Walking is one of the most powerful health tools we have. It improves cardiovascular fitness, boosts mood, sharpens cognition, and can even be a predictor of how well you’ll age. But all those benefits depend on something we rarely think about until it starts hurting: our feet.

For many of us, walking is so automatic that we never consider the mechanics that make it possible. Yet the way we move, the shoes we wear, and the strength of the muscles in our feet can have a profound impact on how comfortably and efficiently we walk. When something goes wrong at our physical foundation, the effects can ripple upward, leading to pain not just in the feet, but in the knees, hips, and back.

My guest today is Dr. Milica McDowell, a physical therapist and the co-author of the new book Walk. Today on the show, Milica explains why walking speed may be a hidden vital sign, what gives you your signature walking style, and how to spot and address injury-inducing inefficiencies in your gait. We then talk about feet: whether you should worry about pronation, how to rehab plantar fasciitis — and no, it’s not stretching — the best kind of shoes to wear, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Solvitur Ambulando — It Is Solved By Walking
• AoM podcast episode with Manoush Zomorodi
• AoM Article: I Started Taking a Walk Every Morning. Here’s What Happened to My Health
• AoM Article: 20 Rules for Walking
• AoM podcast episode with Matt Fitzgerald
• Altra shoes
• Vivobarefoot
• Lems shoes (this is the pair Brett wears)
• Tyr weightlifting shoe
• Injinji toe socks
• Toe spacer
• Study on calf raise standards

Connect With Milica McDowell

• Milica’s website
• Milica on IG

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Walking is one of the most powerful health tools we have. It improves cardiovascular fitness, boosts mood, sharpens cognition, and can even be a predictor of how well you’ll age. But all those benefits depend on something we rarely think about until it starts hurting our feet. For many of us, walking is so automatic that we never consider the mechanics that make it possible, yet the way we move, the shoes we wear and the strength of the muscles in our feet can have a profound impact on how comfortably and efficiently we walk.

When something goes wrong at our physical foundation, the effects can ripple upward leading to pain, not just in the feet, but in the knees, hips, and back. My guest today is Dr. Milica McDowell, a physical therapist and the co-author of the new book Walk. Today on the show, Milica explains why walking speed may be a hidden vital sign, what gives you your signature walking style and how to spot and address injury-inducing inefficiencies in your gait. We then talk about feet, whether you should worry about pronation, how to rehab plantar fasciitis, and no, it’s not stretching the best kind of shoes to wear and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at AoM.is/walk. All right, Milica McDowell, welcome to the show.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Hi Brett, thanks for having me.

Brett McKay:

So you are a physical therapist and you’ve recently co-authored a book all about the benefits of walking. Why is a physical therapist so into walking?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Well, it’s one of the things that we spend a lot of time in our careers helping people restore. When you’ve had an injury, a surgery, an unexpected accident, walking is one of the things that we push immediately. You have a baby, guess what we do? We take you for a walk right afterwards; you have a total knee replacement, some physical therapist is going to come popping into your hospital room and say, “Hey, let’s get you sorted out. Let’s take you for a walk.” So walking is really one of our fundamental movements that demonstrates balance. It demonstrates coordination, it demonstrates can you follow directions. And so it is really one of those things that is a vital sign for your human existence.

Brett McKay:

It’s something we take for granted until we have those moments in our lives where walking becomes painful and then you become painfully aware that, oh man, I got to think more about this. I can’t take this for granted anymore.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Absolutely. I mean, you can not get up and make yourself a cup of coffee or use the washroom easily if walking is limited. And for me, that was an experience I had in high school. I had a sports injury that was misdiagnosed. I spent almost a year out of sports, six months not walking, and it was absolutely eye-opening as a 16-year-old who was hoping to play sports in college, that having a foot injury and not being able to walk just completely changed my entire paradigm.

Brett McKay:

So we’re going to talk about some of the things that prevent us from walking effectively, injuries, how to prevent those, how to rehab injuries. But before we do, let’s just talk about the benefits of walking. We had Manoush Zomorodi on the podcast a little while ago who talked about the benefits of walking even in short bouts. But let’s do a little refresher. Why is walking so good for both our bodies and our minds?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

If you don’t walk, it’s kind of similar to sleeping like trash or breathing poorly. So if you aren’t getting enough walking in your daily life, you aren’t accumulating that rhythmic movement. Your health from a physical side and a mental side can just absolutely go down the drain. And so we really want to emphasize and remind everybody that this is just at your fingertips. A little bit goes a long way. So when we think about the physiological health benefits, if you even go for a five minute walk, so we call that a micro walk, usually that’s about 500 steps for most individuals. We’re strengthening your bones, we’re contracting your muscles, we’re reducing your blood pressure. We can help with blood sugar. It helps with mood. And so as we think about our ability to take control of our health, walking is just so readily available. It’s at our fingertips at all times.

And then on the mental health side, when we think about the psychological and cognitive benefits of walking, as soon as you go for a walk, it boosts your cerebral blood flow. So you’re getting all sorts of healthy oxygen and hormones and temperature change to your brain that not only helps reduce your cortisol, it boosts your dopamine and serotonin. So it’s like kicking in those happy hormones that we’re all looking for, and it actually promotes something we call neurogenesis, which is activating neurological growth factor in your brain. So walking strengthens and improves the health of your brain. It improves the function as well.

Brett McKay:

Typically, when we think about walking for health, a lot of people focus on the number of steps we should get in a day. And I think people probably heard it by this time, it’s like it’s not 10,000 steps. That was a marketing thing by some pedometer company. A Japanese company said, oh yeah, you should get 10,000 steps. But it’s like if you get 7,000 to 8,000 steps, you’re probably good. But I thought it was interesting, you guys in this book talk about a walking metric that seems to tell us more about our overall health and robustness more than the number of steps we walk in a day and that’s walking speed. Tell us about this research. I thought that was really interesting.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, so walking speed was identified more than 10 years ago as the sixth vital sign. And when we think about vital signs, if you go to the doctor today, they’re going to poke you, and they’re going to take your heart rate, they’re going to take your blood pressure, they’re going to look at your respiration rate, we might take your blood oxygen. So we have a series of vital signs that are predictive. They tell us if you’ve got an elevated heart rate and you’ve got elevated blood pressure as a healthcare provider, I need to dig deeper. And it was almost 15 years ago now actually that walking speed was characterized as another vital sign, meaning it has high predictability for problems down the road. The slower you walk, the higher your risk of dying. And it sounds dramatic, but it is one of those things that then when you start to connect the dots and think, okay, do I have a friend or family member or an elder or someone I know who, gosh, they do walk really slowly, why is that?

Are they afraid of falling? Do they have a balance issue? Are they starting to have a neurocognitive issue where it’s hard for them to coordinate the movement? Do they have musculoskeletal problem? Do they have a systemic disease? What the heck is going on? And so when we think of vital signs, this is one that should be held in high regard. And it is definitely something that when you go to a rehab pro, a PT, a chiropractor, some of the general practice physicians are kind of in on this secret. This is definitely something that we want to pay attention to.

Brett McKay:

Do we know what an optimal walking speed is?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So we like to say that about a hundred steps a minute is pretty typical, and between 120 and 130 is what we consider to be brisk. So if you and I are in an airport and we are not late for a flight, we’re probably going to be walking around a hundred steps a minute. But if we’re like, oh, I think they’re boarding, let’s go, most people can kick it up to that 120 to 130. And a good way to test that is if you have access to a treadmill is hop on and just do a step count. So you’re counting each strike right, left, right, left, right, left. And you want to just sort of see what feels comfortable to you. Most normal sized adults, so if you’re not like six foot 10 or four foot 10, most of us that are kind of in that normal center of the bell curve are going to be walking at about three and a half to just under four miles per hour if we’re walking at that 120 to 130. So if you’ve ever walked on a treadmill at that pace, you’re kind of cooking a little bit.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. Alright, so walking speed. I love that. So that’s the sixth vital metric that we should focus on. Correct. This was interesting. You had this whole section. I thought this was really a lot of fun about us having a signature walking style or signature walking pattern. I didn’t think about that, but it’s true. I think everyone has their own unique way of walking. I mean, one of the things that I can do with my family, if we’re at the airport for example, or out in a crowd, I can recognize people or recognize the people in my family by the way they walk. So how do we develop this signature walking style that we have?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Well, it’s a culmination of our good habits and our bad habits. And so I love a good airport. I travel a ton for work, and I am an absolute creeper. I watch people walk, I judge anyone wearing a stiletto. If you’re wearing a stiletto in an airport, I’ve got my eyes on you and I’m just going to say it here and now. I know this audience is mostly guys, but maybe you can influence your gals in your life. Stilettos are the new smoking. They’re terrible for your health. They are absolutely something that you should not buy the women you love. Stilettos, please, and thank you. 

Brett McKay:

Who’s wearing Stilettos at the airport?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Oh my gosh. The next time you’re there, you just take a look my friend and you will be as appalled as I am. Wow. Because what happens if you need to go 120 to 130 steps a minute because they’re boarding, you’re going to miss your flight girl. But at any rate, I love being in an airport. I love observing other humans as a physical therapist. That’s just a big part of my curiosity as a human. And so yes, people have signature walking patterns and they are a culmination of all the good things and all the bad things and all the old injuries and everything that kind of brings you to waking up this morning, all that accumulation of your life. Think about this. If I’m your boss and you come into my office and I give you a raise and I give you another 20% bonus, how are you going to walk out of my office head held high confident, probably brisk a little bit of a spring in your step.

Not quite Connor McGregor walking into the octagon, but you’re going to have a pep in your step. But if you come into my office and I say, look Brett, this isn’t going well. I’m really disappointed in your performance and you’re missing your KPIs, and I’ve got really significant concerns about your future at this company. When you walk out of my office, things are going to look very different. Your posture will look different, your speed might look different, pace is going to be different. And so walking tells us a lot about what happened to you in the past and it tells us a lot about how you’re doing today. Another part of walking signature is it kind of tells us a little bit about your health history. So if you’ve had a leg fracture, if you’ve sprained your ankles 77 times, if you’ve got a leg that’s shorter or longer than the other, if you’ve got low back pain or a limitation in how your pelvis moves, I mean a physical therapist can certainly tell that’s what we’re trained in. But if you’re a lay person, an average Joe, and you’re in the airport and you see someone walk by and you’re like, huh, that doesn’t quite look right. You’re not necessarily able to diagnose or pinpoint the problem like I could. But what you are seeing is a lack of efficiency. And when you see somebody that maybe swings an arm a little differently or they’re wobbling side to side, or you can hear one foot scuffing differently, oftentimes what that means is there’s something imbalanced and an imbalance typically belies an inefficient gait.

Brett McKay:

I want to talk more about having an efficient versus inefficient gait, but one more thing about walking style. So I was listening to Pandora the other day and the Frankie Vallie and The Four Seasons song came up, “Walk Like a Man” – this is the Art of Manliness podcast. We got to talk about this. Do men and women walk differently?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Men and women, if I saw a skeleton, I’d be able to tell you if it was a man or a woman. And we have significant anatomical differences. And those differences then influence our movement patterns, our postures. And so absolutely. I think too, especially in the US, men tend to be taller, men tend to be heavier, men tend to have more muscle. And so you’re moving a different machine than a woman is. And so yes, the gait pattern, an efficient gait. So an ideal gait is going to be similar regardless of gender, age, height, weight, you name it. But overarchingly, you could probably de-identify a person for me and most clinicians, and we’d be able to tell you roughly height, weight, and gender just by watching their walking pattern.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. One thing I’ve read is that men tend to move their shoulders more while walking than women do.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah. So when you think about what’s sort of acceptable posture wise in America, and if you lined up a group of guys and gals, most people are going to lift up their shoulders and kind of get tall and suck in their belly because of some sort of arbitrary beauty standard. And what you’ll tend to notice is women tend to minimize some of that sway. We tend to really suck in that belly to try to look snatched if you will and the guys are like, I’m just trying to get from point A to point B, and I’m trying to do it with some level of style. And so when you see more shoulder movement in a guy or in a gal, what’s happening is they’re creating more rotation. Rotation makes you more efficient. And so a man typically is going to walk a little faster than a gal. A man’s typically going to have a longer stride length and less, he’s significantly shorter than a comparable woman. And so men are generating more force and more momentum partially because of the anatomy, partially because of muscle and partially because of culture as well.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s interesting. Culture, the way we think about sex and gender and a culture can influence even the way we walk, which is interesting. 

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Absolutely. 

Brett McKay:

I want to talk more about this efficient and inefficient walking. So you mentioned there’s some things you can look at when someone’s walking to figure out whether or not they’re walking efficiently or inefficiently. If you’re seeing arm movement kind of off, maybe they’re not moving one arm, that could be a sign. What are some other signs of inefficient walking?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

The best place to assess this is if you have access to a treadmill. And what’s kind of fun about walking on a treadmill is you can not only hear the walking pattern, you can see the walking pattern and inefficiencies come in about a billion different ways. I had a good friend who I was training for a marathon with and he kept complaining of shoulder pain. And this guy was like an All-American track athlete, total stud. He’s jacked, he’s fit, he’s smart. He’s one of those people that’s like an ideal patient. They do anything you ask him to do. I’ve got this shoulder pain, it’s killing me. It’s killing me. So I was like, all right, you’re this stud athlete. Let’s bring you into the office and see what’s going on. So I put this guy on a treadmill and he’s a marathoner. He is an all American, he’s a total stud when it comes to running.

I get him walking on the treadmill and I’m standing behind him. And if you have a physical therapist in your life, we’re always watching you with love, but we are. And so I put this friend of mine on the treadmill and I’m standing behind him and I whip out my camera. I start videotaping him. All he is doing is walking and I take him up to running speed and then I take him off the treadmill and I’m like, well, how do you feel? Well, my shoulder hurts. I go, all right, well look at this video. Oh, you were taping me? I’m like, yeah, of course. I’m a physical therapist. So I show him the video and I say, what do you see? And he’s like, well, I, I’m not swinging my arm. And this guy was a 400 meter runner in track, right? He’s not a long distance guy.

He is a track runner, runs around in circles, indoor track, 200 meter track, outdoor track, 400 meter track. I was like, bro, you are carrying a purse in your left arm, right arm, super duper, huge arm swing, torso rotation, hip rotation. It’s like unlocking his foot. He’s doing amazing on the right side of his body. And it looked like he was carrying a lady’s handbag on the left. And I was like, whatcha doing? And he’s like, I don’t know. Putting people in an environment where they don’t know they’re being observed, where you can control speed and you can get some video is sort of the ideal place to assess. Efficient walking or running a treadmill is a perfect spot. And if you have somebody that can set up a camera, then you can sort of look at your own pattern. You can sort of be your own detective.

I love that kind of stuff. You don’t have to go to a, like a PT, personal trainer, chiropractor, whomever, to do some assessment. And so the first thing you’re looking for is does anything look off? Do you see a wobble? Are you dipping side to side? Do you see your hip dropping, your shoulder dropping? Does it look like you’re limping? Most of us, even if you don’t have formal training, can identify those sorts of things. And then the other thing I love about putting someone on a treadmill is you can hear the pattern, you can hear if they scuff, you can hear if one foot lands harder than the other, an efficient walking gait should sound like this.

And any efficient walking gait will sound like . . . or you hear like a scuff. And so pattern is huge. And these are the types of things that those of you that are listening to the podcast today, go be your own detective. You can play with this stuff. You’re like, man, I’ve got this nagging Achilles thing and I haven’t been to a pro. Help me. Well go get on a treadmill and have somebody hold a phone and see if you can tell, right? A treadmill is a great place to look for inefficiencies. The other place that you can find inefficiency two today, you don’t even have to go anywhere, is go pick up your walking shoes or your running shoes and flip ’em over. Look at the sole of the shoe. Now if you have brand new shoes, this isn’t as effective. So the dirtier, the older the shoes, the better.

The more mileage you have in the shoes, the better. Because what will happen is the shoes are going to tell you a story of what your pattern looks like. Do you have more wear on the heel? Do you have more wear on the toe? Is the wear different on your right versus your left? If you look at your shoe from the top, does it look twisted? These are the things that clinicians will do if you come into our office. But this is the kind of stuff that anybody can do at home to start thinking about, am I efficient when I’m walking? Or if you’re a runner, when you’re running.

Brett McKay:

Some of the things you recommend to develop a more efficient walking pattern, walk faster. We naturally start walking more efficiently when we have to walk a bit faster instead of just puttering around. Walk taller, have good posture when you walk, that improves your walking efficiency swing your arms. You talked about that. And then you talked about you have this great diagram in the book that shows a foot and how a foot should land on the ground for an efficient walk. What does that look like?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yes. So traditional gait mechanics start at lateral heel, so pinky toe side of your foot. And then as you move your body forward, you’re going to load through the middle of the foot, you load the outside of the pinky toe, the ball of the foot, and then your final part of contact is pushing off the big toe. So it essentially goes from the back to the front and from the outside to the inside. And that’s an ideal pattern. There’s all sorts of reasons people have inefficiencies or they can’t achieve that pattern or it’s difficult or what have you. But in a perfect world, if we were trying to get you to an ideal efficient gait pattern, it’s outside of the heel and then you push off with the inside of big toe.

Brett McKay:

And let’s say you have a patient, you’re looking at them like, okay, someone’s off here. We need to focus on improving your foot strike. How do you do that? How do you rehab that? Because someone might’ve been walking inefficiently where they’re maybe walking on the inside of their foot first for their entire life. So how do you train somebody to be like, okay, you’re going to walk, start on the outside of your heel and then kind of rotate on your foot to the big toe,

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Right? Yeah. I listened to when you interviewed Matt Fitzgerald, and I thought it was really interesting in his episode with you how he talked about being a pro runner and having coaches who didn’t try to mess with his gait mechanics, right? So it’s a slippery slope for sure, and it is definitely something where I always have said in my career, 20 plus years as a PT, if you don’t have pain, if you aren’t having problems, I’m not messing with your mechanics. It’s clearly working for you. And if you’re somebody who has some sort of an anatomical difference or you’ve had an injury or surgery, I had an injury in high school, I still have screws in my foot from when I was 16, that changes my loading mechanics for sure. But I’ve done 13 Ironman triathlons, a 50 KI ultra run. I have no mechanical issues, but I’ve got hardware in there.

And there’s a lot of people who do, right? So if you don’t have any problems, don’t mess with it. But if you’re somebody who’s like, I have a chronic plantar fascia problem, I’ve got chronic heel pain, I’ve got a chronic Achilles thing, I’ve got this bite in my hip, I’ve got achiness in my low back, that’s definitely sort of your body trying to tell you, hello, is there something going on down below at your foot? Now, couple that if you are a guy who wears dress shoes, if you have to be kind of fancily dressed for work, if you wear shoes that are perhaps not the right size, over 60% of adults in the US are wearing the wrong sized shoe, wrong length. There’s a lot of factors that can contribute to that. But to answer your question, if somebody has interest in assessing their mechanics and identifying if their pattern is optimal, you can play with it with some very basic drills.

You can play with it with drills. If you’ve got access to a gym that has a mirror, walking toward a mirror, barefoot can tell you a lot. Again, video analysis is priceless. And so even just throwing your iPhone on the ground and videotaping yourself, walking toward and walking away, you can start to get that idea of how do you land if you feel like you aren’t landing lateral and then pushing off big toe medial. You can play with just that strike pattern and standing. So if you go up to standing and almost stand like you’re going to go into a lunge and then you load the lateral foot roll through, push off the big toe and just see how your body feels when you do that, that can sometimes be a good indicator if you don’t have the range of motion to do that or you’ve got a mobility restriction, or like I said, you’ve got old screws in your foot or have had old fracture injury, whatever, it might be a good time to ping a pro, get ahold of your local PT chiropractor foot person and be like, Hey, can you take a look at me?

Because you don’t want to mess with gait mechanics unless you have issues. But if you do have issues, it is a low hanging fruit to try to correct. So

Brett McKay:

We talked about things that can cause issues in your walking gait or gait mechanics. Injuries are a big one, just your life history. What about your anatomy? What if your ankles or your feet naturally cave in or turn in? Can that mess things up for you down the line?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So this is one of those things we definitely myth bust in the book. You alluded to the 10,000 steps a day. That is definitely a myth. You’re correct. It’s a leftover from a Japanese pedometer company’s marketing campaign in the 1960s. Another thing we myth bust in the foot, people are terrified of pronation. Pronation become this bad word in gait mechanics and shoe advertisements and people who have flat feet often are told, oh, you need an orthotic. Oh, you need this. Oh, you need surgery. And interestingly, there’s a lot of science that says a flat or arch is within normal limits. There’s a lot of data that looks at different populations who have flatter feet compared to those who have higher arches and overarchingly. There isn’t a significant difference in pretty large population studies for stress fracture risk or tendonitis risk and those sorts of things.

And so it is a little bit about dated thinking that pronation is bad or flat feet or bad. Pronation is a normal range of motion. And so if you’ve heard that term before and you don’t know what it means, that’s okay. Most of you listening are probably not clinicians. Pronation is a normal movement. When your load goes from the outside of the foot to the big toe side, your middle of your foot needs to pronate. So it’s just like flexion or extension. It’s a biomechanical term for the movement we’re going through. Pronation is getting the big toe down. And so you have to pronate in order to be able to load the big toe and push off, you’re pushing off your big toes, you’re gas pedaling, gait mechanics. So someone who has a flatter anatomy, it used to be this idea that, oh, you’re going to be really sloppy and you’re not going to be able to generate force and you’re going to end up with itis and fractures and all this other stuff.

And the science has really rebutted that in probably the last almost 20 years. So the good news is as all of us want to learn more and be better stewards of our bodies, pronation isn’t a bad thing. And very small percentage of the population, let’s say I think it’s under 5%, it might be maybe like 3%, actually truly have what we call flatfoot deformity, which is medical condition where you’re super, super, super flat and all your bones are sitting on the ground. I actually took care of a patient a couple years ago who had that problem and ended up having a surgery to reconstruct his arch because he did fit into that tiny little part of the population. But for most individuals, a flat, flat or arch or a more pronated foot isn’t problematic if you back it up with good strength around the area. And so a lot of times people have a flatter arch and then their foot is terribly weak and that can start to cause problems. Alright,

Brett McKay:

Maybe we can talk about ways you can strengthen that. Okay, so we can’t use flat feet to get out of the draft anymore. You’re not going to get that rejection.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

That’s right.

Brett McKay:

Okay. And I think you also highlight they did research they’ve looked at, we’re always looking at hunter gatherers to figure out what does a human body look like without all these industrial trappings around us. A lot of those hunter gatherer people, they have pretty flat feet. They walk around barefoot and their feet. You look at their print like there’s no arch hardly. And they’re fine. They climb trees, they walk miles a day and they’re okay.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, a foot that is unobstructed by a shoe gets strong. And there’s this fabulous researcher, her name’s Sarah Ridge, and she is a really smart woman and she researches minimal shoes. So shoes that allow you to behave in a more barefoot manner. So not a shoe with a ton of cushion, not a shoe with a carbon fiber plate, not a shoe with a ton of stack, all that sort of stuff. So a shoe that truly is zero drop, so meaning flat from the heel to the toe, minimal cushion with a wide toe box. And her research has demonstrated that the more time you spend barefoot, the more time you spend in minimal shoes, the larger cross-sectional area you get in the internal muscles in your feet. Now the stronger the muscles in your feet, the bigger the muscles in your feet, guess what happens? Those feet get wider and flatter because just like if my bicep gets bigger, the anatomy is going to change.

And so these itty bitty little muscles that are in between the long bones of your feet, when their cross-sectional area gets bigger, it gives you an appearance of a wider flatter foot. Guess what? Those feet are super duper, duper strong. If you’ve ever seen somebody with a deformed foot, horrible bunion toes are smashed together, hammer toes, it’s all like claw, like it looks terrible. That is a weak, weak, weak foot. That person is going to have absolutely no control of the intrinsic muscles. They’re going to have super weak toe flexors. Those are very problematic for walking and fall risk and balance. When you see somebody with a wide, flat, thick foot, that foot is strong and that foot has a lot of capacity because it has been, as you said, a barefoot hunter gatherer, people who live in beach communities, people that are more often not in a very structured shoe, they have stronger feet.

Brett McKay:

So one thing that can prevent people from walking efficiently or walking comfortably, and I know a lot of maybe runners have experienced this, but this can pop up in anybody. It’s plantar fasciitis. What causes plantar fasciitis?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

It is a bugger. I’ve struggled with it myself. So the plantar fascia is a connective tissue that runs from your heel to the ball of your foot essentially. And its job is just helping to transmit force. It’s an inert tissue. It’s not muscle, it’s not a ligament. It’s similar to tendon from a structural standpoint. It’s kind of in that connective tissue category. So it has a poor blood supply, it has a ton of nerve. It’s one of those structures that when it gets pissed, it’s pissed for a while. So your plantar fascia’s job is supporting the muscular structure of your foot. So guess what? If your foot is weak, who ends up doing more of the work plantar fascia? And there’s a lot of ways to make it angry. You can make it angry by ramping up your volume too quickly. You can make it angry by having weak feet.

You can make it angry by wearing the wrong shoes. You can make it angry by having bad gait mechanics. There’s all sorts of ways to make this thing really cranky. And when it gets upset, it takes a lot of work to calm it down because resolution typically involves some pretty heavy lifting. We have to figure out why is this tissue staying inflamed? Because tissues want to be in homeostasis. Your body’s not happy when something is chronically inflamed. And so when somebody has chronic heal pain or chronic plantar fascia problems, it’s often because another link in that biomechanical chain is not doing its job.

Brett McKay:

So that could be caused by shoes that you’re wearing. It’s just you’re not giving your foot the opportunity to strengthen the muscles to support the foot. And so the plantar facia has to take up the slack.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah. So we talk about, in the book, we have a thing we call the 24 hour shoe clock. And it’s assessing your day or 24 hours by the type of footwear you’re wearing. So let’s say you’re sleeping and you’re barefoot for eight hours, and then you’re at home for a couple hours. And are you someone who wears slippers? Are you someone who wears inside shoes? Are you someone who pads around the house barefoot? Do you wear socks? And then when you go outside the house, what do you put on your feet? Are you somebody that we interviewed a flight attendant for the book and for men and women, they are required to wear specific uniform shoes. In all the major Delta, United American, they all have a uniform shoe requirement. That uniform shoe does not allow optimal biomechanics of the foot. And that’s a problem.

So if I was a flight attendant and I’m spending eight hours a day sleeping, and then I’m spending two or three hours at home barefoot, but then I’m going into a shift of let’s say 10 or 12 hours in a shoe that has an elevated heel, that has a narrow toe box and is stiff, my foot musculature is being compromised while I’m in that shoe, my biomechanics are compromised, my mobility is compromised. And so when you run into individuals who have chronic inflammatory problems, foot, toe, heel, achilles tendon plantar fascia, we use that 24 hour shoe concept to assess, all right, well how much time of the day are you spending in shoes that are maybe not a healthy choice?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll get more into shoes here in a minute. And changing your shoe type can help not just plantar fasciitis, but other issues as well. But what else can you do to rehab? Plantar fasciitis? I know there’s a lot of devices out there, training protocols that people use that these involve stretching programs that you can do what actually works for rehabbing plantar fasciitis.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So similar to a couple of the other myths we busted today, stretching is not typically the solution for plantar fascia problems. Generally speaking, we need to get people strong. And there’s two areas of culprit when you have a plantar fascia problem. A lot of people have weak foot and a lot of people have weak calves. And oftentimes, and this is sort of where the science points us for sure, there’s tons of research right now that’s like in the last probably five years, that’s really trying to drive clinicians away from thinking that plantar fascia problems are a mobility problem and trying to help educate us so we can do a better job taking care of you guys saying it’s not a stretching problem, it’s a strengthening problem. And so if you’re somebody who’s struggling with plantar fascia issues, I would say there’s two things I would immediately tell you to do. The first is assess your shoes because you’re probably wearing the wrong length, and B, something with a narrow toe box. And then the second thing I would suggest you do is assess your foot intrinsic strength and assess your ability to do a single leg calf raise.

Brett McKay:

Okay? And then if your calf raise is not good, maybe add some more calf raises in your strength training program.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So what’s interesting about single leg calf raise is it is normalized for gender and age, and there are very clear thresholds that you should be able to do. This is something that you can try at home to assess if you have a calf imbalance right side to left, or if you are weaker than your age matched peers. So for guys, if you’re between 30 and 40, you should be able to, and this is real science, we can put in the show notes if we need to. You should be able to do 32 single leg calf raises with just fingertips on the wall. So not holding onto a counter full excursion. And full excursion means going through all the full range of motion. And that’s like with a cadence. That’s not like one, take a rest, two, take a rest three, check your email. It’s 1, 2, 3. So if you’re between 30 and 40, 32, if you’re between 40 and 50, 28, if you’re 50 to 60 23, if you’re 60 to 70, 19, 70 to 80 14, this is demonstrating your single leg propulsion endurance. And so if you aren’t even close to that, or if you have one side where you aren’t close to those metrics, what that’s telling us is you are overloading other tissues. And if plantar fascia is the problem, most likely that’s who because your calf isn’t doing its part of the job.

Brett McKay:

And then another thing I thought was interesting that you can do to rehab is maybe one run a week if you’re a runner or you can do this if you just walk too, make sure you’re doing it barefoot on grass.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, the data on that is really fun. And if you don’t have access to safe grass, barefoot on a treadmill is fantastic. But yeah, that’s one that I think a lot of people are very surprised by that because generally when people have plantar fascia pain or they have heel pain, they go, oh, I should get into a huge cushion shoe. All that’s going to do is make things worse. So that’s actually counterproductive. If you have arch pain or heel pain, cushion shoe is not the solution. Less shoe is more a solution. And think about it like this, if I’m in less shoe, am I going to land harder or softer? You’re going to land softer because you don’t want to bang your foot into the surface. If I’m in a super cushioned shoe, it actually makes us strike the ground harder because there’s so much cushion.

We’re not getting that sensory input into the hundreds of thousands of receptors in the bottom of your foot. You have to land harder to get that information to your brain. So it’s counterintuitive, but one of the recommendations you’re exactly right, is barefoot on grass or if you don’t have access to safe grass barefoot on treadmill. And then the other strengthening piece that I would highly recommend if you’re somebody that’s struggling with this type of problem is assessing the intrinsic muscle endurance and muscle performance in your foot. And so in order to do that, and we demonstrate this, this is a drill we call the movement snacks in the book. And this is something we teach in the book. In our book, we have a whole assessment chapter so you can kind of see where you’re at. And my co-author, Courtney Conley of Gait Happens. She’s a chiropractor.

I’m a physical therapist. If you come to see either one of us, the first thing we do is assess you. So in our book we’re saying, Hey, assess yourself here. We’re giving you the tools, do this at home. So if you want to assess the internal strength of your foot after you’ve done that calf assessment, you take off your sock, you put your foot on the floor, and the first thing you do is you try to lift up big toe without lifting up everybody else and without clawing the ground of toes, four or 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you’re just going to try to lift up big toe. Then you put big toe down and relax it, and you try to lift up toes 2, 3, 4, 5. And this is an assessment of your intrinsic foot strength. Another way you can look at this is called lift, spread and reach. And this is actually one of the exercises we recommend.

Where you are sitting in a chair foot is barefoot, heels on the ground, toes are on the ground. You start by lifting up all your toes and big toe as high as you can get ’em, and your arch, so your ball of your foot is off the ground. So your heels is the only thing contacting. Then you spread out all your toes like little frog. So you have space between every single toe, and then you try to reach ’em out like you’re some sort of a gecko. So you lift the foot up, spread out the toes, reach out like a gecko, and that activates all those little bitty foot muscles, the intrinsic muscles in between your long bones, if that is hard for you, if your foot cramps, if you can’t do that, it’s telling you those guys are weak. And guess what? If they’re weak and your calf is weak, who’s doing all the work? Your planner fascia. So the three of those structures are a team, and if one or two of the team members are not holding up their end of the job, not doing their work, that’s when plantar fascia has to do more work and it gets grumpy.

Brett McKay:

And then I think something to point out, if you’re rehabbing plantar fasciitis, this could take a while. It could take once a long time. It does. That’s the same thing with other foot injuries. I’m sure as a physical therapist, one of the hardest things you have to deal with is managing people’s expectations on recovery. It could take a while, but you just got to keep going on with it and keep doing the protocol, stick with it because the rehab will work eventually. And I think you’d say too, get going on that rehab as soon as possible. If something’s hurting, don’t just ignore it.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

That’s correct. I will speak for the entire community of medical professionals everywhere. It is easier for us to solve your problem more recently to when you were injured then three months, six months, a year down the road. So please, please make it easier on us. And if you tweak something and it doesn’t get better in a week and a half, go grab a professional to help you. It will make us getting you better faster. It will reduce how much compensation you start to create in your life to be gimping and limping around something that’s acute. The longer you wait, the more compensation, the more bad habits, the more that inflammation gets to hang around. And the harder it is for our teams to help support you on that journey, getting back to what you love to do. So yes, don’t let it hang out there because some of these types of problems really do require professional to help you.

And I think that goes back to the shoe conversation. If you’re wearing a shoe that isn’t the correct length or has a narrow toe box or is a pronation control shoe, and you actually don’t need that, it’s helpful to get a professional’s eyeball on there. It’s like, I don’t work for a shoe company. I have no skin in the game to tell you what shoe to go wear, right? But I am a professional who can say, gosh, Brett, that shoe seems like it’s not helping you. Here’s some video analysis. That shoe has a wear pattern. I think it’s a problem. Let’s actually measure your damn foot. 60% of adults are wearing the wrong length of shoe. That’s a big deal. And that contributes to these types of problems.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about shoes because we’ve been talking about it throughout this conversation because shoes can cause a lot of foot problems that can affect your foot health. I feel like 15 years ago, barefoot running was all the rage. They even had these shoes, the Vibram five fingers. It’s like a thin piece of rubber under your foot and a place for each toe that was big. But then I feel like in the past five years or so, all the running shoes are, they look like these space, age, moon shoes with lots of cushioning. But it sounds like you’re saying those types of shoes might not be good for our feet. So what is the ideal shoe for foot health, not just for running, but for everyday wear, for walking?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yes. Unpopular opinion. I was in London recently, and there was a Hoka store, right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. The Hokas

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Next. It was right next to the Breitling store. And I was like, wow, Hokas got quite a budget for where they’re putting these stores with their real estate, my friends. Yeah, it is interesting. And you’re correct, there was the, Chris McDougall wrote the book, Born to Run. He’s a friend of Courtney and mine and his conversation changed how people looked at footwear. There was this tribe that was able to run at high performance and super long distances, barefoot. And then the five finger shoe came out and everyone said, oh my gosh, let’s all get those and go run long distances. And what happened there was an epidemic of bone stress, injury, stress, fracture, plantar fascia pain, whatever, because people hadn’t earned the right to wear a minimal shoe. So here’s how I like to characterize shoes, and a lot of this is the work from Courtney and her research over the years.

So there’s three categories of shoes, traditional shoe, which is what most of you’re probably wearing. That’s where I would put a Hoka, a Brooks, a Nike, and Adidas, a dress shoe, a high heel shoe, you name it, a wingtip, whatever. Then there’s a functional shoe. And a functional shoe is a shoe that has the following criteria, wide toe box, low heel to toe drop. So that’s the difference between how much foam is under your heel versus ball of the foot and lower cushion. And you’re correct, Brett, in that most shoes nowadays look like a moon shoe. There’s cushion everywhere. The heels are stacked up super high. And that is a big shift in the pendulum of shoe technology. So we’ve got our traditional shoes, which are normal shoes, like your New Balance, that would be a traditional shoe. Then you have a functional shoe, and then you have that five fingers category, minimal shoes, and not all the minimal shoes have the articulating toes like a five Fingers does.

A minimal shoe is going to be classified as a shoe that has a wide toe box, zero heel to toe drop. So that means your heel is not stacked up above ball of foot and then minimal to no cushion. So if I was going to tell you a brand that meets the criteria for functional, a brand I use personally is called Altra running. So they have wide toe box, they do have cushion shoes, but there are a lot of shoes in their spectrum that are in that functional category for us, which is less than six millimeters of heel to toe drop and then lower cushion. So when their company was created, and I think they’re about 2009, maybe 2013, somewhere in there is when they were launched, their first feature was Our shoe is shaped like a foot. And if you look down at your foot, the widest part of your foot should be your toes.

But because most of us wear traditional shoes or we’ve had to wear uniform shoe, we’ve gotten trapped in wearing dress shoes or whatever, a lot of times the ball of the foot is the widest part and the toes are pinched together. But like you mentioned earlier, people that spend more time barefoot, our ancestors, the widest part of the foot was the toes. And so what Ultra did is they said, it’s for us. Our shoes are going to be foot shaped. They’re going to respect the anatomy. Courtney says that all the time. I love when she says that, respect the anatomy with your shoe choices. So if you look at Ultra’s website or kind of check out their shoes, they’ve got things from that more minimal shoe, right? So very low cushion, zero heel to toe drop. And then they have more introductory shoes that do have a little bit of stack height and a little more cushion.

And then a shoe company that does good job in the minimal space is vivo barefoot. And if you’ve ever picked up a vivo barefoot, it’s minimal. There is very little cushion. Your heel and toe are on the exact same plane. It has a wide toe box. But here’s the thing, with minimal shoes, you have to earn the right, if you just go buy a vibrant five fingers, you go buy a vivo barefoot, and you’ve been in a traditional shoe and you haven’t gained the mobility or the strength, it’s like going to the gym and trying to throw a 300 pound snatch above your head. It’s like going to the gym and trying to bench press your body weight. If you haven’t done that, it’s like going to the gym and trying to do a hundred pull-ups. If you’re not conditioned to do it, you haven’t earned the right.

And so the challenge with shoes is this, because there are gigantic marketing budgets and everyone’s got fancy features and they’ve got pro athletes wearing X, Y, Z shoe. As a consumer, it’s super hard to understand where you fit along that spectrum. So here’s my takeaway. Most of you are in traditional shoes. I would encourage you to consider a shoe with functional criteria. And if you want to go even further, you could consider a minimal shoe. But you have to think about that comparison of can you go in and bench press your body weight? Can you go in and snatch 300 pounds? You have to earn the right to get into that minimal shoe, or you can cause problems.

Brett McKay:

For my everyday shoe, which I do all my walks in, I wear Lems. 

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Oh yeah, I think that’s a great brand. 

Brett McKay: 

Yeah, zero drop. But I love them. I wear them out. I mean, I go through two pairs a year. I walk in them all the time. I wear them all the time. And I’ve been a big advocate for looking for more opportunities to make sure I get shoes that respect the anatomy of my foot. I’m a powerlifter weightlifter. A lot of the weightlifting shoes, very narrow toe box. It’s almost like ballerina shoes. They just kind of scrunch your toes together. Whenever I squat, you got 400 pounds on your back and you’re trying to squat and you’re like, man, my feet just feel all scrunched up. But thankfully, there’s a weightlifting shoe brand that came out, Tyr, that has a wide toe box. It’s improved my lifting experience, it’s so much better. 

And then Lems does make a wide tow box, zero drop dress shoe. They look kind of goofy though. I’m not ready to go to wearing those when I’m wearing a suit. And you guys talk about this, it’s okay to wear if you’re a guy, wears some Oxford’s for a couple hours, but don’t wear them all the time. And most of the time just stay in that functional shoe. 

Let’s talk about the shoe size. I thought it was interesting you said 60% of adults are wearing the wrong size shoe. What’s going on there? Why are people walking around with the wrong size shoe? I imagine it’s because probably the last time they measured their foot was when they were in high school buying new shoes with their mom at JC Penney.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

It’s so true. I mean, how many of us have our high school body weight on our driver’s license? Let’s be honest. So you’re correct. Most people have the misconception that when you stop growing vertically, and I’m almost six feet tall, right? I’ve been six feet tall since I was in high school, so I’m done. I’ve been a size 10 forever. I’m a size 10 in shoes. And another misconception is I wear a 10 in every single brand. So there’s research that came out in 2018, so we’re pushing 10 years that this study has not been refuted. And it was a big scale study looking at adults, and it was, hey Brett, what size shoe are you? So what size shoe do you wear your daily shoe?

Brett McKay:

Size 10.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Size 10, okay. How long have you been a 10?

Brett McKay:

I’d say since high school. 

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Okay, since high school. So when we think about that, and I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I would challenge you to measure that foot, my friend – feet change length for a variety of reasons. Muscle gain, muscle loss, weight gain, weight loss, volume, change, hormones, medications. Most of us have a preconceived idea that when we stopped getting taller, our feet stopped growing. And it’s just simply not the case. So one of the ways to solve that is – do you know the name of that device that they have at every shoe store?

Brett McKay:

I know it’s named after some guy who invented it.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

It is. It’s called a Brannick device. And it is a hundred years old this year. It has never been changed. The features are the exact same. It was innovated in the US. It’s from New York, and that device is still kind of a gold standard of foot measurement. Now, you could go to a clinic and get some fancy foot scan or that sort of thing. And there are some companies, vivo barefoot actually is starting to do a custom flip flop where they scan your foot and they only fit you, which is fascinating, right? It accounts for right versus left differences, those sorts of things. But I would encourage everybody listening, if you take nothing else away, please go measure your foot in a proper shoe store. Because if you thought you were a 10 since high school, you may or may not still be. Your feet are not symmetrical, neither is the rest of you. And so you may have a foot that’s creeping toward a 10 and a half, but if you’re always buying a 10, you’re doing that foot. That’s a little larger a disservice. Another thing to think about is shoe brands are all made on different molds. And so a Nike at Adidas, a Hoka, a new balance, whatever, a 10 is not a 10 is not a 10. And so with that, when you’re switching brands, it’s very important to recognize that you aren’t probably the same size in different brands.

Brett McKay:

So we talked about the ideal shoe is a wide toe box, minimal drop heel to toe drop because you want your foot to just your toes, particularly to splay out as much as possible how they naturally want to be. What do you do if your toes are scrunched together, even when your shoes are off, due to years of wearing constraining shoes? Can you get them splaying out again?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

You can. There is hope. If you take your socks off and you look down and you’ve got a crowded elevator in that anatomy. So there’s a lot of ways to improve your toe splay. One is being barefoot at home and just spending more time barefoot if you have the availability to do that. The second is a device that’s going to cost you 15 bucks. You can get ’em on Amazon, you can get ’em at gait happens. You can get ’em from all sorts of different brands. It’s called a toe Spacer. An important note with these, they are based on your shoe size, so make sure that you are ordering the right size. If you order a toe spacer because if you just order a generic one that’s not small, medium, large, it will not fit your foot and it’s silicone that you wear that goes in between your little toes and it starts to work on restoring space.

Now, to my folks who are high fashion shoe aficionados out there that are wearing suits and wingtips and everything else, you’re not going to be able to put these on and wear them for a long period of time. If your toes were meshed together. Since you’ve been an undergrad at Penn State, this is something you may need to wear for five or 10 minutes and then take off. My husband is a retired professional, big mountain skier, and those in the ski industry know you wear ski boots that are really tight, so you have good awareness and you feel really locked in when you’re doing dangerous things. And he’s got some toe issues from it. And so when we give him toe spacers, he can wear ’em for five to seven minutes. He’s got to take ’em off. But over time, there is hope. You can wear these, wear ’em at home, wear ’em. If you have a wide toe box shoe, you can wear them in your shoes. You can restore anatomical position over time. Now, there are some people who have serious deformities and they’ve got bone spurs and all sorts of issues that may not resolve, but for the majority of us who just have some sins of bad shoes in the past, wearing toe spacers is a phenomenal solution.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. My wife’s a big fan. The socks she wears when she runs these in ninja socks, they’re like toe socks. She likes them. I don’t have the patience to get my toes in each little holes, but I think it can. Also, putting it on is too much, but I think that it does help your toes splay out. It’s just keeping things separated. And then you also talk about toe flossing. I’ve been doing that. It’s basically you stick your fingers between your toes, creating a toe spacer with your fingers and kind of massaging it and working your foot. That’s something else you can do when you’re watching the Great British Baking Show.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, it’s a great way to restore mobility. It’s also a great way to work on creating space. If you can get your fingers in between those toes, kind of like you’re holding hands with your foot. I mean, that just is reminding them what their neutral position was. And if we were able to be barefoot more and we were constrained by shoes less over time, those toes are going to want to go back to that natural state. You made such a good example when you talked about squatting heavy and wearing a narrow toe box lifting shoe. You’re not able to recruit muscles who can help you push into the floor to get out of that hole. If you’re in a narrow toe box shoe, when you go to a wider toe box lifting shoe, you get a performance boost. The science is there. It’s just plain true.

And so that’s not a condemnation of shoes that have a narrow toe box, but if you’ve got the ability to consider something with a wider toe box, you’ve got the budget to try a couple different pairs of shoes. It is definitely something where people see a performance boost and they have better balance. You’re more engaged with the floor. My favorite pet peeve, my husband and I owned a gym for a long time, and one of my favorite pet peeves is having people come in for, we had a CrossFit and we had a functional gym come in for CrossFit and a Hoka or a cushioned running shoe, a Brooks, and I’m just like, this is the wrong tool for a job. You’re bringing a gun to a knife fight or whatever. So you want to select the right tool for the job. And if you’re trying to lift heavy in a super cushioned shoe, you might as well be standing on a pillow.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you’re going to just waste a lot of energy. Yeah. I noticed when I switched to the Tyr lifting shoe with the wider toe box, I was having some knee pain behind my knee, my right knee when I was squatting, when I switched the Tyr that cleared up. Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing. So the thing the toe play does, it’s going to contribute to that more efficient walking gait, which can help clear up foot pain, knee pain, hip pain, all those downstream effects. That all starts with your foot and having that proper toe display. Let’s talk about one last thing. Something else that might keep people from walking or make walking a comfortable are things like bunions, hammer, toes, calluses. What causes those and what can we do to mitigate those types of injuries?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So one of the things we offer up in the book when we encourage people to do a little self-assessment is to start with visual inspection. Take off your socks, look at your feet, and do you have deformities? Do you have differences right to left? Are you seeing a big bunion on your left and nothing on your right. Callouses also tell a story, right? Callouses tell us where we’re loading The weightbearing tissue of the foot hammer toes are often from wearing shoes that are too short or from having internal foot weakness where your toes start to claw the ground for purchase. So if you do that visual foot inspection and you’re seeing things that don’t look neutral, again, bunion, hammer, toe, calluses, corns, which are the bumps on the top of the foot, what that’s telling us is that your footwear is affecting the shape of your foot.

Babies don’t have bunions. And there is a hot topic of debate about whether bunions are genetic or not. And I’m happy to myth bust that for those listening, there is a very small genetic component and some people are more predisposed, but years of wearing narrow toe boxes, shoes that are too short or too tight, definitely accelerates the process of that big toe drift. And once you start going down that path without counteracting it, by changing your footwear, by wearing toe spacers, by getting your feet strong, it can be a very slippery slope. So if you’re somebody who just took your shoes and socks off and you’re looking down there and you’re like, I definitely have a bunion, or I have one that’s bigger on one side than the other, it just becomes this opportunity for you to say, all right, well, what’s the, why do I wear a dress shoe to work every day?

Do I wear a narrow? Those Adidas trainers that are back and so popular right now are so narrow, and I see them everywhere. I was just in New York City for a week, and it’s like everywhere I go, people are wearing the samba or they’re wearing the tigers, or they’re wearing that Asics that’s so popular right now. And those are not a foot shaped shoe by any means. And if you’re walking super long distances in those, or spending a lot of hours in them without counteracting it in some way, it can take you down a path of those deformities getting worse.

Brett McKay:

So it all goes back to shoes. Get that functional shoe, and if you’re ready for it, a minimal shoe,

Dr. Milica McDowell:

And get strong and get strong. So it’s functional shoe calf and foot strength. And then if you want to keep going, start working your way into minimal. And the trick with minimal is you kind of dip back and forth. So as I said, just was in New York City recently. I took a pair of minimal shoes. I took a pair of functional shoes, and I can walk around the city in minimal shoes. I can’t do it all day. I can’t go take 12,000 steps or something, but I can do four or 5,000 steps in a pair of minimal shoes, which for me, with a history of foot surgery and some running injuries and those sorts of things is really saying a lot. I’m pretty proud of that, that I’ve gotten enough mobility and gotten enough strength that I can tolerate that.

Brett McKay:

Well, Milica, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So our book is called I, and it is available everywhere by books, Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, Walmart. We are doing some live events around the US and around London in order to meet the people and get to share our message. My website is milicamcdowell.com. You can find me on Instagram at DrMilicaMcDowelldpt. And yeah, I look forward to meeting people in person. It’s one of those things, if you ever see me in an airport watching people walk, come tap me on the shoulder and say hello.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Milica McDowell, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Thanks, Brett.

Brett McKay:

My guest here is Dr. Milica McDowell. She’s the co-author of the book Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity One Step at a Time. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at our website, Milicamcdowell.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You hear a lot today about how our ample screentime is affecting our mental health. But how is it affecting our bodies, and how is that impact on our bodies affecting, well, our mental health?

My guest today will unpack the ways that digital technology is sapping our vitality, and offer a simple protocol to get it back. Her name is Manoush Zomorodi, and she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric. In our conversation, Manoush explains why a day spent sitting in front of screens can leave you exhausted, even though you haven’t really done anything, and how small bouts of movement throughout the day can counteract that drain and keep you feeling energized and focused. She shares how much activity you need to offset periods of being sedentary, and how to realistically incorporate these movement breaks into your routine. We also get into the specific effects digital technology is having on our eyes and ears — and what you can do to prevent the damage.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. You hear a lot today about how ample screen time is affecting our mental health, but how is it affecting our bodies and how’s that impact on our bodies affecting our mental health? My guest today will unpack the ways that our digital technology is sapping our vitality and offers simple protocol to get it back. Her name is Manoush Zomorodi and she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric. Manoush explains why a day spent sitting in front of screens can leave you exhausted even though you haven’t really done anything, and how small bouts of movement throughout the day can counteract that drain, keep you feeling energized and focused. She shares how much activity you need to offset periods of being sedentary and how to realistically incorporate these movement breaks into your routine. We also get into the specific effects digital technologies having on our eyes and ears what you can do to prevent the damage. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/bodyelectric. All right, Manoush, welcome back to the show.

Manoush Zomorodi:

It is so great to be back. It’s been a while, Brett.

Brett McKay:

It has — 2017 was the last time we talked. It’s been nine years and it was about your book about boredom, Bored and Brilliant, about how boredom can be good for us. You got a new book out called Body Electric: The Hidden Health Cost of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Wellbeing. And yeah, you’re exploring the health cost of always being on our screen sitting down looking at iPads. What led you to explore this beat for the past few years?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, so I’ve been a journalist for 30 years, but my sort of specialty about 15 years ago became tech and business and everyone was talking about upgrading and valuations and all those things, but I was looking around and seeing that my technology, this sounds so quaint now, but my new iPhone was changing the way I did everything. It was changing the way I parented. I could be at the playground and on a call at the same time. Is that good? We don’t have to debate that right now, but for me, it was becoming really a anthropological experiment that was happening on us. And one of the things I noticed was that I started to think differently. So in terms of the first book, I would notice that I was having trouble sort of being more creative than I used to be. And I sort of looked around and thought, what is different now?

And the difference was that whenever I had a crack in my day, a spare moment, waiting in line for coffee, waiting for the subway, I could be productive. I could look at my phone, I could check the headlines, the weather, ping my husband, you name it. And it made me wonder what were the effects of never being bored? And as a Gen Xer, I was told, oh, only boring people get bored. But what if being bored was actually a good thing, this thing that we thought was terrible and to be avoided at all costs. So that led me down this road to understanding the neuroscience of boredom or what really cognitive neuroscientists call mind wandering. So boredom as a gateway to mind wandering, which activates a particular network in the brain that is responsible for our most original thinking, problem solving and something called autobiographical planning.

This is telling ourselves the story of our life, creating a narrative, and that helps us then set goals and work towards those goals. So to me, mind-blown. Okay, so I need to get more boredom in my life. That was like 10 years ago. Apparently boredom is back though from what I hear, Brett, it’s very big on socials. I guess the people who were 10 years old when that book came out are just facing that issue now. Then after thinking about that, I think we’ve seen in the last decade since that book came out, a greater understanding of the connection between how our brain works and our body functions. And so for me with this new book, I couldn’t understand why I was so damn tired At the end of a day sitting on my laptop, I was like, I haven’t done anything. Why am I physically exhausted? And that was the question I basically was trying to solve that ended up in this book.

Brett McKay:

Was there a particular moment where you can think about where it’s like, boy, sitting at this computer all day, this probably isn’t good. Not only for my brain, but just for my overall physiology and health?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, well, I felt it, and I think for a lot of us things came into very stark vision during the pandemic. It was literally that moment where I was on my laptop for work, on my phone, checking in on my family, ordering groceries online. Netflix was the only way to entertain ourselves, and I was bone numbingly tired. I was safe, I was healthy. I had no reason not to feel like I couldn’t spring out of my chair. And so to me that felt like a paradox. I just couldn’t understand how you could get more tired from doing nothing. And the last time I took biology was in high school. So my favorite thing is to track down the absolute experts in whatever field I’m curious about and have them explain it to me and then sort of bring that back to us normies and try to make some changes based on what the science, A lot of science is locked up in journals and my idea is like, well, let’s get it out there and let’s apply it and try to change the way we live based on what we know works.

Brett McKay:

So let’s do a sort of a big picture overview of the state of Americans sitting at their screens and just staring at ’em all day. How much are Americans doing that?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, it’s not good, Brett. It’s not good. By some estimates, the average American sits 187 days out of the year, so more than half the year, nine to 10 hours a day. We know also that the average American is interacting with media about 12 and a half hours a day. So I mean that includes double screening. So I don’t know about you, but my life revolves around chairs and sitting in the morning, I check my phone and where do I go? I go to the office to sit at my desk to look at two different screens. Then I come home, I check my phone again to make sure I know where my daughter is. I listen while I take the dog out for a walk. I meet my husband. We’re rewatching Mad Men on the couch. Essentially, we have built our lives around sitting and screens, and it’s really not that different for older or younger people either.

Like kids are on laptops in the classroom, they come home to do their homework on their laptops, they’re texting with friends, they’re watching YouTube, older adults, how do they stay connected a lot? There’s amazing online courses they can take, the WhatsApp family chat groups. And I say that not as judgment, but just as a fact that this is our connected society, but it just annoyed me that at the same time that screens have become so ubiquitous, it’s now estimated the average 19-year-old moves as much as the average 60-year-old and type two diabetes in young people have doubled. And it is estimated that by the end of this decade, 500 million more people will have at least one more chronic illness and many of those are preventable. So I think we talk so much about the mental health effects of being online, but we have been missing a key part of the equation, which is the physical health effects, the effects on our bodies.

Brett McKay:

So being sedentary increases your risk of diabetes. What else is it doing to us?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, so I mean obesity, that’s sort of a catchall term from essentially metabolic dysfunction for some people. Other people, it’s just lifestyle. As you mentioned, diabetes, I think what we’re leaving out though when we talk about the illnesses is the sort of mental health effects that come from these physical chronic illnesses. So we’re seeing rising levels of anxiety, inability to concentrate, depression, et cetera. And I think we think, oh, that’s because terrible things are happening in social media, but actually a lot of that is related to sitting and looking at screens as well. So when I went to talk to scientists to try to understand that was the question for me. I was like, what is happening in my body when I am sitting and staring at a screen for hours on end? And what I was told was really three things. 

So the first one is that when you sit, you are bent at your waistline and at your knees. And so think of a garden hose when you kink a garden hose and it gets, the water gets backed up in it. The same thing is essentially happening at your legs and at your torso. And what is happening then is that there is less circulation and your leg muscles, I had no idea, are doing incredibly important work and they need blood flow and oxygenation to do this. They are flushing out glucose constantly. They are pushing oxygen up your body, up to your brain, but they need to be stimulated in order to do that. If you don’t do that, that is when you start to see blood pressure rising, blood sugar rising and do it long enough, those chronic health issues start to creep in. Then the other thing I learned was when we sit, we don’t breathe properly.

Our diaphragm is contracted essentially, and full breaths. Again, this is oxygenation. When you don’t get enough oxygen into your brain, this is called neurovascular coupling. Usually the neurons up there can flush out the CO2 if you keep the circulation going. But if you don’t, what does CO2 do? It makes you feel sleepy, foggy, tired, that sense you can’t concentrate. It’s a metabolic thing that is happening. It is within your body. And then the third thing is kind of new and interesting. I started to learn about a relatively new field of study called a Sense called interoception. So I had never heard of this. I’ve heard of introspection or perception, but interoception is the study of the signals that our body is sending us internally. So some of those are subconscious. Our body tells us to breathe. We’re not usually aware of that or heart rate speeds up if we’re anxious about something.

But then there are other times where we are more aware of it or we should be more aware of it. Like, oh, my stomach’s growling, I should go eat. But what I had noticed and what newer studies are starting to also show is that when we are locked in on screens, we ignore what our body is telling us. It might be telling us we need a break or we need to just get some air, some fresh air, or we need to move our body, or we’re getting anxious or we can’t focus. And I think certainly I saw this in myself and I hear from a lot of other people, I just got to power through. I just got to keep going. I got some stuff on my list. I’m just just going to put in one more hour. I can get this done and like, Ooh, what’s that other thing? And then suddenly you have 87 tabs open and you’re kind of spinning your wheels and you’re sort of getting things off your checklist and you feel like you’re working really hard, but the next day you come back and you’re like, wow, that was total crap that I actually produced yesterday. So to me, I was like, oh, okay. So they’re really good biological reasons why I’m tired and cranky and anxious and can’t concentrate.

Brett McKay:

And speaking to that, sort of not being able to pay attention or read your body signals. That’s another thing I’ve noticed when I sit down a lot is that I don’t really pay attention to whether I’m hungry or not. And so it’s like I’m not really hungry, but I’m like, well, I’m kind of bored and I need something to kind of power through this, so I’ll just eat some Reese’s peanut butter cups,

Manoush Zomorodi:

I will eat and have absolutely no recollection of having eaten an entire bag of, well, in my case, it’s popcorn, but it’s amazing. And of course, that’s what our technology is designed to do, to keep us focused, to keep us swiping, to keep us clicking through, to keep us there. That’s the whole point of it. And these sort of more subtle, I would say, ancient signals that we’re getting from inside, they get drowned out pretty easily.

Brett McKay:

What’s interesting about your book is that you highlight that people have been noticing the ill consequences of being sedentary thanks to our new form of labor all the way back in the 19th century. In the 21st century, it’s a lot more cute. It’s all digital. We’re at a desk. But people in the 19th century, they’re shifting away from agrarian to more knowledge work that we think of today, or even just working in a factory where they might be sitting down but moving their hands. What were these people, these writers and thinkers noticing about how that change in work was affecting our bodies, but also maybe their souls even?

Manoush Zomorodi:

I love that you picked up on this, and that is where the title actually comes from. Body Electric is based on the poem by Walt Whitman, and back in the 1800s, there was this move from you could used to be able to, or you used to have to use a thresher to thresh the wheat. And then the industrial revolution begins, we start to have engines and combines and people can sit and do this labor and there’s increased production. And in order to manage this increased production to account for it, to ship it to the right places to create essentially supply chains, we needed clerks. We needed people who managed systems, who managed other people. And as we all know, that requires sitting at a desk, not at a laptop back then, but certainly at ledgers, there was a spate of poetry and people noticing that the clerk’s vitality, I guess is the best way to put it, was diminished.

That they were of slighter stature, that they were pale, that they were as one newspaper, put it tired, not tired because of their work, but tired with their work. And Whitman is saying his poem, the body electric is actually an ode to the human physique at its ultimate when it is relishing the world, when it is using its muscles, when it is breathing the air, when it is in the sunshine and outdoors. And that sort of joie de vivre unfortunately, was not really to be found for people who were stuck at desks indoors even nearly, well, 150 to 175 years ago.

Brett McKay:

There’s a line from Whitman. He wrote an article in life illustrating 1856, talking about clerks at their desk. He said this, I thought it was really good, described them. He said, A slender and round shoulder, generation of minute leg, chalky face and hollow chest. Great description. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

So sad, right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And what’s interesting too is a lot of these writers and thinkers around the same time, like late 19th century, early 20th century, not only were they noticing it affecting people’s bodies, but it gave rise to this idea of sinia, which was basically like you were just overly anxious, you were depressed, and they developed all these health cures for neuro sinnia, and the health cure was like, well, you got to get out to go to some sanitarium and get fresh air and take cold baths. It’s basically the same stuff we’re doing in 2026. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

So true. They were doing cold plunges back then. Well, it’s like you just want to feel something, right? You just want to feel alive, like touch grass. I guess what’s old is new again. 

Brett McKay:

So sitting down looking at a screen, not great for us, you feel crappy, you feel tired, diabetes, you feel creaky and cranky. But then you came across this study by this guy named Keith Diaz that offered a really simple solution to this problem. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

Almost too simple. So I was walking my dog listening to the news, and I heard about this study that had come out. This was January, 2023, and it was a physiologist at Columbia University Medical School. And Keith’s sort of mission in life is to try to understand what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs in order for a sedentary, and I would add screen filled life not to kill them prematurely. And what Keith had found in his lab was that five minutes of gentle movement, so about two miles per hour, not fast on a treadmill for every half hour during extended periods of sitting offset the harms of high glucose blood pressure. It made people feel less fatigued. They were able to concentrate and it improved their mood. And when I heard that, I was like, wait a minute, it can’t be that easy.

That’s it. Just move gently for five minutes every half hour. And then I was like, oh, wait a minute. That’s kind of often actually, would people actually do that? Would they be able to interrupt all their sedentary screen filled lives to add this sort of five minute break within their day? And so I reached out to Keith and I was like, what do you think people could do this? He’s like, I don’t think people can do this. And it makes me depressed because it doesn’t matter if I can show something in the lab if this doesn’t actually translate to real life, it makes no difference.

Brett McKay:

So you and Keith decided to do a big study to see if people would do it, which we’ll talk about. But you actually first tested this on yourself to see does five minutes of walking every 30 minutes, does that actually change your physiology? And so you went over to Keith’s lab and hooked yourself up to some monitors to see what would happen?

Manoush Zomorodi:

I did. So he invited me. He’s like, well, why don’t you try it for yourself and see if you disagree with me that people can do this? So I was like, great, I will be your lab rat. So for a week before I went to the lab, I wore a heart rate monitor, a very sort of fancy accelerometer, pedometer, glucose monitor, the whole jammy. And then I went up to his lab and I spent two days there. So the first day they had me in a room. They were work on your laptop like a normal day all day, just work on your laptop. I had bathroom breaks, I had time to eat my lunch. But basically I just powered through for eight hours and all the while they were collecting my blood sugar data, my blood pressure heart rate, and I was filling out regular surveys regarding my mood and ability to focus.

And then the second day when I was there, every half hour, Keith’s lovely assistant guided me over to a treadmill in the corner and she’d type in 2.0 miles per hour, and I would take a sort of gentle stroll for five minutes. And again, they measured all of those things. And when they compared the two days, it was kind of crazy actually. My blood sugar was cut nearly in half. My blood pressure dropped by five points. My concentration was so much better, and I mean my energy levels and mood were just far superior. I mean, that was so obvious to me. I could feel it the day I didn’t move. I slithered back onto the subway to go home. I was exhausted the day I took the breaks. I was like, great. This was super fine. Okay, bye. I just skipped my way out. And when I saw those results, I was like, well, this is too powerful not to try to get regular people to do this, especially since it is something you don’t need money to move for five minutes every half hour, and maybe there could be effects even if it was not quite that often.

So yeah, so Keith and I, we took our teams at NPR and at Columbia, and we launched a global clinical trial. This was exciting for me as a journalist to do a proper medical study. And we had 20,000 people sign up, which was really cool.

Brett McKay:

And what were the results of that? Did people see benefits and were they able to integrate these short walks into their daily routine?

Manoush Zomorodi:

So what we did was we had them choose a cohort so you could decide to move for five minutes every half hour, five minutes, every hour or five minutes every two hours because not only did we want to measure the effects, but we really wanted to understand the feasibility of it, who managed to stick with it the most. And I was really surprised. I mean, keep in mind of course, Brett, that this is a self-identifying audience like their public radio. Yes, for sure. They’re like, I have this problem. I want to do something about it. So we have to have that caveat. However, of the people who signed up and started the two week period of integrating these breaks into their lives, 80% stuck with it, which I was quite surprised about. They saw on average a 25% decrease in fatigue levels. Anecdotally, they told us about aches and pains going away, being able to concentrate again.

There were reports of better mood essentially, not only just being able to focus, and surprisingly 82% said that they found it doable and they liked taking the breaks. So to me, I was like the data was clear, and I should say there was a dose response relationship. So the people who took the breaks every half hour saw greater decreases in fatigue, greater increases in concentration and mood, but the difference was pretty slight. So for the book, I just thought we know broadly what the data say, but what I wanted to understand was how did people do it In a world that is in schedules and universities and offices and lives built around screens and chairs, what did they do in order to succeed? That’s where I was like, how did they hack their lives to be able to do this without being annoyed by it and without upending all the things that they needed to do?

How did they deal with the interruptions? Because I should also add, Brett, this did not impact productivity. To me. That was the most surprising. I expected people to be like, well, I didn’t get as much done, but I felt better. That was not the case. In fact, we saw a slight improvement in productivity, which is actually what I had observed when I went and did it in the lab. So I just found that every time I took a break, I did not look at a screen while I took my breaks on the treadmill, but I noticed that I would, at first I was annoyed. I was in the middle of something, but then I would sort of strategize. I’d be like, okay, when I get back to my desk, I really need to answer that one email and I need to say these three things and I would just get back and be super efficient and focused and get it done instead of faffing around and not reading all the way to the end of emails and clicking over to check one thing. I just did the work. 

Brett McKay:

When you’re on those walks, you’re thinking about your work a little bit in your head, like, okay, what do I got to do when I get back? And when you got back, you’re like, okay, I know what I got to do because I’ve already thought about it. And so you just were able to do it.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s what a lot of people saw is that the quality, maybe the quantity was less, but actually if the quality is better than you’re not spinning your wheels. 

Brett McKay:

So how did people integrate this in their lives? What were some strategies and tactics that they used?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Super interesting. So what I ended up doing was going through and creating sort of three buckets. One was younger people, students and educators, and we could not let people under 18 into the study, but there were a bunch of teachers who tried to do it with their classrooms. Then I had the middle group, which was information workers, knowledge workers, people who generally make a living off of sitting and looking at a screen. And then the third group, which was older adults who maybe were retired and thinking more about the longevity and health effects for students. Some of it was, I can put it to you two ways. One was there were teachers who really felt very frustrated because there is no mandate for recess in schools. And so it is really left up to teachers to figure out how to get movement integrated into their classrooms.

And it’s not a nice to have Brett. There is a ton of research that shows that movement helps students learn better. There is a direct correlation between those things. And the teachers see it too. It’s not just the kids are wiggly, their bodies are growing and need the circulation and they need the oxygenation. So some teachers, they turned it into a science project in their class. They were like, look at this weird NPR project. This was a high school teacher. And she said, we’re going to do this to understand data collection. We’re going to do this to experience it ourselves and track ourselves, and then we’re going to talk about the placebo effect and see if that has anything. So they turned it into a science project, which I thought was such a creative way of doing it, but I also heard a lot from professors who maybe would’ve powered through a three hour workshop who then integrated breaks into their workshop and found they had a better time teaching their students were more attentive and on the whole people actually retained the information better.

So there’s a lot more into that. And my whole thing is that I think we need to teach interoception at a much younger age, teach really little ones to start to listen to what their bodies are telling them because they are surrounded by screens all the time. So that’s part of that chapter Information workers. I really went deep in trying to understand scheduling, right? Because that’s the thing. And what you saw of course, was that the people who are in power, those are team leaders or executives, they set the tone. They can say, instead of half hour meetings, we’re going to schedule 25 minute meetings. So you get that five minute break or 55 minute meetings instead of an hour. They can say, it’s okay to not have your zoom camera on and move. If you need to move during a meeting, go for it.

Some people who maybe were not in charge could just say like, oh, I need to turn off my screen. I have terrible wifi. And then they would do their movement break, which really cracked me up. And then they would start to create rules like another boss said, when we’re having an internal meeting, anyone is welcome to move during a meeting as they need to, but if we’re with clients, let’s make sure we don’t do that. It’s not socially acceptable. I think once a team decides that it’s okay for heads to be bopping up and down on a zoom, then it’s not a big deal, but it really needs that cultural sort of shift that we are able to do better work and we have higher job satisfaction and also potentially less sick days. So the winds are big. And then older adults had a completely different issue because what I heard from a lot of retired people was actually they were more active during the day.

They were volunteering or helping out with grandchildren or whatever. But come say four or five o’clock, there was sitting for the next 6, 7, 8 hours watching tv, Netflix, scrolling on their phones, and those were the hours that they needed to insert interruptions into, and they made a big difference. I mean, one of Keith’s other studies I should add for people who replaced half an hour of sitting with movement decreased their risk of an early death by 18%. So we’re not talking about huge changes here. We’re talking about just getting more movements into your life. And if you need to start by looking at your phone while you’re doing that, whatever, who cares? Baby steps. We just want you to live longer and healthier

Brett McKay:

After I read the book. So I am pretty active. I take a morning walk every morning mile, and then I take another walk. But after I read your book, I was like, I need to start taking these five minute breaks. So I just set a timer. Every 25 minutes I get up. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the middle of something, I’ll go take a walk for five minutes. Or if I can’t take a walk, I have a problem going outside and taking a walk when it’s really cold outside, I’m kind of a wuss. So I’ll just do jumping jacks. I’ll just kind of look like a weirdo moving my arms up and down, doing 1980s aerobics. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

Totally. And I think what you’re doing is exactly right. Is it time to move? Yes. But if you are like I’m in the middle of something and I am in flow, well then, okay, fine. Don’t take a movement break. It’s no big deal. What I sort of am sick of a little bit is this idea that we are so all or nothing, we’re either on the traveling soccer team for our kids or they don’t play soccer at all. Well, what about just going out in the backyard and kicking the ball around more often? We don’t need to be training for a marathon or just sitting on our butts. It’s like, what if we just got up and I like to do this works for me. I get up and I just walk around. There’s a big conference table, and I walk around that for a couple minutes and then I get a glass of water and I go back to my desk and it helps a lot.

Brett McKay:

You’re kind of like a prisoner that gets your yard time walk around the yard.

Manoush Zomorodi:

I try not to think of myself as a prisoner, but yeah.

Brett McKay:

That’s what I was thinking the other day when I was taking a walk just around in my driveway because I needed to. Why not? It worked.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

But what’s interesting too, you highlight a lot of people may be listening to this, okay, yeah, you can get these health benefits by taking these five minute breaks. But it’s like, well, I exercise every day. I had this hard workout for an hour. I do CrossFit. I do a run. But you highlight research that that’s probably not enough if you’re sitting down the rest of the day. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

No, in fact, it’s definitely not enough. And it’s so unfair. It sounds so unfair. So Keith told me about his own journey when there started to be research into this idea that even if you do a morning workout or you go for an evening run, if the majority of your day is then spent sitting and looking at a screen, it doesn’t matter, don’t give up your workout. Obviously you’re building muscle, cardiovascular strength, all the rest of it, but it is not enough to offset the harms of sitting for long stretches for the rest of your day or evening. And he just said to me, he’s like, this was shocking to him. He’s like, we had been taught when we were getting our PhDs that exercise is the ultimate medicine, that it is the cure for everything. So to then read that, you could check it off your list first thing, but it doesn’t make a difference the rest of the day. That just sort of shocked him. I mean, I guess the good news is if you haven’t been moving at all, you are going to see benefits just by starting to take five minute walks or as you have said, if you can’t walk, there’s options with your arms. The point is to get the blood flowing and raise your heart rate just a little bit, but you don’t have to go crazy.

Brett McKay:

And then the other thing too, you highlight that this is interesting. A few years ago, standing desk became all the rage people heard sitting as the new smoking. Okay, well I got to stand up while I’m working, standing all day at work. Can that offset the downsides of being sedentary?

Manoush Zomorodi:

No. And this was such a drag too. I had people say that to me. They’re like, oh, I’m so glad I have a standing desk. And I was like, oh, I’m so sorry to tell you this. There have been massive studies looking at all the different clinical trials about standing desks, and unfortunately the consensus is that standing at the very best doesn’t really cause much harm. It gets you up, maybe it relieves some back pain, but at the very worst can actually cause circulation problems or increase your risk for stroke and varicose veins and things like that. It’s the movement that stimulates the muscles. And when the muscles are stimulated, they suck in the glucose, they push the oxygen up. Just standing unfortunately is not the answer. It’s so sad again. Yeah, but

Brett McKay:

The answer, it’s easy. It’s just five minutes of gentle movement every 25 minutes. If you can’t do that at least an hour. Just move more. Just move. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

More. Yeah, exactly. What we ended up finding was that most people, if you hate the timers, there’s another thing. Some people would just set a goal, I’m going to take four or five minute breaks today, and then just when it pops up and it feels doable, you know what I mean? And I think what I also found so interesting, and there’s starting to be more research into this, this is not in the book because the research is very preliminary, but this idea that the number one thing people did was set timers in order to get themselves moving. And that makes sense. You can’t remember to get up. You’re in the middle of something. But what ended up happening, and I’ve seen this in myself and it sounds like you probably do too, is that your body begins to send you pings and messages that even if you don’t set the timer, it’ll start to say like, yo, I’m feeling a little rough around here.

Can we please get up? Can we please get up? And many people told me that by the end of the two week study, they didn’t need to use their timers anymore. And I was just talking to some researchers at the NIH who are looking into this idea of introception and motivation and how the body begins. They think it has something to do with sort of circadian rhythms, but not what has to do with night or morning or anything like that, but that the body gets itself on a sort of rhythm and it begins to anticipate and alert the brain that it wants something or needs something, which I think is really interesting.

Brett McKay:

And as you increase your movement, you increase your interoception. So you were able to notice those urges to move more.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Totally. And like Keith said to me, he’s like, I feel like we don’t want people walking around in circles like robots. That’s not the goal. But I think for younger people, if you tell them, this will help with your anxiety, your ability to focus, we hear a lot about people having more depressive symptoms. This will help you feel more positive. And then for people of a certain age, I’ll include myself. I’ve started thinking about chronic illness. I don’t want a chronic illness, and if this is something I can do that makes me feel better and protects my health for longer so I can live not just longer, but live well, then why the hell not?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. One bit of advice I’d give to people who want to start this, and you talk about this in the book, is don’t use your smartphone or smartwatches nudges that they have. I think that the Apple watch has this where if you haven’t been moving for a while, it’s like get up and move. Actually, I talked to someone, it was a psychologist who brought up research that those nudges, those automatic nudges, they actually backfire because you start to resent them. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. And I noticed that with the apple. I set that up in the apple, apple watch when I first got, I was like, oh, I can have it remind me to move when I haven’t been moving. And I would just be like, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss. Shut up for the rest of the day. So if you want to set up a nudge, you have to make it yourself. Set up a timer. So don’t rely on the AI to tell you to move.

Manoush Zomorodi:

And the way I like to think of it is that setting it with intention is you’re making a contract with yourself, right? You’re saying, in one hour I will take a five minute walk, and instead of being stupid machine, you’re like, oh yeah, okay, I made a plan. I better get up and go. That’s not to say it’ll be easy. There are some days where I’m like, I don’t want to. I’m comfortable in my chair, but I feel better. Every single time. 

Brett McKay:

So something else you do besides exploring these overall systemic health benefits of moving gently several times throughout the day. You also talk about what staring at our screens all day is doing to our eyes and to our ears. So how are screens messing up our vision?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Well, I did not know that they are changing the shape of our eyeballs. So our eyes are extremely malleable and cooperative. If you tell them that you want to look at something that is close to you a lot, they will conform, they will change shape and become sort of egg like shapes and you will go nearsighted. And what they’ve seen is that in the past few decades, this is happening to younger and younger kids and more and more kids. I think there’s some statistic that it’s like one out of three kids is now nearsighted. And I spoke to Maria Liu at Berkeley who has been studying exactly, because for the longest time people thought, oh, if you’re nearsighted, it’s genetics like tough luck. And she was convinced that it was actually lifestyle and behavior that were these soaring rates that she saw in her native China that were starting to come to the US. This was 20 years ago.

And so she went into the lab and she actually fitted chicks with contact lenses that made them nearsighted and then tracked how their eyeballs changed shape. And we see the same things in humans that the more you stare at a screen, the better your eyes will get at doing that. It’s basically saying to your eyes, I don’t need you to look into the distance. And so they lose the ability to do so. The good news is that as long as your eyes are still growing, and this is actually into your thirties, there are treatments now that will reverse the effects. You can literally turn back the clock and you need to combine that with things like going outside. I was looking out the window. She was like, no, you have to go outside your brain when you’re inside knows that there are walls and that it won’t be able to get the full horizon effect that your eyes need. She also said, you need to go outside. They’re not entirely sure why vitamin D and sunlight are so powerful for healthy eyes. But that combination of being outside, looking into the horizon, scanning the horizon and doing it regularly tells your eyes that they need to be good at looking close and far.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so mean is especially if you’re a parent of young kids, make sure they’re not just looking at screens. Make sure they get outside and looking at the horizon. If you’re over 30 and you’re already nearsighted, it seems like the clock has already ran out on you,

Manoush Zomorodi:

Kind of. Yeah. But it does matter if you’re in your twenties, you got to be on top of it. If you work inside or you work in a lab or whatever, you will go nearsighted faster. So to me, I was like, wow, I could have done something. I could have staved it off. But you’re right, once your eyes stopped growing, you’re sort of cooked,

Brett McKay:

But it’s still good for you to get outside when you’re on that walk. Don’t look at your screen, look at the horizon. You might not be able to change the shape of your eyeball if you’re 45, but I think it’s still good for you. I mean, I got football shaped eyeballs. I’m in astigmatism, but I still like to get out there and scope out the horizon. It does feel nice on the eyeball,

Manoush Zomorodi:

And there’s a good reason why it feels nice. There’s actually been research into animal eyes. Certain mammals, they have seen that sunlight that hits the back of their retina releases serotonin. They have not been able to show this in humans because it’s hard to prove. But like you say, I don’t know about you, but when I get some sunlight, it just feels good. 

Brett McKay:

What about your ear health? Because what a lot of people use their digital devices for is to listen to stuff. They’re always walking around with AirPods in their ears.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yes. So there has been a really fascinating study going on between Apple and a Michigan researcher named Rick Knight. This is the Apple hearing study where they have tens of thousands of people enrolled through the iPhone. So they’ve been able to track noise exposure, how long they’re listening to something, the volume, also the external noise. So do people put on noise canceling? Do they raise the volume in order to counteract? They’re walking by a construction site or something like that. And Rick told me, because I was like, well, you just need to turn down the volume. He was like, yeah. Not only that though, it’s the duration of listening your ears. It turns out also need breaks. So you know that feeling when I don’t know about you, guns N Roses man would come out and you couldn’t hear for a couple days.

Those are the clia, the little tiny hairs in your ear that have been damaged. And if you give them a break and you let them relax, they will eventually recover. They can recover. But if you do that often enough or you wear down your CLIA and you never give them a break, once they die, they do not grow back. So they are seeing and expect to see more levels of people losing their hearing at much earlier ages. And for a while people were like, well, why didn’t we see that? When we first started, when had consumer devices like the Sony Walkman, and they think that the reason why that didn’t really have that much of an effect or damage people’s hearing was because the battery life was so crappy. And now of course we charge our phones and we listen nonstop. So again, take breaks exposure. Something is being used in your body when you are exposing yourself to exterior sound information vision, and your body just needs to regroup

Brett McKay:

And hearing loss. I think they’re starting to see more hearing loss in younger and younger people. They’re always got their AirPods in really loud, but hearing loss can eventually contribute to dementia down the road.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Right? And also it’s related to people losing their balance and falling the vestibular sort of feeling of being able to hold yourself without falling over. So yeah, there’s very good reasons to protect your ear health. And there’s actually, this has not been shown yet, but there’s suspicions that having noise canceling on all the time might disrupt some sort of connection between your ears and parts of the brain. They’re not entirely sure. That’s very preliminary.

Brett McKay:

You also talk about how our digital lives are impacting our sleep. So how are screens messing up our sleep?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Well, I mean I thought I was like, it’s going to be blue light, right? Blue light is the devil. And actually they don’t think that blue light is the problem. It’s so minimal what blue light does in terms of, look, there are some people who would say, no, I’m very sensitive to it. Absolutely. And children absolutely are sensitive to blue light. But on the new thinking is that rather than the devices themselves messing with our sleep, it’s the fact that we are displacing our sleep with time on screens. So somebody can’t sleep, what do they do? They look at a screen. It’s not necessarily the screen that’s making them unable to sleep. It’s because they turn to the screen or we have the phone on next to us and it’s not looking at the phone right before we go to bed necessarily. That’s making it impossible for us to sleep. It’s constantly being interrupted. I have my phone on next to my bed nervous wreck. I have elderly parents and I have teenagers, but I did learn to set it up. So they are the only people who can call me in the middle of the night. So it’s this idea that just one more show, just like let’s keep playing game. And you lose track of what time it is. It is displacing the amount of sleep that you got and it’s not necessarily the screens itself doing it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we had a chrono biologist on the podcast a while back ago. He mentioned that it’s not, the light from a screen is not enough to disrupt your circadian rhythm, so you don’t have to wear those goofy Elton John blue blocker glasses. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

You need to know yourself. If you were a person who loses track of time or you can’t help but be like, oh my God, I wonder what happens in the next episode. You need to know that, okay, this is a problem for you. Turn it off. Don’t blame the screens though for you’re not sleeping well, blame yourself essentially.

Brett McKay:

And then the other way that screens can mess up our sleep or just being on screens all day is we’re not moving. And being sedentary can also mess up your sleep. You’re not building up sleep pressure. Your body needs movement to feel like you’re tired at the end of the day. And if you’re just sitting around all day, your body’s like, well, I’m not tired. We don’t even go to sleep.

Manoush Zomorodi:

I think to me, that was the best explanation for the feeling of being wired and tired. This idea that you are exhausted and yet an alert, I guess is the way to think of it. And I hate that feeling so much. And what I have noticed, I do track my steps and what I have noticed is I need to hit, if I hit 12,000 steps every day, that’s when I can sleep properly. It makes a huge difference for me. It’s so obvious. If I only get 8,000, I do not sleep as well. I need the full sort of mental and physical fatigue to be able to rest, to really enjoy and sort of let go.

Brett McKay:

Speaking of step count, did Keith Diaz, did his research find that you had to hit a certain amount of steps a day to get these benefits? Or it didn’t matter as long as you moved five minutes? No.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Okay. Keith hates step trackers, which it really cracks me up. He said that when he started wearing one, it made him weird. He would be doing laps around his living room to try to get a step count up. He’s like, it does not work for me. It becomes my master. I don’t care. He’s like, what you need to do is put in the time. You don’t need to go crazy. No sprinting needed. If you want to do jumping jacks, go for it. But you really don’t have to. It’s just putting in the time, putting one foot in front of the other.

Brett McKay:

Last question. So you’re a parent. I’m a parent too. Our kids, they’ve lived in a world where they don’t know a world without screens. They’ve probably seen one since they were one years old. What can we do to help our kids integrate screens in their lives in a healthier way?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, I mean, I think that we’ve become so negative about screens to the point where it might be backfiring. I just think shaming kids for time that they spend on their phones, when really, a lot of the time it’s how they connect with the world and with their friends. I just want us to think about what we’re missing when we are on screens. And that is movement and getting outside. So instead of like, oh my God, get off your phone. Just be like, Hey, did you get some stroll time in today? Did you go for a walk? I think if they’re younger, taking a lap around the block after dinner, a dog is actually a great way to get them moving. Having conversations about if you’re going to have iPad time again for the little ones, how do you feel before you’re starting on your iPad?

You feel good? Okay. And then afterwards, how do you feel? And if they’re grouchy, be like, okay, so now we know that maybe you spent too long on your iPad. Maybe let’s do it a little less next time so that you don’t feel grouchy. I think for teenagers, it’s hard, right? Boy is it hard. But I have seen that my kids walk themselves essentially. They make sure that they get out and air themselves multiple times a day and they don’t feel right. If they don’t, they’re like, oh, I need a walk. And that is just music to my ears.

Brett McKay:

So just have those conversations. Encourage them to develop their sense of interoception and maybe offer some gentle nudging.

Manoush Zomorodi:

And I think it’s more saying what you can do and should do as opposed to what you can’t and shouldn’t frame it as positive. Let’s frame it as enjoying the world. Let’s frame it as touch grass.

Brett McKay:

Touch grass. Well, Manoush, this has been a fantastic conversation. I think hope everyone goes out and starts taking their five minute walks, but where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Oh yeah. Well, I’m the host of NPR’s Ted Radio Hour, and you can find out more about the book at my website manoushz.com. And that’s me on Instagram as well. And Brett, my God, congratulations. I hope I’m on again in another nine years. 

Brett McKay:

Let’s make it happen.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Let’s do it. Alright. 

Brett McKay:

Well Manoush, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Mine too.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Manoush Zomorodi. She’s the author of the book Body Electric. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A few years ago, red light therapy started showing up everywhere I looked, and it’s still getting a lot of attention. Fitness influencers evangelize it for muscle recovery, fat loss, and metabolic health. Beauty influencers say it will give you glowing skin and thicker hair. Biohacking bros claim it can help your mood and sleep, and that if you expose your balls to red light, it’ll boost your testosterone.

Thanks to the social media hype, gyms have started installing red-light booths next to their tanning beds. Just a few months ago, a dedicated red-light studio opened near my neighborhood here in Tulsa. $50 gets you 25 minutes in a red-light booth plus 10 minutes on something called a “power plate.” You can now buy red light therapy panels and blankets for your home, but they’re not cheap; serious at-home red light therapy can set you back $1,000 to $2,000.

As a creaky, stiff 43-year-old veteran garage powerlifter with nagging tendons, I was intrigued by the promises of pain relief and faster recovery. The potential mood lift was also a plus. Rather than schlep to a tanning studio and fork over $30 a pop for red-light sessions, I decided to buy a red-light blanket — essentially a sleeping bag lined with therapeutic LEDs — run an experiment on myself, and then share the results.

Five times a week for three months starting in January, I stripped down to my birthday suit, crawled into my high-priced red-light burrito wrap, and lay there on our gameroom floor for 15 minutes. About halfway into my session, I’d scrunch my body down so the bag covered my head too, burrowing in like I was in my mummy sleeping bag on a cold night of camping. One morning, my son wandered in to find just my gray head protruding from my glowing red cocoon. Gus finding his dad doing weird things for his man blog isn’t anything new. “You look like a weirdo,” he flatly said and walked out. He wasn’t wrong.

I’ll let you know below whether my experiment paid off. But first, let’s take a look at how red light therapy works and whether its popularly touted benefits are supported by research-backed evidence.

What Is Red Light Therapy?

Red light therapy, or photobiomodulation (PBM), involves exposing tissue to specific wavelengths of red and near-infrared light to stimulate cellular function, specifically your mitochondria. When cells are stressed, a molecule called nitric oxide plugs a key enzyme in the mitochondrial chain, suppressing ATP production. ATP is the energy currency our cells use for repair and regeneration. Red and near-infrared light can dislodge that nitric oxide and get cellular energy production running again, allowing your body to repair and regenerate. That’s the theory, at least.

When you’re doing red light therapy, there are two kinds of wavelengths that provide different benefits.

Visible red light in the 630-660 nm range is primarily absorbed by your skin’s dermis and epidermis.

Near-infrared light in the 810-850 nm range, on the other hand, passes through skin and can penetrate several centimeters into muscle and joint tissue.

If you’re treating a skin concern, you want visible red light. If you’re treating a joint or trying to reach deeper tissue, you want near-infrared. Most quality panels deliver both, largely because it makes them more versatile — you can use the same device for skin, joints, and deeper tissue work — which is why they’ve become the standard for broader therapeutic use.

Red Light Therapy’s Purported Benefits

When I dug into the research about red light therapy, I discovered that, like a lot of health fads, the marketing and social media hype around red light therapy has significantly outrun what the science actually supports.

There are some benefits to red light therapy, but they’re a lot narrower than the guys on Reels wearing blue-light-blocking glasses claim.

Red Light Therapy May Improve Your Skin

Wavelengths in the 630-660 nm range penetrate the upper layers of skin and stimulate fibroblasts, the cells responsible for producing collagen and elastin. Meta-analyses have found solid evidence for PBM reducing radiation dermatitis — skin irritation and damage caused by exposure to radiation therapy — in cancer patients. There’s also evidence that it accelerates the closure of chronic wounds like diabetic ulcers.

For general anti-aging applications, red light exposure can reduce wrinkles and improve skin texture over time.

But to get the benefits, you have to do red light therapy consistently for a long time. We’re talking three to five sessions a week for three to six months before you see any changes. It’s not a quick fix.

Red Light Therapy May Help With Hair Loss

If you’re dealing with androgenic alopecia (aka standard male pattern hair loss), the evidence for red light therapy is reasonably solid. Low-level light stimulates the mitochondria in hair follicles and increases blood flow to them. Studies have shown improvements in hair density and thickness in both men and women after three to six months of consistent treatment.

The catch: you have to keep doing red light therapy indefinitely to maintain the hair growth. Stop the sessions, and the follicles drift back to their previous state. So you have to decide whether a modest improvement in your hairline is worth putting on an $800 red-light helmet that looks like something from the Minority Report every day, indefinitely.

Red Light Therapy May Ease Localized Pain and Inflammation

For specific, targeted musculoskeletal problems — knee osteoarthritis, plantar fasciitis, localized joint inflammation — there’s decent evidence supporting red light as an adjunct therapy. Near-infrared wavelengths around 810-850 nm can penetrate several centimeters into muscle and joint tissue and have been shown to suppress pro-inflammatory cytokines and reduce pain. Again, you have to use red light therapy consistently for months before you see any benefit. It’s not a one-and-done thing. Also, it’s an “adjunct” therapy, meaning you need to do it alongside physical therapy to get the benefits.

There are devices you can buy that you can strap to areas that you’re trying to treat. They’re more cost-effective than whole body panels or blankets. Still not cheap though! Look to spend $400-$800 for these.

Red Light Therapy May Speed Up Muscle Recovery (But Probably Doesn’t Do Much for Muscle Growth)

Multiple meta-analyses — including reviews published in 2024 and 2025 — show that red light therapy consistently lowers creatine kinase levels in the blood after intense exercise. Creatine kinase is one of the primary markers for muscle damage, so bringing those levels down faster means your muscles are repairing more quickly. The same research shows consistent reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness, or DOMS.

The muscle growth question is murkier. Recent meta-analyses suggest PBM doesn’t consistently increase peak strength beyond what training alone produces, and nothing shows that it will do much for hypertrophy.

Red Light Therapy Probably Won’t Help You Lose Fat

This is fitness influencers’ favorite claim, and the evidence behind it is the weakest. The theory is that PBM causes temporary pores to form in fat cells, releasing triglycerides to be metabolized. Small studies have documented modest circumference reductions, but these haven’t translated into meaningful changes in total body weight, and without a caloric deficit, the released fat is likely just reabsorbed. No large-scale, long-term human trials support the idea that red light meaningfully accelerates fat loss beyond diet and exercise.

Red Light Therapy Probably Won’t Fix Your Mood or Sleep

Research into transcranial PBM for conditions like depression and Alzheimer’s looks promising, but it’s still in the early stages. It’s worth watching over the next decade.

But systematic reviews have concluded that sleep quality and cognitive enhancement in healthy individuals using red light aren’t yet statistically significant.

If you notice any mood lift from red light therapy, it’s probably the placebo effect, which does have a real impact. If you feel better, you feel better, but red light therapy is a pretty expensive and time-consuming way to get the placebo effect. You can get a mood boost just by walking outside and catching some sun.

On That Testosterone Claim

The evidence that testicular irradiation boosts testosterone in men comes almost entirely from rat studies. Human data is essentially anecdotal. I’d file this under things that work in rats and for TikTok bros wanting you to smash that like button.

Did Red Light Therapy Do Anything for Me?

After three months of spending 15 minutes 5X a week under my red-light blanket, here’s what I found:

My mood didn’t noticeably improve.

My nagging tendons still nagged me.

My skin looked exactly as it did before, that is, like the face of a 43-year-old man. A scar I picked up at Thanksgiving remained stubbornly present.

I didn’t lose body fat.

My recovery from workouts didn’t improve.

My hair, which was already thick, remained thick.

I can’t say for sure that the red light therapy didn’t do anything for me, but the effect was not significant or noticeable enough for me to continue to spend over an hour each week lying on the gameroom floor in a glowing body bag.

So Should You Do Red Light Therapy?

Red light therapy didn’t seem to do anything for me, but this was of course an n=1 experiment. Your results may vary.

If you have a specific problem that the research supports — hair loss, age-related skin changes, a nagging joint issue — a high-irradiance red-light device used consistently over several months may be worth investigating alongside whatever else you’re doing for it. There’s research that backs it up. But keep in mind, even when it works, the benefit is typically modest, and if you have to do the light therapy consistently for months — and in the case of hair loss, forever.

For general wellness, whole-body recovery, fat loss, and mood, the evidence isn’t there. Yet, at least.

My takeaway: if your gym has complimentary red light therapy, it won’t hurt to sit in it for a few minutes after a workout; just don’t expect much from it.

I wouldn’t plunk down the money to go to a specialized red light salon or for an at-home red light therapy device unless you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket, and you don’t mind losing aura in the eyes of your teenage son.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, writer, and one of the most influential spiritual voices of the 20th century — a man preoccupied with solitude, silence, and the demands of the inner life.

He’s best known for his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which traces his restless youth and eventual conversion to Catholicism.

As I mentioned in last week’s Odds and Ends, I recently re-read this book and enjoyed it. It’s full of interesting spiritual insights. But I also picked up something else Merton mentioned: a simple, practical trick for falling asleep.

Thomas Merton’s Trick for Falling Asleep When You Can’t Fall Asleep

Merton discovered the technique during his undergraduate years at Columbia University in the mid-1930s. He was doing what a lot of college students do: trying to find himself. He dabbled in Marxism and jazz. He also read hundreds of texts on what he loosely called “Oriental mysticism,” or what we now call Eastern philosophy.

While Merton came to regard most of this phase as shallow and misguided, one thing he got out of it stuck with him for the rest of his life: a trick to fall asleep when you can’t fall asleep.

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton describes the process thusly:

You lie flat in bed, without a pillow, your arms at your sides, and your legs straight out, and relax all your muscles, and say to yourself:

‘Now I have no feet, now I have no feet . . . no legs . . . no knees.’

Basically, you imagine your body disappearing, beginning with your feet and slowly working your way up. You imagine each of your body parts “changed into air and vanished away” — shins, knees, thighs, hips, abdomen, arms, hands, shoulders, repeating the absence of each part to yourself until it genuinely feels “gone.” You keep moving up your body until you drift off to sleep.

Merton noted that this technique usually worked for him, unless he hadn’t fallen asleep by the time he got to his head; when that happened, “Instantly, chest and stomach and legs and feet all came back to life with most exasperating reality.” Fortunately, he’d typically be conked out by the time he made his torso “disappear.”

Why Imagining Your Body Disappearing Can Help You Fall Asleep

Merton theorized the technique worked because it was a type of auto-suggestion or just plain old muscle relaxation. When you’re nice and relaxed, you usually fall asleep. He wasn’t wrong.

Most insomnia isn’t a body problem. It’s a brain problem. Your mind latches onto something (like a work email, a conversation that went poorly, whatever) and starts chewing on it. The harder you try to stop ruminating, the louder the mental chatter gets.

Merton’s technique solves this with a kind of cognitive sleight of hand. It gives your brain something specific and repetitive to do. “I have no feet. No feet. No legs.” The task is engaging enough to occupy the part of your mind that wants to spin out, but boring enough not to fire you up. You’re crowding out the rumination without replacing it with anything that requires actual thinking.

There are a couple of variations on Merton’s technique that you can also try.

I’ve long done a version of this method that comes at it from a related but opposite angle.

When I was a kid, I watched a show called Under the Umbrella Tree. One episode featured Gloria the Gopher having problems falling asleep. Her solution: she went through her body parts one by one, saying goodnight to each of them. “Time to go to sleep, leg. You’re getting heavier and heavier.” It made an impression on me and I started doing it, and I’ve been using this trick ever since.

I find imagining that each of my body parts is getting heavier and heavier easier to conceptualize than imagining that each part is disappearing. Though I’ve had the same experience as Merton: while I usually drift off to sleep by the time I get to my torso, if I reach my head, whatever relaxation I achieved instantly reverses and I’m wide awake.

You can also try the method that was taught to Naval aviators during WWII, which might solve the problem Merton and I have encountered. With this technique, you imagine each of your body parts going absolutely lax and limp, starting with your head instead of your feet; you first relax your scalp, forehead, jaw, and even your tongue, lips, and eyes, before you start moving down your body.

All of these approaches get you to the same sleep-inducing place: a relaxed body and mind. Experiment and see which one works for you; you’ll be sleeping with the beatific stillness of a monk in no time.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Pooping. Everybody does it, but a lot of people are embarrassed to talk about it. That’s a shame, my guest says, not only because your digestive health is incredibly linked to your overall health, but simply for the fact that there is much happiness to be found in an easy, worry-free constitutional.

Harvard gastroenterologist Dr. Trisha Pasricha is the author of You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. Today on the show, Trisha and I have a fun and frank conversation about the art and science of bowel movements, including the color of healthy stools, how often you should be pooping, if laxatives are safe to use, the food to eat that’s even better than prunes for getting things going, why you feel the urge to go poop at Barnes and Noble, the wonders of the bidet, the danger of using your smartphone on the toilet, how to get more comfortable pooping in a public restroom, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Top 10 Toilet Books
• AoM Article: Be a “Regular” Guy — Tips for Improving Your Daily Constitutional
• The Squatty Potty
• “Mariko Aoki phenomenon” — where individuals feel an urgent need to use the bathroom when entering a bookstore
• AoM Article: You Need to Eat More Fiber

Connect With Trisha Pasricha

• Trisha’s website
• Trisha on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Pooping: everybody does it, but a lot of people are embarrassed to talk about it. That’s a shame, my guest says. Not only because your digestive health is incredibly linked to your overall health, but simply for the fact that there’s much happiness to be found in an easy, worry-free constitutional. Harvard gastroenterologist, Dr. Trisha Pasricha, the author of You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. Today on the show, Trisha and I have a fun and frank conversation about the art and science of bowel movements, including the color of healthy stools, how often you should be pooping, if laxatives are safe to use, the food to eat that’s even better than prunes for getting things going, why you feel the urge to go poop at Barnes and Noble, the wonders of the bidet, the danger of using your smartphone on the toilet, how to get more comfortable pooping in a public restroom, and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/poop. All right, Dr. Trisha Pasricha, welcome to the show.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Thank you so much for having me, Brett. Glad to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you are a medical professor of gastroenterology. That’s a hard word to say. I had to look up how to pronounce it. You specialize in gut health and a big part of your work involves researching and talking a lot about poop. How’d you end up doing what you do?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Well, I am a second generation gastroenterologist. I grew up as the daughter of a gastroenterologist. When you grow up like that, you think that talking about poop every day is perfectly normal and you think that that’s what everyone else is doing. It was delightful. My father was, and still is a gastroenterologist, but he was also a researcher. He was just so excited to tell me and my siblings about the cool stuff he was discovering in his lab every day after he came home from work and he was describing how colonoscopies worked and all of this. I know now that sounds really bizarre, but at the time it was just what we talked about at the dinner table and how cool science was and specifically when it came to our gut. So I loved it and it was kind of what I grew up thinking was the coolest thing in the world.

So I knew I wanted to be a gastroenterologist since I was a little girl. I had never imagined wanting to be anything else. But then when I came to medical school and then I started doing my own training, I really started to realize what a weird gap there was between what other people seem to have learned about poop and their bowel movements and how their gut works and what I learned. And people, for the most part, it seems like, didn’t really talk about their guts and their poop after they turned three or four, and it was something everyone just stopped bringing up at the dinner table. And so I kind of went on this mission and it just started with me talking to my patients about trying to normalize these conversations and having them out loud. And ultimately that led to writing the book. But I really do think that people need to have conversations more loudly because 40% of Americans are suffering from bowel habits that disrupt their daily lives. But you wouldn’t know that because we’re so quiet about them.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, unlike you, we didn’t talk about poop at the dinner table. I don’t even remember having conversations about my bowel movements with my family. And that carries over, I think, for a lot of Americans to how they approach talking about it with their doctor. As you said, a lot of Americans have bowel problems and it can cause a lot of discomfort, a lot of inconvenience in their life, and a lot of it is preventable. Well, let’s talk about this. I think one of the reasons why people have a hard time talking about it is they don’t know how to talk about poop. So when they go to the doctor saying, I got this problem with my bowel movements, I mean, what should they call it? You’re always like, do I call it bowel movement? Do I get scientific and call it stool or feces, human soil, what do you call it?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, liquidating your assets, whatever you want. I have found that I use the word poop usually unless somebody leads with another word that they find more comfortable. And the reason I do that is when I was in medical training, the kind of formal word that all doctors use is bowel movement. And so that’s what I was trained to start saying, and I certainly started saying that. And I had one professor who was a gastroenterologist and he was my research mentor in medical school, and I shadowed him. And he was the first guy I had ever seen, this doctor, this middle-aged gentleman. And this young patient came in and he was like, so tell me what your poop looks like. And I looked at this guy and I was like, this is so weird. You’re this doctor, this white coat. That’s the weirdest, I’ve never seen a doctor say that like that in a clinic before.

But when he said it, this young patient in his twenties suddenly smiled for the very first time and just the whole atmosphere in the room changed. And this guy just totally shared exactly what was going on with him. And you could just tell it broke the ice, it made it comfortable. And after that, I never looked back because I know oftentimes when I tell people, oh, tell me about your bowel movements, everyone stiffens up a little bit. And they too try to match my level of medicalization. And if you could just tell me what’s bothering you, I want to use whatever words make you comfortable. So I think someone should lead with the words they want to use that allows you to talk about it most freely. And my hope is that your doctor’s going to meet you right there.

Brett McKay:

Okay, that’s great. It’s funny, bowel movement. So my name’s Brett McKay. This is sort of a tangent. So when we had the initial things, it started when I was in middle school, I got really self-conscious about it, those initials BM. Oh my gosh. And I had some kid be like, oh, BM poop. And so now, ever since then I do BHM. That’s my middle initial.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Oh my gosh. Now you should embrace it. I’ve embraced TP as a gastroenterologist.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so if you can do that, I can go back to BM. I’m going to embrace the BM.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

A hundred percent.

Brett McKay:

So you describe this idea of euphoria in your book. What is euphoria?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, euphoria. It is a state that I want everyone to reach. And that is where having a bowel movement is the absolute least of your daily concerns. It’s this easy, effortless thing that happens quickly without straining, and then you go about the rest of your day and live your best life. You’re not worried about feeling heavy for the rest of the morning or day because you didn’t have that window to go, or you’re worried, should I go out to brunch with my friends or should I even meet people for dinner because I’m so worried about the bathroom situation? I don’t want you to live like that. And tragically, I think a lot of people are right now. So euphoria is a state of mind and it’s a lifestyle that I think we can all reach — some of us with just a little bit more knowledge about our bowel habits that we just never got. Because the last time we talked about our bowel habits with another soul was usually when we were potty training with our mom and dad. And that was a long time ago. Most of us cannot remember that conversation.

Brett McKay:

So a healthy bowel movement, you’re not even thinking about it, just not even on, you don’t have to worry about it at all.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, you’re not obsessed about, I mean, there’s another end of the spectrum where people, I mean, and this can be quite understandable, but people fixate on their bowel movements all the time. They’re worried about, did I go yet today? If I don’t go, I feel off. And even if there’s someone who you might look from the outside and say, okay, they’re going once a day, they’re regular. But if you’re thinking about it all the time, you’re becoming paranoid. If you haven’t gone, that’s not euphoria either.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about what healthy poop looks like and hopefully we can answer some questions that people have always wondered about it. Let’s start with the color of poop. First off, why is poop usually brown?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, the natural color is actually not brown. The natural color of our poop is like this whitish clay colored. And what gives it its beautiful brown color is bile. So our body produces this digestive juice and it has bilirubin in it, and that’s just this chemical that gives it that brown color. But if we were to take that away, it would actually look bizarrely whitish. And that is why if you ever see a pale, whitish creamy stool, that’s a problem. That’s an emergency. It means that that bile is somehow being blocked somewhere. Maybe it’s a gallstone, it could even be a cancer. But if you ever see that, that’s a big red flag. Go to the emergency room. But then other than that, the normal color should be some shade of brown. And then of course, everybody poops the rainbow from time to time.

I get these kinds of DMs every week where someone’s like, I had a really weird purple poop, or my poop was kind of greenish. Is that normal? And it can be normal. A lot of times we eat things that we don’t put together could impact our poop. For example, a classic one is beets. If you’ve ever eaten beets, you are probably going to have a maroon poop the next day or maybe the next day or two. And that’s just the beets. That’s okay. But if you haven’t eaten those beets and you see anything that looks like red, that would be really worrisome for bleeding. So bright red, maroon, or even pitch black and shiny, that could all be blood.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. So yeah, black poo, that could be okay. Sometimes it suggests there’s some sort of internal bleeding going on up your tract, but sometimes there’s, I think iron supplementation can cause black poo.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

You can have this real chicken and egg situation because sometimes people are taking iron because they’re having some bleeding and they’ve lost blood. But then you see black poop and you’re like, is this because you’re taking iron to treat bleeding? Or is it because you are bleeding?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And then I guess Pepto Bismol can also cause black poop.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah. I feel like we always forget to warn people about it can turn your tongue black, it can make your poop black, and then people are really horrified the next day. But that if you’ve taken Pepto Bismol, you’re allowed to have a few black poops.

Brett McKay:

And another interesting fact about Pepto-Bismol that you put in the book is that if you don’t want your farts distinct before a date or something, take Pepto Bismol before and that will make your farts less stinky. 

Okay. So poop’s naturally clay color until it meets with bile. But this is one of those things that can freak me out because I mean, you hear if you have a clay colored stool, that can mean you have pancreatic cancer or a bile duct blockage. And I can be looking at a light poop thinking, is that clay color? I think there are different colors of clay, and I think, well clay’s maybe a light tan. So maybe my poop is looking like clay, but we’re talking about white clay. It has to be basically white.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, I guess you’re right. There’s differences, there’s earthy tones of clay. This I’m talking about more like a whitish creamy color or kind of gray. And I would say when in doubt, I mean everyone’s poop is going to look a little different. If you have any doubts, I always tell my patients, picture or it didn’t happen. Take a picture of it and then send it through your electronic medical record and show your doctor and just have them lay eyes on it. A doctor will be able to tell you really quickly, am I worried or excited about this or not?

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. And then red, if you haven’t eaten beets, if you see red, that’s another thing you want to go see your doctor about because it could be colon cancer, but it could be something as benign as a hemorrhoid or an anal fissure or something like that.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Totally. Yeah. And most of the time it is going to be something not worrisome, it’s going to be a hemorrhoid. But what I never want someone to do, especially in this stage in 2026 where we are seeing this really disturbing rise in early onset colorectal cancer, is for someone to see bleeding and brush it aside. I mean, this is the trend we’re seeing in studies and with this rising cases that young people, when they see blood, they’re like, this is just my hemorrhoid, or I’m pretty sure this is no big deal. It’s always better to just quickly let your doctor know and let your doctor reassure you and be like, oh yeah, we’ll just do a quick exam. We’ll make sure it’s your hemorrhoid. No problem. But make sure that someone’s taken a look and giving you that reassurance rather than just brush it off yourself.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the shape and consistency. What does a healthy poop consistency and shape look like?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, I think most people think that a perfect shape would be this nice smooth sausage shaped, and then you go and people really aim to get is wipe less, and that is wonderful. That is a nice consistency that a lot of people have. But there’s really such a range of what could be normal. And I would tell people that for the most part, if you start eating a lot more fiber, which a lot of us are not doing, like 95% of Americans are not meeting our fiber goals, if you start to do that, it actually becomes less and less likely that you’re going to have that smooth little sausage that everyone wants. You’re going to start to have fluffier and fluffier stool. You might even start to go more often. That’s perfectly normal. It can be totally normal. And people sometimes when they do that, they’re like, I have diarrhea.

I’m going three times a day. And it’s so soft. That’s fine, as long as it’s not interfering with your social life. There’s a range of normal. And in fact, you should embrace that new you because it means you’re doing something healthy for yourself. And then on the flip side, sometimes when people are having these really, really tiny rabbit pellets, usually I say that that indicates that there’s an issue with constipation, but sometimes the fix can also be quite simple. It can be you need to hydrate more or you need to not hold it in. We do that as adults. We have this urge to go. Sometimes it’s like when we’re at work or we’re on a date at a restaurant and we say, no, no, no, I’m not going to go right now. I feel the urge I’m not going to go. And when you do that, you’re setting yourself up for failure because that stool is just going to dry up and become more hard so that when you decide you want to go later, it’s not the same one that you started with 12 hours ago. It’s a totally different one. It’s going to be more pebbly. So it’s better to try to go when your body tells you to, and you’re going to get a little bit closer to that median.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. So what happens to our stool whenever we get diarrheas? Why does the body decide this stuff needs to be liquid and get out fast? What’s happening there?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, there’s lots of different causes, but in terms of your anatomy, your small bowel, which is that first part of the tube after your stomach, the main point of your small bowel is to absorb all the nutrients and it’s sucking out everything that it wants and breaking it down. And then the stuff that it can’t break down, which is usually like the fiber, which we actually don’t possess the enzymes to break down. It makes its way to our microbiome in our colon. Well, the colon has several jobs. One of them is to suck water out of the stool as it passes through. And stool passes a little bit more slowly through the colon. So your colon has a lot of time to get that water up. But if something happens that triggers that poop to move forward, and sometimes it’s stress. Stress can cause our colon to suddenly start to contract.

That means we haven’t had time to remove and absorb all the water out of it yet. So it’s going to gush out like diarrhea when we’re stressed, spicy food, does that spicy food sense this signal down to say, okay, evacuate everything we have. That too will make whatever comes out to be a little bit fiery, a little uncomfortable, and it’ll also be pretty liquidy. And then there’s other things like infections or just depending on how things are going with other aspects of your life’s travel and exercise, those things can also help speed things up. But before you’ve really had a chance to absorb all the water.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. And constipation is just the reverse. It’s been in the colon too long, so all that water has been sucked out.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, exactly. And there’s a ton of different reasons why we think slow down and why we can get constipated. And you’re right, the longer we sit there, the longer that stool is just your colon is going to keep doing its job and it’s going to keep making it harder and harder, which is why I sometimes think the most important thing people can do who are constipated is just as soon as they hear that call, feel that urge respond because it’s not going to be the same poop later on.

Brett McKay:

What causes constipation? You said there’s lots of potential sources?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah. Well, when someone comes into my clinic and they have constipation, I try to explain the way the colon works in terms of trying to get toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube. So sometimes the issue is that we’re not squeezing that toothpaste tube, and that means that maybe there’s something that’s stopping the colon from contracting so much. We need to do that. We need to generate pressure in order to push the stool outwards. And maybe the problem is actually not that we’re not squeezing the tube, but that the toothpaste itself is rock solid. And sometimes that happens because maybe we’re not getting enough fiber, maybe we’re not drinking enough. Maybe there’s something else that’s making that stool really, really hard. But then the third, and I think most underappreciated part of the problem is that, yeah, we’re squeezing hard enough. The toothpaste is super soft, but we forget to take the cap off the toothpaste tube and then we’re just pressing up against this pelvic floor that is not cooperating.

And that is very common. That happens to about one in three people who have constipation and who have tried different laxatives and different things than they’ve failed. And basically what that means is that our pelvic floor, which is this set of more than a dozen muscles sitting there at the bottom of our rectums, and they need to coordinate in this really highly orchestrated dance, some need to contract at the right time, some need to relax. And for a lot of people, the sphincters that are supposed to be relaxing actually contract. When we bear down, if you think about it, we’re generating all this pressure to try to push our poop out and people’s sphincters contract, and that’s very paradoxical. It’s not supposed to do that. So sometimes when you’ve tried everything, the most obvious answer is actually something that doesn’t involve anything related to your colon, but actually it’s all the muscles in your pelvis that’s the problem.

Brett McKay:

You just went through what you call the three Ps of a good poop. So propulsion, that’s that bearing down that vasalva maneuver, we kind of and get that thing going. Then the consistency, it’s the pliability, the softness, if it’s hard, it’s not going to come out. And that pelvic floor aspect, sort of the cap on the toothpaste.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

And I think for someone to reach euphoria and to have healthy effortless balance every day, you have to think about how you’re optimizing all three of those things. All three of those things need to be working at their best in order to have a bound move. If even just one of them is off, it’s going to be hard to overcome it with just the other two.

Brett McKay:

With the pelvic floor piece, I think we think about that with just women because pelvic floor problems can result after childbirth, but men can have pelvic floor problems too. And you recommend that if you have a pelvic floor issue to go to a physical therapist who specializes in that. We’ll talk about something else you can do, tell your pelvic floor when you’re pooping later on in our conversation, going to the pliability part of the three Ps of a good poop, this is the consistency of the poop. Why does poop float sometimes?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, a couple of different reasons. Sometimes if it’s just soft enough because it has enough soluble material, like enough fiber, it’ll float. Sometimes fat floats in poop. So it depends on what you’ve eaten and how well you’ve absorbed it. There are certain conditions where people do not absorb nutrients and the food that they eat as well as we’d like them to. And traditionally we think about those as resulting in really serious floaters. So there’s a range that could be normal, but if this is your consistent pattern and you have any other symptoms, like you get pain, bloating when you eat, if you have a lot of floaters in your stool, you should actually just run that by somebody and make sure that you don’t have an issue with absorption.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. I mean, so this is always a concern for me. I read these articles like, oh, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer. And it’s like, oh, floating poop. And I’m like, okay, I’m going to be TMI here, but mine, regular floaters, but they look normal. They feel normal. I think I just eat a lot of fiber. I eat like 60 grams of fiber a day. 

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Good for you

Brett McKay:

So I think that’s what it is. Am I right? Should I go see my doctor?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Well, you should always run anything by your doctor you’re concerned about. But what you’ve described sounds very, very typical for somebody who’s just eating a lot of fiber. Once we start eating a lot of fiber and 60 grams is like an A-plus amount of fiber, then people’s poop does change and people are really caught off guard by it. The reason people say that floating poop is a sign of pancreatic cancer is because the pancreas helps break down and helps you absorb that food. And when suddenly that stops working so well, then you might see new floating poop for the first time. But that’s not the only sign. Often, sometimes people, their skin turns a little yellow, they have pain in their stomach. So if you’re otherwise living your best life, run it by your doctor. But it’s most likely just because you’re eating a ton of fiber, which is a great thing.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’m a fiber machine as the kids are saying these days.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, yeah, me too.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the schedule. What does a healthy bowel movement schedule look like? I think there’s this idea that you have to have a daily constitutional to be healthy. Is there anything to that idea?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

There definitely is something to that idea. And I think that this is because our bodies are naturally primed to have a bowel movement first thing in the morning. And the reason for that is one of the things that makes the colon a little bit different and special compared to other organs in our bodies is it really operates on a circadian rhythm and it’s a creature of habit. So when we go to sleep, the colon goes into this really quiet state. It doesn’t move around too much. That’s why for the most part, people sometimes talk about waking up in the middle of the night to go pee. It’s pretty rare for people to wake up in the middle of the night to have to poop, and that’s because your colon’s not really moving. But when it wakes up, when you wake up and it operates on the same circadian clock as you, then that first one to two hours upon waking is when you see some of the strongest contractions naturally occurring in your colon that you’re ever going to get the rest of the day for that 24 hour period.

It’s during those first one to two hours that your colon is doing the work for you. And if you have a bowel movement when your colon is already contracting, it means you have to do way less work. You have to bear down less. You don’t have to strain as much. So it’s a nice window. And then people often in the morning start to stack on other habits that help the colon contract too. Like for example, a third of people who drink coffee, their colon is going to start to contract pretty quickly. People who go for walks in the morning, just a little exercise, can help stimulate those contractions. And we do a lot of those things early in the morning, so it’s a great time to have a bowel movement. All of that said, there’s a large portion of people whose mornings are totally hectic, totally crazy.

They don’t have time for any of this, and they don’t go. That doesn’t mean that you have a problem or that you’re weird. It just means that you need to find a time to respond when your colon’s ready. And some other times during the day, the colon will start contracting if you eat a meal. So oftentimes there’s another wave of people who poop after dinner or poop after lunch. That’s totally normal. A lot of times people come to my clinic and they’re like, it’s so weird that I have to poop every time I eat. And I say, no, no, that’s a completely normal reflex. In fact, it’s like a reflux that we’re born with. Kids are pooping multiple times a day in response to eating, and then later on as adults, we try to suppress that and try not to respond to that reflex for no reason whatsoever.

We should just respond. But it’s actually a perfectly normal part of our human physiology. So there’s a range of what I’d consider normal. And what I usually tell people is, no, it’s not once a day. If you go once a day, wonderful, but you don’t have to do that in order to be closer to God. What I do want you to do is have an effortless bowel movement whenever you go. It should be easy if you go once a day, but you’re straining your eyeballs out for 20 minutes. I wouldn’t consider that normal. So they’ve done a study in the US where they found that people who consider themselves to have normal bowel movements go anywhere from once every three days to up to three times a day. And anywhere in that big range could be considered normal, as long as it’s effortless and you’re comfortable and happy with that pattern.

Brett McKay:

I imagine if you see a change in your schedule that lasts a long time, you’re like, well, maybe I should look at this. So if I usually do once a day and then I’m going three times a day, well, that’s interesting. I should probably check that out.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yes, I tell people to get to know your own schedule and everyone’s going to be different and have some variation in their own life. You might be somebody who goes like clockwork every day, and that’s perfectly wonderful and healthy. But you may also see that you have some variations depending on whatever else you have during your week and how you travel and how you exercise. These things will change, but get to know what kinds of patterns are normal for you. And then most importantly, you should start looking every day before you flush, have a peek. The number of times I ask people, what did it look like? What color is your poop normally? And people just get all embarrassed and say, oh, I don’t know. I don’t really look well, I mean, first of all, how can you not look? I dunno how you resist that temptation, but you should look so that you then when something is different.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Speaking of looking, have you kept up with these new AI devices you can attach to your toilet that takes a picture of your poop.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

I’ve seen some of that chatter, I’m excited about it. I mean, one, well, I think we’re all like, oh my gosh, a little horrified about the idea of a camera down there. But I’m sure they’ve sorted out the privacy issue. But I think, well, yeah, I am excited about what those could show us one day. 

Brett McKay:

Speaking of schedules, and let’s say someone they like, I don’t poop as often as I want. It makes me uncomfortable. I need to take a laxative. But they’re like, well, I don’t want to take a laxative because I don’t want to become dependent on it or something. Is there a problem with taking laxatives to have a bowel movement?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

So I have a few thoughts about this. One is that just to take a big step back, I don’t think there’s any problem with someone taking a laxative, especially because I know that for some people we can help and improve constipation with a lot of these different tweaks and lifestyle changes and a lot of the sort of things I lay out in my book, but there’s also a group of people who have conditions and diseases and changes in the neurons, the nerve cells of their colon, that some of these lifestyle changes are just not going to fix. Constipation can be a disease like any other disease, like high blood pressure, like diabetes, and there’s no shame in taking a medicine to treat that. And so I do feel that there’s often a lot of shame and a sense of self failure for when you take a laxative and if that’s what you need to be.

Well, I don’t think that that’s the case. Now, that said, there are a lot of ways to treat it that don’t require laxatives, but know that laxatives are safe. You should use them as directed by your doctor. And a lot of the earlier studies that kind of got people worried that you could become dependent on laxatives, you were somehow damaging your colon. Ultimately, that data was not very consistent or proved to be robustly true. So I worry a little bit less about that. But I will say there are a lot of ways that you can improve your bowel habits and become less constipated just by changing things about what you’re eating and what you’re doing, and even the position of how you’re sitting on the toilet. I mean, it’s very common that people don’t want to take medicines, but you can take things as natural as like kiwis, right?

In our grandparents’ times, people were taking prunes and prunes are incredibly effective. But I have never successfully convinced a college student to take prunes. It’s one of those things that people just don’t reach for anymore these days. But kiwis have been shown in multiple randomized control trials, two kiwis a day that they are as effective as prunes, but they also don’t cause bloating. A lot of these fiber supplements and prunes can cause, kiwis don’t seem to do that. So it’s a pretty simple fix that’s relatively effective all things considered. And it’s not really a laxative, it’s actually just something that’s high fiber, got a lot of nutrients, and is good for you in other ways.

Brett McKay:

I like prunes. I’m a prune booster.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

You’re pro prune.

Brett McKay:

I’m pro prune. I mean, it’s a dried plum. What’s not to like.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

I think they’re fantastic. And I’m sure you’ve noticed they’re very good at their job.

Brett McKay:

Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. You mentioned something that I thought was interesting. I want to talk about, say if you’re having problems getting your poop out, you’re constipated or it’s a struggle, the position. So I think you might’ve seen these things on Instagram, the Squatty Potty. Is there anything to that, does that actually help?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, so this is an interesting thing that we’ve done to ourselves as a mankind. We thousands and thousand of years ago, I mean they have found these upright chair like potties back in the Roman Empire, but well before that, we were just squatting. All of us squat in our most comfortable, natural way to poop. And we’ve trained ourselves out of that. But I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, and if you ever go to a daycare and you see a bunch of kids in diapers, waddling around, they all pop the deepest squat when they are pooping, they don’t go sit in a chair and poop in their diaper. They squat. And that’s because that’s the easiest, most natural way to have a bowel movement. And here’s why we talked about the pelvic floor, and there’s so many muscles that make up the pelvic floor. One of the muscles there is called the puborectalis muscle.

And if you think about your colon, like a long tube, this puborectalis muscle is like this sling that goes across the tube and chokes it closed. It’s almost like your body stepping on its own hose. And it’s like that when we’re just sitting around in our chairs at a desk at work, for example. And that’s kind of a good thing. It’s nice to have that little extra closure of that door so that there’s nothing leaking out. There’s no pressure, but you don’t want that door to be closed. You don’t want there to be a kink in that hose when you’re trying to poop. And that’s how we poop though when we sit at this 90 degree angle. Well, it turns out that if we try to recreate a little bit more of those dynamics of squatting, and we don’t have to actually squat, because I recognize obviously nobody wants to do that, but if you just raise your knees above the level of your waist, everybody will poop more easily. They’ve done these studies that show that, yeah, people who identify as having who’ve been diagnosed with pelvic floor dysfunction identify as constipated. They poop better when they do that. But even healthy people who think that they poop just fine. Studies have shown that when you raise your knees up, even if you think you’re already doing really well, you would be amazed at how much better you do.

Brett McKay:

That’s awesome. So bring your feet up with the stool. I’m a fan of the Squatty Potty. Speaking of the scheduling, there’s this famous bit in 30 Rock, the television show where Liz Lemon talks about every time she walks into a Barnes and Noble, she has to poop. And I’m like, that happens to me. I don’t know how many times, I mean, I’ve pooped in Barnes and Noble several times. As soon as I walked through those doors, I’m like, I got to poop.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What’s going on there? Why do you have to poop when you go to Barnes and Noble?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, you are not alone. That is such a thing. And it’s funny, it’s Barnes and Nobles. For some people it’s like the Target. I think the Target is a big one for a lot of people. And it’s been described, I think it was back in the 1980s, it was described in the Japanese literature. What is it about bookstores that make people poop? And there are a lot of theories about this, and I’ll give you mine. I mentioned earlier that your colon is this creature of habit. And the interesting thing about your colon is that it can be trained to respond and react to external cues, cues in your environment that will start contractions and start things to change. And if you go way back in time to remember Ivan Pavlov, the scientists we all learned about in middle school, who used to ring a bell and then the dogs would come and start salivating because when he rang the bell, he brought food in.

But eventually he would start ringing the bell and not bring food in. There would be no, they wouldn’t see that there was food, but they’d start salivating anyway. And that idea tells us that just something about our environment that we’ve associated once with a good poop or a good moment in our digestive history can start to trigger those same cues and those same movements again when we start to build that into a pattern. So I think what happens is, one, in order to poop, you have to feel relaxed. That is a fundamental truth about pooping because your sphincter has to relax at that final part. And I think bookstores put people in that relaxed place, and a lot of people actually find that they have to read in order to have a bowel movement. We can talk a little bit more about that, but just a quick light read, it’s just distracting enough.

It gets things moving and it helps them feel good about it. And I think for some people, I’ve heard this, it’s the smell of the pages. Something about it triggers disassociation. And maybe you go poop once in a Barnes and Noble. Now the second time you walk in, now you smell the same pages, you feel relaxed and happy. It was a pleasant experience last time. So you go again, and now you’ve ingrained this pattern and it keeps happening. And now you’ve got this whole sensory experience every time you walk into a bookstore that it’s like a safe space and it’s pleasant, and you go. And I think that’s how we build habits. And I also think that’s what happens in the target. You go in there, you pick up your coffee, you’re by yourself, you’re having a nice walk around, and it feels safe, and it feels lovely. And then you have a nice bowel movement. That’s my theory.

Brett McKay:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think there might be something to that. And if you’re going to read in Barnes and Noble, leave the books on the shelf.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, don’t bring the merchandise in.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, no merchandise. They have a sign that says, don’t do that.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

They know.

Brett McKay:

Right. Well, let’s talk about reading on the toilet. A lot of people do this. When I was growing up, you didn’t have smartphones. And so I would read the back of my deodorant. I read about tampons, my sister’s tampons were there and be like, what’s going on? Because it’s the only thing there. 

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

You learned so much. 

Brett McKay:

I learned so much while I was on the toilet. But a lot of people these days, they take their smartphones in there and they’re on there for a long time. Why is that a problem?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, yeah. I was like, I would learn all 30 weird ingredients on the back of the air freshener. I would read the far side comics. People used to have these little discreet bathroom readers that were just the kind of reading material that could not actually suck you in toilet books. It would be toilet books, and it would be a quick read just to distract your mind for a few minutes. It would be like last week, sports section of the newspaper, whatever it was, you do it, you’d relax, you get the jet and you’d move on. Today, you never see those little bathroom bookshelves anymore. Nobody has that because we’re all bringing our smartphones in. And the problem is that just like we’ve learned in other spheres, like when we’re trying to go to sleep or when we’re trying to have some social connection at the dinner table, the smartphones distract us and really hijack our brains to keep us fully engaged with whatever app we’re on.

The same thing happens in the bathroom. And so we did this study in my laboratory two years ago where we asked people who were coming in for their screening colonoscopy, all about their bowel habits and whether they used their smartphone on the toilet. And then we looked to see when we did their colonoscopies, whether they had hemorrhoids or not. And it turns out that one, yes, all of us are bringing our smartphones in two thirds of the people who we interviewed were bringing their smartphones into the bathroom. But the ones who did, they were 46% more likely to have hemorrhoids, so yikes. And then two, they were five times as likely to be spending more than five minutes at a time in the bathroom just bringing your smartphone in. And that was after controlling and taking to account how constipated they were or how much they strained those things were actually, there were no differences between the smartphone users and not.

So really what we think is the problem is the time, the amount of time you spend there sitting on this open bowl with no pelvic floor support, hemorrhoids are just these cushions of veins. And those veins eventually start to passively fill with blood. And when they become engorged, they pop out. That’s when we call them hemorrhoids, and that’s when we say they’re uncomfortable and painful. But if you sit there like that, it’s not going to happen after just doing it for one time. But if that’s your pattern, you do that every day for weeks to years, eventually we think that connective tissue around them weakens and you get a problem. So that’s why we tell people, one, bring back the old fashioned bathroom reader. Throw in that weird old comic book that you actually can only read one page of before you have to move on, or just set a two TikTok limit. But sometimes I go into these public bathrooms at work and I’ll hear somebody watching an episode of the Pitt, that happened to me last week, and I was like, first of all, I know what episode you’re on, and this is not the place. Just pull your pants up and go watch it at your desk. You don’t have to do this in the current compromised position that you’re in.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so you limit your time on the toilet unless you want hemorrhoids and hemorrhoids aren’t fine.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Exactly. No, indeed.

Brett McKay:

Speaking of going to the bathroom in public, a lot of people have problems with that. And some people we talked about earlier, they feel relaxed enough to poop at Target, but some people don’t feel comfortable pooping in a public bathroom. But as you said earlier, if you fill in that urge, you should probably go if you don’t want to get constipated. So how do you get over that? I don’t know, reluctance to go to the bathroom in public?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, it’s a lot of strategizing, but I do feel really strongly about this that you should go when your body tells you it’s time to go, because you’re going to make it harder on yourself and you’re going to strain harder later if you don’t respond. And so one, I think, and this is something that medical doctors are just surprisingly very good at, you should identify well in advance, do a reconnaissance mission. What are the safest bathrooms in your building? What is the safest bathroom? If it’s not in your building, in the cafe next door or at the Barnes and Nobles nearby, if you’re out in public, find what the safe quiet bathroom is well in advance. And then don’t share that secret with anyone. Keep it to yourself. But if you’re in a situation where you are just caught with whatever bathroom is on hand, and there’s lots of people there, I actually sometimes tell people, put some headphones in and just tune out.

Do a noise canceling thing, or play some nice music so that you’re not distracted and worried and thinking about what everyone else is doing. And you’re so worried that everyone’s thinking about you and they’re listening for any sound you might be making. And once you just tune them out and put the headphones in, it can really help you just focus on the moment at hand because your goal is to just get in and out too. And this actually goes two ways. If you’re somebody who’s sitting in a stall and since somebody else comes in next to you and has to go and you’re just sitting there on TikTok, you have to be a good citizen and pull your pants up and get out of there. Don’t keep scrolling because you have to do unto others as you’d like to be treated yourself. And I guess the other thing I tell people to do is you can make a little bit of white noise if you need to, if you really feel like you have to. You can shake the toilet paper holder, you can play some alarm ringtone on your cell phone and something to distract yourself and distract everybody else. If you really feel like you want to.

Brett McKay:

Actually, I don’t mind going to the bathroom in public. And when other people are taking care of business, I’m like, okay, you’re taking care of business. That’s what you’re supposed to do here. 

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, good for you.

Brett McKay:

You’re in the right spot. Besides pooping in public, one thing that can throw off your bowel movement schedule is traveling. I’ve got an issue with this. Whenever I travel, my intestines are just like, we’ve closed up shop.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What’s going on there?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah. This is very, very common when we travel, a lot of different factors conspire against our colon at the same time. So first off, your colon operates on a circadian rhythm. And let’s suppose you’re going to Europe for spring break, and suddenly your colon is waking up at 2:00 AM and it’s not actually time to go and it’s all thrown off. Or you start to sleep in late. You don’t wake up on time, you sleep in. Maybe you would usually drink coffee in the morning and take the dog for a walk. Now you’re not doing that. Now you’re lounging in bed and just transferring your body from bed to beach, and you’re not doing all those things that usually prime your body successfully for a bowel movement. And then second, I mean a lot of us, this is myself included, the best part of travel is the food.

Half the time we go, we want to try local cuisine, but when you go to Europe, and this is what I see with a lot of college students who are my patients, you should go eat the local food for sure. But you can’t eat six bowls of pasta in a row without any form of impunity. And I really think that people need to aggressively seek out fiber when they’re on vacation, more so than they would at home. If you eat a ton of fiber at home and then suddenly you eat half of that or less than half of that, your colon’s going to respond and react and it’s not going to be happy. And then lastly, I think people do get dehydrated on vacation. People are drinking more often like alcoholic beverages. They’re out walking around being tourists. They’re just not drinking as much water and all of these things together. And let’s not even forget about the fact that we’re stressed because we’re traveling with our families half the time, or maybe we have to share a bathroom with our cousins. All of these things come together at once, and it makes it really hard to stay regular.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So I think we’ve covered a lot here about poop. Let’s say we’ve taken care of business. There’s the wiping part, but you make the case for the bidet.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Oh yeah.

Brett McKay:

Why do you think everyone should get a bidet?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

I love a bidet. And you’ll never meet somebody who has a bidet who feels like just medium about it.

Yeah. We got a bidet a couple years ago, and I’m like, everyone should have this. What have we been doing in the United States that we haven’t had this?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Exactly. You feel like you’re born again. It’s like you want to make sure everybody knows about this. You make people feel bad if they haven’t seen the light. That’s what a bidet does to you. It’s obnoxious. But bidets are so wonderful. And the weird thing is, and I talk about this all the time, and normally the pushback I get from Americans who haven’t tried them before is, this is one, this is really weird. Why would I want anything touching me back there? And first of all, obviously bidet are for external use only, but it’s not any weirder. If you take a step back, wiping is the weirdest thing we can do. Right. I mentioned I had a 2-year-old, if I’m changing his diaper when he was a baby and I got a little poop on my hand, this happens. The last thing I would do is just wipe that poop off my hand with a paper towel and then just go about my day as normal.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. The analogy I’ve heard is if you’ve out in the garden working, you got mud on your arm, you wouldn’t get a paper towel and just rub the mud because it wouldn’t come off. You would put it underneath the sink. 

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah. You got to get some water on that. And yet, for some reason, this absolute most delicate part of our body, I think this part is underappreciated. That area is that skin is actually quite delicate. I think. We think it must be so sturdy standing up against yucky poop, but actually it’s really soft and delicate and it can tear quite easily. A bidet is gentle, clean, hygienic. And I found a lot of people who don’t even realize they’re the kind that would benefit from it. I tell people who I treat, a lot of patients who have Parkinson’s disease or trouble moving, they love bidets because they don’t have to worry about balancing and reaching back there. Bidet just takes care of that. But actually everyone would benefit from it. Think about women who are on their periods. A bidet is so delightful because you have a lot going on at once. Half the time when you’re postpartum, a bidet is lovely because you want to be very gentle. People who have hemorrhoids, people who have fissures, people who just have really hairy bums. People feel like just wiping and it doesn’t really get everything out. When you have a lot of hair back there, a bidet solves all of this for you.

Brett McKay:

Yeah no more dingle berries.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

And then you can get the kind with the heated seats and stuff. 

Brett McKay:

Oh yeah, that’s what we have. And then it’s got a fan. So after you’re done, it dries your butt.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Just drive full service.

Brett McKay:

And they’re affordable. They’re not that expensive, and they’re easy to install. You don’t have to get a separate bidet that you put next to your toilet. It’s an attachment right on your toilet.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

And let’s just emphasize it’s an attachment that runs through your clean water supply. This is a common concern. Are you just splashing dirty water back at you? Absolutely not. This is splashing clean water. It goes to your clean water supply. There’s no risk of weird back splash.

Brett McKay:

And then some people, if they don’t go bidet, they’ll all just use the wipes like adult diaper wipes essentially. Those are nice, but the problem is you’re not supposed to flush ’em down the toilet.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Exactly. Even the ones that say flushable, which a lot of them do, you actually can damage your pipes, and they’re not actually as degradable as we’d like. So if you’re starting to throw those in, the little can next to your commode. Eventually when those build up, you’re like, why didn’t I just get a bidet? That’s not pleasant either.

Brett McKay:

It’s interesting the cultural differences about wiping. So I lived in Mexico for two years when I was in my twenties, and I remember when I first got there and I was living with some Mexicans, a lot of them don’t flush the toilet paper. They’d have a waste basket and they just wipe and put it in the trash. I’m like, that’s interesting. So I had to start doing that. It was kind of weird for two years to wipe and then throw it away. It was weird. 

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

I saw that a lot in Europe too, where there was no bidets in Morocco when I was traveling. And I think it’s a plumbing issue. The pipes were really old, and you have to be really careful. But good God, what if ever there was a sign to get a bidet. 

Brett McKay:

But if you do have to wipe, you suggest not to wipe, but to blot.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Yeah, I’m a blotter or a dabber. I like to dab. And again, that’s because I see people in my line of work. People are often prepping for colonoscopies or they have some condition where they have diarrhea and they’re constantly wiping — that area just gets inflamed and red and unhappy very, very quickly. If you’re doing a lot of wiping just dab, you don’t need to go overly aggressive. Just add, because that skin is so, so delicate.

Brett McKay:

So speaking to this pliability of the three of pooping, making our poops easy to get out, what can we eat for optimal poop health?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Well, there’s three layers of what I tell people to do. So the first one is eat more fiber. And actually, if I could do nothing else, that’s one, two, and three, because we are all struggling, I’m actually delighted that you hit 60 grams for men under 50. It’s like 38 grams. For women, it’s 25, and a lot of us just aren’t meeting that. So if you can do that by any means necessary, even if that’s a fiber supplement, I would chalk that as a win. But the second sort of thing that has been shown, if you’re doing that and you’re ready for the 102 level course, the second thing that’s really been shown to help with your gut microbiome, so those are the trillions of microbes living in your colon and their genetic material is to have a diversity of plant-based sources in your diet every week.

And that contributes to the diversity of those microbes. And you want that. That’s a marker of good health and of a healthy microbiome is the different numbers of species in there. And those microbes just remember, they’re not just sitting there. They’re not passive actors in your colon. They’re taking what you’re feeding them and fermenting it and creating these new compounds, which sometimes are called postbiotics, but they’re like things like short chain fatty acids that get absorbed into the bloodstream and go to other parts of your body. So it is really important what you feed them and how you think about them. So eating a diversity of plants is the second thing that I tell people to try to aim to do. So meaning don’t eat the same routine thing every single day for lunch every single day for dinner. Start to diversify that. But then three, and this is I think the hardest one, the 103 level course is to start incorporating fermented foods into your diet.

This is the thing that every gastroenterologist loves to preach about. But there have been some really powerful studies showing how even two groups of people both eating a high fiber diet, when one of them adds fermented foods, their microbes produce even more anti-inflammatory compounds. And you can measure those in the blood. And so fermented foods are kind of hard sometimes. They’re not necessarily the obvious things that we think of in a typical American diet, but you can get them through just Greek yogurt, which is the most common thing that I usually eat and incorporate into my diet every day because it’s very filling. It makes a great breakfast. I eat it that way. But it’s also stuff like kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, they’re even present to some extent in sourdough bread or soy sauce. They’re there. So the more you can incorporate and start getting in the habit of throwing in fermented foods into your diet, that’ll give you even that extra boost.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, my morning, my diet in the morning is like my colon morning, so the morning I have eggs with these fiber wraps. That’s where I get a lot of the fibers, these fiber wraps. And then I have a mid-morning meal where I’ll have oatmeal, or it could be like a high fiber cereal, and then I’ll put some Greek yogurt in there and then some blueberries. And then I also eat some either sauerkraut or kimchi with my eggs first thing in the morning.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Oh, wow. I love that. That’s like a perfect breakfast. You’ve got all of the components in there.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, Trisha, this has been an amazing conversation. I’ve been doing this for 17 years. I never thought I’d have a podcast about poop, but I did. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Well, they can get the book, You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong. Anywhere that they get books and they can follow me on Instagram.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Dr. Trisha Pasricha, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha:

Thanks, Brett. This was so much fun.

Brett McKay:

My guest today is Dr. Trisha Pasricha, the author of You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about our work at our website, www.trishapasricha.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/poop, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I’ve been writing about testosterone on this site for over a decade because testosterone is an important part of a man’s overall health and wellness. It helps with strength and muscle mass, strengthens your bones, improves your sexual health, and boosts your mood.

You’ll find a lot of information out there on the interwebs about how to increase your testosterone naturally. Cold showers, taking testosterone-boosting supplements, and even exposing your balls to red light.

But after talking to experts on the podcast about testosterone and reading a ton of research on the topic, the conclusion I’ve come to is this: hormone health comes down to consistently doing the boring stuff.

Several years ago, I spoke with fitness coach Vic Verdier on the podcast about how men can combat the fall-off in vitality that can come with aging, including the natural decline in testosterone. His answer was taking care of the fundamentals.

Vic uses an acronym he calls SEEDS to capture the basics of what you need to do to keep your T-levels healthy. It stands for Sleep, Exercise, Environment, Diet, and Stress.

Let’s talk about each of the testosterone-improving components of the SEEDS framework:

Sleep

A large portion of daily testosterone production happens during sleep. So if your sleep consistently sucks, your testosterone drops. When researchers at the University of Chicago restricted young men to five hours of sleep a night for one week, their testosterone levels fell 10-15%. Aim for 6.5 to 9 hours a night.

If you’re looking for ways you can improve your sleep, check out these AoM articles and podcast episodes:

• What Every Man Should Know About Sleep
• 22 Ways to Get a Better Night’s Sleep
• 45 Tips — That You Haven’t Heard a Million Times Before — to Improve Your Sleep
• What to Do When You Can’t Sleep
• How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less
• The Importance of Building Your Daily Sleep Pressure
• Podcast #661: Get Better Sleep by Stressing About It Less
• Podcast #1,055: Sleep Like a Caveman

Exercise

Exercise helps to boost testosterone by increasing muscle mass and decreasing body fat. Carrying around too much body fat isn’t good for T because body fat converts testosterone into estrogen; the less fat we store, the more T we have.

Two forms of exercise are particularly helpful for increasing testosterone. The first is lifting heavy weights with compound lifts that target large muscle groups, such as the squat, deadlift, and shoulder press, and taking adequate rest between sets. The second is HIIT or “High Intensity Interval Training,” which calls for short, intense bursts of effort, followed by periods of less-intense recovery.

But beyond regimented exercise, Vic recommends just staying active throughout the day. Your body wasn’t designed to do 45 minutes of structured exercise while being parked in a chair for the other 15 waking hours. Walk. Do yard work. Play catch with your kids. All those little “movement snacks” can keep your body running like a finely tuned machine, including the parts that manage hormones.

Environment 

Vic’s specific point here is about sunshine and vitamin D, which is closely linked to testosterone production. If you’re spending most of your waking hours under fluorescent lights and only seeing the sun through your windshield on the commute, you’re probably falling short. So get outside more. Eat lunch in the sun. Take your phone calls on a walk. If you live somewhere that gets dark for months during the winter, use some tactics to get more sun during this cold and dreary season. It may be worth supplementing with vitamin D3. But actual sunlight on your skin is the goal.

Besides helping with vitamin D production, getting outside can also help manage stress, which, as we’ll see in a second, is another important factor in hormone health.

Another factor to think about when it comes to your environment and healthy testosterone levels is to make sure you’re not bathing in T-killing chemicals. Pesticides and industrial chemicals can dampen testosterone (and can cause cancer), so definitely limit your exposure to that stuff. Wash produce thoroughly, eat/drink from glass or stainless steel containers when possible, and limit use of products with heavy chemical fragrances or pesticides around the home.

You also want to reduce your exposure to xenoestrogens that are found in a lot of consumer products. Xenoestrogen is a chemical that imitates estrogen in the human body. When men are exposed to too much of this estrogen-imitating chemical, T levels can drop. The problem is xenoestrogen is freaking everywhere — plastics, shampoos, gasoline, cows, toothpaste. You name it, and there’s a good chance there’s xenoestrogen in it. I wouldn’t spend too much mental bandwidth trying to buy products that are completely xenoestrogen-free. Just don’t microwave your food in plastic containers and don’t lick your CVS receipts, and you’ll probably be fine.

Diet 

You don’t need to do any special T-boosting diets like eating Ron Swanson amounts of eggs or consuming three Brazil nuts before you go to bed because the selenium will boost testosterone production while you sleep.

Just eat a balanced and varied diet. Get enough protein. Get enough carbs to fuel workouts. Get a moderate amount of fat for hormone health. Research suggests that about 20% to 40% of your calories should come from fat for healthy testosterone levels. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables to get the micronutrients your body needs for hormones. If your diet is solid, you’ll probably have no reason to supplement.

Diet can also help with fat loss, which will help reduce estrogen and increase T. For help with nutrition, check out these articles and podcast episodes:

• How I Used the AoM Podcast to Lose 20 Pounds in 3 Months
• How to Eat What You Want and Still Lose Weight
• Podcast #1,011: Lose Weight and Keep It Off With Flexible Dieting
• Podcast #721: The Psychology of Effective Weight Loss
• Podcast #636: Why You Overeat and What to Do About It
• Podcast #475: How to Lose Weight, and Keep It Off Forever

Stress

Cortisol and testosterone compete for resources in your body. When cortisol is jacked up all the time from work, doomscrolling, or a schedule crammed too full, testosterone suffers. I think managing stress is particularly important for guys in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who are running hard and wondering why they feel depleted. Vic’s prescription is to build a life with some margin. Give yourself some time to chill the heck out. Take up a hobby. Become a cinephile. Download the Headspace app and meditate if you have to. Getting better sleep will also help with stress, so make that a priority.

None of these are exotic interventions for boosting T-levels. They don’t require a lot of time or money or exposing your balls to red light. Do them consistently, and your hormone health should be fine.

But…

If you’re doing all of this consistently and you still have symptoms of low T (low energy, brain fog, declining strength, low libido, low motivation), get your levels checked and talk to a doctor about whether testosterone replacement therapy makes sense. But make it the last option, not the first. Get the basics right and your body will usually handle the rest.

More testosterone-related AoM podcast episodes:

• Podcast #893: Optimize Your Testosterone
• Podcast #761: How Testosterone Makes Men, Men

For more tips on maintaining your edge as you age, listen to our whole podcast with Vic Verdier:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Cold exposure has gotten a lot of attention the past few years, with people dunking themselves in ice baths for the sake of their health and well-being. But, good news here, exposing yourself to heat by sitting in the sauna or even a hot tub, might actually be even better for you, not to mention more pleasant.

In his new book, Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, Bill Gifford unpacks the dichotomy of heat: how it can be both a danger and a healer. In the first part of our conversation, we dive into that former side, discussing what happens when your core temperature gets too high, why some people handle the stress of hot temperatures better than others, and how heat tolerance can actually be trained. We then talk about the advantages of heat exposure over cold exposure, and the benefits of heat for both body and mind, including how it can boost athletic performance and heart health, and may even be an effective treatment for depression. We also talk about how to get the most out of your sauna sessions and how Bill and I like to sauna.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: How to Sauna — All the FAQs
• AoM Article: How Saunas Can Help Save Your Body, Mind, and Spirit
• AoM Podcast #585: Inflammation, Saunas, and the New Science of Depression
• AoM Podcast #724: The Strange Science of Sweat
• Study reviewing the health benefits of “sauna bathing”
• Hotter’n Hell Hundred bike race

Connect with Bill Gifford

• Bill on IG
• Bill on X

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Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Cold exposure has gotten a lot of attention in the past few years with people dunking themselves in ice baths for the sake of their health and wellbeing. But good news here, exposing yourself to heat by sitting in the sauna or even a hot tub might actually be even better for you, not to mention more pleasant. In his new book, Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, Bill Gifford unpacks the dichotomy of heat. How can it both be a danger and a healer? In the first part of our conversation, we dive into that former side, discussing what happens when your core temperature gets too high, why some people handle the stress of hot temperatures better than others, and how heat tolerance can actually be trained. We then talk about the advantages of heat exposure over cold exposure and the benefits of heat for both body and mind, including how it can boost athletic performance and heart health. It may even be an effective treatment for depression. We also talk about how to get the most out of your sauna sessions and how Bill and I like to sauna. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/heat. All right, Bill Gifford, welcome to the show.

Bill Gifford:

Great to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out called Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, and you take a deep dive into the research about heat and what it does to our bodies, both the good things and the bad things. You start out the book talking about how a bike race in Wichita Falls, Texas in the middle of August, led you to take this deep dive. What was going on there?

Bill Gifford:

Well, it sounds like a terrible idea, right? Riding your bike a hundred miles at a hundred degrees. I like to have a goal or a challenge that sort of then guides me and motivates my training, keeps me accountable, keeps me in shape. And I picked this one for some reason, I think because I’d always thought that I wasn’t good in the heat and that I didn’t do well in the heat. Back when I was a mountain bike racer in my thirties, twenties, and thirties, I always felt like heat was my kryptonite. So I wanted to kind of test that.

Brett McKay:

And so yeah, for those who aren’t familiar, this race, it’s pretty famous. It’s been going on for a couple decades. It’s a hundred miles and it’s again, in Wichita Falls, Texas. If you haven’t been there, it is west Texas. It is really hot in August and I mean people do get heat sickness and some people have actually died during this race because of the heat,

Bill Gifford:

A handful, and the heat is kind of the point. And weirdly you’d think, well, okay, nobody would sign up for this thing, but 10,000 people come and do it some years. It’s wild. And the year I did it, 2023, this, they call it a heat dome. So it was a super hot summer, a hundred degrees or more, pretty much all summer long. And then the day we did the ride got up to about 107 Fahrenheit. It was brutal. Frankly, I was surprised that I made it. And we can talk more about why.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things you do in this book is you talk about the research you did to prep for this race to see, well, what can I do so I don’t get heat sickness so I don’t die? And you talk about in the book, the very first thing you note is that heat can either kill us or it can help us. And let’s talk about how heat can kill us first. How hot is too hot for humans? Do we know that?

Bill Gifford:

We don’t really know. And it kind of depends. About 15 years ago, some climate researchers theorized that there was a theoretical upper limit past which humans could no longer cool themselves down. And it turns out that people were actually already getting into trouble at much lower temperatures. So for example, when there are heat waves in Europe, it’ll be like 90 degrees and that to you, you live in Oklahoma or to me in Salt Lake City, that seems like a relatively nice day in the summer, not too hot. So heat tolerance is very variable depending on a lot of different factors. But the interesting thing that I learned is that it can be trained, it can be altered. So it’s not something that’s kind of set in stone.

Brett McKay:

And I mean, you talk about people in India, kind of a contrast. There’s people in England where it’s like 90 degrees and they’re like, oh my gosh, we’re dying. People in India, they’re living in this sweltering, it’s super hot, super humid, and a lot of people do fine.

Bill Gifford:

I’m not saying it’s fun, but I did all kinds of crazy research for this. But I found one big study where they compare temperature and mortality rates across 400 different cities around the world, and they found that each city has an ideal temperature at which mortality is the lowest excess mortality. So it’s not too hot, not too cold. And by the way, many more people die from cold than from heat, 10 times as many, that was a stunning thing to learn because that’s not how heat is framed. So a city like Toronto, the ideal temperature or the minimum mortality temperature is like 66 Fahrenheit, and then for Tucson it’s like 86. So there’s differences basically. There’s differences in air conditioning, all that kind of thing. But I think a lot of it comes down to heat tolerance of these different populations.

Brett McKay:

Being used to it. What happens in our body whenever it does get too hot. It sounds like from the research you highlighted, it’s not so much the temperature outside our body that’s the problem. It’s our internal temperature – that’s what causes problems. So what happens when our internal temperature gets too high?

Bill Gifford:

We generate a tremendous amount of heat, internal heat, metabolic heat, just by being alive. And then when we do anything, like any activity, it’s almost like a car engine. Your car moves forward a little bit, but your engine is producing four times that much energy. So 80% of it is heat, like a waste product of heat. When somebody gets too hot, it is kind of gruesome. If you get to a certain point, you get into heat exhaustion territory, which is you feel wiped out, you feel confused, you feel kind of lethargic, you might pass out. So that’s heat exhaustion, not usually fatal. But then the next step is heat stroke, and that is what it sounds like. It’s a neurological situation. You can get aggressive, you can get confused, you can pass out, you can have a seizure. And as you’re unable to cool yourself off, as your temperature rises past 105, 106, 107, you get into a situation where your cell membranes don’t function as well, your cells kind of explode. You get into organ failure, especially the liver, and ultimately you die a horrible death. I mean, it is terrible. I’ve spoken to people who have had heat strokes. I’ve seen people having exertional heat strokes and it’s not pretty.

Brett McKay:

It’s scary. But the thing is, you can treat it. We know a lot more about heat stroke, thanks to research in the military is a big place where a lot of this research is coming out of as well as in athletics. So when someone gets heat stroke, how do you treat it?

Bill Gifford:

This is really important. If somebody is in that zone of elevated body temperature, confusion, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, you dunk them in a tub of ice water if you can. I mean, that’s the easiest that stops it in its tracks really. I went to a road race in Massachusetts, the Falmouth Road race seven mile run in August. It wasn’t particularly hot, but I sat in the medical tent with people from the Korey Stringer Institute, which is kind of devoted to this awareness of heat stroke and prevention of heat stroke. And we had runners coming in various stages of heat illness and we just threw them in the ice tub and they would come around, their body temperature would drop and they’d be okay. They’d walk out. Nobody needs to die of heat stroke. I think that’s the takeaway. 

Brett McKay:

And what’s interesting about heat stroke, it can come on, as you said, with this race that you went to when it doesn’t seem that hot outside. Yeah, suddenly, because the issue is, I mean, one of the reasons why we don’t keel over and die when it gets really hot is humans are a species that can cool ourselves really efficiently. We sweat a lot, but for sweat to work, it has to evaporate. That’s what cools you off. So you sweat and then as the water evaporates, it takes heat away from your body. But when you’re in humid conditions, you don’t get a lot of evaporation. So you can run a race when it’s like 80 degrees outside, but it’s really humid. You can get a heat stroke in that because your body can’t cool itself off.

Bill Gifford:

Right. Falmouth was 70 degrees, 70 degrees in like 90% humidity and that length, seven miles, six, seven miles. So it could be around an hour, 45 minutes or an hour intense effort, and your cooling system doesn’t have a chance to catch up. That’s why those events are actually more dangerous than a marathon. But our cooling system is incredible. It’s this incredible gift that I think is one of our fundamental human traits. I mean, it kind of fueled our rise to dominance really. 

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because it’s allowed us to basically migrate across the entire planet and live in just disparate climates. And then, I mean, you talk about this too. We’ve had the Born to Run guy. We’ve had Alex Hutchison on the podcast talking about why humans are so good at running. And one of the theories out there is that, well, we’re really good at persistence running. And so the idea is our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, they would just chase gazelles down and we could do it for a long time because we could sweat and keep ourselves cool. The gazelle couldn’t do that, and so it just eventually had to stop and cool off, and then that’s when we’d go in for the kill. 

Bill Gifford:

Right. So if you think about walking your dog on a hot day in the summer, I mean, you can easily outlast your dog, I’m sure, unless your dog is some kind of endurance monster, but your dog can only cool itself by panting and you’re sweating across your entire body, and it’s amazingly potent cooling. I mean, we have these sweat glands that basically just bring water to the surface of our skin and then it evaporates, and that takes off a tremendous amount of heat. Brilliant.

Brett McKay:

What’s interesting though is that, and you alluded to this earlier, is that you can take two people and put them in the same sweltering conditions and one person could be completely fine and another person could have a heat stroke. What’s going on there? Why the difference?

Bill Gifford:

Right, right. I mean, fundamentally it comes down to different levels of heat tolerance, and there could be other things going on, certain medications, antidepressants for example, it could be a stimulant anyway that plays into it. Somebody could be drunk or hungover, but basically people have different heat tolerance. And the interesting thing to me is that, like I said earlier, this heat tolerance can be trained, it can be modified. So I went to the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, and it’s named after a football player who had passed away due to a heat stroke, a Minnesota Vikings lineman and his family helped found this institute. It’s dedicated to basically studying heat in athletes and workers. And so I did a heat tolerance test. And so basically to do that, they put you in a heat chamber, basically a hot room or a large oven, which is what it felt like, heated it up to a hundred degrees, 40% humidity, put me on a bike and just had me pedal for an hour. And then they monitored my body temperature and watched that go up and up and up and somebody who’s heat tolerant, their body temperature will go up and then it will kind of plateau. If you’re not heat tolerant, it’ll just keep going up and then eventually you’ll get into trouble. So mine just kept going up. So they were like, okay, you flunked. 

Brett McKay:

Okay. So it’s trainable. You can become heat acclimated, and I think anyone who lives in a hot location during the summer has experienced this. Here in Oklahoma in the spring, it’s in the seventies, sixties, it’s pleasant. And then you have that first day that’s above 80 degrees and you’re like, oh, Jesus, this is unbearable. This is hot. And it’s because you lost your heat acclimation during the winter and the spring, and then by the end of August it’s 95, but it feels more bearable. You’ve gotten used to it.

Bill Gifford:

Exactly, exactly.

Brett McKay:

So what insights did you get from this research lab about what you can do to become heat acclimated? Are there protocols? Do we know how long it takes to get acclimated to the heat?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, so this sort of protocol actually dates back to the gold mines of South Africa a hundred years ago. The mine owners used to think that, okay, every black person is heat tolerant automatically. They live in Africa, turned out not to be the case and people died. So they came up with a heat testing protocol, and then people who were not heat tolerant, basically the cure or the protocol is deliberate heat exposure over time. And so they would have these miners go into a tent that’s like 95 degrees. They set up these tents in the hospital, heated them up, and these guys would just shovel rocks for an hour and they would do that four or five times, test them again. Then if they were okay, they could go work. So it takes four or five sessions of an hour of getting your body temperature up to a certain level.

For me, it was going out on my bike ride for a while, get my body temperature up to 101.5 and kind of stay there for an hour. So I did that. I did 10 times as I was training for the hotter and hell a hundred, and I went into the ride thinking, this is a bad idea. This is not going to go well. I was scared. And then I kind of got out there, it got hotter and hotter and hotter and I was fine. I felt great. I couldn’t believe it. Actually, I had built up this heat tolerance by deliberately working out in the heat.

Brett McKay:

So again, heat tolerance is trainable.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, I think I should make the point. I made sure to be safe and monitor my core temperature as I did this. So I had a little device called a core and it straps to a heart rate strap and it senses and calculates your core body temperature. So I knew I was never getting into the danger zone. So it’s really important for people who try this to be safe and not overdo it. And I think this also goes for what we’re going to talk about, which is more the sort of heat exposure by choice heat therapy, things like sauna.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Something else you talk about is that there are some athletes who are using heat acclimation or heat adaptation not only to prevent keeling over in a race or a game, but also just as a performance enhancer.

Bill Gifford:

So as events like the Tour de France or the Olympics get hotter and hotter, heat has started to become, and heat tolerance has started to become a huge factor. And so they’ve had sort of star athletes and race favorites coming into these events and just completely bonking. They were fit, but they weren’t heat tolerant and it’s two different things. And so athletes started training their heat tolerance and then they found out that heat training itself actually brings some performance benefits similar to altitude training. So your plasma volume increases, you have more hemoglobin, more red blood cells, more oxygen carrying capacity. After I did my heat adaptation after I did the hotter and hell, I went back to Korey Stringer and I did the heat test and it was like a piece of cake. I was high fiving the lab guys and smiling and it was dramatic and it was a dramatic performance enhancement.

Brett McKay:

So heat can be a performance enhancer and it can also have a lot of other benefits, and that’s what the thrust of this book is about. So heat, yes, it can be bad for you, it can kill you, but heat stroke is preventable. You can adapt to heat and heat can actually be a big positive for your body and brain. Today we don’t really experience a lot of temperature variations. We’ve got climate control. So you can go from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car. So let’s talk about this. What are some of the benefits of being exposed to hot temperatures?

Bill Gifford:

Well, I think cardiovascular is one side. If you’re in hotter conditions, your cardiovascular system has to work harder to keep you cool. There are these things called heat shock proteins at the kind of cellular level, they’re like little maintenance proteins or one scientist I spoke to called the mommy proteins, they kind of take care of other parts of your cell, other machines in your cell, they take care of your DNA. They kind of clean up age-related damage. So those get activated as you spend time in hot conditions. And I think it’s interesting that people, even though we live in this kind of comfort and I love sleeping in air conditioning, I’m not going to lie, but people gravitate towards things like temperature extremes, things like cold plunging and things like saunas. And I think we kind of crave that variation.

Brett McKay:

I mean, humans have been doing that throughout cultures and throughout time. So the Nordics have their sauna culture, but then other cultures have similar heating therapies that they do where they voluntarily expose themselves to heat. Russia has theirs, Japan has theirs in North America or the desert Southwest native Americans had sweat lodges. So yeah, I think there is this human need to experience extremes and temperature. It does something for bodies. So yeah, let’s dig more into these. This stuff is really interesting. So let’s talk about some of the benefits of heat exposure, voluntary heat exposure, you mentioned a few. It helps our heart health, and we know this because of some studies done on Nordic people who do sauna regularly,

Bill Gifford:

The Finnish, and this was sort of my gateway to this entire topic. I’d been because I’d written two books on longevity, I was aware of these really interesting studies from Finland where they looked at, it was really a sort of a broad heart health study. They were trying to figure out why Finnish guys were dying of heart attacks. And so they looked at a whole bunch of different lifestyle factors over decades. And so in 2015, this cardiologist and some colleagues came along and looked at the data and decided to compare sauna use and outcomes. And they found that the most frequent sauna users in this group had about half the rate or 40% the rate of heart attacks and half the rate of strokes and half the rate of mortality as the guys who used it once a week. Weirdly, they couldn’t find anybody in Finland who any of these guys who didn’t use sauna. So the baseline was once a week, so four to seven times a week did much better than once a week. It’s a huge finding. There’s no drug that does that. It’s a massive effect.

Brett McKay:

So what does the heat do? Why do we get that benefit to our cardiac system from heat exposure?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, it’s primarily, it’s like light exercise I think is the best way to describe it. Your heart rate goes up, your blood vessels expand, your blood pressure drops, so there’s sort of a mechanistic effect on your cardiovascular system. So that’s one, that’s the first level, but I think there’s more to it. I think it may have to do with the fact that you’re activating, and this is a guy who had worked in this lab in Finland. This is kind of what they were pursuing, sitting in the super hot sauna activates your sympathetic nervous system, stressful, it’s the fight or flight, and then when you get out that sympathetic nervous system withdraws. And so they suspect that some of the benefits may have to do with how it manipulates your autonomic nervous system, which I thought was pretty cool.

Brett McKay:

That is cool. You also highlight research how sauna use or any type of other voluntary heat exposure can improve liver and glucose health. What’s going on there?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, that’s a tough one. They did find that it appeared to improve insulin sensitivity, and they don’t know if that’s because it kind of sped up your heart rate’s going, your metabolism is speeding up. Perhaps it’s not clear,

Brett McKay:

But there is some sort of benefit. We don’t know the mechanism.

Bill Gifford:

And some of these healthy behaviors like sauna are kind of tied together. So it’s possible that somebody who’s using sauna more and maybe is healthier to begin with. We can’t discount that possibility. It’s a little tough to sit through a sauna, but it’s also possible that they’re doing sauna and they’re doing a little bit of exercise, they’re eating better or whatever. It’s hard to disentangle. They did find these finished researchers, they did parse that a little bit and they did find that the guys, and this was all men in this study originally, the guys who exercised and used sauna frequently had the biggest benefit. So they’re the ones that had the 50% drop in mortality, but the guys who didn’t exercise and just did sauna, they had about a 30% drop, so 30% effect. So that’s still pretty good. And that tells you that the heat does do something.

Brett McKay:

And then you also highlight research that there might be a potential connection between sauna use or hot tub use with our immune system.

Bill Gifford:

And hot tub use is just as effective by the way people love sauna and hot tubs aren’t as trendy now, but any kind of heat exposure, heat therapy, also infrared has been found to be effective. I think with the immune thing, that’s been something that has been researched actually for decades. And back in the day in the sixties, these German and Scandinavian researchers referred to it as, I think they called it hardening. So by doing the sauna and also the cold, which was part of it, people sort of toughened themselves up and were more resistant to infection. They missed fewer days of work and it’s not clear why.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. What about, I think a lot of people use sauna particularly because they, well, I go to the sauna, I’m going to sweat a lot, so I’m going to detoxify. Is there anything to this idea that sweating a lot detoxifies us?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, I’m going to say I’m going to make people upset and say probably not officially. Sort of mainstream medicine will tell you that the only way we detoxify through our kidneys, through our liver and not really through our skin. So if you’re sweating things out, you’re just kind of sweating out the liquid that’s in your cells, the liquid that’s in your blood plasma. So if there’s a little bit of alcohol from last night that’s going to come out, but it’s not like a primary method of detoxification. There have been some studies that suggest that maybe we do put out things like heavy metals, but those aren’t very good studies. I’ll put an asterisk by that and I’ll say the jury is still out. It hasn’t been well studied. It might be that heat exposure accelerates the detoxification that your kidneys and liver do. Perhaps that’s a possibility. Brian Johnson did sauna protocol for I think a couple months and then he tested levels of various toxins in his body and also microplastics and those dropped by a lot, but that’s an of one. And it’s not a placebo controlled study, randomized study, but he does have access to pretty good testing methods. So I’ll say the question’s still open.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, still open. So potentially we don’t know.

Bill Gifford:

Potentially it does make you feel clean and it is back to your immune point. It’s a pretty clean environment. Not a lot of germs can withstand 180 degree sauna. And in fact, old time Finnish people like I’ve met Finnish people who were born in a sauna, they would give birth there sterile. It was the most sterile room in the house.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. So you mentioned this idea of heat shock proteins. I’ve seen this research before. It’s like, oh, when you expose yourself to heat, you activate these heat shock proteins and that can be good for muscle recovery and strengthen muscle gains. Is there anything to that?

Bill Gifford:

Possibly, but I think it has more to do with cellular resilience and going back to our heat tolerance conversation, there is a military study where they exposed, I think mice to repeated intense heat stress, almost like putting the mice in a sauna again and again and again. They tested their heat shock protein levels and they were through the roof and they found that these mice were extremely resistant to heat stroke. So it’s a protective mechanism I think as far as muscle gains, I think the increased blood flow I think plays a bigger role and that’s why sauna I think is in my opinion, preferable as a recovery or as a post-workout tool to a cold plunge.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about cold plunges because those, that’s been the rage now, we’ll say the past five, 10 years, everyone’s cold plunging. You got the cold plunge bro, and talking about it, talking, how do you know someone guy cold plunges? Well, he’ll let you know that you cold plunges and there’s all these benefits that are touted, increases. Dopamine helps with muscle inflammation, reduces inflammation. But you talk about those benefits are probably overhyped and cold plunges actually might be hurting your gains.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, certainly. In terms of muscle growth, this has been pretty well studied and they’ve found that intense cold exposure slows down muscle protein synthesis. So after a workout, they actually did one crazy study where they had guys do legwork or subjects do legwork, and then they would put one leg in a warm basically leg container and the other leg in a really cold thing, and then they had them drink a special drink, blah, blah, blah, or they could see what was happening in each leg and the warm leg muscle protein synthesis was happening, cold leg, it wasn’t happening. So it tells you that you’re not getting the muscle gains. However, it may help with inflammation. It may increase dopamine, norepinephrine, all those things. It does that in the blood we’re not sure about in the brain. You have to kill the person to test that, so we haven’t done that. Also, it can give you, if you’re talking about jumping into a cold body of water, you’re getting into a territory where drowning is not impossible. If you suck in a big breath of water because of the shock of jumping in the cold, I mean that could be dangerous.

Brett McKay:

The cold plunges for after a workout, they’re like, well, it reduces inflammation. It’s like, well, if you strength train, your body needs inflammation for, that’s what causes your muscles to grow.

Bill Gifford:

Excellent point.

Brett McKay:

If you eliminate that inflammation, you’re just going to kill your gains, but you do highlight it could be useful. A cold plunge could be useful if you’re an endurance athlete. It can help with recovery. And it also just feels good going from the sauna to the cold plunge and back again, that can feel great and it’s okay to just do it, do the cold plunge and hot sauna together just for that. It feels good. But yeah, if you’re focused on building strength and muscle mass, maybe just stick to the sauna

Bill Gifford:

And you want to go in the cold plunge because you’ve built up all this heat in your body and sitting in a sauna, you’re hot. The idea of jumping in a lake superior sounds like the best thing. 40 degrees sounds like the best idea anybody ever had, and I’ve done it too. It’s just I think the science of cold is way behind the science of heat. But you made a great point about inflammation. Inflammation is not always bad, especially in the exercise context. Inflammation is part of what drives those adaptations, and it’s also a healing mechanism.

Brett McKay:

The other thing you point out too is when people do cold exposure, they probably get too cold. They get in a cold plunge that’s like 35 degrees when it really needs to be just like 50. I mean, it doesn’t have to be as cold as you think to get the benefits.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, yeah. This is competitive cold plunging who can do the coldest cold plunge for the longest, and obviously it’s more challenging. I think people like it because a mental challenge, but this is very satisfying to learn from some of the experts I talked to that actually the ideal temperature for the physiological benefits is really in the fifties.

Brett McKay:

I mean, after I read that research about how cold plunging blunts muscle protein synthesis, I stopped doing cold showers after workouts, but I still do cold showers. I don’t do it for any health benefits. I just do it sort of like an exercise in willpower. It’s like, all right, I know this is going to be hard. I don’t want to do this, but I’m going to do it anyways, so that’s why I do it.

Bill Gifford:

And it makes anything else, whatever else you have to do that day, seem easier. And so I’ll do a cold plunge. I’m kind of like, oh God, do I have to do this? I won’t do it alone. But if I’m at the sauna with my son, we like to have little cold plunge duels. It’s social.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s a great father-son bonding activity. Instead of playing catch, do some cold exposure. So going back to the heat exposure, getting the benefits of it, what temperature do you need to get to in a sauna and for how long do you need to expose yourself to that temperature to get the benefits we’ve been talking about?

Bill Gifford:

So this is interesting, those finished studies, they asked the subjects about how hot was their sauna, how long did they stay in, but it was just a one-time questionnaire, so it’s not super reliable. It did seem that the people who stayed in 20 minutes at above a hundred, I think 176 Fahrenheit did the best. I mean, having been to Finland, there aren’t any saunas that are cooler than 176. That’s on the cold end. I’m not sure we can definitively say that there is one protocol and certainly not one protocol for everybody. However, it does appear that a lot of the benefits that I’ve talked about and also some of the mental health benefits, so the heat adaptation, the heat shock proteins, those things, those happen when your core temperature gets up to 101.5 Fahrenheit. So I think that’s like 38 Celsius, so you have to get up to a certain core temperature. That’s kind of what it’s all about.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. And there are ways you had this device that measured your core temperature that doesn’t involve sticking up a probe up your butt. 

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, no rectal probe, no rectal probe, no Vaseline required, and I did endure the rectal probe a few times. It’s just a thing that they do. 

Brett McKay:

My sauna protocol, I have a sauna in my backyard and I like to do it. I get it up to 190 and I’m in there for 20 minutes.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, solid.

Brett McKay:

That’s what it is. And then if I have friends over for a sauna session, we want to talk, I’ll put the temperature lower and turn it more into a sweat lodge. So it’s like 120 and it allows us to talk for a long time, and then we just sweat a lot and then at the end we’ll crank it up and get it really hot and then jump into the pool.

Bill Gifford:

I think going back to our heat tolerance conversation, nobody should jump into 190 degree sauna for 20 minutes out the gate. Just pay attention to your sensations and pay attention to your body. I kind of go in for, I do 10 minutes at first, and then I kind of check in and like, okay, am I bored? Am I too hot? Am I not feeling it? Then I’ll get out, if not stay a little bit longer. I kind of stand past the point when I think about leaving, so I push that a little bit farther, and you have to make sure to give yourself enough recovery. Don’t just go out for two minutes and hop back in. You got to let yourself cool off.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I drink a lot of fluids after

Bill Gifford:

That’s key, and electrolytes, by the way. This is where most of us in our French fry filled American diets, we don’t really need a lot of extra electrolytes. We get plenty, but if you’re intensively sweating or if you’re doing hot yoga or the hotter and a hundred, yeah, you need some electrolytes too, as I found the hard way.

Brett McKay:

How’d you find out the hard way?

Bill Gifford:

Oh, I went to a sauna festival in Minnesota and I was doing saunas all day long and hanging out, and I had a couple beers and I wasn’t really paying attention to hydration or salt. And then the next day I woke up and I just kind of felt miserable and I felt achy. I’d run a marathon. I was just super beat up. And then I talked to somebody and they were like, oh yeah, did you have any electrolytes? Like, nope. 

Brett McKay:

Got to get those electrolytes. 

Bill Gifford:

I didn’t drink enough, didn’t have enough electrolytes.

Brett McKay:

And so you also mentioned earlier that you can get these benefits from heat using a traditional sauna, like a finished sauna that uses wood or an electric stove to heat things up, an infrared sauna, hot tub. You can get the benefits with any of these things. Yeah. So one of the interesting sections that you have in the book, you talk about the mental health benefits of heat exposure, and there’s some researchers who are using heat exposure as a potential treatment for depression. This is coming out of a lab run by a guy named Charles Raison. We’ve had him on the podcast before. Oh, have you? Okay. Yeah, that was episode number 585. This is a long time ago. So for those who haven’t heard that episode and don’t know about this research, what do we know about heat therapy as a treatment for depression?

Bill Gifford:

Well, Chuck is great. He’s a real sort of intellectual explorer and he looks at all kinds of things that might sound extreme or cookie. He’s done a lot with eastern traditions. So the heat piece of it is interesting. He was involved with a study, I think the first study was in Switzerland, and they put these severely depressed people into kind of a heating device. So basically like an infrared sauna that you lie down in. And they heated these people up to, again, 101.5 Fahrenheit, and they found that basically their depression symptoms were wiped out, cut in half or more in some cases, completely gone. So really potent effect against severe depression, which that really surprised me because you think of a heat wave and really hot weather and people can get kind of grumpy, but this appeared to have this powerful effect against depression.

Brett McKay:

Do they have any ideas of why that is?

Bill Gifford:

They have some theories. People who are depressed appear to have a difficult time regulating their body temperature. In general. They don’t sweat as much. Their body temperature is elevated. So there’s something going on with the whole thermal regulation system in these folks. But one theory that these folks are working with is that if you heat up your brain to a certain level that stimulates a brain region. I think it’s called the dorsal Rafe nucleus to start producing serotonin. So similar to what SSRI drug might do. So that’s one possible reason.

Brett McKay:

If I remember correctly, another theory that Charles put out there is that using the sauna, exposing yourself to heat, it is an acute stressor. It causes an acute amount of inflammation. It’s like exercise basically. And then it goes away, and then it goes away. It reduces inflammation. He says it’s sort of like hair of the dog. You give someone, I think depressed people, they have a lot of inflammation in their body and in their brain. So exposing yourself to an acute stressor, it helps dissipate inflammation in the long run.

Bill Gifford:

And exercise does the same thing. And exercise also has a potent antidepressant effect potentially for the same reason is … it spikes, and then afterwards it drops and it stays down.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

Bill Gifford:

Super interesting. 

Brett McKay:

And then you highlight this, and I think Charles talked about this in our interview. He says, this heat therapy for depression, it doesn’t work for everyone. And I think the reason is depression can be caused by all sorts of things. It’s not just because your body isn’t how to thermoregulate or you have inflammation. It could be other stuff. So if your depression is caused by something else, the heat exposure is not going to do anything for you.

Bill Gifford:

The way they discovered this is really interesting, or one way they discovered this, they found that they were experimenting with this microbe that they found in the soil in Uganda, and they were trying to use it to help build up people’s immunity to leprosy. And it gives you a slight fever, but a fever is kind of a healing mechanism. And they found that people who had been injected with this microbe were happier. They got happier really after having this slight fever. Kind of a crazy story.

Brett McKay:

And you talk about in the book, you’ve had dealt with a melancholic disposition throughout your life.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah that’s why I’m a writer.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, same.

Bill Gifford:

It’s required.

Brett McKay:

I’m an Eeyore too. Did heat therapy do anything for your melancholy?

Bill Gifford:

Oh, it was amazing. It’s actually why I started gravitating towards heat in the first place. I started going to the sauna in my gym, which was kind of dark. Not the best, but it was warm and comforting, and I felt good being in there and I, I was going through some difficult work stuff, and prior to that, sauna was not on my to-do list. And so I kind of took that. I was like, Hmm, I felt better. I wonder why. Then I came along and I met Chuck Raison and did a little bit of a dive into that research, and then I actually volunteered to be sort of a guinea pig in a study that he and his colleague Ashley Mason were doing in Colorado. And basically they stuck me in this infrared sauna lying in a hospital bed again with the rectal probe, but anything for science. So they heated me up for an hour and it was totally miserable, and I was like, why did I do this? But I was kind of bummed out. So we did this, and then I hopped in a cold plunge and I kind of went home to the hotel thinking, why the heck did I do that? But then the next day it was like the skies opened up and the angels were singing, and it was like, I hadn’t felt this good in months. I couldn’t believe it. It was euphoric. It was amazing.

Brett McKay:

That was the thing that drew me to sauna was the mental health benefits. I’d go there. I’d have this natural drive to go to the sauna whenever I was feeling really stressed out, and that’s why I started it. And if it helps my cardiac health, great. And if it helps heat shock proteins fantastic. But I do it primarily because it just makes me feel better mentally.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah. There’s something about it. And I do the same thing. I go to the sauna place kind of near my house and spend an hour going in and out, and then I’m just driving home and I don’t care. I like somebody cuts me off, don’t care. I can tackle the work things that I’ve been putting off. I’m just better to be around afterwards. It’s great.

Brett McKay:

So I think when a lot of Americans in particular talk about hitting the sauna or doing heat therapy, we typically talk about it as a biohacking tool. We’re like, I want to improve my heat shock proteins, and I want to improve my cardiac health, whatever. But you argue that taking this, it’s a really reductivist view of heat therapy can miss the bigger benefits of heat exposure. What can Americans learn from Nordic sonic culture and heat therapy about some of those intangible benefits of exposing yourself to the heat. 

Bill Gifford:

And those mechanistic benefits are real. But I think it comes down to how do you approach, how do you think about time? And so here we’re like everything we do has to have a purpose and a payoff. It has to have a concrete, okay, I’m doing this and I’m checking this box, and I’m taking down my blood pressure and I’m activating my heat shock proteins. I think in more traditional sauna cultures and heat bathing cultures, it’s really about taking time to, as one person told me to slow down. So you’re going to a third space, you’re not thinking about work, you’re not thinking about status. You’re not necessarily there for a concrete health benefit, but it’s just taking time for yourself or to be with your family or your friends and to do something that doesn’t necessarily need to be quantifiable or productive.

Brett McKay:

And those Nordic cultures like, it’s a social activity. 

Bill Gifford:

It’s social. Yeah. I mean, the benefits, I think the social benefits are tremendous, but I think if you’re doing it by yourself, it’s almost like a meditation. You’re just slowing down. You’re away from your phone, you’re away from work.

Brett McKay:

For me, I mostly sauna by myself, but when I’m in there, it’s like, no phones are allowed. … I’ve taken my phone into a sauna before and you’ll eventually get this warning saying, your phone’s too hot, take it out. But I just go in there and just close my eyes and just really relax and just don’t think about things. But I do think it’s an even more enjoyable experience when you can do it with friends.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, it’s nice. It’s a good little bonding thing. There’s something about it. We’re in this space that is kind of too hot and kind of slightly panicking, a little bit where it’s stressful, but you’re together. So it breaks down inhibitions, I find also. So in New York where people walk around with their guard up, these social saunas are hugely popular, and you go in and you talk to people. It’s crazy.

Brett McKay:

Well, yeah. You mentioned that in that study with the people about depression and sauna treatment, one of the things they noticed, they started talking. People just start talking and they’re just yapping. And you did the same thing. You just started yapping to this guy.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, I was just babbling like a madman.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. That’s really funny.

Bill Gifford:

And I’m not the chattiest person typically, but it somehow broke down those inhibitions.

Brett McKay:

What do your sauna sessions look like these days?

Bill Gifford:

So there’s a couple places in town that I go to. One place is super, super hot, and so I debate with the guy, I think your song is too hot. But anyway, the cold plunge is awesome. It’s clean, which is I think an important quality in a cold plunge, especially a public cold plunge. So yeah, it’s real basic, right?

Brett McKay:

One thing I noticed cold plunges, and I’ve been wary about doing public cold plunges, whenever I’ve done cold plunges, I have to pee you immediately. There’s some response. I think there’s some response in your body once you hit cold, you’re just like, I need to pee. So I couldn’t imagine doing a public cold plunge because the only thing I’m thinking is people probably just pee in the thing. 

Bill Gifford:

You just ruined it for me, I think. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I’m sorry. Okay. So you do the sauna, you do the cold plunge, and how often are you doing, doing this?

Bill Gifford:

Oh, I do once or twice a week at this point. So I’m like the control group in those finished studies, but it’s enough, and I go when I can take the time it takes. It’s like an hour. And so in fact, I’m going to try to go today and get my kid to go. He’s home from school. So that’s going to be the afternoon, and I go in the afternoon, I go at four. So I’m kind of done with any kind of productive writing I’ve had to do. So relaxing that I want to go to sleep afterwards.

Brett McKay:

For me, I have a sauna in my backyard. It’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. 

Bill Gifford:

That’s so great. 

Brett McKay:

It’s fantastic. You just go in. I go in after a workout for 20 minutes, but it’s awesome. I love it.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah. I feel like I should get one now, but I haven’t pulled the trigger, but I don’t necessarily want to always sit in there by myself. 

Brett McKay:

You like the social aspect of it. 

Bill Gifford:

So maybe that’s a trigger for inviting people over and having sauna days.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, inviting your friends. Well, if I’m ever in Salt Lake, I’ll hit you up. Well, we can do a sauna session.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay:

Bill, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, the book is called Hotwired, and I’m on Instagram and the site formerly known as Twitter at Bill Gifford. I’m also on things like Threads, so you can go there.

Brett McKay:

Well, Bill, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, Brett, thank you. Great questions.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Bill Gifford. He’s the author of the book, Hotwired. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Saunas are awesome, and we’ve previously covered the many mental and physical benefits of spending time in one.

If you’ve been thinking about getting more restorative, satisfying heat exposure in your life, today we cover all the questions you may have about making sauna-ing a regular ritual.

How to Choose a Sauna

Should I go Finnish or infrared?

Saunas fall into two types: Finnish or infrared. They both make you hot and sweaty, but do so in different ways. 

Finnish saunas. This is a traditional sauna. A Finnish sauna uses a heater (wood-burning or electric) to heat the air in a wood-paneled room or barrel. The air temperature in traditional Finnish saunas ranges from 160 to 220 degrees Fahrenheit, with a typical temp of 190-200. The superheated air is what heats your body through the process of conduction.

Most of the studies that have been done on the benefits of saunas were done using Finnish saunas. 

Infrared saunas. Instead of heating up the air in the room to heat up your body, infrared saunas use near and far thermal radiation waves to heat your body directly. Sort of like getting cooked in a microwave. That might sound questionable, but the waves are safe and won’t give you cancer or turn you into a mutant. Because infrared saunas can heat your body directly, they don’t have to get the room as hot as a Finnish sauna to get you all hot and sweaty. Infrared saunas don’t feel as hot as Finnish saunas, but you still get similar benefits.

The type of sauna you go with is a matter of personal preference and budget. Infrared saunas are more inexpensive, and require less energy and a smaller footprint (people put them in bedrooms/garages/basements) than Finnish saunas. If you also don’t like the feeling of super-hot air that you experience in a Finnish sauna, then infrared may be the right choice for you. 

If you’ve got the room and budget, and want the traditional sauna experience, then I would recommend the Finnish style as the way to go. I don’t think the benefits of sauna sessions come completely from the heat alone; it’s not like popping a supplement. Rather, I’d venture to say that its healthifying effect derives from an amalgamation of the heat itself, and the ritual of it. There’s something about the feel and smell of the wood, being able to throw water on the rocks to create a cloud of steam, and the hot, hot air. Feels good, man.

The other nice thing about Finnish saunas is they can be pretty large, and you can put them outside. My sauna from Almost Heaven can comfortably sit six grown men and resides in the backyard; it’s nice having a “third space” apart from the house, getting some fresh air as you walk to and from it, and being able to see a little nature outside its glass door.

Where can I find/buy a sauna?

Saunas are available at gyms, health clubs, and tanning salons.

If you’re interested in buying your own, you can get saunas direct from sauna manufacturers as well as on Amazon and even from Costco.

If you’re looking for a reasonably-priced Finnish sauna, check out Almost Heaven. As just mentioned, that’s where I got mine. Make sure to check their site regularly; they often have sales. 

How to Sauna

Precautions With Sauna

Before we get into the nitty gritty of sauna-ing, it’s worth emphasizing that the heat of a sauna acts as a physiological stressor, and you should take precautions before using one if you:

Have heart issues. As mentioned in our previous article, sauna sessions give your cardiovascular system a workout. If you have heart issues, talk to your doctor before using a sauna.

Take prescription medications. Certain medications don’t mix well with heat exposure. If you’re taking any prescription medications, talk to your doctor before using a sauna. 

Have certain skin conditions. Sauna-ing can be good for skin, as it increases blood flow and circulation, bringing more nutrients to the skin. But it can be bad for skin if you have certain conditions.

The hot air in a sauna can exacerbate skin problems like eczema and rosacea. For eczema sufferers, adding steam can mitigate that, and some claim that using an infrared sauna can actually help the condition.

While you might have heard that sauna-ing is good for acne, because it opens up your pores, the heat, steam, and resulting sweat can actually inflame those pores, and exacerbate breakouts, especially if you have a type of acne which involves inflammation, like cystic acne. If you’re prone to acne and still want to sauna, be sure to wash your face soon afterwards to cleanse it of residue.

Are concerned about your fertility. As explained in our article about male fertility, the reason why testicles reside outside the body is to keep them cool. Sperm counts decrease as the temperature increases. Sitting in a sauna warms up your testicles, resulting in decreased sperm counts and motility.

These effects aren’t permanent and are quickly reversible. You just have to stop using a sauna for a while. 

If you’re trying for kiddos, consider foregoing the sauna. Try a cold shower instead.

How hot should a sauna be?

Researchers haven’t determined a precise temperature and time for optimizing the benefits of sauna sessions, but you generally want them to be pretty hot and of a moderate length (more on that below).

Studies that have been done on the health-promoting effects of sauna sessions have often set the temperature for participants around 180-200 degrees Fahrenheit. My usual go-to sauna temperature is 210.

If I plan on having a long bull session with my dudes, I’ll start off with the temperature at 130 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s more like a sweat lodge experience than a sauna. Low and slow. When the night is done, we finish with 10-15 minutes with the sauna at 210 degrees.

For infrared saunas, shoot for the air to get heated to between 175 and 195 degrees.

How long should a sauna session last?

20-30 minutes is the traditional sauna length for Finnish saunas, and most of the studies cited in our previous article had participants sit in the sauna for at least 20 minutes. 

But the length of your session will really depend on the temperature you set: if it’s high, a shorter, 15-20 minute session will do the trick; if the temp is low, you can go much longer. On my sauna nights with friends, we’ve slowly, yet comfortably, cooked in the sauna at 130 degrees for 90 minutes. 

If you’re using an infrared sauna in that 175 to 195 degree range, 20 minutes is all you need to get hot and sweaty. 

You can divide up sauna sessions with cooling breaks. When my pool is open during spring, summer, and early fall, I intersperse my sauna sessions with jumps into the water. During the winter, I just step outside the sauna and walk around in the cold for a few minutes before getting back in.

With the duration of your sessions, the bottom line is really to just listen to your body: first you’ll feel warm, and then hot, and then hot and kind of uncomfortable (but in a satisfying way) . . . and then eventually you move beyond just kind of uncomfortable to feeling like, “Okay, this is too much, I’m done.” That’s the time to either take a break, cooling off before getting another dose of heat, or to just call it a session. Listen to your body!

How frequently should I sauna?

You could sauna every day if you wanted. 

But keep in mind that, again, sauna-ing is a stressor on your body. There’s a balance you have to walk with it. At the right dose, sauna sessions can help you recover from life and workouts. Too much though, and they can actually increase your fatigue. You can get the benefits of sauna-ing with just two 20-minute sessions a week. Experiment to see what works for you, and again, listen to your body; once you tune in, you can actually feel your body kind of “craving” a sauna session, or conversely, saying, “Now’s not the right time.”

When should I sauna?

You can sauna whenever you want, but if you have a fitness program you’re following, you’ll want to avoid doing the sauna right before a workout. Not to beat a dead horse here, but remember, heat is a stressor. Stressing your body with heat before you stress your body with exercise is a recipe for poor performance. If you exercise regularly, try to do your sauna sessions on your rest/recovery days or right after your workout. 

What should I do in a sauna?

I’ve seen people bring their phone into the sauna to listen to music or a podcast, but the heat isn’t good for your phone, and sauna sessions are an optimal time to disconnect from your tech and from all the annoying distractions of your life. Let the sauna be your sanctum sanctorum.

You might think about bringing a paperback into the sauna with you, but your focus/higher level thinking skills will diminish as your body heats up and your heart rate rises. Plus, your hands are going to get way too sweaty for holding a book.

You can do light stretches and bodyweight exercises if space allows. Your muscles will feel nice and limber and supple. Keep in mind though that your body is already being taxed by the heat, so any kind of movement will require much more exertion than usual; take it easy and listen to your body.

In general, I recommend simply doing in the sauna what traditional sauna-ers have long done: nothing. Just sit there. Or lie down if you have the room (you’ll find it’s hotter when you sit up though, as hot air rises). Let your mind go. Do some reflecting while your thinking is still sharp; meditate when your mind starts going blank. Just be.

What are some rules of sauna etiquette I should be aware of?

We have a whole article on this topic!

What should I do after I sauna?

During your sauna session, you’ll lose a lot of water through your sweat — up to four cups during a twenty-minute session! Be sure to rehydrate with plenty of water afterward. Supplement with electrolytes as needed.

You’ll be incredibly sweaty afterwards, so you’ll likely want to shower; a cold one will feel great (and be far more tolerable than usual)!

Be sure to listen to our podcast with Bill Gifford all about the hidden power of heat: 

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in February 2021.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There’s something about sunlight that really recharges you. If you don’t get enough of it, you feel very much like a potted plant that’s been kept too far from a window — you start to feel as though you’re physically and mentally drooping and wilting.

It’s not just in your head. Sunlight packs a potent cocktail of health benefits: it lowers blood pressure, fights inflammation, supports optimal testosterone levels, improves insulin sensitivity, strengthens immunity, and improves mood and sleep. These benefits don’t just come courtesy of the vitamin D production that sunlight triggers; some of them occur independently of it and are the products of sunlight itself.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get adequate sunlight during the winter months. The sun’s angle in the sky is lower, days are shorter and grayer, and UVB rays — the ones your skin needs to make vitamin D — often don’t penetrate the atmosphere enough for meaningful production in many northern latitudes.

Despite these challenges, winter doesn’t have to cut you off from the sun’s benefits entirely. By using the strategies below, you can still get meaningful exposure — even during the year’s darkest months.

Maximize the Moments of Sun You Do Get

Even if sometimes pale, winter does offer moments of sunlight. The trick is to capture these moments and maximize them.

Time it right. Aim for outdoor exposure around midday (roughly 10 a.m.–2 p.m.). That’s when the sun is highest and its light is most intense, giving you the biggest punch of bright light you’ll get all day.

Get 15–30 minutes when you can. In summer, you can often meet your sunlight needs with 15 minutes of exposure several times a week. In winter, because sunlight is weaker, you’ll want at least that much, and ideally even more, every day. If you can, head up to higher altitudes for a more potent dose.

Get active outside. Choose activities that get you outside — everything from walking the dog to shoveling snow counts — and try to deliberately engage in outdoor recreation like going snowshoeing on the weekend. Staying active outside will keep you warm as you soak in the rays, and movement has its own benefits for vitamin D metabolism, energy levels, and mood — so you’re getting triple value out of each minute of outdoor activity.

Sunbathers on a cold day at Coney Island

Expose as much skin as you can. What’s tough about getting sunlight in the winter is that not only are the rays weaker, but you’ve probably covered up your whole body to keep out the cold.

If the only skin you can expose is your face and hands, you can still get some exposure that way — even lying in a warm mummy sleeping bag with just your face exposed works. But bare more if it’s bearable. Consider wearing a very warm vest (keeping your core warm has a disproportionate effect on keeping the rest of your body warm) while wearing a short-sleeve shirt to expose your forearms. Especially consider doing your workout outside; it’s much easier to shed skin-covering layers once your body is warmed up from physical exertion.

Skip the sunscreen. Unless you’re going to be outside for a long time, will be up at higher altitudes, and/or are very concerned about sun-related aging, you can skip the sunscreen during the winter to allow more rays to penetrate your skin.  

Go outside, even on cloudy days. Clouds may block some rays, but daylight is still far brighter than indoor lighting — meaning you’re doing your circadian clock and mood a favor just by stepping outside.

That’s something to keep in mind with wintertime sunlight exposure in general: even if it’s lower in intensity compared to summer and you’re not absorbing enough to trigger vitamin D production and other health benefits, daily access to bright light still helps maintain your body’s rhythms and mood regulation systems.

Supplement as Needed

In many regions, especially north of about 37° latitude (much of the continental United States and most of Europe), the sun, from about October through March, simply isn’t strong enough to offer all its potential health benefits. So you may need to employ some sunlight supplementation strategies.

Use light therapy. SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) lamps and bright light devices mimic intense daylight and can help with mood, circadian entrainment, and overall energy. Sit in front of a 10,000‑lux lamp for 15–30 minutes each morning to help offset the lack of natural light. These lamps don’t produce vitamin D directly, but they’re helpful for your brain’s light-sensing pathways.

Go tanning. Some people swear by the power of tanning beds to curb the winter blues. But to get their full benefit, you’ve got to choose the bed you use carefully.

Many modern commercial tanning beds, especially those marketed for “bronzing,” emphasize UVA rays, which penetrate deeper into the skin and will mimic some of the benefits of natural sunlight, but don’t produce vitamin D, which requires UVB radiation (specifically in the 290–315 nm range).

So look for a tanning bed that emits a mix of UVB and UVA, or is labeled as a low-pressure tanning bed (these tend to have higher UVB ratios). Ask the salon specifically: “What is the UVB percentage of your bulbs?” Ideally, you want at least 2–5% UVB.

Yes, tanning beds do carry a skin cancer risk, but occasional, limited use — 5–10 minutes, 1–2x per week — is generally enough for light to moderate skin types to boost vitamin D without overdoing exposure.

Even though I’ve already got brown skin, I’ve done a little tanning in the winter and have found that the warmth and light boost my mood.

Take a vitamin D3 supplement. Even though some of the benefits of sunlight are independent of its vitamin D-producing properties, adequate vitamin D levels are still important for health.

While you can get vitamin D from foods like fatty fish and egg yolks, many people won’t get enough from their diet alone and should consider taking a vitamin D3 supplement (the form closest to what your body makes from sunlight). Most adults looking to maintain or improve levels during winter should take about 2,000 IU per day, but the exact dosage you need can vary by age, skin tone, body composition, and existing vitamin D status.

If you supplement with D3, look for one that includes vitamin K2. D3 helps you absorb calcium, and K2 ensures that calcium is deposited in your bones and teeth — not in places you don’t want it, like arteries and joints.

Fill Your Sunlight Camel’s Hump With a Low-Latitude Vacation

People who live in cold, dark, snowy locales often take a trip to warm, sunny, low-latitude locales in the middle of the winter, and it’s wise to do so.

A week of regular sun exposure (30–60 minutes/day with skin exposed) can generate tens of thousands of IU of vitamin D. Since vitamin D is fat-soluble, it’s stored in body fat and released gradually over time. One week of tropical sun can significantly elevate your circulating vitamin D levels, with effects lasting 4–8 weeks.

Multiple days of steady sun exposure will also help reset your circadian rhythms, improve sleep, and give mood-enhancing neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine a big boost.

It will also help you chill out: sunlight, particularly its UVA rays, triggers the release of nitric oxide from the skin, which relaxes blood vessels, lowers blood pressure, and contributes to the calm, mellow — sometimes downright euphoric — feeling we associate with being out in the sun. There’s a reason you feel less tense when you’re on a beach vacation.

The circadian/mood/blood pressure effects of a week of sun exposure don’t last as long as the vitamin D benefits — just a week or two after you come home from vacation — but they all add up to a nice reprieve from the tightly-wound and more downcast state you can find yourself in during the winter.

Seek the Winter Sun

Winter makes accessing sunlight more challenging, but the season doesn’t have to deprive us of its light-giving rays entirely. By being intentional about getting outside, using supplements when needed, and maybe even taking a tropical getaway, you can get the physical and mental benefits of sunlight all through the darkest months. Keep actively seeking the sun through winter’s gray days until its rays return in full force come spring.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Most of us know what we should do to be healthier: eat better, move more, sleep well. The real challenge? Actually following through.

On today’s show, I talk to behavioral psychologist Amantha Imber, author of The Health Habit, who argues that the missing piece in most health advice isn’t more information — it’s learning how to bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

Amantha first outlines four “habit hijackers” that sabotage your best-laid plans and shares practical, research-backed tactics to overcome each one. We then dive into some specific health habits that will give you a lot of transformative bang for your buck. We discuss how restricting your sleep can help you sleep better, the truth about the popular 10,000 steps a day recommendation, the underrated power of an after-dinner walk, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Hijacker Survey Link
• Related AoM Podcasts:
  • The Psychology of Effective Weight Loss
  • How to Hack the Habit Loop to Build a Better Life
  • The Microbiome Master Key
• Related AoM Articles: 
  • Unlocking the Science of Habits
  • The Science of Drive: 5 Theories of Motivation
  • The Power of Temptation Bundling
  • The 10 Best Ways to Make Exercise an Unbreakable Habit
  • The Importance of a Good Start: Using Temporal Landmarks to Achieve Your Goals
  • AoM “Sleep” archives
  • AoM “Habits” archives
  • The Power of Implementation Intentions
  • The Digestive Power of an After-Dinner Walk
  • The Existential in Red Dead Redemption 2 
• Sleep Restriction and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
• Study: Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym
• Study: “I Don’t” vs “I Can’t” 
• Study: The Fresh Start Effect
• Study: Designing More Effective Goals by Using Emergency Reserves (“Hall Passes”) 
• Study: Untapping the Health Enhancing Potential of Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity (VILPA)
• Study: Reduced exertion high-intensity interval training

Connect With Amantha Imber

• Amantha’s website
• Amantha on LinkedIn
• Amantha on Instagram
• Amantha’s podcast, How I Work

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Most of us know what we should do to be healthier, eat better, move more, sleep. Well, the real challenge is actually following through. On today’s show, I talk to behavioral psychologist Amantha Ember, author of The Health Habit, who argues that the missing piece in most health advice isn’t more information. It’s learning how to bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Amantha first outlines four habit hijackers that sabotage your best laid plans and shares practical research-backed tactics to overcome each one. We then dive into some specific health habits that will give you a lot of transformative bang for your buck. We discuss how restricting your sleep can help you sleep better. The truth about the popular 10,000 steps a day recommendation, the underrated power of an after dinner walk and more. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/healthhabit. All right, Amantha Ember, welcome to the show.

Amantha Ember:

Thanks for having me Brett.

Brett McKay:

So you wrote a book called The Health Habit. You are a behavioral psychologist. I’m curious, how did you think about using your behavior psychology to help people establish and maintain healthy habits? Because there’s a lot of books out there about eating right, exercising. What did you think you bring to the table as a behavioral psychologist as to the discussion about health?

Amantha Ember:

Well, it was actually a bit of an aha moment. I was in my local bookshop. I was under a little bit of pressure from my publisher at Penguin to put in a proposal for my next book, and I’m a huge consumer of health and wellbeing kind of books, and I’m a massive experimenter on myself. And it just kind of occurred to me as I was browsing through the many titles that exist in any bookshop around how to improve your health, that if any of them actually worked in the sense that you read the techniques and you changed your behavior and suddenly you were healthier and those new habits stuck for life, then there would be no market for health books. And I thought the missing thing from all these health books is actually the psychology around how do you make all this great health advice stick? And so the idea for the health habit was taking a lot of science backed evidence backed strategies for how can we improve our sleep and nutrition, the way that we move or exercise, but actually give people the psychological tricks to make those great habits stick for good.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’m sure if there are any doctors listening who are family practitioners, they’ve probably seen this. They can tell their patients, well, you need to quit smoking, you need to start eating right, you need to start exercising. And then the patient doesn’t do it. Information is not enough. You have to be sort of a psychologist to help your patients implement these things you’re telling them that they know they need to do.

Amantha Ember:

That’s exactly right. I mean, I don’t think there’s too many people listening that would be thinking, oh, is exercise really good for me? Of course exercise is good for us. We all know that. Yet gym memberships go completely unused every month because there’s a real gap between knowing something and actually doing the thing.

Brett McKay:

What keeps people from following through on their health goals? They say, I’m going to start running, I’m going to start weight training, I’m going to start eating right, but then they don’t do it. What are the big obstacles there? I mean, is it just misguided ideas about habits or behavior change? What do you think is going on?

Amantha Ember:

Well, when I was researching for the health habit, I identified that there were four main barriers that get in the way for a lot of people. I call them hijackers. And very briefly, there are four of them. The first one is motivational. So where you kind of feel like you have to do the thing but you don’t really want to do the thing. So there’s a motivational barrier at play. The second are relational barriers where perhaps the social norms in your life are making it harder for you to do the thing that you want to do. Let’s say you’re trying to eat more healthy, but you live in a household where everyone loves junk food. There’s going to be a relational barrier at play. The third are environmental hijackers. This is where the physical or digital environment that you are living and working within is just not setting you up for success. And the fourth one are cognitive hijackers where you’re just feeling really stressed or exhausted or overwhelmed. And when we feel that way mentally, it’s really hard to change our behavior.

Brett McKay:

Do different people get hung up on the different hijackers?

Amantha Ember:

Well, often at different times in our life and for different habits that we’re trying to change, there might be a different hijacker in the way. So for example, let’s take the idea of someone wanting to quit sugar and a really common barrier there. Environmental barriers where if you’re like a lot of people, you’ve probably got sugary snacks in your pantry, perhaps at eye level, perhaps in a transparent container. And if that’s your home environment, there’s a massive environmental hijacker at play if the sugary treats or snacks within plain sight whenever you walk into your pantry. So that’s one example. Another example around say motivational hijackers is that most people know they have to exercise or should exercise, but they don’t really love it. And so there’s often for people, a big motivational barrier at play there.

Brett McKay:

Whenever someone’s looking at, okay, what’s preventing me from doing the thing I want to do? Whether it’s eating right or exercising or getting better sleep, is there a way to figure out which hijacker is the obstacle?

Amantha Ember:

There is! I designed a really simple survey. It’s in the Health Habit book, but I’ll also give you a link that you can pop in the show notes for anyone to just for free, just assess what is the biggest hijacker getting in the way of you successfully making a change to your behavior right now. 

Brett McKay:

Okay, well we’ll link to that and that’ll be a great thing that our listeners can do. So you have these different hijackers, but you provide ways to overcome these habit hijackers. Let’s talk about motivational hijackers. What are some tactics that people can use to overcome motivational hijackers? So let’s say there’s this thing they want to do, they just don’t feel motivated to do it. What are some research backed tips that they can start implementing to maybe boost their motivation a little bit?

Amantha Ember:

Okay, so my favorite one, and this is the one that I personally use most often is temptation bundling. So this is how it works, and an example of the science that it comes from. So there was one particular study, and there’s been many studies done on temptation bundling that looked at how could we get people to exercise more often. So they recruited a couple of hundred people at a university campus and they looked at their exercise behavior. So specifically how often did they visit the gym on campus for 10 weeks? And people were split into three different groups. So there was one group that was given an iPod, which I know really dates this study. It was done over 10 years ago, and they were given an iPod and it was preloaded with top ranking audio books. And these participants were told, use this iPod, but only when you are at the gym, only use it when you’re exercising and enjoy these brilliant audio books.

The second group were given the same iPods, same audio books, and they were told, look, listen to it when you exercise, but also just enjoy it for the next 10 weeks whenever you want to listen to an audio book. And then the third group were given $25 and that was it, which is actually quite a lot of money for these university studies, but no iPod. What the researchers found is that the people that were in group one, the people that were given the iPod and said only to these audio books when you’re doing exercise, went to the gym over 50% more often than the cash group, which was the control group, the second group that had the iPod but listened to it whenever they wanted. They also went to the gym more often. It was about 25, 30% more often, but not as frequently as the group that only listened to the iPod when they were exercising.

So this is an example of temptation bundling where you are pairing the undesirable activity of exercising with something that is inherently pleasurable in this case, some great audio books. And so for example, how I use this technique in my life is I actually love weight training. I have no motivational issues there, but I do have a motivational problem when it comes to cardio exercise. So I own a very expensive exercise bike and I actually hate using it. And so a few years ago I created a rule for myself where one of my guilty pleasures is watching the Bachelor, which I think, I dunno, I feel like it’s in, it’s like 200 season now or something, but I am a sucker for bitchiness on TV and I feel quite guilty just sitting on the couch and watching The Bachelor. So what I did is I created a rule for myself and I said, I’m only allowed to watch The Bachelor when I’m on the exercise bike. And it completely changed my relationship with riding on the exercise bike. It also meant that I get through seasons pretty slowly and I read all the spoilers, but that’s okay. I still love the show. Temptation bundling, highly recommend it. If there’s a motivational barrier at play,

Brett McKay:

I’m the same as you. I have no problem. I love weightlifting. It’s my passion. I’ve done it for years. Cardio is just a chore.

And so for me, what I’ve done with the temptation bundling is I watch movies while I’m doing the treadmill. I’m just walking at an incline on the treadmill and it’s been awesome because I’ve had this goal for a long time, become a cinephile. I want to watch the Criterion Collection like Seven Samurai and Casablanca, but just didn’t have time for it. So I thought, oh, I can do that while I’m doing cardio. And so yeah, I just queue up a movie and I’m on the treadmill for an hour and I’ve gotten through a lot of the Criterion Collection just by doing some temptation bundling.

Amantha Ember:

I love that. Great example.

Brett McKay:

One tactic that you highlight on how to overcome motivational hijackers is, and I’ve never heard of this one, it’s question powered self-talk. What is that?

Amantha Ember:

Yes. So often when we are trying to do the thing, let’s just stay on the exercise example, I need to exercise today. It’s not particularly motivating when we tell ourselves, okay, I need to exercise today. What psychologists have found is if we can actually change that into a question, we’re much more likely to do things. So instead of going, I need to exercise today, saying to yourself or asking yourself, “Will I exercise today?” makes us significantly more likely to do exercise. So what our brain is doing when we’re asking ourselves a question as opposed to giving it a statement is we’re tricking ourselves into feeling like we have choice, we have autonomy over the decision. And when we feel like we’ve got choice, we’re far more motivated to do the thing. So when we ask ourselves, well, “Will I exercise today?” We think, oh, will I? I’ve got a choice in the matter. And then because we’re trying to be good and trying to do the thing, we will be much more likely to go, yes, I will exercise today.

Brett McKay:

That’s really interesting. I like that. And I’ve seen that in my own life. There’s been times where I’ve used digital nudges to get me to do certain things, get up to walk with your Apple watch, you can set it if you’ve been sedentary for a certain amount of time, it’ll say time to get up for a walk. And I’m like, eh, you’re annoying. Get out of here. But I imagine if it just said, Hey, would you like to get up? I’d be like, oh, you know what? Do I want to get up? Yeah, maybe I do want to get up. It would give you that sense of autonomy.

Amantha Ember:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

So I really like that idea of turning your self-talk into a question. Any other things that you can do to overcome motivational hijackers?

Amantha Ember:

Yeah, I mean, look, there’s quite a few in the book. One that I have found to be very effective is fining yourself. And what I mean by that is, and look, I’ll give an example actually from someone on my team at work who used this. So this particular teammate, she is a crazy mad fan of Leeds. So she follows the football in the UK and she’d set herself the goal of, she wanted to read one nonfiction book for six months every week, a new one every week, which is a pretty impressive goal. And she declared to the team that if she did not hit this goal, she was going to donate I think $100 or something to Manchester United, i.e. the enemy. And this kept her motivated. I think she also had said she was going to post a picture of herself on social media wearing a Manchester jersey, which of course is just a disgusting thing to do if you happen to go for Leeds. So finding yourself and giving that money to somewhere that you absolutely hate can be very, very motivating to stick to a behavior.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about relational hijackers. What are some tactics that are research backed that can help us overcome those relational hijackers? So that’s basically our social environment is getting in the way of us accomplishing or fulfilling our health habit goals.

Amantha Ember:

That’s right. I would say if you’re listening to this and you feel like you’re someone that’s maybe a bit of a people pleaser, there’s a good chance that there might be a relational hijacker at play. And so we can actually use those people pleasing tendencies to our advantage. And one of the most effective things that we can do is to make a public pledge. So this might be on a group WhatsApp group to say, I am going to, I don’t know, eliminate all unhealthy snacks from my diet for the next four weeks, or I am going to do the couch to 5K program for the next eight weeks. And if you announce your goal publicly, so it could just be to friends and family, it could be on social media, just somewhere public, you are much more likely to actually stick to that goal because you don’t want to let other people down and you don’t want to look like an idiot. So it’s really utilizing that tendency that you feel quite accountable to the people around you.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think it’s also useful too, that public declaration saying, Hey look, I have this goal. I want to eat better or I want to exercise. And you tell this to your family and you can say, I want you to hold me accountable if you see me going for a fourth serving of mashed potatoes, like, hey, can you give me the nudge? Like, Hey dad, do you really don’t tell ’em dad, don’t eat the mashed potatoes like, dad, do you really want to eat those mashed potatoes? Cause you want to do the self-talk, give ’em some autonomy.

Amantha Ember:

Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay:

What about environmental hijackers? What are some tactics to overcome those?

Amantha Ember:

So I would say if you dunno where to start, or if you’re thinking, oh, these all sound like barriers, environmental hijackers and overcoming, those tend to be some of the most powerful strategies. So one of the biggest things that you can do is have a think about the behavior that you’re trying to change and think about what in your environment, what is your environment setting you up to be the default choice? So let me give you an example. A lot of people have the goal to improve their sleep. They want to stop scrolling on their phone before bed, very common behavior goal. And if your phone charger is on your bedside table, I can tell you right now that your environment is setting you up to fail. It is very hard to simply just rely on willpower to say to yourself, okay, even though my phone is within arms reach before I go to bed, I’m just not going to scroll on it.

I’m going to do something else. Or maybe I’ll just go straight to sleep really, really hard. So what you want to do in that situation is you want to disrupt the default choice because the default choice in that environment is to pick up your phone and scroll before bed. So to disrupt that default, you might want to, for example, take your phone charger and put it in a completely different room, put it in the corridor, put it in the kitchen, and instead charge your phone there because it is no longer the default option to go, oh, I’m going to scroll on my phone before I go to bed because your phone is not near your bed.

Brett McKay:

I love that. I think you can do that with nutrition if you’re trying to eat better. Don’t buy junk food, don’t keep it in the house and instead buy lots of healthy options and make sure it’s visible

Amantha Ember:

A hundred percent. And look, if you say have kids that demand the sugary treats or whatever, or maybe you’ve got a spouse that is refusing to give up sugar, for example, what you can do to disrupt the default is instead of say having those treats at eye level in the fridge or in the pantry and in transparent containers, you can put them in opaque containers, you can put them out of arms reach. So maybe you have to get a stepladder to reach those snacks or maybe just put them right at the bottom of your pantry or fridge where you’re just not going to see them every time you are in those locations.

Brett McKay:

A big thing that I’ve done to overcome environmental hijackers for exercising, that’s paid off big time for me just having a home gym. It just makes it so easy. I just walk down to my garage and I can exercise. And you don’t even have to have a whole home gym. It could be you got a kettlebell or you have some sort of pull bar and it’s just there in your house and you remove all that friction from exercises. You don’t have to, okay, I got to get in the car, drive to the gym workout, drive back, you can just do it.

Amantha Ember:

Yes. And friction is really important because when you’re trying to do more of a behavior, if you can reduce the friction that is involved in doing that good behavior rather than having to drive to a gym, it’s right in your home. And I did the very same thing and have had a home gym set up, oh gosh, since 2020. And it’s easy. You can also, when you’re trying to not do a behavior or try to eliminate a behavior is you can put friction in the way. But I do love the idea of removing friction. Something that I have heard a lot of people do successfully that are trying to do more exercise is to sleep in their gym clothes. Because when you wake up, there is no excuse not to exercise because you are literally dressed for the gym. I also applied this strategy to parenting many years ago when my daughter was in the earlier years of primary school. And for those that have young kids, you’ll know that sometimes getting them dressed into their school uniform takes a lot of time and is a massive battle that most of us don’t have the patience for in the morning. So I started dressing my daughter to go to bed in her school uniform. So she would wake up and she would be dressed and ready to go, and yes, it would have some creases, but hey, who cares?

Brett McKay:

Alright, so environmental it sounds like, look for friction points and see if you can reduce them. That’ll go a long way. Or if you don’t want to do something, increase the friction. Let’s talk about cognitive hijackers. What are some research backed tactics to overcome those?

Amantha Ember:

Well, probably my favorite one here is the power of a particular word. And that word is “don’t.” So this comes from some research that was led by Professor Vanessa Patrick and what she did, she got a group of people into the lab under the guise of she was just there to teach them some strategies to make healthier choices with their eating. And she divided people into two groups. One group were taught to say, when presented with an unhealthy temptation like chocolate, they were taught to say, I don’t eat chocolate. And a second group were taught to say I can’t eat chocolate. So very similar strategies, literally just changing two letters versus don’t. Then everyone left the lab. But the crux of the experiment actually happened when people were leaving the lab and they were presented with an option of two different snacks. So one option was a chocolate bar, the second option was a healthy granola bar or muesli bar.

And what the research has found is that those that were taught to say, I don’t eat chocolate, were 50% more likely to take the healthy granola bar instead of the chocolate bar all through just changing one little word in their self-talk. So why that works so well is when we say I can’t do something, which is pretty reflective of a lot of people’s self-talk like, oh, I can’t do this, I can’t do that. Oh, I can’t really eat dessert because I’m on a diet, is we just feel a bit restricted and a bit crappy about ourselves. But when we say I don’t do the thing, I don’t eat chocolate, I don’t eat dessert, I don’t have sugar as examples, we actually feel like that is part of myself identity. And as humans, we want to act in a way that is consistent with how we see ourselves. So for me, I used to be a massive sugar addict and this strategy had the biggest impact on me quitting sugar, and it’s been over a decade now since I quit sugar as a daily habit.

Brett McKay:

One tactic you recommend for overcoming cognitive hijackers is using the power of a fresh start to boost your health habit goals. And I think this could be useful coming up on a new year. What is the fresh start tactic?

Amantha Ember:

Yeah, so the fresh start effect is a really handy one, and it suggests that when you pick a date that is the start of a new thing. So it might be the start of a year, January one, it might be the start of a new season, like the start of spring or fall, or it might be even just the start of a week like Monday. We are significantly more likely to stick to the habit that we want to do because it literally feels like a fresh start. It’s like a new chapter in our book. We don’t need to worry or think about all the times that we’ve failed in the past because it’s a fresh start today. So when researchers have looked at people that have tried to kickstart a new habit on say a Monday compared to a Thursday or in the middle of a month versus the first of a month, those that start at the start, if you like, of that month or that week or that season, are far more likely to be able to stick to that new behavior.

Brett McKay:

Another tactic you highlight to overcome cognitive hijackers, I’ve used this with my own health habits, is giving yourself a hall pass to bend the rules. Tell us about that.

Amantha Ember:

I love this strategy and I use it for myself across several different realms of my life. So we’ve probably heard of the term hall pass when it comes to say marriages and having a hall pass if this particular celebrity ever wanted to spend a night with me. But hall passes are really great when it comes to changing our behavior. So there was one particular study that looked at people who were trying to do more steps, do more walking in a day, and all the participants in this study were given the goal of doing 20% more steps than their current month’s average. So it was a bit of a stretch target. So one group were basically told to walk every day for 30 days and try to hit their goal 20% more steps every single day. The second group were given two hall passes every week for the four weeks of the study.

So the researcher said, look, hit your goal every day, but we’re going to give you two hall passes so you can pick two days whenever you want them to be per week, where you don’t need to worry about hitting your steps target. And what the researchers found is that those given the whole path strategy were actually more likely to hit their daily steps target. And when they had a day where they failed, they were much more able to bounce back so they were more resilient. So if there’s a daily habit that you are trying to create, and I think this is particularly good for people trying to turn over a new leaf with their eating or dieting or something like that, what typically happens is we’re like, okay, I am starting a diet on Monday and then by Thursday we’ve, I don’t know, binged on a bunch of things that we’re trying to avoid. We have this thing that psychologists call the what the hell effect? And it’s like, ah, what the hell? I’ve broken the diet, I may as well just go back to my normal eating. But hall passes overcome that because we can simply just say, well, Thursday I decided to take a hall pass and I’m going to get back on the good behavior regime on Friday.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it gets rid of that all or nothing thinking

Amantha Ember:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve used that with my own health habits with eating and exercise. Some days I’ll have days where I need to train and I’m just not feeling it because I’m tired, I’m stressed out and I say, okay, I’m not going to do my usual, my program session, I’m just going for a walk. And it’s not exactly what I wanted to do, but I at least moved my body intentionally. Or when it comes to nutrition, I track my macros, so I try to hit certain protein and carbohydrate and fat targets. But sometimes you’re at a party and there’s like pie or cake and you don’t want to be the guy’s like, I’m not eating that and just I want to enjoy food’s, a way to socialize. So I’m like, okay, I’ll have some cake. It doesn’t exactly fit my macros. I don’t need to have three slices, but I can have a small slice, that’s fine, and I’m okay with that. I don’t beat myself up because I just had a piece of cake.

Amantha Ember:

I think that’s so great. It’s also why cheat days are actually really effective according to science.

Brett McKay:

So let’s talk about some specific health habits. So we established this framework of how you can use behavioral psychology to overcome habit hijackers. You then have a section in the book where you talk about specific health habits that you picked out that you thought based on research would provide the most bang for your buck. So let’s see how we can apply this framework to help stick to these different health habits. The first health habits you focus on relate to sleep. You’ve struggled with insomnia, but now you’re a great sleeper. What are some of the health habits that you implemented in your own life to make sleep better for you?

Amantha Ember:

Yeah, okay. Lemme talk about the one that has had by far the biggest impact. So I am someone that has struggled with insomnia during my twenties, during my thirties, and then in my forties where I am now, it’s pretty much gone. So what happened in my twenties is I was living in Sydney at the time and every morning I would drive across the Sydney Harbor Bridge to get to work and it would be early in the morning and I would always be tired. And one morning it was about eight o’clock in the morning, I thought to myself, I wonder if there are people that don’t actually feel constantly exhausted like I do. And I thought, well, what a stupid thought. Of course there are people that feel that way. And then I thought, huh, I wonder if I’ve got a problem because I’m always tired.

And so I got to the office that morning and I Googled sleep, doctor Sydney and I booked myself in to see a sleep doctor. And what sleep doctors typically recommend is to go into their rooms or a hospital and do an overnight sleep test where you are hooked up to about 30 or 40 different electrodes and it’s very uncomfortable. And then the doctor says, okay, now sleep. So it’s not a fun night, but at least it’s a night where you can get some data on what is going on. So I did that. I felt like I had a terrible night’s sleep, but hey, nothing new because most nights were terrible night’s sleep. And I went back to see the sleep doctor a couple of weeks later with the results and he said, look, the good news is that there’s nothing physiologically wrong. You don’t have a sleep disorder, you don’t have sleep apnea, but I guess the bad news is that it means that it’s psychological and there is no magic pill to fix that.

And so what he prescribed, so to speak, was sleep restriction. So he asked me, how many hours do you reckon you’re spending in bed right now? And I told him that at the time I was getting into bed at about 9:00 PM and I was getting out of bed at about 7:00 AM and so that’s 10 hours in bed, which might seem like a lot of time. But in my sleep deprived brain, I thought, well, the longer I’m in bed, the better the chance I’ve got of catching some sleep, which I think is how a lot of insomniacs think. It kind of feels rational, but it’s actually not. So the sleep doctor then asked me, how many of those 10 hours do you think that you are actually spending sleep? And I thought about it and I said, I reckon maybe six hours. And so he said, okay, what you’re going to do now is you are going to limit the time that you are in bed to just six hours per night.

And so he said, keep your wake time the same. So keep getting up at 7:00 AM because one of the other habits I talk about in the book is having a consistent rise time or consistent wait time. But he said, you are only now allowed to spend six hours per night in bed, which means you’re going to go to bed at 1:00 AM. And I was in shock because going to bed at 9:00 PM versus 1:00 AM, that’s a very big change. And I thought, how am I going to stay up so late? But he said, this is really important because we need to retrain your brain to associate bed with sleep as opposed to bed with catastrophizing and ruminating and worrying that you’re not getting enough sleep. So for the first few nights I managed to stay up until 1:00 AM and by the time my head hit the pillow I was out and I was managing after a few nights to have a really solid six hours of sleep.

And then once I was managing to do that for a few nights, the sleep doctor then said, you can extend your window by half an hour. So I was allowed to go to bed at 1230 instead of one in the morning. I did that for a few nights until I was sleeping pretty consistently for six and a half hours and gradually brought back that go to bedtime until I was in bed for about eight hours, which is what I’d estimated at the time was how much sleep I needed. So sleep restriction therapy is generally with most sleep doctors when there’s a psychological issue, generally the first point of call is what I found and it is so effective.

Brett McKay:

So with sleep restriction, you’re only going to be in bed for the amount of time you are actually asleep each night and you’re doing that so that you only associate your bed with sleep. So to start out, you’re going to count back the hours you do sleep at night from your wake time, and that’s going to be your new bedtime and that’s going to be much later than you’re typically going to bed to start. I did something recently, it wasn’t exactly sleep restriction, but I was trying to retrain my sleep schedule and it involved staying up till midnight every night and it was pretty daunting or demoralizing to make yourself stay up late when you don’t want to and you’re not used to it because I love going to bed early. So knowing that it’s hard to do, what can we do? What sort of tactics that we talked about earlier, can we use to stick to sleep restriction so that you can get the benefit of it?

Amantha Ember:

And look, sleep restriction is a good one to think about temptation bundling because you are going to be dreading those hours that you are forcing yourself to stay awake. So try to make those hours fun. Don’t do something stimulating because that is not going to be helpful in terms of sleep, but you might say save up episodes of your favorite podcast to listen to in those hours where you’re trying to stay awake. Or you might save up episodes of your favorite TV show because TV watching is a pretty passive activity. So I would recommend that people think about what is something that they can really look forward to make staying awake those extra few hours more doable and maybe even a bit more enjoyable.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s why I did, I started playing video games. I’m not a big video gamer, but I started playing this video game again that I’ve already played two or three times. It’s called Red Dead Redemption. You’re basically a cowboy in the American West and it can be stimulating because you’re a bad guy and you’re shooting other bad guys. But I would just go on there to ride my horse in this fictional American west and go hunting for bears and it was actually really relaxing. And so you mentioned some other things you can do for your sleep, wake up at the same time. That’s a big one. And then also I think the stuff that people already know, establish a good going to bed routine, practice, good sleep hygiene, set a time where you’re, okay, I’m going to get off my smartphone, get off Twitter or X Instagram and I’ll do something a little bit more relaxing.

Amantha Ember:

Yes, those are all really important. And then when we wake up in the morning, one of the most important things to do is to get exposure to daylight, to sunlight. So doing that just resets our circadian rhythms. It resets essentially our body clock and it makes it easier to fall asleep at night. Research shows that even just getting out for five to 10 minutes into natural light and daylight in the first hour or two after waking can be incredibly effective at resetting our body clock.

Brett McKay:

So let’s talk about habits we can implement to improve or increase the amount of we move during the day. You highlight a lot of research about what not only just exercise, but just general movement can do for our health. One health habit you recommend is vipa. This is an acronym, so V-I-L-P-A. What is VILPA?

Amantha Ember:

So VILPA stands for vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. It is a mouthful, but it is incredibly effective, particularly for those that hate exercise or say, I don’t have time for exercise. So what VILPA is, and remember, it’s lifestyle, physical activity. These are just moments that might be a one or two minute moment in your day where you are somehow incorporating quite vigorous physical activity into your day. So an example might be if you say catch the bus or the train or subway to work and you’re running late and you sprint the final four or 500 meters, that is an example of VILPA. It’s not exercise like you didn’t map out a minute in your day to do this exercise. It was simply just part of your lifestyle for that particular day. Another example is where maybe it’s after school after work and you are out in the backyard and you’re playing chay with your kids and you’re doing some intermittent bursts of running around.

Again, it’s not exercise that you planned, but it’s just happens to be in your lifestyle where you’re doing a one or two minute burst of pretty vigorous physical activity. So what a huge research study found into VILPA, and this is looking at people who had three to four bouts, if you like, of VILPA. So those one to two minute intense physical activity moments in their day were 40% less likely to die early. So when we look at all cause mortality, they basically had dramatically reduced the chances of dying prematurely from diseases that were largely preventable if we can be healthier with our habits. So it’s a really great thing to actually deliberately incorporate into your day. Maybe instead of just randomly running late to catch transport to your workday, you can just challenge yourself every morning, I’m just going to sprint that final 500 meters to the bus stop, for example. Or every afternoon I’m actually going to plan a game with chase with the kids, or when I take the dog for a walk, I’m just going to sprint those last few blocks with the dog to get some VILPA into my day.

Brett McKay:

One thing that we do in our family is we have this rule, I guess this would be an implementation intention. I think you talk about this in the book, but it’s our rule to get some VILPA is if there are stairs, we take the stairs. We got this from Michael Easter. He’s an author who writes about health and fitness and he has this statistic, I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s basically 2% of the population take the stairs if there are stairs.

So we tell our kids and ourselves, all right, McKays are two percenters. If there are stairs, we’re taking the stairs. And you see this a lot at the airport especially because you’ve got your big giant suitcase, and it’s so tempting to be like, all right, we’re taking the escalator. Can you just stand there with your, it’s like, Nope, we got to get your suitcase, hold it, and you got to go up the stairs. And it’s a short little workout. I mean, it is vigorous.

Amantha Ember:

Oh yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. I love that being the 2% club

Brett McKay:

Another habit you recommend for getting some more movement is to get at least 7,500 steps in a day. Why just 7,500? Typically the number you hear thrown out there is 10,000 steps.

Amantha Ember:

Absolutely. Most people, if they’ve got a walking goal or a steps goal, it’s 10,000 steps a day. And there is absolutely no science behind that number. Where it actually came from is that a company in Japan found that the Japanese symbol for walking looks like the number 10,000, or rather the symbol for 10,000 looks like a man walking. So they thought, oh, okay, let’s create this. I think it was a pedometer that suggests that you should do 10,000 steps a day, and that is how the myth was created. But when there have been meta-analyses conducted around how many steps per day actually reduces the chance of dying early from things like heart disease, what they found is that typically it’s about seven and a half to 8,000 steps a day. That is the magic number. So I would love it, listeners, just adjust their daily steps goal, make it a little bit lower, seven and a half thousand steps because there’s actually science behind that as opposed to 10,000 steps, which was purely a marketing gimmick.

Brett McKay:

So any tactics that we’ve talked about earlier and how you can implement this happen and stick to it.

Amantha Ember:

Yeah, look, I personally love the whole past strategy for this, and I think one of the interesting things about the whole pass strategy, as I described, there was a study that actually looked at people who had a steps goal and the impact of incorporating hall passes. So it might not be possible every day to do seven and a half thousand steps. So just give yourself two hall passes a week and say to yourself, this is my daily steps goal, but there’s going to be two days every week where I give myself permission to not meet my steps target for whatever reason. Maybe you found yourself in back-to-back meetings and you just had no chance to get out for a walk, for example. So use the whole past strategy to make yourself more likely to get that daily steps count.

Brett McKay:

Another health habit related movement that you talk about is taking a walk after a meal. Why that habit?

Amantha Ember:

Okay. So I think that most people know that when it comes to blood glucose or blood sugar levels, which is what happens in your body when you eat something or do certain things, particularly if you have a big sugary high carb snack, you’re going to cause your blood glucose levels to spike and then crash. And you will have experienced this crash if you’ve ever felt really tired or brain foggy or even hungry just after you’ve had a meal, typically about 30 minutes after you’ve had that kind of a meal. And there’s not many nutrition experts that would disagree that we need to try to keep our blood glucose levels as stable as possible. So any strategy that we can use that’s going to help stabilize our blood glucose levels, particularly after we eat, is really, really good for managing our health and managing our energy.

And so what researchers have looked at is what is the impact of after we have a meal, and let’s just say that it is a meal that would normally spike our blood glucose levels, like a really big bowl of pasta is something that will typically spike most people’s blood glucose levels is what if we actually move after that meal? And they’ve looked at all sorts of movement patterns like moving straight after the meal, moving for one minute versus 10 minutes versus an hour. And what they found is that on average, the best thing we can do after we’ve eaten is about half an hour or so after we’ve eaten, just have some gentle movement incorporated into your day for about 10 minutes. So if you aim after, say your lunch or your dinner about half an hour afterwards just to go for a 10 minute leisurely walk around the block, you will significantly increase the chance of your blood glucose level of staying pretty stable and you’ll significantly decrease any spike that was going to happen.

Brett McKay:

I’ve actually experimented with this and it’s true. So there was a period a couple of years ago where I was using a continuous glucose monitor, and I heard about this research about taking a walk after you eat can help reduce blood glucose spikes, particularly if you eat a high carb meal. And it’s true, if I didn’t take the walk and I ate a carby sugary meal, my blood sugar would go up to 140, 150, but then if I waited 30 minutes, it was interesting, I had to wait 30. If I did it right after I ate, if I did the walk, what would happen? The spike would just be delayed. I think what happens is your body, it takes about half an hour, 45 minutes for your body to start breaking down the carbs into glucose. So if you do it too early, all it’s going to do is just going to delay that glucose spikes. But if you time it so that you do the movement right when your glucose is spiking, your body’s digested and sending the glucose to the different parts of your body. You move your muscles and your muscles are just basically vacuums for glucose. Your muscles run on glucose, and so you get those vacuums going by moving your body. It just sucks up that glucose. And if I took a walk 30 to 45 minutes after I ate, the glucose monitor would just be up to one 20, it wouldn’t be as high. So it does work. It is really powerful.

Amantha Ember:

It totally does. I love that you’ve mentioned continuous glucose monitors, which for those who haven’t heard of CGMs, if you imagine something that’s about the size of a ping pong ball flattened and stuck to your tricep with a little needle that pierces your skin, it’s basically a way of getting a continuous read on what your blood glucose levels are doing. They typically last for a couple of weeks and they sync with an app on your phone. And I’ve experimented with them at different times over the last few years, and I find that it is such a great tool for actually changing your behavior because you’ve got the data right there in front of you. There’s no, oh, well Samantha said this or research said this, but is it going to work for me? You can see the data and when you can actually see how the inside of your body is responding to different tactics or experiments that you’re trying, you’re much more likely to keep going with those experiments when you can see, oh, they’re actually working for me.

Brett McKay:

What about just making a regular workout part of your routine? Any advice there?

Amantha Ember:

Oh look, definitely a regular workout is a great thing, and what we overestimate is how long we have to spend working out. So there’s been some great research into not just HIT training, which I think we all know is high intensity interval training, but what is called re-hit training, which is basically boiled down to shorter and less frequent bursts of all out intensive exercise. So what some research from McMasters University found is that the smallest, if you like, minimum viable dose of exercise that we can do to get massive benefits for our cardiovascular health is just a 40-second microworkout where you do a little warmup, get your body warm for two or three minutes, then do an all out 40-second sprint. It might be sprinting around the block for 40 seconds or doing a sprint on an exercise bike and then doing a cool down. And you can get the same kind of gains from a micro workout or reheat workout as you can from going for a 40 minute, 45 minute jog. It’s absolutely amazing. And for anyone that is saying, I don’t have time to exercise, well, all you need is 40 seconds and you will get some amazing benefits from that.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about nutrition habits. What hijackers frequently get in the way of sticking to nutrition habits?

Amantha Ember:

I would say that environmental hijackers are the biggest ones here. If you think about what is in your fridge and what is in your pantry and how much of that is the food that you want to be consuming more of versus food that you think that you should be consuming less of quite often. There’s a lot of food that we do want to be consuming less of that are at eye level in plain view whenever we go to make a food decision. So I would say environmental hijackers, if we can change the physical environment that we’re living in and working in to make it really easy and just natural to select the thing that we want to be eating more of that will go a huge way to having healthier habits when it comes to nutrition.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you have specific habits in this environmental framework that you talk about that people can use to reduce the temptation to sabotage your diet. So the big one is to reduce the amount of hyper palatable foods, so the really tasty Oreos, Doritos, and then the ultra processed foods, which are typically hyper palatable as well.

Amantha Ember:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

And just keep those out of the kitchen as much as you can.

Amantha Ember:

Definitely.

Brett McKay:

We’ve had a guest on the podcast talk about the microbiome, the gut microbiome and how it affects everything about health, from your weight to mood, to sleep, and to support your gut microbiome. You recommend that instead of taking a probiotic, people eat their probiotics. So how can they do that and make it a habit?

Amantha Ember:

So eating probiotics, so this is all about eating fermented food. Things like kefi, things like sauerkraut, kimchi, and yogurt is probably the most easily accessible palatable probiotic that you can eat. And so certainly what Tim Spector, professor Tim Spector from the UK recommends is ideally having some fermented food, eating your probiotics just in small amounts four or five times a day. So you might have a couple of tablespoons of yogurt with your breakfast, for example. Maybe a little bit of kimchi or sauerkraut just as a little side. Again, a couple of tablespoons is all you need with your dinner. So just having small doses throughout the day is one of the best ways to improve gut health.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, what I do, I started doing a while back ago, is I have some kimchi with my eggs at breakfast and it’s not very much. I get there’s a little bag and I just scoop out like a serving of it, not even a serving, just like a spoonful of it, and I got to eat that. And the other one is I eat yogurt. I eat Greek yogurt for a snack and probably get all the probiotics I need. Just making those really small changes.

Amantha Ember:

And it’s far cheaper than getting expensive probiotics from the chemist.

Brett McKay:

Correct. This is true. So if someone is listening to this episode and they’re feeling overwhelmed by the health habits they want to implement, what do you think is the smallest habit you’d have them start with tomorrow to build some momentum?

Amantha Ember:

I would come back to environmental hijackers. I would think about what is the behavior that you’re trying to change and think about your environment, your physical environment at home and work, and any other places where you spend a lot of time and think about what is one change you can make to your environment to make it easier to do the thing that you’re trying to do more of, or to make it harder to do the thing that you’re trying to do less of.

Brett McKay:

I love it. Well, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Amantha Ember:

Well, they can go to amantha.com or they can check out the Health Habit book to learn more about this. And I host a podcast called How I Work, where I talk about different rituals and strategies that some of the world’s most successful people use to get more out of their day.

Brett McKay:

Well, fantastic Amantha Ember, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Amantha Ember:

Thank you so much, Brett.

Brett McKay:

My guest was Amantha Ember, she’s the author of the book, the Health Habit. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about her work at her website, amantha.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/healthhabit where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you’ll find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. You’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.