With literally millions of concussions and other brain injuries happening each year in the US alone, we need to know what the latest science tells us to do to keep our brains healthy and recover quickly if we are unfortunate enough to be the victim of brain trauma.

In this episode, Dr. Jason Smith, DC, FABBR, DACBN, FACFN, FABVR, shares some great advice and busts a few myths that you might be holding onto when it comes to concussion and brain injury.

Everybody loves to eat. Eating is awesome! Some of us even go through our day just thinking about what we’re going to eat next and if we are among the majority of people, we have enough food in our homes to last us several weeks yet we go buy more every week at the grocery store.

But, what if I were to tell you that one of the most surprisingly healthy things you could do to live a longer, healthier, happier life was to stop eating?

If you’ve been around the block a few times, you have seen lots of diet fads come and go. Science is continually testing different theories and approaches to find out what happens when we eat more of this or less of that. But there is one practice that has stood the test of time, in just about every culture and in all corners of the globe; and that is fasting.

Today I'll share the top 12 benefits of fasting and then break down the various approaches to intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating.

Scientific research makes it clear that the quality of one's relationships not only impacts mental health and overall life satisfaction but even one's physical health. Our relationships are really strong predictors of overall longevity and happiness. Just the ability to be in a peaceful relationship with someone changes the way you feel about your entire day. But what is often overlooked is the fact that the quality of our relationships is dependent upon our own sense of self. Our level of self-development impacts how we show up in the key relationships that we are involved in. This is especially true in the marriage relationship. In this episode, we discuss these concepts with Dr. Jennifer Finalyson-Fife, a highly respected and popular clinical therapist, educator, and mental health coach. We discuss how to develop a stronger sense of self, and how to grow out of a validation-based relationship into a deeper, more honest intimacy.

I'm super excited to have one of my mentors and one of my teachers, Mr. Brendan Vermeer. And we're gonna be talking about some really cool stuff related to brain and mental health. That's really his forte. I think this discussion's going to be very enlightening. We'll be talking about the status of the mental health provider community and ways that we can bring a functional physiology framework to improve patient outcomes.

One of the major areas that I focus on with my clientele is hormone balance. So many of the major symptoms of ill health are tied to the function of these critical chemical messengers. Mental clarity, memory, energy, weight control, sleep, happiness, bone strength, digestive function not to mention sexual health and reproduction are all intimately tied to the balance of this complex symphony.

What is surprising to me is just how many of my patients have serious hormone problems. I’m seeing it in both men and women and it is starting to show up in teenagers. If it seems like you’re noticing more and more people you know with hormone issues, you are correct.

The hormonal system is very complex with over 50 different hormones and pre-hormones that are all interconnected and constantly changing in an attempt to regulate us with our environment.  Most of these hormones are secreted in very small amounts. A little goes a long way. Almost all of these hormones function in a negative feedback loop. 

In today's episode, we'll discuss some of the challenges that we face in keeping our hormones balanced and what the best approach is to make our hormonal system happy!

Be honest, when was the last time you had one of those days when things just didn’t seem to be going your way and it was really hard to be happy?

When I have those kinds of days it’s hard to stay focused on the things I can actually control and I find myself wallowing in self-doubt, and self-pity.  I have a tendency to start listening to the inner critic in my head.

One of the Simple 7 Strategies for wellness is to “think well”. It is just as critical to health as our diet, sleep, exercise, and stress management tools are. So today, I want to give you some important coaching around this topic.

For over 2 decades now, I’ve spent my days working in the trenches, sitting knee-to-knee with thousands of people who are trying to improve their health. People just like you who were frustrated, depressed, demoralized, and ready to give up trying to look and feel better. Due to the fact that I’m not a medical physician, the stories I hear are of people who have been bounced around inside of the traditional allopathic medical/pharmaceutical/insurance complex and who are looking for answers that the “system” wasn’t able to provide.

My experience suggests that our current model of “health care” is mismatched with our needs. It is woefully incomplete in its arsenal and has too long been completely driven by pharmaceutical profits and administrative bureaucracy. It lacks the ability to even consider non-pharmaceutical interventions to promote health.

I’ve often said that one of the most insidious misnomers in the world today is calling today’s medicine “health care” instead of the more apt term “disease management“. According to the World Health Organization, the definition of health is “the state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Therefore, caring for one’s health must go far beyond the “saving” of lives inside of a gargantuan, complex, and insanely expensive procedure-delivery system.

Today's podcast episode gives you a few questions that you can use to self-evaluate. Are you focused on creating health and wholeness? Or are you more often entrenched in the thinking that pervades the "disease management" model?

Since the dawn of time, the main drivers of death have been a traumatic injuries and infection from lack of hygiene and sanitation. Only since modern medicine made significant inroads in lowering the death rate from these causes, have we even had the luxury to think about the question of human lifespan potential. Early on in my career, I picked up a fascinating book called “We Live Too Short and Die too Long” by gerontologist, Dr. Walter Bortz. According to his hypothesis and studies, he felt that the normal human lifespan was between 110 and 120 years. Instead, most of the population was aging faster than appropriate due to modern lifestyles. It’s kind of a Catch-22. Modernity dramatically changed our ability to survive infection and trauma but the same ambitions to alter the natural world brought with it unintended consequences that foster chronic disease. Some people have asked, “Do we want to add years to our life, or do we really want to focus on adding life to our years?” But what if that is really a false dichotomy? What if there is a way to thread the needle and to do both? I think that there is. I think that we can make a conscious effort to both extend our life and increase the quality and happiness that we enjoy.

We all prefer to be happy. Our most important job as an organism is to stay alive. In order to do that, we have evolved to find positive feelings when we do things that help us survive and negative emotions when we feel threatened. All mammals have these basic instincts and the wiring necessary to create environments that support this desire. 

Viewed through this lens, we are all “self-medicating” all day long. We are making decisions that are geared towards creating more happy brain chemicals than unhappy ones. These chemicals aren’t supposed to be on all the time but we are wired to remember what worked last time so that we can do it again next time. If there is a positive survival value to the behavior, our brains want to know that. We also want to know the behaviors that have negative survival value so that we can avoid those.

Within the last 10 years, we have begun to understand more about the brain then all the past centuries combined.

The human brain weighs a modest three pounds and has an energy consumption equivalent to a lowly 15-watt electric lightbulb. But it also comprises 100 billion nerve cells (neurons) and boasts amazingly complex hard-wiring 1 trillion neuronal connections. For every neuron, there are 4 supportive cells called “glial” cells which we used to think were only there to support the neurons but we now know are basically the brain's immune system.

The Brain’s design and functioning are a biological masterpiece as well as the source of our mind and identity. Brain research is genuinely a quest to find ourselves. 

There really isn’t anything more important to us than our consciousness and our cognition. Yet most of us have little understanding of what keeps our brain healthy and what we can do to prevent its injury and premature degeneration.

Last episode we talked about the general state of affairs in western civilization as it pertains to brain health and I promised that we’d take this discussion a little deeper. Today, I want to outline what I call the 7 Drivers of Broken Brains - the 7 interrelated causes that lie at the root of most mental health and neurological issues that plague society.