The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Reduce Stress And Improve Wellbeing

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

How To Reduce Stress And Improve Wellbeing | This episode is brought to you by Find My Formula Stress is almost synonymous with our modern lifestyles. We experience external stressors from our jobs, family responsibilities, financial worries, and many other places, then compound them with unhealthy lifestyle choices. The result is an epidemic of stress and increased risk for chronic diseases. Most of us know that things such as eating well, getting quality sleep, exercise, and mediation are all effective ways to reduce and manage stress, but the value of pursuing the things that make us happy and fulfilled is a less commonly cited way to reduce stress.  Late last year, Dr. Hyman sat down with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee to discuss how making time for the things that bring us joy gives us more resilience against stress and fatigue and an improved psychological outlook. They also share practical solutions and simple interventions to help you destress and reset your life, and how implementing small changes to your routine can reduce or completely eradicate stress.  Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is regarded as one of the most influential doctors in the UK and wants to change how medicine will be practiced for years to come. He hosts the biggest health podcast in Europe, Feel Better, Live More, which Apple has announced as one of the most downloaded new podcasts of the past year. His first book, How to Make Disease Disappear, is an international bestseller all over the world and has sold over 250,000 copies worldwide in just 18 months. His most recent book, the #1 bestseller, The Stress Solution, tackles what the WHO calls the health epidemic of our time—stress. Dr. Chatterjee is known for finding the root cause of people's health problems, and he has highlighted his methods in the ground-breaking BBC television show, Doctor in the House, which has been shown in over 70 countries around the world.  This episode is brought to you by Find My Formula, the world’s first personalized nootropics company. Right now, Find My Formula is giving The Doctor’s Farmacy listeners an exclusive discount. Visit findmyformula.com and get 15% off of your first box by using the code DRMARK at checkout. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Chatterjee, “Is There An Antidote To Stress?” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrRanganChatterjee

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. 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? Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Hyman here. You know, I love sharing new tools that I love to incorporate in my own life. And I'm constantly working on a bunch of different projects at once. Like right now, I'm working on a new book, recording podcast episodes,

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first box. They'll send four variations for you to try. Testing these multiple variations is how I was able to identify and continue the exact mixes to get the largest impact on my performance. Like any other supplement or system of supplements, I always recommend you check in with your doctor or healthcare practitioner before getting started. I hope you'll take advantage of this amazing offer. Just go to findmyformula.com and use the code DrMark at checkout. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea Perowit, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Chronic stress has become a major issue in our society. Before the coronavirus pandemic, it was estimated that 80% or more of doctors'

visits are due to illnesses related to stress. Late last year, Dr. Hyman sat down with his friend and colleague, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, to discuss the many sides of stress and how taking time for things that bring us joy can be a very powerful method for counteracting the effects of stress. 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, I sort of, 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, 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. But we can make them more resilient to this. 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 in 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 let me talk about a patient i saw recently i think you'll find this interesting um 54 year old, I think he was, certainly mid-50s. He was the local, he was the CFO of a local plastics company. And, you know, 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 um you know i just feel a bit indifferent to things is this what depression is now 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 know 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 it was very very indifferent um i said the same about his kids and i I said, do you do, you know, have you got any hobbies? He said, Dr. Chach, 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 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 get your train set out now look mark i appreciate this may not be the advice on your prescription pad yeah well i'm all for lifestyle prescriptions right and? Play with train set three times a week for 15 minutes. But I'll tell you what happened. What was fascinating is that- Refills unlimited.

Exactly. But it may not be the advice that he was expecting from his doctor, 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 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 Three months after that, he comes in for a well-man check to my office and he comes in with his blood tests. I'm about to go through them with him. And I said, hey, how are you doing? I feel incredible. I've got energy. 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 love it really really enjoy the job so why is that so powerful mark is this 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 of 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. 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. You really can, and it can make a huge difference. I think when it comes to stresses, 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 road rage dr chanergy hey you know i i if i'm honest seven eight years ago you know when i was a carer for my dad's 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 um but now i just don't i'm like ah they'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 of us 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. And we haven't any structures in our society for really managing that. And most cultures have had ritual, have had

prayer, have had ceremony, have had meditation, have had various kinds of rituals that take a pause in life to stop and to reset and to reconnect with what matters. And we just don't do that. So let's talk about some of the strategies that you put in the book. You talk about the importance of a morning routine because yes, we know the harm of stress and we can go into that more, but I think people get it. What are the three M's you talk about that you can practice every morning to start your day and actually kind of get ahead of the stress? Yeah. So I call these the three M's of a morning routine. The first M is mindfulness. The second M is movement. And the third M is mindset. So I say, look,

I'm a huge fan of morning routines because they give you a period of calm in the morning that's just going to make you a bit more resilient to cope with those stresses that will come up in your day. It's not if they're going to come up, they will come up. So one of my patients simply does this. She does her morning routine with those three M's in just five minutes. She gets up and for one minute, she will do deep breathing. She does a breath that I taught her called the three, four, five breath. When you breathe in for three, hold for four and breathe out for five. Okay, she does that for one minute.

Then she does two minutes of some yoga moves that she learned on YouTube, right? So this is super accessible. She didn't have to go to a class, even though I recommend yoga classes. She learned some moves on youtube which she likes and then for the final two minutes she's got a she's got about three or four books that make her feel good and she literally for two minutes she reads three or four pages from that book and she has reported back that actually that has really really helped her in fact she thinks it's helped her eczema get better which is remarkable because there are many things that can cause eczema eczema we know ultimately is a slight dysfunction of the

immune system stress impacts the immune system of course so for her doing that morning routine she feels is helping her with her skin for somebody else it may not do that right but i just want to really get across how powerful these small intentional moments of calm are so again i hope people listening think you know maybe i'll try that 3m morning routine for about seven days or so and see how you feel we know that health is not focused solely around one specific thing like diet or exercise our mindset and daily practices can be among the strongest guiding forces to carry us on the journey to better health. And making healthy, pleasurable habits part of your everyday life is an essential part

of any wellness routine. Beneficial practices can come in many forms. Explore finding something that feels good to you and make it a non-negotiable part of your daily routine. Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you'd like to hear more about this topic, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversation with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend and leaving us a comment below. Until next time.

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 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.