The 21st Century Disease (and cure)

Do you ever get tired? Do you ever feel rundown and overwhelmed? Do you ever find it really hard to get out of bed in the morning?  Let me guess…You’ve not only felt them, you feel them all the time. And you accept it as “normal.”  But have you ever thought to yourself that maybe this is completely unnatural? Have you ever thought that there may be something wrong and it could be killing you?

I didn’t either. I thought to myself, “Just suck it up.” Mainly because I didn’t have any distinctions for a much deeper issue. It’s not depression. I actually believe this is one of the causes of depression. It’s called adrenal fatigue.

“Adrenal fatigue is produced when your adrenal glands cannot adequately meet the demands of stress. The adrenal glands mobilize your body’s responses to every kind of stress (whether it’s physical, emotional, or psychological) through hormones that regulate energy production and storage, immune function, heart rate, muscle tone, and other processes that enable you to cope with the stress” – AdrenalFatigue.org

Once the adrenals are shot, lethargy ensues and our immune functions are weakened entirely. Years ago I lived with a chronic sense of tiredness, getting sick constantly until I had this distinction. Feeling tired had become so common I actually forgot it, and I only remembered it again when my healers took a look at me and said, “Your adrenals are shot.” 

Has your doctor ever taken a look at you and said, “I think we should test your adrenal glands?” Probably not. Unfortunately most doctors are not aware of it. But I don’t find that surprising considering doctors don’t spend any time learning about nutrition, which I believe is amazing medicine. 

I think the biggest evidence that this has become a prevalent disease is how much we self-medicate with caffeine. Coffee is the second most traded commodity next to oil.  

But do you actually know how the drug works?  Most people don’t realize that when you drink caffeine, you’re not actually getting energy from the molecule. The molecule is creating a chemical reaction in your brain such that it makes you steal your own energy. It creates a small emergency in which the pituitary glands respond by releasing your own adrenaline. The Oatmeal explains it best:

That said, many people (like me) have tapped our adrenals without even using caffeine.  

The good news is that the disease has a cure. This is the best book on the subject of Adrenal Fatigue, and I highly recommend it to get a complete view on how it works, the symptoms, and what you can do to shift your lifestyle. But here are a few highlights:

• Eliminate caffeine as much as possible (Just know that it’s a drug. If anything, treat it like a drug, rather than like a food source).
• Alcohol and sugar further exacerbate the disease.
• Get sleep between 6am and 8am as often as you can. It’s when the body produces the most adrenaline, so it will greatly increase your recovery time. 
• If you have chocolate cravings, it may really be magnesium that you need.
• Take a ton of Vitamin C (see the book for dosing)
• Don’t be afraid of salt. Unless you have high blood pressure, salt is very helpful (especially healthy kinds, like RealSalt)
• Don’t tolerate stress. If you really think about it, the amount of stress we have in our lives is the amount that we will tolerate. If that seems impossible, then you may need to consider your lifestyle (e.g. – Do you really think you can watch dramatic TV shows and they won’t affect your psyche?) 

I don’t like to write about disease, but having these distinctions have really saved my life, and if this sounds like you or someone you know, I hope you’ll consider looking into it. 

When you do, you may find something even deeper. You may find that all that work, all that stress, all that running around town like a chicken with its head cut off was really covering up something within you… A passion you forgot or never knew about, a purpose for your life that makes everything suddenly make sense. Or just that amazing and natural feeling that you’re safe… surrounded by the right people, at the right time, doing the right things, and that life couldn’t be any better. 

The Prescription of the Big Cleanse

Okay, here’s the prescription, as discussed in previous posts.

I recommend first reading Mastin’s original story behind the cleanse (Part 1, Part2, Part 3), and he’s is also available as a mentor through this.

Then here’s the plan. For 30 Days…

ELIMINATE:

• Sugar
• Wheat
• Dairy
• Alcohol / Drugs
• Caffeine
• Sex
• Dating
• Flirting 
• Masturbation
• Facebook
• TV
• Talking to Ex’s or Crushes

START:

• An alkaline diet (I ate a lot of meat, but balanced it out with Green Smoothies)
• Kundalini Yoga (at least 3x per week) – can be done by DVD or via Amazon on demand)
• Taking a natural multivitamin
• Taking digestive enzymes before meals
• Taking probiotics
• Drink 3 liters of water PH 7+ or higher per day  (Essentia brand at Whole foods). 
• OPTIONAL: At least one colonic, if not one per week
• OPTIONAL: Going to bed very early

I have found that myself and others question the Kundalini Yoga part, but it was really quite essential in processing all the emotion that comes up. Mastin did it twice a day on the cleanse so he believes 3x a week is the minimum. 

As you can see, it’s no small deal to do this. But two of my friends dived in instantly. One is almost complete and the other just started, and both are loving the experience of really getting into what emotions have been pushed down for years.  

Consider it like a re-boot, for your life. 

The Big Cleanse – Finale

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” 
― Joseph Campbell

The first two weeks were quite challenging, as I mentioned in the first big cleanse post. All the emotions, and not a single vice to suppress it.  I found that a lot of thoughts came through that I didn’t like. I found myself to be an incredibly judgmental person. It was like I was sitting back and watching myself, because if I took action on those thoughts I believed to be true, I would have said a lot of things I’d regret. 

What was also hard was the social detox. The prescription included no contact with crushes or ex’s, even if they were from high school! I thought that would be no bid deal, but a close friend of mine was going through a challenging situation and I couldn’t reach out. I prayed for her each night, and I was often upset with myself for the pure selfishness of this cleanse. But I also knew I had to do this to find my inner peace. 

You see, most of my life I’ve been obsessed with “doing the right thing.” And I’ve found this to be a terrible compass. It has created more stress and anxiety than anything else. The difference between what I believe is the right thing to do vs what actually feels good has created a sense of guilt so strong that I have often felt like ending it all. (I now realize it was an internal conflict of values so unresolvable, that action action in either direction would cause me pain).

As a life long learner, I became aware of this on an intellectual level. But mere awareness never seemed to change anything (not for long at least).  And as I went through the first few weeks of the cleanse, what I feared most was going through it for 30 days and seeing nothing really change. As I mentioned this, my healer laughed and said, “The one constant in the Universe is change. So don’t worry about that!” 

And then something shifted after the second week. It started when I began going to bed earlier. I found that I loved spending time alone. I cleaned, I read, I wrote, I meditated, I exercised. I was creating a new lifestyle for myself. Emotionally I felt like there were no big highs or lows. Just a constant peaceful foundation that couldn’t be rocked. 

I was taking Kundalini yoga classes 3x a week, and on the 30th day I had my final class. After two weeks of pure peace, I began to feel very scared. When I started the cleanse I couldn’t wait for it to end. And now I didn’t want it to stop. I had entered my innermost cave, made a home for myself, and I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to change my militant diet. I didn’t want to be social, or be in a relationship, or even have sex.  And the guilt ensued. I literally felt crazy – like I had experimented with being homeless for a month and didn’t want to come back. 

It’s been two weeks since the cleanse officially ended, and to be honest… I don’t know if I’m back. I don’t know where I am. I’m continuing almost all of the new habits, but I’m not tied to them.  I find I have very few judgments. I have a much deeper acceptance of people and myself. I’ve also noticed that the emotion of embarrassment is largely gone. I didn’t really notice it till now, but I used to walk around with this constant chatter in my head, wondering what people think of me, trying to take care of people and not upset anyone. Most of that is gone. 

It’s been really nice to reconnect with people. They say I feel more a lot more authentic. And it amazes me how intrigued people are by the cleanse. It definitely gets a strong reaction (in one way or another). A friend of mine noticed a difference so great that he immediately started the cleanse and now I’m coaching him through it. He’s two weeks into it and loving it. 

I highly recommend trying it. I’ll post the exact prescription in case anyone is interested in doing it. But even if you don’t, I want to leave you with a question.  How are you distracting yourself? What is it you’re doing now to avoid a feeling you don’t want to feel?  These things are the guards of the innermost cave. They seem benevolent because all they want to do is protect you from pain. They don’t believe you can handle it. They think you’ll die. 

But I’m here to tell you, there’s gold in that cave behind the dragon… And God knows we don’t appreciate things that simply land in our lap. 

Hyper Sleep

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes one healthy, wealthy and wise.” – Benjamin Franklin

In my previous post about the Big Cleanse, I mentioned that I had been waking up every night at about 3am.  I would be up for hours before finally catching an hour or two of sleep before work. At first, this brought up a lot of fear in me… “What if I’m so tired I can’t work?  What if something is wrong with me?” 

And then I thought, what if I just went with this? 

I quickly recalled a fascinating conversation with my friend Dahyu Patel (an amazing coach, entrepreneur and life hacker). He studies the habits of interesting sects of society such as the Navy Seals, or in this case, native american tribes. “They (the tribe) told me that every hour you sleep before midnight, counts as two hours of sleep if they were after midnight.”  And so he sleeps from 8:30pm – 2:30am and by that math, he gets 8 hours of sleep every night. 

When I first heard it, I was totally intrigued but thought there’s no way I could do it. What kind of life could I have that ends every day at 8pm!?  But now that I’ve eliminated every vice possible, I though, “Shit, what have I got to lose?” So I tried it out for a week.  Everyday I get into bed by 8:30pm and drift off to sleep. Some nights I wake up at 3am and start my day. Other nights I sleep all the way through to 6am. Or other nights I rise from 2am to 5am and then go back to sleep. 

And I have to say, it feels like a luxurious indulgence. 

I find that I am getting more done than ever. My dreams are longer and more vivid. I am no longer waking up with pain all over my body. I am no longer cranky in the morning. And I don’t miss the late nights.  

My old pattern was to go home, feel like I could fall asleep around 8, push through it to work on my passion projects, find that I had no energy to do so, and instead watch TV or mess around on Facebook. 

I looked around the web for any supporting evidence of how this might be beneficial and found this:

“It seems the liver is involved in a good night’s sleep. It regulates our energy level for the next day. The liver follows the cycle of the sun. Around six in the evening it wants to go to sleep and starts to store up the sugars (glycogen) to be used for the next day. When we stay up late at night we affect the liver’s metabolism. It can no longer simply store sugar. Our body, by being awake and active, needs sugar in the blood stream, and so we force the liver to reverse its process and break down glycogen to provide this sugar. We get a second wind, a burst of sugar in our blood stream, and yet we are really depleting our energy for the next day. Our liver can’t store up the glycogen it needs for the next day and so the next day we have a liver that is depleted of glycogen.”

And this video below from the Director of Training for the Kundalini Institute on how rising early makes meditation and focus much easier. 

I’m sure many people think I’m weird or crazy for doing this, but if there’s anything I’m learning doing this cleanse (and growing up) it’s that I’m the only one living my life, so I’m the one who lives with my choices and ultimately decides what works best.  

So… If this intrigues you at all. I hope you’ll stop thinking about it intellectually and try it out and decide for yourself! 

The Big Cleanse

“Wow, you went from looking excited all night to totally scared,” he said.  

I was wrapping up dinner with Mastin Kipp, the editor of The Daily Love. It felt like meeting a long lost brother. And both of us being coaches, we offered our thoughts, feedback, advice.  At the end, I asked him his intuition about me… “You have a big heart. You really want to give a lot. But I think you need to focus. I sense you’re distracting yourself. There’s something you really don’t want to feel, and I don’t know what that is.”   

That was when I started looking scared. I think I even gripped the table.  I knew he was right, but I had no idea what that feeling was. And I had a sense that even if I did know it, knowledge wouldn’t do much. 

He said the only way to really get to the core of what we’re feeling is to eliminate all the things that are distracting us from those emotions. That includes alcohol, drugs, caffeine, sugar, sex, masturbation, even flirting. It includes eliminating wheat, dairy, and taking a range of vitamins, enzymes, and alkaline water. I decided to add to the list:  No TV, and no radio in the car so I can really hear any thought or emotion I may be avoiding.  

I’m almost two weeks into it and it’s been quite a roller coaster. The physical detox has not been hard because I tend to be healthy anyway, but my thoughts have been all over the place. I’ve been quite irritable, finding something annoying in almost every situation (or every person).  It’s like all this blame is getting out of my system. I have to be very, very careful not to act on my thoughts because I know they’re very temporary and very misguided.  And I’ve had a lot of thoughts of self-hatred. That’s actually nothing new for me, but my usual strategy would be to immediately think something different, whereas now it’s like I’m watching another person. It’s kind of eerie, but in a cool way.

What’s even more eerie is my sleep patterns. Almost every night I go to bed around 10 and then I’m wide awake at 3am. Often I’ll get a lot of work done, or read. But one night I realized that beyond all the physical vices, I actually have mental vices.  I spent about 5 hours researching crazy business ideas and reading up on economic and alien conspiracies. As the sun started to rise, I realized that while it was fun it made me anxious, tense and I really had nothing good to show for it. 

Sometimes I feel totally at peace, especially after a Kundalini yoga class. Sometimes everything makes perfect sense, sometimes I’m totally confused, or my body is just covered in pain.  But the roller coaster isn’t even the hard part. It’s interesting, it’s fascinating. It’s weird…  The hard part is when those emotions end. When it’s just me. Alone. Deeply tired in a way I can’t explain. Wondering what the point is, to anything. 

“What are you most afraid of?” Heather asked.  She and David are two amazing healers. 

I lied there on the table, thinking of one image… “Buried alive. Definitely getting buried alive. I think that would be the worst possible scenario.” 

I went there in my mind. Not avoiding it, but actually visualizing myself there. Lying in the casket as we worked through what that means – Being alone, in the dark, totally constrained, no way out. And facing it, the fear disappeared. I felt warm and relaxed, and she whispered, “What if you’re not really in the casket… What if you’re in the womb?” 

And then it was like my world shifted through this paradoxical feeling like I hadn’t gone anywhere but I’m in a totally new place. 

I had this incredible feeling that my life is about to begin…

(Click here for Part 2)

Chocolate?…what you really crave

I keep several bars of dark chocolate in drawers at work. It's an amazing superfood. But I've discovered the intense craving is not about the delicious fat/caffeine/theobromine combination with a little sugar. It's actually about the magnesium. 

The book, The Magnesium Miracle, states that it can treat the following (I especially found it true for #1)

1.
Anxiety and panic attacks- because it helps keep adrenal stress hormones under control 
2.
Asthma – both histamine production and bronchial spasms increase with magnesium deficiency 
3.
Blood clots – magnesium prevents blood clots and thins blood without side effects. 
4.
Bowel disease – magnesium deficiency is one of the main causes of constipation. 
5.
Cystitis – bladder spasms are worsened by a magnesium deficiency. 
6.
Depression – serotonin (mood elevator) is dependent on magnesium for its production and function. 
7.
Heavy metals – magnesium is essential for the removal of heavy metals such as aluminum and lead. 
8.
Diabetes – magnesium facilitates the production of insulin and the transfer of glucose into the cells. 
9.
Fatigue – magnesium deficiency affects hundreds of enzymes, and fatigue is one of the first signs of a magnesium deficiency. 
10.
Heart disease – The heart requires magnesium as does all muscles. 
11.
Hypertension, hypoglycemia, insomnia, kidney disease, migraines, nerve problems, PMS, osteoporosis, Raynaud's syndrome, and tooth decay are all aggravated, and sometimes caused by a magnesium deficiency. 

I recommend the following ways to supplement it:

Ancient Minerals states that best form of absorption is through the skin. So their oils, moisturizers and bath salts can be used this way. Note: Don't get the oil for massage. Use their gel instead for that. 

Calm Natural can be taken at night and helps a lot for getting to sleep as well. Make sure to follow their instructions of using hot water first.

I predict that in the not too distant future the media will be picking up on this, much the same way they picked up on Omega-3's years and years after the healthy communities knew about it. 

All this to stay, I still love my dark chocolate. I just don't have that intense need for it like I did before.

Falling in love with running (when I used to hate it)

I once jumped into a marathon to run 6 miles with a friend till the end.
I never run, so 6 miles was a big deal. It felt great, but for a week my knees felt so shot they would buckle as I walked.

I didn’t take up running again until now.

There’s a theory that modern shoes are actually the cause of many injuries such as knee pain. The idea is very simple… our feet were engineered to run. They are well-designed machine that takes care of everything, including shock absorption.  Before the days of shoes (a couple million years worth of time in the history of the homo sapien) the bottoms of our feet were used to rugged terrain, and our toes were wide creating a stable base, so we could run on anything.   Now our feet have the same design, but the skin is soft, so we just need a good cover for it and a way to spread out our toes.

Enter the vibram five fingers.

I bought the Bikilia model, named after Ethiopian Abebe Bikila who ran a world-record 2:15:17 marathon at the 1960 Olympics in Rome – barefoot. And I just went on my first run tonight.  And all I have to say is holy shit. I usually have to take a break every lap and this time I kept going and going like I was flying. At times it felt like my feet barely hit the ground.  I had to stop myself because I knew the muscles and feet have to get used to it (you run on the middle of your foot, instead of striking at the heel).

Beyond just running, it feels amazing for the real shape of my foot to touch the earth. It’s very grounding. I highly recommend it, even if you don’t want to run in them. (If you do buy them for running, read Tim Ferriss’ blog post first.)

I love simple solutions.

Breakthrough in yoga

Had an amazing breakthrough at Bikram Yoga Green Valley today. There were two poses left, and I was convinced I needed to stop, but John the instructor said not to quit now, that this is where breakthroughs happen and we should go at it as though we just got to class. I took it on and felt all my strength come back. It felt so empowering, and once I did, and got into the meditation pose, my brain flooded with thoughts and ideas for a project at work that would make it both more enjoyable and more successful. 

If you've never tried Bikram, you'll feel like you're going to die the first few times, but it's some of the most soul transforming physical work I've ever done.