Jeff Krasno
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
The issue here with a lot of these chronic diseases, as you well know, is that they are progressive. You know, they don't just come on like the Texas chainsaw murder or whatever. They're slow. low and, you know, they unwind like a little film noir, you know, so this is what was happening in my body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
But the problem here with so many of these chronic diseases is that they're so anodyne, they're so prosaic that we can just write them off of like, oh, I just had a bad day. I just got a bad night's sleep. And then we never really address them until boom.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
You know, you get a bucket of cold water over your head, you know, you get a diabetes diagnosis, or you get, you know, worse, you know, mitochondrial infarction, all sorts, you know, that would be really bad. But, but you know what I mean? So this was my life. And, you know, I just had to wake up and start to really examine the way that I was living.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
But also something deeper in my own psychology, I had to really untangle the story that I was telling myself about myself.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And while I want to talk about really the key core protocols that I think people can adopt that are super actionable, that will bend the arc of their health, I do think for many people, there's a step before that, which is really what I call my biopsychosocial intake form, which is like a very personal inventory of
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
about the story you're telling about yourself i mean i grew up as a very chubby kid i was moving from country to country so which was wonderful on on some level you know i was learning languages and you know having cultural experiences but i was moved into a new school every six months in a new country with a new language with a new clique of friends and of course when you're a kid
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
All you want to do is fit in, right? All you want to do is connect. Being a chubby kid, having to learn these languages, I was essentially willing to sacrifice any and every authentic part of myself in order to fit in. And really the output of that was I became the world's biggest people pleaser. And that people pleasing was like a rucksack that I essentially lugged into my adult life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
In modern times, we have a negative association with stress and totally justifiably, right? Because in the modern age, stress is chronic. And chronic stress, as you well know, leads to imbalances in the human organism and by extension, disease. But stress at its core is actually an adaptive response to our environment. So I live up in the hills of Los Angeles.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And the story in that sack went like this, like, I'm just that chubby kid that will do anything to be liked, that'll do anything to fit in. And I really had to get super honest with myself about who I thought I was, and then realize that change is actually possible, that I actually do have agency, that like my fate wasn't just written in the genetic stars.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
You know, my whole story was like, I just have the thrifty gene, right? You know, great in a famine, but like really bad for Instagram, you know? And I had to relearn a new story about myself. And that was really key. And then that propelled me into, you know, adopting headfirst, jumping headfirst into these protocols like fasting and cold water therapy and some of the other ones I began to stack.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah, sure. It's the Commune Podcast. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I feel like I am a product of everybody else's wisdom. I don't have any letters.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So I spent a lot of time with this guy, Gabor Mate. This is the wonderful thing about having this retreat center in Topanga is that I get to host a lot of these brilliant people and then distill their wisdom to the best of my ability. And Gabor really opened me to that notion that people, but particularly children, will really sacrifice their authenticity for belonging.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
It is reconnecting with your authentic self. So he was really instrumental in helping me sort of tell a new story about myself. And also for me to recognize that in some ways, what was my biggest shortcoming as a child turned into my biggest superpower. And it's crazy. Sometimes the most obvious truths about yourself are just hidden in plain sight. It's like that optic blind spot.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
It's like, he was like, well, Jeff, tell me a little bit about what you've done in your life. And I was like, oh yeah, well, I used to put on big concerts in the music industry and help to tour bands. And he's like, oh, okay. So you brought people together? I was like, oh yeah. And then what did you do? Oh, I started Wanderlust. He's like, oh, what's that? Oh, that's a big festival.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
oh, so you brought people together? I was like, oh yeah, I guess I did. He's like, well, what's your business now? And we were laughing. It's like, it's called commune. It's like, I bring people together. He's like, that is the thread of your life. Because you value belonging so deeply because of your experiences as a child, you turned your biggest shortcoming into your biggest superpower.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
You bring people together. You have to embrace that now. And that was a pretty beautiful eye-opening experience.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
You can get it cognitively, but then when you feel it somatically, when you embody that, it's a different form of satori or catharsis.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I'm apt to go for a hike generally before I have a podcast, for example, to clear my head. And every once in a while on that little serpentine path, I'll run into like a rattlesnake or a coyote, right? And I have a very, very natural adaptive response to stress. I see the rattlesnake on the path. What happens, right? I have a bottom-up response. My heart rate and my respiratory rate increase.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Totally. And then it was also not completely understanding my own physiology. I mean, I remember sitting down with a Dr. William Lee, who I'm sure you've known. I was like, yeah, well, you know, well, I just have bad metabolism. And he's like sort of smiling at me. And he's like, no, no, no. The variation between people's metabolism on a genetic basis is really, really small.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And that our metabolism naturally doesn't really decline very much at all between ages of 20 and 60. It's actually the accumulation of fat and other things like that that actually then hurt metabolism. But just from a genetic perspective, you know, you got to lose that narrative. Like let that little meme of I have bad metabolism just disappear from your consciousness. And so that was helpful.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And then there was like a bunch of candidly like a spiritual part of my journey that kind of converged with this curiosity around my physiology. And it was the bridging of that, of the mystical and the medical, that I guess propelled a lot of other awakenings in me. You know, this notion, this Buddhist notion, that all we are really is change, that everything is impermanent.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so clinging or craving to anything is always just going to result in a lot of dukkha, you know, suffering and dissatisfaction. But as applied to human physiology, That really violated my sense of self. I wake up in the morning and I look at Jeff in the mirror and I'm like, there's Jeff. He's a stable, reliable thing. He doesn't really change. He looks more or less the way he looked yesterday.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So there is a sense of self that is really anchored in physical continuity. But as I started to learn more about human physiology, I was like, nothing could be less true. You know, what we are are seven octillion self-assembled atoms having 37 billion billion chemical reactions per second. Literally, all we are is change. I mean, I'm not the same guy that sat down here 20 minutes ago with you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And really awakening to the fact that I am process and not product was incredibly empowering because that also means that disease is a process. And so if health exists on this spectrum between sort of wholeness, if you will, and disease, I started to feel a tremendous amount of agency around my trajectory on that spectrum.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I could be moving towards wholeness, that is the process of healing, or moving towards disease, the process of ailing. And we have way more agency over our direction than I think we've ever thought before.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
My liver secretes just the right amount of glucose to center my extremities to fight or flee. My pupils dilate. The aperture of my attention becomes super, super tight. I become... self-obsessed and distrust the world. And that's all for good reason, because that serves my biological imperative to survive. And of course, we inherited this mechanism from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I want to just add one more thing about fasting. Yeah. Because there's obviously physical benefits to fasting, but what I found was the most potent benefit of fasting actually might be psychological. Because even though I condensed my consumption of food in that eight-hour window, doesn't mean that I didn't have a hankering for some chips or something at 9 p.m.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so, but I became completely committed. And like I said, I was a disciple to that practice. So instead of mindlessly wandering off to the pantry or the refrigerator to get some crackers and cheese or whatever, I would actually have to stop and witness the nature of the hunger and actually ask myself, is the origin of this stimulus, of this hunger, a biological need or a psychological desire?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And I really had to be honest and untangle that. And 99.99% of the time, it was a desire and not a need. I've got plenty of warehouse energy here for existence for a while. I was essentially eating my feelings. And I think this is what actually contributes to our 45% obesity rate that we have now in the United States is that we are so psychologically triggered so much of the time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And you combine that with the always availability of of calories. And then what do you get? You get a really, really disturbing obesity rate. But for me, what I found was the untangling of this, my hunger between this kind of biological need and psychological desire gave me a certain kind of space. in which to make better decisions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Like Viktor Frankl famously said, between stimulus and response, there is a space. Inside that space, there's a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom and our liberation. Well, that stimulus, in this case, the hunger and the space I found between that and the response, like just mindlessly going to the fridge, like started to enhance my ability in other parts of my life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And it began to sort of punctuate a certain kind of emotional equipoise that I would have in other situations, like when someone would insult me online or when my children would inevitably try to aggravate me or any other stressful thing that came into my life. I just had a little bit of space, a little pause available to me. And that was a very surprising benefit of fasting.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
The problem in modern society is the rattlesnake never leaves the path for so many people. So we're in this chronic state of agitation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So fasting isn't just physical, it's actually psychological too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Specifically as it pertains to fasting? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously there are women who've been incredibly influential on my health journey. In fact, I would say... primarily the biggest influences on my health journey have been female, like Dr. Casey Means, Dr. Sarah Godfrey, Dr. Mindy Pelz. Mindy, for example, has written a number of very, very well-researched books on women and fasting.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I think Eat Like a Girl is one of them. And so I would qualify fasting for women. I think that if you're In menopause, or if you're menstruating, I think you need to take to do an extra layer of research around when fasting is appropriate for you versus men who don't experience as much hormonal instability, I guess I would say, or change really.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So I know Mindy has like a lot of recommendations around when the best time to fast is, is like for women who are still on their cycle. So, you know, probably not towards the end of the cycle, but I mean, I won't qualify her recommendations actually, because I'll just let people do their own research. But yes, I do think that... Women and men are physiologically different.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Really for worse, most research until the 90s has been done on men. And certainly the kind of dosages around medications are always geared towards men. And many of the diseases that disproportionately impact women, particularly autoimmune diseases, have gone kind of very like under-researched and under-studied. I mean, the whole world of obstetrics is... in some cases, quite medieval.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
now on the path in laurel canyon above my house what happens after the rattlesnake looks at me and says i don't think jeff will be on the specials menu today right and he slithers back off into the tall grasses well i return to homeostasis right my heart rate and my respiratory rate decrease the aperture my attention opens back up i become more creative and i trust the world again
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So of course, like given that I live within what I lovingly call my estrogen footprint, you know, I'm very, very supportive of trying to create more platforms for women's health. And obviously we have an event that we have started called Luminescence at Commune that is geared 100% towards that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Totally. And I think the more you can understand about the mechanisms of your own physiology, the more you'll be able to play with these protocols on a bio-individual basis. This is why I think it is important to understand a lot of the underlying mechanisms. I know a lot of people are just like, shut up, Jeff, just tell me what the hell to do, you know? And sure, I get it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
But I think when you understand actually what's happening under the hood and, you know, you're doing a little bit of measuring here and there, I think you start to actually understand your own physiology better. And then you can play with the edges of a lot of these protocols.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I agree that kind of there's this other side of the equation, which is called orthorexia, where you become completely neurotic and fundamentalist about hitting the goals of all of these different voices that you're hearing out there. And that will, of course, just drive you absolutely crazy. It's not possible.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
There's always going to be debate about like, well, you have to fast this many hours to get ketosis and this many hours for autophagy and this many, you know, and great. Like those people with that level of expertise, Should be talking about that to understand the more basic, broader 40,000 foot concept, which is that we are over consuming food and growth needs to be relegated.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
It needs to be balanced by repair. We have, we kind of sanctify growth in our culture at every turn, you know, the GDP, the Dow Jones, whatever, the size of your business, you know, but really we need to balance growth with restoration and repair. And, you know, that applies to food, that applies to sleep, and it can apply to other practices too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And that is a total natural response, right? I return to the middle. I return to homeostasis. The signature of modernity is that we never find the middle again. We never return to homeostasis. So when you're driving here and you're in traffic and you're looking around and you're seeing people are stressed out, that's because they're in a state of chronic stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Totally. And this one, again, I think has, there's a gender, a little bit of a gender debate around this one too. But what I found... for me, was a particular protocol stack was unbelievably effective at helping me lose weight and balance blood sugar levels. And that's this stack. So intermittent fasting, we talked about. I was combining intermittent fasting with a low carbohydrate diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So initially that was kind of what I call the ketotarian diet or what Will Cole wrote a book called Ketotarianism. And that was fairly plant heavy, but low glycemic. Subsequently to that, I started to actually introduce more like regeneratively grown, pasture fed, pasture finished meats, et cetera, to up my protein bolus, particularly in the morning. But let's just say this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
intermittent fasting protocol, low carbohydrate diet, and then introduced a cold water therapy cadenced at a very particular time of day. So I'll unpack why this was so impactful for me. About 10 o'clock in the morning, I would have been fasted for about 15 and a half hours, right? And I would also be on a relatively low carbohydrate diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So my blood glucose levels by extension would be quite low. Now there is a little bit of spike with cortisol in the morning and that's adaptive to get you out of bed and get you alert, get you to a podcast. But mostly like my blood glucose levels would be quite low at 10 a.m. due to intermittent fasting and low carb diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
At that juncture, I would get in to an ice bath before I put the first bite of food in my mouth. And I started seeing like unbelievable results with my just metabolic function and my weight loss. And I started to think about it. So at 10 o'clock, my blood glucose levels would be really, really low. I'd get into an ice plunge and what would happen? That'd be the first thing that happened.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I'd take a big gasp, but my core body temperature would plummet, right? And then my mighty mitochondria would go into overdrive. to heat my body back up, to thermoregulate back up into that warm porridge of 98.6. Get back into the Goldilocks zone. That's what the body's engineered for all the time. Homeostasis, homeostasis.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
But then my mitochondria would look around and say, I need an energy substrate in order to make heat to get Jeff back up to 98.6. but there's not a lot of glucose around. So what are my options? Fat, oxidized fat, convert triglycerides into free fatty acids to use in my brown fat, particularly to upregulate my body temperature. And I started to just burn fat like crazy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And we know just like hormonally, for example, that chronic stress is going to lead to all sorts of different kinds of disease. So chronic stress, again, adaptively activates the liver, for example, to secrete glucose into the bloodstream. That is totally adaptive, but you don't want high levels of glucose in your bloodstream all of the time, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And, you know, as I started to stack those protocols together, just purely for weight loss, I lost really 40 pounds in a couple of months. So I know that cold water therapy has pros and cons for different people. I know some people absolutely abhor it. Count me in that group, even though I do it every day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I mean, I was one of these people that would go into like paroxysms of anxiety, just like looking at a cold lake, you know, whatever. But over time I acclimated myself to that practice, um, There's all these other benefits to it, psychological benefits that I think are quite astonishing. There's also mood regulation. There's a secretion and production of a lot of dopamine, et cetera.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
But I found that for me, this was a very, very highly effective protocol.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Right. Well, again, because I started to understand the underlying mechanism of what was happening. I mean, I could measure my blood glucose at 10 a.m. It was low, you know, 70s, maybe 80s. And so I'm just trying to put one and one together and just report on my own. I get it. I think that we should do those studies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah. Sid Mukherjee, who wrote The Emperor of All Maladies. And if anyone wants to read a book about cancer, which is not always the most uplifting topic. It is one of the most beautifully written books ever really on any topic. But yeah, this, this idea of the Warburg effect with, with cancer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So, you know, which is like, like essentially a dysfunction around glycolysis, anaerobic respiration that leads to the proliferation of these malignant cells and a lot of metastasis. If you can quote unquote sort of starve that of glucose, there could be something there. So I think it's like doing some of these studies that combine the,
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
you know, fasting techniques with chemo or fasting with other forms of immunotherapies. You know, I think these are fascinating and much needed. Have you ever interviewed Thomas Seyfried?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Because that leads to prediabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance. You don't want high levels of cortisol also because it degrades immune function. It actually lowers the production of certain kinds of innate immune cells like neutrophils and macrophages, et cetera. It also degrades gut function over time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Okay. I got to listen to that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I mean, these are very important anecdotes because sometimes it is these outliers that then lead to more clinical study, right? So like, for example, Jimmy Carter, I believe, had like brain cancer, some sort of glioblastoma. He had this immunotherapy, which...
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I believe was with the application of like a Keytruda, but then in combination with a particular probiotic, I believe this was true for Jimmy Carter, but it is definitely true now for treating some forms of cancer that immunotherapy plus like acromantia, which is a particular strain of bacteria, a beneficial strain, actually yields better results.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
It creates dysbiosis and eventually intestinal permeability, which leads to chronic inflammation, et cetera. So this is the problem in the modern age is chronic stress. And I feel like I'm sort of a PR agent now for stress because stress doesn't have to be chronic. If you learn how to manage it, if you learn how to emotionally regulate, then in many cases, You can manage stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so now I think they're starting to do more studies about combining immunotherapies with the right kinds of probiotics, et cetera. So this is like, you know, this is the new frontier. This is actually where AI can become very, very interesting too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
That's not my, obviously my field of expertise, but I think when you start to be able to, you know, use these large models to crunch that kind of data, this is, I think more, one of the most exciting sort of precipices of where we are.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah, I mean, I'm generally an optimistic human being, so I'm trying to leverage that part of me. I'm worried more about, I think, general epistemology and sort of the erosion of reason and rationality and the ability to have kind of nuanced, thoughtful conversations. We live in this attention or persuasion economy, I guess you might call it, where essentially we've taken Drew's time and focus.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I mean, everybody's time and focus and we've productized it and commodified it and we buy it and sell it. And for better or worse, you know, we all exist on social media or we, we all consume a lot of 24 hour news, whether many of us try to avoid it, but that is essentially algorithmically preferenced for salaciousness and scandal and hyperbole, et cetera.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so we have these agitated nervous systems as part of this bigger kind of non-consensual system. psychological experiment of this attention economy. And that really does worry me because it tends to amplify the least rigorous voices and the voices that tend to not really value nuance or common ground or really any effort at sort of finding the middle.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So that is a concern of mine, because I think what we've seen is erosion and just basic epistemology. Certainly, we've seen a lot of erosion in trust of the institutions of liberal democracy that have long kept us semi-stable. And in many cases, those institutions have done a lot of insult and embarrassment to themselves.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I mean, I'm talking about, you know, media, government, institutions of higher learning, certainly food system, pharma, et cetera, you know, A lot of these institutions have really done a lot to undermine public trust in them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And yet at the same time, there is so many sort of misaligned incentives or perverse incentives to continue to sort of burn down these institutions instead of actually making them better. And this does concern me because I don't really know what's on the other side of liberal democracy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
You know, I don't hear a lot of really thoughtful, cogent alternatives to it, you know, outside of, you know, tyranny and despotism and kleptocracy, et cetera, which I feel we're sort of like on the quasi verge of at this very moment. So Yeah. That's a complicated answer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I'm really dedicated to creating a platform and a true marketplace of ideas where the best and most thoughtful ideas can cream to the top, if you will. I really support that kind of
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And in some cases, stress can actually be your friend and confer beneficial results.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
freedom to have those difficult stressful thorny conversations that tend to yield the best and most reasoned ideas and i'm not sure we're really having them as a culture right now what i see is sort of a a sprint to the thinnest edges of the branch on all sides you know we tend to be more and more and more extreme and when i look at healthy systems whether they are
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Economic or political or physiological or psychological, I think the signature of well-being and health is homeostasis. It's finding balance. It's finding the middle. So when I look at systems that are pushing to the edges of the extremes, that seems to indicate to me that there's a lot of dis-ease there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Cool. Well, introduce me to some.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Me too. I can't believe that these kinds of conversations around chronic disease are in the zeitgeist right now. They're fully mainstreamed, where like two years ago, three years ago, you know, we were out there picketing like, hey, pay attention to us. It's really cool to pick up
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
know any media but like i see the new york times every day pretty much has some you know sort of feature on one of these things and and obviously other more independent media is very very focused on it and i think that that's a really a great thing i just get concerned around sort of faustian bargains you know that all of a sudden the only way you can actually make change around
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
you know, food systems is to also think that to embrace people that think that like climate change is a hoax or something. So this is the problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I'm in, I get it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Part of the research of this book was just intellectual curiosity, but the other part was really necessity. I was diagnosed with a chronic disease in 2019. And I was very, very overweight. I was 210 pounds. So I lost about 50 to 60 pounds with a lot of research and end of one experimentation, et cetera. So fasting and intermittent fasting was a big one for me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I believed that for years. Fat makes you fat and sugar is good for you. All these things.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah. Right. Or that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, Drew, thanks for having me. You are just such a great friend and you platform so many amazing people. And I'm very grateful to be here. So, yeah, listen, for hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens, and even beyond that for millions of years, hominids have evolved in relationship to their environment. You know, to be alive is to be in relationship.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
stress protocols that I actually walked backwards into is very related to this. So obviously I was very focused early on around like physiological stress protocols, many of which we've talked about, fasting, cold therapy, heat therapy, resistance training, light therapy, et cetera. The most difficult stressor, self-imposed stressor was actually psychosocial for me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And in the early days, I was candidly pretty fundamentalist about it because I needed to be because... my fasting blood sugar was 125 milligrams per deciliter. So I was on the very, very top of the pre-diabetic range at the very bottom of the diabetic range. And I was having crazy spikes, you know, up to, you know, 250 milligrams, 300 milligrams per deciliter postprandially.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So I'll just set a little bit of context. And this relates to leaning in to stressful conversations. So at the beginning of 2020, or in March, when we were kind of anchoring into poor lockdown, Jake, who's my co-founder at Commune, he's like, Jeff, you should really write a weekly newsletter. It's like people are feeling very frightened right now. They're very alone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And they would really benefit from, you know, having something that was rigorously researched every week, but just also like just little buoys of hope, you know, to navigate the choppy waters of COVID. So naively, I agreed to do this. And it was a pretty big email list at that juncture, probably about 1.2 million people. And I was writing an article every Sunday.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so, but pretty significant article, like 1500, 2000 words, something like that. So- And then like three or four weeks and I was like, I'm over a literary barrel. You know, I've got to produce all that content every week. And fortunately for me, but somewhat, unfortunately for, I guess the rest of the world, you know, 2020 provided tons of fodder to talk about, right. And to write about.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So I was writing about the most thorny issues, you know, COVID obviously, but also the You know, the reckoning around racial justice in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder and then the election and QAnon and Trumpistan and everything else in between. I was including my personal email on these missives that I would send out every Sunday.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And Monday morning I would wake up and there would be this like deluge of opprobrium cresting the bow of my inbox. And it wasn't just recrimination. I mean, there was a lot of emails that were just very encouraging and very thankful and very grateful. But I'd probably get a hundred a week of people that just had some problem with me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
That over 2000 words or some turn of phrase or some concept would have like insulted them so deeply that they felt the need to reach out and let me know. And they definitely did not hesitate to let me know. And most of these emails were just like full of expletives and there was nothing I could really do about it. But there was often like very thoughtful ones, you know?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And I just kind of ground this in like in a very specific example. So like in 2020, like in August, there seemed to be enough data surfacing that, you know, the people that were contracting the disease most severely, you know, ending in hospitalizations or sometimes fatality. tended to be people that had multiple comorbidities or obesity and diabetes prevalence.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And obviously that's turned out to be very, very true in retrospect. But even at that time, pretty early on, there seemed to be indication of that. And I was just trying to write a thoughtful essay about where we were. And so I was doing the best research that I could. And I wrote this essay and
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And man, I really offended a lot of people with that particular essay, because of course, there was also a simultaneous body positivity movement happening at the same time. And so people felt like I was really shaming them for being overweight. And I was just actually writing about the health implications of obesity as it pertained to this particular disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And I had also written tons about being a chubby kid and like dealing with it and my self-image issues and my self-worth issues. But I offended a lot of people. I would kind of exchange emails with folks. And after like three or four exchanges, I would ask them if they would like to join me on an hour-long Zoom call.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Individually. It's a lot of time. It was a lot of time. And this is generally what I call my great David Copperfield routine because I made most people disappear at that point. Most people were like, I'm out. But 26 people took me up on it. So in August and September 2020...
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so this is why now I wear this little disc on my triceps called a continuous glucose monitor. So fasting was one of the key protocols that I developed for me really early on. And it makes total sense because if you ask yourself the basic question, and this could be applied to all of these adversity memetics, how did I evolve, right? Well, I evolved having to endure periods of calorie scarcity.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I put aside an hour, a couple hours every Monday and Tuesday afternoon to have hour-long Zoom calls with people that did not agree with me. And I just gave you one example, but they were also coming from the far right, from the far left, all over the place, you know? And I just really committed myself to this process.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And for those of you who listened to the earlier part of the podcast, you might realize that this might be very difficult for me because I was a people pleaser. I didn't like offending people, right? And at first, when I would get this kind of recrimination, I would feel like very personally attacked, very defensive.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I would stay up all night sort of brooding over like my rejoinder and like holding that little ember of resentment, like waiting to throw it the next morning. Of course, the great moral of that story is I was the one getting burned. You know, I was not sleeping. I was like, so I was like, you know. Over time, I started to actually really build what I call my psychological immune system.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So we're very familiar with our physiological immune system. We build our immunity through a certain amount of exposure to pathogens, viruses, and bacteria, such that our B cells spin up these little proteins, and then ding, ding, ding, ding, they hit the right one, and we call those antibodies, and those antibodies then neuter the antigens on these pathogens.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And then they have memory and it's amazing. But in a metaphorical sense, you can also build your psychological immune system through a certain amount of exposure to insult. And I had plenty of it. And so by the time August 2020 rolled around, I was very unaffected by being insulted. In fact, I became like quasi-untriggerable in some ways. In fact, I even looked forward.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
to being, you know, not insulted per se, but like I look forward to a little bit of conflict. So when I started to go into these Zoom calls with people, I was very, very emotionally regulated by it, you know, going in. And, you know, if you remember back then, we were still developing our fluency with Zoom, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So I would get on a call with one of my detractors and, you know, people would be like, you know, jabbing at buttons. Am I on mute? I'm still on mute or whatever. And we would exchange, you know, a few pleasantries. And then, Drew, it was so interesting. You know, these conversations took on such a consistent pattern. I would sit there and they would tell me their entire life story for 45 minutes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And what I realized in short order is that I was essentially creating a safe and trustworthy set and setting for people to be seen and to be heard. I got better at this skill over time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And I started to actually consider it part of one of my adversity memetics, candidly, is like the importance of actually leaning in to stressful conversations and the possibility of what's on the other side of them. And so, you know, I didn't have any training at that juncture in nonviolent communication.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I subsequently did go get some because I was so interested in this whole world of being able to connect with people that disagree with you. And then I started to build my own sort of regimen or protocol around actually having, how to have these really stressful, hard, thorny conversations. And so there's just like a couple key tips. Please.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Because I think we live in a world where we tend to avoid stressful conversations, right? And that's okay. Sometimes it is best to create space and disengage yourself Particularly when the behavior is really odious, if it's racist or abusive or really neglectful. What sits on the other side of these stressful conversations really can represent a world that our hearts can imagine as possible.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
The first key to having a stressful conversation is doing work on yourself, is becoming emotionally regulated. And that could be through building your psychological immune system, as I've described, but it also could be through breath work, through meditation, even through the psychological benefits of ice plunging or fasting, candidly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
My body was engineered to become a little fat in the late summer or the early fall. Why? Because it knew... that the paucity of winter was just around the corner. But of course, in most of the modern West now, winter never really comes from a food perspective. There's always a surfeit of shelf-stable, nutrient-deficient calories that we can call up in the palm of our hand.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So you have to go into stressful conversations yourself, emotionally regulated. You have to be what Stephen Porges called sort of in ventral vagal activation. You know, you can't be shut down, you know, in totally in your parasympathetic, but you can't also be amygdala hijacked because if you come into a conversation all up here, it's never going to go anywhere, right? You're just going to fight.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So you come into a stressful conversation regulated. That creates the opportunity for coherence and attunement. And then one of the key skills to develop is really listening, deep listening to understand and not listening to respond.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And this is really hard because even in our conversation today, you'll say something and I'm so excited about what you're saying that I'll almost interrupt you, right? And vice versa, just because we're in the flow of each other. But also sometimes that makes a good podcast. Totally.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah, and oftentimes we are concocting a rejoinder or a rebuttal in our heads before our adversary has even finished speaking. We don't even know what point they're going to make. We're already so obsessed with making our own point.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So this was a big one, you know, really listening to understand and not to respond. It actually came out of experiences that I used to have in Japan. I used to go to Japan quite a bit on business and I was pitching bands. I was in the music industry and I'd go into like some CEO's office or Toshiba Yama or something and I'd, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, and I'd be done.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Like, that's the best band ever. They got the best songs. They sell more tickets than anybody. And then there would be this long pregnant silence afterwards. And I was so uncomfortable that I always felt like I needed to fill that void. And then I'd start in pitching again. And this recurred over and over. Finally, I asked our interpreter, I was like, what's up with this?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Every time I go in and pitch my bands, I get this silence. She's like, oh, no, no, no. That's a sign of respect. that they actually listened to everything that you had to say. Then they synthesized it. Then they formed their response. So I started to actually really use that. And even when people on these Zoom calls would stop talking, finally, they'd exhaust themselves.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I'd always leave a little bit of space before I then started. And that really helped them feel heard. Like I had really heard them, you know? Another really good technique to having stressful conversations is seek connection, not solution. Okay. So this was another thing that I learned kind of in the process of doing these calls is
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
as people were talking, I started to notate areas of their life that also converged with my own life. Like I have three daughters, you know, maybe they had daughters. Oh, they were born in Chicago. I was born in Chicago too. Oh, they used to drive cross country. I drove cross country for nine summers in a row, you know, all these things, whatever they happened to be.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And then when it was my turn to speak, I wouldn't start in among, you know, the best points of my argument, I would be like, oh, that's so cool. You know, I've got daughters too. I know what that's like.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And really focusing on these areas of connection created this sense of really deep human connection beyond whatever frivolous, petty argument that we were having around, you know, one issue or another. So that was another one. Seek connection, not solution. And then I think the last one that I would share with you, and there are plenty of others, is this technique called steel manning.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
By the end of this podcast, we could have a whole array of foods here, right, in and out of season. So I really had to examine this and say, listen, I need to balance my consumption of food with some degree of restriction. Because part of nature's plan is to balance abundance with some degree of scarcity. But now in an era of very little scarcity, we have to self-impose this protocol.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Are you familiar with steel manning? Yeah. Yeah. So it came about because it's the opposite of straw manning. So a straw man argument is when you basically take someone's point and you basically discard it through an ad hominem, like insulting them, or you kind of distort their argument. Like if you might say to like, hey, Jeff,
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
You know, we should really invest more money in renewable energy, you know? And I said, oh, Drew, you just want to put everyone in oil and gas out of business. Something like that. You know, I basically just, I didn't really address what you were saying. I just kind of like distorted it. Because it's very easy to knock down a straw man, a man made of straw.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So very difficult to knock down a man made of steel. And that's why it's called steel manning. So with a steel manning technique, you listen to someone's point of view. And then instead of rebutting it, you actually reiterate the best portions of their argument back to them. And this has a number of impacts. A, it makes them feel seen and heard again.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And there's more likelihood of compromise there because they're like, oh, that person really did register the best parts of my arguments. But what it also does, it fortifies your own position because you have to actually consider the best parts of an opposing position. And I found that to be just incredibly helpful and yield amazing results.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And, you know, the, the output of these 26 hour long zoom calls that I had wasn't necessarily agreement, but I made this kind of Rolodex of what I call frenemies, you know, of people that still text me today. And they're like, I hate you. Yeah. They sometimes they do with a smiley face though. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
No, but you know, but, but there is the playfulness now to our, our rapport, our repartee. And some of them like our hardcore Trumpers and some of them are super BLMers and they're all over the place, but, and they're sending me videos and they're trying to like nudge me a little bit. And it's just, but we've come to a new place because we've found some degree of common humanity in each other.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
For sure. And the world needs that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
So this is what fasting was for me. For me, I adopted a very simple 16-8 protocol because I found that there was the most data around that. And that's simply just consolidating my consumption of food in an eight-hour window. For me, that was more or less between 10.30 and 6.30.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah. Well, we also, it also provides a possibility of, of progress through common ground and compromise. I mean, essentially every success in humanity has been predicated on our unique special ability to cooperate flexibly at scale. Like everything big that we've built as a species has required some degree of a large scale cooperation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And I mean, I was running these seminars in the fall, this past fall, on how to have stressful conversations. And at the end, I would get Trump supporters and Harris supporters on stage, and they would essentially look each other in the eye and say, here's my greatest hope. Here's my greatest loss. you know, here's the most important relationships in my life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
They would actually say that to each other. And then I'd flip them and say, Hey, tell your quote unquote adversaries narrative. And then they would. And then they say, Oh, what are the, then I'd ask them like, why are you, you know, supporting this candidate, that candidate. And then they do the steel manning thing of like, Oh yeah, this is why this person's supporting that candidate.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And at the end they would hug These people, like in the most incendiary time in an era of just intense political vitriol, where the invective is so deep that we barely can have a conversation. I mean, we can't even have a conversation, you know, that I would see this before my eyes, people then hugging each other and seeing and recognizing each other's common humanity.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I was like, there is something to this. And here's the last bit of this is that if you can have a hard, stressful conversation, with someone you don't even really know, could it be possible to have that conversation with the people that are most dear and important to you? And we tend to avoid those, you know, like your kids, your best friends, your parents, like my parents are in their 80s.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
You know, this really propelled me to have some of the more difficult conversations with my parents before I can't have them with them anymore. And so I really do think that it is these conversations that separate us from a better world.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I've subsequently played with that window a little bit, but I saw very, very significant results pretty quickly from that protocol. Time-restricted eating doesn't mean you're necessarily calorie-restricting because you could eat 10 pints of Chubby Hubby in an eight-hour window, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah, because they have developed an ability to emotionally regulate, probably, to move back to center. And again, I would say that all of the protocols... that I embrace in my life, that's the one thing that they share. It's like, does this help me move back to center? Does this meditation practice help me move back to some degree of equipoise or emotional equilibrium?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Does this physical practice help me move back into some form of physiological homeostasis? Does it actually help me balance blood sugar levels, balance pH balance, balance the seesaw between excitatory neurotransmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitters? Does it balance my circadian rhythm?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Am I secreting cortisol at the right time, melatonin at the right time, glucagon at the right time, insulin at the right time? Am I balanced between growth pathways and anabolic pathways like mTOR and restoration pathways like AMPK, et cetera? So you really can think about your organism and your psychology as just an endless pursuit of sort of dynamic homeostasis and
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
and then build your protocols on the way you live your life you know, to pursue that goal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Totally. And what do we really truly want out of life?
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Fair enough. But, you know, there is this picture of a life of ease, right? Just collapsed on the couch, binging Netflix in a snuggly 72 degree thermoregulated environment, like, you know, eating some Haagen-Dazs. Okay. You know, sure. That's delicious from time to time. That's not the true ease that we're really looking for in life. We know the true ease when we taste it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
But generally, when you're becoming a disciple to a practice like that, you're making more conscious decisions about what you put in your mouth. And I was, of course, pairing that with data that I was getting directly from my CGM, and I was seeing vast improvements there. So fasting was a huge one.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
It tastes candidly like the tomato that we grew, not the ethylene gassed one that we bought at the grocery store. And growing that tomato yourself is a little bit inconvenient. You know, you have to enrich the soil. You have to plant the seed. You have to prune the plant just right. You have to water it every day. You have to make sure it's getting enough sun, et cetera.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so this is really the ease that we're looking for just doesn't really come for free, you know? And we know it when we taste it. We know it when we're in it. I mean, like right now for the last 90 minutes, we've been completely engaged with each other, sort of outside of linear time and space. We're just completely all here.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And that is like a representation of like the life that we're looking for. It's not like some candy-coated thing. It's actually like when we sort of lose sense of linear time. It's like oftentimes we experience that in like collective enterprise or in like some sort of creative endeavor, sometimes in sports.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
where we have perfect awareness of our body and space and time, and we might be tired, but boy, we're never going to stop. That's often called flow state. And I think that that is sort of reframing that life that we're looking for. And that life...
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
is available to us, but not without of leaning in to the edges of our comfort zone and experiencing some forms of discomfort, some health conferring forms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
No, that's it. I mean, I was fortunate enough to scoop up goodstress.com. There you go. That's a good domain name. I know. So you can check it out there. And, you know, really, you know, this book is a distillation of a lot of wisdom from other people. And, you know, you and I have spent a lot of time together over the years. I've been able to
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
really mine the mental gladstones of so many incredible doctors, a lot of amazing female doctors who have been so generous with me. And, you know, I have the honor of being able to platform many of them on Commune. And so, you know, for people that aren't familiar with it, it is essentially a masterclass platform for wellbeing. You can go there and find
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Now, of course, there's all of these other benefits to fasting outside of just potentially losing weight. You know, there is obviously the activation of certain pathways like AMPK, which I'm sure a lot of experts have talked about on your show, which is associated with autophagy, cellular cleanup. There's mitobiogenesis, the creation of new mitochondria.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
all sorts of information and courses on integrative and functional medicine, but yoga and mindfulness and Qi Gong and Tai Chi and even regenerative farming and essentially everything you need to be holistically well. And, um, and that's, you know, really the, you know, the, the work of my life right now. And so I, I encourage people if they're interested, go to one commune.com.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
That's L N E commune.com. And yeah, if you're inclined to support my work, you know, buy my book. I, you know, I love to write and I will always write a tremendous amount for free, but in order to write a lot for free that I think, um, helps to contribute to people's wellbeing, uh, every once in a while I have to sell something. So help me out.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Thanks a lot, Drew. I appreciate you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
There's the production of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor that seems to even grow new neurons, but certainly manage the functionality of pre-existing neural health. So there's all of these kind of like under the hood benefits, but the benefits that I was seeing was a tremendous amount. of weight loss in combination with a couple of other stress protocols.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I did.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And so we've evolved these adaptive mechanisms in relation to what I sometimes call paleolithic stress. But since the Industrial Revolution, in the West primarily, but really accelerating in the last 70 years, at every turn, we've engineered our society for comfort, for convenience, for ease. And it's my thesis that chronic ease is actually leading to chronic dis-ease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah, well, I feel bad, Drew, because I'm not an extraordinary guest. I'm actually incredibly ordinary in terms of the presentations that were in my life. So I was chronically fatigued. I was brain fogged. I was pretty irritable, very hard time concentrating, couldn't read a book, needed to grab my phone quite often. And then of course, as I described, I was heavier. So I was about 210 pounds.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
But with that kind of deposition of, adiposity sort of dad bod. So a lot of fat right around the middle, you know, and as my children love to tease me, I like to use the clinical name gynecomastia. My kids were like, dad, you have the boobs of man and would sometimes leave one of their bras on my bed just to rub it in a little bit. So I had, you know, that whole sort of panoply of symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
The thing about everything I just named, chronic fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, they are so common now. that we essentially have accepted them as normal, but they're so, so, so abnormal. And so I was walking around in this incredibly compromised state. Now, subsequently, I started to do some testing and I realized that I was pre-diabetic, borderline diabetic.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And then I did some microbiome testing and my gut was as like leaky as a rusty old pipe, basically. So I was dealing with all of those things, but that just basically makes me average.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
Yeah, so I'm a serial entrepreneur, not in the serial sense in that I can't stop making businesses. And so prior to Commune, which is my main gig these days, I was running a festival called Wanderlust. Some of your guests might be familiar with it. It started with just like one little festival in Lake Tahoe, California. geared around wellness, ironically.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
We are essentially using our culture to hijack our biology, and that is leading to all sorts of detrimental downstream impacts. And I can unpack just some of those mechanisms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I was pretty focused on growing that for a number of years. And I think by 2016, that concern had grown to about 68 festivals annually in 20 countries. So you can imagine what my life looked like. First of all, I have three daughters, so we were traveling like a band of gypsies, basically. But I was on a plane nonstop. I was in every time zone you can imagine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
I couldn't even cover the amount of events that we had, candidly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
so i was sleeping very very poorly um you know i was constantly stressed i very very naively raised a lot of private equity money um which i thought was a great idea in the moment and then of course you know i was under the thumb of you know some cigar smoking plutograts in midtown you know looking down at me scrutinizing all my moves
Dhru Purohit Show
Stress Can Actually Make Your Life Better. Here’s How and Why You Need to Reframe Your Relationship with Stress with Jeff Krasno
And that was a lot of stress, bad stress, chronic stress, endless emails, endless pressure. And yeah, my diet was basically carbicide, you know, because I was eating in airports and even when I wasn't eating in airports, I was having that bagel for breakfast or that muffin for breakfast. Obviously, over time, doing that for many, many years, I just wore down.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
We so often associate health with downward spirals, but upward spirals are completely possible. In this day and age, we're largely choosing the way we die with very, very little thoughtfulness. We essentially evolved for a certain amount of stress, but we've engineered our lives at every single turn, often in the name of profit for ease and convenience.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And they say, oh my God, Andre's got a buildup of carbon dioxide. What are we going to do? Hey, make some more red blood cells down there because we need additional couriers. Stop doing that. We need additional couriers for oxygen because oxygen then gets shuttled to our cells and our mitochondria for energy production.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Our mitochondria then becomes hyper-efficient at making energy in hypoxic situations. Also brilliantly, carbon dioxide mitigates body pH balance. So your body's going to get a tiny bit more acidic if you hold your breath for a couple minutes. And that's totally adaptive because In that acidity, hemoglobin sort of loses its affinity for oxygen.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So hemoglobin is that little protein in the red blood cells that takes the oxygen and goes, okay, here we're going off to the blood cells. And if it's more likely to release it, that's better for energy production. So this is just like one of hundreds and hundreds of sort of pre-programmed adaptive responses to stress that exist in the human body.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But we've largely stripped all of those stressors out of the way that we live. So like, for example, like nutrient deficiency or calorie restriction is actually totally adaptive. It's really good for us. Not only does it keep... Andre nice and lean and lithe and a wonderful figure.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But also, it's activating certain metabolic pathways and other enzymes, et cetera, within your body. You know, there's a lot of scientists and medical experts wonks talk about like AMP kinase or whatever, these pathways for restoration and repair in the human body that stimulate these processes like autophagy and cellular cleanup and all this kind of stuff.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
These processes were developed in relation to sort of paleolithic stress because in the olden days, you know, back in our hunter-gatherer days on the Serengeti, There would be a calorie paucity as part of winter, right? But now we live in this age where winter never really comes. So it's all calorie abundance all of the time. So the body is just really doing what it's meant to do.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
It just stores fat away, you know, for a rainy day. But then there's no rainy day. And so this is like...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I think one of the greatest tensions that exist in modernity are these evolutionary mismatches, where we essentially evolved for a certain amount of stress, but since the Industrial Revolution and really accelerating over the last 50 or 70 years, we've engineered our lives at every single turn, often in the name of profit,
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
for ease and convenience and that ease is creating a lot of dis-ease and that convenience is creating candidly a lot of inconvenient truths that we have to grapple with.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, so I ended up coming up with this little acronym called the Big Macs. Not just the ones that you buy at the Evil M, but I really, I call it the Big Modern American Conveniences, so MAC. And, you know, there's, again, there are so many of them. But if you look at, like, I think the primary culprits that then create these mismatches, you know, I would say the number one is our food system.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah. Great to be here with you, Andre. I so appreciate it. And obviously I was thinking about you over the last couple of weeks as our greater community here in Los Angeles has been grappling and enduring these fires. And, um, yeah, I mean, fortunately, of course we were, we were, our locations were spared. Um, and, uh,
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So... starting in really after World War II, we started to see these massive escalations in obesity, right, in this country, and then other obesity-related diseases. That was this time where we started to essentially apply sort of a military industrial mindset to agriculture and to food. This was known as the Green Revolution. And, you know, candidly, it wasn't inspired by
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
for Machiavellian purposes, we needed to make enough calories to meet the needs of a very, very growing and escalating population. The problem was is that we started to create shelf-stable, nutrient-deficient calories, and in a surfeit of them, such that all that in the pump, and then you fast forward now, sort of in the palm of our hand, before this podcast would even finish,
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
We could literally order up any kind of food stuff in or out of season to your front door and have a feast. But this is, of course, like hijacking our own biology because we were meant to... Endure periods of scarcity like we talked about before. That kept us healthy. There's so many other examples. I think the other primary one would be just our sedentary lifestyles. Most of us sit at desk jobs.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I think in the United States, 80% of all jobs are desk jobs. So we're sitting, we're having these... eight, nine, ten hour periods of sedentariness, right? So we're not moving our body. This flies completely in the face of how we evolved. You know, we evolved moving all the time. We walked somewhere between on average, 7 to 10 miles per day.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So for people sort of managing steps on their iWatch, that's somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 steps per day. Sort of just baseline level, you know? often against our will, we were forced into a full sprint, right? Sometimes being chased by an ungulate or whatever. And then we lifted and carried heavy things, right? We, you know, chopped wood and carried water, etc.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, reverence is my Buddhist acolysm. But Of course, now we've essentially denuded that from society. And so we sit at these desk jobs, 94% of our time is spent indoors. You know, again, the body is just doing what it is programmed to do. So there's this... And even...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
You know, our approach to exercise is very, I guess, sort of reflective of this kind of our productization or our commodification of everything. So we have 45,000 gyms in the United States, yet our obesity rates continue to raise year over year. Like now they're somewhere around 44%, 45% obesity rates, not just overweight, obesity rates.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So despite having 45,000 places to sweat and grunt, right, on a regular basis, we keep getting more and more unhealthy. So what's going on there? Well, we tend to productize exercise. And I did this for years where there was like a little blip, a little fluorescent blip at the bottom of my Google calendar that says, Jeff will sit, you know,
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
all day, and then he'll go to the gym from like 6 to 6.45 and sweat it out on the treadmill, you know? And that's just... That approach to exercise simply does not work. It obviously does not work. We see that. So...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
As I started to kind of unpack, you know, all of these different evolutionary mismatches, candidly, by necessity, because I got very, very, very sick, and somewhat out of curiosity too, but really, I had to address real serious issues in my life. I began to really examine all of these different aspects of life. And I started to come back to one simple question. How did I evolve? How did I evolve?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, I mean, I have a bit of survivor's guilt associated with it because obviously we both have communities that have lost a tremendous amount. And, you know, when the fires first started, I really surrendered to our place, Commune Topanga. potentially being reduced to ash. And this was a moment kind of where the spiritual rubber sort of meets the hard, unforgiving reality, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Because this organism is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, millions of years of hominid evolution before that. You know, I am really just...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
the sum total of the intelligence of the universe experiencing itself as me here and now you know i've am the intelligence brought forward of eight billion years you know or 13.8 if you want to go all the way back so and i started to try to live in alignment with how I evolved.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And that started to, from there, I started to populate kind of an amalgam of what I call good stress protocols, or sometimes the protocols of inconvenience. Like putting myself out, testing the edges of my comfort zone.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So whether that related to lifting heavy things or temperature regulation or fasting or exposure to light, all those physiological things became very, very central to my practice in life. And then I also started to apply some of those stressors or adversity memetics to my psychosocial life.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Really started to lean into really like stressful conversations and pushing myself to have conversations that I really would have generally avoided. And what I realized is that doing hard things has incredible benefits. And it also makes doing other hard things easier.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, I mean, we so often associate health with downward spirals. But upward spirals are completely possible. And it really doesn't take that long for your body to gain momentum. And the feeling around that is so vibrant and addictive. And it is available to people. But, you know, a lot of my health journey really started with more of a spiritual quest, if you will.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And, you know, part of my spiritual practice is non-attachment, right? That I can be here and now with my full passionate self, but unattached to result. the buddha's teachings but then when you're faced with the reality right of like oh my god this place that i've built where i've forged so many deep profound relationships This place is at risk. It might disappear.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
In some ways, there were two inquests converging, sort of a mystical one and a medical one. And because I was deficient in both, candidly. And the more I studied the physical, candidly, the more metaphysical truths were revealed. In fact, for anyone listening who is interested in the metaphysical, study the physical. Because that is where the foundational intelligence of the cosmos is patterned.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So my beginning really required me to take kind of a biopsychosocial intake of my own life, really, kind of an inventory. And so many of us become the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and we get anchored in that identity. That I am sort of this fixed Jeff whose fate was poorly written in the genetic stars, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I'll just be that chubby kid that was moving around from country to country. I'll really never be quite good enough. I'll never be liked. And because of that, I will compensate and essentially... compromise my authenticity at every single turn in order to be liked. That was the story that I told myself about myself for almost five decades.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So realizing, having the awakening that change was actually possible was essential to my journey. And I think it's essential to many people's journey because we have been taught as part of kind of 20th century science that essentially our genes determine our fate.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And, you know, this was, you know, in some ways quite an incredible revelation that Watson and Crick had in the early 1950s where they like say, oh, we found the secret to life. It's called the double helix. It's the structure of DNA. And this is how genes replicate so efficiently. And if we can just map that genome, we can discover every source of an origin of every disease.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And then we can address that by addressing those particular genes and those underlying nucleotide sequences. Of course, once we actually mapped the human genome and finished in about 2004 with the Human Genome Project, we realized that we had the same amount of genes as a guppy. We had less than a grape. We had about 22,300 non-redundant protein-coding genes. And so...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
It's not really the genes, really. It's the expression of the genes. And this is where a lot of my more scientific study started to bleed into revealing of some of the greater mystical truths about what it is like to be human. This started to populate this concept called the Tao of Health, which has a number of different axioms or tenants to them. One of them is impermanence.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
We briefly referred to that at the beginning of the podcast. But this was a revelation that, of course, the Buddha had 2,500 years ago sitting under the Bodhi tree. In Sanskrit, I think it's called anika. But the fact that everything in the universe, including you and me and this rug, this camera, et cetera, is impermanent. It will eventually decay.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So clinging onto anything and craving anything is just futile and will lead to a tremendous amount of suffering because we are all impermanent. That really violates my sense of identity, right? Because, like, I wake up in the morning. Andre wakes up in the morning. We tootle into the bathroom. We sort of, like, flex a tiny bit and be like, there's Andre. Don't jump me in here.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And I look more or less the same as Jeff did yesterday. So there's a... Our sense of... identity is often anchored in this physical continuity of like, there's Jeff, there's a stable and reliable Jeff, you know? You know, any even brief excavation into human physiology reveals that that's like complete bollocks. You know, that is a complete and utter total delusion.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
You know, we are nothing but change. We are seven octillion self-assembled atoms that were originally forged in the crucible of some supernova eight billion years ago. experiencing 37 billion billion, that's not a typo, chemical reactions per second. Per second. I am... I'm not even close to the same person right now than I was when I sat down and began this conversation.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And if you look kind of deeper into my organism, what you will find is 39 trillion prokaryotes, these little bacteria and archaea and fungi, these single-celled organisms. You know, they're on my skin, they're in my aura. Increasingly, we're finding them in every organ, but largely they're kind of partying down in the den of my colon. And these little bacteria, these gut bugs...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And in a way, like crisis often does, it forces you to really examine the nature of things and say, what is the most important, potent component? Why do I have such sadness inside? And of course, as I meditated on that, It wasn't for risk of actually losing the physical place, per se. Of course, that would be hard and logistically difficult.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
are regulate almost like every system in my body. And if you were to sum total of their DNA, it's like they have 150 times my DNA. And they're turning over like every four minutes to 24 hours. So I am in complete flux all of the time.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And sort of embracing this idea that I am process and not product was really empowering for me because if I am process, then my diabetes that I was diagnosed with five years ago was also just process. And so is every other disease. And that health really exists along this dynamic spectrum. And that we have a certain amount of jurisdiction or agency over our trajectory on that spectrum.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
that we can, moment to moment, day by day, be moving towards wholeness, that's the process of healing, or moving towards disconnection and disease, it's the process of ailing. And I had agency. And so that sense of impermanence that was born out of my study of Buddhism, as applied to my physiology, was empowering and liberating.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I think the next sort of like part of the Rubik's Cube for me was also very much kind of within the Buddhist mindset. I mean, around... my body and my organism as being completely interconnected and interwoven with the environment. And you've probably come across this before, but the Buddha had this wonderful analogy through an image for the interconnected universe, and he called it Indra's net.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So he saw the universe as this endless cobweb They went on forever. And at every juncture of that cobweb was a crystalline diamond that reflected every other juncture. Sometimes it's a dewdrop, you know. And this is just a beautiful image for the nature of the universe. And it gave birth to this concept of dependent origination or in Sanskrit, I believe it's like pratitya sumat pada.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But that everything is reliant on everything else. And to be alive is actually to be alive. in relationship. That you cannot separate the function and behavior of an organism from the function and behavior of its environment. And again, this violates our sense of identity, because I won't put you, I won't say Andre feels this way, but I'll say I feel this way.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Most of the time, I feel like I'm this singular locus of consciousness, like crouching like a tiger somewhere behind here, somewhere in between my eyes, like separate from you, separate from the rest of humanity, separate from nature, often in competition with it, right? But again, any look remotely
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
excavation of human physiology completely dispels any notion of us being kind of these separate selves. I mean, you have plants in this room at the very, very most basic level. I'm in an interdependent relationship with these plants. They're creating oxygen. I do not create my own oxygen, sorry. I create their carbon dioxide. We're in this beautiful carbon cycle together.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Doing hard things has incredible benefits, and it also makes doing other hard things easier. It really doesn't take that long for your body to gain momentum and it is available to people. Health exists along this dynamic spectrum. We have a certain amount of jurisdiction over our trajectory on that spectrum. Sort of embracing this idea that I am process and not product.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But we see it everywhere as part of our daily experience. You have a very, very steep driveway. It is pretty steep. It is pretty steep, right? If I was going to walk up that driveway, I'd walk much slower as if I was walking on this sort of flat ground right here. I cannot separate my function from the function of the environment.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
My walking is completely dependent on the topography of your particular driveway in this case. But, you know, and these are very anodyne sort of proteic examples, but once you start to think about like our relationship with the air and environmental toxins, or our food and our food system, or our loneliness and our separation from each other,
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
and you realize that you are completely interdependent with the world, then the light goes off. Where it's like, if your environment is shaping your experience of reality, then you need to adopt the behaviors and shape the environment that fosters health and well-being.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But it was really more about potentially losing the container for community and connection. And it helped me to actually focus on really, I suppose, what makes life most worthwhile in the first place. And sometimes like crisis helps you do that.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, no mud, no lotus, right? But I think this is the interesting thing. It's a very astute question. Because what are you trying, what's the goal, right? What is well-being and human efflorescence, really? And what I began to put my thumb on is that every healthy system clusters towards the middle. Every imprimatur of health.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
well-being is an ability for an organism or a system to find balance or the middle. So again, this is very Buddhist in some ways, like the philosophy of Buddhism is Madhyamaka, the middle way. Now, initially, that was sort of like a middle way between asceticism and hedonism, but really was the avoidance of extremes. Now, if you look at economics, for example, I'll get back to your question.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I'm headed there slowly. But what is the healthiest economic system? It's one with a thriving middle class. It looks like a bell curve where the distribution of wealth is somewhere in the middle, right? What is the healthiest... ecological system. So one with lots of biodiversity, with a balance of different species, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And they just fight amongst themselves and nature selects for the best of them and they just kind of just continue to proliferate and grow and improve. What is the best, healthiest political system? One where there's a middle, right, where you can find common ground and cooperation. Not much to be found at this very moment, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So, again, you look at what is the unhealthiest system, one with very polarized extremes. You know, what's the healthiest system? One with strong middle. Like you look at your meditation practice. What is the focus of psychological health? The ability to center yourself, to always move yourself back to the middle, to this kind of unstable place in the middle. But if you look at human physiology...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
The middle is called homeostasis. So the body is riddled with mechanisms that engineer for the middle, for the Goldilocks zone. If you look at like temperature regulation in the body, it's like you get really, really, really cold. What do you do? You start to shiver, right? And your body thermoregulates and you move yourself back into that little warm porridge of 98.6.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Same thing if you get really hot. You're pre-programmed. to sweat and perspire, and then that perspiration evaporates off of you and you come back, you come back to the middle. But every other system, I mean, your circadian rhythm is this balance between cortisol and melatonin,
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Your nervous system is this balance between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, often characterized by different neurotransmitters. So you have these excitatory neurotransmitters on one side, like glutamate, like, oh, very alert, let's go. And then you have GABA. Okay, we're chilling now, we're chilling. And look at like leptin and ghrelin.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
pH balance, everywhere in the human body, health is characterized by this homeostasis. Back to your question. The ironic thing is that the body gets better at fostering homeostasis through a certain amount of imposed stress. So oftentimes it does take you to challenge your body's ability to get into the mud, right, in order to grow the lotus.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So this is why in an era that is completely denuded of discomforts, that's riddled with convenience at every turn. Here we are, sitting in these wonderful, comfy chairs, right, in a thermoregulated environment, you know, with this lovely tea. I mean, you know, whatever. If we sat here, we would just become like those characters in WALL-E, you know what I mean, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Just bring us food now, like summer squash in the middle of winter. I want it. You know, this is the way we live, right? And so... What's, I think, interesting is that in order to instantiate homeostasis, we actually do have to now press ourselves, press the edges of discomfort.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And whether, yeah, that could look like a physiological stress, like self-imposed calorie restriction or time-restricted eating, fasting, that could look like jumping into a cold plunge, it could look like getting into a sauna. That could look like getting up early and getting the proper light in the morning. That could look like, you know, lifting heavy things and overloading a muscle.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But that also could look like pushing yourself into social situations that feel like a little uncomfortable. That could look like actually having that stressful conversation with people that really, really don't agree with you on something. So it manifests... Our ability to kind of lean into discomfort, that opportunity manifests itself in so many different ways.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, that's really nicely described. I mean, I'm sure you have like special spots in nature that you visit. There's this one little place in Laurel Canyon and Fryman Canyon where I hike, where there's like a little cataract, a little waterfall. And, you know, I go back there quite often on my hikes. And I recognize this waterfall, this little area in this creek, because it appears the same.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I recognize its form. But I'm not under any delusion that it's the same exact water molecules, right? I know that the water molecules have all moved together. downstream. And what I am doing, I'm literally just recognizing the form of it. Or it's like, if let's say you have a lighter that you might use around here for some incense or something like that.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
If you were to light that flame, right, you recognize that flame there by its form, but you know that all of the molecules in there have like moved on, right? But we are curiously very, very similar to that waterfall and that flame, right? We recognize each other by our form, but everything that makes us up has moved downstream, right? It's gone down.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And of course, this underscores that idea of impermanence. And for me, it's always very helpful to to look at it through kind of the modern, hard, empirical Western lens, because that's a way that I can understand it. Like, oh yeah, you know, I ate some carbohydrates and that got absorbed in my, through my small intestine into my bloodstream as glucose.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And that glucose got broken down into pyruvate through this process of glycolysis. And my Whatever, my mitochondria turned it into ATP and it's like constructing and destructing and nonstop all the time. I can't even keep my wits on it because it's happening so organically. I think that again, this is like waking up to the transience of what it is to be alive.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
It's not only helpful for navigating your health and how you feel day to day and living with a certain amount of ease, but it's also very helpful at confronting your ultimate demise. That when you understand that all things are impermanent and transient, including yourself, it begins to...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
get at, I guess, what I might call the ultimate target of a spiritual life, which is freedom from the fear of death. Knowing that I am this intelligence animated for a certain period of time that I am this link in a continuous chain of captured sunlight and that Life as I know it, as circumscribed by these five senses, will be rounded with an ultimate sleep.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
that could be considered kind of morbid, like many of the stoic practices, but they're not morose at all, actually, when you really embody them. And it could be sort of a negative visualization if you categorize it that way. But there's this practice of... Imagining that you're doing a thing for the very, very last time. That I'll never make this coffee again.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
That my ability to be here and have this conversation with you is coterminous with the end of my life. But I also know that everything that makes me up, all of that nitrogen and oxygen and carbon and phosphorus and magnesium, that will all move on. That will all keep going. And in that sense, you never really die.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And I think this is really quite important and liberating because we are, as humans, sort of in like this very interesting, strange place in the course of our evolution, whereby some miraculous, fortuitous combination of atoms in the brain, I suppose, that we have consciousness, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
That we can sit here and find little vessels of words to capture thoughts and share them with each other and really enjoy it and be here and Go outside and look at the marvelous hills of Topanga and enjoy the miraculous beauty of a sunset, etc. That there is a feeling of what it's like to be you and me. And we call that sometimes qualia.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But the kind of double-edged side of that consciousness sword is that I also have... the awareness that I'm going to die, and you are going to die, and everyone that I love is going to die. And this mortality awareness has created paroxysms of anxiety throughout human history.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And so waking up to some degree of our own impermanence, I think helps to sort of dull the sharper edge of that mortality anxiety.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I mean, how much of our human stress is based on our fear of death? I mean, quite a bit, right? Our whole relationship with nature, or I would say our hostile relationship with nature, has its provenance in our fear of death.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Totally. It doesn't necessarily have to be the clinical terminus of respiratory and cardiac function or whatever. It can be other forms of metaphorical death. But if I look across human history... We spent an inordinate amount of effort and time killing off all of our predators. For thousands and thousands of years, we basically forced into extinction the most...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I'll never sit here in front of you again. I'll never talk to my mom or dad on the phone again, whatever. Could be small and petty, could be profound. But in sitting in that, there is a profound gratitude that bubbles up from under the crust of consciousness often. And then you come back to the realization that, no, I do get to do that thing again.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
fabulous, wonderful megafauna, like these wombats and giant massive 4,000 pound bears and like saber tooth tigers. And we have this hostile relationship with nature because we're so scared. Of dying. And then, you know, Louis Pasteur comes around in the mid-1800s and says, oh, no, no, no, no. It's not just the things bigger than you that are going to kill you.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
It's also the things smaller than you. The ones that you can't see. They're pathogens. They're viruses and bacteria. Beware. So now we've spent, what did we do? Very human response. We spent the last 165 years killing off everything smaller than us. All the bacteria, all the viruses.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And, you know, I'm joking a little bit because in some ways that was a very good thing, for example, to develop like a smallpox vaccine or something. The point is that we've essentially eliminated all of our predators. And when you eliminate all your predators, you only have yourself to kill. And in that respect, we seem to be doing a fine job.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, I think that so much of our freedom really is in some ways reframing our relationship with nature. Like our Abrahamic traditions are pretty harsh about nature, right? They're like, okay, humans, you're the CEOs, you are supposed to subdue and have dominion over nature. because it comes up, in the best case, as weeds and pests, right? So spray it and kill it.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But particularly spray and kill the part of yourself that is nature, because it's sinful, right? We call that human nature. And if we didn't have, like, a Merlin in a wizard's cap, you know, with a dusty old scroll sitting above us with some moral abacus, like, monitoring our sexual transgressions, we might, like, rape our best friend or something like that. I mean, it's fucking crazy.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So we're taught to really distrust the part of ourselves that is nature because it's made out of clay and it'll go back to dust. And what we're really supposed to focus on is this other part of ourselves called the soul because God literally breathed it in through our nostril in the book of Genesis. And the soul is eternal and it's divine.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So it has to sublimate the part of ourselves that's nature because nature sucks. right it's it's it's mangy you know like and this i think is like a massive myth apocryphal myth about who we are because of course we are nature You know, we are the products of it, and we are... It's not something that pushes us around.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
You know, we are, as you say, a participant in this grand, massive experiment of the universe. And to see yourself as nature, and to trust yourself as nature, is... It's so... It's incredibly... It's just liberating. And, you know, like nature, I've kind of thought of it this way, is a brilliant architect, but an imperfect carpenter. Because the design is fantastic, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But the execution is sometimes faulty, like nature will let you down from time to time. In human physiology, there are mutations. There are single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs, that sometimes predispose us, sometimes dispositively, to disease, like sickle cell disease or whatever, or APO4 alleles. You're 10 times more likely to get Alzheimer's and things like that.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But you can't not, not, not trust nature, right? Because evolution is a product of those mistakes. Because every once in a while, that mutation turns out to be adaptive. And then nature selects for the best of it. And we improve.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And I'm sure that's related to the feeling that you probably had coming back here, which is like, oh my God. I am so grateful that this does exist. And for, you know, often in life we, you know, begin to take things for granted that sort of appear in our quotidian life.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And so that's why, like, even in a conversation like this, where I simply do not know the next word that's going to be emitted from my mouth, I still have to trust myself because I might land on something incredible inside of the mistake. And this is really how I encourage people to live, to trust themselves. I mean... Like, I'm sure you've had this experience.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And this is actually what influenced the cover of my book. But, like, I lived in New York for a long time. But even here in Los Angeles, when you're walking, like, on a sidewalk, you're walking down in Santa Monica or downtown, and it's asphalt as far as you can see.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And then you look down in sort of a moment of pause and you see like a flower or a blade of grass like growing through the pavement of the sidewalk. And you're like, oh my God, nature. It's just, it's irrepressible, you know? And this is somewhere where we can put our faith, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I mean, not faith as belief in the absence of evidence, but like trust in the eternal reliability of what it is to be nature.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So, and then every once in a while we're reminded, oh my God, you know, the bounty of what I have, I should wake up and be grateful for that every day.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah. Well, those monks, first of all. Yeah. I'm nowhere even close to those monks. So I think what you're referring to is this whole practice of like drawing of the sheets. And this was actually the early inspiration of Wim Hof, this notion of building inner fire.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yes, yes. Sometimes against my will. Yeah. Yeah, just as an aside, as a little storytelling aside, Wim and his beloved brood planted themselves at Kamyon Topanga just a few miles from here, which is our funky little wellness laboratory. And for one reason or another, they couldn't find their way out the driveway. But it was wonderful while it lasted.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And, you know, we had a commercial ice delivery in the morning, right, for the cold plunge, and then a commercial wine delivery in the evening for other purposes. Anyhow, it was a very jovial, jocular crew of people. But I will give Wim much credit for... Every morning, without fail, I would see him toodle across the cobblestones and out to the cedar ice plunge.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And it would be like naked, first of all. And it would be just above freezing, like 32 and a half degrees. You know, ice bobbing everywhere. And like a Buddha, he would just... immerse himself with a little kind of half smile across his face and sit in there for a good 10 or 15 minutes. And I'm sure the anti-inflammatory impacts of the ice are very good for hangovers.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But of course, there's many, many, many other attributes metabolically and mood regulation and everything else. And we can go into that at some other time. But then Wim would get out of the ice bath and he would go over and he put on the most diminutive pair of shorts known to mankind, but thankfully something, and go over and weed the garden. Unasked, every morning, same thing.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And I would make a little espresso and I would tootle out and be like, oh, good morning. And without fail, as if he didn't know me, and we spent like 30 straight days doing this, he would launch in to the same diatribe about extolling the benefits of the ice and the breath with the same... vim and vigor that he had done the previous day as if I had never heard them.
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I mean, you know, on and on and on. And I'm like, I'd always be like... Just nodding my head and kind of amazed. And I was like, this dude, first of all, is responsible for spreading this practice that has been very, very central to my health transformation. But he's essentially Taylor Swift. I mean, he's like playing the hits, man.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
He gets up and gives the same performance with the same vibrancy every day. And I really have to hand it to him. He's such a character and so generous. I mean, he was really, really fun to be around. But anyways, his whole practice was in some part inspired by these monks in the Himalayans that would wrap themselves in these 40 degree sheets.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And they would leverage a certain type of breath known as Tummo. to essentially create inner fire, inner heat. And, you know, after 30, 40 minutes, you would start to see, you know, these steam coming up from these freezing cold sheets that they had dunked into a cold river. And then, of course, what did they do? They took that sheet off and they would wrap them in another cold sheet.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And so, like you say... you know, how can we explain with the knowledge that we have at our disposal right now how that is possible, right? How do we engage in that degree of thermogenesis Um, like I can poke at it. Yeah, we've got, you know, the mitochondria in our certain, particularly in this tissue known as brown fat that is like highly thermogenic. Um, and yes, that can access.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
glucose but these monks probably didn't have a ton of that so there's probably some stored fat but these guys were pretty lean too so there isn't a ton of like triglycerides to to convert into free fatty acids for you know the purpose of energy and heat creation so we're you know we're what was the lever
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
in the human mind that was able to produce heat potent enough to dry not one cold sheet, but two cold sheets. And this is a great, of course, the great mystery of, or this is the great sort of, kind of sources of curiosity of like, oh my God, we've just barely begun to learn anything. It's like when you bring a torch out into the vast night sky, what is revealed? Like even more blackness.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So every time you learn something, it reveals, oh my God, how much do I not know? And of course, this is the inexorable march of science. And yeah, I mean, this is why it's so exciting to be alive and be curious. Yeah, infinitely humbling. Yeah, it's like, oh my God, we are just this little delegated adaptability of this massive project.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, and that's, you know, it's totally humbling. And, you know, science and spirituality... have been unduly cleaved as if they're two different things, but they're not, you know? They both, at their best, evolve and are humble and are always asking why, you know? And challenge and open to modification and new observation. And this is why, you know, Buddhism for me...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And Taoism to some degree and to some degree Zen are my sort of preferred modalities because they're not stagnant. They don't exist in one unmodifiable dusty old scroll. What they're actually... They're built to continually transform and grow with the Sangha. So it's like... In a way, I find Eastern religions and science to be actually one and the same thing in many cases.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, I mean, I think you point to some
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
aspect of society right now, which is very, very sad, which is this distension and morbidity that, you know, for the last 15, 20 years of many people's lives, you know, we're essentially limping through life, managing chronic diseases with cocktails of pharmaceuticals that never really address root cause and just sort of mask symptoms for a little bit of time, et cetera.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And, you know, that form of suffering radiates out in so many different ways. I mean, it's obviously the individual that's suffering, but family members and caregivers and the societal expense and the erosion of the importance that we used to put on our elders, you know, these... vessels of accumulated experience that we used to look to for wisdom, now we look to our elders as elderly, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And they're often a nuisance, and we just ship them off, you know, whatever. We'd never do that with Confucius or Lao Tzu. So, yeah, I mean, I am not an immortalist. You know, I don't have escape velocity dreams per se. I think on some level we're pre-coded to die. I think life wouldn't be life without death. There sort of exists within a unity of opposites.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But I, you know, Atul Gawande wrote this wonderful book called... It was being mortal, I think it was. And in the book, he said, yeah, we only lived to about 48 or 49 years old at the beginning of the 1900s. But when we died, we just went right off the cliff. We didn't have this extended, protracted period of misery. Yeah.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So what I, my dream and, you know, this came about, this sort of vision came about really in relationship to my children. So I have three girls. And when they were growing up, I read voluminously to them at night. Back when their bedtime was before mine. Now that's flipped, right? Now they're teenagers.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But I would read all those books, you know, Chronicles of Narnia and The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island Blue Dolphins, like, tons of fairy tales. And like the fairy tales would always generally like include like some scullery made that got three wishes at the end, whatever. So one night I was reading to Micah, she's my littlest one, and she wouldn't go to sleep, couldn't go to sleep.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, I mean, we were evacuated from here, obviously, from Topanga, and then also from Laurel. So I was evacuated twice in two days, essentially. You know, I found myself, I guess, on that one Wednesday night, sleeping on the floor in Studio City at one of my daughter's friend's houses, staring up at the ceiling and asking myself, like, who am I? Who really am I without all my stuff?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So she finally like stopped me and said, hey daddy, you know, if you have one wish, if you were a prince, What would your wish be? And, of course, at that juncture, I was like, I wish you'd just go to fucking sleep. And she was like, she's a very little, tiny creature, but she had a very heavy arm, and she would always, like, slap it over me like a parole officer or something.
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So I could never, like, I'd always skirt to the edge of the bed, and she's like, I'm not asleep yet. So I was like, okay, okay, well, let me think about it. So... I meditated on that question. And then a couple nights later, I rotated back to Micah after reading to the other girls. And I said, you know, hey, Micah, I think I have an answer to your question. She's like, oh, okay.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Well, Daddy, what would be your one wish? And so I said, okay, Micah. So a long time from now, okay, in the year 2088, I'll be 117 and your mom, you know how I fancy older women, she's going to be 118. And that will be the year that we celebrate 100 years together. And it's not unfathomable. 37 years under our belt at this point, we were together when we were 17 and 18 years old.
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She's like, oh, okay, okay, that sounds nice.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I was like, yeah, we'll walk up to this little mountain cabin that we have and kind of the same little trail that we walk up, that we've walked up hundreds of times, and we'll make this, like, wonderful dinner together, this, like, salmon and roasted yams, and I'll unpop this old bottle of Chateau Margaux that I've kept in the basement for years, and we'll sip these little thimbles and then...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
go to bed and she'll spoon me and read me from that, like, same New Yorker article on plague tectonics that's put me to bed for, like, 50 years. And she'll sense my little, you know, parasympathetic slumber breath and, you know, turn off the light. And somewhere in the middle of the night— I like to challenge my kids with science—
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Around 3 a.m., the mitochondria in my cardiac cells and my neurons and the mitochondria in your mommy's cardiac cells and neurons will emit one last plume of carbon dioxide out of their energy-producing chimneys. And our life, the way we know it, will end. And it's totally okay. It's totally okay. It's actually sort of emotional to talk about it. And, you know, she was like five or six.
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And because she was so close to Source on some level, she didn't find that wish remotely morbid. She just gave me a big hug. She said, I hope you get your wish, Daddy. And so that... I think encapsulates the dream that I have for my own healthspan and lifespan. And the one, you know, that sounds obviously a little Pollyanna, right? A little model. And that death should be so...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
empty of pain and decrepitude and cognitive decline. But it's also just as ridiculous that death should be this like inexorable march of bedpans and statins and insulin and worse, you know? And I do believe that that kind of healthspan is available to most people. Because in this day and age, we're largely choosing the way we die. and with very, very little thoughtfulness.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I mean, if you had asked a denizen of 1900, or if you had told them, okay, in 124 or 125 years, there'll be no smallpox, no death from cholera or typhoid, very little death from tuberculosis, whatever, and very little death from infection, they would have thought, oh my God, the human race is winning. Right? You figured it out. That's nirvana.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And of course, texting endlessly with my brother, who lives in Altadena, and listening to the decimation of that neighborhood. which is really sometimes gets short shrift in comparison to the Palisades. But what happened in the Eden fire over on the east side of Los Angeles in that Altadena neighborhood was just as awful, really. Yeah.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
You know, fast forward 125 years, and, you know, our average lifespan is actually decreasing. But the time that we're spent alive is becoming increasingly miserable. You know, we are dying not from communicable diseases. We are dying from chronic diseases, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, and other neurodegenerative diseases, cancer.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And in many respects, these infirmities of modernity are preventable and in some cases reversible. And so this is my great dream, not just for my own life, but for humankind. That we can live these full, vibrant, efflorescent lives. That becoming old is actually a wonderful experience. You know, the way that it actually should be. That you can feel that you are...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
this accumulation of beautiful and treacherous experiences that then you can shed light on life for your future generations. And that is why I'm so committed right now at this place in my life to amplifying
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
the protocols if you will but the ways of living um that can instantiate that kind of full and vibrant life that was beautiful man that that moment with your daughter too is just stands out so strong uh what are those protocols as we start to wrap up i think
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah. It's always hard to pinpoint one because I've stacked a whole variety of protocols that have been so transformational. And there's a part of me that is super geeky that loves to talk about like mitobiogenesis and like autophagy and
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
um bdnf and heat shock proteins and you know endogenous endorphin production all these things you know that are part of a whole series of protocols but if i have to really boil it down you know every experience that we have as human beings is through the prism of our mind right And we go to the gym to exercise our biceps and our quads and our abs.
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And sure, it's great to look and feel good in that respect. But we have to focus more, I think, on training our minds. Particularly because... We live within an ecosystem where the most precious commodity is your time and attention. We have taken Andre's focus and productized it and commodified it, and we sell it for profit. I'm not just saying you, obviously.
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This is part of what we know as the attention economy or the persuasion economy. And what is downstream from that? is an inability to concentrate, endless distraction, and a lack of capacity to access the present moment. We can't even give each other the present of our own presence. Most of the time, we are just lost in thought. You know, we have monkey mind where
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
thoughts are branches and we're just swinging cuckoo bananas riotously from each one, you know? We're never here. We're obsessing about something in the past and projecting that into the future as some sort of negative anticipated memory, right? We build this anxiety like a mason with bricks over it. We become anxious about our own anxiety, and then that makes us anxious. I mean, this is crazy.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So yeah, I mean, at the same time, I mean, I lived in New York City during 9-11. And in the wake of that tragedy, I witnessed something that I'm witnessing here, which is really tragedy and collective grief i guess i would call it sometimes really elicits people's better angels right and the outpouring of generosity um has been something quite beautiful to watch
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And this impacts every other part of our life. You know, how we eat, you know, how we treat each other. how we feel day to day. And so what is interesting is that a lot of the physiological protocols, stress protocols that I talk about actually have very, very potent psychological effects. ramifications.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Totally. You feel high. I mean, being in a sauna creates endorphins, endo, endogenous, inner, endorphin, morphine, opioids, inner opioid. You're accessing your inner pharmacy, literally, when you apply deliberate heat to yourself. So yeah, those physiological stress protocols have protein impacts on your psychology. But I do think this is where cultivating some kind of mindfulness practice is...
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
perhaps the most important thing one can do in a world that is just essentially endlessly trying to trigger you. I mean, our whole news and social media ecosystem is algorithmically preferenced to make you mad. or scandalize you through hyperbole and sensationalism and scandal, etc. So now we have to actually apply these practices to take back our own mind and
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I'm not even close to the same person than I was when I began this conversation.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
For me, I mean, that really does look like the simplest of meditation practices, of finding a single point of focus that could be the breath, that could be a kasina or drishti, that could be a mantra. And the real opportunity there is... is in the return. You're inevitably, if anyone has ever tried to meditate before, thoughts are going to emerge from under the crust of consciousness.
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Like, that just happens. And don't judge yourself. The real opportunity there is when a thought or feeling or emotion, when any phenomena emerges moment to moment within consciousness, can you bring yourself back to that single point of focus. And that is actually where the happiness and the skill, if you will, lies. It's actually the ability for you to bring yourself back.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
There's a fascinating study by these two Harvard dudes, like Killingsworth and Gilbert or something like that. They did a whole study on human happiness. And it said the happiest people were the people that were actually doing what they were thinking about. It sounds so simple. But how often are we doing something, but our mind is just somewhere else?
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And this is what this practice enhances, is our ability to yoke action and intention to be right here, right now. And... And I will just color that statement with something that you were talking about before, which is equanimity.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
So as part of the Brahma-Vihara, which is sort of these four characteristics of enlightenment in Buddhism, one of them is known as upeka, which is often translated as equanimity. But I think people have a really false notion of what equanimity is. They think it's kind of like limp and conciliatory and lacking of passion. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
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Equanimity is the ability to be all here right now with your full passionate self, but unattached to the result of that. And so if you can train your mind to come here now, to be totally passionate about this very moment and this one, right? That is eternal life right there. Because the only time it's ever been and will ever be is right now.
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And if you can be there without any other attachment, then That is the great liberation.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Thank you so much, man. I so appreciate this opportunity.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I mean, I remember I didn't buy my own beer for like three months in the wake of 9-11. You walk out on the subway and there would be people of all colors and creeds and races and religions, et cetera, like giving people hugs, carrying their groceries for them, buying them sandwiches, whatever. It was a moment in time. And of course that faded away.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, people heal in community, period. And yeah, I just want to say that I've seen you work and been for the last couple of years, particularly, we obviously have a relationship that goes beyond that. But you so generously platform people. And I just want to acknowledge how well and how graciously you do that and with a lot of rigor.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
and a lot of obviously incredible execution but with tremendous soul and heart so I'm really just a very appreciative of your generosity and how much you give no thank you man it's my honor and I feel I feel lucky being able to just do this you know I really enjoy it and so it's a gift for me as well
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
That's right.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
But where people's munificence and philanthropic instincts were tickled and brought to the surface.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Totally. And this is where emotional regulation techniques come in handy, right? And being able to manage stress and see opportunity in stress sometimes. But certainly, you know, your practice and my practice, though they probably slightly deviate, they share a common goal, which is one of emotional regulation, where we can bring ourselves back to center and leverage our emotional
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
our better qualities, our neomammalian brain and our centers of rationality and reason to make good decisions and to treat people well. So these are where those practices become probably more important than ever.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Yeah, well, I feel like I'm sort of a public relations agent for stress on some level. Because we have a very negative association with stress in our modern age, and justifiably. But when you kind of untangle the nature of stress, it is actually a very beneficial, adaptive response at its core. I mean, you live up here. In the hills, you probably hike in the hills every once in a while.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I hike, you know. And we might come across a whole host of different wild animals, like coyotes or maybe a rattlesnake, right? So what happens... That happened to me.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And so when that happened... you had a physiological response to that, right? And a very adaptive one. You know, your heart rate and respiratory rate started to increase, like your liver secreted just the right amount of glucose and sent it to the extremities in order to fight or flee. But also all these other things were happening. Your pupils were dilating.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
The aperture of your attention was getting super, super narrow. You become self-obsessed for good reason and distrustworthy of the world around you. And that serves... your biological imperative to survive. So this is coded, engineered in the human organism in response to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as a positive, adaptive response.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Now, in your case, what happened to that rattlesnake? Probably just... took a look at Andre and said, you know, Andre's probably not going to be on the specials menu today. I'm going to just slither off into the tall grasses. I'm assuming something like that happened, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Okay. But, you know, essentially your immediate reaction might have been one of involuntary response, but then you were able to leverage, you know, your conscious top-down pressure to basically push down on that involuntary bottom-up response and regulate. And this is what happens. I mean, if you're on a trail and the snake slithers away, your body returns to homeostasis.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And that's totally normal. And that's good. Your heart rate and respiratory rate decrease. Your aperture opens back up. You become more trustworthy of the world around you. And that's great. That's adaptive. But I think in this culture... the rattlesnake almost never leaves the path. So we're constantly and chronically stressed.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
And that's really the difference between how we experience bad, chronic, modern stress and what I would call sort of paleolithic good stress. And if you begin to actually look at the nature of stress, there are so many mechanisms in the human body that are adaptive.
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
I mean, if you were to go, let's say, to a high altitude, or if we were just to sit here and to, like, hold our breath for a while, might not be really great for the podcast, but... But over time, let's say if we held our breath for a minute, we would have sort of a glut of carbon dioxide. So that's called like hypercapnia and a dearth of oxygen. That's called hypoxia, right?
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E132 - Jeff Krasno: “Comfort is Killing You” - Know THIS about Stress & Anxiety
Now, too much hypoxia, and the podcast would meet an untimely end. Because too much hypoxia, your brain is not going to get enough oxygen, and you'll sign off one last time here on Know Thyself. But the right amount of hypoxia actually triggers this unbelievable adaptive response in the human body. So you have like these little chemoreceptors right here on the side of your carotid arteries.