Ben Greenfield

Like the definition of an adaptogen is something that will kind of turn up your nervous system if it needs an excitatory stimuli and turn it down if it needs an inhibitory stimuli.

Okay.

So an adaptogen is safer to use at night than like a pure central nervous system stimulant like caffeine.

A, by being mostly stupid about most things in the world except health.

And then B, by doing what I think I first read in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes book where Watson meets Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes is going to try to forget Watson's name as soon as possible because he doesn't want stuff cluttering up his brain.

And so I try to write stuff down all the time and get ruminating thoughts out of my brain as quickly as possible.

And so I try to tell myself that I have a clearer, cleaner head because of that.

Do I look like a developmental psychologist to you?

No, but you can play one on TV.

Okay, so I'll play one on TV.

So the way I look at it is you can stem the brain, which is what most people do, which is what I was just talking about, like caffeine, nicotine, energy drinks, Red Bull, whatever.

It's like a dime a dozen.

And like a lot of energy drinks aren't bad.

I mean, there's great brands out there, but it's one thing to just like turn the volume up on an organ that isn't necessarily going to just like spit out good information if you

if you turn the volume up, you have to actually provide building blocks to allow things like the formation of new neurons to occur and greater amounts of neuroplasticity and better connectivity between neurotransmitters and along

along a nerve, you know, as a nerve signal gets propagated.

So if you step back and you look at brain health in general, beyond just like taking things that make you feel more awake, which kind of moved the dial a little bit, you need to do things that provide fuel for the brain.

so for example if you actually look at how a nerve propagates a signal there's these little like insulatory sheaths around the nerves called myelin sheaths and myelin sheaths are made up primarily of two different kinds of fats oleic acid and dha

So oleic acid, as the name implies, is something you would find in like extra virgin olive oil.

You find it in a lot of Mediterranean fats.