Stop Adding. Start Subtracting. The Real Secret to Better Health with Sandy Martin

This episode sponsored by: EXPLORE FOCUSAUR ON KICKSTARTER

Your body is keeping score. And it's been doing it quietly while you push through.

Sandy Martin was at the top of her game. Then everything stopped working. What she found on the other side became a framework for getting well when no one has answers for you.

In this episode, we get into:

• The three-minute humming practice that resets your nervous system and why it actually works
• Why five seconds in, five seconds out is the exact breath interval your lungs want most
• The difference between trying every supplement and fixing the actual root cause
• Why beating yourself up creates a biological cascade that makes everything harder
• How grace will get you further than consistency ever will

Sandy's quick win takes three minutes. One minute if that's all you have. And it works even if you're standing in a parking lot before school pickup.

You can connect with Sandy here:

bioEDGE Longevity Summit https://bioedgelongevity.com/

Living Well. Longer. Together

bioEDGE Decoder https://bioedgedecoder.com/ Your body sends signals long before problems show up as diagnoses. bioEDGE Decoder helps you notice which systems may be involved and why, so you are not left guessing where to start.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bioedgelongevity

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bioedgelongevity

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

I want to share something that genuinely caught my attention. If you've ever picked up your phone to start a timer and ended up distracted instead, you'll get why Focus Door stands out. Focus Door is a physical focus companion that helps you start without opening another app. You twist and click to begin, and in deep focus mode, it creates a real pause between you and your phone. So just one quick check is easier to stop before it turns into a spiral. And when you finish a session, you get a visual reward that makes consistency feel encouraging instead of punishing. If that sounds more doable than trying to outwillpower your phone, it's on Kickstarter right now. Tap the link in the show notes to back focus door in the early bird price and be among the first to get one. This is Quick Wins for ADHD moms. Hey, I'm Jessica Lynn Lewis. So glad you're here. We have a special guest today. Sandy Martin is the creator of Biological Edge Framework and the author of Biological Edge, a practical guide to longevity. After spending $97,000 on optimization protocols while undetected mold quietly erase the results, she learned that order matters. Eliminate the interference first, then optimize. She helps audiences separate signal from noise and stop paying for progress they can't keep. I loved having her on the show today because, you know, there's that connection with our ADHD journey and trying to figure everything out and we're trying to optimize everything. And maybe it just starts with elimination first. So here's Sandy and her story. Well, Sandy, thank you so much for joining us on Quick Wins for ADHD moms. We appreciate you being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Thanks, Jessica. I'm so excited to be here. What an interesting opportunity to reflect on how we we juggle and manage everything and how that affects our bodies.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Yes. And I think we were just talking a few minutes ago at like our bodies. We don't really know what's going on because we're so busy. And taking time to reflect seems like a wasted time because then that would just be five steps behind. But I would love to hear uh more of your story and and how that kind of looks like in your life. Um, but we usually start the show off with a quick win for ADHD moms. So I would love to hear your quick win for today.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

The thing that I do when I'm overwhelmed, and I was at a conference this weekend um just like on every single person I spoke to. I had to bring my best and and be centered. And I took a couple breaks throughout the day, and I did this in the morning, and I did this before I went to bed. I couldn't go to sleep without doing it. Um I hum. And so I do this in a particular order because of the way the body can entrain its systems in one ordered, coherent system instead of fragmented systems. So instead of my brain operating on one frequency and my heart operating on another and my lungs on another, breath and humming have a profound effect. There's all kinds of breath work. But there's something about 10 seconds, 10 second intervals that optimizes the oxygen uptake in the body and it orders the heart rhythms. And so if you breathe in for five seconds and out for five seconds, you can achieve so much, even if you're not in a place where you feel like you can hum. But I like to breathe in for five seconds and then hum out for five seconds as my breath. And the nasal, you can do ohms, that's fine. But if you hum and you get that mmm, you feel it in your nose. Yeah. Um, you'll probably Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Like the resonance, you can feel the resonance.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

You can feel it vibrating your sinuses and your nasal passage. That stimulates the production of nitric oxide in the body. And nitric oxide is the molecule that relaxes our blood vessels. And so if we're stressed, we can at the same time do three things with this one quick win. We can order, we can optimize the oxygen uptake in our body because five seconds in, five seconds out is what the lungs want most. And then it happens to create the smooth sine wave of our heartbeats because the heart rate variance, we our heart rates go up when we breathe in and they go down when we breathe out. And the wider that variance, the healthier we healthier we are. That's called HRV. But it's not just about having high HRV, it's having high, smoothly orchestrated HRV. And that happens when we breathe steadily in and steadily out. So you could put something on your neck or in your ear and stimulate your HRV as a like a biohacking device or something, but that doesn't mean it's going to be smooth and ordered and in sync with your breathing in a way that pulls all the systems of the body together. So I do this for three minutes. I happen to have an Apple Watch and there's a there's a mindfulness app on it. And you can time three minutes and you can set the pacing. So I have it set for um six breaths a minute, which is 10 seconds, five seconds in, five seconds out. And then I just time it and then my watch will tell me the HRV, so I'll know if I've shifted. That feedback alone is phenomenal. Just I don't get the ordered sense. I have an interbalance heart math um device for that that I use occasionally, but I know it's working because I can feel it. I can feel all my systems come together. And three minutes to shift. I mean, you can do a minute, it'll help if you don't have three. But the Apple Watch won't track it unless it's three.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Oh, gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

And so that's how I got into the habit of three. And it will relax your body, it will it relaxes the flow of blood.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Kind of like a reset, like a reset your system if you're in the middle of chaos, which we do find ourselves in. Um, but not even that, like you're you're at a conference, right? So there's that natural anxiety that is probably there for anyone public speaking.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

And there's something, you know, anxiety and excitement kind of have the same signature in the body, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:29

So I could see that.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

If um it just helps to be more present. Like before you pick up your kid from school, that just a minute, just breathe in for five seconds, hum out for five seconds. That's a whole different conversation when the kid jumps in the car than if we don't take a moment. And because it does so many other things, improves the oxygen, improves the blood flow, you know that you're doing it not just for this kind of like I I think I for so many years got lost in the notion that sure, if I could be more present, I'd be happier or whatever. Okay, I'll just I'll get to that later. Right, right. I get no problem for that now tomorrow. Right. And um, but you can shift your body in the moment.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

That's beautiful. Thank you. And you know, these quick wins are are something that completely resets your body within just a couple minutes. But um, you mentioned the mindfulness app on your what your Apple Watch. And I had that on and I turned it off because I'm like, I no, not right now, not right now. I don't have the alerts. So yeah, maybe that's it.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

As like a reminder. I'm like, oh yeah, I should do that.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

That's a good idea. So you don't have to have them as reminders, you just have it on the face of the watch, and then you can just click it when you need it in the moment. That's right. That's right. Well, Sandy, can you tell my tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you kind of found all of this out in your biological edge framework too? Like, I'd love to dive into you know what what that looked like, your story.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna give the quick version. Of course. But I want it, I want it to be relatable to your audience because the piece that I think is most important it to convey to people is that so often we internalize our struggles as coming from our personality, our character, uh, our habits, whatever. And in my case, when I got sick, my first symptom was depression. And I won't say that depression is caused by inflammation, but brain inflammation will definitely cause depression. And so I didn't know. I just my brain very quickly said, Oh, we felt this before. That was depression. And so I was like, but wait, I really like my life. I shouldn't be, I shouldn't feel this way. Yeah, and it wasn't so much a shouldn't, but like a curiosity, like, why do I why do I think that's what it is? How would I be so quick to assume that? I have I had just accomplished a ton of stuff at work, and I I was working hard, like hard, hard. We had um just entered COVID um refunding $400,000 in tickets for a live event we were running. We had to take the whole business virtual, and I created the platform on which the virtual business operated, and I finished that in September of 2020. And then two weeks later, the overwhelm started in the beginning of October, and then by mid-October, I couldn't run reports on the system I myself had built. And so it came on really fast and I didn't know what was going on. But the the worse it got, the more I beat myself up until I just kind of threw it my hands and said, I'm just gonna go to a neurologist because um by that point, two weeks in, I couldn't, I just couldn't decipher the the meaning of the cells on my spreadsheet. And I built the spreadsheet.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Like I had something you worked in every single day, and now it's like I knew I knew what to do, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:09

And I didn't know how to get the information into it or how to run the analysis that I needed to run. But I had constructed it, it didn't make any sense. And I was like, this is so yeah. I um I went to a neurologist and then he sent me out for a SPECT scam, which I wanted. I picked him because he could do that, but I didn't know that he couldn't, he didn't know how to do it properly, and he sent me to a clinic and they didn't know how to do it properly. And so they put me in a room with the lights off. I lied down on the table, it's like a medical room, and I I was like bored. So I closed my eyes and I meditated, and so I didn't think anything of it, I was just bored. And they came in, they injected the tracer, and that took a snapshot of my brain meditating with my eyes closed instead of a snapshot of my brain in regular life. And so they got a whole different brain picture from me, and that's how they study meditators, but they didn't realize they were studying a meditator in the moment. They thought they were just taking a picture of my brain, and so it turns out that my frontal lobe was really nice and quiet because I had I had calmed it down, yeah. And then because my eyes were closed, the vision center was dark, so it looked like I'd hit my head and had a massive brain injury, and so I got diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. They just didn't know what they were looking for. When that came back, what was your first reaction? That I hadn't hit my head, I didn't have a brain injury. How could that be? And he's he suggested hyperbaric oxygen therapy, neurofeedback, and a really strong drug that is only given in severe cases of strokes. And I went to the hyperbaric clinic and met with the doctor there because you have to get cleared before you can do it. $20,000 worth of treatments he recommended. And the doctor asked me what was recommended. I told him and he said, Oh, Dr. So and so. I was like, How do you know that? And he said, Well, he's the only one that recommends that drug. And I was like, Oh. And that's what I knew. So that was early in my process. So I was about six to eight weeks into figuring out what was wrong with me, or trying to figure out what was wrong with me. And I decided not to take the drug. But my then husband and my doctor were pissed, and they I got drugged back into the office, and uh they ganged up on me and tried to make me take the drug. And I was like, no. And I just had this gut feeling that that was too much. I there was more to find out, and I would figure it out. And I had no idea how to start, I had no idea what to look for, and I I was flailing, very confused. So, because of what happened to me, I've had mold exposure, um, and it was carried on paint fumes directly to my brain. People don't normally get mold symptoms from that. It's usually like in your air vents, behind a wall, it's gradual, your body takes it in, you get tired, eventually you get brain fog. I had the reverse. It went straight to my brain, and then the rest of my body got sick. And so I if I hadn't had something so severe, I was so lucky that it took out my prized possession, my brain, immediately. So when it disrupted that, I went into overdrive to fix it. But if I had slowly at 45 started to be tired and achy and a little bit of brain fog, well, there's all kinds of things they want to tell you that is. Oh, it's your hormones. Oh, you're getting older. So I was really flailing and trying to figure out what was wrong with no ability or experience or understanding of where to go. But I just started reading and watching YouTube videos. I mean, I couldn't work, so I had all the time in the world. I didn't have any reason or to feel confident that I could figure it out. And I took some wrong turns. Like I took a an at-home urine test for heavy metals, and you know, I expected maybe something to be a little off. But what happened was the lab technician called me. They didn't get the results to Everly Well yet. Everly well, like, they're great company, great service, but I took the test wrong again. So it's another wrong test. I took an activated charcoal the night before, I peed in the cup, and the night before that, I had a crab cake. And crab cakes have arsenic in them in a form that is supposedly not toxic.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

How would you know that?

SPEAKER_00 14:44

And I didn't know that. Okay, right. Good to know. Um so if you eat a crab cake, which has a, they say, not harmful form of arsenic in it, and then you take an activated charcoal and pee the next morning, all the arsenic comes right out of your body, which is fantastic. That's what it's supposed to do. You did the right thing. However, if you test it, in my case, the lab technician called me and said, I'm not supposed to call you, and paused. I was like, She said, You have so much arsenic in your body, you might just die. And so I immediately thought I was dying. And that was like three months into the process. And so it took me a while to recover from that. It was just so frustrating. And eventually I listened to one of Dave Asprey's books, and he described his experience with mold. And then there was one scan, one slice of that spec scan I'd had done that had a toxic pattern to it based on the research I'd done, and I didn't understand why. And his had the same, and he didn't understand why, but his doctor explained to him that it can be environmental toxins, and in his case it was mold. So I tested for mold and I had mold in my body, and then I got out of the environment and started to detox. And I had, we don't have time to go through all the problems I had with doctors, but but you don't really have to explain to women all the problems that we have with doctors. This is kind of a known quantity. So trust me when I say I got ripped off and misled and eventually had to claw my way back to health on my own because sometimes that's all we have. And so what ended up happening was I finally got better. It took a couple years, and I was no longer aligned with my husband at the time because I changed as a person. I rewired my brain. And I wasn't hard-charging, aggressive, running big comic con personality anymore. I was gentle and cared deeply, and I I just couldn't relate to him or the business at all anymore. And so we are friends, but we went our separate ways. And I realized that I needed to start over also with working and because I was fortunate enough that I didn't have to work while I was healing. And then I started an event. I started a health event because I knew how to run events. And that made sense, right? Your own health journey and you're an event planner. So perfect, pain to purpose. Right. Happens all the time. I didn't realize so I thought that if I got all of these exhibitors in one room that I could save people the hassle and the time and the money that I spent trying just relying on testimonials online to figure out what was good and what wasn't. I wasted $100,000 in the first year on stuff that didn't help me at all. Because until I got the realization it was mold, nothing worked.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Things worked later, but not until I could clear the mold out.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah, you're trying to find that root cause.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Right, exactly. And then so it turns out, even when you put all the vendors in the room and people can go vendor to vendor, it's still overwhelming and it's still hard to know. So you can take sample facts home, but it doesn't really mean you're gonna understand how it works in your body. You can try it once on the show floor, but trying something once doesn't really mean that's gonna be the thing that works for you. And so I also recognized, and this is how I got to write my second book. My first book was biohacking starts with no, because it starts with what you stop. And that's my angry rant about all of the ways that we are assaulting our own bodies or that modern society is assaulting our bodies. And the second book is the framework for navigating that and getting healthy. So edge stands for eliminate, decode, gain, and execute. And the business I'm in is gain. It's all gain. You know, there's a supplement, there's a device, it's all gain. And I felt really bad about for two years just shoving these things in people's faces, like here, try something. It's so shallow. And I and we all have to make a living, and these companies are worthwhile companies, and they have to stand their ground and explain how it works. But the problem in the longevity space right now is that like Kara Swisher just went on CNN and tried hyperbaric. I didn't feel anything, she says. So I don't think it's that big a deal, but you can't try something once and know that it works. And maybe her biology isn't ready for it. When I went into the hyperbaric chamber, I got massive headaches and had to stop because I had mold in my brain. And it only worked after I detoxed. And so we just can't try, try, try, try. That's what we want to do. We want a pill, we want a device, we want a protocol, we want something that really just shifts everything so that we can keep going and take care of all of our responsibilities and maintain our energy. That's what we all want. But when my cousin Brian called me one day and he said, Sandy, what do you think about lion's mane? He's a good old boy from Kentucky. And I was like, What do you know about lion's mane? Like, what'd you hear about lion's mane? And he said, Well, I hear it's good for brain fog. And I said, Brian, you should stop eating at McDonald's. And he went, Oh. And then he did, and he lost 16 pounds in two weeks.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

And so we have to stop everything we're putting on ourselves, or at least one thing that is overwhelming us. Maybe it's a soda addiction, maybe it's a stress addiction, maybe it's the screen, the infinite scroll after 7 p.m. You know, may it could be any number of things. And and stopping's hard. It is. But it it all starts with what we stop. And so I put the framework together to explain to people that all of this stuff is great to try and you can biohack. That's I do. I have lots of devices I love, but I got the mold out, so now it works.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Yeah. And sometimes it's easier to avoid that underlying root cause because trying to fix that takes so much longer than you know, just getting lion's mane and doing that, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. Um but it won't work. But it won't work if you're having a Big Mac every Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

You can take all the lion's mane in the world, but if you're eating sweets every day, if you're starting your day with a sugary breakfast, your body is lion's mane's not gonna be able, it doesn't have that kind of power. Nothing does. None of the pharmaceuticals do. We can't supplement our way out of a bad diet.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Yeah. Doesn't work. That's huge, yeah. And so what does that look like for you now? Do you have like a you you probably certainly use the edge framework in your own life? What has you what have you seen um kind of be the biggest key to all of that? You know, is it consistency? Is it routine? Is it habits? I think it's grace. Grace.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

I think it's grace. Because I, like anybody else, fail to execute too often than I care to admit. So that final step, like I I Start and I get it all in play and then I kind of peter out. Yeah. And it's really hard to stick with something. Um, it's hard for me to maintain a routine.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

Yes, and I think that as ADHD brains, we completely relate to that. And and that's why it's so frustrating because everybody says, just be more consistent.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yeah. That's hard. Just just go a little easier on yourself. Don't don't give up if you're not consistent.

unknown 22:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

When you remember, you'll do it. It's like the reminders on my on my watch. I turn, I don't have any reminders for anything except podcast appointments, except my calendars. The only thing I get alerts for. Because I will ignore it faster than I can turn it off. Like I'm like, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

And it becomes a distraction instead of a help.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

It is. Yeah. And so I'm happy to just when I look at my watch, go, oh, I could take a moment now. Yeah. Or if I know I need a moment, I know how to get it. And I like to think that I can ebb and flow pretty easily. But I know I would be better served by more consistency. And so I try. And then I give myself grace when I fail.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

That's such a huge thing because a lot of us will just beat ourselves up, and that's the last thing we need.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

That has a seriously detrimental effect on your biology. That part, that beating ourselves up, that creates a cascade of hormones that causes belly fat. That one thing sends an alert, you know, that I want I want to be so gentle in the way I say it, even that like I don't have it yet. You know, people can take that in so many directions, but I don't have it together yet. Like, but that just that language shoots signals for stress response. Yeah. It triggers the kidneys, it triggers an adrenal response. The cortisol goes up. When the cortisol goes up, that creates a glucose spike. It tells the liver to create more glucose. It drives yeast infections. I finally figured out because I was have hardly ever eat sugar anymore because it's one of the worst things we can do. And I got a yeast infection. I was like, what the hell did I do? What did I eat? I didn't have a cupcake this week. What is going on? And it was the stress. I made my own glucose that gave me a yeast infection.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

And so the the effects of this are not seen, but it's there. And and the grace will get you so much farther than the consistency.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Oh, I like that. The grace will get you so much farther than the consistency. And that's what we really need to hear. Yeah.

unknown 24:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

All of this, me including it. Yeah. A reminder, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Yeah.

unknown 25:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

And I like you mentioned too, it's like that growth mindset instead of like a fixed mindset, you know. Oh, well, it's more of like, yet. I'm not consistent, and that's okay. And I haven't done it yet. Right. I know I'm supposed to eat a really good meal, nutritious, well-balanced meal. I haven't failed. It's just I haven't done it yet. Well, Sandy, I appreciate your story and um just the time that you have taken to reflect and learn all of this and share that with our audience. Because right now I think there's a lot of us who just don't feel like we have time to figure all that out, right? Um but you've showed us that taking taking time out and learning all of this and learning like your body and the systems and how one thing affects the next, and it's worth the time to to take to figure that out.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

It's worth three minutes of ohms or hums. Three minutes of ohms or hums. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

To just reset your body. Only three minutes. Even just one. Even one minute, scientifically. Scientifically. It's proven that it will help, even just one minute. That's true. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

Well, Sandy, how can people find you? Come to my website, bioedgelongevity.com. I host summits. My next one's in New York in August. And um, yeah, we'll be all around the country next year with events. So maybe I'll get to meet you some of you in person. That would be wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

And I was on your website before we got on, and there's there's so much great great information on there. So I encourage everyone to kind of check out Sandy's website to just to take a really good deep dive into what she talked about. Because we, like I said, we could probably go on for hours and hours and like talk about that. But great. Thank you so much for your time, Sandy. I appreciate you. Thanks, Jessica. Well, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Quick Wins for ADHD moms. My goal is to help encourage you, find out more information so that you can really take the reins and figure out your own ADHD journey. You can find more about what we do at the ADHDmom.com. There's also a dopamine hit list. If you need some healthy dopamine hits to kind of get you through the day, you can download that at the ADHD mom.com. Have a great week.