The Dr. Hyman Show - Simple Methods To Reduce Stress

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker. How do we want to show up, especially when things get tough? This is a great question to ask ourselves as many of us have the tendency to fall quickly and easily into patterns that don’t serve us well, often causing more harm than good, both physically and mentally. There are ways we can take back control of our minds, however, so that we can let go of stress and enjoy what most matters in life. In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Elissa Epel, Dr. Susan David, and Gabrielle Bernstein about the power of the mind to create or reduce stress. Elissa Epel, PhD, is an internationally renowned health psychologist who is focusing on how to live well and thrive with existential stress, despite the challenges we face personally and globally. She is a professor at UCSF and the director of UCSF’s Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and past president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine and serves on scientific advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health. She is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Telomere Effect. Her latest book is The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease. Susan David, PhD, is one of the world’s leading management thinkers and an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist. Her Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Emotional Agility, describes the psychological skills critical to thriving in times of complexity and change. Susan’s TED Talk on the topic went viral, with over 1 million views in its first week of release. Susan is the CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, a cofounder of the Institute of Coaching (a Harvard Medical School/McLean affiliate), and on the scientific advisory boards of Thrive Global and Virgin Pulse.  Gabrielle Bernstein is the New York Times bestselling author of The Universe Has Your Back and has written six additional bestsellers, including Super Attractor, which launched in September 2019. She was featured on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday as a “next-generation thought leader,” and the Oprah Winfrey Network chose Gabrielle to be part of the “Super Soul 100,” a dynamic group of 100 trailblazers whose vision and life’s work are bringing a higher level of consciousness to the world. This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker.  Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off their entire first order at paleovalley.com/hyman. Athletic Greens is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. Elissa Epel Dr. Susan David Gabrielle Bernstein

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. It's not just the action during stress, during events, during tough times. The question really becomes, what are you carrying in your body and mind when nothing is happening? Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I often talk about how eating organ meats is so good for your health. Now, I know it can be hard to work them into your diet, but when we don't eat things like liver, kidney, and heart regularly, we're missing out on wonderful sources of essential nutrients. Organ meats are nature's multivitamins and the richest sources of natural vitamin A, B vitamins, and minerals that we have.

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optimize my health, and I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. And right now, Athletic Greens is giving away 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. And now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Stress is a factor in all of our lives, and it can build through a combination of trauma, life experiences, and our state of mind. How we bottle and brood our emotions and stories rather than sit with them and sort through them can be detrimental to everything from our careers

to relationships, health, and so many other areas of life. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on finding a healthy stress response by managing our thoughts. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Alyssa Epple on mind states and the impact of stress on mitochondria, with Dr. Susan David on how to become emotionally agile, and with Gabrielle Bernstein on the Choose Again Method and why it works. Let's jump in. Usually we think about how stressed does someone get in the moment? How quickly do they recover? And that's important. We want a quick peak and a quick recovery, and that's a healthy, resilient stress response. But it's not just the action during stress, during events, during tough times. The question really becomes, what are you carrying in your body and mind when nothing is happening, when you are at rest, or at least you think you are? And that's a window into the unconscious level of stress that we're carrying. So when we talk about uncertainty stress,

that's where it is. That's because it's a little bit vague and we can catch that. Mindfulness, mindful check-ins help us just in this moment, like just ask, are you tensing up? Do a check-in with your body, your hands, your face, your eyebrows. So often we are tensing up and we sometimes can identify why. And sometimes we can just remember, oh, right now it's not only okay to relax. It's important for my body. I'm not needing to cope with something. So it's that baseline state or rest state that we're learning is really different in people and is a sign of chronic, low-grade chronic stress that we can actually get to and release through different techniques. So red mind is what we've been discussing about coping in the moment when you're fired up and you need the energy, you need the stress response. And we just don't want that to kind of go on and on and have sluggish recovery.

But otherwise, we need that. It's beautiful. It's why we're here today. That's our survival response. And of course, we're triggering it too much as humans with an overdeveloped cortex and the more chronic ambiguous threat we feel. So then there's yellow mind state, which is when we think we are relaxed. It's just how are you walking around during the day? Typical day, where are you at? What's your baseline? You probably do some monitoring.

You know what your autonomic nervous system is set at. And that is probably higher than we need to be at. And so that's what we think of as our default baseline is actually carrying around a lot of both cognitive load from our thoughts, from different information, screens, demands. So we're a bit activated. Then there's also the unconscious stress that we can become aware of and release. So we want to bring down that yellow mind state to a more true resting state. And that's the green mind. Yeah. How do you, how do people start to think about identifying if they're stressed because i think for me i kind of you know didn't really think i was but i i think i sort of i

being able to sort of map out things that like looking my aura rank for example could tell me my heart rate ability or what's happening i was in mexico city for a week and my heart rate ability went down i went to the jungle in cost in Costa Rica and it went way up by three fold. So our bodies sort of register all the inputs, even if we don't think they are. Yeah. I've learned a lot from monitoring and I think that's one way to raise awareness as well as asking ourselves to become mindful of our emotions and our bodily, where we're holding stress in the body, where we're tense.

The heart rate tells us a lot of things, but the heart rate variability we think is more specific to that balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic. So more related to psychological stress, not just metabolic demands. So it's that's super interesting. So Costa Rica leads you to a different yellow, maybe green mind state, better baseline. I monitored my, with my aura ring, I monitored my heart rate variability during a meditation retreat. And we know that when people slow their breathing immediately, they can have a decrease in all the sympathetic activity markers and sometimes in heart rate variability during studies. So it's no mystery that doing these practices and doing them for longer can lead to these improvements. And that those are what we call deep rest states when we're really allowing ourselves to feel safe and to let down and let ourselves go into restorative

mode. But I was surprised at how long my heart rate variability, my baseline heart rate variability took to change. So it was only two weeks later toward the end of the retreat that my sleeping heart rate variability really improved. And I think that's. So two weeks of meditation, like hours and hours every day. Yeah. So for me, it wasn't easy to change my baseline, particularly my sleeping baseline, but it was possible. And it was, you know, I was super excited that it finally changed. Yeah, I had, I had, you know,

rarely get over 40. And then I think the other night when I was in the jungle and I was in this deep sympathetic, parasympathetic state and doing a lot of sort of somatic body work and it went to like in the 90s. And I was like, holy crap.

Like we don't, we don't have a sort of a framework for understanding how these things are so impactful for us. So I realized how much I need to pay attention to the practices that I need to do to actually reset my nervous system regularly. So in the book, you talk a lot about some of these practices, and that's what the stress prescription is so i love you to sort of talk about how do we sort of create a lifestyle and a way of thinking about our day and a way of thinking about the beginning and the end of our day and other types of tools or techniques or doorways other than meditation obviously is powerful but there's there's more than that a little bit sort of explore that yeah we we have these red mind states that we don't want on all day. Drains our batteries,

stresses our mitochondria. We have data on daily mood and mitochondria showing it is really sensitive to daily affect. This was a study with Martin Picard of Columbia, and we were measuring the enzymatic activity. And so when people woke up with more positive emotion and went to bed with more positive emotion, they had higher mitochondria, which we measure kind of in the middle of the week of monitoring. And when they, you know, particularly at night, so there's this idea of how are we recovering from the day can we maintain positive affect at the end of a stressful long day and we certainly found the

chronically stressed participants these were caregivers had lower mitochondria overall but this mood effect pretty much mediated that and overrode that so that's this pointing us to we actually know how to increase positive affect in the moment, you know, quite quickly with gratitude exercises and other ways of thinking and being. And so how amazing to think that our mitochondrial activity might be under our control in this short term way. Wow. So what are the ways that actually you can affect your mitochondrial activity then? Yeah. Well, to get back to your question about the, how do we live a day without chronic stress? So we might think of red mind as like having, you know, drinking coffee all day and just keeping us

in that activated mode. And we want that stress response, but we just want to, you know, use it parsimoniously, not take it for granted when we ignore it it can just be on all day and rush rush rush i mean rushing and packing our day is probably the most common pernicious way that we stay in yellow and red wine yeah the okinawans call it hurry sickness yeah that's good yeah they don't they don't have much of that do they we must look so weird to them. Yeah. I mean, in the blue zones, right. Is it, you know, they just live life. They just, it's slow and it's,

it's about community and people and enjoyment and pleasure and food and hanging out. There's like, nobody's like doing startups and trying to like build a career. It's just, people are just living. And it's just this beautiful phenomena that we see. And I think that's a big part of the longevity in these zones. Yeah, that's beautiful. So the mitochondria are responsive most likely. They haven't been studied to death like all the other biomarkers

in terms of health behaviors and all, but they certainly are related to the hormetic stressors like exercise, increasing them. And we don't actually, we only now I think have really good ways to measure them in healthy humans in a monitoring way. So we're learning more and more, but we do know that they tend to secrete the cell, like lets out fragments of mitochondrial

DNA into the serum during acute stress. And so that's not a good thing. That's not a good sign. That's a sign that our mitochondria are, you know, overstressed and responding to stress with this excessive, what we call cell-free mitochondrial DNA. So they're outside. I wonder if that's why stress causes fatigue, because it affects our ability to make energy. Yes, I think that's exactly right. And that is a new area. In 2018, we published the first paper showing that chronic stress was related to lower mitochondria. And then we were like, why didn't we measure fatigue and vitality? Because you would imagine you have low mitochondria. Some had as low as people with mitochondrial disorder. And that is thought to be at the center

of both chronic illness and mental health now, these mitochondria as the source of aging, breakdown. And so I think it's really helpful to think of our mitochondria and what gives them a boost and boosting positive affect, having more of these restorative states, but also the hormetic stressors, that they probably love them. Well, yeah. So let's talk about the hormesis, because this is a really important idea. We think of stress as bad, but there are actually good

stresses, right? And how do we start to go about thinking about how do we incorporate those in our life as a way of actually impacting our nervous system and the parasympathetic and the sympathetic state, which are often so dysregulated in our culture. It's interesting to think of really planning regular, like a lifestyle habit, hormetic stress episodes. So it's very common to be doing ice exposure or sauna or Wim Hof breathing. And those are, I mean, to be totally honest, I don't think we have many options in our toolbox for hormetic stress that we know of and we know how to use safely and find the right dose. So people experiment and it's just a new cutting edge area of stress to really

understand how these are affecting aging and mental health. There is exciting work on depression and hypothermia showing that when you can raise your core body temperature, even just a few sessions, it can lead to over a month of remission from more severe treatment resistant depression. And of course the cardiovascular effects are well-documented. Rhonda Patrick just wrote a beautiful review of, of what sauna repeated sauna does. So we'll put that in the show notes. What's the reference for that? I'll get, I'll email that to you okay that's great because i think i think you know we we um you know he also on it's nice whatever but

actually these are very therapeutic and i i know for myself it's sort of how i managed to get through chronic fatigue using hot and cold therapies just to be able to function and also just as a just a basic maintenance of my life to for mood for energy for relaxation restoration it's quite powerful yes it is and you know it's beautiful in that it's not medical so it's doing it's you know creating all of these changes in the cell in a dramatic way same with cold exposure same with breath holding the extreme breathing and then the recovery response. So we're just, we're kind of like inducing the survival response in short bursts, and then the counter-regulatory response, turning on the autophagy, cleaning up junk in the cell, reducing oxidative stress, free radicals. And I think in terms of the aerobic stress, I mean, we've been trained to think,

you got to get into, change your clothes, do 45 minutes, you got to get the endurance in. And, and of course, that's important. But what we're talking about stress fitness, you can go do something for one minute, two minutes, you change up your, your physiological state, right? You can go do jumping jacks or sprint. And you don't, and you can, someone was just encouraging me, I was like, happy, you got to change your clothes, you can get sweaty. And they're like, no, I do it all the time. You don't, you do it in your work clothes. So it was interesting just to think like, no, just take away all those barriers about how we think you have to be prepared for exercise and be in the right place and just do the, you know, something high intensity in wherever you are briefly, probably fulfill self-conscious, but that is really changing up our state.

And we also use that in different therapies that are really needing acute psychological first aid for emotion regulation. What do they do? There's all sorts of strategies that are body up like that. So ice on the cheeks is one, as well as the push-ups or jumping jacks. Amazing. So, you know, I think I once was in a hotel and they had a cryotherapy unit, which is where you go and it's like 200 degrees below zero or something.

You cover up your ears and your nose and, you know, it's basically protect the extremities, but you go in this incredibly cold environment for like two or three minutes. And I remember coming out of that, just feeling like, holy crap, but you go in this incredibly cold environment for like two or three minutes. And I remember coming out of that just feeling like, holy crap, I feel like a million bucks. All my pain's gone. I feel energetic.

My mind is focused. And it lasts sort of all day. So I think we kind of have these different doorways we can use. We think traditional things like yoga, meditation, massage, breath work, we're all pretty familiar with that, body work. But there's a lot of other ways we can actually do it. I mean, it can be just a cold shower in the morning or it can be a hot bath at night. Um, really powerful, uh, kind of technologies that we've kind of overlooked as, as key regulators of our biology and our stress response. Yeah. And I think it, it helps to just realize like we really are monkeys in clothes. Like we really do have this mind body of an animal. We're animals and we don't like to think of ourselves that way. We think, you know, the kind of higher status way

is meditation and controlling our thoughts. And the truth is we do really well with body up therapies and they can be even more powerful for some people than the top down therapies yeah right and i think now there's a whole psychedelic renaissance too talking about how do we sort of re-pattern our brains and trauma and a lot of us do with the meaning we make from the world and i you know one of the you know most helpful frames i heard was from uh gabramate which is that trauma isn't what happens to us it's the meaning we make from what happens to us. And I think this is very much akin to the framework of Buddhism, which is sort of where I met you was at this sort of Buddhist conference with the Dalai Lama at a Buddhist retreat center.

And the perspective of Buddhism is essentially that, you know, all of our suffering comes from our interpretation of reality and that it has no sort of objective meaning, but that we kind of put our meaning onto reality, which is why, you know, you can have the analogy I always use is, you know, James Bond can have a gun to his head and he's fine. Woody Allen would not be so fine. Same gun, very different response, right? So, right. So it's not necessarily the external thing that happens. Although there are real physical stresses and things that can happen, but it's, but it's how we, we talk to ourself about how we think about it, the meaning we make from it and all that,

that meaning is what causes the suffering. And, and I think that's, that's what people don't realize is they have the power to change their frame and their mindset when it comes to how they address the challenges in their life and the things that come up, you know, whether it's, you know, being late for a plane or whether it's, you know, more serious life event, um, we have a choice. And I think most of us are kind of, like you said, animal, like monkeys in a suit where we just are reactive and our primitive brains are very much in charge. And a lot of this work that you talk about, the stress prescription, is about how to get our kind of higher level of self-organization and self-regulation through mastering our minds. I mean, that's really ultimately meditation.

It's how do we master our minds. We talked about exercise to build our bodies and eating right. But, you know, the activity of training our mind is something that we don't really even think about in this culture very much. Right. So can you talk about how our mindset and our self-talk and our framing of reality regulates our stress response and what we can do to shift that. Those, a lot of those are top downs or those are strategies that we can use in the moment. And I will talk about those and how much mindset matters, but let's take a step back because you brought up purpose, meaning the meaning we make about events, but also about our life. What story are we telling ourselves? And that's kind of the master stress tip, which is our sense of purpose and our ability to make meaning of when traumatic things happen is absolutely critical to how well we can live.

So we bring these, you know, so we were at this meeting, we both know a lot of people who fully live a Buddhist life. And as part of that, there's a whole worldview and a mindset of noble truth number one that things will happen there will be stress and suffering as as humans and that the future is ultimately uncertain and i asked the i had the opportunity to have a zoom conversation with his holiness the Dalai Lama and that was my first questions you know measuring uncertainty and how do we get so more tolerant of uncertainty it's such an important practice you know way um fundamental belief that of buddhism so what what can we what can we do to embrace uncertainty? And I wanted specific ideas and practices, of course. And that's not quite how he lives. He lives from the worldview of living your

beliefs. And so his answer was unbelievably simple, which is, it is a fundamental belief that the future is uncertain. And that's my answer. So he didn't point us to practices. He pointed us to a shift in how we see the world. Now, we know even Buddhists get stressed, right? We have to keep reminding ourselves of this. So I think there are a couple assumptions we make that lead us to stress, depression, and hopelessness.

So one is that we have unlimited time and we don't really see, it feels like we have, you know, days and days and days, and we're going to live until we're much older. And that's our hope and assumption. And that's how we live. And another is that things should be somewhat controlled, at least in the West, controllable and certain. We should actively control things. And then when things don't go as planned, you know, it really does set us up to have interpretation of victimization, of this thing shouldn't be this way. And so flipping our mindset so that we can really embrace uncertainty and see the fragility of life and really live the impermanence that's there.

We just we're just rushing. We don't notice it. But like this moment with you will never happen again. This moment in time for all of us is gone forever. And each day is so unique. And just remembering that and living in this unit of a day and appreciating it because we don't know what will happen and how long we'll live both in our individual lives when we'll die, but also as a, as a human species, we really don't. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I'm excited to share with you a brand that I trust whose product I've seen value in firsthand, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a wellness tracker that uses science and technology to deliver ultra-personalized healthcare guidance.

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iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels. And not me of course i promise that if you're curious about getting your own health program that's tailored to your unique needs i highly recommend checking out inside tracker right now they're offering my community 20 off at inside tracker.com forward slash dr hyman that's d-r-h-y-m-a-n that's inside tracker i-n-s-i-d-e-t-r-a-c-k-e-r.com slash dr hyman d-r-H-Y-M-A-N. That's InsideTracker, I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And you'll see the discount code in your cart. These difficulty motions don't go, you know, just disappear. And so we know that when people push aside in the way that, you know, the therapist was saying, you don't face into the

reality of what is, when we don't do that, what we often do is we start to hustle with our feelings. So we start to either on the one hand, what I call bottling, where we push aside the emotions. We say, I shouldn't feel that. It's a negative feeling. I'm not allowed to. We might only allow emotions that seem legitimate, like joy or positivity. And basically what we're doing is we're bottling those emotions. But what is bottling? Bottling is avoidance.

And with avoidance often comes the kinds of behaviors that you spoke about earlier. It's like we're avoiding what's going on, but we're drinking more. We're doing Netflix more. We are facing into a heartbreak that might be right in front of us and that if we face into, we'll be able to prepare ourselves more for. So that's one of the things we do when we don't face into the reality of our experience. The other, which looks completely different from bottling, is brooding. So brooding is when we get so stuck in our difficult feelings. I feel so bad.

This is terrible. Why, you know, every time does this happen to me? And what we're doing is we're doing a denial of a different form. So focused on ourselves that we aren't able to see. From becoming a victim, basically. Yeah. And you're not seeing the child in front of you. You're not seeing your loved ones. You're not seeing your colleagues because we're so focused on ourselves. And as it turns out, you know, bottling and brooding look so different. The one is about denial and the other is about getting

stuck in. But both of those, when you look psychologically at the outcome, what you find is that brooding and bottling are both associated with lower levels of well-being, high levels of depression, anxiety, lower capacity to actually problem solve, get your resume together, have the tough conversation, do what needs to be done. And it is also associated with, of course, as you could imagine, lower quality of relationships. Because when you aren't able to be vulnerable with your emotional experience with others, they don't see you as human and connected and authentic. So that's, again, the bottling pot. The brooding, when you're so focused on what it is that you're feeling, it's difficult to connect.

And so there's a really tough impact when you, in habitual ways, deal with your emotions in this brooding or bottling. And, of course, again, our societal narrative in many ways conspires against us being healthy with our emotions. It somehow conveys this idea that if you're just positive, things will be okay, but it just doesn't work out that way. But if you know, throughout human history, I imagine, you know, we've not been that much awake as human beings, right? And so is this an age-old problem and we're just naming it and identifying it now, or is this something new given the stresses and challenges of our society? Because it seems like there's way more depression, way more mental health issues and challenges we're seeing. a result of flaws in our thinking and flaws in our relationship with our emotional life that

get us into these troubles, whether it's brooding or bottling or what other challenges we face in actually having an authentic relationship with our feelings? Well, and that's a really important question. So I think that there are parts of this thinking about emotions that are historical, that if you look at how learning of particular subjects that seem more, you know, literal and able to be quantified, for example, you know, mathematics, those types of subjects in schools have historically been elevated. And then, of course, the default becomes that the things that are much more difficult to quantify are put in this bucket of so-called soft skills.

And it's not that they're soft. Of course, there's nothing soft about them. They are the most critical skills. But there's definitely been a historical demonization of emotions in psychology itself. So in psychology, if we think about the whole transition of psychology, where we had the focus on Freud and your internal world, and then of course, the behaviorists came out and said, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. If you can't measure it, it's not important. And so emotions went into a game that, well, it's difficult to measure, therefore it's not important. We know it's important. We know it's important. So I think there's some things that are historical,

but there's also a couple of things that are going on in our reality. In our reality, we as human beings have been outpaced by technology. We've been outpaced by technology. What does that mean? Well, you know, think of something as simple, not simple, as social comparison. 20 years ago, if you were comparing yourself, you might compare yourself to a person who you didn't like in high school who's now back around in a Ferrari, okay? But it was one person and you were comparing yourself to that person.

Now we are comparing ourselves to literally millions of those people on social media. And so our capacity to actually process all of the different pieces of information that are going on, firstly by social media, but by other things as well, where the more we are faced with information that feels very complex, that we don't know, that feels ambiguous, the more as human beings we default as human beings to fear, trying to fill in the blanks, trying to create stories of what could be. We then find that this fear that we often experience gets transposed into much more of an us and them, because if I can protect myself from the other, so we find greater levels of stereotyping, more rigid thinking. So, you know, a very long, short answer to your question is I think that the signs of this are

historical, but I think that there's something that's happening in the moment, which is this nexus of technology, social media, difficulty in being able to process the information that exists that basically leads us as human beings to often engage in what I call cognitive rigidity or emotional rigidity. where rather than being emotionally agile, we go on autopilot. You know, what am I doing here? Who don't I like? Who do I like? We engage in habits that don't connect with our intentions and we suffer. We really suffer. So can you talk a little bit about how you define emotional agility? Yes. So emotional agility at its core is about being firstly compassionate with ourselves, our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories. And I'll explain what I mean by that in a second. But firstly, it's about being able to enter into a space in which we are compassionate. The second aspect is about being able to be curious with our thoughts and our emotions.

What is this emotion signaling to me about what's important? You know, if I feel rage when I watch the news, that rage is a signpost that I value equity and fairness. And so our difficulty motions, what I'm proposing here is that our difficulty motions aren't just things we need to get through, but that our difficulty motions actually signpost what is most wise and connected and values aligned and intentional for us as human beings. So emotional agility, it's the ability to be able to be compassionate, curious with our thoughts, our emotions, and our stories. But also, it's not just this abstract idea. It's the ability to be courageous enough to take values-connected steps.

So a very big part of emotional agility is about- Can you just define what are those values-connected steps. So a very big part of emotional agility is- Can you just define what are values-connected steps? That seems like an important phrase. So if I, again, going back to the example that I mentioned earlier, if I feel rage when I watch the news, I could push that aside, or I could be hooked on the rage and just act in a way that hurts people. But if I'm able to show up to that rage and say to myself, you know, what is it that I'm feeling right now? What is this difficult emotion that I'm experiencing? What is this emotion signaling to me that is important? Okay, so for me, the rage is signaling that I value fairness and justice, and there isn't enough of it. Values connected steps are then about saying, what are actual physical actions that bring me towards my values. And what's really important here is you're not

doing this in the hot emotion. You're not doing it in the rage and so now I'm acting out. Rather, you're doing it in a way that feels intentional and connected and that is bringing you closer to being the person you want to be. And I use that example with rage, but I can give you, you know, a different example, which is imagine you are feeling bored at work. So that boredom, and it doesn't matter how busy you are because you can be busy bored as well. True. That boredom can be a signpost that you value growth and learning

and that you don't have enough of it. Now, if you simply push aside that difficulty emotion and say, well, at least I've got a job, then you aren't able to enter into the space of using that emotion effectively. And five years time, you could turn around and say, gee, I've been in this boring job for the past five years, but now you've lost five years of opportunity to do something about it. So Values Connected Steps is this idea that when we become more able to metabolize discomfort, because sometimes the emotions we're facing into are uncomfortable, they're telling us about a society that feels wrong or a job that isn't going to work out or even a relationship that isn't going to work out. But when we face into that discomfort

and when we become better at metabolizing discomfort, we are able to be more intentional and to be more aligned with who we want to be as people. And this is the hallmark of integration and psychological health and wellbeing, which is about feeling connected and aligned as human beings. The first method that I share in the book is probably the most valuable. Okay. So this is the method called the choose again method. So we need to have the self-regulating tools to bring ourselves back to a place of higher vibe thoughts and feelings. So here's how it works. Step one is you notice that negative thought that you have on repeat and then notice how it makes you feel. Okay. So maybe the thought is right now, I'll give an example. I don't know how I'm going

to sustain full-time childcare and full-time business. I don't know how. And that's a repeated thought, right? And that thought is giving me a sense of anxiety in my chest. That's step one, describing that thought, right? And how it makes you feel. And like calling it out. There it is. You know, there's that sucker. Let's talk about it.

Step two is really the metaphysical part, which is where we have to suspend our worldly perceptions and recognize that the thoughts that we're having are not who we are. So when we have a repeated thought, Abraham Hicks says this beautiful thing, which is a belief is just a thought that you keep thinking. So if we've had a thought that's on repeat and repeat and repeat, it becomes a belief that we have about ourselves and about our reality. And the only way to unwind that belief is to forgive ourselves for having the thought. And that's step two. So in that moment where I can say to myself, I forgive- Oh, I'm human. Like, it's okay. I thought that stupid thought.

Correct. Or actually, I'm a spirit having a human experience. And that's a little heady for some people, but getting into that place of recognizing that the human thought that we thought was who we were, this perceptual thought that we got hooked into, isn't the truth of who we are. The moment that you forgive yourself for having the thought, or even simply forgive the thought, right? Forgive the thought, oh, there's that thought again. There it is. There it's up again. You are no longer in the belief that that thought is who you are. And you can see that thought as something separate that has been a behavioral pattern rather than the truth. Okay. So it separates it. That's a very powerful idea. I just want to impact that for people because what you're saying is you're not your thoughts because some people conflate who they are with

their thoughts and they're actually become things that are real instead of just a ripple on the surface of the ocean or a lake right that's exactly that's the whole purpose of meditation is to witness the crazy mind that you have because i can't meditate well because i keep thinking well yeah that's the point like you know you actually are watching the unquiet mind do its craziness and then eventually it slows down enough we go oh there's a thought going by and there's another thought and it's not me that's right and what's so interesting about this is that you actually can do this practice before you meditate and it will help you get into a deeper meditation. So the third step,

so you've now identified the thought, you've forgiven yourself for having the thought, so you're no longer stuck in the belief that you are that thought. And the third step is to reach for the next best feeling thought. And it's not like, oh, I'm struggling with my mom, full-time business owner. Instead of being stuck in that thought, I've forgiven that thought now, I can say to reach for the next best feeling thought would look like, it's a privilege that I get this devoted time with my kid at such a really groovy time in his life when like every day is a new development. Every day is a new word. Every day there's a new understanding and it's just happening so rapidly and

I'm going to be the first to see it. And I'm going to be able to focus on my deepening of my bond with my child. And I keep going, right? So you keep reaching for the next spot. And what a privilege it is to be able to serve this human and to be able to put food on his plate every day. And I am so devoted to this child that I can put my business on pause for him. And it will actually expand time because the more fun I have, the more time expands and I can create

more. And so you just reach and reach and get yourself into that momentum. So it's the frame and the mindset, right? And it's sort of like a friend of mine said to me, you probably know her, Mickey, right? Yeah. So she says, you know, you reframe your conversation from, I have to, like, I have to take care of my kid. I have to cook dinner. I have to. And to, I get to. That's right.

I get to, I get to make dinner for my family. I get to hang out with my kid. I get to, and it's a really different way of thinking about your life. It changes everything. And I think, I think that there's, so any situation where whether your deepest low, you can choose again, at your deepest low. And then in the book, there's something really big that I wrote about in the book, which happened before I even had something big happen to me. But I wrote about, I said in the book that feeling good is to decide to stop feeling bad. And a lot of people listening might

be like, F you, Gabby. I have mental illness or I have no money in the bank. But I actually learned how to live that wholeheartedly in May of last year, a year ago, when I was diagnosed with postpartum depression and anxiety and insomnia, and I was suicidal. And at that stage in my life that I'd never been before, I'd never known my illness, I did use, I was able to use the Choose Again method because the simplicity of witnessing the thought of, I want to kill myself, I'm so miserable, to forgiving myself for having that thought, which I could. I could forgive myself because I could say, okay, that's a biochemical condition. I forgive myself. And then choosing again some days was as simple as saying, I have people I can reach out to. I can

call a psychiatrist. Or I had two hours of sleep last night rather than none. My son is healthy. And those small thoughts were what gave me the power to live and the chance to seek help. Powerful. That's a scary moment for you to have to feel that when you have a little baby and you want to kill yourself. It was the worst experience of my life, but it was also the best, Mark. I can tell you right now that that bottom, and I've had quite a few bottoms with addiction and remembering trauma, but that bottom gave me such a deep understanding of mental illness. And, you know, to be honest with you, I was probably part of the stigma for a long time because I could see people would say things like, you know,

I'm depressed or I have, you know, I've been diagnosed with anxiety disorder. And my response would be like, well, here's a meditation. But when you're in a biochemical condition, doctor, you know this, that meditation isn't going to work. And it's not that it won't work ultimately, but there may be some medical intervention. And so I went on medication and that medication saved my life and it deepened my spiritual practice because it made me safe enough to go deeper into my own person. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, what I love about functional medicine is the balance between, you know, both sides of the story. And yeah, whatever it takes, I always say, you know, we believe in what works, whether it's exercise or exorcism, we're going to prescribe the right treatment for the right problem at the right time in the right way. Exactly. And so, you know, I think that right now people's depression may be

activated. Their anxiety is definitely activated. Gut inflammation is activated. You know, I'd like to share a method with, because you're so devoted to the gut, right? Which I really think is what's genius about the functional doctors is that it's all traced back to the gut. And I couldn't agree more. I really just couldn't agree more. But when we say it's traced back to the gut, we have to recognize that it's traced back to stress. It's traced back to anxiety. It's traced back because the root cause of gut inflammation and dysbiosis is our mental condition, our energetic condition. Yeah, those in your gut are listening to your thoughts, by the way.

And you're listening to their thoughts. So it's quite an interesting dance. And listen, I've lived this, and you know this, I'm a SIBO survivor. I am a SIBO survivor. So for those of you who don't know what SIBO is, it's a condition where you have bacteria growing in the upper part of your intestine. When you eat food, you get a food baby and you blow up and you feel really uncomfortable and all this terrible bloating that affects your whole body and your mind and your immune system. And so for me, I did all the food-related changes and I took the medication. There's stages of having to clear SIBO, but what needed to happen most was to regulate my nervous

system. And so I would love to share something that helps with the gut. It actually literally sends a vibration into your gut and then stimulates your vagus nerve and puts you into a parasympathetic state and relaxes you, but ultimately relaxes your belly. So it's called VU breath. Have you ever done this? It's really cool. So you take a deep breath in and extend your diaphragm and then you

hold that for one moment and then on the exhale you chant the mantra voo okay and i'm going to do it with you but you do it in such a way where you get a real resonance in your belly. So you inhale and you hold. You exhale. Voo. Voo. Voo. Hold it again. Then you let the inhale come in naturally.

Hold. Voo. Voo. Voo. Voo. Hold. Hold. And inhale again. Hold it. Hold it. Let's do it one more time.

Hold and then inhale, naturally inhale. Hold, exhale. Voo. Voo. Voo. And each time you let yourself voo you can go deeper and deeper into a place where you start to feel that relaxation it's like a resonance, it's like a vibration

in your gut, in your belly and just a few voos I feel very different I feel very relaxed and it will help you get into that relaxation mode. Your nervous system can relax, but then most importantly, your gut can relax. It's powerful. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the

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