I Would Remove “I Feel Fine” from the Dictionary

THE GREEN LIVING NOW PODCAST WITH AMY HARTSHORN

Season 2, Episode 34, September 2026

Why “I Feel Fine” Might Be the Most Dangerous Thing You Tell Yourself

Guest: Dr. Matt Delgado

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Matt: This is almost laughable when you hear about this. So for her, it was a car accident, 70 mile an hour rollover car accident, and you can imagine what that does to a body. But guess what her words were? “I felt fine.”

Amy: After the accident?

Dr. Matt: Yes.

Amy: A woman survives a 70 mile per hour rollover car accident, walks away and says, “I feel fine.” Two years later, her body falls apart. It’s a pattern that my guest sees constantly in his clinic, patients who insist they’re fine right up until they’re not. Today, he’s here to unpack why and to share his own health story, reversing a Graves’ disease diagnosis without medication. He treats the human body less like a car to repair and more like a plant to restore.

We get into what he thinks most of us are getting wrong about stress, sleep, and even supplements. His take is gonna be a little bit controversial, especially in alternative health circles, so stick around. Here’s Matt.

Amy: Matt, I think you’re gonna open some eyes with your perspective today. So I’d love to understand how you got into doing what you do.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. So I’m a chiropractor, but not in the traditional sense. I did the traditional sense for about six years, and then transitioned more into a neurologically focused chiropractor, so working more on optimizing the brain and the central nervous system.

And your question was how I got into that, so I guess, I mean, two different answers. The traditional chiropractor is through a sports injury, but more recently in my career, this other focus has been more about health optimization. I couldn’t name one moment, to be honest. It was many different events, and probably just an awakening that I was helping people manage symptoms, and I started seeing patterns that people weren’t really getting better long term.

They would come in with a little different variation of the same thing for years. So I started asking different questions.

Amy: Well, that’s fascinating. Do you do network chiropractic or is it something different?

Dr. Matt: No, it’s similar to network. Network’s one of the only truly neurologically focused base chiropractic techniques. The method that I created is called the TriChord Method, but it was built off of Torque Release Technique. So I don’t know if you’ve heard of Torque Release.

Amy: No, but that sounds interesting.

Dr. Matt: Similar to network. Network, for people that aren’t familiar, is a system of analysis and application that doesn’t use any cracking or popping. So I don’t either. I use a little instrument to make an adjustment, and it’s really based on, they call them direct dural attachments, so where the spinal cord anchors. So like a suspension bridge, and we use a reflex. It’s a functional reflex, so not the one, you know, the doctor taps your knee with a hammer.

That’s more looking for, is there a big disease or is there something scary going on in the body? This is, is there an imbalance in the body? And that precedes the pathology. So it’s more of the functional discrepancies, and when you find those, then you can change those. And that’s what the dedication to my practice is really, I’d say, accelerating healing.

Amy: I actually did some network chiropractic, because I’ve always been afraid of the traditional chiropractic. I hated to see people getting popped, and then I’ve heard horror stories of people becoming paraplegic. And it was really effective. I had a pinched nerve in my shoulder, but it worked really well.

So people kept coming back to you with similar conditions that you had been managing. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. Traditional chiropractic, I’d say, is largely built around, currently, a pain model, which is fascinating because without giving you the whole history of chiropractic, it didn’t used to be that. But you see how a narrative around anything kinda shapes what it becomes. I think there are probably many factors, but one of them I’d have to think is insurance. And in an insurance model, if someone has symptoms, you manage the symptoms, and it doesn’t really focus on restoration. It’s more on management of symptoms.

And most people in the chiropractor’s office say, “Well, I have pain.” And that’s what you just said, too, right? Like a pinched nerve. And I’d say we just would see, whether it’s back pain or neck pain or shoulder, foot, you name it, it was like these same patterns would keep coming back. And one of the things that was really fascinating to me is something even like when people would say, “I slept weird and I can’t turn my neck.”

And I was thinking, are you serious? We’re not fragile as a species, and we’ve slept on rocks for thousands of years. So sleeping on a cushy pillow, if that could disrupt someone’s neck motion that much, something is seriously wrong.

Amy: That’s a very good point.

Dr. Matt: And you start asking enough of that, and it led me to this technology that we use to measure the central nervous system, which I would say is the master control center, for people that aren’t familiar. It’s the brain and the spinal cord and the nerves. It controls literally everything in the body.

And the real clear shift came, I’d say, in my clinic when we started treating the body more like a plant than a car. Instead of repairing all the parts that we continuously break down, we started seeing it like a living system.

And if I asked you, and you actually have a plant right behind you if people are watching this on video. I don’t know if that’s real.

Amy: It is. It’s a peace lily.

Dr. Matt: Beautiful. So if that’s real and you put it in a closet just to clean your desk behind you and you forget about it, and you try to bring it back to life, you know, a couple months later, what would you do to bring it back to life? If all the branches were droopy, how would you fix that problem?

Amy: Well, definitely I’d water it. This doesn’t need direct sun, but it would need some sun. And I would probably give it nutrients too after that if it was still alive.

Dr. Matt: So simple. You used a simple answer and you focused on the roots. You didn’t go to each individual branch and prop it up. We don’t use the same logic to solve health problems in the human body.

Amy: That’s such a great point.

Dr. Matt: We obsess about the branches, which there’s nothing wrong with that. You probably could have solved that by propping up all the branches, but you would expend so much more time, energy, resources, and money, and kind of exhaust yourself all the while rather than going to the root system.

Amy: Right. And it would be based on the assumption that there’s no healing capacity in that plant.

Dr. Matt: Bingo. And we have a brilliant, brilliant design. We are designed so intelligently, and the more you learn about normal physiology, the more you start to understand. And more about nature too, right? You own a farm.

Amy: Yes. We have a certified organic farm in Vermont.

Dr. Matt: I’m sure we could talk for hours with your plants. People understand that there’s all these pathogens that could get your plants and you could put all these chemicals on your plant. You can put it in a bubble, or you can just learn to trust nature and learn how to care for it like it’s designed to be cared for. And I’d argue there’s more brilliance and more longevity in that system, and it becomes more efficient.

Amy: And there’s also a point about expectations. My husband’s been farming for, well, he was a dairy farmer with his dad when he was younger, but he’s been doing vegetables and fruits for 35 years. And I think he always gets disappointed when certain crops don’t do as well as others, and he takes that very personally. But I look at it, since I’ve been here for 17 years with him, and I just realize that there are gonna be years when, like the strawberries and the blueberries did phenomenally this season, that’s not always the case. And we’re dealing with so many different factors, because we’ve got the four-legged predators that are trying to get our food as well as us trying to sell it to people.

But there’s new things that come in on weather systems that we hadn’t seen 10 years ago, like this mummy berry thing that’s a fungus that gets into the wood chips below the blueberries, but then it infects the blueberries. But what I’ve noticed is it’s the early ones, so then once it kind of goes through its cycle, then the rest of the blueberries are fine.

It’s kind of that whole expectation and knowing that some things are gonna do well and some things aren’t, and we just have to do the best we can and roll with it, which is kind of a theme that you and I talked about a little bit before we got on.

Dr. Matt: Totally. And I think you just named something. I have a biology background in undergrad, and it was pre-med, but you know, you still get, like, a diverse setup. And I remember in even plant and animal biology, one of the things we talked about, you were just mentioning, I think it was called the Red Queen hypothesis, where we’re always in this dance where the host evolves as the pest evolves as well.

Amy: Yes.

Dr. Matt: And it’s a smart system that’s always in motion, and you don’t just put the host in a bubble to say, “Hey, there’s more pests now.” There’ll always be new ones. Whether it’s a virus or whatever it is, there’ll always be new ones. And how do we evolve to deal with that?

Amy: So that it’s not killing everything. Yeah. So did I read in your profile that you had some kind of a health crisis at some point in your life?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I had an autoimmune thyroid diagnosis 10 years ago. It was Graves’ disease, for those that aren’t familiar. And long story short, I was just getting out of an accelerated graduate program, a doctorate program of chiropractic, and went into a 75-hour workweek job. Probably wasn’t a smart choice.

Three months in, I ended up quitting my job. I was exhausted. My hair was falling out from the fatigue, the stress of it all, the gut pain. I had gut pain. Major hormone imbalances, and I was a mess. So I finally reached my limit of what I felt like I could take, and I’ve never really quit anything in my life. But I remember calling my boss on a Tuesday afternoon saying, “Hey, I have just reached my limit.” And we had had conversations before that, but enough was enough. So I quit my job, and I ended up taking about a year off, where I moved to the desert in southern New Mexico, and I simplified my life.

I’m giving you the short version here, but I tried many things that didn’t work. A lot of supplements and protocols and all these fixes and hacks and you name it. And then I finally just made my way back to the basics, and I put myself in the right conditions for long enough, just like your plant. And I came back to life. So the autoimmune diagnosis went into remission and has been in remission for the past 10 years.

Amy: That’s awesome. And I think I read that you said you ate only foods that didn’t have a label for a year, was it, when you had that one-year kind of sabbatical or whatever you wanna call it?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I took a year off of drinking. I didn’t eat any processed foods, and I didn’t really have the words for it or understand it at the time. It took me about a decade to figure out what I had done and how it connected to the human body, and then how to framework around it that I could apply to others.

But I was really controlling my blood sugar. I significantly reduced carbohydrates. Especially when you get rid of processed foods, you realize how much stuff is, like, all the carbohydrate-heavy things. And I ate way more fiber and protein and good fats. And I didn’t have anything to even measure it at the time. Now, with a continuous glucose monitor, I’ll wear one regularly just to manage my metabolic health. And I have really learned since then that that’s what I was doing, I was creating a balanced blood sugar. That was one of the four conditions that I named. Just like a plant needs, you’ve mentioned sunlight, water, and nutrition, I name four for the human. So sleep, reduce stress, move, and toxins is the fourth. But within toxins, I think the thing that most of us are really missing is blood sugar, because that’s a toxic state.

Amy: So how do you connect that toxin piece with the blood sugar part? And obviously the processed food is one of the ways.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. You’re cooking your body from the inside out. It’s called glycation when you spike your blood sugar. So the word age even in a medical sense, A-G-E, advanced glycation end products, is just sugar coating to cells. You’re literally aging yourself, you’re creating inflammation and oxidative stress. A lot of jargon for, basically, you are putting your body under significant strain and significant load.

And we’re resilient. We’re not fragile. I can’t say that enough. But if you do that constantly, it’s like giving the plant Coca-Cola. And you’re saying, “Well, Coca-Cola is 90% water, and it’s organic Coca-Cola.” But it’s all the sugar that it doesn’t need.

Amy: That’s not natural. It’s not supposed to.

Dr. Matt: Right. And we’ve also isolated sugar into pure forms that you don’t find in nature. I can’t remember the exact ratio, but there’s a ratio of fiber to sugar. I think it’s like seven to one or nine to one. Don’t quote me on that. But something like that, that you don’t find outside of that ratio in nature. But then we’ve isolated pure forms of glucose, and we put it into everything, food and drink.

Amy: Right. And usually it’s the high fructose corn syrup. And that’s even worse.

Dr. Matt: Sure. Sugar in the body in a physiologic sense, I would take real sugar over high fructose corn syrup. But when you still are spiking your blood sugar, you’re still creating this strain and this toxic condition in the body.

Amy: As I was reading your profile, you have a fairly unique perspective, I think, on toxins. Do you wanna talk about that?

Dr. Matt: Sure. Yeah. We were just talking about it.

Amy: Yeah. The other part of it, before we got on, we were talking about the whole striving for perfection. If you’re somebody who’s very health conscious and trying to do their best, the stress that comes from trying to do everything perfectly and eat the purest diet possible. I thought you had some thoughts on that.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I’d start really simple with people, and I can’t say this enough again, I would say we are brilliant and there’s an intelligence within us. We are not fragile, but we’re sold a story that’s really important. It’s not true that we have to do this and this and this in order to prevent our body from breaking down and falling apart. And putting in all these external things that aren’t even necessarily meant to come into the body. I can give an example, like supplements, for example. I believe it was in 2024 in the US we spent $69 billion on supplements. It’s a massive market. There’s like a little disclaimer on the bottom that says, “This is not approved by the FDA.”

Amy: Approved by the FDA, right.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, so you put whatever you want on that, and you make claims that this is gonna help your energy, and it might a little bit.

We’re really obsessing over the toxic load, which is real, and it’s more than it ever has been, rather than the capacity for us to even withstand that and the brilliance of the design of the human body when it’s under natural conditions that it’s meant to thrive in. And we’re ignoring that, and we’re obsessing over this protection against this toxic load. It’s wearing us out in the process.

And those four elements that I just named, they’re simple. They’re not easy. But things like sleep and reduced stress and move and toxins. I think a lot of people think, “Well, that sounds too simple,” or “I tried those things.” But I know that they’re missing it because I get to see this every day in my clinic, and I’m a huge proponent of, if you can measure it, you can manage it. And I think without some kind of measurement, we often miss the dysfunction that’s even going on because we’re so resilient.

Amy: I just wanted to kind of touch on the topic of supplements, because I have such mixed feelings about supplements. I feel like some of them can be very helpful, but you have to kinda know what you’re deficient in. And it seems like often people are deficient in vitamin D because so many people are not going out in the sun for 15 minutes without a sunscreen on to get that vitamin D production going. So for me, like in the winter, I do take vitamin D3. I’ve recently learned taking it with K2 is actually a better form.

I also know that our soils are no longer as nutrient rich as they used to be, and so therefore the food, even in the best soils, isn’t gonna have the nutrients that might have been the case when my grandparents were growing, or my great-aunt Jojo, who grew most of her own food. So I feel like even with certified organic whole foods, there may be some missing elements that our bodies might need, and to supplement could be helpful if there’s, I guess, even an awareness that there’s an imbalance.

Dr. Matt: You’re right.

Amy: What’s your thought about that?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, I’ll bite on that. Thank you. I’m glad that you brought that up. I agree, first of all. And something like vitamin D, that makes a lot of sense, and especially in places that don’t get a lot of sunlight. The Pacific Northwest, I grew up up there. There’s very little sunlight for nine months a year. So I totally get something like that. And that’s what the design is for, is there’s a road to an end, and it’s a temporary bridge, basically, to get you through a state.

But what I see clinically is people are on these for years with no road off of them, and they’re using them to prop the branches up, all the while they’re ignoring the roots. So I’m not against propping the branches up. I’m just saying, “Hey…”

Amy: Address the root.

Dr. Matt: Or if you start, this is a mess down here. And you’re working so much harder and putting all this stuff into your body, which sometimes even makes people worse because they’re on like 30 supplements. You talk about creating a toxic load. My God.

Amy: Yeah. At least on balance. It’s all gotta be then detoxified.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. So I would say if I had to pick between being vitamin D deficient, like if I could take a vitamin D supplement through the winter, or if I could get adequate sleep, seven plus hours per night, I’m gonna pick the sleep any day. And I’m gonna pick that over any supplement, honestly. I would pick both if I could, but if I had to pick one, by far I would pick the sleep.

Amy: Sleep, you think, is more important.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. When we don’t get enough sleep, or with our stress levels higher probably than they’ve ever been, it creates this sympathetic dominance, like the stress mode, this fight or flight state in the body. Then all of a sudden something even like our detox system becomes less efficient and less coordinated, because it’s deprioritized. We can only be in survival mode or this kind of rest and repair mode at once, and both still operate. It’s not so black and white like that, but the body starts to create way more of a priority around survival than it does something like gut motility or detoxification or reproduction. And everyone’s got hormone problems and gut issues, and we take supplements for all of those, but no one wants to talk about our stress.

Amy: Yeah. And it’s such an interesting question because I know people that are in stressful situations and they don’t see a way out, and so they feel like they just have to deal with it. And so of course that’s going to affect their sleep and digestion. You know, if you’re stressed all the time, every time you eat you’re probably gonna churn the food instead of really digest and utilize it. So do you talk to your patients about stress reduction and how to get better sleep?

Dr. Matt: Absolutely. I’ll say this bluntly to people, that I will never tell you what to do, but I can teach you about how your choices right now are impacting your life. And it’s also not my job to judge them because I’m just as human, and I go through seasons of life even where I’m under way more stress, and I live it, too. So who am I to judge? But I’ll tell them as bluntly as, if you’re not able to get more than seven hours of sleep, you’re gonna spend three times as much money in my office. I just wanna be really honest with you.

Amy: That’s an interesting way of looking at it, yeah.

Dr. Matt: Well, they will, because you’re swimming upstream.

Amy: And the reason is because they have more oxidative stress that’s causing all kinds of different pain, or how would you describe what’s happening?

Dr. Matt: More stress on the body. So we’re designed to get seven hours of sleep. And I could name the mechanism behind each of those four levers, but just to simply put it, with sleep, that’s our repair cycle every night. Our biology needs seven hours. And I know some people listening to this will say, “Well, I do fine on four or five.” Well, yeah, because in a stressed state, which is what that puts you in, a fight or flight state, we get a little adrenaline kick. And we also have this thing called baseline resetting, which is the brilliance of the human body, and our baseline just starts to get used to where we are. So all of a sudden, 97% feels about the same as 100%, so we feel fine.

And then the phrase that I would remove from the English dictionary if I could, “I feel fine.” And literally, you see people with any diagnosis, you name it, I’ve heard them say, “But I feel fine.” And it’s a testament to our brilliance. We are not fragile, not at all. But I think we’re kinda missing the point of what’s natural. I think we’ve lost sight of a natural rhythm in the human body, and who better to talk about that with than someone that owns an organic farm, where your whole central premise is the natural design and the natural rhythm?

Amy: Yeah, I mean, the way I look at it is our bodies are designed to heal if we give them the right things that they need, and you already articulated sleep. I would say exercise, sunshine, you know, getting rid of as many toxins as you can, but without completely stressing out about being perfect. So you don’t have to remove every polyurethane cushion in your couch. Ideally you’d try not to have carpeted floors or vinyl floors, and go with solid wood and ceramic tile. But I think when people talk to me about, “Well, where do I start?” I usually start with food, because I feel like it truly is our medicine.

Dr. Matt: Agreed.

Amy: And if we can get good quality food that is helping our body be more effective, efficient, then the rest of the stuff we can deal with, but it’s not quite as high a priority. Unless they already have an autoimmune disease, and then everything triggers some kind of an illness. I’ve had guests on the show, I had a young woman who was in her 20s, and she was fit and seemingly healthy. They were living in an apartment with mold, and she didn’t know about the mold, but she developed this horrendous illness where she couldn’t keep food down, and she had itches and all kinds of allergies.

Come to find out that it was largely the exposure to the mold that was triggering a lot of this. But then once they cleaned up their diet, because they were mainstream food eaters, cleaned up her diet, I think they did a whole juicing protocol to clean out her system. Once she reset, then she was doing great.

Dr. Matt: I love that you brought that up. You described me in my 20s. I mean, I am fit. I had a six-pack, abs, and muscles, and looked seemingly like the image of health, and I had just graduated from a holistic health program, and I had an autoimmune diagnosis. And fitness and health are not the same thing, and how we look externally and what’s going on underneath the surface. And again, we’re so resilient, we’re so adaptable.

And I have some questions for the people with mold. You hear about that more and more. I’m so glad you brought that up. You know, the heavy metals and the toxins, all those are real. And mold can be really disruptive and ruin people’s lives. I’ve seen it. I get these people in my office. But where my strategy is with them, again, is to help their body come back to the design of it.

And I have an example. There’s a patient that came in recently, and she’s really smart. She’s a critical thinker, so she came to this herself with me just asking the questions. And I asked, “How many years were you living in this moldy home?” And she said, “Well, 10.”

Amy: Oof.

Dr. Matt: How long were the symptoms there? Two years. The last two. So why weren’t those symptoms there over the previous eight years? And all of a sudden, they’re there over the two years. And also, why do you see all the mold? There’s no more mold now than there was, arguably, right?

Amy: Unless they live in flood-prone areas, I guess.

Dr. Matt: Well, you take a flood-prone city or a city like Austin that has a really high mold content, but why are we seeing people with so much more mold sensitivity than ever before?

Amy: Well, I guess it’s probably like gluten allergies, peanut allergies, all of these different things that have come up.

Dr. Matt: But then again, they’re all those things. It’s new. I think these are all symptoms. I think we’re still missing what’s underneath the surface. Why I name the root system of the human body being the neurologic system is, it’s the most upstream system in the entire body. It touches and controls every single thing. It controls and coordinates all the functions, whether it’s how we feel, how we move, or how we function.

Amy: Controls the gut.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. It’s the detox. The detox system works brilliantly when this neurological system is healthy, and very few people have ever had it measured, have ever had it looked at or even questioned. And the four health levers that I named, the sleep, stress, movement, and the toxins, those four things really tie back to this one system. So we’re making this neurologic system more healthy when we can optimize those four things. So I’d say our focus has just been altered. We’re so focused on these symptoms and the diagnoses. And I get it, they’re real, and my diagnosis gave me peace of mind when I first got it. But that’s the starting place. That’s not where it ends.

Amy: Exactly. So I wanted you to finish the point about the woman who was only having symptoms the last 2 out of the 10 years from the mold. What did she discover? What did you discover?

Dr. Matt: It was her past car accident. This is almost laughable when you start to hear about this. There’s things that impact the neurologic system greatly, whether it’s some of the toxic exposures that we’ve already named, but outside of that, the stressful situations, grief, divorce, loss, emotional trauma, but then also the physical stressors as well. And the neuroinflammation this creates when we get something like concussion or even car accident. But no one’s measuring it and no one’s connecting it. All these things tie back through the same system.

So for her, it was a car accident, 70 mile an hour rollover car accident, and you can imagine what that does to a body. But guess what her words were? “I felt fine.”

Amy: After the accident?

Dr. Matt: Yes.

Amy: Wow.

Dr. Matt: “I was sore.”

Amy: Was the accident two years prior?

Dr. Matt: It was around that time.

Amy: Oh, interesting.

Dr. Matt: It was just before that.

Amy: So that was the thing that pushed her over the edge to start having all these reactions.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. Yeah. I call this in my book the accumulation effect. The straw that broke the camel’s back is the story of that. And until the last straw…

Amy: I’ve actually been the last straw.

Dr. Matt: Yep.

Amy: I’ve talked about the human body as a rain barrel, and every time we’re exposed to something toxic, and it could be watching the news even, after a certain point…

Dr. Matt: I agree. Totally.

Amy: If you’re at the top of the level of the barrel, right? But once you start to overflow is when you start to feel those symptoms, I think. I’m hoping you agree that, you know, if you have toxins in your environment, you wanna try to get them out, right? Because you don’t need that extra load. But I think what I’m hearing you say is that we can tolerate a certain amount of toxins if our neurological system and our body’s getting what it needs. So we can deal with that a lot better than if we’re pushed over the barrel’s edge, and then we can’t handle any more exposures.

Dr. Matt: Brilliant example. I love it. And to add to your example, I’m gonna name two things. One, when our system has a higher capacity, so that’s the capacity versus the load, you increase the size of the barrel. So yes, you can take more. And then the other thing is that our natural detox systems, they’re always running.

Again, we’re kinda told this story that you need to do a detox. It’s like, what are you talking about? We have a brilliant built-in, the liver, the GI tract for elimination, the kidneys, to some degree the lungs also. These things are always brilliantly doing their job behind the scenes, and when they’re running efficiently, they’re clearing all the things out of our body. So I would say that there’s a drain in this barrel, but the drain on most people is clogged.

Amy: Ah, that’s a good way of looking at it. Yes.

Dr. Matt: So if you can help the drain become unclogged, then all of a sudden the things that come in, they’re also going out.

Amy: Yeah. That makes good sense.

Dr. Matt: And then you get more resilience. You also increase the size of the barrel.

Amy: That’s a very good way of putting it. So what are the top three things that you would recommend the audience do today?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, great question. One is sleep. Sleep is by far, I’d say we’re severely, severely underslept. I believe two-thirds of Americans don’t get enough sleep, seven hours. And I’m giving some generalizations because you’re probably talking to many people here, but for most adults, seven hours is the minimum, eight is ideal, and the regularity of our bedtime is really important, too. There’s a lot of little factors.

Amy: Having a dark room, having it quiet.

Dr. Matt: Yeah.

Amy: Having it cool.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, all these things. Cool, too. And then the other thing about sleep that immediately comes to mind is sleep apnea. How many people have sleep apnea? There’s a loop, I always talk about in my office, the sleep-stress loop. So when we become more sleep deprived, it creates this stress response in the body. And then when we have more stress, it makes it harder for us to sleep. We see how these cycles can continue. So to break that cycle is the second thing. So one is sleep, but to help break that cycle, movement. And I would say walking is where I’d start.

Amy: I like walking.

Dr. Matt: Foundational thing. We’re designed to move regularly, not just have a big surge of it and then sit at a desk for hours. Our species traditionally has moved somewhere between, depending on what you look at, 15,000 to 20,000 plus steps a day. Now, the average American’s getting 3,000 steps a day. And I’d start small. So if people are listening to this, if you’re at 3,000, no judgment, but I’d go for 3,000 to 5,000 and then start winning with that. And then go to 6,000. Start winning with that. And then on my Oura Ring, my minimum that I put is 7,500. That’s just what I try to hit. That’s it.

Amy: Okay. Well, so what’s fascinating as I’m listening to you is when I’m in the farm stand, we have cement floors in the farm stand, right? I’m on my feet for five hours. I’m often carrying our 10-pound dog in my backpack because she’s now a solo. So I feel like I’m building my bone mass, and I don’t have sore feet or a sore back. But then I sit down at my computer for two or three hours to work on podcasts, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m so stiff when I get up.”

Dr. Matt: Exactly. I can relate. I do a lot on my computer and from home. That’s where I’m at right now, and I’ll feel it also. And they say motion is lotion, so it’s an easy thing to help your joints feel good, but also it’s your nutrition. It’s your blood supply to your brain through movement, and that’s what we’re designed for, to move. And when we don’t get enough, we start to impede or slow our healing, and we start to create more of, again, this stressed state. And we think of stress to the system as just like emotion. It is so much more than that. This physiologic stress is when we don’t get the conditions we’re designed to get. It puts us more in this stressed state. So the first way to start is sleep and then steps.

And I’d say the third one, to kinda tie it all together, is to reduce stress, and it’s probably the hardest for people. So I’ve found, and for myself included, and I did something fun in my office. I created a fake prescription pad. As chiropractors, we don’t write prescriptions, so I created this fake prescription pad with branding and made it all official on there.

Amy: Oh, nice.

Dr. Matt: And the prescription is to put someone in time out. And I made it really funny where it’s just, you cancel all your meetings, you sit in a room, and you just breathe and enjoy life. And then the side effects that I put on there: reduced eye twitching, less muscle tension and tightness.

Amy: Oh, interesting.

Dr. Matt: And so I’d say finding downtime. I’ve seen people tend to be so scheduled, myself included. That’s my favorite way to insult my nervous system, overscheduled, overstimulated. On my phone, I just bought one of those things, actually, that puts it in jail at night, because the notifications are always going off.

Amy: Oh, not the Faraday box, but just putting it on sleep so it doesn’t disturb you.

Dr. Matt: Like a Brick, I think it’s called.

Amy: Say it again.

Dr. Matt: It’s called a Brick. And I just bought it, so I haven’t really tested it yet. And it locks your phone. You cannot use anything on your phone except the app that you say. So my alarm is the only app that I’m gonna let through. So when I lock it, and I have it next to me, nothing gets through, and I can’t look at anything on the phone unless I go to my fridge physically and unlock it with that.

Amy: Wow. I mean, one of the suggestions I have heard, and I have not used for a specific reason, is turning your Wi-Fi off at night.

Dr. Matt: There you go.

Amy: Right, and for me it is purely because my daughter had a health crisis 11 years ago, and so I just feel like I always need to be reachable. But I try to keep my phone away from the bed, and I don’t check it much. I actually have it go on, it’s not silent mode, but it’s like a sleep mode so that you can set it from a certain time to another, like 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM or 7:00 AM, whatever you want. You can set it so that you don’t get the sound of the notifications.

Dr. Matt: Exactly, yeah. Like a do not disturb.

Amy: Which is helpful. Trying to manage stress by putting yourself in time out and actually getting downtime.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, scheduling in downtime even, for some people, has been helpful.

Amy: Scheduling it, yes.

Dr. Matt: Put it on your calendar to put yourself in time out, and I think that’s helpful just to break the cycle of always being on and always being so stimulated, especially for people that live in the city. That’s one of my favorite things.

Amy: Which I did when I grew up, and it was totally not my kind of scene. I like the rural, pastoral land that I live on now.

Dr. Matt: All of this that we’re talking about, it’s all in, so I wrote a book. It’s called Stepping Out of the Grave: How to Heal When You’re Tired of Trying.

Amy: Powerful title.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, and it’s a play on words, too. It was reverse Graves’ for me, but I think so many people relate because what they’re walking through right now feels like they’re stepping out of a grave. And what this whole conversation was about is in that book, not only the tactics and the tactical things, which is what people want. But I’d say more importantly, the strategy is probably what they need more than anything. And it’s where we tend to go wrong, or why some of the things they’ve tried haven’t worked.

And one of the bonuses I even have right now, if you get on my wait list for the book, it’s out in January, but it’s a guide that I created, and it’s how to reduce your supplements by half, essentially. And I use a strategy that I’ve used with people. I talk about that continuous glucose monitor. And so many people just from this one thing have been able to come off half their supplements as their body starts to function the way it’s designed to. So we start with one of the four levers just to let people experience right now the impact of the human design and how your body’s supposed to function.

Amy: That’s interesting. As you’re talking supplements, my mind immediately goes to pharmaceuticals, and hearing that something like the average adult person is on six to seven different pharmaceuticals. Which thankfully I am not on any, but that’s another place I think if people can get themselves into a much healthier state, maybe they’re gonna be able to get off some of those medications that are treating symptoms, as opposed to what they really could be looking at, which is what’s causing all the problems.

Dr. Matt: For sure. Well, our focus is on managing symptoms, and we just swap the labels of the drugs for the supplements. They all do something. And we forget that we’re altering the whole body when we put that in. We’re not just changing the one potentially desired effect that we’re trying to create.

Amy: Yeah. Wow. So Matt, where can people reach you?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. drmattdelgado.com/book is where you can get on the wait list for the book and get the free book bonus, the guide that I just talked about. My whole thing is I’m trying to help people gain agency and get away from the system, even to zoom out. This is where pattern recognition is huge, and it’s what the good providers do. They recognize patterns and they help people timeline things, and they help people ask better questions. What is this doing for you? And again, most of the supplements I think that people are on, I’ve seen them be really marginally helpful. Some of them are profound and amazing. And I’m not against supplements. I’ll use them too. I have one right now, but that’s it.

Amy: Wow. Good conversation. Thank you.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, absolutely.

Amy: All right.