Achieving Balance Through 40 Years of Zen with Dave Asprey

Dr. Cates: Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. Today we’re talking about achieving balance through 40 Years of Zen. About a year ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a program, a technique that really changed things on a fundamental level for me. It’s not something I’ve shared on The Spa Dr. Podcast before, so I felt it was time. So who is this friend? His name is Dave Asprey and he’s the founder and CEO of Bulletproof 360, creator of the global phenomenon Bulletproof Coffee a two time New York Times best selling author, the host of that Webby award winning podcast, Bulletproof Radio, and a serial entrepreneur. Dave has dedicated over two decades of his life identifying and working with world renowned doctors, scientists, luminaries and innovators to uncover the most advanced methods for enhancing mental and physical performance. Dave’s discoveries and the companies he’s founded offer tools that enable people the opportunity to take control of body, mind, and biology, elevating human performance far beyond whatever what we ever dreamed possible by employing the principles of biohacking. By the way. That’s a term added to the Miriam Webster Dictionary in September of 2018 with Dave’s influence, Dave has lost over 100 pounds, upgraded his brain, learn to sleep more efficiently in less time, and become a more effective entrepreneur, husband, father, and overall human being. Dave has been featured on media outlets like The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, Nighttime, Dr Oz, the Steve Harvey show, and many more. His impact has been felt on a global scale. He really has a a game changer and a maverick. You may have already heard of Dave Asprey in association with Bulletproof or seen interviews I’ve done with him, but today is different. We’re talking about something different. Dave helped start a program called 40 Years of Zen and the skills and experience I obtained from this helped me on a deep level. I share all about it in today’s interview, I got a chance I was ran into Dave at a conference, pulled him aside and interviewed him about that. I wanted to make sure he’d heard my story and knew what an impact it made. He’s been such a great friend and mentor in my business for me. And so it was great to connect with him and talk to him about this. I hope it inspires you to think about what steps you can take today to make a shift in your life, to create more balance physically, mentally, emotionally, and maybe even spiritually. So please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Cates: Okay, Dave, it’s so good to see you.

Dave Asprey: Trevor, I always love hanging out with you.

Dr. Cates: Well, and we’re talking about 40 Years of Zen today because I had such an amazing experience with it. So I wanted you to share with everybody why you started at, how it all came to be and who it’s a good fit for. So talk about all that. Today.

Dave Asprey: The 40 Years of zen is a personal development neurofeedback program and it’s based on 20 years
of doing neurofeedback that I’ve done in order to basically edit and turn off or upgrade the voice in my head. So I don’t have all the negative things that used to be going on in there. And it’s allowed me to have a lot more energy, which makes everything that you do easier. But having multiple companies at the same time, and being a dad and an author and a podcast and all that kind of crazy stuff that I’m known for doing, my stress level is lower than a lot of people because I just got rid of a lot of the inner garbage that was there. And after a while I said, well, I wanna be able to do this for friends and for people who have the ability or potential to touch thousands or even millions of people’s lives. Because when you figure out what’s real versus what’s your story, you actually have, you’ll have a very hard time doing bad things. So it’s hard to be evil when you have self-awareness. So you could spend 20 or 40 years meditating in a cave the traditional way. But if you wanted, I don’t know, have a family or like do something else that might not work for you. So what if you could get the same brain states, those same targeted states, but you could do it in five days.

Dave Asprey: So I’ve spent four months in my life doing this. I hired a neuroscientist to co-development this with me. He’s a former nuclear submarine engineer, not a typical neuroscientist, but he’s also got 20 years and 100,000 neurofeedback sessions under his belt. And we put this together with training on how your emotions work and neurofeedback to guide you on how to take ownership of them. And so this has been a huge part of my personal development and I just, I wanted to share it. And today people like Trevor, celebrities, CEO’s, and a bunch of people are just saying, you know what? I didn’t have 20 or 40 years. I wanted to become my own guru in a very short period of time. That’s how you do it. So that’s what 40 years is in is. And it just came about because neurofeedback is simply faster and better than sitting in a cave and eventually noticing, oh, maybe that worked.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. So you told me about this a while back and that was a couple of years ago you told me, you said, Trevor, you need to do this. And I was like, okay, Dave, I don’t know what it is, but I do it.
Dave Asprey: You were stuck on a couple of things, but you’re also like a highly successful person. And that’ was the trap that I fell into, early on in my career and like, okay, I’m 26, I just made $6 million. I should be happy. And like, I’m not happy at all. In fact, I told a friend, I’ll be happy when I have $10 million and I had this all be happy wind thing. Not Understand that happiness is a core skill. So I find, I mean, one of guys who did the program was, was in the newspaper for losing half a billion dollars in one day. And I looked at him in the first day of the program and I said, tell me about your mom. And he looks at me and he starts crying. I’m like, this guy has all the money in the world, he could go to any, you know, monastery, any spa, any psychologist, but no one knows how to do it because your mind builds these invisible barriers that you can’t see by definition. And so it’s really normal when people get successful and they start doing bigger things like you are. It’s normal to run into these invisible fences and you don’t know why they’re there or what they are, but they’re actually in you. And so you had a few of those going on like any successful person does. And like you just stepped in and owned it.

Dr. Cates: Oh, thank you. And I know I told you one of the things that I noticed afterwards is that I felt like I was talking faster or thinking faster. Like my team couldn’t keep up with me. They were like, what is, what happened? What did you do? And I was like, this is kind of a blessing and a curse, Dave.

Dave Asprey: Well that there are multiple studies that show neurofeedback raises your IQ. It has to be the right kind of neurofeedback and things like that. But we use a combination of some proprietary stuff that we developed as well as some things that can increase voltage in your brain so you can actually train your brain to make more electricity. And you can tell neurons you’re not firing fast enough, just these neurons over here, you fire faster and you are here, you’re firing too fast. But only when you talk to this section of the brain. So when you were there, you went through on day four probably you went through and you said, okay, what are the characteristics and traits that I want to strengthen, the ones that I want less of. And you can actually dial those in and then train those in your brain. And you sit there for 20 minutes and you feel different when you’re done. But then over time those neurons become locked in, in a good way. The new stuff that you formed there so that, yeah, you come out of there, you are thinking faster. And part of it, if you constantly sorting through your own mental garbage, right. And we all have it like, oh, I can’t do that. I’m not good enough. They won’t like me. Where are they thinking about me? Do I look fat in these pants? Like all those stupid thoughts that don’t do anything. And I don’t know if you guys probably know, I used to weigh 300 pounds. So I know about fat pants. I’ve like tested the number of pleats, by the way, pleats don’t work. But like that whole thing, all those voices, they slow you down. And if you’re thinking about that and you’re also thinking about what’s for lunch in the middle of your meeting with your staff, it’s no wonder you’re a little slow, you’re distracted, but you don’t know you’re distracted. Because those thoughts are always there and they’re just normal. And you actually think they’re you. And they’re not. They’re your hardware. They’re the meat in your body trying to be in charge, not letting you be in charge. So that’s why when you came back, you had less of your own obstacles in the way, and you actually had more electricity firing in your brain. So your staff was like, oh my God, we’re gonna have to keep up with her now.

Dr. Cates: Right? It was the combination of creative thoughts, clear thinking and focus was I think what sped up things for me.

Dave Asprey: I love it that I did that for you Trevor, those are the, the cognitive sort of the left brain logical things you’re talking about. What did it do for you emotionally?

Dr. Cates: You know, I think what was interesting for me is that at that point I, uh, I didn’t know I was gonna lose my dad at that point. But he was, he was sick, but I didn’t think he was gonna. I didn’t think we were going to lose him so quickly. And it helped me so much be able to go through that. And I, cause a lot of what I ended up working on while I was there was my relationship with him and I didn’t even know when I was about to go through. And so when all of this happened, he’s in the hospital. I even shared my notes with him. He like read through my notebook. I was teaching him some of the, some of the work that we did. And he was so impressed and he just, he just, he loved it. And I, so I think that was one of the biggest gifts in doing it was that it helped me heal. And I always had a great relationship with my dad. But you know, you still, there’s always stuff right, with our families and, and so it kinda helped fast forward and make that, you know, heal all that stuff so that I could talk to him about things before he passed.

Dave Asprey: What an amazing story that is. I know that there’s always things that happen if you’re human, you had parents at least so far, that’s the case. And if you are someone who’s going to be born without parents in an artificial womb, you’re probably gonna have real issues, just saying. But here’s what happens when your one or two or three, you’re all emotion and no prefrontal cortex. You don’t have the hardware to be rational and to understand context. So there’s a time that anyone who has been nursed has where it’s like you wanted a boob. You didn’t get a boob. Sorry. It happens to all of us and you’re really pissed off about that. So you can have the best parents in the world, but when you’re, you know, nine months old or 12 months old and you’re like, GAH, okay, that actually leaves an emotional impact. And until you can process that exact emotion with an adult mind in a fully intact prefrontal cortex, the emotional feelings of something as trivial as that, or the time you were bullied, you know what I mean? Entrepreneurs who’ve been through the program like, Oh my God, I’m an entrepreneur because I was bullied in fifth grade. Like it totally happens. Right? And what’s going on is you didn’t feel good enough and that feeling of not being enough, I’ll show them, I’ll build a million dollar company and I’ll take over the world and, and all that, but it all comes down. Okay. The time that, you know, daddy wasn’t there, like, well, Gee, daddy was putting bread on the table, gluten-free bread. But like seriously, you didn’t know that as a kid you’re like, I wanted daddy at baseball and he wasn’t there. All that kind of stuff. The emotional impression is left if you are human and it has nothing to do with how strong or how good your parents are, how good of a person you are. Nothing. It’s just biology and it’s hackable. And like that’s, that’s why even though you have good parents who loved you and took as good of care as you as they could, you’re like, of course there’s issues because you’re alive.

Dr. Cates: Right, right, right. I’m human. I am human. Um, okay, so tell everybody a bit about the program or do you not like to tell? Okay, cause I know when I did it, I was like, what am I getting into? I know it’s five days.

Dave Asprey: There’s definitely a little bit of an air of mystery on purpose. And I’m just, I’m going to leave some of that because if I give you all the things that we’re doing, you’ll just be like, no, really that’s not even possible. So, um, what happens is you go in and we measure your brain with a clinical grade, 24 channel, high end neurofeedback system to see what your strengths and weaknesses are. Newsflash, 90% of people who come through having electrical evidence of traumatic brain injury. You know what happened when you were two, you walked into a room and there’s cushions on everything and there was one little corner and you automatically walked in and banged your head on that one little corner. I swear my kids do that. Your kids did that too, right? They magically find that thing and like, I don’t know where like wired to smack ourselves in the head run where,

Dr. Cates: Ya know, like coffee tables were made to be toddler size.

Dave Asprey: But it’s like we tape all the edges of the coffee table except that one. And they find that one anyway. 90% of people they fell when they were on their bike, whatever. And it’s still affecting your behavior 30 years later. So you can actually tell the brain that’s going on, it’ll wire around it. So for day one, like, hey, let’s see how you’re doing here. We look at your ideal breathing rate, your heart rate variability, and measure of your stress. There’s an executive chef and we figured out if we feed you the right stuff, there’s bulletproof diet in there, and some supplements that you can do two and a half times more neurofeedback than you can if you’re eating what you normally eat.

Dr. Cates: That’s something to take away for just every day function, right? Not just for this.

Dave Asprey: Yeah, we don’t want you to get tired at the end of every day, but you will be exhausted at the end of every day just because you’re doing so much work. And then you meet the facilitators and you go in these pods look like something probably from a spaceship, and they’re designed and custom made. So you have just an enclosed safe space to go in and sit down and access really deep places, the places that you go in your meditation master, when you’ve spent years doing these, these things, it turns out, high-performance is an altered state. And there’s reset modes. Your brain’s capable of where you can go in and say, I’m going to re-experience whatever emotion I have in the boardroom or when I’m fighting with my spouse or whatever the deal is, and you’re actually gonna go in and tell your body, hey, cut that shit out. That isn’t working for me right now and you’re not allowed to do that anymore. Instead, you’re going to be aware and conscious and make choices instead of reacting in a like that and it’s not going to cost you anything because what most people do right now, if you’re listening to this and you haven’t done huge amounts of personal development work, something happens. It pushes a button for you. You feel the emotion and you tell yourself a story about why the emotion happened and then you say, that’s why, but here’s the deal. It just happened and then you made up the story and if you don’t believe me, you ever lean on a hot stove accidentally and you pull your hand away, except you didn’t choose to pull your hand away. Something else chose that. It’s that same thing that’s making you react in situations that you don’t want.

Dave Asprey: And so what we’re doing there is we’re like, all right, let’s list those situations where you react in ways that you are not happy with. And let’s go through something called the neurofeedback augmented reset protocol and go through and change your reactivity pattern. And when you do that, it’s amazing. You could sit in a conference room or at the dinner table or on a date or whatever, and instead of just like completely thinking about the other person’s thinking, tell yourself stories and just being reactive and having your buttons pushed. Like I don’t really have buttons to push anymore like those. So the effort it takes as functioning adults, we all know you go into the meeting, you’re like feeling reactive and you’re like, I’m just going to put on my game face. I’m going to say the right thing inside. I want to kill this person. But I’m like, I’m very calm. But everyone knows, we all know when someone’s sitting there like, that person wants to kill me. But they’re smiling, right? So what if inside you didn’t want to kill that person and you are smiling, that would be a very different meeting and a different outcome and the amount of effort it takes to smile when you want to punch somebody is very different. So what if you remove that innate desire to just tell yourself you’re not good enough or to I think bad thoughts about other people and things like that. You can do all that stuff and normally it’s 20 years of therapy, 20 years of sitting in a cage or in a cave, not a cage. That’s a different thing, that’s a UFC reference, but ya in a cave and all of that, all of that just couldn’t get done in a short period of time. And you know what I’m talking about cause you did it right.

Dr. Cates: So there are a lot of different personal development techniques out there. How does this play in? How does this compliment or substitute or augment whatever.

Dave Asprey: We’ve had people come through who were 20 year experienced meditators for an hour a day. And at the end of it they’re like, oh my God, I was doing it wrong. It’s not that they weren’t getting benefit from their meditation. They were. The problem though is that your brain does not have nerves that tell it how it’s doing. The nerve that’s inside the brain is the fifth cranial nerve. It comes from your molars. Other than that, everything in your brain is all about what’s going on outside of me. What’s going on from the neck down. And what that means is that it doesn’t have self awareness. And so imagine if you’d never seen yourself and like there’s cool movies of mirrors in the jungle. They’ll take a mirror and just hanging on a tree and they’ll film it and you’ll see like a gorilla will walk up and be like, oh my God, that’s me. And they’ll be like, oh, there’s spinach in my teeth, and they’ll actually scrape their teeth. They never thought about the spinach in their teeth. Your brain has spinach in its teeth and you just don’t know it. So once the brain realizes, oh my God, this is what’s happening in the way it adheres and it knows is you’re sitting in the Pod, your eyes are closed, you’ve got headphones on, you’ve got electrodes glued to your head that get an electrical signal from what you’re actually doing, not what you think you’re doing, but what you’re actually doing. And it plays back into a sound and you run through the steps.

Dave Asprey: We teach you that these are things you would do, like a meditation. And then when you do it right, the sounds get louder. When you’re wrong, the sounds get quieter. So you cannot lie to yourself anymore. And so if you’re meditating and thinking, I’m doing the right thing, like, oh, this sounds quieter. Maybe what if during this meditation I shift what I’m doing, or I breathe differently, or I think about something else, right? I do the various things that we teach you to do. All of a sudden, Whoa, I didn’t know that this happened. I didn’t know that my heart would open that way. And it’s now to the point we know about gamma state. So we know about Alpha states, we know the different states and very advanced meditators. We’ve been able to quantify them over the last 20 years. And you can replicate those states. And when you do it, it is life changing and it’s a permanent benefit that extends throughout your home life, your community, your social life, your impact on the world, your work life, all of it. To the point that all of the executives at bulletproof have, you know, a free week at 40 Years of Zen where I’m paying them their salary and I cover the cost of the training, because the return on investment for me to do that is so high. Cause I want people who are conscious and aware and nonreactive. It doesn’t mean that you’re not passionate, you can be exceptionally passionate, but you can be passionate for good stuff instead of against bad stuff. Makes sense?

Dr. Cates: Yeah. That’s amazing. And I know that one of the things I loved about it is being a scientifically minded doctor to actually see what was happening with my brain while I was meditating. To see the brain waves and the different types of brainwaves. And that was fascinating. And then also to get an understanding the connection between those and the sounds that I was hearing. And then that by the end of the five days having control over that it,

Dave Asprey: it’s kind of weird, we learn to walk pretty early on, but the process is really sort of painful. Have you ever seen a kid do that? You know, you crawl around for a while, you stand up and you wobble and you fall down. Well here’s the signal. Gravity and pain will teach you pretty well cause you fall down and you know you fall down. But when you’re trying to meditate, let’s say you’re in a monastery, okay, you know you’ve got your legs all crossed and you know you’re sitting there and you’re meditating and, and the, and I’ve been to Tibet and you know, if you’ve done meditation with the masters and all that, but they’ll sit there and okay, imagine the Buddha, you sitting on a golden throne and there’s 18 little flowers on it and you go through this whole thing. Am I doing it right? I have no idea. But if you do it every day, one day, the zen master’s gonna look at you when he’s noticing you, cause he’s watching a room full of 50 people and he’s gonna raise an eyebrow like, Oh yes, I did it right. Okay. What if a thousand times a second across 24 channels on your brain, there was a zen master looking at you going, you did right? You did it right either, right? No, no, not that. Do that. Do that. That’s why the progress is so much faster. It’s that simple. We don’t have gravity inside our brain to tell us, ouch, that was wrong. So the brain just does whatever it kind of can do.

Dave Asprey: And it’s wired with these three things. And this is in my book, Headstrong. This is an original theory that I just came to you after studying cellular biology, studying psychology. Personal development is all life forms, including the sub cellular Mitochondria, the things that are the first line of inner interactions between you and reality around you, isn’t you? It’s an ancient bacteria inside yourselves. They change what your cells do based on what they sense in the world around you, including your stress, including the light, the food, the temperature, everything. So they’re just the environmental monitors and powered manufacturers and little chemical manufacturers. So they sit there and say, number one goal, don’t die right now. And that’s why we spend so much energy, like 10 times more than anything else on don’t get eaten by a tiger. Don’t, don’t do anything. That’s scary. And you know what’s most scary, Trevor?

Dr. Cates: What’s that?

Dave Asprey: Well, being alone, because we’re supposed to be in little tribes of people and if you get ostracized, you don’t happen to die. Like your parents won’t feed you. You won’t have a community. And so we live in a natural, healthy state of terror of not being liked. Now it’s stupid and dysfunctional, but does it keep dear in a herd together? Yes. Does it keep a pride of lions together? Yes. Does it keep slime molds in a biofilm? Yes. It is a fundamental survival thing. So what if we just turn that down so that you’re only afraid of things that were actually going to kill you instead of things that you learned in third grade would kill you when little Johnny was mean to you. So we do that. The second thing we do is around food because you can starve to death. In fact, many of us that’d be all of us alive, have ancestors who lived through famines because if they didn’t live through them, they would have died. They wouldn’t be your ancestor, right? So actually maybe they died after they had you. Anyway. Famines are a massive problem for all life farms. There’s no nutrients we die. So the energy that isn’t taken out by not getting eaten by tigers gets taken up by worrying about food. And that’s why you think about what’s for lunch. Oh, I really want the Bagel on the table, man, that cookie looks good. There’s a bowl of candy. What flavor do I want? And that voice in your head just goes and goes and goes, and it’s irritating and it completely can be turned off. That one’s relatively easy. And that was my first big book was Bulletproof Diet, like had you turn off that damn voice.
Dave Asprey: But then the third thing is really a sticky one and after you have fear and after you have food, you have the other f word … reproducing the species, right? Trevor doesn’t have any idea what I’m talking about cause she’s so innocent. But when you’re not thinking about food and you’re not thinking about something that might be scary or bad, your might be looking at someone’s legs going, I know I shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts, but I think I will think them anyway because, well that’s how we’re wired. All that isn’t you, by the way. That’s the emerging behavior from ancient bacteria who are the puppet masters inside of you. The good thing is they’re stupid because they’re bacteria and you can train them and that’s what we’re doing at 40 Years of Zen, so like great, now I can use my fear to my advantage. I can use hunger to my advantage and I can even use the energy that goes into passion to my advantage. And then when you get all those things in alignment, there’s the fourth f-word, which is friend. And we’re wired to be nice to each other. And so when you get all those things that are making you afraid of things that you shouldn’t be afraid of, out of the way you have extra energy to support your community. And when I say all life forms do that, every single one of them does it. And so do humans. So we’re wired to be nice to support each other, to specialize, to help someone who falls down and all that kind of stuff. It’s just when we’re caught in those other three F’s that we start acting like jerks and it’s all hackable.

Dr. Cates: Yep. Absolutely. So how do people find out more about 40 Years of Zen.

Dave Asprey: Check out 40 Years of Zen. That’s 40yearsofzen.com. Our facility is in Seattle and it’s about a 40 minute drive from Sea-Tac and there’s a float plane terminal right near it at an executive mansion. It’s a very beautiful, peaceful, secluded setting on multiple acres. And there’s a team of trained people, executive chef, and it’s a very high end experience and you will be taken care of. You don’t have to think about anything except for just becoming a better human being. And it’s going to take about 10 hours a day for five days, Monday through Friday, and the entire time don’t do work. You’re going to be doing enough work on yourself. You’re not going to be sending texts and all that kind of stuff. In fact, it doesn’t work if you do that. And it is a, it’s one of the things that is worth saving for and it’s been a part of my life for 20 years. You know, neurofeedback, and I found that doing neurofeedback on myself was kind of like doing brain surgery on myself and that’s why I eventually got to hiring neuroscientist and very experienced facilitators just to create the results in a very short period of time.

Dr. Cates: This is an intense experience. Maybe not everybody’s ready for that. Also. It’s not cheap. It’s, it’s a little, you know, there’s a cost to it.

Dave Asprey: It’s $15,000. I’ll just be real straight forward. Here’s why, it’s multimillion dollar mansion, neuroscientist, custom hardware and software designed for your brain. A program that I designed, a team of facilitators, an executive chef, the food, the whole nine yards, it’s that way because otherwise it would take three weeks, not one week. So compared to any of the personal development seminars, it’s in that same range. But it is the most effective thing that I know how to do permanent of all of the hacks that I know it’s the one that’s made the biggest difference for me. So I’ve got it as cheap as I can. The mission of 40 Years of Zen is to raise the IQ on everyone on the planet by 10 points. So that means getting the tech that’s now at this facility out into high schools and working with artificial intelligence. So I’m actively funding that and working on that so that we have the ability to have faster improvement and to make it more affordable. So there will come a day down the road. It might be several years where before you get out of high school, like you know what, let’s just get rid of whatever garbage stories you’re telling yourself so that you can just look at the world around you and then do what you want to do. So I think this is a fundamental technology for consciousness and I’m super happy to be able to do it on myself and my kids and my wife and my employees and my friends and whoever else just feels ready. And if you don’t feel ready or you’re outraged that it’s that much, I would love to make it cheaper. I do not get paid a salary from this company. I own the company and put its money back into research and development because it’s about making humanity progress.

Dr. Cates: Right. So do you have any, for people who maybe aren’t quite ready for this, don’t maybe have the time or the resources for yet? Is there anything else that you can recommend that people kind of prepare to kind of lead themselves up to something before they can do this?
Dave Asprey: There’s a field of psychology called transpersonal psychology and there’s an episode of bulletproof radio with a guy named Stan Grof. Stan is the father of that field of psychology and he’s the guy with the year about EFT. The tapping technique or hear about EMDR, this reset mode where you move your eyes and he basically said, look what happens in the womb at birth and or in early childhood affects your emotional state and we can work with that. So I would say start thinking about cheese. Is it possible that my emotions come from something old when I didn’t have the ability to think about them? I’ll tell you, it’s only possible. It’s provable that that is what’s going on. It’s just uncomfortable to think about that. So if you think that’s possible, you’re already halfway there and then you might want to listen to that episode with Stan Grof because it’s going to just clue you in with the guy who actually created this stuff and how he figured it out and what a difference that can make.

Dave Asprey: Because even if you never go to 40 Years of Zen, then you might say, okay, I’m going to try something like EMDR and if you know, which is every time, you know I go to get on an airplane or you know, something happens, I just like completely zone out and I am really uncomfortable when I’m stressed and I don’t know why you can sit down and spend a few hours with a therapist who’s going to put your brain in a reset mode. It doesn’t go as deep as 40 Years of Zen, but it can be really helpful when you know what’s going on and there’s less of the exploratory side of that body. But so try som, EMDR or even just breathing exercises like box breathing, you know, breathe in for five seconds, hold for five seconds, breathe out for five seconds, hold for five seconds, do that for awhile. And that in and of itself can raise Alpha in your brain. So you’re just way more in charge of your brain, your emotions than you think we are. We always will believe our emotions drive us and that we are our emotions. That’s not what the data says.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. And breathing doesn’t cost anything. It’s free. It’s totally free and it’s good for you.

Dave Asprey: It’s good for you but I hear they’re about to put a tax on it.

Dr. Cates: Oh, so Ibetter hurry up and get on that. All right Dave. Well thank you so much for the interview today and teaching us about 40 years is then and what you’ve learned along the way with that. Really appreciate.

Dave Asprey: Well Trevor, thanks for having the courage to go. It’s actually scary, uh, to say I have no idea what’s going on. You know, I have to have some degree of trust in people and to just sit down and just let the unknown happen. So you stepped up to it. It’s a lot of courage and even talking about it too is also really cool. There’s a few other videos on the 40 Years of Zen site. There’s one from a billionaire, another guy who’s, you know, a major seller of private jets. And these are people who are super successful and they’re like, oh my God, I just didn’t know I had this other stuff. So it’s just, it’s the best investment I know I know of, but I also recognize it’s not cheap, but I don’t know how to make any cheaper right now without it not working.

Dr. Cates: Right, right. I’d love to be able to do it again too. So there we go. There’s another layer I’m sure to work on. All right, well thanks again for joining us.

Dave Asprey: Thanks Trevor.

Dr. Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dave Asprey and again, if you’re not quite ready for 40 Years of Zen, there are plenty of other things that you can do to help create more balance in your life. I talk about it in my book Clean Skin from Within in the clean mind section. So there’s some great tips on places to start there and if you want to learn more about 40 years is then Dave Asprey, all that we talked about today, you can go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information there. And while you’re there I invite you to join the spa doctor community so you don’t miss any upcoming shows and information. And we always love to see your reviews on iTunes. So if you can head over to iTunes and take a moment to leave your honest feedback. We always appreciate that about the spa doctor podcast, and if you haven’t found out your skin personality type test yet, if you haven’t taken the test yet, you haven’t found out your skin personality type, you can go to theskinquiz.com find out what messages your skin’s trying to tell you about your health and what you can do about it at theskinquiz.com also, I invite you to join me on social media, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube. We’re all over there, The Spa Dr., And join the conversation there. I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.