their cultural preferences, dietary preferences, financial abilities, that kind of stuff.
Just like you should teach kids about taxes and all these other things.
And so I think if you start early on and you do this with sort of curiosity and skill building, then you release people out into the, you know, that I think that's the place to start.
Because when you get out into the real world and you're working three jobs and you live somewhere where you don't want to go for a walk outside and like you can barely get six hours of sleep every night and you've got three kids that you're trying to look after, saying, oh, hey, you should do 100 push-ups every day, like that's not going to happen.
Other things are going to happen that are more important.
So I think there's that part, maybe the skill building part.
Then it's thinking about how people have opportunities to do those things.
And then I would think about access to high quality healthcare, psychological care, like these things that sometimes people need help that they can't get access to or it's expensive or whatever.
So I think giving more of that so that they get support when they need it would definitely help as well.
So like you'd have these buddies and they'd be your accountability buddies.
But what happened was that when people started to slip, they left the platform much faster because they were like, I don't want my buddies to know that I'm not doing what they are supposed to be helping me do.
So you kind of have to like build in multiple buffers and different ways to help people depending on what it is that motivates them or not.
Why don't, I mean, how much money would it cost to have community gyms set up where you don't have to have money to join, where it's paid for by your taxes?
You're not talking about something that's outside of, you know, like financially, it wouldn't be feasible.
And there was something very similar close to where I grew up in the UK, just like for a couple of pounds, you go do some kind of martial arts class or something similar.
But the thing about Planet Fitness is they kind of a lot of these big gyms, not just singling out Planet Fitness, they kind of hope that you don't show up.
Well, the thing is, like, there's one thing, like, for someone, and I've taken friends to gyms before that don't work out, and they're like, what do I do?
Whereas all the data suggests that literally any type of movement above what you're doing right now is beneficial, cardiovascular health, cognitive health, dementia risk.
So I think some of it is just like letting people know and having people understand that it doesn't take that much to move the needle.
And then when they start to do a little bit, right, you get a bit of a bug.
Maybe you enjoy it.
You find a thing that you enjoy.
You do more of it.
And so that's part of it too, like having people understand that it doesn't take that much to really start having an impact.
One of the things that I like when I talk about movement in particular or exercise and say cognitive function is that you will start to see benefits relatively quickly.
So if you go and do a six second max sprint a couple of times, right?
And there are studies that show this, you will acutely, like immediately see an improvement in cognitive function, better blood flow to the brain.
You've created arousal, which is really important for focus and attention.
If you go for a walk outside, right, you will sleep better that night.
So you'll feel better the next day.
And so, yes, you're absolutely right that this is a lifelong thing, right?
You can't just do it for a couple of months and then hope that it's going to translate to benefits for decades to come.
But you can see immediate benefits if you start to do some of this stuff and you can feel it very quickly.
So I think that that's going to be important because not everybody is going to feel in the position to invest in their future selves.
So if you start to see benefits straight away, you're more likely to keep going with it.
Hintzer, H-I-N-T-S-A, named after Aki Hintzer, who was a Finnish orthopedic surgeon.
He worked with Harley Gabriel Selassie, with Mika Hakkenen.
He was a two-time Formula One world champion.
And then now this is sort of like a big sports enterprise, and I'm their head scientist for motorsport.
So that's all motorsport categories from like karting and kids up to up to Formula One.
We work with several Formula One drivers.
And we provide coaching and medical services.
Each driver, or most of the drivers, have a coach, right?
So like, you know, when you watch Formula One, there's like somebody holding the umbrella, holding the helmet, right?
That's that's usually, well, that's often one of our coaches.
They're usually a strength and conditioning specialist, or they might be a physio or a nutritionist.
Like they have a ton of, you know, really high-level skills.
And they're there every day, right?
They do the sleep, they do the training, like they're traveling with them the whole time.
They sort of can manage as much of their life as possible.
And when you're thinking about that level of skill, the stimulus part has taken care of itself, right?
One of the reasons why these guys are so good is because it's all they've done every day for two plus decades, four decades if you're Lewis Hamilton or close to that.
So, and that's slowly building these skills first in karting, then in these different formula categories, formula three, formula two, up into Formula One.
And so the kinds of things that we might work on, and so like I'm helping the coaches, working with the drivers, we have like a huge team, you know, doctor who works with a bunch of Olympic athletes as well.
And so it's a combination of, are there any individual performance limiters?
So we might do some blood tests, look at nutrient status and various other things, you know, make sure they're really on top of that with their diets.
But then in that kind of world, and like, I'm sure you experienced this yourself, everybody's got a thing for you to try or a thing for you to do, right?
Like you're constantly being bombarded with the latest, greatest technology and like this guy wants to study this thing.
So a lot of what we do is like be really careful about the things that get added and maybe even take stuff away if we need to.
Like what are we trying to work on?
What are we trying to build?
What does this one driver need?
Because they're all very different.
They need a different, you know, they have different diets.
They have different training programs.
They have different warm-up strategies for when they get in the car.
And so a lot of what we end up doing is focusing on the other side, right?
So if you stimulate your brain, it adapts when you rest and recover afterwards.
So because they're essentially jet lagged nine months of the year, right, they're in a different country every week.
And like on top of like every race weekend, they've got to go meet sponsors.
They've got to do media days, right?
They're constantly moving.
So it's what can we do to maintain their level of performance throughout the season?
This is something that the coaches do a ton of work in.
Like how can we, what kind of exercise and how can we do targeted training to like maintain performance throughout the year?
And then the other part is how can we get as much recovery as possible?
Because if we want them to adapt to all the work they're doing and come back each weekend at the top of their game or as close as possible, we need to get them to rest and recover and come back and do it again.
So often we're not focusing on the stimulus part.
We might be in driver training.
We might be thinking about how can we develop cognitive skills and these kinds of things.
And these drive are physical skills.
In Formula One, often it's how can we get these guys to recover better?
How can we get these guys to sleep better?
And then that might be technology, but it might also be, you know, just like, how can we nail the basics again and again, make sure they're getting enough time in bed, right?
Especially when you're traveling a bunch, that gets really difficult.
So we're often focused on the recovery side and how we track, like, how do we collect those data?
How do we know when something's starting to slip and get on top of it early?
And like, how do you went, like, let's say if they fly in for a race, like if they're going from Europe to the United States and they have to race, how many days in advance do they arrive?
And how do they shift their circadian rhythm and eliminate jet lag?
Yeah, there's the time for them, like the number of days they come before the race will depend on how long it was since the last race, plus what other things they've got going on.
But it's often like two or three days, right?
They'll try and get it come in the beginning of the week, at least like Monday, Tuesday, if the race is then going to be on Sunday.
And then as much as possible, you might start to try and shift things earlier.
So shift your light exposure so that it aligns more closely with your destination a couple of days before you travel.
Shift your sleep if you can.
Shift exercise and caffeine timing again, because those things shift circadian rhythm so that so you can kind of get closer to what you're going to do when you land.
And so those are probably the primary tools is exercise, light, caffeine.
You can use some of them use melatonin.
You can also change when you eat.
So like food timing is a zeitgeist.
It's a fancy word for like time giver, like helps to drive circadian rhythm.
So often when you're flying, they'll give you a meal that's happening like in the middle of the night in the time that you're going to land, right?
So often you might try and avoid eating while flying and then have your next meal in time with like a normal meal timing when you land.
So I can't think of a you know other than that makes sense.
Other than the fact that, I mean, you're obviously, you know, sat still for long periods of time, which might not normally happen at that time of day as well.
I think the majority of it in terms, certainly in terms of jet lag plans, is thinking about the timing of meals relative to circadian rhythm because you normally break your first fast at a certain time of day, have dinner at a certain time of day.
So I think most of it is related to circadian timing.
That's a great way to help to offset some of the jet lag because you start to tell your body, oh, hey, like, even though it's whatever, midnight in Austin, right, this is the time when I want to be awake.
So it starts to advance the circadian phase.
So, exercise, some people like to do cold exposure, right?
It does a similar thing, right?
Increases adrenaline, increases heart rate, increases arousal, can do it with light, can do it with caffeine.
And so, like, some combination of those things can definitely help.
One of the issues that we have, it's not an issue, it makes perfect sense, is that the supplements that we use with the drivers have to be third-party tested, right?
NSF for sport certified and informed sport certified.
So, some of the things that we might like to try is that because the drivers get tested because the drivers get tested.
But in reality, there aren't many peptides where I'm like, where I would say, or actually, I couldn't think of any where I'm like, this will have a definite benefit based on high-quality studies in humans, right?
Those studies just don't exist.
And so, until we get to that point, plus the sort of like the gray area of the sort of legality of it, we tend to focus on the real, I mean, it's the basics, but we know that they work.
But there's plenty of anecdotal evidence, especially with professional athletes, with BPC 157 and TB500 particularly, for tissue injuries, for recovering quicker from tissue injuries.
But so with drug-free sport, like with the UFC, they use thorn supplements.
That's what the UFC recommends, which are very good and third party tested.
So you have to find whether it's pure encapsulations or some legitimate, well-proven, established company that provides you with third-party tested supplements.
What supplements have been shown?
Let's stick with Formula One drivers.
Reaction time is critical.
Your ability to function at a very high cognitive state, right?
You're thinking constantly.
You're always calculating and movements.
What supplements are these guys taking that benefit them?
It's the Yerkes-Dodson curve named after a couple of guys who actually did studies in mice that then translated actually surprisingly well over to humans.
And so what it says is that if you're sort of under-aroused, you're kind of disengaged, a bit lethargic, right?
You're not really going to perform well.
If you're over-aroused, you're sweaty, anxious, right?
Again, you're not going to be able to sort of pay attention to the task.
So there's this sweet spot.
At the top of the curve, you're capable of flow states, clutch states, which is where you can perform at your best, but it's still like, it's hard work.
And so what you're trying to do is get the guys to the top of that curve.
And this, for many, involves some element of routine, right?
Knowing that I've done the thing that I know that's going to make me feel good.
And so it's a combination often of the things that we've already mentioned.
They might use some warm-up sprints.
They might use music.
They might use bright light.
They might use breath work.
They might use cold.
Certainly if it's going to be a hot race, they might do some pre-cooling to bring down core temperature.
So some of them have a cold plunge or You can fill a wheelie bin with water and ice and jump in that.
It doesn't need to be that cold, actually.
So for increasing endurance performance, like 20 minutes at around 20 degrees Celsius or like 60-ish Fahrenheit, that significantly improves endurance.
So the problem is that when you get too cold, you can actually decrease cognitive performance.
So there's a fine line when it's really cold that what you want to do is you want to decrease core temperature without negatively affecting cognitive function.
And so that's easier to manage at slightly less cold temperatures.
Because just like if you did really, really exhaustive exercise, right?
You go out.
And so I was a rower in college.
So like a 2K test on a row machine.
Like after that, my brain doesn't work for like hours afterwards.
And so like very, you know, very cold ice baths for several minutes.
For some people, that can decrease cognitive function.
And so when they're jet lagged, I think that that one makes sense.
There are some newer caffeine-related compounds that if we can get them when they're third-party tested, you know, some may try those.
So theocrine or teacrine and paraxanthine, which is a metabolite of caffeine.
They may have some fewer of the like anxiety promoting, high blood pressure, high heart rate effects, but maintain some of the cognitive effects, especially in combination with caffeine.
So you have a little bit less caffeine plus a bit of those.
They're harder to get sort of third-party tested and stuff.
And some of the evidence is newer.
But that's looking sort of promising as another thing that people might try.
Plus there's the, when we're working with different drivers, they each have very unique needs.
So it's trying to, it's a combination of what do I think is really going to move the needle and not overcorrect.
I think most coaches I've spoken to in Formula One have a story where their driver had three espresso before it got in the car and then he overcooked the first corner.
Right.
So it's a really tricky balance of trying to make sure that they can systematically get in the zone to perform well in the car without sort of pushing them too far over the over the other side.
And so that's where supplements become trickier because it's very easy to downregulate if you've overcooked it through some of those physiological means, right?
I can do some breath work or something to kind of calm myself down.
But if I've like stuffed myself full of caffeine, it's going to be hard to like come back from that.
And then you sort of step in the car and it could cause some issues.
So we tend to focus on some of the physiological stuff and then maybe a little bit of supplementation because that seems to be the sort of like best balance across those different needs.
Well, it's such an extreme example because any little deviation that you wouldn't normally feel in everyday life could be disastrous in a Formula One race.
Yeah.
What about different things to stimulate cognitive function, like playing chess or doing, is there anything that those guys engage in specifically to improve the way they think?
A lot of them play some kind of video games, which actually have some interesting evidence to support them in terms of improving cognitive function.
I think for them, though, a lot of that is, it's almost like relaxation.
Like when you drive a Formula One car for a living, like playing a video game isn't necessarily as challenging.
Right.
And so a lot of it tends to be very car focused, right?
They get tons of time in the simulator.
Like during the season, they get a lot of time in the car.
So there's nothing that consistently would work or that everybody does.
I think a lot of where the cognitive training side comes from is during driver development, right?
How can we get more sport specific or supporting cognitive challenges in younger drivers as they're developing?
So we might use some cognitive training tools and some other things to try and support some of those development processes.
Because by the time they're at the top, especially if you want to maintain it, the main thing that you need to do is obviously maintain those driving skills, which you'll get through the day-to-day aspects of the job.
Plus, then it's really continually paying attention to sustained physical health, physical performance, especially because of the arduous schedules and all that kind of stuff.
So often again, they're focusing on the other areas because they know that will help them stay at a high level for longer.
So sleep, some of them use different meditation or breath work or other devices just to kind of help maybe like gamify it slightly or you make it a slightly more enjoyable experience.
It's easier to do, easier to switch off if you're doing things related to sort of like vibration and that kind of stuff.
Well, it seems like that's a great place to study Formula One drivers because you're dealing with these like fine lines, this tiny differential between success and failure.
And one of the interesting things is that the sort of the real performance stuff is kind of siloed within the team.
So then, right, because that's related to performance in the car and that's sensitive information.
So a lot of the time we're kind of thinking about, and this actually, across most sports, the best predictor of performance is subjective well-being.
How does the athlete feel?
And so like there are tons of studies, even like coming out now, like you compare that to blood tests and HRV and all this other kind of stuff.
How they feel.
Am I tired?
Am I achy?
Do I feel alert?
You know, all that kind of stuff.
That seems to predict performance really well.
So how can we, and better some of those, better than some of those other things?
The best is a combination as much as possible.
But so we do a lot of work aggregating data.
But then really the rest of the time is, how can I make sure this guy feels good every day?
Right.
And feels confident when he gets in the car.
And so then we have psychologists.
They're a big part of that.
Plus like keeping an eye on their body and all that, you know, all All those sort of things to sort of put them in the best spot possible when they get in the car.
For fighters, it is like one of the number one predictors of poor success in a competition.
I've seen it over and over again.
Guys with horrible relationships, whoever's fault it is, both fault, both parties, whatever it is.
But those are the ones when they have really bad relationships.
Like there was this one guy that I know that was a really high performer, very good fighter, but he had this crazy girlfriend and she required so much attention that it would drive her nuts when he was getting ready for a fight because he was spending all his time concentrating on the fight and it would peak literally the night before the fight.
Like their relationship was so toxic, she would always start fights and all the coaches knew it.
She would start fights after he weighed in because he was so locked in on the fight the next day that he wasn't paying attention to her.
So she would storm out of the hotel room and go down to the bar by herself and he would freak out and he would always wind up performing poorly.
The one, I think the ones that I found most challenging are, it's usually because they're pulled in so many different directions that it becomes difficult for them to like really engage in the things that we know is going to help them perform long term.
Um, and so, as uh and like, I have friends who work in the NBA, for instance, where I think this is amplified even more.
Right, you have teenage millionaires who can literally do whatever they want right, but you have to like, keep them on on task, and we see that in a lot of professional sports, and so it's that it's that kind of stuff is what's um distracting them?
What are the other things that they're doing that's stopping them from being able to engage in these processes?
Um, and so you, you can have like really good conversations and put together really good plans and like, in the moment, they're really engaged and they're interested and right, they want to do well right, this is their job and they love it.
But when other things start to come into play outside of that conversation, they don't engage with things, they don't do it, they don't see the results that they want, they get demotivated.
But it's usually because, like other things in their life right, could be like the toxic relationships, but it tends to be other other distractors, that kind of um, pull them away from that, that sort of like core goal.
Unfortunately, success is a big one right, because the motivation to succeed in the first place is, you want financial gain, you want recognition, you want all these things that you're chasing after, and then, once you get them, now what?
And some Some, some people like maintain, like really dead, they maintain dedication to the craft.
Like this is the thing that I love and I want to do it every day.
And the longer you do it, the more you have to take care of like the little details.
Like early on in your career, you can train however you want, eat however you want.
If you have a certain set of skills and training up to that point, you'll do pretty well.
But you want to sustain that for a very long period of time.
It requires an increasing amount of dedication to the other areas of your life to make sure that you can still do that.
And I think sometimes people just aren't honest with themselves in terms of what they really want to do or what they're going to spend their time doing.
So that's the most frustrating thing is when you sort of hear one thing, but you see another thing because of the other areas of life that are taking over.
So what do you do if you have an athlete, like say an NBA athlete, and you see all this talent, all this potential, but then you notice that they're getting pulled in all these different directions?
Maybe they're just like spending money all the time and partying and hanging out with girls.
A lot of the stuff comes down to differences in travel schedule and training and the ability to capture data, for instance.
So data capture in Formula One is really hard because of the types of travel and you don't get to aggregate across a team, whereas you're part of a big team, there's several people you can kind of work, but you work with and aggregate data across to kind of understand what's happening with individuals as well as like overall.
But I think that Formula One is unique because it's so individual in terms of each driver has their one specific team and it's often very difficult to capture some of the data that we might want to capture, like getting blood tests on guys who are in a plane every other day, right?
when you're working with these formula one athletes like how much are you changing the methods that you use like year to year um it will depend on whether so i mean my job is to stay on top of the latest research right so
So what's come out recently that we think will meaningfully move the needle in reality, and I think this is the case in the majority of professional sports that I've interacted with.
The main thing is getting the boring basics done consistently.
And again and again and again, we know that's foundational to sustained performance.
And yeah, like the Some of the tools and technology for recovery and some of the supplements, especially if you're trying to address nutrient insufficiencies based on an inadequate diet, which is also very common, those things do make a difference.
But the main struggle, at least from the guys that I regularly see, is having an environment and framework that allows them to keep doing that stuff, like stay on top of a specific training program or stay consistent with a certain sleep routine that allows them to sleep well.
Those are the things that make the biggest difference.
And so it's like that's where we tend to focus.
And then maybe every year or so, we're constantly improving our data capture and our data analysis.
We're constantly trying to improve sort of like the support processes because we know that with the better support, we can make sure they're more likely to do the stuff that's going to make a big difference.
And then maybe every sort of like year or two, there's a new thing that comes in.
And we're like, oh, yeah, we're fairly confident that this is low risk, high potential benefit.
It's not going to take a ton of their time, right?
That's that's another thing is when I first walked into the paddock in, it was here in Austin.
That was the first time I went to Formula One to like start working with these guys.
I like, I showed up and I'm like, I've got like a, I've got like a hundred things that these guys are going to love.
It's going to be really important.
It's going to revolutionize everything.
And then you speak to like a coach for the first time.
They're like, we've got time for maybe one thing.
And you better be really confident that this thing is going to make a difference, right?
Like, and you just, you just have to acknowledge that up front.
And the error is biggest when you're telling some guy to do something before he gets in the car, right?
Because that's going to immediately have an effect.
So there are ways to offset some of that, right?
They have practice periods.
And so it's like right now as a new generation of cars for this season.
Nobody's driven them before.
They're getting more extended track time to practice with them.
So that might be a time when you could try a new supplement or something before you get in the car because it's a much lower risk setting.
You're not racing.
There's not 19 other guys or now 21 other guys trying to get past you.
And then, right, so that, so some of it is that, right?
Trial and error, you acknowledge that you just have to be really confident that you know what problem you're trying to solve and that it's an important problem, right?
So I've worked with coaches and their driver where like reaction time was a very specific thing, like off the line, we think we need X amount improvement.
So then it's a combination of practice, maybe tinkering with some supplements, maybe tinkering with some of that arousal stuff that we talked about earlier.
So you need to make sure it's an important problem.
Then you need to think about like what's the hierarchy of things that have the highest likelihood of benefit and the lowest risk and then sort of work your way through it.
And I realize that this is all kind of in the abstract because it just like really depends on the problem that's in front of you.
And so there's this idea, right, that you want killers.
You want people hard on themselves.
guys who are hard on themselves but for sustained and and so this is looking across like as broad as possible across sport Those who are most successful most often, of course, there's going to be the killer who's just like hardened himself and gets the job done, of course, right?
But these elements of self-compassion that include things like mindfulness, like thinking about the world and understanding it and about their place in it and common humanity, which is like treating themselves as they would treat other people and acknowledging the right, we all make mistakes and stuff always happens, but I can overcome this.
This has happened to me before.
Like I've sucked, I've crashed, I've done something wrong.
And hey, I overcame it and now I'm succeeding again.
Those mental skills are most common amongst the high-level athletes.
So I give an example.
So I don't know him, but like Roger Federer has a very famous quote, right?
He gave at some like graduation address or something, where he says that across his career, he only won 54% of his points on court, right?
So that means that 46% of points, he lost, right?
So that means that every time he makes a mistake, every unforced error, he has to come back and be like, hey, dude, like, you've got this.
I know I can do this.
And that's the point that he's making in this address.
And it's those kinds of mental skills that seem to be most important.
So when you've had a history of beating yourself up and being hard on yourself, and that's kind of gotten you to that point, there will often be a stage where there's so much accumulated pressure or stress or failure that just working harder and being harder on yourself isn't going to get you past it.
Athletes who are successful for a long period of time tend to have those other abilities to like think about the bigger picture, understand what they've overcome previously, treat themselves more like they would treat others.
And they seem to be the ones who overcome failure and then continue to succeed.
And I think you can, there's other stuff going on.
You can think about it in terms of that arousal curve we talked about earlier, right?
As you get stressed and worked up about a missed shot, you're pushing yourself further and further away from the level of arousal that's required for performance.
Well, that's one of the most important things about a shot, because even if your mechanics are good, if you think you're going to miss, you're going to miss.
It's weird.
It's a weird thing because you know what to do, you know how to do it, but if you think, fuck, I can't miss this shot, you're going to miss.
Like nine times out of ten, it's very weird.
So it's a very mentally the game, a giant percentage of it once the skills are acquired, because most of them, when they get to an elite level, have all the skills.
There's, I mean, across every different aspect of cognitive performance, well-being, there's, you know, again and again, you see that psychology drives physiology and drives performance.
Like you can measure these things as you think them, as they then change physiology, which then alters how you perform.
So, I mean, this is a very, very long answer to your question of, like, is like psychology and mental skills important?
Absolutely.
Because I think that's going to be foundational to whether you can even achieve those high levels of performance.
And everybody needs help occasionally.
And that's perfectly normal.
And different people are going to need different tools and different skill sets.
So different psychologists are going to provide different things for them to do.
So like, yes, that's always something that we have on hand as needed as part of the team because that's going to be really important.
Yeah, the mind controls so much of what you do in life, even if you have skills.
And that's something that elite performers either figure out or don't, right?
They either never achieve their true potential because they keep tripping over themselves or they go, okay, this is not helping me.
It's only hurting me.
I keep allowing myself to spiral into this same sort of mental state and I have to find a method.
And so like, when you talk with psychologists, what do they, what tools and what, what, what sort of strategies do they give these athletes to abandon negative thinking?
And again, like, don't want to pretend I'm a psychologist, right?
These are, these are the, we have other people with these skills for a reason.
But I think a lot of what becomes important, again, is thinking about the causes of maybe initially the causes of mistakes and then the causes of stress and why that may or may not be beneficial and the way that you can you can leverage it.
So there's a lot of research on understanding that stress responses are there to divert resources to something that matters and something that either requires your attention or adaptation to it, right?
So understanding that actually stress in the moment, in that kind of moment is a good thing and you want to leverage it rather than be scared of it.
So, and we know that people who are trained in this mindset, so this is work by Aylio Crum at Stanford, the stress is enhancing mindset, also like predicts how well Navy SEALs do during training, like how much they sort of like appreciate that stress response is important.
This is me rising to the occasion.
Not only that, you still get stress, where you still can measure stress hormones.
That still happens, but you release other things that help to also counteract that and drive adaptation.
And it results in better decision making when stressed.
So reframing some of these responses can be important, as well as then thinking about after a mistake happened, thinking about other examples of times when you did that and you overcame it or having like these different parts of understanding what it is to be a human, even when you're performing at an elite level.
Maybe some of it is building in routines so that you feel confident in a given situation, right?
Like these are the things that I do.
And when I do these things, I know I'm going to perform well.
That can be a double-edged sword for some people because, and I think this, we see this a lot of this in the in the world of sort of like health optimization.
We assume that we need to do all these things in order to perform well.
And so then if those things don't happen, we think we won't perform well, right?
So that's another way for us to get in our way, our own way.
So you kind of have to balance that depending on the individual.
And then some of it can be in the moment, right?
So you're one of those pool players and you're getting increasingly frustrated because you're not making your shots.
It's almost impossible to think your way out of that, right?
Your brain is too busy being dunked in adrenaline to like make good decisions.
So that's where you might have tools like leveraging your physiology, breath work, closing your eyes, visualization.
Those things sort of work from the bottom up to kind of help your mind get a grip and like get back in the game.
So it's a whole bunch of different things depending on what you might need.
Is it, I need to regulate myself in the moment?
Is it how do I set myself up for success through a series of, and it could be like, what's my warm-up?
What's my, what am I thinking through?
What am I visualizing before I perform?
Or is it tools to kind of deal with the processes of failure afterwards?
And I would also think that even just the knowledge that these high stress situations where you do encounter failure can produce a result inside the mind that can be beneficial if harnessed.
And so one of the ways that this is taught to other people, right, not just athletes, is like, think about all the people who've performed under significant stress, right?
This is what the human mind and human body is capable of, if only we allow it to do that.
But I mean, this is one of the things we talk about all the time with mixed martial arts athletes in particular is that today is such an amazing time for them because there's so much access to video.
So you can watch all these performances by all these elite athletes and then it raises your personal standards because you're mirroring what these people are capable of doing.
And in your head, you have a very high standard because you've seen it.
And that inspires people to become better.
And so the athletes that we're seeing today, I say all the time that martial arts has evolved more in the last 30 years than it has in the last 30,000 years.
And it's true.
And it's true just based on my own personal experience of seeing athletes from 1997 when I first started working with the UFC to 2026.
It's a completely different standard.
They're so much better.
They're so much more elite.
They have so much more balance.
They have so much more balance in terms of their game is balanced, striking, grappling, wrestling, all of it together.
It's amazing because they're walking on the foundation that was set by the athletes before them.
If we think about these traits that we'd maybe like to carry over that help us perform or maintain performance for long periods of time later in life, like some of that curiosity, not worrying about these burdens, continuing to engage in these things that challenge ourselves that kids just readily do, right?
The brain is exploring and trying to learn.
I think we need more of that as adults.
But when you think about the standard being set or thinking that things aren't impossible, there's two parts of that.
One, yes, that's a huge aspect of achieving higher and higher levels of athletic performance.
But for many of us, like us regular people, when you spend a lot of time seeing other people performing so much better than you, it can have the opposite effect, right?
I think this is something that we see on social media.
There's some really interesting, there's some really interesting studies on social rank, right?
So we are always trying to see where we rank in the world compared to others, right?
It's the part of us like being social beings.
And so if you spend all day looking at people who are richer, more beautiful, more jacked than you are, internally you demote yourself, right?
You give yourself a lower social rank, and that creates a social stress that triggers genuine stress responses, right?
Increased sympathetic activation, activation of some like inflammatory processes in the body, very similar to if you're socially isolated.
So for some people who have the, you know, are on a trajectory to improve their performance, you know, because they're elite athletes and they're seeing these other guys do it.
They're like, oh yeah, yeah, I can do that.
Right.
That's really beneficial.
But in like the general world, the rest of us, when we spend so much time seeing other people do other things better than us, it can almost have the opposite effect.
It's very, that's the thing between the difference between an athlete and someone who is intimidated by other people's performances instead of being inspired.
Yeah, so but that's what I mean is that when you're one type of, when you're an athlete and you're seeing other guys like you do this thing, right, that's like, oh yeah, that creates a bar you want to try and hit.
But that same thing is very different out for the rest of us based on like seeing how we compare to others.
Well, then even worse for young girls because a lot of them are getting surgery because they know that some girls have radically improved their looks through surgery.
And so they think like this is the solution to everything.
And I just need to get a nose job and a chin job and a this and a that.
And also it's like the psychological aspect of being controlled by paying attention to other people's lives is very weird.
And it's, you know, Jonathan Haight wrote a great book about it called The Coddling of the American Mind about the impact of social media and particularly on young girls.
And that aspect of it of comparing yourself to other girls is particularly devastating.
It's like there's you see when the impact of social media, when social media gets introduced into the world, immediately you see more self-harm, suicidal ideation, all these different things increase.
Whereas like, so those same stressors, if you were in a position like an athlete and you're a competitive athlete and you see someone who's elite, you would be inspired, but you feel helpless to achieve these goals that, you know, like you can't get any taller.
You can't get any better looking.
You can't look, it's just, this is what you got.
And then you see these, and then you see people that are using filters.
Yeah, so I think that's why there's this, it's interesting that very similar exposures, depending on who you are and what you're trying to achieve and what you have the ability to achieve, can have dramatically different effects on mental and other well-being.
We didn't talk about this in terms of like the approaches of the most successful athletes is that they don't just say, I want to be like LeBron or Kobe.
They say, what did he do?
What can I do?
So they focus on the process, right?
You have to love and focus on the process because you can't guarantee a certain outcome.
And I talk about this, I talk about this in the book, and I give the example of the 2012 Olympics, right?
The guys who came second, third, and fourth ran personal best times.
Like several other national records were set during the whole 100-meter sprint competition, all the different rounds.
But like Usain Bolt ran, right?
And so like, you can be the best you've ever been and be amazing.
Like you can run fast enough to won a gold medal any other year, but like sometimes you're out of luck because Usain Bolt shows up.
So like you've got to focus on the process because you can't guarantee the outcome.
But by focusing on the process, right, you're going to get much closer.
Yeah, that's interesting because if you are a person trying to be the best in the world and you happen to be in the same weight class as Mike Tyson, it's going to be tough.
Yeah, but I mean, that's always been the case.
That's the thing in championship level fighting.
You find that when someone is a real outlier, that what happens is all the other people in that weight class tend to achieve a very high level, even if they never wind up being as good as Anderson Silva or whoever it is.
Winds up being a very competitive contender class underneath it and much more competitive than divisions that are not being dominated by elite fighters.
So, the first part of the book is about some of the history of neuroscience and why we think about the brain the way we do and some of the limitations that's created.
Like, why we think about Alzheimer's disease as just being like the accumulation of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, which people might have heard of, right?
That's what it's been boiled down to, when there's actually a much bigger picture and many other things that are important.
So, there were several seminal papers in that were manipulated in some way, right?
And this, unfortunately, is quite common where you change the figures, you manipulate these blots to make them show different things, and you kind of move them around and copy and paste.
It kind of shows what you want to show.
And so, like, for some of the seminal papers in Alzheimer's, that turned out to be the case.
But it doesn't discount the fact that it's still a part of it.
But people have increasingly looked away from just the accumulation of certain proteins in the brain for two reasons.
One is that we had, as a field, they had to create new ideas like resilience.
And there's this thing called cognitive resilience, which is how much cognitive function do you maintain in the face of these proteins building up in the brain.
And that's because the amount of amyloid you have in your brain doesn't really predict cognitive function and cognitive decline that well.
So, some of that is related to other things.
So, we know that like exercise is an important part of that.
And then we know that there are these other things that are important as well.
So, inflammation, other cells in the brain that become critical.
So, like the white matter is a really critical structure in the brain.
It's what allows us to have really fast processing speed, decision-making, executive function, the function of the prefrontal cortex.
All of that is kind of dependent on white matter structure.
And that seems to be really related to like vascular function, vascular health, resistance training is really important to support that.
So, like, all these other things become important as well.
So, like, that's kind of the, it's just showing like the first part of the book is saying, hey, we kind of focused a lot here, but actually, it's not that that's not important, but like, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's important too.
And a lot of it is related to things that we have control over.
So, then, you know, we talk, I talk about all the different types of exercise, how different types of exercise affect different parts of the brain in different ways, nutrition, talk a lot about cognitive stimulus, social connection, sleep, like I said, stress management and stress mitigation, and how you can kind of manage your performance in the moment.
And then, all of that comes together in terms of into like a model that I call the 3S model of how these different things kind of interact and affect you on a day-to-day basis.
So, the first S being stimulus, right?
We've talked about all the reasons why that's important.
The second S being supply, which is if you stimulate a part of the brain or a network in the brain with a new skill, that area of the brain, the neurons and the astrocytes there, they ask for more blood flow.
So the blood vessels have to widen, they dilate to bring in more oxygen, bring in more glucose or whatever metabolic substrate you're using, ketones, lactate, et cetera.
And so you need really good cardiovascular health.
That's critical.
So that's a big part of what we talk about.
You also need good metabolic health.
So high blood pressure and high blood sugar are two of the biggest risk factors for later dementia because they affect this supply component, either the blood flow getting there or being able to regulate your energy.
And then there's a bunch of nutrients that are important in that bucket as well.
So omega-3s, vitamin D, iron, magnesium, because they have very B vitamins, they have very specific functions in the brain that we know that if you're deficient, you have an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia.
And then you've stimulated a part of the brain, you've kind of given it all the substrate it needs to do its job.
Like we've talked about, adaptation occurs and function gets enhanced when we sleep or when we recover.
So like that's support is the third bucket.
So sleep is a part of that.
Other support you might get, like hormonal status is important.
Trophic factors, right?
Hormones that get released or proteins that get released that support neuroplasticity in the brain, things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
And then you want to avoid things that kind of inhibit that process.
So chronic stress can do that.
It creates like an over-training kind of picture in the brain.
Smoking, excess of alcohol, air pollution, those kinds of things can have a negative effect.
So like that's how the that's how they all interact.
And the fact that they interact means that depending on what feels most impactful to you, like what's the thing that you think you can move the needle on?
By focusing on one area, the whole network starts to shift.
And we see that in multiple different studies.
So if you focus on sleep and you sleep a bit better, then the next, then we see that like inflammation decreases and blood pressure improves and blood sugar improves.
And the next day you feel more sociable.
So you're more likely to interact with other people in a friendly way.
And you're more likely to engage in cognitively stimulating tasks because when we're tired, we kind of shy away from those things.
And it's the same.
So there are studies in older adults where you give them a brain training program and they sleep better because when you stimulate a tissue, you then drive greater need for recovery afterwards.
Now, when you're compiling a book like this, I would imagine there's a lot of editing.
And so how do you decide like what to leave in?
I mean, this looks like it's, I mean, obviously these are all blank pages, so they're not numbered, but it looks like this is at least a 300-page book.
So unlike most health books, every time I make a statement or I mention a study, there's a little number and that gives you the paper or papers that I'm talking about that supports that.
It's 2,000 papers long.
And so that all has to go online because they couldn't afford to print it in the book.
Like, anyway, people who want to, yeah, people who want to do that can do that.
But in, I'm not quite sure how it ended up being this way, but I actually had to cut very little.
Like, there were things where I kind of went down a little bit of a rabbit hole and my editor was like, meh, I'm not sure we really need this.
I basically wrote until I got to the word limit and then I stopped.
And I focused on the things that I knew that were important and were going to stay important even in the age of AI and as technology improves and changes.
So there wasn't a ton that ended up getting cut out.
So when I started, when I started writing, actually I'm going to disagree with my former self.
I wrote the first part of the book like three times.
And the first time I wrote it, it was like 40,000 words all focused on psychology and like super like esoteric and academic.
And I was like, nobody's going to read this.
So like I had to be scratched a couple of times.
So then the core middle part of the book is all those different areas that we know are important, like the big rocks, and practical frameworks for how to address those.
And then there's just like a, then there's an introduction to like, why should you care about this?
So it's that's kind of like the worst possible end state we want to avoid.
Right.
But you want to maintain your current level of cognitive function for as long as possible and possibly improve it.
And possibly improve it.
And there is evidence you can improve it even later in life.
And so a big part of this is that when you write the, you know, earlier we talked about this graph of cognitive function, right?
It increases to sort of 20 or 30 and then it declines.
When we're doing studies that show that kind of thing, what we're doing is we're looking at a whole bunch of people, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and we're saying like you plot them all on a graph.
And yeah, as you sort of increase in age, there are some people who are going to lose function.
You kind of like draw the average down.
But we've known essentially since for the last 50 years that when you look at the same person over several decades, it's actually very normal for us to maintain function.
So like the Seattle Longitudinal Study was run by a guy called Warner Shai in Seattle.
And it was one of the first studies where they measured cognitive function in the same people every seven years for several decades.
And like every seven years, they measured the same people and brought in new people.
And so they ended up with people who were like in their 20s up to over 100 years old.
And they found that the average effect by that, I mean that more than 50% of people maintained the same level of cognitive function into their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
And those data were used to actually raise the retirement age in the US in the 1980s because they showed that it actually wasn't normal for people to decline.
But the problem is now we've embodied this idea. that as you get older, you will decline.
And as a result, you stop engaging in all the things that we've talked about.
So you're like, oh, I'm too old to lift that.
I'm too old to learn a new skill.
I don't have time to do that.
And as a result, right, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You stop engaging in those processes and decline happens as a result.
But if we know that it's possible to maintain function and we continue to engage in those processes, the norm should be that function is maintained.