Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How a Simple Mindset Shift Can Reduce the Risk of Heart Disease and Improve Overall Health | Dr. Tara Narula

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

A smarter way to think about disease prevention. Dr. Tara Narula is a board-certified cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan and Chief Medical Correspondent for ABC News. Her new book is The Healing Power of Resilience: A New Prescription for Health and Well-Being. In this episode we talk about: What resilience really is, why most of us already have it, and how it can be strengthened The overlooked link between mental health, physical health, and recovery from illness Why mindset and acceptance matter as much as medical treatment when facing health challenges How resilience applies to major life changes, trauma, and chronic disease. Practical psychological tools for working with anxiety, fear, and repetitive thought patterns Why flexible thinking matters How to adapt when life doesn't go according to plan How beliefs, mindset, and the mind–body connection shape stress, healing, and resilience Why movement, sleep, and facing fear are essential ingredients in building real resilience How reframing identity can help people move forward after illness, trauma, or loss Why connection, love, and small acts of kindness are powerful  and underused medicine How hope, faith, and purpose shape resilience, healing, and long-term health Related Episodes: Dan's top 10 takeaways from the science of behavior change: How To Actually Keep Your New Year's Resolutions | Dan Solo Episode   Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel   To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris Thanks to our sponsor:  Cozy Earth:   Head to cozyearth.com and use code Harris for up to 20% off.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, everybody. How we doing? Speaking as a lifelong hypochondriac, I found this conversation to be extremely helpful. I don't know if this is true for you, but I spent a lot of time dreaming up horrible health scenarios and then marinating and anxiety. But I learned a ton in this interview about how one of the most effective things you can do to protect yourself from heart disease and other. other health conditions, is to shift your mindset, specifically to shift your mindset toward resilience. I'll let my guest today provide a detailed definition of that term resilience. She's also going to provide a detailed cookbook for training in resilience. Said guest is Dr. Tara Nerula.

She's a board certified cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She's also the chief medical correspondent for my alma mater ABC News. She's got a new book called The Healing Power of Resilience. In this conversation, we talk about what resilience really is, why most of us already have it, and how it can be strengthened, and the overlooked link between mental health, physical health, and recovery from illness, why mindset matters as much as medical treatment when you're facing health challenges, how resilience applies to major life changes, trauma, and chronic disease, practical, psychological tools for working with anxiety, and repetitive thought patterns, why flexible thinking matters, how to adapt when life does not go

according to plan, how beliefs and the mind-body connection shape stress, healing, and resilience, why movement, sleep, and facing fear are essential ingredients in building resilience, and much more. One great way to practice resilience and reduce rumination is meditation. And I've got a new meditation app that you might want to check out. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up at danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. We're just getting started, but we've already got a large and growing library of guided meditations from the world's greatest teachers.

We also do weekly live meditation and Q&A sessions where you can get your questions answered and meditate in the carpool lane with a bunch of other meditators. Also, the app has a bunch of community features so you can meet your fellow meditators. Dan Harris.com, join the party. Okay, we'll get started with Dr. Tara Nerula right after this. Right before I recorded this ad, I was in my closet looking around for what I was going to wear tomorrow. I've got a family lunch, and I was a little disappointed to see that my favorite pair of pants, literally my favorite pair of pants for two years now, they're unavailable. I think they're still in the laundry.

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clearly in the news, we report all the time on stories of people overcoming some sort of difficult life event or tragedy, whether it is a natural disaster like a hurricane or a school shooting or a personal issue. And it just fascinated me about what is it that makes someone able to kind of come through that and continue on with their life? And then in the same token, I was seeing that in my patients. I have patients who survive heart attacks and are living with heart failure and strokes and still have an attitude of being able to kind of proceed with their life and move forward and advance and have a wonderful quality of life despite having faced a very difficult situation. So, you know, when I was actually approached by Simon and Schuster in 2020

about writing a book, they asked me, you know, what do you want to write about? And I said, I want to write about resilience. And it was something that I had actually brought to see. EBS when I was there as well as a topic that I was interested in and had done a few pieces there in terms of reporting on the science of resilience. So it's something that's really just fascinated me as a human being myself and my own life and my family members, my friends, and then, as I said, in my patients and the stories I was seeing on the news. A lot of us think that we're going to crumble and fall apart when something bad happens. And one of the biggest things I learned in my initial reporting on resilience was when I interviewed the psychologist who studied

resilience and they said the majority of us, 70, 80 percent of us are innately resilient, meaning we are not going to develop PTSD if something bad happens to us. That was really eye-opening for me. And I felt like that's something that I wish everybody knew, you know, that we're actually so much stronger than we even know. And I think that's a huge win to just have that knowledge inside you that, okay, if something bad happens, I am hardwired essentially, evolutionarily, genetically, biologically, to be able to get through this event and not fall apart. So that was really the first thing I really wanted to get out there. But then the second is that this is a skill that you can build. And I think that also was eye-opening to me that it's not just set in stone. There are

tools and tips and science there from the world of psychology that can allow all of us to be able to become more resilient. And what a great thing that is to know I just have to build this skill, just like I would build a muscle. So the next time something happens, I can actually face whatever that is even better and even stronger than I was when I initially faced something difficult. We're going to get into how to build that skill

that's going to take up the bulk of our time. But just staying at a high level for a second, it seems like one of your insights and maybe critiques is that in the medical community, doctors are really focused on the diagnosis, what medicines, what interventions are going to be required, and not so much on the mental health of the patient. And that's especially stupid, given that our mental health and our physical health are not divisible. That's exactly right. That is the crux of why I really framed a lot of this

book around the medical world. I wanted this book to be applicable to anyone who's facing any sort of challenge in their life. But Dan, I think where I really see it coming into play is also in the medical field. And as you mentioned, you know, I'm a cardiologist. I see patients four and a half days a week. And we talk a lot about, okay, we're going to send you for this test and I'm going to give you aspirin and this cholesterol medicine and we're going to do this procedure to open up your arteries. And we focus so much on these prescriptions around interventions and medications. And we so often forget about the mind-body connection. And I ask my patients, every single one of them, every time I see them, how is your mental health? What is your stress level? Because we know, even in the world of

cardiology, that that is a risk factor. If your mental health is not a great place, if you are under stress, that is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And cardiology, I would say, has been a little bit at the forefront of at least guiding the way towards other fields, recognizing that mind-body connection. But even in my field of cardiology, we don't. do a great job asking about it, and we certainly don't do a great job in terms of scaffolding patients with that kind of care. And, you know, my patients are often surprised when I, number one, ask about it, but number two, say, I think you should see a therapist. I wish that we had psychology built more into the framework of how we treat patients because it is so important for them to

not only heal from what's happened, but to prevent and so much of diseases prevention as well. I have, and I'm sure you share this, I have a lot of empathy for physicians. They're working within a system that's largely broken that doesn't provide them with a lot of time to create meaningful connections with their patients. And yet, this approach of just focusing on the sort of technical medical aspect without taking into account the psychological aspects, which are, as we keep saying, are indivisible from our physical health. It's like going to a, knife fight with a spoon and one arm tied behind your back. It's just like you're just missing a huge part of the flywheel of human flourishing. Huge, huge part. And, you know, like I said, it's not even about prevention of disease, which of course is really the future of medicine. How do we prevent? But it is so much about the healing process. And I think that was the other big thing that became apparent to me is that I would send a patient, for example, for valve surgery or a stent, and they would come back to see me afterwards. And when I would walk in the room and say,

are you. The first thing they would say to me is, you know, when am I going to feel like myself again? I'm so afraid. I'm so fearful. I am so overwhelmed by what has happened. I don't know how to move forward. And it just became so glaringly obvious that the stress and the impact of a medical diagnosis or a treatment is on par with any other stressful event that we have in life. And again, like, this is an opportunity for us to intervene. And that's where I hope this book will come into place to say, you know, yes, this has happened to you, but you can still thrive. And here's how, because when my patients would look at me with that sense of fear and almost paralyzed, it's hard as a doctor. You want to be able to help someone through that. And there's like no

guidebook right now to how to do that. And how am I going to get someone to take their medicines and start exercising and eating healthy when they're just overwhelmed by the mental impact of what has just happened to them? And we just don't recognize that being told you have breast cancer or you had a stroke or you have liver failure is a traumatic event. One last high level question here before we get into your very practical tips. How are we defining, and I think you make the case for redefining resilience? I think everybody has their own definition, and that's definitely part of what I came across as I was doing research for this book and talking to different psychologists.

And I don't think you're going to find a universal answer. And for me, it was really this concept of when something happens to you, you are never, ever going to be yourself again. That is what I started to tell my patients. You are not going to be the person that you were before this event happened to you. But you can still be a version of you that can enjoy life. And at the end of the day, that was what this was about for me. It's about quality of life and enjoyment of life. And how do I take who I was, who I am now, and be able to move forward? So it is this, idea of sort of bouncing forward from what has happened to you, not reclaiming who you were, but taking what's happened and literally still being able to suck all the joy out of life that you can despite whatever challenge you faced. Because that's what people care about, Dan. That's what they care about. They want to be able to still be happy, even if something has changed. Yeah. So it's not snapping back to exactly what you were. It is, as you say in the book,

It's about being able to work skillfully with the non-negotiable truth of change. Correct. And still find meaning in life and purpose and joy and hope and love and all of those things that make life worth living. Yeah, I mean, this is where things in my view, and I'm going to get a little weird and Buddhistsy on you, this is the poignancy of being alive that most of us overlook because we're programmed for denial. life seems like a solid movie. I look the same as I did in the mirror yesterday. If I don't, that's an emergency and I got to change it. But we are not these solid nuggets moving unchangingly through time.

We're more like a river, a process that unfolds over time. And happiness, flourishing, calm all depends on our ability to live with this flux in some sort of a quantumist way. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And that's why in the book, I use the example of Michelangelo, sort of freeing the angel from the marble. You know, we are a work in progress. There is something always being chiseled out and created that's new, but something really amazing and beautiful if you can look at it that way. Yes. Okay. So in the book, you've got these eight ingredients for resilience. And we'll see how many of them we can get through, given the time we have allotted here. But I'll aim to get through all of them. The first is acceptance. What do you mean by acceptance and how are you drawing the line between that and resignation? Yeah. Again, when we were sort of figuring out the framework for the book, there are different psychologists that have different sort of tools or recipes. And I think for me, number one in the list had to be acceptance, meaning you can't accomplish any of the other things on your path towards resilience if you first don't accept what has happened to you.

For me, Dan, I, like everyone else, faced my own challenges in life. And my memory of learning acceptance goes back to medical school, which I talk about in the book when I lost vision and part of my eye. And no one knew why. I was very scared. I was in the middle of my training. I was, like, thinking I'm never going to be able to be a doctor. And my whole life is over.

And literally, like I said, my patients are I was paralyzed, almost paralyzed with fear. My mother, who's amazing, sent me a little card in the mail, and on the card, it had the serenity prayer, which basically very quickly says, you know, God grant me the serenity, accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. And she said, why are you wasting all your time worrying about something that might never happen? Why don't you just enjoy every day? And if it happens, you'll deal with it. And if it doesn't, then you haven't wasted any time. And literally it was that one card, that one conversation that allowed me to say, okay, I can't take back that I've lost vision in my eye. I can't change that.

I can't change the fact that I might lose my whole eyesight next month or next year and my whole life might change. But for now, I'm going to accept that this has happened so that I can continue to finish medical school and graduate and go on to the next step. So this whole thing became very clear to me when I was faced with my own health challenge. that's why I made it really step one in this process because you literally cannot face your fears and exercise and find love if you can't just say this has happened to me, bad stuff happens, life is going to throw stuff out you, and I have to accept it in order to be able to move forward. I bump up against this a lot in my work, which is that I personally hate cliches and yet they are so fucking true all the time. And like the serenity prayer is a great example of that. You know, it's knit onto throw pillows and therefore, to me, a little bit annoying. And yet it is incredibly wise.

Yes. And I will say on top of that, as wise and honestly, as obvious as it is when stated skillfully as the serenity prayer does, it's hard to do. I have hosted this podcast for 10 years. I live in this world of imbibing, drinking out of the fire hose of this wisdom. And yet I still worry about shit I can't control all the time. So did that one conversation with your mother really do it for you? Or do you have to remind yourself over and over? Yeah, I mean, it's work.

Like everything else in life, something doesn't change overnight. And it's a process. It's a process of rewiring your brain. I mean, that's where therapy for a lot of people comes in, right? you don't suddenly make a change by one session in therapy. It's a pattern and a, you know, that pathway that you're continuing to kind of hammer down over and over again. So no, it was not as simple as it was, okay, she sent me the card and all of a sudden I was on the right path. But that was so eye-opening for me so that every time I started to kind of go in that direction

of worry and fear, I would think about it. Then the more time that would go on and nothing happened, I said, okay, I'm a little farther away from this event and nothing's happened. I feel a little more comfortable. And that's something that I tell my patients too, which is, you know, time, it's very helpful because if you can just put one foot in front of the other, the farther way you get from the event, it never is going to go away. But that kind of intensity of the worry and the fear will diminish a little bit. So yeah, I mean, it's hard work to change your mindset. Just like it's hard work to eat healthy and to wake up every morning and exercise when you don't want to and to pursue your dreams and your career. I mean, nothing comes easy. But just knowing that

that's like the first key step is really valuable because you can keep going back to it. And I think having role models for people who have done that, and that was another thing that was important to me when that happened to me was, I don't know how I stumbled upon it, but I came across Richard Cohen's book, Blindsided. Richard was Meredith Fierrez's husband, prolific journalist himself. And he talked about his life and what he had faced with multiple sclerosis diagnosis and colon cancer and hit after hit and how he was able to still have this beautiful life with his wife and children and work in a career that he loved. And so for me, again, it was reading my mom's

letter and reading Richard's words and having time pass and realizing I can accept that this has happened even if I don't know if it's going to happen again. You recommend some modalities for helping us work with anxious or self-pitying thoughts. And those include both mindfulness which we talk about a lot on this show and ACT or Act acceptance and commitment therapy. I'm not going to ask you unless you really want to to give an entire explanation of what mindfulness and act are. But are there specific tools from either or both modalities that you think would be useful for the listener? I think everybody's different, Dan. I mean, I think for everyone, different types of therapies work differently.

And it depends on who you are and what resonates with you. I will say I was first introduced to mindfulness and meditation through Jeff Warren and using his meditations on the call map and then introduced it to my husband who is a type A surgeon and said I could never meditate. And I said, yes, you can. Listen to Jeff. He's relatable and it's quick and you can do it. And we would do it together.

And so for me, I discovered that through him. And I loved it. That was helpful. I've been in therapy. I have family members that have been in therapy. cognitive behavioral therapy is extremely powerful because, you know, like ECT, it really provides you with tangible ways to take your thoughts and kind of work with them. I'm just a huge advocate for any technique that works for you as a person. And for some people, it may be, you know,

DBT or ACT or CBT, you know, there may be different modalities, maybe all those modalities, but it is a personal thing. But I encourage people to be open to trying them because what might work for you might not work for someone else. And I know what worked for me, which was definitely CBT over, for example, talk therapy. So. And so CBT cognitive behavioral therapy helps you kind of notice when you're stuck in recurring repetitive thought patterns and to break out of them. Correct. Yeah. I had never done therapy until my 30s. And now, you know, I'm a huge advocate. That's what I said. I'm a huge advocate for. I think everybody should be in therapy because they think we all can work on our mental health and we all need help. And we all need help.

based on our own life experiences and our upbringing and everything that's happened to us along the way. Just for those who've never heard of Jeff Warren, very close friend of mine and the amazing meditation teacher who's done incredible work over on the Calm app, he's also on my app and in my life in a deep way. And so I hear from people all the time who found Jeff either through my app or through Com and just what a positive impact he's had. So go Jeff. Coming up, Dr. Terran Nerula talks about why flexible thinking matters, how to adapt when life doesn't go according to plan, and why movement, sleep, and facing your fears are essential ingredients when it comes to building real resilience. Okay, so we've talked about the first of your eight ingredients for developing the skill of resilience.

The first is acceptance. The second picks right up on this notion of thinking, and it is flexible thinking or embracing flexible thinking. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So in the book, another incredible woman that I interviewed, both for CBS and her work ended up in the book, is Lucy Hohn, who is a resilience researcher herself. She lost her own daughter, tragically, in a car accident. And so the woman who studied resilience had to implement it in her own life. And in one of my interviews with her, she talked about this idea of basically having a goal in your mind, having a goal post, and then thinking when something happens, okay, I'm going to pick up the goalpost and move it somewhere else.

And I just thought that analogy was so simple to understand that we can be going down a path of where we think we're headed and something happens. And that doesn't mean that you're derailed. It means that whatever your vision was, you have to have that flexible thinking to say, I'm going to move my goals and put it somewhere else. And so for her life's path changed when her daughter Abby died, but she realized she still had her husband and her sons and she had to be there for them and create a new life without her daughter, Abby. So the goalpost moved. That's like the easiest way for me to explain that concept of flexible thinking. It's the ability to rework your vision of what you thought your life was going to be and create a new vision for where your life is going to be. I believe in the chapter on flexible thinking, you also talk about

harnessing the placebo effect. So we talk a lot about that in medicine. How is it that if I tell somebody, here's a pill that's made of sugar, and here's a real medicine, and I give them the sugar bill, they actually might do better. And there really is a science there that just our beliefs that we're getting something that is actually helping us can actually help us. And that is, again, speaks to what you spoke about earlier, which is that mind-body connection, which is extremely powerful. And that, Dan, goes back to what we talk about in the very first chapter, which is the stress response. And so, you know, when something happens to you, you have this whole pathway from your amygdala to your hypothalamus to your adrenal glands and adrenaline and noraphenephyr and

cortisol and all these stress hormones and so the converse is that if we are able to change that and rewire we can change a stress response to a resilient response and so you have to imagine if you can release all those stress hormones in response to stress in that pathway if you have a placebo effect might you be able to have the beliefs and release for example anti-inflammatory lower your stress hormones or reduce them or decrease inflammation. So the mind body works both ways. And I think you can't just say it's bad. You have to understand that if the mind body is working in a negative way, you can also harness it to work for you in a positive way simply by believing that something you are doing is going to make you better. For example, if people in the wake of a difficult

diagnosis or the loss of a loved one or the worried well who are in there's no catastrophe in their immediate past but they're spending a lot of time wearing down their resiliency by being mired in useless rumination they can go do a form of therapy or go do meditation and just having the belief evidence-based belief because there's evidence for all of these that this is going to help me, it kind of kicks in, it brings online parts of our nervous system that are helpful in healing. That's right. I mean, there is an incredible healing effect just by the belief that you can get better, that you will get better. It's just so helpful to be reminded of that. Yes, it's very easy to forget. We just don't do a great job teaching people about the power of the mind-body

connection. To me, that was really so important with this book, was linking the roles of psychology with clinical medicine because no one's really doing that. There's no bridge. They need to be connected in order for us to really heal our patients and to help people. Why are they so separate? It's kind of ridiculous. So yes, the mind-body connection works both ways. Another aspect of flexible thinking is denying future certainty. So like not having this fixed view that whatever diagnosis you've just gotten or whatever's just happened to you, is a guaranteed shit show. Exactly.

It's denial used in a positive way, for example. And we talk about actually Richard Cohen in that section. And again, as a physician, I see this all the time. You know, people who have 10 stents in their heart and they look at me and they say, oh, this means I'm going to die tomorrow. I'm only going to be able to live till 60. And I tell them, that's not true. I have patients who live till their 90s.

You know, this is not something that is a death sentence for you. There's not a necessary outcome from this. I have patients who you never think would live more than one or two years because they have end-stage heart failure and they live five, six, seven years. Nobody but God, if you believe, has insight into what the future holds for you. And I think anyone who says otherwise in medicine or elsewhere is not correct, frankly. I'm close friends with this great legendary meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, who has this riff that I've heard her go on many times about certainty and that most of us subconsciously or consciously, embrace certainty because it's a bulwark against a chaotic world. But it's a fool's errand because actually certainty makes you feel worse. It's curiosity. It's openness. It's optimism as long as it's

harmful optimism. Like I, for example, believing that I'm going to join the NBA, probably not good optimism. But like, it's curiosity and openness that feels much more soothing than fixed views about how things are going to go. That's absolutely right. And I think for so many people who struggle with anxiety, for example, it is this fear that things should be a certain way. And if they're not that way, the whole world's going to fall apart. And it's really recognizing that, no, there is no certainty, that things can fall apart

and I'm going to survive. It's a totally different mindset. It's an acceptance that something may or may not happen. We don't know. And I can live in that state of uncertainty. I think that is really the hallmark of how so many people learn. to deal with anxiety is learning to accept the uncertainty. Third ingredient in Dr. Noreal's resilience toolkit is get fit.

Now, we've all heard this, but the way you put it is really interesting. You say exercise is medicine. It is, just like food is medicine. There is just so much power in the movement of our bodies, getting our heart rate up, our muscles working, how we approach fitness, whether that's cardio or muscle or yoga or Pilates or whatever it is, that is medicine. That helps us, we've seen it in a million ways in research, you know, that exercise helps with cardiovascular disease and cancer and our bone health and dementia risk. The list goes on and on. But it is hard for people to, again, I think, recognize how powerful

exercise is just like it's hard for many people to understand how powerful nutrition is. They think, how could food really be that powerful in terms of changing the course of what might happen to us physically, but it is. And it's the same with exercise. What are hope molecules? Hope molecules. Hope molecules, molecules that are released, that basically endorphins sort of when we exercise that allow us to feel better, like endorphins essentially. It's really cool to know that just getting your body moving can have all of these kind of magical physiological and psychological effects as well as eating well. And in this part of the book, you also talk about prioritizing quality sleep. Yes. And yet, we all know this and most of us don't do it. Yeah. What do you tell

your patients about actually doing this stuff that is super obvious, but undersubscribed? The first is obviously educating people about how important it is. For example, sleep. I think we all take it for granted. And I was just having this conversation with someone the other day. I mean, I ask all my patients about sleep and exercise and diet and stress and mental health. And for many of them, all those other things are in line. And it's 90% of people tell me, like, the sleep is where they fall short. And it's the easiest thing to sacrifice. I'll just stamp later and do this. And we don't recognize that that time where we're out, so to speak, there's so much happening inside our body that is beneficial. So for a lot of people, it's just understanding the biology. And we don't, again,

do a great job teaching this in terms of how antioxidants and the foods we eat or the endorphins we release with exercise or how we're able to process blood sugar better and exercise or with sleep the fact that you're clearing toxins out of your brain. We don't explain the biology. And I think people, if they understood the biology more, it would make sense and they might be more willing to do it, number one. But number two, I think it has to be a priority and it's hard work. Just like we said, you have to say, I am going to make it a priority to try to get my seven to nine hours of sleep every night. If that means I'm going to not get something done that I would have get done, you have to make it a priority. I get up every morning at five, try to go to the gym.

I hate it, but that's the only time I can do it. You have to make it a priority to read the nutrition labels. Like no one wants to sit there and read the labels, but how are you going to know how much fats in your food? So all of this is effort, effort, effort, once you get in the habit, once you get in the routine, it becomes easier like everything else. The more ingrained, the more you do it, the more it becomes part of your routine. Okay, I'm going to, This is my daily time to exercise. This is how I'm going to eat. I know I should go to sleep, so I'm going to go to sleep.

But it has to become routine and habit, and you have to make it a pattern. To answer your question, I think it's understanding the real biology behind why it works, but number two, really making a concentrated effort to do these things in your life, even when it's difficult. It's much easier to take a pill. It takes two seconds. To pick up your water bottle and swallow a pill. Or have surgery.

I mean, it's not easy to have surgery, but you go in an hour, you come out, something's missing. It's much harder to do these lifestyle choices that require mental effort and sacrifice. You're sacrificing maybe time with your family or time doing something else to go to sleep. You're sacrificing eating a pizza for eating something. You're giving up something for the goal of something that you maybe can't see that's happening internally. And that's also very hard, I think, too. One thing that's been really helpful for me, and I've thought a lot about habit formation. and it is, as I often say, diabolically difficult.

And we've done plenty of episodes about how to adopt healthy habits. In fact, I'll drop a link in the show notes to a solo episode I did where I kind of laid out all the best tips from the researchers who look into how we can adopt these healthy habits despite all of the internal and external obstacles. But the one thing that for me has been very helpful, and this is an evidence-based assertion I'm making here, but is self-compassion, which sounds a little dope. be a little soft, but it is one way to think of it is just the ability to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend, to have, to establish and develop an inner coaching relationship. So the kind of supportive voice that says, yeah, it's 10 o'clock in night. I would like to stay up and watch three more episodes of Parks and Rec, but I will feel so much better if I go to sleep, the Parks and Rec will be there tomorrow. You're better off going to bed. And then when you

inevitably screw up because I screw up all the time. I often think that there needs to be some word in English for the special shame that we feel for making the mistake that we thought we had figured out and that we always make and that we know better than to make and yet continue to do a million times over. We need a special word for that like compound fuck up that is like so common for most of us. But what I have found, I don't have the word for the thing, but what I have found as a remedy for the thing is just talking to myself like, you know, this is fun. Millions of people are having this same shame spiral right now. It's all good. You know, you get it. This is like a golf game with a million molligans. You can start over as much as you want. That's exactly right. And I think that's what I was going to say when you said self-compassion is I think so many people beat themselves up when they thought they were going to exercise three days a week and they only did it two days a week. Or, they went out and had a dinner that they didn't, and then it sort of throws them off completely. And they're like, oh my God, it just ruined everything. And then you start to kind of spiral. And we're human. We're allowed to fall here and there. And then we just pick up the pieces and move on. You know, one misstep here and there is not going to change the trajectory, right? So it's the overall,

overarching road that you're on. If you're off a little bit, you veer back on. You veer off, you veer back on. But you're going in the same direction. And I think, yeah, if we have a little bit more compassion for the fact that we're human beings and we're not always going to get a right and do it the way we should, but that's okay, as long as we have the vision of where we want to be and we're trying to stay on that path. Ingredient number four is face your fear. Say more about that. Yeah. This kind of speaks to what I said when, you know, people are really paralyzed in that moment of something happening like I was when I lost my vision. And it's this idea of how can I even begin to approach life when I'm so afraid that something might happen again.

And, you know, this is what I've heard from my patients who've had, for example, a mini stroke or a stroke. And then it's like, well, what if tomorrow I have another stroke? Or what if I am out somewhere and I can't suddenly move or what? The fear is like overwhelming that whatever it was that happened to you is going to happen again, that health anxiety. And I see it with people who've had cancer. Whatever the medical issue is, you name it, people are afraid. And in order to. And in order to. to be able to kind of heal and move forward, we have to face those fears. And I think one of the best ways to face it is through therapy. I think that's a very helpful way to actually tackle that number four of facing your fears because I think working with someone who can help you identify why you feel that way, how you can approach when you start to feel afraid, what you can do in those moments, reworking your vision of what has happened to you and how processing it. I think therapy is immensely important for that number four kind of tool. But in order to kind of progress, we can't run away from what's happened to us. We can't let it overwhelm us

and consume us. We have to deal with it to be able to then move forward. So therapy can be great for validating the trauma, which as you write about is really important. You have to acknowledge what's happened in order to, you want to be seen. And that's a huge part of the healing. And then we have to start facing it, and therapy can be helpful for this as well. You use this term in terms of when it comes to the facing of the fear, stepwise exposure. Yeah. Obviously in therapy, that's used a lot, for example, exposure therapy. So you're afraid of heights. And so maybe you go and you walk up one flight one day and you kind of get used to that. And then over time, you're able to walk up two flights and walk up three flights. Like, this is a proven technique in therapy for people with anxieties,

in particular and phobias. And it's the same concept with health anxieties or something that's happened to you. And I use the example in the book of my brother-in-law, actually, who had a heart issue and ended up with a stent and a heart attack. And he was an outdoorsman. He loved being in the wilderness, in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, without anyone around except the animals. And after this happened to him, he was afraid to go hunting again,

to go out into the wild. And it was sad for all of us who knew him. to see that medical issue take away something from him that was so incredibly important to him and his lifestyle and who he was. And so we had a lot of conversations on the phone. He lives in upstate New York where, you know, we talked about, okay, time is going to be helpful in terms of your healing and you take baby steps. So don't go out into Alaska, you know, to go on a hunting trip tomorrow. Maybe go for a drive into the state park a little bit with your dog and walk around. And then maybe in a few months, go on a trip somewhere else more locally. So if you need to be near the hospital in Syracuse, you're close enough that you can get there. And little by little, this is what he did.

And little by little, he realized that even though he had a stent and he had survived the widowmaker heart attack, he could still have a life that he loved and enjoyed. He could still go hunting and he could still be out in the middle of nowhere. You know, that was like a great example of kind of that stepwise approach to little by little building back into your life, things that you like to do, and not allowing the fear to kind of overtake you. Coming up, Tara talks about how reframing your identity can help you move forward after illness, trauma, or loss, why connection, love, and little acts of kindness are powerful and

underused medicine, and how hope, faith, and purpose shape, resilience, healing, and long-term health. Now that we're firmly entrenched in a new year, you may want. want to get more firmly entrenched in your at-home routines. And doing that can be aided and abetted by elevating your at-home decor, elevating your space, which brings me to our sponsor today, Wayfair. From bedding and mattresses to storage solutions for every room in the house, Wayfair is your one-stop shop.

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Right before I recorded this ad, I was in my closet looking around for what I was going to wear tomorrow. I've got a family lunch, and I was a little disappointed to see that my favorite pair of pants, literally my favorite pair of pants for two years now, they're unavailable. I think they're still in the laundry. You know who makes those pants? Quince. Quince has the everyday essentials that I love with quality that lasts, organic cotton sweaters, polos for every occasion, lighter jackets that keep you warm in the changing season, the list goes on. Quince works directly with top factories and cuts out the middleman so you're not paying for brand markup, just quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good

season after season. Hence the fact that my black pants from Quince are still my favorite pair of pants after all these years. I've also got a bunch of sweaters from them and socks and underwear. I got a lot of Quince stuff. I like their stuff a lot. Here's the other thing. They only partner with factories that meet rigorous standards for both craftsmanship and ethical productions. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada 2. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash happier. Free shipping and 365-day returns, Quince.com slash happier. Another aspect you write about when it comes to facing fears is cognitive reframing.

And you talk about an exercise called the identity pie. Yes. So in the process of researching the book, I spoke to a lot of psychologists and one in particular, who works at Mount Sinai. He's wonderful Dr. DiPierro. I thought this was an amazing example of really recognizing we are not just what has happened to us. We are so much bigger. And he used the example of drawing almost like a pie and cutting it into pieces, you know. And so in one piece, you are the wife or the husband.

And another piece, you are the journalist. And another piece, you are the sister. And maybe you're an athlete. And there's a part of that pie that is the survivor of whatever has happened to you. But that is not the whole identity of who you are. And I thought that was such a great way to help people understand that that is not what defines you. That is like a part of who you are. And actually, this just came up, I don't know if you just read Tatiana Schlossberg's article on her cancer. She in the article

said exactly that in one line, that I am not my cancer. This is not who I am. This does not define me. And I think it's very easy for us to allow something that's happened to us to overtake us and that becomes who you are. But I am not just a cancer patient. I am a wife and a mother and this and that and all of these other amazing things. So again, it's taking a step out and looking at yourself from almost like floating out of your body and from a bigger perspective. And it's very easy for us to kind of be stuck in the weeds of what has happened. And that's why I love that identity pie example. I like it too. Ingredient number five, connections. Not a thing most doctors prescribe, although they should. Yeah. So one of my close friends

and my former resident at the Brigham was Vivek Murthy, who has been extremely helpful in terms of reframing how we think about loneliness and connection in this country through his writing and his speaking about it. You know, we are finally beginning to recognize that how involved we are with other human beings actually has an impact on our physical and our mental health and that it is important for us to cultivate that. And so I do talk to my patients. a lot of them are older and maybe have lost a spouse or a living alone about, you know, what is it that you love to do? You have a hobby. Maybe you could join a group where you could do that hobby or a walking club or if you have a religion that you are part of something with your church.

Obviously now with Facebook, there's all kinds of groups people can join on social media. People who are survivors. So, for example, in my world of cardiology, the Go Red for Women campaign has been incredibly helpful for women who are survivors of heart disease to see other survivors, to talk to them, to share their stories. So there is so much power in whatever those connections are, whether it's a big group, whether it's people who have the same interests of you, or whether it's one connection, you know, one person, just one friendship. But that is healing. And that's really important. And we are not meant to be singular, alone creatures in our own

little world. And so, yes, I think it should be prescribed to everyone to cultivate that, to foster that. And again, in whatever way, feels right for you, depending on who you are and what you love. But it is important. To be Harvard-centric for a second, you've mentioned the Brigham and a women's hospital, which is a Harvard hospital. And Boston, where my dad happened to work for 30 years, who's the head of radiation oncology there for a long time. Oh, my gosh. Well, that's where I did my residency. You might have seen him shuffling through the hallway. He's not there anymore. Anyway, also at Harvard, there's the very famous Harvard study for adult development, which has found that the number one variable for longevity is not how much you're sleeping, how good your exercise game is,

it's how healthy your relationships are. And so- Isn't that amazing? Yeah, and it's increasingly amazing when you consider that it's not a thing most doctors recommend to people or even inquire about. Yeah. Well, we talk a lot about things in my exam room that probably a lot of people don't talk about, but- Good for you. That's great. Literally good for you. So along those lines on connections in terms of the how to because this is a thing people often hear, oh, we're social animals, we need to have healthy relationships, but how do I do that? You actually do talk about the how. There's a phrase you use. I'd be curious to hear you unpack it. Find, remind, and bind. Yeah, finding things that you love, reminding yourself of that and then finding others who you can

connect with in that way. That is, it's sort of like re-looking at yourself, who am I, what do I love, what is my identity, reminding yourself of those things, and then finding others that you can cultivate those connections with that may have similarities with you. That's why I said, whether you're an artist, you know, maybe an art club, or you're a writer, or you like to read, you know, go to library. So in order to build those connections, sometimes it just starts with sort of understanding what it is that you enjoy, what it is that makes you tick, and then seeking that out in others who will share that with you. Another thing you recommend, which is much less ambitious,

much less takes less, you know, get up and go, but is incredibly impactful, is just to engage in small acts of kindness. Just say a little bit more about that, if you don't mind. Yeah, well, this just came up actually this weekend. My mother was in town for Thanksgiving, and she said to my daughters, you know, do you ever do little acts of kindness around the holidays?

days. And my daughters said, you know, well, what do you mean, grandma? And my mom explained, you know, sometimes when I go to the grocery store, if someone's in front of me in line, I will pay for their groceries. Or, you know, if I see someone that needs help, I will help them through the door or little things that are totally unexpected. And she said to my daughters, and we said to her, well, that's so great that you do that. And she said, it's great for everyone else, but it's great for me too. She said, it makes me feel good on the inside to do these things for other people. And I think, that is so much a part of the small acts of kindness. Obviously, you're extending yourself to someone else and helping them, but it does release those same sort of feel-good hormones in you to be compassionate and caring in that way and make those small little connections. It speaks to, I think many of us have this view conscious or subconscious that there is a bright line between self-interest and altruism. It's just like trying to divide physical health and mental health. You can't do it. And so altruism is good for you. It is exactly. That's exactly the point. So it is good for someone else, but it's actually also good for you.

Okay. Chapter 6 or recommendation number six, it picks right up on connections. It's about love, seeking out love. I'm curious, how are you delineating between love and connection? Yeah, it's different. That was important for me to put as a separate chapter. in the book because connections are, as we said, it's a little more distant. It's a friend that you go for a walk with, someone that's at your church, someone that you play mahjong with or talk to on the phone. It elicits a different reaction than love, which is that much more intimate connection. And I think for me, the chapter on love wasn't just also about love with someone else. It was about love for yourself. And that was very important too. Again, in order to do,

anything, we have to be able to love ourselves. We're not going to be able to accomplish or be resilient if we are hard on ourselves. So it's giving ourselves that grace and that self-compassion that you just talked about. So it is both self-love and it is also seeking out that very close love that I have seen, again, help patients heal. That's why for me, these chapters were born out of what I see every single day in the patients that I treat. And I see the husbands and wives that come in together to support each other and how they've helped each other through whatever the diagnosis is, or the mother and the daughter who come to every appointment together, or the sisters. I mean, there is no question that having that connection that is deeper

allows people to heal, but also to prevent, you know, there's a reason why they say married couples live longer. There is no doubt that being so intertwined in that way helps you take those steps to prevent like we're going to exercise together, we're going to eat healthy together, or we're going to take our medicine together, or I'm going to go to your doctor's appointment with you that I know you don't want to go to. But then when something does happen that's difficult, having that person by your side to be there with you, no doubt helps people recover and heal. I don't have the data to hand here, and I may be remembering this incorrectly. Aren't the health benefits of marriage disproportionately conferred upon men?

I don't know. I don't think so, but maybe. It just feels right. Whether it's right or not, it feels right. I will say that it is more often the wives sort of bringing their husbands to the appointments than it was the other way around. So it may very well be. A side note, what is going on with mahjong? You mentioned mahjong. Like, I remember my Jewish grandmother playing mahjong at Polynesian Gardens, her condo in plantation Florida. 50 years ago, and now Majong has taken my wife's social circle by storm. Yeah.

It's having a renaissance, rebirth. Okay, so moving away from Majong, though, there's one little thing I want to ask you about in the realm of love. It's oxytocin, which many of the listeners may have heard of, but just give us a primer or primer. I never know how to pronounce that word on oxytocin. So this is sort of what we call the bonding. or the love hormone.

So, for example, it's released when we classically think about it when mothers breastfeed and you release oxytocin when you're breastfeeding your baby. And clearly it's that moment of bonding. But it's also released when we are intimate with someone, you know, when we are physically close to someone. And so, again, showing that there are chemical reactions in our body and hormones and things that happen simply by touching people and being close to the. them physically and affectionately, and that can be a very powerful thing. So, you know, it's, again,

important to explain that the biological underpinnings of a lot of what we just don't recognize is even there, but oxytocin is the love hormone, we call it. If my wife's mad at me, which is not an infrequent occurrence, can I get the oxytocin from the cats? You might. Okay, ingredient number seven, hope and faith. This is something else a lot of physicians sort of steer away from, but I actually feel very strongly about that we need to talk about in terms of helping our patients heal and be resilient. I give the example in the book of when I, again, was in medical school, I had an attending who was an oncologist, and she told all of us medical students, a story that stuck with me about seeing a patient who had end-stage cancer, but could have probably lived for,

at least another year or two, but a different doctor came in the room and in front of the patient and in front of all the residents who were rounding made a comment saying, you know, well, he failed this round of chemo. He's probably only going to live, you know, another few months. And she said, you know, it wasn't shortly after that conversation in front of the patient that the patient died. And she said to us as medical students, you know, it's very important that you never take hope away from a patient and how powerful hope can be. And I never forgot her words. And so I use them to this day. We talked about this with certainty and uncertainty. So when people say, you know, what does this mean? I've just had a defibrillator placed. I had a

cardiac arrest. You know, does this mean my life is over? The answer is always, we don't know. We're going to approach this day by day. We're going to do everything we can to help you through this, to help you quality of life. But no one can really predict. And I think that's the truth, because nobody can. And when we think we can, there is that, again, biological reaction. That is so powerful that literally by telling someone, this is it, something turns off inside. And so taking away hope is not a thing I think we should be doing in medicine or ever. And faith, sort of the counterpoint to that, I think we steer away from talking to our patients about their spirituality and their practices.

But for so many people, that is what keeps them going. And so there is a whole body of science and medicine around a spiritual history. So, for example, making sure we ask our patients, what is your faith and what do your practice? And patients surprisingly want to talk about this. They want you to understand this very huge chunk of their identity, as we talked about, and who they are, and how that plays into their life. And it does. It plays into how they are going to approach whether they want to have surgery or if they take their medicines or if they want to be resuscitated with chest compressions when they go into a cardiac rest or they want a defibrillate. So how do you take that out of how you're carrying someone when it's so intertwined.

for so many people in the choices that they make. And so, again, if you really want to understand the patient as a whole, the person as a whole, you have to understand what is important for them in terms of faith. And for some people, they don't have a strong spiritual faith. And that's fine, but that's important to know and understand. And in the same way for others, it is really what carries them through a lot of these challenging. And I've had so many patients tell me, you know, when they've been hit with, hit after hit, pancreatic cancer, and then they have this and they have that.

And I look at them and they say, it's my faith. And I see it. You know, they have their cross around their neck or whatever it is. We talk about that very openly in my exam rooms because I know how much it matters. I'm not even sick, but I feel like I would benefit from spending some time in your exam room. You're welcome to come. Everyone should get a cardiac screening. So you should come in for your cardiac screening, Dan.

Yeah, I may take you up on that. Okay, we've made it to the final of the eight ingredients. and that is purpose. Yes. So again, this kind of goes back to that goalpost movement, but when something's happened to you and you need to keep going and you want to keep going, having a purpose or having something that you are aiming for, that you're fighting for, that you're living for can become really valuable and helping you thrive.

And that is going to be different for every single person, what that purpose is. For a lot of people, when something has happened to them, their purpose becomes engaging in that particular thing that's happened to them. So, for example, in my reporting on gun violence as a public health issue, I interviewed parents who'd lost children to guns either died by suicide or Newtown Sandy Hook, another woman who I interviewed whose son was playing with a gun with another boy and the gun went off accidentally. And all three of these parents became involved in working to find solutions to ending gun violence

and understanding that it is part of how we need to approach public health, right? So that was their purpose. For other people, I interviewed another woman who had bipolar and was in and out of the mental health care system for years and misunderstood. And she wrote a book and now she's traveling across the country donating her book to raise awareness about bipolar and mental health and suicide. For my patients who have heart disease, many of them want to join the campaign for the American Heart Association to help others. So for everyone that's going to look different. But I think for so many people, that force that's like it's inside of you saying, I still have so much I need to do. I have a purpose here on this planet.

So I know this has happened to me. It's changed my trajectory. It scarred me in some way. But I am still going to keep going because this has now become meaning for me. And that's why it was really important for me to have that be the last part of the ingredients. Because I think it is like the vision of your future, where you are investing and where you're going and what's driving you. And there's some physiology here that people who have a clear sense of purpose, they experience less intense bodily responses to stress? Exactly. As we talked about kind of like there's the stress response that can cause negative reactions. And then by having purpose and, you know, practicing some of these other techniques we've talked about, you are turning, you're dialing down the inflammation. You're turning down the adrenaline response and the cortisol and all of that. So again, it works both ways. And that's what we have to start to understand. The same way that the stress can be.

be negative, we have the power in us to actually harness our body to do the opposite, whether it's releasing oxytocin, you know, or the whole molecules or any of these things inside of us, dialing down inflammation. That's in our power. And that's, I think, what's so, we talk a lot about this in cardiology, that 80% of cardiovascular disease is preventable by what you do in your life. We have so much power in our hands to help ourselves, to heal ourselves. We just have to know how to harness it and how to do it. Another aspect of purpose links back to one of the previous ingredients in the resilience toolkit of getting fit. Having purpose, as I understand it, can help you do these behaviors that are healthy but annoying.

For example, every time I can't believe I do this because I have long made fun of people who do prayer hands. But every time I get on the spin bike or sit in the sauna, which is really uncomfortable, I'll just make a little prayer hands. But yeah, I'm doing this so that I can be stronger and happier. That's right. So that I can make other people stronger and happier. That's right. That top spin helps me, you know, get on the bike or get in that ridiculously hot room. You're right.

And I will say like for a lot of my patients, a lot of their purpose revolves around family. And so for many of them, they will say to me, I want to do this because I want to walk my daughter down the aisle or I want to see my grandkids graduate from college. And so they find that drive to exercise and to eat well and to lose weight and to manage their stress and to sleep because they have a purpose. They want to see that happen in the future. And they know that that's how they're going to get there. So you're absolutely right. You use a phrase in this closing section of the book, give your gift away.

What does that mean? So actually, I have that sitting here. So this, you can't see it probably. But this is the quote sent to me by my patient, one of my patients. It's a quote that says the purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away. And so he is an artist, my patient, and he created a beautiful, he makes cards,

and he created one for me. And inside he gave me this and wrote a beautiful note. And I keep it on my desk always because I think, again, it speaks to that purpose, right? All of us, in my opinion, are here. because we have something to do. In my opinion, it's to learn to love ourselves and others. I think at the end of the day, that's what our purpose is. But hopefully it's to also leave our mark in terms of bettering the world.

And I think for each of us, that's in a different way. And so when we can recognize that we each have that gift that we need to give back, that becomes a driving force that allows us to be resilient despite whatever happens to us. So again, it is that kind of altruistic thing that we talked about. where you're giving your gift away, but it's also benefiting you. Dr. Naurula, before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and any other stuff that you're making that we should know about on social media or elsewhere? The book is the Healing Power of Resilience, and it's going to be published January 20th,

20, 26, and I am very excited to finally have this child be born. I've had two real ones, but this is the third one, so I'm excited for it to be out there. And I truly hope that, you know, this helps people through any challenge, Dan, that they have in their life, whether that's medical or other. And I also hope that it opens the eyes of those in the medical establishment to understanding that we should be creating resilience training programs for our patients and building them into how we practice medicine in every single medical school and hospital in this country, that the mind, body, psychology, physical has to be woven into how we help care for patients and how we help people heal. Amen. And you can also catch Dr. Nerula on this random obscure news network called ABC News. Oh, yeah, that. Yes, you can find me on ABC News, mostly on Good Morning America, and on social media at Dr. Tara Narula on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and X and, you know, all of the above. Tara, thank you. Great job. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dan, for the opportunity.

Thanks again to Dr. Tara Nerula. In the show notes, I'm going to drop a link to a solo episode I did where I laid out all the best tips from the researchers who look into how we can adopt healthy habits. It's kind of my master class on human behavior change. Everything I've learned whittled down. There's a link right there in a show notes if you want to check it out. I also am dropping a link to Dan Harris.com where you can get my new app, 10% with Dan Harris. free 14-day trial, lots of guided meditations, weekly live video meditation and Q&A sessions. You should join the party.

Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. We'll see.