164: Dr. Molly Maloof - Healing Trauma and Stress with Social Bonds, Meditation, and Wearable Tech

Dr. Anthony Gustin welcomes back Dr. Molly Maloof, an entrepreneur, Stanford professor, and biohacker for an information-packed episode. 

You'll hear how the pandemic taught Dr. Molly that social bonds and community are just as vital to our health as good nutrition, sleep, and exercise. She also discusses the quantified self, how to heal past trauma to prevent and reverse metabolic disease, and touches on her research with psychedelic therapies.

Dr. Molly then ventures into her new fascination with emerging sex therapy protocols, an overlooked area that hasn't been innovated in 50 years. She highlights the recent epidemic of sexual trauma and sexual dysfunction plaguing society, and how we can learn to heal through meditation and the reprogramming of our thoughts and memories (in what she calls the "next wave of psychiatry").

As a practicing physician and healthcare reform lobbyist, Dr. Molly also touches on how to create a community of people who advocate for their wellbeing in a broken healthcare system designed to keep us sick for profit.

In this episode, you'll hear about:

• How Dr. Molly assesses her patient's social and support networks along with their general health
• The benefits of creating stronger social ties and being more engaged in your community 
• Why the next frontier of optimizing health is tackling stress and improving mental, emotional, and spiritual health
• How stress manifests itself in our physiology and sexual dysfunction, especially for women, and the sexual trauma epidemic plaguing the nation 
• Studying implicit vs. explicit memories and how we can change our brain's "programming" to lessen the reactivity and negativity triggered by past trauma, PTSD, childhood experiences, etc.
• Meeting our pain with compassion 
• Connecting to a higher power via meditation and spiritual coaching in the absence of formal religion
• Psychedelic therapies and regenerative medicine like NAD
• Why EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) might help people who haven't had luck with talk therapy

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Dr. Molly Maloof's website where you can find her online course based on the one she teaches at Stanford and preorder her new book, The Spark Factor
• Dr. Maloof's Instagram: @drmolly.co
• Natural Action Water Revitalization
• Polar H10
• Hanu
• Oura Ring
• EMDR
• Mindlight
• Myneurva remote neurofeedback therapy
• Sue Carter, who's studied the endocrinology of love and social bonds for over 30 years
• Helen Fisher, the most cited woman on love