Jodi: Hey, I’m Jodi Cohen host and I’m super excited to introduce you to two of my absolute favorite people, my friends Chad and Andrew. So, Dr. Chad Woolner has been studying functional medicine strategies ever since his wife was diagnosed with major health issues and struggled with severe health difficulties in helping his wife.
Dr. Woolner developed a unique approach to helping thousands of people across the US and he runs an integrated practice in Meridian, Idaho and has done postgraduate studies in functional medicine and advanced clinical nutrition.
Dr. Andrew Wells grew up watching his entire family struggle with chronic health issues. He thought it was normal to always have health issues, to have multiple doctors and specialists, and to constantly be on some type of medication. It wasn’t until he started living on his own and exploring the world that he realized being sick and unhealthy isn’t normal.
He started to learn that health was much more than just working then just avoiding sickness. And he’s launched dozens of integrated clinics around the country and has helped thousands of patients reverse chronic disease by getting to the root cause instead of just masking the system of symptoms.
He has a passion for teaching other doctors how to help their patients get healthy without drugs and surgery. And he lives with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. And you guys are both dads. How old are your kids?
Andrew: Five and seven. Two boys.
Chad: And then I’ve got a 16-year-old boy, a 14-year-old girl, and a soon to be 12-year-old girl.
Jodi: Oh my goodness. You’re in it. Well, I know that my community, a lot of us are parents, and a lot of us, it feels helpful to connect with other parents. I’m so excited to talk to you guys today because you’ve developed the best at home practice protocol that I’ve ever seen. Everyone knows they should exercise. Everyone knows that they should get to bed in a reasonable hour. Everyone knows to drink water.
It’s just actually doing it and executing it, and that’s where people kind of bump into themselves. So I’d love it if you could kind of share how you started your at- home protocol, how you think about it and how you communicate that with people.
Andrew: This was really a solution that came out of a problem and I noticed that early on in practice I would sit down with patients with really good intentions and I would talk about like, here’s what to eat and here’s how you should eat it and here’s how to, here’s how to plan your meals throughout the week.
And you need to exercise and here’s how you, here’s an exercise program that looks fit exactly to your needs. And what I noticed over time was that I was just like banging my head against the wall because I would have maybe 10% of our patients that would actually take the information that I was giving them.
These are one-on-one conversations, by the way. And they would actually do that. They would follow my recommendations. We would have 10% of our patients who would just tell me at the end of these consultations, like, yeah, that sounds good, Dr. Wells, but I’m not doing any of that, that you don’t, I can’t. I’m not gonna do it. I’m like, okay.
And then 80% of our patients would do some of it, but not all of it. And they would kind of drop off. They would get excited for a couple weeks and then they would just completely drop off. And so I noticed that most people now in the information age, they already know what to do. It’s not a lack of information. Everybody knows they should eat more vegetables and less processed food. Everybody knows it should move their body. Everybody knows they should get, you know, 7, 8, 9 hours of sleep per night. But for some reason we don’t do it. And there’s lots of excuses, right? We have kids, we have families, we run businesses.
There are endless amounts of excuses and distractions that keep us from taking care of our bodies and our mind and our spirit, the way we know we should do it. And so a lot of what we came up with over the years was number one, completely out of frustration and wanting, very much wanting to help our patients and clients and just, you know, running into this wall.
We put a lot of intention and effort into personal development in a way that is approachable to people, approachable to patients. And so, Chad actually used this. He took a sort of a negative term, which he calls the Trojan Horse and put a positive spin on it.
Andrew: You all know the story of the Trojan Horse, where they use this horse to invade another city with really sneaky tactics. And we realized that you could actually use the Trojan Horse approach to convince people to actually follow through and do the things that we’re wanting them to do. And there are lots of different ways to do that. But that’s really how this started was number one was just really, really want our patients to do what we’re, what we’re advocating they do and so it really came from, and it also came again out of frustration for not getting the results that you’re looking for.
Jodi: I was gonna ask, how did you structure the Trojan Horse?
Tell me how you sneakily got it into people’s lives.
Chad: A lot of it has come from stuff we’ve learned over the years in both Andrew, myself, Jason, our other partner, and Buddy Allen, another partner of ours. We’ve all been lifelong students of personal development and self- improvement and we recognized that if we were gonna get people to change, it’s not a matter of logic and facts. We’ve worked with patients for years and years, all of us. And you can show patients lab findings, you can show them x-rays, you can show them whatever you want and really like hold the mirror up, so to speak, and show them logically, like this is why you need to do these sorts of things.
But again, that’s gonna have very little effect. And so for us, it’s been a matter of figuring out how do we actually tap into the right psychology, emotional triggers, whatever that is to get people to change.
And one of the concepts that stuck with us, I first heard of this concept in the book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
He talks about this concept of a keystone habit and the whole idea behind a keystone habit is like, think about it like the first domino in a row of dominoes. If you can just tap that domino over, it’s gonna have this kind of almost chain reaction. And for me, if I can be honest, where this first came from where it stemmed from me.
I can trace this back to the year 1999. It was January 13th, 1999 is the exact date that I first kind of clued in on this. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was leaving on a mission for our church. And my brother handed me a letter that was in a sealed envelope and he said inside this letter is the secret to becoming a successful missionary.
And of course, it piqued my interest, all of a sudden this mystery and intrigue to it. And I’m like, okay, what is the secret? And he says, but you gotta read it. We gotta wait to read it till you’re on the plane. And so again, even the suspense is building, you know? So I get on the plane. I open this letter and I start reading it, and he basically says, look, you’re gonna get a lot of insight and a lot of good advice from people as to the various secrets, he says.
But what I’m gonna share with you here is like, think about this, like the master key. This is the secret that’s gonna lock all the other secrets. And I’m like, okay, cool. What is it? And he says, commit to getting up early every day of your mission. And he’s like, now that might seem a little bit underwhelming.
Chad: And I was like, okay. And he’s like, but if you think about it, he said, getting up early means that you’re gonna set up a solid foundation every day for your morning routine. You’re gonna be able to study your scriptures, you’re gonna be able to exercise and meditate and prepare and be on it.
And at that moment, it clicked for me and all of a sudden I recognized this kind of like universal truth. And so, long story short, over the years, this has evolved into what we’ve essentially developed in our practice. We developed a morning routine framework called the 30-Minute Reboot, which is basically just a 30 minute morning routine framework that consists of kind of three components of exercise, meditation, and nutrition.
And it’s a simple, easy way to do it within 30 minutes. So it’s not this big, daunting, like, okay, you’ve gotta do these 50 different things and it’s gonna take two hours and you gotta carve out all this time. It’s like, no. Just 30 minutes, can you carve out 30 minutes? And so we recognize like, look, if we could get this keystone habit of a morning routine in place for patients, this could really help set the stage and build a lot of massive momentum in the morning that we’ll see through the rest of the day.
And then likewise, we started to clue in and realize that if the secret to the day is a solid morning routine, then what’s the secret to the solid morning routine? Well, the secret to the solid morning routine is the nightly routine leading up to it, right? Because if you don’t have a good solid nightly routine in place, it’s gonna really make it a lot more challenging for patients to stick to a morning routine.
Chad: And so for us, the, the proverbial Trojan horse is, look, rather than us tell you that you’ve gotta exercise and you’ve gotta meditate, and you’ve gotta do body work and you’ve gotta walk and you’ve got to exercise and do all these different things. We’ve simply framed it as, listen, what we want you to do for the next 30 days is just focus on 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night. Can you do that? Can you just focus on your morning routine and your evening routine? And that being said, we don’t need hours. We just need 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at night, and most people can grasp that intellectually, conceptually, like that makes sense. It’s simple and easy.
Yeah, I can do that. And so what we’ve seen is compliance is way, way high because it’s very concrete. It’s not abstract. It’s not like there’s like some exercise stuff and there’s like some nutritional stuff and don’t eat this, and don’t eat that. And there’s, you know, all these different pieces of a puzzle.
Whereas again, we’ve made it very concrete in terms of the framework, in terms and so it’s far more digestible, it’s far easier for people to get ahold of and this idea of it being 30 days, just do it for 30 days and see what happens at that point in time, we find that there’s sufficient momentum that’s built again, that it makes it really easy and it literally bleeds into all other aspects of their days. Days tie into weeks, weeks tie into months, months tie into years, so that’s the kind of the long and short of it there.
Jodi: I love that and I love how you said that the evening routine bleeds into the morning routine. Do you wanna talk a little bit about what you have people do at the end of the day and how you set them up for success the following day?
Chad: Absolutely. Andrew, you wanna talk about that a little bit?
Andrew: Yeah. And also there’s another component to this I don’t wanna miss, and I’ll tell you what the evening routine is in just a minute. And I was just thinking about this recently, I wrote an email on it and, and my question is, what would cause somebody to dump an ice cold bucket of water over their head?
Like if I told you, Hey, dump an ice cold bucket of water over your head. You’re like, no, I’m not doing that. That’s gonna be uncomfortable. That’s stupid. But what if I said, Hey Jodi, I challenge you to dump a cold bucket of water on your head and you’re doing it to raise money for ALS.
And then once you do it, I need you to post it on social media. Let everyone know you did it, and then challenge somebody else. So all of a sudden what you’re doing is you’re doing a couple things. Like psychologically people like to be challenged. Whether they admit it or not, it’s like they’re making a decision in their head like, Andrew’s challenged me here. I could do that. I’m gonna prove him wrong. I’m gonna do that. And it’s a little win there. You’re also playing somewhat to people’s ego in terms of significance when they say, Hey, I can go online and tell people I’m doing that challenge. Look how cool I am. I’m supporting ALS.
It’s a social status bump and everybody likes social status bumps. And then you’re also, once you’ve gone through that cruel act of dumping water on your head, now you’re gonna make somebody else pay for that. So there’s a little bit. of camaraderie there.
And that was the genius of the ice bucket challenge that was really popular a few years ago was they were just tapping into people’s psychology for rewards, mental rewards, for significance, for social proof, for community. And it was tugging on all these emotional strings. And so what we did was, and like there are all kinds of challenges, like whether you like them or not or think challenges are stupid or fun, they work. Like if you look at the 10,000 step a day challenge for 30 days, there’s actually very little research that shows that that helps with your health.
But people were convinced that that was a good idea and it’s probably a great idea to walk 10,000 steps per day. But when you make it a challenge, you can tell people, Hey, I’m doing a challenge. All of a sudden it becomes exciting. And so that’s exactly what we did with our routines that Chad is talking about.
The morning and evening routine, we made it a challenge, and so we’re challenging people to do it. We’re challenging people to tell people that they’re doing this 30 challenge because that’s what kind of elevates people above the information level and into the heart level where people make decisions based on a motion and based on significance, not based on facts and data.
And so the other cool thing, and Chad alluded to this, we make it doable. We make it challenging. We make it doable. So for example, in the evening routine, uh, we have what’s called the Induction 10. We have our clients and patient play on an accu-ion mat. It’s a really simple device. You can get it anywhere. And we have them do some really simple breath work and we use a device called HeartMath, which can guide them through a breathwork and meditation session.
If they’re not used to that, some people can just pick it up and do it. But it’s really, really simple. Even for somebody who’s never done meditation and breath work, they can figure it out. I mean, my seven-year-old son can do it. So it’s a very easy ask. It’s just carving out the time to do it.
This would be a great time to use essential oils, right? So you’re trying to relax, you’re trying to get your body and your mind into a state of relaxation for sleep. Put some essential oil behind your ear. So, we have the induction 10. We have the reflecting five. Which is five minutes of journaling before you go to bed. So our minds oftentimes need to dump whatever we went through during the day, good, bad, ugly, whatever. It’s just five minutes to reflect on the day of what we’re grateful for, what we’re looking forward to tomorrow, what we achieved that day, what we didn’t achieve that day, what our failures were, what our fears are.
And it’s something that it’s private, you can keep to yourself, but it allows you to kind of empty your brain at the end of the night so that you’re in a better position to get better sleep. It’s one of those old school things like sometimes people look at journaling like something that a 14 year old girl might do. But the research is very solid, in terms of mental health and physical health. I’m just doing this really simple, very fundamental, very old school technique to get better sleep and prepare for tomorrow. And then, the last thing, what am I missing, Chad? There’s one more step, shifting 15. Do you wanna cover that one?
Chad: We make sure that with these routines, they’re set up as a framework so that they’re not rigid.
It’s not this rigid checklist that you have to do these things, but rather this is a framework that you can follow that again will provide a sufficient degree of clarity and concreteness, if that’s a word, so that it’s not vague and it’s not abstract, but rather there’s a five minute journaling process. There’s a 10 minute process of inducing relaxation, right? The reflecting five. The induction 10. And then the shifting 15 is a technique to shift brain waves from an active state to a slower state as well, which already the induction 10 is gonna help with that inherently already.
But then the 15, what we use is something known as binaural beats. And so binaural beats is two different frequencies that are slightly askew from one another. This is like the oversimplified way of putting it, that together, the brain kind of harmonizes and takes these two together and, and meets it in between and typically shifts it. And the whole idea is we use that to get brain to a delta state, which is optimal state, prepped and ready for sleep. And so we just tell our patients, our clients, whoever, put on some headphones. Use the binaural beats, lay down, relax again, slow down your breathing.
And in terms of that, just a nice slow, steady exhale along with that helps to shift the brain and prep it for sleep. And now with that kind of all set up in place, what it does is it really… and we obviously talk about environmental factors as well, keeping the room dark. A lot of those things that are fairly obvious, but sometimes people just need reminders on. And really what it does, it helps set the stage for the best possible outcome for you in terms of stacking the odds in your favor of getting a really good, solid restful sleep in preparation for that morning routine, morning time-wise.
Jodi: I love that. You gave me that book, Atomic Habits, which I thought was so brilliant because that’s one of the reasons I created oil blends, cuz I felt like this is kind of low hanging fruit. It’s an easy way for people to win. And if they’re, you know, not going to bed at a reasonable hour, oils won’t fix that. If they’re allergic to certain foods and they’re eating them anyway, oils won’t fix that. If they aren’t moving their body, oils can’t fix that. So I love giving other strategies to help them to succeed in the areas that they want to succeed, and they’re not sure why they’re stuck.
Chad: That’s huge. And that whole idea of giving people quick wins, we live in a day and age, like it or not, we can fight against it all we want, but we live in a day and age where people are so accustomed to instant gratification. We’re just, our, our attention span is at an all time low.
People really have a difficult time with this concept of delayed gratification. And we can certainly, again, we can fight against that and kind of, I see this with some practitioners, bless their hearts, like I understand it, they have very rigid and strict standards. You know what I mean?
If you’re gonna be my patient, you have to meet these criteria here. And if you can’t meet these criteria, then you can’t be a patient of mine and we can’t help you. And I think there’s a time and a place for that. I get that in some instances makes sense, but there’s gotta be an entry point and for us, the way that we think about it in terms of these morning and evening routines again, is this is a simple entry point for people that can really essentially graduate them to a higher level of operating in their lives.
But for a lot of people where they’re just struggling with motivation and struggling with just even the idea. And I guess I would say too, the people we’re talking with a lot of people and chances are your audience, too. These are people who are already struggling with anxiety and depression and panic attacks and overwhelm.
Jodi: Oh, my God. You want me to take seven seconds?
Chad: And so the last thing in the world we want to do is say okay, here’s this really complex routine or this complex, you know, set of instructions that you’ve gotta follow. That’s just one more thing on their plate that’s just gonna, you know, it’s like the person who’s already drowning and you’re shoving their head under even further or handing them a bag full of bricks thinking that that’s gonna help ’em somehow It’s not, you know, they need an easy entry point. And that’s what we believe we’ve created here is a far easier entry point for people.
Jodi: One, I’ve noticed with a lot of the people that are new to oils, I say things like, well, leave it by your toothbrush, you know, and just do it when you’re brushing your teeth, cuz that’s an ingrained habit. I’ve noticed like for supplements, for oils, if you can make it the morning and the evening, people can somehow manage that. Even if you have kids and you have dogs, you know, you can do it before they wake up or need to be walked and you know, after they’ve gone to bed. It gives you more cushion to committing to yourself.
Chad: What’s interesting is, and I don’t know if these two authors have connected, maybe they have, but I almost feel like it’s a sequel to Atomic Habits once I started reading this book by Dr. Ben Hardy, called Willpower Doesn’t Work. And he really shines a light on different aspects of what’s already been covered in Atomic Habits, been into different angle and a different light. I would highly recommend anybody read that. But one of the things that he talks about in Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about this whole idea of what you’re talking about is lowering or reducing activation energy.
Something simple, and I’ve done this myself. It’s something simple that makes it more likely that I’m gonna get up and work out in the mornings, or run in the mornings, is have your shoes by the door with your socks ready to go so that you know, it makes it just that much easier.
Or exactly like you said, if you’re gonna do your oils, put ’em next to your toothbrush, you know you’re gonna be brushing your teeth, it’s gonna make it that much easier. Essentially what you’re doing is you’re lowering the activation energy. But if we step back further and we look at it for what it really is, what it is is it’s this concept or this idea of environmental design, that’s what’s talked about and Willpower Doesn’t Work, is willpower doesn’t work because it’s all about your environment. Your environment will always trump your willpower, always. And so if we can design and set up proactively ahead of time, our environment in such a way that we’re set up for wins, it makes it a lot more likely that we’re gonna be able to be consistent with what we need to be. Cuz it doesn’t require nearly the same level of energy as before, if we didn’t have an environment set up for succeeding in those respects.
Jodi: No, I love that. It’s funny, my daughter, we’re all parents, so, you know, we’re all trying to teach our kids how to structure things, and she’s gonna leave for college in the fall. So I’m trying to teach her things. Like I have a place where I always leave my keys. I have like my binders, my cell core binders and my oils by my bedside, so I never have to look for certain things, cuz I know where they are. So it just sets me up for success.
Chad: It’s huge. Setting up your environment for wins is absolutely huge. And we’re big proponents of that. And the habits that we teach are really, if you were to step back and look at ’em, they’re environmental design habits is all they are. The morning, evening routine, and everything in between that we teach really focus a lot on that.
Andrew: I was reminded that we were in New York, New York City this last weekend. It reminds me of that, in general, people that live in Manhattan are a little bit fitter than the rest of the population, and one of the reasons for that is they walk a lot. So it’s incredibly inconvenient to have a car there. So if you need to go somewhere, chances are you’re gonna walk there, take the subway, walk to the subway, and so people move a lot more in Manhattan. Not because necessarily they want to walk, but it’s just easier, it’s more convenient.
And so I would encourage anybody to encourage their followers, patients, clients, whoever they’re trying to influence is figure out what you can do to make it difficult to do the things that aren’t benefiting you. And from a health standpoint. And you can, you can, you can artificially do that. You can intentionally do that.
Not just like the great cues that you guys learned, but make it difficult for you to eat ice cream. By not bringing it into the house. My, my father-in-law just arrived yesterday from Iowa and he brought a whole bunch of cookies for us to eat, and I’m gonna be eating cookies. Is it right there on the counter? I’m gonna eat them. So one of the things that we decided as a family was, okay, if we’re gonna eat healthy, let’s just not bring that stuff into the house. We know it’s gonna come once in a while, but we don’t buy it at the grocery store. We just buy whatever’s on our list.
So if we wanna get ice cream, we have to get our keys, get in the car, go to the grocery store, buy it, come back. And it’s like, was was that worth it? Maybe sometimes we do stuff like that, but more times than not, we’re just too tired to do those things, and it’s just not an option. So that’s just one example.
Jodi: Sometimes with exercise is, I commit to meeting a friend in a class. You’re meeting a friend for a walk, because then if I get up and I don’t feel like it, I know I’m not gonna let that other person down so I get up anyway.
Chad: That’s a huge part of it. The social aspect is also another really, really big part. One of the things that I’ll just say too is when we talk about like, exercise, and especially with diet, one of the things that we teach as part of our overall curriculum that we teach is one of the grand truths with regard to nutrition and especially with diet, is people misunderstand, like we’ll talk about like weight loss, which is a big issue for a lot of people, right? People think that weight loss or poor eating choices is the primary driver behind that. And what we argue and what we teach is that that’s a symptom of something far deeper.
And for us, with so much of it, and we’ve already kind of danced around a little bit here in this conversation, but the term that we first, I first heard it used by Dr. Wayne Anderson. He’s a really renowned Cardiologist turned kind of functional medicine doctor, for lack of a better way of putting it.
But he said that the core issue at hand is mental mismanagement. People don’t know how to essentially manage mentally the things that they need to manage. And so we have all of these byproducts or symptoms of mental mismanagement, obesity. The obesity epidemic is a simple symptom or sign, if you will of mental mismanagement, right?
People smoking, addictions of all types are forms of mental mismanagement. A lack of exercise is mental mismanagement, you know? And so, Netflix binging, binge watching TV shows, mental mismanagement, and so for us, so much of what we’ve woven into this curriculum is really helping to effectively learn how to better manage mental states, you know, so it’s a huge, huge part of what we’re trying to accomplish here by teaching people is how to keep their life in such a way that they’re operating at a high enough state to where they can proactively make better choices to environmental choices that will make it easier for them each and every day.
Jodi: You need a parent version of this for like all the parents to help their kids. I’m curious, I wanted to get back to kind of originally compliance rates are below 10%. How has this kind of helped patients with their compliance?
Andrew: We’re starting to compile some data behind that, so we actually have a good number. But we’ve noticed it’s gone up. So we see that through our patients and clients opening up their app, using their tools, showing up to live coaching calls. They’re more excited to do those things as well.
So we’ve noticed an energy shift in that as well. And overall, ultimately it just affects outcomes. And so whatever your outcome is, if you want to, if you want to reverse a chronic disease, if you want to see a test, an objective finding on a test, improve over a period of time, that’s the stuff that we’re seeing.
Chad: I was gonna hit on that real quick, Andrew, is that, you know, one of the cool things about our program is we have providers all across the country in almost every state that are using these same protocols with their own patients. And it’s really cool to not only hear the feedback from these providers, but then also see objective data in the form of pre- and post-lab testing.
We do some pretty unique lab testing that allows us to really measure in an objective manner. People’s ability or in these cases lack thereof to cope with and manage stress. And so we look at very specific biomarkers through that lens of how the body is coping with and dealing with overall stress in their life, in all of its forms.
Emotional, physical, chemical, all those different stressors. And it’s been really cool to see because what we’ve been able to do is get live feedback from these docs. Each week we do these clinical training calls for them, and so we hear, How are your patients doing?
They get these rave reports from their patients and then to us, like, oh, it’s amazing. We’re hearing all these incredible success stories. But then when we look at pre- and post-testing as well, we can see objectively, we can see measurable differences, quantifiable differences in terms of improvement. And so that’s been really rewarding for us to be able to see. It’s been really, really cool.
Jodi: I think mental mismanagement is kind of the missing link in the protocol. Can you share how people can find out more about your work or work with you?
Chad: We have one where we work with providers. That’s if you go to simplifiedfunctionalmedicine.com, You can basically find out anything and everything you wanna know about our program and our protocols from that standpoint. But if you’re like a client, a person who’s like, I’d love to be able to do this for myself, these same protocols, if you go to mindandbodyintegration.com, you can find out as a patient or as a client what that would look like, in terms of working with us. Anything else, Andrew?
Andrew: Thank you. Yeah, that’s a great way to start. We have a couple podcasts that you can listen to. So the Simplified Functional Medicine podcast is a great way to kind of tune in and learn kind of long version format of what we’re talking about here on our podcast.
Chad: And the Health Fundamentals Podcast is another. Simplified Functional Medicine podcast is gonna be geared, geared more towards providers. So if you’re a patient, I mean, you can listen to it as a patient and still get good stuff out of it, but it’s gonna definitely be more focused on, clinical and business from that standpoint. But then, Health Fundamentals is more direct to the consumer, patients.
Jodi: Thank you so much. This is fabulous.
