The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Prioritize Self-Care And Reset Your Stress Response

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Athletic Greens. Taking care of yourself, practicing self-love and self-compassion, working on a growth mindset, building relationships and community, and having a sense of purpose are all crucial to living a fulfilling, long, healthy life. Your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are all transmuted into biological signals that change your gene expression, impacting your immune function, hormones, microbiome, neurotransmitters, neuroplasticity, mitochondria, and more. Yet many of us tend to put self-care last on our list of to-dos (I certainly have for much of my life, to the detriment of my own health). In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I share my strategies for prioritizing self-care for a healthy mind and spirit. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Athletic Greens. BiOptimizers is offering my listeners 10% off Sleep Breakthrough. If you buy two or more you’ll get a free bottle of Magnesium Breakthrough. This is a limited-time offer. Go to sleepbreakthrough.com/hyman and use the code hyman10. AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Learnings from the Blue Zones (4:00 / 1:10)  How your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs impact your health (4:44 / 1:55)  The health benefits of self-compassion and social connections (6:43 / 3:54)  The importance of mindset and having a sense of purpose (8:35 / 5:48)  Simple ways to prioritize self-care and reset our stress response (12:23 / 9:39)

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Our social interactions regulate our biology. They regulate our immune system. So if you're having a conflict with somebody, you're gonna be turning on inflammatory genes. If you have a loving, deep connection with someone, you're gonna turn on anti-inflammatory genes. That's how powerful this stuff is.

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and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. And today I'm bringing you a special version of The Doctor's Pharmacy called Health Bite, because taking small steps to improve your health can make a big difference over time. And today the topic is how do we care for ourselves? How do I care for myself during my crazy busy life? Now, many of us put self-care last on our to-do list. We literally are the last thing on our to-do list.

And I know what that's like because I've done that for a lot of my life to the detriment of my own health. You know, work, family, friends, the needs of others all usually come first. But nourishing our own spirit and our own mental health and our own bodies is so important and it should not be an afterthought. In fact, many of us never think about it at all. But in places like the Blue Zones, they've naturally incorporated many practices that help them live to be well over 100 that we can learn from. They focus on community and connection and

meaning and purpose and rest. They have a lot of chilling time and hanging out. In our fast-paced society with to-do lists, calendars, schedules, extra quick activities, building careers, raising families, taking work home, emailing at night. I mean, it's made self-care and mental health pretty low on the totem pole of sort of priorities for our lives. But the truth is you really can't live a happy, healthy, fulfilled life and a long one if you neglect to nourish your mind and your spirit and your body. So it might be hard to imagine, but your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, grief, joy, sadness, love, anger, they're all transmuted into biological signals that change your gene expression, that regulate inflammation in your body, that alter your hormones and your microbiome. Literally your bacteria in your gut

are listening to your thoughts and changing for good or bad depending on what you think or feel. Your neurotransmitters are regulated by your thoughts, obviously. Neuroplasticity, your mitochondria, pretty much every aspect of your biology is regulated by what you do and what you think and how you live. So I'm going to focus today mostly on the mind and your spirit. And how do we take care of those things in a way that nourishes us, it gives us energy, it allows us to live a long and productive, healthy life. So how do we do self-care? How do we change our mindset? How do we learn about how community impacts our health? Well, there's a lot of information about how self-care or mindset or community all help improve factors for health and longevity. For example, if you're lonely, your risk of death is equal or more than that of someone who's obese.

Being lonely is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. And many people in the world, in America particularly don't have someone they can call if something bad happens or they have a thing they need to talk about or someone who's really a deep, intimate connection, even one person, which is really tragic. So practicing behaviors that focus on self-healing, self-compassion, connection with others are really important. And self-love is hard, but it's got to be your focus because until you take care of yourself, you can't take care of anybody else. So focusing on things like improving what you eat and exercising and stopping smoking, practicing simple self-care, improving your overall health and well-being, optimizing your sleep are so important for your overall quality of life. Self-compassion is pretty important because when

you are loving towards yourself, I mean, think about it. Most of us, if we put our inner thoughts on a loudspeaker and we broadcast in the world, people would think we're crazy, first of all. Second of all, if we talk to our friends the way we talk to ourselves, we wouldn't have any friends. So be nice to yourself. Self-compassion is associated with fixing a lot of problems, including physical health symptoms, mental health outcomes, blood sugar control, people with diabetes, improved resiliency in cancer outcomes, mental health in people who actually have cancer.

So it's really important to practice self-love and self-compassion. Also, nurture your social connections, your community, your relationships. Doing that has been associated with dramatically increased lifespan, improved healthspan. I was just talking to somebody whose grandmother died at 103, and she loved donuts, and she was overweight. They called her Cubby Bubby, which is a Yiddish word for grandmother. And she was 103 years old. But what she did have was a joyful life. What she did have was a deep group of connected friends and social network.

What she did have was a great sense of humor. And she, through her mind, was able to overcome a lot of the things that she was doing bad to her body. So when you actually have these connections and you have a deep social network, it will increase your lifespan. It will improve your mental health. It helps physical markers of health, including blood pressure, your waist circumference, body mass. It reduces inflammation. And this is because of this phenomenon we call sociogenomics. Sociogenomics is the idea that our social interactions regulate our biology. They regulate our immune system. So if you're having a conflict with somebody,

you're going to turn on inflammatory genes. If you have a loving, deep connection with someone, you're going to turn on anti-inflammatory genes. That's how powerful this stuff is. Another really important thing is your mindset. If everything is always a disaster, crisis, or problem, versus everything is a gift and you're grateful and happy, it has a huge impact on your health.

And honestly, you know, I always joke that worrying works because 99% of the time what you worry about doesn't come out to sound true. So the point is that, you know, we make ourselves crazy most of the time by our thoughts and by our beliefs. So people who ruminate with negative thoughts, people who have a kind of a curmudgeonly negative outlook, often tend to have a shorter life and poor physical and mental health. And those who focus on positive thoughts and future goals and rewards are much better chance of having a long life, a healthy life, and a better well-being physically and mentally. My joke always is that optimists live longer even if they're wrong. And it's true.

If you look at the data, your mindset plays a huge role. Optimism plays a huge role on your longevity. Anger is also a big problem. We have unresolved anger that eats at us and also spills out and hurts others. But anger is often often repressed emotion. And when people are not expressing themselves, when they're not able to share their truth, it comes out often as kind of very harsh and aggressive anger.

But what's really interesting is, and this is really from a lot of Dr. Gabor Mate's work, in looking at breast cancer studies, he pointed out that those women who had inability to express their anger, who were always nice, actually had a much higher risk of cancer and a bad outcome from cancer, regardless of the stage or the grade or any type of the biology of the cancer. If your emotions are inflamed, so is your biology. Carolyn Mace, who's an author and a medical intuitive, says that our biography becomes our biology.

It's true the other way. Our biology can become our biography. Our microbiome, for example, affects our mood and our thoughts and so forth. But also our life story can become transmuted into biological signals that can really hurt us. Candice Pert talked about the molecules of emotion based on her work at the NIH, which established a whole field of psychoneuroimmunology about how our emotions and our hormones and our neurotransmitters and our immune system are all constantly in dialogue with each other. So literally your immune cells are listening to your thoughts and it's important because uh if you if you don't address this in

yourself um it actually can lead to bad health outcomes and by you know changing your your perspective by actually learning how to tell the truth by expressing your feelings in a way that's kind not with meanness and aggressiveness but but with kindness, it can have a profoundly liberating effect on your life and also improve your biology tremendously. The other thing that's really critical for your health and for longevity is having a sense of purpose. Just having a sense of meaning and purpose extend life by seven years. If you eradicate all heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, the total life extension would be seven years. So having a sense of purpose is hugely important. That's what's going on in the blue zones. They all have a sense of connection and

purpose and belonging. It's associated with well-being, with improved physical and cognitive health, lower rates of depression, slower aging. Even psychological well-being and having a sense of purpose leads to increased telomere length and slower shortening of the telomeres, whereas chronic stress does the opposite. It decreases telomere length and accelerates aging and oxidative stress. So really important to look at your life and see why you get up in the morning. You know, I think Steve Jobs said once in a commencement speech, you know, if you look in the mirror in the morning and you don't love what you're doing and not excited to go to work, you better change what you're doing because this is the only ride we get.

This is not a dress rehearsal. So what are the ways practically that you can start to reclaim your life what are the ways you can prioritize self-care and reset our stress response well the first is just breath we all walk around breathing and it's available to us 24 7 and it's free so i like the simple take five breath there's a lot of ways to do it but you take five breaths in and out slowly so into the count of five out to the count of five you can hold for five at the bottom if you want and then five breaths five breaths in like that to the count of five in and the count of five out you do that when you wake up before each meal and at bedtime and that's five times a day that can have a profound effect on your health it only takes a few seconds also there's things like meditation you can use guided

meditation there's all kinds of apps out there like calm or headspace you can do guided imagery yoga nidra is wonderful i like that we just lay down i'm kind of lazy but you can lay down even for 10 minutes it makes a huge huge effect on your health improve stem cell function reduce inflammation improves depression anxiety sleep i mean the effects of meditation and stress reduction in the body are huge and if you don't have 10 minutes to meditate or do something like that every day you might want to look at your life and see what's wrong because that is not good if you don't have 10 minutes to take care of yourself uh start a regular yoga practice just moving your body stretching things out getting all the nuts and tits out really helps even 10 minutes to take care of yourself. Start a regular yoga practice. Just moving your body, stretching things out, getting all the nuts and tits out really helps.

Even 10 minutes of yoga a day is really great. 15 minutes, 20 minutes. There's all kinds of great resources online for free yoga classes. So breathing and stretching can really help reset your nervous system. Being on the woods and nature. We all have a nature deficit disorder. They now call it forest bathing. We used to call it taking a walk in the woods.

But basically, the idea is get out in nature and get close to the earth and feel the elements. It really helps bring your nervous system back into alignment. Also, write down what's going on inside.

We found from journaling, which is really interesting, people journaled about their inner feelings for 20 minutes a day, like their true thoughts and feelings. If they had rheumatoid arthritis or asthma,

versus them just writing about like what I did yesterday, for example, which they did a control group. They found that the people who wrote about their authentic feelings had a dramatic reduction in autoimmune symptoms, in inflammatory numbers on lab tests, in asthma symptoms,

and in objective lung function. So this is just writing in your journal can have profound effects in that way. Also, get connected, right? Get someone in your world who you like and make them close, right? Whether it's a friend or a family member, a spouse, even if you're not around in the same area as your close friends made from college when you're younger, get them on Zoom. Get a group together. Meet every week in person. Get a support group going so you can get a safe healing environment to share your life,

all the parts of your life, the ups, the downs, the good, the bad. So being seen and known is really some of the best medicine out there. Start exercising and doing strength training because exercise helps you boost the feel-good neurotransmitters. It helps boost serotonin, dopamine. Resistance training helps actually reduce the decline in testosterone.

So basically, it actually helps your energy, motivation, and mood. So it's basically a win-win-win. So these are simple things that we can incorporate in our life on a daily basis and have profound, profound effects. So remember, you can't just go around doing, doing, doing and giving, giving, giving.

You need to pause and take care of yourself because if you don't, you're going to pay the price. So make sure you take care of yourself. Practice self-love, self-compassion. Work on building a mindset that helps you have a positive outlook on life, build your relationship and community, figure out what your purpose is. And it doesn't have to be grandiose like saving the world. It can be simply just being a good grandparent or being a member of your community or whatever it is. That's really critical. And all these things are essential to having a long, fulfilling, healthy life.

So that's it for today's Health Byte. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please share it with your friends and family on social media. I'm sure they'll like to hear. Leave a comment. What are your self-care practices? What do you do?

How do you keep yourself healthy in mind and body and spirit? And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods foods to supplements to gadgets

to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health, and I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise, and all you have to do is go to drhyman.com forward slash PICS to sign up.

That's drhyman.com forward slash PICS, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter. And I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. 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 practitioneritioner 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.