Sleeplessness: What It Does And How To Cope With The Chaos Today With Dr. Patrick Wanis And Christopher Burres

 

Whether you know it or not, the chaos happening around you has an effect in one way or another. One of them is likely sleeplessness. Most people go through this without understanding why it happens and knowing how to cope with it. This episode, Dr. Patrick Wanis, Human Behavior & Relationship Expert, and Christopher Burres, owner of SES Research, share their expertise in curing sleeplessness. They dive into the behavioral effects sleeplessness has on your daily lives that you may or may not have noticed and then discuss the science behind it. Learn all about the key psychological resources that will help you separate yourself from your emotions to prepare you to handle certain situations you might encounter and restore your state of health.

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Sleeplessness: What It Does And How To Cope With The Chaos Today With Dr. Patrick Wanis And Christopher Burres

I am excited about this episode. This is going to be interesting. I’ve crossed a doctor and a scientific researcher. That’s who we’re going to be talking to. Patrick Wanis and Chris Burres are here with us. Patrick Wanis is a world-renowned expert on behavioral therapy, specializing in the areas of interpersonal relationships, trauma, and human motivation. His insights have been featured on global news outlets such as BBC, Russian News Agency, MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. I also have Chris Burres who is a scientific researcher who has pioneered the use of an astonishing molecule called ESS60. It has some amazing properties which include enhancing sleep and boosting immunity. Welcome to the show, Dr. Patrick Wanis and Chris Burres.

Rodney, thank you for having us.

Thank you for being here and I’m sure you guys get this question all of the time. I can’t wait for this answer. How does a scientific researcher cross paths with a behavioral expert and start working together? Tell me, how did that happen?

I can tell you that Patrick and I have been friends for a long time. We met here in Houston and I think what typically happens in a strong friendship is your motivations are aligned. We’re so aligned in how we deliver value to other people that it’s been a great friendship. There’s a lot of value in our friendship. He’s a human behavior expert and it’s interesting because we were joking that I’m just a lowly scientist. “Patrick’s on MSN. He’s on Fox News and all of this and Chris is also here with us.”

We’ve collaborated on many different things and when COVID-19 went into lockdown, I was sharing with him one day. I was like, “I’m tired,” an oblivious statement. He goes, “Of course, you are. Everybody’s experiencing stress. You’re experiencing stress. That’s causing people to be tired.” We’re dealing with all kinds of emotions. That is Patrick’s area of expertise. These emotions have a detrimental effect that they tend to keep us up at night. We’re ruminating. We’re trying to solve the problems. There are all sorts of losses. Whatever you’ve lost, you’re trying to figure out how to get it back, get through it, or whatever it is. That’s even before the Floyd, the protest, and the rights, we had all these problems. Now, we’re piling on more stuff.

That lack of sleep causes us to have an inability to handle our emotions. I call it this horrible emotional sleep spiral that keeps going down. You’re not getting enough sleep. You don’t have the emotional fortitude because you didn’t get the sleep to handle your emotions well and you’re probably causing problems with loved ones and family and not reacting the way you might want to. That causes more problems and you’ve got more things to think about that night. This spiral is horrible and a lot of it is predicated on sleep. Patrick and I got together. He put together this amazing book. It’s how to Neutralize The Seven Emotions That Are Holding You Hostage Right Now. It’s a phenomenal book.

I’ve got a product that people report better sleep on and we’re like, “Let’s marry these two together.” I’ve spent a lot of time researching sleep because that was what was reported about my product so I need to understand what’s going on. I’m here to give tangible things that you can do to get sleep and Patrick’s here to help you with all of your emotions. I think, Patrick, at five minutes, you can solve everybody’s emotional problems.

Lack of sleep causes us to have an inability to handle our emotions. Click To Tweet

It’s interesting too because you were talking about resilience and I know that a big part of your platform is resilience. Resiliency is your ability to bounce back from setbacks, disappointments, and failures. When you bounce back, you bounce back with new insights, understanding, and wisdom so that you’re able to explore new territory and succeed in that new territory. Given the pandemic and the whole cultural change we’re experiencing, our first response is that we become overwhelmed with emotion. That emotion even gets in the way of us being resilient. Because when you’re bombarded with many different emotions and your sleep is impacted, you’re not able to tap into your own psychological resources. There are four key psychological resources that we refer to as psychological capital, hope, optimism, resiliency and self-efficacy. Emotions are impacted because I did say to Chris, “You mean you’re tired and you can never stop thinking it might be the pandemic.”

The first thing they’re going to feel is fear and anxiety. The fear is the thread of, “What’s going to happen? I’ve lost control. I’ve lost a sense of safety and security. Can I get close to this person? Can I hang out with a family? What should we be doing and what’s going to happen to my business, etc.?” The anxiety is this generalized fear of my world is out of control. I don’t know how to control it. Now, I’m going to desperately try to control it. That exacerbates the anxiety. The second key emotion that we’re all experiencing is sadness. Sadness is the first response to grief.

Grief is when there’s a dramatic change or dramatic loss. There’s definitely dramatic change and loss. In fact, I would argue that when the pandemic began, it was more of a state of fear and sadness. Now, with the protests and the cultural uprising, we are shifting more into anger as a way to get motivated and do things and make changes. Miami Beach reopened and we only started reopening certain shops and businesses a week before that. Now, we have spikes in cases and again, there are all this uncertainty and anxiety, “What’s going to happen?”

I was talking to a client of mine who owns a bar. He says, “I know I’m going to be opening soon, but will people come back?” No one knows. What I did was I created this audiobook dealing with the seven umbrella emotions and clearly defining each of those emotions so you can understand, articulate, and describe what each emotion is that you’re feeling and then saying, “What do you do with that emotion?” If you’re experiencing anxiety, how do you get through the anxiety? There are only two ways to do it. Either you deal with it physiologically or you deal with it mentally. I believe you want to deal with both.

Mentally you say, “My world is out of control. What am I trying to control that I cannot control?” Get clear about that and put your focus on what you can control. That’s dealing with the thoughts. Physiologically, you respond to the anxiety by becoming aware, “Where is my breath in my body?” You can’t be anxious if you’re breathing deeply, slowly, and gently. If you’re almost panting and going to hyperventilate because your breath is high up in your chest. You’re not getting the full oxygen and you’re almost in a heightened state of alert, almost in a fight or flight response. By doing deep breathing and breathing into your belly slowly, all the way out, you’re calming yourself.

I don’t know if you’ve interviewed Shawn Achor with The Happiness Advantage, the guy from Houston. In his book, he basically argues that when you’re in a happy state, you perform better on every level. You can think more clearly and can solve more problems. You can have greater memory, recall, and even have a wider peripheral vision. That’s all when you’re in a happy state. The more that you’re in this painful state where you’re closed up and your vision shot starts to shrink, your digestion stops. Your immune system is suppressed all done by the brain in deliberate response to a perceived threat. Once you’re doing that, you can’t be resilient. You can’t be in the game changer mentality because you’re struggling to survive. If you calm your nervous system down, you’re in a better place to respond to the challenges that are before you.

 

Patrick, I want to talk about that a little bit more because there’s something that you said that triggered me. You said the perceptions of everything that’s going on around you. It sounds like to me that these are emotions that we adopt as a result of our perception of things that are going on around us. This is our environment. I like to target the perception initially because I think that’s the start of all of these emotions and the start of all anxiety, sadness, and all of that. How do I let emotions affect the way we perceive these supposedly traumatic situations?

You could look at it as a loop because everything begins with a thought. Other than someone getting right in your face and startling you or a loud noise, which creates an automatic brain response, which is the amygdala starts to sit out the alarm in your body response with adrenaline, etc. Other than that, your thoughts are going to create your emotions. The thought of, “Rodney did a wrong thing to me.” Immediately, my body’s going to start releasing adrenaline and norepinephrine because I’m getting angry based on the perception of Rodney did something and I must respond in this way. I could say, for example, “Rodney did this and I want to respond with gratitude or I want to respond with anger or I want to respond with this.” The thought is part of the perception. It is part of your perspective because the way I look at things through my filters, through my programming, determines my experience.

For example, if you grew up or if a person grew up and had experienced a lot of abuse as a child, they’re going to constantly be afraid of this recurrence of abuse. They’ve already got a certain mindset about abuse and fear. My point being, the only thing you can control is your thoughts and emotions, but your emotions are controlled by your thoughts. Your thoughts are your perspective. Your perspective is to use a really common example, “What is in this glass? Is it full of water? Is it half full of water? Is it half empty?” If I look outside and I say, “The beach is completely empty because the beach is closed.” I can start to get angry like most of my friends did and say, “When are they going to reopen the beach?”

I can say, “I’m still grateful that I’ve got the beach.” It is affecting me that I’m not able to use the beach because I can’t physically exercise on the beach or swim, but one of my thoughts on a regular basis? We have 65,000 thoughts a day. Most of them are unconscious because we’re not aware of them. What are you thinking most of the time? Do you want to do a great exercise? I challenge you to set an alarm every 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or whatever time you want. As soon as that alarm goes off, ask yourself, “What was I thinking?” and be aware of where your thoughts were. If you want to change the way you feel and you talk there before about a response to the pandemic, I went through it to where you say, “Has everything ended? What’s the meaning of all this? What’s important to me? Let me reevaluate my life. Let me get clear about what I care about.”

If you start to think, “Everything’s done. It’s all ended. Nothing will ever be the same again.” Maybe it won’t be the same, but let’s look at what happens since the protest. Everything’s changing. Who could have foreseen that? We couldn’t foresee that the death and murder of one man, however you want to label, no one could foresee that that one incident would, therefore, create an entire uprising. My point is and I’m not the first person to teach this. I could argue that Jesus taught this. I could argue that Buddhism taught this, which is to get clear about your thoughts, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” That’s the scripture. What does that mean?

The way you think and the way you connect it to your emotion determines who you become. Buddhism teaches as the same thing and it says, “Thoughts create feelings that therefore create the way you act that create your results.” That’s the same thing that cognitive behavioral therapy and rational emotive behavioral therapy teaches. It’s all the same teachings. Stoicism teaches the same thing. Stoic philosophers taught, “Get clear about what you can and can’t control and place your emphasis on what you can control.” It’s also the Serenity Prayer from 1951, which was drawn from stoicism. Even though he doesn’t pray, he talks about the Serenity Prayer, but it’s the same concept.

I want to share with both of you, when the pandemic started, I didn’t feel affected by it. I was doing a lot of online shopping and getting groceries and things like that delivered to my house before the pandemic. My life didn’t change too much. I started working more from home, which was okay because I was already doing things on Zoom. I was familiar with them. The way I was looking at the way things were happening with the pandemic, I thought this was wonderful because there were a lot of tools out there that I thought companies and individuals were not utilizing that would make life a lot better for all of us and even more connected. You’ve seen what was happening.

When you're in a happy state, you perform better on every level. Click To Tweet

The world was coming together as a result of this. In the midst of something that would seemingly disconnect us, but we were finding a way to continue to connect. If you look at some of the stats, you will see that as a result of that, productivity has increased. Companies are looking at utilizing telework and other tools making those available for employees. There is a lot of good that was coming out of this and that’s how I was thinking and feeling about it. I wasn’t losing any sleep about this at all. I wasn’t concerned about contracting yet because I wasn’t around a whole lot of people. I thought the quarantine was good.

I thought that because people were being quarantined, having gone through an accident where I was in a lot of isolation as a result of that accident, experiencing that time by myself. Even though it was a traumatic experience, I got to know me a lot more. I felt that that was my advantage over a lot of people because most people don’t have the opportunity to be still and be with themselves. The stillness was forced upon us. I was like, “That’s good,” because you can do some deep thinking if you will and discover some things about yourself.

The thing is, Rodney, first, you’ve already been through it once. Your pandemic was the original accident you had, which forced you to self-isolate. The second thing is that in most of our society, we spend the majority of our time trying to distract ourselves from looking inward. That’s the difference.

You’re a little bit ahead of me. This whole racial experience happened and initially, I felt that’s what this was. I’m going to be honest. I’m like, “I still don’t want to get involved with that.” It’s horrible, but it wasn’t anything new. This has happened before, sadly enough, it’s still happening and we’re still having a protest. We’re still having the riot and having to do all of these things. For me, it was like, “This is a distraction.” I still wasn’t losing any sleep, Chris, because of my perception of this. It wasn’t until when I started going to protest. I was getting more involved in these conversations and that’s when I started losing sleep. I started getting angry and these emotions started coming up for me because I was fed up. I was seeing things on social media from people saying things that I would think that they would ever say about what’s going on, but yet, they were saying it.

I was feeling a certain way about it and I found that I was losing sleep about it because I was angry. I had a lot of emotions built up around it and that perception of mine was that something needed to change and I was willing to do whatever it took to bring that change forward. My emotions changed my whole, not outlook on life, but the way I was dealing with life. It changed it because I was head down, not paying attention, and focused on what I needed to do for the day. When I lifted my head to look at what was going on, I was like, “Okay.” I almost wanted to stop what I was doing in order to go and do that. A lot of people are dealing with this, Patrick. This is one of those things you cannot ignore and I’m sure, Chris, many people are losing sleep right now. What would you recommend because this is a situation that you can’t just sweep this under the rug or ignore this? You have to deal with this in some way.

Rodney, our message remains the same. It just becomes more relevant and timely. The first thing is the reason that you shifted was that you started to connect to everyone. You said, “I had my head down. I was focused on what I was doing that and I put my head up.” When you said, “You put your head up,” you connected to them and that’s when you started experiencing more emotion. Because you had a thought, you analyzed, and you said, “I’m angry because of injustice or racism,” or whatever it is that you identified that then created the emotion. In my audiobook, Neutralize The Seven Emotions That Are Holding You Hostage Right Now, there’s a key principle I teach. Number one, you’re allowed to feel whatever you feel. That’s important. Second, the way you respond to that emotion will determine whether that is the right thing to do or not.

 

What do you mean by that?

You say to me, “Patrick, I’m angry.” I go, “You’re allowed to feel whatever you feel.” I say to you, “Rodney, what are you going to do with that anger? Are you going to stay stuck in that anger? Are you going to let the anger become frustrating? Are you going to turn the anger into a rage? There’s a difference between looting and protest.” You’ve got to say, “How am I using this anger? Am I channeling it in the right way, the right amount, the appropriate time, the appropriate person, the appropriate context, etc.? Therefore, I teach that not every emotion is negative. It depends on the context.

If you need to protect someone, a loved one and you see your child, whoever it is, a young person that’s being attacked. You’re not going to imagine them in a golden light. You don’t have time to pray. You have to jump in and protect them. What emotion are you going to use? You can use anger, but if you keep beating that person once you’ve protected your loved one, now you’re getting into. It depends on the context of emotions. With anger I say, look at the anger. Is the anger serving you? If you’re going to channel it into a direction and you say, we’re going to use this anger to give us the momentum to protest. We’re going to use this anger to give us the momentum to put pressure on the senate, congressmen, or whoever it is to make changes.

If you take the anger and you stayed home with it, you start to take it out on your husband, your wife, your children, your boss, and your team members, then that’s not healthy. An important part is what’s the emotion you’re feeling and how are you responding to the emotion? Are you feeding it endlessly? Does it have a purpose? How long do you want to stay in the emotion? I say it’s okay to feel sad and grieve over losses. It’s okay to feel sad and grieve if you see an injustice and you see someone that was murdered. That makes complete sense. Chris is going to give you some specific tips on sleep, but I wanted to share that with you. You’ve got to look in your own heart and say, “Is this emotion benefiting me? Can I use it for something good?” Otherwise, it’s a wasted emotion and it’s these chemicals and adrenaline when it’s not used properly. Meaning, if you’re in a car and you’re getting angry, that’s poisoning your body. If you’re using that adrenaline to run, your body’s processing and metabolizing the adrenaline, that’s okay.

I have one more question before we moved to Chris about that because I think a lot of times people react based on emotion. What you described requires a process and skill. I believe that resilience is all about managing your emotions and perceptions. That’s the skill and what happens is people react based on emotion because the emotions are strong. Emotions will get you to move before the thoughts will get you to move. Most of the time, you move by your thoughts. That is a secondary behavior. Other than breathing, what is it that we can do to get us to react not out of emotions, but take that step to think about how we’re feeling because you say that and I agree with you and I know people have heard it before. It’s more like a cliché, but how do they get to that point where they can master that skill?

Number one is separate from the emotion. It means do your best. Your intention is to become the observer of the emotion. If I’m feeling angry and I can recognize I’m angry, I go, “That’s interesting. I’m angry. What am I angry about?” “I’m angry about this thing, this injustice or this wrongdoing or whatever it is. What do I want to do with that anger? You talked about emotions and thoughts. You’ve got to separate them. You’ve got to look at the emotion so that the emotion isn’t controlling. I would say I put my hand over my hand, that’s the emotion controlling you but if you separate, you can be looking at that emotion, which gives you the ability to use your prefrontal cortex, which is your executive decision-maker to, therefore, control the emotional part of the brain.

It’s a struggle because when you’re going into emotions like anger or fear, you’re talking about the primitive part of the brain, which is focused on survival. Even though it is kitsch to say breathing, if you’re not able to do the breathing, at least stop and literally say, “Stop,” and then say, “Let me look at this emotion. What am I feeling? I’m feeling anger. What am I angry about? I’m angry about this.” “What can I do with this emotion? How can I use it in a beneficial way?” This is part of mindfulness. This is part of cognitive-behavioral therapy. You are disassociating, you’re distancing yourself and you’re observing yourself with that anger. It takes practice, but that’s how you become resilient. That’s how you bounce back because you’re practicing mastering the ability to look at your own emotions. I did it with Chris.

The way you think and the way you connect it to your emotion determines who you become. Click To Tweet

It was a separate topic and had nothing to do with this, but we were having a conversation and I said to him, “Chris, I’m too angry to talk.” It wasn’t about him, but I realized I had to separate myself. I looked at it and I said, “I’ve got to separate myself. When I’m in a better place, I’ll come back.” Even though the anger wasn’t connected to that specific, I used the emotional intelligence, which is the self-awareness to say, “I’m responding to this issue with anger, but the anger has nothing to do with this issue. The anger is that issue to my right. It has nothing to do with my left. I withdraw.” That’s how you take charge of your emotions.

With any individual, it’s taking a look at how they’ve responded in this situation. This is a perfect storm and it’s a good way to analyze and survey how you’ve dealt with high emotional states with circumstances like this. I think this is the perfect test to see how you respond. Chris, talk to us about sleep and the effect that it has on the human body because I know a lot of people are maybe losing sleep because of this. There are job loss, death, and all of these things that have happened. Maybe they’re not even thinking about the effect of not getting enough sleep at this point that is having on their body.

First, we talked about this horrible emotional sleep spiral and what’s important to note is that your cell phone has bars on it for signal and battery, but your brain doesn’t have a similar feedback loop for how much sleep you got the night before and how well-prepared for handling emotional stress that day you are. You may have only gotten four hours of sleep, you wake up and there is no part of you that’s going, “I should be careful. I should be as emotionally intelligent as Patrick was in that heated moment and I withdraw.”

You go into that day and you’re like, “This is a normal everyday day. I’m going to go through it and handle my emotions as normal.” The answer is no because actually, you didn’t get the sleep that you needed. There’s a good book out there called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. He worked as a Harvard medical researcher for a while. It’s a phenomenal and scary book. I’d describe it as the scariest book about sleep that you will ever read. It literally goes in and talks about when you don’t get sleep, what’s the impact on your ability to remember things? What’s the impact on your cardiovascular health?

A lot of people don’t realize that on daylight savings time, when we gain an hour, heart attacks go down and when we lose an hour, heart attacks go up. Sleep impacts your cardiovascular health. It also impacts your ability to process insulin and sugar. A couple of days without sleep, with the blood sugar test, you can appear to be a diabetic when it’s just your lack of sleep. As a society, we look at sleep and we’re like, “We know.” If you ask anyone, sleep is good for your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. We know that. We’re like, “Sleep is paramount. I’ve got to get eight hours of sleep every time. I’ve got to do it unless there’s something else to do, I’m then going to skip sleep.”

Patrick talked about the fact that we’re the only species on the planet that will miss sleep for no real good reason. We can probably justify it in our heads that it’s a good reason, that concert was paramount or whatever but we’re the only species on the planet that’ll do that. Getting that sleep and having consistent sleep helps you break that horrible emotional sleep spiral and then have you better prepared for the next day. We’ve got all this rumination going on. What can we do to get that better sleep? I want to talk about the three sleep hygiene things that’ll get you there. These are simple, actionable things you can do. Simple is relative to your connection with these. We’ll see what that looks like here.

 

Sleep hygiene is the practice that you have. One of the better ones and this isn’t even on my list is to get to sleep at the same time every night. That will significantly help you sleep better. The first one is a lot of us are at home and maybe you’re used to working at home and a lot of people who weren’t are now working at home. Maybe they’re having lunch and that lunch is on their couch and the couch causes them to take a nap. First off, napping is good. The data on napping is clear. You can improve your cognitive capabilities for later in the afternoon if you take a nap. If you take a nap, make sure that it is no longer than 30 minutes. As soon as you cross that 30-minute threshold, you start impacting your circadian rhythm. That’s the rhythm that says, “It’s daylight, wake up. The sun has risen, wake up. Start being active. The sun is setting and has set. It’s time to not be active in time to get sleep.” That’s that circadian rhythm. Something more than a 30-minute nap will interfere with that.

Also, if you’re going to nap, make sure you don’t nap after 4:00 PM. If you feel this desire to take a nap after 4:00 PM, I wouldn’t say take a coffee. That would be counterproductive, but take that 5th or 6th walk that you’re taking this day. Get that dog out there one more time. Next is this device. We all have cell phones, tablets, and computer monitors that we’re looking at. All of these devices give off blue light. A lot of people don’t realize that the blue light, a specific light that comes off of these devices, tricks our brain into thinking that it’s the middle of the afternoon.

If you’re talking about that circadian rhythm, the sun has risen and now the sun is setting. If you’re there when the sun is setting looking at these devices and they are emitting this blue light, it’s tricking your brain into thinking it’s noon. What are you supposed to do when it’s noon? You’re supposed to be up and active. It breaks your circadian rhythm. All devices have some blue light filter. On the iPhone, it’s called Night Shift. On different Android devices, it’s Comfort View blue light filter. Even computers have blue light filters. I know Patrick leaves his on all the time so that’s never convincing his brain it’s noon unless he’s doing graphics. Those are photos that he took behind him. When he was working with those photos, he had the blue light filter off. My recommendation, if you’re not going to leave it on all the time, about 1 to 2 hours prior to sunset, start that blue light filter. That can make sure that your body’s in-sync with that circadian rhythm.

The other thing about these devices is they tend to keep us awake. They tend to keep our minds active. I would suggest keeping the cell phone, tablet, and TV out of the bedroom. Charge it may be on a charging stand right outside of your bedroom, maybe the way in the kitchen, leave it in the car, or whatever you need to do to disconnect from that device. Try and disconnect about 1 to 2 hours before you go to sleep so that your mind can quiet down and you can have that restful sleep. Make sure you’re doing that at the same time. I described these as easy. Maybe they’re not.

Putting the cell phone down sometimes isn’t that easy. This was the third one. A lot of people believe that there are some well-documented health benefits of having 1 or 2 drinks. There’s one physician, Dr. Gundry that I’ve done some work with and he says, “If you don’t drink, don’t start for the health benefits.” It’s not that good, but the health benefits of 1 or 2 drinks are well-documented but don’t take them right before you go to sleep. It makes people think they fall asleep easier, but alcohol is a sedative. In that book, Why We Sleep, Dr. Walker talks about the $2 billion “sleep aid” industry. What these sleep aids do like alcohol is you take them and they knock you unconscious.

When you wake up in the morning, you don’t have the desire to sleep so you feel better, but you haven’t gotten the healing sleep that you need that the sleep is supposed to provide. We’re all familiar with REM sleep, Rapid Eye Movement sleep. That’s incredibly helpful. There’s another one called an NREM sleep, Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This sleep are the actual time periods when you’re improving your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. You’re doing emotional healing while you’re sleeping.

If you drink that alcohol or take that “sleep aid,” it’s detrimental to you. I’m going to talk about people who take it. They take it in the morning. They report mental focus and energy during the day and better sleep that night. There are not many things that you can do in the morning. There’s certainly no supplement that I’m aware of that you take in the morning and helps you sleep at night. It’s operating at a fundamentally different level.

Channel your emotions in the right way, the right amount, appropriate time, appropriate person, and appropriate context. Click To Tweet

Thank you, Chris, for bringing that up because when you talk about being resilient, it’s more so about recovering so that you can continue on, and sleep is a major part of recovery. You talked about improving your mental health. A lot of times, we don’t give ourselves that opportunity for our mental health to recover. It’s not so much making it better. I know that’s a part of it, but it’s giving it time to recover, emotionally especially at a time like now where we’ve become emotionally drained. We need to sleep in order to recover emotionally. Sleep is a way of checking out for a minute. It’s that time out and then you go back. When I introduce you, I talked about immunity and I know that’s a big topic for everyone. COVID is still here. It’s been a little overshadowed by George Floyd and the racial events but how can we build our immunity? This is a question for both of you as it relates to emotional healing and sleep. Give us some tips on how we can keep ourselves away from COVID.

I’ll say one thing and that is when you’re experiencing intense agitative emotions and your body and brain are in a hyperarousal state, your brain tells your body to suppress the immune system and to stop digestion. Both of those affect your overall health and then that in turn affects your sleep. During your sleep, your immune system is also being engaged. That alone, just balancing your emotions is a huge boost to your immune system. Chris will talk about ESS60, which happens to be an immune booster.

A little bit of history because it’s a fascinating story. The people who discovered this molecule won the Nobel Prize. This is a chemical model of the molecule. It’s a spherical molecule of carbon with 60 carbon atoms in it. They discovered it in 1985. They won the Nobel prize in 1996 and they did this fascinating study and published it in 2012. In that study, they gave rats water, rats olive oil, and then rats olive oil with this. We call it ESS60 molecule and they thought it would be toxic for various reasons. Instead of being toxic, the rats that they gave ESS60 and olive oil, the MyVitalC formula, lived 90% longer than the control group.

It’s the single longest longevity experiment on mammals ever. It was a pretty phenomenal result and not only that and this is potentially even more important. The type of rats that they used in the study were Wistar rats and those rats die at about 32 months. They actually have a known amount of tumors and the longer they live, the more tumor mass they have in their body. Even though the MyVitalC rats lived out to 62 months, none of them had any tumors. This is a phenomenal result and biohackers, those cutting-edge self-educated people in the health space started taking the product right away and reporting some phenomenal benefits.

My company which delivered the actual ESS60 to the researchers that were out of the University of Paris peer-reviewed published research, stayed away from it because I’m a carbon nanomaterial scientist. I’m not a supplement guy. The reason they won the Nobel Prize is it’s harder than a diamond. It turns into a diamond. You can fire it at a plate of steel at 15,000 miles an hour. Most molecules will just shred apart. This one just bounces back because it’s so resilient. It’s an amazing molecule, but in my head, it’s batteries and solar cells not putting it in your body.

We resisted that because of our background and biohackers were continuing to take it and continuing to report amazing benefits. In the latter part of 2017, a guy with a big YouTube following shares that he’s taking it and shares all the benefits that he’s getting and the in the industry sells out. I come into 2018 because, in 2017, I’m a nanomaterial scientist. I’m 2018, I’m debating if I’m going to be a supplement guy. We’re getting all these phone calls and getting all these testimonials and I had to ask myself two questions. The first was a moral question. I take it, my wife takes it, and everybody on my team takes it. I’m comfortable selling it.

From a supplement perspective, you’ve got the FDA and the FTC and you need to be on the right side of those two organizations and we certainly are. We started selling it in earnest for the first nine months. I’m getting these phone calls about amazing testimonials. People getting rid of knee pain, migraines, back pains, and all of this. I’m a scientist. I’m like, “As a human on the phone telling me, I believe that but I’m a scientist and I don’t know how to believe the information,” because I want data. One of the most consistent testimonials was better sleep.

Our customers take it in the morning. They report mental focus and energy during the day and then better sleep that night. That’s one of the more consistent testimonials. My company is in the middle of sponsoring a sleep study. This is a human trial where we’ve partnered with Oura Ring. It’s a ring that sits on your finger. It’s one of the better sleep trackers on the market. I’m working with a professor out of the University of California, San Diego and he’s a consultant for Oura Ring. He has access to all the backend data. We’re already running a human trial to look at the sleep performance. I was on a podcast with a guy who was talking about supplements. He has a supplement company. It’s the HRV and it’s one of the data points that the Oura Ring spins off. He’s noticed a delta in his HRV being on the product. It’s one of the things that I’ve got a lot of confidence and from my own experience, the testimonials, and then even looking at data that it does in fact help your sleep. It also helps your immune system and I’m a straight shooter and clean cut. I am not going to say it has an impact on COVID because I don’t think that’s responsible. We don’t have any data related to that. What I can say is there are five ways that it does support your immune system and these are the five reasons that I’ve sent extra bottles to my mom and I have my mom taking double servings each day.

It’s a known antibacterial and antiviral. These are the five ways. There are patents related to ESS60 and its ability to interrupt the replication of the AIDS virus. It’s a known antioxidant. It’s 172 times more powerful than vitamin C. In terms of anti-inflammatory, with the FDA, you have to be careful about what you say. What we can say comfortably is that it fits in an anti-inflammatory diet well. Finally, sleep. This most consistent testimonial is better sleep. We know that sleep helps your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. We heard from Dr. Wanis, the impact of having emotional wellbeing can have on your immune system. Those are the five reasons that support your immune system.

How can people get ahold of that? If they want it to get ahold of some ESS60 or learn more about you, Chris?

First, let’s get them that audio file. The audiobook, Neutralize The Seven Emotions That Are Holding You Hostage Right Now. There’s also a guided meditation. It’s phenomenal. Overcoming fear, anxiety, and enjoying peace of mind. You can get both of those and they’re free. When we say free, you don’t have to give us your email. We’re not going to haunt you and harass you with emails and drips and all this stuff. We want to give back to all the stress and lack of sleep that our people are getting. We want to give back to those people. The link is MyVitalC.com/gamechangermentality. That’ll get you those two books. Also on that page, there’s a link directly to get in contact with Patrick Wanis on his website, PatrickWanis.com.

He has a newsletter that comes out every week. If you’ve gotten some sense of emotional intelligence from him from this show, it gets poured into his newsletter. It’s an incredibly valuable piece to read each and every week. It’s also free. You do have to give your email in order to get the newsletter. There’s the link to the MyVitalC home page. If you go to that homepage, you can get our product. You can try it out for yourself. We have a 25% discount for a subscription. You can cancel it at any time. Go ahead and make sure you take advantage of that discount. We also have a coupon code. It’s GameChangerMentality and that’ll get you an extra $15 off on your initial order.

I would like to thank both of you for coming on the show. It’s been a great show and great information. You are a dynamic duo. You never know how your emotions are affecting your sleep and then vice-versa. If you don’t get enough sleep, then your emotions are impacted and a major part of being resilient is managing those emotions. If you can’t manage your emotions, you’re going to have a hard time being resilient. Before we end the show, I always like to ask, what is the game-changer mentality message that you would like to leave our audience?

Always remember, you deserve the best of everything. Click To Tweet

The best thing I can say is a summary of what we’ve been talking about. Recognize what you can and can’t control, focus on what you can control. The one thing that you definitely can control is your thoughts, which determine your emotions, the actions you’ll take, and your results.

What I would share is I’ve got from my relationship with Patrick and we’ve put this and I use it regularly, which is, “Remember you deserve the best of everything because you do.”

That’s my sign off on all my newsletters.

If you can walk around with that type of attitude every single day, it doesn’t matter what happens. You’re looking for the best out of everything because you feel you deserve it. That’ll help you in your perception and your thoughts.

That’s not arrogance and it’s not an entitlement. It’s simple recognition. If you have that recognition within you, then you will respect and treat other people the same way because you’ll also see the same deservingness in them.

If I’m walking around saying, “I believe I deserve the best of everything,” when that sits in deep, then you’ll understand that everybody else also deserves the best of everything.

Thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Rodney. Thanks for having us.

Important Links:

• Patrick Wanis
• Chris Burres – LinkedIn
• ESS60
• Neutralize The Seven Emotions That Are Holding You Hostage Right Now
• The Happiness Advantage
• Why We Sleep
• Oura Ring
• MyVitalC.com/gamechangermentality
• MyVitalC
• https://Twitter.com/myvitalc
• https://www.Facebook.com/myvitalcproduct/
• https://www.YouTube.com/channel/UC4kDYRXra7eeiyhQfYukNJQ
• https://Twitter.com/Behavior_Expert
• https://www.Facebook.com/patrickwanisphd/
• https://www.YouTube.com/user/patrickwanis
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/get-up-book/
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• https://RodneyFlowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734
• Is Life Knocking You Down? Read Rodney’s inspiring story – Get Up! I Can’t. I Will. I Did… Here’s How! https://rodneyflowers.com/get-up-book/
• Recognize Your Positive Potential – Essential Assertions by Rodney Flowers https://rodneyflowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• Get Access to Rodney’s Daily Inspiration in your Inbox Today https://rodneyflowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734

About Christopher Burres

About Patrick Wanis

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