560: Dr. Molly Maloof on Hormones, Trauma Recovery, Healthspan and the Science of Love

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the “Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com, that’s wellnesse with an E on the end. And I am here with Dr. Molly Maloof, who is an expert in extending health span through her medical practice, her personal brand, and all of her educational and entrepreneurial endeavors. She’s the founder and CEO of Adamo Bioscience, which is a company pioneering the science of love. We talk about that today.

 

She provides personalized medicine to entrepreneurs, investors, and tech executives in Silicon Valley. And since 2012, she has worked as an advisor and consultant to over 50 companies in the digital health, consumer health, and biotechnology industries. She teaches a course on health span in the Medical School at Stanford University, which she has transformed into an online course that will be launched to the public later this year.

 

And in this episode, we go deep on hormones, trauma recovery, health span, and the science of love. She shares a funny story of what happened when she accidentally got dosed with a men’s dose of testosterone, how she’s researching the science of love, attraction, bonding, and more. What she’s learning and doing in her work to measure social connection. The reason she believes substances like psychedelics can help heal trauma, with some really important caveats and how things should be done. What safety signaling is in the body and how this is important for healing. Some tools to tune the nervous system back to safety. Precautions for psychedelic use, and when they can do more harm than good. How trauma can affect all aspects of our life, including how we parent. Even more science about the importance of meditation and how to get started, and why she believes it’s the best medicine in the world.

 

The reason intention matters and how to align energy and information flow. How she programs her subconscious for more positive change. Why anxiety is a prayer for things you don’t want to happen. How she’s used hypnosis as a tool for health. How to always talk to your subconscious in the positive. The science on gratitude and increasing oxytocin signaling, and so much more. She’s a wealth of knowledge. I loved this conversation and I know you will, too. So let’s join Dr. Maloof. Dr. Molly, welcome. And thanks for being here.

 

Dr. Molly: Thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast, and I’ve been following you for years. And so it’s such an honor to be here.

 

Katie: Well, I’m extremely excited to get to chat with you. And we’re going to talk healthspan and skin and the science of love and lots of interesting directions. But before we do, I have a note in my show notes that you once got accidentally dosed with men’s testosterone cream, and I have to hear a little bit about this story.

 

Dr. Molly: Okay. So I’ve been really interested in like, what is behind so much of the battle of the sexes these days, right? There’s quite a lot of tension between men and women, largely because of the Me-Too movement, which is, frankly, very much warranted because women, I don’t actually have a girlfriend who had some sort of sexual assault. So it’s been really amazing to see how women can stand up for themselves and men, but I don’t think women totally understand what it’s like to be in a man’s body. And I think if women actually understood what a man’s existence is, like, they would have a very different perspective on sexuality.

 

And so I was at work a long time ago, I was working at a company that was creating personalized medicine, it was custom combat and hormones and nutraceuticals. And actually, this system that I learned how to optimize both of these facets of our health, I still use a lot of what I learned at this company. But one of the things that I didn’t anticipate happening to me at this company was, like, I actually sat down on a chair at work one day, and I saw this there was like, something slippery on the chair. And I was like, “Wow, I must have sat down some polish or something.” So like, that’s weird. So kind of like rubbed it off, you know, try to write kind of ended up rubbing in.

 

And the rest of the morning was really strange, because I started looking at my boss and my co-workers, and I was just like, “Why am I attracted to everybody in the office today?” Like, “Why am I thinking really weird thoughts about everybody?” Like, “I’m not used to this, this is not making any sense to me?” So I went to the bathroom, I remember putting my arms on the counter and being like, “What is going on right now?” And I was like, “Oh, my God, this guy had sat on the chair before me, and he must have applied his testosterone cream.” And it must have gotten on me. And oh, my God, this is insane.

 

It was like, pretty much one of the weirdest experiences in my life, because I was just like, “If men go through this level,” I was, like, “I don’t even know how the men can even function around women at work, if this is what it feels like to be a guy.” And I just honestly, think women would have I am far more aware of like the reality of existence, I don’t think women totally get that, like, men are so much more programmed to actually be like, the testosterone is a sex hormone. And it’s, like, the sex hormone is the hormone that makes you want to have sex.

 

And so when men have literally, like, I think it’s 10 times as much as women, I have to look that up but I’m pretty sure it’s about like a 10x number might be, I think it’s 10x. That is a very different existence to go through, than what we are going through, and I am a very sexually liberated woman who has a very high libido. So I’m like very in tune with my sexual energy. And I’ve transmuted it into my work, and I use it as a fuel source but I don’t think most men know how to do that.

 

And so when I was in college, and you know, would go out and party with guys, I’d never really understood, like, I never really totally realized that it is a different world for guys. Like they are programmed differently. And we can necessarily excuse sexual assault, but we can at least try to understand that if every woman went through what I went through, I think did have a little bit of more understanding of what guy’s experiences, like, and frankly, I dress a lot more covered up in work environments.

 

Like, I when I was younger, I would kind of dress just like not provocatively, but I would dress, like, the way I would want to dress which would be cute, you know, but I now have way more conservative at work. Because I don’t want them to be distracted by my physical self, I want them to be focusing on my mind. And I think a lot of women, there’s been this argument like, “Oh, we should be able to do whatever we want and dress what we want actually like.” There is some truth to covering yourself up to actually be taken more seriously because literally men’s minds are programmed to want to have sex and so it’s hard for them to pay attention when there’s like a beautiful physically attractive woman in front of them who’s wearing, you know, tight clothing.

 

So I actually was with my friends when I was on vacation with they saw me in, you know, swimsuit and they were like, “Whoa, Molly, I didn’t even know you had a nice body.” And I was like, “Yeah, cuz I don’t show it.” And it’s on purpose. It’s by design. Like, I know that society is the underlying evolutionary prerogative is actually just surviving to produce, and whether we can act like we are these fully advanced humans all we want, but this is what we’re here to do, whether we like it or not. And even if you don’t have kids, your genes and your cells are programmed like this.

 

So, we actually have to respect and understand how our bodies work. And in doing that, we can actually learn to coexist more peacefully, I think. But these are contrarian ideas, right? Like, this is most women who are feminists are like, you know, they don’t want to be told that they shouldn’t dress provocatively. And I’m not saying you can’t, I’m just saying, like, look, society tells you, you have to be super sexy. But if we are always super sexy, we actually are putting ourselves at risk for men not to be actually being able to hear what we’re saying.

 

And also, frankly, you know, we don’t really get that there’s still a lot of animalistic behavior out there and human behavior. And it’s very dangerous. And the fact that I have so many friends, including myself who have been victims of sexual assault, says something about how society really operates.

 

And part of the reason why I’m starting this company I started is coming to a Demo Bioscience was, A, I’m trying to teach people about evolutionary prerogative and help people understand why do we have sex? Why do we fall in love? And why do we create attachments? And what are all the things in our lives that can actually disrupt healthy sex? Which one is trauma? What are things that can impair, you know, our ability to love turns out that like, you know, heartbreak can be really painful and can program us to be afraid of love. And attachment? Like our relationships, our parents deeply influence our attachment with the opposite sex and with our friends and family.

 

And so I’ve basically designed this company to be… Initially, it was actually doing drug development but then I decided that it needed to pivot that strategy to working on more salient endeavors, that wouldn’t be quick to market because, frankly, people need knowledge faster than they can, like, people really need knowledge more than they need drugs. And drugs are a great tool and transformation but it’s not enough, we actually need to teach people about how our bodies work, and how they can optimize their health through understanding their design.

 

And so, you know, it really was rooted in wanting to help heal trauma but then I realized that almost everybody can benefit from understanding sexuality, understanding love, and understanding attachment. And at the same time, I have a program for metabolic health that I want to concurrently launch is like, there’s two sides of the company, one will be metabolic health, and one will be pro-social health, for social behaviors.

 

And the reason why I’m focusing on these two facets of life is because we’re literally programmed to survive and reproduce. And so I think that really health should help you adapt and self-managing adversity. And if we’re going to help people adapt in self-manage, then we have to teach them about what is really the way that their bodies work. And it’s a big vision, it’s gonna take me a while, but I’m also going to be developing a nonprofit arm of the company, that’s going to be… It’s not necessarily to be part of the company and it’s gonna stay nonprofit that’s adjacent to the company, it’s going to study, do research on pro-social behaviors, and how to measure social connection, and use that those measurements to actually back up what we’re doing for our programs.

 

Because we can measure metabolism, but we can’t actually measure social connection right now. And I think we actually have the biomarkers for that. But that’s going to be a longer time horizon than the educational products we’re going to build. So I can’t actually develop those biomarkers until we do the research around them. And so that’s going to be a whole other part of the company, but we’re going to basically have an exclusive license to develop any discoveries that we make in the nonprofit realm.

 

Katie: That’s so fascinating. And definitely, I’ve written down with a lot of stuff you just said, especially, I also have a sexual assault experience in my background, and I know many, many women who do. And I think you’re right, that understanding and healing from these things is a big piece in a lot of relationship puzzles that we haven’t fully figured out how to do well. And I love also that you mentioned the social connection side, because this is one that I personally noticed you’re gonna get so excited about Blue Zones, and they want to know exactly what they’re eating and exactly what they’re doing.

 

And I’m like the actual commonality they all have is really solid social connection with people like deep relationships with people, and like maybe not the half a glass of red wine, or whether they’re eating fish or not eating fish, maybe there’s something deeper. And I love that you’re trying to study that. So what are some of the things you’re finding in this because I think this is so needed in today’s world?

 

Dr. Molly: Well, what I’m finding is that well, first of all, most women including myself, we have this bias that it’ll never happen to us. And the more that I’ve talked to women, holy crap. I mean, I have met so many women who lost their virginity to rape. I have met so many women who have been sexually assaulted. I’ve met so many men and women who’ve been abused as children. And I realized that this is the most unspoken about epidemic of our time that we are not talking enough about because it’s so frickin painful.

 

And I literally I’ve cried quite a lot because of the Ukraine and what’s going on with women there and children and the amount of rape that’s happening, and it’s like, we don’t realize that there are real epigenetic scars on our bodies’ programming that literally have to be there is not easy to just heal a scar, like, you actually, like, I do think that intelligence and psychedelics have a role in helping heal trauma but I think the reason why they work is by creating neuroplasticity and inducing safety programming.

 

And what I’ve learned is that psychedelics and entactogens alone are not going to solve the problem, it’s actually the entire experience of healing around it that is so powerful. So it’s the setting. And it’s the people that you’re with, that make the experience a healing experience. And I actually believe that part of the experience is mitigated to the…like, the reason why those parts of the experience matter, and why it’s so important that their safety victim to each of them is because those parts of the experience are literally activating safety signaling, okay? And safety signaling in the body is what makes the body actually learn to turn off the threat response, and to be able to actually heal.

 

And so it’s not enough to just take five, you know, 3.5 grams of psilocybin on your own, you actually do need to have for the full effect of psychedelics and entactogens. It’s more than just the drug, it’s actually about the intention you have going into the medicine, and the preparation that you have going in, and the people that you’re with, and making sure that environment is safe. And if you can do that, then you can actually, I believe that psychedelics help you tune the nervous system back to safety.

 

You know, my experience with sexual trauma was really interesting, because I was basically dissociated for most of my 20s. And had hyperactive arousal, I had sexual pain, and I had anorgasmia with men. And I just didn’t understand why I had a shitty sex life but, you know, did some MDMA with a partner in my late 20s, and all these problems, sexual problems went away.

 

Now, it didn’t fix my attachment dysfunction. It didn’t fix my fear of falling in love. It didn’t fix these other facets of my health, but for some reason, it fixed the sexual dysfunction, largely because I think that the combination of the medicine in a safe environment with a safe partner in a really positive mindset, and in a sexual context created the conditions for me to heal. But I started building a company around this and I was like, “Oh, crap, I can’t just give people psychedelics and teach them how to have proper sexual encounters.” Because that’s actually opening up a giant Pandora’s Box.

 

Because people will do it all wrong, you know, they won’t totally, like, it’s so important that you really trust the people that you’re with when you take psychedelics, and there’s quite a lot of sexual trauma happening in every industry. I wouldn’t say the psychedelic space has more sexual trauma than other industries but because of every industry has sexual trauma turns out because it’s widespread in society. Like, the problem is, is that when you combine a psychedelic that offers neuroplasticity, and you combine it with potentially unsafe sexual experiences, and potentially traumatizing sexual experiences, it can really scar you.

 

So I just think it’s so important that our company starts with education and then starts employing individual personal use of psychedelics in group settings, and then potentially we do the research on sexuality and psychedelics together. Because if we start with sexuality and psychedelics, first, we’re just gonna end up making mistakes.

 

And I realized that when I was like, I spent a year and $100,000 of investor’s money on a drug development plan, and then I had this total awakening of, if I do this, it’s gonna end up hurting some people and I can’t work, I can’t do that yet. I just can’t. We need to have more science and more research before we go off and do that. But I did realize that teaching people about safe sex around boundaries, around safe psychedelic use, what is healthy and unhealthy love, you know, and what is healthy and unhealthy attachment.

 

Like, if you get those things down part, and then it’s actually then you can start having conversations about enhancing relationships and enhancing dealing with trauma and enhancing attachment. But I think it’s so important to have the foundations in place before we start adding a ton of psychoactive chemicals.

 

Katie: Yeah, I think that is really important to separate and I understand why these things have become more mainstream, because they do, like you said, have tremendous potential to help reopen and heal some of these places of trauma.

Dr. Molly: Higher. Yeah.

 

Katie: Yeah, but they also it’s like they’re a tool and they’re not the only tool and I think there’s been conversation around setting but I think the conversation needs to even go deeper than that, especially when we’re talking about people who have specific past trauma that we know about. And I think this is one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you is to bring awareness around that particular part of it. And I love that you’re really doing the research and putting the science behind this because, like you, I think this can be an amazing tool. And I think if it’s used incorrectly, we might actually lose the ability to use it in a way that can help a lot of people.

 

Dr. Molly: I mean, I think that it’s totally within the possibility of our lifetime where these things become banned again. And the cats used to be out of the bag, but could always go back and you never I mean, society can always get stricter and more authoritarian, and drugs do challenge hegemonic worldview. And they give you the capacity to see through a lot of facets of society that are dysfunctional.

 

And fortunately, they also uncover a lot of people’s buried trauma. And so like, that’s why they’re, kind of catalysts. You know, they’re definitely catalysts for change but, you know, I’ve had more than one friend or client or colleague who’s tried psychedelics and has uncovered buried trauma from their childhood that they were like, “Holy shit, I did not realize that happened until it all came back to me and my trip.” And, you know, it was either in early…like, this one woman came when she was four. All these memories that were buried, came back to her about this sexual assault by one of her family friends. And then this other woman, when she was using psilocybin, she basically just rediscovered that there is this experience she had in high school after a dance that was very much a sexual assault. And we bury trauma to protect ourselves.

 

And so what happens when you unlock, when you unbury that trauma when you dig it up? Can be pretty messy. And that messiness is it’s like, what do you do when you have dug up all this stuff? Where do you go? There’s no as far as I can tell, there really isn’t like a program in the world that I’ve heard of that’s like, specifically about, “Oh, yeah. How do I deal with the fact that I was sexually assaulted as a child? Or how do I deal with the fact that I was sexually traumatized as a high school student? Or how do I deal with the fact that I was, you know, raped in college?”

 

I don’t know of any programs that even go into this. And so I just saw an opportunity specifically because I was like, “Wow, if I can heal, from sexual trauma, and mine wasn’t even that serious, like, I don’t want to diminish my own trauma, but I don’t consider my trauma to be particularly like, as bad as what I’ve heard, like, the stuff that I’ve heard has been like, made me feel like well, I mean, I thought I had it bad. And it’s way worse in some cases.

 

But what I did learn was that, you know, if there’s even a possibility of healing from this, and creating a path for healing for people, we need to do it, because otherwise, people are going to suffer unnecessarily, it’s going to affect human relationships, it’s going to actually affect how women parent. Turns out that like, particularly bad sexual trauma can make a woman less likely to have children. And if she does have children, it can make her extremely over-productive, or it can make her extremely avoidant. And it can actually inhibit her children’s capacity to have normal attachment.

 

So there’s often very considerable intergenerational attachment dysfunction and women with sexual assault. So if we did fix this in society, then we would actually potentially affect multiple generations downstream. So I was like, this seems like an important thing to deal with. And the reason why I’m interested in the relationship of love and sexuality and attachment to overall health is because I really do believe that when these pathways get dysregulated, or disrupted, it’s almost like now we’re running to the back of the brain, that actually ends up making a lot of decisions for you, whether you realize it or not, and there’s a lot of subconscious programming from trauma and from, you know, even the trauma of heartbreak or trauma, grief, and loss, like, I would consider heartbreak to be a kind of trauma in some cases.

 

I would consider grief to be a type of trauma in some case, some people don’t even recover from grief for heartbreak. And so when your subconscious programming is affected, then you make decisions for your health differently a lot of people actually struggle with making healthy decisions. They struggle with not reaching for the cookie when they’re stressed. They struggle with all sorts of eating disorders.

 

And it’s because if underneath the surface, there’s a wounded part of yourself that has not been seen, then they’re going to be acting out whenever your capacity is not met by your demands. Your demands exceed your capacity and you just, like, you react from this primitive part of your mind to act on self-preservation.

 

So I believe that a lot of obesity and a lot of eating disorders is like directly tied to emotional dysregulation from unresolved big T or little T trauma. And when I saw that connection, I was like, “Wow, like, you can teach people how to eat healthy all you want, but if you don’t deal with the stuff under the surface, they’re gonna keep very good at making the same bad decisions.”

 

 

And so, I’ve got a big intention to like try to educate as many people as possible about how their bodies really work. And I thought you could do one without the other, but I think you kind of have to do both in a way, because if you just target metabolism, without the subconscious programming, then some people will get better, but a lot of people will just revert back to their previous behaviors. And if you only target, you know, the programming in the sort of information flow of your mind, then you’re missing out on the fact that, like, you have to get your energy ordered as well for your body, for your mind to function properly.

 

Like, I believe that health is product of ordered energy. And negative entropy is essentially ordered energy. Negative entropy is life, positive entropy is like chaos. And so we’re basically heading toward positive entropy as we get older, and the system becomes more complex and disordered. And my belief is that we can actually slow down aging, if we can get energy and information flow to be coherent.

 

So information flow is all about the narrative that you tell yourself about your life, right? That informs all of your relationships and all of your interactions at work. And then energy flow is all about metabolism. And so I was like, I feel like I’ve actually figured out like these two really important facets of health. And I just want to teach everyone about these now.

 

Katie: Yeah, I love that I actually had a very similar experience. And when I shared my episode 309 of this podcast, that was my trauma story, where I was doing all the physical things, and pro metabolic things, all the things you would think of that would have been helping my health, and none of them were working for a decade. And when I dealt with the trauma side, everything physical fell into place with literally no more effort. And I was actually eating more, I was nourishing myself. And so that’s when I was like, this is a huge piece, not just a piece, but probably the most important piece and it’s not being talked about effectively.

 

And I heard from thousands of women who, like you… I mean, I felt like mine was actually pretty intense trauma but I heard stories from people that like, chilled me to my core, the things that have happened to people. And that’s one of the reasons I’m really focused on how do we bring these tools, especially to women, but I mean, everyone, of course, can experience trauma, and especially address, like, you said, some of these epigenetic scars, because they don’t just affect us, they ripple out and affect our kids, most importantly, and then those beyond them.

 

So what are some of the starting point tools that I know you’re working on a lot of different things with your technology around this but for now, while we’re still waiting on the science of the drug side to catch up, like, what are some tools that you point people toward to actually start addressing that subconscious side?

 

Dr. Molly: Well, what’s really interesting is that I thought that subconscious stuff was all… So funny, I thought this unconscious stuff was like, all hippie stuff for a while because I was hanging out with a bunch of hippies. And when Trump got elected, I was basically like, I spent so much time hanging out with scientists and rationalists and people who are just like very unemotional about decision making. And then I was like, “Everyone in that field is very unhappy.” So then I started hanging out with hippies. And I was like, “Wow, you guys live in a world of magic.” And I was like, “What is it about magic that works for these people, like, I don’t understand it.”

 

But I discovered this book, I was at a meditation retreat. And meditation has been I mean, if there’s one thing I would love to scale, is meditation retreats, but the persona is not meant to be funded. It’s not meant to be… It’s not supposed to make money, it’s supposed to be free. So when I make a lot of money, my entire intention is to actually create meditation programs for people because I really believe that meditation is actually the best medicine in the world, but you really have to discipline yourself to do it.

 

But on this meditation retreat, I read this book called “Real Magic” and I discovered that there was this formula that had been used by all sorts of people from the beginning of time, like, people have been using this model of consciousness for a long time and it’s like how you manifest reality. And so one of the things that I learned was, essentially, this is like my model of how do you manifest something? And then how do you create a field?

 

Like, how do you create… What’s called? I don’t like to use the terms necessarily reality distortion field, but anybody who’s trying to create a new world has to actually distort the current reality of existence right now. Like, you actually have to change people’s thoughts about what reality can be if you want to create a new reality.

 

So it starts with, like, this concept of like a little seed consciousness. So your intention is like the direction have an arrow that you’re pointing at a bullseye. And your attention is your eye on that tip of the arrow looking at the vision, which is the future reality you’re trying to create, which is the bullseye, it’s in the future, it’s actually somewhere in front of you. And the path of that arrow is your mission, right? And then with the power of that arrow to hit the bullseye is your emotion.

 

So, positive emotion is particularly more powerful than negative emotion. Love is actually very powerful to like motivate people. And so, you know, intention is your arrow. And then attention is your eye on the bullseye. And your mission is the path of the arrow and the vision is you hitting the Bullseye, and then the emotion is like your arm pulling that bow back. But I read this book by this doctor called “Letting Go,” I think his name is David Hawkins, I think is his name. Is it Richard or David Hawkins? I think it’s David Hawkins.

 

Anyway, this guy wrote this book called “Letting Go” and I was like, “Holy crap, I did not realize that letting go was like the secret.” So the secret is, basically you have to let go of the outcome, you should like, let go, like, go there, just let it go. And but if enough people around, you actually see the entire thing you’re trying to create, like the vision, the mission, they have their attention on the same vision, then you start getting a field effect of reality.

 

So everyone’s starting to make this reality come into existence. And that is like, your consciousness is not just your brain. It’s not like your brain is just like, this is consciousness. Your consciousness is in every single cell of your body, I believe. And it’s largely the information flow, and the energy and information flow is essentially your mind. And your consciousness is like, where is that energy pointed out right now.

 

And so you know, when I’m exercising, I put my energy to like, when I’m lifting weights, I pointed at the muscle that I’m trying to work out. When I’m doing work, I point my energy at like, when I’m trying to write. If I’m on a podcast, I’m pointing my energy at you. But when you’re working on a big idea, you actually want to have a bunch of people putting their energy towards the thing you want to build.

 

So one of the things that I do for programming my subconscious is, like, I really, I pray a lot more. So I used to not pray for a long time because I just wasn’t religious. And then I realized that, like, prayer is literally… So anxiety is prayer for things you don’t want to happen but you can pray for things that you do want to happen, right? So whenever I’m feeling anxious, I just try to cancel those thoughts and I just focus on praying for the things that I want. So I pray in the morning and pray in the evening, mostly in the evening. I also do a lot of dream work. And so your dream state is like deeply connected to your subconscious.

 

So, I spent a lot of time working on how to become a better dreamer. I think I dream more than the average person I get like multiple hours of REM, I don’t even know if that’s healthy anymore. But like I get a lot of REM sleep, I think I probably get more REMS than deep sleep, which might be an issue. But I definitely get a lot of stuff through my dreams. And then on top of that, I have done hypnosis in the past.

 

Hypnosis got me exercising consistently, which is really cool. So big believer in hypnosis. And then I have also used ketamine-assisted therapy and designed a protocol around very specific intention setting that kind of activates the placebo response and uses the neuroplasticity effect of ketamine to make changes in my life.

 

So that’s what actually I do think that helped get me through the pandemic is sublingual ketamine was really useful. I don’t really use it much anymore, but it was very useful during the pandemic because social isolation contributes to declines in neuroplasticity. So exercise and a little bit of psychedelics can actually, you know, that kind of means legal, you can get it prescribed by a doctor, it really did make a difference.

 

But in order to actually create coherent form, like to coherently program your subconscious, you actually have to have very specific requests. So you always want to ask things to your subconscious in the positive. Because subconscious hears…it actually doesn’t respond to the negative. So you just like don’t want to say, “I don’t want this,” because it’s not gonna hear it. It needs to be like, “I want this” instead of “I don’t want this.” So always talking to your subconscious in the positive.

 

And then really taking advantage of this state of mind in meditation. So if I really want to create something, like, the best thing I can do is sit still. And literally, like, meditation is one of the best ways for you to just, like, calm your mind and calm your focus. And just like really let your inner voice come through. So meditation, ketamine-assisted therapy, dream work, hypnosis, and then like really clear intention, setting, and prayer.

 

On top of that, there’s actual evidence that gratitude practices actually increase oxytocin signaling, and like, I think a lot of these have a common thread of oxytocin, and oxytocin essentially is the pro-social hormone and it’s the hormone of feeling safe. And so if you want your subconscious to be able to express itself, it can’t be feeling fearful, it needs to feel safe and connected to you.

 

And the problem is that for a lot of people, their subconscious is in the its fear-based play because there’s a lot of unresolved trauma. So I’ve never really communicated like this before. But I really do think that part of what’s happening when you’re working through your trauma is you’re actually like, bringing through like, you’re actually allowing your traumatized part of yourself, like, find a source of safety and find a resolution. And when that part of yourself feels, it’s almost like you’re turning off the programming that’s constantly in the background of I need to be in a state of hyper-vigilance and alarm.

 

And you can tune that down, turn the volume down, then what I think is really happening on a molecular level is you’re exiting the cell danger response. So the cell danger response is literally… Robert Navios work on what happens in the mitochondria when they feel threatened. And they go into a state of defending themselves and not in a state of healing but in a state of defense. It’s kind of like if there’s a hurricane outside, you can’t like do renovations in the house when there’s a current hurricane. Same thing in your cells, your cells can’t really maintain their thermal behavior if they’re under threat. So we have to turn off the threat if we want to turn on the healing.

 

And there’s actually a program called the Safe and Sound Protocol by the most brilliant thinkers of our time, Steven Porges, who had developed polyvagal theory. And he actually used this protocol to use sound to tune the nervous system back towards safety. So turns out that there’s quite a lot of opportunity. And just like using different ways to tune the nervous system back to this place of feeling like it can relax and heal.

 

Katie: I love that you brought that up. I actually use the safe and sound protocol with one of my children who was a traumatic birth, in an emergency C section, we both almost died. And that was really helpful for him. But I love the things that you just said about anxiety as a prayer for things you don’t want to happen. And I think we want the silver bullet. We want the fancy biohacking and the big tech, but it’s really those things you mentioned the gratitude meditation, and then becoming very aware of what we’re saying to our subconscious and our interaction there. That really, at least to me have had the biggest effect.

 

When you talked about the subconscious side, I realized for a lot of years, I was for sure in that cell danger place, and probably didn’t enter parasympathetic for a solid decade because of that but also the questions I was asking my subconscious were all fear-based, were all negative. And that’s so self-perpetuating. And I started really paying attention to that. And even on a very superficial level, instead of asking, like, “Oh, why can’t I lose weight?” Which of course, then my subconscious would answer like, “Oh, here’s all the reasons you can’t lose weight.”

 

But I would learn to ask better questions and have a more positive focus, with my subconscious of how can I make this so much fun? How can I nourish my body best? How can I love myself best? It totally changed over time, my relationship with my inner self.

 

Dr. Molly: Yes. Self-compassion has done more for my body than anything else in the world. It’s so nuts. It’s like, once you just stopped attacking yourself. Like, if we attack ourselves, we’re actually just setting ourselves up for not healing, because we’re literally pushing ourselves into the cell danger response. Like, I’ve seen so many women who are like, “I can’t lose weight, I can’t lose weight, I can’t lose weight.” And it’s like, and I’ve also seen a lot of women who are like, “I can’t have a child, I can’t have a child.”

 

It’s, like, if that’s what your brain is hearing, then you’re not going to get the outcome you want, because your body’s going to be in a state of threat. So it’s typically when women stop trying that they start getting pregnant, it’s typically when a woman gives up on weight loss and just starts, like, eating what nourishes her and what feels good, that she starts losing the weight.

 

It’s so interesting, like, my body goes completely in and out of, like, I can literally see my body changed five to 10 pounds, depending on if I feel safe, I feel connected if I feel at ease, versus if I feel stressed. If I feel worried if I feel self-calm, like, subconscious, It’s almost like this. It’s like your body goes into an energy storage mode specifically because it’s like, I’m not safe. If I don’t feel safe, I need to make sure I can survive.

 

And that most primitive program is, like, behind why so many people are unfortunately unable to lose weight. And I’ve had way better like way more ease in weight loss and loss this last year than I did during 2020 because I wasn’t trying to lose weight anymore. I was just, like, trying to be connected. I was just trying to connect to my friends, try to work on my own self-love, trying to work on my own attachment dysfunction. And when I did all that work, it was like weight loss just happened and the exercising just was easy. And like eating when I wanted, eating what I knew was good for me was effortless. And I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what about what is this about?”

 

Katie: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be a fight anymore.

 

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And I know we have a time limit with you today. So I want to be aware of that and make sure we also get to touch a little bit on healthspan and anti-aging, because this is another area of brilliance for you. But hopefully, we can also do a round two that goes deep specifically on that. But you mentioned about, you know, anti-aging and aligning energy and information flow.

 

And I know, you’ve done a lot of work with a lot of top performers all over the world on healthspan and anti-aging and that people also look to you for advice on this or that you get asked a lot of questions because you seem to not age at all or age backwards for you to just touch on a little bit of the healthspan and anti-aging stuff while we still have a little time.

 

Dr. Molly: Yeah. I do feel like I am in some ways aging backwards, but I did age forward a little bit during the pandemic. But then aged backwards again at last. And I think the last year I’ve been a nomad. So it’s definitely been a physical challenge in new ways but I have learned to adapt and self manage in any environment, which is pretty cool. Like I’ve learned to like, drop into a city figure out what where to exercise, figured out where to find food, and figure out how to turn my neck circadian rhythms to fit the new place I’m in.

 

But, you know, I was just thinking about what have I done in the last 10 years to like, end up this way. And it’s been a lot of things, the first thing I did was optimize my sleep. Because circadian rhythms program your metabolism, and actually really important for brain health. So getting your sleep right is like everything else is just easier. If you just have more sleep, you just have more capacity if you sleep. Then I optimized my food intolerances because I didn’t realize I had celiac. And I was really, really… I was having chronic diarrhea. I would just like pass out after eating any wheat and anything with sugar, I couldn’t just keep awake. I was just so tired. It was like my body would just shut down.

 

And one of my mentors was like, “You might want to give up gluten and dairy for a little while.” And I was like, “Really?” So I did it and like within six months, I actually put on weight because I was underweight before and my gut healed, my brain improved, my ADHD resolved significantly. And then I got my micronutrients in order because I started measuring my new micronutrients. And I really realized that like a nutrient-dense diet was really important but then in the process, I discovered that my macronutrients were imbalanced because I was wearing a glucose monitor. And I was like, “Oh, crap, my glucose is all over the place.” This is not good, because I was eating a lot of gluten-free foods, right? But they were refined carbohydrates.

 

So I discovered that I needed to drastically cut out a lot of sugar I was consuming. I had to drastically cut out the amount of carbohydrates I was consuming. And then that really made a difference for sure in my appearance, and also my biomarkers. And then from there, I also optimized… No, I didn’t get handed a very good gut. So I’ve had to optimize my gut a few times, I’ve actually had to fix my gut, like, probably four times in the last 10 years, because I just got handed a very sensitive gut. And so that is one of my weak points, unfortunately, but it’s important that you know your weak points if you’re going to try to optimize your health because like, that’s where you’re gonna tune-up, you know.

 

I’ve optimized detoxification, I started doing these vacations with this organization that did fitness with people and like bring these executives on these really fitness-oriented trips. And I really discovered that I had an athlete in me and so I started doing more exercise. So I run and I lift mostly and I like to bike. I love running, biking, hiking, and lifting. I like any sport really, like anything that’s physically active I’d love to do. I am a knowledge worker so I sit way too much from the computer. But I do anticipate moving to an environment where I can walk a lot and do a lot more outside.

What else did I do? I optimized my stress and my, like, really looking at heart rate variability, and specifically even the last six months, I’ve really worked on my HRVs conservatively. So breath works more… I was doing, like, a lot more weight lifting than cardio. So I added more cardio, and just more, more meditation, and just more mindfulness practices have been really helpful. And then relationships, right? So like, there was this big, glaring missing piece and all of my health, you know, theories, when I realized that, like, social disconnection, is a bigger driver of disease and smoking, drinking, sedentary, obesity, etc. And I was like, “Whoa, holy crap, I really need to optimize my social connection.”

 

So after feeling disconnected for a year, because of the pandemic, I specifically went out and traveled to all the major cities of America to see all my friends. And obviously, that’s a major privilege. And I’m fully aware that that’s not normal for most people to do, but I really wanted to rebuild my friendships. So I took almost every opportunity I could to connect with people, and it has paid so many dividends. I feel more connected than ever. It’s just like, the highest I’ve ever been after coming out of 2020 and revisiting all my friends in Los Angeles and being like, “Holy crap, I haven’t been better on my friends in a year and I feel literally so high on life.” It was like I was slightly manic. I was like, kind of hypomanic because I was just like, “People again go by God, I love people so much.” But that kind of toned down by the summer.

 

And so, you know, like a lot of this stuff is pretty central to functional medicine but really my biggest belief is that it was mitochondrial optimization and optimizing for an anti inflammatory like as anti-inflammatory as you can as a lifestyle. Those two things are really the key to aging well. And so turning often from inflammatory signals through optimizing gut health, and then also pro-social behaviors or anti-inflammatory turns out, vasopressin is more inflammatory, oxytocin is more anti-inflammatory.

 

So things are not going to optimize oxytocin, turn off inflammatory signaling, but then the mitochondria of research I was doing was like, “Whoa, I finally understood, like, how we have batteries, capacitors in ourselves, and this is our source of potential and capacitance, and capacity is the ability to do work.” And so the ability to deploy charge, store charge, and use charge is, like, what health is all about, it’s literally how you are able to meet your challenges and exceed, you know, potentially have extra energy beyond meeting your challenges. And also, if you get hit with an infection, like COVID, you bounce back.

 

So I bounced back pretty fast from COVID. I did get access to the antibodies but whether I had Omicron or not, I don’t really know, it could have been that the antibodies were placebo but I definitely felt like I bounced back without any long COVID symptoms. And it’s because I was like I made myself move every day, I actually let myself fast a bit during being sick. So I let my mitochondria just like, I turned down the amount of work that they had to do and just let my body fast a bit. And I do think that fasting is really helpful for healing in some cases.

 

And, you know, as I should also mention is like, building metabolic flexibility is about tuning the mitochondria fuel substrate supply. And so if you can tune to in your body to properly digest fats, and carbohydrates, and flip the switch between fat and carb metabolism, that’s really, really good for mitochondrial health. And that was one of the things that I learned to do in 2018, 2019. It was all about learning ketosis and fasting. And now I do cyclical ketosis. I’m definitely not a person, who just doesn’t eat carbs but I’m far more balanced with my fasting and ketosis than I was in the past because I’ve learned that as a woman, we can really mess up our hormones if we send too many scarcity signals. And fasting and ketosis are good meta hormetic stressors for men. But in women, if they’ve done too much, they will throw off your hormones, and that is not good for fertility.

 

So that’s a lot of things to optimize. And so some people like, “How do you look so young,” It’s like, well, for 10 years, I committed myself to optimizing health. And I ran hundreds of tests on myself and my clients and I wore a continuous glucose monitor and an Oura ring. And I literally taught at Stanford a course on healthspan. So if I don’t look young, then I would be doing something wrong.

 

And so I kind of believe that I also got good genetics, but I do think that I do look a little bit younger than I did a few years ago and I think it was the blood sugar optimization, and then like the working on my trauma and my subconscious stuff. Those two things, that was like, those are the biggest levers I think you can pull.

 

Fitness is pretty much a given, by the way. Like if you’re not exercising, you’re just kind of missing out on more energy, you’re just like, you can literally have the energy of two people if you exercise, so it’s one of those no-brainers. But I think if there are two things that I want to teach the world, you know, it’s all about metabolism. And it’s all about this, these pro-social behaviors, and subconscious reprogramming.

 

Katie: Like you, I’ve discovered as an adult that I have more athletic than I thought I was, and it’s so much fun. I definitely echo your encouragement on that. I do think we’ll have to do a round two to go deep on things like optimizing all of these particulars and HRV. That’s been a journey for me the last couple of years, as well. I definitely echo what you say about fasting as well. I think it’s an incredible tool, but as a woman, you want to very much be in tune with your body, and listen to it when you’re fasting, for sure. And in the interest of making sure I respect your time deadline today, a couple of last wrap-up questions. The first being, if there’s a book or a number of books that have profoundly influenced your life, and if so, what they are and why? I know you already mentioned a couple but curious, are there any others?

 

Dr. Molly: Well, when I was just starting out my career of being a private doctor, I left my residency and started my own medical practice and started my own consultancy, and I did not know what I was doing. But I knew that I knew enough about learning that I could figure it out. So I spent quite a lot of time teaching myself “Bioinformatics,” but that wasn’t really a book. But I did find this but my mentor gave me he gave me a book that was the textbook of “Functional Medicine.” And he said, “Look, if you want to learn what I do to optimize health, you got to learn this.” I was like, “What?” I was like, “Alright.”

 

So that book was really helpful because it gave me a framework of thinking about health that I didn’t know. So that was a really important book. I’m trying to think. I do think that another important book, you know, for anyone who’s going to delve into it the spiritual realm, I was not prepared for the spiritual awakening that I had in 2019. I really just asked the universe for a taste of enlightenment, and it kicked me in the face with spiritual awakening. And it was so intense that I did not know what to do with myself. And I ended up having to go to Maui for three months on sabbatical, because I was like, not in a good state, because I was just like, all this energy was flowing through me, I didn’t know what to do with it. And I didn’t know how to ground myself. And I was feeling really freaked out in general.

 

So I was meditating a ton, I was going to meditate retreats, trying to get my energy down to like normal balance. And I found this book called “Buddha Takes No Prisoners.” And it was like, basically, like, the spiritual path is serious Jedi training. And you do not ask for a spiritual awakening, unless you’re ready for your life to be completely turned upside down. Because you’re not going to be normal again, like, you’re not going to be like everyone else again, you’re never going to go back to the person that you were before. And it’s because it’s designed to transform you.

 

But I needed something to tell me that things were going to get better because at that time, like, there’s plenty of people who go through spiritual awakenings, and they just cannot normally function in society. And unfortunately, we don’t talk enough about this. And I think a lot of mental breakdowns are actually a spiritual emergence rather than a spiritual emergency. And I didn’t have a breakdown, necessarily, I didn’t have like a nervous breakdown. I didn’t have any, really, I just didn’t know how to handle all the change that was going through me. And I was kind of in a state of feeling a little helpless.

 

I actually have heard of people who have had spiritual things they do go through nervous breakdowns and, you know, I didn’t know, there was a book for that. So I felt very much like meditation retreats, and this book would have to “Take No Prisoners” I needed to look at my shadow on my ego and just examine the parts of myself that I really needed to see.

 

And honestly, it’s a process, you don’t just like, wake up, and then you’re better. You actually have to continuously work on enlightening yourself, like, enlightenment is not a destination, it is a practice, like, you have to work on enlightenment. It’s not just like, some people get it and some people just drops down their head, and mountaintop just drops on their head. But most people have to test scale the mountain and scaling the mountain is not just a thing, you just you don’t just reach the top of the mountain and you’re like, “Alright, I am now enlightened.”

 

You actually have to go down back to the mountain again, and then have to go up another one. And it’s like this constant process of going up and down the mountain. And I didn’t realize that. And so that book really helped me a lot.

 

I’d also say that, let’s see here are other books that have been transformative for me. I mean, those are definitely up there, I’d say is like, and then I’d say maybe there’s a great book that my friend Dallas Hartwig recommended to me called “Attachment Disturbances and Adults Comprehensive Repair.” And it was one of those books where I was just like, I need a format of understanding attachment because I don’t really get it. And it was like a textbook for psychologists. And I really think that if you want to understand a topic well, just pick up a textbook on it, and just sit there and read the whole thing. And that was really important for me to understand, “Oh, like this is really key.”

 

And then another great book that I would recommend everyone read, there’s two of them. I love this man, Mantak Chia. He is a legend. And he wrote a book called “Cultivating Male Sexual Energy and Cultivating Female Sexual Energy.” And both of these books are really important if you want to have any understanding of Taoism and like, masculine-feminine polarity, which I think is very much being discarded by our society unnecessarily. And I really believe that the masculine and feminine polarity exist for a reason. And I actually think that the confusion in our society is… I hope I don’t get canceled for saying this, but I do think that confusion in society is a problem for I think, just gender identity issues is a very big concern.

 

And I think it’s a canary in the coal mine of something bigger happening, and I don’t really understand what it is yet. But there’s nothing wrong with being a woman and having femininity and also having been in touch with your masculine side. And there’s nothing wrong with being a man who’s in his masculinity, who’s also in touch with his feminine side. But part of sexuality is about polarity. And so it’s knowing when to drop into your feminine knowing when to drop in your masculine and honestly, I think there’s something to be said about teaching people about that and I really like Mantak Chia’s book because it’s like this very cool Eastern esoteric perspective that you don’t normally get.

 

So those are some of my favorite books, honestly, and they just came to me because they’re kind of salient to what I’m researching right now. And beyond that, like, you know, any other questions. I wanted to do a little quick, like, promotion of this company I’m working with, if that’s possible?

 

Katie: Yeah, let’s wrap with that. I was making footnotes. And yeah, let’s wrap with that, and let’s commit to a round two one day.

 

Dr. Molly: Yeah. So one thing I would like to say is, like, there’s two really important supplements right now that are, absolutely game-changing and they actually work, and like a lot of supplements don’t work, because they just aren’t properly designed. But I’m kind of crazy about these two supplements. One of them is Qualia Skin by NeuroHacker. And they asked me literally for months to be their spokesperson. And I turned them down for literally months. And then I gave their product to my sister. And again, I started taking it myself, because I was like, “Whatever, I’ll try it.” And I was like, “Whoa, this thing actually makes my skin glow.”

 

So people are always asking me, how do you have such great skin and I’m like, “Well, A, I take care of it, I moisturize, I wash it, I never go to bed with makeup on, I exfoliate, I use sunscreen.” But on top of that… And I use vitamin c. But on top of that, I started taking the supplement, and like there’s actual research on carotenoids, increasing the glow of your skin and making you look more attractive. So I love this thing I travel with it. The reason why I like it so much is because I don’t always get access to tons and tons of fruit and vegetables when I’m traveling. So it kind of makes up for a little bit of that. It’s easier to find green vegetables when traveling but red ones are more challenging. So I found it, so it has a lot of red fruits in it.

 

And then I also am obsessed with this company called nPure Three, and they’re probably going to launch in the next three months in America. And it’s the highest grade premium Omega three in the world. It is literally better than pharmaceutical grade. It’s like actually more pure than pharmaceutical grade. And I take like eight capsules of this stuff. And it is literally brain medicine, like it makes my brain feel amazing. And so I’m a big fan of this company, and friends of the founder. And I think they’re going to be launching in probably the next three months.

 

So I would go to their website and sign up if you can. So they’re awesome. Those are my two favorite tips right now for supplements.

 

Katie: Awesome. And I’ll put links to those and also to all the books you mentioned and to your various online presences in the show notes so you guys can find those in wellnessmama.fm. So I definitely recommend… I followed you on Instagram, you always have a lot of great information there as well but I know how busy you are. I know you’re also traveling. So thank you for the time today and for sharing all of this and let’s go deep on health span one day.

 

Dr. Molly: Yes. Can wait for it. And just thank you so much for this opportunity. I really respect this podcast and your platform you’ve built and just looking forward to building a friendship with you.

 

Katie: Likewise, and thank you for being here. Thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama” podcast.

 

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.