The Dr. Hyman Show - Is There An Antidote To Stress? with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

We’re up against a chronic epidemic: stress. In fact, it’s estimated that 80% or more of doctors’ visits are due to illnesses related to stress. This can come in many different forms. Socioeconomic stress is a real burden for many people, as is the stress of taking care of several generations within a family, or meeting the demands of our jobs. Stress can also come in the form of bad food and poor or inadequate sleep, which send negative signals to the brain that produce stress hormones. That doesn’t mean we’re stuck with stress though. Today on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m joined by my good friend Dr. Rangan Chatterjee to look at the many sides of stress and all the actions we can take to stop it in its tracks.  Dr. 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. This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and Joovv. ButcherBox is currently offering listeners of the podcast 2 lbs of wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon PLUS $20 off your first box. Just go to ButcherBox.com/farmacy to take advantage of this great deal. Check out the Joovv products at joovv.com/farmacy. Once you’re there, you’ll see a special bonus the Joovv team is giving away to my listeners. Use the code FARMACY at checkout.  Here are more of the details from our interview:  -The personal experience that changed Dr. Chatterjee’s approach to practicing medicine (6:22) -Why Dr. Chatterjee chose to focus on the topic of stress in his latest book, The Stress Solution (15:25) -The power of identifying if there is a trigger point in your week that leads to the bulk of your stress (19:26) -How stress affects your physiology and why finding meaning and purpose in your life is so important to your stress resiliency (23:53) -Managing your mindset as it relates to what you can vs what you cannot control (36:15) -How lack of downtime contributes to stress, the brain’s default mode network, and our toxic relationship to technology (38:34) -How to create a morning routine in as little as 5 minutes (48:32) -Creating new behaviors and habits (55:34) -The daily gratitude exercise Dr. Chatterjee practices with his family (57:33) -The importance of touch and intimacy (1:00:37) Find Dr. Chatterjee online at https://drchatterjee.com/ and follow him on Facebook @DrChatterjee, on Instagram @DrChatterjee, and on Twitter @drchatterjeeuk.

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forward slash pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And once you're there, you'll see a special bonus the Juve team is giving away to my listeners. Just use the code pharmacy FMACY, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, at the checkout. This is one of the simplest tools to support your body's own ability to make melatonin and get deep, restful sleep, and it's available to use right in your own home. I hope you'll check it out and see why I love using Juve. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever been stressed in your life, today's conversation is right for you because I think stress matters, and we're going to talk about why and how to fix it.

So our guest today is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, who's one of the most influential doctors in the UK and Europe, and he wants to change how we practice medicine using functional medicine. He hosts the biggest podcast in Europe, Feel Better, Live More, which Apple has announced is one of the most downloaded new podcasts of the past year. He's known for helping people find the root cause of health issues, and he's highlighted these methods of functional medicine in a groundbreaking BBC show called Doctor in the House, which has been shown in over 70 countries around the world. He goes into people's homes.

He transformed their lives. He shows what's possible with the power of functional medicine to get to the root cause of disease. His first book, How to Make Disease Disappear, what a great title, is an international bestseller all over the world, sold a quarter million copies in just 18 months. His most recent book, the number one bestseller, The Stress Solution, tackles what the World Health Organization calls the health epidemic of our time, stress. His mission is to help 100 million people feel fantastic by restoring them to optimal health.

Why just 100 million? Why not 7 billion? Yeah, that's a good point, Mark. That's a great point. You know what, I actually- You're like thinking small, Dr. Chatterjee. I thought I was trying to think big. I actually saw this article

where they said 100 million people around the world have to choose between healthcare or food. And it really struck me and I thought, wow, that's an incredible figure, people who have to make that choice. Wouldn't it be great to impact that many people well you know what's true if you eat the right food it is health care and then you don't need health care yeah exactly so it's been so great to know you over the years because you've taken on the leadership role in the UK of bringing forth a new way of thinking about health and disease.

And you've been an advocate for transforming how people think about medicine. And you put content out there that really helps guide people to live better lives, to incorporate the scientific principles that help them do that through your book, How to Make Disease Disappear. And your new book, The Stress Solution, is so powerful. But before we get into all that, I want to talk about your personal story because I've heard you tell it many times. And it took you from being a traditional doctor, trained in traditional medicine, to having your eyes open because your son was fatally ill. And you figured out what was wrong with him and that changed everything for you. So tell us that story about your son. Yeah, Mark. You know, you're right. Like many conventional MDs, I went to medical school. I thought that I was going to learn all the tools that I needed to help my patients get better.

And I think I always had this slight frustration that I didn't really know why that I just thought, you know, there's something about my job which isn't resonating with me deeply. And it wasn't really until my son got ill that I actually figured out what that was. And I can still remember it so clearly. So my son, who was six months old at the time, he had been breastfed for six months by my wife and we went on holiday to France just after Christmas. And on the first day, he wasn't so well. We thought he had a cold. He was bringing up a lot of mucus. And my wife didn't put him down to sleep as normally in the evening. It's his mother's intuition. She knew something wasn't quite right and she just kept him with her in her arms and we were in france at my friend's chalet and she called out to me

i said rongan rongan you've got to come here he's not moving and basically my son had put his arms back he'd gone rigid and stiff um and wasn't really responsive now Now, I thought maybe he's choking. Maybe he's choked on some of the mucus that he's been bringing up all day. And I turned him over. I tried to clear his airway. Nothing was happening. If I'm honest, Mark, I froze.

You thought he was going to die. Yeah, I froze in that moment. I wasn't a doctor with all my experience. I was just a scared father. And it was actually my wife. He said, Rangan, look, we've got to get him to the hospital now. So we drove to the hospital, which wasn't far. It was just two minutes down the road, although I nearly killed us on the way because it had just snowed in the French Alps. I nearly turned the car over and we got there. And what was really interesting is that the doctors and

the nurses were really worried you could tell they were worried because my son didn't have a temperature and you know as you all know it's not uncommon for a six-month-old baby to have a convulsion a febrile convulsion you know secondary to the temperature but his temperature was normal yeah and you could see the doctors wondering well his temperature is normal what is going on so they put a line in his neck you know i actually had to help hold him down while they put a line in his neck which was pretty traumatic for me yeah he had to be uh blue lighted and in ambience down to a bigger hospital because this was a very small regional hospital yeah we got there they didn't know what was going on he had two lumbar punctures and you know my wife and

i were in a bit of a state of shock yeah you're like, what is going on? You know, we're a pretty health conscious family. Um, you know, why is he having this convulsion? And, you know, we weren't sure he was going to make it. And, um, you know, it took a few hours before a doctor came and spoke to us and said, look look we know why he's had a convulsion he's got very low levels of calcium in his body so he's got he had a hypocalcemic convulsion so low calcium levels is dangerous yeah to put it in perspective the normal range in that french hospital of a serum calcium was 2.2 to 2.6 his level was 0.97 wow so not just low and for those non-doctors in the audience calcium is super tightly regulated in the body so any slight deviation is very serious a little high a little

low and this is very low yeah and then we're trying to figure out well okay he's got a low calcium they can give him intravenous calcium, but what caused the low calcium? And clearly he was getting breast milk, so he was getting a lot of calcium. Yeah, exactly. And it turned out a few hours later after these lumbar punctures, and you know, I just couldn't believe that this was going on with my kids. And they said, look, Dr. Chastity, we understand why he's had his convulsion. He's got hardly any levels of vitamin D in his body. Good for them for testing it. Yeah. And that's why he's had it. And then this was like, what is going on? You know,

this is a fully preventable vitamin deficiency. And my son's nearly died from that. Now look, modern medicine saved his life. They gave him a calcium infusion. They gave him vitamin D. The acute problem was fixed. But then we were discharged, you know, five days later. I was like, I was reading up about vitamin D and I was thinking, well, hold on a minute. If he's been deficient for the last six months, if he's been deficient whilst he was in the womb, what impact has that had on his immune system development? this be why he's got eczema and nobody was giving me the answers to that so i made a wife also probably had low vitamin she had yeah she got tested she had low vitamin d and that really drove me mark because if i'm honest i had a lot of guilt i thought how did i did I not know this? How, as a, you know, I used to do nephrology.

That was what I, you know, that's what I was going to do. Where you learn all about calcium and vitamin D. I had an, I've got an immunology degree. I'm a member of the Royal College of GPs. With all these so-called qualifications, I wasn't able to prevent my son having this preventable vitamin deficiency. And there's a lot of guilt there. And I thought, right, I'm going to get my son having this preventable vitamin deficiency. And there's a lot of guilt there. And I thought, right, I'm going to get my son back to full health as if this had never happened.

That was the vow I made to myself. And that drove me every evening, every day. I'd spend two, three hours on the internet, in textbooks, reading, learning, researching, thinking, well, hold on a minute. There's a lot of science out there that I have not learned about as a doctor that I think is relevant for my son. You mean nutrition science? Nutrition science, you know, science on the gut microbiome,

science on how our food choices impact our immune system, et cetera, et cetera. That led me to come over to America to train, study at conferences. And the more I start to understand, I put it into practice with my son. He starts to get better. I start to apply those principles with myself, with my wife, with my family. We start to feel better.

Then I start applying those same principles with my patients. They're starting to feel better. And I think, well, hold on a minute. Everybody's feeling better. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. And I've got to say that, yes, my son was the trigger for me. But, you know, I used to feel guilty about that, Mark.

For years, I think I had this guilt. And I'm starting to let go of that because I think that helps me be the best father I can be. But now I think it was a gift what happened to my son. Because had he not got sick, I'm not sure I would be doing what I'm doing now no yeah you know often many of us who are in this field has some crisis with ourselves or family member where we wake up and we go okay wait a minute what we learned in medical school isn't the whole story that we missed a whole lot about how to create a healthy human none of us took a class called Creating Healthy

Human 101 in medical school. And yet that is the most essential thing that we need to figure out so we can live healthy, vibrant, long lives. And most of the diseases we see today are actually the result of our environment affecting us, whether it's our diet or stress or toxins, infections. These are things that we can actually modify. And that's why, you know, I'm so excited about your new book, which is The Stress Solution. You know, the truth is that you can't avoid stress. Stress is just a part of life. And the question is, you know, how do you define stress? How do you relate to stress? How do you interact with it in a way that

doesn't control you or affect you in the way that it could? You know, I learned that the stress is defined as the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego. So it could be a lion chasing you. That's a real threat to your body. Or it could be you think your spouse is having an affair. Even if they're not, your body has the same response as if it's being chased by a tiger or a lion. And I think we don't, in our society, have mechanisms or systems for addressing that. And not only do we not have systems, but we are exposed to chronic, unremitting stress day in, day out, minute to minute, from the minute we wake up to the minute we go to sleep and we haven't any structures in our society for really managing that and most cultures have

had ritual have had prayer have had you know 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 what inspired you to sort of write this book and deal with this big, un-often-addressed epidemic of chronic stress? Yeah, Mark, I think in my first book, How to Make Disease Disappear, I spoke about what I considered to be the four sort of pillars of health, as it were, the four things that I think have the most impact on our health, but also we've got a fair degree of control over food movements, which we've been talking about for years, but equally important sleep and relaxation. And what was quite clear to me is that people were feeding back to me that

the pillar they were struggling with the most, or many of them were, was the whole relax pillar, this whole piece about stress. People were sort of thinking about their food and their movement, but they really struggled with stress. And I thought, you know what? Food gets a lot of airtime. Movement gets a lot of airtime. I don't think stress is getting the airtime that it deserves. And that's why I thought, well, I'm going to write a book on stress to really elevate it in in terms of our consciousness in terms of what

we're thinking about and you mentioned in the introduction the world health organization right now if you go on their website will say that stress is the health epidemic of the 21st century but that's an alarming statement the health epidemic wow yeah i mean that's incredible and then i might fight a little bit with that i think food per food problem is big one well right up there it's right up well look i think stress and food is linked actually because actually our diet you probably know this but our diet if it's bad causes physiologic stress so when you eat sugar and crap it actually raises your cortisol and stress hormones. Even if you're not mentally stressed, it makes you physically stressed. Well, a lot of these things actually, as you know, Mark, work both ways. So yeah, the poor dietary choices can send stress signals up to your brain. Good food choices can send calm signals up

to your brain. This is also with the gut-bra brain axis which you know you've written about before i've written about in this book um but also i would say it works both ways so if you are chronically stressed yeah it's quite hard to make those good healthy food choices and i you know let's take january in in the uk in the us every january people are trying to get healthy right i'm going to reduce my sugar intake this year. I'm going to cut out alcohol this year. But here's the problem I've seen is that people can use willpower for a week, for two weeks, maybe three weeks. But if the sugar or the alcohol was being used to help them soothe the stresses in their life, they're never going to maintain it long term. So I actually, I agree food is a big problem, but i found with some patients addressing their stress levels means they feel less of the need

to you know to binge on sugar because they're not feeling as stressed if you're happy you know you're not going to eat that bag of chips ohio cookies yeah because a lot of a lot of our food choices are dictated by our emotions and you know we're feeling down, if we're feeling stressed, if we feel we've got too much on, actually that sugary chocolate bar or that bag of chips actually helps us feel good in that moment. So short-term benefit, but long-term harm. But the other thing...

It was interesting. Last night I went out, I recorded my public television show for my new book. And it was a very intense day. And I'd been really sort of under a fair bit of pressure writing the script and getting it all done and performing it and rehearsing it. It's a big production. And at the end of the day, we went out and had a celebration.

And I had two tequilas, which is, for me, a fair bit. And I noticed last night that my sleep wasn't as good, that my heart rate didn't go down enough, that it was really impacting me in a negative way. And today I don't feel as sharp as I normally would because I probably did something that was counterproductive to manage the, quote, stress of all this stuff. And I was giving myself a treat,

but actually it made me counterproductive. Yeah, but this is a story that I think many of your listeners will be able to relate to that um in fact I tell the story in in my book about this chap who I saw um he was a you know busy business guy in his early 50s and what's really interesting about him is that we start to measure something called heart rate variability on him so heart rate variability and what is that it's you know basically it's a measure of how what is the beat to beat variation between our heartbeats now people will think it should be like a metronome you know tick tock tick 70 70 70 yeah but that's actually incorrect what we're looking

for is a high degree of variability complexity yeah complexity and it shows that we're constantly adapting and able to adapt to this changing environment around us and what was interesting the worst heart rhythm is got no variability it's a. Yeah. So a low heart rate variability is actually indicative that we've got high stress levels in our body. And this chap actually on a Wednesday evening, he would find that he was drinking a lot of alcohol. He wasn't sleeping well. He was having a lot of caffeine on Thursday, more alcohol on the Thursday. He was basically, he came in, he was really, really stressed. It was impacting his relationships, impacting his sleep, et cetera, et cetera. The very common story. But as we start to look at his life and actually use HRV, heart rate variability readings, we could see that everything changed

for him on a Wednesday. So what happened on a Wednesday lunchtime, he had a team meeting, right? He found that incredibly stressful. He had to present to his team. You know, it was quite a high pressure meeting and that stress would last throughout the day. So what would happen is on a Wednesday late afternoon when he would leave work, he had to compensate with that stress. How would he do that? Alcohol. Alcohol. So he'd open a bottle of wine. He'd have a glass. That glass, one glass would turn into two, two would turn into three and by the end of the evening he'd had the whole bottle of wine so what happens then doesn't sleep well on the

wednesday nights so thursday morning he's feeling groggy he needs lots of coffee lots of sugar to get him through coffee in the afternoon as well which again impacts his ability to sleep on thursday nights he's not feeling good and that cycle continues where he's having a bottle of wine on Thursday, two bottles of wine on the Friday and et cetera, et cetera. But what did we do? We identified his trigger point was a Wednesday lunchtime. So I could show him that on the data, he could see it very clearly. So we discussed about certain things he might be able to do on a Wednesday evening instead of alcohol. Now, there was a yoga class very near his office. So before he went home, he went to the yoga class. So what happens then? He goes to that yoga class, that helps him de-stress. When he gets home, he no longer feels the need to drink a bottle of wine.

So he might have a glass, but it's one glass and it stops there. He sleeps well. Thursday, he feels fresh. He doesn't get as stressed at work. He doesn't have as much coffee. And before you know it, all we had to do was give him a yoga class on a Wednesday afternoon. And suddenly that changed his whole week. And people who are listening to this, I'd really ask them to reflect on their own life and think actually is there a trigger point in my week where things start to go downhill yeah because if you can identify that and change your behavior it is incredible what you what you can achieve it's true i mean most of us understand you know we need to eat well most of us understand how to exercise and what that means but very few of us understand how can we actually 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 right 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 a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2013. I think it was an editorial piece which suggested that between 70% and 90% of what a primary care physician like me sees in any given day is in some way related to stress. Of course, of course. 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 to explain this information yeah i 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 thinks it's when your body thinks you're in danger it's trying to keep you safe so let's go 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 going to 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. You're going to survive. You know, your amygdala, which is the emotional part of your brain, becomes more reactive. So you're hypervigilant 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 and 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 etc etc yeah for many of us those short-term uh responses that are so helpful become harmful so if your stress 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, lethargy, type two 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 culture we live in that's stress.

We have the toxic food system. We have the chronic amount of live in that's stress we have the toxic food system we have the chronic amount of financial stress that most people feel i think you know 40 of americans can't withstand a 500 emergency 100 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 uh a number of years ago was that more than a poor diet more than 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 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 a few years ago, I came across this Japanese concept of ikigai, which I know you're familiar with.

I saw these four circles and it's where these four circles intersect in the middle is your ikigai. 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. And I thought-

Sounds like you got that nailed, Dr. Chatterjee. Hey, well, look, I'm very lucky. I now have in my life, my job, I absolutely love my job. 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, they found it a little bit intimidating. They thought, yeah, I want some ikigai in my life. That sounds brilliant. I started talking about this concept to my patients. And for many of them, 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 her hand up at the end and she asked me a question. She said, hey, Dr. Chastity, 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 in 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 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 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. 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 I mean, I'm now in California doing my public television show, and 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 say about a patient i saw recently i think you'll find this interesting um 54 year old chap i think he was certainly mid 50s he was the local um 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. 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 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 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 out of 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 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 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 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 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 checked 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 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 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? 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 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 also got to think about those social pieces you know our community the relationships we've got um you know what 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 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've got 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've used these tips

that I've, you know, 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, you know, 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 right? It's the perception of how something impacts us. It's our

beliefs about something, right? So I think 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, 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. You know, if you have income issues, if you have, you know, real trauma in your family, or 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. i think there there are are ways of looking at changing our mindset so can you talk about how that 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 yeah 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, 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.

And 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 stresses

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 their all their sweet treats and they might be thinking which one am i going to have you know they'd be daydreaming a little bit now if you go to any cafe what's everyone doing they're on their phone computer yeah and look to be clear i'm not. 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. Wow. 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, that's, 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 off. 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 i'm a huge fan of 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 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, actually it 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 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 within 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, Dr. Chachi, I feel like a different person. 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. 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 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 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 that i i love it and it's like a regular habit now. We leave our phones at home. We go for dinner. We don't. We, we, um, and on Sunday mornings, uh, my wife and I will go out with our kids and we'll both leave our phone at home. And you know, I, I do that. 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. And I got called out by this, by my daughter 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 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 addictive. 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 way of unwinding, you know, listen to some music, do 10 minutes on your meditation app, like calm or 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 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 for a new email, you're not going to get a notification, et cetera, et cetera. 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 pick up your phone. And I was sitting next to this friend of mine. We 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 showed her, she picked up her phone a thousand times in a day. 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. 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. But I think the 3Ms provides a very valuable structure to help you think about what are you going to put into your morning routine. And it works if you have an hour in the morning, it works beautifully well. If you only have five minutes, like some of my patients, it can still work really well. So the first time mindfulness can be, it can be meditation. It can be breathing. You know, it can be a practice of mindfulness. Whatever you want can go under that umbrella of mindfulness. I personally, currently I'm doing

the calm meditation app. So first thing, when I get up in the morning, I'm plugging into the Calm Meditation app. I put my phone on airplane mode so I can't see any of the incoming noise that might be on there. And I do 10 or 15 minutes meditation. Some days, Mark, I hit the zone and I feel really, really calm. Other days, I just go through my to-do list.

But what I've learned to do is not beat myself up about it on those days where I'm going through my to-do list. But what I've learned to do is not beat myself up about it on those days where I'm going through my to-do list. I'm accepting that, hey, you know what, my mind's a little bit busy today. That's okay. Whereas even 18 months ago, I would get slightly frustrated. Oh, I can't switch my mind off. I can't clear my mind. So I think that's a great practice for people to do. Then I move on to movement. Again, movement can be anything depending on what you like. I do a lot of hip stretches, maybe some yoga moves, maybe some workouts on a step, maybe some press-ups, whatever I feel like for five or ten minutes. That is all I do. And then I'll move on to mindset. So mindset can be anything to put you in a positive frame of

mind. So it could be reading a book that you find very uplifting for a few minutes with a cup of tea in the morning. It could be doing affirmations. And actually, you know, like many people listening, I've got young kids, right? So my daughter, who's currently six, has a sixth sense when daddy is up, right? So I try and get up before them and get my morning routine done. But she can sense when I'm downstairs doing it. And often she'll creep down in. Often it's in my second M, in my movement, which is fine because she just does the movement with me. But if she's there with me for the third M, which is mindset, I'll do affirmations with her. So we'll sit there together. I'll hold her hand. She'll

hold my hand. And we will say for about two minutes i'm happy i'm calm i'm stress-free i'm happy i'm calm i'm stress-free and we'll just repeat that for two minutes and at the end of those two minutes she's got the most beautiful smile on her face i feel totally relaxed and calm and that calm continues throughout the day that's the beauty of it it's not just in the moment i'm more resilient to the stressors in my life. Now, for people who are thinking, I don't have time for that because I've got a lot of patients who are single moms who might be working two jobs. I managed to persuade them to give it a go even for five minutes. And 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 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 yeah no it's so powerful it's just it's just building the structure of that into your day and i think you know when i do it it makes a huge difference and like yesterday again i was preparing for my show and i'm like i got you know 300 emails i don't know this to do and that to do and i'm like no no i'm just gonna stop i'm gonna do a little meditation in the morning i went to work out a little bit i went to the beach

and just sat on the on the on the beach went in the ocean for a little bit and i just my mind was clear i felt calm it was like and it set me up for an amazing day which you know often don't give myself that i mean i i usually meditate in the morning for 20 minutes and uh will exercise when i can can i can i ask you a question mark do you ever feel you know how important meditation is for you in the morning but do you like many of us sometimes feel i'm too busy today i don't have that 20 minutes i just want to get ahead with my emails. And if you do that, I think it'd be interesting for people to hear that is, do you fall prey to the same pressures that we fall prey to? Absolutely. I absolutely, you know, I've got the stuff I got to prepare for. I don't have

time. I've got to finish this. I got to do that. And yeah, but I'll usually fit it in somewhere else. And I think, you know, it's probably a false notion it's probably not even true that if i did it i'd feel better and when i do it especially when i do it regularly like twice a day i don't feel stressed about anything like i'm resilient i'm calm i'm more productive i'm more focused and it's and it's like well how do you have that much time every day to meditate well turns out i don't have the time not to because of the impact it has on the quality of my life the quality of my happiness the quality of my experience the quality of my relationships yeah uh and and my overall well-being and in my productivity so i think it's it's i've learned that it's it's something that's essential

and it's not just an add-on It's as important as eating well and exercising. Yeah. Now, thank you for that. I mean, I find that when I don't do my morning routine, when I think that I'm too busy, I feel it later. Yeah. You know, I get stressed at things.

Things take me longer than they would have done. And I'm not perfect, but I've certainly trained myself to actually do it. And I find, you know, the more you can do it at the same time every day, the easier it is to create that new habit. And if, again, if people are listening to this, I'd say, you know, the last few months I've been really delving into behavior science in terms of what does all the best science and behavior change say about how we create a new behavior? And, you know, research from Duke University suggests that over 50%, I i think it was 56 of what we do in any given

day is habit yeah it's not conscious thought it's habit so the way to create new behavior is to stick it on to an existing habit that you are already doing without thinking so for example in the uk i don't know if it's the same here but a lot of people like to put the kettle on in the morning and make themselves a hot drink whether it's a coffee or a cup of tea. So with many of my patients, I start simply that. I say, look, how about when the kettle's on, what do you do? Oh, I normally flick emails or go on social media. I say, okay, why not when the kettle's boiling, why not for that one minute do some deep breathing?

And it's amazing how powerful that is because they don't need to find time in their day because many people say they don't have time they're already going to be boiling that kettle so they're using that time productively to get that one minute of deep breathing in yeah and again breathing is one of the simplest and fastest ways to switch off your stress response breathing is information for your brain it's information for your body it's true you know we were talking earlier about bj fogg who's the behavioral scientist and he talks about behavior change having to be broken down in something that's you have an intention to do you have a desire to do you have the ability to do and you have a trigger to do it exactly and so for example

i really wanted to do more push-ups I'm getting older. I don't want to lose muscle. It's important. And I'm like, oh, I'm so busy, but I know it takes like 30 seconds or a minute for my shower to heat up in the morning. So I basically have a trigger, which is I turn the shower on and I dropped out of the bathroom floor and I do my 30, 50 pushups and then I'm good. And it's, it's a so simple at that time, I don't know what else I would be doing there. They're just sitting there waiting or looking at my phone. But it's a simple behavior change habit so you can integrate in your life that make the biggest difference.

So powerful. And gratitude, for example, you've spoken about gratitude before. I write about it in this book. You know, if you want to make a gratitude practice regular, simple things you can do. If you want to do it before you go to bed to really put your mind in a positive frame of mind, leave a journal that you like, that you've bought, that you really desire, you want to write in, leave it next to your bed on your bedside table with a pen. Just makes it a little bit easier. Every time you put an obstacle

in the way of doing a new behavior, you make it less likely. Keep it there. You're going to go to bed and it's just going to prompt you to go, hey, I'm just going to wipe those three things down. There's a lovely gratitude practice I actually do with my kids every day that I wonder if people might find useful. It's something that the strength coach, unfortunately,lympic strength coach who tragically died last year charles poliquin he taught me well he told me about this a few years back that he did this with his daughter and it really resonated with me and it's at our dinner times when i'm at home you know it's a big thing for us we'll all sit around the table to have dinner together and you know we're not all our devices and what we do is we play a little game

and everyone has to go around the table and answer three questions what have i done today to make somebody else happy what has somebody else done today to make me happy and what have i learned today and mark if i'm honest i thought this is going to be a great exercise for my kids it's really going to help them teach them about the importance of putting them into a positive frame of mind but i've got to tell you for my wife and i as well it's the most incredible practice and because we do it over the dinner table i've not had to find time in my day to fit it in it's not another thing i have to fit into an already busy day well i'm going to sit down and have dinner anyway. And what it helps you do is it helps connect you with the people around you. And in a really beautiful way, I start finding out things from my children and my wife that I wouldn't have otherwise found out.

You know, I can ask my kids, how was school today? And then, fine. Yeah, fine. What did you get up to? Nothing. Okay. And you can't really go down that road much. But you play this game.

Like my daughter recently said, hey daddy, you know, Annabelle opened the door for me on the way out to the playground today at lunchtime. I thought that was really nice. And I feel as though I'm helping to teach them from a young age, how important it is to look for those little bits

of positivity that happen every day. And the research is powerful. We know that gratitude is good for our physical health, our psychological health, our emotional health. And it's such a simple practice. Goes back to what we said at the start, stress is endemic in our culture. We can't always remove the stressors that are there,

but we can put into practice really simple, accessible things that all of us have got access to you know i think it's that important it's what's so beautiful about your book this dress solution because it's filled with really practical tips that are achievable it's not like oh you have to go to a monastery and meditate for three months and then come out right and and one of the things you talk about which i thought was really interesting and and kind of novel and also a little bit challenging in the Me Too era is the importance of touch and intimacy and the physicality that actually helps to reduce stress. I remember reading a study that in neonatal ICUs, if the babies were picked up and touched and massaged,

that they would heal better, that they would get out of the ICU faster, that they wouldn't need as many medications. It was really objective scientific data showing the power of touch to accelerate newborn babies healing. Yeah, I think this is the chapter I'm most proud of in this book actually because I do think it's new. I think it is challenging a lot of people's perceptions and it's giving priority

to probably the most neglected of all our senses which is human touch and like when we saw each other we gave a big hug and it was awesome but it changes the whole dynamic but there is such good science on this so the reason i wrote this chapter actually is because i was filming a bbc one show um last year called holding back the years and as part of that we we went to Liverpool John Moores University and I met someone called Professor Francis McGlone, who's one of the world's leading researchers in touch. And he says that human touch

is not a sentimental human indulgence, it's a biological necessity. And he has spent his life, the last 20 years researching touch fibers, the nerve fibers. And I think this is super, super interesting. So we think of touch as, oh, you know, someone touched me on my forearm. Touch is just there to tell me that somebody has touched me on my forearm, but it's not true. So there are two types of touch nerve fiber. There's the fast one and there's a slow one and they do different things. So it's very much like pain. So it's probably

easy to understand if we start with pain. So if you, for example, in your kitchen, there's a hot pan on the stove and if you touch it and it's really hot, instantaneously, your hand will come off it. That's the fast nerve fiber that's told you there's something hot on your hand and you move away. There's no emotional quality to that pain. That is simply telling you what's happened. A few seconds later, the emotional part of that pain comes. You start to feel, you know, really offended. You feel upset that that's just happened to you. Kids, kids are a great example of this like when my daughter was four and if she would fall over i remember once in the garden she'd take a minute for her to figure it out that it was yeah yeah initially right she'd

rub her knee because she knew her knee had been touched and she'd be a bit bemused three or four seconds later she started to cry so it's's a delayed response because the slow nerve fiber communicates something different. It communicates the emotional quality of that pain rather than just the geographical location. It's the same with touch. Same thing with touch. He's got these experiments set up where he's found that actually there's a type of nerve fiber on your skin called the CT afferent nerve fiber. Now, the name doesn't matter so much. What's important about this nerve fiber is that it is optimally stimulated when you stroke it at three to five centimeters a second. Now, when you stroke your wife or your kids, Mark, you don't calculate, I'm going to stroke that now at three to five centimeters

per second. No, but when you watch mothers stroke their children, they automatically lock into that speed. Why? Because that C-tactile afferent nerve fiber doesn't tell you where you've been touched. Those nerve fibers go up to the limbic system in your brain, and there's an emotional quality. We know that when you stimulate these nerve fibers, it lowers your heart rate. It increases oxytocin. It lowers your blood pressure. It increases the amount of natural killer cells in your body. Natural killer cells are part of your body's innate immune system. They help us to fight off things like viruses and infections. All of these things get influenced by human touch and we have neglected this and you you mentioned the me too era we have become a touch averse society and

i and i totally understand the rationale for that i totally understand that there has been a lot of inappropriate touch in society but i think that has come at the expense of safe, appropriate touch. You know, Mark, as a doctor, I can tell you, 10 years ago, if I was giving one of my patients bad news, you know, I probably would have come in close. I would have put my hand on their shoulder and really sort of delivered that information in a hopefully a caring and compassionate way yeah now i feel scared to do that i feel you know it feels right in this era we now live in i think we have i still hug all my patients hey no no but that's awesome mark but what i'm saying is that many of us feel that we can't touch anymore and i'm talking about safe appropriate touch but hey mark look to put it

into perspective basketball teams in the nba have been shown in a study that if the teams who touch more at the start of the season are the teams who end up higher at the end of the season yeah which is incredible touch each other you mean you touch each other more yeah so there's more human touch there if a waiter comes to give you the bill in a restaurant and they tap you on the shoulder you tip more than if they don't tap you on the shoulder so if there's any waiters or waitresses listening there's a tip on how to get more tips all right but but what does this tell us it tells us there's something primal about human touch and we're not you know we need to touch more essentially and i will say that some

people find it quite hard to be touched. And often that comes down to experiences as a child, whether they were touched enough or not. Or touched inappropriately. Exactly. And I do recognize that. And I think we've got to be very sensitive about that. But a lot of the time with my patients, I ask them to keep a touch diary, find out how many times in a day or in a week they've had safe appropriate touch and i say within two weeks try and double that right where you where you see a friend i say to guys instead of just eight hugs a day to be healthy i heard yeah but there is you know i have literally summarized all the top science in this in my chapter on touch to really give people

the science of feeling it's actually there's. And that's the beauty of this stuff. There is real science behind it. And again, look, I think it's about giving people tools that are relevant for them. Some people may be listening to that and go, yeah, I'm okay on that area. That's not something I need to worry about. I'm like, okay, fine, focus on another area. But maybe someone listening to this

will resonate with that and go, you know what, I think that's me. I think i could probably start to increase the amount of safe appropriate touch i have in my life and give it a go and again i've got so many stories of patients who've done this can i give you a hug or you know you just get asked permission and i think it's not so bad people everybody craves more connection affection and touch and intimacy it's it's part of our nature and it's such an i guess the extension from that is you asked me about touch and intimacy.

I also wrote a chapter on intimacy because this was in the whole, the book is split up into four parts. And there was one quarter was on relationships. And I think relationships are very important because one of the best ways to de-stress is to have close nourishing relationships in our life. But at the same time, too much stress makes it very hard to have have close nourishing relationships in our life but at the same time too much stress

makes it very hard to have those close nourishing relationships it works both ways like all of these things and i feel that it really really sort of plays into this idea of technology and how much it's now impacting us and bleeding into all aspects of our life. I sort of make the case in my book, it's slightly controversial, but I say that many of us are now having eye affairs with our phones. You know, in the sense that we are now, we now know the curvy contours of our iPhone

more than those of our partners. Right. And I said it slightly to to be provocative but really to to make people start to take a take a look at themselves and you know the cliche now is that a couple goes to bed at night right they're in beds together and they're physically together in the same bed but they're actually in their mind a million miles away because they're both on their devices in their customized worlds of emails or the right feed on netflix frankly a human being you know is going to find it very hard to compete with that this is a highly curated personalized feed you know to basically you know

basically have you yeah and so i say look we really need to prioritize those relationships get more intimacy and i was inspired by my mother-in-law actually about something called a 3d intimacy greeting um I used to I used to work uh very near to my wife's parents and sometimes I would drop in for some foods uh which is great so I got this beautiful home-cooked meal um you know at least once a week it was incredible but what I noticed when I was there is when my father-in-law came back, if I was there eating and he came to the door, my mother-in-law would go and give him this huge hug, say some really kind words and really look him in the eye.

Isn't that incredible? After 30, 40 years of marriage, they're still doing that. And that really informed what I call the 3D intimacy, the 3D greeting, which is greet your partner or your friends in three dimensions with touch, with voice and with eyes. It sounds a bit forced, right? It sounds a bit cheesy, but I guarantee if you try this for a few days for just 10 or 15 seconds it will transform the fabric and the dynamic of your relationship it's something my wife and i try and do every morning because otherwise you get together you're in the kitchen you're trying

to get the kids ready for school you're checking your emails yeah yes you're physically together but you haven't really connected and it's just about giving them a hug looking them in the eye and saying something really kind or something nice to them and actually since the book's been out it's amazing how many times on twitter or on instagram people have said to me hey dr chachi i've tried that 3d intimacy greeting with my husband he doesn't actually know i'm doing it on him and he's just like a different person. He's kinder, he's warmer, we're much closer. And it's so easy. It's so easy. And I think it's one of those things in the book that I think is so simple to do. It's so important. And it not only is good for the other person to receive that, but it's good for you to give that because it actually connects

you as well. And I think most of us don't take the time to really stop and i i think you know in my relationship it's so important for me because it's easy to be distracted you're in the middle of something but when my partner walks in a room i stop what i'm doing i get up i give her a hug i look at her i greet her and i say something nice and i think it's it's the most powerful thing mark you know that sounds so simple and in many ways people might be thinking why does a doctor have to tell us this stuff but the reality is this is where society is today relationship problems are driving a lot of health problems as well and we're not present in our relationships we're distracted it's not uncommon for one person to come home now the other person is still stuck in their computer

and you barely say a word. I have done that in the past, right? I am not saying that I'm whiter than white on this. I also do these things, but I've recognized the problems it causes. But you mentioned another important thing, which I think it's really important to focus on. And that is, I mentioned the research of when you are

stroked when you are touched what that does for you well actually the research also shows that the giver of touch also receives benefits and you just right you know whether and that could be for your pets as well if you give your pets a a cuddle you stroke your pets you also get a benefit so it works both ways of course you're not yeah you're it's a it's a virtuous cycle it really is and so you know i'm very i i was really i really wanted to put this relationship section in the book because as important as meditation as breathing as working out as all these things are you know i i get that we've heard those things before it's important to emphasize them but i think this whole piece around relationships really needs

emphasizing particularly today yeah being connected being present intimacy touch there are things that we forget about because we're so distracted and the book i think is such a big contribution to us understanding the relationship of all these things to the quality of our life and our happiness and the happiness of our relationships our productivity at work i mean it is a central issue of our time and nobody really talks about it that much but it's and we we've had many shows on meditation and stress but i think it's it's such an important book and it's such an important topic. And I just want to thank you for bringing that in the world, for teaching us the simple things and the little bite-sized pieces that are really doable. You know, the one-minute breathing

exercise, you know, the 3D greeting. I mean, these are simple things that are brilliant and easy. And if we do them, the power to transform ourselves, our lives, the quality of our experience, our level of stress is just fantastic. So thank you, Dr. Chatterjee, for being on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Mark, thank you for having me. It's great to catch up. And if you've loved this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment.

We'd love to hear from you. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, everyone. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. So two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me.

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