Today, I am thrilled to welcome Jeff Krasno, the Co-founder and CEO of the Commune well-being master class platform and the author of Good Stress, as my guest. Jeff also hosts the Commune podcast, where he has interviewed various luminaries, and writes a weekly personal essay called Commusings to explore spirituality, wellness, and culture.
In today’s discussion, we discuss the marginal decades, contrasting the allopathic and integrative medicine approaches, looking at the advantages of hormesis and intentional stress, the idea of balance, and the Goldilocks zone. We also dive into the effects of cold and heat therapies on emotional and thermal regulation, the role of heat shock proteins, the impact of distraction and dopamine foraging, the importance of relationships, and the benefits of xenohormetics, polyphenols, and more.
This conversation with Jeff Krasno is incredibly insightful, and his book is well-written and beautiful to read.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
How the high prevalence of chronic diseases in the U.S. impacts individual and societal health
The astronomical cost of chronic disease treatments in the U.S.
How the chronic disease epidemic connects to political, invective, and societal issues
How medical treatment has evolved from acute injuries to chronic diseases
Why addressing chronic diseases in your 30s and 40s leads to better health outcomes
How modern conveniences can affect people’s health
What are the benefits of hormesis?
How dopamine foraging impacts concentration
Why it’s essential to be present and pay attention in all social interactions
The role of polyphenols in stressed plants and their benefits for human health
The importance of nutrition for maintaining health and preventing chronic diseases
Bio:
Jeff Krasno is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of luminaries from Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Gabor Maté. Jeff pens a personal weekly essay titled “Commusings” that explores spirituality, wellness, and culture and is distributed to over one million subscribers every Sunday. Jeff is the author of Good Stress, a collection of protocols he created to counteract the "chronic ease" that created our modern epidemic of dis-ease. Good Stress is available March 25, 2025, wherever books are sold.
“Our modern medical system is not attuned to dealing with lifestyle diseases of modernity because they are so progressive in nature.”
-Jeff Krasno
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
Follow on Twitter
Check out Cynthia’s website
Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com
Connect with Jeff Krasno
On his website
The Commune platform
Pre-order a copy of Jeff’s book, Good Stress
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
[00:00:29] Today, I had the honor of connecting with friend and colleague Jeff Krasno. He's the cofounder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal wellbeing. He also hosts the Commune Podcast and has interviewed a variety of luminaries. He also pens a personal weekly essay titled Co-Musings that explore spirituality, wellness and culture. And he's the author of the book Good Stress.
[00:00:54] Today, we spoke about the marginal decades, the impact of allopathic versus integrative medicine approaches, the role of hormesis and deliberate stress, and the concept of balance, as well as the Goldilocks zone, the impact of cold therapy and heat therapies, including emotional regulation, thermoregulation, the role of heat shock proteins and more, the impact of distraction and dopamine foraging, the value of relationships, xenohormetics, polyphenols and more. I know you will find this to be an invaluable conversation. And Jeff's book is so beautifully well written.
[00:01:35] Well, really initiating the conversation today, talking about what is the state of healthcare in the United States. You bring up some staggering statistics in the book, talking about between 2014 and 2021, the life expectancy declined 2.8 years from 78.9 to 76.1. And certainly, as a clinician over the past 25 years, I keep reminding people, like in 1997 versus 2025, which is where we are now, I've been privy to watching an evolution and a de-evolution in many ways, from your perspective, again, having this kind of bird's eye view, looking in from the outside. What concerns you as a parent, as a father, about the decline in overall health that you've been able to witness over the last 10, 15 years?
Jeff Krasno: [00:02:29] Yeah, absolutely. Well, you point out that statistic about life expectancy, and that's certainly a very important statistic. And that's a little bit of a moving target because I think for men, that number is even lower now. I think what concerns me more acutely really is what I've become to understand as sick expectancy, which is really this distension of morbidity associated with chronic disease. And of course, this is something that you're going to see firsthand but I see it within my family and unfortunately, I had to look in the mirror and see it in myself because five years ago I was diagnosed with a chronic disease, even though I ran a wellness company and I know a lot about health, all of a sudden I had diabetes but I'm just really an average American in this regard.
[00:03:16] 50% of us are either diabetic or prediabetic. And this is part of a panoply of chronic diseases that are just really crippling us in mid to later life. I think now the average American spends the last 16 to 20 years nursing at least one chronic disease. I think 60% of Americans have one, 40% have two. I think if you make it later on in your life, you're managing three or four. And of course, our modern allopathic western medicine system essentially just is obsessed with treating the symptoms of those diseases without ever really addressing root cause. So, then what happens is that for the last 20 years of an average person's life, they're literally limping through life. And this has so many knock-on impacts.
[00:04:10] I mean, obviously with heart disease and dementia, there is the disability, the decrepitude, the cognitive decline, etc., associated with what that individual must go through. But then that suffering radiates out often to family members and caregivers for multiple decades. [laughs] And then of course there's the astronomical societal expense associated with it. So, now more or less the approximation is about four and a half trillion dollars per year treating the symptoms of chronic disease. That's almost 20% of GDP and really not that many people talk about that. And if we continue at this pace, by the year 2040, that's expected to be $10 trillion a year simply treating the presentations disease.
[00:05:06] So this touches so many areas and where it gets very personal, candidly for me, is like my father for example, has been managing cancer for the last five or six years. And fortunately, he has the means to address his disease in various different ways and he's doing okay. But what I really worry about is what we're missing out from our older people who used to provide so much wisdom through accumulated experience. And now, our elders, or what were once elders have become elderly and we often consider them a nuisance or we ship them off to nursing facilities, etc. And we're missing out on so much potential wisdom and learning that they can share with us to guide us in terms of how best to operate in society.
[00:06:06] So, there's just so many elements of this. There's obviously a political dimension of this. I believe and this is perhaps, cubbyhole for another debate, but that inflammation in the human body is actually spilling over into inflammation in the body politic. So, I look at our absolute invidious political invective right now and for me that is simply a reflection of inflammation in the human body. Yes, there's a lot of other elements associated with that as well. But if you wake up and you're working two part-time minimum wage jobs and you can't afford your insulin and you're nursing multiple chronic diseases and you're a single mom and you're buying all of your groceries at 7-Eleven or whatever, you're probably pretty angry and you have a right justifiably to be angry.
[00:06:58] So, I think that we could do so much by addressing this chronic disease epidemic both in terms of our personal health, both in terms of being able to soak in the accumulated wisdom of our elders to address some of our political issues and then obviously from an expense perspective.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:07:18] Yeah, it's so interesting to me because I think about Peter Attia talking about the marginal decade or decades, and that's really what you're speaking to, is that we have so normalized chronic disease management. I know listeners know this, but for 16 years I worked in clinical cardiology and then I left nine years ago because I was tired of writing prescriptions. Because in cardiology you're dealing with high blood pressure, lipid disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, carotid artery disease, peripheral vascular disease, and the sequelae from all of those things. And it really speaks the fact that, our traditional allopathic model, which is great for emergencies, urgencies, we're better than probably any other country in the world dealing with urgencies and emergencies.
[00:08:02] We don't do a great job with prevention, for the most part, chronic disease management, because by the time someone is diagnosed with high blood pressure, they very likely are already on that slippery slope of insulin resistance. And I recall, when I was a new nurse practitioner, telling patients, “Oh, if you live long enough, you're going to develop high blood pressure because your arterial walls just get stiffer.” And that was the prevailing philosophy. This is just what happens as we navigate becoming an older adult. And so, I think that one of the things when we talk about these marginal decades and certainly if we look at the research men do go through andropause, women go through menopause, which is a much more magnified experience. And that whole grandmother effect, why do women go into menopause?
[00:08:49] And so you'll have evolutionary biologists that will say, “Well, it's the grandmother effect. It's not having to take resources away from procreation. The grandmothers can help rear the grandchildren. They can contribute to society. But you're absolutely correct that we are getting to a point where we have very frail, very fall-prone, sarcopenic, metabolically unhealthy older adults who are not able to engage in the way that I think that they probably presume they would be able to. It's interesting, anytime that we travel and we just got back from a trip and I was saying to my husband where we’re traveling to, I did not see anyone that looked metabolically unhealthy. And I said, that is so unusual and so rare. But having said that, I think for everyone that's listening, just bringing greater awareness to how lifestyle impacts the trajectory of whether or not we go on to develop these diseases is quite significant.
Jeff Krasno: [00:09:43] Yeah, such great points, Cynthia. As you said, modern Western allopathic medicine is very adept at treating acute injury and you break the leg, etc., thank God for modern medicine. But even if you went back to1900s, let's say not even that long ago, death often came on a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. [laughs] It came on quickly. There was not this endless protracted illness distension. And if you were to ask, a sort of a regular denizen of New York City in 1900, “Hey, in 100 years no one's really going to die of cholera or typhoid or smallpox, tuberculosis will be mitigated, etc. You would have imagined that someone in 1900 would have been like, oh my God, nirvana, we're going to live forever, because at that juncture, these diseases of modernity were virtually non-existent.
[00:10:50] These lifestyle diseases, cancer did exist certainly, but heart disease, diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, stroke, these were very, very contained diseases. And I think, what we've learned now more recently is that our modern medical system is just not attuned to dealing with them because they are so progressive in nature. They're not the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They're a French film noir. [laughs] They unfold very slowly and sluggishly and they take root in your 20s and 30s, and you begin to develop, sort of the beginnings of metabolic dysfunction. And they present in the most anodyne, boring ways.
[00:11:39] Then we accept what is abnormal as normal. So, you wake up and day to day, you're just like, “Oh, I'm chronically fatigued today. I have a little brain fog. I have a little excess adiposity around the middle. I'm a little bit irritable. Oh, I can't concentrate. Oh, I need to reach for my phone every two seconds.” And I'm candidly, I'm describing myself five years ago. But we've accepted those conditions, those presentations, because they seem so prosaic, they seem so normal. But those conditions, those presentations are literally just barely upstream from these diseases that we've labeled. And I think that this is what we need to open our eyes to, is that, it's not good enough to essentially tackle one of these chronic diseases when you're in your 60s and 70s.
[00:12:35] Yes, obviously you want to do everything you can at any point. But, if we can start addressing these in our 30s and 40s, if we can start engaging in all of these activities from healthy diet to resistance training to other forms of therapies that we might talk about, we can actually truly address the diseases that are responsible for most mortality. More or less in today's world in the West, we are choosing the way we die and not with tremendous thoughtfulness.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:13:08] Yeah, no, it's interesting. I recall a conversation. Both of my grandmothers were nurses and my maternal grandmother, I had her in my life up until my early 40s. And I recall her having a conversation with me and she said, “Cynthia, pneumonia used to be an old person's best friend.” And I didn't fully appreciate it the first time she said it to me, but the longer my trajectory in healthcare, I started to understand what she was saying was we have prolonged life. It's not quality of life, but in many instances, we have prolonged life that people who would have otherwise, who would have succumbed to sepsis, just from getting urinary tract infection, people can get a systemic infection or pneumonia, which most people would have died from 50 plus years ago. Now we keep people alive a lot longer.
[00:13:57] I interviewed a hospice nurse and she was talking about quality of life in terms of death in the ICU versus in a hospice environment. And I don't want to make a broad generalization except to say that we've gotten to a point, we've done such a good job with technology keeping people alive, but ultimately not per se in terms of quality-of-life metrics. If you are stuck having dialysis and you're a middle aged or older person, or you're someone that's lost their vision because you have had long standing high blood pressure and didn't know it. That's why they call hypertension, the silent killer because more often than not I would see young people in their 30s that would have chronic kidney disease, they would have visual issues related to uncontrolled high blood pressure over time period. And so, I think to your point, a lot of these lifestyle-mediated diseases and disorders could be preventable if we were at an earlier age intervening in a lifestyle kind of continuum.
Jeff Krasno: [00:14:55] Yeah, 100%. I think it's tricky. I have three daughters, they're all teens. Well, my eldest is 20, I'll give her credit there. And I see how society has engineered their lives and of course I have a certain amount of control over their lives, a diminishing waning amount of control, let's just say. But I have set up a home environment to I suppose temper some of these sharper edges kind of modernity's artifacts. But I look at their life and it has been engineered in almost every respect for convenience and comfort and ease.
[00:15:35] Everything from the convenient food that they can acquire on every street corner, to the convenient way that they can communicate, to the snuggly thermostat that keeps their room at 72 degrees. Essentially, they really don't have to face a lot of adversity. And we evolved within Paleolithic conditions of adversity that really conferred a lot of resilience, a lot of strength, activated a lot of longevity pathways, etc. And I look at my girls and they are living the absolute polar opposite of that. And we've engineered our society in so many ways, often in the name of profit, but for the most cheap shelf stable option and again, I use that metaphorically.
[00:16:32] Yes, it can be applied to food, but it also can be applied to 24-hour access to on-demand entertainment, etc. And when you begin to really unpack the impacts of a lot of these conveniences, they're leading to a lot of inconvenient truths, candidly, and I really do believe that a lot of our chronic disease epidemic is due to this, I guess I would call it an epidemic of chronic ease, is that, ease has undermined our adaptive mechanisms and rendered them maladaptive. Getting a little fat in the fall was adaptive when the winter came, but now the winter never comes, in terms of food.
[00:17:21] So, we have this evolutionary mechanism to store energy as adipose tissue because we knew, our bodies innately knew that the paucity of winter's fallow was just around the corner. We wouldn't be able to get the calories that we would need. So, we would actually put on a little fat in the form of excess glucose that we would harvest in the fall through fruit, etc., like that. And our paleolithic genome is still here, we're still with it, we're still wearing the same genes, if you will. But over and over again, what we've done is created is these evolutionary mismatches that have rendered these hard rot adaptive mechanisms maladaptive.
And, I think this is, where I landed in my own life, candidly, that, I was the product of this modern lifestyle and I had to really pull apart what the provenance of my disease and this is where I've landed is that, I actually have to adopt more inconvenience in my life to align myself, with my engineering. [laughs] And it's somewhat ironic that we are suffering in some ways from our own success.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:18:41] Yeah. And it's interesting, in the book you refer to something called the “Fucks,” the Four Ubiquitous Contemporary Killers. And that stands for, obviously what we're really pointing to that we have gotten to a point where we're so comfortable, there's no degree of hormesis, beneficial stress in the right amount at the right time. And our lifestyles have become innately comfortable. And in many ways, indoor plumbing is a great thing. But having said that, it's the convenience of so many other things, and it's like a domino effect that things sometimes are just too easy. And if they're too easy, then we're not pushing ourselves in a way that is expending that energy or allowing us to get a little bit physically uncomfortable.
[00:19:23] And I know that we will eventually get to cold therapies because that for me is I like being warm, I don't like being cold. And so, it's something I have to work at in terms of hormesis. So, let's talk about finding this happy balance between acute stressors versus chronic stress and how that can go from being beneficial to nonbeneficial.
Jeff Krasno: [00:19:48] Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it was Paracelsus said that the dose makes the poison, right? And this is really key to keep in mind because we have learned that a certain amount of self-imposed deliberate stress confers a benefit, but it always has to be in the right dose to confer that benefit. Because while some degree of hypoxia, for example, is adaptive, hypoxia can also be the source of death. Hypothermia or hyperthermia, I think what's interesting about some of these protocols that we can adopt is that we push the edges such that we get better at bouncing back to the middle. And what I've learned about health, and this doesn't just apply to the human organism, it actually applies more broadly to health in every expression, the signature of well-being is really balance.
[00:20:46] We look at, for example, economics, the most healthy economic system has a thriving middle class or even politics, there's a strong center, a strong middle that's characterized by compromise and cooperation. In ecology, you can look at biodiversity, sort of a balance between different species, certainly in the human body homeostasis is everywhere to be found. So, pH balance, the balance between your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system, the unbelievable balancing act that a healthy liver does with blood glucose in the bloodstream. Got thermogenesis and thermoregulation, for example. Unbelievable. pH balance, it's hard to actually throw your pH balance off, really. Your body is so good at maintaining that 7.35, 7.4 range.
[00:21:40] So, really, in order to be healthy, what we should be doing is fostering our capacity to bounce back to the middle, to bounce back to the warm porridge as sometimes I call it, or the Goldilocks zone. And it is ironic that sometimes pushing ourselves to the edges helps us with this ability to bounce back. And certainly, like I do that in meditation and that's sort of a psychological centering. So, we always want to find emotional regulation that pushes us back to center. But yes, I mean, certainly like for example, to get deliberately hot, which we tend to avoid in modern culture because we live in an era of digital thermostats where we don't even have to get off the couch. It actually knows our own behavior. So, it sets thermostat temperature for you. But to get deliberately hot, what does the body do?
[00:22:34] It has an adaptive response to that heat as it pertains to thermoregulation. We perspire that's one of the great advantages to being human. But then there's also these other incredible benefits that we start to uncover. The production of BDNF and heat shock proteins and the cardiovascular benefits and all the things that I'm sure people on your show have talked about in terms of deliberate heat therapy or sauna or infrared therapy. Then on the other side, you have deliberate cold therapy. And like you, I would just go into like anxiety fit just staring at a lake, I hate the cold. [Cynthia laughs] I literally abhor the cold in every aspect. But part of my protocol was adopting a cold plunge therapy and I look at it askance every morning and I say, “Not today.”
[00:23:28] And the second I say not today is the second I get into it. But again, what does the body do? Your core body temperature when you get into an ice plunge is going to plummet. And then your body goes into thermogenesis. It knows that it needs to get back into that happy place of tenuous equilibrium, that 98.6 little Goldilocks zone. So, it seeks out glucose or in some cases, fat if you haven't eaten very much and you don't have a lot of blood glucose. And it uses that energy substrate to go into your mitochondria, particularly in that brown fat tissue to make heat and to bring your body back up into that Goldilocks zone. So, we have all of these built in adaptive mechanisms for balance, but we often don't use them.
[00:24:20] And then when we don't use them, they become rusty, let's say, [laughs] and we lose that ability to find balance. And I think, the cold-water therapy is an interesting one because it's protein, because, there are all these physiological benefits, metabolic benefits, certainly. There's also sustained dopamine production, I think over 48 hours. So, I think that there is actually some very, very interesting potential utilizations for cold and addiction. That's like a whole other conversation probably, but I think that's really interesting. But what I find about the cold is that there are all of these psychological benefits to it. So, if you really examine the other phenomenon that happens when you get into the cold, yes, there's the metabolic ones that I just talked about, but there's also a psychological thing happening where it's like you get in, you gasp, right?
[00:25:20] You're having an epinephrine response, and you're getting that adrenaline coursing through your veins and you're feeling that panic coming up, like into your neck. At least that's where I feel it. And then you have that moment where you can apply top down, voluntary conscious pressure on top of involuntary bottom-up response. And you can do that sometimes with conscious breath work or you can actually just do it with your hippocampus, your rational brain, where you put that top-down pressure like, “No, I'm going to be okay. I'm going to be okay, I'm going to pull myself back into my parasympathetic nervous system.”
[00:26:08] And the better that you get at that exercise, the more it begins to spill over and punctuate other elements of your life that will inevitably be stressful, whether that's as a parent or in traffic or on Instagram or wherever it happens to be, where you can apply that top-down pressure on top of that involuntary sympathetic response. And that ability to emotionally regulate. It might be the most potent ability in this day and age given that our whole social framework is set out to trigger us moment to moment. Literally, social media is algorithmically preferenced to tickle your human negativity bias and so if you can cultivate those ways to put top-down pressure, to find space between stimulus and response, boy, are you going to better off navigating life.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:27:11] I think that's such an important point. And I know for myself personally, as someone that I would describe as a quiet type A person. For me, when I'm doing cryotherapy or a cold shower, I am constantly doing that breathwork piece. Yesterday we lost power. We had a storm that came through our part of Virginia. And I told my husband, I was like, “I needed a shower” that was going to happen. And he was like, “You realize there's no hot water.” And I said, “It's okay, I'm going to take a fairly quick shower.” And I think it was about a minute and a half, but it was ice cold water. And I said, “When you start to get that really uncomfortable feeling, it's like just getting back into that breath work to keep yourself in the parasympathetic, I think is really invaluable.”
[00:27:54] And it's the same breathwork I do before I speak on stage, before if I'm traveling to do a podcast, it's what I do to regulate, as you mentioned, that emotional regulation. But for me, it allows me to feel very present in my body as opposed to when you get a degree of emotional dysregulation and you feel like you're scattered, you can't think clearly. It's the fight or flight response where you get very narrow minded, focused on one thing at a time. And so, I think what you're really speaking to is benefits that you get from cold exposure as one example, are so much more than just the cold exposure. It is a far deeper, more profound impact.
[00:28:35] When we're talking about cold therapy, on the other side is heat therapy. And there are plenty of people that don't like being hot. And so, I always say what you try to avoid is generally what you need to do. For me, sitting in sauna, I love doing that. That isn't something that I find to be particularly challenging. But let's talk about the differentiators in terms of benefits between cold therapy versus heat therapies.
Jeff Krasno: [00:28:57] Yeah, sure. So, my natural habitat is much more heat as well. And I really, really enjoy a sauna and I very much enjoy the whole contrast bathing regimen. And that's kind of part of my daily morning protocol very early in the morning. In some ways they're similar and in some ways they're very different. So, you're taxing your body's ability to thermoregulate. So, that's one place where they're similar. Your body has that Goldilocks zone, that happy place. And so, when you're going to get hot and when I mean hot, I'm generally trying to follow the data there. So, prevailing data I believe says in order to exact the maximum benefit, you're looking at four to seven sessions per week about 20 minutes per session, that's your duration.
[00:29:56] And at a temperature between 170- and 200-degrees Fahrenheit. And then some people have proclivities around humidity level, but generally like 10 to 15% humidity. So that's where I've seen the data. A lot of that comes from Finland and Rhonda Patrick has been instrumental in assembling all of that data into meta-analyses. So, people who are interested in that can check out her work. I think it's very solid. But obviously getting hot and being in the sauna and people know this by dint of their own experience, mimics some degree of cardiovascular exercise or aerobic exercise, I should say, because your heart rate is going to increase. So, is it like a HIIT exercise? No, because you're not going to probably get up into Zone 4, Zone 5.
[00:30:44] But you'll probably get into like some sort of Zone 2. And there does seem to be tremendous cardiovascular benefit from the sauna. All the data that I've seen points to that. Then what we also see is some degree of detoxification, though I think that sometimes is hyperbolized candidly because there's other systems in the body that are really designed for detox. But there is, I would say, probably some decent detoxification benefits. What I think are interesting are these other pathways that seem to be activated through deliberate heat therapy and most notably a protein known as BDNF. So, brain-derived neurotrophic factor that seems to be instrumental in maintaining the functionality of neurons and even potentially neurobiogenesis, sort of the creation of new neurons. And of course, this violates everything that we've ever been taught about the brain.
[00:31:44] Although of course, like in the last 20 years, the field of neuroplasticity has come into its own. But for many, many, many decades, we were taught that the brain basically stops growing at age around 25 and becomes much, much less plastic. And that's probably true. But now we've seen evidence that, we can grow new neurons. And of course, we know by product of our own experience that the brain changes, because by the end of this podcast, I will have learned things from you that I didn't know at the beginning of the podcast and that is some reflection of my brain changing. So, being in the sauna seems to really help that process. And there's these other proteins that seem to be activated by sauna use, known as heat shock proteins.
[00:32:30] These are proteins that my understanding is they help to maintain the functionality and three-dimensional shape of other proteins. So, proteins have this three-dimensional folding in order to be functional and sometimes they get misfolded and then they become dysfunctional. Sometimes, we associate that with beta amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain that have been associated with Alzheimer's, etc. So, it seems that the production of these heat shock proteins that come from sauna use can help maintain protein functionality. So that's pretty cool. And then there's endorphin creation. So, I love endorphins, obviously I'm a competitive tennis player still, so that's probably where I mine my own pharmacy, if you will. But your body really is a pharmacy. I mean that's sort of a metaphor.
[00:33:25] But if you actually examine the word endorphin, what you get is endogenous. So that's the first half of the word, which means internal and morphine or orphin. So that's an opioid. So, you're basically self-making opioids in your body that are adaptive, not maladaptive, ones that you could take from the exogenous world. And so, that often contributes to these feelings of wellbeing. They're analgesic too, obviously. And so, there's every reason in the world. There's also vasodilation that's happening in the sauna. And then if you contrast bathe, getting into cold is a vasoconstrictor. And so, if you're going back and forth, you're getting this vasodilation due to vasoconstriction back and forth, which will help your circulatory system and your lymph.
[00:34:12] So, you're moving blood more readily through your body, you're getting more perfusion to your brain, etc., you're getting oxygen to your cells. That's a good thing. You need to make energy with oxygens. So, there's so many good reasons to do the sauna. Those are a few of them. [laughs]
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:34:27] No. And I think what I love is that you touched on all the things that I thought would be of greatest interest. I think for anyone that listens to this podcast, doing things that are for our brain, brain protective. And so, I think a lot of people probably associate sauna therapy with, it's good for sweating, it's good for detoxification, it's helpful for mood. I feel better when I get out. But understanding that there is research to suggest that, it can contribute to the creation of new neurons in the brain. I mean, that's incredible. And then on top of that, these heat shock proteins that have the ability to be incredibly brain protective. And for listeners, understanding that our brains as women are largely protected until we go into menopause and the changes in estrogen in particular and obviously, we've had Dr. Lisa Mosconi on, she's an acclaimed women's health brain researcher, understanding the physiology and the changes that are occurring in middle age.
[00:35:25] To me, that just gives me more reasons to want to ensure that I'm doing sauna therapy. Now at the beginning of our conversation, we were talking around technology and how so many of us, including our children, are, dare I say, addicted or we have a proclivity to the last thing we do before bed and the first thing we do in the morning is check our phones. Let's talk about the research around how frequently Americans are checking their phones. Because when I read that, I thought to myself, that's horrific. If we're checking our phones 325 times a day, that's average. So, there are people that are doing more than that. Why are we so fixated on technology? It's both a blessing and a curse. You and I both grew up in a time when there were no cell phones. We had landlines. There probably wasn't even the ability to- you had one phone call at a time. You couldn't just interrupt phone calls. Whereas now we're so connected with one another. And I think in many ways that technology allows us to feel connected, but also feel lonely at the same time.
Jeff Krasno: [00:36:31] Yeah, I really often think of this as the greatest nonconsensual psychological experiment of our time, because we are essentially model organisms here, having to, for the very, very first time, live within a world that is literally vying for our time and attention at every single moment. In fact, where we spend our time and attention, that has been productized and commodified and it is bought and sold, and we rarely think about it that way. We think about it in terms of, “Oh, like, what are my favorite influencers doing today?” Or like, “What Cynthia is saying on Instagram, etc.” And yes, certainly there are some positive aspects to that. I love seeing what you're doing on Instagram. [Cynthia laughs] But I also think that we need to be aware of the downsides of this particular phenomenon.
[00:37:34] I think when we step back, we can see it in ourselves. I'm a podcast host and I do a tremendous amount of research for my guests, but candidly, I have a very, very hard time sitting down and reading a book cover to cover, certainly cover to cover. And even for me, that is not good news because I'm probably in the 1% of people that actually has to read books for a living. So, what we've seen is a degradation of our attention spans and our concentration spans so much to the point that we are lacking the ability to have long wave thought and this really spills over into creating solutions, finding cooperative middle ground to actually move things forward. These kinds of things really stand on the shoulders of our ability to concentrate.
[00:38:42] And so, I interviewed this neuroscientist, I write about this in the book, actually, but I rarely actually talk about it. But you bring this point up. This guy named Adam Gazzaley, brilliant neuroscientist, and he makes a really potent analogy around information foraging. So, he uses this foraging metaphor and that if you were a hunter-gatherer and you were to sort of come across a wonderful fig tree, you would essentially denude that entire fig tree, right? You'd get all the ones at shoulder height first and then and you'd climb it and get the harder ones to get, etc.
[00:39:18] But of course, like if you came across a whole grove of fig trees, you just kind of pull the ones that were the easiest to get off and then you'd look at another one that was close by and you'd go to that one and then you look at another one and go by and you'd go to that one and so forth and so forth. We do that with information now. We get served up a piece of information and then we rarely actually harvest that entire article because it is in the publisher's interest to get us to click out of that article into another article right away because they're trying to serve up more ads. [laughs] So, within the first hundred words, we're foraging on another information tree. So, we're clicking over there and then in the first hundred words of that, we're clicking over there.
[00:40:03] And our brain is always making this kind of cost benefit analysis. You're like, “Oh, I kind of got the gist of this piece of information. I'm going to pop over there, I'm going to pop over there.” And all of a sudden that's what scrolling is. And so, we get so accustomed to that. And you can also think of it as dopamine foraging. Because for every little bit of like or engagement or something that confirms a bias that you already have, you're getting that little spurt of dopamine and then you're going over to the next spurt of dopamine, etc. And that's fine, [laughs] except really when you examine the knock-on impacts of that sort of behavior, we are unable to actually concentrate. We are so distracted.
[00:40:53] And there is a really interesting paper published in science by, I think it's Dan Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth. It had a very unscientific name actually, for a science journal. I think it was published in science. It was called A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind. And in this paper which reflected this clinical study that these guys did. What they found was that the happiest people in the world were actually thinking about the thing that they were doing. And so rarely are we actually doing that, so rarely are we actually yoking action and intention. We're almost always involved in some activity, but distracted off thinking about something else. And this is where obviously meditation can become very, very helpful in one's life.
[00:41:45] Because one of the goals of meditation, one of the targets is being able to come back from a thought or a distraction, come back to a single focus, a single pointedness of mind that could be a breath or drishti, a gaze point or a mala through your fingers, etc. This ability again to come back to center, to yoke what you're thinking about with what you're doing and not be distracted all the time. It's not only good for concentration span, it seems to also contribute to happiness. So, this is a big deal. And you know, again, I see this with my children because most children, they are on social media a lot of the time. And we just went to Mexico for 10 days and we were largely off of our phones.
[00:42:36] And I can see this discernible difference. Like at the dinner table, everyone's engaged with each other, everyone's in conversation, everyone's doing what they're thinking about. You know, we are all right there with each other. And so often in our society, we're not there, we're off somewhere else.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:42:54] No, you bring up so many good points and I think that you're probably unusual. I would say I'm saying this is a generality. If you have the ability to focus and be focused one thing at a time. I know that women's brains are not per se conditioned to be that way where the multitaskers and thinking and thinking. But what's interesting to me as an example is I love to read. I'm a gigantic nerd. I'm like always enjoy learning one of the few things I can do if I'm very interested in what I am reading. Like if I'm in a book and for listeners to understand I was in the thick of things with your book, very focused, very deliberately reading and taking notes and doing that.
[00:43:36] But I agree with you, when I'm not 100% invested in what I'm doing, it is so easy to get distracted. And before you know it, you're down a rabbit hole and you're reading a story online about some innocuous celebrity and you find out something you didn't want to know about that person. [Jeff laughs] But I think it's so easy for that to happen. But meditation is antidote to this dopamine foraging distraction that we're experiencing. Are there other things that you have found through interviewing other experts and in your research for the book that are also beneficial. Because I think, a technology holiday is a good thing. I know we just got back from Belize, and for the most part, my kids were disconnected certainly during meals. But explaining to them like, this is our time to all be present and together.
[00:44:25] And we're at a stage with my teenagers now, one's in college, so we have our youngest at home with us, and we have a pretty steadfast, Saturday and Sunday are family meals. During the week, things are all over the place. There's sports and all sorts of responsibilities. But I remind my kids, I'm like, it is so important for all of us to come together as a family. It doesn't per se, have to be your family, but there are plenty of listeners that don't have kids. But having some type of a ritual where you are fully present, engaged with the people you love and care about, I think is so important in this day and age when I think for many people, they may be connected to technology, but we know, the risks of being lonely.
[00:45:06] We know that that can be as bad as smoking in terms of the physiologic impact. And so, I'm so glad that, you know, this focus of the mind is, is part of this book, because it was something that really spoke to me in terms of bringing greater awareness to this, even for listeners, just to be aware of where they're distracted in their personal lives.
Jeff Krasno: [00:45:27] Yeah, well, our entire experience of being alive is decoded through the prism of the mind. So, you can engage in all these other physiological protocols, and there's every reason in the world to do so, but you're still here in your mind. And this is why we go to the gym for our biceps and other large muscle groups. But the mind has to be one of those muscle groups. And so, you can really think about it as going to the mental gym. And I am returning to the mental gym as one of my tensions for 2025, because it's easy to veer off that path. I think there's a lot of ways that you can integrate simple practices within your life to train yourself to be more present.
[00:46:17] And a lot of that, as you astutely pointed out, has to do with relationships. So, really, the greatest gift that you can give anyone in this day and age, when every single person is vying for your conscious attention, the greatest gift that you can give anyone is the present of your presence. And so, in every conversation that you have, just experiment with this. Just try to be all there. Don't check your phone. Don't think about anything else. Just engage with that person. Don't look over their shoulder. Don't think about who else is in the room. Don't think about what you have to do later. Just try it. Just be all there with that person. And it is amazing what happens. It is so fulfilling. And this is another technique actually I picked up when I was in Japan.
[00:47:18] I'm a refugee of the music industry, so I used to represent bands, and I used to go to Japan all the time for music, and I would be pitching my bands to executives in Japan. So, I would go into the CEO's office of Toshiba EMI or something like that, and I would be talking about how great a particular musical group was and how many records they were going to sell and how great their songs were. And I'd have this whole spiel, this pitch. And after my pitch was done, there would be this long, protracted, pregnant silence in the room. And as a Westerner, I was very uncomfortable with that silence. And so, I needed to fill the void. So, then I would start back in with another pitch, right? It’s very American. And this would happen time and time again.
[00:48:08] And finally, I asked my interpreter, this wonderful young woman named Tomoko. I was like, “What's going on? I'm in this meeting, these are meetings. I'm getting no response.” And she's like, “Oh, no, Jeff, that is just a sign of respect that they listened to every single thing that you had to say. Then they were synthesizing it, and then they were coming up with a suitable response or rejoinder to you.” And I was like a massive light bulb went out over my head. I was like, “Oh, my God. Wow, that's an incredible custom.” And when you think about it even through, the course of this podcast, you're saying something that I find interesting, and I'm already generating a rejoinder or a rebuttal in my head before you even finish your sentence. It's a natural proclivity.
[00:48:58] And we get excited when we're in conversations and we have these mirror neurons, etc. But this is another technique that I've tried recently, which is to listen simply to understand and not to respond. And then allow for some pause between what someone has said to me and my response back to them. And that action really helps people feel really heard and seen. And I've experienced it in ways that I found to be very, very gratifying and fulfilling. And I think it ladders into this idea of being very present and pushing yourself in situations that are social to be very, very present.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:49:49] I think for every one of us, we have a friend or two that when we are speaking to them, we know that we have their undivided attention. There is nothing else going on in the world. And there is no greater gift than giving someone your full attention, like truly your full attention. Not looking over their shoulder, not looking at your watch, not looking at your phone. And I think in our infobesity, Sam Horn has coined that phrase, like in this environment where we are constantly inundated with information and stimuli, that is an incredible gift to be able to provide people with. And I too, am one of those individuals that sometimes those pregnant pauses are so uncomfortable.
[00:50:35] But acknowledging that in the instance when you were doing business overseas, that's a sign of respect just reaffirms to me that sometimes that pause is not, per se, a negative thing. I think that's where our westernized minds probably go, but allows us to have an opportunity to digest the information, be able to think really thoughtfully. Ironically enough today my team posted a podcast I had done with someone very high profile, and this host talked over me the entire interview, like the entire time. And I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but I was watching it this morning, and the thing that struck me was, I know it was probably just this person was just so excited to get all these questions out.
[00:51:17] But it's interesting the way I interpreted me, feeling I was stifled now, looking retrospectively, not having the ability to properly articulate what it was. They were asking a question, and before I could respond, they were speaking over me before I could even start responding. And it was an entire interview like that. And so, I think, again, going back to, as you say, the value of relationships, giving people our full attention is certainly this incredible gift. I would love to kind of end the conversation today. I always say it all starts with food. Talking about nutrition and how there are protective compounds in food themselves that can be a source of beneficial hormetic stress. And I'm not talking about the ultra-processed foods. I'm talking about the real whole nutrient dense foods.
[00:52:06] Let's at least end the conversation speaking to that, because I think that nutrition is something that is really misunderstood. I think our perception of what food is, is sometimes adulterated by the processed food industry. And so, helping people understand that these unique compounds in certain types of foods can stress our bodies in beneficial ways.
Jeff Krasno: [00:52:27] Yeah, this was a fascinating area of discovery for me. So, I think many of us are familiar with this concept of hormesis, this biological phenomenon in which the right dose of stress confers a beneficial health response. And that we're familiar with that in the human organism, but it also seems to be true with plants. And so, there are a species of plants that are known as stressed plants, or xenohormetans, etc., that plants don't exactly have an immune system the way humans have an immune system. They don't develop antibodies per se, the way our adaptive immune system does, but they do have defense mechanisms in order to survive.
[00:53:10] And it turns out that when plants are stressed, and by stressed, I mean put into inhospitable conditions, like scorching wind or high heat or big temperature fluctuation or rocky soils, etc., or insects or pests or other kinds of invasive issues, that they actually build their own defense mechanisms in order to survive because they have a biological imperative as well, not just humans. And they will build certain compounds that then we call polyphenols often. And so, the most kind of famous example of this is the grape that developed a compound that has now gotten a lot of PR named resveratrol. But resveratrol in a grape skin actually just developed naturally to protect it from fungus. And then winemakers, vintners, started to stress grapes purposefully, not for their polyphenol content really, but for taste.
[00:54:16] And it just parenthetically the most stressed grape, as I understand it, is the Pinot noir varietal. So, if you are a wine drinker and oenophile, that might be your healthiest option. But what's interesting about these compounds is that they're not only protective for plants, but when humans consume them, that protection or that benefit is conferred over to us. And sometimes that is done through stressing us a little bit such that we actually have then a positive adaptive response to that stress. So, I think the jury's still out on resveratrol. It's certainly, obviously David Sinclair made it very very popular in his research with mice and with yeast. And it activated a certain pathway known as the sirtuin pathway that protects DNA expression, etc.
[00:55:10] No, you cannot drink enough wine to get enough [laughs] resveratrol for it to be protective in that way. I think something like 1500 bottles or glasses of wine either way. I wouldn't say that's a particularly adaptive choice. But the point is that resveratrol is one of these compounds that is developed in stressed plants that then seems to confer some form of benefit in the human organism. And there's a bunch of these, EGCG in green tea, for example, is one. Luteolin is another one. Jeffrey Bland, who I'm sure you're friendly with, really the godfather of functional medicine, claims to have found the world's most stressed plant in this Himalayan Tartary buckwheat, which obviously had its provenance in the Himalayas, which is obviously a very inhospitable place to grow. Because there's going to be massive fluctuation in temperature and rocky soils, etc.
[00:56:05] But this plant became so resilient that then when we eat it, we get some of those positive compounds. And, yeah, you can find it in, like, I'm a big sprouter. So, we sprout at home all sorts of different-- You can sprout almost anything I found, [laughs] but some things are more successfully sprouted than others. Broccoli sprouts are kind of like the good place to start because they're fairly reliable and easy to execute around. But these have these glucosinolates that then form sulforaphane when you actually consume them. And they seem to be protective against cancer, so anticarcinogenic. And this is like a whole area that I think is fascinating because there's this emerging field of study known as epinutrition.
[00:56:52] So, Kara Fitzgerald, who, again, I'm sure you know as well, she's written about this, and this is just cool emerging science, but for the last 50 years of the 20th century, we essentially subscribe to this notion of genetic determinism that like our genesis and our underlying nucleotide sequences were determinant of our health and our proclivity towards disease. And yes, in some cases, they do predispose us to certain diseases and in some rare cases, definitively. But what we have discovered over the last 20 years, that it's more about the expression of those genes. How are they turning off? How are they turning on? And it seems as if nutrition actually is a major arbiter of gene expression.
[00:57:40] And a lot of these particular compounds that we do find in plants can pull some levers on genetic expression. And I don't want to overstate this case because I think we're still learning about it. But I think the moral of the story here is that there are a whole classification of foods, particularly in the plant kingdom that can deliver a lot of benefit. They often are actually reflected in their color. So, sometimes that those deep colors, especially with those berries or with apples, with quercetin, etc. And this is why I try to actually veer away from the superfoods concept. Yes, I do think that there are some foods out there that seem to have amazing nutrition profiles, spirulina or something like that. But what I try to do is like grandma, right? Eat the rainbow.
[00:58:39] Because if you're eating all of these different colors, it's probably representative of a diversity, a balance of different phytochemicals that could be very adaptive. And so, this is a place that-- I'm into a lot of the stress protocols on my own personal physiology, but this was sort of an interesting little area of discovery for me.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:59:00] No, it's so interesting and a wonderful way to kind of end this conversation today. Thank you for your work, for your thoughtfully written and as I was telling Jeff before we even started recording that I get to read a lot of books. I'm privileged to be able to do that and interview some amazing individuals. But your command of language and communication is really, I mean, it's so beautifully done. Please let listeners know how to connect with you, how to purchase your new book, how to listen to your podcast for which I'm grateful to have been a guest on last year.
Jeff Krasno: [00:59:34] Yeah, I will. But before I do, let me just thank you for this opportunity, Cynthia. You're such a generous human. We don't know each other that well, but in the time that we spent together, I really feel a connection with you. But I also see how you navigate the world, and it's one with a lot of generosity and open heartedness. So, thank you for being who you are. Yeah, I have a book coming out. It's really my first book, curated some other books in the past, but this book is called Good Stress and I stumbled upon goodstress.com and was able to acquire that URL so you can go there to find out more about it. And you know, really, it is a squeezing of the sponge, I would call it.
[01:00:18] It's a distilling of the wisdom of other people, you among them and certainly many of our colleagues and contemporaries that I've had the great fortune to be able to interview as part of my Commune platform and my Commune podcast and hosted them and sauna-ed with them and hiked and dined and done all sorts of other crazy things with a lot of these amazing people that bent the arc of my personal health journey. And I've been lucky enough to bask in their glory. So, this book, Good Stress is really a distillation of what I've been able to learn from a lot of those people and a lot of them are featured on my Commune platform. So that's just at onecommune.com and I'm just @jeffkrasno waxing sort of alternately poetic and pathetic on Instagram. [laughs] So that's another place to find me.
Cynthia Thurlow: [01:01:06] Thank you again.
Jeff Krasno: [01:01:08] Thank you.
Cynthia Thurlow: [01:01:10] If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review. Subscribe and tell a friend.
The idea of "good stress" as a key to better health is such a refreshing perspective! Finding balance—whether through fitness, mindfulness, or even a confidence-boosting change like a new hairstyle for women—can make a huge difference in overall well-being. It's all about small, intentional choices that help us feel our best!