EFR 802: Master Stress - How to Fortify Your Physiological and Psychological Immune System with Jeff Krasno

00:00 - Speaker 1 The following is an Operation Podcast production. 21% of Americans reported that stress increases tension in their bodies, so this physical manifestation. 20% say that stress caused them to snap out of anger, just kind of reach your boiling point, and another 20% reported that stress caused unexpected mood swings.

00:18 - Speaker 2 Every six months we survey about 1.5 million people through email and stress and anxiety number one Every time in terms of you know what's your biggest problem in life. So, of course, what happens in your body at that juncture? Hypothalamus triggers your pituitary triggers your adrenals. You release a steroid hormone called cortisol. Cortisol does what it's supposed to do in the body Makes your heart rate increase, makes your breath rate increase.

00:48 - Speaker 1 It releases glucose from your liver, which then goes to your extremities so you can fight or fly, but we need it, I'm hearing. We should not villainize cortisol. All stress, should you choose it to be, can in fact be good for you.

00:54 - Speaker 2 You know, the reality is whether it's getting into an ice bath or getting into jumping into the ice bath of a stressful conversation. You know this shouldn't be stressful, but it is. But guess what? The good news? The gospel it gets easier. Doing hard things makes doing other hard things easier. Hey, my name is Jeff Krasnow. I am the creator of Good Stress, which you can find on Commune, and I'm here on Ever Forward Radio.

01:18 - Speaker 1 Well, jeff, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for coming by Ever Forward Radio. Welcome man.

01:22 - Speaker 2 Yeah, chase. What a treat, man. I know we've been talking about this and here I am. I'm so excited.

01:26 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm so stressed out, but in a good way, which is good stress, exactly what we're going to talk about. But in preparing for this and preparing for hearing more about your work, and focus around the good aspects of stress good stress, you stress. I was just really looking at some surprising stats around the state of our stressed out state. In America, 49% stress is negatively affecting their behavior. 21% of Americans reported that stress increases tension in their bodies. So this physical manifestation. 20% say that stress caused them to snap out of anger, just kind of reach your boiling point, and another 20% reported that stress caused unexpected mood swings, oh, huge, and I'm certainly not immune to that either.

02:11 - Speaker 2 In fact, you know we survey at Commune every six months. We survey about 1.5 million people through email, through our email list.

02:21 - Speaker 1 It's a hell of a sample size.

02:22 - Speaker 2 It's a pretty good sample size, so we get back a lot of data. I mean, even if just like 1% answer the survey and stress and anxiety number one every time in terms of what's your biggest problem in life. So stress is rampant in our society. What we normally associate with stress in modern culture is distress right, it's chronic stress, and stress is actually an adaptive response in the body. So something happens. You know that you perceive as a threat and I think you know your audience is probably very familiar with that endocrine cascade that happens in relation with threat perception, right. So something.

03:05 - Speaker 1 Fight flight freeze.

03:07 - Speaker 2 Exactly Something in your perception is either inducing some sort of fear, or maybe there's an insult or neglect, or something that happens on the internet generally, or 24-hour news or incessant sensationalism hyperbo that's designed to trigger your human negativity, bias, on social media, for example. Something like that happens and you know you have a normal stress response, an adaptive stress response, right, same thing like if I was actually hiking in my neighborhood three days ago and I ran into a coyote, right so, and I was on a trail and it was between me and where I had to go. So, of course, what happens in your body at that juncture? Very normal, adaptive response. You know your hypothalamus triggers your pituitary triggers your adrenals. You release a steroid hormone called cortisol. I'm sure many people are very familiar with cortisol. Cortisol does what it's supposed to do in the body it makes your heart rate increase, makes your breath rate increase, it releases glucose from your liver which then goes to your extremities so you can fight or fly.

04:14 - Speaker 1 All good things. In this scenario, Cortisol gets such a bad rap. I think people hear cortisol and it gets them stressed out unnecessarily, but we need it.

04:23 - Speaker 2 I'm hearing we should not villainize cortisol. In fact there's natural cortisol waves that are adaptive in your life. It goes up in the morning because sleepy Chase needs to get out of bed and be alert and do things with his life, and then it goes down and there's a little peak in the afternoon because he needs to do some more things, and then there's a natural trough in the evening as melatonin rises. You know that's a good balance, endocrine balance. But the other things that happen, you know, with a stress response is, you know, your pupils might dilate, the aperture of your experience gets really tight and again, that is adaptive, because it serves a biological imperative, because you feel like you're under threat. Right, what else happens? You become very self-obsessed and self-focused, you see the world as a threat and your sense of trust with the outside world begins to erode because you need to take care of number one of your own individual right here right now.

05:25 I'm not safe okay, so that's cool. That's actually an adaptive response to stress. But what if the coyote never goes away, right? I'm sort of metaphor in that particular case. But what if, like, your stress is incessant, it's just endless, and you have this overactive stress response and no tools to emotionally regulate back from this sympathetic overload or amygdala hijack, back into a ventral dorsal state or a parasympathetic state? What happens then? Well then, cortisol is always active and in a perpetually cortisol-infused state.

06:09 What happens? Well, your blood glucose goes out of balance, right, because your liver is always secreting glucose into the bloodstream. Insulin then goes up, you become insulin-resistant, prediabetes, diabetes, goes on and on and on from there. What else happens? Your immune system begins to falter because high cortisol will undermine the production of certain innate immune cells like neutrophils and macrophages, monocytes, etc. That are incredibly important for protecting you against, you know, bacteria and viruses and other pathogens. What else happens? Well, chronic cortisol will erode the good bacteria in your gut and cause dysbiosis or eventually, maybe leaky gut, intestinal permeability, which will lead to constant inflammation and over-agitated immune response. So you have low immune function and then bolstered immune function.

07:02 The pros just keep coming function and then bolstered immune function. The pros just keep coming, yeah. So this is what's going on and you know, in modern society it's perpetual IV drip of chronic stress and this is incredibly detrimental, obviously, both to our physiology and our psychology.

07:21 - Speaker 1 In your opinion? Blanket statement here how much of the current stress we'll just say in America is self-inflicted versus reality? How much of it is just us perpetuating worst case scenario being stuck in our head, possibly even catastrophizing actual stress, but just making it a mountain out of a molehill, so to speak? What's the kind of ratio do you think people are dealing with in terms of perceived stress and actual stress?

07:45 - Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if I really have a clinically evidence-based answer for that, but I would say like it's. I'll just say to you now it's 50-50. Because certainly there is a very, very toxic environment in which we live, right. So Gabor Mate uses this like great metaphor in his book. You know, you put like a I don't know a bacterial cell in like a Petri dish right and you fill it with like nitrogen and carbon and all sorts of good stuff. You know, the normal expectation is that cell is going to proliferate and be healthy. You put that same cell in bleach or alcohol and what's the expectation? That expectation is going to become dysfunctional and die. So the name of that biological medium is called a culture, if you remember from biology class. So we also live in a culture.

08:41 You put us in a healthy culture and you fill it with love and nutrient-rich whole foods and all sorts of good stuff. The normal expectation is that we're going to thrive as individuals. You put it in a caustic, toxic culture and what's the expectation? And so, stressed out, sick human beings are really just the normal and expected result of living in a toxic culture period. So there's a lot out there working against us. At the same time, there are tools that are available to us that are geared towards emotional regulation, that are geared towards emotional regulation, and in fact, the body is engineered to always bounce back.

09:29 We're actually engineered for homeostasis, you know. Balance, equilibrium. It's sensitive and tenuous. So you know we get knocked down, we come back up, and so we need to cultivate that same. Like the body, for example, like the liver it's fucking amazing. So I mean the liver like titrates, like just right, to balance the right amount of glucose in the bloodstream, you know, provided you haven't screwed it up, you know. Or the acid alkaline balance it's like right around 7.35, a little bit alkaline. You can do a lot, and the body will always kind of maintain that homeostasis, thermoregulation, right. So you get in an ice bath. What does the body do? Raises your body temperature back up.

10:13 - Speaker 1 That's why we shiver. Yeah, trying to heat you back up.

10:16 - Speaker 2 So we're like meant we're engineered for the Goldilocks zone and in fact, health is the Goldilocks zone and that's true in all of its expressions. You look at like what is a healthy economy? Look like it looks like a bell curve, right Where-.

10:34 - Speaker 1 Not this one right now.

10:35 - Speaker 2 Well no, because this one has three dudes that own more wealth than the bottom 50% combined Jeez. So it's a flat world with spikes at the end. But a healthy economy would look like a bell curve. It would look like a distribution of wealth and a thriving middle class, right? What would health look like in ecology? It would look like biodiversity, right. What would it look like in politics? Well, it certainly wouldn't look like what we have today, which is just like extremes. It would look like compromise and middle ground and finding commonality, etc.

11:10 Healthy systems tend to cluster towards the middle, and that is also true with the body. The body clusters always towards the middle. You've got excitatory neurotransmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitters like glutamate and GABA, right? So when you're psychologically balanced, those are in some sort of equilibrium, right? You know you have insulin and glucagon, you have cortisol and melatonin, et cetera. You have all these contraposing molecules and you know your job is to sort of foster a really nice homeostasis between them, a nice balance. So, to get back to your question, it is really incumbent on us to find the tools to emotionally regulate such that when we are triggered, when something out there hijacks our amygdala, and we have that adaptive response that then we can then pull ourselves back, we can find that space between stimulus and response, and in that lies our liberation right.

12:09 - Speaker 1 For me when it comes to stress, the more that I have learned about stress, how it shows up in my life, what it looks like, what it feels like and that could be stressors just the concept of stress, actual, you know, working on the inside, working on cortisol management, it's kind of of for me boiled down to there's nothing I can do to really eliminate stress or stressors in my life. If I choose to get out of bed, then I am 99% of the time going to be welcoming same, similar new stressors into my life. It is only the level of awareness which I can catch myself when I'm getting stressed out so that I can better manage it. Do you think the trouble with stress right now with most people is the disconnect there, the lack of awareness around stress is inevitable, versus oh, this is stress, I can manage it.

13:01 - Speaker 2 I think so. I mean, certainly there's things that you can do to mitigate outside stressors in your life. You don't have to be on Twitter or X, right, Um, but I think that you're right. It is a mindset question and so, like I'll use um, I'll use an example. So I talk about fasting a lot. Fasting was really important for me in my own health journey and maybe we can unpack that later but I was very, very overweight and I was diabetic and all these kinds of things, and so I started to adopt all these protocols and fasting was one of them. So I adopted at this it was like three or four years ago like a 16-8 protocol, and I'm sure your listeners are very 16 hours no eating.

13:51 - Speaker 1 Eight hours eating window.

13:53 - Speaker 2 Exactly so consolidating all my consumption of food in an eight hour window. I mean, it was actually. I was a little bit fundamentalist about it at the beginning, but I've since left, stopped being neurotic about it. You beginning, but I've since left and stopped being neurotic about it. You know, I'm just kind of like, like to have fun. We will probably eat tonight together outside of my window.

14:10 - Speaker 1 We will, we will, we're making, we're making concessions everybody.

14:13 - Speaker 2 Yeah, but when I first started I was, I was pretty, I was stringent and you know, fasting in many ways is a spiritual pursuit. It also it's obviously very has a lot of physiological benefits, but in a way, like the biggest thing for me was spiritual or psychological you might categorize it at so because I became sort of a disciple to this practice and I consolidated all my consumption of food into eight hours. That didn't mean I didn't get hungry, you know hungry at 9 pm at night right.

14:49 But that was outside of my window. So what could I do? Well, I knew I wasn't going to eat, but that didn't stop me from having the stimulus. So what I had to do was actually examine the nature of that stimulus itself, examine and witness the nature of the hunger and then ask myself the question is this hunger a biological need, or is it an emotional or psychological desire?

15:23 - Speaker 1 Or am I just stuck in a habit loop and I don't even realize it? I just always in this place, or this time, grab this snack, do this thing, and it's just mindless.

15:31 - Speaker 2 Of course, because when I wasn't a disciple to the practice, what would I do? I would just mindlessly, unconsciously, meander over to the tray of snacks over here and pick up the Cheetos or whatever and indulge, right. But because I couldn't do that, I was forced to find that space between stimulus and response, to actually witness the provenance, the nature of the stimulus itself, and then take a break and then decide is this because I'm bored, or someone insulted me on Instagram, or for some other? Am I eating my feelings? Because 99% of the time, it wasn't really a biological need, and so I use that example because, really, fasting for me, yeah, it was certainly effective as it pertained to food, but really where it was most effective is where I started to apply that principle to other parts of my life, to finding that space between stimulus and response as it pertained to drinking alcohol, for example. Is this really a biological need or is this really a psychological or emotional desire? What am I going to do right now? Certainly with my children. I have three teenage daughters.

16:51 - Speaker 3 There's plenty of opportunity to be really fucking frustrated with them.

16:55 - Speaker 1 There's lots of stimulus let's just say well in public they're on great behavior. I met them, I think twice now, so I don't know what you're talking about. I always say the world gets the best of them in every way.

17:05 - Speaker 2 They would do something that would be aggravating or annoying right to me, and then, instead of just snapping and being completely reactive, find that space. Say well, what is the origin of their behavior, why are they acting this way and what is the appropriate response to this behavior? And this is the key to everything in life Chase is finding that space. Viktor Frankl wasn't a dummy. Yeah.

17:34 And that is true, and that mindset sits behind almost everything, every choice, every behavior that we engage in. In fact, you know, as I began to think about, like the protocols that I was adopting in my life to you know, reverse all of the chronic fatigue and brain fog and dad bod and man boobs and all this other shit that I had years ago. It was mindset behind all of those things. You know that was key.

18:08 - Speaker 1 Well, you're in the right space for that. That's what living a life ever forward is all about the whole point and theme of the show and I think this is a great opportunity to kind of shift into the core of your new work around. Good stress, positive stress, you stress If you choose it to be. All stress and this is going to be a hard one for some people to grab a hold of or to practice all stress, should you choose it to be, can in fact be good for you and it's just to your point, our mindset around it.

18:35 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so I completely agree, and it's certainly easier in some places in our lives than in other places in our lives. Candidly, I think the stress or the eustress, or the relationship that I had with stress that was most interesting in some ways had to do with personal relationships.

19:06 - Speaker 1 How so.

19:08 - Speaker 2 Okay. So in 2020, in March 2020, I started to write an essay for a commune to send out every Sunday, and my business partner was like you should really write something, give people little buoys of hope, and you know stories that they can relate to, and you know, if we share, this too shall pass. Yeah, it's like if we share our emotions, you know they're easier to process, et cetera. So I did Quickly found myself over a literary barrel because I had to produce like 2,000 words every Sunday. But fortunately or somewhat unfortunately for the world, but fortunately for a writer 2020 provided plenty to write about and I was really taking on a lot of, I guess, incendiary issues. Obviously, how could you not? So there, was COVID, Obviously how could you not?

20:08 So there was COVID, and then there was the reckoning for social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder, and then there was. Qanon and all of the crazy vicissitudes of Trumplandia and the election and everything like that. So there's plenty to write about and I was really trying to write very thoughtful and I was really trying to write kind of very like thoughtful, kind of quote, unquote, middle way articles that took in a lot of different viewpoints, etc.

20:38 But over the course of 2000 words I was bound to offend someone Right Of course, and especially during that time, because people were very triggered, right or ready to be triggered, and I made the dubious choice of attaching my personal email to the bottom of every one of these essays. The list at that point was like 1.2 million. It's now grown.

20:58 - Speaker 1 I have to just bring up. Everyone listening is going to be like Jeff. How do I grow my email list? To over a million. That's insane. That's another. That's amazing. Yeah, that's another podcast.

21:11 - Speaker 4 That'll be part two, I guess Happy to talk about it.

21:13 - Speaker 2 But yeah, actually Oprah taught me, but that's a whole other thing.

21:18 - Speaker 1 Oh yeah, yeah, You're just going to drop Oprah in the middle of the podcast.

21:33 - Speaker 2 All right, the podcast all right, I'm gonna drop it. All right, just so we can continue it next. So you book me again. Um, she didn't talk me, teach me personally, but her team. Um, so I did that, and then I would wake up monday morning with 500, 600 emails to that email box and you know, most of them you know candidly were encouraging and nice, but I'd probably get two or three dozen every Monday that would sort of crest the bow of my inbox with expletives.

21:54 - Speaker 4 Like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like a thousand times in an email, you know.

22:14 - Speaker 2 But some of them were actually thoughtful in their own way and I disagreed with them, but whatever. And they came from all sides of the political spectrum. I mean, certainly there was a lot of people on the right that didn't like something I had to say, um. And then there were people kind of on the far left and kind of in the abolish the police crowd that didn't really like what I have to say or didn't think like a white man should be centering himself during this time, but of course I was just writing my essay every Sunday. Anyhow, regardless of that, you know, I vowed to engage with those people and initially it was very I took it very personally and I was very defensive. Honestly, I was like wait, I'm just trying to write a free essay here, you know, to examine thoughtfully these issues that we're grappling with as a society. And why are you tearing me up?

23:15 - Speaker 1 That's my favorite part about putting out free content is that the lengths which people will go to just pull you down and the time that they take out of their life to berate a free piece of content.

23:27 - Speaker 2 Totally. But I started to actually get a little bit more insight into the nature of that behavior. So I would engage in a few emails back and forth and the more thoughtful, respectful people would write me kind of long responses and stuff. So eventually I said, okay, let's get on a zoom call. And at that juncture that's my great David Copperfield routine, because most people disappeared at that juncture.

23:55 - Speaker 1 I was going to say did they actually take you up on it? 26 people did. Wow, that's actually impressive.

24:00 - Speaker 2 So I did 26 one-hour Zoom calls with people that disagreed with me or didn't like me in one fashion or another.

24:10 - Speaker 1 How did it go? What did you do? What was the outcome?

24:13 - Speaker 2 So interesting. So I really did have to get myself into a place of safety and security Like the Greeks, stoics call this euthymia sort of a state of unflappability where you sort of inure yourself to insult. And I'd taken so much insult that I basically built what I call my psychological immune system.

24:38 - Speaker 1 And now, how did you actually drop in to prepare yourself for that?

24:42 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so well you know your audience is very intelligent as it pertains to human physiology. So we build our physiological immune system through exposure low-grade exposure to pathogens, right so bacteria and viruses, et cetera. The same really could be said for your psychological immune system, that through low-grade exposure to some insult and criticism you build up immunity to those things. And by the time August, september came around, when I had these calls, I'd really built up my psychological immune system.

25:19 - Speaker 1 You got some tough skin, thick skin. You got some tough skin, thick skin, yeah.

25:21 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and I just realized that other people's criticism and ad hominem was really just their own anger and they were just trying to displace that anger onto me so I could pick up that ember and hold it and plot and brood over how I was going to throw it back, but who would be getting burned at that point?

25:48 Oh damn so I stopped, I dropped it and I started to try to again examine and witness the nature of the stimulus, like where is this coming from, where is this behavior coming from? And so it was with that mindset that I entered these conversations and my goal really was to create a safe and secure environment to have these kinds of conversations, such that when we did have the conversation, like we weren't, our amygdala weren't hijacked, you know that we could actually be in a place where we could leverage our neo-mammalian rationality and and, and you know, really try to connect. So I got on these calls and but at this juncture I'll say, chase, I didn't have any training in nonviolent communication or anything like that Empathic conversation or communication.

26:48 - Speaker 1 I later I'm sure you became a quick learner. Yeah Well, I was going by instinct, for sure.

26:53 - Speaker 2 Later I met a number of people that were trained by Marshall Rosenberg, who started nonviolent communication. There's a whole approach to having these kinds of conversations, which I later learned and I'm writing about in this book. But at this juncture I didn't really know what I was doing. It was just going by instinct. But I was entering these conversations with the express intention of creating a safe and secure environment, Because that's the only environment in which relationships can really truly form.

27:24 - Speaker 1 Any conflict resolution, of course.

27:25 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, and you need to be available, you know and and be seeking mutuality etc. Um, so I get on these calls. There'd be like two minutes of like superficial pleasantries. I thank you for doing this and hey, how are you great?

27:42 - Speaker 1 um, so I'm here to tell you why I hate you so much, um, but, but the weather, wow, but that's not how it? Went actually.

27:48 - Speaker 2 So I got on and, very much unlike this conversation, I didn't say anything. I was just like hey, welcome, you know, I really want to understand how you feel and please just tell me, and I'm here to listen. That was how I started and I generally didn't say anything for 45 minutes. And, chase, they didn't say anything generally about the issue that had brought us initially to Loggerheads. They just told me their life story and their pain and their anguish and their divorce and their kids and man and I just sat there. It's crazy.

28:39 - Speaker 1 Wow, this is powerful man, this is powerful. So, I can just imagine some of these conversations. I mean these people were like hurting.

28:51 - Speaker 2 And what I realized is that, you know, people just wanted to be heard, they just wanted to be seen, and that was my role here was to provide a safe container and environment for them to be seen and heard. So that happened, for, you know, they would go on for 45 minutes or so and as I got better at doing this, um, I started to take notes and noting places of convergence in my life, with them, with their lives. So like, oh, yeah, I've got daughters, they have daughters. Okay, cool, write that down. Or like, oh, they were born in Chicago, I was born in Chicago, okay, write that down. I was like, oh, they drove cross country, I drove cross country. Oh, their car broke down in Texas, my car broke down in Oklahoma, whatever, I started to write down these places of commonality and by the time they kind of exhausted themselves. I would say, oh, that's so funny, man, I have three daughters too. Man, we're in the three daughters club.

29:54 - Speaker 1 You just reflected back the same story, but it's yours.

29:56 - Speaker 2 And then they were like oh my God, and what I realized is that the key to these stressful conversations is not seeking agreement or solution. The key was seeking connection. And you know, what came out of this is like I had like two dozen what I call frenemies. They're in like their own little address, part of my address, but contacts or whatever as my friend frenemies, and I still text with probably 10 of them, no way, and they're all over the place. Some are like hardcore Trumpers and they're they razz me. And I mean it's they razz me. They send me like check me out, you know, this week, you know you and your progressive liberal walkers do you get any?

30:45 - Speaker 1 uh, storming the capital photos.

30:47 - Speaker 2 No, I didn't get any and then I get you know stuff you know totally from the other side as well, and and it's just become sort of uh, we have a very fun, funny repartee that I have with a lot of these people and, candidly, it gave me an insight into parts of the culture that I just never understood, particularly the kind of rural, white working class, and I had a number that's probably the biggest proportion of people that I began to communicate with were. You know, folks that were living in what we call sometimes the flyover states. You know that were. You know that main streets had been boarded down and they, you know, were working two part-time jobs at minimum wage and shopping at 7-Eleven.

31:37 You know, those are the people that I really connected with and started to, you know, really have a lot of empathy for. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, this kind of leaning in to stressful conversations. There may be nothing more important than that, because if we can lean into a conversation that is difficult and thorny, you know, with someone we don't even know, well, maybe then we can build up, um, the courage and the bravery to have the conversations that we need to have with the people that we actually love, but we tend to avoid those ain't that the truth?

32:19 like my parents. They're in their 80s. I got to have those conversations, you know. You know my daughters, like my wife, my friends, and and I've become, you know, much less worried about having those conversations. I don't I don't avoid them anymore.

32:40 - Speaker 1 One key word I heard in your story there. First of all, again, that's incredibly commendable and what a really cool thing to have literally in your back pocket, in your phone or email list of these people that you know at any moment are down for a challenge, and it sounds like you're in a good, healthy, debate kind of relationship. And what a great ego check, what a great life check, what a great yin to the yang or yang to the yin here, I guess in this case. Um, I think that's just really commendable and I would challenge everybody listening to just lean into that. How much more convenient and comfortable it is for us to surround ourselves with like-minded people, with comfortable people, with people that don't challenge us. Now, of course, that's great. Like-mindedness is amazing, and I wouldn't be here today and you wouldn't be here today, I'm sure, if it were not for such practices.

33:29 - Speaker 2 We connected over shared values.

33:31 - Speaker 1 Yeah, but how many of us can go. You know what? Two of the 10 people I surround myself with the most. I keep because they challenge me. Here's an example Adversity, adversity. It shows up. I'm in a studio and like, the world still goes on. Best intentions still, the world goes on. But here's an example. One thing that works for me in a situation like this, when stress, literally distraction, uncomfortability comes knocking or banging on the side door, is, you know, remembering that it's not about me, that's just somebody trying to do their job. That's just somebody doing their job and then, without them doing their job, right now, banging and clanging trash cans while I'm trying to talk. You know we would have trash running through the alleyways. We wouldn't have, you know, systems and things that I take for granted, all of us take for granted. That's just somebody doing their job, and when I think about that, it really pretty immediately makes me go all right.

34:23 - Speaker 2 You just found the mindset right there.

34:25 You could have been like, oh man, we got to stop the recording, but you said wait, hold on, wait a minute. This is actually an opportunity that just presented itself to model how you deal with adversity. And you know the reality is whether it's getting into an ice bath or jumping into the ice bath of a stressful conversation. You know, doing hard things makes doing other hard things easier, you know, just simply. And so we need to get comfortable with discomfort, because it's actually comfort and convenience and chronic ease that actually leads to chronic dis-ease. We've engineered our lives to be so comfortable.

35:10 Surf it of endless highly processed calories, right? Or a little digital thermostat on the wall that keeps us at a snuggly little 72 so Chase and I can be comfortable during the podcast or whatever you know like 24-7 access to Larry David. Little 72 so Chase and I can be comfortable during the podcast or whatever you know like 24-7 access to Larry David, like I want to see you know, don't ask me to give up my Larry David.

35:31 - Speaker 1 All right, I keep LD.

35:33 - Speaker 2 I keep LD on on demand, as you should um but you know, I guess what I'm saying is that you know our lives that have been engineered for tremendous convenience over the last. You know 50, but certainly 150 years, or I should say 150, but certainly in the last convenience store, the 7-Eleven how detrimental the food is in a convenience store. In the end it's not convenient at all to go to the doctor or to be on insulin for the rest of your life or a statin for the rest of your life or a statin for the rest of your life, or rely on a Zempik or Wegovi to be able to maintain a healthy weight.

36:29 - Speaker 1 Or to rely on people in our life to give us these aspects that we can't figure out how to give ourselves. There's also such a thing as relying on things that are most people would say outside. Looking in, oh, this is good, you know. Oh, I need my partner, I need my job, I need this thing, I need these relationships.

36:53 You need yourself first and foremost, which I want to kind of go back to in your story with all those people you were connecting to, the haters you know, for lack of a better term, I heard connection, and I think once we're able to realize and develop, create, reconnect, a connection to our stressors, we then begin to kind of dissipate them, we develop a healthier relationship and this is the path to eustress, right.

37:19 But I think most people struggle more often than not connecting to themselves and therefore staying in a state of chronic, unnecessary stress. And I can personally say that the more I have spent or created habits and the work mental health, emotional health I mean all of my personal wellness practices have gotten me closer and closer and closer to Chase and connected to myself and being able to recognize when I'm disconnected from myself so that I can drop back in, and not all the time, but most of the time my woes become way less woesome, my stressors become way less stressful and I figure things out more quickly than just staying stuck and disconnected to myself and therefore in stress and not on the path to you stress.

38:08 What would you recommend somebody to do right here, right now, to develop that connection to themselves, first and foremost so that they're more on the path to you stress?

38:16 - Speaker 2 Yeah, well, there's a lot of things, um and I think you know what you're pointing to um, you know we all struggle with to one degree or another. Many of us are seeking external agents, be them products or shopping, or Instagram likes or followers, or drugs, or alcohol, or chocolate, cake, or new shoes or whatever. Larry David. Larry David. To assuage our own perceived deficiencies and discontents right, so we're looking to external agents for that, but those provide ephemeral, if any, comfort really in that project and really you have to look internally. It's about interoception.

39:08 - Speaker 1 How does one do that? How does one actually look internally?

39:12 - Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I think the first step is, I think, just being aware of it, so having some awareness that you know chasing something outside of myself is not going to.

39:22 Really it's going to keep me on this, basically this hedonic treadmill. There are practices specifically for this. There's a lot of stoic practices actually. Sometimes they're like negative visualizations, where you think about something that you really really cherish that you have. Maybe it's like a watch that your dad gave you, a family heirloom, or a relationship that you have in your life that you really really cherish that you have. Maybe it's like a watch that your dad gave you, a family heirloom, or a relationship that you have in your life that you really really care about. And then you imagine losing that thing, smashing it to pieces, yeah, and you sit in that feeling of that loss and that pain and that regret, and then you come back to this unbelievable sunny realization that that thing still is in your life and the net effect of that is loving the things that you already have and that can elicit a tremendous amount of gratitude.

40:19 - Speaker 1 So there's a lot of practices that way. So you're talking about maybe, the practice of detachment?

40:25 - Speaker 2 yeah, could boil it down to that yeah, or that, just that, that very practice of focusing on loving the things that you already have, or focusing or thinking about that the thing that you're doing might be the very, very last time that you're doing it. And that can be as prosaic as making a cup of coffee, if, if chase was going to make.

40:45 Only, I don't know if you drink coffee, but oh yeah let's say you were going to make, after this podcast, your last cup of coffee ever in your life. I bet you'd make a very, very good cup of coffee it would be strong coffee again.

40:59 - Speaker 1 Yeah, shout out strong coffee company.

41:01 - Speaker 2 There you go straight up, yeah um, and so you know, obviously you know we kind of skate through life. You know my dad calls. Do I pick up the phone? I'm busy. But then, when I'm really focusing on that, well, what if this is the last time you would ever call?

41:17 of course, yeah pick up that call and I'd talk to him for hours. And so I think you know it is leaning into the things that we already, that we already have and that can really elicit a tremendous amount of contentment and happiness. But I will just say there's so many other ways, I think, to lean into stress and honestly have a very positive relationship.

41:43 - Speaker 1 Like, like what if you could give us your, your personal top two? I know you're, you're deep in a lot of research and have an upcoming book around all this, so I'm sure you have a couple top of mind yeah.

41:52 - Speaker 2 So I would say I'll start with I guess I'll start with resistance training, just because it was so such an anathema to me. I was never never the gym guy.

42:05 - Speaker 1 And now.

42:05 - Speaker 2 I've come out of the closet.

42:09 - Speaker 1 Come on in the water's fine, Thanks man. Actually it might be cold. It's probably a cold plunge water. It's probably a cold plunge.

42:16 - Speaker 2 But I find it to be really interesting. About eight months ago I was hurting my back all the time. This was so recently I would like popping and crackling in my knees. You know, I was been an athlete all my life, um and uh, just kind of an avid tennis player, but I was really just like getting injured all the time. And then, um, my buddy Light Watkins, I don't know if you know, yeah, yeah, he's been on the show.

42:40 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah he's been on the show.

42:41 - Speaker 2 Yeah, he was like Kraz, you've got to get into squats, man. And I was like, oh yeah, well, of course, because part of my MO is actually examining how my hunter-gatherer ancestors lived, because we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, living relatively in the same way and living a little in the same way and living a little bit more that way, and, of course, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were big squatters. They didn't have comfy couches or comfy chairs, and so I started squatting all the time. I couldn't hold. I couldn't even get into a squatter position. First of all.

43:20 - Speaker 1 You want to squat? Right now I could squat if you want. You want to drop it down? Let's do it, let's go. It's position.

43:27 - Speaker 2 First of all, you want to squat? Right now I could squat. If you want to drop it down, let's do it. Let's go, we'll make it interactive. This is shout out darshan shaw. We're taking a micro. What is it called it?

43:31 - Speaker 1 um a snack, exercise, snack yeah, I'll take exercise snack and this is why I wear abc pants.

43:34 - Speaker 2 These are lulu stretchy pants oh yeah, I got some jeans, like just to sit here. Oh yeah, like you can get low, let's go. No, you're gonna be better than me. No, he's got it. So I started to uh, just to sit, sit in. I started to sit in a squat more often that felt good.

43:52 Honestly, yeah, a little stretch yeah yeah, um, I played some wicked tennis this morning, anyway, so I was like um, and then, uh, and then I started to like get a little bit more involved with it and started to do a lot more squats on a bozu ball, for example. You know, um, and I used to do squats with weights on a bozu ball and I really liked that because it, like you, don't, your mind cannot walk that's a challenge.

44:20 Yeah, absolutely um and and it brings your breath very central and your focus and your attention very central, very centered um. So that was great. And you know I noticed like just in my own you know musculature and my physiology boy, after doing that often for six to eight months, you know, boy, that really changed. But where this kind of like became really interesting to me is training my quads actually ended up training my mind. How.

44:54 So at first it was really hard, right, you know, I couldn't squat, I couldn't get my heels even close to the ground. I had to put like a piece of wood and use it as a wedge. And then I got better, and I got better, and I got better and I got stronger. And then, eventually, you know, when I would go on the tennis court, I was like boy man, my core and my center is really, really strong. Then I started like not losing, because come two and a half hours in in the third set, I was still there Like I was just. And not only that, I became then so confident Because I was like, yeah, you're going to play great and you might beat me if you get lucky, but come two hours from now, I'm going to be stronger than you. So we'll see what happens.

45:50 - Speaker 1 What a great literal stress adaptation.

45:52 - Speaker 2 I know so that then that kind of confidence started to sort of permeate my psychology. And then what happened? I started to like find this incredible ease because I was so confident I could balance this kind of like parasympathetic clarity on the tennis court with obviously a very sympathetic, like fight or flight body and find that unbelievable balance between and that's really flow state where you basically just become, you know, completely aware of your body in space and time.

46:34 And it used to be very difficult for me to find that place and now I really can find it more often. Resistance training also. I mean I was metabolically beyond, metabolically dysfunctional. I mean I had, you know, I wear a continuous glucose monitor. You know I put that on maybe three or four years ago. At that juncture I had, you know, fasting glucose levels of 125 milligrams per deciliter, so kind of the highest end of prediabetes, lowest end of diabetes. That sent me finally to my PCP, which we were talking about before we started recording Hell of a journey.

47:11 Yeah, it blew that appointment off quite a lot but finally went in there. Finally went in to see my PCP and had a hemoglobin A1C of 6.7%. So again that was kind of higher end of prediabetes, lower end of diabetes and so this was very central for me adopting all of these protocols. But where I really saw the balancing in my blood sugar was after doing more resistance training, because essentially muscle is a metabolic organ, really it's the machine, yeah, just a glucose sink.

47:53 And you know, contracted muscle does not even require insulin to uptake glucose out of the bloodstream. And you, you know, that's where I saw my essentially my fasting glucose levels went from 125 to about 80. Wow, over the course of about four or five months.

48:10 - Speaker 1 That's incredible.

48:11 - Speaker 2 And obviously that was stacked with other protocols. But, man, you know, getting into building muscle, particularly at 53, was a game changer for me, and I'm certainly not Lou Ferrigno or anything but yeah, me either Me either.

48:27 - Speaker 1 For sure, you know there's this concept I love. I forget where I heard it. It's not a chase original by any means, but knowing without doing is the same thing as not knowing now, yeah, right now. We can pick up our smartphones, we can listen to podcasts, watch podcasts, go to seminars, we can read, we can research, we can learn all of these amazing things about how to become more aware of stress, to mitigate stress and to turn everything as much as possible into positive stress through mindset and our own lifestyle adaptation From knowing to doing. Where are people slipping up? Why are they not doing? Why are they not adherent? What is going on there?

49:06 - Speaker 2 yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with habits. Right, you have to unwind maladaptive habits and wind up habits, good habits, adaptive ones and I think a lot of it is because you know, the way that the information is presented seems inaccessible. So I might say like not to you, but to someone like hey, dude, ice baths like unbelievable activation of dopamine for 48 hours, incredible for mood, unbelievable for metabolic health, incredible for building psychological resilience I could like go down the list. Nobody is going to jump into a 34 degree ice bath if they've never done it before, and that's the way a lot of this is presented. So what I try to say to people is take a shower and at the end of the shower just slowly turn it down a little bit colder till it's a little bit uncomfortable, and then get out.

50:07 - Speaker 1 We're microdosing here. We're microdosing adversity.

50:10 - Speaker 2 The dose makes the poison right. We don't want hyperthermia or hypothermia, we want to slowly be able to, you know, increase duration and, in this case, lower temperature. And that goes for everything Like I wear these, like minimal shoes.

50:26 - Speaker 1 Oh yeah, vivo, these are Vivo.

50:27 - Speaker 2 Yeah, great, I just met up with Galahad last week actually, yeah, he was at my house for the weekend and but he would, and we did this talk together and you know, someone said like, yeah, I bought some Vivos and then I went running for 10. I did I bought some Vivos and then I went running for 10. I did, I started running 10 miles a day and like my feet hurt and he's like no you don't want to do that and I said that's the.

50:50 That's the equivalent of jumping into a 34 degree ice bath If you've never done one before.

50:54 - Speaker 1 Or someone who has never exercised trying to deadlift. You know four or five, 100% yeah.

50:59 - Speaker 2 It's like the dose makes the. We want to present these things as accessible and they are. Getting. Cold is free. Like not eating saves you money. This is not like ozone therapy or hyperbaric chambers or cryo.

51:19 - Speaker 1 There are levels to this, of course, within reason, within means, within budget, within access.

51:24 - Speaker 2 Most of these things you can honestly just do. It's just about, actually what you're saying is merging. You know um intention and action, all right.

51:33 - Speaker 1 Let me ask you directly, then if you could give us what is one absolutely free of course someone's going to chime in and make an excuse about something but one of the freest, best things we could do to introduce eustress into our life all the way up to if you have the means, it's going to cost you money to you know, how are you going to invest? Where are you going to invest to really go that route of eustress? Or maybe is there one or two that you have?

52:01 - Speaker 2 Yeah. So I would say you wouldn't think that it would be difficult or stressful to sit on your ass and do nothing cool.

52:13 - Speaker 1 I love that you said that but it is in.

52:18 - Speaker 2 You know, in today's world, everything, everybody and every company and everything is vying for two things your time and your attention. Right, and we simply were not evolved for this kind of information overload. So we need to take back our time and attention and you do that through a practice, and that practice, initially, is very stressful. To sit here and do nothing for even 60 seconds and just witness phenomena arising and subsiding in consciousness moment to moment, or witness our breath, just sit there and notice. Just sit there and notice. Do it right now. And you know this shouldn't be stressful, but it is. But guess what? The good news, the gospel it gets easier. Doing hard things makes doing other hard things easier and the benefits are just inestimable in your life. Again, it goes back to that mindset. If you're able to witness the garbage truck, come and go see it's gone now, right, the garbage truck isn't really that different.

53:44 - Speaker 1 I forgot about it until just now.

53:46 - Speaker 2 It's not really different than an emotion or a feeling. They come and they go Right, so you just don't attach to it to identify with it. And the more you engage in this practice, the more it begins to punctuate. You know your life everywhere, so that would be one.

54:06 - Speaker 1 Yeah, what about if we want to drop some dollar dollar bills everywhere? So that would be one. Yeah, what about if we want to drop some dollar dollar bills? And let's say I got a budget of 100 to 500? What is something that I can invest in for a positive stressor in my life?

54:16 - Speaker 2 yeah, so many of these things like are free, like fasting, for example, and cold therapy and light therapy, getting out in the morning for 20 minutes and, you know, staring into the sky, which will set your circadian rhythm, et cetera. You know, heat therapy is not always free, so not everyone has a sauna, for example, but you can get I just bought for $100 on Amazon, I admit, a sauna blanket. Oh, I've seen these. Yeah, yeah, and you, you know, you snuggle in, you're like a little corn dog.

54:54 - Speaker 1 You're like a hot dog and it's jeff in a blanket. Yeah, it is exactly jeff in a blanket.

54:59 - Speaker 2 They give you two little like arm holes if you do want to like you know be on your phone if you want to.

55:05 - Speaker 1 Sure, because we can't do. Can't do nothing, right?

55:07 - Speaker 2 you can't do nothing yeah, if you could stack those protocols, be in the sauna, blanket and meditate, do nothing, um, uh, and so, yeah, you can get the same benefits there, I mean. So basically, um, you know, exposure yeah, why is heat?

55:24 a eustress yeah, well, heat is. Heat is going to mimic in some ways, you know, cardio-aerobic exercise because it's going to raise your heart rate and so it's going to be like zone one, zone two exercise in terms of, you know, imparting some of those cardiovascular benefits like aerobic exercise does. There is some detoxification associated with sweat. So you're going to sweat. Most of your detox happens with your liver and your and your kidneys and stuff like that, but you are going to get, you know, some heavy metals and some other things through through sweating. But the bigger ones are, you know, seem to be the activation of certain proteins in the brain, like BDNF.

56:10 - Speaker 1 Brain-driven neurotrophic factor Exactly, which is a good thing.

56:13 - Speaker 2 Total good thing, I mean. Until relatively recently, we essentially thought that the brain stopped growing at age 25, 26. Now it is true that I see it with my daughter Her brain's like popping off right now. She's in college and she actually called me earlier today and read me this essay. I'm like, are you kidding you? Are just brilliant. But now you know, with neuroplasticity, you know we're discovering that.

56:41 - Speaker 3 We're discovering that. We're discovering that we're discovering that we're discovering that we're discovering that. We're discovering that we're discovering that. We're discovering that we're discovering that we're discovering that we're discovering that we're discovering that we're discovering that we're discovering that.

56:57 - Speaker 2 We're discovering that it's essentially new neurons.

56:59 - Speaker 1 This is solidifying my your question earlier about if it was my last cup of coffee on earth. Strong Coffee Company actually has it increases BDNF. It has nootropic factor neuro factor in it already. Yeah, so I'm going out swinging cup of coffee on earth? Strong coffee company actually has. It increases bdnf. It has, um, okay, nootropic factor sure, neuro factor in it already. Yeah, so I'm going out swinging.

57:12 - Speaker 2 The last cup is serving me well, all right, all right fortunately won't be your last cup, um, and then the other one. You know, rod and patrick talks a lot about this. She's kind of like the sound my queen um, exactly she went um.

57:26 I don't know the stat anymore, but you know it's like equivalent to the number of like sheep there are in New Zealand. In terms of the number of saunas there are in Finland, I think there are more sheep in New Zealand, but anyways, so much of the data around sauna is from Finland, for good reason.

57:46 - Speaker 1 We have so much time they've been doing it for so long yeah, and it's cold and actually my mother-in-law is in town.

57:52 - Speaker 2 I've got to take her to the airport after this. She's Finnish, so she's always been big in Sodom. My wife is part Finnish and hopefully they're not Finnish with me, but I have to write that one down.

58:05 - Speaker 1 That would be a stressor. That would be a stressor.

58:07 - Speaker 2 That would be a stressor. But there's also, you know so Rhonda Patrick has rolled up a lot of this data into meta-analyses around sauna, so she's great to follow around this stuff. But there's also this other protein called heat shock proteins. So heat shock proteins actually maintain the shape of other proteins. So when proteins get generated in the body through the combination of amino acids and different recipes coming from our DNA, et cetera, they get made in the ribosomes of the cell and they have a three-dimensional shape and they need to maintain that shape to be functional, and sometimes they'll misfold and then become dysfunctional. So these heat shock proteins seem to be very good at maintaining the three-dimensional shape and, by extension, maintaining the functionality of these proteins, and so there seems to be some mounting evidence that they are neuroprotective against, like beta amyloid proteins or tau tangles, etc.

59:13 which are often associated or correlated with Alzheimer's. There's a lot of different theories about Alzheimer's these days, but clearly these beta amyloid plaques and these tau tangles tend to be highly associated with Alzheimer's, and these heat shock proteins that you get from the sauna um seem to prevent the development of these kind of more deleterious amazing.

59:37 - Speaker 1 I'm here for it.

59:38 - Speaker 2 I'm here for it and to be honest, it's a very, for me it's a very pleasant experience, much more pleasant than being in the cold. Um, and then you know I'm sure a lot of people you know do the contrast bathing and if you do that kind of hot cold, hot cold, always finish cold. You know, heat is a vasodilator, so it's going to open blood vessels up and cold is a vasoconstrictor, it's going to close blood vessels down and so when you go between the two of them, you're opening and closing, and opening and closing and that has really great benefits on the circulatory system because it's moving blood around and the lymph, because it's moving the lymph around.

01:00:15 So, you know, so these are some of just the more kind of empirical hacks. You know that you can do no.

01:00:21 - Speaker 1 Thank you so much for sharing and I can't wait to learn more when you have your finished work out. Stress, I think, is a really unique thing. It's something that we all can relate to and we all have a relationship to it, whether we realize it or not. So here is our moment of awareness to develop for the first time, or come back to in a new way, that relationship to stress. If you could summarize, before I get into my last question, if you could summarize into one statement, one phrase, what would you want the listener, the viewer, to walk away with the most today in terms of the concept of stress, particularly eustress?

01:00:56 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so I believe that chronic dis-ease is the result of chronic ease. So we evolved with certain forms of paleolithic stress over tens of thousands of years. You know food scarcity, fluctuations in temperature. We lived outside and immersed ourselves in nature. We lived communally. You know we were responsible not only for our own well-being but for the well-being of the tribe. So what I really encourage people to do is examine the conditions in which we evolved. What were those paleolithic stressors that conferred benefits and resilience, and live a little bit more that way.

01:01:46 - Speaker 1 I can't talk. It's been a long podcast day. Excuse me, I can't disagree with you there, absolutely. So, to bring it all home, I think what you're talking about here is an incredible example of moving forward in life, living a life ever forward. But those two words, jeff, when you hear them, what do they mean to you? If I were to ask you how does Jeff Krasnow live a life ever forward, what would you say?

01:02:06 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I think we're always in this place of evolution. You know, I mean, four years ago, man, I was not in good shape, like I said. You know I had, you know I had the. I'm kind of the most boring guy you could have on your podcast, honestly, because my story no, trust me, you're not.

01:02:26 - Speaker 1 No, no, no.

01:02:26 - Speaker 2 Because my story is not extraordinary at all. It's so ordinary. But the problem is we've normalized brain fog, chronic fatigue, you know adiposity, irritability, the inability to concentrate. I read zero books in 2017. 17 zero books.

01:02:54 So what I guess what I'm saying is change is possible, moving forward, ever forward, is possible, and I see it, I'm living proof of it, and the kind of the great news right now is that there is so much agency. It's like we are impermanent processes, changing incessantly in relation to our environment. Period. We are impermanent. Chase tomorrow is a different chase than chase today. Now we're anchored to the sense of physical and psychological continuity that gives us an identity. But I'll see you tomorrow or I'll see you tonight, and billions upon billions of bacteria in your gut will have turned over, billions of cells will have died and new ones will have been created. You will not be the same person. You will be literally reincarnated by the time I see you tonight. Change is incessant and so, when we recognize ourselves as process and not product, we have a choice. We can be moving towards wholeness that's healing, or we can be moving towards disease that's ailing, and we have tremendous agency over which direction that we're going. And fortunately, man, I got lucky and I moved forward.

01:04:13 And the other thing I would just say is I love learning. You know, remain curious. That is going to pull you forward, because I'll tell you, basically, I almost put myself autodidactically through a strange form of medical school. Over the last four years I interviewed 400 doctors. You know, I used to like avoid a white coat at all costs.

01:04:42 - Speaker 1 Now I want to like wear one talk about a total immersion therapy or exposure therapy? Yeah, totally.

01:04:48 - Speaker 2 And the amazing thing is when you start learning and start growing, it is like bringing a torch into the night sky right. It reveals how much darkness there is. When you start learning about physiology or microbiology or virology or vaccinology or etiology, you realize how much you don't know and that can be frustrating sometimes, but it's so alluring and it keeps you growing.

01:05:21 - Speaker 1 Never a wrong or right answer. I loved and appreciated that interpretation. Jeff, where can my audience go to connect with you and learn more about stress and your work? Yeah, get on that amazing email list. Yeah, yeah.

01:05:32 - Speaker 2 I write these commusings every week. So yeah, my platform is called Commune. I have a little imposter syndrome, given who else is on there. It's Zach Bush and Mark Hyman and Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra and Sadhguru and Wim Hof and all these people Some Marianne.

01:05:47 Williamson and Deepak Chopra and Sadhguru and Wim Hof and all these people Some pretty good company. But I'm on there too and I have a couple of courses. I have one on stoicism and then I have an online course on good stress. So you just go to onecommunecom, that's O-N-E. Communecom, all right. And I host a podcast called Commune where you can hear people 30 times smarter than me and you know I kind of wax.

01:06:13 - Speaker 1 Until Chase Schooning comes on Hardly, hardly. Then it's only 29.

01:06:20 - Speaker 2 And yeah, I'm sort of waxing alternately poetically and pathetically on Instagram at Jeff Krasnow. So those are the primary locales.

01:06:29 - Speaker 1 Amazing. Well, that will all be in the show notes and video notes for you guys. Thank you so much for tuning in here today. Definitely check out Jeff's work. It's been great getting to know you and your family and community more the last couple years now, and I'll see you in a couple hours for dinner. Sounds great man, all right, thanks Jeff, thanks dude.