Building Adaptive Capacity w/ Dr. Erik Korem

Building Adaptive Capacity w/ Dr. Erik Korem

January 31, 2024

On this episode of the show we chat with Dr. Erik Korem, a High-Performance thought leader that introduced sports science and athlete-tracking technologies to collegiate and NFL football. He has worked with the National Football League, Power-5 NCAA programs, gold-medal Olympians, Nike, and the United States Department of Defense. He’ll share how to build, maintain, and cultivate agility in both body and mind.

Episode Transcript:

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[Music] Mark azoulay is an industry leader in

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Psychotherapy and men’s mental health he’s helped countless guys get back on their feet deepen their relationships

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and Excel in their lives now he’s taken all that he has learned and is sharing it with you in each episode Mark will

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interview an expert in the field of masculinity and men’s work we’ll cover topics such as emotional intelligence

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masculine identity anger management Financial Health trauma recovery marriage and divorce ethics and

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spirituality tune in and become a better man welcome back to the show I’m your

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host Mark aay and I’m here with Dr Eric Corum he has worked with NCAA uh sports

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teams he’s a doctor of exercise science and he’s a founder of a company called am7 that uses Health metric data to help

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people get recommendations to improve their lives Eric welcome to to the show thank you for having me I’m excited to

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be here yeah I’m excited to talk about this topic because I have a passion for using technology in mental health uh and

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in physical health and I love talking to people that are really on The Cutting Edge of combining that because I think a

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lot of guys we need data to make decisions you know we love that data driven stuff we love the charts we love

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the graphs we love the recommendations yeah I know 100% uh guys are really drawn to seeing the the

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needle move and if they can Corel an action they’ve taken to a a data point

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that’s been moved it’s easier to continue taking action yeah it’s one of the greatest motivators right you to see

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those numbers slowly tick up on really like gamifies Health um so before we

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dive into the product I’m curious tell us a little about yourself like what got you into this whole thing yeah so I

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spent about 16 years as you mentioned working in college football and working

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in the NFL I started as a traditional strength and conditioning coach on the human performance side and then about 13

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years ago I pioneered the use of athlete wearables here in the US so we were I

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was at a Florida State University and we were the first group to ever track a football player in game so we had these

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devices that were on the pads of the players and they were connected to GPS satellites and we’re collecting millions

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of data points and um we were able to turn that data into actionable

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recommendations for our coach in staff our training staff medical staff to improve performance reduce injuries and

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in one year we had an 88% reduction an injury wow and our team yeah our team

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went on to win a championship and then uh the NFL flew in and like what the heck’s going on here and it blew up and

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now every single NFL game NBA game Major League all these games are tracked AWS

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nextg stats if you watch an NFL game and they’re like so and so is running 20 M an hour that’s where all started so my

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background was in human performance um got into the weable space and then I

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really got obsessed with this idea of resilience and adaptation because what

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we started noticing is the best athletes in the world um I had also worked in Olympic track and field for about 14

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years they could adapt to a tremendous amount of physical and mental stress and

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thrive they could take on a bunch of stress and Thrive and the best athletes in the

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world you could just keep loading them up systematically over time and they get better and better and better versus you

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know even an athlete that was maybe a starter on the team they would hit a a Breaking Point and so I wanted to be

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able to build this capability into anybody and so we call it adaptive

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capacity how do you deliberately take on stress and get better yeah that’s really

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interesting to me right it it reminds me of the concept of antifragility right the idea that right like with chaos and

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with more inputs the system gets stronger M sure the there’s a simple

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recipe it’s you have to have the right dose of stress with the right dose of rest you

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have to inoculate yourself to it and there’s really kind of Five Pillars for how you build adaptive

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capacity um but and there’s a crossover with the physical and the psychological uh so physical training

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does have a general um impact on psychological

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resilience and so uh these are called crossover adaptations and so it’s just a

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fascinating field and now we’re in a world where people are have so much stress coming into their

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lives and I think it’s a fallacy to say that you can manage

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stress you can’t like nobody can M like okay we’re about to end enter an election year like can you manage all of

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that chaos yeah you can’t make it go away right you can’t like tune it out yeah what you can do is you can build

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the capacity to adapt to it you can have the right Tools in place so you can

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harness your attention and direct it where you want it to be directed towards and then when these Black Swan events do

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happen or unexpected events happen somebody rear ends your car that doesn’t cause you to crumble you can continue to

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moving forward yeah that’s really fascinating you know I I want to bring you back to your time working um with

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the athletes and you tell there two different types of people right and I’m curious like was there any predictors of

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the people that were able to have this adaptive capacity or was it did you only really see that Under Fire in like a

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stressful situation um no it’s a trained ability now there are genetic limits to certain

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things so for instance certain types of humans can endure

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a ridiculous amount of psychological stress right or stress uh that’s directed at the central

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nervous system for power and speed adaptations but if you slowly inoculate

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people over time they can handle a tremendous amount of volume so you know

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um there’s a fallacy people are like you know just be mentally tough you know like you should be mentally tough to everything that’s it’s like bogus I I’ve

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worked with special operators and you could have let’s say a somebody that

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just went through Q school and now they’re like a green bre or whatever right uh but they’ve never jumped out of

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an airplane and you were to just take them in a plane up to altitude and like put

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them at the edge of the door and like jump they you they would have a stress response they’d freak

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out but if you take them to Fort Benning Georgia and you take them to a jump school where they learn how to

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jump off a small you know 10- foot area into a foam pit and they to jump and roll and then they slowly they’re like

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this this tower that pulls them up to x height and drops them with a parachute and a little bit higher and drops them

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in a parachute and then over weeks they’ve been inoculated to that stress and so when it’s time to jump out of the

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plane they can handle it I think a lot of times we just jump two feet in and we

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wonder why we burn out or get injured or feel overwhelmed um

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and you know then you’re like well what about these crazy events that happen in life well you should be slowly

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deliberately taking on different types of stresses to build that capacity so you

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can Thrive yeah I really like what you’re saying and I think there’s a really core Concept in masculinity literature right

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is this idea that men grow through challenge you know and what I’m hearing you talk about is it’s about that right

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amount of Challenge and I’m also hearing a real value of humility right this idea of like look I might not be able to jump

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out of a plane right now but I’m able to do this jump school right or hey I might not be a All-Star weightlifting athlete

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but hey I can do assisted you know pull-ups or whatever right like this idea of like really really knowing

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yourself and meeting yourself where you’re at in the you know with with the goal of getting

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better no 100% I’m with you on that um as a man if you want to kind of shift to

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masculinity you know I my view masculinity was rooted in uh I guess you

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could say a spiritual worldview or biblical worldview that men are supposed to be

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providers and protectors uh they’re also artists and

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Poets and there’s a soft and tender side and then there’s a warrior type of side you know and so my world view on what it

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meant to be a man was shaped by my faith um and now was a father and a husband

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it’s like now it’s really in practice right because like it’s one thing to have a view on you know what it means to

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be a man and be I would just say a single man where it’s pretty much just the world roles around you let’s just be

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honest like you go to work hopefully you’re a good employee and a good colleague and you have your you know

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good to your family or loved ones but then like if you now have a family like now things are ratcheted up another

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level and how does masculinity play out with my wife and how does masculinity

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play out with my children I think it’s like it’s a whole another ball game it’s one thing to talk like think about it

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it’s another thing to actually do it yeah and to be to be on all the time right I when you have a family they’re

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always there you know and especially your child right they’re they’re just studying you so deeply and they’re

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learning everything that they’ve learned about masculinity and about men from from fathers um I’m curious if if a

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story comes to mind or anything comes to mind about the difference between those two ways of

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being yeah I mean what you just mentioned I’ve actually been thinking about just the past couple days yeah um

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like always being on or always being watched well not just being watched but it’s being mindful of okay the our our

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natural inclination is to be selfish whether you know it or not like when

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like I mentioned before like before I got married it was all about me and then I got married almost so like oh my gosh I’m a scumbag like I just think about

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myself all the time right and then and then I had a child I’m like oh my gosh I really am a bad person like I have to

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care about somebody else right it’s a forcing function well we all just kind

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me personally I’m a weird like I love being around people but I really need

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time alone and it’s a very weird like I wouldn’t say I’m an introvert and I would definitely wouldn’t say I’m just

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an extreme extrovert I’m just like like right in the middle and um and so when night when the evening comes my kids get

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home from school I’m also towards the end of my day and guess what I’m tired and so the easy default is to just

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like oh we let’s turn on the TV or let’s like just numb our minds but I’ve been like trying to be

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very intentional about I’ve got a almost 12year old an 8-year-old and a

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four-year-old I got like six or seven years left with my older child I’ve heard that like between the you know

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when you have a kid between years 1 and 18 you have them for 18 years right every day and then after 18 let’s say

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they go off you’re only going to see them for about one more year for the

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rest of Life 3 365 more days if you kind of add it up that’s a it’s a startling

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fact yeah of like combin time yeah it’s freaky and so especially if you really

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love your children and so like last night I’m like okay um my wife is

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actually the baseball coach uh she was a former Elite college softball player so she coaches the eight-year-old so I have

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the 12 and the four-year-old I’m like all right we’re going to eat dinner together we’re g to talk about like what

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they did and you know their likes and dislikes and then like I’m G to play with one of them and then we’re going to go on a walk together after

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dinner to me being a man is like sacrificing and like if you watch the

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best manly movies of all time like the hero’s always sacrificing something

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Braveheart you know why am I thinking only Mel Gibson movies right now uh

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Patriot you know whatever the most latest and greatest one is it’s like you’re you end up doing something for

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somebody else and so I think that’s where the rubber really meets the road and not

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losing yourself in your kids or losing yourself in your work or your whatever but at the same time like like really

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just giving yeah I really love that idea you know I’ve been studying um atmology

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recently and I was looking at the definition of the word hero where it comes from right and it’s often

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mistranslated as the strength of two men right you think of a hero it’s like oh yeah he’s so strong he’s as strong as

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two people right you know Captain America Iron Man whatever right but what it really is translated to is the

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strength for two men right the idea that a hero has strength for two people right

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more strength than just for himself and it really made me associate when you’re talking about this idea of giving and

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sacrifice and ultimately love right I mean that’s really what’s underneath it is the idea of having so much strength

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you can give it to somebody else I’m curious your your thoughts on that man I’m taking notes right now that’s really

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strong um and the only way to do that is if you have a reservoir to pour from yes

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and so that’s where this idea of capacity comes into play um if you think about so from a

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biological perspective every day you only have a certain amount of capacity for stress okay and you can think about

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that is kind of like your gas tank the bigger the gas tank so like the bigger the gas tank the more gas that can fit

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in that tank so let’s say you had a car and you’re driving you’re in Colorado I’m in Texas and I’m going to drive and

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see you as long as the car is in working order and I can keep putting gas in there I’m going to be fine right or if

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you have an EV the size of the battery but um every day you wake up with a

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certain amount of gas in the tank that’s what like some of these

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devices like say Readiness like you mentioned whoop earlier or whatever people don’t the these these companies

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do a very poor job of explaining what this actually means it’s like your adaptation

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reserves and so if you can build a bigger tank like let’s say I had a bowl

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right and that bowl is my quote tank and I and all the stress I can adapt to is fill is I pour into that bowl it fills

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it all the way to the top and I’m like all right Mark you need to run across the room with you run across the room and

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just water’s flying all over the place right but if I give you a massive bowl that you can barely bit both arms around

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I pour the same amount of water in it you could like Sprint up and downstairs and nothing’s going to happen you’d

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actually have a reservoir to pour from so if to going back to this thing if you want to be a

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hero you got to have a big freaking tank and that there’s a way to build

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that you know and there’s five basic pillars sleep exercise mental Fitness Nutrition and fostering healthy

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relationships and the literature is very clear that these are the five ways to build stress resilience and more

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adaptive capacity yeah I really I really like that I want to dive into that on those side the commercial break those

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different pillars you know and I want to before we do that I think talk about the the developmental thing right because

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you say that young men are selfish which I I agree right but I think another way to frame it using your model is it’s

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we’re learning how to fill our own tank and we’re learning how to you know increase our capacity so that then we

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can do the next step right of giving it to a child or giving it to our partner or giving it to our community or our

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church or whatever it is right yeah and I don’t mean to be negative when I say selfish no I think you’re right I mean

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we are a little bit we’re all I think we’re all a little bit selfish but like I mean just be around a child like I want a cookie and you say no and they

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get all bad right but it’s more like you just only have one person to take care of yeah right and so you’re that’s just

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your reality but if you can think about the future and what you’re building

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towards if even if you don’t have a family what are you going to do for your community are you going to be a

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productive agent in society or is it just going to be about you um I would

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say that that’s an unfulfilling life um if you’ve got some if you got

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some Reservoir and you got something to give you should give it help somebody else find somebody else you can serve

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and love on yeah I I fully Endor that right I think you know I think a lot of

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men in the current generation young men need to hear that because I think they feel unprepared for fatherhood and

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unprepared for marriage because they didn’t do things like that and I think you know Athletics is probably the most traditional way but I think you know

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service oriented is really good you know education is really good I that kind of like forces you to build discipline and

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work on those pillars is critical so that when you do it next stage you’re ready yeah just work yeah just work work

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hard right show up well for anything it could be a robot project it doesn’t

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matter yeah you know I’ve got a one I got one son that’s an athlete the other one’s more of an engineer and both work

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hard just to different things yeah yeah just like applying oneself right to to just you know reality um so we’re going

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to head to our first commercial break when we come back I want to dive into those five pillars that you talked about and how your product and app really give

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recommendations and track those with a certain emphasis on the mental Fitness uh component um so if you’re hanging on

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in there we’ll see you on the other [Music]

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www.men theapy podcast.com now back to the men’s therapy

20:18

podcast welcome back to the show I’m here with Eric Corum the founder of am7 a fitness and mental health and capacity

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wearable I’m a tracking app and we’re talking about ways to increase your

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adaptive capacity which I think is huge right this idea that you put forward of having a large gas tank um having so

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much capacity that you can one deal with the stress of your life right deal with complex stress and two in some ways

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maybe more importantly give it to your family your community your church whatever it is so as we dive into this

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next segment you have your pillars uh that you want to talk about that really Define how to grow capacity yeah uh so

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there’s sleep exercise excise mental Fitness Nutrition and fostering healthy relationships or having a community and

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I think I mentioned before the the scientific literature is very clear that if you engage in these things at certain

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thresholds not only do you increase your resilience but you increase your longevity your health span and so we

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could take on the first one which is sleep that was my doctoral work was in sleep and uh I was just fascinated by it

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because there’s only a few things that without it you die right water food and sleep and it’s like I wonder how this

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impacts our ability to adapt to stress and it is like it’s the anchor um you if

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you want to somebody you’re a psychotherapist if you want to like just tear somebody apart you you deprive them

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of sleep oh yeah you got you hallucinate after like two or three days it just breaks absolutely that’s why like hell

21:48

week for SEALS or you go to Sears school and they sleep deive you just start going nuts start seeing stuff but

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there’s so many biological processes that happen during sleep as a matter of fact it’s we’ve yet to fully be able to

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elucidate like what exactly is going on um there’s a theory that just came out

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about criticality if somebody’s just a a fish AO Google go Google that it’s

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fascinating work that just came out um in the field of Neuroscience but we know several things happen when you sleep um

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number one uh your immune systems are strengthened as a matter of correct you create something called immunological

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memory so you’re either adapting to stress or you’re Mal adapting if you’re adapting you’re getting better if you’re

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Mal adapting you’re getting sick or injured or eventually you will die if you can’t adapt to stress that’s just

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kind of how it works and so when you stress by the way it’s really important

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to understand this stress is not the enemy it is the gateway to growth stress

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is your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful there are times when you need this turned on but sleep

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you want these systems dialed down cortisol goes down you create immunological memory basically your body

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can kind of go oh these are foreign Invaders that I fought off during the day and it really does some cool things to kind of remember those things uh your

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endocrine system is really kind of dialed in so for men most of your testosterone is released during sleep

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specifically during REM sleep the later phases of sleep um if you so after 30

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our sleep I mean our testosterone degrades about 1% per year

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there’s things you can do to mitigate that but if you were to deprive yourself of sleep to about five hours or less per

23:34

night for just one week you would Age yourself over a decade in the terms of

23:40

testosterone you’d experience a 10 to 15% drop in sleep um and so there’s a

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lot of guys looking at testosterone replacement therapy right now if you just get your sleep dialed in you know

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they can have a tremendous impact on your testosterone levels it impacts your hunger hormones called leptin mellin

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cortisol levels um there’s a hormone called growth hormone that’s released during early slow wave sleep which helps

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your tissues regenerate something that’s very fascinating that we’ve started to

24:11

understand about in the past 15 years is there’s something called a lymphatic system in your body it’s kind of this

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metabolic drainage system your brain doesn’t have a lymphatic system it has

24:22

something called A gimatic system that was just discovered like I said in the past 15 years and essentially what

24:27

happen this system is only active during sleep and during this time uh cerebral

24:34

spinal fluid goes up in your brain kind of soses around and then it drains out

24:40

metabolic waste products some of which are associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and

24:47

dementia so it’s hypothesized that you ever like have a great night of sleep and you wake up and you’re just like oh

24:53

man I feel awesome my brain’s clear just everything’s great some days you wake up your brain’s f foggy you know like

24:59

you’re just kind of uh it’s because your brain is literally full of crap that’s fascinating yeah that’s interesting yeah

25:06

it’s and so if you look at this the data Alzheimer’s disease is significantly

25:13

increased in the population at the same time we’re seeing plummeting sleep durations the average American sleeps

25:20

around 6 and a half hours a night which is not an adequate amount of sleep so as we see sleep go down neurodegenerative

25:25

diseases are going up a lot of neuroscientists now that we understand about the lymphatic system they’re like look here’s some causality here you’re

25:32

not getting rid of these metabolic waste products and Tow and amalo beta are building up in your brain well these are

25:38

causes for neuro degeneration um so you know regarding sleep there’s just really three things

25:45

to pay attention to when it comes to wearables do not look at deep and REM sleep that stuff’s not even accurate um

25:52

the re the research demonstrates that it’s the best wearable on the market the ring is only

25:58

79% accurate compared to the gold standard poly stenography so you should only be focusing on duration so how much

26:07

and 79 hours per night is ideal um it takes the average person

26:13

about 20 to 30 minutes to fall asleep so if you’re like oh I’m going to bed at you know uh 11: and I’m waking up at 6

26:21

that’s not seven hours it’s more like six and a half so you need about a half an hour longer of time in bed to reach

26:28

that kind of critical threshold the next thing which is really interesting is

26:35

consistency there’s a a a paper that just came out about sleep consistency being a great predictor for

26:41

cardiovascular disease uh so there’s something called social jet lag it

26:46

sounds just like it’s just like the feelings of regular jet lag but let’s say you sleep a certain way Sunday night

26:53

through Thursday night and then Friday and Saturday night you like you know I’m going to stay up till 1 and been watch

26:59

Netflix and then I’m G to sleep until 10: like what happens is your circadian

27:05

biology gets a little disrupted so by the time Monday comes around you feel like

27:10

garbage and so this having a consistent sleep schedule help prevent cardi metabolic disease uh prevents depression

27:18

weight gain and then the last thing is when you go to bed uh there was a paper uh done by the

27:26

broad Institute and and and Harvard they looked at over 600,000 people in the UK

27:31

bio bank and the University of Colorado participated in the St in the study there you go um where they found that

27:37

shifting the midpoint of your sleep back one hour so let’s say you go to bed at

27:44

1:00 am and you shifted it back to 12 there was a 23% reduction in the risk of major depression wow yeah you shifted it

27:51

back another hour they found it was almost 40% and why because people that go to

27:58

bed earlier and wake up earlier get more natural sunlight exposure which is the

28:04

anchor for your circadian clock so fascinating stuff so sleep is is definitely one that you want to pay

28:10

attention to um another one is exercise you know I won’t go into a ridiculous

28:16

amount of detail but being physically fit and having a healthy body improves resilience by blunting stress

28:23

reactivity um it also helps develop psychological stress resilience because here’s the deal stress is a general

28:31

there’s multiple systems basically three systems that are involved but it’s a generic

28:37

response so when I uh have a difficult conversation with somebody my sympathetic nervous system is cranked up

28:45

my HPA axis I start activating glucocorticoids etc etc it’s the same

28:50

process when you exercise so when you exercise you are literally practicing turning on the

28:56

stress system and turning them and dialing them down and so the literature

29:02

is pretty clear you need about 150 to 300 minutes of heart rate elevated

29:07

exercise per week and two total body strengthening sessions per week uh it

29:12

can be whatever type of resistance training you want but there was a really cool paper that just came out that showed if you do those two things you

29:19

reduce your risk of all cause mortality by 41 to 47% big numbers so it can be whatever

29:26

you want you like rowing to get your heart rate up great you like to ride your bike

29:32

phenomenal uh but you need to exercise and get your heart rate up for a consistent period of time and you need

29:39

to do resistance training it’s kind of annoying for people right now and we can add steps

29:45

into this equation too because people are like why do we got to track our steps why like a hundred years ago we

29:51

were just active right like yeah the world was a very different place you had just walk

29:57

to go places right weer workers we were we weren’t cranking away on our

30:02

keyboards to make money building yeah and so like there’s there’s the aerobic

30:08

exercise there’s resistance training and then walking walking you need to hit around the magic number seems to be

30:15

around 8 to 9,000 steps a day for reducing risk of cardiovascular disease all cause mortality and you know as a

30:23

psychotherapist that one of the best ways to help you process a difficult situation is getting an optic flow so

30:31

whether that’s riding a bike outside or walking outside or roller skate whatever it helps dampen the fear response helps

30:38

you process information so exercise is critical um Community I think this

30:45

is as we look at the post-pandemic world you’re going to start seeing a lot of literature coming at about the effects

30:53

of isolation um just because of Co but there was a paper that came out in the British psychological Society recently

30:59

that points out that greater social connectedness during lockdown periods was associated with less worry fatigue

31:08

lower perceived levels of stress they basically provided a buffer against poor

31:13

physical and mental health outcomes and so we need to stay connected to

31:20

people um a paper that came out of the University of Kansas in the past year demonstrated that just one meaningful

31:28

conversation per day significantly lower stress boost

31:34

your mood enhances social connectedness so just like I’m going to sit down and listen to a friend I’m going to catch up

31:42

with a buddy and we’re going to joke around and have a good time um and what was interesting about this paper is that

31:47

they found that face-to-face communication was significantly more effective than digital communication DMS

31:53

and texts and then the last thing I would say is this there’s um we don’t have

31:58

time for this but our understanding of stress has dramatically changed in the past 20 years and there’s something

32:04

called allostasis and allostatic load if you’re interested go research it but I was looking at paper on how papers on

32:12

how we can better manage this these stressors that come into our life and something interesting popped up there

32:18

was a study with over 5400 people across 18 years that that regularly attended a

32:25

faith community and they found that there was a 55% reduction in all cause

32:30

mortality with people that had regular attendance in a faith community when they controlled for socio demographic

32:35

clinical and latory factors here’s the point it doesn’t didn’t talk about what

32:41

faith or anything like that but if you think about the commonalities between like Faith groups is they meet on a

32:47

regular basis there’s typically some level of accountability to other human beings and

32:54

then they share their burdens with one another and whether you’re a person of Faith or

33:01

not that is really important to thriving as a human being and so this idea of

33:06

community is is critically important and the LA and then before we get into the last one we’ll touch on nutrition for

33:13

just a second I know that can be like a very hotbed issue with people like hey you know I like to eat a certain way and

33:20

you know there’s like there’s keto and there’s carnivore and there’s like so many options yeah here’s here’s the

33:27

basic deal eat an anti-inflammatory diet like if you want to adapt to stress

33:35

you have to create the conditions for adapting to stress okay

33:41

if your body is in a constant state of inflammation it’s not going to it’s going to be mobilizing resources to deal

33:48

with all of that and not the specific stressor that you’re taking on and so

33:54

most of the literature out there that kind of points like is there kind of an ideal di is it’s kind of this

34:01

Mediterranean diet which is just you know multicolored fruits and vegetables

34:07

so we got a lot of people right there that’s totally fine whether you’re vegan or not or vegetarian um nuts grains or

34:14

nuts uh oils uh different you know healthy fats um some you need protein

34:22

for sure you know if you’re a vegetarian you’re just going to have to eat a lot of vegetables to get it but if you don’t

34:27

hit a certain protein threshold your body is going to start breaking down muscle protein and that is not good um

34:35

whether you like to eat fish or not fish oils are phenomenal for preventing neurod degeneration

34:41

helping with cognitive Health reducing depression um and there was a really

34:46

cool paper that just came out recently on so there’s a new field emerging called

34:51

chronobiology which is like does the timing and types of food that you eat is

34:57

there a relationship to a 24-hour day and there is with two things that we’re starting to see one is protein

35:04

intake uh and the other is is um if you eat your last meal after 900 PM the

35:13

later your last meal is the higher your risk for cardiovascular disease and there seems to be like

35:19

people talk about intermittent fasting it’s kind of like you almost want to like eat earlier in the day yeah

35:27

and stop eating you know by six o’clock and at least having a 12-hour period where your body is not having to take in

35:34

food and your blood sugar isn’t elevated can significantly impact your ability to adapt to stress so those are the first

35:42

four uh there’s so many layers to go into that but there’s basically just a couple tenants for each if you just kind

35:48

of can hit these thresholds you are setting yourself up for building a massive

35:53

tank yeah I think that that’s really great I think you phenomenal job of like really highlighting those and some of

35:59

the key things for people look at and watch out for and there’s a lot yeah there’s a lot of research there um you

36:04

know in our next segment will really dive into mental Fitness but I’m curious with the remaining time you know where

36:10

people can learn more about these different pillars right they dive in and get good information because I think

36:16

that’s a key point right there’s so much bad information out there I have a newsletter called adaptation um so if you want to follow

36:23

me on social media Eric Corum on pretty much any platform but if you go to my website eric.com

36:30

um there’s a newsletter link there we’ll I’ll get that to you you can send out to the site’s under construction so if you

36:36

just go to one of my social media handles I send people every Friday like tips for how to be more

36:42

adaptable um and then we’ve embodied that in our technology A7 which you can talk about later but I try to just bring

36:49

people like actionable research that’s coming out unbiased I don’t have a slant

36:55

in one of these camps I’m just like let’s just help people yeah I think that’s great right because there’s so

37:00

people that are trying to like push their particular Trend or their particular you know solution Silver Bullet to it yeah for listeners all

37:07

those links will be in the show notes you can follow Eric on that stuff and learn more about him um and what he does

37:13

we’re going to move to our next commercial break and when we come back we’re going to do a deep dive on mental Fitness which is that fifth pillar um

37:19

and really relevant to a lot of our listeners and Eric if you can think of some takeaways that people can do if

37:24

they want to make maybe one easy or or high leverage change in each category

37:29

what some of the guys that are listening could could do um to start seeing results right away so if you’re

37:34

listening hang on in there and we’ll see you on the other [Music]

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www.men therapy podcast.com now back to the men’s therapy

39:40

podcast welcome back to the show I’m here with Dr Eric corm and we’re talking about mental Fitness which I think is a

39:46

a huge thing and I’m excited to hear you know your thoughts on it and also how your app A7 tracks that because I think

39:54

it is a really cutting edge thing to have technology interface with mental health so I’m really excited to hear you

39:59

know what developments are in that space yeah so mental Fitness I think I think

40:04

you’re going to start seeing instead of mental health you’re probably going to see more of this term being used for a

40:11

lot of people um and I think because it’s a trainable thing to an extent

40:17

right there’s always pathologies and things like that just like in you know any other you know physical health

40:24

whatever but mentally fit we kind of we’ve kind of Blended something called

40:29

psychological flexibility into this mental Fitness kind of bucket but it’s the ability to be consciously present

40:36

and to process information without bias this empowers you to respond quickly and

40:42

rationally to changing circumstances through committed actions anchored in your values so let’s just think about

40:48

what that means um you’re in a okay I’m a father of

40:54

three kids uh the end of the day I’m tired one of my kids said something to

41:00

me and maybe it I don’t know ramped me up a little bit and I I snap back at him

41:07

and then I’m like H that’s not that’s not how I wanted to respond you know the our biggest

41:13

failures are when we don’t act in a way that we believe is aligned with our values and a more mentally fit person

41:20

just like a physically fit person can take on a lot of stress and they just keep moving they keep moving a mentally

41:27

fit person is able to be present in the moment and have stuff coming at them and

41:33

then no matter how much that would typically ramp them up they can go okay this is what’s happening and I’m going

41:39

to be able to respond now in a rational way that’s really anchored in who I am

41:45

and there’s this myth you know I worked with Elite athletes I worked with multiple Olympic gold medalists I’ve

41:51

worked with NFL Super Bowl champions you know there’s kind of this myth that the best in the world don’t experience

41:57

uncomfortable thoughts emotions and feelings and that is just completely

42:03

fals um there is a a an Olympic cyclist

42:09

his name is Sir Chris Hoy he’s the greatest cyclist ever I

42:16

think he had six Olympic gold medals if I’m if I’m not correct um and if I’m

42:22

correct and he somebody asked him what it felt like to race and an Olympic finals and he said it felt like I was

42:30

going to The Gallows like he was going to die Terror

42:36

right Terror absolute Terror what most people don’t realize is most people do not have a personal record or run their

42:41

best race in Olympics they just utterly tank yeah but this is what he said I

42:47

remember this is the greatest cyclist of all time but then he said but then I would shift my attention to my hands

42:55

gripping the steering wheel or my feet in the clips or my butt in the seat and

43:01

so what he was doing is is I’ve got all these uncomfortable feelings and I feel like I’m going to die and throw up and

43:07

all this kind of stuff but I’m harnessing my attention and now I’m directing it to where I want it directed

43:13

at right now and then I’m going to take an action and so uh my friend Dr Peter

43:19

habell says that attention is the currency of

43:25

performance and that’s essentially what we all want

43:30

is control of our attention and then the ability to make an action that’s

43:35

anchored in our values and so one of the best ways that you can train this

43:40

capability is mindfulness now mindfulness for a lot for some people they’re like is this

43:45

like a religious thing no okay it’s like it’s essentially bringing your

43:52

attention to some type of physical sensation that’s one way of doing it it could be breath work it could be just

43:59

closing your eyes and focusing on your breath the inhalation the

44:05

exhalation and then the real magic happens when your little monkey brain kind of drifts off and you go oh I’m not

44:13

present right now and you kind of bring it back um I was just going back and forth with a coach who randomly reached

44:20

out to me on a direct message on Twitter and he’s or X whatever you call it now and he’s like I’m I’m just kind of have

44:26

hard time with this I’m like have you tried mindful walking he’s like what’s that I’m like just walk and just focus

44:34

on the your foot rolling across the ground it’s really hard um maybe it’s

44:40

mindful eating and just take Could you actually sit there and eat a meal and just focus on the food itself and

44:48

chewing um practicing this is like a superpower once you start to be able to

44:54

notice where your mind is that it has significant impact on rumination uh reduces mind wandering um

45:03

there was a recent paper that demonstrated that consistent it was actually uh published in Jamma

45:08

Psychiatry that demonstrated that mindfulness was just as effective in reducing anxiety is anxiety symptoms is

45:15

the commonly prescribed anti-anxiety drug Lexapro um now they did a lot of

45:20

mindfulness wasn’t just like five minutes but it’s very interesting um one

45:26

of the most fulfilling things that we can do is deep work where we’re just fully engulfed in one thing one task our

45:33

mind’s not all over the place and training mindfulness allows us to get into that you know Flow State or

45:40

whatever you want to call it and so there’s multiple different mental Fitness tools you can use mindfulness is

45:46

one of them breath work is another for regulating stress but it’s also mindful

45:52

if you really think about it because you’re having to breathe in a cadenced way um so I would say those are two of

46:00

like my favorite tools also like gratitude journaling um that’s been a powerful

46:06

tool for me especially in periods of time when I feel my mood is starting to

46:11

kind of Wayne I’m just not in a great mood I don’t know if you’ve ever done a big three Journal but like you sit down

46:18

and you maybe think of like what’s the best thing that happened today and then you actually try to relive and

46:25

experience the emotions and feelings of that moment and write it down maybe you had an interaction with a colleague or a

46:32

spouse or a friend or maybe nothing great happened to you but maybe you

46:37

found some beauty in the weather or the sunset or something like that there’s a

46:44

lot of different things that we can do to improve our mental Fitness but I think the one thing that we should be fighting for is our

46:50

attention yeah I think that’s that’s critical right and I think if I can just underline what you’re saying to our

46:56

listeners out there is like you can actually change your brain and you can change your perspective and you can

47:01

change your reality you know and you know I’m a meditation teacher I was training more Buddhist Traditions but

47:07

there is this idea of you know it’s not about staying focused and not thinking I

47:12

always want to say that when people talk about mindfulness it’s about coming back you know and for a lot of the athletes out there like that that’s your rep

47:18

right like you’re just doing a rep every time you get distracted and come back get distracted come back so you’re practicing that coming back it’s not

47:24

about not being distracted um so I like adding that component because I think it’s critical and like being able to

47:30

harness your attention and your focus is like you said it’s a superpower it lets you not freak out in moments let you

47:37

really pay attention when it’s really important to and it lets you kind of actually see and pick up more subtle

47:43

layers of experience which can sound kind of woooo but really it’s like you’re going to notice things that literally you did not notice before

47:50

whether they be like moments of beauty or micro Expressions on people’s faces or eye contact because we’re often very

47:57

scrambled especially in modern society when there’s all this phone stuff and you know our eyes like very rarely

48:02

actually lock on to things there’s all these you know studies that do eye tracking when they look at people um in their natural environment and our eyes

48:08

are just like bouncing off the walls going crazy because we’re not able to actually just focus and look at

48:13

something which is crazy to think about that we’ve in some ways lost our ability to look at things um right like seems

48:22

pretty fundamental but mindfulness is is really critical in building some of those skills um so I I’m curious how

48:28

does am7 how does your app incorporate that how does it track that um what’s the role of technology and building

48:34

mental Fitness yeah so we we’re Hardware agnostics so we connect to your Apple

48:39

watch or Fitbit or Garmin whatever and we do a couple things one we we can

48:45

assess how you are globally adapting to psychophysiological stress not just through the data coming through the

48:51

device like HRV but we actually take you through a very short we call uh calibration every morning so about 60 to

48:59

90 minutes after you wake up you take about 20 seconds 30 seconds and we ask you very specific questions about your

49:05

mood your energy your sleep your stress your soreness your motivation um what this does is it

49:11

actually starts to develop something called interoception where you’re starting to better understand what’s actually going

49:16

on inside of me and then our algorithms combine all this data and they’re like here’s exactly what you should do each

49:22

day for Your Mind Body and Recovery to build more adaptive capacity so from an

49:27

exercise perspective the exact type intensity and duration of exercise that you can adapt to um we have resistance

49:35

training protocols that are adapted every single day to volume and intensity so you’re not just chronically like just

49:41

burning yourself out um from a mental Fitness perspective it’s like the precise tool at the right

49:48

time so if you’re really stressed out we’ll send you a specific breath work tool or maybe you’re low on energy will

49:55

send you a very different breath work tool or maybe mindfulness tool may we have all sorts of mindful walks mindful

50:01

watching the sunrise like really cool stuff six cense noting that you can add to we have you these little like morning

50:08

routines that you can create based off of your schedule where it’s like oh do you want us to notify you when the sun

50:13

comes up to get some sunlight cool when you do that would you like to do a three minute mindfulness session with Dr habal

50:20

on a sunrise you see what I’m saying and then we also do this for sleep and Recovery so we not only make

50:27

recommendations for how long and the different things but then we have these this masterclass library that teach you

50:33

how to do each one of these things so it’s not just recommendations which is great it’s not just data points but then

50:39

we close the loop with coaching and a plan for you so this is really a holistic health and wellness system that

50:47

to my knowledge has never really been all of these things wrapped into one app for folks and so that’s my passion uh

50:54

that’s why I left professional sports to build this and to help you know people like you and me that want to be better

51:01

versions of ourselves that want to be the best men that we can be consistently adapt to stress and show up in an

51:07

authentic way yeah I love that right I love how personalized it seems to be right how customizable and there’s this

51:14

great you know Marcus Aus quote right sto philosopher where he says um the soil doesn’t lie right and he talks

51:20

about in the terms of masculinity this idea of like getting your hands in the soil working with something physical and I think in the monor world it’s data

51:27

right so there’s a way that like if you’re actually making life changes based on real data it can’t lie right

51:33

you can’t like fudge it you can’t you know exaggerate it you can’t minimize it it’s like this is where you’re at and I

51:39

think that type of like very clear feedback I think men are hungry for it you know it can be it can be you know

51:46

humbling at first but I think ultimately I think we’re really hungry for like knowing where we um rank you know and

51:52

knowing what our stats are no question yeah and it leads to these great um great improvements so yeah Eric we are

52:00

at our time I’m so happy to have you on the show I think you really did a great job like overviewing all these different

52:05

Pillars of Strength and pillars of um adaptive capacity so as you’re wrapping up where can people learn more about you

52:11

or where can they find you online yeah so I do have a podcast called The Blueprint and we basically distill

52:18

petting Edge Science Leadership and life skills in a very short 15minute episodes

52:23

so like think of it like huberman you know instead of listening to two hours on all these protocols we just try

52:28

to give it to you in 15 minutes so if you want more kind of the science behind this that would be a great place it’s

52:33

called The Blueprint um you can also connect with me on Instagram LinkedIn or

52:40

Twitter at Eric Korum and then that adaptation newsletter every Friday I send you um three tips for Mind Body and

52:47

Recovery to build uh more stress resilience fantastic yeah and the product is A7 A7 yes it’s A7 it’s in the

52:55

App Store and you can go to am.com aim.com and sign up for it there

53:01

so would love for you to try the app uh We’ve almost got a thousand people using it now we just released it in September

53:07

it’s growing it’s an amazing community of folks so I’m very thankful to be on the show today and have the opportunity

53:14

to share about this fantastic well thanks so much for joining us and to our listeners out there if you feel like

53:20

this has been helpful for you please share it like it give us a festar review Send to somebody send to some gu who

53:25

really wants something holistic that they can just get into right I think with the New Year still you know fresh

53:31

behind us this is a great time to start really like understanding uh your mind body and spirit and I think um just

53:38

share it around right uh try it out so thanks so much for tuning in and we’ll see you next week another episode of the

53:44

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53:49

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