In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. Sam Shay, a recognized clinician who proudly shares his own experience as someone who grew up with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome.
Dr. Shay’s mission is to support moms trying to balance raising a “neurodistinct” child with their work, other children, relationships, and staying healthy themselves. He sees these parents as being overlooked and uncared for, and his work is to bring them the tools they need to thrive along with their families.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Shay and I discuss:
- His personal journey growing up with undiagnosed Asperger’s (the term he prefers) and how this led him to his current clinical focus of supporting moms of “neurodistinct” kids
- An often-missed reason why some parents are comfortable with an autism spectrum diagnosis and the strengths and weaknesses that come with that…and some parents aren’t
- Why Dr. Shay prefers the term “neurodistinct” over “neurodivergent” and “neurodisorder”
- How autism spectrum disorders and other personality disorders may have played an important role in our species’ evolution
- The unseen exposure that may be increasing autism and other neuro-based diagnoses…it’s not chemical toxins!
- Dr. Shay’s 2 most crucial tips for moms of neurodiverse children
- An amino acid Dr. Shay likes to use in his practice that looks and tastes just like sugar and can be a great sugar replacement
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome to The Energy Blueprint podcast. In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. Sam Shay, who specializes in helping moms of neurodiverse, neurodistinct children to reclaim their health and their energy, and to make the lives of their children and their whole family better.
I want to say that even if you don’t necessarily identify or connect with the idea of having neurodistinct children; I, for example, have two young children, ages eight and five, who I wouldn’t identify as being neurodiverse or neurodistinct, but even for me, I found Dr. Shay’s insights to be extremely valuable. I think that if you open your mind, especially if you’re a parent– He’s also targeting moms. I’m, of course, not a mom. I think for parents more broadly, in general, I don’t know if you necessarily will get a lot of value from this podcast if you’re not a parent, but– Actually, now that I think about it, think back to the conversation, you might. There might be some stuff in here that you might get some insights from. Especially for parents, I think that there’s a lot of really valuable insights that you can glean from this. If you are a parent of a neurodistinct child, I think in particular, you’re going to get a lot of value from this discussion, and I highly encourage you to check out Dr. Sam’s work more broadly.
He’s got a really interesting story. I won’t tell it here. I’ll let him tell his background story. I do want to mention one part of his story, which he doesn’t say at the beginning, which is that he’s also a stand-up comic using humor to educate and entertain on topics like functional health and life with Asperger’s. He’s recently released his one-hour comedy show, NeuroSpicy: Love, Life, & Comedy on the Spectrum, which I’m excited to check out. I haven’t seen yet, but it sounds cool, and after having this conversation with him, I was impressed with him. I really enjoyed his way of thinking about things and having this dialogue, this back and forth with him was great. I actually invited him back on the show for a part two because I enjoyed it so much.
With no further ado, enjoy this conversation with Dr. Sam Shay.
Dr. Sam, welcome to the show.
Dr. Sam Shay: Thanks, Ari. It’s good to be here.
Dr. Sam’s story
Ari: First of all, you have an interesting backstory. You are in the realm of helping mothers of neurodiverse children. How did that happen? This is certainly the first podcast guest that I’ve had on the show who’s dedicated to not helping people with a particular medical problem where the focus is on that, but helping mothers of children with a particular issue. How did this unfold? How did this come about? How did you get into doing what you do now?
Dr. Sam: Sure. My story is just another version- in some ways, it’s just another variant of the wounded healer. This was my story. Many people who you’ve interviewed, they become what they’re doing in the natural health field because they struggled with the thing or someone they love and care about dearly struggled with the thing or some similar story.
In some ways, it’s very simple. My mother had me, and I’m neurodiverse. I have Asperger’s. Then the complex part is all the detail filling in that story. The short version is that I grew up on the Northeast, and my parents divorced when I was six years old, and it was a pretty nuclear divorce where me and my siblings were caught in the blast radius. My parents did not handle it well at all. They did the things you shouldn’t do, like weaponize kids against the other parent and all this terrible stuff.
When I was growing up, I didn’t know I had Asperger’s until my late 30s. This is maybe five, six years ago when I figured this out. To that effect, there was no education on it. There were no resources. There was no education. There was no understanding about it. It was just people– my parents thought my issues were in my head, and it was some sort of attention-seeking behavior, when really I was just deeply confused by everyone around me, and I was trying to get answers as to why people were saying some things and doing others. People had all these inexplicable social rules that I was punished for not following the rules that were never made explicit, and no one would tell me what the rules are. It was just this very confusing, very stressful time.
What is Asperger’s?
Ari: Dr. Sam, can you briefly just define or give people a sense of what Asperger’s is for people who are not familiar with it?
Dr. Sam: Sure. It’s approximately 1 in 200 to 1 in 250 people worldwide. Asperger’s is a different type of brain makeup where there is a couple defining features. One, a hyper-literalism, kind of a monotone speech pattern. There’s not a huge amount of up and down. I’ve had singing lessons, a lot of them, and sang a lot in a former time, so I have much more prosody, much more musicality than other people on the spectrum, but that’s because of training. There’s a sense of literalism, awkward socializing, poor ability to read social cues, usually hyper-intelligence and the lack of modesty that goes with it. [laughter] Special interests, like really deep [crosstalk]–
Ari: I was going to say, your only flaw– I like to tell people sometimes the joke, “My only flaw is excessive modesty.” [chuckles]
Dr. Sam: Right, exactly. Putting modesty but the modesty.
Ari: Yes, exactly.
Dr. Sam: What we see historically, Asperger’s definitionally was consumed by the autism spectrum disorder label in the more recent versions of the DSM manual, which I deeply disagree with. First off, I’m not a disorder. I don’t like being lumped in with a disorder diagnosis. Number two, full-on and autism is different than Asperger’s, and it’s mostly characterized by a full verbal function. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Temple Grandin, but she’s one of the biggest advocates for people on the spectrum. I asked her this directly at a talk she gave about the difference between the two, and she said it was a big mistake to lump them together.
For people who don’t realize it, people on the spectrum have– A huge disproportionate amount of science and technology and art were created by people of Asperger’s on a per capita basis. For example, Oppenheimer, Einstein, Turing, Elon. There are so many people in science and technology. Who’s the guy? Dan Aykroyd, who wrote Ghostbusters, he was assessed as having Asperger’s in the ’80s. That was very rare to get that early. If you listen to his interviews, you’ll see it, like that [mimics], that almost robotic cadence to his voice and the obsessive thinking and the brilliance that he has. There’s a great book called The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome written by Dr. Tony Attwood. It was published in 2019. I wish it was written in 1989. My parents could have read it. That would’ve been easier for everybody. That’s the longer version available.
Now people on the spectrum– When we’re talking about moms of neurodiverse kids, there’s lots of different neurodiversity. Asperger’s is the one that obviously I’m most familiar with. Then there’s ADD, ADHD. There’s the people that have OCD, sensory processing disorders, and all sorts of other different things. The reason I’m focused on helping the parents, especially moms, is, one, I’m quite happy to help fathers, but the reality is that it’s almost– it’s like an 80-20 principle. 80% of the time, it’s the moms that are the ones who are engaged in and interested in improving their own wellbeing in the name of helping their families, their kids.
My mom, growing up, she was terribly sleep deprived as a single mom raising, with some help, four kids. My father did pay child support, but he was effectively absentee. She was also hangry because she was eating candy bars for lunch and bragging about it, how quick and efficient it was. She was also in massive amounts of pain from a very bad back, and as you know, there are even certain painkillers that decrease empathy. That’s the one way they actually- the actual mechanism of how they lower pain is because they decrease the emotional circuitry of pain.
Dr. Sam’s story continued
Ari: It’s also harder to have empathy when you’re in pain itself.
Dr. Sam: Correct. Absolutely. The reason I want to focus on the moms is that if Ma– In some weird time machine world, if the older version of me was able to go back to the younger version of me and help mom, her life certainly would have been better, but also my life and everyone else’s life would have been better. Now some people may say, “Well, why don’t you just help you?” It’s like, well, the thing is that my parents pathologized me and they kept trying to fix me and mostly by chucking me in front of a shrink, and putting me on a low-cholesterol diet at age seven in the ’80s because they thought my cholesterol was too high at age seven, and no other real awareness about anything.
They were busy pathologizing me, and the reality is that there was no guarantee of their ideas of helping me would have helped me and also helping everyone else. Because if they’re too busy, my parents, antagonizing each other, the reality is that it’s at the parent level is the bigger cause of all the strife downstream. My mother’s physical health was– by her own admission later on in life. She said she didn’t make the best decisions for me growing up. Now spoiler alert. My mom and I have a great relationship now [inaudible 00:11:46] 25 years. In fact, she’s coming to visit in just under two weeks. We’re going to spend about six days together, and I very much look forward to it. It’ll be the second time she’s coming out to visit me.
I would like parents to not have to do that 25-year lift to need it to reconnect to their children as adults. Again, everyone benefits, everyone, if the parents– usually it’s the mom. If they are healthier and have more resilience and more energy, then everyone benefits. There’s just no other way to say it. There are people who are real specialists in helping kids who are- young kids, particularly, autism and whatnot. That’s not something that I particularly focus on. I think it’s the parents who are the missing– there’s a real lack in focus on helping the parents.
Ari: Yes. I have a quick, funny little story that in my family, there’s sort of an inside joke about me having Asperger’s. I was indirectly diagnosed with Asperger’s by my sister’s psychotherapist without ever having seen her. [chuckles] My sister and her husband were seeing the therapist, and for whatever reason, they were talking about me in one session, or maybe over several sessions they had told the therapist about me and describing certain behaviors. The therapist goes, “It sounds like he has Asperger’s.” Ever since then, we talk about me as having a diagnosis of Asperger’s too, even though the therapist has not yet done the official assessment of me.
Dr. Sam: The funny part is it’s very hard to actually dial in on a specific Asperger’s diagnosis. I mean, there’s a bunch of questions– Dr. Attwood’s book goes into this, but there’s not a blood test for it. That’s one reason why I made the 60-minute comedy show, NeuroSpicy: Love, Life, & Comedy on the Spectrum, is because I wanted to build a dedicated 60-minute comedy show to educate on Asperger’s, and it’s because it’s- was nothing there when I was growing up. What is the fastest way to scale a message, make it palatable and make it interesting and make it funny?
Stand-up comedy is something that I actually latched on to, and comedy itself is something I really latched on to. Stand-up comedy is more defined term later on. Growing up was watching comedy that helped me understand the world because my mom and when I would go visit my father, they would just throw me in front of a screen. I was watching sitcoms and comedy shows to try to understand and analyze, like an anthropologist, human behavior. Now realizing that, I was like, “Okay. Can I explain all of Asperger’s in 60 minutes, or the important bits, and then in a way that doesn’t blame or dunk on normies or neurotypicals and doesn’t also embarrassingly self-deprecate on me, someone on the spectrum?”
The show is designed to bring normies and aspies and people on the spectrum together. There’s no politics, there’s no cursing, there’s nothing gratuitous. I would say it’s PG-13 not because of a language issue, but because the content is kind of- it’s a headier bit of topics, and so young kids won’t really understand what’s going on. You’re welcome to send that over to your sister. [laughter] “Does this remind you of somebody, question mark?”
Ari: Yes. She’s like, “Ever since he was a little kid, he’s done this, this, and this.” The therapist is like, “Sounds pretty typical of Asperger’s.”
Dr. Sam: Right.
Ari: Anyway.
Dr. Sam: You also have the modest intellect?
Ari: Of course, yes.
Dr. Sam: Of course.
Parenting a neurodiverse child
Ari: [chuckles] No. Let me ask you this. There’s an issue here that I’ve seen come up many times over the years, and some of the language that you’re using: on the spectrum, neurotypical, neurodiverse, right? You talked about when you were a child that your parents were pathologizing you, trying to fix you, and implying that was a pretty awful thing to endure. There is this, I think, a spectrum of ways of conceptualizing this where– using the word spectrum, let me differentiate it from the spectrum and say continuum.
On one end of this continuum, you have people who say, well, we can diagnose this XYZ disorder, this one is autism, this one is Asperger’s, and so on and so forth, and this one is diagnosed by XYZ symptoms, and then we attempt to treat this disorder and fix this disorder by doing XYZ interventions. On the other end of the continuum are people who- and I’ve encountered this several times with mothers of neurodiverse children, who will definitely use the language of neurodiversity, but also really reject any notion that there is anything “wrong” with their child, anything that needs to be fixed.
There is a tendency among this type of individual to say, even when their child is maybe disabled in pretty debilitating ways in life with things that maybe could be helped in some way if one was to work at them, like you gave the example of singing classes to help develop your voice, for example, which affects your ability to communicate and be on a podcast like this and reach people effectively and teach. I would say this almost denial that there is anything to even work on and say, “My child is perfect just the way they are. I don’t need to do anything. I accept them for who they are, and therefore, there’s nothing to be done.” If you catch my- I’m sure you do, you catch my drift in this continuum.
Dr. Sam: Absolutely.
Ari: How would you clarify where do you think is the appropriate place to operate from on that continuum?
Dr. Sam: Sure. There’s a meta issue and then there’s the terrestrial issues that you mentioned. The meta issue is, are the parents stressed out, overwhelmed, low-resourced, low resilience, whatever’s happening in their lifestyle, in their life, whether it’s sleep deprivation or any of the things that my mom went through, and they’re looking at their child as like, what’s this problem to solve? The problem to solve can come in one and two ways. Because either you have this diagnosis and we got to just correct your diagnosis, or the other way to solve it is to say, “There’s not a diagnosis here. This is fine,” and then they just want to–
If the parent is under-resourced, stressed out, exhausted, et cetera, then either of those choices can be unnecessarily stressful and counterproductive. Because the lens is, how can I control the situation either through hypercontrol of it or willful blindness of it? Both can be problematic. By focusing on the parents, there can be much more clarity on what is the best approach. That’s the meta issue.
On the granular level, so for the crowd that wants to find the assessment, the diagnosis, the label, it can be very helpful or counterproductive. It could be either. It can be helpful because if I was assessed as having Asperger’s accurately, and they had the resource book like Dr. Attwood’s book or my comedy show or any other resources today, then it would be like, “Oh, my kid is not broken.” It’s like me speaking as a mom. “He’s got a set of superpowers and a couple meaningful kryptonites.” He’s not broken or pathological. He’s got a different brain and a different perspective that he has to learn how to adapt to the world because his brain is just the way it is, and we want to make sure that he’s navigating a world which is overwhelmingly, 99.5%, not like him. We have to teach the life skills to help him succeed and also to thrive within this space, so his unique gifts can come through and also be seen, recognized, supported, loved and cared for, not shunned and marginalized. There are some real life skills that are realities that have to be trained up on.
Having the assessment, the diagnosis, the label; one, assuming they do get the right label on it, that’s trick number one. Then two, they’ve got the resources– the label itself has all of the explanations of what it means and what you can do and what are the pitfalls, what are the gifts, what are the different realities that are going to happen. Then you plan accordingly. For the people that are saying my kid is not broken, he’s not– well, for one, first off, there’s a massive continuum, as you said, of from mild to severe.
In my comedy show, I describe that I’m on the spectrum, but my father is the bookend. In fact, I figured out I have Asperger’s because I found out my father had severe Asperger’s, and I’m the one who figured [unintelligible 00:22:31]. In fact, Dr. Asperger himself, this is when he started his research, I don’t know, ’40s, ’50s, et cetera– no, he definitely started it at least in the ’40s, maybe even slightly earlier. He said there was a first-order relative, 25% of the time there was a first-order relative that had similar things going on.
If you’ve got the parents that are saying there’s nothing wrong with my child, they’re normal, they’re not broken; on the one hand, I can interpret that as an expression of, “I don’t care how you may be different in other people’s lives. As my child, I love you tremendously however you present.” That’s not a bad thing. I’m not going to criticize that. The thing that I will raise some caution about is that, are you then not going to prepare your child in the world they live in with the brain they have?
I’ve said this before on other interviews. Raise the child you have, not the child you want. That may be hard to hear, but if you raise the child you have, that would imply that there’s a level of curiosity about who really is my child versus some projection of what they should be based off of cultural inertia, the family generations, “My parents’ parents, parents was this, and therefore, we should just continue on in this way,” or the local culture of the school or the group you’re in or whatever that everyone just acts a certain way and your child isn’t. Raise the kid you got, not the kid you hope you would have had.
Ari: Yes. Beautifully said. I love the way you explain that and clarify all of those nuances and distinctions. It’s a bit of a minefield to go into that without offending people, but saying the messages maybe people need to hear to help their children the right way and to avoid pathologizing them and doing harm through that mechanism as well.
Dr. Sam: It’s a yin-yang thing. Pathologizing them is a yang expression of things should be different. Also, willful blindness is a yin expression of things should be different. Both can go to an extreme, just like yin and yang can go to extreme– I no longer do acupuncture, but I used to be one. This yin-yang concept of anything in its extreme basically creates the same problem that you were trying to avoid.
Ari: Why neurodistinct and not neurodivergent or neuro disorder?
Dr. Sam: To me, the term neuro disorder implies there’s something pathologically wrong, like it’s a disorder in the sense that it’s bad as opposed to just different. Neurodivergent, that also implies a negative valence attached to it. I say neurodistinct because, one, it’s more accurate. I’m 1 in 200 people. That’s distinct. It doesn’t mean I’m a disorder. It means that I’m distinct. It carries a bit of nobility to it. Not that I think I’m royalty or something, but there’s a level of pride, of I’m acknowledging that I’m different, and I’m not only different, I’m very different, and I’m going to lean into that in a way that’s productive, as opposed to I’m very different in a weird, unsalvageable way.
Ari: Can I ask a question here, and I’m a bit maybe stepping back into the minefield.
Dr. Sam: Sure.
Neurodistinct versus neurodiverse
Ari: There’s a lot of discussion, and you can give a very short answer because I’m sure this could probably be an hour-long podcast in and of itself, the question I’m about to ask, but this is relevant to the way that you just explained things. There’s a lot of talk in recent years of how much autism has increased in recent decades. It used to be– I forget the numbers off the top of my head. It used to be, let’s say, 1 in 10,000, now it’s 1 in 10 or whatever it is. You probably know the numbers.
If we’re talking about something that is neurodistinct, that is rapidly increasing in prevalence as a result of certain toxic elements in the environment, for example, it’s been linked to various environmental toxicants, exposure in utero and in development and things like that, this would imply more in the direction of a disorder. On the other hand, if something is relatively stable over time– and you feel free to push back if you disagree with anything I’m saying here because this is your area of expertise. I’m just thinking through it in real time.
If we’re talking about something that is stable over time. Let’s say Asperger’s has been 1 in 200 people going back thousands of years. That implies that this is a genetically selected for trait in that it has maybe some trade-offs present. Maybe that over time, the genes that predispose to this thing are being selected for in a way because they give some survival advantage. For example, you talked about that it’s often associated with intelligence, people who are very innovative, people who are in certain areas very gifted. The genes associated with schizophrenia are also associated with people who are very artistically and musically talented, as an example, but it also leads to this potential for having a psychosis and being out of touch with consensual reality.
Are we talking about something that’s relatively stable over time, that paints more of a picture like that, or are we talking about something that’s rapidly increasing as a result of toxic elements of our modern environment?
Dr. Sam: Dr. Asperger observed the 1 in 200 to 1 in 250 phenomenon back in the ’40s and ’50s, which predated the current chemical soup we’re all swimming in by a large margin. Just like there are outlier personalities and brain makeups in the very, very small percentages, whether you’re talking about Asperger’s, and then, I’m not saying these are the same, but aversive personalities like true sociopathy, true psychopathy, true schizophrenia, all those, the very, very, very small percentage in the population that do persist genetically because they do fill in certain niches and provide some sort of– if you’re talking about the aversive personalities; when humans go through any cycles of wartime, it’s those personalities that survive and thrive in war and [unintelligible 00:30:48] persist.
Then schizophrenia, like you mentioned, I have a couple of close friends that they have a first or second-order relative that had full-blown schizophrenia, but my friends are brilliant. Their brains, like they have the full consensual reality, but they have the rapid, rapid analysis of everything in their environment that is stunning. The benefits may not be specific in the person who has the very rare brain makeup. It may be they just got the extreme edge of it and they’re going to struggle, but their entire family got smaller doses of it, which then helped them help their lineage. In fact, that’s another thing in terms of genetics. I think discussing things in terms of the survival of the lineage will clear up a lot of this.
Evolutionary biology doesn’t give a hoot about you or me. They only care about how far the lineage goes into the future, which can explain why there can be some people in a family that there’s one person that doesn’t reproduce, but that person’s contributions to the culture, the society, the family, the tribe, et cetera, is so massive, it helps the lineage of his nieces and nephews well into generations.
Ari: Or something was selected for because it was a particular genetic trait that in small or moderate doses was helpful for the overall lineage, but every now and then somebody is an extreme outlier and gets an extra big dose of it.
Dr. Sam: Exactly. That’s the whole premise of why eugenics doesn’t work because the thing you’re trying to get eliminated just gets rarer and rarer, but eventually two people of the same thing will come together given enough time, and that trait you were trying to “remove” will come back. This is relevant to Asperger’s because Dr. Asperger had some very uncomfortable ties to the Nazi party. It is hotly debated whether he was complicit with the Nazis to allow his work to be used to identify “undesirable” children for sterilization or elimination. Now I would have been one of those children if I was in that time. It is hotly debated whether he was complicit or not. There’s people who say, no, he was trying to protect them, some people who say, no, he was actually working hand in hand in glove with the Nazis. It’s very contentious.
Either way, I personally– and that’s also one reason why the term Asperger’s has been removed and consumed within the ASD continuum because Asperger’s has a dirty association with the Nazis. Pushing back on that, I’m very proud to call myself an aspie, regardless of Dr. Asperger’s involvement with the Nazis, because it was Asperger’s syndrome folks who actually brought the Nazis down. I can prove it with three names that I mentioned before: Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Turing. It’s actually irrelevant whether Asperger was in bed with the Nazis because it was Asperger’s syndrome that took them down. I’m super proud to be called an aspie. Super proud of it. I don’t care what the doctor was doing.
Ari: Yes, that’s great.
The rise of neurodiverse diagnosis
Dr. Sam: Going back to the rest of your question, I think we’re only like five minutes into the one-hour side podcast. [laughter] I would say that there’s absolutely a hardwired genetic statistical reality to a certain number of people on a continuum that’s just there. Now will it vary percentage points here and there based on what part of the world, and if there’s been a genetic bottleneck in certain populations or whatever? Sure. Then you come to the question of, well, what about the chemical soup we’re swimming in? I’m going to answer the question by talking about aversive personalities.
I literally just finished a book this morning called The Five Types of People That Will Ruin Your Life, which was actually a book recommended on the air by Andrew Huberman, and it talks about the five major aversive personalities, written by someone who’s both a psychologist and a lawyer. He specializes in aversive personalities like sociopathy, paranoia, schizophrenia, narcissism, et cetera. What he says is that there is– he talks about the genetics of it. There is a genetic predisposition on a certain percentage, but what’s happened is that with the advent of social media and tremendous negativity bias on the part of our media overlords here, the current digital culture is promoting the social factors to bring out, express, and even celebrate these aversive personalities.
People who do have aversive personalities, they now have this niche of being an anonymized troller on some social media platform. Then the people who have a much, much lower diluted version of it, they’re suddenly getting all the training and the tools and the outlets to then express more fully these things that would have otherwise been dormant. There’s not a chemical soup necessarily, but a social media soup and a cultural soup that is now exposing and amplifying these traits.
Is there a rise of people on the spectrum? One, the chemical component, that’s its own minefield to step into. I will say that with increased awareness of a particular thing like Asperger’s, like the way that your sister’s psychologist, whatever– I’m sorry, I’m just reminded of Spaceballs, the movie where Lord Helmet says, [mimics] “I am your nephew’s uncle’s cousin’s roommate’s brother.” [laughter] [unintelligible 00:37:20] saying, “I am your father,” like it’s just funny, like a six degrees of separation.
Ari: [mimics] “I am your sister’s cousin’s brother’s psychotherapist.”
Dr. Sam: “Roommate,” [laughter] whatever. Diagnoses become very popular, they go in waves, so there may be moments of an increase because now it’s on everyone’s mind. Humans view their life through a story and through a narrative, and now we have this new character that’s come in, and so now we’re foraging. In my head, it’s the foraging circuitry that’s triggered because we’re looking for patterns. It’s a foraging circuitry that, oh, I’m looking for this particular type of thing that fits this particular profile. Then suddenly, when you have the pattern in your head, you suddenly are able to see so many things. Now whether or not those things are real, that you’re actually seeing, is another question.
There can be– and to be very clear, I’m not saying that this is what’s happening globally, but I saw it in my own high school where children– it’s like suddenly all these sprinters were being diagnosed as narcoleptic so they can get on Modafinil or whatever.
Ari: Oh, Modafinil, yes.
Dr. Sam: Yes. Suddenly, they’re all narcoleptic. It’s amazing. All these sprinters. It may be super embarrassing to fall asleep while you’re doing the 100-yard dash. It’s the same thing that I saw in the high school that I went to is that people were being handed out ADD diagnoses just so they could have an untimed SAT test to give them an advantage. Now I’m not saying the people who don’t have ADD shouldn’t have different test environment. I’m not saying that everyone who has ADD is taking advantage of that system, but I saw it in real time. People were bragging about it [unintelligible 00:39:11]
Ari: There’s no question there’s a cultural phenomenon. That there’s ideas that get into people’s heads and that influences this whole picture.
Dr. Sam: I’m a special brand of weird, or I’m a special brand of broken, or I’m a special [unintelligible 00:39:25] like, I’m a special. It’s now trendy to have– and I’m not saying it’s now globally, but it can be amongst certain groups of people in certain ages, certain schools or whatever. It can be trendy to find out how I’m super different. There’s a running to the diagnosis as a way to assert one’s autonomy and specialness.
Ari: Yes, for sure. There’s a social phenomenon, and it seems to be especially prevalent in the younger generation today, I would say, more than ever.
Dr. Sam: You’ve got the issue of with social media and the highly impressionable youth using it, there’s a much higher possibility for social contagion. The social contagion literature goes back hundreds of years. It just can propagate much faster. Again, it’s not to say that anytime a family or a child believes that they have a certain thing, that means that it’s a social contagion, or they’re attention-seeking, or they’re being rebellious, or whatever. There may be some realities there to really look at. It’s a very strange time we’re in right now, Ari. It’s weird. We’re in a very weird time.
The top three things parents of neurodiverse children should focus on
Ari: Agreed. Dr. Sam, I want to make sure that we– There are so many interesting topics that I could talk to you about. I want to talk to you for hours on just what we’ve been talking about already, but this is about moms. I want to get back to that. What are some of the key things that moms of neurodistinct children should be aware of, and what should they be doing? What should they be focused on? Maybe what are some of the mistakes that many of them make?
Dr. Sam: Sure. From a resilience, energy, health, wellbeing lens, there’s a couple key things that moms can do. The first one is to prioritize your own health. I know that may be hard for some moms to hear because they’re busy self-sacrificing for their kids. I think that’s also partly genetic and just cultural. I’m not criticizing that, per se, because it’s understandable. I think that really prioritizing one’s own health, that is number one. Prioritize it, get support, work with practitioners, and prioritize it. That’d be number one.
Number two is to prioritize sleep, not just for yourself, but for the family, and create a culture in the family being a sleep-focused or sleep-centered family. That we will do things as a family to support all of our sleep. That did not happen with my mom and I and everyone else. That was not a thing. Sleep hygiene was not– it was just not. Everyone, everyone will do better with better sleep. There is no panacea, but the closest thing we have to it is better quality sleep. Closest thing we got. Now obviously, we can spend five hours on sleep and talking about all the nuances of that.
I think the one thing that I would encourage all parents to do, and also which would help their kids, is avoiding junk light, just like avoiding junk calories at night. If you think of junk light as junk food, just for your eyes, it’s like junk calories for your eyes. If you have that image that, oh, this is junk light, like screens at night– we can get into people changing their bulbs, the LED to make them the soft red or the orange at night and whatever, but getting off the junk light will help everyone. There’s like 60 other things we could talk about, but [crosstalk]–
Ari: Not just for the eyes, for the brain. I think it would be [crosstalk]–
Dr. Sam: The eye is your brain. Yes. The eye is actually [unintelligible 00:43:42] with the thalamus, yes.
Ari: Yes, but it’s affecting the whole circadian rhythm, which impacts [crosstalk]–
Dr. Sam: Totally. That’s what I meant. Absolutely. The light will screw up your circadian rhythm. It will affect everything. Just the quick rubric of junk light as junk light is junk food is for a layperson to be like, oh, as opposed to going into the details of melatonin and circadian rhythm and all the different pieces of all the pathways. Not to be modest or anything.
[laughter]
Ari: I can wax on for three hours straight [crosstalk] on the mechanisms of circadian rhythm. [chuckles]
Dr. Sam: Be all sophisticated talking about it. Anyway. The other thing that would really help is having a solid breakfast. I really push back, personally, against the skipping breakfast thing. I really, really push back against it. I don’t think it’s very smart for people. I’m about to say something very controversial, and I’m okay with it. I think the majority of people who are promoting the skip breakfast for intermittent fasting, I think, are usually 20s to 40s, financially solvent, tech entrepreneur males. I don’t think moms and kids should be skipping breakfast in the name of some ideal of intermittent fasting. Because I saw what happened with my own mom and her just setting herself up for failure and just eating candy bars, and myself having these giant energy crashes and moods up and down. Look, I was having like high-gluten-flour breads, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. Just junk food [crosstalk]–
Ari: Oh, yes. My parents were health conscious when I was growing up, so I was eating tons of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, lots of margarine, because that was the healthy thing to do.
Dr. Sam: My God, I don’t know how we lived. The two bookends of the day. Prioritizing it, sleep-centered family, and then breakfast. Now obviously, there’s much more here. I have my own framework called the 10 Pillars of Health, where there’s 10 specific factors to analyze people’s entire lifestyle and then to prioritize what to do first, next, and last. Then there’s the entire universe of functional testing: mitochondria testing, gut testing, genetics, hormones, et cetera. This is where if moms really want to get super granular and figure out exactly what biochemical pathways have been damaged or are out of sync or pushed sideways or whatnot, functional testing [crosstalk]–
Ari: In themselves or their children?
Dr. Sam: First in themselves. Because again, we help mom, the whole family will benefit. No guarantee of if we just focus on the kid, the whole family is going to benefit, but if you help the mom, everyone will. I’m not saying don’t care, do the things for the kids. I’m saying that it’s usually if you just focus on the kids that the parents are neglected and that that’s a mistake. That’s a huge mistake. You can do both, but don’t neglect the parents.
Ari: Yes. Speaking of skipping breakfast, I’m skipping mine right now as a result of this [crosstalk] podcast timing.
Dr. Sam: Do you I breakfast shame you right now?
Ari: This is my breakfast time. I should be eating breakfast before I go play tennis right after this, but instead I’m doing this interview with you where you’re telling me about the harms of skipping breakfast.
Dr. Sam: I feel so conflicted. I’m enabling your hanger.
[laughter]
Ari: Where do you go with lab testing? This is, in my personal opinion, a bit of a contentious topic, I guess. It’s broadly contentious. Within the realm of functional medicine, we have an ever-expanding array of potential tests that one can do. The tendency and thinking is always that essentially, the more tests you do, the more comprehensive tests you do, the more nooks and crannies of your physiology that you do testing for, the more complete picture you’re arriving at. The flaw in this type of thinking is, of course, which many people don’t realize, that many of these tests aren’t that accurate and can give you bad data, essentially. Then if you start to act on bad data, you’re likely to be led astray.
I’m just curious where you land on the spectrum on the– [chuckles] I keep using that word. Where you land on this continuum of your perspective of what tests you think are valuable, how much testing to do, et cetera.
Dr. Sam: Sure. The first thing about testing is to focus on lifestyle analysis first. That testing is an extremely valuable adjunct, but it cannot be done in isolation of looking at what’s going on with your sleep, what’s going on with your diet, what’s going on with toxic exposure, what’s going on with your exercise routines, what’s going on with your bowel function, are you chewing and pooing regularly? Do you have exposure to– what are your stress levels? What are your morning and evening routines? I’m ticking through basically the 10 pillars here.
That testing is put on the foundation of lifestyle analysis. Because doing testing and then giving like, here’s a diet, here’s a supplement, but without changing lifestyle is a bit premature, I think. My platform is lifestyle analysis first. Then from there we can actually be judicious about what tests to pick. Not everyone needs a thyroid test. Not everyone needs mole testing. Not everyone needs Lyme testing. You don’t need to just throw the entire battery of tests at people.
If we start from that premise, that we analyze lifestyle first and you have a plan of your lifestyle and that’s the foundation, and then from there you can pick what tests are actually the most– It’s an 80-20 principle. What’s the fewest number of tests to give the most valuable amount of information in an area that the lifestyle analysis alone is not explaining the stuff you’re going through. If you can whittle down the tests based off lifestyle analysis, that would eliminate a bunch of these problems right off the get-go.
Then it comes down to what company, what test, and then this ongoing debate over which test and which company and so on. I have my favorite labs, and then there’s– Is it okay that some people are saying, well, certain labs are less accurate than others? I’d be very worried if there wasn’t that because everyone should be trying to find better and better labs and investigating the validity and efficacy of these labs. It’s totally normal and expected and, frankly, relieving that there are people who are openly scrutinizing functional labs because we need to have people scrutinize to make sure that there’s not something that’s been ignored over days or years or whatever.
The other thing about labs is that I think that there are certain types of metabolites that can be, very frankly, obvious that people need support with. If someone is doing an ION panel from Genova, and they’ve got several key amino acids like glycine that are low, meaning they’re under the 2.5% of the bell curve of the rest of the population, that to me seems extremely valuable. Now is it accurate that it’s really under 2.5% or is it really like 5%? Honestly, that doesn’t matter at that point. It really doesn’t.
Dr. Sam’s favorite amino acid
For those of you that don’t know, glycine is one of my favorite amino acids. Number one, it looks and tastes just like sugar even though it’s an amino acid. That’s the one thing that people can do. Like my mom; if she had glycine powder available instead of sugar and she would have added that to her drinks, that would have certainly helped. Glycine is also one-third of the amino acid backbone of glutathione and it’s structural– it’s a wonderful amino acid. The reason I’m talking about glycine is because I was analyzing a panel yesterday and glycine happened to be low, so it’s top of mind.
If you’ve got some really extreme edges of the numbers, I’d say those are more reliable than the things that are like second quintile or fourth quintile. I’m looking more at the outer edges of things in terms of veracity. Those are the ones I look to first and look to balance first. Because if you’ve got one thing like glycine that’s way out of line, it’s going to affect so many other things downstream. I think even on the test, there’s a continuum, not a spectrum, there’s a continuum of the markers that you should put more emphasis on in terms of whatever protocol you’re going to work with. Was that helpful?
Ari: That was great. Dr. Sam, let people know two things, actually. One is, what do you want to leave people with? What are maybe the top one or two takeaways that you want to leave parents of neurodistinct children with from this episode? Also, let people know where they can follow you, where they can get in touch with you, how they can work with you.
Dr. Sam: Yes. I’d say the main message is that your- for the parents listening to this, that your health matters too. If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your kid. That prioritize your health for not only your sake, but for your kid’s sake. I wish my mother had done that. I really do. This is why I’m so focused on this population.
The second thing that I would emphasize is focus on sleep-centered for your– do the easy things first, the sleep-focused, sleep-centered family. Focus on a solid, healthy breakfast. If you just help those two bookends and you put the priority of your health as a matter of principle above it, that’s a fantastic start. Then if you can, work with someone who is a practitioner or a coach or whoever to help you specifically increase your resilience, increase your energy, increase everything about your health and wellbeing so that you can have a healthy and balanced and fulfilling life as a parent, as opposed to burning out and getting overwhelmed, which is a typical plight of a parent.
I would love to be able to be the one to support you in this. If this resonates, just go to my website, just drsamshay.com, D-R-S-A-M-S-H-A-Y.com. There’s a link to schedule a chat. I got some freebies on there, a lifestyle nutrition guide. I also have my YouTube channel of all my stand-up comedy, and a bunch of other interviews over the years and whatnot.
Yes, I’d say, I wish my mom prioritized her health for everyone’s sake. I hope to be that person to be able to facilitate in other families and be able to give to you what was not available to us.
Ari: Dr. Sam, thank you for coming on the show. This was an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you. I’m excited to check out some of your stand-up comedy. I look forward to [crosstalk]–
Dr. Sam: [unintelligible 00:55:49] learn something about yourself.
Ari: What’s that? Oh, I will [crosstalk]–
Dr. Sam: Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself on the Asperger’s thing.
Ari: [chuckles] I might. It’s possible. Still waiting on the official assessment.
Dr. Sam: CC me the text to your sister. “Sis, dot, dot, dot. Awkward. You were right.”
[laughter]
Ari: That’s right. I’ll put it on a group text so you can read [crosstalk]–
Dr. Sam: Right, exactly.
Ari: Dr. Sam, thank you so much. Really, it was a pleasure. I hope we can continue the conversation. I hope this evolves into more conversations because I suspect there’s lots more fun things for us to talk about.
Dr. Sam: Oh, totally. I look forward to it already. Thank you for all the work you’re doing. It’s because of people like you, seriously, that now everyone can find information like this. We didn’t have this in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s people like podcasters, summit leaders, educators like yourself that are able to share content like this. We did not have this growing up. This could have been the episode to change our lives. I want to thank you for being a platform to be able to get this valuable information out, whether it’s me or someone else. Because this is the way that families can change.
Ari: Well, I appreciate the kind words, but I’m going to throw them back in your direction. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. I think it’s super important, and I think you’re going to transform a lot of kids’ lives because of this work. Thank you for that.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
00:44: – Guest Intro – Dr. Sam Shay
03:27 – Dr. Sam’s story
06:07 – What is Asperger’s?
10:57 – Dr. Sam’s story continued
16:47 – Parenting a neurodiverse child
27:34 – Neurodistinct versus neurodiverse
34:54 – The rise of neurodiverse diagnosis
41:34 – The top three things parents of neurodiverse children should focus on
52:35 – Dr. Sam’s favorite amino acid
Links
Click here to work with Dr. Sam Shay
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