What Is Your Body Telling You?

Dr. Matt (cold open): We’re one of the sickest countries in the world. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, gut issues, anxiety, depression. 60% of our country has at least one chronic disease. We’re great at fast death. We suck at slow death. Most people cannot fall asleep or stay asleep.

Kassidy (cold open): Just don’t scroll. Read before bed. You will fall asleep and you will sleep hard. If you want change, you have to change. How does someone start paying attention to their body?

Dr. Matt (cold open): Four key ingredients. We call them the Core Four. Sleep, stress, and then…

Kassidy: All right, what’s up everybody? Welcome back to the show. This is For Your Own Good. I’m Kassidy Warren, and I’m sitting here with Dr. Matt Delgado. We’re in Austin, Texas, and you’re a neuro-based chiropractor, and you help people unlock their body’s intelligence, right?

Dr. Matt: Yeah.

Kassidy: Really excited to talk to you. We’re also both coffee nerds, which I appreciate. I’m originally from the Seattle area up north, so I think that might be where I get it from.

Dr. Matt: I think the coffee culture in Seattle is because it gets so cold, and we just need something to open our eyes a little bit.

Kassidy: And there’s no sun for a month at a time sometimes. The gray is real, and that’s also why my wife and I are spending more time down in Arizona. Well, let’s jump right in. I wanted to ask about how chasing success can impact your health, or my health, anyone’s health. How does chasing success impact health?

Dr. Matt: I’ll try to give the shortest answer I can for that. I think the best way to answer it is with my own personal story, taking us back about eight years ago, right out of chiropractic school. For people that don’t know, chiropractic is a doctorate level program, so it’s a similar number of hours to medical school. It’s really intensive. And the irony there is it’s one of the most unhealthy things you can go through to become a health professional. Long nights, long days. And after school I stepped into a 75-hour workweek job thinking, oh, I got this, that’s fine. I was really inspired by the work that this clinic was doing. Actually moved to Omaha, Nebraska, of all places.

Kassidy: As part of the post-graduate work?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I was really inspired by the work this clinic was doing. They were helping a ton of people, and I really resonated with the way they were helping people through the type of chiropractic they were doing. And I overlooked the personal side of it, which was really taking care of my own health and what my life would be like outside of the 75-hour workweek, which is not much. Not much time for literally anything.

So fast-forward three months later, I got really sick. I had an autoimmune diagnosis, Graves’ Disease. For people that don’t know what that is, it’s an autoimmune thyroid condition, where your body essentially is attacking itself. And the symptoms I was experiencing at the time, I think the one that freaked me out the most was hair loss. That’s not even one that typically goes with this diagnosis, but I remember showering one time and my palm was covered in hair, and I remember calling my mom in tears.

Kassidy: So concerned.

Dr. Matt: And my energy levels were nonexistent. I felt like I was having to drink four cups of coffee throughout the day just to feel somewhat, not even close to normal, but somewhat normal. I was having severe gut pain. And my clinical brain started going off, trying to figure out all these different things and thinking of them as such separate things. I couldn’t figure it out. I ended up going to a local functional medicine doctor there in Nebraska, and it kind of fell apart pretty quick after that. My body started screaming at me, and it became more and more clear that I could no longer do what I was doing.

Kassidy: And how old were you?

Dr. Matt: 27.

Kassidy: So you’re 27, your hair was falling out, your stomach was in knots or constant pain, and you couldn’t stay awake, or it was hard to function throughout the day. And so then you mentioned your clinical brain was thinking of ways… I didn’t understand what that term meant until I started reading more about the health industry and all that. So what does that mean, your clinical brain, versus going to the functional medicine?

Dr. Matt: What I meant by that was I started thinking, well, what’s wrong with me? Back to the textbooks in school. What’s wrong? And I chose to go to a functional medicine doctor, which is more around basing health on the way we function optimally. I think traditional Western medicine is more from a disease lens. They give you a diagnosis. The diagnosis tells us what, but it doesn’t tell us why. And the diagnosis can be a helpful place to start. I’m not saying it’s not important. But if we just look at the what, it’s like, okay, there are these alarms going off in the body, but why are they going off?

And for me it was pretty obvious, having been through the training I’d gone through, more of a holistic approach, that it was my lifestyle and my stress levels and lack of sleep. I mean, I think honestly I was sleeping probably four or five hours a night for a period of… God, I was sleeping under seven hours for a period of a year.

Kassidy: Really?

Dr. Matt: And I think just the combination of the stress levels and the sleep alone, and then the work hard, play hard. That was such a thing in school too. We would study so hard, then we’d go out and have a bunch of drinks and celebrate, and it just perpetuates the cycle.

Kassidy: So when did you get, or how did you get diagnosed with Graves’ Disease?

Dr. Matt: Through the doctor that I was seeing there locally, and I actually didn’t even hear my diagnosis until after I had quit. I just knew that my body was screaming at me so loudly that I could not do it anymore. So I remember calling my boss at the time and telling him, and I felt like such a quitter, such a failure at the time. I’ve never quit anything. I grew up playing sports. And I just said enough was enough. And I ended up, we were just talking about the desert off camera, I moved out to the desert, to New Mexico. Mesilla.

Kassidy: Okay.

Dr. Matt: Just outside of Las Cruces.

Kassidy: Love, love Las Cruces.

Dr. Matt: Yep. I spent just under a year letting myself be bored and learning the basics again, learning how to basically sleep. I slept a stupid amount during that year, making up for lost time, I guess. Honestly, some days I would sleep 15 hours in a day, between all the naps and everything I was doing. And just ate real food and went for walks. I ended up working at a restaurant in Las Cruces part-time, waiting tables 20 hours a week.

Kassidy: So you just stopped doing anything. And you just were.

Dr. Matt: Yes.

Kassidy: You just were. How did you do that? Because I think to go into chiropractic, to get any doctorate degree, is high performance, like intense. The type of people that go do that, entrepreneurs, investors, people that are trying to go make something of their lives, they kind of live that life of go, go, go. And the idea of stopping is more of a mental exercise than a physical one, I think, right? So how did you do that?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, bingo. Good question. My mom at the time was a huge factor in that. I’d get “Matthew” when I’d get in trouble, and she’d change her tone, and it was, “Matthew, if you don’t slow down, I’m gonna come down there myself.” And I’m stubborn, probably like a lot of others.

And now, fast-forward, through my career I’ve been so fortunate to have worked with some of the highest level professionals in athletics and in the performance scene and business. And you’re spot on. When someone has an injury, or when they’re forced to sit out for a season, it can feel like torture. Literal torture. And I’d say for me, that is how it felt. But it took a huge reframe.

And I failed many times at rebuilding the building blocks. I would go a month with my good habits, and then I thought, oh, I’m fine. And I’d go out and have two beers with friends, and I would feel like I was right back at the beginning. And that happened probably three times. And then I finally said, okay, I’m done. Once I gave myself even a longer window, I said, I’m gonna give myself a year. I’m not gonna drink. That was the hardest thing as a 27-year-old. I’m not gonna drink for a year. I’m gonna commit to eating a certain way. I’m gonna commit to sleep.

And I literally had to change who I was. I’d just moved to Austin after about eight months of doing that, so it was rebuilding a new friend group that had different values. The people I was hanging out with, those relationships naturally changed. I’m still friends with some people from earlier, but my friend group is very different now. Our values are more based on health. I can call them at 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning to go for a walk, versus 11:00 at night to go out to a bar.

Kassidy: If you want change, you have to change. That’s what change looks like. Changing who you are, not who you are fundamentally, but the things that you do, the way that you think, how you act, and the people that you surround yourself with. And that means relationships change, conversations change, where you go, how much you sleep, all that changes. But you learned that at 27, and so you stopped drinking for a year. Are you still not drinking?

Dr. Matt: I drink now, and I love to toe the line. My entire life I’ve toed the line, because I’m just as human as anyone else. And through college, it was a very PNW thing too, I made beer.

Kassidy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Matt: I love beer. I don’t do gluten anymore, so there’s a… Actually, just down the street here, I have to try Lazarus, because there are a lot of breweries in town that remove the gluten through an enzyme. I love the finer things. I worked in the restaurant industry and have a love for hospitality, good food and good drinks, cocktails. There are some really incredible bars that have such an artful way of making drinks. And wine from the Northwest. I love those things. So it comes in phases, but I probably have max a couple drinks a week. And then I might not drink anything for a month.

Kassidy: I think you’re lucky, because what you described… I’m eight years sober coming up in March, and actually when this episode comes out it might be around that time. But your description of, oh, I built good habits for a month and then I went out, that’s very common for people that are quitting or have tried to quit alcohol. They’re rewarding themselves. Their brain tricks them into saying, oh, you’ve done a good job, you can go reward yourself with a drink and you’re gonna be fine. But ultimately for me it was, I just have to cut it all out. It was easier for me to completely cut it out. And I’m really fortunate.

Now I do NAs. I didn’t even drink NAs for a long time, non-alcoholic beers. I just completely stayed away from it. And then I was with somebody that had one, and I was like, oh yeah, maybe I will try one. And then from there I was like, oh, I really enjoy this, actually. I was worried about it maybe sending me down a path of wanting to keep drinking.

Dr. Matt: I can totally get that. And after about a year and a half of good habits, I had a remission status with my autoimmune diagnosis, and I got really overly concerned with my choices, in a good way. I had a huge fear of what it would be like to go back to where I was. I didn’t really start to even introduce things like sugar. And I don’t eat refined sugar right now. I still don’t. But natural sugar, which does the same thing to our glucose levels underneath the surface, I’d rather have honey or maple syrup.

Kassidy: Yes, yeah.

Dr. Matt: There’s a $9 chocolate cake in town that I love. But now I will do those things, and my addiction is caffeine, so I’ve got to play with that drug and not abuse it.

Kassidy: Yeah, you and I are on the same page on that one.

Dr. Matt: And I’m never gonna give it up. But then I say never, and it’s like, well, maybe I should try it for a little bit at least.

Kassidy: I’m big into doing things that are the opposite. If you say something like, I am never gonna do that, you should probably go try to do that, right? Because there’s something in your mindset when you say I’ll never do that. That means you should absolutely go try it.

Dr. Matt: I fast from it every year.

Kassidy: From caffeine? Oh, good. Maybe I’ll try that.

Dr. Matt: Sucks, but I recommend it.

Kassidy: So you say something I’ve read in some of your posts and other things you’ve put online. You want to redefine what it really means to be healthy. What does that mean to you, and how can I understand that?

Dr. Matt: Good question, because it’s a buzzword that a lot of people throw around, so let’s get buzzy with it. I’m writing a book right now, and the subheading is really the story: burnout, autoimmunity, and the illusion of health. I think that phrase right there, the illusion of health, we can use to answer this.

Our idea of health is typically what we look like or what we feel like on the exterior surface. And if you were to look back at me at 27 years old, I looked good. I was fit. I appeared really healthy, and this is the perfect example of the illusion of health. But then underneath the surface, I was screaming and miserable.

And this is what my practice really has turned into. People will come in, young people, we take care of a lot of young professionals at my office that are about our age, and they’re seemingly very healthy on the outside. Austin especially is such a fit city. People look so good. And then they start talking, and you realize, oh, shoot. The women coming in haven’t had a menstrual cycle for years, sometimes five years. Or they have severe gut issues, anxiety, depression. These things are common. They’re not normal. There’s nothing normal about any of those things.

Or headaches. Headaches are super common. People will say, oh yeah, I get headaches, but just the normal amount, or it’s just dehydration. Or pain even. Pain is purely an alarm system. It’s a really intelligent response, and it’s just alerting us there’s something going on underneath the surface. Our body whispers to us in these ways. It gives us these little signals, and then eventually, if we ignore them long enough, screams, just like mine did years ago.

And sleep, we’re completely sleep deprived. Ask your friends, anyone listening to this too, ask your friends. This is the easiest to see. They’re most likely medicating with something. Melatonin, which isn’t actually effective to induce sleep unless you’re changing time zones. It’s not the greatest thing. Or some kind of CBD or THC gummy. Most people cannot fall asleep or stay asleep.

Kassidy: I’ve found, just anecdotally talking to people, that people take gummies or have a glass of wine and they say it helps them fall asleep. When I was drinking and taking gummies, I will tell you that I would wake up in the middle of the night, and when I would wake up I would still feel hungover, whether it was on a gummy or not. Maybe less so if I had a gummy. I think the best sleep I’ve ever gotten has been when I just cut out all vices. When I got rid of everything and I stopped making excuses.

But what I really think is going on, because this was what I was afflicted with, was the anxiety of life and the rumination inside our heads. When people say, I need to shut the switch off, I need to turn my brain off, that’s anxiety of everything going on in your life and being too busy and not paying attention to what your body’s telling you.

And it’s funny you said Austin is a fit city. There was a bunch of marathoners running around today when I was going to get coffee. But I almost think of what you’re describing, where these fit people come in and they have these ailments, as almost like functioning alcoholism.

Dr. Matt: Totally.

Kassidy: Right? Where it’s like, oh yeah, I drink, but I go to work, I get this done, I’m doing all these things, my kids love me, all that. And so with health, if I’m running a bunch of miles, if I’m lifting a bunch of weight, if my muscles look good, then I’m healthy.

Dr. Matt: Yep, exactly.

Kassidy: When deep down, underneath, your body’s telling you something different.

Dr. Matt: Totally, and it’s a relative term. We’re one of the sickest countries in the world. Peter Attia, he lives here in Austin actually, uses a great phrase in his book Outlive. Highly recommend that book too. That we’re great at fast death, we suck at slow death. And what he means by that is we’re one of the best countries in the world. There’s no better place to be for emergency medicine. If you break your arm, you want to be in the United States. But once that fracture is healed and now we’re looking at metabolic dysfunction, which most of our country has, 90% of our country has insulin resistance, even if we appear healthy, we’re one of the worst countries to be in. 60% of our country has at least one chronic disease.

Kassidy: Yeah. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer.

Dr. Matt: So the relativity. We’re just not that bad, because the person next to us has three named conditions or diseases. So it’s normal. It’s not that bad. And the way we’re handling it is so reactive, and in such a broken system. If we’re using insurance for our health, I don’t think there’s a way to really… because it has nothing to do with health optimization. It’s symptom management.

I wore the shirt on purpose today. It says, “Real doctors prescribe lifestyle changes to restore health,” over the top of, “Real doctors prescribe drugs to manage symptoms.” And until we break free from that… So when you ask about redefining health, it’s this shirt right here, and it’s foundational lifestyle habits, and people aren’t teaching those anymore.

And these foundational lifestyle habits, there’s a concept that a guy named B.J. Palmer talked about. He was a developer of chiropractic in the 1920s, and he was talking about this. And it’s true today more than any other time. An idea of a health bank. Depositing money, and this is good for probably people listening to this who talk about money. We’re concerned about the pennies, putting pennies back into our health bank. We’re all arguing over the stupid shit. I don’t know if I can say that on here.

Kassidy: No, you can.

Dr. Matt: Pennies when it comes to supplements. I’m not against supplements, let me finish. But also, on podcasts or on Instagram, you’ll see touching receipt paper being toxic.

Kassidy: I saw that. Oh, I don’t get that.

Dr. Matt: And they’re not wrong, there are all these chemicals in things. They’re not wrong. But those are pennies, and we are so distracted by these pennies while we forget to look at the fact that we’re being robbed of dollars from our lifestyle habits.

And these four key ingredients, we call them the Core Four in my office, are really the key to health, and they’ll never change. They will never change. It’s sleep, stress, toxins, and I’d say in the form of biochemistry, like I’m usually wearing a continuous glucose monitor to track how my food is affecting my glucose. And then the last one’s movement.

Kassidy: Let’s hear those again. The Core Four.

Dr. Matt: Yep. Sleep, stress, and I’d say those two are at the top for sure, and then movement and toxins. And if we can control those four things, then that’s 90% of health right there. And that’s what I did really to overcome an autoimmune diagnosis and get my health back. I couldn’t put words to it at the time, but that’s exactly what I did. I controlled those four elements. I moved to the desert.

And you put it on repeat long enough, the body is so incredibly intelligent. We are designed to heal, and we’ve somehow forgotten this. We remember for a plant. If a plant is sick, the first thing we think of is water and sunlight. But for us as humans, we have totally lost the connection to that power within all of us. When we’re not well, that same water and that same sunlight is designed to bring us back to life. And those four key ingredients, you put those things on repeat, and now I get to help people overcome the same things that I went through, and it is freaking incredible to see on repeat, miracle after miracle, when people are committed to those.

We talk about balancing the nervous system in my office. That’s how we do it on our own. And I’m going to go as far as saying, if you’re seeing a chiropractor for pain, great. I did. For years I was in a model of more pain management and symptom management. You can completely get out of pain and never need your pain-based chiropractor again, even if you commit to two of those. Sleep minimum seven hours a night, and steps. If you get at least 7,500 steps in a day, you put that on repeat for a month, your pain will most likely go away completely.

Kassidy: I want to hit on a couple things. I love everything that you just hit on, because you talk about the pennies. I haven’t been able to put it into those words, but I hear people talk about things like seed oils. You mentioned the receipt paper. I can’t even name all the things that people get from social media, the internet. Even people that say, oh, I need my protein, but they’ve got diabetes, they’re extremely obese, they don’t move. It’s like, do not worry about any of that stuff. Do not pay attention to seed oils, even the gluten stuff, unless you really do have celiac.

Anything that is this lower level, before you take care of movement and diet and sleep, just do that. Just eat whole foods in normal quantities. Go do some level of exercising, whether it’s walking or lifting weights or whatever you can do, and then get a lot of sleep. And then once you get down to a healthy level and your ailments start to disappear, then you can start to refine among these penny-type things.

But think of it like a funnel. Most of us don’t realize how far away from our health we’ve gotten. Even when I restarted my fitness journey just months ago, I couldn’t believe how far away I was. And I was more fit than most, way more fit than most. But I was like, whoa, I am really far off. And I really started doubling down and saying, okay, I need to ignore what I used to believe about this stuff, because I didn’t realize how far away from it I was, and I need to go in with the people that are smarter than me and just do what they tell me to do.

So the other piece was around the pain. I know the hard part for people in restarting their life around fitness or getting well is they have ailments, they have pains. Maybe they’re going to a chiropractor, maybe they’re doing nothing, maybe they’re doing something else. But a lot of people don’t start because they have pain, and so they’re afraid to use their limbs and their joints.

I had a great friend who ended up joining the fitness program that I’m in, and I didn’t realize this. He told me this after. He was asking me a bunch of questions ahead of time, because he was kind of trying to get out of, like, do I actually have to do everything the program does? Eating whole foods and lifting weights and all that. And I’m like, yeah, man, you kind of just gotta go in and do it. But he told me after, what it was was he’d had a ton of back pain for years, like actual pain, and so he was really nervous about going and lifting weights. And now, even after doing the program for like six weeks, a couple months, he says his back feels better than it ever has because of him taking care of himself.

Dr. Matt: I love that. I think a reframe for people: we forgot what pain is. We forgot what symptoms are. I just had a fever like five days ago. I didn’t take any fever reducers, because I know the design of the fever is intelligent. It is my body’s fastest way to heal. Suppressing that fever will slow my healing. It’ll take me longer to heal, but I will feel better temporarily. That’s the trade-off. There’s always a trade-off when we take that.

And with pain, pain is the alarm system. It does not tell us where the fire is or how big the fire is. And I get it, the alarm is freaking annoying. If we burn something in the kitchen, the smoke alarm’s going off. My first thing is to turn the damn alarm off, because it’s annoying. I might wave a towel at it. I might take the batteries out of it. But then if I do that, I think, okay, the problem’s fixed. Well, what if there’s still a fire?

And that’s what we’re doing. We are so infatuated with this loud alarm that we forget to even look for the fire. And as soon as we turn the alarm off, we’re done, we fixed it. Which is so stupid, because this fire keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the alarm keeps coming on, and we can’t figure out why does this alarm keep going off. There’s a fire. We’ve got to look for the fire.

Kassidy: So you said one time, “I see the body as an interconnected whole with the nervous system as the star of the show.” How does that relate to what you’re talking about?

Dr. Matt: The nervous system’s like the conductor of the symphony. It’s controlling everything underneath the surface, and the four key ingredients I just mentioned as foundational are really tied back to the nervous system. Everything we experience in life happens through the nervous system. From moving, to the autonomic nervous system underneath the surface, to the detection of a threat. Everything that we need in life happens through this system.

But we’re so resilient. This is the good news. It’s a blessing and a curse of being so resilient. You mentioned your own reintroduction to your fitness journey. I’m interested to hear if you thought that you were healthy even at that time. My guess, from working with thousands of people, would be yes. It’s a relative thing, and we get used to our new baseline of where we are. We get so used to it, and we can reach for a cup of coffee so easily to mask the feeling of being tired. It doesn’t give us any energy. Caffeine gives us zero energy. It just blocks adenosine, which is the hormone that alerts our brain that we’re tired. So we have so many substances to block the feeling of being tired, or to induce the feeling of being tired. We were talking about the sleep aids that everyone’s using.

So this nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord, when we really focus on optimizing the health of that system, it’s going to translate to things like better movement, better cognitive function, better digestion. When you think of all these different symptoms I mentioned earlier, anxiety, depression, digestive issues, pain, trouble moving, those things are all related to an unhealthy or an imbalanced nervous system. And it’s hard to pinpoint, because it’s the slow burn.

In my office, we have a picture in all of our adjusting rooms of the straw that broke the camel’s back. For 95% of people that come in, it’s not one big event. And same with my own story, it was the little things. Our health bank being robbed little by little for a period of years, and then we wake up one day and we’re like, oh, my neck hurts. I can’t turn my neck. It must be my pillow. But it has nothing to do with me sitting at a desk for the last ten years, being overly stressed and sleeping less than seven hours per night over the last decade. It couldn’t be that. It’s gotta be the pillow and the mattress.

Kassidy: How does someone start paying attention to their body?

Dr. Matt: Data is my favorite thing. I think it’s the bridge between how we feel and how we function, because we’re so adaptable. We’re going to feel good even when we have shit going on underneath the surface. So if we’re purely relying on how we feel, we have blind spots with our own health always. Our own biases. We’ll tell everyone, I’m doing all these things right, I gotta be healthy, I’m staying away from seed oils, I’m not touching receipt paper, I’m healthy.

So I think if we track. And my favorite way to explain this is coffee. I promise it’s related. You’re a coffee nerd yourself, and you make espresso, and I’m curious, do you use a scale?

Kassidy: I do use a scale.

Dr. Matt: Why?

Kassidy: Because I want to make sure that what I’m putting in is accurate and what I’m getting out is what I expected.

Dr. Matt: Without that scale, how good do you think your espresso would be?

Kassidy: It would be very irregular and unpredictable. It might be good sometimes, but probably most of the time it’s not gonna be as good.

Dr. Matt: Beautiful. Yep. And there’s a sweet spot, for people listening to this that don’t know coffee. There’s a sweet spot when we talk about espresso. If coffee’s under extracted, it’s gonna be sour, and this could be two seconds. If it comes out two seconds too quick, it’s sour, and then two seconds too long, it’s bitter. But that sweet spot is where the symphony goes off in your mouth. When you take the first sip and you’re like, this is incredible.

And when you can control those elements, there are elements in coffee like the grind size, the yield, the pressure.

Kassidy: Water.

Dr. Matt: Pressure, water temperature. Exactly. So there are gauges to measure all that. And then the scale is the last little bit. You can buy a $50 scale, and that is going to make sure your coffee is perfect. And in our health, it’s really the same way underneath the surface, to measure these four things. I’ve got that for less than $200. I’m wearing an Oura ring right now. That’s one way, but you can buy the knockoffs. The knockoffs work. I’ve tested them. I’ve tried the Chinese ones. They work just as well.

And with it we can measure steps and sleep and HRV, which is stress. So there are three of my four ingredients that I’ve got from this one ring. And then I’m not wearing one today, but a continuous glucose monitor. And for anyone who’s arguing around diet, or which diet is the best, just put one of those on and you’ll have no doubt if what you’re doing is good for your body or not good for your body.

Kassidy: What happens when people get too focused on the data though? Is there a danger in using too much data versus feeling your body, or a combination of both?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a sweet spot to it also. I think to simplify health is really important, and we tend to overdo it with so many things. So I’ve brought it back to four. And I think some of us at times, if we’re going through a challenging time especially, the data can make it harder to even see where we are, and that’s where working with a professional can be really helpful.

And the first thing in the sequence we help people with usually is sleep. I’d argue that’s the most important when it comes to our health, especially of our brain and our nervous system, which controls everything. So helping someone get back to seven hours of sleep per night, and a lot of times it’s reducing caffeine and increasing their movement, steps per day. And we start with one thing. That’s it.

I had a phone consultation recently with a person that flew in to Austin to see me that was trying to figure out all these health things. I call it the specialist shuffle, when they’re seeing all these different specialists and no one can figure it out. And usually by the time they fly in, they’ve spent at least 50 grand, and they’ve spent years trying to figure out their health concerns. This person flew in, I gave them a plan, sent them back home to find a nervous system-focused chiropractor, and gave some lifestyle recommendations too.

A couple months into this person’s plan, there were some things that were slightly going off, and I saw through an email that they sent me, okay, there’s room for a little bit of an audit. So I get on a phone call with this person, and my new chiropractor that I had just hired was sitting in the back room with me, and I put it on speakerphone so she could hear. And she was amazed at how simple my advice was to this individual. Sleep more, move more. It was that simple.

Kassidy: Yeah. And you said something. You said, do one thing. And this is what I tell people trying to do anything in their life. Whether you’re trying to get healthier, you’re trying to change something, you’re trying to make more money, you’re starting a new business, you’re trying to change your habits, pick one thing and do that for 30, 60, 90 days, six months. Do one thing so consistently, because that builds your confidence, it builds your habits. You can see the change that that one change made, and then you can start to introduce additional changes. But until you get good at doing one thing, it’s gonna be hard to do two, three, four, five things differently.

So with the sleep, you don’t know this about me, but that was one of the biggest things, and it was coupled with the movement and working out, because those go hand in hand, I think. If you move more and you work out more, without killing yourself and overdoing it, your sleep should get better. That’s what I’ve found.

Dr. Matt: Well, and growth hormone, there’s a connection there. Growth hormone is so tied to deep sleep especially, and we induce that through exercise.

Kassidy: Okay, I didn’t know that.

Dr. Matt: They’re totally connected.

Kassidy: There you go. So if you do two things, do some working out and sleeping. But what I did to improve my sleep, because I think scrolling is a bad habit for people. Whenever I talk about my sleep, this is what comes up. Oh, well, I scroll too much before bed, da da da. I have my phone automatically at 8:00 every night go to a fully gray screen. Fully gray screen. I don’t choose it, it chooses me, and it’s almost painful to look at. And so it removes all the blue light, not just the blue light though, all color, all dopamine. You try to go scroll with a gray screen, you’re like, what is this? It looks and feels totally different.

So that was probably the biggest change, and whenever people see my gray screen, they get freaked out. They’re like, what is that? I’m like, this is how I changed my life, through better sleep. And then the other thing is, just don’t scroll. Read before bed. If you turn your screen gray and read before bed, you will fall asleep and you will sleep hard, guaranteed.

Dr. Matt: I agree, and I make it even easier for people. We’ve found that if we’re in an active pursuit of something on a screen, like video games or scrolling on social media, if we’re actively using a screen, then it significantly alters our ability to get into a sleep state. Passively on a screen, it’s not as hard. So if we’re watching TV. I’d say slowly move for people at home, even just going from using your phone to watching TV. Using the screen is not the end of the world. Just watch a movie or something. I say don’t watch the news and don’t watch an action movie. You don’t want to put your body into that sympathetic fight or flight state. But that’s what social media does to us also, it puts us in that state. So it’s more so protecting ourselves to not get into that state.

Kassidy: I actually rarely watch even action movies these days. I don’t want that in my brain. You realize, whoa, it gets you in an altered state. And I mean, I can come down out of that, but I choose not to do that right before bed.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, exactly.

Kassidy: And so speaking of technology, you said that tech neck, or text neck, describes the effects on the neck and spine from prolonged use of devices. It’s a modern issue that we need to address. Are you seeing people come in with spinal issues because of technology?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. And more so I’d say it’s what it does to our lack of movement. So when we can measure it, we can manage it. If you’re wearing something to track movement, I think that’s the most important thing. But yes, this tech neck term describes the effects of everyone and their mother having neck pain now because we’re not moving. And when you think of the body alerting us, that’s how it’s doing it, with these tight muscles and pain. It’s just letting us know, hey, move more. And again, I think our pain will completely go away if we walk at least 7,500 steps in a day. I’d say really 10,000 is ideal. And if we’re sleeping better.

But these postural issues we’re seeing, that’s a deeper story when we look at it. So in my office, we’ll measure the nervous system with a lot deeper view. Not just the daily wearable, but we use INSiGHT nervous system scans to measure three different things. Heart rate variability, I won’t get too nerdy with people, and paraspinal thermography, which is the autonomic nervous system function. And surface EMG, and what that’s looking at is the neuromuscular signal. So how much nerve signal is getting to the postural muscles along our spine. And posture is controlled through these small postural muscles. It’s not a conscious thing. Someone can smack you and say, hey, sit up straight. You can for a period of time, but if your body doesn’t have access to that, then you can only be so good posturally.

And through years of sitting and a lot of other habits outside of that, stress, lack of sleep, what we’ll see oftentimes when we measure this in people is a completely exhausted nervous system state. And an exhausted state takes a long time to get into, and it takes a long time to break out of. And when we’re in that state, it severely alters our energy, for one thing, but also our muscles throughout our body. We develop compensatory movement patterns, tight everything, altered movement patterns, limited mobility.

But posture has a huge influence on metabolic function, you can say. We use a lot of energy to combat gravity. About 80% of our brain’s resources are used to combat the forces of gravity. And when we have poor postural muscle tone, our body’s not efficient in energy utilization. So think of money again as an easy way to talk about this. Our body’s having to spend way extra on posture, and it’s robbing from other areas. So this is why we’re seeing a lot of systems disruptions through hormone imbalance and digestive issues and all these other things. It’s an energy crisis. The technical term is dyskinesis, if people want to look it up. It’s an energy crisis with our nervous system, where we’re having to spend way too much on posture.

Kassidy: That’s a really great argument to make for just taking care of yourself, because we literally only have so much energy in our bodies, right? So you’re saying that 80% of our brain’s mental energy is spent combating gravity. And then on top of that, if we’re not functioning properly, let’s say we have posture issues or other things going on, more energy is spent just to combat and deal with that, so then our body cannot deal with our hormones or digestion or liver function or kidney function, brain function. So by having bad posture, it’s actually aiding in the biomechanical breakdown of our bodies?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, it is. And this is nothing new. 1980, 1981, I think, Dr. Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery that our brains are using so much power to keep us upright and combat gravity. And we see these things as such isolated problems, and that’s why we tend to go to all these different specialists and end up in a specialist shuffle, rather than seeing it as this interconnected system.

Kassidy: It’s really so interconnected, more than we think. And you’re not saying that if you have cancer, just sleep more and move more and that’s gonna cure your cancer. But what you are saying is that there are a lot of preventative things that we can do, and there are a lot of signals we can pay attention to, to prevent us from getting to that place.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. And I’d say if I had cancer, that is a damn good place to start, and that is actually personally for me right where I would start, those four foundational things.

Kassidy: With business, it’s easy to see these concepts. Even Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, ex-CEO of Amazon. One of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos was, instead of looking at what’s gonna change in business in the next 10 years, why not look at what’s not gonna change?

Dr. Matt: Which is the foundations. And anyone in business, it’s easy for us to follow the trends and even platforms or things that are working, but what will never change are the foundations. And when you listen to a genius man like Jeff Bezos, he makes it really clear for us.

Even looking at pro athletes that I’ve worked with for years, the way they train, 80% of their time is spent in Zone 2 heart rate, which is the foundational heart rate zone. 80% of their time is spent working on their foundational skills, and then they work on the little things more situationally for their sport above that.

Kassidy: I love that, because I think foundational stuff is what drives my habits daily. Feeding my body, feeding my mind, connecting with others, and then continuing to share everything that I’ve found successful. And we forget the foundations. And it goes back to focusing on pennies, right? Those are not the foundational elements that you need to be focusing on.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, the pennies, the seed oils.

Kassidy: Focus on the things that are gonna build you up.

Kassidy: There was something I wanted to ask about, and it relates to what we were talking about with the body kind of breaking down and your mind spending more energy. I saw a video of yours where you talked about, and I’m gonna mess up the pronunciation of this, I’m sure, proprioceptium.

Dr. Matt: Pretty good. Proprioception.

Kassidy: Proprioception. Okay. What is that, and why is it important? Because it freaks me out thinking about how our bodies can change.

Dr. Matt: Sure. I created a phrase around this recently, the domino effect. I started finding this in sports, in football, and then in basketball, and then I realized, oh, this is actually everywhere.

I just had a patient come in and see me this last week. If I have a new patient, mine are usually people no one can figure out, and they’ve been to a million other people. With the way our systems are set up, I’m only in the clinic about five hours a week clinically. So when I see a new patient, looking at their intake, I’m like, okay, they’ve been to a million other people, and they can’t figure it out.

There was someone recently that had a recurring foot injury and knee injury, and looking through the intake, all I had to see was that one thing at the very top. And I like to guess before I go through everything what it is, and my guess was that it was a concussion that somebody missed at some point. I get in with this new individual, turns out there was a concussion that somebody missed at some point. It was 20 years ago.

Head injury in particular is one of the biggest things that’s going to alter our communication from our brain to our body. And this fancy word proprioception really just refers to a kind of spatial awareness of where we are in space. So if I close my eyes and put my arm out all the way to the side, I know my hand is out here because there’s this talk going between my brain and my body, communicating to let me know exactly where it is. Same when I step off of a curb. I know exactly where to place my foot.

So when we have something like a head injury, or even a car accident, or the little lifestyle habits through time that build up, it’s going to alter this communication system from our brain to our body, including proprioception. And when we don’t have as good of awareness spatially, we’re more prone to injuries, especially extremity things. An ankle injury, a knee injury, a shoulder injury.

So this term domino effect is something I use to describe, you have typically a concussion or a car accident, and then you’re gonna see this person years later having recurring ankle injuries, recurring knee injuries, recurring shoulder injuries. I actually just wrote an article about this in a local magazine, Austin Fit Magazine. There’s a Texas women’s basketball player that we take care of, Rori Harmon is her name, and we just wrote an article about her case, and it was this same thing. And in sports, no one can figure it out, which blows my mind, because they have the best of the best looking at things, and they’re just missing that connection right there, the brain.

Kassidy: And so what I heard you say is essentially your mind-body connection is disrupted, and you have trouble placing your feet or your other limbs where they might need to go, which obviously can hurt performance, but it can also cause injuries.

Dr. Matt: Totally. It’s the difference sometimes of millimeters, or even an inch, two inches. And it might not sound like a lot, but in sports, that’s the difference between a catch on a football field, or a made basket for a basketball player, or the average individual playing rec sports, playing their pickleball match, the shot that’s in versus the shot that’s out.

Kassidy: Or whether you twist your knee or not, right? And cause injury.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. Because of the placement. And that’s the cause of so many injuries we see, even in rec sports or in someone at the gym. We tend to not see it far enough back. When we look at our injury, we think, well, I didn’t warm up enough before I did it, which is usually not the case. Or, I just didn’t stretch before I did this lift, and that’s why my shoulder is messed up. But it’s like, no, that’s not why. It was a concussion ten years ago. It was a car accident that you felt fine after ten years ago. But again, even if you feel fine, that doesn’t mean that you were functioning fine after that. In a car accident, five miles an hour is all it takes to create ligament damage in our spine and alter our neural pathways also.

Kassidy: That’s so interesting. And so you mentioned that you help athletes. I think I saw that you help Arch. Arch Manning. He did a video for you, and it looks like you help a lot of other local athletes too. How has that sort of come to be for you? How do people find out about you, or why are they drawn to you and want to work with you?

Dr. Matt: Good question. Years ago, it was really the foot that got my name in pro sports, and it was the NFL where I got my start. I’ve never been an official chiropractor for anybody, and I joke with them now saying I probably couldn’t, because now I know that they give a lot of Band-Aid recommendations for symptom management. I’d wear the shirt on day one and I’d get kicked out probably.

But it was through a lot of NFL guys. They were having foot problems, and they heard that I could do some things with their feet. The foot’s always been an emphasis of mine. I created a technique system, the TriChord Method. It looks at the nervous system first, but then extremities, largely the foot, and then the ligament system, which is highly affected through impact injuries, traumas, car accidents. A lot of us have some sort of ligament instability or hypermobility in areas, and we don’t even realize how it affects us. It could be limited motion in our neck, or feeling like we always have to pop our neck or our back, and that was me for years.

It took me years to make this system, but it was just an obsession. Just like with coffee, I had an obsession with figuring out different technique systems that I could pull from, and then I made my own. And I think through the years, these pros are looking for, like anyone else, they’re very human, and they’re just looking for an edge and for something that can keep them healthy. Because back to my own story, when you feel like you’re sidelined, it’s like your world is being taken from you. And they want to care for their body in this way.

I’ve gotten to see how dirty pro sports and even college sports are on the business side. I could never be a team doctor now, seeing it, because it’s all about the money. It’s a business, and they’re not advocating for their players so much. A lot of times the assistant coaches are the real stars, or they have really great people on staff. But these players many times… I’m not gonna say any names here, but years ago I remember a football guy, there are quite a few of them, and I think one had had six cortisone shots in one season. You’re not supposed to have more than one every six months.

And I asked, well, did they ever explain the implications of even having one? And he looked at me and he said no. I said, really? Well, let me teach you about it, because this is your body, and I’m not gonna tell you what to do, but you should make your choices from an informed place. I told him that after two or three of them, we start to usually see ligament laxity, ligament instability, this hypermobility or overstretched ligaments. So for example, if you put a cortisone shot in one shoulder, a lot of times what you’ll see is the other one will start hurting, because you’ll start to get these effects on the ligaments in the body. And they don’t explain that to them. There’s a cost to everything we do medically.

Kassidy: Well, and you see them bring out the blue tent and they go in there, and all I can imagine is they’re just shooting them up with something in there, right?

Dr. Matt: Oh man, I have stories I’ve never said publicly. I don’t care now, so I’ll give you another one too. On the field a lot of times, and I’m not gonna say what team, I’m not gonna say at what level, but in football they’ll ask them, do you feel like you can stay on the field? That’s the question they’re asking them.

I’ve seen people through the years with concussions, and I won’t formally diagnose a concussion, but I can touch at it in a way where there’s no doubt in my mind someone has one. And the team doctors won’t diagnose them with a concussion, because then they have to sit them out. They’ll delay imaging because they don’t want them to be diagnosed with a concussion. They’ll give them a simple survey. Are you feeling forgetful? Are you feeling disoriented? That’s it. And most concussions happen during practice, whether you’re talking about basketball, soccer, football. They happen during practice, and many of them are undiagnosed, and no one really realizes that they’re even taking place.

So the players have come to trust me over the years. I mean, you probably hear it in my voice. I give a shit about them. I’m advocating for them and I care about them as humans. I don’t care what they’re known for or who they are or their name, but I really give a crap about them and their health and who they are as people. And I get to know them on a personal level. My favorite players to work with have always been the best humans behind it all. And you mentioned Arch, he’s an incredible human. He and I like to wear free T-shirts, and Arch always comes in in a free T-shirt. So he’s become one of my favorites just for the human that he is.

Kassidy: He’s a great human. Incredible. Building trust with people, being someone that they can trust in a sea of people that are trying to capitalize off of their success or just use them as an asset to the team, I know how that can feel. It’s someone that gets them, that resonates with them, that wants to take care of them and help them. And I think we need more people like that in our lives outside of sports and football. You need someone in your life that is that person, that thread that you trust, that has your best interests at heart, that will tell you what you need to hear, but also wants to take care of you in that way.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. Or that’ll literally say, because there are times where I say, I’m not for you, or I don’t think I can help you, or I think your sequence is off, I think you need to see someone else before me, and I’ll make a recommendation. And we believe it takes a community for health. And I have my own team too, because I have my own biases for my own health, and I’m just as human as anyone else. But I think really a level of honesty where you can tell someone, you need to see this other person first, or I don’t think I’m the best fit for you, and just trying to help them. Go figure. Just help them. Just help them find what they’re looking for, and I might not be your person.

Kassidy: So you’re writing a book. What’s the name of the book?

Dr. Matt: Stepping Out of the Grave. Overcoming burnout, autoimmunity, and the illusion of health.

Kassidy: That’s a good title. Stepping Out of the Grave. Wow. Because you felt like you were in the grave. And diagnosed with Graves’ Disease.

Dr. Matt: With Graves’ Disease, yeah. One foot in the grave.

Kassidy: Is that written? Is it published? Is it coming out?

Dr. Matt: I just am finishing up the last chapters. I actually just wrote the chapter about the coffee stuff, comparing it to health.

Kassidy: Oh, so soon.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. It’s self-published. I gotta thank my mentor, Brian Eisenberg.

Kassidy: Big name in business.

Dr. Matt: He’s done a lot of things in conversion, SEO, New York Times bestselling author himself. He was the one that nudged me hard to tell this story, and helped me tell it in a way that it’s not too technical, that it’s more of the story than anything. And I think it’ll be really relatable to a lot of people if they’ve experienced any level of burnout or health challenges, or they’re just not sure where to start with their health in general.

Kassidy: How important was it for you to get a mentor, and how long has he been your mentor?

Dr. Matt: Very, very, very important. Seven years, since I started my practice. He was one of the first people I met. I actually saw on Instagram that he was connected with me. And at the time I had maybe 200, 300 followers. Not that that matters, but I wasn’t really using Instagram much. I would very lightly use it, and I’d see who would interact with me, and I’d use it as a tool to meet new friends and meet up with people in town.

And I saw this guy, clicked over to him, and I saw in his bio he was a New York Times bestselling author, and that got my attention. And I Googled him, and he’s got a long list of things that he’s done professionally. And I ended up reaching out to him, and we’re both baseball fans, so we went to a baseball game here in Austin, the Round Rock Express. And I ended up having my chiropractic table in my car, and I adjusted his son that night, maybe him too, I can’t remember, in the parking lot of the Round Rock Express game at about 9:00 p.m., wearing shorts and flip-flops and a T-shirt. And we’ve been friends ever since. We meet up for lunch. We go on walks.

And he’s really honestly inspired me with his own health journey, and it’s been really cool to now connect over that. I talk to him every day on the phone. He’s really taken control of his health and his life, and he was the one that got me on a continuous glucose monitor. I saw what it did for his life, and he lost 40 pounds, and this pain in his toe that was there for years completely went away, and all these other issues, in four months. So I started wearing one. It’s just been a really incredible friendship. But also I’ve learned a ton through business and in life also.

Kassidy: And he encouraged you to write the book. And this book would not be coming out if it weren’t for him. I think that’s really important for people out there to hear, that you need to have mentors that are gonna push you. And my mentor is all about telling stories, get your story out there because people need to hear it, and it’s selfish to keep it to yourself and not share who you are with the world. Especially if you’re doing good things and you have a good product or service. Or even if you’re not running a business, but you’re doing good in the world or want to do good in the world, it’s selfish to not share yourself in that way, and share your story, because there are millions or billions of people that need to hear it and could benefit from it, just from you being you and telling your story.

So Dr. Matt, this has been incredible, such an incredible conversation. I really think people are gonna take a lot away from this. The Core Four, if anything, the Core Four, and get better sleep and start moving some more. But where can people get ahold of you? Where can they find you? If they want to fly out to Austin, drop the name of your practice, and I want to make sure that people know how to find you.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, for sure. Lifespring Chiropractic is the name of my practice. There are actually a lot of good resources on our website. There’s a foundational health guide I created, probably revised it 20 times, but it’s things that I use in my own life, and it revolves around our Core Four and things you were talking about earlier, even to help induce better sleep. There are a lot of little things in there to help people get better sleep. It’s all free. And Instagram, if they want to reach out to me directly, Dr. Matt Delgado. D-R M-A-T-T D-E-L-G-A-D-O. That’s the best way to find me.

Kassidy: That’s right. Appreciate you so much. Thank you for coming down, and thank you everybody for listening. As always, love you, appreciate you. This has been For Your Own Good.