Jenny Powers, PhD - Rediscovering Ancestral Health

Jenny Powers has navigated many roles throughout her life: athlete, scientist, wife, mother, and writer. Her journey as a collegiate basketball player honed her ability to push physical limits, while her PhD in Immunology challenged her intellect and deepened her understanding of research. Motherhood transformed her perspective, highlighting what truly matters and igniting her passion for writing.

In her book, On the Origin of Being, Jenny weaves together her varied experiences to explore the complexities of human nature and our remarkable ancestors. She resides in Colorado with her family and pets, continually inspired by her research and discoveries.

They explore modern health issues and ancestral wisdom, starting with hospice care and the role of "death doulas." This leads to a discussion on dietary habits, contrasting simple ancestral diets with modern processed foods. Dr. Powers emphasizes eliminating processed foods and highlights Nutrigenomics for personalized dietary guidance based on genetics. 

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Takeaways

1. Adopt dietary habits suited to your genetics for optimal health.
2. Cut back on artificial lighting and processed foods.
3. Meditate and practice gratitude to reduce stress.

Connect with Jenny Powers:

Website | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn |

Transcript

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Welcome to Your Infinite Health. Are you getting older? Are you feeling it? How would you like to do that in reverse? We're your host Doctor Tripp. And Lanae. We've run an integrated medicine practice for 13 years. Together, we have 60 years of combined experience helping clients. We've helped tens of thousands achieve success in health and live longer, happier lives. In this show, we'll cover peer reviewed and evidence based integrative approaches to creating the health you've always wanted. We also share professional experience we see in the field every day. So if you're ready to feel, look, and live your best life, you're in the right place. Welcome to Eurofina Health podcast. Tripp, what are you doing this weekend? Hey. Not sure yet. You're not sure? You don't know what you're doing this weekend? You're just you're so presently minded. You don't know what's going on? Yeah. No. You're too much in the now, darling. Yeah. So much in the now. Listen, we're gonna get into that actually a little later. But so I think I mean, I bought tickets to go see Twister. Twisters. Pretty excited about that. You? Oh, yeah. That's gonna be fun. That should be fun. So I asked I asked Huckleberry if he wanted to go to the movies because tickets are expensive. So I don't wanna take a kid if he doesn't wanna go. And he's like, nah. I mean, I can go or I cannot go. It's up to you. So I was like, okay. Well, then I guess you're going. So dragging the kids to a family thing to go see the movie. Hopefully, it's not too crowded. But the theater here is pretty decent. Like, it's a like a small town theater, so it doesn't get too crowded even on, you know, premiere nights. You are not listening to me. Yes. And put the dog down, Tripp. Trying to trying to get the dog out to bark. Okay. Well, since you're not participating in my conversation, I guess I'll ask you a joke or I'll tell you a joke, not ask you a joke. I'm gonna tell you a joke. What did the drummer name his daughters? He had 2 daughters. What did he name them? Not sure. And a 1 and a 2. Okay. So clever. Alright. Listener, before I waste any more of your time, we have a guest on that you're gonna love, gonna learn so much about. It is the authors of the book on the origin of being. And I'm going so we had one author. We had, Jenny Powers here. Her coauthor, Luke Comer, was unable to participate, but I'm gonna honor him and read his little bio anyway. So Jenny Powers is an accomplished writer, scientist, and athlete. She earned her PhD PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Colorado Denver. Her journey as a collegiate basketball player taught her to push physical boundaries even as she continually expanded her intellectual horizons. She is deeply inspired by the exploration of human nature and the study of our ancestors. Her role in researching and coauthoring on the origin of being marks the culmination of this passion to date. Jenny balances her professional endeavors with her roles as a wife and mother in Colorado. And Luke is the visionary behind On the Origin of Being. He is an independent producer, writer, and director whose work ranges from scientific reductionism to imaginative spiritual explorations aiming to identify and fulfill fundamental human needs unmet by modern society. For decades, he has studied human biological and cultural evolution, focusing on food, psychology, sociology, art, and even shamanism. After graduating from Oberlin College, Luke devoted 3 years of his life to leading therapeutic wilderness courses for adjudicated teenagers. Afterwards, he moved to Boulder, Colorado, starting the restaurant Native to support his rock climbing and skiing. In his late twenties, he experienced a healing and existential crisis and experimented with various modalities, including therapy, dance, yoga, psychedelics, raves, Burning Man, and even longer excursions into the wilderness. Afterwards, he devoted himself to generating content and published the novel Yoke of Wind, created and produced the touring multimedia show called The Portal, and owned and produced Colorado's largest camping festival called Arise for around 15,000 people from 2013 to 2021 before being undone by law enforcement. When Luke comes on the show, we're gonna have to ask him about that. He is the founder, director, and writer for the project still in development called the First Supper. He is one of the original investors in Meow Woof and Electric Playhouse, and he also advocates for freedom of assembly in Colorado supporting artistic and alternative cultures. Luke spends much of his time in the outdoors pursuing various sports and attending camping festivals. Alright. Jenny, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to chat with doctor Goolsbee and I. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm I'm excited to talk with you about our book. Yeah. And so it it remind me the name of the book, the or the origin. It's on the origin of being. So we paid homage to Charles Darwin on that because his seminal book is on the origin of species. But then it's understanding the theory or understanding the science of evolution to enhance your quality of life. Cool. Well, definitely wanna jump into that. But before we get there, can you tell the listener how you and Luke became inspired, or what was your journey that led y'all to the creation of the book? Yeah. Well, I have a background. I have a PhD in immunology. So I was kind of on the tenure track. I went to I was working in National Jewish on rheumatoid arthritis induced lung fibrosis of all things. And but I wanted to have kids, and I wanted to kinda step off the academic academia track. And I'd always wanted to be a writer. So I stepped away from that, the bench work, and I actually started writing middle grade novels, which are 8 to 12 year olds, fiction, science fiction, actually. Okay. So not like Judy Blume? No. No. Not like Judy we'll say, like, age, but more science fiction, fantasy type stuff. Oh, that's And and it was really cool because I you know, writing doesn't really pay very much or if at all. And I was looking for something to do that, like, would I could be involved in the working world and interact with adults. And, so I was looking for a, like, a side job, and I applied to be a researcher for Luke Comer who was doing who's researching a book on nutrition. And it was like, oh, this is perfect. I can do research. And the first thing he said when we got on the phone with the interview is that he'd already hired a nutritionist to help him. So I was like, oh, man. But he said did the interview. Yeah. But then he said, I think he liked, you know, my background and, you know, there was a writer and a scientist. And he's like, but I have this idea kicking around in my head, and it's he's been holding this vision and this concept about how the environment we live in today is so different than the one that we evolved in. And it's changed so rapidly that we have not had time to evolve and adapt to the modern world. And so when he was working on his nutrition book, he found that all of the other other ways of being, other things in your in our lives that we're no longer living according to how we evolved to live because we have this environmental mismatch. And it sounded so fascinating to me. We talked for maybe 2, 2 and a half hours. It was, I think we just really really a long interview. We clicked. Yeah. And so he wanted me to research and write this book. And what really, I think, drew drew me in was the the two aspects of this part of the book that really drew me in were the work aspects because being, you know, a graduate student, a postdoc working 80 hour weeks, feeling like you had to have it all and do it all. You know, that really burned me out, in my scientific career. And, also, you know, I just was I love the environment. I love being in nature. Colorado is just this beautiful place to be. And I was becoming more and more disconnected and, I don't know, sad about what was going on, you know, how the environment's been getting damaged and how we are part of nature, but it seems like people just don't care. So the work chapter and the nature chapter in this book were really, like I I really loved doing those. So I was on board completely. And so that was probably about 5 years ago, and then COVID happened. And we finished up the book, but then we just didn't really do anything with it until everything kinda calmed down. And then this past year, we've been we hybrid published it, and it came out at the end of June. Okay. Well, awesome. And so where is it on Amazon or or Yeah. Yeah. It it's on Amazon. You can find it there. I think it's on Barnes and Noble. We have a couple of independent bookstores who are carrying it or who you can order through if you prefer to do independent bookstores. And so, yeah, if they go to our website, there's a link to it right there, and that's how you get it. Okay. Cool. Well, let's go a bit deeper into, you know, the content of the book and, like because you're talking about sleep and you're talking about nutrition. Can you go a little bit deeper into, like, ancestors, how far back? Are we talking, like, cave people? Or We we're talking about the very beginning of life because there are a lot of traits that actually appeared in in the very, very earliest life on earth. For instance, circadian rhythms. The cyanobacteria in the ocean needed to know when was the best time to get nutrients, when was the best time to do photosynthesis, when was the best time to undergo cell division. So, you know, the the best time to undergo photosynthesis is when the sun's up. Right? But the best time to undergo cell division and replication is not when the sun's up because now you're gonna get UV damage, and it might not be the best you know, you might get a mutation and stuff. So they evolved circadian very, very rudimentary circadian rhythms to know when to come up and go down and come up and go down to to do various things throughout the cycle of the day and night. So so a lot of these things, we actually take all the way back to the beginning of, like, single cells, and then we trace it through, you know, higher higher order organisms, eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, mammal you know, mammals. And we we pay special you know, we we go through that sort of quickly. We don't spend a lot of time on you know, we just touch on some of the similarities and some of the trends we're seeing. And then we spend a lot of time on primates and, the human lineage especially. And then we develop like a whole chapter to our hunter gatherer ancestors. So anything from about 200000 years ago to about 12000 years ago when the agricultural revolution started. So and then of course we talk about, you know, we kinda take people on this evolutionary journey and we talk about how our ancestors lived, especially our hunter gatherer ancestors because they were homo sapiens. And by the time we get to the chapter on the modern you know, how the modern world or how modern people are dealing with this particular topic, I'm hoping that people already know, like, I know what's wrong. I know what's wrong. You you know, they they can tell that there's this mismatch between our behaviors when we were evolving and when we lived very stably as hunter gatherers. I mean, it was a very stable adaptation. So our bodies are really attuned to that lifestyle. So then we get yeah. Begin to the modern humans, how kind of disrupts these patterns of behavior and what are the consequences of those. And then we talk about what are the things that people can start trying to do to you know, we don't wanna go back and live 12000 years ago. We wanna be in this modern world, but we wanna change our behaviors in order to be more aligned with our biology. Because I think, you know, I like to kinda say we're still running hunter gatherer software for the most part. There haven't been really any major evolutionary changes, especially not in the last 100 years when I feel like the the speed of change and technology just took off. We have not really had you know, we're not adapted to eat refined that much refined sugar. We're not adapted to look at screens. We're not adapted to sit in a chair and work all day. So there are hopefully people by understanding kind of where we came from. And how we evolved into, you know, the way we evolved, it'll be easier for them to be like, oh, well, that's why I don't need blue. I don't want blue light, you know, at night. That's why I need to get sun sunlight in the morning. So, hopefully, we want this to kinda be a self help book to help people learn and make just make better decisions for their health and wellness that actually will stick because they understand, like, the science behind it. That's cool. What what is what are you calling twilight existence? Okay. Yeah. So that is in our sleep chapter. So our, hunter gatherer ancestors obviously had no electricity. The only light they had was sunlight, moonlight, and firelight. So in the mornings, when they woke up at the same time, they've pretty much every day, they were out in nature, and they were exposed to very bright sunlight. So if you look at the intensity of the light is spikes really high in the morning, and then it kind of changes and goes away. And then at night, there's just no light at all. Mhmm. But a twilight existence, when we get up, we turn our lights on and we kinda have the same basal level of light. We never get that really sharp peak at night or oh, sorry, at the very beginning in the morning. And then the sun goes down and we still have the same level of light. We're just, you know, we're using our overhead lights or whatever, and we're here and the hunter gatherer light exposure is way down here. So we're kinda just we're we never get the high highs. We never get the low lows, so that's why it's twilight. It's not full sun. It's not full dark. It's always just in that between area. How does somebody today, like, combat that or reverse that? Yeah. Well to get up and go outside? Like Yeah. That that's a really good question. So I think, you know, the first thing is we can do 2 things at once. Get outside in the morning. That is a great time for you to connect with nature, which is important. Does that's a good time for you to exercise, move your body, which is really important. But get that you know, every morning, have some part of your day be outside getting that bright sunlight even if just for 10 minutes. You know? The sun the sunlight will really, really, you know, help it'll help you wake up. It'll help set your circadian rhythms. And then at night, this is the most probably the most important thing. Somebody I can't remember his the name of him right at the moment, but he classifies, blue light as a carcinogen. And he said that people need to realize that the blue light that we continuously have after the sun goes down is really screwing up kind of the regulation of our hormone production. And so things that would regulate that normally regulate, you know, to keep us in homeostasis, it would you know, our our hormone are way out of sync because we're getting mixed signals. Like, is it dark? Is it light? Do I need to make cortisol? Do I need to make melatonin? What are things looking like? So the decreasing blue light at night is probably the number one thing to do. And I know people are not gonna wanna give up their screens, but, you know, the the wisdom is to not look at a screen an hour before bedtime. But, also, there's so many technological things. Like, I have these blue light blocking glasses. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah. I mean, there's they're all over the market. These are really old. I'm sure they're because they just clip on my glasses. But I also find that I don't mean these very often because most devices these days have, like, a, night shift. So they actually change the colors that are coming at you. And so it's really easy to just like, okay. At 4 o'clock every day, all of my devices turn to night shift or red shift or whatever, you know, the device calls it. And then you still you can still see things and have things, but you're not stimulating, you know, the the mechanisms to be like, okay. The sun's still up. It's not time to make melatonin yet. Or it delays the melatonin production. So those are probably the 2, you know, sunlight in the morning, less blue light at night are kind of the 2 things you can do on the end ends of your day. So you won't have that twilight existence. You can more mimic that high intensity light in the morning and not intense light in the evenings if you do those things. Oh, and those are very simple, easy to implement changes, I think. Mhmm. Yeah. I think so. I've started doing them, and it really helps. I know you have dogs. It helps to have dogs because they're a quick reason to go help you. I don't know. Uh-oh. Those dogs, man, they're Panama. You're right. K. They don't know when it's Saturday is the way. Wow. That's very true. Yeah. They they are quite set in their ways. They want their walk in the morning for sure. Yeah. Yeah. They do. What what I really like about this perspective is the fact that it actually is stimulating, like you said, the homeostasis and our biology to actually repair and create an environment in the body that is healthier so that we so we're not creating, you know, all of those zombie cells, the welfare cells, as I call them, creating the, you know, the adversarial environment biologically that causes or actually is the cause of cellular aging and disease processes. I think this this is the way that medicine can prevent the astronomical costs of pharmaceuticals and the health care system as it exists today. Yeah. I I totally agree. People think that if you talk about hunter gatherers, they think like, oh, they had these brutal lives, and they didn't have Medicaid, you know, medicine and but, you know, yeah, they didn't live in a world where they had a lot of childhood mortality. They didn't have the ways to combat bacterial infections and things like that. But the people who actually survived into adulthood lived well into their seventies. So they're so the people if you'd only take the people who kind of got into adulthood, they have a very similar life expectancy to our modern day humans, but what's amazing so it's, like, 70 I don't know. Depending on where you look, 76 to 78 is the the modern life expectancy. But from about 60 to 65 on, how good are those how good is your health and wellness in those the last years of your life? Right? Most people who have these noncommunicable diseases of modernity do not necessarily have this robust, healthy, you know, last 15 years of life. Whereas in the hunter gatherer tribe, the older people had big positions, had important positions, in the group, and they were active. And they didn't die of heart disease. They didn't die of cancer. They didn't die of diabetes. They didn't even get any of those things. So their the last 15 years of their life were served kind of, you know, as their midlife, that they were as healthy and had the capacities of somebody much in our culture, you know, it's when you hit 65, everyone just expects to have these diseases, and it's really that's a totally modern convention that started happening once we stopped kind of living in the way that our bodies need us to live. A modern medical paradigm. Yes. Exactly. Think about the retirement age and retirement. And so people I maybe they lack purpose and productivity. Retire. So how did the hunter gatherers die? They lived to 75, and then they got eaten by something? Like No. I mean, they What's what's cool is so this is the first book in the 3 book series, and we actually talk about, in the last book, it's kind of we the first book's basic needs. The second book's co, social needs, child rearing, the sexes, social groups. And then the last group, the last book talks about more cultural needs, and we talk about how hunter gatherers approach death. So that I was like, oh, that's a really good question. But maybe we should wait and talk about that book then. Just because they they I mean, just to touch on it, I I'm sure you're familiar with this. Like, today, death has become something that happens behind closed doors. You do everything you can to help somebody die longer so they stay alive longer, maybe in really bad health, and they're usually in some sterile hospital room with nobody around. And that was total it wasn't like that. When a hunter gatherer died, They were at home. They were surrounded by their loved ones, and they were there was so much ceremony and ritual around that that it really, like, meant it meant something. And they were there's a lot of peep a lot of tribes and groups were like, they have a really rich culture and belief in the the ancestors being able to be contacted and to look over the tribe and things like that. So it just had such a different place in life. Death had a place in life. They were used to death because it could happen at any time. They could get eaten, you know, an an animal or even just like, you know, get a bad cut and have a bacterial infection and not be able to just survive that. But I think the way that people approach death nowadays versus back then, I think we could learn a lot from them too. So Yeah. I like the way you described it. I think do you think, like, hospice tries to do something like that? Yeah. Hospice is getting there. I think there are now there are now, like, death Yeah. Duels? Aren't there, like, death duels now? Yeah. Duels. That that's Ginny Ayan. Sounds like a Star Wars character. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a medical oncologist by training. Okay. And, and spent about 25, 30 years doing that. And, hospice, hospice, in my mind, is is right. It's more like pressuring people out at this the gathering of the the tribe, family, and all that. It's it's Let me put you on a morphine drip and let you rest away. Yeah. Mhmm. Thing. Yeah. Comfort measures. Right? Oh, and that's what you were saying. They drag out the dying process. Yeah. You you keep people alive longer, but really you just keep people dying longer. Yeah. Yeah. Chemotherapy. Yeah. Okay. Let's not get into oncology. Yeah. We're getting way off topic. But it's interesting. It's very interesting to talk about these things with you guys. So, I mean and the way getting back to how ancestors ate, that was clean eating. Right? That was Oh. Meat and vegetables, unprocessed. Like, that's a very I feel like that's not a complicated lifestyle to choose. Mhmm. You know, in in my mind, I feel like people overcomplicate nutrition with rules and calories and crap. And in my head, I'm just like, look. If it doesn't if it doesn't die or go bad in 3 to 4 days, it shouldn't go in your body. What are your thoughts? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that I I totally agree. I think people are making nutrition too complicated. Everyone is fighting over what people should eat. Let's eat keto. Let's eat carnivores. Let's be vegans. Let's do all this stuff. And they're all fighting with each other when really we need to get together and tell people what they shouldn't eat anymore because that if we can get most people to stop eating what they shouldn't eat, we're the battle is mostly won. So, yeah, of course, hunter gatherers, ate whole foods. The way they they processed foods to make them digestible or, you know, they cooked them or ground them and stuff, but they still ate the entire food. They ate the skin. They ate the seeds. They ate, if we're talking about animals, they ate connective tissue. They ate the organs. And so they I know. Right? Waste not, what not, I guess, but I can't get there. I know. Well, because that's we're used we're not used to it. We we weren't raised. We eat muscle meat. That's all we eat. That's all we ever eat. So we're just not we're not used to it. There are other cultures that it's their delicacies and they eat them. But the other thing is, you know, a lot of these things, there is no our ancestors had honey occasionally. It was a very big treat, but it was a really hard resource to get to. Some places had, like, maple syrup and things like that, but there was no refined sugar. And in no animal's history was is there a precedent where they evolved with that much processed refined sugar in their diet? I think we went from £4 of sugar a year per American in the 1700 to, like, a 150 to £200 of sugar a year now, which is that's just mind blowing. Whatever our bodies have not evolved to handle, our bodies have had maybe a 100, 200 years to start figuring out how to deal with this sugar that's in our, you know, our high blood sugar all the time, and it's not adapting. You know, we this is the disease of the modernity. Kedies, cardiovascular disease. Yeah. Yeah. All linked to sugar. All of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well and, also, hunter gatherers never ate, you know, artificial things. There was nothing artificial. You know? No artificial sweeteners, colors, flavors, preservatives. Like you said, if if it's not decaying or or going bad, don't eat it because our bodies don't know what to do with it. Also, trans fats, like, that's a whole different kind of fat that our body has never encountered before. So eating whole foods and, you know, not eating processed foods, I think that's the biggest takeaway message because I think after that oh, go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say it's so simple. When you go to the grocery store, even the grocery stores make it really easy for you because most of those fresh foods and the what do you call the the butcher dude? Mhmm. Mhmm. The deli? Out yeah. It's on the outside. Yeah. You just don't go down the aisles where things that never go bad live, then, a, you're saving money, and, b, you're getting closer to making smarter nutritional choices. Yeah. And then I think after that, our ancestors lived in so many different environments. Right? They're they're Inuit who lived in the Arctic, and they ate mostly animal products. They eat protein and fat. So 95% protein and fat, maybe 5% plants, carbohydrates. And they, they adapted, their bodies could handle that. But on the other side of the spectrum in the rainforest, probably they would eat 65 to 70% carbohydrates, fruit, lots and lots of fruit, and maybe only 35, 30% animal proteins. So people who are saying like, oh, the paleo there's only 1 paleo diet and this is what it is. The paleo diet is actually averages, whereas the individual groups had very different ratios of the macronutrients. And so what I think, once somebody stops eating the bad stuff, then they can figure out what makes them feel best because I don't think I think everybody's a little different in terms of their genetic history, and I'm sure you guys have heard of Nutrigenomics, which is a very new kind of field of research, which might be fascinating to figure out for when they start figuring out some things. So you'd be able to, like, give yourself a a gen genetic profile of the things that you are best suited to eat. Are actually doing. Yeah. We have been doing that. I Cool. I did one of those tests on myself, and I gotta tell you, I I always like, Tripp, you gotta look at this. I don't know what any of this means. It was I'm still trying to decipher all of that. But, yeah, we do the Nutrigenomics and the No worries, dear. No worries. We're having the gizzards, not Oh god. No. No. No. How's some liver? Liver and onions. Yeah. So we yeah. So that information is very comprehensive even. So we do that, and then we have, like, the gene the genetic. Do well, I at the limit, we do whole genome sequencing and Mhmm. And adapt to the to the patient, specifically, an n of 1. So, there You're right. People are different and have different tolerances and benefits from different things. So it's not appropriate to say paleo is this way. And if you don't And and I hope rather than making it more confusing, people will be like, well, what the heck am I supposed to eat then? Well, get rid of the bad stuff, and then you can see what foods make you feel the best. Right. You know, and use yourself and how you feel as your guide. You don't have to, I'm gonna do that. I'm a carnivore. I'm a carnivore. But if you're not feeling good, even somebody tells you this is the best optimal way to eat, but it does not working for you, leave it. Try something different. And if your your doubt adds up, then you know. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Alright. I wanted to ask about because I really like the statement you had in the present moment mindset as the ancestors had. So let's talk about that. Okay. I think as we were evolving, it was a very highly developed survival trait to be able to be in the moment and to know what's going on around you in the moment. Right? Is that, you know, is is that breaking branch somebody I know or is it a tiger? I feel the weather changing. I need to get home. They're in the moment. They are taking in their environment through all of their senses and acting on what they receive and acting on what their brains are telling them. This is what's going to happen. Where I think nowadays, we are so not in touch with the present moment. We are always living in some other either the past. Or the future. Dimension. Yeah. Having having what is it? We're anxiety, worrying about the future, and depression. Yeah. Over something. And if you think about it, so their concept of time was so different than ours because someone coined the term a delayed return economy. Oh, oh, sorry. Immediate return economy. So what they would do is they would go like, oh, I'm hungry. I'm gonna go get let's go get some food. And so they'd go get food and then they'd eat it. They got their reward or they got their return on their efforts immediately. So they were able to always just meet their needs when they needed to have it. So if you go back to sleep, they're tired. They're gonna go to sleep. They didn't have things like Netflix to override our body's signals to that we're tired. We should go to bed. But when agriculture came along and now we went from an immediate return economy to a delayed return economy, and that is more you plant the seeds, you wait 8 months, and then you harvest. So now we're all of a sudden starting we're being very future oriented. We're gonna get a paycheck at the end of this cycle. We're gonna harvest our food at the end of this cycle. And I think just naturally, we started not living in the present moment. We started living more in the future. And nowadays, with so many distractions and, you know, our health isn't good, our mental health isn't good, so we're prone to be more in the future, in the past with anxiety or depression or whatever. And that's why meditation and mindfulness is such a powerful tool because it helps us figure out how to return back to this present moment where everything's okay right now. I can I'm in tune with my body. I'm in tune with what's going on around me, and you can get out of that fight or flight at least for a little while before you go back into the into the ring. Yeah. I mean, I know. I've historically, I'm always future focused, and part of me worries that if I'm too in the now, then the things that need to be done in the future just won't happen. It's a mental state. Yeah. So I think there's studies where if you are in the present moment, it doesn't mean you don't plan for the future. You just don't live in the future. But if you're in the present moment, you are you have the the mindset and the, you know, you're not in this fight or flight, so you can actually focus better and see what your priorities are. You can plan better. You can say, okay. Well, what needs to be done first? What need rather than being like, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. What I need to do so many things. I don't know what to do, and then you just don't do anything because you're overwhelmed. Right. I think Mark Twain said it best. I've had a lot of worries in my life. A couple of them were real. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. We we make up a lot of our own reality in our heads. Yeah. We do. So mindful so you said meditation. So steps somebody can do, very simple steps. I think people also overcomplicate meditation as well. It doesn't have to be that complicated, people. And when I started meditation, I couldn't get out of my own head that I was doing it wrong. Right. You know, that this isn't working. Why is why aren't I feeling great right now? But it it takes practice. And and there are still times when I don't have a good meditation. It it happens. You know? It's not I guess what's really important in that scenario is not to judge yourself. Right. Like, you can't get it wrong. You know? Exactly. Some of the tools that I find very helpful, like, I like to do the h z, the Hertz. Like, YouTube has a huge library of banaro beats. I've just I've heard of this. Yeah. I love to put those on. Those are very helpful for just setting the mood and helping you be in the present Right. Moment and focusing. That the it takes you out of the beta zone that what which is our waking interaction zone, and it puts you in a either a a lower wave frequency and basically get you down to theta or delta in your and that monkey brain that I call it. The monkey brain is squashed, and you can remain without thinking about what if, what if, what Well, or instead of saying what if, gratitude is also a great way to be present. She can't be grateful and in in a state of anxiety at the same time. Yep. That's very true. Well, and talking about that hurt, that sound, think about people who whose cultures are meditate you know, have meditation in them. The Buddhist monks, they have this tone that they do or people who use Om or mantras and stuff. Those are all trying to evoke that same physiological reaction, I think. Yeah. For sure. I mean, my go to is all is well. And I repeat it on the in breath and the out breath until I really feel like all is well or I've passed out and gone to sleep. So Yeah. Tips and tools. What else what is one thing that you would like the listener to know? I think well, when I started this project, it was kind of this blank sheet, this blank slate with this outline, and I started getting really overwhelmed and really judgmental of myself of all the things I was doing wrong. Right? Because, you know, like I was saying at the beginning, you're reading along and you're like, we don't do that anymore. We don't do that anymore. And so what I found to be really helpful is take these small at the end of every section, we have these just, like, small actionable things that people can do. And rather than take it all on at once, you know, you need to do little bits at a time. What resonates with with you the most? What area are you struggling with the most? It could just be, okay. I'm not getting any processed food today. Just for let's try it just for a day. Or I'm gonna for this week, I'm gonna get up every morning and I'm gonna walk, and then I'm gonna see how I feel. And what I found, once I was able to get over that judgment and start actually doing these things because I learned so much about my own health and well-being in this whole process, it was just amazing. You start to feel better. And then when you start to feel better, you're like, I wanna feel even more. I wanna feel even better. Let's so what can I do next? You know? And then when you're not so tired all the time, going to the gym doesn't feel like a burden. When you know that if you eat that much ice cream before you go to bed, you're not you're gonna feel kinda hungover the next day. So just don't feel overwhelmed because modernity this is why we're in fight or flight all the time. We are very we're stimulated all the time. We're we just have so much coming at us. We're overwhelmed all the time. So don't let your health and well-being be something that overwhelms you. Just take it one step at a time and, you know, do what feels right for you in the moment. Cool. I like it. Okay. And one more time, where can they find the book, and then where can they find more about you and Luke? Okay. Yeah. So we have a website. It's www.on the origin of being.com. Those are also our Facebook and Instagram handles are at on the origin of being. I feel like I'm I feel like Instagram I'm I'm gravitating towards Instagram as my favorite place to interact, but I also have Luke and I both also have LinkedIn profiles, so we do some things there too. But, our website is probably the best place to start. It has links to all of those things. It has excerpts from the book. It has a place to order. We have a little video. We have our biographies on there. So I think that's probably the best place to start. Cool. And, listener, as always, I will put those somewhere in the notes so you can find them later now or whatever you wanna do. Jenny, thank you so much. That was so informational. I'm kinda thinking your book probably needs to be a textbook and be introduced to curriculum in schools. It sounds like a wealth of information. Yeah. I mean, it's something that I would be a a good foundation starter for, our patients for sure as we integrate all these things in and and get the results we do. I mean, that is a a foundational kind of aspect and perspective they need. Yeah. Yeah. I I agree. I think it chain it's really changed my life. So both writing the book and going through the whole process of publishing, but also learning about all this stuff and actually applying it to my own life completely changed the trajectory of my life. So it I mean, it works. Amazing stuff. Thanks. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun. Yeah. It has been. Well, listener, I hope you found this educational, informational, somewhat entertaining, and until next time. Thanks for subscribing to Your Infinite Health. I'm doctor Tripp. And I'm Lanae. Until next time. Feel it, look it, and live it.