Evan Transue: All right, hello everyone and welcome to our fourth episode of the Beyond Autoimmunity podcast by Autoimmune Recovery Lab. one of your hosts, Evan Transu, co-founder of Autoimmune Recovery Lab. And I have with me Ryan Monahan, our other host and other co-founder of Autoimmune Recovery Lab. So today we are, it's not that we're gonna be going into things that don't have a scientific basis. They actually do. And Ryan certainly probably can speak on that a little bit better with the extra training that he's gotten. But we were discussing this as, you know, just business partners and experiencers of chronic disease ourselves. And we said, you know, we have to touch on this, especially earlier on in the podcast, because I've hosted a few different shows throughout my years. I hosted a show that I had actually had 480 episodes. And even in those high 400s, I was astonished by how many people said they went back to the first one and started listening from there. So we know a lot of people do this and we wanted to make sure we covered this. It's fun to get into the nerdy labs. It's fun to get into the science behind what supplements and nutrients do. But if you don't, understand this part, I might go as far as to say that none of the rest of it even matters. And what we're discussing today is the mindset shift, the identity shift, the commitment that it takes to really overcome ⁓ any chronic disease, but specifically an autoimmune condition. If it was straightforward and easy, I think almost anyone would do it, right? There wouldn't be tens of millions of people suffering with autoimmune conditions. And at least part of that is because of genuine ignorance around what's causing it. I get that, but.
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: There's a lot of people that I have interacted with throughout the years. There's a lot of people Ryan has interacted with throughout the years. We have tons of colleagues in this functional space. And I mean, it has to be in the hundreds of thousands of individuals that we've either talked to directly or on social media, if you count all of our colleagues combined, that have the information now, but they never change. Nothing ever actually gets better. They know what to do, but they never actually do it. And we're going to discuss some of the why of that today and perhaps how you could overcome that. So. Ryan hello great to be talking to you as always
Ryan: Yeah, hey everyone, hey Ev, glad to be here. This is definitely an incredibly important topic. And as you mentioned, in a sense... None of these other biohacks or all the other information doesn't really quite matter as much unless kind of segueing into the topic for today, unless we have our mindset right, right? Unless we have a roadmap, unless we know where we're heading. In a sense, it's almost like the frame around which, you know, everything we think about, everything we do ⁓ is contextualized. So super excited to be talking about this today.
Evan Transue: Yes. You know, I always share my story in the sense of I had those seven different diagnosed health conditions at 18 and then I got into natural medicine. It's not that that's untrue. It's that there's one little part of the story that I do believe you know, but almost no one that's listening would know. It's actually that I got into personal development first. I got very lucky to get involved with a group of young people. I needed this so bad at the time. I was just a mess, man. I got kicked out of school, I'm using drugs. Like it was not good. And I get involved in this group. of people that were very involved in personal development. And they were all like 18 to 22. So some of them I looked up to as being older. They were all, you know, at least my peers, they were close enough in age. And it was just, it was so interesting to go from, I mean, literally in a six month period, I went from hanging out with people that used hardcore drugs all the time and I was doing the same thing to a group that we literally read books together. We would take the time to like pause, everyone reads, and then we share what we're working on or goals and all that kind of stuff or what we learned from the book. And that personal development stuff came before the biggest parts of my health journey. And I am so thankful that I got indoctrinated with that information at 18 years old, because I can just see, and I'm including myself in this, I can see as we get older and as that prefrontal cortex fully develops and as that brain development solidifies around 25, 26, it's almost like the... the human body is designed to keep you stuck in your ways. Cause it's like you made it 25, 26 years, right? You must be doing something right. This is again, ev-belief, ev-theory. I kind of believe that's why it's very hard to change certain personality traits. This is science-backed. Unless trauma happens after the age of 25, 26. Most of our personality traits cannot change after the age of 25, 26, unless a severe trauma occurs. And I think at least part of that is because the body says you've already been here for a quarter of a century. You must be doing something right. So we're going to keep you. locked into these patterns. I thank God that this happened to me at 18 before I knew any better, because I absorbed this stuff blindly. I read a book called The Compound Effect, which talked about different habits and how very small actions over a long period of time can make a difference. So an example from the book, I know you love investing, Ryan, an example from the book had to do with someone who invested long term versus someone who didn't. It had an example of a gentleman who had just one extra beer a day.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: Or maybe it was, whatever it was, was an equivalent of like 200 extra calories a day. And then they showed what that did over 30 years to someone, just 200 calories extra a day. That's not hard to get, right? But it's also, ⁓ it's like one of those things, what's easy to do is easy not to do. ⁓ So you probably should be eating well, but that's easy not to do. And it's easy not to drink a beer, but it's also very easy to drink a beer. And when you do that over 30 years, this person weighed significantly more than the other individual, just from that extra 200 calories a day. And then I learned this and this is what this matters for in terms of this conversation today. I learned that the situations in my life ⁓ I wasn't a victim You know, I thought I was for a very long time. ⁓ even though I made very bad decisions in high school I blamed everything on my outer circumstances because I had mental health issues I had struggles that for those on audio I'm doing air quotes right now no one else had ever experienced or they couldn't possibly know my life. And so it was that, the fault of that, that led me to the drug use, which of course led me to all my problems. So it wasn't my fault. And I learned in this book that there was a difference between fault and responsibility, a difference between fault and responsibility. So there's some things in life that are our fault, no doubt, right? There's certain choices that we blatantly make. We knew the consequences and we got the consequences. Yeah, that's your fault. And then there's things
Ryan: Mm-mm, yeah.
Evan Transue: This is everything else, by the way, literally everything else. That might not be our fault, but it's still 100 % our responsibility because no one's coming to save us. We don't live in a utopia where that just happens. So it might not be my fault that I dealt with panic disorder at five years old. It might not be my fault that I dealt with major depressive disorder starting at 14, 15 years old. It might not even be my fault that I happened to be in a friend group that was unusually willing to try substances at earlier ages than other friend groups. None of that might be my fault. but it is my responsibility to say this is where I'm currently at and what actions can I take or can I stop doing in my life to lead to a better circumstance. And I know that this is incredibly hard for a lot of our autoimmune warriors as we call them. These autoimmune warriors are overrepresented amongst women. Women are overrepresented ⁓ amongst people who deal with autoimmune conditions. And Ryan, you talked about this on episode. One, how they're more likely to score higher on that ACES test, right? Adverse Childhood Experiences, I believe that's what it stands for. Either way, would be the same point. So if you have dealt with severe trauma in your life, the first thing that you might think of when I say something like that is like, well, he doesn't know my life. It's like, I don't have to, to know that it's your responsibility. Now, should it have to be your responsibility? No, my friend. ⁓ I want that to be very clear before we get into this today. No one is saying.
Ryan: Mm-hmm.
Evan Transue: that someone who had severe mental health issues like me or someone who was abused should have to take full responsibility for that situation. That's not fun to have to deal with alone. It's not fair either. But that's how life operates. So to tell you anything else though is actually to hurt you. Because if I say, well, you're right. It's definitely not your fault. 100 % it's not your fault. And there's nothing you can do about it as a result. That leaves you stuck in the mess and the situation that you're in today. Versus if I say, you know, hey XYZ person, it's 100 % not your fault that this happened to you as a kid, but no one's coming to fix this. So it is 100 % though your responsibility to say, what can I do given this very crappy situation to possibly make it better? So, sorry for my soap box to start this off. You can kind of see motivational speaker I was creeping out here. So I'm gonna back off a little bit and throw it to you because I'm wondering, man, like,
Ryan: Hmm. Yeah.
Evan Transue: I only know you as a person who seems to take responsibility for everything, but I would assume that's not how you grew up. I could be wrong. I'd love to know like when that became a part of your health journey where you were able to adopt that mindset that if it's to be, it's up to me.
Ryan: Mm. ⁓ gosh, I love that. There's so much to talk about here, so much to unpack. So I'll start here from a really young age, and I'm not sure we've ever talked about this personally before, but I, without getting into all the details of why this happened, but I ended up going to three different high schools. ⁓ One of which for my sophomore year of high school was in the Atlanta area in Georgia. And then I ended up having to move back to Connecticut. So I ended up going to three different high schools. And as a result of that, that was very, difficult on my mental health. It was very, extremely difficult to... ⁓ attach myself to any kind of friend group or to make long-term friends because I was, you know, relocating all the time and starting new three times in a row. ⁓ So it's one thing to do that as an adult, but when you're a teenager, right, when you're already really confused about things and I was dealing with a lot of depression ⁓ at the time as well. ⁓ And so that kind of like compounded this whole situation a little bit. So the reason I share this is because there's one thing I learned from that experience and I'm grateful in hindsight that I went through that challenge or difficulty. There was a part of me that thought that if I was to relocate and to go to a new school, a new high school, and even in like a new state and start afresh, that that was gonna kind of magically solve all my problems. And I quickly learned that that was not the case. That the surroundings ⁓ did not determine my degree of internal well-being or happiness. And I learned this lesson multiple times in a row, in fact. And so what I started to realize is that kind of my internal sense of, let's call it home, know, feeling at home in the body, feeling okay with myself. feeling a sense of wellness and inner happiness was that it was not determined by my physical location. That I had to cultivate that internally. That no amount of changing my external circumstance is going to provide that for me. So again, I think that that's kind of like a unique circumstance that not a lot of people necessarily go through. And it was a really early life lesson that taught me how to be resilient and to adapt very quickly. Because changing these circumstances every year, going to these three different high schools pretty early on, I had to learn to adapt, be resilient, to learn how to get to know people really quickly. But again, most importantly, it was my first kind of life lesson. and let's say whether that was self-imposed or from the outside or not that you know mindset is everything and even before the age of 18 I kind of started to develop this philosophy almost like this kind of like Buddhist mindset towards life that the only thing that is permanent is change Right? But the one thing I can't control the external circumstances, but I can control the way I react to my environment. Right? So. ⁓ ⁓ I started to think about how I could cultivate this like inner sense of happiness or peace within myself, regardless of however stormy the circumstances were in life. And to kind of piggyback on what you had said earlier about investing, right? So investing as like the healing mindset is this long-term game. Right? Where you're thinking 10, 20, 30 years out ahead. Right? So what that means is riding out a lot of fluctuations, a lot of turbulence in the market where there have been times where I've looked at my investments and I was down 50, 60%. Right? And I go, okay. Okay. Tomorrow's another day, figuratively speaking. Tomorrow in the investing world is maybe three months, right? These things have a way of sorting themselves out. The vicissitudes of life as Charlie Munger would call them. And he's even talked about this in interviews as well that with Berkshire Hathaway having lost, where their portfolio has been down 50%. Imagine the nerves of steel you have to have when you're talking about managing. Billions of dollars not like you know Tiny little amounts of money like we're talking about here, right? Or maybe who knows maybe I'll get there one day ⁓ But it takes this mindset where you have to think this is temporary. This is part of the process I'm in it for the long game right and so I'm not here to talk about investing. We're here to talk about health and But I think it takes a similar mindset with the healing journey where inevitably there will be setbacks The healing path or trajectory is not a straight line. It never, never is. Right. And you know this for yourself. I know this for myself. You know, we go through these changes and we start doing the right things and we could have setbacks. We could have autoimmune flare ups. We know, for example, with autoimmune conditions, we have this, this autoimmune condition within our system for life. There's no like cure for an autoimmune disease. So what we're doing is managing the illness, right? We're negotiating with our body. Like we talked about in the very first episode zero zero, that it's this ongoing negotiation. It takes a long-term mindset. takes, ⁓ you know, thinking about these diet and lifestyle strategies, not as protocols, but as long-term approaches to how we are like actually fundamentally living our lives and interacting in life. So. ⁓ you know, the, the, the inevitable moments where even still over a dozen years into my own healing journey, where I have setbacks, I sit back, I observe almost. dispassionately just go, ⁓ interesting, right? ⁓ There's a flare-up. But rather than letting myself get sort of emotionally wrapped up in that drama, because it's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up in that drama and say, ⁓ my god, why is this happening to me? I do everything perfectly, I'm doing all the right things. You know... I hate to say it, but woe is me, right? We can get into this kind of woe is me attitude rather than going, you know what? ⁓ In a few months, I might not even remember that this happened. Let me just continue to do the things that I know will benefit me. Like for example, optimizing our circadian rhythm, getting to bed by 10 PM, being mindful of eliminating inflammatory foods in the diet. And Maybe there's certain supplements we know that help us in these more turbulent times when we're experiencing flare-ups that can help us mitigate the damage. But yeah, that would be, think a really good way to start this conversation or journey of mindset is thinking about this very long-term mindset. And we have to be thinking about Like if we're staring at our stocks or whatever going up and down every day, I don't recommend doing that, right? That's just noise. You're just getting caught up in the noise and it's a great way to keep yourself anxious. And it's just kind of the same thing with, I have seen this by the way with clients that... And this is always an interesting thing for me to observe clinically is when I have a client send me like 50 pages of symptom journaling where they've been tracking every little change in their symptoms hour by hour, day by day for months or more years. And that's often a sign to me, by the way, of a very dysregulated nervous system. There is such a thing as overthinking it. There's this balancing act, right? And the degree to which we're sort of like over-tracking or over-analyzing, right, especially these day-to-day moment-to-moment fluctuations, right, I always say look at the changes on a week-to-week basis, a month-to-month basis, right, not to get too wrapped up in the day-to-day fluctuations. So.
Evan Transue: So in terms of, man, this is like, it's so funny, because the words are probably some of the simplest that we'll ever use on the podcast, right? Because we're not using big scientific words or fancy things. But in terms of the actions, it might be some of the hardest. In terms of like really, really implementing this into your life. So I want to go back to the fault responsibility thing and like what that would actually look like to implement in your life. So.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: This is kind of funny because this has nothing again to do with investing or finance But there's a famous book called rich dad poor dad by this gentleman Robert Kiyosaki I can't tell you much of what I read in the book But I do remember this because I needed it at the time so the whole premise of rich dad poor dad is supposedly his real dad was You know not as great with money And then he had a friend's dad that he talked to as a mentor who was the quote-unquote rich dad that taught him about you know life and money and stuff whatever and so The rich dad said something to him, Robert that is, at one point that made Robert say, you know, I can't afford that or we can't afford that as a family. And the rich dad said to him, never say you can't afford that. Ask yourself how you could afford that. And this is where people I think that are getting into this, they dismiss things like that as like woo woo, self help, positive thinking type of thing. It's like, ⁓ come on man, I can't afford a Lamborghini. I'm not gonna ask how. It's like, well. never say you can't afford that. Ask yourself how you afford that. come on man, I can't afford a Lamborghini. I'm not gonna ask how.
Ryan: Mm-hmm.
Evan Transue: Okay, you might not be able to do it tomorrow, but I certainly know this. If you're going to dismiss it, the possibility, from day one and moment one of thinking about it, you are correct. You've absolutely guaranteed that you're never gonna get the Lamborghini. If I at least start asking how... you might not be able to do it tomorrow, but ⁓ certainly know this. If you're going to dismiss it, the possibility, ⁓ day one and moment one of thinking about it, you are correct. You've absolutely guaranteed that you're never gonna get the Lamborghini. If I at least start asking how... Who knows? Who knows? Maybe some good thoughts start to come into my head. So how does this link to the personal responsibility thing? Because I realized people misinterpret the message and they'll still misinterpret it even if I specify it this way. I've said it so many times, I know unfortunately people still take it wrong if enough people listen. The personal responsibility thing is not to be confused with fault as we talked about and does not imply any blame. In fact the word fault, it does imply blame. That's why I don't like the philosophies that say everything's your fault. There's some people...
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: that kind of take that. I'm a literal person when it comes to words. I'm like, no, that's not accurate to me. Everything is not my fault. Everything is not your fault. There's no way. Everything's my responsibility. Because if I say everything's my fault, there's a shame that comes with that. There's a blame that comes with it. There's a negative mindset that comes with it. When I say it's my responsibility, it's the exact opposite. It's an empowering mindset. It's the same concept as saying I can't afford it versus how I can afford it. I can't afford it creates a stinkin' thinkin', as our friend Benazati says. and just, ⁓ woe is me, and all this kind of stuff. How can I afford it makes me ask, well, okay, dang, I make 50,000 year right now. A Lamborghini might be, I don't know, two, 300,000 easily. That's a lot. ⁓ I'd have to be working a completely different job. Okay, well, how would I do that? Or maybe I'd have to start a business. Okay, how could I do that? And again, I'm not saying that makes it easy, but at least we're getting the creative faculties moving now. So when we take responsibility for this stuff in our life and we say, you know, my health is declining right now. I'm not gonna... Play the blame game. I'm not gonna beat myself up because that's not gonna help, right? ⁓ Ryan, you brought this up, getting into that just kind of emotional distress. That doesn't help at all. That's gonna actually make the state worse. But let's say I'm in it. My health is actually getting worse and I take responsibility for everything in my life. So, all right, if I was fully responsible for this, what might I look at first? Okay, well, I'm gonna go over my habits that I already know I need to be done. I need to be going to bed at a certain time. There's a certain way that I eat that makes me feel great. There's a certain way I interact with my relationships. There's a certain amount of time that I work. And I go through those categories. And by the way, in 10, 12 years of doing this, almost every single time that I've had issues, I'm not doing one of the foundationals or I've let one of them ⁓ slip, right? Ryan knows kind of ironic compared to our last episode. One of the things I let slip the most was the bedtime ⁓ after mold exposure, which greatly disrupted my sleep. So the mold exposure is not my fault, but it is my responsibility to figure out, all right, how do I get back to this thing that I was able to do pretty successfully for eight or nine years straight?
Ryan: Mm. Yeah.
Evan Transue: that got affected by this mold thing now, right? So it's interesting too, when I look at anything going bad health-wise, I can almost always find it with the foundational things that I'm doing wrong. Let's say the foundationals were perfect though, then I would take the next step. I'd say, okay, well, if I was still fully responsible for my health, which I am, and I know I'm doing all the foundationals right, what else have I not looked at? Is there something that I'm missing? Is there an education that I can get? Are there people that I can work with? Is there someone that I can talk to? Could I find someone who's been through a similar story? Can I read a book on this subject? This is something that if you apply it will affect all areas of your life, which is great. And here's a great test, and if you're honest with yourself to any degree, everyone answers this the same way. It's actually quite humbling, and it's humbling for me every single time I ask myself it. If you sat down right now, you turn the dang phone off for a second, no email, no Facebook, none of the stuff, you just sit quietly, what a concept. And you take a few categories in your life, let's say like health, ⁓ wealth, finances. ⁓
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: love, happiness, all that kind of stuff. And you ask yourself in silence, or you can write it down. I like to sometimes write the question down and ponder the thing, it kind of helps me. What is one thing right now I could do to improve my health? And think about that even for a second, What's one thing that I can do right now to improve my health? I guarantee an answer just came to your mind, an answer probably came to Ryan's mind, even though he's doing pretty well, and an answer came to my mind. That's interesting though, right? You didn't have to listen to a podcast for that. You didn't even have to read a book for that. You already knew. So that's cool. Then if I ask myself, what's one thing I could do better for my finances? This one, ⁓ my gosh, I could always do better at this. You know, I'm great at making it, but gosh knows where it goes once it comes in, right? So I could think of a few things I could do better with the finances type of thing. With love, maybe you have a relationship, maybe you don't have a relationship. Doesn't matter. What is one thing I could do?
Ryan: Yeah. ⁓
Evan Transue: to improve the quality of my relationship that I currently have or to improve my chances of getting a relationship if that's what I desire? Bet you can answer that. And then in happiness, what's one thing that I could do that would improve my life satisfaction? What's a recreational activity that I've neglected or whatever? Isn't it fascinating that again, if you're even a shred honest with yourself, you were able to answer all of those probably with more than one thing. So why don't we do it? Now Ryan, I don't wanna... leave you on a cliffhanger here because in the sense like I know that I probably said a lot that you might want to add on to but I feel like with your training especially with MVHWC you might be best to answer why can't we do it? How come we can answer those questions but we just don't do it? obviously please feel free to add anything but I would also love to know why don't we do it and how can we start doing those things that we know to do.
Ryan: Mm. Yeah, happy to speak to that and very quickly first before I forget to piggyback on what you said about what's one thing we can do today. Years ago, the first book I think I ever read on call it self-help, which I know sometimes that genre has a bit of a stigma or even like a negative connotation, but it was a book written by James Altucher called Choose Yourself and it completely changed my life. And one concept that he taught in that book was this what he called the 1 % rule, which is simply that if you just change your life by 1 % a day, that by the end of the year, that's 365 % of a change. You're like literally a different person. So coming back to your question here, in the world of coaching, we use a concept called SMART goals. which is essentially, I love this term in terms of coaching psychology, it's called shrinking the change, right? Instead of, you know, I'm gonna run a marathon tomorrow when I could barely walk around my block, because I'm dealing with chronic fatigue. It's like, maybe we should think about... making that goal a bit more specific, measurable, attainable, right? Shrink the change, make it, you know, more bite sized. And this is just common sense, but it also is backed up by behavioral psychology that if we make our goals smaller, we're more likely to attain them. And then that sets off this kind of positive psychology flywheel. Cause we get that little dopamine hit, right? I did the, Hey, I started just walking around the block in my neighborhood. It was a five minute, 10 minute walk. I accomplish something and that builds and promotes the sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. So I've thought a lot about over the years how do you convince someone that change or healing is possible or that their life can be better when they don't believe that because that's a challenging situation to help. someone to change because we can't just like magically by osmosis plant that mindset into someone else right so you know how do we do that i think a great place to start is maybe first by helping someone to identify times in their past where they have tapped into their own strengths in order to overcome an obstacle right give them they need evidence the key word here is evidence And so if they don't have it now, let's help that person go back into their past and let's say, all right, when have you used, you're a really resourceful person, Evan. When you try to go to solve a problem, you're going to go, you're going to read a book. You're going to listen to a podcast, right? Maybe take a course online. All right. Well, you came up up against this problem. Maybe it was a financial problem in the past. How did you overcome it? ⁓ well, gosh, yeah. Five years ago. I was trying to get out of debt. So I took this financial course. I learned how to systematically pay off my credit cards. I learned how to put a small percentage of my money away every month and to pay myself first. That's something that Robert Kiyosaki talks about, right? Pay yourself first. And so great. Well, that's an example of where you were able to tap into your own self-determination, self-efficacy, tap into your own strengths to overcome an obstacle. So with this current problem, you're struggling with brain fog every day or weight gain. How can you tap into that same innate superpower, that skill that we know you have to... to instead of by the way instead of me just telling them the answer it's putting that person in the driver's seat of their own destiny and we're asking them how would you solve this for yourself knowing you've been able to accomplish similar things in the past right and get that person to come up with this is all rooted in positive psychology you're getting that person then to come up with their own solutions ⁓ yeah i guess you know i did see this podcast about how to overcome brain fog. And it seemed really interesting. Maybe I can listen to, maybe I can, there were some episodes about this on autoimmune recovery lab. Maybe I can see what Ryan and Evan have to say about it, right?
Evan Transue: You
Ryan: So I think you're kind of getting the idea there, but I think again, if people are starting with a really negative head space, we need to find evidence from their past that they have been able to, hey, if they're living and breathing and they're standing in front of us today, chances are they've overcome some kind of difficulty or hardship in their life. So then, you know, it's a matter of understanding what that person's strengths are, what their values are, and then bridging those to their their future? What's the vision they want to paint for themselves? Now this is something that Dr. Joe Dispenza talks a lot about. I don't think he's necessarily the first person to come up with this concept, but when we imagine ourselves in the future, we can really sit very deeply in a vision of our ideal future. Magic wand scenario, nothing holding us back. And let's say that's on a reasonable timeframe, like three years from now, not in some far away, distant point in the future that seems unattainable. Like let's say three years from now. And you're sitting on the beach or having dinner with your best friends. You have a flexible job that allows you to work remotely. You know, you're eating healthy. You're doing yoga three times a week. You, you, ⁓ You know, you get a massage once a week. It could just, you know, no holding back. This is just whatever your imagination allows you to take you to. And if you could sit in that vision so vividly that you're able to make the hairs on your neck or your arms stand up. What you're doing is flooding your body with endorphins. And this is the key, this is the Joe Dispenza part, is that your brain doesn't know the difference between that imagined reality and what's actually happening in the moment. Your brain thinks it's actually happening, right? And so even if your life doesn't look like that in the moment, we could sort of trick our brains, right, to ⁓ flood our body with positive. ⁓ neurotransmitters and endorphins as though that's actually happening. And that can become such a powerful ⁓ motivating force to give us context for Why are we doing all this work? Why am I taking all these supplements? Why am I running these lab tests? Why am I, you know, like we talked about in the last episode, getting up at 6 a.m. and going outside first thing in the morning in the freezing cold to get light in my eyeballs, right? All these crazy things that Ryan and Evan are asking us to do. Well, guess what? In order to get to that point in the future, in order to get to that point, that's all about the tiny little 1 % individual decisions we make today to pave the road for that future brick by brick. So then it's linking that future vision. And then really quickly, and then I'll hand it back to you, I might even invert that for the client that I'm working with and say, what would your future look like if you didn't change at all? things stayed exactly the same. And I actually hope that they're a bit terrified by their own response. I know that's a sounds like a harsh thing to say, but I want them to be slightly at least slightly terrified where ⁓ my god like I can't that's that's not an option right I can't I can't keep going on living with this fatigue the brain fog the muscle and joint pain the weight gain, the insomnia, the low libido, the hair loss. It's not an option. I can't, can't possibly, well, okay. I hear you loud and clear. Well, do you think that you're gonna get to that kind of ideal future if you're doing exactly what you're doing now? And hopefully the answer is no. And then a recognition that things need to change.
Evan Transue: Yeah. I love what you brought up about the, ⁓ like just kind of breaking things down. ⁓ it's like in terms of, ⁓ starting a new habit, right? Cause I know you love Warren Buffett. ⁓ and he has this quote, right? The chains of habits are too strong to be felt. ⁓ until, ⁓ dang it. I messed that up. I'm not going to edit that part. The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they're too strong to be broken. I only have like 10 minutes to think about that. Jeez. So, ⁓ anyway, you know, it doesn't mean that you can't actually break.
Ryan: I'm
Evan Transue: in my opinion, in my experience. But it does mean that they're heck of a lot harder. He has a lot of validity in what he said there. And so what I have found is sometimes you have to be so ridiculous with the action that you're taking for the new habit. Like that's what's going to allow you to do it. So for example, ⁓ why does someone not do those things that they know that they can do to improve all those areas of their life? I think probably a lot of it's overwhelming. I actually think we can think of so many things that it's like, well, how the heck am I going to implement 10 new things in two or four different categories of my life?
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: Tomorrow well, you're not gonna do that right so that's where you have to learn to have that discernment to figure out Okay, so let's just focus on health this month right who cares it doesn't have to be finances this month It could be just health this month I make a list of all the things that I could do then I kind of circle what I believe would be the top one and then I make it Ridiculous, so what I mean by ridiculous is Let's say I'm having a hugely hard time removing gluten from my diet, okay? And I know this sounds stupid, but this stuff works, man. This is how I've implemented many habits is just being ridiculous with it, especially it's interesting. I found that it was easier to switch fast before the age of 25. And I don't know if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. As soon as my brain developed, maybe mine's still helping, who knows? But I'm pretty sure mine developed at 25, 26, like other people's, it got a little harder to make those changes, even though I know the principles and I know how beneficial they are. I still found that it's tougher. to change. It's kind of interesting and I have to rely on these micro methods even more if you'll call them that. So let's say it was something like removing gluten. All right, and I have cereal for breakfast. I have a sandwich for lunch. I have pasta for dinner and I have, you know, five cookies as a snack. I would literally make the change. like, all right, I'm not allowed. Again, it depends on how extreme of a problem you're having. It could be something as stupid as I'm not allowed to have half of one of the cookies today. That's all I'm going to do. Or it could be like one of the five. I'm not allowed to have. They say, well, that's not gonna change anything, right? Well, no, it does, right? We're starting the actions. And then you do that until the point that it just, you don't even think about it anymore, because now the habit has shifted, and then you remove another one. Now, what happens is, you don't have to rush this, because even if you just did that over a three month period, you'd probably remove gluten completely, and you're way better off, and you only took three months of your life to do it. Not a big deal at all, very good job. If you do this almost always, your body kind of wants to do more because it's so outrageous. So here's one that helped me when I wanted to start reading more because I knew how much reading was helping me. It's improved every aspect of my life in every category. In fact, I'm actually a believer that there's really no problem I have ever dealt with. Maybe you're different. I don't know. There's no problem I have ever dealt with in any category of my life that someone else has not already been through, solved and written in a book that I can buy for $10 on Kindle. That's my belief. Maybe my life's too simple. I don't know. So reading is everything.
Ryan: I love that. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Right, and I do a lot of audiobooks, I'm like, how can I read more? So then I realized, okay, this is what we're gonna do, it's gonna be this ridiculous. All I have to do is read a paragraph from the book. I can pick up the book and read a paragraph. That is my goal for today, is just that, and then I can go on the computer, I can screw around, can doom scroll, whatever. Now there are times where I have been so weak in my motivation that it literally was the paragraph, and then guess what, you actually kind of feel good, by the way, because when you set the expectation and you meet the expectation, even if it was very low,
Ryan: and
Evan Transue: you still feel better, it does something to your brain, very interesting stuff. But I'd say at least over 60 % of the time, what that ended up being in the beginning was reading more than a paragraph. I'm like, well, this is interesting. Right, I wanna finish this thought. And then that turns into two paragraphs. It's like, well, this whole chapter is kind of interesting, I gotta finish this chapter. But I'm already in the, I'm in the green. Because I can stop anytime I want, because I already read my paragraph. And so I don't beat myself up if I read 10 paragraphs the one day and then only one the next, the goal was one, that's it. And so when you start doing these like micro changes, you will find that again, almost any habit that you want to implement can be implemented. I met a guy, this is crazy. ⁓ My buddy Joey, I shouldn't say I met a guy, it's one of his clients. So my buddy Joey, I think I've told you about him before, he competes in strong man. He's six four, 265 pounds. I this is a gym guy, man. And he still knows how hard it can be for some people. He helped some of them. I think he took this from Atomic Habits, but he's actually used this with clients where literally their task,
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: was to drive to the gym parking lot and they're allowed to leave. They just bring the clothes, they bring the shoes, they drive to the gym parking lot, they're allowed to leave and that's the check mark for the day for the coaching. And then you know what almost always happens, even though some people had taken them up on that, literally by the way, almost always the person's like, I'm already at the dang gym. I got a membership, I'm paying for this thing, I got my shoes, the outfit looks kinda cool, I wanna go wear that. People always have their gym outfits set up. So then you go in and then guess what? If you go in for five minutes, you're already in the green.
Ryan: yeah. Mine as well.
Evan Transue: Again, so everything kind of feels great after that because you're just doing more than you said that you would do. So what I'd highly recommend is like Ryan said, kind of have that vision, then figure out what are the one or two main habits that I need to change right now in order to fulfill that vision. And then you start with these micro changes. A great way to stay on track with any of this, by the way, I'm not gonna share my specific goals, those are private. ⁓ I always carry this around. This does not miss me. And that's my little notepad. So my little notepad has. what I'm currently working on. I do it in the present tense. I do all that kind of stuff. And you know what, man, there's gotta be something to that because the New Age spiritualists believe it, the secular people believe it because of the reticular activating system, and Christians like me believe it because it's in the book of Mark. It says when you pray, pray as if what you want has already come true, and it will be so. Right, I'm paraphrasing, but that's fundamentally it. So it's like so interesting when science, reticular activating system, a reticular activating system, by the way, is like the phenomenon when you say I'm gonna buy a red car or a certain model of car, and then all of a sudden you start seeing it everywhere. Right? Our mind is filtering all the crap that comes in in today's world. Right? You might not have noticed certain things behind me. Right? While I've been talking, you might not have noticed a thing in Ryan's background because that's not important right now. You were listening to us. So when you start consciously focusing on something, the science shows that that helps you think about it more. Again, the new age spiritualists believe in manifesting and then the Christians also believe in praying for these things. So I believe there's something to it.
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: So what I do is the thing that I'm working on at the time, I like to write it down, I have it with me, and like Ryan said, you can visualize with this, I think that's very important. But even more important is I can carry this around very easily, or, I've done this many times, is I take the little thing, I just rip it out, and I put it in my pocket. But now, think about this, what have I been training myself to do? I trained myself that I write this down and I visualize it, and now I have that piece of paper. So every time I put my hand in my pocket and I feel the paper, bam, triggers the thing, bam.
Ryan: You're reminded of it. ⁓
Evan Transue: Yeah, and you put your hand in your pocket all day for your phone or whatever. It could be the background of your phone. I find that that ends up getting tuned out if I do edit the background up as the background on my phone, but some people like that. Anyway, the reason I suggest that though is because the more you think about this thing, the more you're gonna start taking those little micro changes. And this is the secret, the real secret. Coming full circle to what I said before, I can't afford it versus how can I afford it? When you constantly think about something, Man, this mind that we were given is one of the most interesting things in the world. It's like these ideas and these intuitions just kind of flow in. And I'll be 10 days into a goal that I set and I thought I thought about every possibility and I do not know how to express this. Just like out of nowhere, bam, a new idea. I mean, this was so obvious. Why did I not think about that before? I don't care. I just say, thanks, I appreciate it. And I go execute on that idea that's gonna lead me to this thing that I'm working on.
Ryan: Evan, are you familiar with the quote? It's actually comes from a neurologist, which is that neurons that fire together wire together. Yeah. Right. So it's basically this idea that the more we repeat a belief or even a habit that it
Evan Transue: I've heard that before,
Ryan: the more it's like ingrained into the physical structures of our brain. So the more those neurons are firing, they start hardwiring together. I'm a musician, so I almost think of like the way we would etch the groove into a record, into a vinyl record, right? And so that becomes like this permanent, right? So when the needle drops into the record, it always follows that same path. Like it can't actually follow another path, right? It's like permanently embedded into the record. And in a sense, that's how neuroplasticity works. That could work to our disadvantage with limiting beliefs or habits that are working against our favor. But also if we're aware of that fact, we can use neuroplasticity to our advantage. We can rewire our brain. And neuroscience takes says that this is not necessarily easy, but we can do it that it takes about six months of concerted effort to rewire our brain. Right. So for example, if I fundamentally believe as many people do, and I don't necessarily again, it's not their fault, but it is their responsibility. If they believe that I am fundamentally broken, this is just who I am. People just get sick. This just happens. It's genetic. My mom and dad had this disorder. Therefore, it was inevitable, right? The doctor said that there's nothing I can do about this. I will always struggle with this issue, right? Well, the truth is that your thoughts become reality. And those repeated thoughts and beliefs and actions will actually ⁓ create a phenomenon where your brain is sending those messages to your body. Your body takes instructions from the mind. What if I woke up every day and I decide to, I almost imagine like Bart Simpson writing on the chalkboard, the same line over and over again, right? I am strong, healthy, and resilient in all situations, right? I am healthy and resilient. and I have an abundance of energy every day. Whatever it might be, call it a personal mantra. And that might feel woo-woo, but the neuroscience backs this up. So we write that down 100 times a day on a notepad or on Google notes or whatever. We sing it in the shower. We say it to ourselves out loud while we're driving in our car by ourselves so we don't look like a madman to whoever's in the passenger seat. You do that enough and those neurons start to wire a new pattern in your brain that essentially gets embedded into your subconscious and then your body is taking new instructions now from the brain. Is that like my default state now is not ⁓ fragile? Like I can't even go out to eat at a restaurant because I might get cross-contamination from gluten and I'm gonna be sick for a week. Well, if you're predicting the future like that, it's, that's what's going to happen. You've already decided that's what's going to happen. But if you've already predetermined and decided I'm, you know, I'm resilient enough to go out into the world and handle these situations with enough time, you can rewire your neurophysiology and the fundamental way that your body responds to the stimulus and the environment, like how cool is that? So there you go.
Evan Transue: So guys today, and by the way, if you want proof, I'm not trying to impose something negative on you guys, but I will say this. If you want proof that it's a mindset issue, remember all I asked was just to write something down. You could take two seconds, anyone can write something down, man. You have nothing to lose, takes two seconds. So three days from now when a fraction of you remember this moment where you're like, he told me to write something down and I couldn't even do that. By the way, that's totally a mindset thing. I believe 100,000 % I know when I have limiting beliefs around a goal that I'm trying to achieve because I just don't write it down. It is the funniest thing that I cannot sit there and write one fricking sentence down on paper. And that's the proof to me always that I'm like, all right, I gotta work through something here. So that's even more of a reason to write it down by the way. But just something to think about. Hopefully you are not that person. And even if you are, when you recognize it in three days, fix the problem. You are a human. You have autonomy over yourself. You can pick up a pen, you can pick up a pencil, you can pick up paper and you write it down. It's a sentence.
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: ⁓ I hope you do that and if you feel comfortable sharing with us, think you can comment on this actually on Spotify and YouTube, which is cool. Let us know what you're working on. I think that's interesting. this is autoimmunerecoverylab.com slash podcast four. That's autoimmunerecoverylab.com slash podcast and the number four. You get the notes from today just in case you forgot anything. All of them are summarized there so that you can have your action steps and anything that we referenced today will also be in there for you guys. I'll try to throw in maybe one or two YouTube videos of some of the guided meditation type of things that could really help you guys. My mom loves those. I love those. ⁓ And I actually used what you were talking about, Ryan. That's how I overcame my fear of public speaking and it's how I overcame my fear of flying is by doing these guided visualizations where I pictured myself doing the thing I was scared of without the fear. So there's a lot to it. ⁓ Thank you guys very much.
Ryan: Hmm. Awesome, we'll see you next time.
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: There's a lot of people that I have interacted with throughout the years. There's a lot of people Ryan has interacted with throughout the years. We have tons of colleagues in this functional space. And I mean, it has to be in the hundreds of thousands of individuals that we've either talked to directly or on social media, if you count all of our colleagues combined, that have the information now, but they never change. Nothing ever actually gets better. They know what to do, but they never actually do it. And we're going to discuss some of the why of that today and perhaps how you could overcome that. So. Ryan hello great to be talking to you as always
Ryan: Yeah, hey everyone, hey Ev, glad to be here. This is definitely an incredibly important topic. And as you mentioned, in a sense... None of these other biohacks or all the other information doesn't really quite matter as much unless kind of segueing into the topic for today, unless we have our mindset right, right? Unless we have a roadmap, unless we know where we're heading. In a sense, it's almost like the frame around which, you know, everything we think about, everything we do ⁓ is contextualized. So super excited to be talking about this today.
Evan Transue: Yes. You know, I always share my story in the sense of I had those seven different diagnosed health conditions at 18 and then I got into natural medicine. It's not that that's untrue. It's that there's one little part of the story that I do believe you know, but almost no one that's listening would know. It's actually that I got into personal development first. I got very lucky to get involved with a group of young people. I needed this so bad at the time. I was just a mess, man. I got kicked out of school, I'm using drugs. Like it was not good. And I get involved in this group. of people that were very involved in personal development. And they were all like 18 to 22. So some of them I looked up to as being older. They were all, you know, at least my peers, they were close enough in age. And it was just, it was so interesting to go from, I mean, literally in a six month period, I went from hanging out with people that used hardcore drugs all the time and I was doing the same thing to a group that we literally read books together. We would take the time to like pause, everyone reads, and then we share what we're working on or goals and all that kind of stuff or what we learned from the book. And that personal development stuff came before the biggest parts of my health journey. And I am so thankful that I got indoctrinated with that information at 18 years old, because I can just see, and I'm including myself in this, I can see as we get older and as that prefrontal cortex fully develops and as that brain development solidifies around 25, 26, it's almost like the... the human body is designed to keep you stuck in your ways. Cause it's like you made it 25, 26 years, right? You must be doing something right. This is again, ev-belief, ev-theory. I kind of believe that's why it's very hard to change certain personality traits. This is science-backed. Unless trauma happens after the age of 25, 26. Most of our personality traits cannot change after the age of 25, 26, unless a severe trauma occurs. And I think at least part of that is because the body says you've already been here for a quarter of a century. You must be doing something right. So we're going to keep you. locked into these patterns. I thank God that this happened to me at 18 before I knew any better, because I absorbed this stuff blindly. I read a book called The Compound Effect, which talked about different habits and how very small actions over a long period of time can make a difference. So an example from the book, I know you love investing, Ryan, an example from the book had to do with someone who invested long term versus someone who didn't. It had an example of a gentleman who had just one extra beer a day.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: Or maybe it was, whatever it was, was an equivalent of like 200 extra calories a day. And then they showed what that did over 30 years to someone, just 200 calories extra a day. That's not hard to get, right? But it's also, ⁓ it's like one of those things, what's easy to do is easy not to do. ⁓ So you probably should be eating well, but that's easy not to do. And it's easy not to drink a beer, but it's also very easy to drink a beer. And when you do that over 30 years, this person weighed significantly more than the other individual, just from that extra 200 calories a day. And then I learned this and this is what this matters for in terms of this conversation today. I learned that the situations in my life ⁓ I wasn't a victim You know, I thought I was for a very long time. ⁓ even though I made very bad decisions in high school I blamed everything on my outer circumstances because I had mental health issues I had struggles that for those on audio I'm doing air quotes right now no one else had ever experienced or they couldn't possibly know my life. And so it was that, the fault of that, that led me to the drug use, which of course led me to all my problems. So it wasn't my fault. And I learned in this book that there was a difference between fault and responsibility, a difference between fault and responsibility. So there's some things in life that are our fault, no doubt, right? There's certain choices that we blatantly make. We knew the consequences and we got the consequences. Yeah, that's your fault. And then there's things
Ryan: Mm-mm, yeah.
Evan Transue: This is everything else, by the way, literally everything else. That might not be our fault, but it's still 100 % our responsibility because no one's coming to save us. We don't live in a utopia where that just happens. So it might not be my fault that I dealt with panic disorder at five years old. It might not be my fault that I dealt with major depressive disorder starting at 14, 15 years old. It might not even be my fault that I happened to be in a friend group that was unusually willing to try substances at earlier ages than other friend groups. None of that might be my fault. but it is my responsibility to say this is where I'm currently at and what actions can I take or can I stop doing in my life to lead to a better circumstance. And I know that this is incredibly hard for a lot of our autoimmune warriors as we call them. These autoimmune warriors are overrepresented amongst women. Women are overrepresented ⁓ amongst people who deal with autoimmune conditions. And Ryan, you talked about this on episode. One, how they're more likely to score higher on that ACES test, right? Adverse Childhood Experiences, I believe that's what it stands for. Either way, would be the same point. So if you have dealt with severe trauma in your life, the first thing that you might think of when I say something like that is like, well, he doesn't know my life. It's like, I don't have to, to know that it's your responsibility. Now, should it have to be your responsibility? No, my friend. ⁓ I want that to be very clear before we get into this today. No one is saying.
Ryan: Mm-hmm.
Evan Transue: that someone who had severe mental health issues like me or someone who was abused should have to take full responsibility for that situation. That's not fun to have to deal with alone. It's not fair either. But that's how life operates. So to tell you anything else though is actually to hurt you. Because if I say, well, you're right. It's definitely not your fault. 100 % it's not your fault. And there's nothing you can do about it as a result. That leaves you stuck in the mess and the situation that you're in today. Versus if I say, you know, hey XYZ person, it's 100 % not your fault that this happened to you as a kid, but no one's coming to fix this. So it is 100 % though your responsibility to say, what can I do given this very crappy situation to possibly make it better? So, sorry for my soap box to start this off. You can kind of see motivational speaker I was creeping out here. So I'm gonna back off a little bit and throw it to you because I'm wondering, man, like,
Ryan: Hmm. Yeah.
Evan Transue: I only know you as a person who seems to take responsibility for everything, but I would assume that's not how you grew up. I could be wrong. I'd love to know like when that became a part of your health journey where you were able to adopt that mindset that if it's to be, it's up to me.
Ryan: Mm. ⁓ gosh, I love that. There's so much to talk about here, so much to unpack. So I'll start here from a really young age, and I'm not sure we've ever talked about this personally before, but I, without getting into all the details of why this happened, but I ended up going to three different high schools. ⁓ One of which for my sophomore year of high school was in the Atlanta area in Georgia. And then I ended up having to move back to Connecticut. So I ended up going to three different high schools. And as a result of that, that was very, difficult on my mental health. It was very, extremely difficult to... ⁓ attach myself to any kind of friend group or to make long-term friends because I was, you know, relocating all the time and starting new three times in a row. ⁓ So it's one thing to do that as an adult, but when you're a teenager, right, when you're already really confused about things and I was dealing with a lot of depression ⁓ at the time as well. ⁓ And so that kind of like compounded this whole situation a little bit. So the reason I share this is because there's one thing I learned from that experience and I'm grateful in hindsight that I went through that challenge or difficulty. There was a part of me that thought that if I was to relocate and to go to a new school, a new high school, and even in like a new state and start afresh, that that was gonna kind of magically solve all my problems. And I quickly learned that that was not the case. That the surroundings ⁓ did not determine my degree of internal well-being or happiness. And I learned this lesson multiple times in a row, in fact. And so what I started to realize is that kind of my internal sense of, let's call it home, know, feeling at home in the body, feeling okay with myself. feeling a sense of wellness and inner happiness was that it was not determined by my physical location. That I had to cultivate that internally. That no amount of changing my external circumstance is going to provide that for me. So again, I think that that's kind of like a unique circumstance that not a lot of people necessarily go through. And it was a really early life lesson that taught me how to be resilient and to adapt very quickly. Because changing these circumstances every year, going to these three different high schools pretty early on, I had to learn to adapt, be resilient, to learn how to get to know people really quickly. But again, most importantly, it was my first kind of life lesson. and let's say whether that was self-imposed or from the outside or not that you know mindset is everything and even before the age of 18 I kind of started to develop this philosophy almost like this kind of like Buddhist mindset towards life that the only thing that is permanent is change Right? But the one thing I can't control the external circumstances, but I can control the way I react to my environment. Right? So. ⁓ ⁓ I started to think about how I could cultivate this like inner sense of happiness or peace within myself, regardless of however stormy the circumstances were in life. And to kind of piggyback on what you had said earlier about investing, right? So investing as like the healing mindset is this long-term game. Right? Where you're thinking 10, 20, 30 years out ahead. Right? So what that means is riding out a lot of fluctuations, a lot of turbulence in the market where there have been times where I've looked at my investments and I was down 50, 60%. Right? And I go, okay. Okay. Tomorrow's another day, figuratively speaking. Tomorrow in the investing world is maybe three months, right? These things have a way of sorting themselves out. The vicissitudes of life as Charlie Munger would call them. And he's even talked about this in interviews as well that with Berkshire Hathaway having lost, where their portfolio has been down 50%. Imagine the nerves of steel you have to have when you're talking about managing. Billions of dollars not like you know Tiny little amounts of money like we're talking about here, right? Or maybe who knows maybe I'll get there one day ⁓ But it takes this mindset where you have to think this is temporary. This is part of the process I'm in it for the long game right and so I'm not here to talk about investing. We're here to talk about health and But I think it takes a similar mindset with the healing journey where inevitably there will be setbacks The healing path or trajectory is not a straight line. It never, never is. Right. And you know this for yourself. I know this for myself. You know, we go through these changes and we start doing the right things and we could have setbacks. We could have autoimmune flare ups. We know, for example, with autoimmune conditions, we have this, this autoimmune condition within our system for life. There's no like cure for an autoimmune disease. So what we're doing is managing the illness, right? We're negotiating with our body. Like we talked about in the very first episode zero zero, that it's this ongoing negotiation. It takes a long-term mindset. takes, ⁓ you know, thinking about these diet and lifestyle strategies, not as protocols, but as long-term approaches to how we are like actually fundamentally living our lives and interacting in life. So. ⁓ you know, the, the, the inevitable moments where even still over a dozen years into my own healing journey, where I have setbacks, I sit back, I observe almost. dispassionately just go, ⁓ interesting, right? ⁓ There's a flare-up. But rather than letting myself get sort of emotionally wrapped up in that drama, because it's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up in that drama and say, ⁓ my god, why is this happening to me? I do everything perfectly, I'm doing all the right things. You know... I hate to say it, but woe is me, right? We can get into this kind of woe is me attitude rather than going, you know what? ⁓ In a few months, I might not even remember that this happened. Let me just continue to do the things that I know will benefit me. Like for example, optimizing our circadian rhythm, getting to bed by 10 PM, being mindful of eliminating inflammatory foods in the diet. And Maybe there's certain supplements we know that help us in these more turbulent times when we're experiencing flare-ups that can help us mitigate the damage. But yeah, that would be, think a really good way to start this conversation or journey of mindset is thinking about this very long-term mindset. And we have to be thinking about Like if we're staring at our stocks or whatever going up and down every day, I don't recommend doing that, right? That's just noise. You're just getting caught up in the noise and it's a great way to keep yourself anxious. And it's just kind of the same thing with, I have seen this by the way with clients that... And this is always an interesting thing for me to observe clinically is when I have a client send me like 50 pages of symptom journaling where they've been tracking every little change in their symptoms hour by hour, day by day for months or more years. And that's often a sign to me, by the way, of a very dysregulated nervous system. There is such a thing as overthinking it. There's this balancing act, right? And the degree to which we're sort of like over-tracking or over-analyzing, right, especially these day-to-day moment-to-moment fluctuations, right, I always say look at the changes on a week-to-week basis, a month-to-month basis, right, not to get too wrapped up in the day-to-day fluctuations. So.
Evan Transue: So in terms of, man, this is like, it's so funny, because the words are probably some of the simplest that we'll ever use on the podcast, right? Because we're not using big scientific words or fancy things. But in terms of the actions, it might be some of the hardest. In terms of like really, really implementing this into your life. So I want to go back to the fault responsibility thing and like what that would actually look like to implement in your life. So.
Ryan: Mm.
Evan Transue: This is kind of funny because this has nothing again to do with investing or finance But there's a famous book called rich dad poor dad by this gentleman Robert Kiyosaki I can't tell you much of what I read in the book But I do remember this because I needed it at the time so the whole premise of rich dad poor dad is supposedly his real dad was You know not as great with money And then he had a friend's dad that he talked to as a mentor who was the quote-unquote rich dad that taught him about you know life and money and stuff whatever and so The rich dad said something to him, Robert that is, at one point that made Robert say, you know, I can't afford that or we can't afford that as a family. And the rich dad said to him, never say you can't afford that. Ask yourself how you could afford that. And this is where people I think that are getting into this, they dismiss things like that as like woo woo, self help, positive thinking type of thing. It's like, ⁓ come on man, I can't afford a Lamborghini. I'm not gonna ask how. It's like, well. never say you can't afford that. Ask yourself how you afford that. come on man, I can't afford a Lamborghini. I'm not gonna ask how.
Ryan: Mm-hmm.
Evan Transue: Okay, you might not be able to do it tomorrow, but I certainly know this. If you're going to dismiss it, the possibility, from day one and moment one of thinking about it, you are correct. You've absolutely guaranteed that you're never gonna get the Lamborghini. If I at least start asking how... you might not be able to do it tomorrow, but ⁓ certainly know this. If you're going to dismiss it, the possibility, ⁓ day one and moment one of thinking about it, you are correct. You've absolutely guaranteed that you're never gonna get the Lamborghini. If I at least start asking how... Who knows? Who knows? Maybe some good thoughts start to come into my head. So how does this link to the personal responsibility thing? Because I realized people misinterpret the message and they'll still misinterpret it even if I specify it this way. I've said it so many times, I know unfortunately people still take it wrong if enough people listen. The personal responsibility thing is not to be confused with fault as we talked about and does not imply any blame. In fact the word fault, it does imply blame. That's why I don't like the philosophies that say everything's your fault. There's some people...
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: that kind of take that. I'm a literal person when it comes to words. I'm like, no, that's not accurate to me. Everything is not my fault. Everything is not your fault. There's no way. Everything's my responsibility. Because if I say everything's my fault, there's a shame that comes with that. There's a blame that comes with it. There's a negative mindset that comes with it. When I say it's my responsibility, it's the exact opposite. It's an empowering mindset. It's the same concept as saying I can't afford it versus how I can afford it. I can't afford it creates a stinkin' thinkin', as our friend Benazati says. and just, ⁓ woe is me, and all this kind of stuff. How can I afford it makes me ask, well, okay, dang, I make 50,000 year right now. A Lamborghini might be, I don't know, two, 300,000 easily. That's a lot. ⁓ I'd have to be working a completely different job. Okay, well, how would I do that? Or maybe I'd have to start a business. Okay, how could I do that? And again, I'm not saying that makes it easy, but at least we're getting the creative faculties moving now. So when we take responsibility for this stuff in our life and we say, you know, my health is declining right now. I'm not gonna... Play the blame game. I'm not gonna beat myself up because that's not gonna help, right? ⁓ Ryan, you brought this up, getting into that just kind of emotional distress. That doesn't help at all. That's gonna actually make the state worse. But let's say I'm in it. My health is actually getting worse and I take responsibility for everything in my life. So, all right, if I was fully responsible for this, what might I look at first? Okay, well, I'm gonna go over my habits that I already know I need to be done. I need to be going to bed at a certain time. There's a certain way that I eat that makes me feel great. There's a certain way I interact with my relationships. There's a certain amount of time that I work. And I go through those categories. And by the way, in 10, 12 years of doing this, almost every single time that I've had issues, I'm not doing one of the foundationals or I've let one of them ⁓ slip, right? Ryan knows kind of ironic compared to our last episode. One of the things I let slip the most was the bedtime ⁓ after mold exposure, which greatly disrupted my sleep. So the mold exposure is not my fault, but it is my responsibility to figure out, all right, how do I get back to this thing that I was able to do pretty successfully for eight or nine years straight?
Ryan: Mm. Yeah.
Evan Transue: that got affected by this mold thing now, right? So it's interesting too, when I look at anything going bad health-wise, I can almost always find it with the foundational things that I'm doing wrong. Let's say the foundationals were perfect though, then I would take the next step. I'd say, okay, well, if I was still fully responsible for my health, which I am, and I know I'm doing all the foundationals right, what else have I not looked at? Is there something that I'm missing? Is there an education that I can get? Are there people that I can work with? Is there someone that I can talk to? Could I find someone who's been through a similar story? Can I read a book on this subject? This is something that if you apply it will affect all areas of your life, which is great. And here's a great test, and if you're honest with yourself to any degree, everyone answers this the same way. It's actually quite humbling, and it's humbling for me every single time I ask myself it. If you sat down right now, you turn the dang phone off for a second, no email, no Facebook, none of the stuff, you just sit quietly, what a concept. And you take a few categories in your life, let's say like health, ⁓ wealth, finances. ⁓
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: love, happiness, all that kind of stuff. And you ask yourself in silence, or you can write it down. I like to sometimes write the question down and ponder the thing, it kind of helps me. What is one thing right now I could do to improve my health? And think about that even for a second, What's one thing that I can do right now to improve my health? I guarantee an answer just came to your mind, an answer probably came to Ryan's mind, even though he's doing pretty well, and an answer came to my mind. That's interesting though, right? You didn't have to listen to a podcast for that. You didn't even have to read a book for that. You already knew. So that's cool. Then if I ask myself, what's one thing I could do better for my finances? This one, ⁓ my gosh, I could always do better at this. You know, I'm great at making it, but gosh knows where it goes once it comes in, right? So I could think of a few things I could do better with the finances type of thing. With love, maybe you have a relationship, maybe you don't have a relationship. Doesn't matter. What is one thing I could do?
Ryan: Yeah. ⁓
Evan Transue: to improve the quality of my relationship that I currently have or to improve my chances of getting a relationship if that's what I desire? Bet you can answer that. And then in happiness, what's one thing that I could do that would improve my life satisfaction? What's a recreational activity that I've neglected or whatever? Isn't it fascinating that again, if you're even a shred honest with yourself, you were able to answer all of those probably with more than one thing. So why don't we do it? Now Ryan, I don't wanna... leave you on a cliffhanger here because in the sense like I know that I probably said a lot that you might want to add on to but I feel like with your training especially with MVHWC you might be best to answer why can't we do it? How come we can answer those questions but we just don't do it? obviously please feel free to add anything but I would also love to know why don't we do it and how can we start doing those things that we know to do.
Ryan: Mm. Yeah, happy to speak to that and very quickly first before I forget to piggyback on what you said about what's one thing we can do today. Years ago, the first book I think I ever read on call it self-help, which I know sometimes that genre has a bit of a stigma or even like a negative connotation, but it was a book written by James Altucher called Choose Yourself and it completely changed my life. And one concept that he taught in that book was this what he called the 1 % rule, which is simply that if you just change your life by 1 % a day, that by the end of the year, that's 365 % of a change. You're like literally a different person. So coming back to your question here, in the world of coaching, we use a concept called SMART goals. which is essentially, I love this term in terms of coaching psychology, it's called shrinking the change, right? Instead of, you know, I'm gonna run a marathon tomorrow when I could barely walk around my block, because I'm dealing with chronic fatigue. It's like, maybe we should think about... making that goal a bit more specific, measurable, attainable, right? Shrink the change, make it, you know, more bite sized. And this is just common sense, but it also is backed up by behavioral psychology that if we make our goals smaller, we're more likely to attain them. And then that sets off this kind of positive psychology flywheel. Cause we get that little dopamine hit, right? I did the, Hey, I started just walking around the block in my neighborhood. It was a five minute, 10 minute walk. I accomplish something and that builds and promotes the sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. So I've thought a lot about over the years how do you convince someone that change or healing is possible or that their life can be better when they don't believe that because that's a challenging situation to help. someone to change because we can't just like magically by osmosis plant that mindset into someone else right so you know how do we do that i think a great place to start is maybe first by helping someone to identify times in their past where they have tapped into their own strengths in order to overcome an obstacle right give them they need evidence the key word here is evidence And so if they don't have it now, let's help that person go back into their past and let's say, all right, when have you used, you're a really resourceful person, Evan. When you try to go to solve a problem, you're going to go, you're going to read a book. You're going to listen to a podcast, right? Maybe take a course online. All right. Well, you came up up against this problem. Maybe it was a financial problem in the past. How did you overcome it? ⁓ well, gosh, yeah. Five years ago. I was trying to get out of debt. So I took this financial course. I learned how to systematically pay off my credit cards. I learned how to put a small percentage of my money away every month and to pay myself first. That's something that Robert Kiyosaki talks about, right? Pay yourself first. And so great. Well, that's an example of where you were able to tap into your own self-determination, self-efficacy, tap into your own strengths to overcome an obstacle. So with this current problem, you're struggling with brain fog every day or weight gain. How can you tap into that same innate superpower, that skill that we know you have to... to instead of by the way instead of me just telling them the answer it's putting that person in the driver's seat of their own destiny and we're asking them how would you solve this for yourself knowing you've been able to accomplish similar things in the past right and get that person to come up with this is all rooted in positive psychology you're getting that person then to come up with their own solutions ⁓ yeah i guess you know i did see this podcast about how to overcome brain fog. And it seemed really interesting. Maybe I can listen to, maybe I can, there were some episodes about this on autoimmune recovery lab. Maybe I can see what Ryan and Evan have to say about it, right?
Evan Transue: You
Ryan: So I think you're kind of getting the idea there, but I think again, if people are starting with a really negative head space, we need to find evidence from their past that they have been able to, hey, if they're living and breathing and they're standing in front of us today, chances are they've overcome some kind of difficulty or hardship in their life. So then, you know, it's a matter of understanding what that person's strengths are, what their values are, and then bridging those to their their future? What's the vision they want to paint for themselves? Now this is something that Dr. Joe Dispenza talks a lot about. I don't think he's necessarily the first person to come up with this concept, but when we imagine ourselves in the future, we can really sit very deeply in a vision of our ideal future. Magic wand scenario, nothing holding us back. And let's say that's on a reasonable timeframe, like three years from now, not in some far away, distant point in the future that seems unattainable. Like let's say three years from now. And you're sitting on the beach or having dinner with your best friends. You have a flexible job that allows you to work remotely. You know, you're eating healthy. You're doing yoga three times a week. You, you, ⁓ You know, you get a massage once a week. It could just, you know, no holding back. This is just whatever your imagination allows you to take you to. And if you could sit in that vision so vividly that you're able to make the hairs on your neck or your arms stand up. What you're doing is flooding your body with endorphins. And this is the key, this is the Joe Dispenza part, is that your brain doesn't know the difference between that imagined reality and what's actually happening in the moment. Your brain thinks it's actually happening, right? And so even if your life doesn't look like that in the moment, we could sort of trick our brains, right, to ⁓ flood our body with positive. ⁓ neurotransmitters and endorphins as though that's actually happening. And that can become such a powerful ⁓ motivating force to give us context for Why are we doing all this work? Why am I taking all these supplements? Why am I running these lab tests? Why am I, you know, like we talked about in the last episode, getting up at 6 a.m. and going outside first thing in the morning in the freezing cold to get light in my eyeballs, right? All these crazy things that Ryan and Evan are asking us to do. Well, guess what? In order to get to that point in the future, in order to get to that point, that's all about the tiny little 1 % individual decisions we make today to pave the road for that future brick by brick. So then it's linking that future vision. And then really quickly, and then I'll hand it back to you, I might even invert that for the client that I'm working with and say, what would your future look like if you didn't change at all? things stayed exactly the same. And I actually hope that they're a bit terrified by their own response. I know that's a sounds like a harsh thing to say, but I want them to be slightly at least slightly terrified where ⁓ my god like I can't that's that's not an option right I can't I can't keep going on living with this fatigue the brain fog the muscle and joint pain the weight gain, the insomnia, the low libido, the hair loss. It's not an option. I can't, can't possibly, well, okay. I hear you loud and clear. Well, do you think that you're gonna get to that kind of ideal future if you're doing exactly what you're doing now? And hopefully the answer is no. And then a recognition that things need to change.
Evan Transue: Yeah. I love what you brought up about the, ⁓ like just kind of breaking things down. ⁓ it's like in terms of, ⁓ starting a new habit, right? Cause I know you love Warren Buffett. ⁓ and he has this quote, right? The chains of habits are too strong to be felt. ⁓ until, ⁓ dang it. I messed that up. I'm not going to edit that part. The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they're too strong to be broken. I only have like 10 minutes to think about that. Jeez. So, ⁓ anyway, you know, it doesn't mean that you can't actually break.
Ryan: I'm
Evan Transue: in my opinion, in my experience. But it does mean that they're heck of a lot harder. He has a lot of validity in what he said there. And so what I have found is sometimes you have to be so ridiculous with the action that you're taking for the new habit. Like that's what's going to allow you to do it. So for example, ⁓ why does someone not do those things that they know that they can do to improve all those areas of their life? I think probably a lot of it's overwhelming. I actually think we can think of so many things that it's like, well, how the heck am I going to implement 10 new things in two or four different categories of my life?
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: Tomorrow well, you're not gonna do that right so that's where you have to learn to have that discernment to figure out Okay, so let's just focus on health this month right who cares it doesn't have to be finances this month It could be just health this month I make a list of all the things that I could do then I kind of circle what I believe would be the top one and then I make it Ridiculous, so what I mean by ridiculous is Let's say I'm having a hugely hard time removing gluten from my diet, okay? And I know this sounds stupid, but this stuff works, man. This is how I've implemented many habits is just being ridiculous with it, especially it's interesting. I found that it was easier to switch fast before the age of 25. And I don't know if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. As soon as my brain developed, maybe mine's still helping, who knows? But I'm pretty sure mine developed at 25, 26, like other people's, it got a little harder to make those changes, even though I know the principles and I know how beneficial they are. I still found that it's tougher. to change. It's kind of interesting and I have to rely on these micro methods even more if you'll call them that. So let's say it was something like removing gluten. All right, and I have cereal for breakfast. I have a sandwich for lunch. I have pasta for dinner and I have, you know, five cookies as a snack. I would literally make the change. like, all right, I'm not allowed. Again, it depends on how extreme of a problem you're having. It could be something as stupid as I'm not allowed to have half of one of the cookies today. That's all I'm going to do. Or it could be like one of the five. I'm not allowed to have. They say, well, that's not gonna change anything, right? Well, no, it does, right? We're starting the actions. And then you do that until the point that it just, you don't even think about it anymore, because now the habit has shifted, and then you remove another one. Now, what happens is, you don't have to rush this, because even if you just did that over a three month period, you'd probably remove gluten completely, and you're way better off, and you only took three months of your life to do it. Not a big deal at all, very good job. If you do this almost always, your body kind of wants to do more because it's so outrageous. So here's one that helped me when I wanted to start reading more because I knew how much reading was helping me. It's improved every aspect of my life in every category. In fact, I'm actually a believer that there's really no problem I have ever dealt with. Maybe you're different. I don't know. There's no problem I have ever dealt with in any category of my life that someone else has not already been through, solved and written in a book that I can buy for $10 on Kindle. That's my belief. Maybe my life's too simple. I don't know. So reading is everything.
Ryan: I love that. Yeah.
Evan Transue: Right, and I do a lot of audiobooks, I'm like, how can I read more? So then I realized, okay, this is what we're gonna do, it's gonna be this ridiculous. All I have to do is read a paragraph from the book. I can pick up the book and read a paragraph. That is my goal for today, is just that, and then I can go on the computer, I can screw around, can doom scroll, whatever. Now there are times where I have been so weak in my motivation that it literally was the paragraph, and then guess what, you actually kind of feel good, by the way, because when you set the expectation and you meet the expectation, even if it was very low,
Ryan: and
Evan Transue: you still feel better, it does something to your brain, very interesting stuff. But I'd say at least over 60 % of the time, what that ended up being in the beginning was reading more than a paragraph. I'm like, well, this is interesting. Right, I wanna finish this thought. And then that turns into two paragraphs. It's like, well, this whole chapter is kind of interesting, I gotta finish this chapter. But I'm already in the, I'm in the green. Because I can stop anytime I want, because I already read my paragraph. And so I don't beat myself up if I read 10 paragraphs the one day and then only one the next, the goal was one, that's it. And so when you start doing these like micro changes, you will find that again, almost any habit that you want to implement can be implemented. I met a guy, this is crazy. ⁓ My buddy Joey, I shouldn't say I met a guy, it's one of his clients. So my buddy Joey, I think I've told you about him before, he competes in strong man. He's six four, 265 pounds. I this is a gym guy, man. And he still knows how hard it can be for some people. He helped some of them. I think he took this from Atomic Habits, but he's actually used this with clients where literally their task,
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: was to drive to the gym parking lot and they're allowed to leave. They just bring the clothes, they bring the shoes, they drive to the gym parking lot, they're allowed to leave and that's the check mark for the day for the coaching. And then you know what almost always happens, even though some people had taken them up on that, literally by the way, almost always the person's like, I'm already at the dang gym. I got a membership, I'm paying for this thing, I got my shoes, the outfit looks kinda cool, I wanna go wear that. People always have their gym outfits set up. So then you go in and then guess what? If you go in for five minutes, you're already in the green.
Ryan: yeah. Mine as well.
Evan Transue: Again, so everything kind of feels great after that because you're just doing more than you said that you would do. So what I'd highly recommend is like Ryan said, kind of have that vision, then figure out what are the one or two main habits that I need to change right now in order to fulfill that vision. And then you start with these micro changes. A great way to stay on track with any of this, by the way, I'm not gonna share my specific goals, those are private. ⁓ I always carry this around. This does not miss me. And that's my little notepad. So my little notepad has. what I'm currently working on. I do it in the present tense. I do all that kind of stuff. And you know what, man, there's gotta be something to that because the New Age spiritualists believe it, the secular people believe it because of the reticular activating system, and Christians like me believe it because it's in the book of Mark. It says when you pray, pray as if what you want has already come true, and it will be so. Right, I'm paraphrasing, but that's fundamentally it. So it's like so interesting when science, reticular activating system, a reticular activating system, by the way, is like the phenomenon when you say I'm gonna buy a red car or a certain model of car, and then all of a sudden you start seeing it everywhere. Right? Our mind is filtering all the crap that comes in in today's world. Right? You might not have noticed certain things behind me. Right? While I've been talking, you might not have noticed a thing in Ryan's background because that's not important right now. You were listening to us. So when you start consciously focusing on something, the science shows that that helps you think about it more. Again, the new age spiritualists believe in manifesting and then the Christians also believe in praying for these things. So I believe there's something to it.
Ryan: Hmm.
Evan Transue: So what I do is the thing that I'm working on at the time, I like to write it down, I have it with me, and like Ryan said, you can visualize with this, I think that's very important. But even more important is I can carry this around very easily, or, I've done this many times, is I take the little thing, I just rip it out, and I put it in my pocket. But now, think about this, what have I been training myself to do? I trained myself that I write this down and I visualize it, and now I have that piece of paper. So every time I put my hand in my pocket and I feel the paper, bam, triggers the thing, bam.
Ryan: You're reminded of it. ⁓
Evan Transue: Yeah, and you put your hand in your pocket all day for your phone or whatever. It could be the background of your phone. I find that that ends up getting tuned out if I do edit the background up as the background on my phone, but some people like that. Anyway, the reason I suggest that though is because the more you think about this thing, the more you're gonna start taking those little micro changes. And this is the secret, the real secret. Coming full circle to what I said before, I can't afford it versus how can I afford it? When you constantly think about something, Man, this mind that we were given is one of the most interesting things in the world. It's like these ideas and these intuitions just kind of flow in. And I'll be 10 days into a goal that I set and I thought I thought about every possibility and I do not know how to express this. Just like out of nowhere, bam, a new idea. I mean, this was so obvious. Why did I not think about that before? I don't care. I just say, thanks, I appreciate it. And I go execute on that idea that's gonna lead me to this thing that I'm working on.
Ryan: Evan, are you familiar with the quote? It's actually comes from a neurologist, which is that neurons that fire together wire together. Yeah. Right. So it's basically this idea that the more we repeat a belief or even a habit that it
Evan Transue: I've heard that before,
Ryan: the more it's like ingrained into the physical structures of our brain. So the more those neurons are firing, they start hardwiring together. I'm a musician, so I almost think of like the way we would etch the groove into a record, into a vinyl record, right? And so that becomes like this permanent, right? So when the needle drops into the record, it always follows that same path. Like it can't actually follow another path, right? It's like permanently embedded into the record. And in a sense, that's how neuroplasticity works. That could work to our disadvantage with limiting beliefs or habits that are working against our favor. But also if we're aware of that fact, we can use neuroplasticity to our advantage. We can rewire our brain. And neuroscience takes says that this is not necessarily easy, but we can do it that it takes about six months of concerted effort to rewire our brain. Right. So for example, if I fundamentally believe as many people do, and I don't necessarily again, it's not their fault, but it is their responsibility. If they believe that I am fundamentally broken, this is just who I am. People just get sick. This just happens. It's genetic. My mom and dad had this disorder. Therefore, it was inevitable, right? The doctor said that there's nothing I can do about this. I will always struggle with this issue, right? Well, the truth is that your thoughts become reality. And those repeated thoughts and beliefs and actions will actually ⁓ create a phenomenon where your brain is sending those messages to your body. Your body takes instructions from the mind. What if I woke up every day and I decide to, I almost imagine like Bart Simpson writing on the chalkboard, the same line over and over again, right? I am strong, healthy, and resilient in all situations, right? I am healthy and resilient. and I have an abundance of energy every day. Whatever it might be, call it a personal mantra. And that might feel woo-woo, but the neuroscience backs this up. So we write that down 100 times a day on a notepad or on Google notes or whatever. We sing it in the shower. We say it to ourselves out loud while we're driving in our car by ourselves so we don't look like a madman to whoever's in the passenger seat. You do that enough and those neurons start to wire a new pattern in your brain that essentially gets embedded into your subconscious and then your body is taking new instructions now from the brain. Is that like my default state now is not ⁓ fragile? Like I can't even go out to eat at a restaurant because I might get cross-contamination from gluten and I'm gonna be sick for a week. Well, if you're predicting the future like that, it's, that's what's going to happen. You've already decided that's what's going to happen. But if you've already predetermined and decided I'm, you know, I'm resilient enough to go out into the world and handle these situations with enough time, you can rewire your neurophysiology and the fundamental way that your body responds to the stimulus and the environment, like how cool is that? So there you go.
Evan Transue: So guys today, and by the way, if you want proof, I'm not trying to impose something negative on you guys, but I will say this. If you want proof that it's a mindset issue, remember all I asked was just to write something down. You could take two seconds, anyone can write something down, man. You have nothing to lose, takes two seconds. So three days from now when a fraction of you remember this moment where you're like, he told me to write something down and I couldn't even do that. By the way, that's totally a mindset thing. I believe 100,000 % I know when I have limiting beliefs around a goal that I'm trying to achieve because I just don't write it down. It is the funniest thing that I cannot sit there and write one fricking sentence down on paper. And that's the proof to me always that I'm like, all right, I gotta work through something here. So that's even more of a reason to write it down by the way. But just something to think about. Hopefully you are not that person. And even if you are, when you recognize it in three days, fix the problem. You are a human. You have autonomy over yourself. You can pick up a pen, you can pick up a pencil, you can pick up paper and you write it down. It's a sentence.
Ryan: Yeah.
Evan Transue: ⁓ I hope you do that and if you feel comfortable sharing with us, think you can comment on this actually on Spotify and YouTube, which is cool. Let us know what you're working on. I think that's interesting. this is autoimmunerecoverylab.com slash podcast four. That's autoimmunerecoverylab.com slash podcast and the number four. You get the notes from today just in case you forgot anything. All of them are summarized there so that you can have your action steps and anything that we referenced today will also be in there for you guys. I'll try to throw in maybe one or two YouTube videos of some of the guided meditation type of things that could really help you guys. My mom loves those. I love those. ⁓ And I actually used what you were talking about, Ryan. That's how I overcame my fear of public speaking and it's how I overcame my fear of flying is by doing these guided visualizations where I pictured myself doing the thing I was scared of without the fear. So there's a lot to it. ⁓ Thank you guys very much.
Ryan: Hmm. Awesome, we'll see you next time.
