Recovering brain function after injury or neurological decline requires more than one solution—it requires a strategy. In this episode of the My POTS Podcast, Dr. Joseph Schneider shares his personal and clinical approach to rebuilding brain capacity through fasting, nutrition, exercise, and comprehensive functional care. Drawing from his own stroke recovery journey, he explains how consistent, science-backed habits can restore function, improve energy, and support long-term brain health.
Podcast Episode 41
Brain Health and Recovery Strategy
In Episode 41, Dr. Schneider introduces a powerful concept:
👉 Capacity — your ability to think, move, function, and live fully.
After a stroke or brain injury, this capacity is reduced. The goal of recovery is not just survival, but rebuilding that capacity over time through targeted interventions.
Autophagy: The Brain’s Natural Repair System
One of the most important tools discussed in this episode is autophagy — the brain’s ability to clean out damaged cells, toxins, and debris.
Dr. Schneider highlights how this process can be activated through:
- Structured fasting (including 3-day fasts)
- Nutrient-dense foods like sardines (rich in omega-3s)
- Proper hydration and rest
- Consistent circadian rhythm
Autophagy plays a critical role in brain detoxification and recovery, especially after injury.
Stroke Recovery: Rebuilding Lost Capacity
Dr. Schneider shares his personal experience with a subcortical stroke, which affected his ability to communicate between the brain and body.
This resulted in:
- Paralysis on one side of the body
- Loss of coordination and movement
- Reduced cognitive and physical capacity
Recovery has been ongoing since 2017, demonstrating that:
👉 Brain healing is possible—but it takes time, consistency, and the right approach
The key focus is restoring communication pathways and improving functional capacity step by step.
Exercise: The Most Powerful Brain Stimulator
Exercise is one of the most effective ways to rebuild both brain and body.
Dr. Schneider recommends:
- 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise per week
- Daily movement routines (cycling, rowing, core exercises)
- Consistency over intensity
Exercise activates:
- Nervous system signaling
- Blood circulation
- Lymphatic drainage
- Digestive function
- Energy production
When muscles demand energy, the brain responds—helping restore overall capacity and function.
Capacity: The Key to Living Fully
Capacity isn’t just physical—it includes:
- Mental focus
- Energy levels
- Ability to stay awake
- Physical endurance
- Emotional resilience
Low capacity can show up as:
- Chronic fatigue
- Post-exertional exhaustion
- Difficulty thinking or concentrating
Improving capacity requires consistent effort over time, not quick fixes.
Nutrition: Fueling Brain Function
Nutrition plays a foundational role in recovery.
Dr. Schneider emphasizes:
- Whole, high-quality foods
- Avoiding processed sugars
- Supporting metabolism and energy production
- Using targeted supplements when needed
One key recommendation is Microdaily, a balanced nutritional formula designed to:
- Support brain and nervous system function
- Improve energy and circulation
- Provide essential nutrients without over-supplementation
A Holistic, Integrated Care Model
Hope Brain and Body Recovery Center focuses on comprehensive, multi-system care, including:
- Neurological function
- Musculoskeletal health
- Circulation and cardiovascular support
- Digestion and metabolism
- Breathing and autonomic regulation
Each patient receives:
- Advanced diagnostics
- Personalized treatment plans
- Therapies designed to increase total body capacity
This approach shifts from symptom management to true functional restoration.
The Power of Personal Experience
Dr. Schneider’s philosophy is deeply influenced by his personal life:
- His mother’s focus on nutrition and health
- His father’s battle with diabetes
- His experience caring for a family member with cerebral palsy
These experiences shaped a care model centered on:
- Quality of life
- Functional independence
- Compassionate, long-term support
Looking Ahead: Sleep & Mental Health
Future episodes will focus on:
- Sleep cycles and circadian rhythm
- Mental health and emotional resilience
- Their impact on brain recovery and overall capacity
These are critical next steps in completing a full-spectrum brain recovery strategy.
Start Rebuilding Your Brain Capacity
If you or someone you know is struggling with:
- Stroke recovery
- Brain fog
- Chronic fatigue
- Neurological decline
There is a path forward.
Hope Brain and Body Recovery Center offers personalized programs designed to:
- Restore brain function
- Increase energy and endurance
- Improve daily performance and quality of life
👉 Visit https://hopebraincenter.com/ to learn more or schedule a consultation.
Transcript
00:01
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Good morning, Dr. Joe Schneider for my POTS podcast. So my POTSpodcast.com is the place that you can get some answers about postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, postural orthostatic tension syndrome, or blood pressure. So it’s your autonomic nervous system functioning at a level that can maintain heart rate, oxygen and blood pressure at acceptable limits. With acceptable limits. Okay, so when that you don’t have acceptable limits, your heart rate is too high. When you walk up, steps may go up to 160, 170, 180. If you have anxiety, your heart rate may go up even higher, your heart rate may go up and your blood pressure may go down, causing you to have dizziness and syncope and so forth. So there’s a lot of things happening now with looking at the just dysautonomia and looking at how your autonomic nervous system, your automatic system runs to support you.
01:13
Dr. Joseph Schneider
You don’t think about it. It should run without thinking, should run without you having any thought behind it. So it brings up for me, capacity. So after I had the, had my stroke, I went to Dr. Mike Gordaria and a brilliant functional medicine doctor and functional neurologist, and he would say, autophagy, Joe, autophagy. And so at the time after the stroke, I had no clue what he was talking about, but he put me on a three day fast. A three day fast. I mean, I get up there, I’ll tell you what, the guy had no mercy. He, he wanted to get my brain better. So autophagy is your brain’s ability to clean up debris, clean up infection, clean up things that are going on with it that are destructive to the brain. Now rest is important.
02:20
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Your circadian rhythm and rest and sleep supports autophagy. So rest is really important. And also fasting is important for three days fast is, I would say three day fast was really good, but it wasn’t a water fast. I had an omelette in the morning, a three egg omelette in the morning, less than 500 calories. It was a vegetable omelette. And there you go. So for three days, did an omelet in the morning, I consumed a lot of water and in a hope that I would get rid of the scab that was in my brain. Well, you know, after several months of doing functional neurology and doing fasting, three day fasts, I would do it once a month with him. I did it once a week. I did the first week and I did the second week.
03:24
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So there’s a lot of YouTube videos about sardine fasts and I’m a fan of sardines. I don’t know if you’re a fan of sardines. Not a lot of people like sardines or like the smell of sardines. But the fast goes this way. You have three cans of sardines a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. Where you have one in the morning, you can have two in the evening, however you want to do it. But sardines are really rich in protein, in minerals and vitamins, omega 3 fatty acids, which are basically anti inflammatory to your system. So today I’m starting my sardine fast. Now sardines bring up a memory for me with my mother. My mother loves sardines and I would eat sardines with mustard sauce on crackers.
04:27
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So I can remember sitting with my mom enjoying my own can of sardines. She had her own can of sardines and we would put them on saltine crackers and we would enjoy our sardines. My mother was a great cook. She liked all kinds of foods, could make any food from any culture. And it was just a pleasure having her as my mother growing up in her house in her hometown. And my father had died from a stroke, but he had diabetes that was uncontrolled. And so my father death brought on a commitment by my mother to make sure that we didn’t fall in the same genetics of getting diabetes and so forth. So were allowed to have treats in the house. No sugar, no cakes, no tasty cakes, things like that. We had to sneak out and buy that on our own.
05:41
Dr. Joseph Schneider
And so weren’t allowed to have any treats when were younger. So my mother was really adamant about that. She made us good foods. We had pasture raised beef, she was always going to the butcher, getting the best quality meats and best quality chicken and so forth. So that we ate really well, that we control our blood sugar and that we grew up strong, intelligent and able to take on the world the way we should. Now when you fast, you cause autophagy to happen. So it’s. It’s really a detoxification of the body and detoxification of the brain. Now thinking about this, over the weekend I had the opportunity of going to a patient’s house and spending the weekend and it was a realization of a patient who had a stroke and what stroke is about and what a stroke does.
06:59
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So we know the stroke is if it’s an Ischemic stroke, we kill a portion of the. Of the brain, it dies. That portion of your brain that loses blood flow dies. Or we can have a hemorrhage in the brain, and that portion of the brain that has the hemorrhage and causes scab, where there’s blood instead of neurons and axons, dies. When you have anoxic stroke where you lose oxygen to the brain, you have a heart attack, and your. Your heart’s not pumping, you’re not pumping blood to the brain, there’s no oxygen, parts of your brain die, or you lose your brain, and you end up dying also. I mean, that’s the realization of brain injury, especially due to stroke. So my stroke was in my subcortex. It took out my. Some of my basal ganglion on the left side.
08:05
Dr. Joseph Schneider
It also took out some of my thalamus on the left side. So it was subcortical mostly. So that area died. I had a scab in my brain, and so I lost capacity to do work not only in my brain, but in my body. I became paralyzed on the right side of my body from my face, my shoulder, my torso, and my. My leg on the right side. But it wasn’t a. A weakness paralysis. It was a paralysis of thought. So the subcortex is a relay to your body. So the parts in the cortex were working fine, but they had no way to communicate with the rest of the body. So when you, when that area of the brain has neglect, then your cortex, over time, loses capacity. It doesn’t have the capacity it did before.
09:15
Dr. Joseph Schneider
And capacity enables you to do things and to do things for a longer period of time. So, I mean, I really can’t. Couldn’t walk as well. I mean, I started exercising, and I found that even exercising wasn’t preserving the capacity of my cortex like I wanted it to do. And I wanted to plasticize or bring back neurons and axons that I didn’t have before. And I can’t say that I wasn’t able to do that. I am able to do that now more than ever. Since 2017, there have been many different improvements in my system, but there’s also been many capacities that were lost due to the stroke. So capacity is the topic for today.
10:13
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So when you lose capacity, you have a brain injury, whether it’s a traumatic brain injury or whether it’s a stroke brain injury, whether it’s a neurodegenerative system that’s inflaming your brain so that over time, your brain loses capacity or ability to do Work or you lose, or you have a neurodevelopmental disorder where your brain and your body aren’t developing properly. So they’re all pretty tragic, whether a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, a nordegenerative condition, or we have a developmental condition over time. And there’s many ways that we can define that, but if you look at function and how you function, you can define it. Now, this morning I did 30 minutes of exercise. I did 20 minutes on my bike, five minutes on my upper body bike.
11:26
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Then I did 20 sit ups, I did 50 rows on my rowing machine, and I did 20 climbers on my climbing machine and that took me 30 minutes. So I did 30 minutes. So I invite anyone that has an issue with brain injury or developmental injury to the brain to exercise. Now the standard of exercise is 150 minutes a week is the most effective way to exercise. So when you exercise your body, you’re exercising your brain, you exercise your nervous system, you exercise your blood vessels, you exercise your lymph system, you pump lymph, you exercise your digestive tract, you exercise your circadian rhythm for wakefulness and sleep. Now I know it’s a lot more complicated than that, but they’re the basics and we got to be brilliant at the basics.
12:48
Dr. Joseph Schneider
We don’t want to be just brilliant and complicated, but we want to be brilliant at the basics. So when you exercise physically, your digestive tract works better, your autonomic nervous system kicks into its state of body need. All right, so when I exercise, I’m going like this. The muscles are saying, give me energy, give me energy, right? So when your muscles are shouting, give me energy, you’re sensing that in your system. You have sensors all over your body, chemical sensors, proprioceptive sensors for muscle contraction, joint movement, things like that. They’re all firing and they’re all happy and like saying, okay, give me energy. And if you don’t give it energy, when the muscle fails, it doesn’t have capacity.
13:51
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So we’re always should be, especially if we have brain injury or if we don’t have brain injury as prevention, have exercise as part of our daily life every day we should be doing something. Now the 150 minutes could be 30 minutes, five days a week. 30 Minutes, five days a week of aerobic type exercise, moderate capacity exercise that raises your heart rate, gets your blood pumping, gets the nerves firing and getting everybody happy within your body. Because were made to move. Our body and our brain were made to move within Our environment, right? There’s reasons why we have to move in our environment. In ancient cultures it was go hunt something, go pull something out of the ground so that we can eat, so we have energy through food to enjoy our lives or work or take care of our families and so forth.
15:04
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So that’s the simple antidote to return your body to a good capacity so you can do more. So today I did 30 minutes of exercise and I can tell you over the years getting to this point has been hard. This is like crazy hard. And every one of my patients that come into the office, getting your capacity back is crazy hard. It is so hard. And so your capacity could be to move, could be to lift, it could be to think, it could be to read, it could be to have enough energy to stay awake throughout the day. Because people with chronic fatigue, they can’t really do that. Or you know, another thing is post exertion of Malays or fatigue. You know, when you exercise you get so much fatigue that you have to take a nap. You can’t do anything else.
16:14
Dr. Joseph Schneider
That’s where your capacity is really low. So we must be doing things that improve our capacity. Now we eat to drive our system. Now I know that really it’s become to the point where now we see advertisements all about food all over the place, restaurants, stuff like that. Super size it, you know, get fast food, processed food and things like that. But the truth of the matter is that we eat to fuel our body. And if we don’t fuel our body right, we either get weak or too thin, but mostly we’re getting too fat. We’re big and larger than we need to be to move around the planet in a good efficient way. So capacity and efficiency are two good words that we want to like shout from the highest mountain.
17:15
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Because if you can’t don’t have capacity, you can’t get to the top of the mountain, you can’t get to the top of the steps. You can’t really take care of yourself. So when I see patients that have stroke and it’s severe, much more severe that I went through then and I see them losing capacity now before my stroke, I mean I could ride my bike 30, 40, 50 miles if I wanted to. I could run if I wanted to. I could like do things. I like to swim, I could swim boating and things like that. A lot of that I can’t do now. I just can’t do it. But you know what? I’m going to keep exercising. I’m going to improve my capacity and I have a plan.
18:04
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So the plan is a plan to get back your capacity to work, to do hobbies, to exercise, to enjoy the beach, enjoy boating, enjoy swimming, and really enjoy your life. Because life is about activity. Now let’s go back to my mom. My mom had a older sister who had cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus when she was young. And she was confined to a wheelchair. She couldn’t move her arms and legs. My Aunt Marie was a wonderful, sweet woman who spent her life in a wheelchair. And through the grace of God, I was given the opportunity to experience my Aunt Marie. And she was at Vineland State School. My mother took us down there to visit her all the time to see my Aunt Marie. Now, that doesn’t really happen.
19:13
Dr. Joseph Schneider
A lot of people that go into Violin State school and they get to a point where they lose capacity. They don’t have any visitors. So one of the things I grew up with was that, yeah, people, when they lose capacity to get older, that family and friends sometimes can’t handle it. They can’t handle the fact. Or be able to watch someone be incapacitated. That’s another interesting word, incapacitation. And so my Aunt Marie was confined to a wheelchair. My mother was always getting her radio because she loved music. And the radios were breaking down or staff would take one or something like that. Or buying her clothes, getting blankets for. So forth and so on. And every time I went down and it wasn’t something that she bought for my Aunt Marie. My mother was like on the warpath. Trying to find out who.
20:15
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Where those things were that my mother had spent time and effort to buy her. To make her life more comfortable. And then we would take her out to restaurants and her whole family would get together. Not only the Schneiders, but the Walshes and the Flemings and so forth. And we would celebrate having her Aunt Marie. And we would sing with her, especially around Christmas. We’d sing her Christmas carols and stuff like that. She just loved it. And I mean, I had the opportunity. I had to take her to the bathroom. I had to lift her up when I was 14 years old and help my mother with my Aunt Marie, help her with the wheelchairs and so forth and so on. But my mother was also kind of like an engineer.
21:02
Dr. Joseph Schneider
She was always trying to figure out what could she do with the wheelchair that would make my Aunt Marie more comfortable. So I guess I was made to. Through my life. And what my. What my experiences were. To pay attention to diet because of my father’s death. To pay attention to Movement and what you can do with someone that can be confined to a wheelchair or has had a certain tragedy happen to them, like a stroke or traumatic brain injury where they lose capacity and their ability to move. So I’m proud of our center. I’m proud of Hope Brain Body Recovery Center. I’m proud of Hope Regeneration Center.
21:53
Dr. Joseph Schneider
I’m proud of the work that we do to make lives easier and to increase the capacity of each patient neurologically, musculoskeletally, with muscles, fascia, tendons and so forth, with circulation, improving digestion, improving breathing mechanisms and heart rate. To really comprehensively look at someone’s function that’s been compromised and lost and raise the function of their system. So, So raising function is what we do. And if you know anyone that needs our type of care, because we only do comprehensive care for our patients, we do comprehensive diagnostics, we do comprehensive exams, we do comprehensive therapeutics in our center. And if you know anyone that is suffering at this point and needs some help, have them give us a call, click on the link above and schedule a consult call.
23:10
Dr. Joseph Schneider
We’ll go over your case and see if our center would be appropriate for you to come so we can increase your capacity, increase your function, make your life much better than what it is at this moment. So click on the link above, schedule your consult. And as part of that, if you know anyone that needs good nutrition, we saw we sell a formula in the office and it’s by Engage Global. It’s micro daily. And microdaily is probably the most comprehensive non mega dose vitamins in the world. You don’t need mega doses, you don’t need 50 vitamins. You need formulations, good formulations that were developed to support your body processes. So click on the link above for ordering emf. Micro Daily emf. You can get a hydro, which I like. It’s either in a citrusy type flavor or a BlackBerry. They’re both very good.
24:26
Dr. Joseph Schneider
They have an energy formula, they have a heart formula, they have all these boost formulas that are just really great. It’s nutritional science on steroids. It’s just the best you can get. So click on the link above and get yourself your microdaily so you can be taken every day to support your vitamin needs for your brain, your nervous system, for your muscles, for your circulation and for your mental health. And you’re going to hear more from us on sleep and sleep cycles and how important sleep cycles are to you mentally, emotionally and physically. So thank you for today and every day and say your prayers and pray because pray. Praying is your first start, your basic start for making sure you change your brain.
