The critical role of mental health within functional medicine. While physical health protocols, such as nutrition and supplementation, are well-established, the mental aspect is often neglected. The importance of addressing mental well-being as a foundational element for overall health is emphasized, stressing that mental health practices should be integrated into daily routines. Incorporating mental health strategies like therapy, gratitude exercises, and mindfulness can enhance both mental and physical well-being.

The connection between the subconscious mind and trauma is explored, explaining how unresolved issues can influence behavior and health. The importance of therapies, such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), to uncover and address these underlying issues is highlighted. By prioritizing mental health, individuals can create a strong foundation for their physical health, ultimately leading to a more balanced and fulfilling life. The discussion serves as a call to action, encouraging listeners to take proactive steps in nurturing their mental well-being.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:04 – Introduction to Functional Medicine Collaboration
01:06 – Importance of Mental Health in Functional Medicine
02:12 – Common Agreement Among Experts
03:08 – Mental Health and Everyday Choices
04:16 – The Need for Mental Health Practices
05:09 – Exercise and Mental Health
08:32 – Subconscious Mind and Trauma
11:37 – The Role of Therapy and NLP
13:24 – Mental Health vs. Supplementation
14:14 – Call to Action

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Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] I was working with one of my buddies this weekend. Over some. Or my. Anybody who says functional medicine. And, we were kind of going through the different protocols that he was using, that I was using, and kind of showing the differences and trying to come up with better protocols. And it was funny because the new protocol we’re running that has all the mental work in and of all the in our post, in our piece of it, we started down, we started talking about, and he was like, this is the thing that everybody’s missing. He was like, this is a piece. He’s he’s like, he’s he’s fully functional and certified and adult functional medicine. I’ve got function at some, pediatric people I work with a lot. And, he was like, this is the thing that we’re missing. He was like, we got all the chemistry and we got the, you know, supplementation. We’ve got the, you know, all the detoxification stuff. We’ve got the nutrition stuff. He’s like, that is the the mental piece is a big thing that we’re missing. And so we’re working on rolling some of the mental work that we’re doing into some of the, already established.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:06] First medicine protocols that he’s running. If we’re trying to come together, do more work together with some of our functions and bodies. But that’s the biggest thing. It’s like it’s always funny when we sit down and I talk to people who have high physiological training, functional medicine docs, neuro neuro guys, neuro biochemical guys. That is the number one thing, that we we’ve all been like. Oh, yeah, 100% something addressed it all. And here’s the funny thing. It’s not like like with the chemistry thing. Like, should I take 100mg Q10 or 150 and there’s like a 100. There are 150. Like, everybody has their own opinions. The thing is, is that we all agree that we need some cookie tech. We all agree we need methyl to be vitamins. The quantity and the amount of individual. Folate or the methyl Kabala main or whatever it is, whichever b it is. We might argue a little bit about how much we need, but we all agree that we need it. And so she gets on it. The thing is, is that I have never spoken to any guys I disagree with. Right. Like guys who are like you should you stand for everything. And I’m like, you’re crazy. That’s terrible.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:12] The research shows physiology shows are terrible, but we both agree on the fact that mental peace is a big, big, big, big part of things. Everybody needs your time. I don’t think I’ve spoken to any. Anyone, you know, health care practitioner, you know, trainer, anybody even I consider health care practitioner trainers, more health care practitioners in us. They’re doctors. Everybody agrees like, the mental piece is really, really important. Like, I’ve never, like again. I’ve never met anybody who’s like, the mental patient is irrelevant. Like, nobody says that. However, think of it. Yeah. When you go to your doc, when you go to, you know, we open up the magazines in Muscle Fitness, obviously nobody’s like, hey, have you guys stopped and checked your mental patient? And this isn’t for like, oh, I have this major problem that I’m trying to deal with. It’s eating me alive inside. I don’t know how to do a deal with it. Yeah, those guys definitely need help, but everybody needs to work on your mind. That’s why we keep talking about every single thing that you guys do.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:08] Everything. Like, you know, if you show up to the gym every day, you had to make that choice, right? You had to decide to build the, you know, the commitment and dedication. You have it. You build it. They take decision. You decide, you know, I’m going to I’m going to choose to eat right. I’m going to choose the supplement. Right. Like it’s all a mental thing. And so the idea that we’re not spending giant amounts of time starting off working on the mental peace, I think is one of the major travesties, what we’re doing, nobody is nobody’s arguing that the mental piece isn’t valuable. Nobody’s arguing that we should all be doing something for our mental peace. What are we doing right? That’s the thing. And so, you know, you know, people come in like, well, hey, is the NLP thing therapy? Technically, legally, we can’t call it that. However, I will tell you that, you know, anything that you go into beforehand and you have a positive outcome on the other side and you feel better. It has to be a form of therapy. So I understand it’s confusing, but from a legal aspect, we can’t necessarily call it that, but it’s one of those things that is highly beneficial. Now if you’re like, well, I’m not going to get into doing NLP, but I’m going to do something great.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:16] Go call seven counselors, therapists, psychologists in your area. Go meet them in 1 or 2 sessions with them and figure out who works best with you and start working on your mental health. You know, if you guys have sex, you know, a little bit of time in the middle of the day. If you end of the day, beginning the day would be like, I’m restructuring my day. So I have mental breaks in my day where I can sit and, you know, go over gratitude. I can sit in, you know, decompress or I can just breathe super duper important. Like, you know, the the thing that we are not addressing almost at all is the mental space. And it’s always funny because people come in, they’re like, oh, I don’t understand. Like how, like how why should we start here? Like, oh, well, but you don’t have to, you don’t have to start with that, okay? You don’t have to start with, you know, Gratitudes you don’t have to start with, you know, going and seeing a therapist. But what are you doing now? Like, what is the thing you do now specifically for your mental health? And I know a lot of guys are like, I work out. That’s fantastic.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:09] Like, I’m not arguing that because the neurology is wildly. It’s one of those we know pretty well that exercise shifts you from the sympathetic, stressed out state to a parasympathetic resting, digesting state better than anything we know. And with that, we get suppression of the major function. Again, fear, anger, terror, all that crazy stuff. Yeah, 100%. Like absolutely. Yeah. We understand why you’re pissed off. You’re super angry to go walk around for a minute while you calm down a lot faster. Like that neurologic function we get we understand it. So if you’re working out for your mental health, great job. Count that for 100%. Control something you’re doing. What else are you doing? Are you are you reading? Things are uplifting. Are you reading? Say are you putting things into your head that are positive and uplifting and beneficial? Are you constantly being, you know, beaten down by, you know, media that is negative? You know, those are some of the things that you’ve got to really kind of watch out for, you know, how are we taking care of our mental health, how we take care of our kids? Mental health. You know, the things that we say, the things that we do, the things that we don’t listen to are traumatic in a lot of different ways. Yeah. And it’s not a, it’s not a, you know, you’re a bad parent who needs x, Y and Z.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:19] It’s just stuff’s going to happen and sometimes. And here’s a problem. This is a this is the hardest thing with trauma. Trauma is not what happened. It’s what you perceived it to be. Because again, remember we’re not working on chemistry that much anymore. We’re working on mental peace. We’re we more of this serial. We’re working on the here’s how things are. Here is how you should be. Here is how you say, you know, those are the type of things of, you know, building the cycles up, breaking cycles down. You know, those are the type of things that we need to be really, really focused on as we go forward. Because the one thing that we’ve noticed is that regardless of where we are biochemically like, because we have so much biochemical research and, you know, you can go to a store and get whether they’re good or bad, you can get all sorts of supplementation. Every single food product we have has a list of nutrients and stuff on the back of it, all the nutritional information. So from a chemistry standpoint, it’s now it’s just making the right decisions. You know, we’ve already we’re all started on it. We’re all, you know, more or less, you know, in that chemistry thing I got talk to you all this all the time and they might not know why, but like, high protein diets are the way to go. And I’m like, yeah, good job.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:29] We we might need a couple more hours going through exactly why. But yeah, I hope you got high protein. Low sugar. Good job. That’s not knock you out. But the. They said the same thing as I talked to him, like, what are you doing to your mental health? And people are just sitting. They go, what do you mean? I mean, go for your what what do you do for your mind? Like to, you know, make sure your mind’s in the right place and that sort of thing. And so many people just go, yeah, I don’t think I’m really doing anything for that. Yeah, sometimes, like if you were like, well, I go to church, I go to Bible study. That’s fantastic. Like, you know, if you’re if that’s if that’s the thing that you learn to bring you peace, it brings me tremendous amounts of peace. I that’s one of my all time favorite things to do for mental health is, is do that does deep explorations, discussions on religion and philosophy and things like that. Like I that helps me. But, you know, it’s actually been great. What else are you doing? Like during the day, like during the normal day when stress gets to you and everything’s going crazy and, you know, you’re worried about, you know, kids are starting back and this, this, this person’s sick and this thing’s going on.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:32] And we got all these things we got to for football practice and for, you know, band practice and for whatever you have all these things going on, what are you doing to calm the noise down? Like, what are you doing to kind of help reorient the way that you look at things like, how are you that those little things that are irritating you, like, you know, those sort of things. And then if you really want to get, you know, really into the functional piece of it is the unconscious or the subconscious portion of your mind, which is where you plays a lot of, you know, young talks about it like, you know, Freud talks about it like the part of your mind is conscious that you have normal thoughts and is driven by the unconscious in the subconscious mind. Kind of like an example. I was using a vessel. There’s a whole bunch of non-computer people, but it’s kind of like task manager, right? Because you can look at your trying like, okay, you know, I got my internet, I have some googles running. I got, you know, these three, you know, things running. And so when you have, you know, passenger, it’s like oh there’s 27 processes going on. Like I was only aware of four of them. And that’s kind of a subconscious mind.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:33] And sometimes you have to go in and open up subconscious mind and be like intact. But and that’s again, that’s kind of where a lot of your therapy, some of your NLP stuff, that’s where that lives. So that’s the big piece is what’s going on inside your head that you’re maybe not even aware of, because those are the things that drive who you are and what you do. This is where a lot of these childhood traumas, this is where, you know, psychological trauma, you know, divorces, PTSD, things like that. You know, shift who you are and how you think and how you process information. Because if you if you’ve been traumatized, you can if you’re not consciously thinking, hey, the last time I did this, I got hurt. And so this I’m going to put up walls. I’m going to put barriers to keep myself, to protect myself from getting hurt. Those are those are oftentimes unconscious or subconscious terminology, decisions that you are making, you’re just not aware of. And so a lot of times when you become aware of these decisions, you can stop them and you can create new habits and build new, new functional tools to get yourself moving in the right direction.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:34] But again, if you don’t have me walk you through it, if you don’t take the time to investigate and dig into these things, a lot of the things that we’ve the the decisions we were made making due to our unconscious decisions are going to continue to happen. And so that’s a big piece. So when we start talking about how important the mental game is, it is wildly important. It’s just not something that we’re dealing with very much. Everybody agrees that yes. Yeah, mental health is super important. We should you should totally be doing more things from a. So health 100% needed. And we have all this research being like, hey, high stress causes all these problems, right? You know, we have all this information on it. We’re just not really doing anything about it. That’s why we started rolling in the mental health piece to what we’re doing. That’s why, you know, I chose NLP. One of the pieces that we’re working with, because it is, I think, the fastest, easiest way to get another look on maybe problems that you’re having unaware of, pointing out blind spots to you. That type of thing. It’s telling.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:37] So, like, if you’re running a business and you’re in the business and you know, the whole, you can’t see the forest for the trees, and then someone comes in like a consultant. He goes, hey, did you know that your KPI is over here wrong. Hey, did you know that, over here, you’re not even here. I mean, watching for these things. You’re. You’re bleeding money over here, or you’re doing a lot of work here that’s not returning anything on it, because you can look at it from an outside vantage point. You have a different angle on it. Wildly, wildly helpful. And that’s kind of what, you know, a lot of different talk therapy is, you know, plays out a little bit. That’s why it’s super important to go. And you sit down, you talk to somebody and you work with somebody and you go, hey, here’s how life is rolled out to me. And I can psychotherapy or talk therapy. I’ll go ask you questions to help you kind of figure out on your own. Like, hey, this this thing that I’ve been doing isn’t as productive or beneficial to me as I think it was. Maybe I can come up with a different way of doing these things. Is going to be more beneficial to me and move myself in the right pathway because we all get stuck in these things.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:36] And here’s the thing. If you’re not working with somebody on them, you’re just sitting there trying to work on it yourself. You can only possibly see it from one vantage point. And so getting somebody else that you can talk to as you work with, helping you see it from a different vantage point, might be all you need to solve these problems that you’ve been dealing with, whether you know it or not, for years. So a lot of this stuff is going to translate. The mental stuff is going to translate directly to physical health. So if you guys aren’t doing anything for your mental health, find something like, you know, go talk to a therapist, you know, you know, find some NLP guys, you know, start reading really positive stuff. You know, like get something to help push your mind in the direction you want it to go. If you just let modern society fill it with fear and anger and hatred and terribleness, that’s what you’re going to have. So think about your mental health.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:13:24] Think about what you’re doing on a constant basis to improve your mood, improve your attitude, improve your, you know, your outlook on life to decrease, you know, materials and things like that. Those are the things are going to help more than anything else. You know, people ask me like, well, what would be better if I could only afford to do the mental health for a month or take supplementation for a month? Like, which one is that? And I tell people. I would go with mental health. And the reason is because there’s a lot of supplementation that a lot of people need only because they’re in a sympathetic state. If they could relax and calm down and shift back in the parasympathetic. Half the problems that we’ve used to work on them, we would need. And so that’s the biggest thing. If you can get the mind right, the body will always follow. It’s not possible to have a healthy body with an unhealthy mind. So keep that in mind if you guys have not been doing anything. If you guys need some help, hit us up. You know, drop it in the comments and we’ll help you guys kind of find places to go.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:14:14] But you know, just you know, there’s there’s things online just Google you know, psychotherapies are talk therapy counseling. You know near me and find somebody and figure out, you know, what works best for you. But the mental peace is the probably the biggest thing. It is the biggest thing. We’re not addressing the way we should. So if you guys are looking for something that to tweak your health or biohacking body kind of work on that mental peace, it is the number one thing to do for all things in your body, and nobody’s really doing anything about it, so check that out. Thanks for your time.

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