Meet Jeff Krasno
Jeff is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of luminaries from Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Gabor Maté. Jeff pens a personal weekly essay titled “Commusings” that explores spirituality, wellness and culture and is distributed to over one million subscribers every Sunday. Jeff is the creator of Good Stress, a collection of wellness protocols that he developed to reverse his diabetes, lose 60 pounds and reclaim his health at age 50.
Good Stress is available as on-line course and is being developed into a book and TV series. Jeff and his better three-quarters, Schuyler Grant, operate Commune Topanga, a 10-acre wellness center and production lab where they host regular retreats together featuring yoga, cold plunging, sauna bathing, lectures and story-telling. Jeff attended The Hotchkiss School and received his BA in 1993 from Columbia University. In 2008, Jeff co-created the concept for Wanderlust, a series of large-scale events combining yoga & wellness with the arts. Wanderlust became the world’s most recognized wellness events brand with 65 events in 20 countries. Jeff served as co-CEO for eight years. Jeff serves on the board of Pure Edge, a non-profit organization dedicated to integrating yoga and mindfulness curriculum into the public school system.
Jeff is a contributor to the Huffington Post and Fast Company. His first book, eponymously named, Wanderlust, debuted in May 2015 on Rodale and has sold more than 50,000 copies worldwide. He also curated the Wanderlust cookbook, Find Your True Fork which came out in July 2017. In 2016, he was selected by Oprah Winfrey to be part of the SuperSoul100 as one of the nation’s leading entrepreneurs. Jeff & Schuyler have three beautiful daughters, Phoebe, Lolli and Micah. They currently live in Los Angeles, California.
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Podcast transcript:
Hey, Dr. Pedram Shojai urban monk podcast. Happy to have you here. Jeff Krasno old friend, uh, ran wanderlust, ran a bunch of really cool stuff. Been around the block. I love what he’s doing because he is experimenting all of this really cool new biohacking stuff on himself. Uh, really raw. Uh, love the way he reported what he’s been doing.
Hope you enjoy the podcast.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Jeff, it is good to see you.
Jeff Krasno: Padrim, it’s been a minute.
Jeff Krasno: Great to connect with you. Yeah. time I saw you was on your property in Topanga, um,
Jeff Krasno: Indeed, we’ll have to lure you back with a carrot.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Carrot.
Jeff Krasno: Hi, California Carrot. of the snow, so it might be easier than you think It’s . Yeah. Six long winters. Um, you know, it’s,
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, well, if you, if you fancy mud come our direction. We’ve had our fair share of precipitation here in
Dr Pedram Shojai: it, when it rains, it pours.
Jeff Krasno: It does. we’ve had a weird winter where, um, it’s been too warm. So we’ve had your storms just not cold enough. So just kind of slushy, crappy, whatever. So, um, it is good to see you. I’m excited about the work that you’ve been doing. Um, always kind of watching you from a distance.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And today we’re here to talk about stress, but not the way people think. Right. And so this has been your study for a minute now. Um, and would love for you to share what, positive stress is really about and why it’s important to us.
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, well, thanks for the opportunity to be with you and to connect with your amazing community that you’ve been building for so long. This is a very, very personal topic for me because, uh, and, you know, we can unpack this perhaps later, but unbeknownst to myself, I was diabetic. I found out in a sort of Bucket of ice water that fell over my head, which wasn’t, uh, deliberate at that juncture.
Jeff Krasno: Um, and so, I started to really unpack why I was sick and, um, and a lot of that had to do with how we typically think of stress and how, kind of, we associate stress in our modern culture, which tends to be chronic, right? So, chronic distress that, uh, disrupts, uh, Um, our nervous system creates this sort of cascade, this endocrine cascade that has all sorts of detrimental knock on impacts.
Jeff Krasno: So, we’re very, very kind of familiar with that feeling, right? Something happens to us, you know, online or maybe we’re overworked, um, we’re not sleeping well. All of sort of the, You know, artifacts of modern culture that lead to this kind of initial kind of spike in cortisol and, uh, and that can lead to a degrading of the immune system.
Jeff Krasno: That’s certainly what happened with me. I was getting sick all the time. It can undermine the health of your gut, so lead to dysbiosis and intestinal permeability, leaky gut. Also happened to me. It can also lead to diabetes because chronic cortisol is going to raise glucose levels in your blood. That’s actually adaptive because when you’re stressed, uh, on the Serengeti, you want glucose to go to your extremities so you can fly or, or fight. But chronically, elevated glucose levels are going to lead to insulin resistance. Uh, obviously, I’m sure your, your audience knows that, you know, glucose relies on insulin from the pancreas, uh, to usher itself into cells for energy creation, energy production. But the access of any one molecule in the human body, as I learned, creates a resistance to itself.
Jeff Krasno: And so, I became very, very insulin resistant. Um, and this was, you know, due to a panoply of different things, but largely due to chronic stress. You know, as you know, I, I ran a company called Wanderlust for many years. Ironically, it was a yoga and wellness company. Um, but you know, you know the deal. It’s like oftentimes, you know, in this era of workaholic.
Jeff Krasno: Uh, we become sort of workaholics, we become under like a tremendous amount of pressure. I was flying around nonstop, uh, on an airplane trying to kind of get that business to pencil out. Um, and you know, I started to develop the, God, like these boring, common prosaic symptoms of like brain fog and chronic fatigue and irritability and lack of concentration.
Jeff Krasno: Of course. they started to appear on me in ways that insulted my vanity in the form of like dad bod and you know, worse, you know, these ghastly fleshy protuberances on my chest, um, often known as man boobs. Um, I think in your world, that might be clinically kind of comastia. Um, and so this was all really a result of chronic stress. Uh, or bad stress, but as I learned from you and many, many other doctors that I’ve had the opportunity to, uh, to interview and to spend time with, there is a good form of stress and it is actually the form of stress that we evolved with as human beings, as homo sapiens and hominids, uh, you know, on the Serengeti of East Africa, if you will.
Jeff Krasno: So, we actually evolved, um, With and for periods of food scarcity for fluctuations in temperature for actual immersion, uh, into nature, um, for exposure to light at certain particular times of day. And we also had a lot of conflict, psychological conflict, good stress conflict in our life. Uh, but we didn’t try to solve that through sending kind of ad hominem attacks over Facebook anonymously as digital warriors. We actually had to lean in to sort of good, stressful conversations and, and resolve our differences face to face. And find sort of cooperation. So, there is a, a, a very clear delineation between bad stress as this chronic modern IV drip of stress versus good stress, which is short term and acute and actually leads to a lot of resilience.
Jeff Krasno: And we have this, as you know, this hormetic response to it. It’s actually beneficial for health, but what was once customary good stress in our life, we now actually have to self impose, um, deliberately. Because in most of the world, there is no food scarcity. In most of the world, I don’t have to rely on my hypothalamus, uh, for temperature regulation.
Jeff Krasno: I can just go over to the wall right here and set my thermometer, or set my thermostat, right? You know, I’m constantly getting blue light. I’m constantly getting, you know, sitting in comfy chairs or comfy couches and wearing, you know, big comfy shoes, etc. Because largely, modernity has designed for convenience and comfort. And what I discovered for myself is that the source of my chronic disease was actually chronic ease. And so I’m trying to unwind that.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that line. Chronic ease, the disease of modernity and all of the creature comforts that we were so good at inventing have now overwhelmed to the point where we are Falling and crumbling under the bad stress. So good stress, bad stress. I mean, cell, you talked about eustress in the fifties. Um, now everyone’s doing eye spas.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Everyone’s doing this thing. Uh, my challenge with it, and I’d love to kind of bring you into this conversation, is there is, I feel a lack of context for people who are doing this to understand. The overall gestalt of why they’re doing it and what’s important. And that’s why I’m really excited to talk to you about this is, you know, Oh, so and so said, do a nice bath.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I’m doing a nice bath, but they don’t understand the context of the adaptation that is then going to drive the physiology, the neurophysiology and all of it. So you’ve, you’ve done a deep dive, would love to get into that, that layer of setting the table so that then it becomes an operating system.
Jeff Krasno: So good. That’s really great. No one’s ever asked me that before I brought that up. So thank you. Um, let’s see. Well let’s see, I’ll try to put it in like a bit of a Taoist context. How’s that? So, um, so, Everything in nature emerges as this coincidence of opposites, right? There are unity of opposites. We know that just kind of in our regular life, there’s left and right and up and down and, uh, cold and hot, you know, these phenomena that essentially define them each other and, um, and nature has a way of finding a sensitive equilibrium between opposing forces.
Jeff Krasno: Okay. So, you know, this is obviously most, uh, You know, depicted in the yin yang, right? So it’s like you’ve got the, the, the shadowy side of the mountain and the sunny side of the mountain, and there’s a little bit of shadow in the sunny, and there’s a little bit of sunny in the shadow. Um, as I started to unpack the nature of well being and disease, I started to actually look at human physiology, and everywhere I looked, I saw uh, Essentially a yin and a yang within my own physiology. Now this is a little bit of an oversimplification, but everywhere you look, you know, you have growth pathways, like mTOR, and then repair pathways, like AMPK. You have, uh, Anabolic, um, hormones like insulin, and then you have insulin has its partner that or its counterpoint that honestly needs a PR agent at this point, which is glucagon and you know, you have excitatory neurotransmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitters like glucagon.
Jeff Krasno: glutamate and GABA. Um, you know, you can really, you have cortisol, uh, and you have melatonin. And, and all of these different pathways and molecules in the body sit on this seesaw. And, you know, Your, your body is engineered, um, to foster this really, really sensitive equilibrium in the body. It’s called homeostasis, right?
Jeff Krasno: So we, you know, and we experience homeostasis all the time. We run up a hill really fast and our heart rate and our, and our respiratory rate, you know, spike. And then about two minutes later, provided we’re actually in, pretty good shape that just regulates, you know, it comes back to the warm porridge of the Goldilocks zone. Um, the same could be true for like acid pH balance, right? You know, it’s amazing. The body just maintains that like 7. 4 percent little alkaline alkalinity no matter almost what you do to it. Um, You know, the, the liver titrates glucose just like incredibly, uh, concisely to keep, you know, the right amount of glucose, um, in the bloodstream, unless you, you screw these things up. And um, yeah. And this is what I started to realize is that the artifacts of modernity, culture, lifestyle, what it does is that it inhibits our ability to, um, to bounce back and to find homeostasis or equilibrium in the body. And, um, Equilibrium is basically the signature of every healthy system. I mean, not just the human body, but the body politic. Um, you know, we’re, you know, of course we don’t see any equilibrium there right now either. Uh, there’s no middle, there’s no cooperation or common ground, but when there is, it’s healthy and it’s working. In economics, you know, a thriving middle class, it looks like a bell curve, right? It always clusters to the middle. Um, it’s homeostatic or in, in, Ecology and agriculture, I suppose it could be biodiversity, right, and not monoculture. So, what I started to realize is that health is essentially homeostasis, is our ability to achieve balance. And disease, almost every form of it, is a lack of ability. To maintain homeostasis and you see it in imbalances and that was certainly true with me because my blood glucose was massively imbalanced, you know, I had 125 mg per deciliter fasting blood glucose level and I went to the doctor and I was like, what is this?
Jeff Krasno: I got a hemoglobin A1C test and it was like 6. 7 percent and it was like, yo, I don’t know. Jeff, you have to make a change. You are not, uh, you are not in balance. You’ve been yanged, basically. You know, I was all cortisol, all insulin, all glutamate, all sympathetic nervous system. I was yanged, and I needed to balance my life.
Jeff Krasno: So, to get back to your question, I needed to find the practices and the protocols that could, um, enhance my ability. to achieve and re establish homeostasis or balance in my own life. And ironically, those practices push the edge of my life. of your own systems, such that you are then able, better able, to come back. And it really, what you’re doing is you’re training your body to bounce back. And there’s a lot of metrics that we look at, like heart rate variability, for example. Well, we want, actually, some heart rate variability, because that is an indicator of our ability to sort of bounce back and have a healthy, um, good stress response, right? So I started to look at all of these different protocols and say like, how does this protocol actually help me reify balance and equilibrium in my life? And then I started to, you know, enumerate them and stack them and combine them in different ways and um, experiment with them on my own self, both physiologically and psychologically.
Jeff Krasno: So, we can talk about some of the physiological, um, proxies and how they, they instantiate balance. But there’s also, obviously, the psychological or spiritual side. I mean, when we emotionally regulate, we call that being centered, right? Like finding equipoise in our life. Um, so it’s not just balancing your blood sugar levels, although that was important for me. It’s also being able to balance your, uh, um, your emotional and psychological response to stimuli.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that. Um, back in my clinical days, when somebody would come to me talking about stress because of what Betty said at the water cooler, you know, something trite, I would know that they didn’t have real stress in their life. And I’d say, you know, you, uh, I’m prescribing rock climbing or repelling. I need you to jump off a fucking bridge.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right. And, and, and really start to understand what it feels like to actually be dying because this is, this is bullshit. Right. And because that equilibrium, that window became so tight, they weren’t tempering between the extremes. Um, and I really love, I mean, people, everyone’s heard about saunas and ice baths at this point.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And I do want to talk about that because it’s, um, I, I think that they are incredibly relevant and powerful, but this idea of psychological resilience and tempering that comes around also having social stress and understanding how to kind of combat some of the things that would make you kind of uncomfortable.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s very novel and I think it’s very interesting in a world where because the middle is gone, and we’ve all shut up. Cause there’s no discourse now it’s like we can’t even talk and if you can’t do that, then you’re going to get further isolated in one of the extremes and you’re either red team or blue team or you know, my way or the highway and you see it reflected in the society around us.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And I think that this, what you’re talking about is the solution. Should we engage in it? So I’d love to dive deeper into that.
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, you become either with the equivalent metaphorically of hypothermic or hyperthermic. Right? And you don’t, Find that Goldilocks zone around 98. 6 where we can all essentially cohere a little bit, right? So, yeah, I mean, there’s so many metaphors, I think, you know, to, to, um, to draw on there or to paint, which is, you know, Like, for example, you know how we develop our, our, our physiological immune system.
Jeff Krasno: So it’s through low grade exposure to pathogens, right? So as a child, we’re exposed to different kinds of bacteria and viruses. And in response to them, we have this floating brain immune system that detects a foreign agent and then, you know, Goes into a protein creation process of creating the right antibodies such that when they, you know, encounter that again in life, they have the defense system, you know, so that can really be applied to our psychological immune system as well, you know, there actually is great benefit to being exposed to some form of psychological pathogen.
Jeff Krasno: And now again, low grade, I’m certainly not like. like. the dose makes the poison, right? So it’s like I’m certainly not out there justifying like abuse or odious behavior or neglect or racism or anything like that. But being able to quote unquote like eat a little dirt um, is actually quite adaptive for your psychological immune system.
Jeff Krasno: Like you can get Get insulted or get some form of criticism and maybe there is a response like, I don’t remember if, I think we’re about the same age, so you might remember weeble wobbles. So you can weeble, but then you wobble and you, you, you bounce back to center because, you know, you have the awareness there that, that. realizes that, you know, if someone is criticizing you unfairly or insulting you, what they’re really doing is they’re taking their own anger and giving it to you. And then you can then decide whether or not you want to pick up that ember of resentment and hold it and wait to throw it back and get burned that whole time or not. And this is kind of what the Stoics, um, They had a word for it, I think it was euthymia, right? Was like the development of sort of an unflappable state of being in which, you know, you can actually go through life, focusing on the things that you can control, but not being overly swayed by the things that are outside of your control.
Jeff Krasno: And this was honestly really important. For me, um, and, and I ended up putting myself through a really interesting set of experiences in 2020, um, around kind of developing euthymia and then conducting stressful conversations, uh, but in an adaptive way. So I started writing this, um, So I started writing this, um, weekly column, um, about kind of socio political affairs and sometimes health and, and other things.
Jeff Krasno: And 2020 certainly offered plenty to, to write about, if you remember, uh, you know, from COVID to the, you know, national reckoning on social justice to every random emanation of Trumplandia to QAnon and whatever. So I was writing this article. sending it out to about a million people, put up my, um, personal email on it, and I send it out every Sunday. And Monday morning I’d wake up, I open my computer, and like my inbox would be deluged with emails, five or six hundred emails, and most of them would be, you know, supportive and encouraging, but dozens upon dozens would be incredibly critical, many of them were mean spirited and full of expletives and all the typical things that, you know, you might expect in 2020 when people were incredibly triggered. But Pedram, honestly, like I was, I took it very personally and I was very defensive at first. And then, you know, over time I started to, I was introduced to stoicism. I started to apply a lot of those principles. And I became, uh, less affected by insult and criticism. And then actually I started to lean into it and I started to look forward almost to, um, you know, detractors. And, um, and in the fall of 2020, I actually arranged 26 hour long zoom conversations with people that. didn’t like me or disagreed with me and, um, it was a fascinating experiment because I actually gathered a lot over that many conversations. I actually gathered a lot of data and at that juncture, I wasn’t really versed in nonviolent communication. or steel manning or some of these other techniques for having stressful good conversations. Um, but I kind of instinctually walked backwards into it and then subsequently was, was introduced to many of these systems and, uh, and it was amazing, you know, I was getting criticism from all sides of the political spectrum.
Jeff Krasno: So a lot of, Trumpers on the right and plenty of like abolish the police people on the left so I was kind of getting it from both sides or people that were super pro pharma and pro vaccine and people that were steadfastly anti vax and Kind of by the end of this process, I had built kind of this whole Rolodex of frenemies where maybe we actually never found agreement on the actual issue itself, but we found so much common humanity and common ground that, you know, we actually, we actually, that actually superseded or transcended the original issue that had put us at loggerheads.
Jeff Krasno: And I think that’s really what we need to foster. Are these stressful, difficult, thorny conversations because, I mean, that’s really what stands between us and the world that, you know, we hope is possible.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Do you ever publish these zoom calls? Did you get permission to air? I mean, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that experiment. Right?
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, no, I didn’t because I tried a couple times to suggest that, but people bristled.
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, they just, they shut down. yeah. Mm hmm. And that’s the challenge. The best stuff happens off air and then all the vitriol goes on air. Um, and I, I’m very, very, very interested. Yeah. In that type of experiment, socially, sociologically, um, all of it, because I think that right there is the medicine, you know, I’ve said this a lot on the show, but you know, something you’d mentioned alluded to is this concept of being uncomfortable, the discomfort, the literal translations of Kung Fu are hard work or eat bitter.
I hope you’re enjoying the podcast. Want to point you to the temple grounds, go to the urban monk.com. I look at the temple grounds. It’s where I teach all of these wonderful practices that really help. Accelerate, some stuff we’re talking about in this podcast. Uh, the work, do the work. Once you do the work, you challenge your body, you challenge your mind, you challenge your system to grow. That’s where the real good stuff happens.
Check out the temple grounds in the urban monk academy. Back podcast.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And, uh, The only way my Kung Fu gets better is to consistently challenge my ability to stay calm and focused and centered as I spar, right? As, as I test my resilience in everything that I do. So whether it’s having my body say, Ooh, it’s cold. And then up my metabolic rate to generate more heat to, Physiologically counterbalance that versus externalizing that and running over to the thermostat.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Or, hearing someone say something very hurtful and developing a stoic filter to say, Okay, so how do I communicate with this person and turn this into a growth opportunity? Those to me both allude to an internal nexus of control that we have lost. It’s
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, totally. It’s so funny, man. You, you really put your thumb on it quite quickly. Um, I’m not surprised, but, but still, um, kind of what I discovered that there was a phenomenon that sits behind all of these adversity mimetics, whether they’re fasting or cold water therapy or meditation or breath work or stressful conversations, et cetera, which was a, which was really mindset. And, um, And I begin to see the signature of mindset across all of the protocols. So like, for example, uh, you know, I would start my intermittent fasting protocol, condense all of my eating window into eight, uh, into eight hours. Um, at some juncture within, you know, the other 16 hours, I would feel the stimulus, right?
Jeff Krasno: So in this case, the hunger, But because I had superimposed this fasting protocol, I couldn’t just like mindlessly meander over to the cupboard and pull out a bag of chips or cookies or whatever. I had to stop and examine the nature of the stimulus, the nature of the hunger itself at that moment. And, and this was really key, because in doing so, I began to be able to delineate what was a, um, Sort of how to put this, what, what was a biological need and what was a emotional or psychological desire, right? And in that mindset, in that space between stimulus and response, you know, Frankel style, I, I found that almost all the time it was a psychological desire, it was an emotional need. and not a biological need. And once I was able to kind of put my thumb on that, I could start to apply that same fasting mindset to all these other areas of my life. You know, whether that was Instagram or being a dad and trying to raise my horrible, adorable daughters or, um, Or, you know, retail therapy, or drinking, or all the different areas and potential vices that I’m dealing with as a normal human being. And, and the same was true for, for cold therapy. Like, as you say, we can talk about, excuse me, the, the, the You know, the physiological benefits, the dopamine release, the, the, you know, all the metabolic upgrading that’s going on there. But, you know, I, I abhor the cold. I absolutely abhor the cold. You know, I meant to, you know, I want to be in a snuggly little nest somewhere with like a mama hen like sitting on me. Um, uh, probably rephrase that at some point. Um, but, You know, the cold, um, you know, more than anything is, you know, represents this sort of tug of war between kind of your, your natural stress response.
Jeff Krasno: You get in the ice bath. What happens? Okay, you’re flooded with adrenaline and epinephrine. It’s like, coursing through your body to the point of, you know, psychological panic, right? And so then at what point can then you apply top down sort of Neomammalian hippocampal pressure on top of that bottom up response, involuntary response. And, you know, over time, as you apply that top down pressure, you know, you can begin to sort of lower temperature and extend duration. But, you know, and yeah, that’s impressive, but really where it’s most useful is is when it begins to punctuate the other elements of your life, such that when a stressful situation appears on the highway or in a relationship, you are essentially using that same arrow from your quiver to apply sort of top down, rational, hippocampal sort of Um, tangling of a situation on top of that bottom up involuntary, uh, stress response.
Jeff Krasno: And again, that, that’s a mindset, um, capacity or, or, or capability. And you know, again, you know, we can apply that, that sense of being aware of finding that liberation, that space between stimulus and response in almost every one of these practices and, and they’re, they have a lot of utility. Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai: There’s something in that that I just want to put my finger on and double click real quick in that there is an adaptive crossover functionality that you’re alluding to that it’s like, show me how you do one thing. And I’ll tell you how you do everything. Once you start to establish this beachhead of mastery and resilience, it starts to cross over into all these other areas of your life.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And to me, that’s where the leverage of this type of youth stress really comes in is it just makes you a more adaptive, resilient, robust human organism. And as witnessed by your transformation last couple of years of really leaning into this. So I’d love to just spend another minute on that because that then starts to have a halo effect into every area of one’s life, which then becomes, you know, it’s just talk about leverage.
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, we’re so used to downward spirals in our health, right? So, you know, we develop prediabetes and then excess adiposity. And then all of a sudden we have high inflammation. And then all of a sudden we have some form of early, early cardiovascular disease. I mean, that, that is, you know, you can really draw that line.
Jeff Krasno: It’s, it’s not even that jacket, but what is also possible is a Upward spirals, upward spirals in life, um, and in your health. And, uh, we don’t talk about those as much, but, um, but they’re absolutely just as possible. And, you know, it seems a little bit trite and glib, but, you know, the body is really dying to heal.
Jeff Krasno: It is engineered, um, you know, to foster homeostasis and balance. And if you create the right conditions for it. So for me. I had all those kind of anodyne, prosaic symptoms of brain fog and chronic fatigue and insomnia and irritability. I think I read zero books in 2017, so I couldn’t focus for more than five minutes.
Jeff Krasno: I mean, let alone write a book. Um, you know, and then obviously I was, you know, 55 pounds heavier. Um, and, uh, you know, I had these diabetic blood sugar levels. All of that is gone. And I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’m far from perfect. You know, this is Because health exists on a spectrum and it’s a process. Right, because we’re changing every single millisecond of the day, but we have a lot more agency over which direction on that spectrum that we’re going than we ever thought, you know, and so we can be ailing, you know, moving towards disease or, you know, You know, healing, moving towards ease or moving towards wholeness. And we have a lot of agency over, you know, which trajectory, you know, we go on. Um, and that was, you know, really my experience is that I began to, you know, stack and apply these different protocols in my life such that, you know, I was started to experience upward spirals in my life. You know, I was in, I was like a chronic insomniac. Um, and I really just. I never thought I’d be able to turn it around. I was super chubby. I’ve been chubby all my life. I just, for many, many, many years, especially as a kid, I was just like, Oh, I lost the genetic lottery. You know, I just have bad metabolism. It’s like I have it like a lighter pencil or whatever.
Jeff Krasno: Um, and, uh, and I, I really, uh, was able to kind of unwind, um, um, A lot of that, uh, a lot of that negativity and turned it into, you know, something very, very positive. So I’m, you know, and I’m also just consider myself very, very fortunate. I, I get to, you know, spend time with, with people, um, who know a lot more than I do every day. Um, and so I’ve been able to glean, um, a lot of the, uh, You know, a lot of the proxies that work best for me, um, and, you know, I’ll say like everyone’s there is tremendous bio individuality around all of these topics, but I also think that there are some general principles that we can apply kind of on a more epidemiological basis that just work for people and, um, and, you know, this is what I’m passionate about, about, you know, amplifying kind of now in this moment.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So on that point, I want to kind of lean into this as we have about 10 minutes to go here. Um, strategically, there are many ways. I’ve done this. I’ve seen this done. I’ve seen people report back, right? The, the kind of top down. It’s like, Oh, the stress is killing you. We have to tackle the stress. We’ve got to do stress management.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You’re going to do Tai Chi and breathe. And you know, once we kind of bring down the distress, your system will start to align. I’ve seen people say, well, no, just do all the you stress and take the ice baths and the saunas and all this stuff. And it will start to counter balance. The distress and I’ve seen all sorts of stuff in the middle.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So what worked for you in terms of, you know, turning the dials towards homeostasis? Um, and what are you seeing? Um, you’ve been, this is a conversation you’ve been central to now. So what are you seeing work?
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, so I’ll just focus on my metabolic health for a moment, just because that has sort of what you can measure, you can improve, right? So it’s a very, um, you know, it’s a quantifiable, um, component of my journey. So what I found for me, um, was the stacking of about, of three different protocols that were really central to getting my blood sugar levels balanced. So one of them was intermittent fasting, um, And, you know, I talked about, you know, I do basically 16 8 and I’m not like crazy fundamentalist neurotic about it. I was, you know, fairly strict with it when I first started because I felt like I needed to be. Um, but now, you know, I’m kind of, you know, a little bit looser with it. Um, but obviously if you’re condensing, you know, your eating window into eight hours, you know, you’re giving. You know, there’s a lot we can talk about NRF2 and autophagy and AMPK and all these other things. Um, but really what I was doing kind of at a higher level, I was giving my body an opportunity to rest and repair and not just sending it a monotone signal of growth and anabolism and, uh, mTOR or whatever, you know, all the time. And of course, you know, I was paying, when you’re paying attention to what you’re putting into your mouth, when you’re establishing that mindset, you’re not necessarily going to lose weight because yeah, of course you could eat 20 pounds, 20 pints of Ben and Jerry’s in an eight hour window and, and not calorically restrict, but generally that’s not how it goes.
Jeff Krasno: You know, there’s a Hawthorne effect, right? going on that, you know, your behavior changes under certain form of study, even if it’s your own observation. So, I lost a tremendous amount of weight. I started to see, um, my blood sugar levels regulate, uh, with a, with a fasting protocol. And then, kind of where I really, really saw the, the kind of acceleration there, was in combination with a Deliberate Cold Therapy Protocol. And I started to play around with, you know, ice baths and cold showers. And where I really saw it was when I began to, uh, to cold shower or ice bath prior to breaking my fast in the morning. And of course I started to understand the mechanism behind that, which of course you know. But after 15 and a half hours of essentially not eating, your blood glucose levels are going to be very low.
Jeff Krasno: I mean, you know, there’s, your liver is always like making glucose and things like that. But essentially, your, your blood glucose level is going to be very, very low. You get into, uh, Um, an ice bath and what happens, you know, your core body temperature plummets, right? And then, you know, your body does what it does.
Jeff Krasno: Your hypothalamus goes into action and it says like, we need thermogenesis because we need to heat the body back up and get it back up into that homeostatic level. So it needs to create heat. Well, heat is essentially energy. So your mitochondria need an energy substrate and it scans around the body for it and heats At that moment, there’s not a lot of glucose around. So what does it have at, at its disposal, it has its repository of energy, also known as fat And so it oxidizes triglycerides and u adipocytes and turns ’em into free fatty acids and ketones. And you’re using fat to warm up your body because there’s no glucose around. And I, uh, Petri, it was crazy. I mean. Sounds ridiculous, but I almost felt like I could saw, see the fat melting away off my body, um, when I started stacking those protocols together, which was essentially cold therapy before breaking a fast. Um, and, and I saw great improvements with, with blood glucose. And then the last one on top of that was, you know, resistance training. So. I was kind of always like a chronic cardio guy. I, I never spent time lifting weights or doing body weight stuff. Um, and then that really changed. And I, um, I’m the dude that like, could not do one pull up and over a six month period, I went from zero to doing a hundred per day and, um, and other body weight exercises, et cetera. I was very interested in body weight resistance training because I could do it anywhere, um, but, but certainly like doing it in the gym is very useful as well. And I started for the first time in my life actually building lean muscle mass. And, uh, man, that’s where I saw basically my blood glucose levels completely stabilized is having more muscle on my body. Um, because as I learned, you know, muscle was essentially just a glucose vacuum. Um, it was my basal metabolic rate obviously went up, but, um, even at, even at rest, um, you know, your muscle mass is going to be a greater consumer of glucose. But, um, You know, muscle contraction does not require insulin for the uptake of glucose, um, as I learned. And, um, and this is really where I saw just all of my pre diabetic symptoms are, um, just melt away. And I became really just metabolically upgraded. And that just spilled into every single, um, like nook and cranny of my life. Like my, I started making better brain energy. I just was more, I just, I upgraded my ability to essentially produce energy in my body, and that’s essentially all we do, right, until we don’t, and then we move into some other outside of, you know, time, space, location, and form.
Jeff Krasno: There’s probably some other thing that we, that happens, but um, Um, but I just became a more optimal energy producer, uh, through the, the stacking of those protocols. And you know, again, this is like bioindividual, you know, fasting doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re menstruating or, or or in menopause or whatever, you got to like unpack all of these things, you know, has, uh, as needed, but those were the, those were the protocols that really bent the arc of my metabolic health.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And energy is the currency of life and you had more of it. So then what did that do to the psychological stress? What did that do to the mindset as you had more bioavailable energy? How did you change psychologically, emotionally, um, and how did it spill over into other areas of your life?
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, well, I was certainly less irritable. Um, I had a greater ability to focus and concentrate. Um, and, uh, you know, a lot of it was, I think part of it was just feeling better in my body every day. And kind of back to some of our earlier discussion. I think. We would go a long way at healing the body politic if we just hurt, healed the human body.
Jeff Krasno: Because I think, honestly, a lot of the inflammation that we see in society right now is a direct spillover of the inflammation that we’re feeling in our human body. If you wake up and you basically feel like crap, you’re probably not going to treat people well. You’re going to be depressed and irritable and, um, and, you know, and pugnacious. And so that’s the world that we’re living in. We’re living in this very inflamed space. Um, so I just saw, you know, um, yeah, the spillover, uh, you know, between the way I physically felt and my own kind of psychological mindset, you know, all of the time. And I was more willing. to lean into discomfort, um, psychological discomfort.
Jeff Krasno: Um, and I started just doing harder things. And I think what I learned was like, you know, doing harder things makes doing other hard things easier. Um, and, uh, yeah, it was like, I became more curious And, you know, it’s like, I’ve almost, like, feel like I put myself through some form of layman’s med school, like, over the last four years, just by, like, being curious and alive and, uh, you know, now, you know, my wife’s like, come to bed.
Jeff Krasno: What are you doing? I’m like, I’m reading PubMed. She’s like, what the hell are you doing? Like reading, like primary source data and clinical research. And I’m like, yeah, well, you know, I went through 10 years of my life. Essentially not learning anything. And so, that rekindling of that curiosity and that desire to learn and like, the wonder and awe I have for science and nature.
Jeff Krasno: And it’s like, dude, it’s spiritual for me, to be honest. Um, because, you know, I’ve also like fascinated by Eastern religions and Buddhism and Taoism and Zen. And the more I studied human physiology, the more I saw the metaphysical patterned in the physical. You know, and I was like having these moments of satori all the time, you know, I was like, Oh my God, you know, this is Taoism in action.
Jeff Krasno: My body is Taoism in action. This is the Tao of health, right? It’s like, I am impermanent, you know, I am interdependent with my environment. You know, I’m always changing all of these bigger spiritual concepts were coming kind of. I could. Put my thumb on them in my own physical body and, and sort of bridge mysticism and medicine and, you know, it’s just been like a, such a vibrant part time in my life.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s so funny. We’re out of time and I could do this for another two hours with you. It’s good. It’s good to see you again. But when you were Yeah. Great to be with you. um, this concept and I’ll leave this as an open loop and we come back, we were talking about this concept of, you know, going to the cupboard and grabbing a cookie, um, because you had an emotional need, not necessarily a physiological need.
Dr Pedram Shojai: As you were saying that, I was thinking, you know, if this guy was out in the prairie 100, 000 years ago, Then you got to start listening to the wind and following tracks and have this interconnected, um, search or mission you go on to go find this thing called food, which isn’t in a cupboard, right? And so there is this really interesting metaphysical thing that ties back in with nature and our place in nature when true hunger emerges outside of all of the comforts that we’ve stacked around isolating ourselves from that, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Which is a whole other can of worms. But look, I’m Really happy to have had you on the show. Um, I invite you back. Um, tell people how to find you, your work on this resilience stuff, your upcoming book, all of it.
Jeff Krasno: Yeah, sure. And thanks again man. I really, uh, I, I realize how much I appreciate you. When I’m with you. Uh, I, I, I mean, I always appreciate you, but it really becomes, uh, in stark relief when I’m with you. You’re so thoughtful. Um, yeah, I’m prowling the Serengeti of Instagram. Uh, at Jeff Krasnow. So you can, uh, see me wax alternately. Poetic and pathetic there. Um, but, uh, the course will be on Commune, so my platform, which is 1onecommune. com, uh, forward slash good stress. And, yeah, the book will come out on Hay House, uh, Penguin Random House, next May, April or May, also titled Good Stress. And, uh, as we talked about, uh, Briefly, before we got on, we’re shooting a Good Stress TV show, um, in in December, God willing.
Jeff Krasno: So, that’ll be, uh, that’ll be an interesting endeavor. But, um, yeah, and then I’ll also, obviously, host the Commune podcast, so people can find that, uh, and all the podcatchers, and, um, that’s the place where I, I really. Get to have these really fascinating conversations with people like you and our community of friends and doctors and spiritualists.
Jeff Krasno: So, those are the places.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Love it. Love it. Big fan of you. Big fan of your work. Keep it up. Looking forward to seeing you Thanks man.
Hope you enjoyed that. Jeff is great. I invite you to check out his work. I just think that what he’s doing has always been cool. And he’s just one of these guys that I’ve really appreciated, um, in this wild world of self-help, he’s just an honest voice and he’s a good guy. So check out his work. I’ll see you in the next podcast.