No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Unlocking Consciousness: Psychedelics, Healing, and Spirituality with Dr. Anna Yusim
Unlock the mysteries of the mind with Dr. Anna Yusim, MD, a leading psychiatrist and Yale Medical School professor, as she guides us through the fascinating world of psychedelics. We promise you'll discover the untapped potential of these substances in treating conditions like PTSD and trauma, where traditional methods often fall short. Dr. Yusim shares her wealth of knowledge on blending ancient wisdom with cutting-edge science to shed light on the true efficacy and safety of these transformative treatments.
Explore the profound impact psychedelics can have on consciousness and mental health, and learn why creating placebo controls in psychedelic research is a challenging yet crucial task. Dr. Yusim dives into the personal and subjective nature of healing experiences, revealing how psychedelics can offer a new perspective on substance use, mindfulness, and our connection to higher consciousness. Lifestyle changes, such as meditation and breath work, play a vital role in maintaining the positive outcomes of these experiences, offering listeners practical insights for personal growth and well-being.
Venture into the cultural and legal landscapes of psychedelics across the globe, from Jamaica to the Netherlands, and understand their potential benefits for neurodiverse individuals. Beyond individual treatment, we discuss the integration of spirituality and medicine at Yale, a pioneering initiative that seeks to enhance mental health care through spiritual practices. Visit www.annayusim.com for more resources and join us in exploring the promising intersection of psychedelics, spirituality, and medicine.
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Are we okay with lighting?
Mark McGrath:It looks great. It looks great. We're so glad you're in Miami. I'm in Manhattan, I'm freezing my butt off.
Dr. Anna Yusim:You've gone south for the. That's exactly where I left from and, as you know, mark, we were there together at the Psychedelic Academy just a few days ago.
Mark McGrath:Yep, yep, I went to Hamilton last night walking around and freezing out of the train, so when I saw the window there and I saw the palm trees, I was a little envious. So thanks for coming on. A little background for those listening. Dr Anna Youssef is a psychiatrist. She is a professor at Yale Medical School and we had the honor of meeting at, as you mentioned, the Psychedelic Assembly here in Manhattan.
Mark McGrath:You're not the first psychedelic guest that we've had a conversation with.
Mark McGrath:We've had quite a few, and I credit Ponch, my friend and co-host and business partner, for really turning me on to this world, because my knowledge of psychedelics up to this was the music that I loved as a kid and as a veteran, being a member of a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business, we've learned the value of psychedelics for PTSD, which we have an extreme interest in, and we want to get your insight on that.
Mark McGrath:The other thing that's fascinating when you were speaking at the psychedelic assembly why I came up to you is that you're doing something with the Yale Divinity School and I'm the grandson of a Yale Divinity grad and that really struck me by combining the idea of psychedelics and spirituality, and the topic of that conference was sort of the underground world of psychedelics and you were talking more about how there's hope, where it's really emerging to the above ground, and you, as a practicing psychiatrist, certainly are in the above ground version of anything related to psychedelics. So we wanted to get talking with you, get to know you and learn about the work that you're doing that can help others that are suffering from trauma, which, of course, is not limited to the military. It could come in many, many forms.
Dr. Anna Yusim:I love that. Mark, thank you so much for having me, and I feel that your mission to be able to share your story and help others other veterans and others going through trauma, through psychedelics and in all sorts of other ways and through other modalities is a beautiful one and a very important one, and I'm so happy to be here with you today.
Mark McGrath:Well welcome and we'll look forward to seeing you again in Manhattan soon. So give us the high level view from where you sit in the hallowed halls of Yale Medical School when you're looking at psychedelics as a form of medicine and that was a big part of the conference was really talking about it as a medicine that's been around for thousands of years. What's sort of the view from your end when you discuss psychedelics with colleagues that are quote unquote in the mainstream or the official medical world?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Yeah, it's kind of what you just said, mark.
Dr. Anna Yusim:It's bridging ancient wisdom, because this has indeed been around for thousands and thousands of years and many indigenous cultures have a certain knowledge and sacred practice connected with these psychedelic plants and psychedelic medicines that we are just beginning to understand right. So that's one part. There's so much wisdom, there's so much sacred tradition, there's so much indigenous heritage in there that has so much healing potential, and what we're also doing is recognizing that and trying to fit it into Western medicine, which involves double-blind control trials, which involves trying to understand the biological mechanisms underlying that, which involves trying to really see, at a mechanistic level, what is safe and what's not, what diagnoses will it cure, what sorts of conditions will it treat, what kind of side effects will it have, for whom is it safe, for whom is it not safe? Questions that are so important to ask when you use any kind of medicine and study any medicine, and especially when you're studying a plant medicine. So we're bridging these worlds, the ancient wisdom and the modern science, and that's why psychedelics are so interesting and important.
Mark McGrath:What's the biggest hangup when you think of something that's been around for thousands of years? When you look at the established medical world, the established medical community, what are some of the biggest hangups? Where they have about psychedelics?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Yeah, and I think you know they're trying to understand this medicine, as they understand. Most medicines, and the majority of medicines have a biological mechanism. They're subjected to double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. A placebo is very easy to create for many of the prior medicines. It's not so easy to have a placebo for psychedelics, because usually people will know if they're on a psychedelic versus not.
Dr. Anna Yusim:But this is just, you know, a few of the things. The other thing is how does healing take place? Right? Does healing take place primarily through a biological mechanism? And can you just distill it down to a? You know, you have calcium channels that open up and you have an increase in serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine or glutamate, and this is exactly how it works. Or is it something much deeper?
Dr. Anna Yusim:I think psychedelics are so interesting because not only do they offer a novel biological mechanism to treat some of our world's most treatment-resistant mental and medical conditions, they also, for many, offer a connection to spirit, and that's much more difficult to study, right? A connection to spirit is so transcendent and subjective. So how, if I have my experience and tell you about it, how then do we subject that to a double-blind control trial? And then what if that's the key part of my healing. What if that's even more important to me? What happened to me, how I had this subjectively transcendent experience? What if, in my account, that was more important to me than the biological mechanism of the medicine? So this is why psychedelics are so interesting and also complicated.
Ponch Rivera:I'm curious how does consciousness fit into this? You know the hard part about the hard science about consciousness that you know it's hard to define. We're talking about how we're connected to the world, vibrations in the space that we occupy. How does that factor into this type of research right now?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Absolutely. This research is at the core of this, because psychedelic research is essentially consciousness research. Right, psychedelics can be used for many purposes. One purpose is treating symptoms, conditions, disease. Another purpose is promoting well-being, longevity, optimizing your mental health condition, and another purpose is an exploration of higher levels of consciousness, because there is something that you get from the psychedelics. You know what we're talking about with these self-transcendent experiences that people are. Often it's very difficult to get it through other ways. Some people can get it through meditation, through breathwork, through other practices that also can enhance consciousness and elevate your state of consciousness, but often the fastest and quickest way to it, without being a meditation practitioner for many years or for many, many, many hours in a day, is to take some ayahuasca or some psilocybin, depending on who you are and how the medication affects you. So I think that psychedelic or psychonauts, individuals who utilize psychedelics, also become, just by the nature of the act, consciousness explorers.
Ponch Rivera:I buy all that. That's great. My experience with psychedelics was one time Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT, and the unexpected outcomes were I stopped drinking alcohol, right, and became more connected with food, meaning I could taste the richness in the food, the earth, the oneness, right. It was really weird. You became a tuning fork. You know vibrations made more sense to you, and afterwards it was the willingness to meditate, to do breathing exercises things that I once in the past thought were too woo-ish for me I started to do. Now there's a downside to this, and that is I didn't go through the full coaching protocol. Right, I did a little bit, so set and setting and all that matters. But how important are breathing exercises, food, diet, coaching, when it comes to taking in these medicines?
Dr. Anna Yusim:It's a great question, right? Because what if you have a one-time deal, that you have this experience and then you're done? And so this is my question to you Punch, when you had this experience and it changed your relationship to food, it changed how you're able to experience food and enabled you to stop drinking. How long did that last?
Ponch Rivera:It was two years and even today, alcohol, my body rejects it. I don't want it. I'll still have a drink once a week and it's probably the worst experience the next day. So it's not like it just magically gets rid of everything. You're still a human and your body still adapts and you still go back to type if you will. So you have to find a way to sustain that and that's one thing I did not do, and I think a lot of my friends are doing a great job at the sustainment piece, which includes the meditation and mindfulness, and they're not drinking alcohol because their body just kind of rejects it. My experience is it's not just a one and done.
Dr. Anna Yusim:Absolutely. I would agree with that and I think what you're saying is so important, like so what you're basically saying is that with these medicines the 5-MeO-DMT and the Ibogaine it changed the way that your body processed alcohol and before perhaps you had alcohol cravings, you loved alcohol, your body thrived on it, you could get high off of alcohol or whatever drug people are doing, but then something shifted and your body's whole response on a biological level or maybe on an energetic level, just was not compatible with alcohol anymore. That's really powerful and often that does indeed entail a lifestyle change to sustain. But I love that you're saying that it happened for two years and I'm wondering what lifestyle changes accompany that, if any, or breath work or meditation practices Some breath work right.
Ponch Rivera:So you know I'm not a psychonaut. I just went through one time experience with a good friend of mine who's actually running one of the houses down for Ambio Life right now down in Tijuana and what his experience is completely different than mine trying to get off the. I forget the type of meds that he was taking for PTSD, tbi and such which really did a lot of damage Benzodiazepines, I think he was on those and he was injecting cocaine into his arms before he went down there. So two different approaches. One he had all the coaching and support and I didn't. But the experience I had was stop drinking caffeine, stop drinking alcohol, more connected with my wife, more connected to the world, more willing to meditate, to slow down and do breathing exercises, to look outside of the traditional medicine, if you will understand functional medicine, understand the importance of food and how that drives our behaviors. And really, actually I would say it helped create this podcast because the connections to, like Robin Carhart-Harris' work with the entropic brain hypothesis connected us to the free energy principle, which brought us deeper understanding of John Boyd's observable-oriented side act loop and we got to see it as an active process. So it literally changed my view on the world by going through one protocol and I don't need to go back through. I want to go because I need that re-blue and I need that reconnection and I need that coaching.
Ponch Rivera:So, just so everybody knows, I recently went to the doctor, got all my medicals sorted out, my blood taken, because when you do anything like Ibogaine and I'm not saying I want to do Ibogaine again nobody should ever want to do Ibogaine again that's probably the craziest experience you'll ever have in your life and it's not fun. But you need to have medical clearance to go do that and that's very important. And you pointed out earlier, everybody's body's different, so not everybody should be taking psychedelics. This isn't something everybody should do. There's different modalities out there. This is just an option that some people have that you'll need medical clearance for and that's the way I approach it. We're not promoting the use of psychedelics on here, the recreational use. I don't believe in any of that. I mean you can if you want, but the therapeutic, medical use of it seems to be the right way to go. And I'm kind of rambling here, but I wanted to share with you some insights that I had from a short experience.
Dr. Anna Yusim:I think that's beautiful and that's brilliant, and in my experience with people who have gone through experiences like your own, it happens in one of two ways.
Dr. Anna Yusim:One is yours and you have an amazing experience that changes your life forever and it sticks and it changes certain aspects of your behavior, your habits, the way that you interact with the world, the way you taste food, the way you relate to other people, and it's an amazing thing.
Dr. Anna Yusim:And then there are others for whom the experience is more like a glimpse. It's a little bit more short-lived, so it's a glimpse as to what is possible. And then the person has to do a number of practices and change their life in order to integrate that glimpse into the rest of their life and essentially enable the rest of their life to catch up with what they saw and what was possible in that glimpse. And that entails all the things that you're asking about before Integration practices changing your diet, changing your lifestyle, engaging in breathwork practices, meditation, journaling, other introspective practices, remembering the lesson that you got from your plant medicine journey in order to remind yourself on a regular basis, so that it's not just a temporary glimpse but something that actually changes your reality, how you relate to the world how you relate to your most deeply held core beliefs and what those beliefs actually are.
Ponch Rivera:That's fantastic. There's so many aspects we can get into about the experience and all that, and I know there's a lot of podcasts that talk about it. I think we're more interested in the connection to science, and I brought up the free energy principle from Friston and work that Carl Carr Harris is doing. There's talk that, hey, ketamine is not a psychedelic. I mean there's all kinds of things going on. I'm curious what kind of messages do you have today for an audience that may be business leaders and veterans, may be conservative, may be more into religion, may dismiss the use of psychedelics as a therapies? What can you impart on them?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Yeah, definitely. I think that there are people whose lives are changed through psychedelics, who have tried everything, and psychedelics are their last straw, and I've seen that for mental health conditions like depression, including Ibogaine for treatment-resistant depression, where somebody literally was going to get doctor-assisted suicide because their depression was so, so bad. There's not many countries in which you can do this, but you can argue for it in certain countries and then they had an Ibogaine treatment and finally something worked. It was the first time that something worked, so miracles like this do happen and that's number one.
Dr. Anna Yusim:So, for people who are very conservative and very suspect of psychedelics, there are certain people who have been helped by psychedelics where nothing else helped. And then there are other people who were helped somewhat by other things and psychedelics really attenuated and accentuated their healing. And then there's people who've used it to really grow as human beings and expand their perspective, and especially business leaders and individuals who are in creative fields and influencers, people changing the world. They would receive a download or they would receive a whole new perspective on life as to what they need to do with in the world, how they need to see the world, a perspective that maybe has been keeping them stuck a point of view that's been very constraining and they're able to through a psychedelic experience shift that and other people connect with source in their psychedelic experience. It's that and other people connect with Source in their psychedelic experience. It's a deeply spiritual, transformative, very, very personal subjective experience.
Mark McGrath:I was going to ask just kind of what Ponch was saying, because I came at it reverse. I had stopped drinking five years ago and then became open to psychedelics when I learned more about what what Potts was teaching me about how it can treat PTSD and others and, and being a veteran being concerned about my brothers and sisters, that 22 of them a day or more are killing themselves. And one of the common threads, uh, were a lot of psychoactives. Right, they're taking lots of different psychoactive types of medications. But another thing too, and we're we're both from the naval branches, so Ponch is a naval aviator and I'm a former Marine officer.
Mark McGrath:These are extreme alcohol cultures that in fact, in the song the Navy's hymn, it's drink to the foam and in the Marines it's here's health to you and to our core. So drinking alcohol was always part of it and it accounted for lots of death, premature suicides, duis, incidents, fights, violence, international incidents. I mean these things can be extremely explosive and I think that alcohol is probably the most dangerous drug out there. And then my knowledge of psychedelics up to that point had only been hey, the Beatles took it, so it may be, you know, maybe there's more to more to look into it and uh, sergeant Peppers was cool.
Mark McGrath:I think what I'm hearing you say and what I've learned through the Psychedelic Assembly and from Ponch and other veterans that have been exploring psychedelics, is that there's an alternative that, as you say, might be a last resort, but there's an alternative that continues to emerge and maybe might even be a first resort, that could prevent a lot of those things that get you to that last resort the excessive drinking, the addiction to psychoactives, the prolonged depression and things like that. What are your thoughts on that? As it relates to alcohol?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Absolutely, absolutely yes, as it relates to alcohol, absolutely. And yes because at the root, especially if we're talking about PTSD, at the root is deep trauma. At the root is an experience that we interpreted in a certain way, or that our brains or minds interpreted in a certain way, that with the right you know medication and with the right experience, could actually be shifted very, very radically. And alcohol is one of the ways that people will self-medicate.
Dr. Anna Yusim:And in order to deal with the symptoms of PTSD, and PTSD comes as three primary symptoms One of them is reliving the experience, whether it be through your thoughts or through nightmares, of thinking over and over. Two is avoidance of any reminders of that experience. And three is hypervigilance, so having an exaggerated response, so like you hear a noise and you're, and then often there's also mood disturbances, whether it be anxiety and depression, and it's incredibly debilitating. And our treatments for PTSD are unfortunately very limited and psychedelics are offering a level of treatment for individuals who have not been able to get that treatment before and we very much hope that MDMA down the road will be approved as well, because that's very powerful and the data is.
Mark McGrath:I mean it wasn't approved because the trip away, one coached meditation, away from not doing the terrible thing that they had, the only way that they thought that they could get out of what they were suffering.
Dr. Anna Yusim:Absolutely, absolutely, and I think that there's a number of different groups working to try to make psychedelics legal, accessible, safe, to try to get the science on. Who does it help? Who does it not help? What psychedelics help what? In what conditions do you take it? At what point do you take it? How often do you take it Really, answering those vital questions that we need in order to integrate it into our country and culture?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Now, that being said, there's also a whole underground movement for people to get it that way, and there's also plenty of people going to indigenous cultures, to Peru, to Costa Rica, to Mexico, to be able to do it in those settings. And there's also a number of places in the world where it's already legal. There's places in Jamaica, there's places in Netherlands. There's certain psychedelics that are legal. I mean ketamine, it's argued. Is it a psychedelic, is it not? There's ways in which it is and ways in which it isn't. But then also there is you know, psilocybin is legal in certain states and decriminalized in others. This is becoming, hopefully, more accessible and we're going to know more about who it can help.
Ponch Rivera:I wonder if we could shift gears a little bit away from psychedelics and talk about something a little weirder maybe, and that would be meditation, the vibrational meditation. I'm not sure what it's called, but you're very familiar with. How do you say it? Binaural, what's the word?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Binaural beats.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's something you're familiar with. Can you walk us through how that works, if that works at all?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Yeah, definitely, definitely. So. Yeah, I feel like meditation in general. So there are these consciousness elevating practices. Right, we talked about psychedelics being one such thing that could elevate your consciousness or give you a glimpse into a whole other aspect of consciousness.
Dr. Anna Yusim:Meditation is another such practice, and meditation comes in a million different forms. There's many, many different types of meditation. Binaural beat meditations is listening to a certain sound frequency, and the sound frequencies are a little bit different in your left and right ear, which creates this difference in frequency, which actually, because of that difference, your brain is more attuned to the meditation and you're able to get into a higher state of consciousness faster. So binaural beats speed up the rate at which you can get into an altered state of consciousness or in a higher state of consciousness, and there I have published some papers on Sacred Acoustics a very powerful binaural beat company that was started by Karen Newell and her partner, edmund Alexander.
Dr. Anna Yusim:Edmund Alexander is the neurosurgeon from Harvard who had the book Proof of Heaven, so he used these binaural beat meditations to re-engage with his near-death experience and to bring that up through meditation. But at the end of the day, like meditation also can get you to the states that psychedelics can, but it takes much longer, and for a lot of people you know they, especially people who are hurting or are in trauma they need answers now and they might start meditation. But it can be frustrating because you have to change your relationship to your thoughts, and your thoughts are all consuming, and so psychedelics can give you that glimpse and then you can follow up and learn to do it in a more sustained way through meditation.
Ponch Rivera:So the vibrations and frequencies of the world are important to healing, is that correct? Am I hearing you correct? And these folks that are creating these chambers or whatever they may be, headphones? It could be. There's an egg out there that I sat in which was pretty relaxing and pretty fascinating. All these things are real. I mean, what I'm hearing from you is this isn't some made up stuff. There's evidence that suggests this works. Vibrational healing works. Is that correct?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Yes, yes. So people always ask you know, psychedelics are so powerful, they create these amazing consciousness enhancing experiences for us. How do we get there without psychedelics? And the answer is through sound, light and vibration. So the egg that you were sitting in probably had a combination of sound, light and vibration. Binaural beats are a form of sound and vibration together, but there's also vibrational practices. There's a chair called a shift wave or a slow wave that really can. It's almost like you're dissociating from your body. I have one of those and you literally are like flying above your body. And then there are certain you know light practices or light and VR headset that you can utilize together with sound, that you really create for yourself a psychedelic like experience. And different people are different. Different people respond differently. For some people it'll be very potent, for others it'll be like OK.
Mark McGrath:What about things like? What about neurodiversity? We've had a guest on a Poncho interview. I had a discussion around neurodiversity, you know, be it autism, dyslexia, Atzberger's, ADHD. Are there any benefits to neurodiversity with psychedelics?
Dr. Anna Yusim:It's such a great question. I believe that actually, well, there's a number of books written on this and that individuals with neurodivergence could respond even better than the general population or have more potent or more frequent, you know, life enhancing experiences through psychedelics. I have had in my practice a number of people come and tell me that and there's certainly books of individuals who have had incredible healings from some of their autistic symptoms or some of their really the difficulties or challenges through psychedelics. So you know, when people come to me with neurodivergence, I always think about that. I always think about, you know, is ketamine an option for these people and for the people that in my practice who've come, generally they do particularly well on ketamine if there is some sort of neurodivergence?
Mark McGrath:Do you see like psychedelics as something like for, say, people in high stress environments like fighter pilots or Navy SEALs, you know? Do you see psychedelics as potentially even an enhancement for people in their professional lives in that respect, you know, because we hear about artists all the time, Like we hear about like well, the artists took this, and musicians or whatever. But what about people with actual high stress, with incorporating psychedelics into their training regimen or whatever? Would that give them an edge?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of my interests, in addition to treating mental illness, is brain optimization, because I'm an executive coach and a psychiatrist. Addition to treating mental illness is brain optimization, because I'm an executive coach and a psychiatrist. So as a psychiatrist I help people who might be in a state of pathology get to a baseline, and then as an executive coach I help people who are already at a high baseline to optimize their performance and get to the next level. So they really want to optimize their brain even though they don't carry a diagnosis. They're not depressed, they're not anxious, but they want more. They want to be the best that they can be. They want to be super creative, they want to have vision, greater connection to source, greater connection to their intuition, things like that. Can psychedelics do that? Absolutely, it's not just psychedelics that can do that. Other brain enhancing things are transcranial magnetic stimulation. There's other tools which can act very powerfully on the brain to enhance and optimize brain capacity, but psychedelics certainly could be among those.
Ponch Rivera:We're starting to see athletes, elite athletes. We had Aaron Rodgers with his Netflix special I think a three-part special where he does some ayahuasca and he's into some stem cell work as well. So where I'm going with this is there's a natural path that the earth gave us, that the environment gave us, and then there's this manufactured path that man put us on right, and that's when you go to a doctor and they hand you pills and the pharmaceutical industry keeps making money off of that. That's a path that we're currently on. So this big shift how do you get the medical community to embrace this type of thinking that perhaps there's a better way?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Right, right, I think you know what is going to convince the medical community is that it's going to the psychedelic medicines, will abide by the rules of science, meaning that they're going to help people in a controlled, in a sustained way to reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, ptsd, addiction, alcoholism, whatever that is that we're treating, and that it fits into the Western medical model. And that's what we're trying to do right now to create the double-blind control trials to figure out who does this help, how does it help, at what doses, at what frequency, with what sorts of other agents together with it? That will help it work even better. How do we decrease the side effects, the risk profile? Who does it work for? Who does it not work for? Those are the questions that need to be answered, and when they are, the Western medical establishment is going to be much more open.
Ponch Rivera:Today's elite athletes. They're starting to pick up on this right To use this type of coaching, this lifestyle, this quality food, meditation, breathing, the cold plunges, the psychedelic this is all going to increase human performance in the future more than likely. Would you disagree or agree with that and if so, can you walk us through what the future may look like with this new path?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Absolutely. I think that you know this is really the wave of the future. Just like you're saying, this is longevity medicine and this is the path of optimization. Right? Everybody wants to live longer, be better, run faster, be more productive, be more beautiful, be younger. All of those things and all the things that you're talking about are part of that. Now, for that, we need to optimize our diets and in order to optimize, something we also have to know. We have to have the science to know what actually optimization means. Is it eating this way or that way? Is it sleeping this much or that much Like? We already know a lot and we could know even more. And so being able to, you know, have, like the, you know the cold plunges and the infrared saunas. That's very powerful. That stimulates hormesis, which is temporary stress, in order to have a much greater long-term gain. So those practices are very powerful for longevity. Also, you know, there's like infrared saunas actually are helpful also with depression. There's a woman at UCLA that studies the connection between heat and depression and it's a potent, powerful tool. So a lot of these things. It's interesting. Right, they're optimizing, but they're also preventing certain conditions and a lot of people.
Dr. Anna Yusim:We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. Right now, there's so many people with anxiety, depression, ptsd, addiction, what have you. So people do need that healing and often the same things that will heal, that are the things that, even if you don't have it, are going to help you to feel better and optimized. Are the things that, even if you don't have it, are going to help you to feel better and optimized, like, for instance, transcranial magnetic stimulation. It's FDA approved for smoking cessation, depression, anxious depression and OCD obsessive compulsive disorder but it's a very powerful practice and many people will use, including professional athletes, forms of transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is when you stimulate your brain with magnets, essentially in order to optimize their brain performance, in order to reverse age their brain.
Dr. Anna Yusim:I work for a company called Conscious Health in Los Angeles and we have a special form of transcranial magnetic stimulation called EMBP electromagnetic brain pulsing and we've had a lot of success for PTSD with that. But also we have professional athletes come and we have professional fighter pilots come, individuals who are looking really for brain enhancement to be a little bit better, and it's powerful. It's a powerful, powerful tool for that. So psychedelics, transcranial magnetic stimulation and many other things like this. We have the tools now to optimize every aspect of our wellbeing, and it's very exciting.
Ponch Rivera:So is there a connection to the state of flow or flow states and what you're talking about with the Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, you know being present, and all? That that's connected to it.
Dr. Anna Yusim:Okay, so you can call yourself a flow coach.
Ponch Rivera:You're the perfect flow coach, then right.
Dr. Anna Yusim:If you need me to be a flow coach, I'm happy to be your flow coach, but absolutely and this is the thing that state of mind right, being present, being able to be in flow with life, that's a whole other thing. We often want to control everything. We want this to be our way, this to be the way that we want it, but to be in flow with life is accepting life on life's terms, being able to surrender, being able to, when things don't go your way, to have the right perspective and optimism and outlook, to be able to change course and get to where you need to get to, and realize that you create all your circumstances, that you create your reality.
Mark McGrath:As we wind down, because we know you have a hard stop with us today. Talk about and this was, I said, mentioned at the beginning one of the things when I went up to you after the panel discussion. You mentioned that you're working with Yale Divinity School, which my grandfather was an alum of, and it caught my attention and this connection between psychedelics and spirituality, which I think lots of the ancients had already figured this out, but it seems like there's an emergent opportunity between Yale Medical, where you are, and then with the Divinity School. Why don't you share with us about that?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Absolutely, absolutely, mark, and I love that you had a family member who went to the Divinity School. That's just beautiful, and indeed I am with Dr Christopher Pittenger, who's one of the deputy deans of psychiatry at Yale. We're creating a mental health and spirituality program and, eventually, center that's gonna bridge the Divinity School and the medical school and we're gonna ask a lot of questions at the interface of spirituality and medicine and bridge the two of them together. And often you know spirituality has been removed from medicine, but it's becoming more and more accepted that having a healthy spiritual life in terms of your beliefs, your practices, your rituals, your connection to a spiritual community is actually very intimately connected to your mental and emotional well-being, and so that's what we're creating at Yale to be able to study that from a research perspective, to be able to have educational opportunities and then to be able to integrate it into the clinical care of patients.
Mark McGrath:I don't think it would be the first time that Yale's been involved in a spiritual awakening, so it'd be interesting to see how this one goes, and we certainly wish you every success on that one.
Dr. Anna Yusim:Thank, you Mark.
Mark McGrath:And keep us posted. So for the official part of the recording we'll close out now. Just before we go, would you just tell us and we want you to hang around when we stop recording where's the best places that we could go to send our listeners, be they leaders in business, athletics, the military. Where would you like us to send them?
Dr. Anna Yusim:Definitely. They can go to my website, wwwannayusomcom, and they're welcome to contact me, and we have all kinds of workshops. I work with people one-on-one as a coach as well as a psychiatrist, and I'm happy to speak with anyone interested.
Mark McGrath:Well, thank you very much for joining us on no Way Out. We hope it'll be the first of many more discussions. Thanks for coming and we'll talk to you soon.
Dr. Anna Yusim:Thank you guys.
