How to Cure Insomnia, Anxiety & Depression with Dan Murray-Serter: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Air brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Sales Evangelist. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down how to cure insomnia, anxiety, and depression. To drop these value bombs, I brought Dan Murray Sertar into EO Fire Studios. Dan was the UK's Young Entrepreneur of the Year, host of the UK's number one business podcast, Secret Leaders, and founder of a new brain care company called Heights. In today's foundation, we'll talk about looking after your brain and making sure you're feeding it what it needs to thrive.

0:39And if you put your brain first, the rest follows Fire Nation. It's your most important organ. It will take care of the rest of you and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Dan and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

1:13Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Dan, say what's up to Fire Nation and what is something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? Great question. What's up, Fire Nation? Firstly, hello from London where it has been a beautiful day despite what you might think about London.

1:50The sun has been shining all day. What do I think about becoming successful? I know that there's the Malcolm Gladwell school of thought of success comes from 10 ,000 hours of practice, but I believe that that is wrong. I think it comes from 10 ,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12 ,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30 ,000 hours of sleep. So I very much believe on over-indexing on rest and space and sleep to do much more productive work to make you more successful. Wow. Sleep for me, Fire Nation, is literally my one focus and priority in life. I mean, if I get my eight hours plus a night, I am crushing it the next day.

2:36If I don't, I'm not. And I'm actually pretty obsessed right now with getting at least two, hopefully three hours of sleep in before midnight, meaning I'm falling asleep by around nine-ish because that's when I find my deep sleep actually happens, which is so critical, so key. So I love that we're talking about this because listen, if you have insomnia, you know how painful lack of sleep is. If you have anxiety and depression, it only gets exacerbated by lack of sleep. And that's what we're talking about here today about how to cure insomnia, anxiety, and depression. And Dan's dealt with this stuff, which is why he's founded this company called Heights to really help with brain care, because that's really, really key stuff.

3:16So let's kind of talk about that process of you starting this company Heights. Break it down. Okay, so the story goes, it was about three or four years ago, I was in a period of my life where I was very happy, objectively happy. Everyone asked me how I am, I'm happy. I was running a tech company, it was going well. I was getting married in the summer, my mom had just recovered from cancer. I had all of these great reasons to be happy. I'm a glass half old kind of guy. I do my gratitude journaling. And one day I just couldn't sleep. out of nowhere. That was okay. But like the next night I couldn't sleep.

3:48And you know, the symptoms really were I'd go to sleep at midnight, actually, and I'd wake up at 2am or by 2am wide awake, full of energy, there's no chance of getting back to sleep. First couple of nights, obviously, I'm like, great, I'll just get up and do some work. A few nights later, I'm like, okay, I'm obviously just like Elon Musk, I've heard that he only sleeps about two hours a night, maybe I'm gonna invent, you know, a new transportation to take us to Venus or something who knows um sadly that didn't happen that reality and this sort of narrative that really fit my um fit my condition started to wane a little bit so I was going into the office you know having done eight hours of work already um by the time we started our day um feeling quite smug and productive for the first few weeks but over the period of five and a half months, which is how long I had insomnia.

4:38I was just drained, desperately drained, as you would be. I tried all the different things to help solve it. So I went to the doctor, obviously, the doctor recommended me sleeping pills, I didn't believe that that was going to be a long term solution. So I didn't really appreciate that kind of diagnosis. I tried meditation, I tried calm, I tried Sleepio, which is a sleep specific meditation app, I went to a sleep therapist, I tried all the different things. It just got worse and worse. And what ended up happening was, you know, during the day, I'd start to have, you know, really chronic anxiety, panic attacks out of nowhere.

5:13I'd be sitting in a meeting, I'd get hot and cold sweat suddenly, and have to leave. I just didn't really know why or what was happening, why this was happening to my body. Anyway, I was out for dinner with a friend explaining to her my symptoms. And she just turned to me and said, Have you heard of brain nutrition? And I was like, No, I literally don't know what you're talking about, frankly, I'm going to consider myself a fairly healthy guy. You know, I measure my blood. I do all of these different things. My father died when I was young of ill health. So I'm very into preventative measures and looking after myself.

5:44So, you know, objectively, I thought I was a pretty healthy guy. But here I was having dinner with a friend, she mentions brain nutrition, and tells me that I should go and see a dietitian. And I didn't really know what a dietitian was. I've heard of nutritionists, because you know, that's just a lot of people on Instagram, obviously. But she explained that a dietician is like a nutritionist, but they deal with sick people and they're medically trained. And, you know, they actually have to study and do the science and everything. So they are literally dealing with sick people. And she's like, it sounds like you have a mental health problem.

6:14And I've not really diagnosed myself, right? I hadn't really thought about it like that. So I went to see this dietician. And the experience was so fascinating, because within one minute of telling her my symptoms, she literally turned to me and said, you've got a brain nutrition problem. You need to take these supplements. And she told me to go and take DHA, omega three, blueberry extract, and B vitamin complex. And the reasons for those were, she said, your brain is 60 % fat, and 90 % of that fat is one compound called DHA. And it's very common that people have a DHA malnourishment issue. If you do, you are essentially depleting your brain of its core nutrient that it needs to thrive.

7:00And then replacing it with things, you know, she gave a great, a great analogy, which was this a bit like, you know, if you're building a house, and you put in bricks, you can remove a few bricks, and you can put in polystyrene, it'll still keep the house up. But after a while, if you take away one too many, you know, the foundation starts to fall apart a little bit. And she's like, that's basically what it sounds like you've got going on she recommended blueberry extract because she said it's a powerful antioxidant that'll clean out your glymphatic system of your brain no idea what she meant obviously i was like okay cool looking very smart and smug with myself of course which is um and she's an impi-vitamin complex because you know you've got insomnia and you're having a spike of energy at two in the morning which is you know not helping anyone and um and so you need to regulate your energy supply she was literally like go take these um but buy them from a really high quality retailer because what you won't know is that most supplements that are cheap that you will be gravitating to go and buy on the high street and will not have the dosages in that you need there is literally a discrepancy between the minimum amount you can put in and make a marketing claim in the supplement industry and the whole world like globally and the actual amount according to science that you need to try and solve these issues.

8:12So she literally wrote me a prescription. And I went and spent$150 on these three products. And within 10 days, I was sleeping like a baby. I had no anxiety. Like, it had literally gone away. And I called her up in absolute astonishment and excitement and everything else. And she was so completely nonchalant. She was like, yeah, I know. And I was like, oh, okay. Do you know what I mean? I was like, so excited to tell this person she saved my life. you know, changed my life. And she was like, Yes, I know. And I was like, Right, okay. And she was like, Yeah, basically, just frustrated that the media and then the supplement industry, which doesn't help itself, enable these stories about how they don't work.

8:53And most people go and buy normal supplements in the high street, which are low quality. And basically, all supplements have a legal requirement to put the information on the box, which they do, but in tiny asterisks. So the example that she gave me, which always stuck to me was seven C's, right? Seven C's is the biggest amica 3 brand in the whole entire world um they're the ones you go and take if someone tells you to take amica 3s they put in 45 milligrams per day in their daily dose because that's the minimum amount you can put in and make a marketing claim like helping with healthy brain function but you need 250 milligrams as a minimum according to science so if i went and bought seven seeds i would have to be taking that product six days just to get one day's worth of what i was actually needing in my brain for the health so it and that that is a problem that sort of perpetuates everywhere so for me it was two things it was like one was wow i can't believe this woman is so completely uninterested in my personal story she's just saved my life and actually she's more just annoyed that i'm surprised than anything else um and two as an entrepreneur you know there is a real opportunity here to create a brand based on science so based on what the science says about how to take care of your brain, particularly if nutrition is such a big part of it, that creates a giant gap in the market.

10:10And I think this is where the insight sort of came from, where the first thing I did was started writing a newsletter, because, you know, you can obviously do that with MailChimp and a keyboard for 50 quid. So, you know, for 50 bucks a month, I was starting to build an audience by literally researching a science paper every single week and rewriting it in plain English so people would read it and you know in millennial language with some lulz and some gifs of course um but the point was I was um communicating what a science paper says is good for your brain and how to take care of your brain according to science because I felt like one of the reasons why I was so unaware of the things that could happen is because I've become completely apathetic and uninterested and unable to trust anyone because on Instagram just so many different, you know, influential, charismatic marketeers trying to sell me all sorts of potions and, and things that in the end, my trust had just been eroded so much, I had this perspective that nutrition was nowhere near, you know, supplements were nowhere near my scope of consideration for solving a proper mental health problem.

11:16And when I started reading the science papers, that said the opposite. Science literally told me that nutrition was one of the most likely ways to improve my mental health if I had a problem and if I was at a baseline to improve it to give me better clarity focus sleeping better you name it and I just thought that this was the most fascinating market opportunity because the science is all there to prove that this stuff works if you as the brand owner are responsible are putting in the correct dosages of picking your ingredients really well and essentially fueling someone's most important organ with the highest quality nutrients you possibly can, then they're more likely to actually feel the impact.

11:58So, you know, I set about starting the company Heights with my co-founder Joel on this idea of we don't take care of our brains. Let's start a company that explains what science says we can do to take better care of the brain that takes care of us. Right. And that was essentially the trigger point. And it started two years ago, 125 newsletters later, I'm still going. I'm still writing it. And yeah, I mean, I've been talking for a while now. It's very unaware of me. Sorry, a massive monologue. I accept your apology. I mean, you are British. It's kind of one of those things. I'm just going to sit back.

12:32I'm British, so we've got to apologize. You have to understand that there is so much frustration out there by these functional medicine doctors, by people who really do understand how the brain, how the body, you know, how your gut microbiome, like how these things work. And they are frustrated. They are frustrated that, you know, there's so just much in the way of lies that is out there in the world, because it is so sad to see people just, you know, chugging soda and crushing sugar and eating this and doing that and process and preservatives and all this crap. And just thinking that, Hey, like either a, A, what I'm doing is healthy because it says no fat on it.

13:10Or B, like not even knowing that what they're putting in their mouth is having the effects that they're having when it comes to sleep or mental health or all these things. And it can sometimes be very simple supplements, very straightforward things that your body's missing in the form of what it could be. Vitamin D, zinc, fill in the blank on a number of other things. And boom, it can just change things literally sometimes overnight. And I do agree with you though, Dan. It would be nice if she wasn't so nonchalant about it. She was like, yes, I'm happy for you because I know that this is changing your life.

13:44Let's get this word out together. And Fire Nation, we're going to be talking about some other things when it comes to insomnia, anxiety, and depression when we get back from thanking our sponsors. But also, I want to have Dan really kind of break down his ability to disrupt the supplement industry because it's a pretty fascinating thought and theory and process. And again, we'll be there when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Are you ready to start your year off with increased revenue, faster growth, and record-breaking performance? Well, a powerful sales platform can make it all happen.

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15:24Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx Talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx Talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more, visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart and out into the world where it belongs.

16:03That's thought-leader.com slash fire. So Dan, we're back. And as we teased before the break, disrupting the supplements industry. How does one even start doing that? Because it is an entrenched industry with a lot of difficulty to break in. What do you do? It's really funny. because me and my business partner were from a tech background. We built a tech company previously. So we knew nothing about supplements, nutrition or neuroscience. And I think that's actually been to our benefit because we asked the first principle stupid questions. So we went around and asked people who were taking supplements, you know, what do you do?

16:40When do you take them? Why do you do this? And all this stuff. And what we learned is most people will start taking supplements and not continue taking them. It's the most common trend. So people about 15 days in or whatever start forgetting and they don't bother. And so we looked at this, you know, there's a number of different things we looked at, but one of them was the quality of the supplements was so bad they never felt anything. The second was they all come in the same bottle, right? The same round bottle. Right. So they all go into a supplement cupboard and out of sight, out of mind. So, you know, we had spent so much time and energy thinking about user experience in our mobile company that, you know, we were like, well, why does no one think about doing that in the supplements industry?

17:21So we worked with this world leading agency called Pentagram, who, you know, quite famous for making the Kindle and the iPad. And we said, like, let's completely change the game. Let's make a bottle that fits through the letterbox for people, can hold 60 capsules because it's two a day. That's how many we needed to get the actual quality that we needed to feed people's brains. But let's reinvent this so that using best-in-class habit design understanding, when someone starts taking our smart supplement, they will continue taking it. The most important thing you learn from building a consumer mobile company is retention.

17:57Retention is the name of the game. And if you can figure out retention, customer acquisition is easy because most of your customer acquisition comes from personal referral because you've nailed retention. so you know the same is true in my mind when building physical products that if you nail retention that's your growth strategy but no one does that and the reason no one does that is because everyone is willing firstly everyone usually that creates a new supplement comes from within the industry so they come with all the preconceived ideas about how you do things and we literally ripped up the entire rule book so we said if this is d2c how can we start right So we send our product to 72 different countries.

18:36So it gets sent all over the world. We have customers everywhere, including Puerto Rico, as you know. And the reality for us is we started with the ingredients. So the most common thing that almost every single supplement manufacturer will do is they will buy all the supplements from China. This is just the cheapest and it's the mass manufacturer of most of the ingredients. But we did the opposite. We said we want to be a B Corporation. So we want to be a highly sustainable company. We want to have the highest quality product in the market bar none. So we will research where every ingredient comes from and make sure it's the best.

19:11So as a result of that, our omega-3 oil, which comes from algae, comes from Nova Scotia. Our blueberry extract comes from Italy. You know, we've literally gone to the highest quality manufacturers of each of the ingredients. So they are in their most bioavailable form. And every single one of our 20 ingredients that goes into the product has literally been sourced from the world's best manufacturer with the highest quality principles. Common thing we did was we said we're not putting in any caking agents or synthetic fillers whatsoever, which, funnily enough, was such a weird thing to the manufacturers that they didn't believe us.

19:44They're like, wait a second, you're not putting sawdust in these supplements? I don't think we understand what you're talking about. You'd be amazed, though. So, you know, jokes aside, what we learned by looking into the supplement industry, so 99.999 % of all supplements have caking agents and synthetic fillers bulking agents in them. But what's crazy is a large amount of them will even have things like rat poison and cyanide. The choices are bizarre. And I'm not joking either. It's just completely crazy. Most of them are chalk and things like that. So this is one problem is you're buying a cheap supplement.

20:15You're getting the minimum amount in there. But worse, in my opinion, is you're also taking a bunch of stuff you didn't ask for, like chalk and worst case cyanide. So we were like, we are just going to pack our product completely full of only ingredients. There will be no synthetic caking agents or anything like that. And the first three times we got our product from our manufacturer, that's not how it turned up. Because literally three times in a row, they refused to do it like that because they thought they even misunderstood us or that we were joking. because it's so unusual because we're the only people that have ever asked for it and they're like but you realize that you there'll be so much more cost to you if you do it this way and we're like yes we realize that that is literally the point the point is to have the best product in the market kept on having to send it back so that story alone tells you how uncommon it is to actually give your customers the best quality product you possibly can however um we did it we put together this patented capsule so the capsule is very cool it's got omega-3 on the outside and and the vitamins floating on in the inside so it's like a very beautiful designer looking pill most importantly for that you can take it with water first thing in the morning because again we did our customer research and we learned that people don't have a regular time of day to take their supplements because they need to take them with food and people take food at all different times so they get out of the habit for us you can take the product first thing in the morning and it has full bioavailability into your gut because of the omega-3s on the outside that dissolve first and the nutrients inside that dissolve with it.

21:47It basically dissolves in fat, which is exactly how supplements should be taken. That's why you take them with food. So we hacked the system of the capsule. We hacked the system of the bottle to make sure that it's in front of people's mind. Most people have it on their bedside table, but obviously a lot of people have it in their workstation. No one keeps it in their supplement cupboard, which is exactly what we were looking for. And then, because it's online, you know, when you sign up, we often get you to take the brain health survey. So you have a good understanding of where your brain health is at at the moment.

22:18And then we help take you through like a course with a whole bunch of different world leading health and wellness and science experts to nudge you on your journey, depending on your age, on your diet, on what you're currently feeling now, you know, is it anxiety? Is it sleep? Are you actually fine? And you're looking to improve your cognitive performance. All of these different inputs. We've worked with world leading scientists from Stanford and MIT and UCL to make sure that you are getting personalized content for you that's helping you along in your journey. And as a result, you know, we think about this concept of brain care, you know, as more than just looking after yourself from a nutritional point of view, but being aware of the different small things that you can do to improve your brain's health every single day.

23:02And I think The most curiously interesting thing about what we do is really the fact that for a lot of people with mental health problems, and they could be mild anxiety all the way through to full-blown insomnia, obviously, is a whole array that we feel in society. The most common thing that we do when that happens to us is think about how our psychological state can be improved by different triggers. So do I need to go see a therapist? Do I need more social connection? Do I need to find more purpose in my life? These are all the questions we ask. But what I've learned, and science backs up, and therefore our product is for some reason this unique story in the marketplace, is that yes, there are psychological triggers, but there are also biological triggers.

23:49and quite often if you're having a mental health problem you're not necessarily having a psychological problem like I wasn't you are having a biological problem and nutrition can be the answer and this is where we come in and I think what's even more interesting is you know a lot of people are aware in the one percent and I'm sure a lot of um you know definitely a lot of your listeners will be in that sort of one percent of optimizing cognitive performance so the idea of taking supplements to optimize your cognitive performance will not be lost on them at all. However, the difference is a lot of these people jump straight to nootropics.

24:25Nootropics is a little bit like, you know, you want to run a race and let's say you want to do a 10K. And so, you know, you start day one by having a Red Bull and you go super fast, but you can't really do that every day. The better way of doing it was to feed your body with the right nutrition every single day, the right fuel. So over the period of four weeks, you train for the 10k and you can do that every single day. And that is to me, the difference between nootropics and our smart supplement, we use all high quality natural nutrients to feed your brain when it needs to thrive. If you can get it from your whole food diet, you should.

24:59And we tell people that we have recipes on our website, we tell everyone that they shouldn't be taking a supplement, they should start with their own diet. But the second best thing to do is not nothing. It's to look after your brain and make sure that you're feeding it what it needs to thrive. And the impact that people have from this is profound. You know, if you look at our Trustpilot reviews, the majority of them relates to we've helped solve their sleep, they've got less anxiety. It's all of the things that I personally experienced. And the difference between me and the dietician is I'm not nonchalant about it.

25:31I guess you could say to my favorite stuff. And it is fascinating to me that literally like my mother used to send me off to school in the morning with one toaster strudel, like one toaster strudel, which is nothing but sugar and fried dough. And it's like, I went to school to think, to learn, to be educated. And by the way, to play sports and to like run around and like, what were we doing? Like, I am like so jealous if I ever have kids, like how lucky they are that they're going to have the right stuff for their brain, for their body, for everything. I'm just like, Oh, I'm so jealous of you.

26:03But this is what it comes down to fire nation. You need to take care of yourself. I mean, I'm actually holding this bottle that Dan's talking about in my hand right now. It is gorgeous. He has a gorgeous pamphlet that comes with it that actually goes into some of the details he's talking about as well. So just really overall, he's just going for this. How can I be the best solution to a real problem? How can I be the best solution to a real problem? Not like the most sawdust in a capsule solution to a problem, the best solution to a real problem? How can you do that, Fire Nation, in your world?

26:39So Dan, take this home for us. I'm giving you one minute, then I'm literally hitting the mute button on you. What is the one thing you want Fire Nation to take away from everything that you said here today? What's that one final value bomb? I think, to put it really succinctly, if you put your brain first, the rest follows. so in life if you take care of your most important organ it will take care of the rest of you and frankly this is not an opinion it is a scientific fact that your brain is an organ it is a scientific fact what it needs to thrive it is a scientific fact what ingredients and what nutrients help it thrive and so if you want to perform in life if you want to sleep better if you want to think clear, if you want to make better decisions and all of those things compound to making more money, living healthier, longer and happier lives because your brain is literally your control center, then feeding it the best fuel that it needs to thrive is probably the single most important new decision that you can make as a listener.