The Mightiest Warriors
The Mightiest Warriors is a podcast that shines light on the remarkable stories of humans who have transformed profound adversity in their lives into a force of compassion, leadership and service to others.
"He who has a why to live for can deal with almost any how."
Victor Frankl
The Mightiest Warriors
From Neuroscience to Military Excellence: Dr. Allison Brager's Journey
Dr. Allison Brager lives at the fascinating intersection of elite athletics, military service, and cutting-edge neuroscience. As one of the Army's "71 Foxes" - a small, specialized group of uniformed neuroscientists and neuropsychologists- she's revolutionizing how we understand human performance in extreme conditions.
This conversation reveals how Brager's journey from collegiate pole vaulter to professional CrossFit competitor shaped her approach to sleep science and resilience research. After feeling out of place in traditional academia, where fellow researchers dismissed her as a "dumb jock meathead," Brager found her true community in military service. "Being in the military is just like being on a sports team," she explains, describing the camaraderie and shared purpose that now fuels her passion.
Working with Special Forces operators, Brager applies her expertise in sleep and circadian rhythms to transform how elite warfighters approach health and performance. She's at the forefront of what she calls the shift from "Medicine 1.0" to "Medicine 2.0" - moving beyond reactive healthcare to proactive lifestyle optimization. Through wearables, nutritional science, and evidence-based training protocols, she's helping America's heroes not just survive their careers but thrive long afterward.
About to begin teaching Psychology of Leadership at West Point, Brager shares the three principles that guide her work: "Be a good dude," "stay in your lane," and "check your ego at the door." These simple yet profound values reflect the humility and service orientation that define true leadership - whether in combat zones, research laboratories, or athletic competitions.
Tune in to discover how neuroscience is transforming military performance and why finding "your people" might be the most important factor in reaching your full potential. Subscribe now for more conversations with remarkable individuals who've transformed life's challenges into careers of service and leadership.
Hi, I'm Dr Mark Pettis, the medical director of Essential Provisions, a high-quality whole food nutrition company that makes meals ready to eat and sports nutrition blends for greater performance and resilience, and just nutrient-dense fuels for the warrior in each of us. And the Mightiest Warriors podcast is an informal conversation with remarkable people who've transformed challenges in their lives into careers of service, of leadership, of service of leadership, and I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to be talking with Major Allison Brager, and I'm just going to introduce Allison from some information I've picked up. Allison is a neurobiologist with expertise in sleep and circadian rhythms and she works for the United States Army. She's active duty and has done a tremendous amount of research in this area, with emphasis on resiliency to extreme environmental stress, sleep deprivation all the things that we know are just critical in day-to-day health and performance. She's had many leadership positions in the federal, government and university departments and has done active consulting and education for the US Army and education for the US Army, for Department of Defense, nasa, the NIH. It's a long and impressive list and I'm really delighted Allison to have an opportunity to chat with you.
Speaker 1:And I should say Allison got her PhD at Kent State University a doctor in physiology and did her undergraduate work at Brown University, not far from where I was born, in Providence, rhode Island. Maybe a conversation for a different time, allison, but when I was in high school this is back in the early 70s, where there wasn't a whole lot to do, certainly no internet I would go with my buddies to the Brown University bookstore. That was where you could meet really interesting and mature, right Young women and men.
Speaker 2:Hey, I get it. You know what? That's a great spot to hunt.
Speaker 1:No question. So anyhow, welcome to the Mightiest Warriors Allison.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's a pleasure to be on. It's funny. I feel like I had the same tactic in college too, in order to, like you know, meet people during my single life. So that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're currently at Fort Knox in Kentucky, is that?
Speaker 2:right, so I'm at. I'm at Fort Bragg.
Speaker 1:Fort Bragg.
Speaker 2:And I'm getting ready to move to teach at West Point here soon.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, yeah, it sounds like you you've been very active, and what are some of the things that you'll be teaching at West Point?
Speaker 2:So I'll be teaching this course that every cadet has to take. It's called the psychology of leadership, actually it's. I'm super excited about teaching it because it means I basically will get to teach every cadet that will walk through that place over the next three years and then, you know, serve as a mentor for some of the more upper level courses related to neuroscience. So it's yeah, I'm very much looking forward to getting back into the classroom full time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great, and, in my experience, teaching it really keeps you fresh, and I can only imagine that your military service informs a lot of what you're able to share in a way that's very practical and applicable, and so, yeah, that's an awesome opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yep, no, I'm looking forward to it. It's been part of my career goal career path so I'm happy to make it happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tell me a little bit about just growing up, your background.
Speaker 2:Allison, did you have military in your family or you know what sort of got you on that on that path? So my mom's grandfather he was part of the infamous Army Air Corps, so that show Masters of the Air. He was one of the mechanics for the early days of the Army Aviation Corps, but really it was 9-11. So most of my mom's family is from outside New York City. So kind of you know, if you grew up in the Northeast you had that call to action to join the military.
Speaker 2:I actually was getting recruited at the time by West Point but my, my parents really wouldn't let me go to West Point. So I sort of like always had that call for selfless service, ended up going to the antithesis of West Point, not in spite of them, it just, you know, culturally I just felt like I really identified with the teaching, philosophies and way of life of Brown University and, you know, still had that call to service after my time at Brown and then, probably 10 years later, when I was doing my fellowship, I ended up at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research attached to Walter Reed National Medical Hospital in DC and my first day there the department chair asked me if I wanted to join and I was like well, I'm 33. I'm a neuroscientist Like what would I actually do? And it turns out the Army has a small but mighty group of neuroscientists known as the 71 Foxes, and so ended up commissioning within six months.
Speaker 1:The 71 Foxes. These are neuroscientists in the US that do research and work directly for the military.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they're uniformed neuroscientists. I don't know what the equivalent is for the Navy, but there are 20-some of us, from Captain to Colonel. Not all of us are neuroscientists, so technically they're research psychologists. I don't really identify as a research psychologist, I don't really have any formal training in psychology, but I would say about six or seven of us have like formal training as neuroscientists and so we tend to focus more on things like you know, unmanned systems, drone operations, inclusion of human performance within the military portfolios, like more biomarker studies, some more like biomedical aspects of military warfare planning and operations warfare planning and operations Fascinating.
Speaker 1:So did you, as you were doing your neuroscience training at Kent State in the back of your mind. Was that ever something you thought you would end up doing, or did this seem to come about in a somewhat unexpected way?
Speaker 2:Definitely unexpected. You know, I thought I was going to be the path and like, follow my mentor mentors footsteps, most like most people who are getting their PhD. You know I thought, well, be a professor, I mean I enjoy teaching, I enjoy being in the classroom. But I kind of realized during my fellowship years my first fellowship at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, georgia, when I went on the job market for permanent faculty positions, that you know I didn't really identify and fit in within the culture of academia. I was often seen as like a dumb, jock meathead, which sort of again inspired me to write that book Meathead.
Speaker 2:People really didn't take me seriously because I just I lived a different lifestyle than them. Like I still was an elite athlete, I mean I was trying to make an Olympic team when I was in grad school. After grad school I found CrossFit and I competed as a professional in the CrossFit games while doing my fellowship and serving as research faculty. And so you know, I was looking for a different culture and a different community that more or less aligned with my values and that really wasn't academia. But when I started working for the military I realized, like I found my people. You know, people who love to do hard things, push themselves physically and mentally daily and, you know, had a lot of the same values that I was, that were instilled upon me growing up in a, you know, working class blue collar city right outside of Kent State in Northeast Ohio.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well so, as an elite athlete, training for the Olympics and balancing that with fellowship graduate studies, the level of focus and dedication just had to be over the top, allison. How did you balance that? That's a lot of challenge with respect to development and allocation of time and resting, and how did you juggle all of that and how?
Speaker 2:did you juggle all of that? Well, if you think about it, I wasn't actually successful because I realized you couldn't get a PhD in neuroscience and try to qualify for the Olympic trials at the same time. No-transcript, I was so. In high school I was one of the first female pole vaulters in the state of Ohio. That was later in high school.
Speaker 2:So really, college was my first dedicated time to compete in the pole vault and I, you know know, kept doing better year after year. Um, competitive the ivy league was pretty competitive with track and field at the time. Um, and I, just I was like why not, let me give it a shot? And uh, you know, I never really improved. Um, you know I. But I don't regret anything. I just know that if you want to do something really well and you want to be an expert, it taught me a lesson that, like you, can only be an expert in one thing at a time. Like you, there's a reason why you stay in your lane uh, because you can't do multiple things Well once. Um, you know, I think that's like a famous Bruce Lee quote. It's, I fear, the man not that has 10,000 kicks that he's done one time, but the man who has done one kick 10,000 times.
Speaker 1:Love that and it's so true, yeah, I think is the most people haven't embraced particular goals and performance at with the depth that perhaps you have in areas of your life, alison. But I think anyone who's on an intense sort of professional journey but also trying to cultivate or develop an assertive self-care or competitive performance mindset, can appreciate just how difficult it is to excel, really excel at that. Two standard deviations from the mean level in multiple things you know sort of simultaneously. But you have it's, you's reading your resume and a lot of your accomplishments. It you've it. The impression is that you've really come upon this sort of triad military service. You know research and application of that research and certainly what I would imagine in your own personal life and self-care. It feels very congruent and integrated and that has to be a really nice place to be, both personally and professionally to be both personally and professionally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it definitely is. So I mean, I think that's what it is. Being in the military is like I found my people. You know I I don't want to say like I still live like as a college athlete, but I think back to my time as a college athlete and that was truly like the best four years of my life Like I got to travel the world. I mean we traveled to California, we went down to Florida, you know, competed against the best of the best in track and field.
Speaker 2:We used to do a trip to England to compete against Oxford and Cambridge. So like I was always just with my teammates. Like I ate with my teammates, I trained with my teammates, I traveled with my teammates and I just feel like being in the military is just like being on a sports team. It really is. It's like being on a collegiate sports team and you know, if that's the identity I will continue to live in life. It is what it is. But you know that's the identity that I embrace and you know what fuels my passion each and every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that very much resonates. Alison, a Navy SEAL who lives in Kodiak, alaska, and he does wilderness survival skill training, both for the military as well as the military as well as, um, you know, for any individual who who likes those uh more uh, challenging wilderness excursions um, as well as taking people on tours, and uh, he was commenting on how it very much felt like the life of a, of uh, of an athlete, um, that that interpersonal uh connection and that sort of team mindset, sort of the shared brain uh, and that that that um, um uh drive to find that edge where you can um uh realize the, the, realize the experience, realize the output, whether it's a pole vault or shooting a gun at a very high level, consistently, you know, making that analogy to sort of that professional athlete and functioning on a high level as a default and, of course, the importance of self-care as a way of enabling resilience, given the challenges of that mindset.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's that there are so many parallels, you know, like, especially where I work now for special forces, like you know, I remind myself that every day it I wanted to compete in conference, I wanted to compete beyond, and that requires dedicated focus, discipline and effort each and every day. You can have bad days, but as long as you still show effort and care and concern for you and others, it all works out, and that's what I love. I feel like my job allows me to be a better person and to learn a lesson each and every day looking at the science of lifestyle, which would certainly include sleep quality and circadian rhythms very much.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of an amateur neurobiologist and find emerging trends in biology really fascinating. I think biology there isn't a textbook today that probably isn't outdated given the explosion of knowledge. And when I look at topics, clinical topics like neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, als, and look at where a lot of that research is going, which is not so much genetic there's obviously a lot of emphasis on the genetics of those examples but really on how lifestyle influences one's metabolic landscape and how that ultimately can take a challenged brain, whether that might be a traumatic brain event or PTSD, just from the emotional trauma, or whether it might be just the day-to-day challenges of maintaining that professional athlete-like focus and performance while experiencing a wide array of environmental conditions. And so I can only imagine I guess where I'm going with this that the research as it relates to the military, many of the challenges that are seen and the desire to create effective treatment, rehabilitation mitigation, risk mitigation, et cetera has to be a really active area right now for people with your expertise.
Speaker 2:No, it totally is. And I think what's really nice about where I work is I work with individuals, at least in the special forces community, who are at the beginning or the tail end of their career. Either we're trying to instill these lifestyle, cultural habits that, quite honestly, the generation before them got completely wrong. You know, the generation before the new generation was the medicine 1.0 approach to use, like the.
Speaker 2:Peter Atia analogy, whereas this generation is very much ingrained in the medicine 2.0 approach, but then also, like I, work with individuals who, through the use of wearables and being more self-aware of their eating habits and their sleep and how much they train and when they train, are able to have a transformation to go from medicine 1.0 to medicine 2.0. And as like my Sergeant Major always says and I love that he says this this is like we are trying to return American America's heroes back into society to be role models and uh and figures, rather than you know, your drunk uncle who talks about his days in the war. Um, because I think that that's so true. It's like lifestyle really. It not just has an impact on your psychological health but, we know, through epigenetic regulation and other modifiable biological factors, has a huge impact on your physiological health.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and the realization that the brain is a true of of the human body in general. But you know, I was taught, you know, a generation ago that you know the brain was this sort of fixed biomass that peaked at a young age and then had this inexorable decline. And you know, pray that no bombs drop later in life and that you can be active up until which time. You know you transition.
Speaker 1:And now the understanding that the brain is so malleable, so plastic, so adaptive, as you were saying, epigenetics, the science of how our book of life can rewrite itself in response to changes in our environment, is a very liberating, I think, sort of understanding.
Speaker 1:And I find the hope there is that many of the things historically that we thought were fixed or inevitably progressive have probably far more possibilities than what historically we would have ever imagined. And that to me is very exciting about where we're at now, whether it's nutrition and how nutrition influences every aspect of health and performance and metabolic resiliency, or whether it's other aspects of a soldier's mindset, lifestyle, et cetera, and how it helps prepare them not just for the challenges that they confront but recovering from the challenges they confront. And it's a much more interesting story now as a clinician, as a biologist, you know, I've come to appreciate that most of what I was taught a generation ago has turned out not to be true, and I think this human potential is and possibility is far greater than what certainly the Western medical enterprise has given it credit for.
Speaker 2:Nope, absolutely. Yeah. I mean I think you know nutrition and exercise like it's validation for people who and you know that's sort of the thesis of my popular science book Meathead is like it's validation for people who have exercised their whole life, either as a competitive athlete or as someone who understands, like the benefits for mood, energy, mental health. But it also for those who you put in the work and make a transformational lifestyle change and see the powers of exercise not just on physical health but, more importantly, mental health. You know there's no turning back and there's so much documented evidence in terms of exercise reducing, you know, overall morbidity and mortality across the board. In my opinion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no question, as we sort of bring this home, allison, when you're, when you're you're going to be at West Point very soon what, um, when you're able to give advice, um, uh, whether that's related to the, to the neuroscience you do, or whether it's just someone who's had lots of experiences, who's who's had elite athletic sort of training and experiences, what, what, what are sort of the pearls that? What are sort of the pearls that you emphasize, that you pass along to some of these young adults who you know, I would think, are the credibility and the ability to influence behavioral change, is much more likely to be the case when it's coming from a respected member of the tribe, as I'm sure they perceive you to be. What are some of the words of wisdom that you typically pass along?
Speaker 2:It's funny you say that I think the one that sticks out the most. I actually Colonel Drew Morgan, nasa astronaut. He told me this when I was going under assessment and selection with NASA and this is before I got to the Special Warfare Center in school and I realized it's the whole basis of what we're looking for in a Green Beret and a special operator. And it's be a good dude, right, like man or woman, like dude using, like you know, not assigning it to any gender, but be a good dude. And what that means is you are an honest, hardworking, contributing member of society and you're humble about what you do. So, um, you know that's. I think one of the greatest gifts I have been blessed with working in the special operations community is I've worked with America's heroes and they have done heroic things of valor and courage that many Americans would never anyone in the world would be unwilling to do. But no one talks about it. Right, like they don't use that. They know that, like those events in life shape them, but they don't use that to get ahead in life. Right, it's just a part of who they are, but they just go out there and they teach, train, coach, mentor others and are humble about how they do it, and I think that's that's the most important pearl is to like be a good dude, is to like be a good dude.
Speaker 2:The other thing I talked about is right, stay in your lane is, like you know, we all are experts in a world, in this world, and it's important to listen to other experts.
Speaker 2:Right, like I, I am not an expert in maintenance, or nor do I tout to be, even though I was a company commander of a trucking fleet. As part of my time as a company commander, when I did that role, like, I sought out the experts who were the experts in truck maintenance and repair, and we ended up, you know, creating a great culture and increased morale in that company because we each stayed in our lane and catered to our strengths and attributes. Um, and then, you know, similar, in a similar vein to those two, is, um, I always love the quote like, check your ego at the door. Um, you know what I mean by that is, you don't want to have like biased, preconceived, uh premonitions about someone. Um, you want to like accept them for who they are and not pass any judgment. And um, right, just just be, be humble about what you do and be grateful that you get to do the things you do.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, each and every day, Love that Allison, be a good dude, leave your ego at the door. And yeah, the humility I with with medical students residents. I often refer to this notion of the humility to ego ratio and you know, the great wise healers understand that the more they know, the more they realize they don't know and they're yep.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and their humility grows with that, or should grow with that, and their ego should require much less to be satisfied.
Speaker 1:And that, I think, as everyone knows, in the medical enterprise is not necessarily the rule, but certainly those have been the lessons for me in my life and they resonate more today than they ever have. And you're very generous with your time I know you're really busy right now, alison and this generosity of spirit comes across quite loud and clear in all that you've done to serve our country, to serve our participants in the armed forces, all you do to advance our learning and understanding of the brain and how it impacts our lives. I'm very grateful for that, alison, and you are one of the mightiest warriors, and thank you for serving us with your time and energy. And I should note that the reason we can't see Alison's beautiful face is that she is in a secure facility where video recording was not an option. So I just want to thank you for that and I something tells me our paths will cross in the future. I do hope that's the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, if I see some of your friends and teammates out at Summer Strong, that's where I'm headed after this interview, so I definitely look forward to getting back into a community that you know Bert Soren, I think, has has created and forged. You know, when we cross paths at Winter Strong back in February, Amazing energy.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, enjoy that Allison, and I'll remind the team from Essential Provisions that you'll be there. So safe travels to you and keep shining your light.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much and yeah, thank you for your patience with me and my work day Always. I always feel bad when I'm late for things, but just you know, that's how the operational tempo works around here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got to. When the cosmos gives you feedback, you got to roll with it. So, Yep.