Adam Torres and Dr. Jarrett Grunstein discuss Dr. J’s Pillows.
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Show Notes:
Dr. J’s Pillows is helping people get good sleep. In this episode, Adam Torres and Dr. Jarrett Grunstein, Founder of Dr. J’s Pillows, explore Dr. J’s pillows and how it helps people sleep better.
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About Dr. Jarrett Grunstein
Jarrett is passionate about delivering the highest level of care for those suffering with back and neck pain. After many years of working in private practice while simultaneously serving as Chiropractor for the Toronto Blue Jays, He finally moved back to New Jersey. They recently had their 8 year anniversary at Grunstein Family Chiropractic Center here in Livingston, New Jersey.
Separately, he has spent the last 4 years writing a paper that outlines the cause and preventive cure for Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis in children. Currently looking to partner with individuals (firm) to move medical device from current stage (initial prototype and utility patent pending) thru the iterative prototyping process, FDA approval, manufacture, and distribution.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today my guest is Dr. Jarrett Grunstein, and he’s founder of Dr. J’s Pillows.
Dr. J, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me here, Adam. I appreciate it. All right. So we got a lot to talk about. I want to get into the pillows. I want to get into your practice. I want to get into some of your pillars of health. So we got a whole lot of value to bring to the audience today. But before we start all that, I want to start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Dr. J at mission matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Dr. J, what mission matters to you? My mission is to get America sleeping better, sleeping correctly, and doing it through a pillow and other products, ultimately, that we’re going to ultimately be manufacturing here in the United States.
Fantastic. Love bringing mission based individuals on the line and love a good pillow, man. Before we get into the pillow, I want to know a little bit more about your background, like how you got started in chiropractic and kind of what led you on this path. Sure. So I did my undergraduate work at a school where I was able to actually minor in yoga of all things, which is unusual these days.
And when I finished that program, I moved to India and I lived in an ashram where I studied yoga even more in depth. And through these studies, I became very passionate about the spine and spinal health, and that ultimately led me to discover that chiropractic care was the perfect fit for me as a career, and that’s what, that’s how I got started.
What drew you that versus some other maybe professions of healing? What, what specifically about chiropractic did you like or what or drew you to it? Well, I had considered going into western medicine. My, my teacher in India was a medical doctor. However, for me, I just was so allured by the fact that I could use simply my hands and a couple adjusting tools and no medication and possibly get people feeling better in terms of their back and their neck plane.
And that’s exactly how it’s been. played out. So through natural medicine, I’m able to achieve things in my office that often medical doctors need to prescribe medication to get people relief. So that, that was the lure. Let’s get a little bit into maybe just some of your core belief around this subject and maybe even talk about some of the pillars of health.
I’ve had a bit of time to review some of your work like breathing, thinking, sleeping, like maybe go into your pillars of health a little bit so we can get a feel for just your, your ideology in general. Absolutely. So, like I said, I studied in India, and that really got me tuned into the power of meditation, the power of the mind, the power of breathing, and so, traditionally, the three pillars of health are how we move, how we sleep, and what we eat.
And adding on top of that, four and five are how we think and how we breathe, and I really got that from yoga principles and through all five of these pillars. Interestingly, we can either move ourselves more into what’s called the fight or flight response or the sympathetic nervous system or the rest and digest.
parasympathetic nervous system. And these two branches of the nervous system really will determine whether our heart or digestion and other areas are functioning well, or if there’s hindrances leading to different disease processes. How does this connection or how does this ideology affect and or shape your approach to like sleep and also pain relief?
Okay, so in terms of sleep, one of those five pillars, the reality is, is that if we’re not sleeping enough, which the numbers ranges from seven to nine hours a night as an adult, we’re really throwing ourselves into that sympathetic or fight or flight mode, and that is going to have all these negative consequences for heart health and other areas of our health.
So that’s one of the major areas. Mhm. And continue. Yep. There was a second part of that. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of pain. One of the many consequences of not sleeping properly is our pain threshold actually goes down. So when a patient comes in, I’ll always ask on a pain scale 1 to 10. How are you feeling?
They might. Say is seven, but if they’re pain if they’re sleep deprived that seven would have actually been possibly quite a bit lower But they’re just much more sensitized to pain when they’re not sleeping properly And this is a vicious loop because they’re if they’re in pain that can often affect how they’re sleeping So you can see how pain and sleep are kind of a reciprocal relationship And looking at these, these in your background, so now you get to this point to where you’re like, you want to come out with or you you find you’re inspired to come out with a physical product.
1st off the name. Dr. J’s pillows like where where’d that come from? Well, I’ll tell you Dr. J started. My patient started calling me Dr. J close to 17 years ago. I guess My name, Dr. Jarek Grunstein, was a nice shorthand for that, but really what happened was I was working as chiropractor for the Toronto Blue Jays for four seasons, and one of my early on patients, he thought that was kind of clever, taking the Blue Jays and turning my name into Dr.
J, and it stuck, and I thought it was a clever and kind of a nice shorthand rather than people calling me my full name. It’s much more informal. Hmm. And then getting to this concept of the pillows and coming out with a physical product. What was the inspiration behind that? Yeah. So when I opened my practice about 20 years ago in Clearwater, Florida, I asked initially right on the history form.
How do you sleep? Do you sleep on your back? You sleep on your side, sleep on your stomach. What I realized is that two thirds of people roughly actually shift between their sides and their back at night. So I started looking for pillows in the marketplace that were actually designed for both sleeps.
positions. And surprisingly, there isn’t, there wasn’t any at the time. And to this day, there really, in my opinion, still isn’t a pillow that actually keeps your head and neck neutral for both those sleep positions. And so you go into this product and design, like, talk to me about what that was like to bring something to the market like this, because this is, or correct me if I’m off.
Have you ever had a physical product like this before? Is this your first time going down that path? No, this is my second time. So this whole process started 14 years ago. There was an earlier version of this pillow is filled with. Polyfill. I have to admit it was a cruder version of the current pillow.
It was just a first iteration. I ended up licensing the patent to a pillow manufacturer here in New Jersey where I am currently. And they sold about 10, 000 pillows around the country, mostly through Amazon. And but I realized that the pillow flattened out a bit and also the design was It had a needed improvement.
It was a first iteration. So I went back to the drawing board and put a lot more science into the second version. And I also changed the material over to organic latex, which is a non toxic material, unlike memory foam and other materials that many people sleep on at night. Go go a step further and tell me why this why this makes the unique the design unique or different.
Okay. So basically when we sleep on our back, you don’t really want a pillow that’s going to elevate your head because it pushes the head forward. But then when you’re on your side, you need a pillow that’s going to fill the gap between the side of the head and the shoulders. Essentially, you can essentially, you can see that any pillow that is just one level isn’t going to work correctly for both back and side sleeping.
So that’s 90, 99 percent of the pillows are one level. So right out of the gate, Most pillows aren’t designed correctly. So basically I took this concept where basically you can have a pillow in the center and the central part where your head is cradled properly. Your neck is neutrally aligned. And then when you roll to your sides, it’s much higher so that now the pillows are going to allow for your head and neck to be perfectly aligned while you’re on your sides as well.
So it’s really. Three pillows in one. What kind of response have you gotten from this new, the new version? Well, this is brand new. We really are just launching. So you’re catching us at the very early stages of this process. But I’ll say just since bringing patients into my office and I have a little mattress set up here in my office, essentially everyone who lies on it goes to our website and buys it.
Yeah, which is a good thing. I mean, of course. There are a lot of pillows in the marketplace. So I think people hear, ah, another pillow. It gets a little exhausting, particularly because since pillows typically aren’t designed properly people who have gotten burned many times. And I’ve heard many stories.
of people having a graveyard of pillows on their bed or in their closet, you know, it gets tiring, wasting money. So I understand people are a little possibly skeptical, even cynical at this point. So I think that people are going to most likely buy this right when they just try it out. So we’re going to try to get heads on pillows as much as possible.
That’s a big part of our strategy. How do you recommend using your pillow, especially for people that might have a special issues or specific issues like a neck pain or something like that. Well, to be clear, this pillow is for two categories of individuals, those who have neck pain and those who have struggle sleeping.
And here’s why. What the scientific studies actually show is that if a pillow keeps your head and neck neutrally aligned, you’re going to wake With less neck pain or no neck pain, and it is going to directly affect the quality of your sleep. And the reason why is that when your neck is neutrally aligned, there’s basically no noise.
You don’t have any irritating experiences going from your head, telling your brain, which can disrupt sleep patterns. Though, basically what we’re really trying to address here is to get people sleeping better. So yeah, if you have a neck. problem. Chances are you are struggling finding a pillow right now.
And speaking of neck and back pain for people that maybe aren’t ready to go to visit a chiropractor yet, but they do want to start improving. Is there anything that people can do at home to improve their posture or otherwise? Yeah, I highly recommend my patients take a look. It really depends on their work life.
That’s a big one You know anyone who works at a desk, which is a lot of us. Oh, yeah Look, yeah, we need to consider where is the monitor place? Ideally we want to placed in front of us But slightly down just slightly down because our eyes naturally look down about 15. You want to make sure it’s not off to the side.
You want to make sure that your chair is high enough so that your your arms aren’t elevated like this, but also so we want nice, relaxed shoulders when we’re working. These will all participate. Another high, great recommendation is a standing desk if you’re working at a desk all day. So instead of sitting for long periods of time, ideally, you know, I like to tell patients 30, 45 minutes tops, you know, I want you getting up walking around ideally just for a little bit because our backs were just not meant to sit all day.
You say that, you know, sitting is the new smoking. So that’s a big one. Yeah. Well, Dr J, this has been great having you on the show. I love hearing about and I’m glad to hear that we’re, we’re breaking the product first, that this is another iteration of it. I know you’ve been at this for a while and it’s interesting to see you pioneering in the pillow market.
Can I throw any more peas in there? I don’t know. But, but what’s next? I mean, what What’s next for you? What’s next for the rollout of the pillow and your practice? Well, thank you. Basically we’re going to be using this time to get a lot of heads on pillows. We’re also excited to be launching future products in the next year or two.
The next one is a knee pillow for both back and side sleeping, and that’s going to keep the low back in neutral in both those positions. So basically we want to get the neck and the low back, get people around the country sleeping correctly. Wonderful. And if somebody’s listening to or watching this and they want to follow up, they want to pick up a pillow, learn more about the pillow.
Practice, follow you. How do they do those things? All right. Well, best thing would be to go to our website. It’s www. drjspillows. com. That’s drjspillows. com. Perfect. And for everybody listening and watching this, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes. So you can just click on the links and head right on over and pick up one.
Speaking of mission matters, if this is your first time with us and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Dr.
J man, appreciate you coming back on. Appreciate all the work you’re doing with Dr. J’s pillows and until the next time. Thanks so much, Adam. Appreciate your time.