Optimize Your Brain Power & Vitality: The Ultimate Biohacks

We often expect our bodies and brains to operate at peak performance throughout our lives. Yet what fuels us–and what we can get away with–in our first few decades of life doesn’t cut it as we get older. In fact, I’ve discovered that optimal mental and physical health require greater focus and effort with each passing year. So whether you are looking to heal an injury, increase your brain power, train your nervous system for weight loss, boost your resilience, or foster healthy longevity, today’s interview with Dr. Scott Sherr, a leading board-certified internal medicine physician who is certified in Health Optimization Medicine, offers empowering news for you. Get the clear, actionable, and research-backed information you need to improve your mental and physical health.

Topics discussed include health optimization, brain health, energy, resilience, science, longevity, parasympathetic nervous system, sympathetic nervous system, brain fog, hormones, perimenopause, menopause, testosterone, mitochondria, methylene blue, HBOT, PTSD, healing, and fight-flight response.

Please note that this episode contains sensitive material; listener discretion is advised.

Emergency Assistance Details: If you or someone you know needs immediate support, please call your emergency services. In the US, 24/7 help is available by calling “911,” “988” (Suicide and Crisis Hotline), or SAMSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). As applicable, additional resources may be provided in the show notes.

Non-Emergency Online Mental Health Information: https://www.nami.org/support-education/nami-helpline/ and https://odphp.health.gov/myhealthfinder/healthy-living/mental-health-and-relationships

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: No expert is offering medical or psychological direction or advice; the content is purely informational in nature. Please consult your physician or healthcare provider before undertaking any new regimen or procedure.

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Optimize Your Brain Power & Vitality: The Ultimate Biohacks

We often expect our bodies and brains to operate at peak performance throughout our lives. Yet what fuels us and what we can get away with in our first few decades of life often doesn’t cut it as we get older. In fact, I’ve discovered that optimal, mental and physical health require greater focus and effort with each passing year. Whether you’re looking to heal an injury, increase your brain power, train your nervous system for weight loss, boost your resilience, or foster healthy longevity, this interview with a Board-Certified Internal Medicine Physician is going to offer empowering information for you.

In this episode, we’ll focus on this reader’s real life question. “I’m only 45 years old, but struggling with thinking clearly. I have a lot of brain fog. I think it’s an aging issue or maybe some trauma from a bad auto accident. My exercise is limited because I get bouts of neck pain. I don’t want to feel this way for the rest of my life. I had tried physical therapy, but it didn’t help much. My partner thinks it might be PTSD. I know none of this is good for my kids to see. Can you talk about this?” With that question as the focus of our episode. I’m Dr. Carla Marie Manly, and this is Imperfect Love.

I’m delighted to introduce you and to be joined by Dr. Scott Sherr. Dr. Scott is a Board-Certified Internal Medicine Physician, and he’s the Chief Medical and Health Education Officer of Troscriptions. Welcome to the show, Dr. Scott. It’s such a joy to have you with us.

It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for joining us. Before we get into this interesting question that’s going to have loads of information for most of our readers in some way or another. Could you tell our readers just a little bit about what makes you, you?

It probably starts off way back. My father is a chiropractor for over 45 years in New York on Long Island where I grew up. I am an Allopathic Physician by training. I’m an Internal Medicine doctor, but that puts me in a very unique situation of having a very alternative background and a very different perspective than most conventional doctors. I trained in something in 2017 called Health Optimization Medicine, which is a nonprofit organization that’s training physicians to optimize health rather than focus on disease.

My real goal with the patients that I work with and in the companies that I help run is to truly try to move the needle on health and help people from the ground up from a foundational perspective, but help them along the way too. When you’re optimizing your health, when you’re coming from a place where you’re not feeling very good, it can take a while to feel better sometimes.

We have to have ways to address some of those bottlenecks along the way. My clinical practice is a foundation of Health Optimization Medicine. The perspective shift has always been, “Let’s optimize health rather than focus on disease specifically,” because when you optimize on the foundational level, everything gets easier. In addition to my medical background, I have four kids. I’m married to a Physician. That’s always interesting and I live just outside of Boulder, Colorado.

Thank you for sharing all of that lovely background. It’s exciting for me on both personal and my professional level to talk with someone who’s interested in health optimization instead of disease. When we shift that focus, it makes sense because the healthier we are, the less likely we are to get diseases because our cells are doing better, our body’s doing better, and correspondingly, our mental health is often doing better. I’m so excited for this episode.

With your background, many readers, whether they’re struggling with as this reader sounds like she might be or they might be. Whether it’s threads of anxiety, depression, the mental health issues that go along often with not feeling well. We are going to be adding some nice rich information for that as well.

Thank you for joining us. Now, when we look at the overview of what this reader is talking about. It sounds like there are kiddos in the mix and a partner. They are struggling with brain fog. The age is 45 years old. I’m getting thoughts of maybe something hormonal, but they can talk about hormones, but also sometimes very lasting effects of something like a physical trauma. I’m going to throw the ball in your very capable hands and let’s go from there.

Understanding Your Dual Nervous System

There’s a lot of places we can start here, that’s for sure. The place that I’d like to start off with is a bit of a definition section okay. When we think about our nervous system there’s two branches of it. There’s the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system it’s called your fight or flight nervous system. This is one that gets you away from something that is chasing you, hypothetically. At least in ancient times, that used to be the way it happened.

Now, if something’s chasing you, that’s what it’s going to do even in modern times. In modern times, the sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight, is on the majority of the time. This is because we don’t sleep very well. We need more sleep to be able to downregulate our nervous system. Also, because we’re in our face with notifications, scrolling and phones and so much information coming at us all the time.

When this happens, oftentimes our body and our brain react like we’re in this fight or flight. Over time, in addition, we don’t even realize that we’re in it all the time because it’s just our normal. Society rewards being in fight or flight. It’s the hustle that never stops. I grew up outside of New York City. That’s very much like the city that never sleeps. Everybody knows that saying and, “You’ll sleep when you’re dead,” kind of things.

What’s interesting about this is that you can get away with a lot of these things in your 20s or maybe 30s. As that sympathetic nervous system stays up for long periods of time, you’re going to start having challenges. There’s a lot of other things that might happen that could up level the sympathetic nervous system as well, making it very difficult to shut off and trauma.

An accident in this case can significantly do that as well because if your body doesn’t feel safe because you got into an accident and you’re having post-traumatic stress related to the accident. You’re constantly rewiring or constantly reminding or replaying that in your mind all the time. Even if you don’t even realize you’re doing it after a while, it becomes almost self-perpetuating on some level. That’s the sympathetic nervous system. It’s on for many of us especially if we’ve had trauma in our history.

The other side of our nervous system is called the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is classically thought of as a rest and digest nervous system. It’s resting, digesting, detoxifying, and healing. If you want to heal something, you have to be in parasympathetic mode to do it because what our body did evolutionarily is if you’re in sympathy all the time, it thinks that you are in survival mode.

You’re trying to survive. Not thrive. Surviving means that all of your resources internally like your hormones, your vitamins, minerals, and nutrients are going to keep you alive. Not keeping you thriving or healing or growing. It’s a very important distinction because we need to get ourselves more into that parasympathetic mode to be able to heal. Many of us are running in this sympathy all the time.

I couldn’t agree with you more and I’m thinking about how important it is to build in, as you were saying, instead of building in breathing breaks or rest breaks or sitting in the sunshine breaks. Many of us are so accustomed now to reaching for the phone because we don’t know how to be alone with ourselves. That doesn’t feel like we’re being productive or doing. Before we go deeper, could you offer maybe a gem or two? I have a selfish motivation here. I tend to be pretty good at pausing to breathe. Sometimes better than others.

My dear husband likes to pick up that phone anytime he’s not physically moving and he’s looking and he’s scrolling. I’m like, “Sweetheart, come on. Let’s train your nervous system to downregulate.” He looks at me and rolls his eyes because I’m his wife. What would you say for anyone who’s reading where they’re doing that or their kids are doing that or a partner is doing that? Maybe this reader who wrote in is doing that. What would you say about a few key ways just to press pause?

Reprogramming the Brain Beyond Survival Mode

The first thing I would say is that it’s not your fault. The reason why that’s important is that it’s twofold. One, evolutionarily, we are not programmed to do anything more than survive and reproduce. If you think about it, reproducing is surviving your genes. Survival is what we evolutionarily are trying to do at all times and keeping ourselves alive requires knowing what’s going to happen next. Not what’s going to happen in 6 months or in 3 years or in the next hour, or the next couple of days.

Our brains are not evolved to think long term because all we cared about evolutionarily was to survive the next 24 to 48 hours. As a result of that, our minds are constantly going and going. We have an average of around 70,000 thoughts every single day. That’s on average. If you have anxiety, insomnia, or depression, that can go up to 120,000 thoughts per day. Most of the thoughts, even if you’re at average, which is 70,000, are not that helpful as you can think about it. If all of your readers have a moment and think about what their mind is continually looping on. Most of these aren’t very helpful in thriving.

They’re more helpful in potentially surviving something. It’s like, “I have a blemish here. Does this mean I have cancer?” You go down and you’re like your Dr. Google death trap. Now, it’s the Dr. ChatGPT death trap or whatever. It is now versus what it used to be. The first thing to mention is, evolutionarily, you weren’t programmed to think long term and happy. You were programmed to survive. Happiness is very different. Learning to understand your mind is always looking for ways to survive. It extends to this second aspect of things is that we were always looking for novelty.

We’re programmed for a novelty because we survived by learning how to do things better, new, and different. Our social media companies have taken advantage of this and give us novelty in our hand to scroll through cat videos, dog hugging, jumping off an airplane, everything that you can imagine. The novelty piece gives our brain what it wants. It actively takes time and it takes effort to reprogram these kinds of things.

The question is, what can you do about this? I told you what’s against you, but the first thing to realize is that, 1) It’s not your fault because of these programs. 2) It’s how you’re going to have a different relationship with your mind. You are not your thoughts. And this is a hard thing for people to realize because we get so caught up with our thoughts on a day-to-day basis and a moment-to-moment basis. If you can observe your thoughts, you’re not them. If you feel happy, sad, tired, or angry, that means there’s some distance that you have from your thoughts.

What I first start doing with my patients is start helping them reprogram how they engage with their thoughts. Meditation is a great way to do this. It doesn’t require you to be sitting on a mountain top and doing this for three hours a day. If you just have the capacity just to observe your thoughts for five minutes, by the way, what’s going to happen when you do this is that your mind is going to go crazy for that 5 or 10 minutes.

Usually after the 10 minute mark or so, that’s when things start quieting down. Your mind realizes that you’re not going to follow every track that it wants to try to get you to go through that you haven’t done for the last five days, and now you’re going through your to-do list, that thing. The biggest thing to do is that. That’s the big piece. One of the other major things is to take breaks from your phone. Take breaks and don’t make it as easy for you to be able to engage in the phone all the time.

This breaks on the weekends. This is using various apps that make it very difficult for you to use various things during the day. There’s all these different softwares now that you can get on your phone that decreases the amount of time you can use social media. All these various things that you can do. Breathing is super important too and learning how to do breathwork can be helpful and getting outside, as you said.

The biggest thing most people can do is turn their phone off for periods of time and realize that everything is going to be. From there, it’s the bigger things like learning how to meditate, learning to create space. Also, sometimes using supplementation can be helpful here. Meaning that sometimes leveraging what’s called the GABA system in our brain. GABA is our primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain.

It’s one that calms down the firing of the brain. Leveraging the GABA system can be super helpful because that in itself can calm down that thought generator so that you can start creating some space. Sometimes, I use supplementation to calm down the firing so that you have more capacity to find that space.

I agree wholeheartedly with all of those little pieces. I’m a big fan of leaving my phone behind. Unless I’m going somewhere where somebody needs to reach me. I will leave my phone on purpose, on the counter, in my purse, or somewhere, and it’s amazing. Sometimes people wish they could get ahold of me, but if it’s not there calling you. People get used to the fact that you say, “I don’t check my phone frequently or I leave it on the counter when I’m outside gardening or when I’m writing or whatever it might be.”

You learn that you don’t have to be leashed to it. In fact, life can feel a lot better when you’re not leashed to it. Thank you for that and for talking about the importance of being able to meditate and go through those little periods where the mind wants you to reconnect with the thoughts and the breathwork. The simple power of deep cleansing breaths when you feel things ramping up, just pausing, and closing your eyes, if you’re not driving. Deep breath in and deep breath out.

When you’re talking about what supplementation, not that you’re prescribing anything, and I’m certainly not. What would you advocate as maybe just one or two supplements that might be a go to for the average person or this person who wrote in who’s suffering in various ways? One or two supplements that are key.

The key to understand here is that supplementation can be very helpful, but it’s probably not going to be the only thing that’s required. It can help you find that parasympathetic side. Get out of that sympathetic mode. That fight or flight. Get into the parasympathetic and give you the experience of what it feels like to again be there and that can be transformative in some people.

Supporting Energetic Capacity Before Downregulation

However, those who have a lot of stress, like a lot of trauma. It can sometimes backfire. You have to be careful here. If you’re super stressed all the time, you’re not sleeping well, and you try to calm down your nervous system too quickly. Sometimes, what can happen is that you can crash. You have to be aware of that because that crash happens when you don’t have a foundation that’s available to take your foot off the gas pedal. You’ve been on the gas pedal for long periods of time.

What happens when that is the case is that you significantly deplete your machinery that helps you make things like energy in the system, hormones, and neurotransmitters. If you very quickly put the brake on, there’s no leg to stand on. The system can significantly crash as a result of that. Be aware. If you’re reading this and you’re tired but wired all the time. You’re not sleeping very well. You have severe amounts of stress and anxiety, then looking to calm down your nervous system wouldn’t be the first thing to do. You want to work on supporting the energy side of things first.

This is why I often tell my patients that if you want more energy and you have a lot of anxiety. What’s interesting about this is that you need to have more energy to have less anxiety. Especially if you’ve been further down that track for a long period of time, because you need more of the energetic support. When anxiety comes down, you don’t feel like you crash. Saying that is important because there are probably some readers out there that are having a hard time. If they try too hard or too quickly to downregulate the nervous system, it can sometimes backfire.

These are the people that try to do breathwork, and they feel worse. When they try to go to the sauna, they feel worse. They try to do cold plunges, they feel worse. They try to meditate, they feel worse. These are people that have been on a challenging path for a long period of time. That is not the majority of people, though. It’s a subset of people that is very important.

Healing requires shifting from constant fight-or-flight into parasympathetic rest. Discover how to regulate your nervous system. Share on X

Can I pause for just a second to ask you because this might help readers? I’m thinking of people who have been on, let’s say, a central nervous stimulant like Adderall for a long time. They decide as adults, even though they’ve been on it since childhood, “I’m going to go off this. I’m done with this,” and then they crash because their system is used to that stimulant. The natural hormones and neurotransmitters that have been taken over, even though they may have needed it, but now the body is used to relying on the central nervous stimulant from elsewhere. They can crash. Sometimes, it’s not just days or weeks. It can be months. Does that resonate with you?

It does, because it can be simulated by medication, as you said. It can be somebody that had trauma that hasn’t felt safe in twenty years, and their system’s been in that sympathetic overload for a long period of time. I call this the sympathetic spiral but it can also be because of medications that are clogging the system all the time like Adderall, for example, that are doing it.

It can happen as a result of that as well. In the end, you’re left with an energetic capacity that’s significantly deficient, and depleted. Your cells need to make a lot of energy to survive and to work well. If they don’t have enough capacity, they start shutting down. Over time, when you’re sympathetically overdriven for long periods of time, they shut down in a way that lets them survive, but they can’t make energy very efficiently.

You have to be able to bring the energy back in to be able to get more energy efficiently into the system again, and then start feeling better. It happens so often that I find people are trying to do the right things like the breathwork, the meditation, and the mindfulness and they feel worse. This is often why. It’s because their system doesn’t have enough energy.

Now, before I get to that, because it’s an important point, addressing the energy side of things. For most people that are not that significant, like the person you mentioned in the beginning. This is a great example of somebody that’s not probably that far down this sympathetic spiral as I talk about it. They’re at a place where they’re stressed, having issues, having brain fog and they might’ve had trauma from an accident.

In these cases, it is a great idea to try some supplements to potentially help down regulate the nervous system and see how they feel. Now, if they crash, you have your answer. You can’t do it that way. You have to work on energy first. If they feel better when they go down, then that’s a great way for them to know where they are, because they’ve forgotten most of the time. They’ve forgotten what it feels like to be in that parasympathetic mode.

Calming Overactive Thought Generators with GABA

GABA, as I mentioned, is the primary inhibitory. It’s the brakes of our brain neurotransmitter. It would be reasonable to think, “Maybe I should take a GABA supplement.” GABA is in supplements. You can buy anywhere you’d like to buy your supplements. The problem with GABA as a supplement, GABA is too big of a compound of a molecule to get into the brain. If GABA supplements work for you, that often means that you have a leaky blood brain barrier.

Your blood brain barrier is trying to keep things out of your brain to protect it. If GABA goes in, and it works. It means that the brain barrier is not doing what it’s supposed to do. This often correlates with having a leaky gut, if your readers have heard of that. A gut that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, keeping things in the gut and then letting them expel, versus letting things into the body and causing inflammation. Having a leaky gut is very common.

I don’t like to use GABA supplements. Although, GABA itself, if it does work, it’s diagnostic that you have to optimize the gut as well. I like other things. In addition, I like a compound called Kava, for example. It’s a kava plant. Kava is great because it works on the GABA receptor at a separate site. I like that a lot. I like a compound called Agarin, which is in a mushroom called the Amanita mushroom. Which binds to the GABA receptor for a long period of time and increases the capacity for those brakes to turn back on.

I also like L-theanine, passionflower, and ashwagandha. Those are my main ones. I also even like some of the non-psychoactive cannabinoids. Things like CBD, CBN, and even CBG. These are all non-psychoactive that work on that GABA receptor and other places in the brain to calm things down. In this lady’s case, that’s probably where I would start. Which is working on something that can help down regulate her nervous system in a gentle way to see if she can get the experience of feeling like her nervous system is not in overdrive all the time.

When we look at her brain fog, plus her physical pain. Is it reasonable to think that by down regulating her nervous system, that in getting more into this parasympathetic mode of ease and maybe a little bit of flow. By doing that, it might clear up some of her brain fog and it might decrease some of the physical pain?

What’s so interesting in my practice is that so many of my patients complain of brain fog. What they all want is more stimulants to increase their brain capacity. They want more that’s going to rev them up but I often find when you rev the brain down and you calm it down. Their brains start functioning better. Why? If you’re sympathetic all the time, if you’re in that fight or flight, what happens is that blood flows to the front of your brain, where you have what’s called your executive function.

This is the place where you can keep things in your mind. Bring things from long term to short term storage. Keep a visuospatial recognition of the area around you. Create a map. The blood flow to that area when you’re overdriven in the sympathetic goes down. The classic example of this is that you’re about to give a speech in front of a lot of people and you forget your lines. Your mind goes blank. It’s that feeling.

That’s very much associated with brain fog for people where they have this. They describe it as brain fog. They describe their mind going blank. This is often, not always, but often caused because of that sympathetic overdrive. Having too much fight or flight ongoing. Now, it’s not always the case that this is ongoing, but I find that if you can down regulate the nervous system and get more blood flow to the front of the brain. That’s often going to help significantly.

Restoring Brain Energy and Focus via Mitochondria

Brain fog is often in addition to the sympathetic parasympathetic balance, related to how well your brain cells are making energy. If you’re sympathetically dominant all the time, they’re not going to make energy very well, as I was alluding to earlier. The reason for this is that part of the cell is called the mitochondria, the part of the cell that makes energy, the powerhouse of your cell. Some cells in our body have just a few mitochondria.

In other cells of our body, we have thousands of mitochondria, especially in our brain. The mitochondria are the energy engine of our brain. They make a huge amount of energy. They make the energy currency called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate. Our body makes about 150 pounds of ATP every single day. It’s a huge amount. Our brain is the number two maker of this energy just behind our reproductive organs. Eggs, oocytes in females, and sperm in males have the most mitochondria per cell, but you’re not using those on a daily basis. You’re using your brain on a daily basis.

When you have energetic deficiency in your brain, this is when brain fog starts happening because your brain needs all of that energy to function effectively. The final thing I’ll say before I stop for a moment, would be that our cells are like gasoline powered cars, our mitochondria. We make energy, ATP, as I mentioned, but this energy is not free. Alongside making ATP, we make water and carbon dioxide. We breathe out carbon dioxide. Everybody knows this. It goes to the plants. They make oxygen. We breathe in the oxygen.

Oxygen helps us make energy. In addition to those, we also make what are called free radicals or reactive oxygen species. These are small reactive inflammatory molecules that in small amounts are very much needed for signaling in our body. If we have too many of these and we don’t have antioxidants to neutralize them, then the stress of the system goes up and we have more inflammation. It is so important to realize that, yes, brain fog could be because of being too sympathetically activated. Oftentimes, it’s not exactly related to that. It’s more related to the energetic deficiency of our cells as a result of either not making energy efficiently or not detoxifying from the energy that we make.

That is a lot to take in and you say it so eloquently. Thank you. Please correct me on this because I’m out of my league. When we are trying to get rid of brain fog, we want to look at how we are doing in general. If we’re in constant flight mode, which is what flight mode does. All we care about is survival. We’re not paying attention to the leaves on the trees or the little details or the pretty flowers.

We are paying attention to, “How do I get from point A to point B safely?” Often, when we forget where we’ve put our keys or we put the milk in the cupboard instead of the fridge, things like that. It’s not because we’re losing our mind. It’s because our mind is somewhere else. We are not being mindful about our activities.

If we’re anxious or we’re in physical pain, we may be creating this cycle of more forgetfulness, more of this fog because we’re not present. The second part you were saying is, we have this element here, this important element of the mitochondria, the cell’s mitochondria. We need to take care of that because if we’re not paying attention to it, we’re not giving ourselves antioxidants and engaging in selfcare. These powerhouses aren’t running efficiently. Did I get that right?

You did a great job.

Trying to downregulate an exhausted nervous system too quickly can trigger a crash. Build cellular energy first. Share on X

Now, let’s talk about how our reader or any reader can take care. You’ve given us some great ideas of how to slow down so that the brain fog is less on the first level, contributing to it by not being mindful and present and in a reactive state. Let’s look at the part with the mitochondria, these wonderful little powerhouses that we all have.

We all learned about mitochondria back in high school or maybe middle school, depending on the person. My daughter was learning about them in 2025. When you learn about them, you learn that there’s one of these mitochondria in a cell amongst your nucleus, cytoplasm and cell membrane and things like that. As I was mentioning earlier, your brain has thousands of mitochondria per cell to help run all the functions that are required.

When those mitochondria stop working efficiently, you stop being able to make energy efficiently. When does that happen? From a symptomatic perspective, you start feeling brain fog, fatigue, wired but tired, mood issues, and mental health issues. There are a lot of things in the world around us that affect mitochondrial function.

We’ve been talking about one of them here, which is this sympathetic overdrive. This is always being in fight or flight. It puts a lot of stress on the mitochondria because if you are telling your body that you’re always in survival mode, it’s going to try to pump out as much energy as possible to keep you alive but the system can’t keep up with that over time. There’s other things, too. One of the biggest ones, and maybe with this lady that we talked about in the beginning, the 45-year old.

Navigating Midlife Hormonal Shifts and Health

Maybe she’s a female, we don’t know if hormonal changes. Perimenopause is a huge shift for women. It’s a gigantic shift because progesterone and estrogen drop dramatically. Estrogen is one of the best mitochondrial enhancers on the planet. It works well to support mitochondrial function, both energy detoxification. When those levels start going all over the place, a system that was compensating before that, all of a sudden, the estrogen’s lower. The mitochondria don’t have support and they start to crash.

This is so common for women that reach middle age because they have this going on. In addition, they have progesterone that’s dropping dramatically or going up all over the place. Progesterone is so important because it works on the GABA system, which we talked about before. It’s helping you sleep. If your sleep is now fragmented, disjointed and you’re not getting enough of it. That has a reactive effect on your body to put you more in that sympathetic mode. It becomes this constant loop.

You have the mitochondria that are directly affected by these huge shifts in estrogen levels, and then the progesterone levels are all over the place. Sleep is all over the place, and then the mitochondria are more stressed as well. It’s a big one for this lady that she might have been okay. Maybe the accident did have a significant effect. Maybe she did have some mild PTSD and it was okay until the hormones started going and having significant shifts throughout the middle age period where she is now.

It’s not just hormones that affect mitochondrial function. It’s toxins in our environment. There’s pollution. You can imagine there’s many things that are outside in the environment that are affecting our mitochondria on a day-to-day basis. We have forever chemicals. We have cosmetics. We have things in our environment that are affecting us all the time.

You also have infections. Things like Lyme disease, mold, Epstein Barr and COVID. These are all affecting mitochondrial function as well. Even medications that some of us take on a regular basis. It may have an effect on how well our mitochondria are working. Things like proton pump inhibitors, which are acid reducers. Birth control pills deplete nutrients that can affect mitochondrial function.

Some of the diabetic medications can do it, too. Even diabetes and insulin resistance is a big factor in causing mitochondrial dysfunction too. What I just described to all of you is that when you have this ecosystem now, when the mitochondria aren’t working very well. It could be because you had this, I call it like a top-down sympathetic stress, work, life, PTSD, relationship. This is all happening, but you can also have direct mitochondrial stress from some of the things that I just mentioned.

This is a 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 punch. Now you’re trying to rebuild from here. It could be challenging. Knowing that this pattern exists is what’s been so transformative to my practice and to work. We’re looking at, how can we rebuild? How can we find ways to support mitochondrial function now, for example? There’s many ways to do this.

As you were talking, I was feeling hopeful and hopeless on some levels. I’m thinking about all of the people in California, Colorado, and all over the US and the entire world were wildfires and people, some very proximate to the fires. What a huge load on physical health and mental health. As you’re talking about all of these assaults on mitochondrial health, and we think about, most of us aren’t aware. Even if we did have a course or two in high school or even college. People aren’t aware of these intense loads on the system that can manifest in brain fog, depression, anxiety, feeling low, and sleeplessness.

We get on that cycle of sleeplessness or whatever’s happening, and then we can’t ever rebuild it. We just keep feeling worse and worse. As the reader wrote in, it’s showing up as brain fog and physical pain. Yet, thank you for addressing the important factor of what I suspected might be at play, the hormonal issue.

Thank goodness that the research that was out there that prevented women, listen women or listen men who have a woman in your life. It’s wonderful for a woman if she’s evaluated by a competent medical practitioner to take hormone therapy. It was a no-no incorrectly for so many years. Dr. Scott, thank you.

If you want to add to that, feel free. Unless there are some serious issues going on, it’s good to get hormone replacement therapy. That might be a part of what these individuals need, especially the way you explain it in this beautiful, body, mind, spirit approach that you’re taking. A holistic approach. What do you think?

What you just described there is the path. It’s the path of how do you start rebuilding? How do you start feeling better? There’s short term solutions and there’s more long-term ones. The goal is to find a provider to work with, if you can, to truly start optimizing your health. Unfortunately, the conventional side of things is not very helpful. I wish it was, but the conventional doctor is what their goal is. It’s to get you out of their office within fifteen minutes and I understand this.

I was there for many years. It was not an easy place to be. I’m an internal medicine doctor. I worked in the hospital for many years. I get it. I get the pressures and the challenges there. You need to think about working with somebody that can help with your long-term health and hormone optimization, if you’re a female. Even males, too. Males have what’s called andropause, which is a slower decline in hormones, but our hormones also decline. Not as dramatically, but testosterone levels start dropping around the age of 30 or so for most men

Working with a provider, and we have a pretty awesome nonprofit group called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, or HOMeHOPe for short, that trains practitioners on looking at optimizing health on these foundational levels. Looking at vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and cofactors. Looking at gut health and hormones. These are all very important. This is what I do with my patients. This takes time, though.

It’s not something that’s going to happen and make you feel better overnight. Sometimes with hormones, it could be pretty quick, which is great, especially for females. Oftentimes, it does take time. The key is then, as you’re looking at a long-term optimization strategy, what are you going to start doing now to help you? It’s the simple things that can go the longest way, but that doesn’t mean that simple things are easy either.

Simple things like looking to start moving a little bit better, working on your relationships, breathing a little bit better, trying to hydrate better, trying to get better sunlight, and trying to work on just the foundational low hanging fruit that you’re doing on a day-to-day basis. It’s like checking your phone incessantly that is causing a lot of stress to your system. What I found over the years is that it can be very difficult for many people to start. They don’t know where to start and they don’t know how to start. It can feel like a lot of energy of activation to try to get some of these things done.

Brain fog is often a signal of cellular energy deficiency in your mitochondria, not a lack of mental focus. Share on X

That’s where in some people supplementation can be very helpful. I use a lot of mineral hydration in people because it supports that mitochondria, the part of the cells that make energy. I use antioxidants, for example. That could be helpful. I use B vitamins. Often, I try to do these in a way that’s tailored to the person because I’m checking laboratory testing that can be helpful.

I’m also a big proponent, as I mentioned, of looking at downregulating that nervous system. Looking at the GABA side and how we can optimize that stress response. Taking the stress off can be very helpful, as I mentioned earlier. In addition, when it comes to the mitochondria itself, what I love is a couple of things that I found to be very transformative, very quickly for people. One of them is a compound called methylene blue, which is relatively unusual because it’s very blue.

It’s been around over 125 years. If you get a very clean source of this particular compound, it works on the mitochondria within about 3 to 5 days at the right dose. As a result of that, I can start seeing people recover much faster if they have a little bit of this on board. Not forever, but for a little while, just as they’re getting themselves back a little more on their feet. The key is to get clean sourced methylene blue. You don’t want to get it from Amazon, for example.

You want to find a practitioner to work with that can provide you guidance with methylene blue to make sure it’s safe and the right dose. This is also something that I do in clinical practice. We have a company that helps provide this service as well called Troscriptions. We started as practitioners looking at this and saying, “It’s going to take us six months or a year to help people sometimes. What can we do to help them along the way?”

That’s why we created the company that has products that have methylene blue. It has products that have the GABA side too, working on calming down the nervous system with something like Tro+ Calm or our sleep products that help with sleep as well. Again, I’m not saying you have to go out and use our products. The goal here is to give you an idea of the kinds of things that you’re looking for to help you now so that it might be easier for you to change your diet. Get out of a bad relationship, or at least get out of a room where your partner is snoring. That is not good for your health, I promise you.

Thank you. Now, I have a question. You said something about mineral hydration. Could you please talk about that and how it might help our readers?

This is a super simple one. Your cells require minerals to work. This is like magnesium, calcium, potassium, manganese, and other trace minerals like selenium. These are all essential for your mitochondria to work better. Many of us are mineral deficient. Magnesium specifically is involved in like a thousand different enzymatic processes. It’s involved on the GABA side, as I mentioned earlier, with talking about GABA.

It’s involved in making energy as well in the mitochondria. If you’re magnesium deficient, which is about 70% to 90% of the US population, it’s going to be difficult to regulate these things. I often start off with mineral hydration or mineral supplementation with patients because it’s easy, well tolerated, and almost everybody needs them. Magnesium is great. You can take it during the day, but it also can take it in the evenings because it calms down the nervous system. You can take it in various forms outside of like a hydration solution, but as a supplement.

Magnesium itself is great for your brain. It’s great for your mitochondria. It’s great for your GABA system and for like 70,000 other things in your body too. It’s not rocket science to start looking at minerals. When I talk about hydration as a part of that, hydration is a big deal because so many of us are chronically dehydrated.

Our body is made up of about 70% water, and most of us are not drinking enough liquid on a daily basis to maintain our hydration needs. If you don’t, the water that you need gets taken from places like your cells, which stop working as well if they don’t have enough water to maintain their capacity to do the things that they want to do to help you stay healthy and alive. There was a book that I read back in the early 1990s.

Hydrating Cells with Essential Mineral Support

My father recommended it called Your Body’s Many Cries for Water. If you’re hungry, drink water first. If you have pain, drink water. If you have brain fog, drink water. A little bit of a nuance there is that water is better absorbed if it has a little bit of mineral with it, especially sodium. Sodium is salt. A little bit of salt is going to make that hydration get into the body a little bit more. Sodium is also a mineral that I forgot to mention, but it’s important too.

It sounds like there are products out there that have this mineral mix, much like we think about an electrolyte mix adding it to water. This helps, because so many people I talk to, and this happens to me. I’ll drink, drink, and then I’m just peeing it out. I’m like, “I don’t want to be doing this all day,” so then I drink less If we have something with sodium in it and other minerals that help us retain the water in a good way and absorb all of those wonderful minerals. With our food supply, things are so processed now. We are not getting the minerals that we might have gotten if we were living off the land when the land was clean.

Exactly. Our food now has about 70% or 80% less mineral content than it used to 40 or 50 years ago, maybe. With industrial farming and everything else, it’s just depleted our soil. We just don’t get as much of that. That’s the big thing that’s important. For those that are reading, if you are in your 40s, 50s and 60s, evolutionarily, you’re not supposed to live much longer than your 40s for the most part.

There’s always people that lived many generations more to be like the elders in the community. If you want to stay healthy, it’s probably not going to be by just living your life without thinking about how to optimize your vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and cofactors, your diet, your lifestyle. Unless you’re like George Burns, the guy that was smoking cigars and drinking whiskey until he was a hundred.

That’s pretty rare, everybody. It’s not going to happen to you most of the time. You have to think about your health. That’s another big thing as we transition into that timeframe. It’s no longer about the day-to-day. It’s about starting to try to retrain your mind to think of that 6 months, year or 5 years. Women are a little bit better at this than men because they have children. Men have children too, but women have more of the motherly instinct, which tries to keep their kids alive for longer.

They tend to think a little bit further in advance than men. I find in my house, my wife doesn’t think about anything from 0 to 6 months. That’s my job, and then she thinks about like 6 months to 3 to 5 years with the kids. It’s very interesting how that’s played out in my house, but it’s also an interesting, important note. If you want to stay healthy and optimized, it’s not going to happen without paying attention to it. Especially for women, as they go through midlife, as the estrogen levels start dropping etc. It’s going to be harder to maintain. That’s why it’s so important to think about things in a larger context and not just going through the motions.

I know. Back to the minerals. I had read an article where there is an issue now with so many people using sea salt instead of iodized salt. That many people are now deficient in iodine, which we need. Some of these nuanced pieces that it’s important to try and get, as you’re saying, a practitioner who will look at you as a whole person, your entire picture.

Readers, this does take money. It does take time. If you can all afford it at all, you’re worth the investment. Usually, the outlay I’ve found is bigger at first because you’re doing the outlay at first to get that there. Once you’re more streamlined, it tends to have a much less costly edge to it. That’s my perspective. One more question because it was part of what one of the things you are offering. I know so many readers will enjoy this.

Drinking water alone isn't enough if your cells lack essential minerals like magnesium and sodium for proper hydration. Share on X

You talk about wiring yourself to lose weight because again as we’re aging and even for the reader who wrote in. Weight gain sometimes creeps in and exacerbates conditions. It exacerbates the pain that might be present. We feel worse when we’re not moving. What is something that you can just highlight on that front as we prepare to wind down?

Weight is probably the third most common complaint to primary or to conventional or to any doctors, the number three, the three complaints, top three are energy, anxiety, and weight gain. They happen in different orders. Typically, energy and anxiety go between one and two, and weight gain is the third one. What happens when you get more stress and more sympathetic activation without that compensatory capacity to detox, heal, and recover. Your system is going to be in inflammatory mode, inflammation mode. Inflammation will hold on to your weight. Why?

It’s because it thinks that you’re not going to survive. Once it keeps the weight on as long as possible so that you have extra weight in case your food runs out. Many people that are going through midlife, many people that are going through huge transitions, a lot of stress and trauma, they’ll find that maybe initially they lose weight when they have a lot of stress but after a long time, they start gaining weight. This is because of a hormone called cortisol.

Cortisol is our steroid hormone in our body. It helps rev up our nervous system. It responds to your energetic needs for sympathy, fight or flight. It’s important. We need cortisol. It rises when we get up. There’s a big peak of it and then it drops down throughout the day. If you have a flat cortisol, which means that your cortisol never fully rises for various reasons or never fully comes down. This is a little more complicated than we need to get into.

If it’s elevated, just flat out, no matter if it’s up or down or whatever, as I talked about. Initially, it’s going to cause you to lose weight because your body is dumping things into the system to try to help you make more energy. Over the long term, it’s going to start depositing more fat and trying to maintain as much fat as possible so that if you don’t have any more food coming in, you can maintain energy demands without it.

This is also correlated to inflammation because your mitochondria are stressed too. You have that aspect where you’re not making energy effectively anymore. Your mitochondria gets very scared and then says, “We need to keep on inflammation. We need to keep on the weight.” It becomes very difficult to lose it.

It’s very common in midlife for people having a very difficult time. Calming down the nervous system, doing the things we mentioned, optimizing your health, looking at supplementation, this is all part of the process. Once you start down regularly in the nervous system, you get this recalibration and then people start losing weight much easier.

Thank you. You’ve offered us so much, Dr. Scott. As I reflect on what you’re saying, the whole picture of it. It feels like we’re looking at something that’s not instant. We are definitely socialized these days in one instant. If we’re willing to go one step at a time and enter this journey of creating full health or more complete health from the inside out. The long-term benefits are there because then we are taking care of this beautiful house that we have.

We’re so blessed to have this body, take care of it and give it the energy, the time, the commitment, and the focus it deserves, particularly as we age when it’s more sensitive. Also, the accumulation of all of the toxins and the stress and all of that are there. It’s worth it and can help all of us. In particular someone like this reader who wrote about this constellation of symptoms that could be improved if they were able to address it in a formulaic way, in a way that they deserve.

This goes down with love, relationships and happiness. These are all the things that you speak about all the time. Once a system is more regulated, it’s much easier to feel close to people, to feel intimate with people and to enjoy those times. It shouldn’t wait until then. Having good relationships or trying for them, even if you’re not feeling good, is also going to help you, by the way. We know this. It’s important to have community. It’s important to have people around you that can support you, even if they’re far away. I just want to make sure that’s also acknowledged as well.

Thank you. Going back to the piece I was saying about formulas. We are all individuals. Formulaic in some ways has a negative connotation, but I use it in this sense of creating a formula that works for each individual. That’s what doctors like you are doing. You’re looking at the individual and helping them create a formula that works for their life, their body that then makes the entire system.

As you’re saying, we are more than just the body. We have our relationships. We have our kiddos. We have all of these other factors. When we take care of the body, the mind and the spirit, everything tends to run so much better. Dr. Scott, thank you so much for your expertise and your energy. Where can our readers find you?

Thank you for having me. My name is my website to make it super simple. It’s DrScottSherr.com. There you can find my consulting and my clinical practice, something called Health Optimization Medicine. As I also mentioned in this episode, it’s also a nonprofit. You can check it out at HOMeHOPe.org and you can learn about working with a practitioner that might be aligned with helping you optimize your health.

We have a company called Troscriptions. It’s a company that helps people now along that path. It’s a practitioner company. If you have an interest, go check it out. You can also get your practitioner to sign up to be able to use some of our products. We also have other clinicians and a map that might be useful to find somebody to work with to help you along that path. Helping with energy focus, sleep, stress, and immune system function. We have products all around all of those topics, conditions and challenges. Check it out at Troscriptions.com. You can also find us on the socials at my name, at @DrScott Sherr, @Ttroscriptions, and @HOMeHOPeOrg as well.

Thank you. Now, just one last piece, Dr. Scott. For someone who’s not living in Colorado, you said there’s a map. Are you throughout the world? Are you throughout the United States? Where can people find a practitioner who works like you do?

Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, a nonprofit, has practitioners all over the world. I would encourage you to go to HOMeHOPe.org and put in an inquiry, and we can help find you somebody that’s hopefully close by. At Troscriptions, we have mostly US providers, but we also have providers in other countries as well such as in the UK, Australia, South Africa and other places.

Go check out the practitioner map at Troscriptions. You’ll find a practitioner that you can work with. Also, if you have a practitioner and you want them to start using the products. You can also have them head over to Troscriptions.com and sign up as a practitioner and get access to all the products for you as well. That’s also a great way to get involved and get them involved in the ecosystem too.

We need these changes in our medical system, in our healthcare system. Thank you for your wisdom and expertise. To our readers, as always, thank you for tuning in. It is always my joy and privilege to spend time and to spread the word about ways that you can take care of your body, your mind, and your spirit. This is Imperfect Love.

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About Dr. Scott Sherr

Dr. Scott Sherr is a board-certified internal medicine physician and the Chief Medical and Health Education Officer of Troscriptions. He is certified in Health Optimization Medicine (HOMe) and specializes in Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT). Scott’s mission is to make complex science easy to understand and apply. Through his clinical work, teaching, and media appearances, he helps people and practitioners use HBOT and HOMe principles to boost brain health, energy, and resilience. Known for clear, actionable education, he translates cutting-edge research into practical steps that improve everyday health.

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Optimize Your Brain Power & Vitality: The Ultimate Biohacks

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Optimize Your Brain Power & Vitality: The Ultimate Biohacks

Understanding Your Dual Nervous System

Reprogramming the Brain Beyond Survival Mode

Supporting Energetic Capacity Before Downregulation

Calming Overactive Thought Generators with GABA

Restoring Brain Energy and Focus via Mitochondria

Navigating Midlife Hormonal Shifts and Health

Hydrating Cells with Essential Mineral Support

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