18. You Can’t Biohack Unresolved Trauma - Longevity Science & Ancient Wisdom with Anna Bjurstam

In this episode, I’m joined by Anna Bjurstam — a global pioneer in wellness and longevity.

We talk about the powerful connection between modern longevity science and ancient wisdom, and why true health is about so much more than living longer. It’s about creating more quality, presence, and vitality in the years we have.

One of the biggest takeaways from this conversation is that no amount of biohacking can bypass unresolved trauma stored in the body. To truly heal and thrive, we must address both the mind and the nervous system.

Anna also shares the science-backed practices, rituals, and tools she personally believes in for greater health, longevity, and wellbeing.

Anna has worked at the forefront of the wellness industry for more than 25 years. She is former Vice President of Spa & Wellness at Six Senses, co-founder of Raison d’Etre, trained in BioGeometry, and certified as a shaman through the Four Winds Society.

This episode is a beautiful blend of science, spirituality, and practical tools.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Happy Healthy, a podcast that inspires you to live a more meaningful, content, and authentic life. In this podcast, I speak with inspiring experts and thoughtful people about health, personal growth, and conscious living. Thank you for listening to this show, and thank you for listening to yourself. Today I'm honored to introduce Anna Bjorstam, a true pioneer and global leader in the wellness industry. In this episode, we are talking about wellness, longevity, and why we must combine modern longevity science and ancient wisdom to not only live longer, but to gain more quality of life in those years. One of the biggest takeaways is that no amount of biohacks or longevity practices can bypass the effects of unprocessed trauma stored in the body. We must deal with this both to live longer and better. And of course, Anna also brings us all the science-backed practices and tools we can use for more longevity and health. Anna has worked at the forefront of wellness for more than 25 years. She has a background in finance, is trained in biogeometry, and is also certified as a shaman through the Four Winds Society. She previously served as vice president of Spa and Wellness at Sixth Census and was also co-founder of Ressent Detre, one of the world's first consultancy firms dedicated to holistic wellness concepts. And a little practical note for this episode before we begin. My microphone audio is unfortunately not as clear as usual, and I truly apologize for that. Thankfully, Anna's voice and her message come through clearly. So, without further ado, let's welcome Anna on the show. Welcome Anna! Thank you. I'm so excited to have you here in the podcast, and I'm just so grateful that you want to participate. Before we dive in, I would like to ask you the question that I always start by asking my guests. And that is, what does it mean to you to be authentic and true to yourself?

SPEAKER_01 2:16

For me, one of my values is integrity, and that goes hand in hand, and it's about doing the right thing, even if no one is watching. And I also think it is about being true to yourself. That is authenticity. If you're your real self, that then you're authentic, not someone you pretend to be.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah. And I'm also curious, have you always known that you want to work with these longevity tools? Or how come you ended up working with what you work with today?

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Um, I think it's been kind of written in my uh my life uh story from the very beginning. When I was 14, I had a near-death experience. Um, I got very sick. I got something called meningococcepsis. You usually die from it. And when I came into hospital, it was too late to do anything. So I was laying there in the ER, and I realized, looking at everyone around me, that I was gonna die. I even asked a nurse, am I gonna die now? And she started crying, which she shouldn't do in the ER, but something made her do that. And I realized, oh my God, I'm gonna die. And at first I felt, I don't want to die. I haven't told my sister that it was I lied to her. I stole her shirt. I had all these, and then I always remembered like how I would not I needed to tell I'm sorry to my sister because I took her shirt. And and I should have done this and I don't want to die yet. And then I got this profound peace. Nothing in ever, any intervention I've done has come to that peace, that total bliss and beautiful. It was the most beautiful feelings. I it's unexplainable. And and going into the tunnel and that everyone else experienced. And then obviously I didn't die. And there were several experiences around this. I then was in hospital for several months. I had to learn to walk, I got because I was lame for a while, etc. So it was it was a bit, but no one could understand why I didn't die. And but I had some experiences around that that showed me that this was not by chance and that it was something more out there. I had a man come up to me that I've never met that came from the US the day before and told me about my whole disease and secrets that I hadn't told anyone that I knew, that I've been thinking. Uh and he just said, I'm here to tell you so you would know without any um that uh that you are it wasn't your time to die. This was an experience that you were supposed to have and that you have other things to do on earth. And because he knew things that would be impossible for him to know, and I'd never met him, and he's never been a sweet in before. Um I knew that. So there's so many of those things happening around there. So that put me in a trajectory of knowing that there's something more out there. And then I just got interested. I was in very much into fitness, loved fitness, and then I worked in the fitness industry, and then I started to do meditation. I did my first vipassana, and then I started to do yoga, and then I did healing. So I just, and then I started to work with doctors and scientists. So it's just kind of all led and it's built and built. And I think one of the most important things is my curiosity, is that I want to learn more. So I always studying something and learning about that. And and for me, that that's what fuels me is like to learn more about this industry and what we're doing. So, yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

We are gonna dive into everything about longevity, wellness, ancient wisdom, all of that. And I would like us to start by clarifying some of these concepts because they are sometimes misunderstood. Can you tell us what longevity and wellness actually mean?

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Longevity is well, the medical term of longevity is how long you live, if you live to 80, 90, or 100. That's all. It doesn't matter if you're uh healthy or not healthy. The commercial term and that's being used today is what's your health span? How healthy, how many years are you healthy? And what we have seen the uh from research is that the past 50 years we've done all kinds of amazing medical interventions and etc. and uh discoveries, yet we don't live one year healthier. We only die older and we're sick for longer. So it's quite scary that not even a year longer has changed the last 50 years. So maybe 50 years ago we lived till we were 70, now we might live to 76, and that means that we are six years sicker, living sicker. So we often, when our parents die, etc., we we say, thank God that she finally got to pass away. She was suffering for such a long time. So, with that, longevity has kind of come up now to be like, how long can you be healthy and how do you extend your health span so you don't have to be sick that long? And that's the difference. Now, wellness is often how do you get there? That's a platform, that's a base. Uh, it's about sleep and food, nutrition, your mental stability, whereas longevity there is more scientific and measurable, where you look at the 12 hallmarks or 14 hallmarks, I just changed it, of aging. And that is you can measure every hallmark. It's mitochondrial health, it's gut, it's senescent cells. It's a completely different language and way of measuring compared to wellness. And there's also different types of interventions. So you could say that wellness is a base because it doesn't matter what interventions you do. And I'll tell you, I met a man very recently. Uh I didn't meet him, but a busy addict and a trip, and he was doing all these longevity interventions, but he was smoking, drinking, eating, was overweight, but he still did stem cells, peptides, all kinds of things that he was super interested in. But he can do that for such a long time and it's going to get very little results because he's not doing the wellness, he's not doing the basics. So you can say the wellness is a base, and then longevity is a different strategy. And what longevity is about, if one may simply say it, is that it is to rid the body of our zombie cell or senescent cells. That's basically what longevity is. Uh because we have these cells in our body that stops dividing. And when they but they don't they don't get killed. So they're like zombies, they just wander around. And they also excrete dangerous material for our system. So because we have we eat McDonald's, we're stressed, we have pollution and toxins, our body is fighting that instead of cleaning these zombie cells. So, therefore, in order to live longer, healthier, we need to clean them up because these are the ones that then cluster became so many, they become cancer, Alzheimer's, and all these other uh autonomic diseases that are skyrocketing at the moment. But if we can rid us of this inesome cell through various strategies, then we have a much larger chance to live longer, healthier, as long as you're doing the base wellness. So that's that's a very simple way of looking at longevity.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

There is a lot of science behind the longevity. What about the wellness? How much science do we actually have in that space?

SPEAKER_01 10:11

More and more, actually. Um, it it's there's more research coming about uh being out in nature. Sometimes I don't think we really need nature because we innately know that being out in nature makes us feel really good. But science is now proving it, and then doctors can mention it and say, you really need to be more out in nature. So, or a massage or training, all of those. So there's a lot of science happening at the moment, which is really interesting. We have this marriage between medical and wellness at the air, which is happening. It's like they've been like this awkward, forced marriage couple, both working, where uh, you know, the wellness wife maybe scoffs at the big pharma, and big pharma scoffs at at wellness for doing crystal healing or whatever it could be. But what has happened in the world today is that we have an avalanche of chronic diseases, and our health care or sick care cannot solve the solution, obviously. That's what we can see, and neither can our uh wellness. So they have to cooperate. So they have to do couple therapy. So what we're seeing, which is super interesting, is right now is that it's a marriage between health care and wellness in order to solve the solution. So, and that means that science picks up on wellness because it has to validate uh this marriage, so to speak, and couple therapy that they're right now going through in order to solve this. And we're seeing that if you do wellness and medicine, that can actually help and solve the issue.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

And we are going to later in the conversation dive into some of the more practical tools and tools and the science-backed practices. But I would like to go a little bit deeper in the understanding of yeah, longevity and wellness because I know that you also talk about childhood experiences and that childhood experiences, trauma, etc., can actually affect this topic around longevity and well-being. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

SPEAKER_01 12:25

The world's most recognized test is called the ACE test, A C E test. It's 10 questions, adverse childhood experience. It's up to your 18. And it's 10 sec uh questions basically saying if you had a parent who got divorced, a parent who beat you, a parent who sexually assaulted you. So you ask, answer these 10 questions. Now, if you have six and above, um then you uh live 20 years less. That is a lot. And so so literally you then and and if you don't deal with these traumas, you literally, and it's it's quite I had a lady that I was working with, very famous, everyone in the world knows who she is. She had six on the score, and she had several suicides attempts. She's been a heroin addict, uh, she's been institutionalized, she had done electrical shock therapy. And about a year ago, she was on 21 medications just to kind of stay sane and alive, which is uh mind-boggling. And then she went and did a plant medicine intervention, which is not something that one has to do, but one can do. And she tried everything else. And she realized that she needed to work through her traumas, not try to subdue them with drugs, alcohol, sex. She was a sex addict, all of these things that she tried to do, which is super interesting. So she's now working through her traumas and she will not die 20 years uh shorter because she's doing the work and walking the path to get through. But if you don't, then you usually have a destructive behavior that means that you live young uh less, 20 years less. And you can also see even if you have, I believe, six uh four, then up to four on this ACE test, you are 700% more likely to become an alcoholic. Even as little as two, you're 300% more likely to have to retake a year in school. So it's really that your childhood experience, if you don't work through them and go through the trauma, they will affect you for in a negative way for the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

And I am almost shocked that it is such a big impact in almost 20 years.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Yeah. And what's interesting is that a lot of the businessmen are the ones that are doing longevity interventions. And what has been shown with businessmen and women um is that often because they are successful, it's because they have a traumatic childhood. So that has something to prove. So it's interesting what they should do is maybe not stem cells but uh trauma intervention.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

I think it's such an important message because it's sometimes we grasp around these, you I wanna do this and I'm gonna do this and gonna do this, and we forget to look at kind of like the the pace, or what is maybe the foundation we need to fix before we can add on. So it's just so important that we care and that we heal. And the good news is, as you say, we can heal. So so, in in what ways can we start to work with this that we know can help?

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Well, what we've seen is that cognitive therapy and the natural and going to psychologists and psychiatrists doesn't really often get you through the trauma, unfortunately. So you need it is other types of therapy, which could be spiritual therapies, often uh community. It is about, yes, shamanism or energy medicine. It can also be somatic therapy. Uh, so there's a number, it's because it's also stuck in your nervous system, a lot of the nervous system, uh, it could be something called TRE, where you do, where you do shaking. There's a number of, but somatic therapy in particular is something that has skyrocketed up as a very user-friendly intervention to help to at least start and cover. And somatic therapy is doing small exercises to assure you that you are safe because trauma makes you think that you're not safe. So then the nervous system is in uh fight and flight instead of in safety. So a lot of that somatic therapy, energy work. I I worked with a lady, her son, who was 26 at the time, committed suicide, and she'd gone through years of therapy, and then she went to my good friend Alberta Violdo, who is uh who was my master in training me in in shamanism. And I was together with Alberta working with her, and after a week, she had come to peace with her son's suicide. And she said when she was leaving, I said, I wish I wouldn't have spent thousands and thousands of Euros on physical uh psychological therapy and therapy when I just needed to do this for a week and just heal my trauma and the energy around my trauma and then feel at peace with what her son has done. So I've seen so many examples where people are stuck in their trauma and they because our conventional medicine generally cannot treat it, and you can't talk yourself through. Uh you can't mentally dissolve a trauma. It has to be almost energetically to be able to do it because it's part of your energy body.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Me personally, I have had like a lot of issues with my health and my hormones and my digestion. And I did, as I think many can recognize, you know, went to the doctors, and of course we have to go to the doctor and make sure we don't have any illnesses and stuff. But I was left with no answers, and I did all the right things, you know, with the food and the psychologist, etc. etc. And I did experience a little bit of improvement. But as you talk about, I finally, after like seven years, went to a somatic experiencing psychologist. And for the first time, I actually got into my body like emotionally and energetically, and that literally changed everything. So I'm just so happy that you share this message because it really is the most impactful thing that we can do to go into the body.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Yeah, it's it's about and I think we sometimes forget we are using various wearable devices. If someone asks you, How did you sleep last night? Oh, let me check my app. Uh instead of let me check in with my body. And that is, we don't have to have an app to tell us how we slept. We can feel it. And when we start using wearables, and wearables is not wrong, but you need to use it in the right way. They will not tell you how you feel. You have to feel so, and especially women uh in particular need to be in touch with their body.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

There is such a big power in the body, and I would like to uh dwell a little bit in this topic we are at right now, you know, with the the body, the spiritual well-being, because I know that you really emphasize that we have to bring this into the talk and the conversation, all these ancient wisdom, tools. And can you just start by telling us like what does spiritual well-being actually mean?

SPEAKER_01 20:10

It is about it's not about having a religion, it is about being connected to something bigger than yourself. Often you could say it's a purpose in life, but that you feel that there's something more than than just you and this on this earth. It is about having a community. We have a big loneliness epidemic today, so you need that community. That's also about having spiritual well-being. Um, it's about having a practice, whether it's meditation or breath work or prayer, um, and all of those combined becomes spiritual well-being.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

And what can we say anything about this spiritual well-being and the importance of it? Like in the field of science, do we know something?

SPEAKER_01 20:57

Yeah, and it's interesting when science. I just want to kind of well, first of all, um, yes, there's enormous amount of researcher, research around spirituality and longevity and well-being. Uh, those that have a regular spiritual practice is 94% less likely to take suicide. That's pretty big. Those that have a spiritual practice has 60% higher immune system function. Again, that is huge. So a spiritual practice is so incredibly important. Now, I also want to say when it comes to science, is that we know today that 50% of science is proven to be false. Uh and 70% of any clinical study that is done is failed to be replicated. And even and and it's impossible to replicate them. So it has been proven over and over again that most of our science. Science is false because money has made the researcher or aim to have a successful scientific outcome to skew the actual scientific research. So 70% of the scientific clinical studies cannot be replicated and get the same outcome. So one has to have a pinch of salt also with science, because it is staggering how much which we can't rely on. And I also think that science gives us part of the picture. And what we have today is also the emerging of quantum physics, because the Newtonian science cannot solve everything. It's been proven that, okay, so then they invented quantum physics, which could be related a lot to consciousness and spiritualism, etc., and it have an explanation method. And I've gone pretty deep into quantum physics as well to understand it. And it does explain some of the spiritual uh factors as well that people want to have explanation, but science cannot explain everything. And it's when we think, and also when we think that what we can touch and see and hear, that that's reality, we also need to be reminded that we only hear less than one percent of all the sounds out there. We have, if you have a dog, you know that they hear completely different things and react on other things. We actually see less than a half of percent of what's going on right now. A bird sees completely different things. A bird can have lots of colors, but we see it as black because our spectrum. So when and and then you say, well, is the bird black or does it have color? It depends on who the spectator is. But what we do know is that we see about half a percent of what's happening in the room you're in right now. And then we see that is reality and nothing else exists. So it is, I just want to kind of say, I think science is great because it it proves, but it also is false, and we have to take it with a pinch of salt. But that all said, there's over a thousand papers with if, for instance, there was a paper on uh I read, heard about recently of Afro-American men who and they looked at them, those who went to church once a week and those who didn't. And those that went to church once a week lived to an average of they were 80. And those who did not live till they were 64. So that is a 16-year difference. Again, so you can see that spiritual practice, and there's so many studies like this, and they're well out there and they're proven and they're validated to show how important a spiritual practice is for your health, well-being, and longevity. And if you don't have purpose in your life, and and the one thing more I want to say is if you look at the one factor that we all live for that can make or break us, it can heal us, it can make us sick, it's love. That is the number one thing we all want in life. We want to be loved, we want to find someone to love. Yet science has completely ruled that out because you can't measure it. So when you look at healing, if you look at health and medicine and even wellness, it's gone. You don't talk about love simply because you can't measure it. But we all know that this is the number one important. So, what I again I want to say that science has a purpose, but it doesn't show up the whole picture.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

And it just speaks to that place in ourselves that we just you know, we just know. And it is so difficult today, as you say, because we have to measure everything and the science is so good, even though there is questions to some of the science. But that's also actually a part of I you know, I called my podcast Happy Healthy, just because also in my little tiny experience of health and a good life, there are so many things we need to do, but in the end, if you can navigate by what truly feels good and lights you up, you know, like love, like happiness, I believe that is the way to navigate your life.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Yeah, and you have a two-year-old daughter, so uh that shows you about love and happiness, sometimes a bit frustration, but but still that's also part of life. But the love you feel for for her is unlike any other love, and it is very real, although we don't see it as real sometimes in a scientific context.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

You have mentioned that you have trained as a shaman through the Four Wynn society, and yeah, you have worked with anti-wisdom traditions. What do you think that these traditions have understood about health and healing that the modern medicine is just about to rediscover?

SPEAKER_01 27:14

I think that the indigenous wisdom that is there knows that physical health is not everything, and that's what we're seeing. And then you think mental health, so we got the whole mental health piece, that's not everything either. So I think what they're seeing is that connection, connection with yourself, with the others and the world around you, that is a must to have health and wellness. So I think this is what doctors and science is looking at. And I also see that science, um science, as well as doctors, uh researchers, they're much more open to it and they're also looking for it because they're seeing that it's not the whole picture. So I think that connection with nature, yourself, others, the community, and how important that is. Um and that is something that we can't touch and feel, and love and ideas and creativity, all of the curiosity, all of these states are so incredibly important that we I think that's what we're just about to to under discover, that we have to make that as part of our wellness and society in order to basically save this epidemic that we're in at the moment, where so many people are getting autism and Alzheimer's and cancers and other auto-numine diseases.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

I am so happy, and I'm sure you have convinced all the listeners now that we need to take care of our childhood experiences. We need to take care of our spiritual well-being. And when we do that, what are all the science-based tools and practices that we can do to expand our lifespan and our health span?

SPEAKER_01 29:06

I think some of them are scientific and some of them are not. Uh, a lot of it refers to that we're so overwhelmed today in our society through social media, IT, uh, everything around us, so we don't have time to pass. So there's a number of things that we can do that are fairly simple. Um, and for instance, one is that when you wake up, if the first thing you do is to look at your phone and then you scroll for, let's say, 30 minutes, in those 30 minutes, you get as much information as you did 50 years ago for a whole week. So, but our brain has not changed. And the idea with us is that we wake up and then we go up on a peak, like this, and that's where we are in the middle of the day somewhere, and then we go down and then we go to sleep. That's how our brain works. It's like we start slow, we wake up. But what happens is that when we stimulate with looking at our phone for 30 minutes when we wake up, our brain peaks here and then it crashes. And then it can never reach up to its full potential because you became brain tired. So, one of the worst things that you can do is to look at your phone and we hear it, but we have to understand it. And then a tool that I have uh created for myself, me and my friends is that we set two alarms: one when we wake up and one when we are allowed to look at our phones. And someone said, Well, my son is in a war, how can I not look at it? Well, set your alarm for half an hour earlier because then he would anyway not be woken up, and then just do meditation or other practices for the first 30 minutes and then look at your phone. But get your brain to wake up slowly. So I think those are things. Uh a good night's sleep is very important. That means seeing uh sunlight as quickly as you can. Now, Sweden, Denmark is not the uh best in sunlight, so having a blue light could be very important. Um, so those are things that you can do: breath work, meditation, somatic therapy, um, just relaxing. One thing that's emerging a lot in research now is microposis during the day. Because we have two, our nervous system has two systems. It's either on or it's off. And when we are in sympathetic, meaning that we're on the gas all the time, if we don't take breaks during the day, when it's time for us to sleep and we put on the break, the shift is too much. So we don't ever go into sufficient deep sleep. So micropauses, that's about five to ten pauses a day where you do three minutes of breath work, you lay down, you take a walk, round the block, do something completely where you just relax your nervous system from being on. That has proven again to help with deep sleep, uh, with being calmer, because you have to, if you have a trauma, and you can also, apart from having gas and break, you could also be in freeze, which means that your nervous system is closed down. So, in order to solve your trauma, you need to start with your nervous system. And a lot of that research and science is coming out right now. And and therefore, you all of these practices of microposis, breath work, meditation, walking in nature, exercise, sleep, all of those are incredibly important. And then I would advise to find a good healer, energy medicine practitioner, shaman, um, to also, and that is a so to speak, a non-scientific uh field, but that is something that I'm an advocate for because I've seen the profound changes. And the good thing with this is that generally it can do no harm, it can't do anything bad to you. So why not try it if you're feeling stuck? Is to go to, as you did to somatic therapy, go to an energy medicine practitioner, go to healer, and see what that might be because we have had healers for hundreds of thousands of years in every society they've been. Doctors we've had for a couple of hundred years. So when something sustains for that long time, it has to be, if it only would be French, it would not have survived, but it has. So I think those are practices that we can all do. Some of them are very scientific and some of them are not. And you have to listen to your own intuition. I think one of the most important things in life is to listen to your own intuition.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

And when we speak about longevity and the well-being and all the biohackers out there, we hear a lot about we need to take the cold exposure, we need to do the infrared, we need to do all of these things. What does the science say about these practices?

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Well, um, they're all good, but you have to know when to take them and not to take them. So I think that is the most important thing is that right now everyone, and there's a big discussion at the moment, is is cold dips or cryotherapy good for women or not? And uh it's definitely better for men than for women, but it also all depends. So with women in particular, it all always depends because we're on this hormonal cycle and we're up and down and right and left, whereas men is pretty stable. They have high or low testosterone, and that is it. They can do intermittent fasting for months and months, and it has a great effect. Women who starts intermittent fasting has in the beginning great effect and then it stops because we are not supposed to do intermittent fasting. We are supposed to be able to do fasting sometimes, and we're supposed to eat carbs sometimes. We have to be metabolic flexible, super important. So, again, with all these biohacks, red light therapy, PMF, hyperbaric, all of them. I'm a huge proponent. Uh, yesterday I did hyperbaric. Um and today I'm probably gonna do some PENF, PMF, pulse electromagnetic field. So I do a lot of biohacks myself, but it very much depends on your goals where you're at in life. I have right now a fairly low HRV, which is the heart rate variability, which means that my nervous system is stressed. So my goal is to bring the HRV up uh to a healthier level right now. I'm an apostle, so um, that is also, and I'm uh 55 years old. So all of those that makes me incredibly different from you, which is on a cycle, you're in the middle of the life, you're a mom, and probably the only thing that relates both of us is our nervous system, our stressed. You're driving businesses, you're doing podcasts, you have a two-year-old. So your nervous system is on a lot. So you're kind of navigating how do you keep balance in your life? So a cold immersion, for instance, could be if my HRV is high, absolutely I can do a cold immersion. But if my HRV is low, no way. That's too much stress on my body. So again, these are the things that we have to look at. Uh, whereas a man could probably do cold immersion almost every day uh without any issue, and it would be very beneficial. So I would say it all depends, but I love biohacking. I think it's a great way. And most of the biohacks that we have is because we're living in a city and we're inside 90% of our day. So if we were living in the countryside and out, we wouldn't need any biohacks because nature is a natural biohack. So the red light, that is actually sunrise and sunset. Pulsive electric magnetic field, that's actually the frequency of nature that we because we don't have it living in the city, we need to infuse it into our body. Uh a cold dip, it's just natural. It's been natural forever that we're sometimes cold, we're sometimes hot, but living in a city, we're always comfortable. Same thing with fasting. We're sometimes hungry, we're sometimes have food, we sometimes don't. So all of these interventions and biohacks is to literally get us closer to nature that we're missing because we're living in the city. And if you're a farmer, you don't need any of these biohacks.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

And can you tell us what the science say? What is it that we can measure? What is it that the cold exposure and these practices can do in the body?

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Um, well, cold exposure, for instance, has a beautiful thing. It actually uh, yeah, obviously it gets us our immune system. Once our skin temperature goes down to 15 degrees, it sends a signal to the brain saying, alarm, alert, we need to have our system to go into immune system. We shut off the circulation to our limbs because we need to protect our organs, and then we wake up our soldiers in our body called sertuans, and get them to get them to work because they're sleepy. So we get them to work so we get an immune system response. Another thing that cold exposure does is that it increases our endorphins with 300%. And it's like taking a drug and you're high for six, seven hours. So it's amazing. And and that's probably the best thing with cold exposure is, and even if you have a cold shower, even at 20 degrees, uh you get that cognitive effect. So it's been proven for mental disorders. It's really good because if you can naturally produce 300% more endorphins for six, seven hours, that means that you take better, more positive decisions during the day than just kind of binge eating and watching Netflix, maybe and feeling depressed. So cold exposure is so good, but it depends on because it also causes a stress response in your body. And that could be damaging if you're already very stressed. So that is the issue with cold exposure, white so discussed. Um, infrared saunas, the light penetrates about a centimeter below your skin and warms up those tissues. So it's amazing for uh circulation, for pain, for tissue generation, for detox, for sleep. So that those are the things it's all about light. And we normally get that if we're outside, but we don't anymore. Red light, it just penetrates just below the skin. So that means that you uh have stimulate collagen production, so it's used for scars, burns medically, and we've obviously seen that it is great for skin, and uh, so that's where we see we see all these red light masks. But what has been proven is that it's literally uh charges our mitochondria, our batteries in our cells throughout the body when you do red light therapy. So it's one of those best interventionists area. You can do them anytime. The only caveat is that you can only do it for 20 minutes a day, and then it's full. Uh, and if you do it more, it gets a negative response because then your body gets a stress response. So maximum 20 minutes of red light per day, but um it's it's magical. And then we have lots of other hyperbaric chamber, etc., where you work on delivering oxygen to your tissue. You have pulse electromethyl, which means that it's about a cell massage and how the exchange of the cell works with nutrients. So all of them have their scientific value.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

And in the talk of longevity, as you also mentioned in the beginning, there is the talk about the zombie cells and also about autof. How do we uh work with that?

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Yeah, so we have autophagy is super important, um, and we need to have a strategic report. Autophagy means self-eating, so the cell eats itself. So when you have damaged cells, when you do autophagy, that means that you put your body in a state where it can repair itself. Or if you have zombie cells, it helps to clean out those cells. So autophagy is the number one, and we have autophagy every night when we sleep in someone, but that's not enough with our stressed environment from toxin food and natural stress and social media, etc. So we then need to do an and the best way to do autophagy is that once a month or once every month, you do a three-day fast. And for some people, and that means uh for some people you can do it. I do a water fast, but some people think that's it way too hard. So then you can eat one vegan meal a day with maximum many grams of protein. The moment you go over 20 grams of protein in 24 hours, you go off autophagy, you stop because then you're in the build phase. We talk about how important muscle mass is for women and for men and everyone, and that you need protein for that. But you can't just build, build, build. You also need to clean. So autophagy is a cleanse process where you just make a clean house, and that meaning to invest three days where you don't do exercise, you can do walk or soft yoga or something, and you drink a huge amount, and then you eat maximum 20 grams for one meal of protein, and then you have to look at like because broccoli has protein or uh beans have protein, so you can't go over those 20 grams, and and then you can also support it with infrared saunas, compression therapy, and other biohacks together with that. But those three days, at least every other month, are crucial to sustain longevity too, because you then that's just when you repair the damaged cell and clean out the zombie cells. So autophagy is magic. And you have those health nuts, you have Brian Johnson who's taking maybe it too far, but he has autophagy almost every day. So he only eats, I think, between up to 11:30 in the day, and then he doesn't eat anything for the rest of the day, and then he goes to bed at 8:30. So he wants autophagy on a daily basis. Now he's taking it too far. We have all of these, we always have those that want to do it a bit more than anyone else. But uh, at least I would say three days every other month is a good protocol with one vegan meal a day or water fast, whatever works for each individual. And that will greatly expand your. Life, your health, and your wellness in the long-term future. And once you've done it a couple of times, you almost long for it because you feel so great, because you burn a lot of fat. So you go into ketosis. So, and our brain is 60% fat, our work heart is 60% fat. So that means when you fuel your body with the fat, then it really makes us so sharp and focused. So once you get over that hump of fasting, you usually get a bit addicted to it. So three days of fasting is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 44:35

Wow, you really got me. I've never tried that actually. I have done back in the days when it was popular some juice fast, and we also have Greenwich Smoothie Fast that I think actually goes a bit into this because it's only green smoothies for three days. But I'm curious for if the listeners are like me, you know, might maybe they have their own business or a mom or both, or maybe a little bit stressed. Is it still a good idea to do like every single month? Yeah, it depends on your stress levels.

SPEAKER_01 45:08

So you should only fast when you're in a good place, when you feel calm. Uh there's no point of fasting if you have a deadline, if you've been traveling, if you've been sick, it's a bad idea. Now, if you're going through what they've seen is that if you get into autophagy when you do uh chemo, if you have cancer, uh then you have 40% less chance to get the cancer back. Uh so that's where kind of autophagy, yeah, because what happens is when you don't eat lots of food when you're doing chemo, because when you eat the food, our soldiers need to focus on digesting the food. If they can just focus on the chemo and the cancer and not have to do uh work with the food, that is a time when it's really good to fast when you're not feeling well. But apart from that, I would say that you do not fast if you're stressed. And if you're in constant stress, you need to deal with the stress before you deal with all these interventions. Because, and when I go to longevity conferences and speak, or and I'm doing that a lot at the moment, what it all boils down to from any scientific expert always talks about stress in the end, because there's no point of doing any of these interventions if you don't control your nervous system. And the best way to measure that is your resting heart rate when you wake up and your HRV, uh, which is simple. You can buy a simple oxymeter to put on your finger in the morning to measure your HRV as a baseline every day, or you can have an aura ring, you can have a wok band that I have at times, uh certain times, months in the year, not all the time. I don't like to have electricity on me, but I do it have it sometimes. When I go through, like right now, I'm doing a fairly advanced peptide regimen, so I need to measure everything at the time. Um, because I'm deep into peptides at the moment. Um so so I would say that fasting is great, but you need to check in that you are in a good space and you feel good. That's when you should fast, not when you're stressed and have lots to do and you don't know how to be able to cope with life.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

Exactly. And this just an so important message because, as you say, even the science proved that you have to deal with the stress and you cannot just bypass the nervous system irregulations and all of that with all the biohack. So it's just so important to come back and listen to the body. And we are reaching the end, Anna, and you have always already shared so many great knowledge and tools that we can start to look into all of us. And I always end by asking my guests this the same question, and that is when is it the most difficult for you to be true to yourself? And what helps you stay authentic in these difficult situations?

SPEAKER_01 48:03

It's when I say yes to too many things, and I get uh I don't have time to stay balanced, too much travel. Um, like this fall, I said yes to too many speaking engagements, which meant that my work fell behind, and then I have a family, etc. So I was always running, running, running, and that's why my HRV is so low. It was about four months of just burning the candles in both ends, and I should know better, but sometimes you don't. So that's when you take. So for me, it's important to take a step back and look at okay, something is not right right now. What do I need to change? So I think that is, but that's when it's hard to stay true when you're running, running, running, and trying to, and life always throws you curved balls. So it's about catching them, but also then saying, okay, uh, and also to being for to stay true to myself is like if I feel um that I am feeling tired today or that I'm in a bad mood, I need to respect that and say, I need to go easier on myself today. I need to, and I and so I think that is is also to listen to your body and to take a step back when life gets too much for you. And then it's about discipline. So for me, I put into my calendar, and they're non-negotiable of my minute breaks, when I go to exercise, when I meditate. Those are things that I just have to do, and I put them, and if I don't put them on my calendar, I won't do them. So I need to do them because otherwise I get locked down with everything else. Taking, you know, then I think, oh, I can clean that up, or I can do this, or I can do that. So it needs to be non-negotiable. So I think those are three, but it's generally it's when life uh gets too much and I get too stressed, and then I don't listen to myself, and then I'm not true to myself. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 49:58

Anna, this has been such a great and important conversation, and I'm just so happy that you wanted to join me on the podcast. So thank you so much, Anna.

SPEAKER_01 50:07

Thank you. Thank you so much, Julie. Really appreciate it. Love to be here.