The Dr. Hyman Show - 5 Steps To Destroy Negative Thoughts For Better Health

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens.   Our emotional health impacts our physical health, there is no way around it. Traumas and toxic beliefs are scary to unpack but when you do, you give yourself the freedom and opportunity for dynamic growth. In this episode, Dr. Hyman is joined by Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dr. Daniel Amen, Byron Katie, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and Lauren Zander. They explore how focusing on your emotional health as much as your physical health will have big payoffs for your wellness and happiness throughout life.   Since 2010, Dr. Joe Dispenza has partnered with scientists and universities to perform extensive research on the effects that meditation has on the brain and body. During his advanced retreats around the world, his team has gathered more than 8,000 brain scans and 4,000 heart-rate variability measurements in an attempt to correlate the effects that sustained elevated emotions and self-regulation have on heart and brain function, immune response, and overall mind-body health.   The Washington Post called Dr. Daniel Amen the most popular psychiatrist in America and Discover Magazine listed his brain imaging research as the top neuroscience story for 2015. He is a double board-certified psychiatrist and ten-time New York Times bestselling author.    Byron Katie's simple yet powerful process of self-inquiry, which she calls The Work, consists of four questions and the turnaround, which is a way of experiencing the opposite of what you believe. Her books include the bestselling Loving What Is, I Need Your Love—Is That True?, A Thousand Names for Joy, and A Mind at Home with Itself.   Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is regarded as one of the most influential medical doctors in the UK and wants to change how medicine will be practiced for years to come. His mission is to help 100 million people around the globe live better lives. He hosts the most listened to health podcast in the UK and Europe, Feel Better, Live More—which regularly tops the Apple Podcast charts and is listened to by over 2 million people every single month.   Lauren Handel Zander is the Co-Founder of Handel Group®, an executive life coaching company. Her coaching methodology, The Handel Method®, is taught in over 50 universities and institutes of learning around the world, including MIT, Stanford Graduate School of Business, NYU, and the New York City Public School System. Lauren is also the creator of Inner.U: Learn to Human BetterⓇ , the online coaching course that teaches the entirety of The Handel Method, which has been used by dozens of celebrities, CEOs, and entrepreneurs since 2004, and she is the author of Maybe It’s You, a no-nonsense, practical manual that helps readers figure out not just what they want out of life, but how to actually get there.   This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens.   Rupa Health is a place for Functional Medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.    Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my listeners 10 free travel packs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to take advantage of this great offer.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Can you teach your body emotionally what the future reality that you want to live in feels like before it happens? Nothing is true, humans. Nothing's fact over there. No one's stuck forever. Nothing's true. I just want to share with people that this is something that it will change your life. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health.

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This is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. Now, so many of my patients wait until they're sick to finally take care of their health. I've even had doctors, many doctors as patients, who just wait for their problems to get worse and worse and receive a diagnosis of a disease before they take any action. Well, that's not the path to health. We can live longer, healthier, happier lives if we just prevent the imbalances in our bodies in the first place. And nutrition is a key part of this. And many of us don't get the optimal amounts of nutrients through our diet alone, even a whole foods diet. And then

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simple glass of water that I can take anywhere. Right now you can get a free one-year supply of Athletic Greens Liquid Vitamin D and five free travel packs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen that's a-t-h-l-e-t-i-c greens g-r-e-e-n-s dot com slash hymen. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi this is Lauren Feehan this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Focusing on your emotional health as well as your physical health has big payoffs for your day-to-day wellness and happiness throughout life. On today's compilation episode, Dr. Hyman talks to Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dr. Daniel Amen, Byron Katie, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee,

and Lauren Zander about how toxic thoughts can impact your emotions and how to turn those thoughts around. Let's dive in. There's an unlearning process before the relearning process. There's a breaking a habit of the old self and a reinvention of a new self. You got to prune synaptic connections and self and a reinvention of a new self. You got to prune synaptic connections and they got to practice sprouting new ones. You got to unfire and unwire.

You got to refire and rewire. You got to deprogram and reprogram. You got to lose your mind and create a new one. And you have to unmemorize emotions that keep you connected to the same familiar past and then recondition the body to a new mind and do a new emotion. So then that process, if there's a formula to apply, let's just say, you sitting in your meditation, it means- Because it sounds good, right? But how do you get from here to there? I'm sure everybody's thinking and listening.

Yeah, of course. But everybody's done it. They've done it. They just haven't made it a habit. And so then if you're sitting in a meditation and you have something to do and your body starts going, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, and it's my ex-wife, it's my whatever. And you go like this to your body. Okay, okay. Now, listen, you settle down and you know exactly what to do and you tame the animal. You tell it to stay and relax it back into the present moment. What I want you to know, sit, that's a victory. That's a victory. And then if the body starts going, I got to get up, I got to check my cell phone, I got to go, I got a meeting, I'm busy. And

you notice that your body's habituated into the same predictable future and you settle your body back down into the present moment, now you're executing a will that's greater than those unconscious programs and that's a victory. And if you keep doing this over and over again, just like training an animal, the body's going to stay. It's going to surrender to a new mind. And when that occurs, there's a liberation of energy and the person relaxes into the present moment. That's the unknown. The familiar past is the known. The predictable future is the known.

The only one place left is the sweet spot of that generous present moment. Now let's get the person so familiar with their unconscious thoughts that when it comes, they don't respond to them. So aware of their habits and behaviors. So, so, so conscious of the emotions that they typically feel on a waking day, they would never go unconscious to that emotion again. And you say to the person, hey, Mark, what thoughts do you want to fire and wire in your brain? And with intention and attention, if we showed you how to do that, nerve cells that fire

together, wire together, just take a little repetition, a little presence. You start installing the hardware, keep doing it. It's going to become a software program. What does that mean? That's going to be the new voice in your head that says, Mark, you can do it. If you said, okay. I can teach my inner voice to speak a different language. Exactly. You can change. You can change this mind. But then you want to talk Portuguese because I think it's a nice sounding language. But it's a very sexy language. I think Portuguese is very sexy. But if you said then, OK, how am I going to be with my co-workers? How am I going to be with my employees? How am I going to be with my ex-wife? What would greatness look like today?

And you sat down and closed your eyes and you rehearsed in your mind how you were going to be in every one of those situations. If you study the research in neuroscience, mental rehearsal installs neurological hardware in your brain to look like you already did it. Yeah, that's what I think about my serve before I serve and I do it better. Of course, because you produce that mind. So if you keep doing that, you install hardware, practice it and rehearse it, it becomes a software program, which means you start behaving that way. Now, here's the challenging part. Can you teach your body emotionally what the future reality that you want to live in feels like before it happens? Now, this is very difficult if you've been conditioned into believing something in your outer world has to

change to make away, take away the emptiness or the lack to make you feel differently. This is saying actually feel the emotion before it happens and don't wait for the experience to occur. Teach your body what the feeling will be before it occurs. If the environment signals the gene and the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion, you're signaling the gene ahead of the environment and genes make proteins and proteins are responsible

for the structure and function of your body and the expression of proteins is the expression of life so teach the body emotionally to self-regulate to believe it's living in an environment that's flourishing that's wonderful keep practicing it and it'll become familiar to you and the process then creates a new identity and it's not difficult once you understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. And the more you combine all those different branches of science and make it in a simple way to understand, if people understand the what and the why, the how gets easier because you can assign meaning to what you're doing and it becomes instrumental. So get a group of people, a thousand people, 1500 people, 2000 people into a room, teach them that information, whether they're coming for wealth or health, a relationship,

a new career, a mystical experience, get them all together and teach them and measure what can take place in a one week period of time. And I assure you that's more than 75% of the people that go through and go all in and retreat from their lives and remove the same stimulation from their environment and not be in the same conditions and teach them that information and give them numerous opportunities to apply it and numerous opportunities to get beyond themselves. All you need is that first person that stands on the stage and says, hey, I walked in here with Parkinson's disease. I have no idea what happened, but I'm not trembling anymore. And boy, that last thing, just something clicked for me.

And the person in the audience was watching the four minute mile right in front of them and going, wow, that guy looks like he's not a vegan. He doesn't look like he's particularly in shape, but his Parkinson's went away. And wow, I mean, if he could do it, I could do it. And somebody else changes their belief and now that's a footprint in consciousness get enough people doing that by the end of the week you're going to see things we've seen blind people seeing deaf people hearing not once not twice really seen people with strokes for 10 years lift their arms up again we've seen people step out of wheelchairs people on crutches drop their crutches mean, you see the body literally recalibrates to a new mind and they're not intentionally trying to do anything.

They're just becoming somebody else. But the process of overcoming is the process of becoming. And if you teach people that formula and you get just one or two people doing it, it's just going to become an infection and it's going to wellness and it's going to spread just like disease. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. I think health is contagious actually. So Joe, a lot of people listening are going, yeah, this all makes sense. And, and I'm certainly having these thoughts, but, but taming the mind is hard and and a lot of us feel things and have really strong emotions and we think that that they have a existence of their own um but but really the thoughts that create emotions right it's thoughts that create the feelings because we have a belief we have perspective we have a narrative and it can happen in a nanosecond right it can happen

in a nanosecond but is that how it works, as you said at the beginning of the show, there's never a time where your body is an influence in your mind and there's never a time where your mind is influencing your body. You have a body in your mind and a mind mapped in your brain and it's the same. So, to a person then who's become so happy being unhappy that that familiar feeling in them is something that they enjoy feeling because they don't know who they would be if they didn't feel that feeling. Okay. A lot of sick people see that. Without their illness is their identity. And why?

Why? Because the suffering, and I'm not saying this is for everybody, but that person gets attention from it, gets people to visit, gets whatever they need. But in a sense, they also have relationships where they love to share the same emotions. And if you share the same experiences, you share the same emotions. And if you share the same experiences, you share the same emotions. So Mark, let's get on the phone and let's complain for the next 30 minutes about how miserable life is. And then I'll try to top you and you try to top me. And we're using each other to reaffirm some type of conditioning, right? So that becomes the identity. So then, so then let's just say you, decide to stop blaming start stop complaining stop making excuses stop feeling sorry for yourself stop talking trash stop commiserating you just say

i'm gonna quit that in the first hour you do really well but the problem is the body's saying hey mark um this is where you're going in an hour yeah it's not where you call joe and you start commiserating. So what does the body say? The body starts influencing the mind and it starts calling up circuits in the brain that are connected to that emotion that you've been using all along. So then you start thinking about all the reasons you're unhappy. Now that thought leads to a choice. That choice leads to the same behavior.

The same behavior creates the same experience and the same behavior. The same behavior creates the same experience and the same experience produces the same feeling and the same emotion. And that same emotion starts to influence the very same thought. And now the person returns back to their same biology and the health condition will always be there because it's the environment that looks like it's signaling the gene. So then, but it's the emotion. So, so then if the person all of a sudden says, okay, I'm going to do my meditation and you do your meditation at 11 o'clock in the morning, and that's normally when you get on your, your, uh, emails and start judging people, it, your body's going to say you're out of schedule. So, so the process of change requires then not only addressing the mind, which is the thought, but also the emotion that's conditioned into the body.

And if you break it down for people, they'll be able to distinguish in the process of change. Oh, my God, like I'm fasting from breaking an addiction. You know, your body your body's craving just, I just got to suffer a little bit with somebody and it wants to suffer and you got to be able to work with it and not just to sit there and white knuckle it, to learn how to self-regulate, to learn how to make those changes with your eyes open. That's when it matters the most. You practice meditation with your eyes closed. You take your body out for a test drive during the day with your eyes open, and you work on staying conscious, right? I mean, the purpose of meditation is to get better at meditation, to get better at life, right?

Exactly. Exactly. Becoming more conscious. Exactly. Yeah. And so those four elements that you talked about a little bit. Can you work with kind of address that? Yeah, so it's really simple. So the first thing is that people had this very strong belief that there was some innate intelligence within them that was giving them life.

There's some energy, some force of life that made them more vitalistic and less mechanistic, whether it was spiritual, whatever they wanted to call it, that there was some power within them that they acknowledged that was giving them life. The second thing was they realized it was their own mismanagement of their thoughts and their actions and their emotions that created their health condition. They realized, I actually had a strong part in this. And they started taking responsibility and really started, they decided, I got to break the habit of being myself. Now, they really said, if I'm going to live the next part of my life with this health condition,

I don't want to live like that person any longer. If I only have six months to live, I don't want to live that way. So, they started becoming conscious of their unconscious self and so conscious that they didn't want to go unconscious. And then they started thinking, number three, if I actually had a new lease on life, if I actually could heal, if I actually could live another year, how would I live my life? Now, they didn't say I'm going to be the same person. They said, how do I want to think? How do I want to act? How do I want to feel? And exactly how I described, they went into an inward process, not even a meditation, just what do I want to tell myself? And let me repeat it. How do I want to live with my family? How do I want to eat dinner? What emotions do I want to feel? And they started changing their personality.

They started reinventing a new self. And then the last thing that they had in common is that they started noticing when they would close their eyes and do this, they lost track of space and time that they thought was like 15 minutes that went by or 20 minutes that went by. And in actuality, it was an hour and 20 minutes that went by. They had no sense of space and time in their inner process. And I was interested in demystifying the process because I wanted to see if we could teach that process that worked with sick people on other people. And it worked. So you're taking these ancient spiritual traditions and meditation and spiritual practices.

And you put a lot of structure and science behind it to help the average Westerner who's not familiar with those practices to actually access it, which is really an extraordinary gift. And I'd love to sort of have you talk about some of the practical things that people can do, like gratitude. You talk about how there's 1,200 chemicals released in the body from the practice of gratitude. And again, I'd be scared to know how many molecules come out with the practice of stress and complaining. I don't want to know that. You know what I mean. I don't want you to talk about the gratitude, the biology of gratitude. Yeah.

So I studied this extensively because we actually did an experiment. We took a group of people that came to our event, and we did all kinds of brain measurements on them, and then we put heart rate variability devices on them. And we asked them to trade emotions like fear or anger or resentment or impatience or frustration and stop feeling those feelings and just for a few times a day to feel gratitude. And we would talk them through it just for 15 minutes, 10 or 15 minutes just for a few times a day to feel gratitude. And we would talk them through it just for 15 minutes, 10 or 15 minutes, two, three times a day. At the end of four days, we were looking to measure if there were any significant changes in their immune regulation. And we found out that the body started producing 50% more of a chemical called IgA, immunoglobulin A, the body's natural antiviral, antibacterial, natural flu shot. And so, when you are receiving something favorable,

or you just receive something enjoyable, if something wonderful just happened to you, or something really amazing is happening to you, you feel grateful. So the emotional signature of gratitude is something amazing is happening to you or it just happened to you, right? So it's the ultimate state of receiving emotionally. So if you can teach a person to truly practice gratitude, there'll be significant changes in the way their heart thumps, the way it beats and what it starts to do to the brain. We've studied this thousands of times. So when you start feeling grateful, your heart starts beating in a rhythm that begins to influence or inform the brain that it's safe to create.

It's believing in that moment that it's safe to be out of survival. And practice that enough times, the body starts to regenerate. So we saw changes in immune regulation. We saw changes in gene expression. Why? Because the body's believing it's living in an environment where the person's dreams have already happened. Now, we only accept, believe, and surrender to thoughts that are equal to our emotional state. We never accept, believe, and surrender to thoughts that are not equal to our emotional state. And this is why affirmations don't work. You could say, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. And your body's going, no, you're not.

You're miserable. So the thought never makes it past the brainstem to the body. Teach a person to change from fear and break that conditioning and practice with enough times creating the same feeling of gratitude as automatically as they did with fear. It makes sense then that in a very short amount of time, you can see very significant changes in how the body regulates and how it functions. And the heart then starts to beat in this beautiful, beautiful, coherent state. And so we started looking to see if teaching people how to do that and sustaining it, if it made significant changes. And without a doubt, when we accept, believe, and surrender to the thoughts that are equal to the emotional state of gratitude, that information programs the autonomic nervous

system into a different destiny. So then teach a person how to be in a state of receivership and gratitude. They can program their brain and body a lot quicker than when they're feeling fear and anger, because you get the diagnosis, the moment you get the diagnosis, you notice a change in your internal state, you're changed. And when you notice that change in your internal state, the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot. And that's called a long term memory. So the doctor says, you have six months to live, you have this condition, this is what happened. And all that information is going in because it's equal to the emotion of fear. So

and get the person out of that state, because that's a state of survival, and you're losing energy in the body. And in gratitude, you're you're regenerating energy. So get the person to a state of gratitude, and then teach them how to program their brain and body, then you start seeing changes in their autonomic nervous system. Yeah. It's like the biggest pharmacy is between our ears, right? And that you're teaching people how to access that. The challenge I see for people, and I'm thinking about this very selfishly and personally, is, okay, I meditate, but is that enough? If I meditate 20 minutes twice a day and I do sort of a mantra meditation, I meditate, but is that enough? If I meditate 20 minutes twice a day

and I do sort of a mantra meditation, I still have this relationship to my thoughts that I struggle with. So is there other practices that you teach that help people to really break that pattern? Because it's not just about sitting. It's something else that has to happen as well, right? Sure, sure.

And well, first of all, absolutely. Meditation is not just to meditate and then get up and return back to the same person, flipping people off on the freeway and judging your partner. That's going back to the old self. Meditation is to prime the brain and body into a new state of being, right? And then maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day. You got to be able to practice it with your eyes open that no condition, no circumstance in your environment, no person, no thing, no craving in the body, no wrong choice. You got to be able to sustain that state. And if

you can, get ready because there's going to be changes in your outer world, that's the law. So when we started studying people that were healing in this work, that were diagnosed, a lot of them with immune mediated conditions, Mark. Like autoimmune diseases. Yeah. Autoimmune diseases from cancer to rheumatoid to everything in between. They noticed that when they started doing the meditations, they started, their well-being came back, but their blood values and their markers never changed. And it occurred to them, my God, I have a great meditation.

I feel amazing. But then when I get up, I return back to the same worrying person. Now I gotta step it up. I gotta make the changes with my eyes open. And when they started doing it with their eyes open, that's when we started seeing the blood values and everything changing. So in our retreats, you can sit as it and get really good at it. But then there's four types of meditation. There's a seated, there's a standing, there's a walking and there's a laying down. And so if you're going to become that person you want to become, you better be able to practice doing it with your eyes open. So we teach people, 1,000, 1,500 people on a beach or in a park. It's really cool to watch. Everybody get that, open their hearts, get in that elevated state and move into a new state of being.

And then let's open our eyes. And now let's practice walking with our eyes open as that person. No different than rehearsing for a play or rehearsing and becoming that person. And if you do it enough times and a person understands that if they could really, if I, how would I walk if I could heal my body in an hour? Who am I going to leave behind here? And who am I going to walk as? And a lot of people just hit it. And when they do, you see dramatic changes in their health because they're actually embodying the energy of their future. So we practice sitting,

sitting, we practice standing and walking, we practice laying down. We practice it always because we want the person to become that very person in one week. And if they do, our research shows there's dramatic, dramatic biological markers that change, not small amounts, like thousands. What are you seeing? What are you seeing? Wow. Oh, my God. Just everything from methylated DNA to changes in cytokines, the changes in immune markers to suppression of ATP and cancer cells

to down-regulating genes for Alzheimer's. And we just see dramatic changes in people's biology. And you mentioned gene expression changes too. Can you talk about genes? Because, you know, we don't really think about our thoughts changing our genes, right? Yeah. So, I mean, again, I mean, I'd like to simplify it for the average person, for us regular people. And it's really simple. I mean, your body's a protein producing machine and muscle cells make muscle proteins are called actin and myosin. Skin cells make skin proteins are called collagen and elastin. Stomach cells make stomach proteins are called enzymes. And every cell in your body, except red blood cells, makes proteins and proteins are responsible for structure, holding it together and functioning physiology, how we work. It's messengers, right? But in order for a cell to make a protein, a gene has to be regulated. So they used to say genes create disease. Well, you know this.

Less than 1% of the people on the planet are born with a genetic health condition. Everything else is lifestyle. It's behavior. It's stress. So, so, so then is it possible then that if you, if they, they say now with genes don't create disease, it's the environment that signals the gene that creates disease. Take two identical twins. You watch one age looks, you know, dies at 54. The other one lives to 83. They don't even look like the same person, share the same genome. Well, the environment was signaling the gene expression to make certain proteins, and the person develops a different condition because it's the environment that does that. But here's the

problem. But if the environment signals the gene, the outer environment of the cell is the inner environment of the body. And what is that? That's the emotions or chemical, physical, and emotional balance that we have to maintain. So if a person's just constantly living in fear, and even if the environment is wonderful and they're on vacation, and they keep remembering an event or anticipating a future,

and they're bringing up the emotion of anxiety and fear, it makes sense then that the person's signaling the gene outside of the outer environment because they're making the emotion in their inner environment, and there's no difference. And so if that happens, the constant effect by the hormones of stress downregulate genes and create disease. And if you can turn on that stress response just by thinking about your problems, then your thoughts are literally going to make you sick. Yeah. So if your thoughts can make you sick, can your thoughts make you well? And you cannot begin to see changes in a person's health until they stop regulating the same genes the same way. And they start upregulating new genes and downregulating old genes.

And if they do that, they start producing different enzymes and different chemicals and different hormones. And their body begins to scale in a different direction. How is it different from other forms of meditation or practice that people are doing? Gosh, to be really honest, Mark, I don't even know what anybody else is doing. We're so immersed in the stuff that we're doing. Basically, what I am, I'm a pragmatist. You want to talk about quantum superimposition, to me, if it has no effect on my life, I'm not interested. But if it has an if there's a practical application, I'm, I'm interested in the practical application. So we look at we've who you I was gonna say, we have over 13,000 brain

scans. Now, we look at real time brain scans, I'm looking at your brain, in a one hour, an hour and 10 minute meditation. At certain moments, I'm watching what you're doing, if you can actually change your brainwaves. And if you can sustain those changes, and and, and'm watching what you're doing, if you can actually change your brainwaves and if you can sustain those changes. And can you do it again and make it a habit? Can you make it a skill? Can you repeat it enough times that you can do it more automatically? So I'm watching the words. We're watching the words that I'm saying.

I'm not studying any tradition, any ancient scriptures. I think that the moment you start talking religion or tradition or scriptures or spirituality, you're going to divide an audience. I think science creates community. And so what we do is we look, we've actually created, when you see a person move into love or gratitude, and you see what that does to the brain in an instant, it informs the brain to be creative. When you see that and you see this dance between the two, and you turn around and you look at that person and they got this big smile on their face, they're so in love with the moment, they don't

want it to end. And there's very strong biological changes. So we're looking at scans of hearts and brains. We're looking at collective scans of people just to see if we can demystify the process. I don't want to shut an audience off with a word. I want to create new words that are science-based. So the meditations that we teach all have meaning behind what we're doing because we've studied the scans and studied the effects. And it has certain intentions of why we're doing it,'ve studied the scans and studied the effects and it has certain intentions of why we're doing it whether we want to signal new genes whether we want to you know create more brain coherence more heart coherence we want to create coherence between the brain and the heart i mean what is it that we want to do so we have different meditations you know for different

intentions really so a number of years ago i realized if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it if it's headed to the dark place, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And bright minds is the mnemonic we came up with. And the B is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. It's also associated with addictions. It's associated with depression. it's associated with depression it's

associated with adhd and schizophrenia so you want to do everything you can to protect your blood flow and 40 of 40 year old men have erectile dysfunction do you know what that means 40 of 40 year old men have brain dysfunction because if you have blood flow problems anywhere it likely means they're everywhere right and so you know you have blood flow problems if you get a scan because spect is a blood flow study uh if you have hypertension if you have any form of heart disease if you don't exercise um so it just gives you some very simple things to do. The R is retirement and aging. When you stop learning, your brain starts dying. And I turned 65 this year and I've seen thousands of 60, 70, 80 year old brains. And the news is not good. It's sort of like you know as we age our skin begins to fall off our face the same process happens in the brain unless you're serious about it right i mean i have your scan 10 years apart

and as you got older your brain got better yeah well how exciting is that that you're not me happy i'm very competitive with the brain the brain you have um the eye is inflammation that i mean both you and i know it's a disaster inflammation is a disaster for every organ in your body it's true including your brain and so people can measure their omega-3 index before you just go on to what you can do, it's important to underscore this. We know from the research today that depression is inflammation in the brain, that autism is inflammation in the brain, that ADD and dementia are inflammation in the brain. And if that's true, then the question is, what's causing the inflammation?

How do you stop it? And how do you fix it? So tell us about that. So if you have a low omega-3 index, taking omega-3s can be really helpful. You have to get your gut right. Because having this thing, and I'm a psychiatrist. I didn't know one thing about leaky gut until I read the Ultramind solution. And then I'm like, oh, you have to get your gut right.

Because if your gut's not right your brain's not right you're likely to have things get inside your body that have no business in your body which causes an autoimmune or an inflammatory response so food really matters sugar is pro-inflammatory and foods that quickly turn to sugar bread pasta potatoes rice you want to you often say eat them like a condiment right uh that last recreational drug recreational they're not even a condiment sugar and is a recreational drug it's it's it's fine but you say the four white powders? Yeah, the deadly white powders. The deadly white powder, white flour. White sugar, cocaine, and too much salt.

So diet really does matter. And our processed foods are loaded with pro-inflammatory omega-6s. So corn and soy, we're overloaded with them i mean not that they're evil but they're not the right choice as primary staples in our diet um but also things like infections and mold and we're gonna get there so the eye is inflammation the And so get your gut right. Omega-3 fatty acids. The G is genetics. And the big lie with genetics is I have obesity in my family, and that's why I'm fat. Well, the fact is I have obesity in my family.

I have a brother and sister who are 150 pounds overweight, but I'm not. Why? You're wearing a skinny suit. Because I know the behaviors that make it likely to be so so genes are not a death sentence what they should be is a wake-up call and tell you what you're vulnerable to so that you get serious about prevention i mean you're in better shape now than when i met you 15 years ago. You lost more weight, you get more muscle, and you're 15 years older. And I work on it, right? But it's because I love what I do. And quite frankly, I have four children. I never want to live with them.

I love them. I want to be independent for as long as possible. I don't want them being worried about taking away my driver's license. That means I have to take care of my body because my body will then take care of my brain. But that causes you to think ahead, which is, of course, a brain function. The H is a national epidemic that nobody knows. It's head trauma. Head trauma is a major cause of psychiatric illness,

and nobody knows about it because psychiatrists, psychologists, marriage and family counselors, they never look at the brain. And so that fall out of a second-story window that caused you to be angry and depressed, nobody's thinking about rehabilitating the damage that occurred. That's why you really shouldn't let your children hit soccer balls with their head, play tackle football. And if you've been in a car accident and then you got depressed,

somebody should look at your brain and then you should go about rehabilitating it. And that's what I did with the big NFL study. And we published a study. 80% of our players get better in as little as two months it's amazing by putting them on our bright minds program so i'm pretty excited about that the t is toxins and when i first started scanning people i mean it was really clear that marijuana alcohol cocaine methamphetamine heroin are bad for your brain. But then I would see these toxic scans of people who never use drugs. And I'm like, oh no. I had not one lecture on mold exposure

when I was a psychiatric resident or heavy mercury or mercury poisoning or lead exposure, none of that. And so we often find ourselves working up a toxic brain. And did you know 60% of the lipstick sold in the United States has lead in it? I didn't know. So I think that is the kiss of death. And so I know you know this app, Think Dirty. And when I downloaded it, you can scan all of your personal products. I threw out half of my bathroom

because it was basically toxic yeah the things like parabens and phthalates they're called hormone disruptors which we're going to get to in a second but you don't want whatever goes on your body goes in your body and affects your body so So you have to get rid of the toxins. And basically, it's decrease exposure and support the four organs of detoxification. Kidneys, drink more water. God, eat more fiber. Liver, stop drinking.

I'm just not a fan. I mean, we can talk about it. But it disrupts liver function. And sweat with exercise or take saunas. People who take the most saunas have the lowest incidence of Alzheimer's disease. So M is something I call mind storms. It's abnormal electrical activity in your brain. So if you have a hot spot in your temporal lobes or cold spot what we see it's

akin to seizure activity so sometimes anticonvulsants can really help a ketogenic diet has anticonvulsant yes properties there's this great book it's written in 1980 by um jack dreyfus who's the founder of the famous dreyfus mutualual Fund. And he said, a remarkable medicine has been overlooked. And it was Dilantin, which is an old anticonvulsant. He'd been going to see a psychiatrist forever. He said three days on Dilantin, he didn't need a psychiatrist anymore because it had balanced his brain.

And so the second I is immunity and infections. If you look at a map of the United States and you look at the highest incidence of schizophrenia, overlay the highest incidence of Lyme disease, they're identical. It's incredible. Anybody in the West or the Northeast or the Northern Midwest should be screened for Lyme if they have a psychotic disorder and just need to screen them for it. Because if they have it, treating it may actually treat their, quote, mental illness that is not mental. It's brain.

Treat the body, you treat the brain. Yeah. N is neurohormone deficiencies. D is diabesity. You know, as your blood sugar goes up and your weight goes up, your brain gets smaller, as we talked about. It's getting your weight right, your blood sugar right. And S is sleep. This is how you keep your brain healthy.

I think the whole idea of our beliefs and our thoughts and our emotions being things that you can unpack, right? Most of the times we're in this collapsed reality where we have a thought, you know, based on a belief that creates an emotion and it all happens in a nanosecond. And it's almost like what happened for you is that it's sort of slowed down so you could see, oh, this thinking may not be true,

but I believe it. And it's causing me to have all these horrible feelings and all this suffering and be miserable. And how do I break that cycle where I'm constantly believing the stupid thoughts that I have, making them real and putting meaning on things that are causing me so much pain. Yeah. It would be like if I have the thought, like I ran into an old friend, and she was in a hurry and sloughed me off, and my feelings were hurt. Okay. And now I'm thinking, what did I say?

What did I do? Why did she? And she this and she that and all of that going on. So what is the cause of my suffering? What I was thinking and believing in that situation on standing on the corner when she did not have time for me. So now people can do what I did. They can download on Byron Katie.com, they can download what I call a judge your neighbor worksheet. And there are six questions on that judge your neighbor worksheet.

So because the ego is always in the past or future. And since, since that situation is up for me, now, I look at the judge your neighbor worksheet, knowing that the cause of my suffering again is what i was thinking and believing then so there's six questions on the worksheet and i filled them in with what i was thinking and believing then i just answered the questions now i'm going to question what i was thinking and believing, because that was the cause of my suffering. And then as I question it, there are four questions, and then I invite people to flip them, to try them on, to see what is as true or truer for them in that situation. So the first question is, is it true she doesn't care about me?

Yeah, no, clearly not. Yeah. And so I meditate in it. You know, the work is just pure. It takes stillness. It's pure. It's purely a meditative process. It is contemplation. and if I can do it, anyone can do it. So is it true? Is the first question. Can I really know that it's true? So there's a combination of really two questions there. Is it true? Can I really know that it's true? She doesn't care about me. And then I meditate in that I'm on the street corner with her. I see her face. I see her expression.

I can hear her. Because when I'm believing the thought she doesn't care about me, I can't really hear her then. But I heard her, but the ego doesn't want me to hear it. So now I'm there. I'm still in it. And then the third question, how do I react? What happens when I believe the thought? And then, Mark, it moves into your field. How do I react when I believe the...

Of course, this is your field too. How do I react when I believe the thought she doesn't care about me? I get really still and I get in touch with my emotional. I see where I feel that. I feel how powerful it was, maybe on a scale from one to three. How much of my body did it take over? I think it's just one place, like in my solar plexus, or maybe only in my shoulders.

But then I notice, as I sit and how I react when I believe the thought I can get it hit my show it hit my neck and so I'm really I'm meditating in that and then my chest I see how much of my body is taken over emotionally yes when i sit and how do i react when i believe the thought now all those emotions show up for a reason and it cannot be what she said and did it can never be that it's what i'm thinking and believing that is the cause of that emotion okay So in that, how do I react when I believe the thought I continue with, noticing the illusion the ego offers up. It shows me the past where we were such good friends, and it compares with, and what did i say or do and then in the future where she's going to

talk to people about me she's going to ruin my reputation she's going to she doesn't care about me and and that i know mind and in its past future all the proof is right here in my head that she is a threat to my existence. You just made it all up. Yeah, a threat to my existence, meaning identity, that I want people to see me as kind and loving and a good friend, and she's blowing it and she's gonna blow it with you see that identity the ego's always protecting so as i said and how i react when i believe the thought all of this comes up now this is where addiction comes in when i'm thinking that on her, I feel guilty. That's just a given.

I don't have to like it. It's a given. And guilt is an amazing thing. It says, look at your thinking. What are you thinking and believing? Something's out of order and it's not her. And I'm not letting her off the hook I'm just doing my own personal work now yeah okay so I see she's gonna tell people and they're gonna this and

they're gonna and and and she's this and she's that just my judgments about her I'm going to experience I'm going to notice them guilt now guilt is the. It is the food for addiction. It's where addiction is born. And so then I see like the chocolate ice cream. I mean, my ego's going as far as it can. And then boom, chocolate ice cream. I see it in my mind's eye. And then if I say the word apple, immediately you see an apple in your mind's eye. It's like I'm casting a spell on you. Like banana, you saw it. I just cast words, cast spells. So I see that.

Now chocolate ice cream, I said I'd never do it again. I said I was only going to have it once. I said it. No. Now, if you imagine biting into a big, juicy lemon, ripe lemon right now, you feel the physical effects? Yeah. Physical. You did not eat a lemon. That's the power of mind. Yes. The power of what we call ego. So that's addiction. If I see the lemon and it causes that thing in me, literally it's so powerful. It could raise blood sugar.

Mm-hmm. It could do a lot of things so you know that's why pills are so popular for stress so so I notice the cause of my suffering on every level body mind spirit okay so how do I react when I believe the thought? I see that I went into victim mode as I was standing there. It was not too much, but just a little. Okay, guilt. Why does the guilt come from being a victim? It argues with our true nature. And the proof of that is anything we think that is not understanding, kind, connected is a word I love.

Connected with the human race and everyone in it. Connected. It doesn't mean I'm going to hang out with that person. It doesn't mean we're going to have tea it's just i'm connected i understand i understand if i if i were thinking and believing what that person was thinking and believing that murdered another How could I not? Yeah. How could I not? So this is not a little thing that we're inviting people to. It is, you know, that identity from I can't even leave my bedroom into a person that loves people. I mean, that travels the world for more than 30 years that's not a

little thing no so so what you're saying almost myron is that in your mind you made up a story or a narrative about what this person's actions meant but i can't claim I did it. Meaning I didn't do it on purpose. It's the ego at work. I didn't do it on purpose. So your higher self, when you say I, you mean your higher self didn't do it. Well, it's like find a place where you said or did something that was that you felt a little guilty over you know like a place where you a little guilt okay you find that place where you said

what you said or you did what you did that caused a little guilt something that you that you had hoped you wish you hadn't done okay so you you said what you said you did what you did and you felt guilt now get really still and identified what you would identify what you were thinking and believing just before you said what you said or did what you did. And then tell me, did you have a choice? In that moment to feel what you're feeling? I think it's automatic, right? We have automatic conditioning and patterning and beliefs that are sort of embedded in us. But what you're asking people to do is slow that down and start to look at the truth of it. And this case you're talking about did i have a choice i mean in that moment you may not have the choice to kind of not have that emotion but then you can kind of look at it

and stop which is what your work is about it's about okay i had this experience now what and with this particular friend yes if i were thinking and believing and tested this many times it's a way of life for me if when I consider what I'm thinking and believing I can even justify the thing I said and did of course okay and and so why do I feel guilty about it you you know, even a little. Yeah. So, and it's not right or wrong. We're just looking at how we react when we believe a thought. Yeah. Well, that's a huge thing. And I think a lot of the times we have beliefs that create the thoughts that lead us to interpret

something as bad or in a way that causes us suffering, right? So you interpreted your friend's behavior as somebody who didn't care about you, wasn't interested in you, maybe had negative thoughts about you, but you don't really know what was going on with that person. They could have been late to go visit their mother in the hospital who was dying, or they could have been stressed about blah, blah blah blah and you you take that on as your own thing and so i think we you know i had a friend once who said to me stop looking for ways to be offended you know yeah yeah a great line or my mother used to say to me you know when you're driving the car and someone honks is what makes it what makes you think that's for you yeah When a police car goes by, you're like, oh,

and I think that is a very powerful concept in your work that I think is worth unpacking because most of us are so attached to our thinking and our thoughts and our beliefs that we don't have a space between those thoughts and beliefs yeah and our interpretation of those right that's why that's why your question is it true is so important is it true yeah that's the first question right is this really is it really true that she hates you or doesn't care about you or that she's going to go say bad stuff about you or yeah right and or not beautiful, right? And I think that's really a powerful insight. It is. It brings us back to some sanity. Just the question, is it true? The other three questions and turnarounds aren't even necessary if a person just said, and is it through? Is it true? All of it would meet that question if a person got really still. Is it true? You'd be shown how you react when you believe the thought, what you

said, what you did, how it felt, and the answer would reveal itself. And yes or no, when a person, when I ask myself is is it true she doesn't care about me, for example, I get still in that. And to find there's only one syllable to answer the question, is it true? It's either yes or no. And they're both equal because let's put it here with me. I'm only looking for my authentic answer. And so that may take a while, but I can't answer what other people, how the world would answer it.

Like the whole world could say, she doesn't care about you, but I'm dealing with me. I've got to know she doesn't care about me. Is it true? And then, you know, it's a beautiful thing mark because when these things are worked through i can just it's nothing to pick up the phone and say you know as we were standing on the corner and and um you know i had the thought that that um you didn't care about me um do you and was missing something? And that's not exactly a great situation to, but anyway, we're free. We can do our work and call and test it. And if she says, I don't,

I didn't care about you and tells me why, then there is something I can do about me that I was blind to that he opens me up to. So people grow me in the world. But we're too fearful to even call and ask. We just assume and then we feel bad, we feel guilty. And then we maybe eat the ice cream or take the drug or the pill or snap at the at someone that we love completely and then we're guilty over that it's a so your work really is is focusing on this simple idea that that suffering like our own emotional mental spiritual suffering really is inside of our minds and is not real and it's a story we tell ourselves that we torture ourselves with.

And then there is a way to be free of those thoughts that make us suffer. And that's really what your work is about. And waking up to, to what is real and what is not. So how do you get people there? I mean, the four questions and the turnaround is really the simple process, right? And it seems so simple, but it really is very powerful. And maybe you can take us through what those four questions are again and what the turnaround is and how people can use this process to really get free. Okay.

So the first question is, is it true? so she doesn't care about me okay is it true can i absolutely know that it's true and i'm going to meditate in that and i'm going to be there in that time and place anchored there and then how do I react in that situation when I believe the thought she doesn't care about me? I get really still, my eyes are closed, I'm meditating in that situation, I can see my body language, I see clearly my attitude, I'm in touch with the emotional I felt. I'm not just pretending it didn't happen. I'm present here now, seeing now what I saw then that I couldn't see then. I'm present.

Then the fourth question in that situation, standing on the corner with her, fourth question, who would I be without the thought she doesn't care about me so to test that I'm going to get still drop my story and listen to her words in other words I'm not going to put meaning on it I'm dropping my story listen to her words, see her expression, her body language. So I'm seeing her without my story, okay? So who would I be without the thought? Learning a lot, learning a lot, Mark. About yourself.

I'm connected. I'm connected. And it's never too late because the next time I see her, I'm connected. And it's never too late because the next time I see her, I'm connected. I'm not seeing who I believed her to be in the original situation. I'm seeing her as from an awakened mind, from a more awake mind. The compassion's there and I'm not trying it's I'm connected in that case self compassion unless I said or did something okay so then the last part of the work is to to flip it to turn it around and so she doesn't care about me turned around she does

care about me now I'm not going to just believe that. I'm meditating in the situation. She does care about me. Now, what you said earlier may show up for me. I may see that she was in a hurry, that she said something to tip me off, that she needed. Who knows what's going to show up, but I'm not going to make nice with it I'm going to be there now I'm going to be then now and she does care about me in this that see she does care about me she did stop to talk to me I mean I'm gonna see a lot as I witnessed that in the silence from here.

And then another turnaround, she doesn't care about me. Another turnaround, I don't care about her. Oh, wow. In that situation, where was I uncaring? And so... Going to yourself. And this work takes so much courage, where was i uncaring what did i say or do did i give her the look did i did i look like bothered did i anything okay now let's say

i said something rude it just came out of my mouth which happens as a believer she doesn't care about me for example okay so so now the next time I see her I might call her and I might say you know when we met on the corner it looked to me like you were in a hurry and I'm sorry if I held you up and you know I I was a bit rude. And, and I'm sorry for that. And, and you get to clean things up if you made a mess. I do. And then I get to make it right. I don't do it with the next person. Maybe I'm a little more patient with the next person. And so these turnarounds, we're not trading

one belief or another, we're meditating in the, you know, the possibility of the person comes in the trailer, like, look at other ways of looking at the same situation from a different perspective and trying it on and seeing if it's true or not true how it feels yeah and and you're not necessarily saying it is true but you're saying you know i don't care about me but maybe that's true and then you start well you know i look at i don't uh i don't care about her and then i i sit in that and see see um as i said earlier, anything that I I said or did that would lead anyone to believe that I didn't care about

them. And, and, and then there's another turnaround. I don't care about me. And in she doesn't care about me turned around, I don't care about me. So where is it that I was disrespectful of myself, that I didn't give it time, that I interrupted her, I was in a hurry, I was the one that pulled away, she didn't. And it shifts every relationship we've got because our identity is shifting every time we sit in inquiry. deactivate that stress response activate what we call the relaxation response or the healing response in the body in a deliberate methodical way just like we exercise or eat well and i think those are skills we never learn that are hard for people to understand how to incorporate and yet they're pretty easy to do and they're actually fun and you feel amazing after yeah that that's the beautiful thing about this is that they're not as hard as we

think. They're quite simple. Most of them, I think pretty much all of the recommendations in my book, I think are free. Like literally you don't have to buy fancy equipment or fancy apps. Actually, a lot of this is accessible to all of us. But just to put in context the scale of this problem, Mark, I mentioned what the World Health Organization say, but there was in context at the scale of this problem mark i mentioned what the world health organizations say but there was a paper in the journal of the american medical association in 2013 it was i think it was an editorial piece which suggested that between 70 and 90 percent of what a primary care physician like me sees in any given day is in some way related to stress of course.

I mean, these are remarkable statistics. It's either caused by or made worse by stress. 100%. And I think once people understand... I mean, if you're stressed, your blood sugar goes up. Your blood pressure goes up. Your blood vessels get stiff and hard, right? Yeah, I mean, I try and explain this. Yeah, I find that when patients understand what the stress response is, I find they're really engaged in trying to change it.

So I say to them, look, your stress response is ultimately trying to keep you safe. It's when your body thinks you're in danger, it's trying to keep you safe. So let's go back two million years ago. And then you can understand what the stress response is, how it's evolved. So you are in your hunter-gatherer tribe and a wild predator is approaching, right? In an instant, your stress response gets activated and your physiology starts to change.

So as you said, your blood sugar goes up, which is gonna help deliver more glucose to the brain. Your blood becomes more prone to clotting so that if you get attacked by that line of bitten you're not going to bleed to death yeah you're going to survive you know your amygdala which is the emotional part of your brain becomes more reactive so you're hyper vigilant to all those threats around you that is an appropriate short-term response to a threat the problem now mark is that for many of us our stress response has not been activated by wild predators it's been activated by our daily lives by twitter

by social media email inboxes by cnn fox news to-do lists right elderly parents we're looking after um you know two parents working in a family one's trying to rush home from work to pick up the kids, et cetera, et cetera. And for many of us, those short-term responses that are so helpful become harmful. So if your stressors is going up every day, right? And blood sugar going up for a short period of time

is not a problem, right? But if that's happening day in, day out to your email inbox, well, that's going to lead to fatigue, letgy type 2 diabetes high blood pressure you know all from the stress response now we have so many more stresses than we used to right we have the the culture we live in that stress we have the toxic food system we have the chronic amount of financial stress that most people feel i think you know you know, 40% of Americans can't withstand a $500 emergency, a hundred million live in poverty or near poverty, which is hugely stressful. I mean, you know, one of the studies that I, I found most striking a

number of years ago was that more than a poor diet, more than smoking, more than lack of exercise, that socioeconomic status and a lack of sense of control of your life really stress is the number one predictor of death and disease and i think it's something we don't really appreciate and we don't as physicians really learn how to address it how to measure it and how to help treat people yeah i i totally agree and actually the first part of my book is actually on meaning and purpose. And it's relevant to this because not having that control over your life, not having a sense of meaning, not having something to get up for every day, that is arguably the most stressful thing in your life. Even if you're doing everything else right, if you don't have that. And, you know, a few years ago I came across this Japanese concept of Ikigai, you know, which I know you're familiar with.

You know, I saw these four circles and it's where these four circles intersect in the middle is your Ikigai. You know, when you are doing something in your life that you're good at, something that you love, something that the world needs and something that pays you money. Yeah. And I thought. Sounds like you got that nailed, Dr. Chatterjee. Hey, well, well look i'm very lucky i have i now have um in my life my job i absolutely love my job that's that's for sure but what's interesting for me is i saw that and i thought yeah i want some icky guy in my life

that sounds brilliant i started talking about this concept to my patients and for many of them yeah they found it a little bit intimidating. They thought, well, how am I going to find one thing in my life to tick all those four boxes? And actually, when I was giving a talk in London recently on stress, this Japanese student put a hand up at the end and she asked me a question. She said, hey, Dr. Chastity, you know, I've grown up with this philosophy and I've got to say I find it really stressful. I find it too high a bar to live to. And what I did in the book is I created a new framework that I use for my patients. I call it the live framework. It's a much more achievable way, I think, for a lot of people to find their meaning and purpose. The L is for love, I is for intention, V is for vision, E is for engage. We probably can't go

through all of that, but you know, i sort of i i use it with my patients to help them start to find meaning and purpose and the first one i think is really important love yeah right so the research on this is super clear regularly doing things that you love makes you more resilient to stress right so you mentioned a lot of americans are struggling that they don't have control over their life and this is the interesting thing about stress mark is that sometimes we can't as physicians change the stressors in our patients lives right no no you can't change what's happening out there you just but we can make them more resilient to this yes and regularly doing things that you love makes you more resilient to stress at the same time being chronically stressed makes it harder for us to experience

pleasure and day-to-day things so one of my recommendations to my patients is have a daily dose of pleasure even if it's just for five minutes you know can you each day give pleasure the same priorities you might give to the amount of vegetables you have on your plate or whether you go to the gym this could be going for a walk it could be reading a book listening to a podcast it could even be coming home from work putting on youtube watching your favorite comedian for five minutes and laughing yeah that is very important and very valuable and it makes a huge difference i mean i i you know i am not in california doing my public television show and i you know i was at the hotel and i was right on the beach and i went out to the beach and I jumped in the water swam a little bit and I came back and I

literally just laid there in the sand doing absolutely nothing and I can't tell you how pleasurable that was to just be unplugged for a minute and stop and most of us just keep go go go all day long and distract distract distract well there's there's obviously the nature piece there as well, which is very impactful for stress. But let me talk about a patient I saw recently. I think you'll find this interesting. 54-year-old chap, I think he was, certainly mid-50s. He was the CFO of a local plastics company. And he was in a good job, earning good money, married with two kids.

He came in to see me and he said, Dr. Chastity, look, I'm sort of, I'm struggling a bit. I find it hard to get out of bed sometimes in the morning. I find it hard to concentrate at work. You know, I just feel a bit indifferent to things. Is this what depression is? I started to chat to him. We did some tests i was looking into all aspects of his lifestyle um but ultimately one thing was quite clear to me is that he never

did anything that he loved so i asked him you know how's your job he said yeah it's fine you know i don't really enjoy it but it pays the mortgage pays the bills feeds the family i said okay how's your relationship with your wife yeah so so you know i don't really see her much, but it's, you know, it's fine, I guess. He was very, very indifferent. I said the same about his kids. And I said, do you do, you know, have you got any hobbies? He said, don't judge me, I don't have time. My work's busy. At the weekends, I've got to do all the chores. I've got to take the kids to their classes and their sports games. I don't have any time. I said, did you ever have any hobbies?

And he said, yeah, sure. When I was a teenager, I used to love playing with train sets. I said, okay, fine. Do you have a train set at home? He said, well, yeah, I've got one in my attic, but I haven't played with it for years. And I said, what I'd love you to do when you get home this evening

is get your train set out. Now, look, Mark mark i appreciate this may not be the advice on your prescription pad yeah well kind of you know i'm all for lifestyle prescriptions right and he play with train set three times a week but i'll tell you what happened what was fascinating is that refills unlimited exactly but you know it may not be the advice that he was expecting from his daughter but he said yeah okay sure i'll do that Then this was in a conventional medical practice. These were 10 minute consultations. This is in the National Health Service in the UK. We don't get the chance to follow up all our patients. We see maybe 40 to 50 patients a day. We simply can't follow them all up. I didn't know what was going on with him. Three months later,

I finished my morning surgery and I was in the car park about to go and do my home visits. And I bumped into his wife and I said, hey, how's your husband getting on? She said, Dr. Chastity, I cannot believe the difference. I feel like I've got the guy I married back again. My husband comes home from work. He's pottering around on his train set he's always on ebay looking for collector's items and he's now subscribed to this you know this magazine i thought okay that's incredible i still hadn't seen him three months after that he comes in for a well man check to my office and he comes in with his with his blood tests i'm about to go through them with him

and i said hey how are you doing dr chachi i feel incredible i've got energy um my mood is good and i feel motivated i said how's your marriage marriage is great i'm getting on really really well with my wife how is your job love it really really enjoy the job so why is that so powerful mark is this did he have a mental health problem he had a train set deficiency or did he have a mental health problem or train said deficiency or did he have a deficiency of passion in his life and when he corrected that passion deficiency it's true everything else starts to come back online so I want to expand the conversation about stress to go yeah sure breathing nature meditation exercise these things are fantastic and of course I talk about them and I go into the science and the practical implications of people but what about something about passion doing things that you

love it's just as important it's true you know i often talk about what are the ingredients for health and one of them is meaning and purpose and i was just shocked a number of months ago to see an article in the journal the american medical association that people who lacked meaning and purpose had a higher risk of death and disease. I mean, it's just striking. It turns out in the research that it's not just smoking or bad diet or lack of exercise, but lack of meaning and purpose that increases your risk of death. I mean, that's a very striking finding. Yeah, it's amazing. And obviously, the way we look at health, we're looking at all of these multiple inputs that play a role in someone's health.

And of course, I'm just as passionate about food, physical activity, sleep, you know, all these things that are critical. But we've also got to think about those social pieces, you know, our community, the relationships we've got. You know, why do we get up each morning? Do we feel that we've got control over our life? Or do we feel, you know, do we sit in traffic for two, three hours a day in a job that we can't stand for a boss who doesn't value us? The reality is that that is the case. You know, we're going to have to think about with our patients how we tackle that. Of course, not all our patients can leave that job, right? So I'm passionate and i you i've used these tips that i've you know that the book is full of so many tips so people can literally choose the ones that are relevant for their life but i have worked in deprived areas in the uk for many years and these tips also work for people in deprived areas on low incomes because the common criticism of wellness is that it's just for the wealthy. It's for the middle classes. And I'm passionate to say it is applicable to everyone.

You give people these tools of nature, of passion, of a quick five-minute workout. Even if you're living in a lifestyle that you don't enjoy, that there are lots of stresses in your life you can help process that stress yeah um you really can and it can make a huge difference now one of the things that people don't realize is they think stress is subjective but it's subjective right it's the perception of how something impacts us it's our beliefs about something right so i think if if if that's true then how do we sort of create a different mindset so that when something happens you know it's not stressful i was talking to my wife this morning you know she's putting on a show a comedy show called the consciousness show and she had some issue with the tickets and she was getting stressed about it

because she thought the one that were on the waiting list were actually given tickets, and she was kind of freaking out. And I'm like, that is not really a big stressor. I mean, it's your belief about it. It's not a big deal. Like, there are things to really be worried about. And I think for most of us,

we get caught in this vicious cycle of stress and worry about things that are not really worth worrying about. And I think it's our beliefs about it that make it seem so. And I think there are real things to worry about. If you have income issues, if you have real trauma in your family. I mean, there are real things that are going on

that are stressful. Like my dad died last summer and that was very stressful for me. But I think there are ways of looking at changing our mindset. So can you talk about how that works? Well, i think there's a couple of things to say there i think when it comes to stresses um i think we need to think about what we can control and what we can't control many of us i have for years spent time and energy worrying about things i have no control over

and that's something that i've changed a lot in my life. I've really had to work hard on that. And once you get into that mindset, it's amazing how your stress levels just come down because so many of those things, like traffic, I can't do anything about traffic. I just don't let it worry me anymore. I'm just like- You don't get road rage, Dr. Chanergy? Hey, you know, if I'm honest, seven, eight years ago, you know, when I was a carer for my dad, when I was working a busy job, when my kids were very young and wasn't sleeping very much, you know what, if I was driving to work and someone would come in front of me or cut me up, I'd probably get quite agitated if I'm honest. But now I just don't. I'm like, ah, they're

probably having a bad day if they're sort of screaming at me from the window. And I'm just a lot more chilled and relaxed. I mean, you give your power over to other people if you let them affect you that way yeah for sure but it's something we have to work on and i think the reason why many for struggle with this is because of time now let's explain what i mean by that i think one of the biggest stressors in the modern world today in the 21st century is our lack of downtime so the modern world has stolen downtime from us. It's gradually been eroded out of our lives. I'll give you an example. We're here in Santa Monica, right, in California. I bet 10 years ago if we were here and we went into a local cafe to buy a coffee, I bet people would be standing in line, they'd be looking around. They might bump into a friend.

They might be looking at all the sweet treats and they might be thinking, which one am I going to have? They'll be daydreaming a little bit. Now, if you go to any cafe, what's everyone doing? Everyone on their phone, computer. Yeah.

And look, to be clear, I'm not criticizing. I will do that as well a lot of the time. Okay. But my point is- Just to be. Just lack of time. You know, it's fascinating.

I just went to give a talk at the cia the central intelligence agency and it's a highly secure building langley and there's no technology allowed so you can't bring in a phone computer nothing not even a fitbit and what was striking to me is that everybody was present i gave a lecture to 300 people and nobody was on their phone. I was in a room giving a talk to 30 or 40 doctors and health professionals. Nobody was on their phone. And everybody was focused and paying attention.

It was the most remarkable thing. It was like going back on a time machine. But only a time machine of 15 years. Yeah. That's how quickly things have changed. The iPhone was 2009. Yeah. And I don't think we've realized how toxic that is. Because you may say, well, why does that matter? You know, what's the problem

that we're using this downtime to get ahead? You know, we're sending an email, we're quickly updating our Instagram. Well, I'll tell you the problem with that. There's many problems with that, but we used to think that our brain went to sleep when we switched off, right? When we stopped focusing on a task in front of us, our brain went to sleep. Neuroscience shows us that's not the case. When we stop focusing on a task in front of us, there's a part of the brain called the default mode network or the DMN that goes into overdrive. Now, what does that part of the brain do? Well, there's many things, but two things I think listeners will find really interesting is that part of the brain helps us solve problems and helps us be more creative so this is why so many of us get our best ideas when we're out for a walk out for a run or we're in the shower i don't

know if it's just me or you do you get i get my best ideas when i'm in the shower totally when i go for a run or a bike ride and i can just wander and this is because mark our brain is trying to solve problems for us if we give it the downtime to do that and i think showers are one of the few places still where our phones haven't you know we don't i don't know about you i certainly don't take my phone into the shower with me i'm sure that will change very soon yeah now the new phones they go down to four meters underwater so yeah i mean this is why we keep trying to swimming actually because i think swimming is again one of those sports now where you can still do without technology you know even in the gym now people are posting selfies of them doing their workout updating their feed you know and and the dmn is a really important part of our brain and i i go into a lot of companies now to talk to them about employee well-being and one of my top tips for them is take a tech free

lunch break digital detox even if it's just for 15 minutes take a tech free lunch break and last year actually i made um actually was earlier this year, I made an ITV documentary on stress. And we got to take three or four people, we got to measure their stress levels minute to minute throughout the day for three days. And one chap in particular, he was a manager of his local company. He took his job seriously. He wanted to lead by example, but he was complaining of stress. He was complaining that he was drinking too much alcohol. His relationship with his wife was under strain. And he was complaining of stress. He was thinking, he was complaining that he was drinking too much alcohol. His relationship with his wife was under strain and he was always tired. Now we measured his stress levels. It was HRV, heart rate variability. And we could see that actually

on his work day, his stress levels would climb throughout the morning. At lunchtime, he would work through his lunch and they'd keep climbing. And all afternoon as well, they were just constantly elevated. He would go home late. He would drink alcohol to unwind. He wouldn't be present with his wife. That would cause issues. He wouldn't sleep well. And the cycle would continue. All I changed with him, Mark, was I said, okay, look, I want you to take a 15 minute break at lunchtime. I want you to leave your phone in your drawer and go outside for a walk. He was very lucky he had a rivet nearby

and we can maybe touch on why nature is so important. So all he did was for 15 minutes at lunchtime, he went for a walk in nature without his phone. Now, when we remeasured his data, objectively, his stress levels were right down. But subjectively, what did he say? He said, say he said dr chachi i feel like a different person yeah i'm more creative in the afternoon i enjoy my job more i'm leaving early now rather than late it's not just on time i'm leaving early i'm drinking less alcohol and my relationship with my wife has improved yeah so this is what

i call the ripple effects right one small thing it's powerful so when we say that wellness is for the middle classes well hold on a minute who doesn't have the ability to have a 15 minute tech free lunch break yeah right that is free that's not that's not asking a lot it's true and i'm not trying to underplay this but i'm very powerful i mean i i think the whole digital detox movement's really growing and you know for my wife um for our anniversary i got her a little box and and and i said here honey here's your anniversary present and she's like oh this is such a nice little box i said no no that's not the present the present is i put my phone in the box friday night and i don't take it out till Sunday night. And she's like, started crying. Like that was the best present I could give her,

to be present with her, right? The presence of presence, right? And then I did it and I thought, oh, this is for her, you know? But my experience was so transformational. I was like laying on the carpet, playing with the cats, listening to jazz, just daydreaming, relaxing, not grabbing my phone every second. And it was the most wonderful experience for me. I love it.

And it's like a regular habit now. It's so awesome. We leave our phones at home. We go for dinner. We don't. We, on Sunday mornings, my wife and I will go out with our kids and we'll both leave our phone at home and you know ideally i do it for the whole day but often it's

like four hours four or five hours and what's incredible is that you come home and i feel like i've been on holiday yeah like you we don't realize how much this constantly checking our phones is draining us yeah and i got called out by this, by my daughter. This was a few years ago. You know, I was playing with her in our living room and I can't remember what was going on, but you know, I kept nipping out into the kitchen to keep checking my phone. And she said to me, daddy, you're not really here, are you? And that really, really struck me. I mean, kids really can teach us how to be present and live in the moment. And I thought, wow, she's right. I'm not really here because yes, I'm in the room playing with her, but my mind is actually

not quite there. It's thinking about what's going on on my phone. And that really, that really changed my behavior. That'll get you. That did did get you that got me big time right from the mouth of babes right yeah but i think it's a very powerful um lesson for all of us and i think people need strategies because these things are designed to be addictive so you know i will not charge my phone in my bedroom anymore if i bring that phone into my bedroom right i can't resist it i simply cannot resist it's too. So I charge it in my kitchen. And so I say to people, you need to try and create a bit of tech-free time in your day. Sure, lunch break is a great time to do it. But if you can have some time, ideally a golden hour

in the morning and a golden hour before going to bed. If a golden hour is too much, start with five minutes in the morning, five minutes before you go to bed. Well, if you can't figure out how to do it for five minutes, there's definitely a bigger problem in your life. Yeah, there is. But you know, and also when people are commuting, right, that's a time when often people are on the train, on a bus, you know, what you want to do then is instead of trying to catch up on those emails, use that as a, as a way of unwinding you know listen to some music do 10 minutes on your meditation app like calm headspace listen to an inspiring podcast that feels good like my one or your one or anyone that they like right use that time really value your mental space what information are you feeding it if you watch the news and you're putting toxic information right into your

brain the whole time that is going to impact the way you feel your stress levels i said take the news app off your phone in fact another tip i say to people and this is probably one of the most impactful things notifications take them off your phone and how did i guess hey it's one of the most i mean it's one of the most powerful things but mark i would challenge anybody listening to this podcast for seven days to switch off their notifications which simply means you know if someone likes your instagram post you're not going to get a notification if you have a new email you're not going to get a notification etc etc try it for seven days if you don't feel better fine go back to it and then people are on their phone so much they don't

realize there's a new screen app where you can look on your iPhone and see how many times you picked up your phone. And I was sitting next to this friend of mine who were at a lecture and she was picking up her phone, doing Instagram, whatever. And I'm like, give me your phone. And I grabbed her phone and I'm like,

showed her like, she picked up her phone a thousand times in a day. And I'm like, that is a lot of time picking up your phone. Now, the other thing that really drives people crazy, which I talk about way too much, is your inner dialogue, the way you talk to yourself. So if someone says, I don't love myself, right? And I'm like no the voice in your head's an asshole right like no no your higher self is muzzled where is she where is he what happened let's get it like nothing is true human nothing's fact over there no one's stuck forever nothing Nothing's true, right? Truth is something you believe, and that's very fishy, right? Because we, whoa, right?

And so what I start to unravel is that your thoughts create your feelings, create your actions all. And you don't see them happening. But if you slow it all down and get conscious to what the voice in your head is saying, you can take on one area of your life. And funny enough, I love people taking on food. Because, especially on your diet, right? You're not hungry, people.

This is not a diet, right? This is not calorie, right? No calorie management, right? So this is just eat damn healthy and you won't be that hungry soon. That's true. Right. Period. Right. And so that's ideal to hear your inner dialogue, chasing a drink, chasing a cookie, chasing why you deserve it, chasing, like you have to get to know yourself and what the voice is saying in any

area you're suffering or loathing or disappointed or feel depressed. Well, sometimes your inner dialogue you think is actually you. That's the problem. It's like there's no separation between the story you're telling yourself and what you actually think is true. So most people can't even tell they just said something to themselves. Like they're like, huh? Right.

And so we've been working on something for me recently around my sleep because, you know, my sleep gets disrupted. I travel 50% of the time in different beds here and there and I have a whole story about it and tell myself all this nonsense. And I finally came begging to you after trying this many times with you

and I was like, I just need help. And, you know you just no no no it was even cooler because your your fantasy had a solution that if you ever stayed in one place so it had a theory you had a whole theory that it's all because of this it's all because of this it's all because of this it's all like it's all because of these things that if I ever got home long enough and slept in my bed long enough and my cute wife was over there long enough, it'd be good. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, no.

Yeah, no. How about that? Yeah. So the voice is in a constant only if, only if, yeah, but, yeah, but. Like, it's crazy. Yeah, like last night I was like, oh, well, I went out to a friend's place for dinner and had some wine. We stayed up really late and I usually don't stay up that late.

So I'm thinking, oh, the wine is going to make me not sleep. Oh, if I stay up late, I have to get up early to get somewhere. So like, am I not going to sleep? And then I'm not going to fall asleep. And then if I wake up, am I going to fall back asleep? And so I had this whole thing going on that was just bs that had nothing to do with anything even before i even went to sleep and it's like an example of that inner dialogue i'm like oh that's shut up like that's like it's like so you have the ability to kind of recognize it

and then notice it and then understand it's not true and it's just this voice that you need a different voice saying something else so then i just just, well, then I ask you to go. So what happens is I get you to trail your negative inner dialogue. So at least you know, who's sorry, everyone. I like to curse, man of fucking with your life, right? Like it's seeing the future and you don't, you don't sleep in it, right? It's seeing the future. You don't make money next month. You're seeing the future. You don't, right. And it's negative.

Over 80% of our thoughts are negative. So that's the work we have to do. And so once you start to hear the voice, then I tell you that's your lower self. Hi. Right? And your higher self gets to respond to your lower self. And I call it a talk back.

Like talk back to that voice, like HS, higher self, talk back to LS, lower self, right? And we, and I get, and then all of a sudden, you start to get that the negative inner dialogue is genius, because it tells you what you actually want to say. Like your issue about sleep is likely not disappearing for your life mark right so if people overeat if people don't like to exercise if people over drink right you will be signing up for that issue for the rest of your life people i'm sorry you've been signed up you weren't at the gate i did sorry but. But get over it. Get used to it. Let's win. Right? So then your lower self says something and you're like, shut up.

Here's what I really think. I'll be so tired. I'll sleep like a baby. Right? Like, right. So then you can have another belief counter the lower belief. It's so powerful. I feel like I've sort of really

broken that down. I mean, I know it's work, but I really didn't see how I was doing that to myself because I had a really very convincing inner dialogue. And I think right now people are struggling. And I think it's important the narrative story we tell ourselves. And I think it's powerful. And I think right now we're shifting how we're doing things. We're shifting the way we're learning. And I think, you know, I just want to share with people that this is something that it will change your life.

If you focus on working with your mind in the way that Lauren is talking about, it's transformational. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other

professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.