Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #279 BITESIZE | Do This Every Day to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Andrew Weil

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 200 of the podcast with a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, Dr. Andrew Weil. Now in this clip, he explains why our mind and body are so connected and how a simple daily breathing practice can help reduce stress. What do you mean when you say mind-body medicine?

Starting point is 00:01:46 Do you see the mind and body as separate? Does society see it as separate? And what does that umbrella mean? I think the only way you can separate mind and body is verbally. I think they are two poles of the same reality. And I think the reigning paradigm in Western science and medicine simply does not see that, you know, that we have a materialistic paradigm in place that states that all that is real is that which is physical, that which can be touched, measured, I guess, in medicine, taken out. And that if you observe a change in a physical system,

Starting point is 00:02:26 the cause has to be physical. Non-physical causation of physical events simply is not allowed for in that paradigm. And this is why mind-body interactions have been never accorded their proper due, why research in that area has been stunted, why hypnosis has never been fully accepted as a medical modality, for example, why we can't make sense of work cures. There's a whole range of things, but that is changing. And some of the change has come about with validating placebo responses through brain imaging and showing that there are correlations with activity in particular areas of the brain. So this makes it accessible to people. Gradually changing.

Starting point is 00:03:14 But I would say there's a whole range of therapies under the heading mind-body medicine from biofeedback, hypnosis, visualization, and so forth. biofeedback, hypnosis, visualization, and so forth. In general, these methods are very cost effective, time effective, even fun for both practitioner and patient, and yet they are very underutilized. What are some of your favorite sort of stress reduction practices that you find people get real benefit from? I would say that learning and practicing methods of neutralizing the harmful effects of stress is right up there with nutrition and physical activity and adequate rest and sleep is one of the planks of healthy living. I don't think it's possible to live without stress, but I think you can learn to manage it and not let it damage the body or mind. I think that learning how to regulate the breath is the most time and cost-effective method

Starting point is 00:04:13 of reducing anxiety, of promoting calmness. And I've been astonished at how little scientific attention has been paid to breath. And by the way, this is something that comes from Indian culture. If you look around the world at places, whether it's martial arts or natural childbirth or athletic performance, where breathing is stressed and you try to find where this knowledge came from, all roads lead to ancient India. You know, this is a science that developed thousands of years ago in India and has diffused all over the world. And as I say, just astonishing how little scientific research has been done on breath and its ability to change physiology, although that finally is changing. Yeah, it really is. I mean, you have widely popularized the 478 breath. Can you tell us

Starting point is 00:05:06 what the 478 breath is? And, you know, when did this start coming into your awareness? And when did you start talking about it? It's a yoga technique. So again, thousands of years old, and I learned it from Dr. Fulford. And I have been practicing it since probably the early 1980s. And I have taught it. I teach it to every patient I come into contact with, to all of my students, sometimes to very large groups of people. It's so time efficient. breathing in quietly through your nose to a count of four, holding your breath to account for a count of seven and blowing air out forcibly through your mouth to a count of eight and repeating that for four breath cycles when you're first learning it and doing that twice a day

Starting point is 00:05:56 religiously. And that's all. And by simply doing that over time, you know, over the space of a month or two months, you really change the dynamics of the involuntary nervous system. A decreased sympathetic tone, increased parasympathetic tone, the relaxation response lowers heart rate, lowers blood pressure, improves digestion, really amazing results. And it takes 30 seconds twice a day. I mean, I love recommendations like that. You know, very, very effective, but free and accessible to everybody, which I think is something that I always try

Starting point is 00:06:38 and keep at the back of my mind when talking about health. There's this theme coming up, Andrew, which is, you mentioned inflammation before you were becoming aware in the maybe early 80s, that there's this kind of root cause of chronic unresolved inflammation that may be behind or at least contributing in a large way to things like hypertension, type two diabetes, heart disease, you know, depression, whatever. It's like, okay, great. You also mentioned that you teach the four, seven, eight breaths to pretty much every single one of your

Starting point is 00:07:09 patients. So what I really love is this understanding and this idea that there are some basics of health, right? There are some commonalities that if we focus on the creation of health in the body, if we focus on the creation of health in the body if we focus on reducing inflammation in the body through hopefully lots of uh you know lifestyle practices we can tackle multiple different diseases even though we're not targeting them specifically and it's, you know, as you say that 478 breath, it sounds like you use that as prevention, as prophylaxis, but also as treatment when somebody has a problem. And I think this is in many ways, changing the way that we look at medicine, because we have been taught in a certainly, I was trained, what, maybe 30, 35 years after you, but a very sort of, quite a reductionist model.

Starting point is 00:08:09 We're very good at giving labels to different diseases. We separate off the body into different specialities and that can have value. But also we forget that we're one interconnecting system. And if you change one part of that system, you also have a knock-on effect on other parts as well. Yeah, let me give you an example with 478 breath. This is by far the most effective anti-anxiety measure that I've come across. It makes the drugs that we use for anxiety look very pathetic by comparison. And I have used that in patients with the most extreme forms of panic disorder successfully, although in some cases it took some time of regular practice for them to get control of it.

Starting point is 00:08:52 But the difference between treating an anxiety attack or panic disorder with a drug like a benzodiazepine and with the 478 breath, it's a very stark contrast. When people are panicked or in anxiety states, the subjective experience usually is of being out of control. If you deal with that by giving a medication, you reinforce the false idea that the locus of control is external. And over time, that method becomes less and less effective and often creates dependence. When a person discovers that they have within them the ability to control an anxiety state by regulation of the breath, it's a revelation. It's totally empowering. And that method becomes more effective with repetition and creates greater independence and greater autonomy. It just couldn't be a greater contrast of those two approaches.

Starting point is 00:09:52 You mentioned the placebo effect before and the power of the mind. And I've shared on this podcast before that my realization over the past few years has, yes, food, movement, sleep, stress, super important. They are very, very important things to try and help everyone with. But actually, if you go one step further, I really am feeling more and more that it's the mind, it's our belief systems up here, how we view the world actually determines a lot of those behaviors in the first place. actually determines a lot of those behaviors in the first place. And unless we tackle that, yeah, we can make big improvements with food and movement and stress. But at some point, to really get that long-term change, we've got to tackle what's going on up here. And you mentioned the placebo. And it's interesting that there's such powerful research behind the placebo, but how do we talk about it in medicine? It's the most

Starting point is 00:10:45 derogatory thing in the world when you were talking about trials, isn't it? It speaks to how little credence we give or have typically given to the power of our minds. Yes, the two most common usages of the word placebo I hear in medicine are, how do you know that's not just a placebo effect? And the most interesting word there is just, or we have to rule out the placebo effect. You know, we should be ruling it in. Placebo responses are pure healing responses from within, mediated by the mind. And that's what we should be trying to make happen more often. That is the art of medicine. How do you present treatments to patients to get the maximum healing response with the minimum direct physical intervention?

Starting point is 00:11:30 Again, something that I began writing about long ago and talking about, and I'm happy to see gradually a change coming about in that area. But that word is so charged and so loaded, and the thinking that placebo responses are imaginary and they're not as important here's a little there's a little assignment that i like to give to medical students and also to doctors and training as well is to go into pick up any medical journal at random that reports randomized controlled testing of drugs and look up an article and flip to the back where there's a table summarizing the results. In the placebo group, there will always be, always, one or two or a small number of subjects who show all of the changes produced

Starting point is 00:12:20 in the experimental group. In other words, any change that we can produce in the human body with a pharmaceutical agent can be exactly reproduced in at least some individuals, some of the time, purely by a mind-mediated mechanism. To me, that is the most important single fact that's come out of this whole era, 70 years of randomized controlled drug testing. And that's what we should be trying to figure out how to take advantage of and make happen more of the time. I find that one of the main things that I can do for patients is to instill in them greater confidence about their body's own ability and resilience. And I think many people have no confidence at all in that. And the fact is that most of us are mostly healthy most of the time.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And that's remarkable, given how many things could go wrong inside the body, how many things out there have the potential to harm us. It is miraculous that most of us are mostly healthy most of the time. And that is a tribute to the intrinsic healing mechanisms of the human body. Really hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday

Starting point is 00:13:35 and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #279 BITESIZE | Do This Every Day to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Andrew Weil

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