Today I am speaking with my friend, Thomas P Seager, PhD on all things cold therapy. We discuss the science behind cold therapy and protocols to implement it into your life. 

Dr. Thomas is also the founder and creator of the Morocco Forge, the coldest cold tub on the market. It also offers grounding benefits and is self cleaning with ozone. If you are in the market for a cold tub, this one is it. You can save off the home model with code Kayla150 and the commercial model with code Kayla500.

Learn more about the Forge here: https://www.morozkoforge.com

Thomas P. Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering & the Built Environment at Arizona State University in Tempe AZ.  His teaching and research is focused on a new approach to personal development called Self-Actual Engineering, which is about redesigning ourselves, or relationships, and our lives to realize more of our fullest potential.  He has authored over 150 scientific articles, but you can read more about his work on human resilience, personal psychology, and entrepreneurship at his personal blog https://seagertp.substack.com/.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00.310] - KAYLA BARNES

So Dr. Tom is a pleasure to have you here with me today.

 

[00:00:04.250] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Thanks for inviting me.

 

[00:00:05.860] - KAYLA BARNES

Absolutely. So, a little preface. I mean, you and I have had some great conversations in the past. Where can I mention the bio hacking group still like it's a closed group right now, but we're in a little group with some other biohacking business owners and we just talk about different topics every week and it's been such a pleasure to be there. But Dr. Tom created the Morocco Forge, which is taking the cold therapy and cold tub space to like, new levels because you see these videos of people with actual ice floating on top of the forge. So it's the coldest tub on the market, right?

 

[00:00:47.270] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

That's right.

 

[00:00:48.340] - KAYLA BARNES

How cold?

 

[00:00:48.770] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

It can't get any colder than 32 and you don't want any colder than 32. So there's a thermodynamic limit on how cold your ice bath can get. And we're it I love it.

 

[00:01:00.720] - KAYLA BARNES

It's incredible. So today we're going to be talking all things cold therapy because cold therapy, although it's something that obviously our ancestors were doing hundreds of years ago, it's making a big splash on social media. I talk about it all the time. I'm a big fan. I do everything from the cold showers in the morning to cryotherapy. Soon I'm going to have a morsco at home. We're just chatting about it, but let's dive into some of the science. So there are so many incredible benefits of cold therapy. And yesterday we were talking a little bit about metabolic health and cold therapy. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What are the benefits to metabolic health from cold therapy?

 

[00:01:43.570] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

It's almost unbelievable. There's a big difference between our allopathic drug and surgery approach to what is now industrial medicine. What everybody knows is medicine because a drug, a pharmaceutical, is meant to target one thing inside your body and they call all the rest side effects. It ignores the fact that the body is a complex system. You can't ever just change one thing in a complex system. So there's no such thing as a side effect. There are only effects. When you take a drug trying to target the one thing, often people will wind up on this cascade where they have to take something else to manage the effect that they don't want from the drug. The difference to cold exposure is that it acts systemically, just like nutrition acts systemically, just like exercise systemically. So when people say, how can exercise be so great that it slows aging, improves mental health, improves cardiovascular, how can exercise be so magical that it does all of these great things for you? It's because your body is biologically wired to need exercise. The exercise works systemically on your body and everything in your body and your brain improves. Cold exposure is the same way.

 

[00:03:00.750] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

We are evolutionarily biologically hardwired to need cold exposure. And this was a real surprise to me. But the more I went into the evolution of it, the more it made sense. You remember where Jim Hoff takes all his people? Where does he go on his historic record breaking mountain climb? It's Mount Kilimanjaro. And up at the top, there's still, I guess, depending upon your views of climate change, there's still a glacier. It turns out there are four glaciers at the equator in East Africa. Human beings. It's called a bottleneck. We're constrained by these periodic ice ages in which a small number of humans were clustered around the shore fronts of wherever we existed in Africa or elsewhere during these ice ages. And the waters that melted off of those glaciers were, guess what? Cold. We evolved to be in cold water. And this was a revelation for me as I read more about the aquatic ape hypothesis, about how human beings have downward facing nostrils so we can dive while we walk on 2ft, so we can wade through the water. Why, we have subcutaneous fat so that just like dolphins do, just like the manatee does, just like whales do, so that we can streamline and stay warm in the cold water.

 

[00:04:27.610] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

We are evolutionarily evolved for our bodies to expect to be cold, just like we're evolutionary evolved for exercise. And if you don't get enough cold, these disorders start showing up. The first place that they show up is in your metabolism, because the way we stay warm when we're in the cold air or in the cold water, there's two mechanisms of thermogenesis. One is our muscles begin to shiver. Chatter which almost everyone is familiar with. And how we're socialized now, at least in the United States, is when we begin to shiver. We say, oh, I better go get warm. I got to put on a sweater and a hat, and I got to go find, I don't know, someplace to warm up. But the other way is called non shivering thermogenesis. And that happens only in your brown fat. Brown fat is not energy storage like white fat is. Brown fat are packed with mitochondria, and the only job of a brown fat cell is to burn glucose, to burn lipids, to burn the fat that is stored in the white fat cells to keep your body warm. And this is how we can be warm blooded mammals walking across the Bering Strait and populating the world and all of the different climates in which human beings exist.

 

[00:05:46.920] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

The key is this non shivering thermogenesis, the brown fat. Any time your muscles begin to shiver from the cold, you have signaled your body to activate any brown fat that you have and recruit more of it. To do that, your body has to make a lot of new mitochondria so that the mitochondria can process energy stored in the form of glucose and fats into heat. The brown fat is going to be at the base of your neck, above your shoulder blades, back here. It's going to be around your clavicles. There's a little bit around your heart. The whole point is for the brown fat to be inside your body where your internal organs need it the most. So when the heart parts, pumps the blood up to the brain, what's it got to do? It's got to go through the neck. It'll go right past the brown fat, which is making the heat, keeping the brain warm, keeping the heart warm. The cold activates the brown fat, recruits new brown fat, builds new mitochondria, clears glucose out of your bloodstream, improves your insulin sensitivity, and begins fat burning. So brown fat isn't stored where I got my love handles.

 

[00:07:01.870] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Brown fat is stored where people don't see it as fat, and it's meant to do a different job. So how does this work? We talked a little bit about how it clears the glucose and improves the glucose sensitivity. There's a really good study out of Germany, and these were all I'm going to call them middle aged men, but that means like 55 to 60 as far as I'm concerned. They were all obese, sedentary, suffering from different stages of type two diabetes. They kept them in the cold air for ten days. Shorts and a T shirt was all they were allowed to wear, but they instructed them no exercise. They gave them all the snacks they wanted to eat. And it sounds like a disaster. This is like it would be a tailgate party in the United States where you're eating chips and you're sitting around with your buddies watching TV. You're not even allowed to exercise. Ten days later, they'd reverse the type two diabetes. It doesn't take a lot of cold. It certainly doesn't take a freezing Moralesco Forge to get these metabolic benefits, because as soon as you start to shiver, your body is getting the cold that it needs.

 

[00:08:08.730] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Everything in your body is saying, oh, we know what this is. Let's begin to get that brown fat going. Let's improve our insulin sensitivity, let's start burning some of that fat, and you will get a metabolic correction from the state of metabolic disorder, what I call industrial disease, because diarrh Street has such a catchy song about it when you've gone so far that you've developed type two diabetes. And by the way, you don't have to be obese for that. Know a woman who was at 12% body fat. She was living on a diet of Coca Cola. And aspirin she was rail thin and her HBA one C was over seven, that's type two diabetes. Although it correlates with obesity, it's not a matter of obesity. It's a matter of metabolic health, your mitochondrial health. And when you rely too much on carbohydrates, this is when you begin to get the met and you don't get enough cold metabolic disorders. She reversed her diabetes. How did she do it? Cut her carbohydrates down, cut the liquid carbohydrates out, got into the Forge started doing a little bit of yoga. Type two diabetes. We're now at the point where it's optional, but what comes before type two diabetes is called insulin resistance.

 

[00:09:27.850] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Ben Bickman wrote a great book on it called How We Get Sick. And it's the most comprehensive single source of information on metabolic disorders that I've seen yet. He didn't talk about cold exposure. He talked about low carb. He talks about keto. But lately you follow his instagram, and sure enough, he's getting into the ice water. It's very gratifying to see what people typically don't recognize is how many other disorders come from this failure to get cold exposure. That is, your metabolism is at the root of something like eight out of the ten. I'm making this up, but it's not that wrong. Maybe it's seven out of the ten leading causes of death in the United States. Alzheimer's. That's a metabolic disorder. Cancer, 80% of them. Metabolic disorders. Cardiovascular disease, a metabolic disorder. If you're not taking care of the way your body is processing energy, then you're sick. And that's one of the things that I learned from Ben. So there's three ways to do it, sort of this triangle of metabolic health. One is exercise. And everybody knows this. You learn this from your gym teacher in kindergarten. The other way is diet.

 

[00:10:46.450] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

And here there's a lot of misinformation coming out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The cereal companies want you to eat their sugar. The soda companies want you to believe that it's all about calories rather than quality. And you have to fight against this industrial food complex trying to tell you to eat grains and refined carbohydrates because they're terrible for you. So there's exercise, there's diet where you want to go low carb. And the carbs that you do get, you want to get them from fruit and whole grain sources. And the third pillar for which there's really no substitute is cold exposure. Because the best way to recruit to maintain your brown fat is to get in the cold. Doesn't take a lot. It takes a lot of courage, maybe, but it doesn't take a lot of exposure. There was a study came out of Denmark. Susannah Soberg is the lead author, and she studied winter swimmers. She surveyed them. How much time do you actually spend in the fjord? And the average among the winter swimmers who had brown fat was eleven minutes a week. So a lot of people will ask me, well, what temperature do I need?

 

[00:11:57.750] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Well, how much time should I be in there? And it all depends on what you're working on. If it's metabolism, what Soldberg established is that eleven minutes a week, however you want to divide it up, one session of eleven minutes, three sessions of almost four minutes. Eleven minutes a week will work. We don't even know if that's the minimum. It might be even less. But she showed that on average eleven minutes a week will recruit, maintain the brown fat and fix your metabolism, which is a wonderful thing you don't even need. We're down to zero degrees Celsius and we're making ice. But the German study was somewhere in the all you need is the feeling where you're beginning to shiver. You're cold enough.

 

[00:12:43.080] - KAYLA BARNES

Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's so important, and I think that the stats are somewhere around. Only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy, actually, that is the staff. And that's very sad. And to be honest, it's quite ridiculous because we have so many tools that we can kind of put into a protocol to change that. But at the same point, recently, the tough food kind of calculator. Have you seen this going around? It came out in 2021, but this is what's going to be presented. So the gentleman that actually created this food profiling device, he is now the co chair for the upcoming White House Summit on Nutrition. And when you look at the rankings, I mean, Lucky Charms is one of the top five things that people should be eating. I mean, this is embarrassing. So I understand that the direction for nutrition is so completely confusing to people. And so it's not a big surprise to me that we are where we are. But the thing is that we all do need to take accountability. And there's creators all over the Internet. There are scientists, PhDs like yourself, people like me, trying to share what I can understand from people like my friends and research and studies and all this.

 

[00:14:13.360] - KAYLA BARNES

So the resources are out there, but we just have to do better because I think everyone should really strive for and deserve energy and being able to sleep well at night and being able to power through and get what they want to do done. And cold therapy is, for a lot of people, can also be free. Let's talk a little bit about cold showers, because the problem with cold showers for me is that I don't get cold enough. Do you get a little bit acclimated to how cold? Because I do cryotherapy, as we know. Many of my friends have a Morasco and I go in there Morasco. So I do a lot of different variations of cold therapy. So for me, the shower doesn't get quite cold enough, but I think it's an incredible starting point for people.

 

[00:15:00.170] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

When I started, it was cold showers. I'd read Mike Sirenovich's book before he became a political journalist, and he wrote this book called Gorilla Mindset, and he said, well, you should do cold showers because they're awful. I'm like, okay, I'm going to challenge myself. And he was right. But I'm in Phoenix. Even in December and January, the temperature of our tap water is in the low 60s. It feels cold because I wasn't cold acclimated, but it's not cold at all. The more brown fat you accumulate, the more your smooth muscle tissue, which is responsible for basal constriction and basodelation. That is, it controls your circulatory response. So the more you become cold acclimated, the lower what I call your thermal comfort line goes. So when I started, a 75 degree shower may have been, well, it's not a hot shower, but it's fine, and I can handle this indefinitely. That thermal comfort line, you take it down to 62 and it felt miserable, wretched and cold. Well, the thing about Phoenix is, once you get into May and June, the tap water is now in the 80s. There's no such thing as a cold shower.

 

[00:16:11.120] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

So for me to continue, I had to get together with Jason Stauffer. He's my partner. We founded it together with his wife, Adrian Jesak. We had to buy £200 of ice. We got one of those stock tanks and we dumped it in there. And you get about 15 minutes in the Phoenix heat before you're disappointed in how much ice you just hauled from the Quickie Mart or whatever, and you're trying to get four people through, but it's too hot. You do get acclimated. And now 50 degrees is like, nothing for me. I have a customer in town. He has Parkinson's, and he's using cold exposure to help manage his Parkinson's. You get like two and a half, three times dopamine hit from your ice bath. And if you've seen the Patch Adams movie, if you know anything about Dopamine, parkinson is a disorder in the dopamine system. So he will get hours of relief from his morazco just by using cold exposure. But he keeps it at 50 because he's new to this and because when he begins to shiver, it frightens him. It's hard to distinguish the cold, thermogenesis shiver from the Parkinson's tremble.

 

[00:17:27.970] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

So I went over to his house and it's 50 degrees. And I thought, well, how am I going to challenge myself with this? He said, get a snorkel. And he sort of dared me. I mean, it wasn't just his idea, and I'm a sucker for a dare. So I got the snorkel and I was going face down 50 degree water, and I'm like, this would be great. I'll really challenge my nervous system. I'll see how long I can hold this indefinitely. Cold wasn't the problem. What turned out to be the problem was it was all psychological. I had a flashback that was very powerful to being a child and learning how to swim with my mother in the moment where she started supporting me. I'm a little kid, I'm four or five years old, and she started by supporting me, kind of a dead man slope. But then, of course, she rolled me over to blow bubbles, so I would get used to having my face in the water. There is something called the dive reflex. And the water where I learned to swim, it wasn't that cold. But when a human being goes face first into the water, lots of things begin to slow down.

 

[00:18:34.730] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

This dive reflex prepares our body to slow our metabolism so the heart rate slows. Breathing, of course, stops. And this allows you to go as far as you need to go to get the I don't know, you're going for lobster. I don't know what you're doing down there, but you're getting dinner. And this is what our ancestors did when they adopted. So the dive reflex slows the whole metabolism down. There's also something called the gasp reflex. When you get into cold water, not so much face first, but let's say you go feet first. Right away you feel your thermal receptors on your skin are activating your sympathetic nervous system and you begin this process of sort of panic. You activate your fight or flight response. These two can sometimes be in conflict. So scuba divers snorkelers. They're very conscious of their breath, how much oxygen they're using. And I used to snorkel all over the place when I was a kid. It wasn't the cold. It was the flashback response of this autonomic conflict between the gas reflex I've got my snore, I need as much air as I can and the dive reflex, everything should slow down and everything should relax.

 

[00:19:49.560] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

That brought me into a flashback when my mother was trying to teach me how to swim. I finally came out minutes and minutes later. And it's a good thing that he's a good friend because we had a chance to talk about it, to talk about the relationship that we have with the water and how we learn to swim and how most kids are afraid. At some point, if you need the metabolic benefits, then 50 60 cold showers can be fine. But if you're going for the psychological benefits, which is what I was doing that day, then you need to challenge yourself psychologically. You need that nervous system response. You need to be on that psychological edge where you're trying to structure your breathing and structure your thoughts so that you can strengthen your vagus nerve and your parasympathetic nervous system. 50 degrees won't do it for me. For me. Now, if I don't look down at my forage and see ice, I'm bored. If it's 34, it doesn't scare me. So we've got an article up there that says, set your forge to a temperature that frightens you. And that's because it sounds like you were past the metabolic threshold.

 

[00:21:05.540] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

It's great that we're activating our brown fat, but metabolism is not our problem. We go into the cold for other reasons. And it can be the psychological resilience response. It can be the stress inoculation that we get from the cold. It sure was for me that day.

 

[00:21:24.830] - KAYLA BARNES

That's great, and I agree with that. I always am a big fan of doing hard things in cold therapy. It used to be a really hard thing for me and still is because I continue to challenge myself and increase or up the ante. At my clinic, I have a cryotherapy chamber. And it gets to it's a very different experience than the cold water therapy because you don't have that initial shock like your gas reflex because it's just not the same. But I still challenge myself. It goes to about negative 175 with winds. And I'll just open the door. So the chamber only wants you to be in there for three minutes and 30 seconds, but I'll just open the door and I'll restart the session and stay in there for longer because I know that if I don't get to a state in which I'm shivering, then I'm not really allowing myself to get the maximum benefit. And also it's interesting because some days if I sleep a little bit less or have a little bit more stress, I'll actually start to shiver sooner than I normally do. So that's an indicator for me without any fancy technology that I need to get better rest that night or I need to take it a little bit easier, do some more stress relief.

 

[00:22:41.210] - KAYLA BARNES

Is there any science to kind of correlate those?

 

[00:22:44.090] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

There is. It's not great because it's coming out of psychology. But the phenomenon that you just mentioned I've experienced a dozen times. I might be anxious, I might be stressed out. Maybe I had an argument with someone who's really important to me. It could be Jason in the business, it could be my girlfriend. It could be anything that is weighing on my psyche. And I will start shivering like 45. I save myself, oh, I need a forge. I'm stressed out. I need and I'll get in there and the shiver response will come in less than a minute. And I'm so cold acclimated that for a long time I was wondering, well, what the heck is that? It's trauma. It's not metabolism anymore. Peter Levine has this great book called An Unspoken Voice. He's got another one called, I think, waking the Tiger. But Peter Levine is a psychotherapist or psychologist expert on trauma and how to resolve it. He talks about when he got run over by a car and he was conscious enough. They wanted to immobilize him to get him into the ambulance worried about his enacting. And he was shaking. And he knew that the shaking response sometimes it's called trembling.

 

[00:24:04.630] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

It's not often called shivering, but it could be a tremor or a tremble or a shiver or a shake that that response was his body releasing the trauma of the event from his nervous system. And if he wasn't allowed to move and it's not like he could get up and run. He was immobilized by his injuries, but he began shaking and he knew that that would protect him from PTSD. So I started reading more about it and sure enough, there's a phenomena where the brain surgery patients are coming out of anesthesia. They're coming out of brain. You can imagine they're just undergone brain surgery, talk about trauma, and they will often begin this trembling, shivering response. It used to be that the surgeons thought the operating room is too cold. They used to think this is a ThermoGen. It's not. It is their body attempting to release the trauma that has happened during the surgery to their nervous system. They used to administer drugs to try and calm the body down, to prevent the body doing from what it needs to do or even strap kids down and, oh, my gosh, the PTSD that resulted from the body being unable to release its stress through this shivering experience was horrific.

 

[00:25:24.540] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

So now some leading, when I say leading, they're on the cutting edge of adopting better practices will allow the shiver to take place because they know that's the way the nervous system protects itself. So you're saying, well, if I had a bad night's sleep, which is probably the reason you had a bad night's sleep. In my case, I keep a dream journal. I have nightmares, and I know what they're about. So if I'm having that bad day, I will go in the forge and I will instead of trying to calm myself down so the shiver does not happen, a lot of people ask me, should I shiver or not? Sugar? Depends on what you're working on. If you want to recruit the brown fat, then breathe into the relaxation and attempt to postpone the shiver. Work your brown fat so that it does more of the thermogenesis. But if what you're working on is releasing trauma, then there are sometimes I'll go in there and I'll be like, bring that shiver. I need that shiver. Of course, I get out, I have the norepinephrine, I have the dopamine. I always feel better. We've got one customer, very high stress career, and he calls the forge the mood changer.

 

[00:26:36.560] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

And he's right. You can't help but change your mood when you've created all these hormones and neurotransmitters as a result of the cold exposure. What it sometimes does is let me take a minute. Whatever the fears were, whatever the anticipatory anxiety I had, whatever the stress it was that was plaguing me, most of it's in my imagination, I shiver, I clear my imagination out, and then I'm better able to deal with whatever the reality is instead of the things that are climbing around inside my head.

 

[00:27:12.530] - KAYLA BARNES

Absolutely. And, yeah, I mean, there was a direct link. I certainly had a lot on my mind when that occurred, and it was of no surprise at all. I actually really like it when things like that happen because it just shows the body brain mind connection so strongly. So it was incredible.

 

[00:27:32.410] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

There's a little window into you.

 

[00:27:34.970] - KAYLA BARNES

Exactly. Because I already knew, I already knew what kind of state I was in that day, but that really kind of just gave me the physical awareness that I was right. So we talked a little bit about what we talked a lot about metabolic, metabolic dysfunction and how cold therapy can help with that. What about chronic disease in general and inflammation?

 

[00:27:57.590] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Cold is great for inflammation. A lot of people came to cold because they were high school athletes or college athletes or maybe they're weekend warriors. And they know that after they've done the half marathon and their knees are barking, they know to get into the cold. The cold will reduce the inflammation both in the muscles and in the joints, systemically throughout the body. It will speed the recovery. It will give them back into performance shape faster. So if what you're doing is some kind of multi day event, and you're going to use coal to recover from strenuous exercise so you can perform again if I ever find myself in the Tour de France by some crazy accident of alternative universe, I want a nice bath to end my day. But if what you're trying to do is build muscle, build endurance, don't get in the cold after exercise. Let the inflammation do its job. It's analogous to the shiver response after trauma. Your body is wired to know what to do. There are some cases where, and I'm not a medical doctor, you know, my doctorate is in engineering. There are some cases where the inflammation could be so extreme that it becomes dangerous.

 

[00:29:20.780] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

But we're not talking about those cases. We're talking about you've had a good workout, you know you're going to be sore. Give it a few hours. And by a few hours, I mean four, 5 hours before you get into the cold. And this will allow your body to get the most out of its hormetic response. You've stressed your body, you've broken it down, let it build itself back up. So I exercise after my ice bath. And I don't do a lot of exercise, Kayla. We're not even talking 20 minutes. But I'll go in the forge. I'll come out and of course I'm cold, but I have all this dopamine and I'm fired up and I feel like Superman. So I'll get my steel mace out and do some three hundred and sixty s. And I've got my kettle bells like Scott Carney wrote about. And I've got a barbell, I got a chin up bar. I'll just do these basic things that I can sit on my balcony to help the blood return to my extremities, to help me rewarm. And it turns out there's a great study on this from Japan. In the early nineties, they took a bunch of male college students.

 

[00:30:29.830] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

They're always college students because I guess they'll volunteer for anything. And they did cold exposure, then exercise, just like I do. And they found out a big boost in testosterone, a big boost in Glutenizing hormone, which is a metabolic precursor to testosterone. When they did it the traditional way, exercise and then cold exposure, testosterone was depressed. Luteinizing hormone was depressed. When you reverse it, when. You use the exercise to recover from the cold. Now. I'm 56 years old. Last time I had my testosterone checked, it was through the roof. The lab report came back with a little red exclamation mark saying it's abnormally, too high. I brought it to my urologist. He said he thought maybe I was taking a little cream or something. He had me tested for luteinizing hormone. That came back with a big red exclamation mark. My testosterone was levels of, like, over 619 year old. And here I am, what I'm calling middle aged. So there's many of the chronic what are called chronic diseases. What we're supposed to accept is kind of like the natural breakdown of the body. Oh, you know, Tom, you're getting older now. You're not as young as you used to be.

 

[00:31:45.840] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

And so these things happen. There are a lot of guys my age are on, like, five different prescription medications, and I don't want to judge anyone and what they're doing because I'm not in their body. For me, I'm going to do everything I can to either postpone or avoid that kind of treatment of myself, and I say everything I can. I eat pretty clean, but I have my bad days. I exercise a little bit, but I'm not a gym rat. I've got a healthy metabolism, and I probably do more cold exposure to make up for the other things that I'm not doing right. If it's a chronic disease, you're typically told that it is progressive. It is for the rest of your life, and you can expect this to get worse. That's what they told Adrian when she was diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. But they did not tell her is that the thyroid and brown fat worked together. The thyroid signals the metabolism, and the brown fat signals the thyroid. Now, Adrian grew up in Florida, and then she moved to Phoenix. There's no cold. And she would tell you, I hate the cold. I'm just one of those people who can't get cold.

 

[00:33:01.250] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

When she saw Jason and I get really into this, she said, Well, I don't want to be left out. Her first ice bath was something like 9 seconds. She dropped in, and she looked like a Wiley Coyote cartoon or something. She popped out there like some magical catapult was in the ice bath. 9 seconds. And we congratulated her, because the most difficult moment is the moment you enter the ice bath. Less than a year later, she didn't have ashimoto's. Why? Because she went from 9 seconds to two minutes to four minutes to eight minutes. Because when she introduced cold exposure into her body, she recruited new brown fat. The new brown fat, according to a video that Ben Dickman just posted, brown fat produces more thyroid hormone than the thyroid does, but it does something else. It modulates. It regulates the thyroid. So her thyroid was out of whack because she had no brown fat when she added the brown fat. Now the thyroid has something to work with. The two of them stabilize one another. And her thyroid, I just went away. She brought her clean labs back to her doctor, and her doctor said, how she moto's go?

 

[00:34:16.010] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

And Adrian said, I don't know, doc, but I feel great. And he said, Well, I guess you don't need these pills anymore. And she said, I was hoping you say that because I stopped taking them a month ago. He said? I'm not sure. I mean, we ought to keep an eye on you, right? And she said, I don't know if I want to come back. I think I'm going to work on my allergies next. And sure enough, it took another year. She's got no allergies either. And she's not the only customer that we have that right now. It's a mystery. I don't understand the mechanism of allergies resolving themselves, but sometimes they do as people age. Maybe it has nothing to do with the cold exposure. What we're finding is that when you apply, when you give your body what it needs as a system, all kinds of surprising things begin to happen. Your skin gets better, your energy levels get better, you sleep gets better. And you shouldn't be surprised when the things that you thought you were going to have to live with for the rest of your life begin resolving themselves.

 

[00:35:18.870] - KAYLA BARNES

I agree completely. I mean, our bodies are meant to heal if they have the tools that they need, the right environment. We remove some of these toxins, we give ourselves the things that we need. That is really the entire purpose, and that's really how it's supposed to be. And also, I really do believe that we need to do hard things because these hermetic stressors. Look, life is hard, and if you're not prepared for it, then it's really going to take its toll on you. And every day when I'm at the gym, when I'm doing cold exposure, when I'm doing all these things, at this point in my life, I feel like, dangerous. I don't have to be worried about anything because mentally I can get through anything. And partial thank you to cold therapy, because once you are able to push your body beyond the limits that you thought were possible, you realize that there really are no limits. And the only limits that we have are the ones that we're imposing on ourselves because we decide it's too cold and that we have to get out. Yes, eventually you do have to get out, but you can do so much more than you think.

 

[00:36:20.460] - KAYLA BARNES

And that spans across every single parallel of life your career, your personal life, everything. So I think if you can push yourself beyond what you're comfortable with in something like a cold tub, it's just like the gym. The way that you show up in the gym, that's going to bleed into every other area of your life. If you really do hard work there, you're going to do hard work other places. So I love it. You mentioned testosterone. So first of all, congratulations on that, because I think that there's probably an extremely small percentage of men, not even just your age, that are actually getting an exclamation point that the testosterone is too high based on the normal lab levels. And we know that normal lab levels are identified from sick people. So I don't ever want to compare my levels to, quote unquote, normal lab levels. But this is a massive problem right now. Men's testosterone levels are tanking. I mean, sperm count is tanking, and we can hypothesize as to why we think that is. But let's kind of talk about a fix that cold therapy might be able to provide for testosterone. Can you tell us a little bit about the science of why it boosts it?

 

[00:37:33.500] - KAYLA BARNES

You mentioned a couple of pieces, small pieces, but can you pull it all together for us?

 

[00:37:38.550] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

I'm going to tell you about my experience because I don't know enough about the mechanisms. There's a lot of good stuff on. Why do the testicles hang down outside the body? Your ovaries are inside your body. Why should my testes be outside my body? And it turns out that they're outside to stay cool, because sperm production works better when the boys aren't too hot. Well, that's good to know, but nobody's asking for 34 degrees. You can go on the Internet and you can find guys icing their balls, and maybe that helps their sperm counter. Maybe that's not what I was doing. I was worried about my prostate because I got my labs back, and these are routine, kind of like, hey, we're doing cholesterol, we're doing test. And I'm just checking all the men's health boxes. And the first thing that came back was my PSA. So this is prostate specific antigen and normal for a guy my age, or maybe healthy, whatever they call it was less than four, and I'm up at seven, so I got to do some research. Like, I'm elevated. And sure enough, the PSA is not a super reliable test, but these levels were consistent with heightened risk for prostate cancer.

 

[00:38:55.360] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Now, prostate cancer, it seems to be ubiquitous in America, and I didn't know because guys don't talk enough about this. So I started talking to some of my friends, older friends, younger friends. I'm like, have you ever had your PSA check? And the stories that they started telling, like, Tom, I had my prostate removed two years ago. You didn't tell me. You went like, well, what was your experience? Oh, the biopsy was terrible. I haven't had an erection in two years, and I'm not exaggerating in some cases. Not everyone has a kind of a nightmare experience, but the possibility was raised by the men that I talked to. So I wasn't thinking about testosterone at all. I was thinking about prostate, and I didn't want a biopsy. I didn't even want a prostate exam. I didn't want to go anywhere near an allupathic medical doctor's office. But I got very self conscious. I said, Am I having trouble, Urinating? I don't know. It seems all right, but all this stuff is living in my brain. And I said, I'm going to do anything I can to stay out of that doctor's office. And that means that I'm going to start with Keto and cold exposure, because, thank goodness, Travis Christopherson wrote a book, two of them, but this one was called Tripping Over the Truth, and it's about the warburg effect and the metabolic theory of cancer.

 

[00:40:18.550] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

He wrote another one called Ketones the Fourth Fuel that came out a little bit later. Those books are very helpful, but something in my intuition was saying, I'm going to go full on diet, cold exposure, and do everything I can to circulate those Ketones. Dean hall is the most miraculous case. He lost his wife to brain cancer, and sure enough, he was diagnosed with leukemia, and a lymphoma doctor told him, it's inoperable. Won't respond to chemo. You're going to die of this. Dean said, Before I go, I want to do something that will inspire cancer patients. I'm a swimmer. He's a swimmer and a psychotherapist. He said screw my practice. I'm going to wind down. I'm just going to swim. I want to swim the entire length of the Shannon River in Ireland. That's where my people are from. And if I can do it with leukemia, then maybe it will inspire other people who don't have as bad as I do. He lives in Oregon, and he started training on the William At River. He swam the entire length of the William At River, and the William At is cold. He shivered. He's burning I don't know how many calories a day, however many Michael Phelps was burning.

 

[00:41:34.150] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

That's what Dean Hall is burning. He's lost a lot of weight. He's burning through fat. He had a medical team supervising him. He was almost certainly in ketosis. And when he finished, his leukemia was gone. Now, how does that happen? But as I the science, and Dean Hall's experience, the reinforcing, my intuitions that I needed to get a hold on my metabolism and monitor my PSA before I did anything drastic, that allopathic medicine might recommend. And sure enough, it took about six months. My PSA dropped down to 0.8. I never would have even known a dang thing about testosterone if it hadn't been just one of those extra boxes that I checked when I was trying to take care of this prostate scare. Well, it turns out that Dean is not unique. When you read Tripping Over the Truth, when you read Thomas Seafried's book, cancer is a Metabolic Disease, and you realize that something between 70 and 80% of cancer cells have a gene that upregulates for glucose metabolism, when you realize that they are obligate glucose fermentors. There's no other fuel that can give a cancer cell all the energy it needs to grow that fast.

 

[00:42:49.850] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Then you realize that metabolism is one of the key pillars of cancer, and we're not even touching it. There are a few studies about the ketogenic diet as an adjunctive to cancer therapy, and they're all pretty promising. But there was a new paper that came out in one of the Nature journals, and this was a guy in Sweden with a Japanese name, Seki, working with a bunch of researchers in China, and they implanted tumors in rats or mice. They kept one, the control group at 30 degrees C, and they put the other at four degrees C. And guess which group had faster growing tumors? What they proved is that the brown fat activated by cold exposure inhibits tumor growth by using up the glucose in your bloodstream. So you're asking me about testosterone, which is a wonderful question. And here I am saying I don't know the mechanism. I came to it accidentally through this other route thinking about cancer, and now the science on cancer is getting better and better about I don't want to use these war metaphors about starving cancer of glucose. Well, Seafread is really big on ketosis. It turns out that if you put cancer cells in a petri dish in a test tube and you add ketones, you kill them.

 

[00:44:18.980] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

So cold exposure seafood doesn't say anything about brown fat, and Seki doesn't say anything about ketones. But you put these two together and you realize what was going on with Dean Hall. He was starving his cancer of glucose and creating ketones in his bloodstream that would kill the cancer. And he's clear to this day. He's not the only one. We got another article about that testosterone seems to be the result of fixing metabolic disorder. I agree with you 1180. I mean, it's high and I'm probably not there all the time. It goes up and down seasonally. It goes up and down throughout the day. But that's what normal should be. Jason had his check. He does it every year on his birthday. And so he's born in October, and I guess he's 40. He's going to turn 43. Last birthday, he was 990, and he started down in the 500s. What people consider normal is actually depressed because, as you said, normal ranges are based upon unhealthy people. I think what's going on with me is I just relieved my body of the things that were keeping my testosterone down because I'm fixing my metabolism, because I'm fixing my psyche, I believe.

 

[00:45:38.870] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

I don't know. I'm an engineer. I think it just allowed my testosterone to come up to the levels that it was supposed to be.

 

[00:45:47.010] - KAYLA BARNES

Yeah, I get another great point just to go back to. When you give the body the things it needs, takes away the things that are hindering it, amazing things happen. And that's how you achieve optimal health. So I agree with that. I want to kind of pivot to brain health and cold therapy. So let's talk about some of the brain benefits of cold therapy.

 

[00:46:10.410] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

We got a really good article called Cold and Cognition because this came up. A customer wrote to me. I'm an engineer. I'm not that kind of doctor. I don't heal anybody. People heal themselves. I build equipment, and I write articles. But I put it out to our medical advisory board, and it was unanimous. They told me that cold exposure is good for the brain. It makes sense. Heat is much more dangerous than cold in this acute sort of exposure. I'm not saying the sun isn't good for you. It is good for you, and there's a lot of good data on that. But your brain is much better off in the cold than it is in the heat. I met an emergency room physician, and she said that they have standing orders in the emergency room. Any cold water drowning victim isn't dead. Isn't dead until they've completed resuscitation efforts, isn't dead because they brought people back to life. They have no signs of life. But because they're a cold water drowning victim up to 24 hours, they can resuscitate people. Because the brain is kept in a state of potentiality by the cold, the proteins and the connections are not destroyed in the cold.

 

[00:47:35.970] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

They are preserved. So what does this have to do with us? Cold is safer for your brain than you might think. That's the first thing. And I've been looking more at traumatic brain injury. How do we help our brains heal? How does the brain relate to metabolism? And I got to say, I'm not the expert. So I've been trying to talk to colleagues at ASU who are working on neuromodulation, who are working on the brain gut axis. Turns out not all your thoughts come from up here. Many of them come from your digestive system. When people ask you, what is your gut telling you? That's not just some kind of a metaphor. The microbiome in your gut works with your brain to create thoughts, to create feelings, to motivate behaviors. So I'm learning more about traumatic brain injury. I'm learning more about recovering from brain trauma and using cold exposure. And all of this is coming at me because I got an email from a Hollywood stuntman. He's been in some famous movies that you would know that I'm not allowed to talk about. You've seen his work, and he went something like 310 days without sleeping.

 

[00:48:52.380] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

He suffered multiple concussions on the set of a movie, and his kind of a macho, shake it off, I'm all right. He was not well protected, not by his union rep, not by the people running the movie set, and he got the takes, and they're really good, and he has suffered ever since. 310 days without sleeping sounds physically impossible. When I talked to Kurt Parsley about it. He's the sleep doctor, the former Navy Seal, who then became the doctor to the Navy Seal. He said he must have been nodding off even if he was catching microsleep. And I don't know. But this former stuntman tells me that he's monitoring himself. He's used his GoPro. He's proven to people that he goes days without sleeping. We get him in the ice bath. He sleeps better. So this motivated me to understand what's really going on inside the brain. And I haven't got it all figured out yet. When you're in the cold and this is a research study and you give people math problems to do it's like the cold makes them stupid. Now I'm a university professor, and my brain, like, if everything else went to hell, the thing I most identify with is the health of my brain and the idea that I'm getting into the cold and I can't do math problems or I can't remember a sequence of numbers because I'm feeling dumb in that moment.

 

[00:50:13.840] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

It's kind of frightening. That's the short term response. That's the hermetic stress. Longer term, of course it's better for your brain. Of course it helps keep me sharp. Of course it helps with memory. So take a look at the article as the best state of my knowledge now, but I'm getting together with my colleagues at ASU or writing a proposal to the National Science Foundation asking for $25 million to start a new engineering research center. And here's the question what does engineering have to contribute to the mental health crisis that the country finds itself in right now? I know that cold exposure can fix depression. I know that cold exposure can help with anxiety. What I don't know is I think it can help with Alzheimer's, but I don't have the data. What I don't know is, can it help with traumatic brain injury? Can it take people who are healthy, normal functioning under stress and improve their cognition? And this is what my colleagues at Arizona State and I are beginning to play around with. The possibilities are mind boggling. And one of the sites that we've invited to work with us is Case Western up in Cleveland.

 

[00:51:29.220] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Cleveland has a great medical center, and we're going to invite biohackers like you to contribute to the proposal to test the technologies to provoke the questions, to share their experiences that generate new hypotheses. So we'll have to do another podcast in a few years, and I might have better answers for you.

 

[00:51:50.670] - KAYLA BARNES

Yeah, we will. I can lend a little bit of information to this topic. So when it comes to mood regulation and you touched on this earlier, but cold therapy can significantly increase our serotonin, which is related to our mood. It can significantly increase our dopamine. And there's a study, and I'll put it in the show notes because I don't remember exactly how long they were in the cold therapy, but it was cold immersion therapy and it actually increased serotonin and dopamine by 250%. So it's to me no question that that would significantly improve your mood, your drive, because we know dopamine is related to drive and reward and motivation and then it actually increased the Noradrenaline 500% which that's where you're going to get that really natural energy boost. So I do cold therapy every day in the morning with my shower, but then I also do it around two or 03:00 p.m. Because 03:00 P.m. Is the latest. I won't have any coffee after 03:00 P.m.. So I have it as a natural not mood booster, guest mood booster, but energizer. And it really gives me super clear, gives me a second wind to go finish all my nightly tasks and it's absolutely incredible.

 

[00:53:08.750] - KAYLA BARNES

Additionally, through my training as a certified brain health coach, obviously we focus a lot on concussions and what to do if you were to receive a concussion and one of the first things that you would want to do is actually try to get your head cold as quickly as possible. So by quelching that inflammation through cold therapy, it could have access to cryo or if you have access to a cold tub or a cold barrel or a cold shower, it's going to help to quouch that inflammation because our skulls are not expandable and if our brain is inflamed, then the cold can help to reduce that inflammation, which is important. So anyway, that's my thought on brain health. Also there is some data that cold therapy can help to strengthen the blood brain barrier. So we have what is called the BBB or the blood brain barrier. It's similar to our gut which can become more permeable based on. You know. Different lifestyle habits like lack of sleep. Too much alcohol consumption. Neurotoxins. Things of that nature. Which can increase the permeability of the blood brain barrier. Which we of course don't want because that is protecting our brain from all sorts of bacteria and things of that nature that can potentially pass through if it's permeable.

 

[00:54:27.720] - KAYLA BARNES

So I really love cold therapy for that reason, for the brain strengthening the blood brain barrier and of course strengthening of the vagus nerve. I would love for you to talk a little bit about the parasympathetic system and the sympathetic system and the role that the Vegas nerve has in regulating those two systems because I think that's important as well.

 

[00:54:52.350] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

I wish I had the Vegas nerve that Vim Hawk has. I mean, he's earned it. So maybe I'm not willing to do the meditation and the study that he has and that's why I wish instead of doing the work. But you know that there is the autonomic nervous system that consists of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. There are things that happen automatically in our body. Digestion heart rate is one. If I'm going to start exercising, my heart knows what to do on the border between the automatic and the conscious is the breath. When you're not aware of your breath, your breath will speed up, slow down, go shallow, go deep, as if it had its own controller, just doing whatever it thinks you need in the moment. But you can also control your breath. Now, people like Vim, I've heard of other people who are extremely experienced in meditation and have an extraordinary mind. Body awareness can control their heart rate too. According to Scott Carney's book, I've never asked Vim that he can turn on his immune system. He can activate his own brown fat by concentrating his thoughts at the area at the top of his shoulder blade.

 

[00:56:10.000] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

And I believe all of this because the mind is such a powerful thing. Bruce Lipton wrote, look, your cells have no choice but to respond to their environment. That's what cells do. It's physics. And what is the environment that your cells respond to? Well, there's the chemical environment, what's coming from the bloodstream, what's in the chemistry around the cells, and then there's the electrical environment. Your body cells must respond to the signals that they're getting through your nervous system, through your brain. And I think Bruce Lipton is a pretty smart guy, so I believe it when people say that they can move things from the automatic into the conscious awareness and begin to control aspects of their body, whether that's digestion or something else that would ordinarily be automatic. This is kind of blending the sympathetic automatic response and the parasympathetic, which will calm you down, because those automatic functions can exist in both systems. But the breath is the window into the consciousness of all those automatic things. When we get into the ice bath, our autonomic system activates the sympathetic nervous system. And autonomic and automatic are two different words, but they sound alike.

 

[00:57:33.910] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

So automatically you have a dive reflex, you have a gas reflex, whatever it is, if you're going in feet first, and I recommend you always go in feet first, you Gasp involuntarily, your heart rate might start boosting up. Your body is beginning to respond to its environment. The breath is where you gain conscious control. You slow that down. I like box breathing because I'm a counting kind of guy. And it doesn't matter. You don't need a metronome if you're structuring it. If you're breathing consciously, then you're taking control. You're able to relax your automatic fight or flight response that's happening in your sympathetic nervous system and strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system. That says, in this situation, which I'm activated, I'm telling my breath to relax. You will notice your heart rate going down. Justin Hogman. He's on Instagram. No joke. 44. He's been getting into his forge with his heart rate monitor on and he's a former Navy Seal. He's one of our two customers that have multiple sclerosis, and they're like 17 FDA approved drugs for Ms. None of them work as well as cold exposure so he's using it to manage his cold exposure.

 

[00:58:52.140] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

He's also got traumatic brain injury. And you will see his heart starts at about 120 beats per minute, and it goes down into the low 60s. When you take control in this situation that has activated you, you can calm yourself down, strengthen your vagus nerve, strengthen your parasympathetic nervous response. So that when I find myself in other situations, and Lord knows driving on the Phoenix Highway is an activating situation, I now have the memory of, I can breathe, I can calm myself. I can bring it down. I can strengthen my vagus nerve. Now, some people, they want to do that because they have a big putt or something, because there's something that they need to perform. Maybe they're giving a talk and they get staged fright. This happens to me all the time, and they want that vagus nerve stimulation. There are technologies, one that you can put in your ear, I think I saw, that will stimulate your vagus nerve, try and calm your thoughts to prepare you to perform in that space where you need stillness. What I'm working on is doing it without the technology, doing it because I'm telling my body to do it.

 

[01:00:08.580] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

And Adrian is magnificent in this regard because she developed a mantra. It's kind of a self hypnosis. When you get into your morale, every cell in your body is going to be saying, kayla, you're crazy. We're going to die. And your cells can't process a negative. You can't tell yourself, no, we're not. You can't have an argument with your toes and expect your toes to, like, under you. Just tell your toes what's really happening. This is what cold feels like. Tell your toes that this isn't death and this is what cold feels like. So Adrian developed this mantra, and she uses it when she guides people through the cold. And I have it in my head whenever I start to feel like, oh, that hurts. I should probably get out. Hang on. This is what cold feels like. That's all that's happening here is you feel cold. Oh, your toes hurt or your hands hurt. That's because they're cold. This is what cold feels like. Your brain is sending. When you have a mantra like that signals back to the cells in your body, they have no choice to respond. Oh, okay, I guess that's cold.

 

[01:01:24.250] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

Then you'll calm yourself down.

 

[01:01:29.010] - KAYLA BARNES

Yeah. That's incredible. And such a useful tool. I mean, I've gotten to a place in my life where I can really I have complete control over my mindset, I would say 99.9% of the time now, and it's because you are way better than me. Well, it was a big to do for me because I just decided that I wouldn't let my mind determine how I was going to think, and I was going to decide that, and it served me extremely well. I recommend everyone work towards that.

 

[01:02:03.040] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

I'm.

 

[01:02:03.370] - KAYLA BARNES

Writing about it in my book that's going to be coming out next year. But, yeah, this has been an incredible conversation. And everyone, if you're not doing cold therapy, today is the day, the best day to start with yesterday. The second best day is today. So just go right now and just take a cold shower. Start tomorrow morning or start right now and take a cold shower. I mean, you can graduate up to something like the Morosco, but just start simple. It's a free practice that can really upgrade your health, really improve your mindset, your mood. I recommend everyone start today.

 

[01:02:37.590] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

When you were a kid, did you ever have that experience of sticking your head in the freezer?

 

[01:02:43.290] - KAYLA BARNES

I don't know if I ever stuck my head in the freezer.

 

[01:02:45.520] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

I did. I remember my mother yelling at me about letting all the cold air out. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and it gets humid and it gets hot, and you come in and you feel a little overheated and you're like, I know what to do because I'm a kid, right? I'm going to open it up. I'm going to stick my head right in there. Felt great.

 

[01:03:06.370] - KAYLA BARNES

I have a cryofacial at my clinic, so I'm equating that to sticking my head in the refrigerator because I actually don't think I've ever done that, but just on the face. Feels amazing. Yeah, cold therapy for sure. Dr. Tom, it's been an absolute pleasure having you here with me today. And we're going to put all the Morosco notes in the show. Notes.

 

[01:03:26.450] - Thomas P Seager, PhD

That's fantastic. It's been a pleasure to be here.

 

[01:03:29.330] - KAYLA BARNES

Thank you so much.