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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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This episode is brought to you by LMNT. And you’ve probably heard me talk about my love of getting enough salt before and how this made a drastic difference in my energy levels. And LMNT is the easiest way that I have found to do this as well as the tastiest. We know that proper hydration leads to better sleep, sharper focus, better energy, and so much more. But hydration isn’t just about drinking water. In fact, only drinking water alone all the time can actually be counterproductive. Because being optimally hydrated, which is a state called urohydration, is about optimizing your body’s fluid ratios. And this depends on many factors, including the intake and excretion of things like salt and electrolytes. Now, electrolytes are charged minerals that conduct electricity to power your nervous system. They also regulate hydration status by balancing fluids inside and outside of our cells. LMNT was created with a science-backed electrolyte ratio of 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium with no sugar. So even though these taste incredible, they don’t have added sugar, and I love my kids consuming them as well.
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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and I absolutely loved recording this episode with Mastin Kipp, who I met years ago, and I was so excited to reconnect with. This episode delves into the topic of how to reclaim your nervous system. If you have listened for a while, you know that this was a huge piece for me in my personal journey and in healing, and I love Mastin’s approach to this. He has so many valuable takeaways in this episode. And I feel like this is going to be life-changing for a lot of people listening. If you’re not familiar with Mastin, he’s a life coach, an entrepreneur, an author, and a self-taught expert on the human mind. And he bridges the gap between therapy, coaching, and personal development with over two decades of experience combining psychological research, neuroscience, evidence-based concepts, and practical tools. He has a new book called Reclaim Your Nervous System, and he delves into some of the key concepts in that today. I will link to a lot of additional resources in the show notes at wellnessmama.com because he has some really valuable advice in this episode. But let’s jump in and delve into the topic of reclaiming your nervous system. Mastin, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Mastin: I’m so excited to have this conversation. My pleasure.
Katie: Me too. And we were talking before we started recording, we’ve actually gotten to meet in real life through a mutual friend, Jim Kwik, who’s also been on this podcast. And I’m a huge fan of Jim and his work. And I’m really excited to actually learn from you today and to get to share this conversation with the audience. Because you have expertise in many areas, but the one you’re going to be talking about today, I feel like is so important for women and for moms and for our kids. And it’s, I feel like just not discussed widely enough. We hear a little bit about nervous system health, but I feel like it’s a little bit elusive and there are not great resources that I found until you for actually, how do we develop a solid foundation in this area? How do we support our nervous systems? I know there’s so many directions we can go in this, but for maybe broad context, as we start, can you walk us through sort of the importance of the nervous system and why this topic deserves attention?
Mastin: Absolutely, yeah. So basically, all of our life that we experience is experienced through the nervous system. So our thoughts, our feelings, our physical sensations, the trauma that we’ve been through, the joy that we had, the best day of our life, the worst day of our life. The memories that we hold on to, that we cherish. Everything is experienced through our nervous system. Learning, relationships, falling in love, all of the experiences of life happen through our nervous system. And there is also a developmental process that is predictable that the nervous system goes through from conception through to about 25, 30 years old, when our prefrontal cortex, the most advanced part of our brain comes online.
And so all of our experiences, our relationships, the food that we put in our body, all these things shape our nervous system. And then that creates expectations from our nervous system that are mostly unconscious about what life means, what’s safe or not safe, what we should or shouldn’t do, what’s okay to do, what’s not okay to do. And so if we want to change your life, if you want to help your child be set up for success into adulthood, understanding your nervous system and then the nervous system is so very important. And also understanding that depending on the age of a child, you’re basically the regulating force in that child’s life because they don’t even have the machinery available yet. And so understanding this, I think creates a lot of context for how to show up as a mom, a business owner, a partner. And also understanding what maybe children are going through, what a partner is going through. And in general, it sort of explains why people do what they do and what we can do to start to shift and change it. But if we don’t understand how our nervous system works, how the nervous system works, life is very mysterious. But when we start to understand these things, a lot of things become less mysterious.
Katie: I’m so glad you brought up that point because I read this in passing and I was going to ask you to confirm and maybe explain a little bit. But I read that essentially until about age seven, our children are actually very extremely co-regulated and essentially dependent on us for nervous system regulation, which makes sense. I don’t know if that’s entirely a true stat or if there’s a lot more nuance to that. But I feel like even just that idea really brought a lot of like as a mom, I thought like, oh, wow, that makes sense. And that’s something I would want to be very aware of, especially with babies and small children.
Mastin: Big time, yeah. I mean I think these days it’s about 35. But no, I’m just kidding. But no, I think, here’s something that’s important to understand. Like one thing that starts to happen when we talk to people who are parents about this stuff is it’s like, did I mess up my kids? And the answer is human beings have been around for like a very long time. Like you didn’t mess up your kids, and it’s never too late to learn this stuff and then to have a positive impact on your children. And so that’s an important thing to understand.
But yes, when children are younger, they don’t have a prefrontal cortex or much of one. And so it’s the parent’s job to basically be the regulating factor. I remember when I was like five or six years old, I was having a temper tantrum. My father told me I was acting like a child, and I literally yelled at him like, I am a child, and I didn’t realize the wisdom of that statement until many years later in therapy. But children can be very dysregulating, but they’re supposed to be because they don’t have the machinery. It’s like being mad at like a tricycle for not going as fast as a NASCAR. Like it just doesn’t have the machinery yet.
And so the best way to influence your children is to understand how the nervous system works, how your nervous system works, and to decide to be a regulating force in the household for yourself. And then also hopefully if there’s a partnership or a marriage of some kind that you two present a united front and understand how each other’s nervous systems work so that like the kids aren’t splitting the parents and the parents are both arguing and repairing in front of the children. That’s also very important too. So the children can see the process of rupture and repair.
Katie: Well, I feel like that’s an important point. It seems like often parents want to avoid conflict in front of their kids so that it doesn’t stress the kids out. But I have heard that as well, that actually it’s more powerful for them to see you actually be able to engage and have disagreements. And then the repair that comes from that, then if you always hide the disagreements and they never get to see things work out, which makes sense.
Mastin: That’s right. Or if they see the argument, but not the repair. Now, we’re not talking about adverse childhood experiences. One of the ACE questions is something like, did you witness violence growing up? So we’re not talking about violence, but we are talking about disagreement because basically you’re modeling for your children. We only wish that children could pay attention to what we said, not what we did. But they’re modeling what we do and the state that we’re in. They’re a reflection of that.
And so if we can show them, yes, it’s okay to disagree. Well, first, we’re not going to raise people-pleasers or pushovers. But then also it’s okay that we can disagree and then come back together and repair because then that helps us create secure functioning. Because we realize, oh, there’s a rupture, but then there’s a repair afterwards. And that creates an expectation in a child’s nervous system that I can speak up, cause a little bit of disagreement, but ultimately be able to come back together. That’s really what secure functioning is all about. And so modeling that for them is very, very important for sure.
Katie: And I would guess also modeling that in relation to them, like as parents, if we ever lose our patience or have a bad day, I found that like with my kids, if those things inevitably happen, if I then go back after and apologize to them and take ownership for like, I’m sorry, I was low on patience and I overreacted. It actually seems like that strengthens the bond, which makes sense.
Mastin: Big time.
Katie: That’s awesome. Okay.
Mastin: Rupture and repairs and everything. My parents were very smart when I was younger. They told me the difference between loving me and liking me and not even me, but my behavior. So they maintain always a posture of we love you, but we don’t like what you just did. And they separated those two things. So there was a sense of being enough, but then realizing that the problem wasn’t me. It was the behavior. And that was super helpful for me too as a kid. And then later learning about all this stuff, I was like, my parents were like pretty smart actually, you know?
Katie: That’s awesome. I think that’s huge for all the parents listening is just if we can anchor in them, like there’s always unconditional love. And that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree or like everything you ever choose to do, but none of those things are a threat to the fact that I love you unconditionally and you can’t change that. I think that’s huge. Okay.
So I would love to get into the nitty gritty of how do we reclaim and support our nervous systems because some listeners probably have heard me talk about this before, where this was actually a pivotal piece for me, actually, even in my physical health, I was 10 years in doing all working with all the doctors, doing spreadsheets worth of supplements, tracking everything and saw little to no improvement. And then when I addressed the mental emotional side, and I would say like drastically shifted my nervous system, my entire body changed. And so I’ve seen firsthand like this, I feel like is a massive key piece that doesn’t get talked about enough. And also for me, at least it was a long and winding journey and a little bit elusive to try to figure out. So walk us through sort of like nervous system inputs, or how do you even become aware of the state of your nervous system? And then we’ll go into what we can do about it.
Mastin: Sure. So first thing first, the reason why it’s not talked about enough is because the research is so new. So it’s coming out very quickly. And so I’m doing my best to bring it forward. So conversations like this really help. So you can think about your nervous system as, one of the things to think about is it’s depending on what’s happening in your body, whether you’re in creative thinking and expansion and big ideas or if you’re in fight or flight or if you’re kind of shut down and dissociated and checked out. Each of those states, nervous system states, has a different expense in the metabolism.
So when we think about being in a regulated nervous system, when I feel like I can handle any emotion, I can get stressed and then come back, or I can get sad and I can kind of come back, I can see things clearly, I can make a new decision about what something means, those are metabolically very expensive. There’s a lot of oxygen and glucose necessary to be in that state, and we need relational and environmental safety. So that’s more of what’s called a ventral state, ventral vagal state, where there’s health, growth, restoration. I’m pro-social. I’m engaging with other people. I tend to have nice vocal prosody. I tend to have safe signals on my face and in my tone of voice and my body posture.
But when there’s too much challenge, we go from that state, we drop down into the fight or flight state, which is sympathetic nervous system. That runs up and down your spine. That’s anxiety, stress, fear, et cetera. And that’s where we get a lot of cortisol, low-grade subclinical inflammation, HPA axis issues, and stuff like that. Except in sympathetic nervous system, when you look at cortisol being boosted, well, what boosts alongside cortisol is glucose levels. Because the body is preparing to fight or flee, which requires mobilization, and our body needs glucose to mobilize.
And so one of the reasons why we sometimes have chronic fatigue or we have these mysterious illnesses that no glutamine can get rid of or probiotics can get rid of is because our metabolic energy is being diverted into stress hormones. And it’s basically using up all of our energy to fight or flee. But then if we don’t move, we don’t move through it, we don’t use it, it just stays static and low-grade inflammation causes all kinds of problems all over the body. And then if we’re in a sympathetic nervous system state, that typically inhibits a vagal tone, which is part of the parasympathetic nervous system that helps us be in health, growth, and restoration. Because why would I be calm if I’m about to be attacked or something like that? So I can’t have, I can’t be calm. I can’t be regulated.
But if there’s too much challenge, and I can’t run and I can’t fight back, I drop down to what’s called a dorsal vagal response, which is the vagus nerve below the diaphragm, which is immobilization, dissociation, checking out because some part of me feels like there’s imminent life threat. I cannot escape from this. I have to shut down. This happens sometimes when certain people see blood and they pass out. That’s called a vasovagal syncope. That’s the vagus nerve shutting you down. People pass out for different reasons. When there’s dissociation because of trauma, that can be a dorsal vagal shutdown response as well.
However, when we’re in dissociation and shutting things down, we still are holding the experiences that we went through out of awareness, which is also metabolically expensive. And so when you recover memories of trauma or dissociation and you’re able to bring them forward from the back parts of the brain and the body into the prefrontal cortex to make a new decision, which is what psychedelic therapies do, good therapies help with, breathwork, somatic work. The goal of most good work is to make that happen. Then we can make a new decision about what something means. And our body and nervous system doesn’t have to hold those memories out of awareness, i.e., allocate/budget energy to hold them out of awareness.
And so sometimes chronic fatigue is a combination of I’m stuck in fight or flight. There’s a bunch of stuff I don’t want to remember. My body’s keeping all this out of my awareness just so I can be here. That’s not Lyme disease. And I’m not trying to be negative. We work with a lot of functional medicine doctors. But it’s interesting, I had a client once who said she couldn’t move forward in her business because of Lyme disease and she got all this brain fog. But then as soon as she started talking about her children, she lit up like a Christmas tree. And I said, so let me understand. Do you have like topic-dependent Lyme? Because when you were talking about your kids, you were lit up. But you’re talking about your business, there was this brain fog situation. But the idea of being seen, being heard, speaking up, using her voice was activating old memory that she was holding out of awareness.
And so it’s important to understand that yes, it could be adrenal fatigue. Yes, it could be some type of Lyme disease or some type of chronic illness that you should definitely see the functional medicine doctor about. However, these other things are very important to take into consideration. So when you talk about your journey, what you basically did was help your body bring things into awareness so it doesn’t have to use energy to hold it out of awareness. Probably had some somatic releases associated with that, emotional releases associated with that, that brought that information to the most advanced part of your brain where you could say, ah, that doesn’t mean this anymore. It means that. And now we have integration. And now that energy can be used for health, growth, restoration, joy, running your business, being a mom, all those other types of things. And so, I don’t know if that answers your question, but…
Katie: Yes, that was perhaps the best explanation of how the nervous system functions in a practical way that I’ve ever heard.
Mastin: Oh, yay.
Katie: And I absolutely resonated with that. Because the words that were given to me when I was struggling through that was thyroid disease and Hashimoto’s. And so I had this story about having Hashimoto’s, and that’s the reason I was so tired. Turns out when I addressed the inner work and the trauma side, it was actually that my nervous system was in a state of sympathetic nervous system dominance for over a decade. And so it didn’t matter what I did to try to nourish my body the perfect way or all the things I was doing. My body couldn’t receive the safety signals of that because I was in sympathetic dominance the entire time.
And so I went through like it was an adjustment for a year, I think, as my nervous system sort of re-regulated and learned to actually be able to enter parasympathetic and to feel calm. And it was life-changing. I actually credit that a lot with my thyroid, I no longer have those words that they gave me related to my thyroid. So for me, this was absolutely a key piece.
And you mentioned some great terms that I would love to go a little bit deeper on. You mentioned somatic work and breathwork and some of the other tools that are available. I know from experience, the nervous system side can feel difficult to kind of make progress on, especially if you have, like I was, was in that state for so long. It definitely took some intentionality and for me, a lot of experimentation. So if we can shorten that journey for anyone listening, I would love to hear from you, what impactful tools would you start with or where would you begin?
Mastin: Sure. You just said something really important. And the fact that you know about this is so cool. So this idea of sympathetic dominance basically means that your body is frozen in a state of sort of chronic fight or flight, and it’s an extremely expensive state to be stuck in metabolically. So a lot of resources are being diverted away from health, growth, restoration, pro-social relationships into defense, fight or flight, and into cortisol, into adrenaline, into like a high-stress rate.
So when we think about what does the nervous system need to come out of sympathetic dominance, this is going to sound really basic, but it is. Okay. Most things are here. You know, the latest nervous system science, polyvagal theory, the author of polyvagal theory, Stephen Porges, says that safety is the treatment. So before we even get into a modality of breathwork or EMDR or psychedelic work or a million different other things, you got to, not perfect safety, safe enough. So the practitioners you choose, the people in your life, the environments that you’re in, we want to create enough safety so that you’re getting signals of safety. Because sometimes people will say, I had a bad experience with EMDR. But what they mean is I had a bad experience with a specific EMDR practitioner because the modality is sort of the modality. But does the person make you feel safe or not? And sometimes we can pick people who mirror childhood caregiving patterns or we have to take care of them.
So you want to prioritize, do I feel safe? And there are some people that you can probably just open up to and talk to and tell them everything. I don’t know why, but I just, it’s because you feel safe. There are some practitioners or massage therapists or myofascial people that I’ve worked with, just them walking in the room, my body starts to relax, right? So you want to start to pay attention to when do you start to feel activated or dissociated or checked out or in a stressful state? What are the things that are causing it? And name and notice that first. And then also where do you feel it in your body? And start to pay attention to those things first.
Because I’m modality agnostic. I will tell you a few things though. To regulate your nervous system, it needs resources. And there’s three resources that it needs. Safe relationships, glucose, and oxygen. If you don’t have those three things, then you have a deficit. So you might have a relationship deficit. You might have a glucose deficit. Sorry, people, for ketosis unless you have cancer and stuff like that. And then also there could be an oxygen deficit. So that’s why, for example, breathwork, especially if you’re doing long holds and long exhales, helps oxygenate the body, right? Because if you’re holding your breath or exhaling, you’re probably not in a fight-or-flight situation. And so when you’re holding your breath and exhaling, it activates what’s called the vagal break, which down-regulates sympathetic nervous system, right?
One of my favorite modalities, it’s a little bougie. It’s bougie, but I love it. It’s hyperbaric oxygen. Hyperbaric oxygen compresses oxygen molecules and gives you about four times the amount of oxygen you normally get per breath. And because they’re compressed, they get delivered through multiple delivery mechanisms in the blood. And a lot of times, like sometimes our prefrontal cortex just doesn’t have the oxygen that it needs. And so breathwork, hyperbaric oxygen, doing things that help oxygenate your system, very, very valuable.
Now, the brain also needs glucose, which is not a license to start going to town on M&Ms or whatever. But we do need carbohydrates and glucose for our brain. So you want to be properly fueled and have proper nutrition also. And so if you have safe relationships, enough oxygen, and enough proper nutrition, then we can start to get a baseline of, okay, what works for you? Because what does somatic work? It just means the body. Everything is somatic. There’s no such thing as a non-somatic workout or yoga class or breathwork. Like, for it to not be somatic, it would have to not happen in your body.
So everyone’s using this word somatic. I’m using it literally to just mean something happened in your body, right? When you digest, that’s somatic. It’s over the body. But there’s different body modalities that can help calm things down. Because when we’re in sympathetic, the goal is to get the energy out. So that’s why exercise can be so amazing. That’s why yoga can be so amazing. Sometimes we get things stuck in our fascia, and we want to open up the fascia because if you’re staying down all day or whatever. So there’s lots of different things we can be doing. But if we don’t have safety, if we don’t have safe relationships, if we don’t have enough oxygen and abundance of oxygen to fuel our brain and enough glycogen to fuel our brain, all the other stuff doesn’t really matter. Does that make sense?
And then as soon as you start to have those things, then the world of modalities opens up. But I will tell you this, I would never suggest you use something or a modality that’s not somehow grounded in nervous system science. Because if it’s not aligned with how your nervous system works, we should throw it out. End of story. Just because someone came up with a model doesn’t mean that it’s aligned with our biology.
And so I don’t have a do this modality because it depends on where people are in their journey. Sometimes they’re healing. Sometimes they’re recovering. Sometimes they’re strengthening. Sometimes they’re optimizing. And so it’s like an athlete. If they are out because they’re having surgery, that would be different than if they’re on the field trying to optimize their performance. And so the modalities are a little more, it’s harder to say, well, this is the thing to do.
Katie: I’m so glad you brought that up because I’ve seen this play out in the health and wellness world for years. It’s like everybody wants the blueprint. They want the silver bullet. They want the exact plan. But there’s so much nuance there because we are each so individual. And it seems like in the nervous system realm, that is also extremely true. And there are these universal things that universally help the human nervous system. And the ones you just mentioned, I love because they are either largely extremely inexpensive or completely free when it’s something like, breathwork that’s accessible to all of us. And actually, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t take a lot of time. But as humans, we seem to have this ability to underestimate things that are extremely, profoundly helpful if they’re simple. Because we underestimate them based on their simplicity.
Mastin: I’ve done that a lot.
Katie: Yeah, we want the new fancy biohack or the expensive modality when really, it’s these foundational things. I love that you’re bringing a voice to for our nervous systems, what those foundational things are. It also helped my perspective a lot when I realized there’s been a lot of discussion about nervous system health in like little sound bites circulating on Instagram, for instance. And it always seems to focus on like regulating and calming. And somebody brought up a point that I thought was really valuable on the podcast actually, is like, if you are in the fight state of nervous system and you’re trying to just calm yourself down, like forcibly calm down, that’s actually nervous system suppression. Because you mentioned exercise, like actually your nervous system might need you to move. It might need to physically process that energy versus just thinking like, oh, I’m going to force myself to calm down.
Mastin: That’s right. And calm and regulated are far from the same thing. Okay. Because you can be dissociated, checked out, and calm. A regulated nervous system is like a healthy, pliable body. So example, Tom Brady, right? Best quarterback of all time. So about 45 years old, he was in the game, which is way longer than pretty much anybody, I think it’s the longest career ever. He created pliability where he could take a hit without being taken out. And that is really what nervous system regulation is all about. It means we can get angry, sad, stressed. We can experience the full range of our emotions and body sensations without being taken out by them.
So a calm nervous system sometimes means, to your point, suppressed or bypassed, right? A regulated nervous system says I can experience the full range of emotion and come back to baseline and not have to avoid an emotion or avoid a body sensation and be calm. Because calm is not our goal, always. Calm and regulated are not synonyms anywhere close to the same. They don’t mean anything close to the same thing.
Katie: That’s extremely valuable context to understand. I think we’ve kind of gotten a mis-explanation of that and these like mini soundbites that are floating all over Instagram. And I’m also glad you brought up the glucose piece because I’ve seen this, especially for women in the last 10 years or so, there’s a trend toward more intermittent fasting, more ketosis, more carnivore. And I think from a metabolic side, there can be a time and a place for all of those, but it seems like, especially for female hormones, overdoing that can be stressful on the body. And like you said, we’re trying to create safety within the body and not stress, but there is a metabolic need for glucose. But I would just love a little bit more nuance on this because like you mentioned briefly, that doesn’t mean go eat M&Ms, but the brain does need glucose. So any idea how much we need and/or healthy sources of ways to support that?
Mastin: We’re getting into zealot territory, Katie. So I’m going to watch my words right now, okay? So I just want to name that. So here’s what I’m going to tell you, okay? A good friend of mine is Dr. Layne Norton, biolayne on Instagram. He has a PhD in nutrition and he’s been on the Huberman podcast a bunch. I would refer you to Dr. Layne in terms of nutritional advice because that’s outside the scope of my practice. But here’s, I’ll tell you my belief, okay? My belief is that there’s a proper amount of proteins, fats, and carbs that we need based on our goals, weight loss, weight gain, building muscle, keeping muscle, whatever it might be.
So I believe in the law of thermodynamics, which means that if we consume more than we burn, we add adipose tissue or fat. If we burn more than we consume, then we take off adipose tissue and fat. That’s just physics. You can’t argue with that. Yes, there are extreme cases of thyroid and stuff like that. But for the most part, calories in, calories out, it’s like bank accounts. It’s accounting. It’s very simple.
In terms of carbohydrates, what I will tell you is that when you start demonizing a macronutrient for everybody, that’s a red flag to me because lipids and fats are precursors to hormones. Carbohydrates provide glycogen, which makes pretty much everything work in our body. Our muscles use glycogen. Our brain requires glycogen. And proteins are precursors to amino acids and neurotransmitters as well. And so we need all three. And we want to be able to test what makes sense.
What if I’m allergic to something or whatever it might be? Okay, yes, on an individual basis, there’s going to be personalized advice. Maybe some people can’t have gluten or some people can’t have a certain type of fish or nut or whatever it might be. But we have such an unhealthy relationship with food that to me it’s more about what is your relationship to food and just understand that each of the macronutrients is a required building block for things that happen in your body.
So if you demonize carbs, well, you’re not going to be giving yourself the glycogen that you need to do certain things. If you demonize protein, well, you’re not going to give you what you need to produce serotonin, usually. If you demonize fats, well, now you’re not giving yourself what you need to produce, I don’t know, testosterone or estrogen, right? So we need to understand that the macronutrients are building blocks for multiple processes in our body.
And so when it comes, and the best food test is you. You are the best food test, right? And so if it works for you, it works for you. But don’t do it because Paul Saladino said to do it or Gary Brecka said to do it, right? Or even Layne said to do it or Huberman said to do it. Do it because here’s what the literature says and here’s how I feel when I do it.
But I feel like talking about certain food preferences is almost like having a religious conversation about what God is the true God because everyone is going to disagree. So at the end of the day, you can only tell if it works for you, if it works for you based on how you feel. And if you’re having a hard time with brain fog, if you’re having a hard time with good thinking or creativity, maybe add in some complex carbohydrates and see what happens. God forbid, right? There’s been like this war on carbs for so long.
When we look at intermittent fasting and we look at some of these things, the only thing that intermittent fasting does in the context of weight loss is it shortens the window with which you can consume calories. And if that works for you, awesome. But there’s no, it’s not like, but you can’t, if you intermittent fast at a calorie surplus, you’re still going to gain weight, right?
And so we want to sort of take a step back from the emotional reaction around what food and what macro or micronutrient is what and go, when I eat this thing, how do I feel? Period, end of story. Because at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing. And then we should probably do a courtesy to others and not say, well, because this worked for me, it must work for everybody else. And if you’re going to do that, at least say that you’re doing that so that you don’t get a bunch of people eating one macronutrient only because it worked for you. I think that that’s a major disservice that we see in the health and fitness space.
And I love what biolayne does because he breaks down the science behind it. And he basically says, what I just said, which is do what’s right for you. But in terms of what to eat and the science behind nutrition, Layne Norton to me is the best, but not just his opinion, the data that he reports. And certainly, meta-analysis or larger bodies of work or human randomized controlled trials are the best place to get that information from. But your body is also the number one place to get the information from.
Katie: I’m so glad you said it that way. I’ll link to him as well in the show notes, but I seen that trend and I avoid actually sharing ever exactly what I eat in a day or exactly what supplements I taken a day for that exact reason in that I think there’s wisdom and we can learn something from essentially everyone we meet.
But I think the danger is when we try to apply the exact same template that worked for someone else to us because we are also individual. And it’s often we hear all the argument based on double-blind placebo-controlled studies. And I’m like, yes/and. An N of 1 study, if the N of 1 is you, is actually the most valuable data you will ever get. And so it’s like approach everything with curiosity, experiment on yourself and value that data. So I love that you explained it that way.
I also know you have literally, like quite literally written the book on this topic. And there’s so much more related to this than we can cover in this episode. I will link to it in the show notes, of course, but can you explain where people can find you and also find your new book, which I recently got to read and it’s awesome.
Mastin: Oh, thanks. Yeah. So it’s just Mastin Kipp, M-A-S-T-I-N, Kipp, K-I-P-P, on all the places, Instagram, TikTok, website, et cetera, YouTube, et cetera. And then Reclaim Your Nervous System is available wherever books are sold. Amazon, barnesandnoble.com tend to be the easiest place to go for that. And it is a guide to positive change and post-traumatic growth and mental wellness. So it is about positivity and creating a great life. It’s not about heavy trauma conversations. It really is about how can I make my next chapter my best chapter through the lens of the nervous system.
Katie: I love that. I say often on here that at the end of the day, we are each our own primary healthcare provider because we’re the ones making the daily choices that affect our health. And I feel like you’re giving a tangible resource for the nervous system side of that, which I think is a big piece for a lot of people. It certainly was for me. So I’m very grateful for your work. If you guys are listening, stay tuned because Mastin will be back to delve into some other topics on here as well. But Mastin, for today, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation and I’m so grateful.
Mastin: Okay, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Katie: Thank you for listening and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
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