A Natural Anxiety Reset For Men Over 40 with Dr. Anthony Balduzzi

0:00Mental health is at an all-time low. There are hundreds of millions of people struggling with anxiety, and depression, and feeling lost, and this is largely due to our modern lifestyle and environment that is making it so that our bodies and our minds are under constant guard. Anxiety is not some character flaw. It is a nervous system state that is not feeling safe. When we do not feel safe, our nervous system is in this sympathetic tone. It is responding to threat, and when our nervous system is responding to threat, what the brain's activity is, active, constantly thinking, and ruminating, never resting in the present moment where we feel connected and safe. The way you breathe is one of the greatest levers for shifting your physiology into safety. And I promise you this, if you try to do everything else that I say in the rest of this podcast, all the strategies, but just skip the breathing, you will never experience the results because the breathing is the deepest access point to safety. Oxygen is part of the force of life. You can go

1:04a long time without water. You can go an even longer time without food. Oxygen, you need it constantly. And so for our body, the safety that creates when we breathe properly and the chemistry changes, when you breathe through your nose, releases nitric oxide, which dilates all your blood vessels, getting that blood to the brain. Circulation is moving, feeling very safe. Your vagus nerve gets activated by nasal breathing. And if you can slow down your breathing, you're training your body to be in parasympathetic tone. Let me ask you something, when's the last time you were in a room full of men who actually get it? Who know what it's like to juggle work, family, and still fight to show up for your health every single day? Well, that's exactly what happens August 7th through 9th at Fitfather Fit Mother Live in Phoenix, Arizona. One of our guys, Nick, came last year expecting to learn some new great fitness strategies, but he didn't expect was walking away with tools that changed immensely and emotionally, not just physically.

2:06When he got home, his family saw it, his friends saw it. He felt like a different man by Sunday. That's what this event does. You'll train with me and our team. You'll get strategies that you can't find online, but more than that, you'll walk into a room full of people on the same mission as you, and you'll leave on Sunday with new friendships, momentum, and clarity that you didn't have on Friday. This is not a sit in your chair type of conference. You do morning workouts, cold plunge, sauna, yoga, stretching, breath work. You're going to feel this upgrade in your body, and we're at the beautiful Arizona Grand Resort that has a 7-acre water park, lazy river, golf course, spa, and we have special suite rooms that run only $150 a night. This feels like a vacation and a breakthrough at the same time. You can bring your entire family if you want. Some people do. Make this a summer trip in a peak experience for you in 2026. And here's the thing. Last year's VIP tickets sold out, and the guys who were there,

3:08they're already registered for this one. That should tell you something. Early bird pricing is live now, but it won't last. So go to fitfather.com forward slash live. That's fitfather.com forward slash live. This could be the weekend that changes everything for you. I hope to see you in Phoenix. Hey there, my friend. It's Dr. Anthony Balduzzi. Welcome back to another powerful episode here on the Fitfather and Fit Mother Project podcast. Today, we're talking about how to calm your mind and reduce anxiety naturally. Today's episode is about your mental health and well-being, which is such a huge part of our physical health. Because ultimately, if we ask ourselves what we want out of our life experience, the first thing someone's going to say is not six pack abs. They're going to say something like, I want to be happy. I want to feel fulfilled. I want to have a rich life of love and connection. So we're inherently valuing the subjective experience of

4:14our lives, our well-being, and then we also want to be expressing that through healthy behaviors, and ultimately enjoying a healthy, strong fit body. The mind and the body are so integrated. And today, I want to talk about this topic of my direct experience with dramatically improving my mental health and what I've come to learn and understand about the interplay between the physiology and the body and the mind and the thinking and the emotions. I'm going to share with you some of the practices that I have done that has really rewired my brain and my nervous system to feel calm and safe and clear. And this is going to be helpful for you personally, but also for anyone in your family. Because right now, if we look around today's day and age, mental health is at an all-time low. There are hundreds of millions of people struggling with anxiety and depression and feeling lost. And this is largely due to our modern lifestyle and environment that is making

5:15it so that our bodies and our minds are under constant guard. And so I want to say that anxiety is not some character flaw. It is a nervous system state that is not feeling safe. When we do not feel safe, our nervous system is in this sympathetic tone. It is responding to threat. And when our nervous system is responding to threat, what the brain's activity is is active, constantly thinking and ruminating, never resting in the present moment where we feel connected and safe. And so ultimately, what we're doing is this interplay between all the mental stuff that we can do, working on our attachments and the things we need to forgive and practicing more gratitude, but also the physiology of feeling safe. So that's really important to understand because that's what we're really going to get into. Let's define what anxiety is. It's your felt sense of lack of safety in the body paired with a racing mind with shallow scattered attention and vigilance.

6:23Always looking for that next thing. And so as I shared, and I'm sure you know this, there are two main branches of your nervous system. There is the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic is what's activated with fight or flight. This is when we are really responding to a real visceral threat. Or in today's day and age, we're activated in a way due to this constant anxiety where the stress physiology is on. We're pumping out more cortisol, more adrenaline. The brain is in very fast and active waves, these beta waves that are scattered thinking. And then we have parasympathetic, which is where our body is healing, where digestion happens, where we feel relaxed and safe. And in an ideal scenario, we should be in parasympathetic 95% of the time, 98% of the time. And we only activate sympathetic when we absolutely need it. And for most people that is so far off the lived experience, the lived experience might be 50-50.

7:26It might even be more sympathetic. And I think this is one of the main reasons that people are dying younger. It's one of the main reasons people are struggling with food addictions and other kinds of addictions is because we're in this anxious nervous system sympathetic state and we're trying to fix it externally through all different kinds of vices and engagements. And I want to really teach you a little more about the brain too, because imagine this activated sympathetic stressed physiology, which leads to an increase in your heart rate, a feeling of tension in your muscles, right? Those tight traps or stress in your low back that you might feel. Your body under sympathetic tone is releasing more cortisol and more adrenaline, which has a negative impact on your immune system. It can make it more likely that you hold on to visceral fat and grow that. But inside your brain, a lot of things are happening too. The brain has all these amazing regions and specific regions have specific functions. There are regions of your brain that are related to your vision. There are regions of your brain

8:30related to your hearing. There's regions of your brain related to judgment and decision making. Some related to motion and motor units and action. So you have all these different areas. And when we are in this activated sympathetic state, your body is producing these very fast beta waves. And this is anywhere in 18 hertz up to like 30, 40 hertz where we want the brain to be mostly when we're feeling relaxed and connected is producing alpha waves, which are below 13 hertz. Let's just say anywhere from seven to 13 hertz. And now I find this to be very, very poetic and beautiful is the earth's natural frequency. The human resonance is stated on average, although it absolutely is variable and fluctuating at around eight hertz, 7.83 is often cited. That is right in the alpha band of the brain's electrical activity. And what I take that to be in the poetry of the connection between our human physiology and the planet is when we're in resonance

9:34with life and nature, our brain is producing alpha waves, which are the exact kind of waves when we feel relaxed and connected. In fact, when they measure Olympic athletes like an archer or let's just say someone playing golf and Tiger Woods is about to smash a drive, their brains have a burst of alpha waves right before they do that that excellent execution of the motion. It's like inflow in the zone. So we want to brain that gets into those more slower wave patterns. We're going to talk about how to create that through daily practice and even some foods. And when it comes to those alpha waves versus those beta waves, a lot of this is also the chemistry that creates those. So we have different types of neurotransmitters. Some are very activating like glutamate, some are very calming like GABA. Most of us, if we have anxiety, need more calming. We need more GABA. And this is why so many people turn to alcohol or other kinds of drugs and sedatives to deal with anxiety because those things directly increase GABA. When people drink or have

10:38that glass of wine, it increases GABA. Are they looking for the alcohol or are they looking for the change in the state of the neurochemistry? What if we could produce that GABA, those neurotransmitters that gets that brain into that more relaxed state? They get the nervous system of the entire body into more relaxed state with doing healthy behaviors instead of one that cause harm. That's what we're going to unpack today. So your body is trying to protect you. The goal is not to win or beat anxiety. The goal is to reestablish safety in the body and the mind. And so we're going to work from the bottom up in this sense through the body first and then into the brain. And so we talked about the idea of safety, right? Anxiety is a response to threats. So we want to create safety. And I'm going to make the argument here for the sake of this framework that there are four big safety levers that we can pull. The first one is our breath and our body presence. Our breath and our body presence. The second one is our movement and our training. The third one are our daily

11:39inputs like our caffeine, our screen time and technology, our foods and the kind of sleep. And the fourth one is our environment and the meaning we make in our environment. This is like nature, gratitude, forgiveness and meditation. So breath and body presence number one movement and training number two are inputs like caffeine, technology, food and sleep number three. And number four is our environment and the meaning we create. Nature, gratitude, forgiveness and meditation. We are going to unpack these each of these. I'm going to share with you the strategies I think are our most useful and the deeper understanding of how it ties into the preamble we've done so far. When I was really starting to understand the mind body connection, one of the first places I began to read in research about 10 years ago was looking at some people that I've really practiced a lot of meditation. I looked at the different yogis from India and the people who practice Zen and there was this overarching idea that the breath in the mind are like twin sisters.

12:41When the breath is very shallow and fast, the mind is very anxious. When the breath is happening through the chest, short chest breathing, the mind is very anxious. When the mind is calm, the breathing is slow, deep through the diaphragm and coming in and out through the nose. The way you breathe is one of the greatest levers for shifting your physiology into safety. And so almost all of us at some point need to relearn how to breathe properly, which is through the nose, the belly expands and comes back in. It's relaxed and it's slow. And I promise you this, if you try to do everything else that I say in the rest of this podcast, all the strategies, but you skip the breathing, you will never experience the results because the breathing is the deepest access point to safety. Oxygen is the part of the force of life.

13:43You can go a long time without water. You can go an even longer time without food. Oxygen, you need it constantly. Try to go more than two minutes without oxygen. You're in trouble, right? And so for our body, the safety that creates when we breathe properly and the chemistry changes, when you breathe through your nose, your nasal cells are sensing this opening of air coming in, it releases nitric oxide, which dilates all your blood vessels, getting that blood to the brain. Everything is circulation is moving, feeling very safe. Your vagus nerve gets activated by nasal breathing, especially when your diaphragm is expanding. And if you can slow down your breathing, where the complete inhale, exhale takes around five to 10 seconds, you're training your body to be in parasympathetic tone. And there's a lot of cool new research, we're really looking at the electrical activity of the brain, how that corresponds with the

14:45electrical activity of the heart through the vagus nerve. And they're now basically showing that if you can get your average respiratory cycle of inhale, exhale to be around 10 seconds, meaning you're taking six breaths per one minute, six complete breath cycles, you will have a highly regulated nervous system. And so the best way to breathe at rest, and this may take training for you, is in through your nose, out through your nose. Your belly expands more than your chest, and you're exhaling longer than you inhale. So let's say we inhale for three or four seconds, exhale, inhale, exhale, exhale, inhale, if you do a mini practice like that throughout your day, maybe even 10 little rounds of that

15:54intentional breathing, you are slowly going to retrain your breathing pattern. So often helpful to put a hand on your belly to make sure your belly is actually expanding and to literally practice this. It's a great time when you're on your walks or you're doing your daily movement to get conscious with your breathing and practices. There was actually like a year of my life where I had to learn how to breathe through my nose. I had a lot of like stuffed nose because I was eating the wrong foods. I was more of a chest breather and it took a lot of actual training, but I'll tell you when I got this nailed down, my stress levels decreased dramatically. So breathing is so key. Let's keep on moving through though, because the breath is just one part. I want to talk about exercise. What I talked about movement and training is being an anxiety medicine. Exercise is literally one of the most reliable anti-anxiety interventions that we have. It actually produces greater effects than most of the pharmaceutical drugs that we give people for anxiety and depression. It helps regulate the nervous system. It boosts neurotransmitters. It improves circulation. It helps us sleep better.

16:58It gives us a chance to practice that breathing and it makes us more resilient because it's a conscious intentional stress that our body creates an adaption response to. And so there are many different types of exercise that are really anxiety friendly. The best one perhaps is light walking or light cardio called zone two, for example. Zone two cardio is basically where you and I are doing some kind of exercise where it's not intense enough where we can still maintain a conversation. So we're going on a hike, but we can still talk. We get into zone three and zone four when we really need to focus on our breathing we can't talk. If you can do zone two walking with nasal breathing for 20 to 45 minutes, a couple times a week, it will change the game for your anxiety. Strength training is often huge as well. That's why we recommend two to four times a week of structured strength training for the confidence of resilience

17:59in the muscle mass. And if you're at a healthy state where you're feeling very strong and you want to make yourself even more resilient, then doing some high intensity interval training once a week, twice a week, brief sprints, bike intervals will make you stronger and faster. And that's like the added layer once you're really there. If you're anxious though and you're having a very hard and stressful week, the idea of not exercising is a big mistake. It's actually lean into your training. And that might mean more gentle training, literally just some cardio focusing on breathing could be exactly what your body needs, but lean into training. It's so important. I want to talk about things that stimulate the system, particularly our stimulants like caffeine, nicotine, and pre workout. There are external things we take that can really drive our nervous system into sympathetic tone. That's what stimulants do. They stimulate sympathetic activation. They're literally like stress activators and they have use and utility, but when we live our lives by ingesting these things

19:04constantly, we're creating a state of sympathetic dominance where we can never get into rest and digest. And most humans that I know are taking some kind of caffeine or stimulant, myself included. Over time, I have learned that my body personally does better with green tea, matcha tea or cacao. All stimulants, they all have caffeine, just lower amounts, and they also have a balanced amount of different compounds that don't get me as wired. You might be a coffee person. I will assure you, if you want to have a very calm mind and you're drinking a lot of coffee throughout the day, those things are kind of incompatible. In fact, if you had the crazy desire to go to a monastery and get very good at meditation to experience these deep states in yourself and to have a calm mind, you would not be drinking coffee. They would get that out of your life because it creates so much activation. And so a couple things you can do is one, play around with different types of caffeine delivery. You might find that tea is better for you

20:07than coffee. You might find that green tea works good or even something like yerba mate tea. You might find that you do better with a coffee that's blended up with some collagen or some MCT oil or some butter. Some people find that adding some of the fat and different things in the coffee can blunt the spike. So you got to play around with this stuff because if you're living on these caffeine, it can be excessive. And one thing you can do is take a stimulant break once in a while. Like set it on your calendar for like one to two weeks, you get off all caffeine. And if that terrifies you to do, you probably need to do it at some point. It could be a very powerful practice because then you could do experience what your nervous system is actually like when it's not being constantly stimulated. And I wouldn't suggest you do this during a very stressful time, maybe leading into some kind of vacation where you can downshift. That can be very helpful. And I know for me, when I made the transition to drinking cow, which is ceremonial grade dark chocolate,

21:08which has caffeine in it, it has something called theobromine, which is also activating. Believe it or not, it has a tiny bit of nicotine in it. And it's one of the most powerful antioxidant foods. And it boosts stem cell circulating stem cells in the blood. It's very, very amazing. I know when I drink my cacao drink, I feel so much better than when I have coffee. I can be in that calm focus without being overstimulated. If you want to build muscle after 40, I have a simple hack for you. Get more minerals. A lot of people don't realize that your nutrient needs actually increase with age. And according to a recent CDC study, more than 90% of men over 40 have at least one mineral deficiency. And that's a problem if you're trying to get in shape because low mineral stores affect your health more than you think. You need a variety of minerals for testosterone production, protein synthesis after exercise, fat burning, and even erection quality. If you want to age well, minerals are a non-negotiable. That's why I have partnered with bean minerals.

22:09They're a stellar company and they make mineral replenishment super easy for busy dads. All you do is take a one-out shot of bean minerals each morning. It tastes like water and contains every mineral you need to support male health in the right ratios with fast absorption. In 30 seconds a day, you can refill your mineral stores and boost your fitness and performance naturally. Gibby minerals a try, head to www.beanminerals.com and use code FitFamily at checkout for 20% off your first order. Now, when it comes to nutrition, there's some other nutrition things we can do for anxiety. First off, we've got to stabilize blood sugar. For our body, when we have these huge spikes of blood sugar, it is a stress for the body. The body needs to do a lot of work to stabilize that blood sugar because floating around sugar can damage all of our organs and it's not good. So again, healthy nutrition stuff we talk about all the time in our programs and on this podcast, the protein-forward breakfast, the balanced meals, making sure we're not doing tons of crazy

23:10snacking, getting enough fruits and veggies, like these kinds of things are massive for stabilizing blood sugar. The more nuanced approach here that might be new for you is that we can eat certain foods that increase GABA, that relaxing neurotransmitter that we want more of in the brain. And one of the ways to create more GABA in the brain is to eat foods that are rich in an amino acid called glycine. Glycine is an amazing amino acid that they actually give people for panic attacks. It has that potent of an effect on GABA. If someone is having a panic attack and you give them 5 to 10 grams of glycine powder, it will very likely help them. It increases GABA pretty substantially. The foods that are highest in glycine is bone broth and collagen gelatin foods. Bone broth and I should just say like collagen generally in gelatin foods are around 30 to 40% glycine total. It's a massive amount. And it's one of the reasons when we look back on ancestral

24:11nutrition, humans of the past didn't just eat the muscle meats. They ate the muscles. They ate the connective tissue. They put bones and stews. They ate the organs. They were getting a wide variety of amino acids. Right now we just basically eat the chicken breast or the steak flank, but we want to be eating all of those different types to get more glycine. Soy is a food that I eat all the time. That might surprise you. For my body, I know I eat organic tempeh, which is a fermented soy. I feel phenomenal on that. And guess what the the plant name of soy is? Glycine max. It's literally one of the richest sources of glycine. And so I'm always getting around 3 grams of glycine. If I eat a block of some tempeh, which I find is good in salads or it's good with some ketchup and mustard, it's something that works for me. It may not be something that you want to do. I'm just telling you, find a source of glycine for you. It might be the collagen proteins for me. I get it through tempeh, which works really well. Also fish,

25:14sardines and salmon and mackerel have those omega-3s that are amazing, but they also are rich in glycine. And so you can think about nutrition as actually supporting that glycine GABA connection. That can be really good. You also want to make sure you're getting enough magnesium. A lot of people find when they're not getting enough magnesium, which is a major nutrient deficiency for so many people, they feel more anxiety. Guess what one of the highest and richest source of magnesium is? Dark chocolate, cacao. So one of the reasons when I designed the original shake recipes were fit followed from mother. I knew people were deficient of magnesium. I wanted to make sure they got it in their bodies. So I recommend cacao powder in there, right? Not only does it give this gentle stimulation, but it gives the magnesium as well. So there's a lot of art designed into the finer details of the program approach, but also you can eat magnesium rich foods. You can take a magnesium supplement. Omega-3s are so helpful for the brain health. Those are found in obviously the fish, salmon, sardines, mackerel, these types of things, but also in hemp, in chia, in flax. So I recommend

26:16getting both the plant-based and animal-based omega-3s. Today, I had an arugula salad with some smoked salmon with some lemon, extra-version olive oil, and hemp hearts on top of it. It was amazing. That's like a super-brain healthy meal that is really easy to make. It takes like three minutes to make, and it's good for supporting the brain chemistry that is relaxed. And of course, hydration and electrolytes are key. You start your day off with good hydration that bolus of 16 ounces up to 32 ounces of water with some minerals. That could be as simple as some Celtic salt or some pink Himalayan salt, or more advanced, like my favorite minerals, beam minerals, BEM minerals. If you go to their website and use promo code FitFamily, you get a discount. I take those beam minerals in the morning. It is one way to make my body feel safe. It's like, oh, body, you need oxygen and you need water and minerals. Here's all of it. And a lot of people who are chronically dehydrated, stresses the body, then drink the coffee, jacks up those stress

27:18hormones, and then are checking the phone and the technology to the constant stimulation. It's no wonder. We're so anxious. And that is a segue to the next point I want to talk about is technology and screen time. Now we're moving into the environment part of this discussion. Modern technology is probably besides the fact that we have messed up food that's inflaming us and unhealthy is probably the biggest variable with creating our anxiety. The human system is designed to process data, right? All of the inputs from the natural environment that are related to our survival needs. We're looking for food for satiety and nutrients. We're looking for threats in the environment. We're looking for sexual partners. We're looking to protect our families. We're creating meaning through all the movement and the sensory input. And now we have these supercomputers in our hands that are constantly dumping data on us through all of the feeds, all of the buzzes, all of the

28:21notifications. It creates a mental state of just complete over stimulation. We're checking our messages in anticipation for work emails that keep on coming in. If you're using social media, those things are designed to prey on your neurochemistry just like a slot machine. You see the next thing pop in your feed. You get a little dopamine hit. All the artificial light from these things is disrupting your sleep. Basically it's creating anxious and addicted neurochemistry and a nervous system that's constantly on. It is no surprise that technology is wrecking our mental health. Certainly, if you're listening to this, you're in your 50s or 60s or 70s, you grew up in the pre-technology area. You likely did not experience a crippling amount of childhood anxiety. You look at kids now today who are growing up on iPads and phones and computers. So much anxiety in young people. It's due to the technology. And so reducing your technology

29:21is a research proven to create better mental health and less anxiety. A good target would be to get under four hours of screen time per day. And like particularly your phone, there's a difference between phone, you know, addicted messaging notifications and deep work on a computer. If you're creating something, if you're reading something, if you're making something, that is a different interfacing with technology than consumption and reactivity. And a simple flex is this. In the morning, can you create like regimen to boundaries where before you just jump into reactivity and train your your brain and your nervous system to look for threats and constantly respond to create space in the morning where you do things that are good for you. You hydrate, you walk, you pray, you meditate, you read a book you've been wanting to read. Something where you're flexing proactive grounded state in your body, in your habits as opposed to reactive. Other things just turn the notifications off. Other things are make sure one hour in the morning, one hour a night, you get rid of the technology. You know, another thing might be to take

30:26one digital Sabbath a week, take a full day or a half day where you just like disconnect from the tech. You know, I've shared this in some context. I maybe two years ago, I went and I did a darkness retreat down in Mexico where I got to stay in a pitch black room for seven days. And it was one of the most profound and powerful experiences of my entire life for many reasons, right? In pure blackness and getting all that time to really be inside myself in process and I was healing a lot of stuff at the time. One of the best parts about it was a digital detox. I had the least amount of technology of maybe any human on the planet during that time because the answer was zero, not a single light, not a single buzz during that week. And I left that being holy crap. It was like hard to get back on my phone because I was really like living in my presence and it's easy to get sucked back in. So what if we can create just a little bit of that on a weekly basis? It can be very, very healing. Now, let's talk about a little more about environment.

31:30And the first thing I want to go with environment is nature, which is the humans natural environment. We are modern. We're living in cities and concrete jungles and connected on tech. And we forget that this body comes from Mother Earth and we are meant to be connected to nature. Nature regulates our nervous system. In Japan, they have this concept of forest bathing, forest bathing, where they basically do research where people who go out into nature, who take nature walks or even better spend a day or a couple days camping, they measure their physiology and what happens, cortisol reduces by 30 to 40%. A immune system gets stronger. Heart rate variability, which is a measure of parasympathetic tone improves. People feel more connected and happy. They have better neurochemistry. So how can you build this into your life? Well, on a daily basis, can you get outside? If you have the privilege in your schedule to go

32:36outside during sunrise and sunset times, these are really powerful times to be outside, even for five minutes. Do you have the ability to schedule some nature time like a hike with the family or even once a quarter, an outdoor trip where you can really get in? That forest bathing research showed that people who spent two days in nature, they actually had persistent benefits to their immune system and their nervous system for up to a month. Wow, right? That's a great ROI. And there is a lot of powerful science to grounding an earthing. This is putting your feet on the earth. The earth has a natural flow of electrons due to the metals in the earth, the fact that it's getting struck by lightning. And these electrons are very healthy and regulating for our body. They help our blood cells flow better. They prevent our blood cells from clumping. They can help us speed up our healing. And so feet on the earth is very, very good. But even if you get outside without, you know, with rubber shoes on, still so,

33:36so powerful. Now, a couple other things. I want to talk about gratitude and forgiveness. These are also two huge levers that as you're doing your self healing and your self therapy are some of the most powerful things to shift your brain and your thinking and your nervous system patterns. Gratitude is a safety signal. It is an expression of abundance. It is turning your attention towards what is supportive, what is working, and what is already here and abundant in your life. And so even if things are, you have problems, but you can still find a way to be grateful. And it's a simple practice of just asking yourself on a daily basis, probably as a part of a morning routine or evening routine. What am I grateful for today? It could be the simplest thing. I am grateful that I have a roof over my head. I am grateful that I have tomorrow to do even better. I am grateful that I have taste receptors to taste the lemon juice on my tongue.

34:37I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my faith. Whatever it is, when you train and you actually make gratitude a part of your practice, your life will change because your brain will change. And what if you layer this into your eating? You know, the idea of saying a prayer before eating or blessing the food as we come together is so wise. It is using the anchor of these meals that we have as our cadence as humans and in putting gratitude is this beautiful thread of thankfulness that we're tying into the food, which is so primal. And it actually shifts our system into that parasympathetic, relaxed and connected state where we actually process the food well. So gratitude, a couple things and here's the here's the trick to this. As you write them down, the things you're grateful for actually feel it. The feeling is the nervous system operating in the gratitude. It's one thing to say, I am grateful for, you know, my spouse. But then it's like, I am to then

35:40feel your gratitude for them in your body. That's actually what makes the change, that feeling step. So don't miss that. The other thing is forgiveness. There's a lot of research on those brain waves. And I told you about those fast beta brain waves, the very active brain scattered anxious, like not really present, or at least doesn't feel nice. We want to move into alpha. The number one way to move the brain into alpha is to forgive, forgiveness practice shown in countless EEG where they measure the brain wave studies. So you can be forgive basically anything. Homework here from this discussion today is to make a list of anything that has charge for you. It could be people in your life that you haven't forgiven. It could be situations that you still feel some resistance to. It could be something in yourself that you've been holding onto. Basically, all these little things that we create these attachments to, they're kind of like having open

36:42windows on your computer. They take up your RAM. They're running in the background, even if you don't realize it, and they're decreasing your ability to be present and express the full capacity of your memory in your RAM. When we close down these windows by forgiving, we open up our capacity to be present and feel safe. And this is deep work. This is not just like I forgive over a night. It might take a lot of time. But I think in the Bible, for example, there's great wisdom that says, how many times should I forgive? And the answer is 70 times seven, which is basically the way of saying infinite, forgive, forgive, forgive, forgive. Because if our mind and our nervous system is this cup of water, clean water, ideally, we want it to be clean. We want it to be still. And every day, we're dropping in things that make the water murky and dark and also agitate the surface of the water. Then forgiveness is the way we constantly purify day in and day out. Forgive and gratefulness.

37:46Forgive and gratefulness. This will transform your anxiety if you weave it into your day. And now the final thing I want to share is all of this can be more or less wrapped up into a practice, a spiritual practice for you. This spiritual practice may be tied to a religious faith that you have that occurs as true to you, but it also could be just seen and felt as training the nervous system to return to safety. One word that's been thrown out for this for centuries is meditation, which really can be defined as the skill, the practice of bringing your attention in your awareness back into the present moment, into the body, into the breath, into the feeling of everything, the feeling of your thoughts, the feeling of the tingle in your feet, the feeling of the posture, the experience and acceptance of everything that comes, the sounds, the sights,

38:50the activity of the mind, and coming into that center of stillness and connection. When you feel that, when you feel that center, what has happened is you are in parasympathetic. Your breath and your respiration rate has slowed to that connected level. Your brain has downshifted into alpha waves. Your immune system is operating functionally. Your cells are healing themselves, and you feel peace, real peace. And so meditation is something in whatever form that you do it in that feels good for you, that I highly recommend you do. And if you are watching these episodes and actually checking them out on our blog on fitfather.com and fitmother.com, I highly recommend you do. We will put in the show notes a meditation from Alan Watts. Alan Watts is an amazing philosopher, sense deceased, who did a lot of great work helping people experience

39:51a meditative state in bridging philosophy of the East and the West. And he has a 12-minute meditation that is so powerful and beautiful. I've played it during our Sedona retreats for our participants because it's so good. And we will link that and even embed that on the page. So, again, I do recommend you check out these podcast episodes and the bonus resources on the blog and on the site, because we have a lot of good stuff there. However, you choose to meditate using an app, just sitting in a chair, going out into nature, listening to music. Whatever works for you, the idea is to get present into the body, find stillness in your center. And just like exercising getting healthy, it's hardest at first when you're moving from an unhealthy agitated state. And over time, that hard training becomes easy. It becomes joyful. It becomes something you're drawn to instead of dragging yourself towards. That shift happens when you're persistent and dedicated.

40:53And so, understanding the benefits of all this stuff is so key to build up the motivation. I'll just say, this is the quality of your life. There are many people who train so hard to have good looking bodies, but are anxious, depressed, and insecure inside. There are many people who feel at peace and happy, but still have not expressed mastery in their bodies and they're unhealthy. They're doing behaviors and they're eating the wrong foods and they're not in perfect integrity. What I want for you, if it's a desire on your heart, like it is on mine, is to have the fully integrated human experience. A healthy, energized body paired with a clean, peaceful, connected, loving mind that then goes follows your authentic excitement and desire, connects with life fully and just shines light through your very being on everyone you come encounter with. And I think like that, if we can all move towards this consciously in our own ways,

41:57not to get there perfectly, but to walk that path, the ripple effect of that is truly what transforms the world. And so, I appreciate you listening to this and I hope that something struck you as a practice or a shift for you to make in your life. If you're inside our app, please do comment and let our team know what really resonated with you. Comment in the chat forum. And if you want to get deeper into the mental and emotional aspects of health, if you want to train with me on these things in person, do meditation, do breath work, come into the right kind of nutrition that's supportive for brain health. This is exactly what we cover and experience inside our live experiences at our Sedona retreat, which you can find at fitfather.com, Fortslash Sedona. We have one coming up for fit followers in April. You can also go to fitmother.com Fortslash Sedona to get on our wait list for upcoming fit mother one. We have our live conference happening in Arizona, fitfather, fitmother live August 7 through 9. Highly recommend you get there.

42:58Three days of immersion in a beautiful resort where we're going to be doing all of this stuff, connecting, regulating our nervous systems, enjoying healthy food, training and playing, sharing stories, going down the slide at the water park. So much fun will be had there. For one of your summer activities this year, I highly recommend you join us. It can be truly life changing and I'd love the chance to meet you in person. So that's it my friend. As we end this, I want to invite you to take three more slow deep breaths for me. First, feel your feet. Drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw, soften your eyes and your face. We're going to take that nice slow breath in through the nose, out through the nose. You can put your hand on your belly as we do this. In through your nose, exhale, in, in. Now, think about one thing that you're grateful for

44:12right now and feel it. Feel one thing you're grateful for. It can be anything. Okay. Thank you for your time and your presence today. I wish you a beautiful rest of your day. Tune into next week's episode on the podcast. We have more amazing stuff like this. If you have a request for a topic, this one, for example, was a topic or request from one of our members, message us, post inside our community, inside the app. Let us know what you want to hear about. And I will share what I know about it to help you and your family live long, strong and healthy. This is exactly our mission here at Fit Father and Fit Mother. This is Dr. Balduzzi signing off. Thank you, my friend. Bless you and I'll see you in a future episode. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Fit Father Project podcast. If you love what you heard, please rate and review our podcast on Apple podcasts. It really helps spread this show to more men who need this valuable info. To watch full video episodes of this podcast and other

45:14motivational videos to inspire your training and more, visit our Fit Father Project YouTube channel. It's free and everything's made for busy guys who are 40 like you. Visit youtube.com, forward slash Fit Father Project to get access to our entire video library. And finally, if you or someone in your life is interested in becoming a Fit Father or needs help losing weight, building muscle and living healthier after age 40, then visit FitFatherProject.com where you can see our proven programs, supplement line for guys 40 plus and free meal plan and workouts to get you started. This is Dr. Anthony Balduzzi signing off. I'll see you in the next episode.