Brain Health, Hormones, and Longevity: What You’re Missing

In this episode, we dive into the powerful connection between brain health, hormones, muscle, and mindset—and how they all impact your longevity, mood, and daily performance. Dr. Janine Crifasi breaks down why what we often blame on hormones may actually stem from brain function, and how stress, trauma, and lifestyle can quietly shift how we think, feel, and show up. From the realities of the “sandwich generation” to the early signs of cognitive decline, this conversation brings awareness to what so many people are experiencing but not fully understanding.

You’ll also learn how modern clinical neuroscience is helping identify and address these challenges through real, measurable data and personalized care. If you’ve ever felt “off,” struggled with brain fog, or questioned changes in your energy or mood, this episode offers insight, clarity, and a proactive approach to taking control of your brain health and overall well-being.

About the guest:
Dr. Janine Crifasi, DC, is a Board Eligible Diplomate of Applied Chiropractic Functional Neurology and Clinic Director at Brain Restore Center of Chandler. She is a dedicated doctor and educator specializing in brain and central nervous system health, with extensive experience in spinal care, rehabilitation, and clinical neuroscience. Dr. Crifasi has held multiple leadership roles, including Executive Director and Clinic Owner, and has been recognized as a national and international speaker. She is committed to advancing patient care through innovative, multimodal approaches and educating both professionals and the community on optimizing brain health and performance.

Location: 3800 West Ray Road #12, Chandler, AZ 85226
Phone: 480.756.2600
Email: azchironeuro@gmail.com

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Stay Sassy and Strong with Dr. Micol

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Dr. McCole Nealy, and thanks for listening to our show. We are here to talk a little bit about mindset, movement, and muscle, and maybe a few other little fun things along the way. Hello, today we're talking about something that impacts our entire life. Hormones, muscle, mood. It's your brain. Dr. Krafassi, thank you for joining me today. Oh, thank you for having me. You have so many things you've done. Um accolades, um, degrees, conferences. You wrote this book that's incredible. I can't wait to get through the whole thing. Um, but tell me a little bit, um, just in general, how does brain health really affect longevity for us?

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Brain health is responsible for every action, every reaction, every function sensation that we have, the perspective we have is based on our brain function. And if we have any kind of an interference with that, what ends up happening is it's a skew. So if you're used to being a certain way, thinking a certain way, having a certain amount of energy, and then for whatever reason, out of nowhere, perhaps a trauma, emotional, and traumas aren't just concussions. Okay. Traumas are anything that has a significant impact on the way your body creates hormones, like you said, manages hormones, manages your stress level, or something that may cross that blood-brain barrier could change your perspective, it could change your mood. You know, we've all had dynamics with somebody where you're in a great mood, you came back from a vacation, and you know, the cap on the toothpaste didn't bother you. There are other times there are other things going on in your life, like the sandwich generation, taking care of kids, taking care of parents, trying to manage themselves, their work, etc. And that cap is what puts them over the top. And that's what happens. In fact, I had a new patient in this morning, and she's like, something's changed. I don't know what it is. Must be menopause, must be this. Somebody said yesterday, I know I had a trauma years ago. I'm not myself. And another recent patient said, Within one year, a friend of mine who seemed okay said, I feel like my memory has changed. I must be getting older. One year later, he is in a facility and he's not remembering hardly anybody. Just within a year.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Within one year. Wow. And how many times do you see, like you mentioned, she said, Oh, my hormones are off? How often do you see people are blaming hormones? Because that's kind of a buzz right now. Exactly. But they think, oh, it's my hormones. It must be because that's what everybody's looking at now. But how often is it actually brain health?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Well, like I said, brain health controls everything. So your hormones are going to change, but your metabolism, your um activity level, so much can play a part in how your brain interprets those hormones. For example, if um, well, just to back up the bus a little bit, right now, one out of three of us has a brain-based neurodegenerative condition. One out of three. One out of three. So that is costing the economy 67 million dollars a year today. In the next 25 years, where presumably everybody here in the studio is still going to be here, half our population, one out of two of us, is expected to have that. So we need to protect this. Thankfully, people are going, oh, I think it's my hormones, oh, I think it's this. And they're like, I want to do something about it. Yeah. So that's the benefit, but it's costing us a lot of money and a lot of effort and a lot of relationships. So when somebody can turn around and say, Okay, I think it's my hormones, I need to go get checked. Or, like somebody said recently, I know I fell off, I fell off a horse or horse fell on me re you know, in her past. We've had a few people that have come in that, you know, have had PTSD from domestic relationship issues. Sure. There's a lot of people that have careers that are very, very stressful.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Tell me, you used a term the sandwich generation. Yeah. Explain that a little bit and how that is affecting brain health. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

It's it's both for the caregivers as well as for their parents or their children. Okay. So in this generation right now, I believe the statistic is 64% of women are the responsible party for raising the children predominantly and caring for the patients. If you do research on that, 50% of them are testing positive for stress beyond their cognitive capabilities. So they're a housewife, they're a mom.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

No, no, not all. Yeah. They're doing it all. They're doing it all. So they're they're taking care of their kids, they're working, and taking care of their parents, probably too.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

And 40% of them, these women, I should say, and you know, of course it's men too, but women predominantly take on that role. We're caregivers by nature. Yeah. So when we take that role on, there's 25% of them are working full-time, 40% are working part-time, and 17% are having a hard time managing the finances and all of it because they are feeling, or legitimately, it is falling upon their shoulders. So we do know also that people that are the caregivers, unfortunately, succumb to health-related issues before the people they're caring for. So brain health, excessive stress, inability to manage that stress is going to again go back to the hormonal cascade. We tend not to eat as well, let alone the fact the food that when we were kids was nutritionally more uh robust than it is now. And that being said, we're not eating as well. They're not, they're grabbing food on the go. That's creating a leptin resistance, which is then creating stress hormone cascades. And that's not going to be good for their health. And these are the people that are responsible for making sure the kids are growing up with what they need and managing the caregiving aspects to make sure their parents and, you know, unfortunately, those patients, again, let's go to statistically, 33% of those people right now are going to have a brain-based disorder. That's going to involve balance. That's going to involve coordination. A lot of times people are, you know, falling. It's just, oh, all of a sudden they feel they're more clumsy or it's old age. No, there's a reason for that. So a hypothetical situation is the kid comes home from school, the woman's just walked home from school, uh from work rather, and then she turns around and gets a phone call that, you know, so-and-so has fallen. We've got to take them to the hospital. Stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. Sure, one after another. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's very difficult.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

And that's because this is so relatable to absolutely. I mean, even personally, I can I can tell you I've felt that before. Um, and I I was on the phone with my mom just yesterday. I go, I think my brain's just broken. I can't think today.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Right. And that's, you know, and that unfortunately becomes a comfortable but inaccurate norm. We just deal with it because we have to deal with so many other things in life right now. You know, we've got to work, the economic strain that's going on, the responsibilities that we all have right now is taking a toll on us. Again, the, you know, the way we're trying to balance our lives with, you know, commutes and things like that, it makes it really hard. But there's options. And that's what we've tried to do, you know, and developing programs for people using clinical neuroscience to give people the opportunity to have a multimodal approach to understanding what's going on with their brain health. Or, you know, again, a lot of people don't even go, oh, I have a brain health issue. It's something's not right. I don't feel right. I'm something's, you know, something's off is often a very common symptom that we'll hear.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

I want to hear more about this because I think we can all relate. Like, yeah, sure. We we've got that stress. A lot of people come in and be like, hey, something's just wrong. Hormones, something I'm hurt when I wake up. Let's say you get someone in your clinic. I walk in and I tell you, like, my brain's broken. What would you do? Like, what's your first step?

SPEAKER_01 8:59

I would tell you your brain's not broken. It just may not be working right. Okay. And what do we do? Well, what we do in our office is we we, before anybody even comes in, we have you guys starting to think about your brain. So we're going to send you paperwork that's going to assess the different functions of the different lobes of the brain and the brainstem. Okay. Get us. Just by testing. Uh well, this is just your questionnaire. Okay. Yeah. It's just a questionnaire. You're going to do that ahead of time. I'm going to take a look at that form, and then I'm going to ask you very provocative questions about what is what does that mean when you say, um, you know, I just feel like I have brain fog. You know, what do you what does it mean that you don't feel like you have your memory right? So we're going to try and get to the root of the problem. And then we're going to talk about, you know, dietary measures and and um the comprehensive aspect of it. The program that we've designed is, again, like I said earlier, a multimodal approach. So we're going to do a brain map on patients. It's called a quantitative electroencephalogram. So there's a cap. It's got 19 locations on it that is going to record in real time your brain activity. Does it hurt at all? Not at all. Okay. Not at all. I mean a little goo-oo, but it's all water-based. So it's just stuck onto the thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

So you probably don't want to go on a date or anything like that after, but crazy head after that. Yeah, crazy hair. All right. So you you get that done, then we're going to go over that right then and there. It's going to populate. Yep. You're going to get immediate results on what that brain scan shows and whether or not it is something that is of concern and if it correlates to your symptoms. You know, because sometimes people feel things and sometimes we disregard things. And then there's other things that it's just important to know about. So this gives us objectifiable data. Yeah. If the patient, you know, qualifies and is receptive to it, then we will schedule a neurological interference assessment, which it uses a balanced tracking plate, which is going to see how your body moves under certain stresses that are going to deal with proprioception, where your body thinks and joints think they are in space. Okay. It's going to record uh how your vestibular or balance centers are responding to different environments on the balance tracking plate. And then it's also going to see how your vision plays a part in that. So let's just suppose as we age, you know, our vision typically changes a little bit. How much of a bearing does that have on your balance and your brain health?

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

So we take that data, then we also do a one-page assessment, which is going to check a couple of different things, short-term memory, spatial relations, a little bit of um interaction with us. That has a recordable score as well. They all do. Okay. And then they're going to come into the room with me and I'm going to do a lot of bedside examination. We're going to check heart, lungs, blood pressure, pulse oxygenation. We're going to see how the sense of hearing is. And again, a little bit of integrated memory, sense of smell, all the cranial nerves. And then we're going to try and do activities to see if those independent parts of your brain can work independently. And can they work interdependently with other parts of your body and flow together? Exactly. And then we would come up with whether or not, again, somebody would fit into our plan, which our I need to stop doing that. Our brain restore program is about using neuroenergetics, which are low-level lasers that do not create any heat. They only allow for healing. And there's there are white the lasers that we use are thoroughly researched. There's white papers behind them, and they have had no issues recorded. And so it completely helps the cells to heal from the outside. It helps the channels that allow the nutrients that when we're under oxidative stress, which is an overall term for what we were speaking of before, that stress causes the cells to become depleted and/or damaged. So it helps those cells to heal. We have a hyperbaric chamber that we use. We love hyperbaric. Yep. And our hyperbaric chamber, it's using a soft shell chamber. So we're not using pure oxygen. We are actually filtrating the oxygen within the room. So it's completely safe. The city of Chandler, that was very important to them that we weren't doing that. And for us, it gives us peace of mind because you know we're also treating other people while people are getting that. Yeah. And of course, they are being checked and monitored while they're in there. And that helps the neuroplasticity, the changes in the nerves, like the laser does, like the therapeutic applications we do using movement and activities in our office. Tell our listeners how hyperbaric chamber. So you're laying in the chamber, which it feels like you're on an airplane. You're not feeling compressed or anything like that. That's, of course, having a subtle impact on the lymph and the flow of blood in oxygen and nutrients in your system. And then it helps to drive some of the nutrients and the toxic waste into a part of your blood called the plasma, which helps to filtrate the system.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Also helps to sort of speed up metabolism a little bit because you're using your glycogen stores to help your body create this energy flow that it needs. And so patients get that as part of the program. Then we are also going to do from that brain map that we had earlier. We have a program that is going to do a neurofeedback aspect, either auditorily or visually. And again, it depends on the particular makeup and findings that we have with the patients. And some patients can progress between one to the other, but to make sure we get that brain passively firing and used to when you're in a stressful environment where oftentimes people like, oh, I can't handle loud or being outside is too bright for me. It allows us to get a subconscious reaction and an automatic feedback loop that's more positive than when they came in that caused them to have the need to have the treatments.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

So can someone do these treatments even if it's maybe they haven't had this big event or an injury? Maybe they're just really stressed. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Does this help? Absolutely. You know, stress is the number one killer right now. Yeah. And people living with oxidative stress that leads to a lot of the, well, let's back up a little bit. In in holistic health care, we talk about dis-ease, dysfunction. If you leave that for too long, we lose that hyphen and it becomes dysfunction and disease. So if we can get a handle on that ahead of time, that's going to help the body to function better. That's going to help the circulation, help the oxygenation, because we all know we need oxygen to thrive. We need gravity, we need movement, but we need appropriate movement. So I not sure if that answered your question or not. Definitely.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

So we've got laser, hyperbaric, counseling, like talking, biofeedback.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

We've got sensory motor activities that we're doing with them. We do, I call it the walk talk, chew gum. Because sometimes when there's a breakdown in the communication between the lobes of the brain, that's going to execute in inappropriate movements. You know, we've seen, we've seen kids backpacks, that's causing a change. Their brain thinks that's normal. They take the backpacks off and they're still sitting like this, right? Sure. Then you have patients that have Parkinson's that are, you know, stumped over because their brain thinks that they are falling backwards, so their brain causes them to come forward. Right. Yeah, I know you and I both, right? So if we tell people then to move and stand up, they can't because their brain keeps them in that activity loop. So we will do a lot of activities, sensory motor integration, cerebellar integration. We help to manage the pain. A lot of them have, because everything feeds through a part of your brain called the thalamus, which is your pain modulator, some people that even have chronic pain that nobody seems to understand, or, you know, the medical field just, you know, they they can't have something, whatever their dis-ease is. If it doesn't have a box to go into in that profession, they don't know what to do with it. And patients are left to feel unsupported, you know, hopeless. And what we want to do is give people hope for their health. And that's what we're trying to obtain.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

What would be the first things you would tell someone here's some early signs that you should watch for that say, Hey, come talk to me? Like in general, what what are those?

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Stress that they're not managing, they're not sleeping well at night, unexplained weight loss or weight gain, poor sleep patterns, flying off the handle, or not processing at all. Yeah. I used to like to read, but I can't read anymore. I I'm not main, I'm not retaining things. I used to manage my checkbook and I can't, you know, like, or there's just overall apathy. And that's not a quality of life. Who cares if you live to be 104 if you if you don't have a quality of life? So it's about making sure that that we're living a life that we're enjoying and you have a quality of life. And one of my mantras is your quality of life is directly related to your quality of health. Without one, you cannot have the other. And the brain kind of controls all that. It does. And it's whether we're awake or asleep, our brain is always firing. Our feedback loops, our vestibular system, our ocular system, as a matter of fact. That vestibular ocular system is our most active reflex. So when you're dreaming and your eyes are moving in your dream, guess what? You're affecting that. So that's why sleep can play a part in this. So, you know, there's so many things. That's why we're offering a free QEG scan. Free. And then if patients do end up deciding and we feel that they're a candidate and they want to investigate it further, the examination that we do, which is normally roughly $800, we're only offering it for $200.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Because we want to be able to help people. That's exactly it. We want to give people the gift of health.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

I think too many people think, well, this is normal aging. I'm just getting old, my brain's going to stop. But it doesn't have to be.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

It doesn't have to. As long as we're alive, we have the opportunity to stimulate the brain. 30 years ago, we didn't think that was the case. Clinical neuroscience, as you know, is the fastest growing aspect of healthcare right now. Yeah. Because the neurodegenerative changes that are happening is going to supersede cancer and heart disease combined if we cannot get a handle on this. That's not me saying it. That's what the research is and the projections are showing. And that I don't want to be part of that. And I don't want the people around me that I love to be part of that. Sure. So we're trying to do our little part, like Gandhi said, you know, be the change you want to see in the world. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

What's the number one thing that you would tell people to avoid to help your brain? Sugar.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Well, because here's the thing is right now it is believed that sugar is type 3 diabetes and the leading cause of dementia. Yeah. And sugar, well, sugar can be fruit, it can be candy, it can be heavy carbs. And when your brain thinks that when your brain registers that leptin is telling you, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, and it's not stopping it, we start to retain fat, brown fat, which is not the healthy fat.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

And then your hypothalamus, which controls your hunger and your satiety cycles, doesn't know when to turn off. That is also where your sleep and wake cycles are. That's where a lot of your mood is. That part of your brain is where your pineal gland, which has to do with a lot of your hormone cascade, comes from. Yeah. So do you see how all of this fits together? So, you know, a free brain scan to at least get a benchmark for where you are is really a good place to start. And to know that they have us as a resource because things can change, traumas can happen, emotional or physical. And so stay away from the sugars.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Avoid sugars, get your brain sugars. Yep. Okay, on the flip side, real quick, what then is the number one thing you would tell? People to do. If they're not going to come see you, they just want to try something on their own first. What can they do for their brain health besides avoiding sugar?

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Move around.

unknown 22:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

At Power Health, we really, really preach to people. Movement is medicine. Muscle is medicine. And yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

And appropriate movement. We want to make sure we're coordinated. And everyone was, oh, what should I do? What should I do? What's the best exercise? The one you're going to follow through with. Move. Yeah. Whatever it is. If you want to start rock climbing, get do it safely, but do it. If it's if getting out and walking is good for you. And just to preface that a little bit, it's best if you're doing something that has a gravitational force. You know, bicycling and swimming are really good, but that's not putting as much strain on the bones and the joints and the proprioceptors that we spoke about. So just getting out and doing something on a regular basis.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

I I've become an ultra runner and I tell people that's not for everybody. It's not even healthy for some people, but it's my brain. The running is what keeps my brain. And so this is fascinating. I could talk for days about brain. You and I both. You and I both. Uh well, Dr. Chris Posse, thank you so much. I can't wait to hear more and maybe come see your place. Please do. Um, but thank you so much for giving us some of those quick ideas about brain health. And just remember keep moving, avoid your sugar, and then come get your brain scan. Thank you.