Good Life Project - How to Live Better & Longer With Ayurveda | Avanti Kumar-Singh, MD
Episode Date: December 16, 2024Avanti Kumar Singh shares her powerful journey with breast cancer while writing The Longevity Formula, blending Western medicine and Ayurvedic wisdom. Discover her 5 "longevity switches" and daily pra...ctices like breathwork for vibrant aging by reducing inflammation and nurturing life force.You can find Avanti at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Karen Walrond about embracing the grace of age.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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I think the goal really is to get our health span to equal our lifespan.
That, I think, is success.
That's living a beautiful life.
That's living a good life, right?
That when you can live however many years you're going to be on this planet, if you
can live all of those years or most almost of all of those years with health and vitality,
sign me up.
That's what I want.
So have you ever noticed that some people seem to age more vibrantly than others,
even into their 80s and beyond? They move with energy and their minds stay sharp and they
maintain an inspiring independence. And meanwhile, others become frail and struggle with decreasing
vitality year after year. It makes you wonder,
what is their secret? Is it just genetics or is something else going on? What if there was a way
to unlock your body's natural ability to do things like reduce inflammation, repair cells, and truly
thrive as you grow older? My guest today has uncovered ancient wisdom that could help us all
age with more vitality and health, energy, and ease.
Avanti Kumar Singh is an internationally recognized Ayurveda and integrative medicine
practitioner and traditionally trained physician. Her unique approach, it brings together the best
of Western medicine with the ancient knowledge of Ayurveda from her South Asian lineage.
And after navigating her own journey with breast cancer, Avanti
realized the importance of not just preventing future illness, but actively protecting our health
and wellness in the present moment. In her new book, The Longevity Formula, Ayurvedic principles
to reduce inflammation, increase cellular repair, and live with vitality. Avanti shares a five-part
blueprint for really igniting our body's innate healing ability.
So imagine moving through life's later decades with sustained energy and sharpness of mind and independence.
This conversation will open your eyes to what's possible when you start living in harmony with Ayurveda and nature's rhythms.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good
Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the
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You and I have been rolling together a little bit professionally as friends for years now.
I have been fascinated on multiple levels.
One, as somebody who started out in a very Western medicine setting, in emergency medicine, in a major city, doing the whole thing, and then really having an awakening to Ayurvedic practices.
And then that now being informed in a much more personal way through your own journey,
through breast cancer over the last couple of years. So I want to dive into all of this
because it's really informed what I see as sort of like an emerging and different approach to
how we step into the second half, the third half, whatever it is you may call the later seasons of our lives. As we have this
conversation, how has the last year or two shifted your perspective on really what it means to be
well? I would say it has shifted it in so many ways. I set out to write this book on longevity
right before I got, well, I should say my body got
this diagnosis of breast cancer. I'm really careful to use that language just because
I'm so much more than my body. And I really was thinking about longevity because I was approaching
my 50th birthday. I'm now 53. So it's been a couple of years since I started this project. And, you know, for me, it was about how are all of my elders, my, you know, my parents,
my aunts and uncles, my grandparents living into their 80s and 90s so well.
I mentioned this because I think that my perception and sort of idea of wellness goes beyond sort
of what I've been thinking about for so long,
which was sort of like preventative in the future. And all of a sudden, when I turned 50,
it sort of was like, oh, it's not in the future. It's now. And really thinking about how does that
play out and what was the secret sauce that my family members were sort of using to live in this way where they were so
vibrant, you know, living independently, not really in pain, able to, you know, do all of the things
of life, whether it's going to the grocery store or cooking for themselves or bathing themselves,
things that, you know, we take for granted as we get older that we're going to be able to do all of those things.
But they were able to do this and they were so sharp cognitively.
They're so invested and connected to their families and their communities. And so I really started thinking about wellness from this perspective of like, how am I going to continue this wellness now as I'm going into my 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, right? And then I get hit with this diagnosis
four months into writing this book. And it really shifted my perception again,
because then it became not just about prevention, about wellness necessarily,
but I had this realization over the course of the year that it is about
protection, protection of your health today, every day, now. Not, again, that it's something
in the future, but that what we are doing through a healing system like Ayurveda with all of these
amazing practices that we've been doing for 5,000 years, that it's not
preventative. It is preventative, but it's not just preventative, it's protective. So that's
sort of the lens that I think really sort of emerged for me from this experience in the past
two years. I want to dive into that a little bit more, but I don't want to skip over a correction
that you just made to yourself when you were describing this.
You started by saying, I got this diagnosis.
And then you corrected yourself and said, my body got this diagnosis.
And that seemed like a really important distinction to you.
I'd love to tease that out a little bit.
Yeah, you know, it was something that one of my spiritual teachers taught me many years ago.
And yeah, I would, you know, use that language,
you know, sort of really try to practice it. But it became really, really important when I was first
told that my body was diagnosed with breast cancer. And the reason it was so important is that
it allowed me to understand myself to be so much more than this physical container, this body. I realized
that I am the I am, that I'm so much more. I'm a soul within this container, which is something
I've always believed. And it was really, really sort of very ever-present to me of like, okay,
so you've believed that for a long time, but now do you really believe it? And so can you really lean into this idea?
Because I will tell you, Jonathan, when I found out, and this all happened very fast,
I went in for a mammogram and the mammogram took a little longer.
Then there was an ultrasound and I knew what was going to happen.
I mean, I'm a doctor.
I knew what was going to happen.
And within three days, I got this diagnosis back, right?
I was pissed off.
I was really, really angry.
I'm like, are you serious?
Are you freaking kidding me?
I have been taking care of people my whole life.
Since I was a kid, family roles, responsibilities, being the elder daughter of an immigrant family.
My nature is such that I love to
help people. I always want to take care of people. And then I chose a profession that is helping
people. I'm an MD, right? I literally have been taking care of people my whole life. And I'm like,
this is what I get. And I've been practicing an Ayurvedic lifestyle since I was a child
and went back to Ayurveda from Western medicine. And I'm like, are you kidding? And I
think the only way that I could figure out how to move forward was to have this understanding that I
am so much more than my body. Because if I had just stayed in that place of I in continually
identifying with my body and saying, I have breast cancer, I think it would have been really,
really difficult for me to
get through it. And so I had to really sort of sit with it and change the language and realize I'm so
much more. And that is, I think, what really helped me get through all of this. So it was
really important for me. I mean, it's a subtle but a powerful distinction. And as we know,
you know, like the language, I mean, the research is clear that the language we use, not just with others, but the language we use with ourselves to ourselves.
Sure.
Has a very real impact.
I mean, I was never somebody who sort of like overly woo or metaphysical, but you actually start to see like interesting.
No, actually, there's this real thing about the chatter that we actually actively spin in our heads.
It has a very real and measurable effect physiologically, psychologically.
So this is one of those tropes that actually has some real power behind it.
Absolutely.
And I think it's so powerful because I think that we forget how incredibly expansive we are as human beings. We are beings, right? We're not
just humans. We're beings inside of this human form. And when we limit ourselves to this body,
we're limiting ourselves. We're not tapping into that expansive nature that we have and the
connection that we have with the entire universe, which, you know,
sort of goes into what Ayurveda is really about, right? It's connecting with all of nature, with
the universe around us. And so I think that there's just a limit that we put on ourselves
when we identify too much with the physical body. So I want to acknowledge something here also,
though, and get your take on this, because I have no doubt, you know, we have a large global audience.
There will be somebody listening to this who either has navigated a diagnosis or is recently
diagnosed or is in the middle of this, who's listening to this.
And I don't want that person to feel in any way that what you're saying is minimizing
the reality and the hardness of
the experience that they're in or that they've been through?
No, and I absolutely, I would never want to suggest that. I think what I'm maybe sort of
saying is that, yes, the pain is real. The discomfort is real. Distress is real. When you
receive a diagnosis like this, when you're going through any kind of a
symptom, right? But and, like, you know, you can hold two truths is that, and you are so much more
than that. I mean, that's my belief, right? And it's again, not to minimize that, but also to say,
is there more to this? Can I lean into the possibility that there is more than what I'm feeling physically in my body. And so again,
it's not to dismiss anything that anyone's feeling or to make light of that at all. I think it's just
to maybe broaden how we look at it. Yeah, that makes sense to me. When you start with your
Western medicine background, you bring in the Ayurvedic traditions
that have been with you for part of your life, but became a much more centered thing in your
professional life as well in recent years, what you've been navigating in the last few
years.
And then all this simultaneously is happening while you're sitting down, like writing a
book about how do we age beautifully and well and live like really well.
And this is something you write
to actually early in the book is sort of like this notion of like, well, we need to also broaden the
lens here and really understand like there's this paradox about there are some myths and some
assumptions that we make about what it means to actually age in this country that aren't necessarily
true or helpful. Yeah, it was that sort of realization, like I was
telling you before, when I turned 50 or was on the eve of my 50th birthday and remembering my
grandfather and sort of how much he influenced me and this understanding of like what he was when
he was turning 50, 60, 70 is not the picture that I was given growing up in America. I was born and raised in the States.
My parents came here from India. The pictures were so paradoxical in a way for me of what I saw
in Western culture and ads, you know, about dentures and orthopedic shoes and walkers and
all these things that were not my personal experience,
because I'm seeing my grandfather in his 50s and 60s and 70s with no problems. I mean, he's walking,
you know, five, six miles every morning, and he's fully cognitively there and really sharp. And
I think it's just, it was such a different picture. And so I started thinking about aging in the East, in South Asia, in India.
It's looked at as such a different experience than what it is in the West.
We really look at it as the idea of wisdomhood, right?
We have childhood, then we have adulthood, and then we transition into this beautiful
space of wisdomhood.
And I love that term because it's so much about we are more than our physical body.
You know, it's sort of getting into that realm.
But it's also adding this piece, this layer of the importance of elders and the wisdom
that we have as we go into our 50s, 60s, 70s.
And it makes it a beautiful time. It makes the process of aging a very empowering time. It makes
it a time that you actually have even more importance to the people around you, your
friends, your family. And that's also been my experience, too, of what happens as you age. There's that level of the experience,
but there's also the very real practical level. So like on the ground that it feels like in
Western culture, in Western medicine, we're figuring out a lot of ways to extend the number
of years on the planet, right? So, you know, like we're adding time. But at the same time, we're also experiencing levels
of chronic illness and disease and disability, where you start to tease out this distinction,
this is something you speak to, between lifespan, like simply having more time on the planet,
and healthspan. How are you actually feeling during that time on the planet? It seems like so much of the focus is more years. And I feel like we're just coming around to, but how are you actually
feeling during those years? Yeah. You know, I mean, Western medicine is so good at extending
our chronological lifespan. We're going to get older every year. That's just a fact of life.
We can't stop that from happening.
And Western medicine can make those years keep going and going and going. We can live longer
and longer and longer. But the question is, how are we living those years, those extra years?
Are we living them with disability and dis-ease and illness? Or are we living them with vitality and energy and connection and participation in life, right?
I think that's the real question.
And that's the difference.
And that's really health span, that vitality, you know.
I think the goal really is to get our health span to equal our lifespan.
That, I think, is success.
That's living a beautiful life. That's living a
good life, right? That when you can live however many years you're going to be on this planet,
if you can live all of those years or most almost of all of those years with health and vitality,
sign me up. That's what I want. Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful. It's interesting. I remember years back, Stumley Pond, Tulga Wanday's book on being mortal.
And really being introduced to this notion of a quote, a good death and how it's also
kind of foreign in Western culture to really even think about this.
Sure.
And it's really focusing around the time fairly immediately before when somebody passes and
the decisions they make and how they want to be.
Sure. But, you know, like we, we also don't even look at that in the larger context of the whole
final third of our time here. You know, like what is, what does it actually mean to spend that time
well and to feel well along the way? So when you start to zoom the lens out a bit and you're
bringing in all of the different worlds and expertise that you
sort of like look at to figure out, okay, so how do we look at this time and really age beautifully?
It's like you create your own model here, basically, that brings together different
worlds. You have the longevity formula, which sort of says, okay, so what if we actually pulled from
all these disparate places, took the wisdom and the intelligence and the science from them,
and saw how they came together in a coherent framework. And there's certainly these two
macro focuses. One is the notion of cellular repair, and the other is the notion of reducing
inflammation. I'd love to sort of take them one at a time and explore them a bit.
I started thinking about, from an Ayurvedic perspective,
what's happening? Like, how is it that my elders are aging in this way? And I sort of went back to
all of the books and sort of started looking, like, what are we really trying to do here?
And what I came up with is that we're trying to nourish the tissue layers in Ayurveda. There's
seven tissue layers that we talk about, or dhatus. And really,
what I was finding over and over again is that when we nourish those tissue layers,
we will age vibrantly. We increase our longevity or we support our longevity.
And so then I had to start thinking, okay, well, what does that mean from a Western standpoint,
right? Because I always want to bring those together. I'm so integrative and I'm Western trained and a scientist.
And I also know that the Western mind wants to know why they want the proof. And so I was like,
well, how does this line up? And what I found is that this idea of tissue nourishment,
of nourishing the tissues, increases longevity.
So the opposite is also true, that tissue depletion causes physiological aging, right?
And this sort of morbidity and mortality that we talk about in Western medicine.
And what I saw is that the tissue depletion happens from these two things, which is
decreased cellular repair
and increased inflammation.
Okay.
And that's important because what we're doing is we're having this accumulation of cellular
damage in the tissues, which causes all the problems, which causes the depletion of the
tissues.
And so there's where I saw the bridge, right? That the tissues become depleted
because we have all of these cells lying around that are not getting cleared, that are causing
more inflammation, and that's what causes the depletion of the tissues and physiological aging.
So that's where I made those connections. And so cellular repair is just that. It's like, how do we, as we age,
our cells don't repair as well as we get chronologically older. So how can we increase
that cellular repair or decrease the cellular damage, which we talk a lot about? And then the
second part of that longevity formula is how can we decrease inflammation? And actually both of them work
together because when you have a lot of junky cell parts, like sort of just lying around
because we're not clearing them, we're not repairing them, that also causes this chronic
low-grade inflammation. And we know that low-grade inflammation and problems with our cellular repair are both linked directly to
sort of the nine mechanisms of aging that we talk about in integrative medicine. There's these
nine mechanisms that are pretty sort of widely agreed upon as mechanisms of aging. And so this
kind of all just sort of came together for me and I was like, oh, I get it. I get it. And I
started to look at, well, how is it that we are nourishing the tissues through all these things
that we would do in Ayurveda that I grew up seeing my grandfather do every day, that my elders do,
that I've written about in my other book, and we've talked about on this podcast before,
that how does that really play into sort of this idea of longevity? And that was sort of the aha light bulbs that went off for me.
I mean, it's so interesting, right? It seems like there's either a benevolent or destructive cycle
that can spiral around between cellular repair and inflammation, you know, and it's sort of like,
if you don't address both, then you almost have like a broken cycle.
And if you have this sort of chronic low-grade inflammation, you mentioned a couple of times this notion of cell parts or dead cells or old cells.
I have heard in different conversations this phrase zombie cell repeated a number of times over the years or senescence. Is this what we're
talking about here? Yeah, that's one of the ways that we have these sort of zombie cells hanging
around, you know, these cells that should be cleared that are not. But it's also, you know,
cells that are damaged through genetic damage, right? The DNA damage that will happen or the
protein damage that will happen, mitochondrial damage.
Like all of these things are related to the cell and it will cause the damage in the cell where it's not going to get cleared.
As we age, the clearing, repairing process slows down.
And so they're kind of hanging around.
So it's not just the zombie cells,
but it's all these other mechanisms of aging that cause damage to the cells
and then cause the inflammation.
So it's kind of all of those.
That makes sense.
And as you're describing those, I'm like, oh, but wait, aren't those all the things
that, quote, just happen naturally with aging?
And it sounds like you're saying, well, some, yes.
Some of this is just the pre, some of this is going to happen at an accelerated rate.
Right.
But maybe not at the rate that many of us are experiencing.
Exactly.
I think that's the point is that as we age, as we get chronologically older, these processes
accumulate, right?
Whereas when we were a little bit younger chronologically, we can sort of repair all
of those problems that are happening all the time that are natural, right?
DNA damage, protein damage, mitochondrial damage.
These are things that happen all the time at every age.
It's just that we don't repair it as well as we get older.
And then on top of that, if we're not clearing it
and it's hanging around,
it's causing inflammation in the tissues.
So we have like a double whammy from that.
That's what's happening.
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You mentioned these nine biological mechanisms of aging. Can we walk through those a bit? types of misreading of the DNA when it replicates. You'll have all these problems in how the DNA is
unreplicated and that causes damage to the cells. That's the first one. The next one is telomere
shortening. And you can think of telomeres like these little caps on the end of the DNA
that protect it. And what happens is as we age, we start to lose those protective caps, and then that causes problems. So that's another mechanism of aging. The third is epigenetic changes, right? Epigenetics has sort of gotten a lot of talk over the last 20, 30 years, the original, you know, by Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, when he talked about this. And epigenetic
is just that. It's epi on top of our genes. And it's the idea that we can turn on and off the
switches for genes through lifestyle. And that's why lifestyle medicine and all these practice
quite, you know, these things that we do in Ayurveda are so incredibly powerful because they have the power to turn on and turn off genes. So that's epigenetic changes.
The next is protein damage, right? Damage to the building blocks and messengers of our DNA,
of our cells. The next is dysregulated nutrient sensing. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about those.
There's sort of four main mechanisms as of today when we're recording this podcast, which
really talks about how food influences our genetic expression, how it switches on the
longevity switch or switches off the longevity switch.
Another mechanism, so the sixth one is
mitochondrial dysfunction, right? Mitochondria are the powerhouses in our cells and they can get
damaged. So then we have decreased energy sources and that causes problems in physiological aging.
The next is senescent cells. As we talked about, the zombie cells that kind of just
hang around too long. They don't go
away and they cause all this inflammation. The eighth is stem cell exhaustion, which is, you
know, stem cells are the potential for us to become anything. And so we start to lose that potential
for differentiation and that can cause aging. And then the last is something we called inflammaging, which is sort of this wrong kind of inflammation.
And, you know, we have too much inflammation that is harmful and less of the inflammation that's protective.
And inflammaging is related to all of the other eight mechanisms.
So that's just kind of a really quick. I mean, but as you're describing them, it really sounds like these are all things that are
influenceable by the choices that we make and the behaviors that we engage in.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that so many of us feel that we are sort of doomed to whatever our genes are,
whatever we've sort of been given, you know, and I don't
think we understand how much we can influence it exactly is what you're saying, because all of
these mechanisms, we know we can influence through lifestyle, through diet, through stress management,
through all of the things that we talk about in Ayurveda that we've been
talking about for 5,000 years, and that we now have the proof that it works.
Do these nine mechanisms, you were saying you sort of saw a corollary between
the seven layers of bodily tissues. Do the nine mechanisms of aging from a sort of a more modern,
a more Western lens, also have sort of an Ayurvedic
overlay that kind of matches, or is it a different approach to understanding?
I think it's a little bit of a different approach. And I think it's more of the nourishment of the
tissues, right? And so I think these mechanisms of aging come into that, the formula, right?
That we can actually nourish the tissues by increasing cellular
repair and decreasing inflammation. And so that's where these nine mechanisms connect to nourishment
of the tissues. So if we can influence these nine physiological mechanisms of aging, we will nourish
the tissues, all seven tissue layers, and therefore support longevity. That's where they
connect. So there's not a correlation of nine mechanisms and something in Ayurveda, but that's
where they connect is in the tissues, the tissue nerve. Got it. You mentioned, you used the word
earlier, dhatus. Is that roughly what the name of a layer would be? Yeah. So tissue is dhatu.
I've also heard, and probably a lot of other people who've had any level of exposure to Ayurveda, like what the name of a layer would be, like the seven. Yeah. Okay. So tissue is dhatu. Yep.
I've also heard, and probably a lot of other people who've had any level of exposure to Ayurveda have heard this word dosha.
Does this tie into this conversation in any meaningful way?
It ties in in the aspect of, you know, the doshas are about the five elements, right?
And this idea that everything in the universe is made of five elements, space, air, fire, water, and earth. And that each of us has a unique mind-body
constitution or those shape constitution that we are born with. That is sort of our natural
state of balance. When we start to move away from that state of balance, then we start to have
symptoms, illness, chronic disease.
And it can be really subtle. It can be really, really obvious. It just depends on how far you are
away from your natural state of balance. So how does that connect to the tissues?
It's a complicated set of connections, but I'll try and make it simple, is that based on your dosha, you also have a propensity to have certain tissues that
will not be nourished as well. That's one mechanism. The second is that all of these tissues
are nourished by the elements, by the doshas in different ways. So you have sort of this dual mechanism happening where
if the tissues are not nourished completely by these doshas, by these elements, they can also
become depleted. So it's the more complicated connection, but yes, they are connected.
On a meta level here, if the big idea is that in order for us to not just extend our years on the planet, but also live well during those years, be as healthy as we can during those years, age well, that we have to replenish our tissues.
We have to nourish our tissues.
Yes.
Then the big obvious question here is how?
Exactly. Where do we even begin? And you lay out a number of different things to explore. So maybe let's touch into some of those things, you know, and one of
these is a conversation around toxins. And I think this is again, one of those areas where
when some people hear the word, they roll their eyes and they're like, oh dear, really? We're like, we're going there again? Isn't just this part of like this sort of like kind of
strange wellness culture? Take me into this conversation around toxins in a way that feels
more grounded. The idea of toxins is that when you have a toxic load in your system,
it's not going to function well. Okay, so that's sort of the grounding
principle there, right? We can all agree that if you have a lot of garbage sitting around,
it's going to cause problems, right? And that's really what toxins are. The problem is, is that
toxins is a word that has so many multiple meanings, and it's used so many different ways
in Western culture that it kind of confuses things. From the Ayurvedic perspective, we have a digestive fire
or agni that is sort of a metaphor for digestive capacity. And when we have a strong,
healthy digestive fire, which we now know in Western medicine is the gut brain, right? We
know that digestive health is connected to every health issue that there is,
right? And every connected to every organ system, every organ, every cell, it's all connected.
We have this agni and agni is a metaphor for our ability to keep what we need and get rid of what
we don't. When we don't have a healthy agni, we're going to have a buildup of a
lot of toxins, a lot of garbage, a lot of stuff that we don't need, which causes problems. So
that's kind of where this toxin idea in Ayurveda comes from. It's not specifically like the toxins
in our environment or in our food. It includes that, but it's so much more.
It's about the toxins that we're taking in
and not releasing from our relationships,
from the conversations that we have,
from the work that we do,
from the spaces that we live and work and play in.
And it's not just like the environmental toxins
and the paint and the construction, but the toxins from just having a messy environment or disheveled or disorganized
environment and how that affects you, right? So it's toxins in so, it's such a broader perspective
than the idea that we have in Western culture of toxins. It's interesting to think of it that way,
as you just described, it's the toxins that may emerge from a particular relationship.
Right.
Bridge that gap for me a little bit though, because somebody's going to hear that and think,
we've all heard the phrase, a toxic relationship, right?
Yep.
But how does that toxic relationship land as being a toxin in my body?
Anything that is going to cause a stress on the system,
anything that is a stressor that is going to cause a sympathetic stress response in your system
is toxic to you. It is going to cause problems. So the connection is if you have a toxic relationship where there's a lot of arguments or bad feelings or hard feelings, right, or hurt feelings, at some point that's going to start to affect your emotional health, right?
It causes stress.
Just being around somebody who you have a toxic relationship or a difficult relationship with causes anxiety. You know, how many times do we feel so anxious when we're in the presence of, you know, maybe a difficult boss or a difficult
colleague or a difficult family member, right? We're coming up on the holidays, right? Thanksgiving
is like a huge trigger for so many people for this exact reason, right? Relationships cause a lot of
stress. It puts us into a sympathetic response,
which when we're in a sympathetic response,
we're releasing all these hormones.
Now, those are actually a good thing at a modulated pace.
The problem is, is that in our modern life,
we're in that stress response 24 hours a day.
That's not how we were designed.
And that's what causes
problems. So pulling back, right? A stressful, toxic relationship causes stress, causes the
release of all of these hormones at a pace that is detrimental to our health. That's the connection. So when we're thinking about the experience of
toxins in our body, then we really need to think more expansively. It's not just like,
what am I eating? What am I drinking? What am I breathing? Which is part of it. That may be
this measurable things. These are particles that come in that are actively toxic in our system.
But we also need to think more expansively as, how am I spending my days? Who am I with? What is the nature of my relationships? Am I exerting myself in a way that
is devoid of purpose and kindness and dignity? Or am I being nourished by the things I'm doing?
And that these things can all, through the cascade you just described, effectively become
sources of toxins.
Yes, absolutely. You hit it on the head. Absolutely. And I think that that expansive
view is so important for us to think about because we get so sort of fixated in Western
culture on the toxins in our water, in our food. And again, those are all really
important. But here's the thing. You can be eating the, quote, cleanest, most organic,
pesticide-free diet in the world, and you'll still be sick if you don't fix the relationships that
you have in your life, if you don't feel a sense of purpose and connection to other people.
Those things will affect your health. And so the focus
on just the food that you're eating without thinking about relationships and career and
purpose and kindness and connection, you're going to miss something. You're going to have health
issues. And I completely, I'm on board with that too, which, you know, as we move further into
life also, and it sounds like part of what you're arguing is that like over time, this will accumulate and really affect
how you age. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And so I think that that's so important as we step
into those wisdom years to really consider what do I want this period of life to look like?
And even for people who are in, you know, their twenties and thirties, they should be thinking
about this also, you know, the earlier you start, the better off you're going to be
because you're going to have those processes just, you know, going sort of, you know,
humming along smoothly. I would encourage everybody who's even younger to really think
about this because it does affect your health in the future. But especially for those of us who are,
you know, sort of stepping into this next
phase or next era of life, these are important things to think about. It's really important.
Beyond thinking about them in the context of toxins, what can we start thinking about on
the doing side here? Before I get to that, let me just talk about the longevity switches and removing toxins is one of those, right? There are five third is to move that prana because we need to
move that prana around. We can't just add it. Got to move it, cycle it through so that we're moving
it through the energy body. We're moving it through the physical body. The fourth is to
sync with nature. We know about circadian medicine and how important that is. And then the fifth
is to feed or nourish the system. Some of what we were talking about
with connection, community, purpose.
And so there's those five longevity switches.
And so the doing part becomes,
well, what can I do to switch those switches on?
That's the way I like to think about it
and to even talk about it with people
because I find that when people understand the why and how these simple practices we do every day
are related to switching the longevity switch on they're like oh i'm gonna do that and we'll
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So before we go to the how to switch some of them on, then I do want to spend a little bit
more time understanding what we talked about with like one of them, but you use the second one was
adding prana. Yeah. Anyone who's taken a yoga class in the last
10 years has heard the word prana and probably had no idea what it meant or worn the clothing
brand. And you describe it as, and I've heard it described as life force. Again, in the name of
trying to speak to the broadest number of people here. Talk to me more about what you actually mean
by this. The most important sources of prana are the air, the sun, and water. Now we know from a
Western standpoint that those are all really important for our health, right? We need water.
We're mostly made of water. We need light and sunlight for many reasons, you know,
including circadian rhythm, which controls everything. And we need air. We have to breathe
it, right? Those are all sources of prana that are so important. They're not just life force energy.
They're actually components of things that we need to function and to live. So there is the connection, right? So if
you sort of have a hard time thinking about prana and energy, you can think about it as these
elements that we just need to live. That's how I would bridge the gap there.
I mean, it's interesting. When I think about it, that's sort of like,
so there's an energy within us that we derive, at least in part, from energy or from the natural environment around us. At the same time, we are also bioelectrical beings. There's a little measurable current that moves through us. Do you equate or do you make any sort of overlay there between the Eastern notion of prana and the little electrical fields that move through
our body. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think the electrical fields are sort of the scientific way
of explaining life force energy that we can't see. And I think that they're actually one in the same.
I mean, Einstein said energy is not created or destroyed, right?
And he's talking about a mathematical equation, but it's actually about energy that we're talking
about from a prana standpoint, from the life force energy. They're one in the same thing.
It's just how do you think about it? See, again, this is where the words sometimes get in the way
because the way we use it in Western.
It's like we just want to lock it down.
We're like, just give me the rational, scientific, like granular description so I can just like put it in my head.
And it's like some things actually aren't that simplifiable.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, when you think about it, the Earth has a resonance called the Schumann resonance, as it was called, this frequency of the earth.
And they found that these people just went a little bananas.
They really started to have health issues because they were not connected to the heartbeat of the earth.
They then took a speaker and put it into that bunker with the frequency and everyone's health issues resolved. We quite literally are connected to the energy of the universe and it impacts our health. So again, it's not always easy to understand how these equate, but they do. You also described one of the switches, now that we have a little bit more
understanding around prana, as moving prana, like this is another switch. Talk to me a little bit
more about this notion of actually taking this feel, this life force, this energy, and being
able to intentionally move it. So the idea here is that energy is the blueprint for the physical body,
according to Ayurveda and even yoga. So the energetic body is a blueprint. In Ayurveda
and even yoga, we believe, and even in Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine,
we believe that when there's a blockage of energy flow, there will be issues. So you'll have symptoms, illness, chronic disease,
depending again on how big the blockage is, how long it's been there. Has it created blockages
in other areas of the body? That's why, you know, we have things like acupuncture and marma therapy.
These are all things to help with unblocking energy blocks. When we're talking about moving
prana, it's exactly that. It's to increase the flow of
that energy through the body so that we can get rid of those blockages so that we can resolve the
symptoms and then we have better health. So that's where that idea of moving prana comes from. Now,
again, we can equate that to something very simple to understand from a Western standpoint,
which is just move the breath.
When we breathe, if we breathe better and we consciously breathe, we are going to really
help to increase the flow of that oxygen for all the physiological reasons.
Our cells need oxygen to live, but we're also moving energy through the body and we're
decreasing the blockages. So it's sort of like we're doing two things at once. So the breath is
really a way to understand prana, to understand how to move energy through the body. And along
those same lines, I would imagine that physical movement is also one of these other ways.
I wonder, maybe you can clarify something.
I remember years ago reading some research on the lymphatic system,
which is one of the core systems in the body that helps really sort of cleanse a lot and also move around.
It's critical on immune function. But unlike the respiratory system, which has a pump in the lungs,
unlike the cardiac or respiratory system, which has a pump in the lungs, unlike the cardiac or respiratory system,
which has a pump in the heart, it was my understanding that the lymphatic system,
which is really critical to move things around through, actually doesn't have a designated pump.
Right.
And that things like physical movement and breath are actually the pump.
Exactly.
So it sounds like this is sort of like another overlay there.
Right. It's another way to get rid of toxins, right? The lymphatic system is the way that we
get rid of stuff that we don't need. Again, when you are moving, when you're walking,
when you're doing yoga, when you're swimming, when you're doing any kind of movement, dancing,
any of those things are going to help. They basically are squeezing the muscles, which is helping to move the lymph because they're all connected. They're
all in the same area. It acts as a pump to move that lymph through the system and get rid of
toxins. Yeah. Sort of like you're flipping a couple of switches all at once. Exactly.
So one of them is also what you described as syncing with nature. And on the one hand, I can see probably folks saying, well, of course I can go for a walk.
I can be around nature.
I can be around trees.
I can put plants in.
But there's something bigger that you describe here, which I thought was interesting, which is also syncing with the rhythms, the rhythms and the micro and macro rhythms of nature.
Yeah.
This goes to circadian medicine. 2017, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was given to
a group of researchers that discovered the mechanisms of the circadian clock. And so we
know that living with the cycle of nature on a daily basis, let's just start there,
with the path of the sun through the sky,
is absolutely connected to our internal body clocks, our circadian rhythm. Why is that important?
Well, because it actually connects to all of our hormonal control. The two big pieces,
the two big sort of characters in that story are melatonin and cortisol. Melatonin is our sleep hormone,
helps us go to sleep. Cortisol wakes us up. Those two hormones have a downstream effect on all of the hormones in the body. When you have a dysregulation of that system, of the release
of those two hormones, you're going to have problems. Light is actually one of the primary controls of
those two hormones. When the brain senses that there's decreased light, it says, oh, nighttime's
coming. Daytime's over. Nighttime's over. I got to get ready to sleep. It'll start increasing
melatonin to help us go to sleep. And then the flip side is true in the morning. As our brain
starts to sense that there's more light, it says, oh, it's daytime. Let's turn off the melatonin and let's increase the cortisol.
When we live in harmony with that path of the sun, we wake up when the day is breaking,
when the sun is waking up, and we are awake during the daytime when the sun is awake,
and then we go to sleep when the sun is going to sleep, we are in harmony
with nature. We're living in harmony with that micro daily cycle of nature. At a macro level,
when we start to live in harmony with the seasons of nature through seasonal eating,
seasonal living, again, we're harmonizing with the cycles of nature. We're going to have better
health. Like why we go inside and stay indoors in a warm area when it's cold outside, right?
We're living in harmony. We're not just sitting outside in the cold weather and not protected,
you know, wearing, you know, warm clothes or, right? These are all things that we've known to do
over centuries as human beings. We just know how to live with nature. The problem is, is in our modern life, in our modern world, there is so much technology that can help us not live in harmony with nature. And that's where the problems start.
So if you were to look at the technology that is most disruptive to our ability to live with nature right now, what would you point to?
Computers. I think it's these computers. I mean, me and you are talking over a computer, but it's the blue light from these little phones that we carry everywhere with us and read on tablets and work all day on a computer. So it's not only the blue light, but it's also sitting
still and not moving, right? Moving the lymph, moving the prana. It's the neck position that
we're in when we're looking at our phones, right? These are all, I feel like it's so much a part of
this story with our computers. I don't remember. I mean, me and you are pretty close in age.
When we were growing up, we didn't have all this stuff. I feel like we were so much healthier for so many reasons,
you know, emotionally from social media and all these things, but we didn't have laptops. I mean,
I remember typing my college applications on a typewriter and having correctioning, right?
It was very different. I feel like we had so many health issues because of the technology that we have. It is so interesting, right? We have this incredible technology that
allows us to flatten the world and connect with each other on one level and do so much and
accomplish so much and learn so much and have these incredible breakthroughs, sometimes in
medicine. And at the same time, they are absolutely disconnecting us from so much of
the natural rhythms that humanity spent thousands and thousands of years developing wellness
supported by. And now the pace of change, we're not keeping up with it. And that's just a Western
overlay. Then if you zoom out to the Ayurvedic overlay, we're talking about thousands of years.
Living in harmony with the rhythms of nature is just so important to overall well-being.
When we talk about the final switch that you described, which is this idea of feeding the system, which feels like it's also the embodiment of everything that we've been talking about
to a certain extent.
And then we reflect on all five of
these switches. How can we start to wrap our head around? Because it can feel overwhelming.
For sure.
So how can we start to wrap our head around? Okay, how do we start to step into this? How do we start
to take little actions? Like what are the biggest levers that will flip these switches? Given that
I'm not going to blow up my life right now, how can I start to step into to
take action on what we're talking about here in a way where I feel like it's actually going
to make a meaningful difference?
Yeah.
So there's a couple of things that come to mind.
The first is to remember that you want to start with a quick win, what I call a quick win. So start
where it's easy. We have this weird obsession in our Western culture of doing things that are
really hard or making everything hard. We feel like we have to overhaul everything in our life
all at once for it to make a difference. So that's just not true. So start with something small,
like you said, and start with a quick win. What's going to
be easiest for you to incorporate into your life, to link to something else that you're doing? So
that would be the first thing I would say. The second thing to remember is that when you actually
go through all of these practices and kind of read through everything, you're going to realize that
every single practice, and I go through, you know, 15 or 18 different practices
in the book, they switch on every lover. So you really can't go wrong, okay? They're all going to
switch on all five lovers in some way. So don't worry about picking the perfect one. That would
be the second thing I would say. And the third thing I would say is give yourself some grace.
Do the best you can on a daily basis.
Yes, these are important things to do every day.
Consistency is key, but also give yourself some grace. And if one is sort of not feeling really well or you're not able to sort of connect with it, switch to something else.
That's okay.
Just start somewhere and make adjustments as you go.
So the three things that I would say that you could really start with.
The first one is to fast overnight.
Simply do not eat when you should be sleeping or when the sun is sleeping.
So when it's dark outside, don't be eating.
Have your last meal, you know, as early as you can, seven o'clock, six o'clock, something
like that, at least two or three hours before bed.
And then don't eat for 12 hours.
So if you stop eating at seven o'clock,
don't eat until seven o'clock in the morning.
Really simple.
Why is that so important?
It's because nighttime is when we can kickstart autophagy.
It's when our body can clean up.
It's a cleanup time.
It's not a time to eat more food.
It's for us to sort of repair and get rid of toxins.
Also, fasting is the best stimulator of autophagy.
It actually kickstarts that process.
Autophagy is this process we have, natural process in the body, that basically cleans
up all that old junky stuff that we were talking
about at the beginning of the conversation. Old cellular parts, debris, cleans it up, gets rid of
it so that we can have less inflammation and increased cellular repair. That's what autophagy
does. So when we fast overnight, what we're doing is we're kick-starting that autophagy
every single night.
So that's the first thing I would say.
Just don't eat at nighttime.
Easy.
The second one is to, in the morning, as close to the time that you wake up, try and get
outside and get some natural sunlight into your eyes.
So that means no sunglasses, not through a window.
You're not looking directly at the sun, but you're in natural sunlight.
Why is that important?
We talked about circadian rhythm.
Your brain will sense that light and say, oh, it's daytime.
Let me reset my circadian clock, right?
Increase the cortisol.
So again, when you do this every single morning, you're resetting that circadian clock on a
daily basis.
And that has all those downstream
effects. That's the second thing I would say. Really simple and has, I mean, again, these are
things that are going to switch on all five longevity switches. And the third is kind of a
twofer. Meditate and breathe. Why are those important? It's because it shifts you from a sympathetic stress state, stressor state, into a parasympathetic
or relaxed state.
And that is important, again, because we know that stress and a stress response is connected
to pretty much every chronic illness that we have.
It is one of the biggest factors that causes physiological aging. So if we can learn to modulate our stress
response and continually go in and out of stress and relaxation, we're actually going to support
our longevity. So something as simple as meditating for three minutes, do the dishes and focus on the
warm water, go for a walk, go for a run, sit and just breathe and drink your coffee. Any of those things
can be meditative. It's just basically creating a point of focus that then takes you inward.
That's what meditation is, right? And we know that that has all the effects in our brain of
neuroplasticity. It helps to reroute old patterns, right? All of these things
that we know are really good for us and also ships us into that relaxed state. And then if we can
breathe, as you said, we all tend to breathe just up here from the neck up. We need to breathe into
our bellies and we need to extend our exhale to be longer than our inhale. And that will put us into a relaxation response.
So again, that it's so important.
And those are simple things you can do any time of the day.
You don't have to go into this like fancy breath work.
Just remember to make your exhale longer than your inhale.
No, I love that.
I also love the three sort of setup pieces of guidance, especially the third one, which
is give yourself some grace because some folks will hear this and they'll be like, okay, I'm going to do it. I'm doing the three sort of setup pieces of guidance, especially the third one, which is give yourself some grace
because some folks will hear this
and they'll be like,
okay, I'm going to do it.
I'm doing the three things.
I'm going to not eat for like 12 hours,
like when the sun goes down,
then I'm going to get a little bit of sunshine
in the morning.
Then I'm going to do meditation
while I'm folding my laundry.
And then I'm going to just slow my breath
for a little bit.
And then they get a weekend
and then they'll fly somewhere
and they'll miss a day
or they'll miss a weekend.
And they'll come back like, oh, I blew it. I'm so frustrated. I'm not like, okay, like I've messed myself up. Now I'm causing myself harm, which then if I'm reading it right, actually becomes potentially like a form of toxin because now you're actually triggering your sympathetic nervous system to kick in and say like, like, not okay. So the notion of just like, you're a human
being, give yourself grace. Like the standard here is not perfection. It's just like, do the
best you can. Exactly. And then forgive your humanity along the way. Yeah. Just be kind to
yourself. You know, we're so hard on ourselves about everything and it creates more stress.
I often think about all these, you know, wearable technology pieces, you know, the rings and
the watches and all these things that are supposed to help us, right, monitor our health,
make better choices.
But I do find that they can cause a lot of anxiety for this exact reason of like feeling
that you're not perfect if you don't get the perfect number of hours of sleep or the perfect
reading on your CGM, your continuous glucose monitor or whatever it is. So many people get so anxious because they're like,
oh my God, I'm doing these wrong things. And so I feel like it's all a balance of like
using this information and even thinking about the things that we've talked about on this podcast
episode or in my book, but sort of taking it with a sort of, okay, these are things that can be
helpful to me. If I approach it with this kindness and love towards myself of like, all right, this
is good information. I'm going to try my best and then we'll see what happens, right? I love that.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I've asked you this question
in the past, but it was years back now and you've been on a journey since then. So in
this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
To live a good life is to be connected to yourself, connected to others, connected to
something larger than yourself. I don't think I could have gotten through the breast cancer healing journey
that I went through without really realizing how important connection is for health and well-being.
And so, yeah, to live a good life is to be connected. Thank you. Thank you.
Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we
had with Karen Waldron about embracing the grace of age. You'll find a link to Karen's episode in
the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox
and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter,
Crafted Air Theme Music, and special thanks to Shelley Adele for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow
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Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.
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Mayday, mayday.
We've been compromised.
The pilot's a hitman.
I knew you were going to be fun.
On January 24th.
Tell me how to fly this thing.
Mark Wahlberg.
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You're going to die.
Don't shoot him, we need him.
Y'all need a pilot.
Flight Risk.