Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it.

Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits & Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therisage.

Their Trilight Panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go, and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where, honestly, I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for. I personally Use Therisage Tri-Lite everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to therassage. Com right now and use code be bold for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to therisage, T-H-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E. Com, and use code be bold for 15% off any of their products.

Exercise is very important for overall brain health.

Your diet matters, and your level of exercise matters, and the supplementation matters, and giving people medication. And I'm not opposed to medication. But once we start them, they're insidious in that they change your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal.

When you're doing all those ancillary things, and you still have anxiety, you still have ADHD, when you have all these other things still creeping up, is that when you start implementing medication when it's not? Or is it all just like it's all relative? You could be at a 10, and then you start doing these things, and you get down to a 6, and that could be good enough.

Well, it's only good enough. I think people should see us at Amen Clinics when their mood, their feelings, their behavior, or their thinking is not what they want and not getting them to the goals they have. Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual help. When you feel like there's something blocking you. Now, 20% of the people who see us, they have no problems. They just want a better brain. It's like, okay, brain health is the most important part because without my brain, I'm not me. And so about 20% of people just come because they want to know and they want to plan to optimize it. Most people come because they want to feel better. And you think of medication when you've done the things you can do that I talk about in the end of mental illness, like your thyroid's right, and your vitamin D is right, and your testosterone level is right, and your hemoglobin A1c is right. It's like your physiology is good, and I still feel anxious, then One, we think of something like gabaconine to settle that down or theonine. And if we're still not making progress, then it's like, Here are our medication options.

But it is 10th on the list as opposed to first on the list.

Can we just talk a bit about just optimizing someone's brain a little bit? Because you're saying that's 20% of your business, right? A lot of people who are hackers or just overall high performers or whatever want to optimize their brain. I did see one thing that you said that was very interesting, that people who play racquetball or any racquet sport, they tend to live longer, their blood flows better, therefore it's very helpful. The coordination sports helps to optimize your brain, right? Is that why the racquet is so good. Can you talk about that and give me some other tangible ways people can optimize their brain health?

If we think of the mnemonic I have at the end of mental illness, it's called Bright Minds. You want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it if it's headed to the dark place, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. When it comes to coordination exercises like racket sports, the B in Bright Minds is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. It's associated with depression, ADHD, and schizophrenia. You need to keep your blood vessels healthy, pliable, and working right. The low blood flow scans we see, it just goes with ADHD, brain fog, depression, and so on. It means you have to keep your vessels healthy. You do that with exercise.

Exercise, yeah.

You also do it with... You avoid things that hurt them. So caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, high blood pressure, any form of vascular disease, you need to take that seriously. Things like exercise, beets, oregano, rosemary help increase blood flow and certain supplements like ginko. So one of the eleven, you're just thinking, Oh, my diet matters, exercise matters. Okay, most people know that. The R is retirement and aging. When you stop learning, your brain starts dying. So new learning should be part of everything you do. And oh, by the way, you should know your ferritin level. Ferritin is a measure of iron storage. If your If your ferritin is low, you're going to be anxious and look like you have ADD. And if your ferritin is high, it's associated with premature aging. So know your important health number. So with blood flow, we talked about blood pressure. With aging, we talked about ferritin. The I is inflammation. When your body is inflamed, you have mental health issues because your brain becomes inflamed and you're anxious or you're sad. And inflammation can come from low levels of omega omega-3 fatty acids. It can come from gum disease. It can come from a leaky gut.

It can come from processed foods or fast food diet. And taking omega-3 fatty acids, flossing your teeth, Taking probiotics, all of those things can help quell inflammation. The G is genetics. What's in your family? Because we just tend to be vulnerable to death. The G is on a death sentence. They should be a wake-up call to get healthy. The H is for head trauma, a major cause of mental health problems that nobody knows about because most psychiatrists never look at the brain. And how would you know if that accident you got thrown out of the car at three years old mattered if you didn't look? And the literature on head trauma is so clear. I didn't make this up. Head trauma, undiagnosed head injuries are a major cause of homelessness, depression, suicide, suicide, panic attacks, ADHD, learning problems. And so a strategy is always protect your head. And so when my kids want to go snowboarding, I'm like, No, bad idea. Because you're just more likely to have a concussion when they want to play tackle football. It's like, no, it's not going to happen because- How old are your kids? My youngest is now 16, and I have grand babies from 2 to 10, and I adore them, but they're not playing football.

I think that's neglect or abuse, depending on how you define it. But on average, kids have a concussion every year they play football. You should never be okay with them. The T in Bright Minds is toxins. Alcohol is not a health food. Marijuana is not going green. Both of those are directly toxic to brain function. But there's a whole bunch of other things that are toxic. General anesthesia is toxic for some brains. The products you- What's a lipstick. I'm sorry?

Lipstick can be toxic.

60% of the lipstick sold in the United States has lead in it. I call it the kiss of death. Then we're in this pandemic, and people are lathering their bodies with these antiseptics, which are just loaded with toxins. I know. I'm Totally. I'm a fan of green products because the soap can kill COVID. But you don't want all the other things you can't pronounced on your skin because whatever goes on your skin- Yeah, exactly. Goes in your body and affects your body.

Yeah. You said, okay, a couple of things you just said, the ferritin that you mentioned, because I don't think many people have heard of that. What is that? How do people get tested for that?

It's a measure of iron storage in your body.

Is that a normal blood test? Can you go to any doctor?

Just a normal blood test, ferritin level. People who are low, anxious, ADD, tired, can't sleep, people who are high, premature aging. If you're low, you need to take iron. And red meat is probably okay, sustainably raised red meat. If you're high, you need to donate blood. So I'm always high. It runs in my family. So I donate blood twice a year, and it It keeps it at a high level.

Then you said for inflammation, well, a couple of things. The gut, you touched upon it with gum disease. But the other thing is, what's the correlation between gut health and brain health?

They're completely connected. If your gut is not right, say you had a lot of antibiotics when you were a child because you have lots of ear infections, and it really damaged the microbiome, 100 trillion bugs in your gut, then you may be chronically anxious the rest of your life because you have an unhealthy microbiome in your gut. So just think of the microbiome as the bug population, where all of us have about 100 trillion bugs in our gut, and they make our transmitters, they detoxify our food, they help us with digestion. And if they're not healthy, you feel terrible, emotionally. Almost all functional medicine doctors start by improving the health of your gut, which you need to do with your diet. And people have heard of probiotics. A lot of people haven't heard of prebiotics. That's actually eating fiber to feed the probiotic. You got to take care of the bugs in your gut by feeding them right. And stop poisoning them. Alcohol poisons the microbiome.

Yeah. I feel like it's becoming much more known about the gut health at the brain-gut connection. But you know what's interesting about you is I feel like you're a combination of a functional doctor and a brain doctor, right? Because you do a lot of the same things that a functional doctor would look at.