What Worked Was Giving Up Control

THE STRENGTH CONNECTION WITH MICHAEL KURKOWSKI

September 2026

To Succeed More, Do Less w/ Dr. Matt Delgado

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Michael: All right, and we are live. Welcome everybody. Dr. Matt Delgado, welcome to the show.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, thanks so much, Michael, for having me.

Michael: Absolutely. I really appreciate you coming on. Your story personally as well as professionally is fascinating, so I was really excited to, you know, have you come on, so we’ll get right into it. At 27 years old, a bunch of shit changed for you in your life. Tell me what happened.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. At 27, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune thyroid condition, and people may not be familiar with what that even is, so happy to go into it a little bit more if you’d like. But it was Graves’ disease.

Michael: This was Graves’ disease, right?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, Graves’ disease.

Michael: What exactly is that, if people don’t know?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. So autoimmune just means the body starts attacking healthy tissue. It recognizes a threat when something maybe isn’t necessarily really a threat. So my body started attacking my thyroid, and you don’t realize how much the thyroid has involvement in just about everything until it starts to be attacked.

And for me, it showed up as extreme fatigue. My hair was falling out. That actually was what freaked me out the most. And at 27, I think I probably had really, really low testosterone levels at that point. I remember, like, my sex drive was nothing. That freaked me out also. I wasn’t sleeping. I had just a level of, like, pain and tension in my body that was probably constantly there that I got used to. And there were a few other things: gut pain, digestive challenges. But I’d say those things were the main things that I was really dealing with at the time.

Michael: Yeah. So was this a gradual thing that came on, or was there something, like, finally that came? Was it the hair falling out that was like, “All right, something’s really going on here, and I gotta figure this out and get this checked out”?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, great question. It was definitely gradual, and the body’s so resilient. And I’m competitive, so if you would’ve asked me how I was doing probably a month before I got the diagnosis, I would’ve said, “Fine.” I actually would have said, “I’m doing fine, and everything’s good.”

And so the symptoms came on gradually, but I think that’s the brilliance of the human body. We’re so adaptable, and we get used to feeling a certain way that we find workarounds for just about anything, and I did. And there’s a lot of, you know, vices we can even use, or supplements, or you name it, to kind of prop ourselves up.

And I’m a big coffee fanatic, so that was something that, for me, I didn’t even realize was masking, you know, my fatigue levels, and how amazing caffeine is at doing that. But yeah, it was a gradual thing for sure, and for me, it was right after grad school. I’m a chiropractor, so the graduate program I did is, for people that aren’t familiar, it’s a similar number of hours to a medical doctor program, and it’s intensive.

And I think the irony is one of the most unhealthy experiences that I ever went through was to become a healthcare provider. And I did an accelerated program, and I’ve always done well when I’ve had more on my plate. And I just burned the candle at both ends for years and got by with probably very little sleep. And I had a really good social life, too, and it caught up with me.

Michael: Yeah. So when you got this, I mean, really there’s three options usually they give you with this. Either you can have surgery, you can go on meds for the rest of your life, or go on like radioactive iodine to work with this. But you chose a different approach to really look at this more holistically, which, you know, from talking to you and hearing your story has succeeded, you know, in great proportions here.

But what was that process like of thinking through how to overcome this? Because obviously there’s the quick aspects like, yeah, get surgery or something like that. What made you look at this differently from not just a healing perspective, but also kind of a lifestyle perspective at the same time?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, thank God I’d been immersed in such a holistic health scene in chiropractic school. And I remember even first, just to kind of paint the picture, first being introduced into this type of scene. Because everyone, from what I’ve seen through years, I’ve been in clinical practice for 10 years, and I’ve seen thousands of people, and almost everybody identifies with the word healthy.

Almost everyone says, “I’m healthy.” And you realize there’s a relativity. They’re comparing themself to someone else or to something they used to be. So what I said at the time going into chiropractic school, I felt like I was a very healthy person. I looked like the image of health. But just being so immersed in, like, a really crunchy granola holistic scene, the most natural form of everything they would utilize.

Like all my, you know, deodorants changed to non-toxic, and toothpaste, and a friend’s girlfriend, I remember, chewed me out because I took NyQuil because I felt sick. She’s like, “What are you doing? We’re supposed to be chiropractors. Like, we believe in the human body and the body’s ability to heal itself. Why are you taking this stuff? You don’t need that to heal.”

So slowly over the three-year shift, I made my way from being like deer in the headlights, getting chewed out for taking NyQuil, to owning no medication, taking no medication, and not chewing people out for doing that same thing, but maybe quietly judging them a little bit.

Michael: Sure.

Dr. Matt: So I had, you know, the roots of a really holistic lifestyle, and I didn’t want to have surgery and be on drugs for the rest of my life, like you said. And the thyroid is like right in the throat, so for people that aren’t familiar, they would cut you open and take your thyroid out. Like, that is so invasive.

And I was 27 years old, and I just thought there’s gotta be a better way. And in school, we didn’t really learn that this was reversible or this was something that you could really change, but more so we learned that you just manage it, and you send someone to a doctor, and they’ll help you manage the symptoms of it.

So I didn’t really know, to be honest, what I was doing, but I just didn’t wanna accept surgery and being on drugs for the rest of my life as the final stop. So I looked everywhere, and then I did a lot of things. I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, and ultimately, I think you know the end of this. I put myself in the right conditions long enough lifestyle-wise, and I was able to send this into remission, and it’s been in remission now for about 10 years.

Michael: Okay. What was the process of changes that you made at that time? Obviously, here’s the solutions that they give you, or like, “This is what we can do.” Okay. I don’t wanna do that. I wanna look at this differently. But I’m sure there was a lot of, you know, either, like, knowledge learning at that time or, like, kind of processes of shifts of that. And you said you already, like, felt like an identity of a healthy person, and this sometimes warps that a little bit from a mental standpoint. What were the changes early on that you started to make which put you on this path into getting into remission?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. It really threatened my identity, I’d say, more than anything. Like you said, that was huge for me, and it took a lot of time for me to fully accept that, you know, I was supposed to be this image of health that was recommending health to other people, and then here I had this label, this diagnosis. I felt like a fraud, to be honest, and I felt like I wasn’t in a position to really be recommending health to other people when I didn’t feel like I could. You know, somehow I missed something myself that created this big blowup.

But yeah, I think with what I tried ultimately that ended up working, I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, but you asked, like, what ended up working was really giving up control. And I think for a lot of men, you know, that I get to see in practice, and myself included in this and where I started, it was just trying to kinda outperform, which is what I always had done.

I mean, in my career, I was really successful with everything I’ve always done, so I just put more energy and more force into it, and I took more supplements, and I tried more protocols. I tried one for just about everything. And I think the surrender piece was so big in this, of just finally getting to a place of, like, just trusting my body and just saying, “You know what? I am going to go back to the basics.”

And I quit my job. I moved to the desert in southern New Mexico, and I lived, like, a really boring life for months. I took about a year off of work. I didn’t have a job. I slept, like, 12 hours a day. I was making up for lost time. I ate nothing but whole foods. I didn’t get fancy with the different diets and things. I did for a while, and that just stressed me out. But I just ate, like, really good quality foods. I cooked all my own meals. I rarely, if ever, ate out, and I went on walks and hikes.

Michael: Yeah. Did you make these changes in a way of thinking like, “This is going to be the path towards remission from this particular disease,” or was it more of a, “I’m just gonna, like, do what I think is best for it and just kinda live the best that I can and kinda see, like, let the chips fly where they may”? Does that make sense?

Dr. Matt: Totally. Yeah, the latter there. So I had no idea that this was gonna go into remission. And actually, the thing that scared me the most was that I was gonna have to live with this for the rest of my life. For some reason, I gave myself a year. I don’t know why I did that, but I just said, “I’m just gonna give myself a year and see what happens.”

So just what you said, that’s what I did. Like, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but I’m just gonna give myself a year. I’m gonna do these things, and I’m gonna see if that changes anything. And I’d say probably six months into doing that, I felt mostly symptom-free at that time. And then I’d say about a year in, the interesting thing was that I probably felt better at that time than I ever had in my entire life, before I had a named diagnosis or not.

And at that point is when it actually was in remission. Like, I kind of already knew before getting retested. I felt great, and I think we kind of lose sight of how great we can actually feel because we’re so incredibly intelligent as a species at just creating workarounds and getting through it and getting by.

Michael: Yeah. What was the biggest difference you felt in feeling better? Better is a spectrum. Like, we can say a lot of different things. Like, what was it that you felt that felt so much better, like, this six months down the road?

Dr. Matt: Energy, number one answer by far. And of the thousands of people I’ve seen over a decade in my career, energy is the number one thing that people really want back, because you realize, like, when you have more energy, you have more vitality. You can take that into everything. Your relationships get better. Your fitness gets better, if that’s what you’re into. Your career, your social life, your family life, it all gets better. You have more to give, and I think it was just recharging my battery for long enough, for a year, that I had more to give.

Michael: Yeah. Was it, like, a big mental difference for you of going into this path of… Surrender’s a great word for it, and I think that’s a fascinating word in itself, because I think oftentimes we can think that’s synonymous with give up. But more so, it’s actually from the positive side, letting go of control and saying like, “I’m just gonna do what I feel is best, the standards that I’m gonna hold myself to, and let the outcomes happen from there.”

But during this, you know, path, you were a high-performing person, like, based on a measurable standpoint. Was this a challenge of shifting into a mindset of letting go of control, or was it more of just, this is exactly what I need to do and I’m just gonna let it happen?

Dr. Matt: Great question. It’s one of the single greatest challenges that I’ve ever faced in my life, and it was because it was so counterintuitive maybe to what I thought I needed to do. Everything I had done my whole life really was, like, perform more, do more, do more, do more. So to do less just felt really unnatural.

And I was in a space, I was surrounded by people that were high achievers, overachievers, brilliant people, people that were really successful. So when you see that modeled around you too, it just becomes the norm. It becomes the standard. So it was hard. It was really hard to do less and to just slow life down enough.

And I think if I wouldn’t have moved to such a boring place in the desert, I would’ve had a lot harder time. Like, if I was in a fun city like Austin right now, or New York City, or somewhere where there’s a lot going on, I think I would’ve been really, really challenged. But I kinda put myself in the middle of nowhere where I had family there, but it was boring, to be honest.

Michael: Sure, no doubt. Hey, it’s, you know, nature versus nurture, right? Oftentimes just the shift in the environment is one of the most powerful things that you can do. Like, I think specifically with mindset work, we think of mindset as all this willpower and, like, energy, motivation. The first thing to do is set up the environment in the right way, and sometimes it’s as extreme as moving to a really boring place. But at the same time, if you can’t do that, like, creating some sort of environment specifically for that area, that’s probably the first step you need to do.

Dr. Matt: Amen. And you just named the whole central premise, really, of how I see health right now, which is that we’re more like a plant than a car, and a plant responds to its environment. And if you try to grow a droopy plant back to life, I’ve asked thousands of people this, they take a systems approach. They look at the roots of the plant. They’d say, “I’d give it water, and I’d give it sunlight.”

So you’re really giving more health to the roots of it to grow the branches back to life, because you know there’s more sustainability in doing that than going to all the branches and wasting all your energy and trying to prop them up forever. And I’d say in the human body, the root system is the central nervous system. It’s the brain, the spinal cord, the nerves. The nervous system touches and controls everything. It controls everything in the body and all of the branches and all of the parts.

So what I didn’t know at the time back then was that the conditions I put myself in, that was really helping my central nervous system get back to an optimal place so that all these branches could resolve on their own like we’re designed to do.

Michael: Yeah. I love that. I love that analogy you have of a plant versus a car, because I’ve used the car analogy numerous times throughout the years, Matt.

Dr. Matt: I did for years myself too. For years I did it.

Michael: Yeah, so thank you for that. I wanna dive into that a little bit more down the road. But, you know, a year in after making this shift, you were in remission, and what was that time like when you realized that, oh, I’ve actually, like, conquered this in a way that’s very different than what I was told I can do? Was that a shock to you? Like, was that a, oh my gosh, everything that I aimed for actually worked in a really good way? What was that time like when you recognized that, oh, now I’m in remission?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, again, brilliant question, and I get to see it now in other people, and I’d say the word’s disbelief. And you almost don’t wanna say it out loud, because if you say it out loud, you know, I’m a little superstitious. I played baseball for a time in my life, and it’s like, shoot, like the no-hitter in baseball, if you talk about it, then something goes wrong.

So the fear then became, well, what if I lose what I’ve gained back? So it turned to a different fear, and I think it took years for me to release that, with just actually having to fall down a few times and learn that the body’s not fragile. But at the same time, like, if I just treat my body, again, like crap, and eat whatever I want, and I’m working long hours, and I’m really stressed out, and I’m limited on sleep, I can easily go back to that place.

But yeah, it took some time before I really found, I think, peace. And the identity thing was probably the hardest too, because then once it went into remission, I feel like I’m fixed. It’s like I was broken, then I’m fixed, but then the fear becomes being broken again. Until you realize it’s gray, until you realize we’re a plant, again, responding to the environment, and always and forever changing. A plant doesn’t break and you don’t fix the plant. It will always and forever respond to the environment, and I think that’s something that set me free, was just finding peace in that.

Michael: Yeah. You said that, you know, you conquered this in a year, but it took another 10 years to really understand why. Tell me a little bit more about that. Like, what was the next decade after this? What has this been like of you reflecting on this and kind of not only using this for personal success, but now also helping other people find this in themselves?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, I guess I’m not that smart, because it did take me about 10 years. And I think the first six years in my career, I saw the lifestyle that I had lived. Like what I just said about the nervous system, I didn’t know any of that. I just thought, “Okay, this is awesome. I am really into a healthy lifestyle. I know that’s important for my own health.”

But then the gap, and what I didn’t realize, was that I was treating people like a car in my clinic as a traditional chiropractor. You know, I think largely, and I wouldn’t have said this at the time, but I largely helped people manage symptoms. And there’s a ton of value in that, don’t get me wrong.

And then at the highest level too, like, I got to the highest level of sports. I got to work in, you know, professional athletics, college athletics, and I’d say after six or seven years, I started to see a pattern of people coming in with the same things or a little different presentation of the same things. It might have been a shoulder injury one time, then a knee injury, then an ankle injury, but they always had something going on, and nothing really changed long term.

So I think I started asking different questions, and there was a series of events that just led to this shift in my life where I got more into asking about, well, what about the thing that controls all the parts, which is the brain, the central nervous system?

And I started looking into a few different technologies to be able to measure the central nervous system, and I was a little skeptical. I’m competitive. I’ve always been a little skeptical, I think a healthy amount, with things. And I came across this, it’s called INSiGHT scans, a few different measures to look at the nervous system and be able to quantify it. And I saw my own first scans, and I was shocked at what I saw, and I thought it was a mistake, actually, because my nervous system was not in a good place, even after years of being in remission.

But just a pileup of owning a business, and my mom had passed a few years prior, and, you know, the grief from that, and probably grinding still a little bit too hard. That was a huge moment for me, I’d say, in my career, that I got to open my eyes again to, oh, I’ve kind of gone back in a way again and not even realized it.

So from there, there were a lot of little events that just slowly, you know, I started asking different questions and then started to integrate the pieces, what I knew about lifestyle, and then clinically also with the nervous system. So my whole focus and my whole practice became, oh, it’s the root system of the plant, and if we can get that more healthy, then everything thrives.

And, you know, I wasn’t taught that in school. Like, I wasn’t taught to ask people about their sleep, and I didn’t know the significance of getting enough sleep and what limited sleep would do, or stress, or how to ask about that, or movement, or toxins. I didn’t know any of that in school.

Michael: Yeah. Why is that, do you think? I mean, it’s something, you know, I talk about this a lot, and I think anybody in practice, we understand, like, the foundational things of sleep, of recovery, of strength training, of nutrition. Like, all the big knowledge pieces that we know that make up health are there. Yet oftentimes when we’re taught things, like, I mean, I went, you know, through strength coaching and fitness and stuff. You’re taught the muscles. You’re taught, like, this muscle moves and stuff like that, but never actually understand. Because the nervous system is a big word, and I think we think of it as, like, one thing, but it’s not. It’s the encompass of everything that’s going on in there.

So why do you think, going through school, they don’t tackle that? Is it because it’s so complicated and it’s hard to fully grasp that from an educational perspective? What’s your thoughts on that?

Dr. Matt: Okay, I’m gonna hit a little bit here. I mean, I think when we look at a few key players in this, the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, I mean, there’s a lot more money in us being sick. And I don’t know how or where the schools or the train of thought or healthcare has gotten away from really addressing the human as a whole, but we’ve really gone into this whole car logic for a human in almost every scenario.

And I’d like to think a lot of it really is from this story that we’re fragile, and that we’re always breaking down, and we need more drugs. And I think a lot of it does revolve around, when you follow where everything leads, I think for a lot of people, it ultimately leads them to a doctor where they’re getting drugs or where they’re getting surgery.

And that’s where I was led at 27 years old, and I think without asking enough questions, and having enough curiosity, and being open-minded enough to see it a different way, I could have easily gone down that road.

Michael: Yeah. I think there’s something with, like, a solution versus a relief debate that’s going on. I remember Anthony de Mello says this beautifully in his book Awareness, where, are you looking for a solution or are you looking for a relief? And so often it’s so easy to find a relief. I don’t feel good right now, and you get the quickest thing that can just make you feel a little bit better than where you are right now, and it feels like a solution, but in reality, it’s a Band-Aid over a bullet hole.

And I think that’s not just in medicine. That’s in almost anything, right? It’s the quickest way to get from feeling not so good into feeling a little bit better. It does feel better even though it’s not a solution, and that’s why it’s so easy, and it’s almost seductive to go down that route, because it’s a quick sell, it’s a quick relief, and then all of a sudden you seem like the hero of just giving somebody that relief.

Dr. Matt: Amen. I sold that for years, Michael, and I was that guy for years, and I think there was an innocence to that. I didn’t realize what I was doing, and I had a good heart in it, honestly, and I think most people do. I think most practitioners and clinicians are good people with a good heart trying to help the world out.

But I think we also like credit for fixing people, and I don’t think we realize the implications of that, as we’re taking the most powerful thing from them that we should not be, which is agency. And we take their power from them when we are the ones fixing them, rather than the magic’s in them all along. It always has been, it always will be. The human body’s incredibly intelligent. It’s designed to heal.

Michael: Yeah. And, you know, I think it’s very easy, if you just listen to the big noise out there, to always think there’s a demonic idea, like there’s some malice that a lot of people have. I don’t think that. I think most people are trying to find the right solution for people. But it’s a very challenging thing when somebody’s in pain. You wanna get them out of pain as quick as possible. So if there’s a relief, there’s something to that.

But when you shifted your practice, because, you know, during this time you said you quit work, you just took care of yourself, getting back into work and not going back to just what you were doing before of fixing the car, to now changing the questions that you had, what was that process like for you? Were there stumbles and roadblocks that you had to kinda get over, either personally in your own mental block or actually even changing how you approached working with people? What was that time like for you of shifting your practice?

Dr. Matt: A ton. I said so many things that I think I realized didn’t land for people. It was easier to sell the car model because everyone else is doing it. So, you know, this will give you quick relief, and that’s what they want. That’s what most people want, is convenience. Time is actually the biggest barrier for most people. They don’t want to commit to something for long enough. And the cost, you realize after a while, isn’t really even it. It’s the time. So if you can help them fast, that’s what they want, and that’s why I think a lot of people want a quick fix.

So yeah, I stumbled a lot with telling a different story, and it took me, again, a lot of time and a lot of practice to come to the simplicity of this plant story, and teaching people and helping them understand how they got to be where they are, in a way that resonates with them so that they want to help themselves.

An example of this, you know, there’s four real lifestyle factors. I’ve named them here already, but in my office we call them the Core Four. It’s sleep, stress, movement, and toxins. And one of them as an example, sleep. I had a guy who was a basketball player for years. He saw me yesterday in practice, and he’s sleeping five hours a night, and I don’t wanna make him feel stupid, but I just told him that, you know, any less than seven hours of sleep a night, and you’re gonna spend three times as much money in my office. I’m just gonna be really honest with you. I’ll never tell you what to do, and if you want to, that’s your choice, but it’s gonna take so much longer for your body to heal, because it’s like trying to grow a plant back to life in a closet.

You could probably do it, but it takes way more work, way more energy, and way more resources. So you kinda set someone free when you give them that. So again, I didn’t have that level of simplicity or clarity in the beginning, and it took a long time to figure it out. I’m still figuring it out.

Michael: Well, it’s an ongoing process. It’s like a plant, right? You don’t just go in and fix it right away.

Dr. Matt: Always.

Michael: So, the Core Four, I wanna dive into these a bit more: sleep, stress, movement, toxins. I think anybody listening to this understands those in some capacity on a surface level. From your work with those, what’s the one that you see is the most common challenge for people to master, maybe is the best word for it, or really just do it till they can’t get it wrong rather than first do it till they can get it right? What’s the one that seems like the most challenging for the people that you work with?

Dr. Matt: I think all of them, honestly, and in subtle ways people wouldn’t expect. Sleep is probably it, though. And the thing people say with sleep is, “Well, I feel fine with less than seven hours of sleep.” So our biology requires seven hours of sleep, and you can think of it just as the cleansing system of the body, and for the brain, the glymphatic system. It’s really where things get repaired, and you have like a recharge, if you will, for your battery. It’s why we sleep, among other reasons. There’s many reasons there, and there’s a lot of brilliant things that happen when we sleep.

And if we don’t get that seven minimum, and eight really is more of the ideal, but when we don’t get that, it puts a lot of strain on our central nervous system. But we actually feel fine, and I hate this phrase, actually. I would remove it from the dictionary if I could, “I feel fine.” Because feeling fine isn’t the whole point, and I think no matter what we do, the brilliance of the human is that we’re gonna feel fine.

But you get more adrenaline, more cortisol when you’re in this sympathetic dominance, more of this stressed state from limited sleep, and you do this again and again, and it just starts to feel normal. So you actually feel fine when going through that, and all the while your function is being altered and it’s becoming less and less and less.

Michael: Yeah. It’s funny. I just had this conversation with Ally Gilbert the other day.

Dr. Matt: I heard.

Michael: Yeah, and this is something I talked about a bit, Matt, is that doing fine, and, you know, she has the quote, “Fine is not a status, it’s a sedative.” And I remember reading Gay Hendricks’ book, The Big Leap, where he has the four different zones of competence, and that third one is that zone of good enough. And that’s one of the most dangerous places for a lot of people to get to, because things are going okay if you’re in this zone. Like, you know, maybe job’s going okay, relationship is fine. It’s not great, but everything is just… It’s very easy to rationalize, because you’re like, “Well, so many people have it worse than me. Like, look, I still have shelter, and I still can get food. I’m not, you know, getting chased by bill chasers and stuff.”

So things are okay, and you almost get warped into this comfortably numb zone where it almost would even be better if things got a little bit worse for you, and that would actually put you into a zone of taking more action. Taking a step towards getting to an even better, more optimized zone in that spot is almost challenging because things are okay. Like, things are fine, and then it’s so easy to just fall into this almost like cozy blanket of life.

Dr. Matt: Totally. When people come into my office and they’ve actually come in saying they’re coming in for more like preventative, and they’re not really in a bad place, I actually dislike it for the reason that you just named. They’re not motivated enough, commonly, and I’ll tell them that too. I’ll tell them, you know, “My biggest fear with you here right now is that there may not be enough motivation or enough there to create a drive to make some of these changes.”

And in my own story, I mean, you see, if my life wasn’t falling apart in the way that it was, I would not have quit my job and moved into the desert in a boring town in southern New Mexico. There’s no way. The pain is such a gift to us in that way, or symptoms can be a huge motivator of things.

And there’s a term, actually, called baseline resetting, and it just shows the brilliance of the body and why we always feel fine, and it’s that our baseline resets to whatever level that we’re at, and it shows how adaptable we are. But again, to your point, it’s not the goal. It’s not the end goal, just to get by with feeling fine.

Michael: Yeah. I saw this firsthand, you know, almost a decade ago when I was in a spot with a very highly stressed job. I could do that when I was in my early 20s. You know, at that time of life, you’re kind of made of rubber and magic. Like, you can get away with a lot more stuff and still crush out a workout, and, you know, go a whole day on just a cup of coffee, and you feel okay in that zone.

But I got to a point where I recognized the same thing, where I was getting four or five hours of very disrupted sleep, but I could still function. Like, you know, in my job, I could make a sale, or I could just do something good. And in your own mind, you’re rationalizing it like, “Well, hey, look, I can still get some shit done even though I was on three hours of sleep.” And you can take a small sample size of, like, one thing that you do and say, “See? I can accomplish this if I only get, you know, a certain amount.” And then we look at that small sample size as an aggregate of, like, I can do this for the rest of my life. Yeah, if you have to do something for one particular day and you didn’t get a perfect amount of sleep, once in a while you have to do that, but that doesn’t mean that that’s now a solution that you can live by.

Dr. Matt: Correct. Yeah. And, I mean, your point with stress. I know you had asked about one of the conditions. To name one, I named sleep. I mean, stress is right up there. That’s why I said all of them. I won’t go through all of them, but I think stress is worth naming here. And you just saying that made me think of this, and you’re probably very evolved in this, so you can say in hindsight, you know, “I felt very stressed,” or, “I was going through a really high-stress season.” Most people can’t, and when we’re in it, we don’t name that as stress, because, again, we’re so adaptable.

And I think the words that I’ve interchanged to help people recognize stress better are overstimulation and overscheduling. At least in, like, a modern city and in a modern culture, that’s how stress often shows up. And then you pair that with something like a HIIT workout even, and we don’t realize that the physiologic stress response is what we’re talking about, not the feeling of being uncomfortable or the emotions that come with maybe, you know, having a hard time with something. That’s not what we’re talking about. The physiologic stress response is what we’re talking about.

And I almost rename it for people to better conceptualize it as the zone of performance, because it’s where performance happens. It’s not a bad thing. We villainize the stress response, but it’s where the best workouts happen. It’s where our focus at work happens. But it all draws from the same account, and I think that’s misunderstood.

So if you’re working, you know, 50, 60 hours a week, and always scheduled and stimulated, and then we start drawing from the same account with these high-intensity workouts, we’re always in this performance zone, and we never give that sleep and that repair the chance to take effect. And then we can see how this imbalance starts to form for years, just these little withdrawals from the system, and it’s like this health bank that we have that slowly becomes indebted, and the debt becomes greater and greater until it becomes negative enough that we scream and, you know, we have a blowup.

Michael: Yeah, the debt that builds up. And what you mentioned too there, Matt, about the baseline reset, I think that happens so much in stress aspects too. You know, it’s just like working out, right? If you lift 100 pounds and it’s really heavy, well, if you keep doing that, all of a sudden you get more resilient, and then that 100 pounds doesn’t seem like as much. It’s the same thing with aggregate stress that we have in our lives. And I saw this personally in a high-stress environment. After a while, that just felt like the norm, you know? Just getting, you know, screamed at, or, like, “We need to get this done today.” You just get so normalized to it. Doesn’t mean it’s good. It just means the body is very good at finding that adaptation.

You know, if you ever read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he says this from the crazy extreme aspects of it, of the concentration camps, and seeing somebody die right next to you, and you have just no response anymore because the mind is, you know, adapting to it.

So as you said there, sleep, from a measurable standpoint, we can get that. Stress seems like the one that is so much more challenging because it’s not as easy to measure. You can’t step on a scale and say, “This is how much stress I have going on for the day.”

Dr. Matt: Got something for you there, though. I’m glad you said that.

Michael: Okay, please.

Dr. Matt: So I’m gonna actually start in a place you might not expect me to start. I’m a huge coffee nerd, and I think for any of the dudes listening to this especially, I’m in like a home espresso Facebook group. This is really nerdy about me. There’s like forty thousand mostly men from across the world, and they’re super technical, super analytical. A lot of them are engineers, and there’s car people in there too, and I love that. The nerd in me loves that, and I’ve been doing home espresso for fifteen years. And something you said about measurement, I think, is so important.

So just to reinforce what you said, in espresso, there’s four main levers, just to simplify it, and two of them the machine controls, mostly. So temperature and pressure, your machine does that for you. But then the other two are gonna be time and yield, or the time and the weight of what you’re putting in and what you’re putting out. And that’s your job to control. And if you control those two things, then you get this consistency, and you find, in espresso, what’s called the sweet spot, which is ever so elusive. And if you’re slightly long, the shot’s bitter. If it’s slightly short, it’s sour, and it’s really like this two-second window typically you’re looking for.

And when you can get that, you can do it again and again and again, and it becomes consistent, and then you start to have fun with it. And I’d argue in our health, it’s really similar. If you can measure it, you can manage it, just like what you were talking about. And I’m wearing an Oura Ring right now. I think there’s a lot of different wearables out there, but one of the things that’s helped me become more aware of the stress that I have is this Oura Ring.

And it actually shows, I think it uses a few different variables that factor into your stress score during the day. I think it’s temperature, heart rate variability, movement, and it takes those, and it actually shows you how much stress you have during the day. And if you look at patterns through it, you can start to see certain times or certain days or certain moments or events where you become stressed.

So through wearing this, I’ve actually learned, like, the anticipation of something, I’ll get more stressed maybe than even going through something. Like when I’m at a conference with a few hundred people, anticipating getting up and three hundred people leaving this room, that stresses me out. But I never would’ve said that. Or traffic, sitting in traffic, I never would’ve said that. But I know that through this measurable, through this wearable.

Michael: I love that. Yeah. That’s interesting. So you’ve worked too with, you know, people at the highest level, professional athletes. I know you work with UT and stuff like that, and there’s always an aspect of thinking that, you know, top high-level performers are doing something so different than other people. But oftentimes, I’ve heard you say the strongest people are often the most stressed nervous systems as well. How do you approach working with high-level performers like athletes, who need to succeed at a specific time, like, they’re looking for a specific result from it, talking to them about holistic things or kind of looking at the whole big picture? I could see there might be some challenges there of getting that message through. Have you found that at all, or are they more receptive to this talk about the big picture, even though they have specific things that they’re aiming for?

Dr. Matt: Oof. Yeah, it’s very, very hit or miss. Some of them are super open to it, some of them aren’t. I end up finding the right ones, I’d say. And to give a couple examples even, and just a disclaimer here, I’ve never been one of the team chiropractors for anybody. I probably never could be, because I can’t follow rules particularly well, and I advocate for the players more so than anything. And if there’s something that just doesn’t seem right, or a lot of times you see in sport, they just try to get people back on the field and they’ll rush through things, and that doesn’t always sit well with me. And I don’t take insurance, because I believe that insurance is really a broken model in itself, and that doesn’t align with my beliefs around health.

So with that disclaimer now, I’d say that, I mean, I have so many stories through the years, but I think a lot of what I’ve seen, I’ll just say, was people, I mean, they’ll get cortisone shots, and far too many, and I’ll ask them, like, “Has anyone ever warned you about the risk of any of these shots?” And they’ve always said, “No.” I’ve never had one person tell me yes. And, I mean, drugs is a huge part of it, to reduce the pain, especially in football. That’s where I’ve probably seen the most drugs and the most shots of different types to get them back on the field. And I understand it from their point of view. It’s costing them a lot of money to not be on the field. So if they can get back on there, then that makes sense.

But then there’s one person in my career that really stands out. I wish I could say this person’s name. I can’t. This is a household name that everybody knows, and this person in sports, during the off-season, would treat their body like a plant, and would just, like, really minimize everything and reduce the stress, and would tell me even, like, “I’m very different from all my teammates and all the other people. Like, I just chill during the off-season. Like, I don’t do all these crazy workouts.” And he’s like, “I do some of them, but…” And you never would guess it. This is one of the best athletes in the world, and it’s someone that’s just, I think, very counterintuitive to what we would think, but it’s so brilliant.

Like, just get a lot of sleep, reduce your stress, go for regular foundational movement like walks, put good food into your body, and that’s what this person does, and it’s worked brilliantly for him for a long time in his career. Versus some of the others that will spend, like, ungodly amounts of money, I’ve seen, on throwing everything, throwing the kitchen sink at something, and it’s like they’ll get a massage, and acupuncture, and chiro, and, you name it, all in the same day even too. And then just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like five days a week, and they’re trying to, you know, forever manage. You said something about that earlier too, which was really brilliant. They’re never really trying to resolve the full thing. They’re just trying to manage what’s there.

Michael: Yeah, relief versus solution.

Dr. Matt: Exactly, yeah. So I think the athlete scene at the highest level was something that I didn’t love, to be honest. And there’s a few, not everyone, but there’s a few that I love to work with. But they treat their body, I’d say, way more like a car than they do a plant, and they throw a lot of money at it, and they waste a lot of money.

Michael: Yeah. It’s tough, because I think, you know, regardless of who you are, whether you’re a top-level performer or you’re just trying to stay healthy, you throw so many different things all at one time at a problem of just trying to be healthier. Well, one, the challenging thing is you’re probably just cross-contaminating a billion different practices in here. But at the same time, even if it does work, you have no idea what the heck actually worked for you out of all those five that you’re doing, and maybe you just got some relief, almost like a placebo aspect of just feeling like you’re doing something to get there.

But I think at the same time too, you think of a football player, yeah, there are specific things for that. Like, if you need to play a big high-level game and stuff like that, yeah, you’re probably gonna try and do maybe some things that aren’t, quote-unquote, the big picture thing, to get on the field for that particular Saturday or Sunday that you’re gonna play. But then in the off-season, when you have a little bit more time, a different season, focus on getting these other aspects down. Sometimes I think that is a challenge we have, is we’re always looking for, well, this is the way to do it. Well, sometimes seasons do change based on what you have going on in your life, and maybe you need to be a little bit more focused on one area versus another one. So it’s not always just a one-size-fits-all approach.

Dr. Matt: And there’s so much brilliance in what you just said, because again, strategy changes depending on what you’re trying to do. There’s nothing wrong with a quick fix, and sometimes a quick fix is much better, because if you get paid $50 million a year and you need a quick fix, you know, it’s costing you a shitload of money if you don’t do the quick fix. So there’s a time and a place for it, but I think where we can go wrong is forever being on the quick fix without asking why.

Michael: Yeah, I love it. Dr. Matt Delgado, ladies and gentlemen. Matt, I really love the insights that you have, not just, I mean, from your personal experience of seeing what you went through for yourself, but then how you’ve used this to, you know, help your practice and bring it out into your content, I think, is really valuable and really important, so I appreciate you coming on today.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. Thanks so much. And I think for people also that are listening that want to start to treat their body more like a plant, I’ve always been a prove-it guy, so I actually created a guide, and I titled it “How to Get Off Half Your Supplements,” because I think when the body’s working like it’s designed to, all of a sudden we don’t need all these supplements. And my book that’s coming out in January, if you get on the wait list, I’m giving this guide for free. So I think it’s something that people will really get to see, that the magic’s in them, not in someone else fixing them, and it’s what I wish I would’ve had ten years ago when I got diagnosed with Graves’ disease.

Michael: I love it. Perfect. We’ll grab those links, and we’ll put them in the show notes. If people wanna follow you, check out more of the work that you’re doing, what’s the best place that they can go to, Matt?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, either my personal website, that’s where my book’s at, drmattdelgado.com, or drmattdelgado on Instagram.

Michael: Perfect. Awesome. Brother, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Listeners, thank you so much. I will catch you guys in the next one. Peace.