Andy Galpin: [00:00:00] You wanna tank your testosterone? Go ahead and sleep poorly. Go ahead, and then blame it on, you know, microplastics or whatever the heck you want, but nothing will drive this boat more than chronic sleep deprivation, especially with a, a chronic sleep disorder. That hasn't got your attention yet? I'll keep going.

Hala Taha: Young and Profiters, today we're joined by Dr. Andy Galpin, a human performance scientist, tenured professor, and coach to elite athletes, CEOs, and high achievers.

Andy Galpin: If you're in your mid-20s to 50s and you do shift work and you snore a ton at night, there's a very, very strong chance that that's a big contributor to your ED.

Your physiology's greatest asset is pattern recognition. Your body is running signals all day trying to figure out, what do you want me to do? It's kinda like your executive assistant. I

Hala Taha: think people don't realize some of the peptides that they're buying online are, like, for animals.

Andy Galpin: I know several people, major, major names that you would all know, some of them are really big promoters of this stuff, and they were knocking on death's door because of it, [00:01:00] and those stories aren't public.

Hala Taha: When you are working with a CEO or a founder, what are some of the first things that you do to kind of, like, map out their performance plan?

Andy Galpin: We need to run an analysis of everything that goes on or in your body, and then everything that comes out of your body. Founders, executives, entrepreneurs, they don't have time, so what we need is accuracy, and that choice we make is built on what we call a performance anchor.

Anchors are constraints. They're things that slow you down and things that add wear and tear.

Hala Taha: So give us some examples of, like, the top three anchors that you see that entrepreneurs specifically face.

Andy Galpin: The biggest one is

Hala Taha: Yeah, fam, we talk a lot about high performance in business. But today we're talking about the body that has to sustain it.

Because let's be real, most entrepreneurs obsess over their business strategy, but totally wing it on their health strategy. Today we're joined by Dr. Andy Galpin, a human performance scientist, tenured professor, and coach to elite athletes, CEOs, and high achievers. Andy has spent 20 years [00:02:00] studying what it really takes to look, feel, and perform at your very best.

In this episode, Andy breaks down why there's no one-size-fits-all formula for fitness, how to identify the hidden performance anchors draining your energy, sleep, and focus, and how entrepreneurs can build a realistic health system that actually supports their ambition. Andy, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

Andy Galpin: It's great to be here.

Hala Taha: I'm excited for this conversation. I feel like everybody's into fitness these days, but there's so much on the internet to kind of decipher through, and it's so hard to figure out what we're supposed to do. And you are really, like, the expert for the experts in this field. So really excited to talk to you about this.

So why don't we just jump right in? What is one thing on the internet right now inter- inter- related to, like, fitness that you wish you could just, like, erase and just, like, remove from the internet?

Andy Galpin: Oh, geez. Uh, what, what a question to get started. What we wanna be careful of before we answer that is [00:03:00] I don't like to kill motivation with information.

And that's an important theme to start off if, because there, it, are so many ways you can go about your health, your fitness, your wellness, nutrition, exercise, mental health, all those things. I, I do worry that because we like to sensationalize things, that someone gets really excited, they try something, it's their first health practice, and then all of a sudden something hits them on the internet, and then they feel deflated, demotivated, and it's so confusing.

So overall, my initial answer to that is if you're doing something that is, you know, generally good, keep doing it.

Hala Taha: Mm.

Andy Galpin: Let's not worry about it. There are levels of detail we can get to. There's more effective and more efficient ways and so forth. But the basic practices of health and human performance are really fairly consistent.

And so I think my answer to your question would be the myth I want to die is the fact that any individual person, there's some magic recipe-

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm ...

Andy Galpin: [00:04:00] and there's some one thing that's gonna cure all their problems, or there's one thing if they're doing it wrong, they'll get nothing right, right? We hear this stuff and, and this is generally how social media presentation works is like, "You're doing this all wrong."

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: Well, that's rarely true. Or, you know, if you're over 40 and male, you can't do this. Th- almost all those things are complete nonsense. They're not evidence-based. They're not, uh, practical. They don't work in the real world, which is where I operate. They don't matter. Uh, so globally, it's that type of sensationalism and that type of anesthetic response that we have these hard-cut, won't work at all, absolutely have to dos, uh, because of, you know, you kinda mentioned it, but I'll, I'll just say it myself.

I, I coach the best, highest performers in the world in men, women, young, old, all those things. So I can just tell you flat out it's not true, and that's not how people get, become their best and that's, it's just not really the case.

Hala Taha: Well, I can't wait to figure out how people can become [00:05:00] their best and kinda distill all this wisdom from you.

But first, something that I've heard you say that I think is just really interesting is that you say that everyone's an athlete, and I've got entrepreneurs tuning in, and they might work out, and, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs wanna be fit 'cause they're just high achievers in all aspects of life. But they- they're probably not thinking thems- of themselves as athletes.

So, so why do you say that?

Andy Galpin: Awesome. Thank you for that. That's one of my core sayings and beliefs. There's an athlete in all of us, and when I say that way, I don't mean anything related to sports. I don't care if you ever played a sport or ever do. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm referring to is the fact that every one of us has some desire in three core elements: look, feel, and perform.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: All of us wanna look a certain way or don't wanna look a certain way. I don't care. I'm not judging value on that at all. Some of us care more about aesthetics, some of us care less, but none of us care zero. So there's some element of how we look [00:06:00] that matters to us. There's some element of how you feel.

This is, are you in pain? Do you have a lot of energy, right? Are, are you-- do you feel like you can go and do whatever you want, or you feel restricted, right? There's physiological feeling, there's psychological feeling, but there's some aspect that... And then the third is actual performance. How do you actually execute?

Do you make good decisions? Do you run fast? Uh, like what are you actually executing and getting across the finish line? And I, and I continue to pull examples here that are not just physical, 'cause I haven't said this yet directly, but this includes cognition, this includes memory, this includes emotional control, leadership.

These are the type of things when we're looking at full complete packages that we're caring about. So when I say everyone is an athlete, what I'm saying is you all have a physical, psychophysiological presence you wanna have, and you wanna be able to compete. And not just maybe with yourself and have nothing to do with kicking a ball or putting a score on a scoreboard, but you want your body to be able to do what you want when you want and to [00:07:00] suffer minimal consequences for that action.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: If that's not athlete, if that's not being able to be show up and present, perform, I don't know what is.

Hala Taha: When you are working with a CEO or a founder, what are some of the first things that you do to kind of like map out their performance plan? Like what are the things that you're evaluating, and what are some of the common, uh, patterns or challenges that you see a lot of like CEOs and founders face?

Andy Galpin: Right. We've done this a ton. Uh, this is a, is a big part of, of my life over the last number of years. I'll give you the philosophical approach, and then I'm happy to give you any individual specific test or example that, that you would like in as much detail as you would care to have. But philosophically, our approach is we need to run an analysis of everything that goes on or in your body- How all that is metabolized, processed, and handled, and then everything that comes out of your body.

And by coming out of your body, I'm talking about everything from your sweat, urine, saliva, stool, to your physical performance, right? That's an [00:08:00] expression of coming out of your body, um, to your happiness again, to your IQ, your word recall, your energy throughout the day, all those things. And so we will spend a good chunk of time using research-grade analysis tools and technologies to cover all of that.

Then what that allows us to do is to come back and follow up with high precision, super specific follow-up testing. And that way we don't have any false positives or negatives or flags or anything like that. We can then construct individual plans that are high precision and simple. And so our philosophy is a lot of data, so we know the full package, nothing's being missed, and then we can make really smart, informed choices that are realistic.

Founders, executives, entrepreneurs, they don't have time to be like a thirty-two-year-old in Escondido and with no kids, right? Where it's like, "Okay, great, you have a three-hour morning routine. I got it. You're gonna do this." Like, those are not things that land with executives and founders. [00:09:00] And so what we need is accuracy, and we need precision And that choice we make is built on what we call a performance anchor.

So whatever is anchoring your performance the most, we're gonna make sure we have high-precision solutions for that that are effective for you and your physiology and lifestyle, not just random ones that, you know, should be applied if you have X symptom or Y test result. Uh, that allows us to, to make the plans, um, realistic and super effective, um, because they are based on your unique physiology, but they're within the constraints of your travel and schedule and so forth.

So philosophically, that's what we do.

Hala Taha: Hmm. And when you say, um, anchors for your performance, can you give us some example? Um, I'm assuming- Yeah ... this means, like, what matters most to them in terms of their performance?

Andy Galpin: Anchors are constraints.

Hala Taha: Oh, okay. They're

Andy Galpin: things

Hala Taha: that,

Andy Galpin: that slow you down and things that add wear and tear.

So the anchor could be something like you've got a micronutrient imbalance or insufficiency. [00:10:00] Could be a lifestyle behavior and habit. It could be, uh, the time of day you're doing certain work tasks. It could be your training program. It could be your circadian rhythm. It could be something in your physical environment, your water, air quality, nutrition.

It could be anything. The con- the anchor, though, is the thing that's causing unnecessary and excessive physiological stress, right? This isn't just necessarily like, "Oh, I feel stressed today," but it's burning energy. It's slowing down productivity. It's costing additional resources above, above and beyond what it's returning in, in terms of investment.

That gives us precision. We go target that thing, and then for the most part, we can back away a little bit because physiology works as a mosaic. It's not individual systems. So when you relieve major stressors or anchors like that, then you can kind of back away pretty good. The rest of physiology tends to take care of itself.

Hala Taha: So give us some examples of, like, the top [00:11:00] three anchors that you see that entrepreneurs specifically face.

Andy Galpin: The biggest ones we will categorically see from a complaint perspective or symptomology is something like this. Either you're one of two people. One, you feel great, good, you just wanna make sure you're optimizing and you're ahead of things, or you're executing, but you're doing it through sheer wheel, sheer will, grit, fortitude.

Something sucks. Energy's way low. Uh, you're just working through the whole thing. So in the second case, that's more interesting because we can give tangible examples. We tend to see things a lot like energy is one of our, our largest ones. Um, either I struggle with sleep, can't get to sleep. If I do, my mind is racing, wake up at 2:00 in the morning all the time for no reason, can't get back to bed.

Energy is not where I want it to be, therefore either I don't have enough energy throughout the day or I have to use excessive exogenous stimulants, nicotine, so on and so forth, things like that. I also then have the I'm overwhelmed. I'm into [00:12:00] health. Maybe I'm into it, maybe I'm not, but I know that this will make me more effective.

I believe the data, but I'm overwhelmed with the information. There's red light, there's PEMF, there's nutrition, there's just so many things, and I don't wanna be a professional health guy. So can you help me distill what matters for me? And my point. So those are the most common reasons people, uh, will come to our coaching practice, and what we'll see out of that is a combination of things.

I've mentioned one, but small im-imbalances, insufficiencies, excesses in nutrient intake, caloric intake, uh, practices. Obviously, there's a combination of limited or no physical activity to way too much, the wrong type at the wrong time of day. Um, schedule isn't aligning with your circadian rhythm. This can look like things like some days I feel great, and some days I feel like shit, and I c-can't get my rhythm and figure out why.

We see a lot of travel complaints, right? "Hey, I just, I gotta be on the, the road all the [00:13:00] time, and I need a system 'cause I have to just be able to execute sleep and productivity." We see a lot of, of course, in the men, a heavy amount of low testosterone or similar things, and there's lots of stuff that go into it.

Testosterone is honestly typically overused.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: But things in that cascade, a thyroid is really common, uh, and so forth. Um, we see s- uh, a good amount of, uh, gut microbiome or gut health-related concerns. Um, so these could be like inconsistent bowel movements or simply, man, a lot of bloating, a lot of, um, stomach pain and kinda weird things like that.

And then the last one I'd say would be musculoskeletal. So, you know, shoulder just constantly hurting, um, don't like the way my arms look. Something like that is just off all the time, and I've, I've done A, B, and C, and I can't get this thing figured out. So, uh, those would be categorically some of the, the more common ones outside of...

And maybe I [00:14:00] guess another big one is I mentioned and several times now, cognitive ones.

Hala Taha: Yep.

Andy Galpin: I'm just not as sharp as I used to be. I feel like I can't remember stuff as often, and I'm not as articulate and take, or it takes me longer than it should be, and I don't really know why. Nothing's changed. Um, things like that.

So- Like I need direction from Yeah Those are the, some of the more common

Hala Taha: ones. Yeah. A- and this kind of reminds me of what we were talking about earlier in the conversation, where on the internet they try to, like, make everything a one-size-fits-all, but first you gotta figure out, like, what are your actual problems and what are your goals?

Um, because everybody kind of has different goals. So can you explain to us why we need to be, like, really specific about knowing what we want to achieve to begin with?

Andy Galpin: The concept of defender, and if I gave you a business example, and I approached business as, you know, someone who owns five companies, but I don't consider myself an entrepreneur of any kind, and if I walk you through some of our business plans, you might look at me and be like, [00:15:00] "You're a child.

Like, this is laughably bad." And then I would do the same for you with your health approach. And the reason is, the answer is typically really simple and right in front of your face, but you're just really kind of a- addressing it like a bit of an amateur. That's, that's really common. Um, so the defender's approach is the analogy I like to use.

Uh, you're trying to score a goal. Imagine you're playing soccer. Something is defending you from that goal. You are obsessed with the goal. I need to be obsessed with the defender That's the fundamental difference. So your goal is fat loss. You wanna get leaner. Great. You're locked in on fat loss. I'm locked in on why aren't you already as lean as you wanna be?

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: What is defending that? And people just assume I need to lose fat, therefore I have to go on a diet. That's like me saying, "I wanna make more money, therefore I need to sell more things." Like, well, okay, so- sometimes, but there's all this other [00:16:00] things going on in business that can make you more money-

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm

Andy Galpin: and it's a, it's, it's a, and so hopefully that analogy lands- Yeah ... with people like that's exactly what we're after. And so categorically it is hyper-focused on the goal, but not identifying the true defender.

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm. I'll

Andy Galpin: give you some examples since fat loss is right there. There is a tremendous amount of literature on the role of sleep in fat loss.

In fact, there's been a number of studies that have been done where they'll give people the exact same calorie count and put them on different sleep totals. And one study in particular I'm thinking of was eight hours of sleep, uh, in exchange for 5.5 hours of sleep. And you'll see several pounds of fat loss accumulate differently when your sleep is restricted.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: So you're over here thinking like, "I gotta go on this diet and I'm counting my calories, I'm starving myself," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "That's my goal." But then I'm looking over this and going, "Yo, if your sleep is continually trash, I can walk you through the entire neurophysiological cascade that's happening here that's [00:17:00] making weight loss either incredibly difficult physiologically or behaviorally."

Right? We know there's excellent research showing that when you sleep poor, your drive for energy internally is higher, and it makes sense. You're sensing signals, no, you're in a low energy state. So it's driving you to seek more energy. You'll overconsume more food and there's these m- uh, things in your body called leptin and ghrelin that regulate both how full you feel and the opposite of is how hungry you are.

Those things get inverted when you sleep poorly, so you don't feel as full and you feel hungrier. You're also going to seek more n- uh, more calorie dense foods. So instead of choosing something that's half the calories, you're gonna want to divert to the thing that has more calorie. Your body will know these things.

In addition to the fact that you're probably gonna be less physically active because you're fatigued, you're more likely to be like, "Oh, I can't get it in today." You're gonna be less productive, feel more anxiety behind, like you can just see, I could go, I could spend a whole podcast on this point. So we have [00:18:00] an actual behavioral element and we have a true physiological response.

And so the classic examples, um, you know, kind of giving you a tangible one from the question a few moments ago is you're looking at fat loss and I'm looking at this and going, "This is a sleep problem." All we have to do here is make a moderate improvement in your sleep, and the fat loss will come. And I could do that from a hundred angles, but sleep is by far the biggest lever that we've seen as an effective tool for entrepreneurs and executives without question.

And we don't need to be perfect or optimized by any stretch. But you can, you can get the, you know, zone two training, you can do all the things you want But nothing will move the needle more than small improvements in sleep.

Hala Taha: Yeah, Bam, I'm on a real health kick this year, and I love doing health resets.

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Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This [00:21:00] is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I feel like when I get good sleep, I feel like I'm on top of the world. I can accomplish anything.

And when I get poor sleep, it's just a horrible day you know, compared to, compared to other days. Let's take a tangent on sleep. So I was listening to a lot of interviews that you do and studying for this interview And something that you said that was really interesting is that you can study patterns when people are sleeping, and you can tell whether they're having trouble sleeping because of, like, depression or anxiety, and you can actually see, you know, what they're actually suffering from.

What are some of the patterns that you see in people who are... For example, like sometimes when I have big speaking engagements, I can't sleep, and it's my worst nightmare because like we just said, if you sleep, you, you perform the best, and it's like on the biggest days of my life I can't get any sleep.

So what happens when we're having anxiety or depression?

Andy Galpin: Amazing question. This is a bunch of technology that one of my companies called Absolute Rest has developed and we [00:22:00] validated many times now. But it would be almost impossible for the average person to differentiate anxiety from depression based on how you feel or like a commercial sleep tracker.

So that specific comment you're referring to, and, and also by the way, I appreciate the fact that you took time to go listen to other interviews and prepare for that. It's not always the case. So thank you for that with your schedule. Of

Hala Taha: course.

Andy Galpin: But what I was referring to on that is the ability is we will see different what's called sleep architecture patterns, and so our technology can measure this at really high fidelity.

And so we can actually see, and, and the markers, um, the strategies that your brain will develop throughout the course of the night will differentiate things like anxiety from depression. And so we can see that on those things, especially if they're true clinical, right? If it is like I had a little bit of worry tonight, uh, okay.

But there, there's some level of granularity I might not be able to pick up on. But if you're experiencing true anxiety or depression, and especially at a high level, we'll be able to differentiate those things, um, which is important because many people actually don't know the [00:23:00] difference. Um, and they're sort of like, um, anxious but they're really depressed or, or vice versa.

I also wanna come back to another point you mentioned. You said how you might get a bad night of sleep prior to a big event and maybe a big award show or something you may be headed to- ... or not. You're like everybody else. We coach people that do this all the time. I mentioned we also coach, you know, the, the most elite athletes in the world.

When you're sitting there and you know tomorrow you're about to get in a cage or an octagon and fight in your underwear in front of millions of people for a world championship, nobody sleeps that night. Mm-hmm. Nobody sleeps the night before a World Series. No one sleeps the night before the Super Bowl.

You're like everybody else.

Hala Taha: So one, you should give yourself a little bit of grace and forgiveness.

Andy Galpin: You're... If you would-- If you didn't have that, I'd be like, "What is wrong with you?" Like, what is there? At the same time, there's a lot of research, and we've seen this in our experience as [00:24:00] well, one night of bad sleep does nothing to performance.

Like nothing. You will perform just as well. Where we worry about sleep is when it's chronic and consistent That's where we start to be concerned about cognitive ability, capacity, endocrine health, immune health, long-term health, so on and so forth. So if you're that person who's like, "Oh my gosh, I had this big event.

I didn't sleep at all. Oh my God, I'm a wreck now," you're not. What will change the most with a single bad night of sleep, though, is mood and your perceiving-- perception of fatigue. You will feel bad, and you'll be cranky, and you'll be all those things. But if we were to put you through advanced neurological testing and cognitive testing that we do You would have a very small, if any, deficit in that.

And physically, you see almost nothing. So one night of bad sleep is never our concern. Play through it, no big deal. If this is happening multiple times a week, [00:25:00] or multiple times a week you're getting this kind of chromy sleep, then that's actually the thing we're far more concerned about.

Hala Taha: That is so good to hear.

And it, and, uh, like, from my personal experience, I always do great even though I didn't get any sleep. And, a- and like, I'll be, like, rehearsing whatever I need to do when not sleeping to prepare. Yeah. No,

Andy Galpin: thanks. But you're a performer, right? Yeah. You show up, you, you perform.

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: That's what you do.

Hala Taha: Something else that's interesting related to sleep, so my boyfriend snores, and we have an Eight Sleep. And we hooked up our Eight Sleep, and one of the things that it does is, like, he gets, like, a snoring score, right? So I remember one night, it's the first time we used it, he opens up his, his app, he gets a snoring score, and he's got, like, he, like, snored for, like, 50% of the night, and his sleep score was, like, 70%.

Okay? Then I, my s- my snore score was 1%, but my sleep score was, was 50, and he got a better sleep score than me. And so I was thinking, "I'm not getting any sleep 'cause [00:26:00] you're snoring. That's, that's the problem," right? So talk to us about snoring. What do we need to know about it? And also, like, how big of a problem is who you sleep next to when it comes to your sleep?

Andy Galpin: Some, some great questions there. And whether or not you and your partner decide to have a sleep divorce, you know, I'll leave up to you. But you wouldn't be the first person to do that. Really good set of questions. First of all, Eight Sleep is great. I actually don't know their full algorithm, as nobody does, but my assumption is snoring factors very little into your actual score, right?

So that's not, uh, really the concern. Most people assume snoring is benign, and it can be. Certainly everybody will snore a little bit, but if it is at that level, almost certainly that is not benign, meaning he would most likely have a, a true clinical sleep disorder.

Hala Taha: Mm.

Andy Galpin: Could be sleep apnea, very likely. Uh, it could be other things as well.

Sleep apnea itself, around [00:27:00] 70 to 80% of people that have true clinical sleep apnea will go undiagnosed. In women, it's 90 to 95%. So I'm not saying 90 to 95% of women have sleep apnea. What I'm saying is 90 to 95% of women who have sleep apnea will never know it. Women just do not associate themselves as even plausibly ha- potentially having sleep apnea.

In fact, I'll ask you right now, when you think of sleep apnea, what's the avatar that comes to your brain? Uh,

Hala Taha: a guy that's, like, kinda fat and overweight or something like that. Big,

Andy Galpin: fat guy.

Hala Taha: Big neck.

Andy Galpin: 100%, right? No woman identi- identifies themself as that, right? And so when they have bad sleep or low energy, irritability, they immediately think, "It's related to my menstrual cycle.

It's hormone-based. It is my mental load. It's my worry. It's my anxiety." And certainly can be all those things. Um, we're actually running a really large study in [00:28:00] my lab right now. We're on year three, and we're actually gonna wrap up this month, where we're doing a lot of this direct testing, and we're analyzing sleep at a real high fidel- This is the most in-depth study ever done in sleep in women, and we're looking at this every single day, uh, with our research-grade at-home technology, um, to map this across the cycle.

So we have a pretty good feel for what's going on here. But to come back to the point, women just don't associate themselves or think that they could potentially be doing this I don't know how large of a human, uh, your, your boyfriend is, but he may or not be big either. And so-

Hala Taha: He's like fit ... certainly being larger- Yeah, he's fit and everything, yeah

Andy Galpin: still almost surely has sleep apnea.

Hala Taha: Mm.

Andy Galpin: And there's a lot of things you can do about apnea. The most common ones are, of course, some sort of medication or, uh, what's called a CPAP. So one of those big, like, Darth Vader breathing machines, and you, like, hook it up, and you have that mask on. And those are great.

They're fine. They save lives. Uh, we generally don't use them because there's a lot of [00:29:00] things you can do, um, l- that are other options from oral appliances like a, a mouthpiece to tongue exercises and other breathing devices, uh, and, and training tools you can use that can actually eliminate that problem.

Hala Taha: Mm.

Andy Galpin: And so we can get it done with, and, and it's not always fixable, but there's probably, I don't know, 50-plus different things we can do for sleep apnea that are not, you know, pharmacologically based or, uh, a big giant breathing machine.

Hala Taha: What about, like, getting your, like, a, if you have a deviated septum and, and fixing that?

Andy Galpin: Uh, it... So one of the things we'll actually do is we will image that, and we'll be able to tell you directly, is this anatomical? Uh, and then one thing we haven't discussed yet is there's a difference between what's called central apnea and peripheral apnea, and so this is all stuff we would identify and then be able to, again, say this is the very specific route you need to go, uh, including things like this is anatomical.

I would [00:30:00] probably say, oh, on the spot, maybe 5 to 10% of people we end up coming back and saying, "Hey, this is truly anatomical. You need to either have some corrective surgery or whatever," and then get you in touch with a person. But most of the time we don't have to go that route. I mean, if there was a known severe nose break, uh, and one of the nostrils is fully collapsed, then possible, but there's also a lot of trainability there, too.

We, we've helped a lot of people get out through that without having to have surgery.

Hala Taha: So, like, you know, almost every boyfriend that I've ever had snores, and they all think it's not a problem, right? They all are, like, in denial. It's not a problem. What do you wanna say to the people out there that are snoring?

What do they have to do? And, like, why do they need to worry?

Andy Galpin: You almost surely have sleep apnea.

Hala Taha: Like, what does that do to you? Like, what is sleep apnea?

Andy Galpin: Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. Great. Uh, just pop that into Google, and you can look up 100 things that happen with sleep apnea. We mentioned some of them already.

This is body composition. This is nutrition. This is energy throughout the day, easily. You wanna [00:31:00] tank your testosterone? Go ahead and sleep poorly Go ahead and then blame it on, you know, microplastics or whatever the heck you want, but nothing will drive this boat more than chronic sleep deprivation, especially with a, a chronic sleep disorder.

Um, you wanna look at cognitive function? Look at the literature there. Uh, in, in fact, I, I said this earlier, but you will find no single factor that has more of a direct performance contributor than bad sleep. Look at the research on neurological diseases, Alzheimer's, dementia, and Parkinson's. It's astronomical, the association between sleep apnea and those.

You... That hasn't got your attention yet? I'll keep going. There is fourfold increase in risk in people who do shift work and erectile dysfunction. If you increase and put sleep apnea on top of that, it goes to, like, a ninefold. So if you're experiencing, if, if you're in your mid-20s to 50s and you're experiencing any form of erectile dysfunction, and you [00:32:00] snore a ton at night, there's a very, very strong chance that that's a big contributor to your ED.

You would not be the first Female partner who sent their male partner to work with our company specifically because like, "Yo, you're fucking with my sleep. Like, you're ending mine." And so they'll come in and do that. Um, and it's not an un- small percentage of people who, uh, end up having that because... And in fact, what typically happens actually is the female comes in and goes, "I, my energy's terrible.

Maybe I'm in perimenopause. Like, I don't know what's going on. I feel awful." And we run the full evaluation and we're like, "No, your sleep is great, and your husband is tanking it with his snoring." And then we fix that, and we're just like, "Great." So that, that is a, a really common thing that can happen. Women have a strong tie between sleep quality and libido.

So if you're snoring and you're ruining her sleep, you're gonna pay for that, too.

Hala Taha: Um, okay, let's talk trends 'cause there's so much on the internet. Um, I wanna [00:33:00] talk about, like, some terms that we probably hear often, and I wanna understand what they really are. And then I also wanna talk about, like, trends in general.

So let's talk about one that is, uh, really bubbling up lately, which is this trend of people wanting to be, like, really skinny again, okay? So, like, in the '90s everyone was super skinny and, and then it got like everybody wanted to have a big butt with Kim Kardashian , and then it's back to, like, skinny is in.

Um, and then there's the counter, you know, the counter, you know, strong, not skinny. There's kinda two camps. What camp do you sit in?

Andy Galpin: Well, first of all, if you ever saw me out in public and you looked at anything I was wearing, you would immediately know I have no touch with pop culture of any kind. So this is the first I'm hearing of it.

Um, I'm not and never have been a fan of the, the skinny look. I think skinny jeans, uh, have probably made my wardrobe go to, uh, exactly zero jeans with the exception of- ... stuff I put on [00:34:00] to run a chainsaw

Hala Taha: and stuff like that. Well, for your information, skinny jeans are out, so you're good on that one now.

Andy Galpin: In men skinny jeans are out?

Hala Taha: In men? Yeah, now everything's about- Amazing ... baggy jeans or, like, straight leg. Oh.

Andy Galpin: That's what I'm talking about. Bring JNCOs back. Let's go. I'm in on that. Um, I'll go back to my point earlier.

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: I told you everybody cares about look at some point.

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: I d- I have a terrible sense of style of any kind. I mean, just probably just look what I'm wearing right now, like, I look ridiculous at all times.

My wife is permanently embarrassed by my physical appearance. There's a, no s- no small number of times when she's like, "Nope, you're not leaving the house with that." Like, "Get back." Like, "Open up the suitcase. What's in there?" I'm like, "Not gonna happen." Um, so I, I don't care about any of those things. All I care about is that people are addressing their aesthetic appearance from a place of positive mental health.

That's it. So if you're using it and then it is a motivating factor, which is, I wanna be clear, that's a good thing. Everyone has a little bit of going, "Oh, gosh," like, "I don't like how I [00:35:00] look right now. A little bit I'm getting sloppy. Tighten things up." And that's really, really good. If you didn't have that, we would be very unhealthy, or potential there.

But then there's also clearly a line where we've gone too far n- past that. So as long as you're in a spot, I, I don't really care. I- as long as you're taking it to a skinny perspective where skinny is not detrimental to your health, um, again, I'm, not even just the, the mental side now, now I'm talking about physical health, uh, loss of too much muscle mass, too lean, too long.

Um, you know, one of the things that we are very good at identifying, the, via, uh, a lot of blood analysis is whether or not you're in a state of what's called low energy availability. And what that ha- what means, or what that means is you're actually chronically hypercaloric for too long, and that may not mean you're on a diet.

That may not mean you're skinny or losing weight. Um, but this causes a cascade of issues throughout the system, all associated to just too long of periods with insufficient calories. And again, [00:36:00] doesn't have to mean intentional dieting at all. I- in fact, it's, a lot of times it surprises people. Um, so when we can see that, we can pull back the curtain and then, and figure out a structured way to fix that that doesn't lead to weight gain.

So barring any of those things, if you're not compromising, uh, physiological health and you're coming from a place of sufficient, you know, mental health and we're not contributing to or exacerbating a, um, an eating disorder of any kind, then I'm the worst person in the world to judge appearance for that anyways.

Like, I think I look weird. So, uh, yeah, whatever. I'm not into it. I'm far bigger fan of athletic jacked. Like, I, I like the muscle, um, but, you know, to each their own.

Hala Taha: Yeah. Okay, so another trend is this thing called hot girl walks, right? So, like, a lot of girls like to walk a lot. You've heard, I'm sure, 10,000 steps, right?

10,000 steps a day. Yeah. So a lot of people say, like, you don't need to work out. You could just walk. Just walk and [00:37:00] eat healthy. What do you think about that?

Andy Galpin: We'll go back to almost the first thing I said. We wanna promote physical activity. I want as many people being as active as you can, and I want people to know that one is better than zero 100%, full stop.

Two is better than one sometimes, and nine may not be better than eight, but if we're at that level of like this is our only physical activity and we're exchanging this against nothing, then walking is... In fact, if y- the, the research on longevity and mortality and overall health is extraordinarily clear.

By far the biggest benefit people will get with their physical health is just going from a zero to a one or a two. You don't get much of an increase in health going from a s- uh, numbers wise, by the way, I'm saying this like a random arbitrary scale of one to 10. You go from eight to nine, you probably are not living a, a day longer.

You go from nine to 10, you're not living a day longer. You go from zero to one, you might increase 10 years-

Hala Taha: Wow ...

Andy Galpin: on your lifespan. If we're looking at cancer [00:38:00] risk, cardiovascular risk, um, overall all-cause mortality, and, and depending on metrics, like I'm just throwing kind of a bunch of data together there, it, it nothing, nothing will impact your health more than going from the lowest level to slightly above that.

So I'm all for it. Um, we are in no shortage of people walking too much. Like, that is not a thing. Yeah. That's not

Hala Taha: a

Andy Galpin: population health pro issue. So I wanna make sure that if, like, that's your jam, hell yeah, I'm with you. Like, get it. Awesome. But you said something very specific, which is they're doing that and then actively saying, "Because I did that walk, I don't need to exercise," and that is incorrect.

The same thing I could, I could say also for things like sauna. I'm one for sauna, it's great, could be cool, but if you're saying, "I don't need to exercise because I did my sauna," now we're, we're off-kilter and we're, we're actually incorrect, right? We are, um, legitimately misinformed at this point. So would love people to have a little bit more structured exercise.

Um, [00:39:00] but love the fact that more people are walking, and if you're telling me there's a thing where a bunch of hot girls walk around, like, just send me the notification. Um-

Hala Taha: Awesome. I feel like I have so many questions to ask you based on what you just said. One of the things that I'm really into right now is doing...

I, I work out a lot, and I love to take heated classes. So it's like heated strength training classes with weights, and it's, you know, cardio and, uh, s- heated mat Pilates. I do a lot of heated classes these days. Do you feel like it's actually good for you? 'Cause part of me, I'm like, "Am I just, like, stressing my body out so much b- and, like, because I'm, like, trying to do all this workout, like, in, like, 90-degree heat?"

Like, is it too much stress or, or do you think that's good?

Andy Galpin: You're probably majoring in the minors there. So my general answer is it probably doesn't matter either way. If you feel like you get in there, you feel better, you're more motivated, you work harder, you, uh, have a higher quality of training because it's a different vibe- Mm-hmm

then it's actually [00:40:00] probably a net positive.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: Physiologically, is it doing anything? Probably not. At the same time, I would say the opposite can be true. If it's so hot that maybe you might be happier but you can't do as many reps, you have to shorten the workout, you can't go as heavy because you're just overloading and overheating and fatiguing too soon, then you might be in a spot where you're actually causing a small amount of decrement and you're not maybe getting as much.

But it comes back to what the goal of it is, right? If you're saying, "I'm trying to maximize my strength," and exercising in the heat is minimizing your quality, how much you can lift, how often, then it's probably coming at some detriment. It's not zero. You're not wasting your time. You're not breaking things down.

You're not getting unhealthy. You're just not getting as much strength gain as you would.

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: If you though you're, you're saying, "Oh, I'm just kinda like lift a couple times a week and I'm trying to just get strength and some fat loss, grow some muscle, improve my range of motion, feel good, get the endocrine respon-", and you're kinda doing like all that, then like we're [00:41:00] splitting hairs over going like, "You love it?

Yeah, you're into it? Well then, ride." Yeah. "Let's go." Like who cares? Like, don't kill the information, the motivation with a little bit of information here. Like, we're not worried about that. Um, if you're trying to win a world championship, I'm splitting that hair, right? If you're going, "Yo, we're trying to..."

Even if it's a world championship for you, and you're like, "I'm, I'm doing a half-marathon in six weeks and I'm trying to run my best score ever." Great, and you're gonna run the half-marathon in four hours, and that'd be a terrible score. I don't care. It's still, it's still like you're trying to get your best.

That's when I'm gonna start going into, okay, we can do this better this way, that way, that way, because the goal is trying to get some other outcome. But if your outcome is just all the general health things and then you love it- We're good.

Hala Taha: Well, something that I'm curious about because I see it on the internet all the time, there's a lot of women that like, they'll put out posts and they're, they're in incredible shape and they're like, "I used to kill myself in the gym, but now I just strength train three times a week and walk, and now I'm in the best shape of my life."

Like, [00:42:00] everyone's overdoing it, right? And, and they kinda say... And then there's this thing of cortisol belly, right? Because women, if they... I saw you. He's rolling his eyes if you guys are listening. So, so it's, well, how do you feel about

Andy Galpin: this? You know, look, I had Lauren Kleinsorge-Sempell, who was my former student, uh, now she's gone on to finish her PhD in protein metabolism.

Uh, you know, I had her on my show a while ago. Uh, she's doing the best work of anybody in this field right now, and I'll just summarize my position really quickly. I am so stoked that there is more and more energy going into female and women-specific recommendations. That's awesome. Like, here for it all.

My lab has historically been one of the very few labs that has focused on that as well. It's not the main thing we've ever done, but we've, we've done a number of studies, um, targeting and, and looking at things more interesting to women from biopsies and muscle physiology stuff to, I mentioned sleep, and so on and so forth.

At the same time, that space is overloaded [00:43:00] with utter nonsense. So I understand. Uh, I'm not a woman, but I, I understand the appeal to feel like you're being heard. Finally, stuff is being designed for you, not just- designed for men and then being pushed to you. But we're also being inundated with messages like women are a separate species.

So no, you're not the same as men, but you're not a totally different species either. And the bulk of the research shows that the overwhelming majority of health-related, uh, protocols, programs, designs, exercise, nutrition are identical for men and women. They're overwhelming. There's some small things at the end, especially of course, tons of stuff related to menstrual cycle and so on and so forth.

But from like an exercise perspective and nutrition, this is almost identical with very, very small changes. So I do get frustrated when I see things like that, um, because yes, cortisol is, cortisol is real, but it's also supposed to rise. Like that is, that [00:44:00] is, that is exactly how you cause physiological adaptation.

That's what's supposed to happen. Uh, there is also certainly an association between belly weight and aging in women, and cortisol also can go up chronically over time. But to call those things causative, uh, again, is it's like so counter to the actual evidence base, it's nauseating. And it's infuriating, especially if it comes associated with a, then therefore you must train this way, or you can't train this way because you're a woman.

That's the part where I'm like, stop. Like stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. If you're simply saying your lived experience, you as a woman, you've done this and you've had great results, cool. All for it all day. Great. Let's continue to put stories out there to give people options But if we're crossing that line and saying, "It's because your physiology can't handle this or doesn't do this," that's when we have to push back and say, "That's garbage.

That's absolutely not true." And why that distinction matters is you're confusing [00:45:00] and you're putting up com- unnecessary barriers to women. We, we don't wanna do that. You've seen, like, my philosophy now several times. I don't like unnecessary barriers. We have a hard enough time getting people to exercise and be healthy.

Let's not confuse them unnecessarily and make them feel like, "Oh, well, shit, I'm just doing it wrong. I'm gonna quit." That, that's not the case. Um, especially if you're using that to push product.

Hala Taha: Yeah, and es- That,

Andy Galpin: that's

Hala Taha: when it gets really hard ... especially if, like, not everybody wants to be a bodybuilder either, right?

You just wanna be fit, healthy. It's like, just do whatever motivates you to get out there and move. I totally agree. What's up, Yap fam? Spring is here, and let's be real. Most people fell off their healthy eating habits. Not me, and it's all because of Huel. That's H-U-E-L. My entrepreneur friends put me onto Huel.

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What are, what are these? What's the difference between these two? 'Cause I think people get them confused, and I, and I feel like people don't even know what they really mean.

Andy Galpin: Sure. I'll do, uh, my best to give you a quick overview here.

Hala Taha: Okay.

Andy Galpin: I'll tell you out the gates, I don't care that much about those distinctions.

Hala Taha: Well, maybe it's not important. Maybe you just tell us what's important about them.

Andy Galpin: Well, I think it is important to, that we potentially walk through these things 'cause I'm sure you're not the only one who's like, "What do I do here?"

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: So zones. Uh, depending on who you ask, there are somewhere between five and six heart rate zones, and that alone should tell you, wait, this, this is not like a science thing.

This is a completely arbitrary human distinction. Your physiology doesn't have a magic zone that it's in. It just knows its heart rate can get as high as it can get, and then it gets the lowest it can get. And if you wanna subdivide that into 1 category, 5 categories, 25 categories, that is a human [00:49:00] artifact So by that tone, you can see, like again, if you're in magic zone two, which would be an example of, well, let's say your maximum heart rate, the kinda back of the hand way we calculate that is two hundred and twenty minus your age.

So if you're 40, two twenty minus forty, you would have an estimated maximum heart rate of a hundred and eighty beats per minute. That number's random though. Like, you might be actually at two hundred. Like, I'm over 40, and my maximum heart rate's still over two hundred beats per minute. So it's, it's just it's a very rough guess.

But then what we're basically saying is, all right, let's say one eighty is your max, and the lowest you get to at night is 40. All right, so then we take that difference there, which is a hundred and forty beats, and we divide it into five equal parts or something like that. So zone one, zone two is simply saying, like, you're the second, uh, twentieth percentile up, so you know, maybe your heart rate's at a hundred and five, [00:50:00] hundred and ten beats per minute, like something like that.

So it's not nonsense. Uh, the point of zone two stuff and why it's popular is it's trying to help people understand low-level physical activity is actually really beneficial, and that's true. Walking, light cardio, it has a human physiological benefit because we've been doing it for the vast majority of our species, and now we don't do it at all.

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm. And

Andy Galpin: that has created some physiological problems. I don't like to get caught up too much on, like, your heart rate or your lactate millimole is this. Like, if, if you kind of know what I'm talking about, that jargon. If not, don't worry about it. Um, but I'm not convinced there. I am convinced, though, low-level physical activity is, is a really good thing.

The opposite of that is the VO2 max, the max heart rate type of stuff, and I would have a similar opinion. Um, it is really good from a health, long-term health, from an acute performance perspective and, and everything in between to get your heart rate up really [00:51:00] high occasionally. It's a really beneficial thing.

Rule of thumb for me is once a week, try to get your heart rate up as close to max as you can Anything past that, you know, like we, we can do. We, we can work with. But if you do several days a week where you're doing a lot of low-level physical activity, one day a week where you're getting it up as high as you can, most people are gonna be in a pretty good spot.

Concern there is when people do that high-intensity stuff too often. Um, so the kind of the comment you made about like, oh, we're working out too hard. Some people are. We have seen this cause a lot of issues, especially a lot of high-intensity exercise in the evening, uh, after work. That can create problems, a lot of them.

Uh, but to categorically say like, "Oh, oh, you know, most people are working too hard," definitely not. Like, we can show you millions of people who are not working hard enough, and I can show you thousands of people who are working too hard, so, like, what are we learning there? I, apologies, but I hate stuff like that.

Like, you're not helping anybody. Half the people you're like, "Great, that was helpful." And the other half of the people, you're like, "You [00:52:00] just ruined it, made my shit worse." So not helpful.

Hala Taha: I love the advice that you're giving because you're really not prescribing anything specific. You're not saying you gotta do this a certain time, amount a week.

You're just saying, move your body, get your heart rate up once a week. So is that like sprinting or just like HIIT training to, to get your max heart rate?

Andy Galpin: Yeah. Sure. The term to pay attention to the most here is... I, I kinda can give you a business analogy, but you'll, you can make that gap yourself here. Um, the concepts are few, and the methods are infinite.

So conceptually what I gave you, right? Move your body a lot throughout the day, big range of motion, train hard a couple times a week, things like that. That, that's all you have to do. And if you look at any high quality program, they all have those same exact principles. Now, the methods you pick, oh, we could be here for decades.

You know, barbells, bands, sprinting, uh, in a pool, [00:53:00] intervals, you know, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, Norwegian protocol. I mean, sure, we could go to the end of the moon with different options, but what you'll notice is the ones that work are doing the same things. They're just packaged a little bit differently, right?

At the end of the day, it's like you wanna be profitable, you have to make more money than you spend. Great. But, you know, you zoom in on any category. All marketing, there's blah, blah, blah, blah categories of marketing. There's just like... Again, you can keep going there. Um, so I prefer to, uh, you know, with big audiences like this, to, to give those concepts.

It's like, hey, just make sure you're hitting these things and, and if you like to be in a group activity class when the temperature's turned up, cool. If you hate that and you wanna isolate and be by yourself, fine. If you wanna do all calisthenics and body weight, amazing. You wanna do all heavy barbells, great.

Like, we can get there a million ways, uh, and when we have you individually, and we can know more about your situation and preferences and lifestyles, then we can tell you exactly what to do. But categorically, [00:54:00] all of our programs are gonna be hitting the same couple of modules. Um, so that's what's most important.

Hala Taha: And when you say, you know, you can get in trouble doing too much of this high-intensity training at night, is it 'cause it impacts your sleep? Is that what you're s- is that what you're referring to?

Andy Galpin: One of the things that can happen, uh, most people who are probably listening are gonna have a day that looks something like this.

You wake up earlier than you would like, you immediately rush to checking work-related things. You probably then add stimulants, and then you go from the next 10 to 12 hours with absolutely zero downtime, and it's all decision-making and choices and, uh, high cognitive demand, physical activity, get up, move to this, meeting to this, this, this, this, fire this person, buy this thing, spend this.

Okay. And then you leave all that, probably take some more stimulants in the form of a pre-workout, head to the gym, and then rack your s- your sympathetic drive up as high as possible again. And then you come home and attempt to go to sleep. Great. So this [00:55:00] looks like one of two things. You're exhausted and either you fall asleep immediately, but then you wake up 2:00 in the morning, mind racing.

Why? 'Cause you ran so much gas, you burned it all down, the exhaustion was so high, but you're not down-regulated. And there's a significant difference between sleepy, fatigued, and tired, and physiologically down-regulated and relaxed. Most of the activities people do to decompress and relax at the end of a day are not physiologically down-regulating And we see this in your data really clearly.

And so what we need to make sure we do is add intentional down regulatory pieces that are also hopefully decompressing and decompressing and, and relaxing. Where the exercise piece fits in there is most people, especially if they're doing that thing at night, they're not matching that with any down regulation, so then they just roll right into sleep.

Added sympathetic [00:56:00] drive, resting heart rate is higher, HRV is lower, respiratory rate is higher, and again, you may fall asleep really quickly, but eventually either you're gonna wake up in the middle of the night often, you're gonna wake up early in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep, or if this is done chronically, this is when we start to see physiology pay the price.

So cognitive productivity starts to go down. Creativity, lateral thinking, flexibility starts to get hit and don't know why. You keep pressing on that, now we'll see endocrine function disrupted. We'll see thyroid, we'll see testosterone. Um, because of those things, we'll see body composition worsening, and now this is when we're getting the slew of Mid 20-year-olds already going to TRT and exogenous hormones where we're like, "Okay, uh, n- now you've just opened up Pandora's box that you're gonna be on for the next 100 years of your life, and none of that was necessary at all if we just did a s- few simple things," like not even necessarily taking your exercise away, but just [00:57:00] maybe if we can reorder it or we can do a couple of practices after the exercise, um, to come back down or before bed.

So it's not about people having to, to redo their entire lives or their structure. That's not gonna happen. But it's saying within the constraints that you have, can we just do a few simple things to mitigate the damage and to turn that stuff down? So-

Hala Taha: Yeah ...

Andy Galpin: um, the sleep is a, is a big one of it, but can also, I guess my point being there, it can also simply actually be a, a physiological problem, um, that may not be expressed in sleep at all or actually damage sleep, but it can lead to, uh, the physiology just crashing at some point.

Hala Taha: One of the things that you say is that downregulation is a skill, and when I heard you say that, that like really like was eye-opening to me because I was like, "Oh, wow, like I never really thought of like downregulation as a skill," and that's something that people don't often talk about, and it's even something that you can teach your kids to do, which I just think is just such an incredible like life skill to teach your [00:58:00] kids because for me, um, my parents were awesome.

Uh, my dad was a surgeon, like all great things, but I never had a bedtime. Like when I was gr- I literally never had a bedtime when I was growing up, and so I'm the one that's like always up till 2:00 in the morning, like never wants to go to sleep, and it's 'cause I just didn't learn that, whereas like Kate, my business partner, she's in bed at 10:00, and like she's so like, you know, cranky if she doesn't get to sleep by 10:00, which I think there's good and bad because I also think it's, you know, it's, it's good to be able to stay up when you want to, right?

So talk to us about downregulation as a skill, and then also like what can we do as we start to have children? People who are listening to this show probably have young children. How do we, how do we down re- make sure they learn that as a skill?

Andy Galpin: There were lots of questions there. Yeah. I'll do my best, and then you can tell me which ones you wanna follow up on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In response to you and your business partner, there's something real called chronotypes. So this is the idea that you might [00:59:00] actually just be better kind of being on a go to bed at 2:00 AM and wake up at 10:00 AM sort of a schedule. It might fit your physiology better. That's a little aggressive of a timeline.

Probably not. Uh, generally, things start to go south as we get past midnight in, on nearly all people. So what I would probably do is wanna rein that in. I would say, okay, let's probably move to like 11:30, midnight sort of sign rather than 2:00. Um, th- that's a real possibility. There's also something that happens in the fact that your physiology's greatest asset is pattern recognition.

More problems and advantages exist in people because their physiology was just really good at finding the pattern than people realize. It's not necessarily the blue light. It's not necessarily the supplement. It's not necessarily the meditation. What almost always plays a bigger impact than anything that's given you a positive or negative, uh, experience is the fact that it was able to create a cue and a pattern.[01:00:00]

Your body is running signals all day trying to figure out, what do you want me to do? It's kind of like your executive assistant who's like running behind you at all times trying to anticipate what's next, and the ones that are good at it are like, "Oh my God, she's amazing." And the ones that are terrible are like, "He's horrible."

It's just the fact that they are good at predicting what's coming next. That's what your body's doing at all times, and the better it is at that, the, the better you feel, and the worse, the opposite. So it's not necessarily in this case about your timing. Again, we probably wanna wheel yours back a little bit, than it is your actual s- uh, consistency of schedule.

That's what we would want to optimize for. So your body can have those anticipatory responses for both signaling you to go to bed so that you don't lay around and go, "Oh my God, like I'm just not tired today. I'm not tired today." Well, you're probably not tired, assuming you didn't make any silly decisions with stimulants or something like that.

But you're probably not tired because you had an inconsistent wake schedule. And so your body is just going like, "Yo, like I don't know what is next, and like I can't predict anything." So some nights it just crashes you, and then some [01:01:00] nights it keeps you up, and you're in this loop 'cause it, it just doesn't know what's going on, where your business partner has a very known system and is repeating.

It's like, yo, 9:00, like we're hitting the, the eject button Now, at the same time, I'm with you. I said earlier, but I'll be more direct. Sleep is an example of we don't wanna optimize sleep. I want you to be as resilient as possible. Sleep resilience is the truth key for high performers. That means we get effective and efficient sleep in spite of chaotic changes.

You didn't get to do your walk today. You missed your workout. You did have a little bit of extra stimulants. You're on a plane, time zone. Can we have all those? Uh, in my case yesterday, I had to film for almost 10 hours of content And that morning, for 90 minutes between 3:30 and 5:00 AM, the fire alarm was going off in my house all day.

My kids are up, [01:02:00] finally get them back to bed at 5:00, but now I'm over an hour behind on work, right? So I was gonna start at 4:00, and I'm-- it's like 5:00, and I'm like, "Oh my God." And then my wife gets up, and she's got food poisoning. So now I've gotta take care of her. Kids are up, gotta get them off to school.

We're supposed to start shooting at 8:00, and I am four hours behind on work. And now I'm not back till 9:15. I'm five and a half hours behind the whole thing. Can I still do all that, get through that, and shoot, execute? That is resilient. And then that night, which was last night, can I get to bed in the same routine?

Can I have the same quality, get up today, and not need 28 extra cups of coffee, not sleep in an hour and a half today, so on and so forth. That's what we're after. That's what we're targeting. So I want the same for you. I would be like, "Yo, can we..." Without having to say to you, "You have to go to bed at the same exact time.

You have to wake up the exact same time. You have to have this full routine that you can't mess with," like, that's not going to work in most people's lives. But can we develop the things that are necessary for you to just be able to lock in at all [01:03:00] times, regardless of when, you know, uh, shit hits the fan a little bit?

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm.

Andy Galpin: So that's what we wanna go after. Now, the easiest path to that is to start with patterns and stability. So with your children, and my kids, uh, my daughter is about to turn eight, my son is six. They go to bed at the exact same time every single night. My night routine starts with them.

Hala Taha: Hmm. '

Andy Galpin: Cause we start, you know, 90 minutes before we're doing this.

We're playing, you know, we eat at this time, roughly. We do this, we do this. So it's not like, I'm not like, "Okay, phones are off for two hours." Like, we're not doing any of these things w- but you are doing the same things that are roughly the same time, starting again several hours before. It is, you know, we're gonna do, uh, games, and then we're gonna eat at this time, and then we're gonna play, and then at this time we're gonna take a bath, and then we're gonna read, and then we're gonna read to the...

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they're having fun. They don't feel like they're there, but it's a really consistent pattern. So their [01:04:00] physiology knows when food is coming. It knows when the bath is coming. It knows all that stuff, and so then when we say, "Okay, bedtime," like we're plus or minus four minutes, and we almost never have issues with them going to sleep.

But then I've gone through that process internally, so then I know I now have X, Y, and Z I'm going to do, and it's pretty easy for me because I've, I've had a several-hour lead in to them You don't have to be as strict as I am if I'm being candid. Yeah. If I was in charge, it wouldn't be that strict. But the boss is like a- He's like, "Nope, they are out the bed."

Like, geez, he is on it, and always been there. Um, so there's downsides though. Like, if, if we're out doing something or traveling or on vacation, and my kids are 45 minutes on sleep time off, like, they're just disastrous. So they're not resilient at all. Like, they're not. They're very sensitive. So I don't fight sleep battles on 95% of the days, but if we do something and they miss a couple of hours of sleep, they're not nearly as resilient as, say, my nieces and [01:05:00] nephews-

Hala Taha: Mm

Andy Galpin: who have a system more like yours where you're just, like, all over.

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: But then they also have these huge blow-up days and just, like, uncontrollable wakings and just all that stuff. So, um- Yeah ... what I guess I'm gonna say is it's not a value judgment for me. You, you live whatever standards for it you want, but you'll have that option to play, um, if you wanna make a change.

It's, it's all about pattern recognition.

Hala Taha: Yeah. And so when you say, um, downregulation is a skill, right? Oh, yeah. So you're really, you're really talking about creating those routines so that you can effectively fall asleep. What are some of, some... What are some of the best routines that people have to go to sleep?

Andy Galpin: Okay. Great. Thank you. This is, this is a great question, and I never answer it at all When I say down-regulation is a skill, people assume that they can just relax immediately, and that's not the case at all. You are inundated with sensory overload right now. Humans have never [01:06:00] experienced this much sensory input.

Um, there's a thing called boredom that just does not exist in the human world anymore, and it's not just like an old person like, "Oh, we're not bored anymore." It is actually a legitimate problem. We are in an, a state actually right now, um, that a lot of folks are calling creativity crisis. So overall creativity scores in schools are plummeting, and that is directly tied to boredom.

One of the strongest ways to enhance creativity is boredom, and since people are not being bored, we're not being creative, and this is a really significant issue. What happens throughout the day is you have work coming in at all times, and then you have podcast, and you have engaging Netflix and- Mm-hmm

all this stuff,

Hala Taha: right? Doom scrolling I think is the, the big one.

Andy Galpin: Doom scrolling and geez, like the, the compulsion ones, the TikToks and things like that are just horrific for the human brain, like horrifically bad. [01:07:00] So because of that, those small moments, those minutes throughout the day where your brain used to decompress and deconsolidate, reconsolidate ideas and thoughts and emotions, and the process are gone, which means your brain has to do that at night now.

It does not happen until you finally close your eyes.

Hala Taha: Mm.

Andy Galpin: So we have actually toned down our physical skill at toning down. We're not good at it. We have to go back and engineer that skill. I said this a bit quickly earlier, but what I'm referring to is the fact that just being relaxed or falling asleep is not the same as physiologically down-regulated.

Hala Taha: Mm.

Andy Galpin: And we need to bring that process back. It's critically important. So you can do a ton of things for this. One of them is some of our favorites, I should say. If you can give me five minutes Twice a day. And you can walk. Ideally 10, but I'll, I'll let you s- like, give me literally five minutes to 10 minutes where you go for a walk with no sensory input.[01:08:00]

You're not taking calls, you're not listening to audiobooks or podcasts or music. I don't want you doing a walk talk with your friend, like none of that stuff. Social relationships are incredible. I want that time too, but you have to have some processing and downtime. If you wanna lay on the floor, set an alarm for five minutes, close your eyes.

It's not about a nap, but this is give your brain some goddamn seconds to process. Not only will your creativity and problem-solving go up, but you will actually build a skill that says when you get into bed, "Oh, now I remember how to do this. I remember how to wind down quickly," 'cause it doesn't know how to do that.

It will fall asleep from exhaustion, but not that. If you wanna do that as a walk, if you wanna just, you know, jump out of the office and walk up and down the stairs for 10 minutes, um, I don't want this as exercise. I want you to breathe through your nose only and just slow your breathing down That's all we wanna do.

If you wanna do this as meditation, if you wanna do this as... [01:09:00] Again, millions of ways we can get there. The core element though, five to 10 minutes of no sensory input. That's what we have to have. We can do this as, uh, we actually have a partnership that we're launching, and I don't know when this is gonna come out, but it may be up, but, uh, we're doing a large thing with a meditation app called Waking Up.

Um, so Sam Harris and I collaborated on this, and this is one of the tools we have in that challenge, is can you give us a few minutes of walking? If you wanna engage in actual meditation, that is a great way to build the skill as well. A million ways we can go about this. If you're into the spiritual practice stuff, great, you can go that route.

If that doesn't fit your stuff, we can do this from physical activity. If you hate me- I mean, there's so many ways we can go about it, and all these different traditions have a lot of science behind them, a lot of evidence, but they're just different ways to give your body some ability to do that. And so when I say that down-regulating is the [01:10:00] skill, we have to get better as, you know, my friend Jill Miller has said plenty of times, like, we need to get better at turning on the off switch.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: Why do you care? This is getting to sleep faster. This is what it looks like when you didn't wake up in the middle of the night. This is what it looks like when you woke up the next day even after five and a half hours, but you don't feel exhausted and crushed. You don't have huge lulls throughout the day.

This is what it looks like when you have overall far better emotional regulation throughout the day. You're not just having these up and down days, and you're all over the place. These are byproducts of being better at down-regulating. So the, the last thing I'll say on this and wrap it up is this starts as an active skill.

You gotta go for that walk, right? We gotta practice the meditation. We've gotta do these things. I need your time and attention there. But it doesn't take your body very long to create patterns of that where it can start doing that subconsciously for you That's the goal. [01:11:00] Let's move these into a backwards process just like digestion and everything else in your body.

It can get there and it does not take long, but we just have to build that skill, and that's exactly why we call it a skill. Just like your strength or learning a new language or learning a new software program, it can go really quickly into autopilot, but it'll never get there if we don't start that process.

And so we gotta get past that inertia, uh, for honestly two, three weeks. And then from there, your body will know how to do that. Um, and I know this to be true because when we actually put monitoring tools on people, we can see this happening in their physiology right as they're working, right as they're doing stuff, where in the past it wasn't going to do that.

So we can see it's like, okay, the body has learned to auto-regulate, um, but just over the years we've slowly tuned up, not given it an actual skill to control that, regulate that, and so then the system gets out of whack.

Hala Taha: This was such an incredible conversation, but this [01:12:00] specifically was probably my favorite thing that I learned because we are always being told to, like, multitask and kind of fill up every minute and make sure that, like, if you're gonna walk, you can, you know, listen to a podcast and walk.

And I personally, especially 'cause I feel like I live in a podcast, I love being in silence a lot of the times. Um- Yeah ... and it makes sense because if your brain is working out all your problems and just, like, thinking through things, then when you're sleeping it could just chill out, 'cause we already thought through all the, all the big things, right?

So I feel like that's so smart. Is there a certain time of the day we gotta do this? And then, um, maybe just, like, quickly, like, why breathe through our nose? Like, just 'cause you mentioned that and is, is that super important? 'Cause I, I wouldn't have done that.

Andy Galpin: Time of the day? No.

Hala Taha: Okay.

Andy Galpin: Do it, do it whatever you'd like.

I'll give w- you one more little tip. If you can try to protect the first 10 minutes of the day, that can be really good as well.

Hala Taha: Mm. [01:13:00]

Andy Galpin: It's not realistic to be like, "No one touch your phone for the first hour." Deaf ears. Like might as well just cut my mic off for 10 seconds. It's not gonna happen. Fine. But can you give me just a few minutes?

That can do it as well. So if you wanna be those like, like what I will do every morning, basically, wake up, I don't use an alarm. I'm up and I'm in the forest within six minutes of waking up, right? I just get up, I grab the dogs, and I'm in the trees and I'm, and I'm sort of going. And sometimes I walk for 20 minutes and sometimes I walk for 90 seconds.

Like I'm not out there, like let the dogs go out, let them go, you know, uh, use the bathroom and that kind of stuff, and then I'm back in the house. So sometimes I'll wander on for more. Fine, no big deal. But it's the process of going in and then I get into work and do things like that. So if you wanna double dip your walk, man, cool.

If you wanna do that later, fine. No big deal. Why do you breathe through your nose? You don't have to. I like it though because of several things. One, it will [01:14:00] probably slow you down Most likely you're a go-getter, you're gonna wanna get out there, you're gonna power walk. Okay, great. I gotta get in and then I gotta get back 'cause then I gotta grab my food and then I got my next meeting.

This is when we're supposed to be chilling. This is not exercise. These are not power snacks. We're not burning calories here. We're not trying to lose fat. We're trying to just slow the body down. So breathing through the nose will do that. Two, it encourages and gives you an opportunity to practice proper breathing mechanisms.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: In general, when you breathe through your nose, you're more likely to use diaphragmic control, intercostal muscles. It's not a guarantee, but much more likely you'll actually use better mechanics. And many people struggle with the skill of breathing. It's kind of like the skill of down-regulation. It's like one of the lost arts here.

We see it as a problem really commonly. So if we can slide that in as a little bit of practice, it's a win. We also get better at breathing through our nose, which is generally more down-regulatory than breathing through your mouth. A [01:15:00] general, not always, but generally when you breathe through your mouth, this is a stress response, right?

When you think about it, like if someone's going mouth breathing, no one thinks, oh, that person's relaxed.

Hala Taha: Yeah.

Andy Galpin: Right? Like, it's not. You can actually induce this, by the way. If, if you are tired, here's a little hack you can do. If you're tired and you're dozing off or not doing something, do a whole bunch of mouth breathing and your sympathetic arousal will rise.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: So the opposite is true. You can breathe through your nose and this will oftentimes do the opposite. It releases a bunch of chemicals and signals called nitric oxide and has a whole physiological response. Um, but what we're seeing is, and you'll notice again kind of another theme, I like to try to stack habits and stack wins, and so I'm getting three or four or five benefits out of that rather than just one.

So those are, are, are tools that I like to prioritize, the ones that give you multiple ways that you can get wins out of it. Um, so I like it for all those reasons plus several more, but that's the quick version of, of why we would like to go through [01:16:00] the nose.

Hala Taha: Love that. I love this advice. We learned so much in this episode.

I wanna end this episode talking about, um, staying athletic at any age. Something that I've been noticing on social media is, like, there's, like, an influx of, like, super ripped 50 plus year old women and it's like, it just feels like it's coming out of nowhere. It's really exciting for me and probably other women because we've been trained our whole lives that, like, we just go downhill and there's nothing we can do about it and, um, it's really cool to see, like, all these really fit older women now.

Um, and so I wanna talk about, like, why is this happening? Um, and, and a part of me honestly feels like, is it easier to get super fit after menopause?

Andy Galpin: Okay, really good questions. Why is it happening? It's a combination of it's just socially more acceptable, right? You're okay to do that, and you don't have to worry about embarrassment and ridicule, you'll as much and all that stuff.[01:17:00]

Two, we obviously have huge advancements in pharmacology, right? We, we have everything from peptides to true hormone replacement and otherwise, and that has been a game changer. No question about it.

Hala Taha: Mm.

Andy Galpin: Third one, uh, is you, you- women have more access to strength training, to equipment. It's easier. It's more in vogue.

It's normal. Um, it's cheaper to access and things like that. And so, you know, historically, if you look at the number of women who strength train compared to men, it's abysmal. Uh, I can't remember the last set of data, but it's something appallingly low, the percentage of women who lift weights.

Hala Taha: Oh, really?

Andy Galpin: Super low. So I'm s- like, if you're telling me that's happening, I'm like, "Hell yeah." I'm all for it, right? Like, do you, right? I'm, I'm all the way in on it all Now the menopause question is interesting, and, and this is a whole episode we would have to do here- Yeah ... but the, I think that maybe the, the most fair statement we [01:18:00] could make here is there is enough evidence at this point to suggest that there is no guaranteed decrement in your ability to gain strength or muscle with perimenopause.

You don't just stop being able to grow, a- and that's really weird. Now, some individual women might have issues, like t- of course, right? We... Per- menopause, perimenopause are so chaotic that the individual responses are all over the place. But there's been so many studies now where s- we can, you know, fairly confidently say on average, there's no reason to just think because you're in perimenopause or you, you're, um, you're past that window, that all of a sudden you can't grow muscle anymore.

So the role of testosterone and estrogen, while we're still learning a lot, they just don't seem to be blockers-

Hala Taha: Mm ...

Andy Galpin: for that. Um, so is it easier to grow muscle post? I don't think I would say that, um, but I would certainly say there's obviously no guaranteed loss either. [01:19:00] And so potentially what you might be seeing is, uh, you know, I don't know how old you are, but if you are in a spot of where perimenopause is really difficult on you, then that may be compromising b- because of all those reasons and that you're dealing with.

But then past that, maybe once that's all gone away, that's cleared up, then you feel good, energy's consistent, and now you're able to train really hard and go after it. So that might be a little bit of what you're seeing is they've gone through the chaos, it's settled down, they've got a plan, they've got an approach and a strategy, and now they can eat, train, recover, and then get after it.

So, uh, that's all speculation of course, but that would be my recommendation, or that would be my thought of probably what's going on there. Um, but physiologically there's no- nothing to think it's like somehow like easier outside of it's just easier to be more consistent, train harder, feel better, uh, and you don't have the swings in energy, uh, that would happen with even a perimenopause or prior to that with a normal menstrual cycle.

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm. Okay, last question that I have to ask is about peptides. Uh, peptides are all the rage. Um, [01:20:00] I'm starting to take some peptides. People are getting them like from Temu basically overseas. Uh, how do you think people should approach peptides and experimenting if, if you support that?

Andy Galpin: What a question as the last one.

You had to, you had to throw in that one. You might as well just ask me what president I voted for. Like, oh my g- Peptides have been around for 100 years. Uh, they've been in the performance phase for probably close to 30. So this is a range of everything from insulin, insulin's a peptide, tons of evidence, saved millions of lives, to things that are popping up, black market, uh, don't touch them.

And I could tell you anecdotal stories everywhere in between. It's not particularly helpful though, because any anecdote you could find on the positive side, I could give you something to match on the negative and the inverse, [01:21:00] right? So for all the scare stories, I could find you thousands and thousands of people that got no negative reaction.

There's a reason we have science. It's because science gives us the ability to say what is actually generally true, how do we reduce uncertainty, so we're not just simply playing the game of anecdote versus anecdote.

Hala Taha: Mm-hmm

Andy Galpin: Some peptides, as I mentioned, have a ton of research, some have some, some have little, some have none whatsoever, some are nonsense.

So it's impossible to categorically answer. Um, so my position on them is all that, anywhere from totally love it, support it, into these, to hate it, don't touch it, um, to like, okay, well there's no evidence, but I'm comfortable if you wanna tinker with this. Um, so you'd almost have to go one by one a little bit.

And what I can categorically say is, you know, as a, a, a practicing scientist for coming up on 20 years now, I'm generally gonna lean more towards evidence-based, peer-reviewed publications than most of your influencers and practitioners, right? [01:22:00] Categorically. I also work with humans, and have for a very long time.

In, in my job, I have been paid and always will be paid to produce results. And so I'm, like I'm here ultimately to make a change in someone and to get them closer to their goals. So I'm not the type of person who's like, "If it's not in a randomized controlled trial, then we're not using it at all." If you're a professional athlete, then we have to pay attention to testing, right?

And so i- if X, Y, and Z is banned under WADA, USADA, your collective bargaining agreement, then I don't touch them, don't even get close, not interested. If those things aren't applicable, then there's other stuff we can go to. Um, so I'm, I'm quite over the m- all over the map with these things. Um, I, I don't sell them, I don't have an affiliate link, we don't use them in our programs.

Uh, I almost never recommend peptides, um, o- of any kind. Um, if, if we're going to, that's gonna be, you know, the medical providers will recommend that. Someone's [01:23:00] on them and they wanna ask, great, but I'm never gonna be like, "I saw your blood work and you definitely need BPC 157." Right? That, that's never gonna come o- out of my mouth because we don't have any human evidence-

Hala Taha: Hmm

Andy Galpin: on those things, and, and a thousand other reasons. There's probably so many other ways we can get there. Um, so big question. Hopefully, that gave you the scaffolding of how we tend to think about them. Uh, so obviously it's a very interesting space, and it's one of those things where, geez, every month you'd have to have me back on and I'd have to be like, "Okay, we, we nail this now.

We know this now, and we don't know now." Um-

Hala Taha: Yeah. It's still so early ... that's generally- I, I think people don't realize some of the, some of the peptides that they're buying online are like for animals and not, not tested on humans.

Andy Galpin: Um, well, it can be way worse than that.

Hala Taha: Yeah? I

Andy Galpin: know s- several people Major, major names that you would all know.

Uh, some of them are really big promoters of this stuff, and, uh, they were, they were knocking on death's door because of it, [01:24:00] and those stories aren't public. Then there are some who are big names who have told their stories about infections, autoimmune reactions, and other things. So there's probably more risk here than most people recognize and realize.

Uh, they're just not hearing most of the stories. At the same time, again, I can tell you flat out, like I know some people who've been using some of these things for literally close to 20 years. And so not only are they made for animals, uh, but they're not even made for any level of biological consumption at all in, in many of the cases.

So, uh, we'll see the tide turns here because our, our federal government and the US, um, the administration is unique, is how I'll say it. Like, it's something that we've never had before. And so depending on what happens, this allows people to do everything from compound stuff that they couldn't or then they get stopped, and then certain things come back on board.

So it is a, it is a such a fluid, dynamic moving [01:25:00] target That, that, you know, we of course present publicly caution.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: Um, but yeah. So who knows? I mean, by the time this airs, half of them could be approved for human consumption. We have absolutely no idea, or it could all be banned, which most of them are, and then they actually start prosecuting people.

Like, we, we just have no idea what's gonna happen, so.

Hala Taha: Well, Dr. Andy, this was such an incredible episode. I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. So the first one is, what is one actionable thing my young and profiters can do to become more profitable tomorrow? And this can be profiting in all areas of life, so you can stick to fitness if you'd like or something else.

So one actionable thing.

Andy Galpin: I would say run an analysis of your lifestyle. Find one thing that is causing the biggest anchor, and address it. Why I'm saying that is when we, when we start to look at some of the things I've mentioned, you know, energy and recovery and [01:26:00] cognitive performance, we often see these...

I, I forget what that phrase you just used, but your, your entreprofiters or

Hala Taha: something else. Young and profiters.

Andy Galpin: Young and profiters. They tend to wanna chew on everything, and so they, they, they go after too many goals at once, and then it's, it's difficult to actually make a change. So because you're almost surely mostly focused on your business and then maybe leaving some time and slots for your family, you only have so much you can do on this side.

So find one thing, ideally the thing that's causing the biggest problems, and singularly focus on that for a quarter or whatever it's gonna take until it's resolved, and then go to the next one. But keep it as, as a single point of entry. Make it, check it off the box, and then move on to the next problem.

Hala Taha: Hmm. I love that. It's like the anchors we were talking about earlier in the conversation. And what would you say your secret to profiting in life is?

Andy Galpin: Consciousness.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: I'm in for any lifestyle choice you want. I know friends that work [01:27:00] 100 hours a week. I know friends that work one. Rich, poor, in between.

Plenty of people who are loads, loads and loads of money, and they have no sense of presence and happiness and joy, and plenty of the opposite. They make pennies, but they're very present and happy. So you can win either way. My only thing that I will ask of you is just be aware of what choice you're making.

Hala Taha: Hmm.

Andy Galpin: If you're good with it, I'm good with it. No problem. It's when we lack the consciousness and awareness that life tends to just run away from us, and then we get lost in the thing, right? So it's like, did you, did you really want this? Are you sure? Are you just, like, doing this because this was the next thing that was the next thing, or there's some underlying assumption?

And I went through this personally as an academic. You start doing all these things, and you gotta do this, and you gotta do this, and then you have to do that, and then you gotta get tenure, and I got that. And then it's like, well, you gotta be promoted to full professor, and then I was promoted to full professor, and all the things.

And then you stop and you're like, "Well, wait, like, why am I doing this activity?" Well, that's 'cause of what you do. [01:28:00] Well, well, well, wait. And then you just start running that analysis being like, "Did I actually want that? Did I, did I care? Was that really worth A, B, and C?" And so I'll just kinda summarize all that in, into consciousness.

Like, are you just conscious and aware of where you're at and how you're spending your dollars and your chips and your points and your time and your days and your hours? If you are and you still make the choice, like, again, let's go. Line up to the race. I'm in. Like, you wanna spend your life just running...

Uh, I have a friend, a friend of mine ru- runs 10 miles every day. Great. Like, he just... You get my point. Yeah. It's just like, are you really aware of the consciousness of how you're spending your life points? If you are, do whatever you want, I don't care. If not, then let's make some change to get us back in alignment.

Hala Taha: Hmm. I love that. It reminds me of something that Gretchen Rubin talks about. It's called drift. She says, like- Oh, yeah ... people will, like, just drift into becoming a doctor, even if it's hard. Even if it ta- [01:29:00] if they had to go to years of school, they're, they're not really making a decision, they're just drifting towards some sort of whatever path they think is just the next thing to do.

So I love that. Dr. Andy, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? What is the name of your podcast, your YouTube channel?

Andy Galpin: Yeah, sure. Most of everything we do can be found at Dr. Andy Galpin on social, so, uh, Instagram and Twitter and all that, YouTube. The name of the podcast is called Perform with Andy Galpin, and it runs in short series.

So you can check that out and get all caught up, um, at any time. And then for the most part, everything else can be found just at my website, andygalpin.com.

Hala Taha: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on Young and Profiting podcast.

Andy Galpin: Thank you so much. It was awesome.

Hala Taha: There you have it, Young and Profiters.

Dr. Andy Galpin gave us such a practical reset on what high performance really means. This episode was not about chasing the newest fitness trend, [01:30:00] copying somebody else's morning routine, or thinking that there's one magic formula for health. It was all about understanding your own body, your own demands, and the specific things that are slowing you down.

One of my favorite ideas from Andy is that everyone is an athlete. And for entrepreneurs, your sport is your calendar. It's the meetings, the travel, the constant problem-solving, and the pressure to keep executing. So your health cannot be something you squeeze in after you're already burned out. Your energy, focus, memory, emotional control, and leadership all come from the same system.

And if you want to perform better in business, you have to take care of the body that is carrying the business. Andy also broke down sleep and recovery in a way that really hits home. He reminded us that being exhausted is not the same thing as being relaxed. You can be completely wiped out and still not be physiologically down-regulated.

And like Dr. Andy said, down-regulation is a skill that you can learn. So tonight, give your body a real signal that it's safe to power down. Cut that [01:31:00] late caffeine, put your phone away earlier, take a walk during the day. Not a walk and talk, no podcast, no music, but just walk and breathe through your nose and think about your day, think about your problems, and then you won't be overthinking at night.

You'll be able to relax and have really deep sleep. So I love that hack. And having better sleep, Dr. Andy said, is the number one way to improve your performance. And the truth is, Yap Fam, your business will only grow as far as your body can carry you. You don't need a perfect routine. You need a repeatable one that supports the entrepreneur you are becoming, and you need to do it step by step.

Figure out what is the anchor that's blocking you the most. For me, it's getting better sleep. That's probably it for a lot of you. And start there. Don't boil the ocean. Before I sign off, a huge thank you to this incredible Yap community. This year, we won so many awards. We were actually nominated for seven different awards, and we got Best Performing Podcast Award at the Indie Pac Awards.

We got the Palestinian Excellence Award from the New York City Podcast [01:32:00] Awards, and I also received a nomination from iHeart, the iHeartPodcast Awards, which is like the Grammys of podcasting for Best Business and Finance Podcast. I competed against Steven Bartlett and lost, but he's really tough competition, so I don't feel bad about that.

And I also just got a Webby honoree for Best Business and Finance Creator, so feeling really blessed about that. And Yap Fam, none of this happens without you. Every listen, every share, every five-star review, this is your work too. So thank you, guys, for supporting the show. So let this be a reminder, Yap Fam, keep going, keep betting on yourself, because the version of you that does not quit is the version of you that wins.

And please take care of your mind and your body along the way. As always, this is your host, Paula Taha, AKA the Podcast Princess, signing off