Nutrition and Supplements for Brain Health

for somebody again we're making this a little bit obviously this is adhd focus but in general for someone who wants to you know have better memory have better focus have better attention you know is there things from a nutrition perspective that you would recommend that people might oversight whether it's the the obvious generic stuff or whether it's something that people don't think about from a nutrition supplementation and a lifestyle perspective yeah from i mean from a nutrition thing i would say more um more plants i don't want to say veganism but but people don't eat enough plant matter so especially things like um like berries like berries that have a lot of antioxidants and a lot of chemicals that improve memory but we don't no one really knows how they do that they kind of have an idea they're starting to, but you know, that type of thing, um, for most people that don't have ADHD, don't, don't get, watch your stimulant intake because for those types of people, it's going to actually make things worse because it's going to make them almost have like ADD types of symptoms. They're all jacked up. Um, whereas it's like, okay, you're normal, but now you've taken so much coffee that now you're acting like you're ADD. So maybe if you improve your sleep and, and maybe have a reasonable amount of coffee maybe throw some theanine and with that they smooth some things out you'll probably be concentrating better you're probably not procrastinate you probably get more done um that's what that's this type of stuff i would look at i like uh is a thing is a precursor to the gaba because i can actually cross the blood bank about it right is that the mentality well well no what i would use it for is to um to block uh to block like adenosine receptors. Um, well, what am I looking at? It's, you're going to make me pull this out. I have a good picture of this, but basically we're going to say the not, cause I can't think of us. It's again, it's late in the day and my medication wearing off. But, um, if you want to look at like the non-sciencey, um, reason why you would use the ending with coffee is it, it's smooths out the negative effects from coffee. So if you have coffee, you still get the, the focused energy but you don't get the erratic you know jacked up feeling from it right so yeah yeah and i like uh sun theanine is uh is the tried and true one that i've always used so if you see sun theanine on the bottle then that's pretty good so like if you're having a couple cups of coffee maybe throw in 100 milligrams of that and see if that smooths it out quite a bit that that's interesting that's something certainly i look at me what do you see often like i mean I'm assuming you've worked with people that have ADD, ADHD, and I know you work with people who have massive caffeine addictions because that's 90% of the personal training industry and I know how many coaches you train. You know, like, whether it's stimulant medication or stimulants in general, like, do you see this having a big impact on HRV? This is something, again, a relatively personal question when I know that, you know, I even, like, improved my nutrition, improved my conditioning over the course of the last year. resting heart rates in a low place blood pressure in a really good spot my hrv is always relatively on the low end of where things should be you know like this could be completely unrelated but when i start thinking of like a heavy use of stimulants also now finding out potentially having you know now having adhd i'm starting is there a link here between you know have you taken hrv lately since you started a medication uh not consistently i haven't used this thing quite enough i never charged it would be really interesting because there's a lot of people i've talked to that the minute they got in there on their meds that their hrv actually got better interesting yeah i the only time the only time i took i remembered this being charged and took it was after a massive team social where alcohol obviously crashed my metrics anyway so it ended up being exactly the same um but that that'll be that'll be interesting to look at actually it would be yeah it'd be interesting for you to track that and just see if it's significantly better than what you're tracking was before you started the medication and maybe different between medications if i like if i've got a month of ritalin see how that affects it then go on to something else see what happens there that could be a very very interesting thing one of the big things too is when you when you get on the medication obviously it's a stimulant so uh you're going to probably see a small increase in heart rate you're probably going to also see a small increase in blood pressure so i'm big on people with add getting your your lifts and your mess done like get your low intensity and moderate intensity cardio done and that will allow you to become stress resilient so that you it won't have that effect like i still even on medication i still have sub 120 over 80 um blood pressure and my heart resting heart rate still like 48 to 52 even on the even on the medication but when you first get on it you gonna see blood pressure is gonna jump up a tick and it shouldn jump up massively but you're probably gonna see it jump up a little and the heart rate but after a couple two to three weeks it should normalize um but then if you if you like i did this stupidly i ran out of my medication forgot to go to back to the doctor and i went for like two weeks without it and i saw when I got back on it, I had this crazy, you know, increase in blood pressure again and heart rate. It was really super weird, but then it just leveled out and you got normal. But I think if you get really aerobically fit, um, that will prevent or hopefully be a prophylactic of preventing those increases. Um, and, and, um, I mean, aerobic training has such a profound impact as well on brain derived nootrophic factor and, um, and, and the concentration and linking neural networks. So people who aren't doing any aerobic activity, um, and haven't for a long time, I would suggest doing a couple of blocks of that, like daily aerobics, 30, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, something like that. It's real easy stuff, not just walking because that's not really going to do you need, you need the huffy puffy stuff. So just building up to say a 70% R.E. Max, kind of sustaining that just for a couple of months. And you'll see a massive decrease in blood pressure and heart rate. And you'll find that everything's a lot more smooth. You'll concentrate much better. You also sleep a lot better as well. And the good thing about that, that's something that's probably an impact of anyone. ADHD, you know it. Like how many people, and you alluded to it early on in terms of people, heavy use of caffeine intake. It's like, you know, are you getting those symptoms artificially because you're always heavily caffeinated? you're always on low sleep now i'm i'm really intrigued at seeing what um when i go back to the uk in the end of june and i'm there for six weeks and that's what i plump here at the time and i'm gonna like switch decaf cut my caffeine intake right down i'm not doing one-to-one sessions so i can spend more time sleeping i'm like i'm really intrigued to see what happens to my metrics keep my medication up but like see what happens around that and see how much better sort of a lot of those things get because i i know i can burn the candle at both ends yeah and one thing too like going back to that kind of doing the aerobic things i posted this a while back but there's been quite a few studies looking at like uh aerobic activity and memory and what they did was they would do aerobic activity and study and they found that memory retention was much higher if you were doing aerobic training and then like kind of uh contrast training that with a study session so it actually it works not just for the adb people for normal people as well okay that's that that that's that's really interesting especially you know as i said this is going to be my my my pet project for six weeks not only see where my metrics at but almost like see how much study i can get done i've already started booking as many consoles i can get done from people in the uk and missed in-person education i've not done any in two years because there's there's nothing here in hong kong but you know so i'm making making up for lost time i'm going to see tom hibbert go and see michael gould and see i'll travel and see nick if i can engage in a good rant every now and again um but uh yeah like yeah really really really interesting stuff for this i mean