Transcript #484 The Missing Elements for Perfect Health with Dr. Anthony Gustin
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- Find out what’s in store on this Myers Detox Podcast with Dr. Anthony Gustin who joins the show to talk about what to do when you feel like you’ve hit the pinnacle of your health. Maybe you’re doing everything, eating the right diet, exercising daily, and taking the best supplements, but want to improve your health even more. Well this is the podcast for you! Dr. Gustin covers all of the things you can do to improve your sense of being, engage your spiritual journey, and find your sense of purpose. He discusses addresses emotional trauma, connecting with your food and the people who make it, as well as the importance of community in staying healthy. So many interesting discussions and ideas of what to do to take your health to the next level, so many sure to tune in!
- Find out what inspired Dr. Gustin to get into the field of health and wellness.
- Learn about some of the top things Dr. Gustin did to upgrade his own health.
- Find out how our connection to people and things affects our health, especially when it comes to social media.
- Find out why creating community is so important for your health, and some of the best ways you can create it.
- Learn about Dr. Gustin’s journey with addressing trauma, and why participating in something better than yourself is so critical.
- Learn about the role of spirituality and religion when it comes to health and community.
- Find out how plant medicine can help upgrade your health and well-being.
- Read some of Dr. Gustin’s final thoughts, and an overview of the steps he feels are most important for you to upgrade your health.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Hello, everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast, and today we have a special treat. We have my friend, Anthony Gustin, Dr. Anthony Gustin, on the show, and he’s going to be talking about what you do when you reach the pinnacle of health. You’ve been doing everything for your health, for your diet, your supplements, your exercise, and you’re just kind of feeling like you’re looking for something more. There is something more that you can do to improve your life, to feel like you have a sense of purpose in your life. And so Dr. Gustin is going to talk about his own spiritual journey, his own health journey, and what he has learned along the way. So some really good lessons here for anyone feeling like there’s something missing in their life and they’re just longing for something more besides just eating their salads every day and working on their health and just feeling like that they’re waking up just kind of “Nah,” and they just feel like maybe waking up feeling gray and there’s still yearning for something more. So check out the show.
So Dr. Anthony and I talked about plant medicines on the show. We talked about spirituality, we discussed trauma, and the role that trauma can play in health issues. We talked about just also connecting with your food and learning who the people are that are growing your food, and Anthony’s kind of thoughts on connecting with your community through growing food and sharing food with people that you care about, and a really, really interesting show. So check it out. Dr. Gustin is a former sports rehab clinician, entrepreneur, author, podcaster, investor, and amateur farmer. He’s currently working on some new projects to help save our food system in scale regenerative agriculture. He last founded Perfect Keto, which had been acquired to help people with metabolic dysfunction and equip foods to provide people with whole food nutrition supplementation. He’s always exploring how to live like a human on his podcast, The Natural State Podcast, and his newsletter, the Feed. You can learn more about Dr. Gustin and his work at dranthonygustin.com. Anthony, thank you so much for joining the podcast.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Thank you for having me out.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the health world?
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Oh, boy. This story gets longer every year for sure, but I mean, the short of this is that I was really unhealthy, fat, and sick when I was younger. I grew up in the Midwest, where it was just common. Everywhere I would look, it was the same thing where people were just unhealthy, standard American diet, addicted to anything that they could be addicted to, repressed emotions, and tons of trauma, on the cycle goes. I was fortunate enough to escape that, and my entry was in nutrition, so taking control of my own nutrition. So even in high school, I started to work on that stuff and just got sick of doctors telling me, “This is just the way it is. This is your genes. This is how your life is going to be.” I didn’t want to accept that, so I kind of took things into my own hands and knew I wanted to help other people do that.
And a way I knew how at the time was to be a physician, and I didn’t want to sort of go in the standard medical route of prescribing medications, all that type of stuff. So actually, with the guidance of some local people, chiropractors and physical therapists sort of chose that as a route to be more preventative. And so fast-tracked, I got my doctorate in chiropractic, masters in sports rehab, and I was working with a lot of athletes doing functional medicine work, but also sports rehab, musculoskeletal work, sort of working a little bit more of a holistic perspective. And then started writing. I realized that there was a thing called the internet that you could reach people on.
I lived in San Francisco, this is like, I don’t know, for 10 years ago now, and started writing articles, posting stuff online, getting a little bit of falling and realized how with content I could help people instead of started putting out information and then launched a bunch of different businesses after that to try to help people with just being obsessed with the question of why people so sick and how do we improve the human experience and have people have a rich human experience. And that has led me to a lot of weird places. And so I got really into a ketogenic diet. I think that a ketogenic diet is a great tool for people who have metabolic dysfunction, and led me into farming. So I got into farming, even doing that a lot in the last couple of years, and now just really into the food system, literally how we grow our food and how it’s so much more important than just the nutrients we gather and the connection to the food community, et cetera.
So it’s kind of all over the place now, but still asking the same question of why is our experience so broken? And in the majority, we have obsession around physical health, and I think that that for sure is an issue, but what’s going ignored also is, I think, the unmoored ness of people’s lives and how that leads to depression, anxiety, suicide, just the feeling of emptiness. Even if people master their physical health, they, I think, still have a lot of issues. And I think I went through the same arc of getting healthy myself physically and then still having some trauma to deal with, still having some emotional, mental, spiritual gaps in my life, and realizing that wholeness as a human includes so much more than eating well, sleeping right, moving, which is the things that I was obsessed with for years. And so I’d say I’m still on a journey of trying to figure out a lot of that stuff for myself. But yeah, it’s been a weird path that I’ve been enjoying.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree with you. I had reached a point where I was just working so hard on my physical health and the diet and the supplements, and then just I was like, “What in the hell do I have to do to feel good?”
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Because you thought, “Oh, I just need to fix my neurotransmitters with more animal protein or whatever the case may be.” And I went on a certain journey as well. I never thought I’d be talking about bioenergetics. I never thought I’d be talking about things that I’m talking about today and where my journey would lead me as well. But yeah, the emotional trauma component was huge for me as well, and it’s something that I think everyone in our journey, we have to reach a certain point where we’re looking for that next rung to go to. And yes, for me, it was that trauma and then adding the spirituality component as well. So what have you learned in your journey? What has really helped you after you’ve conquered your physical health? What was the next thing for you that really upgraded your whole being?
Dr. Anthony Gustin: I think the next biggest thing was for sure dealing with trauma and stored. I don’t know if you call it shame or just this berry thing, but my child was very intense, very abusive, physically abusive, and I thought I had dealt with it. I had intellectualized a lot of it, but I hadn’t re-experienced anything, and I hadn’t actually gone through the emotional process. And there’s so much great work now. I mean, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Gabor Maté talks a lot about this stuff. He has just published his new book called Myth of Normal. I thought when I heard about this stuff initially in my clinic, I thought it was bogus. This stuff gets stored in your body, and you have to reprocess it; trauma leads to all of these things, and it can lead to physical manifestations, et cetera.
And it wasn’t until I started experiencing, again, I was mastering all of these physical things but still felt a reactivity and activation of my nervous system, bouts of depression. And by all measures, my life was phenomenal. And so I just kept asking, “What the hell is going on here, and how do I figure out more?” And so, after the whole physical health thing, I think that that was the biggest unlock. Probably what helped me most was that I tried therapy. I took traditional talk therapy for a long time. I don’t think it’s a great tool for people who intellectualize things because the issue is not understood generally. I think there’s a level of conceptualization that is helpful to friends. We don’t have them, but I got them in about a week or two. I read a couple books, and I was like, I understood the mechanisms of a trigger, psychology, et cetera, but it didn’t help me actually move through anything. And our standard of care around mental and emotional health, I think, is so poor.
The only model we have to measure or address anything currently is by sloppy surveys, really soft data, and really crude ways to go about it. And there’s no practicing anything. And so if you, for example, were trying to master anything in the physical health realm, let’s say nutrition or working out, and the only help you got was an hour a week with a nutritionist where they told you concepts about nutrition, but you went back, and you didn’t change your habits of eating and nothing, you didn’t excavate anything around your lifestyle around nutrition; the same thing happened if you went to the gym once a week and a trainer walked you through why you’d be doing exercises and then maybe walked you through a little bit of an exercise, but you didn’t do any other exercise the rest of the time, what would you expect? And I think that when looking at mental and emotional health, the same thing happens there, or we’re not really changing people’s habits, their behaviors, the way that they’re approaching things, which I think is fundamental.
In general, my health philosophy is that we have this natural environment that we have evolved in and that our bodies and our brains, and our entire being is looking for cues of the environment that we should be having. So we have this natural state environment, and when you have an organism in this natural environment, the natural state of it, which is the name of my podcast because I’m so obsessed with this concept, is health. And so because we’re out of this natural environment, we have to manage health as a thing. It never, throughout all of human history, used to be something that we were even cognizant about unless we had some acute injury, fell off a cliff, and broke our leg or something like that. Like, “Okay, now you have a state of disease.” But in general, health has taken care of our environment.
And so you see this if you, for example, look outside; squirrels don’t have to worry about being healthy. An oak tree doesn’t have to worry about how it grows its limbs and how it points towards the sun. The conditions of the environment are appropriate, and you have an appropriate reaction, which is health. If you saw a weird, scraggly oak tree with limbs falling off with dead-looking leaves, if you saw a squirrel that was three times the size coughing and limping around and couldn’t move and was really confused, you’d ask, “What the hell’s going on here?” And the paleo primal ancestral scene, I think, gets a lot right as far as needing to restore a natural environment to have any sort of resemblance of health. However, I think one thing it misses is that we generally need an intervention to get back on track. And so another way I think about this is if you have a train running on tracks, all the conditions are right. The environment for that train is appropriate for it to have a normal state, a state of a quote, unquote health; the train moves forward, great.
If the tracks are bent, the train will fly off of the tracks. Okay, so the state of the train tracks is bent, not good, unnatural environment, train flies off. If you fix the natural environment and the train tracks are now normal again, that doesn’t mean that the train’s going to run. You need to have a huge intervention of getting some crane to put the train back on the tracks. And this is the thing also around mental and emotional health is that a lot of times we don’t ask either question. We don’t ask, “What is a normal, natural environment, and what is the intervention we’re doing to get back on track?” And so when looking at things like talk therapy, et cetera, I think they’re very terrible, poor ways to try to get the train back on the tracks. And then the train tracks are still bent. And so you’re not looking at what are the conditions that must be present for our normal human experience with emotional and mental health.
And I think that there’s so much relational connection there that, luckily, I met my wife, and she serves a good purpose in this, but trying to restore and think about how a human environment should be included, and I’m still trying to define this from a mental, emotional, spiritual perspective. With physical health, I think, it’s really obvious of proper food, being outside, moving a lot, sleeping all right, et cetera, exposure to light. These things are all very obvious of how humans should live in a physical environment. But when it comes to a relational environment, I think it can be very soft and confusing. And I went to see the state of this tribe in Tanzania, the Hadzabe tribe, and this is one of the things that really impacted me was their involvement in a community. And I had never seen anybody like that before in life and how that resulted in their happiness and security. So things that you see there of no one’s ever alone in those communities ever for longer than 30 seconds.
And we live a life the exact opposite; we are mostly alone and then have to plan these things where we have this belonging. No longer do we have an actual community; we have general friends, but I think that a community. There’s a necessity for a part of a greater whole. So you exist in most modern American or even any Western world; your skills don’t impact the people that you actually know face to face. And so there are several layers of obstruction like, you go do the things to make money and then use your money to transact with strangers that if things went awry, you would likely never see them again, and they would go do what’s best for them in their own family. So there’s not an actual community here, and people aren’t doing things for each other.
They’re doing things for money so that they can have this abstraction layer, but there’s no security because no one’s really doing anything. You don’t bring skills for the people that you actually know. And I think that that level of disconnection is huge. And then there’s then a level of just communication and connection and emotional connection with people. It takes a very long time in modern society that I’ve noticed it’s really drop in and get to a level of support, connection, and understanding with somebody else. And it’s because we grow up with different stories; we have different realities. We now have devices that give us different algorithms. Our realities are so fractured that we don’t live on the same plane anymore. To try to get to a point of common understanding is really difficult. And so I’ve worked in a lot of different ways to try to recreate these things, which have been challenging, as far as recreating the environment of it.
But on top of that, the interventions, again, I was saying that the one-on-one therapy was not really working for me. But what has worked is a lot of other things around plant medicine work, breath work, meditation, journaling, self and introspective stuff, things that, again, are less dependent on an authority once a week and more of things that I can integrate into my life as practices and habits that change my psychology to actually address the annoying thing. So it’s a very long answer to your question, but that’s been at least some of my exploration on this path.
Dr. Wendy Myers: No, it’s a beautiful answer. And yeah, we are. We are so far removed from our tribal ancestors and how we are in that kind of environment, how we’re meant to be in that environment around other people and to care for our elders and a community caring for our children and getting that support, and we are so far moved. And just the social media, I do social media for my work, but I’m just trying to spend less time on it. I think it’s just an absolute poison to our self-love and our self-esteem. But people, they’re wanting that sense of community. That’s one of the reasons they’re doing it. It’s just this kind of, I don’t want to say grotesque with just this warped sense of community, but people are just, they’re desperately trying to connect.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah, it’s part of this negative feedback loop. The same thing with junk food. You’re hungry, your body needs nourishment, and so you go to these things that have been engineered to basically addict you to eating more. You eat them, you don’t get nourished, so you need more nourishment, so you’re more hungry, so you go out and eat more of them typically. And once you get momentum in that, it’s really difficult. I’ve seen this, even the basic thing of people who eat a standard American diet, and how hard it is to switch to eating real food. And my journey I was talking about before when I was really unhealthy eating the Pop-Tarts, Tostitos, all this type of stuff, to now where I try to literally know the humans that are growing my food and how they connected us to my food system, grow as much of it myself as possible and know where all of my food comes from, eating real food that spoils hunting a wild game, all this type of stuff.
That was a 15-year journey to get to that point. And the same thing happens with connections on social media and devices and people’s community and relationships with others. And I actually think it’s a harder thing to switch, and it’s a harder thing to change because the lifestyle that is required to change to eat healthily, I think, is less friction than the lifestyle it takes to change from getting your connection with these service level apps and internet, and then to get an in-person community and do that, that level of change is so much more drastic for most people that it’s even harder. And so you’re taking what took me at least a 15-year journey to change nutrition; how long is it going to take an average person who’s addicted to these devices to build an appropriate in-person community? I don’t know. But it’s definitely been a hell of a lot of work for my wife and me to think about this, manage it, change our lives, change our relationships, and try to mold something different and change the momentum of what we’re just blasted with on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And when you look at the millennials, we look at our children; I mean, they grew up with social media; it’s their life. I mean, they can spend hours and hours, if not all day, on video games interacting with other people on social media apps. And they’re designed to be so addictive. I’ve been finding myself, I go on, I’m just wanting a little laugh or a little, some Jay Shetty or some Matthew Hussey or whatever. And then three hours later, I’m like, “What in the hell? I am wasting my life away with this addiction, this addictive app.”
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah. And the challenging part is that we’re getting to the point where you can’t live without it. Literally, you won’t be able to function in society without these tools. Whereas, at least if you want to off-ramp off of junk food, you can eat real food. Sometimes it’s hard to find, but you can still do it, and it’s not necessary to participate in society to eat junk food. The cell phone is such; it’s basically sewed on most people’s hands, myself included. It is an absolute requirement for me to do what I do; do what I want, that would be good. And that’s only getting more and more and more and more and more involved. And so again, the off-ramp, like, how do you even expect people to do this?
And this is when looking at sort of this natural state, this natural environment, and how to modify things, I don’t think there’s any going back. And I think once you admit that and you realize how we best use these tools to go forward and integrate instead of trying to push away, then it becomes more of an awareness of how do I use this as a tool rather than this relationship of all or nothing has to push away, but that still gets me back and back and forth.
Dr. Wendy Myers: And so what are some of the things that you’re doing to create more community to kind of make that transition to feel like you have, like you said, more of a community and maybe getting off the social media, et cetera?
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah, so in this weird spot, because my wife and I are moving out of the Texas area and restarting our community entirely, so I’ll let you know in a year or two how I intentionally built a community in Bend, Oregon, which is where we’re moving. But what we’ve done over the last couple of years, I think the biggest thing again, is the feeling of service to people. And the way I did that a lot over the last year and a half is growing food and so actually doing farming. It was just one of these things that I was very interested in, and I wanted to learn about it. So I bought a farm and have been producing a lot of food for friends, family, and other people in the community. And that level of connection to nurturing, paying attention, and participating with nature, growing the food, giving it to people, watching them enjoy it, and getting nourished is a sense of belonging that I’ve never had in my life.
And so that, I think, is a huge, huge part of it. How are you contributing to the people that you can actually look in the face? And for some people, that’s very different. My wife, for example, has much softer skills that I think society doesn’t value as much, which I think are more important than even growing food for people. So it’s creating a safe space for people, helping people feel heard, being there for people when they’re having a difficult time actually processing emotions, working through them, et cetera. I mean, that’s what she does for work, but being able to do that for our friends and family and being able to do that is another thing. That’s her path of service and how she contributes to our quote, unquote community.
And I think just being aware of how much time you are spending quote, unquote working, which is just, again, 99% of it for people is typing away at a computer so that way they can make money, but then they never really take that back into a local community for people that they actually interact with and actually have relationships with. How are you impacting their lives and how are you showing up for them, and how are you uniquely contributing to that? I think that not only that strengthens bonds of community, but it gives the individual a sense of purpose that otherwise, I think, can be very listless without, and this is another thing too. Before I started thinking about this and doing this, I had an amazing day-to-day experience, and it’s not like I was depressed, but at the end of the day, I just sort of would reflect and think, “What is the point of my life right now?” Just completely without purpose.
I think purpose can be driven in a lot of ways, but I think that in the most basic form, even if it’s volunteering once a week or something like that, people can find such meaning and purpose and anything to contribute to somebody’s lives, again, that you can actually have a conversation face-to-face. And with the way the world is changing, people are having less and less and less of those interactions over time, which is really sad.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I think it’s so important you’re not going to wake up feeling good or feeling energized without having that sense of purpose in your life, but it can take a really long time to discover that. I think in the meantime, people need to really think about focusing on love and gratitude by making all their decisions and thinking about it before they say something, before they interact with people, coming from a space of love and gratitude. But I think first you have to love yourself in order to have something to give to other people. I think that can be really challenging, and that’s where the trauma work comes in.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yup.
Dr. Wendy Myers: It’s releasing these negative emotions and these traumas that are energetic frequencies trapped in your energy field that need to be released in order and remove these roadblocks to caring about yourself. And so, what kind of things did you do on your journey to work on traumas? I had the same thing. I did therapy for 10 years, and I spent a fortune.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Wendy Myers: But yeah, it was great to become an expert in your neurosis, but it doesn’t help with trauma release.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: A lot of different plant medicines were crucial for me to step outside my really rigid reality to understand bonds and just to view things very differently. It allows you to have different neuroplasticity and literally rewire your brain in many ways. And I think my nervous system was just caught in this intense, rigid mode of fight or flight for so long, and it wasn’t until I started regularly using some of these compounds that I could literally feel my brain changing and my reaction to certain situations. For example, if somebody were to say something or I got cut off in traffic, I’d immediately go from zero to a 10. And it was like my body was on high alert, all-time hypervigilant. And I’ve done a lot to try to rewire that. I would say it’s not perfect by any means, but a hundred times better than where it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So that has been a huge one.
I think for me as well, the spirituality meditation component and just the integration of belonging to something more than, I guess, the nihilistic point of view that I had before, it’s the ultra rationalist growing up, rejected any sort of institution of religion. Again, just like an extreme materialist and rationalist, I didn’t think there was any point in living but still carried on my day-to-day. I would forget about it when I stopped thinking about it late at night when I couldn’t sleep and then just operate day to day and have a level of spiritual belief, which I don’t necessarily buy into any sort of organized religion, but I have my own sort of identity around spirituality now that whether it’s true or not, whether I’m just making up a story or not, it doesn’t matter. It makes my life way better, so I don’t even care.
At this point, having a purpose of belonging and participating in something better than yourself is so critical. And that’s another thing, forming that over the last 10, 15 years and diving in and researching a bunch about your religion, spirituality, having experiences myself allowed me to form a set of stories that I could anchor all the other work on, otherwise it would just all fall away. And you see this in so many other cultures throughout all human history, and the modern way to explain it is, oh, these people are just superstitious. They were really dumb, and this was their way to grapple with the fact that we just died and nothing happens after you’re dead.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Well, this is before they had science.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Exactly. And I think we’ve just replaced the religion of every other culture with now the religion of science, the religion of progress, and the religion of the individual. Humans worship something, and so if you have a void of some sort of spiritual practice beyond you, you’re going to typically worship yourself. And I think that’s far more damaging, and you see it across all society currently. That’s not something that we can do. It’s like breathing. We have an element whether we like it or not; it’s part of the human condition of worship, belief, having this sort of existential capacities. Your brain goes there eventually if you have enough space for it if you’re out of survival mode, and if you have enough time to ruminate on things, every human gets to that point. And no matter what, you create a story, and you hang it on that. And as you said, we have this now, this story of science, progress, and individualism that I think is part and parcel of why we have most of the problems we have now.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love what you said that you don’t have higher power to worship; you’re going to worship yourself. And that’s where we see this kind of breeding of narcissism in our society. And narcissism is a result of parenting, and it’s just so rampant, at least in the Western cultures for sure, that in many ways, people are lacking religion or rejecting it for one reason or another. Our stories are very similar. I have the same thing, right? Outright rejected organized religion, but I still felt like there was something there. I was into Jesus, but not really but definitely now having a practice. Spiritual practice is so important..
Dr. Anthony Gustin: I think it gets easy to get allergic to these terms. I think people get traumatized by organized religion and their experience of them.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: And then they reject it all. And Jesus, even saying the word God for a lot of people, becomes like this heavy-loaded term. And so then they don’t have the vocabulary. Our language shapes our reality so much. And if you say, “Hey, I don’t identify with what’s going on over here, that’s organized religion, but I have no other words to use it and to talk about it and to vocalize and communicate with other people, it’s not a real thing.” And this is the challenge, I think, about religion and the institutions that have fallen down and have failed us for many reasons, is that it carries with it in this monolithic sort of way, all of the language associated with spirituality, and it makes all the language taboo.
And when you take language away, your experience and your reality become very limited. And I think this is a part where you see all these kinds of woo people talking about things. And it’s the same thing that they’re saying in religion, but they’re like, they’re needing to find these other ways to speak about it because otherwise you get lumped in this other thing. And it’s a really interesting thing to just observe people’s experience internally versus their experience externally and how it has been validated through language specifically, and how control of language over time. This guy, Ivan Illich, talks a lot about how this really shapes our literal experience as humans. So this is a tangent, but something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is just the use of language around spirituality and religion is really an interesting thing.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And it’s also so true what you said about people being so mired in their health issues or their busy life or social media, they don’t have maybe consciousness to expand into a spiritual practice or the energy of the time or much less stepping into their life purpose when you’re just kind of mired with all your health problems, and you’re just busy trying to figure out your health issues. You don’t have the energy to discover or step into your life’s purpose. And I think for me, that’s where I’ve gone on this podcast and my personal journey going into health, talking about detox, but then going into bioenergetics to help correct the body’s functioning on it in many, many, many levels, which allows people then to focus on the higher level things where they can serve on this planet.
But yeah, so speaking of plant medicines, I’ve never heard anyone complaining about plant medicines. I’ve never heard anyone say that they don’t like plant medicines or that didn’t work for me. I mean, most people that I’ve met that are doing it are rabid fans. I have a friend of mine that just came and visited me in Mexico. For the most part, I’ve known him; he used to be a client of mine, but a really good friend now, very depressed, very kind of closed, like trauma. And he is a new person after taking psilocybin and taking that on a regular basis. He’s just completely opened up and bloomed in many ways. So plant medicine is something I haven’t really explored so much on this show, but definitely, usually, 10 out of 10 people are rating it.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah. The popularity of it is getting interesting because it is something that used to be so sacred and held with reverence and taken very seriously as a medicine. And we have all these indigenous cultures that have used these compounds for thousands of years. The training level with most of these shamans, people who would facilitate the experiences, sometimes they’re chosen at birth to be shamans and trained for their entire life, and then they’re in their 60s finally being able to facilitate. And now we’re having any bro off the street who has a pocket full of mushrooms can be your facilitator. And I think that that is a very different experience. It’s a confusing space. And I think without the right container in it, without the right intention, without going into it with very specific guidance from people who have experienced, who do it and have done it for many, many, many, many years, I think what can happen that I’ve seen a lot in the Austin area especially is people get addicted to the peak state of the experience.
They don’t end up doing any work; they just keep going back. And I think in this state as well, you can be very impressionable. And so if you go in it in a way of trying to explore, not from an excavation route, but more of a reinforcement of ego, I think that you can actually get out of it what you’re looking for. In many ways, I think, damaged people who aren’t appropriately ready for trauma work can reinforce this ego, this delusion of grandeur that they have, then talk about it on social media and use it as a way to reinforce their awakeness and wokeness and spiritual connection. But really, it’s just this religion of mine just keeps being more and more reinforced. I’ve seen that intuitively, to an insane degree, especially again around the Austin area. It’s like it’s some people with 500,000 and a million Instagram followers talking about how their life has changed, and it’s so amazing.
And then everybody else who’s following them wants to do the same thing. It’s like this parroted thing, but people don’t have the right guidance, they don’t have the right experience, they don’t have the right intentions going in. It’s a very serious thing. And I think they can take people off of the track, and it can be something that is really hard to step out of because, again, we have this neuroplastic effect of it, literally changing your brain wiring. And if you go into it in a high ego way, and it reinforces that and wires your brain that way, you can be in a neuroplastic state with some of these compounds for weeks. And so it’s just, I think, a very tricky thing. I think it can be very powerful, and there’s a lot of great stories, I agree. I think it should be taken with extreme caution and extreme reverence and respect.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree for sure. Yeah, I haven’t had that many experiences with it, but I’ve had someone give me LSD for a microdose, and it was amazing. It was absolutely an amazing experience, but it wasn’t within a ceremonial type using frog medicine or combo or psilocybin or anything of that nature.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah, they’re all tools. And I think, as goes with most tools in our modern environment, we overuse them, over-apply them, and use them entirely wrong. But I think it’s just with anything, even social media; as you said, as long as you’re aware of the usage of the tool and using it properly, I think that it can be a tremendous leverage point.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, but I definitely see where the psilocybin is similar; synthetic components like LSD definitely help with depression, and it can be very kind of revolutionary in that sense where other methods aren’t working. But what boils down to it is it’s a spiritual issue, it’s a trauma issue, but there are so many different tools out there today, and I’m glad that plant medicine is getting more research behind it and becoming more mainstream and more people are talking about these wonderful tools that can be used to essentially help bring people out of their shell and change their lives and their way of thinking.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: For sure.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah, I think that the framework I explained earlier and all the things we need to manage regarding physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and how we should be recreating our environment. But moving forward, I say this because I saw on Twitter the other day this guy saying, “Look at my sleep stack and all the things that I’m doing. They’re like 58 items, whereas my eight sleeping mattresses are set up like this.”
Dr. Wendy Myers: Don’t people cannot sleep?
Dr. Anthony Gustin: “My eye mask is this special material. These blackout curtains, like this, and blah, blah, blah.” There were 58 things. And generally speaking, we compartmentalize all these areas of our lives. Even when I was talking about before, here’s how you should think about connection, and you need to have this thing and that thing. And there are so many things to end up managing that I come through like, “Here’s this thing you can stack with that can get you to the most amount of these with the least amount of work.”
Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic. Yeah, I think it’s like when you think about every area of your life, the exercise and the diet and the sleep and the supplements, and this, it becomes so overwhelming. All the money you need to spend and the time you need to invest.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Who has the time? I mean, I know one point of my health is my full-time job, but when I was a stay-at-home mom with a full-time job, that’s all I did was read about health and do health and go to the farmers’ market, make food. I think it’s difficult to figure out where to invest your energy. Where’s the return on investment of your time and money when it comes to health?
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah. So what I think to be the easiest way is to go meet your producers who grow your food and have a connection to your food system and support local farmers. I went through, and sort of tried to check as many boxes with one thing as possible. If you could do one thing, what’s the one thing you could do that would maximally affect all these other things? And I think that’s it. I think it’s if you go find your small farmer where you get food and even just start if you don’t have the time and money to do that, just when you eat something, think about, “Where is this coming from? All the ingredients in this dish, where are they all coming from?”
And I think that the connectedness and the awareness around food, where it’s coming from, once you start going down that rabbit hole, it kind of unlocks everything. It’s almost a proxy for having made it through the journey to some degree of all this type of stuff. And I have a new project in Central Texas in Austin called Rooted Local Meats that is trying to facilitate this and bring the best local producers to consumers and then facilitate events like this and allow people to find these connections in their community. It’s hard to do, but it’s one simple thing that I think people could do that could change a lot in their life and how they experience it.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. What is the project called again?
Dr. Anthony Gustin: It’s called rootedlocalmeats.com which is a website. And yeah, I mean, if you’re in the Austin area, check it out. We’re just doing meat for now, but we’re going to expand to, again, all the stuff that people could buy, any producers that are local. I got to thinking that people keep money locally. Again, it’s just this, how can I contribute to my local community? And I think that there are a lot of good producers who are unfortunately having to resort to shipping their products across the globe and frozen ice. And it’s like you’re taking something that should stay in facilities, a connection of farmer to consumer, and now you’re making it a faceless e-commerce transaction. And I feel very strongly against that as the future of agriculture.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love that. I love everything that’s going on in Austin, and there are so many people I know that have moved to Austin. There’s such a huge health community there and a lot of health influencers and things like that. But yeah, I wish there were more things like that here in Mexico.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Well, maybe that’s how you contribute.
Dr. Wendy Myers: It’s pretty dire down here.
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah, time to get your hands dirty and start a little community down there.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Exactly. I have a guy who’s going to do a garden for me, and he has a little community of people that he’s growing food for and planting the gardens and trying to connect people and trade food and things like that. And I bought a bunch of seeds to facilitate that, but I’m good with that project at some point. But yeah, I love what you’re doing. I love that message. I think it’s super, super important. Well, Anthony, thank you so much for coming on the show, and why don’t you tell us what your health website is, because you have amazing content, you have amazing articles, very, very in-depth, really good content, and a great podcast too. Where do we find that?
Dr. Anthony Gustin: Yeah, the podcast is called The Natural State. It’s found on any platform and then anywhere else you want to read, do email, Twitter, et cetera, all that stuff is just my name. So just search for Anthony Gustin, anything will come up.
Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic. Well, Anthony, thanks for coming on the show. And everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Meyers. Thank you so much for joining us on the Myers Detox Podcast. I love this conversation that we had because as I learned more about health, I can’t stress enough that it’s great to focus on your diet and the supplements, but eventually, you find it’s just not enough, and you’re hungering for something more. And so you do have to instill a spiritual practice and develop more community, and then we’ll work on trauma. These are all essential components. So thanks for tuning in, and I’ll talk to you next week.
