Deep Dive: Natural Stress Relief for Improved Gut (and overall) Health & Well-Being

Michael Roesslein:

Okay. Hey, can you hear me?

Steve Wright:

Yeah, can you hear me?

Michael Roesslein:

I can, hold on, my computer’s being a little weird. I got this new fancy audio video setup and it makes everything all slow on the screen. Too much power.

Steve Wright:

Well, the light looks good, the background looks good.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s lovely. I think it overwhelms my computer a little. All right. Hey, everyone. I think, yep, people are trickling in. We’re a little early in the day today, so thank you for joining us this morning. Or I guess early afternoon, depending on where you guys are at. There should be more coming in. We’ll let some people trickle in. Let me fix the chat. All right. They make the default on Zoom now with the chat to where nobody can talk.

Steve Wright:

Love how they always push updates and don’t tell anybody.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, it’s great. We did a whole webinar once and I was like, “Huh, the audience is really quiet today. We have no chat.” And then at the end somebody put it in the Q&A like, “Hey, the chat’s disabled.” Yeah, Zoom likes to change settings on the fly. Keep us on our toes. Okay, how’s it going, Steve?

Steve Wright:

Trying not to be stressed.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today, right?

Steve Wright:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

Cool.

Steve Wright:

How’s Italy?

Michael Roesslein:

Perfect then. It’s nice. It’s been nice the last week or two. We hit 70 Fahrenheit this week, which is strange for now, but I’ll take it. But I’m actually flying to Chicago tomorrow for a memorial. One of my friends passed away, so I am going to be flying to Chicago for just enough days that I will also be jet-lagged when I returned. I’ll be there four days and then I’m coming back.

Steve Wright:

Sorry to hear about your friend.

Michael Roesslein:

Thanks man. Speaking of stress, back-to-back 24-hour travels within five-day stretch will do it, so that’s a good thing for us to be talking about today. All right, I’m going to just go ahead and people are going to be trickling in still. Everybody, if you can see us, hear us, everything looks okay if I’m dodging around because this fancy camera, it’s right in front of my monitor, so I can’t see the monitor that well. Just comment in the chat, let us know you can see us and hear us, and maybe where you are joining us from. And then we’ll jump into talking about stress relief. And in a time that sounds like both of us could use it. Rachel’s in Chicago. How cold is it?

Steve Wright:

Chicago?

Michael Roesslein:

I’m scared. I’ve been scared to look at the weather forecast, because I don’t even own, just in case it’s bad. I don’t even own stuff to wear that’s appropriate for that kind of cold. And so I’m just pretending that’s not possible. But it’s February.

Steve Wright:

Yeah, well, good luck with that plan. Denial, right? That’s a coping technique.

Michael Roesslein:

That is a good plan. Another coping, another stress management. It says volume is low. Does anybody else hear the volume is low?

Steve Wright:

Volume is low for both people, or just one of us?

Michael Roesslein:

Mostly Michaels, huh? I could talk loud, I’m basically yelling. It says it’s up 100%, good volume on both. I don’t know. I’m going to go with it. I’m just going to keep close to the microphone and I’m going to talk really loud.

Steve Wright:

Start yelling.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, let’s talk about stress. All right, so.

Steve Wright:

Good check.

Michael Roesslein:

Yes, we are going to talk, temperatures will be in the fifties for a few days. Wow, see it worked, dude, that’s a win. Chicago 50s February. That’s never happened in 30 years that I lived there, so denial for the win. And just in case it doesn’t work, we’ll talk about some other stress management techniques today. Before we go, Steve is the founder of Healthy Gut. He was also the founder of SCD Lifestyle, which was a platform that really changed the game with gut healing and helped, I don’t know, a zillion people with complex gut problems. We’ve done a lot of interviews and webinars with him. We’ll link some of them under this video somewhere, so you can go watch those too if you want.

I know Steve’s story by heart at this point, basically. But Steve got into creating really, really solid gut health supplements originally for his own usage. And got into gut healing for his own needs, because like many of you, he had really awful GI symptoms for much of his life. The healthy gut line is awesome. They’re the best digestive supports I’ve found anywhere. He’s got, the HoloZyme is the best enzyme. HCL Guard is a great upper GI HDL support. He’s got the HoloImmune, the paraprobiotic that helps reset the immune system quite a bit. And the butyrate, the tributyrin, which I take every meal myself actually, which has wide, wide, wide benefits. And we’re due for another webinar on butyrate soon. I remember there was some new stuff that came out and we haven’t talked about it. Maybe the next one will be on butyrate.

And then there’s a couple products that might confuse people a little bit as why does a company called Healthy Gut make a magnesium? And we did a webinar on magnesium and learned the importance of magnesium for the gut, but it was basically just because you didn’t find one on the market that you saw that was high quality that didn’t have a bunch of crap in it. He makes Magnesium-HP. And then what we’re going to talk about today in a little bit is a product that is geared towards stress and anxiety and sleep troubles. And I’m curious, how does the Healthy Gut Company and the healthy gut guy end up producing and selling a product that is all around stress and anxiety and relaxation? And then we’re going to talk a lot more about that in a minute.

Steve Wright:

Well, yeah, it’s not because we’re going to be billionaires or anything, because nobody wants to buy a stress product. It’s because I needed it. Because, so I mean, number one, I’ve had gut issues since birth that have waned and they’ve gotten better and they’ve gotten worse and whatnot. I’ve always had sleep-related troubles. I did not know that I suffered from anxiety until I was in cognitive behavioral therapy and all the different types of coaching programs later on in my late 20s. They’re like, “That’s anxiety.” I’m like, “What?” They’re like, “Yeah.”

Michael Roesslein:

But everyone isn’t like that?

Steve Wright:

Yeah, what do you mean? And then it became this whole veil, just like-

Michael Roesslein:

I was 36.

Steve Wright:

Yeah, this cloud just parted. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, my mom has pretty solid generalized anxiety disorder.” Her parents probably did, potentially both my grandmothers did, and I achieved that same sort of marination, my nervous system got that same marination. And that is a lot of how I go through life. And then being married was the last cherry on top, because my wife doesn’t have it. And she’s like, “What are you spinning out about?” And I’m like, “Well, this and this and this.” And she’s like, “Sid you notice the sun’s out today? Did you notice that we have a roof over our head? Did you notice there’s water?”

And I think I was teaching gut health for eight or nine years in total denial of the impact of the nervous system on the gut and vice versa. It’s a bidirectional flow. And it’s only been in the last six, seven years that I’ve really started to unpack this flow and made tremendous quality of life improvements for myself. And they made that, like focus on the nervous system made extreme leaps in gut healing for myself and then for others around me that I’ve helped when all the best gut stuff, all the best diet stuff, all the best functional medicine testing were just not achieving the resilient steady gut. It was like that Greek myth where you’re rolling the boulder up the hill, you almost get there and then it falls back down on you.

And that’s what life felt like when I was just focused on the gut. And I feel like that’s relatable. I mean, put it in the chat if that’s relatable to you with your gut health or your chronic disease health, your inflammation health where you are struggling so hard, you’re making progress and then something happens and the boulder runs you over and you’re back at the bottom of the hill starting over.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, I can relate to that on a lot of fronts. Mine wasn’t gut problems that I was dealing with, but I also discovered that I have anxiety when I was about 36 when I started doing a lot of healing work. And then I would be talking to a therapist and be like, and they’re like, “Whoa, have you ever taken medication?” I’m like, “For what?” “For this incredible amount of anxiety that you have.” And I was like, “No, I don’t have anxiety.” And then I started to realize that not everyone swirls 10,000 thoughts in 60 seconds when they try to go to sleep. And not everyone can’t focus on something in front of them because there’s other things going. And yeah, I was the same way. And it was like, wow, I also learned I have ADD. And that was a problem other people have.

And I think that a lot of our audience, we hear this all the time, are people who made some progress. They read a book, heard about a special diet, went to an SCD website or tried a supplement or whatever, and they did. They got better, they felt better. And then something happened and it regressed and then they tried something else and it got better. And it’s been this constant back and forth and back and forth of feeling better, feeling crappy, feeling better, feeling crappy. And as we’ve talked about before, both of us have done a lot now on the other side of healing, I guess I would call it in the mental emotional, the nervous system side. But I mean, I’ve done five years now of pretty extensive training in that. And I now believe that nervous system dysregulation is the driver of most chronic health conditions to some degree or another. And we just finished recording, well, actually a couple of months ago. It’s going to air next month, an entire summit called Beyond Functional Medicine.

And about a third of the interviews, maybe more, are primarily focused on that idea. That trauma, nervous system imbalances, anxiety, stress, these kinds of things, what it does to the immune system. What it does to the gut, what it does to pretty much blood sugar regulation, what it does to sleep quality, which then in turn screws up blood sugar regulation. And it just kept, even the interviews that weren’t focused on that topic as like, “This is the topic we’re going to talk about.” It was brought up in every single interview I did that if your nervous system is dysregulated, meaning you are feeling anxious or agitated or stressed, a lot of people don’t even know. You didn’t know, I didn’t know. And we knew each other before we knew this, so we were probably in a room freaking everybody out.

Steve Wright:

Talking too fast.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, the two of us were just like bl, bl, bl, bl, bl and everyone’s like, “Wow, look at those guys.” But we didn’t even realize it because this state I think has been normalized. It is just how so many people are, so they don’t even realize that there’s another way that you can be. And so when we’re talking about this, we use terms nervous system regulation, whatever, what are some signs or symptoms that somebody might be a little on the anxiety spectrum or something of that measure?

Steve Wright:

Whether or not you want to adopt the anxiety label for yourself or any of these labels, you can look, if you have any sort of biofeedback devices in your house, you can look directly at your own nervous system. In my opinion the science, there was a study just published about HRV and it’s linked to dysbiosis in Japan. There’s HRV and almost anything else. You can look at your HRV, you can look at your resting heart rate-

Michael Roesslein:

It’s high rate variability for people who don’t know.

Steve Wright:

Yeah, sorry, we’re talking heart rate variability. It’s sort of a measure of your vagal tone or your parasympathetic tone. You can look at your resting heart rate, you could look at your breath, your respirations per minute during sleep. All of these are not absolutely directly like a measurement of anxiety and nervous system dysfunction, but all highly correlated to nervous system dysfunction. And so these are markers that they don’t have labels. It’s not stress. It’s your HRV is not high enough, your respirations are too high, your heart rate’s too high, your blood sugar’s too high. You don’t have to label these things, but they are real. And they do change when you introduce interventions around the nervous system. And I think that’s the beautiful thing that we’re going to get to here. And it’s not just about BeSerene and stuff that I’ve developed. It’s about holistic healing and not getting run over by the boulder.

Because in my opinion at this point with the way that the world has gone, we’re talking about the interconnectedness of the world, the ability to find a negative story about anything, anywhere, anytime. The ability to never unplug and always have a dopamine hit. The toxicity in the water, all these things, it’s not going away. The cat is out of the bag. It’s forever changed. And unless you are going to go be a hippie in Montana and farm cranberries or something, you’re screwed, or you’re not. And you can just accept that we are now going to have to evolve our own behaviors and our own routines to evolve our bodies to deal. And if you do it unconsciously, I think that leads to doom scrolling, Facebook scrolling, lots of TV, alcohol, alcohol rates are way up. Nicotine’s back, weed’s going through the roof. Shopping, other types of these coping mechanisms. These are all, and I’m not trying to label these things as bad. I use alcohol, I use weed.

Michael Roesslein:

No, it’s self-medication. It’s ways you’ve learned to regulate your system.

Steve Wright:

Right, right. These are not bad, because if you don’t regulate, you’ll start to go crazy and then you’ll do something really dumb thing and probably die. That’s how it works. You have to cope, you have to self-manage, and you have to self-regulate. And so, most of the time we reach for unconscious things in the Western culture. And that’s why I think we see these big new trends around breath work, around cold plunging and sauna. Around, yoga’s not in vogue right now, but it was like five years ago everybody was doing yoga. It’ll be back. Meditation is really cool. Five years ago now-

Michael Roesslein:

It’ll be back.

Steve Wright:

… you got a cold plunge. Yeah, but it’s coming back.

Michael Roesslein:

You got all [inaudible 00:17:03] well listening to a podcast in a cold plunge.

Steve Wright:

Right, right. And avoid electricity. The point is, these are healthy ways, or not. These are more healthy ways to cope with today’s world and the idea that we’re going to be able to do those things that take effort every day get it right. We’re talking about breath work, which is for most people intense. Or how about a glass of wine? Which one takes more effort? I mean, the wine is definitely easier. It’s faster.

Michael Roesslein:

The wine is very easy.

Steve Wright:

It’s easier. We’re going to need to have, in my opinion, products on hand that offer a similar level of relief on a regular basis that don’t require exercise and transcended experiences and things like that. And so I think that’s my model of resiliency in today’s world is that you get conscious to your coping mechanisms and just make sure you have a medicine cabinet full of products that are health promoting. And not just a medicine cabinet full of the best tequila and the best red wine and things like that. Because the goal is to choose the ones that are going to be the best for your coping, but choose more and more on the healthy side when you can. And choose less and less of the ones that will make the resiliency less over time.

Michael Roesslein:

I love the explanation there. And it’s true. When these conversations first started happening, when I was hearing them about 10 years ago about our culture and the society and the system we’ve created and how it’s overwhelming and the doom scroll and all that. There was still this, “Just put it away.” That was the solution. Just-

Steve Wright:

Turn it off.

Michael Roesslein:

… unplug and don’t pay attention. And that’s gone. That ship has sailed. That is out of the harbor, that is now gone. We now live in this world. And we are not made for this world at all. The level to which we are not made for what we’re currently living in on how many different depths could be a 10-hour discussion. But I love that you mentioned, and I want to reiterate that there’s no shame in it. I’ve completed the training with Dr. Gabor Maté, who’s famous now for addiction and trauma healing and stuff.

Steve Wright:

Amazing.

Michael Roesslein:

And the first rule there when doing that work that he teaches the compassionate inquiries, the modality is that there is no shame. And he works primarily with heroin addicts. And when people think of heroin addicts, junkies, the first thing is shame, shame, shame. And it could be that. It could be a shopping addiction, it could be whatever thing that you hide from other people that you do that you’re embarrassed of, that shame. Shame goes out the window, because like you mentioned, you’re just regulating yourself in a way that you’ve learned how to do it. Whether that’s wine or junk food. When I used to work with clients, I would give them these … Poor people. I would give them these super elaborate protocols to start immediately.

They’d come to me super unhealthy. I’d analyze everything. I’d be like, “Here’s your diet. Here’s your supplement routine. Here’s your lifestyle stuff. You have to do these new 106 things that you weren’t doing yesterday and then you’re going to feel awesome.” And then two weeks later they would come back to me and they’d be like, “I didn’t do any of the things.” And I think, “What is wrong with these people? Are they lazy? Do they not want to get better?” And it’s like you can make changes, but if you don’t address that underlying dysregulation and that underlying anxiety and the underlying thing that was driving you to drink the wine in the first place. That’s why outside of AA meetings, and I’m not trying to throw AA under the bus, saved the lives of a few of my friends, I know it’s great for some people. Outside of an AA meeting you won’t see anyone drinking alcohol, but you’ll see a bunch of people pounding a hell of a lot of coffee and chugging down a ton of cigarettes. And it’s just replace this thing with that thing.

And that’s what we often do. And that’s why we don’t necessarily get better. And I think that’s what you’re saying is that what you’ve tried to do personally and that you would suggest is whatever this thing is that you replace that thing with, make it a healthy thing. And there are, I don’t want to make it sound like you need a thing, because there are practices and skills and healing work you can do and all these things that really do shift it at the core level. But like you mentioned, I facilitate a trauma-focused biodynamic breath work. It is involved. It’s much more to do than a glass of wine. And so is seven-day meditation retreats, and so is meditating for 30 minutes a day. And so our brain retraining programs, which are really popular in chronic disease realms right now, the DNRS, those kinds of things, that’s 30 minutes to 60 minutes a day.

Steve Wright:

And thousands of dollars versus going to get some chocolate, or a cupcake, or some wine.

Michael Roesslein:

Hey, let’s not get crazy and attack chocolate, but I just heard everybody gasp out there. “I’m not giving up my dark chocolate,” but exactly why do you need it? I get what you’re saying.

Steve Wright:

Look, I ate so many dark chocolate bars I gave myself cadmium poisoning. I have the lab tests, so I am not here to shame a single person. I have reached into the garbage and grabbed cookies back out that were touching things that I was like, “Oh, this is a new low.” And then I’ve eaten that cookie. I have emotional eating issues. I’ve been way heavier, but there’s science to it. There’s science to that.

Michael Roesslein:

That should be on somewhere. That should be somewhere. It should say, “I ate so many dark chocolate bars, I gave myself cadmium poisoning,” Steve Wright. That needs to be on a thing somewhere. But yes, I hope what everybody’s taking away from our ADD fueled ramblings is that you’re going to find a way or ways, most people many ways, to bring that balance back. You know that feeling, and this is actually what I guide people through in sessions is like that feeling, they found that when heroin users see the kit, like the stuff that you use to do the heroin, like the needle in the, I forget the tourniquet, the whatever. Their body produces a rush of endorphins and dopamine and things and they feel awesome before they even touch the thing. You guys know what your things are that help balance and regulate your system, because they’re the things that when you’re really stressed, or when you’re really upset, or when you’re really agitated or really anxious or whatever, you think of that thing and the instant you make the decision that you’re going to do that thing or eat that thing or drink that thing or smoke that thing or whatever it is, there’s a calm that comes over your body.

And it probably happens right now if you think about that thing, like chocolate bars. And so that response, there’s a lot of different ways to find that and have that. And what we haven’t talked a lot about is when we’re in that state of anxiety, of agitation, of stress, of nervous system activation chronically, I’m sure that your family’s history of anxiety and growing up in a house full of anxious people, it’s no surprise that you also grew up with severe IBS and digestive issues, right?

Steve Wright:

Yeah. I mean, that’s where we can get in more into the science if people want, but I feel like facts don’t do us any good at this moment in time about it. But if you want to dig deeper, there’s now research on the COVID pandemic workers, the health line workers where they were repeatedly exposed to high stress environments. Their microbiome is now dysbiotic and it’s not changing back. There are other studies showing repeated stressful events. Even one big stressor can shift your microbiome and your inflammatory pathways to be more inflammatory for basically ever unless you intervene. And that’s the thing here. The caveat is if you do nothing, if you just reach for gluten-free junk food and alcohol, which I’ve done plenty of and I continue to do, you will not reset that pathway and you will always be fighting this dysbiosis in the microbiome.

You’ll always be fighting a nervous system that’s out of dysregulation and inflammatory pathways that are ready to be triggered at any moment in time. And I think what we’ve been talking a lot about what I would call tonality or tone, your nervous system tone. I want to just define these things real quick. Your nervous system tone in my opinion, is your ability to respond to life. Can you respond and can you do it in a healthy way? You also have a nervous system range, like a literal range from fight or flight, I’m going to murder, to rest and digest. I am completely comatosed, I can’t move. And a lot of people’s ranges can get slowly over time due to life and due to the household, the family they grew up in, their choices. The range can shrink and you can basically get locked into this really tight range that actually might be on the sympathetic side of your nervous system, the fight or flight or the parasympathetic side, the rest and digest.

Some people do argue that, for instance, depression are partially linked to people who are locked deeper into parasympathetic. And anxiety is people who are locked deeper. The range has moved up higher into sympathetic and they can’t cycle basically between the ranges. The simple analogy is how do we fix our phones and our computers? We power them down and power them back up. We restore the range of which it’s operating and it basically magically the electricity works better across the device. It’s very similar inside of our bodies. And then there’s the set point which is like, what are the brain waves, the electrical activity, the neurons, the firing patterns? What are those? What do you wake up to and go to bed with every day? That’s your set point. It’s your nervous system set point.

You actually get no choice in this, unless you consciously choose to move it. And that is a lot of the work you were talking about. Doing the nervous system retrainment, doing brain retraining, doing deep trauma work, psychedelics, things like this can really move that set point and begin to open you up to a new awakening every single day. But let’s be really clear here that the reason why, for instance, I love tequila and red wine and sugar, is because every day my set point is a little too high on the scale. And over time, if I don’t cycle my system, my range gets compressed, compressed, compressed, until I get more emotional and more anxious as the week goes on. And then by Thursday or Friday I can’t wait to have a drink or I can’t wait to do something that is going to dampen my nervous system out of that range.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, thank you for that. And I’ve seen similar models and a lot of things affect the range, but we’ll do what we need to do to get back into it. And what puts one person out, like you said, put one’s person out to where they’re stuck is not enough to put with your wife, something happened and you were like blah, blah, blah, and she’s like, “The sun is out.” Well, that thing was also affecting her life in some way, the thing that you were all dah, dah, dah, dah about, but it wasn’t enough to push her out to where she wasn’t noticing stuff around her. Yeah, I don’t think we need to get too much into studies and this is all very … We’re not speaking on anything that’s fringe ideas or concepts here. This is all very, very well established at this point. That when the nervous system is activated or outside of a healthy range of tone or activation, it impacts everything else. Immune system, gut, all these things.

And so many of my wife’s co-workers, she’s an ER nurse, and when she has COVID, she went into a huge flare with her autoimmunity. That’s why we ended up moving away and getting her out of the ER was because that job and the stress and what it did to her health. But so many of her co-workers have gotten sick since then. But that’s the correlate. We just in a really, really detailed way talked about, why is this important if we’re talking about gut health? Why is this important if we’re talking about autoimmune? Why is this important If we’re talking about chronic disease and sleep?

And so we’re going to talk about BeSerene, which is actually two products that you guys have. One is a topical instant relief and one is the daily, the capsules. But I’m curious how it actually came about. I know this story a little bit. And I think it’s funny in a way, because I love the quote that you have on your site. And you said that to me when we had a conversation before you guys were even selling it. Can you just share a little bit about, and if anybody has any questions about any of that stuff, you could throw it in the Q&A, we’ll get to them in a little bit. But I’m curious how it came about, how this even came about? You weren’t out looking like, “Hey, we need to add a stress relief product to our lineup.” Were you just, you stumbled upon it or what happened?

Steve Wright:

Yeah, so I have a friend that we go back a decade or more, Dr. Morgan Camp. He’s a MD functional medicine specialist. He’s been in the integrated functional game for 10 years longer than me. And we met during the Kalish program back in 2013. He has suffered from social anxiety in a big way. Sometimes parking in the car and not being able to go into Whole Foods because of social anxiety. And this is a man with a MD license who was early into functional medicine, integrated medicine, has literally anything he wants at his fingertips, and he was still struggling with this. And so in the mid-2010s as psychedelics renaissance was kicking off, he was convinced that maybe he needed to go do some shamanic healing in the jungle. And so he traveled down to Brazil and was going, he thought Ayahuasca was the medicine for him.

He got there, the shamans did their thing where they just size you up. And they use their intuitive knowing and healing and they said, “Nope, you’re going to sample this plant Mulungu and everyone else is going to do ayahuasca, but you’re going to do Mulungu and you’re just going to drink this tea over here. Mulungu is a non-psychoactive plant. They make a bark, they take the bark from the tree and they extract it with water and stuff. And it’s been used for centuries in Brazil for anti-anxiety, anti-inflammation, anti-pain, sleep, all kinds of things like this. And so basically they gave him Mulungu for seven days and it really impactfully moved his set point and his ability to respond, or his tone.

And then as he came back to the U.S., of course, anybody who’s done any retreat work, any good retreat leader will tell you the real work starts when you leave. Because you go back into your own house. You go back to your old friends, you go back to your family system. And that’s where you have to try to become the same person you were all zenned out on retreat in the real world. And so when he got back there, he was struggling, and so he started ordering Mulungu from Brazil and just dumping tablespoons into tea and water and just playing around with it. And he figured out with another herbalist friend who’s a master herbalist in the Chinese medicine tradition and Ayurvedic traditions in California. They put together a blend for him. And this blend was allowing him to go be social, do normal things for the first time in a really long time. And so they developed this product called BeSerene Daily, that’s the BeSerene product out now.

And he sent me some because he was really proud of it and he knows that I’m always trying weird stuff. And every year or two we’d call each other and talk about, at the time it was psychedelics, now it’s peptides and things like that. And he was like, “Hey, try this out. Check this out. I’m watching this company.” I’m like, “Cool, man.” I tried it. I didn’t notice much in the beginning. I wasn’t like something that I was like, “Oh, I need this.” But since he sent me so many bottles, I sent some off to my mom and I was like, “Hey mom, this will help you with just everyday life and stress and anxiety and stuff.” And so I didn’t know this, but unbeknownst to me, she became a customer of the company and she started taking four to six a day, which is at the upper max of it. And she was able to deal with the pandemic. She’s a librarian at a school, a public school. She was really conflicted about the whole pandemic and have a lot of anxiety that went through the roof. And so these capsules really helped her.

And in the meantime Morgan created a topical version that was more for instant relief. He sent me some and my sleep, I was at a state with my sleep where Shea was considering another room. I was just tossing and turning. I would wake her up, I would be swearing. I was trying, I was at the level of I was going to go to prescription level stuff. I just couldn’t figure out how to relax. And this instant relief cream completely transformed my ability to shut my mind off. Because that was my issue. I was just looping. My mind was racing, I couldn’t get back to bed. And this totally changed my experience, my sleeping experience, and I was like, “Wow.”

Fast-forward a couple years, they are deciding to wind down the company and move on. And so at the time I was already really happy with the products. My mom was in love with the oral, I was in love with the topical, and so we ended up striking a deal to acquire the brand and the formulations and some of his consulting time to make the products even stronger and better for the healthy gut standards.

Michael Roesslein:

Wow, that’s pretty cool. I didn’t know all of that. I knew you tried something, liked it a lot and told me, “I liked it so much I bought the company.” But in the topical you’re finding it, and I saw a lot of reviews on your site too. A lot of people saying that the topical just works real quick. This would be helpful for people with chronic stress, chronic anxiety, sleep issues, trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep. But also people may not know. I didn’t even know. I wouldn’t have even considered myself a person with anxiety until about six years ago. I would personally recommend to anyone with any sort of chronic … Mary Ann says she survived the holidays because of the topical.

Steve Wright:

I love that.

Michael Roesslein:

I would recommend to anybody with any chronic health conditions to at least give something a go that calms the nervous system down, brings relaxation and brings them calm. Because I, like I said, I had no idea and I was the most high strung person in the room everywhere I went and I had no idea. I thought I was chill. And then I started doing this kind of work. And now I’ve been at retreats and I’ve been places with teachers and other students who are super chill. And super grounded and super regulated and balanced. And even after all the work that I’ve done, I still stand out like a sore thumb when I’m in a room with them, so I still have a long ways to go. And people might not be conscious of it. You use the word conscious and unconscious a lot in that initial discussion. People might not even be conscious of it.

I guess a couple of questions about the product is right now the daily, the capsules are finishing up the process of being reformulated, like you mentioned, to make them stronger, make them a little more effective. Those will be ready in a couple of weeks. We’re doing them on a pre-sale, so those will be ready a couple of weeks out. And then, I don’t know, I didn’t hear a specific ingredient listed there, but go ahead.

Steve Wright:

In the process of acquiring the company, I didn’t want to completely change everything right away. We just stripped out the flows and the fillers and things like that. Then this round we built it back from the ground up with some higher quality sources. Sources that will hopefully pass NSF standards and Sportsafe standards next year. And so that process took longer than I thought it would. And so that’s why we’re out of stock, I do apologize for that. It’s frustrating to me. My mom is rationing her pills, so trust me, I’m not … This isn’t fun for me. But I have built what I believe is a superior product and everybody, including Morgan and the other doctor in California are very excited about this new formula. Yeah, we are in pre-order. It’s going to be minimum three weeks probably before we’re shipping.

I guess I’ll say a few things. Number one is, if you don’t use BeSerene products, that’s okay. Because BeSerene does not include a lot of ingredients that you’ll see normally in a stress product or a anxiety product or a cortisol product. Those three categories, stress, anxiety, cortisol, they use a lot of the same ingredients. Most of the products use these same ingredients. My position would be that if you’re dealing with chronic health issues, if you’re dealing with gut health issues, inflammatory issues, if you have a history of these things, you are doing yourself a disservice to not include some sort of nervous system support every single day. I don’t care if it’s BeSerene or not, but the science is overwhelmingly clear. If we were having this discussion four years ago, you would have said, “You guys are a little woo. You guys don’t know.” But no, and it is just pouring out.

If you want better nervous systems, you want better brain health, you want better microbiome, you can support the nervous system to get those things, which is cool. You don’t just have to take gut products to get a better gut. And so I would say if there’s any one takeaway, it’s buy some sort of support and take it on a regular basis and cycle. Try different ones. Because the reason why BeSerene exists is Morgan and the other doctor did love the normal formulas for stress relief, which are typically Ashwagandha, Rhodiola, Lemon Balm, Chamomile, Pantothenic acid, other B vitamins. And it’s not that those herbs are necessarily bad or wrong. But it’s just that certain nervous systems don’t get a lot of benefit from them. I’ve chugged inappropriate doses of Ashwagandha. It doesn’t do a lot for me. All the studies are very supportive for Ashwagandha. There’s nothing really to say bad about Ashwagandha, other than clinically speaking.

I didn’t respond to it, and I don’t know a lot of people who do respond to it. But there’s clearly a ton of people who love it. And so, if you’re not going to do BeSerene, do something with Ashwagandha, do something with B vitamins, things like that. I think the other thing is that as the popularity of these products has grown, the normal ones, the herbal extracts have gotten more expensive and therefore the companies are diluting the milligram amounts. And so BeSerene is completely different. We have the Mulungu herb is the star herb, then we have Shatavari root, which Shatavari root is on a crazy uprise right now. We have really cool studies in humans for strength, for nervous system tone, even some menopause symptoms. It’s okay for men, don’t worry. I take it every day.

There’s some other ones like Rehmannia, which is a really cool root that’s heavy in Chinese medicine, but it’s not really Westernized over here. And so the goal with BeSerene was to develop a product that was not whole nervous system tonic. It’s actually just absolutely parasympathetic focused. It’s all vagal tone, it’s all parasympathetic. Most of the other nervous system cortisol, stress anxiety products include a range of sympathetic and parasympathetic herbs and mixtures. This one, we were like, “Those don’t seem to be working for us. Let’s see what happens if we just try to drive someone as deep into parasympathetic as we can and see if they rebound.” That’s been what’s happened, and that’s why I think it’s working.

Michael Roesslein:

Great. That all makes sense. It sounds like the reformulation is going to make it even better. I’m sure that some of those herbs are getting really expensive, because there’s a zillion products now that utilize a lot of them. We do have one question in the Q&A. It says, “Is there caution for use if one is on medication for high blood pressure simply to pressure lowering effects, or are there possibly harmful contraindications involved?”

Steve Wright:

There is one absolute contraindication, and that is if you’re on prescription lithium, so not the supplemental stuff, lithium orotate is a supplemental form. You can take it along with lithium orotate. In fact, we debated putting that in the formula. But the prescription lithium is an absolute contradiction. The herbs interact with the same pathways and you do not use either product. There is contradicting evidence in the clinical journals for things like high blood pressure and blood glucose and things like that. Basically, some of the studies suggest a slight lowering in blood pressure, a slight lowering in heart rate, and then other studies show zero effect at all. And so if you’re nervous if taking herbs is something that worries you with your medications then don’t take it or get your doctor’s approval first. Otherwise, we have successfully sold this product for, they sold it for two years. We’ve been selling it for almost 18 months, and we don’t know of any serious side effects that have happened in regard to these areas.

Michael Roesslein:

Great. I take the lithium orotate probably three days a week. I don’t take it every day, but I take it also. It’s helped my mood quite a bit. I put a link in the chat that is to the BeSerene products. There is the Daily, which is on pre-sale right now that should be ready in March, while it’s being reformulated. And then the topical is available right away. And then I put a code in there for you guys to save on the initial trial. Because we want everybody to be able to try it, so we put a discount on there to be able to try it off the bat.

Steve Wright:

And they really work together. It’s not one or the other. I take three BeSerene Dailies with my dinner. It helps me wind down at night. It helps me reach a lot less often for alcohol at night after a stressful day. And then I keep the BeSerene Cream, the instant relief inside my nightstand or on top of my nightstand. And I use it maybe two nights a week to three nights a week. But there’s times where things are going absolutely sideways in my company or in my personal life, and I might use it seven days in a row and then not again for, I haven’t used it for five days right now. In other words, it’s like a spot relief, but it can also be used Daily during times of high stress. I personally think it works really well for folks who cannot calm down. That’s sort of the idea. You define why you can’t calm down.

Are you unable to calm down because you’re having anxiety? Are you unable to calm down because you’re angry? Are you unable to calm down because you’re afraid? Whatever the underlying emotion is, that is the perfect time to try the BeSerene IR. I take it to me when I go to the dentist, I do two to three pumps before I do any dental work. We have people who have social anxiety.

Michael Roesslein:

I’ll need 1,000.

Steve Wright:

1,000 pumps, the whole bottle. We have people who have, they’re on the spectrum. They take it before they go out and do social things. There is a disclaimer here. Which is that just please be an adult, don’t use it for the first time and then go to something very important, have to drive somewhere or go to a party and then be super pissed at us because you got really sleepy or you got a little drowsy or you didn’t like how you felt. Test drive it first so you know your dosage, and how it makes you feel and then apply in real life. Because I could take it and I could drive for an entire day. I think it would help me with traffic. Some folks take it and they’re like, “I don’t know how you could move after you take this stuff. I just go immediately to sleep.”

Michael Roesslein:

Okay good disclaimer, good instructions. Anything else you’ve learned over the 18 months on feedback from people that everyone should know or hear about or regarding usage dosage, best practices?

Steve Wright:

The Daily builds over time. The range there is two per day to six per day. Typically, the best is to start dosing it from lunch onward. Because it can lower cortisol. It’s part of the herbal mixtures to lower cortisol spikes. If you take it when your cortisol is high in the morning, you could basically suppress your cortisol wave throughout the day and create an improper cortisol rhythm. Typically, with the BeSerene Daily, unless it’s a very stressful time period, if you just lost somebody in your life, if your job just went to hell, take it whenever you need it. But for most folks, they’ll want to start at noon and take one or two with lunch and one or two at dinner.

The hormone clinics, we have a lot of hormone clinics who use it. And perimenopause and menopause clinics that use it. And so they give the BeSerene Daily to women and they tell them, “Look, this is going to help you with your hot flashes. This is going to help you with your cortisol rhythms, your estrogen rhythms, and it’s going to help you stay asleep.” The BeSerene Instant Relief is to fall asleep. And so when you get into those phases, especially when the hormones are just, perimenopause are everywhere, you never know what they’re going to be. Taking the Daily, Daily as it’s named and then the Instant Relief as needed is really how the products are designed and how the herbs work over time.

Michael Roesslein:

That makes a lot of sense. And what you’ll find if you click that link and go to where the BeSerene products are is there’s the bundle with the two of them together. That is actually discounted 20% when you get them off together. So, you won’t need the coupon. The coupon is for individual, and that coupon, because we love Steve and we love Healthy Gut, works for all Healthy Gut products for the next few days, not just the BeSerene. I will be sending an email with links and shopping stuff. But any Healthy Gut products you can throw into your order and it will be discounted, and the bundle together is 20%. But keep in mind, the Daily is on a pre-sale. It’ll come out in a couple of weeks. And we’ll update you when it ships and everything. “Does one build up a tolerance?” I have a comment.

Steve Wright:

I think that you, not necessarily to the Daily, but to the topical, especially what I’ve noticed is that in the beginning, one to two pumps was so amazing. It was instant relief. It was just like what I wanted weighted blankets to do to my nervous system, but they never did. They just made me hot and mad. It was just in an instant sort of possibility to not have to think and be hypervigilant as much. But over time I noticed that I began to rely on that and look forward to that. You were talking about with kind of a version of the heroin thing you were talking about. And in that case I ended up getting higher and higher in the cream and disappointed when I didn’t get that immediate absolute mind turnoff effect. I think there’s a mental component to using coping mechanisms, just how we … There’s an expectation and there’s a looking forward to on some of these things that I do think ends up emotionally, which then those emotions turn into chemicals.

Those chemicals turn into physical electrical signals, things like that that ends up biting us. Can you build up tolerance? I bet you can. Yes. I think I’ve noticed it and I had to, so when I was doing that escalation, I was like, “Oh, the BeSerene Daily is not really for me. The BeSerene don’t really need that.” But I was just relying on the cream. Now that I rely on both of them, I don’t seem to have that buildup angry issue that I was having. Three of the BeSerene Daily capsules with dinner is like, that’s what I do. I do three magnesium HP and three BeSerene Daily, either an hour before bed or with dinner. And that’s my way to just shut down and not have to eat a bunch of sugar and drink a bunch of wine.

Michael Roesslein:

Makes a lot of sense. The Mag HP, we use it before bed also, and it helps a lot with winding down. Because everything is go, go, go here until we go to bed. Now there’s a seven-month-old running wild in my house. And I work much later here than I did in the States. I work until eight, which is equal to 5:00 p.m. there essentially, unlike how society runs here. But we don’t stay up as late as they do. I’m like, go, go, go, go, go. And then it’s bedtime. And that doesn’t always work very well, so I’m looking forward to giving it a shot myself. Cool. I don’t see any other Q&A questions. We had a really good audience, a number of live people for the early in the day on a weekday.

If you order the bundle, the cream will not ship out until the pills are available. I think we would ship them together to avoid double shipping costs. Otherwise, there would be double shipping costs on the order, which would get really expensive. The bundle will be discounted in the future as well. The 15% off deal for the healthy gut is right now. If you want to get the cream now and just try it and wait and order the bundle later, that would be an option. Or you could order the bundle now and wait, either way, doesn’t matter. I don’t have any other questions. I’m excited about this how you mentioned we weren’t looking for a stress product. Nobody wants to buy a stress product. It disappoints me so much, so that everyone wants, “Give me something for the gut, give me something for this, give me something for this, give me something for this.”

And the thing that’s really driving all of that stuff, crickets, and its disintresting and it’s not sexy and it’s not flashy and it’s not whatever, but it’s the thing that most people actually really need. I’ve been frustrated with it, with that topic on that front for a long time. They said, “Off-topic, is the magnesium supplement free of corn?” I don’t believe there’s any additional ingredients in there.

Steve Wright:

Yeah, it’s corn free. Yeah, I mean, look, 2014, Jordan and I, back when it was SC Lifestyle, we built this thing called Two Minute Call. We spent six months and 20 or $30,000 to basically before text messaging and everything was cool we built this social behavioral thing that would, basically it was like a little info product for 17 or 27 bucks. It taught you box breathing, some triangular breath work, and then it would send you a random text between eight a.m. and eight p.m. twice a day in order to remind you for two minutes to just choose one, like the box one week, the triangle the next week, and breathe. Because the research was becoming so clear to us that the nervous system was tied into everything we were trying to fix with people.

No one bought it. We sold four. It was the most crushing business experience we ever had. Because we thought we were doing the world. We thought we were doing good in the world. We thought we developed the thing that would work in the Western world, “Only two minutes a day, you don’t even have to think about it, I’ll text you.” It was terrible. And it’s just kind of interesting to be over 10 years later now focusing on these from a different angle. It’s like, “Look, just take it and just pump it on your wrist two to three times. Rub it in. If you could do that, you should feel something. You can go more if you need to.” Pop these little pills, hopefully. The goal, again, the goal is take this seriously, buy someone else’s product or buy our product. I think ours is better for people with hyper vigilance, people with anxious minds, racing thoughts. I do think it’s better for women in perimenopause or menopause because the herbs also double for the associated hormonal symptoms.

Michael Roesslein:

The Ayurvedic herb you have in there’s a powerhouse for that. It’s in all the formulas, all the Ayurvedic formulas for perimenopause and women’s hormones.

Steve Wright:

Yeah, it’s cool. The herbalist in California, he’s just a gem. He refuses to wear shoes in the office and he licks all the herbs for us, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, this one’s extra potent on this pathway.” Anyways, he’s the one that does all the QA. I mean, we run all the regular-

Michael Roesslein:

He’s a microscope.

Steve Wright:

We run the regular Western QA stuff as well. But he’s the one that actually tells us about the herbs and their qualities.

Michael Roesslein:

Who needs a microscope when you have an herb likker?

Steve Wright:

Exactly. Exactly.

Michael Roesslein:

That’s another T-shirt. We’ve popped out two T-shirts today, chocolate cadmium poisoning and the herb likker. Yeah. And we’re joking a lot, because Steve and I joke a lot, but this is a really important topic. So much so that I am shifting my entire career towards doing work that is based on nervous system regulation very soon. I’m still going to be hosting things for RHT and producing some functional medicine-related stuff. We have new podcasts and interviews coming, so I’m at all this kind of stuff. But behind the scenes I’m handing over pretty much all other operational stuff, because I’m going to be doing work that is 100% focused on not only nervous system regulation, but under finding the reasons and healing the reasons why the nervous system dysregulation is there in the first place. Working to release those things. Because I’ve experienced, like you mentioned, you have an incredible difference in quality of life since you started becoming conscious of those things and working on those things.

And I have too, and so of a lot of people that I’ve worked with and met. That’s where I think the real deep healing comes. And this stuff can really help people who either are doing that work, not ready to do the work, or it even makes doing that kind of work easier. Because when people say, “I can’t meditate,” I used to be one of those people, like, “Meditation is impossible.” And it’s because when I sat down to meditate, my anxiety brain was like, “It is party time right now. We’re not doing anything else. Let’s think about all the things at once.” Now it’s just me. You just think about all the things at once. And stuff like this has a huge impact when you’re trying to do stuff like that, because it calms that down and actually allows you to do the practices.

I love products like this. I’m really excited about it. I’m excited to have it in our shop. I think it will help a ton of people in our audience, those who know they need it, where they’re nodding like, “Yes, I’m hearing you talk about me very much.” And then those who have no idea that they need it, which was me six years ago, I would have listened to this and been like, “Huh, that would really help somebody else. One of those weirdos with anxiety.” Regarding BeSerene, five ingredients in there, one is that heavy hitter. Oh, and I use the term heavy hitter I was talking about, what is the name of that? The-

Steve Wright:

Mulungu?

Michael Roesslein:

No, that’s what you said. That was the main one for the calming, but the Ayurvedic herb for hormonal balance for women.

Steve Wright:

Shatavari.

Michael Roesslein:

Shatavari. I always mispronounce it, so I was trying to get you to say it. Shatavari. That was the one I was talking about. That’s in all the Ayurvedic formulas for hormone balance and women’s health.

Steve Wright:

And in the IR, the only overlap is Mulungu. Mulungu is, in our opinion, it’s the star herb, but the IR is built with GABA. So I have a pretty deep belief at this point in time that people who have nervous system dysregulation, who have gut issues are either consuming the oral GABA they take at the gut level, or they can’t get it across a disrupted gut barrier. And so the BeSerene IR, part of the reason why I think it works is that you’re topically delivering a awesome amount of herbs, but also GABA and L-theanine, which are known to help with changing the brain state, reducing anxiousness, getting to sleep, things like that. And so I guess I should have been more clear of that the herbs are very different in both formulas. The only crossover is the Mulungu.

Michael Roesslein:

Okay, perfect. Thanks for your refreshing candor. I think candor is one of the better things that we could be called. I feel like its better. It’s a positive word, so thanks.

Steve Wright:

Well, I think the shittiest thing about this, no pun intended, is that I don’t think you want to learn stress management for somebody who’s not like you. If you have an anxious system, if you have a hypervigilant system, Michael and I are probably good people to follow and listen to. But if your nervous system’s not quite like this, if you’re more of a very depressive type nervous system, things like that, maybe there’s a different formula that’s better suited to your nervous system. A better type of just way of path or something. But I think what you said in the beginning is the 100% truth. We are all choosing things all day long to deal with this in this mismatch between our brain and our nervous system and the current environment we’ve built. It’s literally not evolved yet. And so we are choosing things every day, whether corn chips, chocolate, obesity, wine, alcohol, weed, all these things.

Whether you want to be conscious or not, that’s your choice. But if you do want to have less inflammation, have less fat, have more control, I think using supplements wisely to help you gain that is the biggest thing. And then that way, hopefully you, we now have a rule like one bag of corn chips per week, one pizza per week. That’s all the household over here gets. It got a little aggressive over COVID and it was a lot of soothing. It was a lot of boredom, anxiety, anger, and it just got aggressive. And so now I use more BeSerene. Like I said, I take the Daily and the IR when needed. I try to use the up more magnesium, things like that. Hopefully that’s also empowering, just like, this is real, this is happening, and it’s okay.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, no, no, I love the message. And we only have one pizza night a week here as well, and we rotate between two spots. Because every neighborhood in Italy has 62 pizza places. But it is different here. But yeah, we do pizza one night a week. And corn chips are not my thing, but we do kill some dark chocolate around here. I got to check my cadmium levels apparently, now I’m going to have anxiety about that when I try to go to sleep tonight. Now I have a new thing to worry about. But no, this is great. I’m excited to have this stuff in our shop. I think it’ll help a ton of people. Thanks for the questions, everyone. Thanks for being here. I know it’s early on a weekday and I appreciate everybody making it live. We had a lot of people on live.

And thanks, Steve, for your time and for always finding the best stuff. You always find the best stuff across various fields of stuff and your anxiety-driven, obsessive research has benefited tons of people. And so we’re all very grateful for your anxiety. And we’re happy that you have it and that it has helped so many people find better health. And joking aside, I’m glad that you’ve found the way that you found and that you’re doing so much better, because I know what it’s like to be that anxious all the time, and it is not like we’re joking about it right now, but it’s not fun and it’s not funny. If somebody out there is in that kind of level of anxious and activated, I get it, we get it. We’re not trying to make light of something that’s really difficult. We’re just trying to offer solutions that can help you. Hopefully everybody found this valuable. We will be sending out a recording of it this evening, I think. We usually wait until tomorrow, but I think this one’s going out this evening. And healthy anxiety, Stephen says. Yeah, definitely.

And de-stigmatizing these conversations. I think laughter does a lot with that too. I think some of these topics people dance around and don’t talk about it. Definitely don’t openly admit like we do. Most health people aren’t going to go on the internet and talk about how bad their anxiety is. But I think that, I don’t know. I’ve never done bullshit very well, so I always have been just kind of me wherever I go. And you have too, and I think that’s why we get along. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Carol. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks, Victoria. Good to see you, Julia, Rebecca, Ted. Thanks, everybody. Thanks Lauren, everybody-

Steve Wright:

Yeah, thanks everybody.

Michael Roesslein:

… being here. Thanks, Steve. We’ll talk soon.

Steve Wright:

Thanks, Michael.