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Today’s Health Upgrade

• Use it or lose it

• Pillow problems

• Does ashwagandha lower stress?

• The lie you believe

Use It Or Lose It 
The "Internal Shower" Drink

The claim: Does mixing two tablespoons of chia seeds in lemon water and drinking it on an empty stomach "cleanse and detox" your digestive system?

Let’s Break It Down: The name alone is marketing genius. And admittedly, this is more about overpromising than about being bad or dangerous. 

TikTok's "internal shower" — chia seeds, water, and lemon juice — is framed as a digestive reset, a detox, a bloat cure, and a hangover remedy all in one glass. Millions of views. Dozens of wellness influencers. All built around a simple premise and promise: your insides need a rinse, and this drink does it.

Chia seeds are 23% to 41% dietary fiber depending on the variety, and that fiber has a legitimate basis for improving gut health: it adds bulk and moves things along, shortening how long waste sits in the gut. Two tablespoons deliver roughly 10 grams of fiber in one sitting. Real, functional, effective.

But "internal shower" implies a cleanse — a detox, a flushing mechanism — and that's where the science stops, and nutritional fiction starts. 

There's a big difference between helping you stay regular or improving gut health and "boosting" digestion or detoxing your system. 

Your body breaks down and absorbs food on its own schedule; you can't speed up the enzymatic work of digestion, and there are no toxins waiting to be rinsed out. 

The lemon? It contributes mostly flavor, not function. 

And the fiber itself cuts both ways: 10 grams is great. However, if you're not used to it and don't eat much fiber, that much all at once can cause gas and bloating; the opposite of what the trend promises. It’s not that you can’t eat all that fiber; it’s that you need to gradually build up. 

The goal is to eat approximately 30 grams per day, but having too much too soon can make you feel worse, even if you’re doing something good for your body. 

The Verdict: Lose the claim, keep the behavior, and eat chia and other fiber sources. 

There's no such thing as an internal shower. Chia is genuinely good, but ramp up slowly and take it with plenty of water. If the idea helps you improve your diet and consume more fiber — remember, 95% of people don’t get enough fiber — then it’s a net positive win. 

But if you believe it’s a cleanse, then you’re being misled. 

Together with BEDGEAR
Why Trapped Heat Steals Your Deep Sleep (And Why Your Pillow Might Be Part Of The Problem)

There's a small thing almost everyone does in their sleep without deciding to: a leg slides out from under the covers, or you flip the pillow to find the cool side. 

That reflex isn't random. Your body is working to shed heat, and how easily it can do that shapes the deepest, most restorative stretch of your night.

When researchers helped heat escape the body overnight, people got more deep sleep and a slower resting heart rate. 

Scientists analyzed the sleep of participants of different ages, sexes, and body sizes under full sleep-lab monitoring on a surface that gently drew heat away through contact. On the cooled nights, deep sleep (stage N3, the slow-wave phase where growth hormone peaks and your body does most of its physical repair) rose and resting heart rate dropped. However, there was no change in REM sleep. 

Interestingly, the changes had a big range. Some people saw a small change in deep sleep and heart rate, and others saw a huge jump. It suggests that the effect is real, but it’s not the same for everyone, and that is likely determined by how “hot” you run when you sleep. 

The most interesting part: the sleep improvements didn’t depend on how cold the room was, or core temperature, but how much heat actually moved out of the body. 

In other words, your system has to shed heat to drop into deep sleep. Make that easier, and you sink a little deeper.

If you want to reduce how much heat you trap, start with a cooler room, but make sure you emphasize lighter covers, breathable sheets, and a surface that doesn't retain your body heat.

There's one spot where most people trap heat and don’t consider: the head and neck are two of the body's main heat-release zones overnight, which makes your pillow the most thermally compromised thing you sleep on. 

Standard pillows work against you. 

Memory foam is closed-cell, so it holds the heat your head gives off and builds a warm pocket right where you're trying to vent it. Dense cotton covers seal it in. That's the real reason you flip to the cool side at 2 a.m.

Most "cooling" pillows have a cool-to-the-touch cover that drops your skin temp for a few minutes, then your body heat catches up, and the surface warms right along with you. The study didn't measure how cold the surface was to start. It measured how much heat actually left the body across the night. That takes airflow, not a cold first impression.

If you’re looking for a pillow to support better sleep, the best one we’ve tested is BEDGEAR Performance® Pillows. They fit your body type and sleep position to prevent misalignment that disrupts your sleep.

Instead of one cooling layer, they build airflow into every layer: an Air-X^® mesh gusset with vents that pulls hot air out at the perimeter, React™ open-cell foam that lets air move through the core instead of trapping it, Ver-Tex™ cooling fibers that conduct heat off your skin, and Dri-Tec^® fabric that wicks the half-liter of sweat you lose overnight before it becomes a second thermal load. 

It follows the science of cooler sleep: the pillow keeps heat moving out rather than slowly soaking it up. BEDGEAR® applies that same principle to every layer of their sleep systems — including sheets and comforters — with each component engineered to enhance airflow and prevent overheating.

And as an APC reader, for a limited time, you get 20% off BEDGEAR pillows and bedding when you use the code “PUMPCLUB.”

The sleep formula for your bedroom is clear: cooler room, breathable bedding, and a pillow that's fit to you and designed to let heat escape instead of trapping it.

For anyone training hard and chasing recovery, a few more minutes in your most restorative stage, repeated night after night, is a win your body will appreciate. 

On Our Radar
Does Ashwagandha Really Lower Your Stress Hormone? 

The pitch for ashwagandha is simple: take it, drop your cortisol, feel calmer. A new analysis suggests there’s some truth to the claims, but it’s when you use it that matters if you want the benefits.

Ashwagandha can lower cortisol, but mostly in people who are already stressed. And the evidence doesn’t show a dramatic change.

Researchers reviewed 23 randomized, placebo-controlled trials on men and women to see what the herb actually does across your hormones. 

For cortisol, the stress hormone, they found a genuine drop in groups with elevated stress. However, the results were very inconsistent. Some people saw results; others saw none. And the research that was more significant used much higher doses than you typically see. 

Ashwagandha's active compounds appear to turn down the volume on the HPA axis, your body's stress-hormone thermostat. But just how much is still being determined, and it’s unclear why it works better for some than others.

But the studies didn’t focus on whether you actually feel less stressed. They measured cortisol in the blood, not mood. Earlier work has shown that cortisol can fall without people reporting feeling any calmer.

If you want to try it, your odds are best when your stress is genuinely running high, not when you're already rested. Most stress trials cluster around 300-600 mg/day of a standardized root extract. Bottles vary wildly in strength, so don't assume two products are the same thing. And remember to only take supplements that are third-party certified and verified. 

Give it a few weeks before you judge it. And if you have a thyroid condition, loop in your doctor first before using. 

Adam’s Corner 
The Lie You Believe

For a stretch of years I'd rather not count, I was living a lie.

On the outside, I looked like the picture of health. The diet, the training, all of it. I could do things in the gym that made strangers stop and ask what my program was.

I'd built a career meeting people on their terms and helping them become healthy, and there I stood, apparently living proof that the advice worked.

But there was also a lot of smoke and mirrors. I was running the entire operation on three, maybe four hours of sleep a night.

I want to be honest about how that felt from the inside, because that's the part that matters.

It didn't feel like a problem. It felt like an edge.

At 4 a.m., when I could hear the refrigerator think, I'd crank out work, eat breakfast, and get ready for an early lift. Up before the world, down long after it, running on almost nothing. And somewhere in there, I was proud of it.

I don't need what other people need. I run hot. I'm built for this. It's fine.

It was not fine.

Underneath it all, I was unhealthy. Not in any way a camera could catch. In the ways that actually run your life and take years off the back end of it.

The sleep I was skipping was doing things to my body I would have flagged in half a second in anybody else. In myself, I flagged nothing. I looked in the mirror, saw a fit guy, and called it health.

Looking back, it made me wonder: How does a person deceive himself that badly? 

How does the guy who knows all about health walk straight into one of the least healthy things you can do, night after night, and feel the whole time like he's getting away with it?

I went searching for an answer, and found that it's much bigger than a "me" problem.

The Lesson of the $1 Test

Of all places, a study from 1959 explains a lot about how we think, and it might help you catch something about yourself that's been hiding under the radar.

Picture a college kid at Stanford with a board full of wooden pegs. His job is to turn each peg a quarter turn. Then turn it back. Then the next one. One peg after another for an hour. No music, no talking, no point to any of it. The task was built to be painfully boring, and it delivered.

When the hour ends, a researcher asks a small favor. The next participant is waiting in the hall. Would he tell the guy the task was fun? For his trouble, there's a dollar in it.

So the student takes the dollar and tells the stranger that the most boring hour of his month was a good time.

Then comes the twist.

When the researchers ask him how much he actually enjoyed those pegs, he doesn't roll his eyes or call it a slog. He says it was pretty fun.

And here is the whole thing: he isn't performing. He believes it.

They run a second group through the identical setup, except these students get paid twenty dollars for the same lie. Different response entirely. Ask them if it was fun and they laugh at you. Of course it was boring. I only said otherwise because you paid me twenty bucks.

Twenty dollars is a reason. Twenty dollars lets a man tell a lie and keep his self-image intact, because the money does the explaining. He isn't a liar. He's a guy who did a favor for cash. 

One dollar leaves a gap between what he did and who he believes himself to be, and that gap itches, and the human mind cannot leave that particular itch alone. 

So it does the only thing left to do. It reaches back and edits the truth. 

It decides the pegs must have been kind of fun after all, because a decent, honest person wouldn't lie for a single dollar, and he is a decent, honest person, so it couldn't really have been a lie.

And the person paid a dollar never feels the shift happen. There's no moment of deciding. He walks out into the parking lot genuinely believing the boring thing was fun.

The dollar was never the point. The point is what the mind does the instant the story it tells about itself no longer matches what's true.

When the truth and the story don't match, most of us don't fix the story. We move the truth.

Where We Hide

You might read all this and think, “Sure, a rigged little lab, a bored kid, a setup. Not me.”

But it happens all the time.

A few years ago, researchers took a big, nationally representative group of American adults and asked: Are you active enough? 

Sixty-two percent said yes.

Then they strapped motion trackers to those same people and let the devices ride along for a full week.

The verdict? Only 9% were hitting the guidelines.

And the raw minutes would be funny if they weren't so familiar. People reported around 324 minutes of moderate activity a week. The devices caught about 45.

The participants didn't miss by a hair. They overshot their own lives by nearly seven to one.

The trackers aren't perfect. But nothing shrinks a gap that size down to a comfortable size.

We believe we're doing more, and we mean it. Same as the kid with the pegs. Same as me while sleep-deprived.

There's a reason we're wired this way, and it isn't stupidity.

Psychologists describe something like an immune system for the ego. When a fact threatens the picture we hold of ourselves, the mind mounts a defense as automatic as your body fighting off a bug.

It blames the timing. It argues with whoever delivered the news. It hunts for the one flattering number and clamps down on it instead. In the moment, it protects you. Over the years, it walls you off from the exact truth you needed most.

I see it in the community we've built. The Pump Club app is the positive corner of the internet. It's the honest room. We don't sell a fantasy. We provide a space for honest conversations, accountability, support, guidance, and all the tools you need.

And even in there, I watch self-deception happen every week. Someone who is well past 300 pounds will admit, steady as anything, that his weight isn't really something he worries about. He's not dodging me. He believes it. His mind did for him the exact thing mine did for me. It found the fact that would hurt and set it somewhere he wouldn't have to look at it.

This isn't about weight, abs, the scale, or whether you tracked your lunch. I don't believe in one-size-fits-all goals and I never will. Your body is not a scoreboard and I am nobody's judge.

It's about a single question most of us spend real energy avoiding: Am I being honest about my own life? My habits. My choices. The distance between what I say I want and what I'm actually doing about it.

Most of us can't answer it, and not because we're weak. Because the honest answer costs something, and "it's fine" is right there, free, waiting.

The truth doesn't cut because it's cruel. It cuts because it fits.

How You Get Clarity

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Shame is not clarity. Come at yourself hard enough, and the defenses only climb. All the self-attack does is hand the ego one more thing to protect you from.

Before you look at the hard thing, plant your feet on something true about who you are that has nothing to do with the sore spot. People rely on you, and you show up. You've survived worse than this, and you're still standing. It can be anything, as long as it's real.

Then, standing there, look at what you've been avoiding. The actual number, not the rounded one. The 45 minutes where you'd have sworn there were 324. The behavior you keep excusing. Naming it is most of the work, because a thing you've named to its face can't hide from you anymore.

And if you can't see your own blind spot, which is the whole nature of a blind spot, borrow someone else's eyes. Ask a person who knows you and loves you enough to be honest: where am I fooling myself?

Then don't argue. Let it land.

Once you can see what's in your way, you build a plan. You go over it, around it, or through it. What you can't do is route around a thing you refuse to look at.

That is what clarity buys you. Not comfort. A map.

The Two Kinds of Hard

None of this is easy, and I won't pretend it is. Looking straight at your own life is hard. It means owning the time you can't get back and the choices you'd redo if the world let you.

But I've come to believe there are two kinds of hard. Your job is to choose the right one.

The first hard is the one we've been talking about. Turning around, telling yourself the truth, and standing accountable.

The second hard is looking away. Keeping the comfortable story running in the background. It doesn't ache at first. That's the whole trap. It aches later, all at once, when you finally see how far down the wrong road you've gone.

Years ago, someone told me it's better to be hurt by the truth than to be comforted by a lie. And nowhere is that more accurate than with yourself.

If you find that you've deceived yourself, this is a good moment. Because you can't go back. The road ahead is the one stretch you still get to decide.

I know how all of this can sound. Like the sad part. Like the exact moment you've been ducking for months, maybe years.

But I've stood on both sides of it now, and I'm telling you it is not the bottom. It's the chance to turn and rise.

Change rarely starts with a good feeling. You start on a true one. And a true one, once you stop sprinting away from it, is close to the best thing you'll feel in a long while because it's honest ground.

The haze doesn't lift because life got easier. It lifts because you finally stopped lying about the weather.

I sleep now. I'm not great. I still can get more. But it's far better and consistent. And I now realize that I didn't feel as good as I thought I did when I was deprived.

I'm healthier now than I was at my most impressive. Happier, too. And not one piece of that was available to me until the night I stopped saying it's fine long enough to see that it wasn't.

You still have time to catch yourself in the act, to set down the comfortable version, and ask the question that will change your life:

Where are you telling yourself it's fine?

And if you find an answer that's hard to swallow, ask one more:

Who do you get to become now that you can finally see it? -AB

-Adam Bornstein is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Arnold’s Pump Club

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.

1. The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).

2. Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to review our interpretations of the research and ensure scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell