The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Your Diet, Sleep Routine, And Relationships Can Make Or Break Your Health

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, AG1, HigherDOSE, and Super Simple Grassfed Protein.  We all know that life gets busy, but to stay healthy, you have to have a set of nonnegotiables that you make time for daily. Prioritizing food as medicine, establishing a consistent sleep routine, and cultivating community can all offer immense benefits, not only for your quality of life but your overall health and well-being too. In today’s episode, I talk with Dhru Purohit and Radha Agrawal about these three things that you can choose to focus on to level up your health. Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, The Dhru Purohit Podcast, is a top 50 global health podcast with over 30 million unique downloads. His interviews focus on the inner workings of the brain and the body and feature the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. Radha Agrawal is the cofounder, CEO, and Chief Community Architect of Daybreaker, the early-morning dance and wellness movement. Daybreaker currently holds events in 25 cities and more than a dozen college campuses around the world and has a community of almost half a million people. She is also the author of a new book called Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life. In this episode, Radha makes a case for community. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, AG1, HigherDOSE, and Super Simple Grassfed Protein.  Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food-sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now, AG1 is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting drinkAG1.com/HYMAN. Elevate your wellness game today by going to HigherDOSE.com. You can use promo code HYMAN at checkout to save 15% off site-wide or just go to HigherDOSE.com/hyman. Right now, you can get 10% off Super Simple Grassfed Protein with the code protein10 at drhyman.com/protein. Full-length episodes (and corresponding links) of these interviews can be found here: Dhru Purohit “How To Use Food As Medicine” Dhru Purohit “Why Sleep is More Important Than Diet” Radha Agrawal “The Most Important Medicine For Your Health and Longevity”

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We have to sort of expand our idea of food from just being fuel and energy to being information that regulates everything in our biology that determines healthy disease, whether we're going to live a long time or die quickly. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. I'm excited to share with you about our next partner, AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. If you're ready to take charge of your health and well-being, then AG1 is the perfect starting point. With an amazing 75 different nutrients carefully formulated to work together, this supplement fills any gaps that may exist in our diets. By incorporating AG1 into your daily routine, you'll experience a noticeable difference

in your well-being. I drink it every day and I consistently feel better and have more energy throughout the day. AG1 is a terrific opportunity to transform your health with science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. So why not replace your multivitamin, probiotic, and more with one simple drinkable habit? If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Get 10 free travel packs of AG1 with your first purchase. Go to drinkag1.com forward slash hyman. That's drinkag1.com forward slash hyman. Check it out. Your home's indoor air could be up to 100 times more polluted than outdoor air. Toxic particles exist in cleaning products, house paint, stoves, air fresheners, and even furniture. In addition, there are other harmful contaminants floating inside your home environment such as

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give my listeners the best deal yet on this amazing filtration system. Right now, if you go to drhyman.com forward slash filter, you can get the Air Doctor purifiers for $329. That's $280 off the normal price. 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 Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. In our culture, we often overcomplicate things. We think we need to pay a lot of money buying gadgets to make us healthier. And sadly, we often feel that health is out of reach, giving up before we even start. But there are many areas in life such as food, sleep and community where we can make changes to significantly move the needle in creating greater health. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy about three of the most impactful ways to optimize your health.

Dr. Hyman speaks with Drew Proat about using food as medicine and about creating a supportive sleep routine and with Radha Agrawal about how to build community and why it is so important. Let's jump in. The single most important thing you do every day to control every single one of your biological functions that determine health or disease that will make you live to 100 or make you die at 50 is what you eat. There is no more powerful lever you can pull to change your biology in real time. And I'm not talking about something that takes decades or even weeks, literally days or minutes. You are changing your biology with every single bite of food. And that's because food is not just calories. If it was just energy and fuel, it's just gasoline, it would be fine. You'd burn it. It doesn't matter what you eat. You could eat

Doritos. You could have a Coca-Cola. You could have a broccoli. It doesn't matter. But what we now know is that food contains, particularly plant foods, contain powerful compounds that drive your biology and help you stay healthy and prevent reverse disease. So what is food anyway? Like people don't understand food. They think, oh, it's just energy. It's just calories. Yes, it's calories. They go, well, it's protein, fat, and fiber, and carbs. Yes, it's all that. But what kind of protein? What's the quality? What's the quality of the carbohydrate? Is a carbohydrate from a broccoli sprout the same as a carbohydrate from a can of soda? Well, obviously not, but they're both carbohydrates. What about fat? Is the fat from margarine or Crisco the same as a fat from fish

oil? No, they're both fats, profoundly different effects on your biology. Same thing with fibers, all kinds of different fibers, soluble, insoluble, different effects on your microbiome. So everything depends on the quality of the food you eat and the information in the food. The second thing is that there's this class of compounds that are in plant foods and actually also, by the way, in animal foods, believe it or not, called phytochemicals. These are plant-based compounds. Phyto means plant. Phytonutrients, phytochemicals, they are regulatory molecules that I think have been critical in our evolution. And I actually, I've never heard anybody talk about this except, besides me, except David Sinclair, who's one of the leading aging researchers on the planet

at Harvard. And I call it something different than he does, but I think we've evolved with these plants to help us run our biology. I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation. We've literally adapted our biology to use the plants to work with us to create health. And they're all the compounds you might've heard about that are kind of healthy compounds in food like resveratrol or curcumin or green tea extracts like catechins, maybe the broccoli spouts, sulforaphane. These are all these compounds in plants that are their defense mechanisms. They're their mechanisms to stay healthy and protect themselves against disease and predation and adversity. And, you know, why should we be using these molecules in our biology? Well, because we've evolved eating these plants.

And so our bodies are lazy. We don't make vitamin C because we can get it from food. So we don't make these compounds, but they're critical to our long-term health. You're not going to get a deficiency disease in the sense of a vitamin deficiency, but you're going to get chronic illness if you don't eat these plant compounds. And there's 25,000 of them. The Rockefeller Foundation is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create the periodic table of

phytochemicals and how they work with our bodies, what they do. I've written a lot about this. And they regulate every single system in our body. And we're going to go into how that works. But one of the important things to understand is that these phytochemicals are not just found in plants. New research from Dr. Fred Provenza and Stephen VanVillette, who's at Duke and now is at the Utah State University, have found that animals eating a wide variety of wild and even domesticated, but of a wide variety of plants, contain those compounds from the plants in their milk and meat. So if you eat a regenerally raised grass-fed meat that's been eating maybe 20, 50, 100 plants, it's very different than eating a cow

that's fed the silage in a factory farm that's full of ground-up animal chicken feathers and skittles and who knows what the hell else, plus corn and refined oils and all kinds of weird stuff they put in it. Very different composition of the protein in a factory farm meat than a regenerative cow, for example, or a wild elk or whatever. And we know this is true even from interventional studies that if you eat protein for protein, gram for gram, the same amount of wild meat versus feedlot meat, it has profoundly different effects on your biology, even though it's the same amount of wild meat versus feedlot meat. It has profoundly different effects on your biology, even though it's the same grams of protein, the same calories and everything else is the same.

So we have to sort of expand our idea of food from just being fuel and energy to being information that regulates everything in our biology that determines healthy disease, whether we're gonna live a long time or die quickly. And that's really the power of food. Mark, let's talk about the seven systems of functional medicine and how we think about food impacting or interfacing with all of those seven systems. This is something that hasn't been talked about a ton, but you've written a little bit about it. And I think it'd be useful in the context of

today's conversation. Well, you know, maybe you can put in the show notes, but for my last book, The Pagan Diet, I wrote 15,000 words explaining how this works. Unfortunately, it was too long for the publisher. So it got mostly taken out, but we have that content. I'm happy to share it in the show notes. People that want to learn about food as medicine, we can provide that. Let's make a PDF and people can download it if you're okay with it. Yeah, for sure. I think it'd be great. So here's the meta view. Our current view of disease is outdated. It's based on symptoms. It's based on diagnoses. You have heart disease, you have cancer, you have autoimmune disease, you have dementia. It tells you nothing about the cause.

It's just a name. It's like saying, well, I have a headache. What's causing your headache? Did you get hit in the head with a hammer? Do you have a brain tumor, an aneurysm? Do you have a migraine? Did you eat gluten? You know, do you have a cold? Do you have a flu? Like, what's causing your headache? Saying you have a headache doesn't mean anything. And it's the same for every disease, whether it's depression or cancer or heart disease or diabetes. Just the name tells you what the symptoms are. It doesn't tell you the root cause. And when we look at the reimagining of medicine through the lens of functional medicine, systems biology, network medicine, this is the future of what's happening. Okay, this is not my idea. This is not Dr. Hyman's view of the world. This is actually what's happening in the

science. At Harvard, they published a textbook called Network Medicine, describing this phenomena of the radical change that's going to happen as we begin to understand the root causes, the multifactorial causes of disease, and the multiple things we need to do to correct that disease. And I'm so excited about this because it's actually finally hitting mainstream science. It's not hitting mainstream medicine yet. It's still on the fringes. And unfortunately, it's going to take a while because it takes about 20 years from scientific discovery to implementation of medical practice or longer. And this is a big paradigm shift, so who knows? Maybe we'll have a fast one or a slow one.

I don't know. Anyway, the key is that the body is organized in a very different way than we learned in medical school. It's not organized into organs and specialties. It's organized into these seven basic systems that are the functional networks in your body that control every single thing in your body. So every disease that exists today, I mean, obviously not getting hit by a car. I mean, that's a different kind of thing. But pretty much every disease is determined by imbalances in seven basic functional systems in your body that are controlled by your genes, by your environment, and your lifestyle. So all

that dynamic interaction between your genes, environment, and lifestyle is regulating these systems and is determining whether they're in balance or out of balance. And the single biggest thing you can do every day to positively or negatively affect these seven systems is picking what you eat properly. If you pick the wrong foods, you're going to damage these systems and cause inflammation and damage to your microbiome and impaired detoxification and hormonal dysregulation and all kinds of stuff happens as you eat the wrong foods. And we'll go through each one. So what are these seven systems?

There's your gut. We call that assimilation. Your immune system. your defense and repair. Your energy system, how you make energy in your cells from food and oxygen. Your detox system, how you get rid of internal and external waste. Your transport system, which is your circulation and lymph. Your communication system, which is hormones and your transmitters, other messenger molecules, peptides, all kinds of stuff.

And your structural system, which is your biomechanical structure, your body, your musculoskeletal system, all the way down to the subcellular structures of your cells and your membranes. And those are all affected by your lifestyle, your diet, and various insults like toxins and allergens and microbes and radiation, all kinds of stuff. So our goal is to figure out what are these seven systems, where are they out of balance, how do you get them in balance? That's the key to understanding disease and the key to fixing what's wrong with most people. What is so beautiful about food

is that we're finally understanding how food interacts with each of these systems. I'm gonna just take you quickly through an example of each one, positive and negative. The gut. If you eat our Western processed diet, you're going to grow really nasty bugs in there, and those bugs are going to produce really nasty compounds that make you sick and even make you gain weight. If you eat the right kinds of foods full of

polyphenols and fiber and probiotic foods like sauerkraut, you're eating cranberry and pomegranate, you're having prebiotic foods like asparagus and plantain and drew some artichokes and artichoke hearts, these are going to help create a healthy microbiome. So you can harm or heal the system by choosing the foods you eat. Your immune system, the same thing. Our diet is very inflammatory. We eat sugar, processed food, refined oils. These are highly inflammatory foods that are driving our biology towards inflammation, which is at the root of most disease. On the other hand, if you eat a whole foods, plant-rich, anti-inflammatory, phytochemical-dense, high-fiber diet, you're going to be

reducing inflammation. If you are looking at energy, for example, if you eat an excess of calories but not enough nutrients, which is what most Americans do, and this is kind of frightening actually when you look at it. We were eating about 500 calories more per person per day than we did about 50 years ago. All that has to be processed. And it's processed in these little energy factories like your car engine called the mitochondria. And these mitochondria are very sensitive to an overload of sugar and starch and chemicals and processed foods. So if you're dumping all that in there, you're going to slow down your energy production.

On the other hand, if you're having good fats and you're having phytochemical-rich foods and antioxidants in your diet, you're going to be helping the energy production. And detoxification is another great example. If we're eating foods that are full of pesticides and chemicals and all kinds of stuff and that are full of sugar, which is damaging liver. By the way, one of the biggest causes of liver failure in the world is sugar, fatty liver. It's the biggest problem affecting 90 million Americans. If you're eating all that, it's damaging your liver. But if you're eating, for example, broccoli sprouts or lemon peel or green tea or any number of these plant compounds, what we call plant-based

polyphenols and phytochemicals, they upregulate your detoxification system. So if you have, every day I make sure I have at least a cup or two of some family in the broccoli, collards, kale, brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, and so forth, kohlrabi. And I try to include that in my diet on a regular basis, which actually helps to enhance detoxification. Same thing with circulation, lymphatic flow. You know, you want to make sure you're having foods that are not making your circulation sluggish and inflamed, which is processed food, and you're eating lots of phytochemical-rich foods. Same thing with hormones. If you're eating, for example, a lot of sugar and starch, you're driving insulin up. You're driving your adrenaline up, your stress hormones up. If you eat a whole foods, plant-rich diet, a vegan diet, you're doing the opposite to your

hormones. You're balancing your hormones. We know, for example, that if women are eating a lot of sugar, they actually can get a lot of estrogen, and that causes them to have all kinds of hormonal issues and infertility and menstrual irregularities and all kinds of problems. And that can be fixed, for example, by having them eat lots of fiber and flax seeds and soy foods and things with lignans in them that actually help to balance the hormones and getting rid of all that food. Same thing with your structure. If your structure is abnormal, you're not going to be healthy. We used to have a terrible word. It was kind of pejorative that we used in medicine when we were operating on people who were pretty unhealthy and had crappy

diets because their tissues would just fall apart in your hand. So you'd be operating them and you'd try to sew them together and the tissues would just like fall apart. We call it PPP, piss poor protoplasm, which is terrible. But doctors, you know, have to, I guess, keep themselves amused while they're dealing with really difficult situations. And it's because their nutrition was so bad, that their tissues and their structure was so bad. Whereas now, you know, you can, if you take someone with a healthy diet and you can look at their tissues, they're very different and they stick together well, they're structurally sound. And I can go into way more examples, but food influences every single one

of these things. So every bite of food you take changes your gene expression, your epigenome, which controls the master switches around aging, longevity. It affects your microbiome, your hormones, your immune system, your brain chemistry, your structure. Everything is affected by the quality of the food you eat. That's why the most important thing you need to understand around food as medicine is that food is information. And what information or what code are you putting in your body? If you're putting corrupt code in your operating system, your software is going to be glitchy, and that's called disease. And if you're putting good code in, you're going to have a really awesome functioning operating system,

which is going to create health and vitality. And food is the single most important thing that can do that. Mark, there was a great stat that you shared in Food Fix and also the marketing that you were doing around the book about just how many chronic diseases and deaths from chronic diseases every year have been attributed back to largely food. Can you share that stat with us and walk us through some of that information? Yeah. Well, there's the Global Burden of Disease Study that has been done. It's a really profound study.

It's still ongoing. It's a massive study. It's constantly collecting data. And the study was shocking. For the first time in history, obesity and chronic disease that's caused by food outstrips smoking as the number one cause of death in the world. And I think conservatively, it's estimated that it kills 11 million people a year. Now, think about it. I mean, if 11 million people died every year from something else, we would be up in arms trying to deal with it. If, for example, there was a new virus or something that was killing 11 million people,

like COVID, look what we've done with COVID. We go crazy trying to deal with COVID. We're not even talking about this. We're not even addressing the fact that in America, we are a minority of the world's population, about, I think, 5%, and make up up to 20% of the COVID cases and deaths. Why? We have the best healthcare system in the world because we're the unhealthiest population driven by our modern American diet. And so when you look at globally, the deaths from chronic disease, it's about double that of infectious disease. So we have about probably 40, 50 million people a year dying globally from chronic disease. And some of it's about double that of infectious disease. So we have about, you know, probably 40, 50 million people a year dying globally from chronic disease. And some of it's smoking for sure,

like lung diseases, but the majority of it is actually somehow related to diet. So diet is the number one killer in the world. And what's amazing to me is that the number one killer is food. And yet the National Institute of Health, our government's research organization, spends almost nothing on nutrition and chronic disease. It's staggering. And I'm involved with a campaign that derived from the book called the Food Fix Campaign. It's a nonprofit that I created to drive policy change. And one of the things we're advocating for is a National Institute of Nutrition, which many other countries have, but we don't. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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use the coupon code hymen10. Don't miss this opportunity. It's a limited time offer for this month only. And now let's get back to this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Well, that begs the question, you know, why don't you think, especially here in America, why don't we have that? And why is food largely ignored by conventional medicine? It's, you know, most doctors, as you know, most people, most human beings, for that matter, are good natured. They want to help people. They want to make a difference. But why is it that we've lost sight of the impact of food when it comes to health? All I have to do is look at the medical school curriculum. I mean, I had nutrition. It was about a couple of hours devoted to kwashiorkor, merasmus, serophthalmy, and rickets,

which are vitamin deficiency diseases you see no longer in the developed world and rarely in the developing world anymore. It was sort of like a historical tour through the history of vitamin deficiencies. And there was no mention of anything related to chronic disease. It was just staggering. And yet food is the number one cause of chronic disease, the number one cure, and doctors know nothing about it. So they're completely uneducated. The last place you want to go to get advice about nutrition is your doctor. Unless, you know, there's someone like me who spent their life studying nutrition. But it's really a problem.

And so we have this blind spot. The other thing is that doctors don't believe that it works. Why? They go, well, you know, you're a little overweight, your cholesterol is a little high. Why don't you improve your diet or your blood pressure is a little high? Why don't you eat healthy, exercise, and come back in three months and we'll decide what to do. Now, that means almost nothing to people. What does eat healthy mean? What does, you know, have a balanced diet mean? What does eat in moderation mean? Nothing to most people. They have no clue about how to navigate the nutritional landscape we live in. And we live in a toxic nutritional landscape where the easy choice is the worst choice for you and the harder choices are good for you.

In other words, you have to go hunt and gather to find something healthy to eat, which is tough. So, I mean, I've traveled all over America, and it's like it's bad out there. I mean, unless you get into some pockets where there's some awareness and consciousness of good food, it's mostly a nutritional wasteland. And so doctors really can't be faulted because it's not part of their curriculum. And one of the efforts I've been involved with is called the Being Rich Act, which is an act in Congress to fund nutrition education. The other thing we need to do is to actually change licensing exams so that doctors cannot

become a doctor unless they pass a test, which includes a whole section on nutrition. Now, I hate to say this, Drew, but most of the curriculum in medical school is driven off the licensing exams. What do you need to know to pass a test to become a doctor? And if there's zero on nutrition, that's what they're going to learn, zero on nutrition. So if you make 10% of the questions nutrition-related and chronic disease-related, guess what? The medical schools are going to have to include it in their curriculum. So we have a long way to go to fix this. But the other thing is that doctors don't actually ever see it work. And like, you know, if I have a patient with heart failure and kidney failure

and liver failure and diabetes, and I say to a doctor, well, I'm going to reverse all that using food, they're going to go, good luck, buddy. I mean, I've, you know, I've never seen it. Can't happen. In fact, I had one patient at Cleveland Clinic who came to see me who was overweight, diabetic, high blood pressure, kidney failure. And he followed everything I said. He lost a bunch of weight. His kidneys reversed. His heart failure got better.

His cholesterol normalized. The blood sugar normalized. Everything was corrected. He went to see his kidney doctor. And his doctor was like, what the heck did you do? I've never seen this before. I've never seen kidneys actually improve. We can slow it down. We can medicate it. We can manage it. But they are untrained in how to use food as a drug. And it's not the same for everybody.

It's not like one diet fits everybody. What I treat an autoimmune patient with is different than I'll treat a diabetic patient with, different than I might treat an Alzheimer's patient with, different than I'll treat someone who's got chronic fatigue. It's very, very different depending on what is going on. And I literally, just like there's hundreds or thousands of drugs, there's thousands of different permutations of diet that can be personalized and prescribed as a drug that works better, faster, and is cheaper than any drug on the planet. It finally feels like sleep is getting the attention it deserves, largely with a lot of individuals out there really sounding the alarm. People like Matthew Walker, who you've had on

your podcast before. And for many people that are listening, their diets are pretty good. But when your sleep is really off, it can hijack your entire life. So what are three things, Mark, that you think that people can do today, starting today, that could radically improve the quality of their sleep? I mean, it's a lot, right? So I think it's one, your sleep environment. It's two, your sleep hygiene and habits. And three, it's what you're consuming. So the first is your sleep environment. Your bedroom should be dark. It should have a cool temperature, ideally 68 degrees. You should have quiet. So if you're not in a quiet or dark place, earplugs and eye shades are the way to go

keeping cool is also really important at night you sleep better when it's cool so there's the chili pad and uler and sleep aid there's a bunch of other technologies that actually can make you have a cool bed which is a great thing the second is your sleep hygiene you know you want to make sure you're you're not on your screens at least a few hours before bed two or three hours you don't want to eat late three hours before bed you don't want to be drinking a lot of alcohol, caffeine late in the day. You want to make sure that your environment is good. Take a hot bath or take a cold that people are saying helps their sleep. There's a lot of simple practices and I've written lots of articles about this. I think you can link to them in the show notes about 20 things

you can do to improve your sleep. And the next bit would be, you know, what you're doing in terms of your lifestyle. If you, you know, exercise late, if you drink coffee, if you're eating alcohol, if you're eating late, all these things will disrupt your biorhythms. Ideally, you know, keeping your blue light exposure low. That's also really important at night because, again, we're so exposed to artificial light. We're exposed to computers and that disrupts our melatonin production. So, you know, those are just a few things that you should think about in terms of sleep. But the more people can focus on regular sleep with a rhythm and regular sleep hygiene

and the right environment and avoiding the things that we know screw up sleep, people can often reset their sleep systems. A lot of people don't know actually what good sleep looks like. So talk to us about what good sleep should look like or actually feel like after you've had it and contrast that with what are signs that somebody might have poor sleep quality in their life? How does it show up with how they feel? Well, you know, I'm reading a study where they looked at sharpshooters in the military like snipers. And they found that if they slept eight hours, they'd be like 99% accurate. If they slept seven hours, they would be maybe 95% accurate. If they slept six, they'd go drop down to like 60% accurate.

If they're under six, they're like less than 50% accurate. So it's like crap shoot, which is kind of astounding because these people are highly skilled people. But it's been said that not getting adequate sleep is equivalent to being drunk or driving drunk. And I think that's true. I've experienced a lot of sleep deprivation in my life because of working in the emergency room, delivering babies, working as a doctor on call.

I mean, it's just a thing, right? And you get so impaired. I remember almost driving into a ramp on an exit ramp when I was falling asleep driving. So it's really, really important. Quality sleep is important. You need deep sleep. You need REM sleep. And there are now all kinds of sleep trackers, whether it's the Oura Ring or Fitbit or Apple Watch or other trackers, to see what the quality of your sleep is. Are you waking up frequently? Do you have interrupted sleep? Are you getting enough deep sleep? Are you getting REM sleep? So you can start to look at these things and actually get a good sense of what the quality of your sleep is. But you'll feel it. I mean, if you wake up refreshed and energetic and your head's clear, you bounce out of bed, well, you're probably going to

sleep. If you're waking up constantly flipping and flopping, you know, that is not going to lead to a sense of wellbeing and abundance and feeling good. So, you know, often your body will tell you when you don't feel good from lack of sleep and getting good sleep is really the medicine that we need. Sleep is medicine. What are the consequences of chronically not getting enough sleep? Is it just that you're tired or are there deeper issues that can have almost like permanent damage on the body? Absolutely. I mean, I think we're just recognizing the dangers of sleep deprivation in terms of its risk for chronic illness, heart disease, cancer diabetes alzheimer's

depression anxiety mood disorders of all sorts so it's a real thing and i think if we don't take it seriously we're going to be missing the boat on a very important intervention and helping to address some of these chronic diseases that goes far beyond diet or exercise the other thing that happens is your brain at night has a system of cleaning cleaning and repair so you need to have the what we call the lymphatic system working the lymphatic system is like the lymph system of the brain that's recently been discovered and it's so important it really is activated at night so if you're not sleeping at night you're not clearing out the brain waste and you're going to have a brain full of sludge and waste products that are metabolic waste and toxins. So it's so important for that particular reason too, to make sure you have adequate good sleep. I know there's a little bit of controversy

around this and a lot of different opinions, but from your perspective, how many hours of sleep should we be shooting for in the evening? I mean, it's very individual. Some people do fine on six hours. Some people need nine hours and you need to find out what your number is. Everybody's different, but the amount of sleep where you can feel good and energetic and your quality of sleep is deep. I mean, if you sleep six and a half hours and it's like, you know, a ton of deep sleep, a ton of REM and really reparative, and that might be enough for some people. Other people might need nine. I need about eight or nine. I love if I can get it, but it really makes you

feel much more vibrant and healthy and functional. So I think if I can get it, but it really makes you feel much more vibrant and healthy and functional. So I think, you know, it's certainly more than, than seven, ideally, and probably between seven to nine hours is a good amount. And again, as I said before, you know, last century, about half of us, I mean, sorry about the average age of the average number of hours of sleep at night was like nine hours. Now it's seven or less. All right. Next question. What are commonly overlooked issues that drive poor sleep? Unexpected things, things that people may not know that expand on that first list that you gave us when we were opening the episode. Yeah. I mean, I think people don't understand the role of their overall pattern of being and living. So first thing is when you wake up, you should get 20 minutes of sunlight

without sunglasses on because it resets your pineal gland, which makes melatonin, regulates your circadian rhythm. So we want to keep our circadian rhythms in balance. The second thing is, you know, our diet plays a huge role. And particularly, you know, if we're eating a diet that's, you know, high in starch and carbohydrate, we're having fluctuations in blood sugar. We may actually even at night get hypoglycemia, and that can really disturb our sleep. We can get night sweats. You know, men often get night sweats too, but that's often usually low sugar. And then the cortisol spikes, and you get a spike in sugar in the morning.

So that's often usually low sugar and then the cortisol spikes and you get a spike in sugar in the morning. So that's a real problem. I think the other thing is, you know, people are probably consuming a lot of alcohol, caffeine, sugar, all these disturbed sleep, chronic stress. You know, if you're not actually discharging stress, a lot of people go to bed tired and wired and a lot of people have adrenal issues. So they're pushing so hard in their life that they actually don't have a chance to reset and relax their nervous system. And that leads to incredible amounts of cortisol production, cortisol disturbed sleep. I mean, if you take prednisone for whatever reason, it's going to mess up your sleep. So stress plays a huge role. Exercise, I mean, you don't want to exercise too late in the day. That can often activate you. So there are a lot of things that can drive poor sleep. Lack of magnesium, which is common in the country. If we don't eat magnesium in the forms of

greens and beans, nuts and seeds, we end up with magnesium deficiency, which affects about 45% of the population. And people don't sleep well when they have low magnesium. It can cause irritability and tension and stress. And then plus caffeine and chronic stress and smoking, a lot of other things will cause magnesium depletion. So you want to make sure you're getting plenty of magnesium. Talk about sleep in your life. What are the things that now at the age that you're at and your schedule, what are the things that throw your sleep off? And what are the effects that you notice in your performance the next day when your sleep is thrown off no yeah i mean it's huge i mean if i'm traveling you know i'm trying to stay in one place longer but it depends on the bed and the pillows the sound

the noise the temperature i mean i i can get messed up and given all the years of screwing with my schedule and sort of staying up all night, I definitely have sleep issues, but I've learned how to actually mitigate them by, you know, making sure I do a bedtime wind down ritual by making sure I take my bedtime supplements like magnesium, a little melatonin. And, and, and if I don't get a quality sleep, I notice in the next day, I can't focus. I can't think my brain is like distracted. It's hard for me to be present with other people it's hard for me to feel motivated doing anything i know as i get a little depressed but it's not i know i'm not depressed i just know it's a sleep like a sleep so i i think you know very attentive to sleep but i think you know sometimes it's hard

you know when you're out with friends and you're traveling you're on vacation it's a little tricky but mostly i i'm pretty good about getting to bed by 10, 9.30, 10, sometimes a little bit later and try to sleep, you know, read a little bit. I have a light, which is a reading light that's kind of an amber light that has no blue light in it. So I don't have to leave the light bulb on on the bed. So I try to calm down from the light. I have blue blocker glasses at night I use. That really helps. And so that all benefits me. Talk to us about how conventional medicine typically treats poor sleep when a patient is going through it and contrast that with functional medicine and how a functional medicine doctor would look at addressing

poor sleep quality with a patient. So from a traditional medical point of view, I mean, there are reasons for people's lack of sleep that a conventional doctor will look at, whether it's sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, there's sleep studies that doctors do that can be very revealing. A lot of people have undiagnosed sleep apnea. At the Ultra Wellness Center, we now have a home sleep study kit, which allows people to kind of get tested and do it at home, which is great. However, you know, often there's really very little to do from a conventional perspective other than, you know, recognize basic sleep

hygiene. And then there's a CBT sort of approach, cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps people deal with sort of the mental aspects of insomnia. And that can be very effective. Cleveland Clinic has an online program. There's called SomRest, which is available. So there's a lot of really useful conventional approaches to help people reset their sleep. However, there may be a lot of other causes from a functional medicine perspective for sleep disruption. The traditional medicine just says, oh, do therapy or take these sleep pills or practice better sleep hygiene. But they don't really say, well, why is your sleep disturbed in the first place? This is why we're so effective in functional medicine because we don't want to know just what you have, insomnia. We don't know why. Why are you not

sleeping? Is it because your thyroid's not working? Is it because you have chronic stress and adrenal burnout? Is it because you have low magnesium? Is it because your microbiome is inflamed and causing inflammation in your brain? Is it because you might be hypothyroid, which can cause a little bit of sleep disruption? Or is it because, you know, you have a bad sleep environment or because your sleep habits are terrible? Or because, you know, we go through all the underlying root causes. And then we address those, whatever they might be. You know, it's amazing to me, Drew. I never would have thought this was the thing. But when we put people on the 10-day detox diet, when we put people on an elimination diet and get rid of processed food, sugar, dairy, gluten, grains, et cetera, it's amazing how many people report, oh, my sleep got so much better. I'm sleeping so much deeply.

I feel so much better. I'm like, well, wow, I don't know about that. But I think what happens is there's inflammation of the brain and inflammation will interrupt sleep. And when you start to live an anti-inflammatory life, you actually will end up with a much better sleep quality. A little anecdote is that my dad, many years ago, when we put him on a version of the 10-day detox, and he had been eating bread his whole life, uh, because he grew up a vegetarian and still was a vegetarian when he was doing the program. Um, one interesting thing that he noticed is that when he had cut bread out of his diet, he noticed this chronic back pain that he had at night that would make it harder for

him to fall asleep, uh, went away because the inflammation went away and that then made it easier for him to fall asleep. And so he got a better night's rest. There you go. Yeah. Talk to us about another patient and a case study that you can think of where sleep was the missing link that allowed them to get into a better state of health. Anything that comes to mind?

Well, I have two. One was this guy who was very smart, editor of a major, major sort of Sunday kind of magazine, newspaper. I mean, you would all know what it was. And his team was like, he's just falling asleep all day in the office. I'm like, it's terrible. He's not, he's not able to function well. It's annoying. He'll fall asleep at meetings.

I'm like, well, tell me about your life. He says, well, I drink, you know, 12 Cokes a day and have 12 cups of coffee a day. I'm like, oh, okay, well, maybe caffeine is a problem. So we got him off the caffeine, and we put him on an anti-inflammatory diet, and it was amazing. He just completely turned around and was able to, you know, be able to function again. There's another case. I remember a young, well, not young, he was about a 50-year-old. He's young to me now but if he seems very young to me it's all relative uh and he was a lawyer and i'm like well tell me how you're doing he's like well i want to lose weight i'm kind of overweight and he had you know the big belly and pre-diabetes and i'm like well tell me about your life and well you know i said you sleep okay well yeah but um you know during the day i i use a

stand-up desk this is before stand-up desk where This is before a stand-up desk was a thing. Because if I sit down, I'll fall asleep while I'm working. And I'm like, wow, okay, you probably have sleep apnea. So I said, let's test you for sleep apnea. And he sure enough had sleep apnea. We put him on a CPAP machine, which is a breathing machine to sort of stop CPAP, he literally lost 50 pounds just like that and felt so much better. And we corrected his underlying issues around sleep and metabolic health. The thing is, if you don't sleep, you also crave carbohydrates, you crave sugar,

you crave all the junk that's going to make you gain weight. And we know this even from studies on young, healthy adult college males who were not overweight when they deprived them of two hours sleep a night compared to the control group the ones that had the two-hour sleep deprivation ended up having higher levels of um grayling which makes you hungry and pyy was lower which is the appetite suppressing hormone and so they had hormonal changes that made them crave more carbohydrates eat eat more food, be hungrier, gain more weight. And so really the key to often healthy metabolism and that impacts their sleep. I know you have a lot of experience with meditation and different protocols that you've used either personally or recommended to people in the past,

but is there something that you could suggest that those individuals could try when it comes to winding down at night and getting ready for bed? Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, when you think about it, it's kind of silly. We like, go, go, go. We're answering emails at 11 o'clock at night. We're looking at our screens. We're engaged in all kinds of stressful, emotional, psychological things with our own work or whatever. And then we're like, okay, lights out, boom, go to sleep. And people are exhausted, but they often fall asleep and then often wake up frequently because they got the stress hormones going in their body. So I think really having a sleep ritual at night is so important for me.

It's very important. I get off screens at least a couple hours before bed. I often will take a hot bath with Epsom salt and lavender, which calms my nervous system down. I'll put the little kind of amber light that has no, it's like a reading light that has no blue light. Turn all the other lights off. I'll read a little bit in bed. And the reading and the calming down just calms it down. The other thing I can do often is I'll read a little bit in bed and the reading and the calming down just calms it down. The other thing I can do often is I'll write a little before bed. So I'll literally dump out what's ever in my head. I'll just write it all out and I'll just completely purge anything that is

a negative thought pattern in my head or my worries for tomorrow, what happened that day, whatever, whatever. And I just try to let go. And the other thing you can do is a little yoga stretching before bed, a little deep breathing exercises before bed, get a little massage before bed, you know, all those things can help. You know, if you're a partner, you can rub each other's feet. That's a very relaxing thing to do. I have a Theragun. I'll often use that to kind of relax my muscles and nervous system. You have to find out what's right for you, but it really requires some level of decompressing and unwinding before you get into bed because if you just plop into bed

after running 100 miles an hour, it's like you're not gonna fall asleep or you'll fall asleep because you're exhausted and then you wake up because you're under chronic stress. When I say the most important category in life to focus on and everyone says, focus on money, power, fame, and building your business. But really, none of it will happen and or will result in joy or joyful life experience if you don't have a community being like,

oh my gosh, Mark, high five. Like, whoa, we get to celebrate your major win, New York Times bestseller list again. Holy shit, let's go and throw a giant party for you you know what i mean if you're just kind of like writing by yourself in your room and have no one to celebrate then at the end of it you're empty again you know so it's it's so critical that we continue to put our laptops down and keep our word and go to those dinners with our friends and say yes to the dance floor and say yes to adventure because at the end of the day no matter no amount of success will mean anything if there's no one to celebrate it with right so um so so so column one was all the qualities i was looking for in a friend right so i wanted friends talked about

ideas and not each other i wanted friends who said yeah you bleep that out um to life um i wanted friends who you know really took care of themselves and took care of each other. I wanted friends who were interesting and interested, who were good listeners. I wanted friends... I wrote down everything I was looking for in a friend, which was kind of vulnerable because there's so much shame

around saying I don't belong or there's so much shame around writing down the qualities. It just feels desperate for some reason in today's society. But if we just removed. Not really. Right. That's what I'm saying.

But if we removed all of that stigma, because there is stigma around FOMO, right? Fear of missing out and fear of being left out. You don't tell people like, yeah, I was left out from the party and it really hurt. Like you're, we're so proud. We don't really talk about that. Right. But FOMO is a concept I talk in my book quite a bit, which is fear of being left out, right?

Which is a more subversive, negative version of FOMO, right? And then JOMO is joy of missing out, which is the joy of missing out and having the confidence to know there's other things to do. But so column two is all the qualities I don't want in a friend, right? So I don't want friends who are negative Nellies, lazies, shoulder shruggers you know debbie downers netflix and you know chill watchers all the time um and homebodies

like i wanted friends who were just like you know really say yes to life say yes like and i call it fyf in my book it's a very and then somebody else might want a friend that they can sit around and do knitting with that's right that's what i'm saying so everyone's different so your qualities are going to be very different from my qualities whoever's listening out there right and that's what I'm saying. So everyone's different. So your qualities are going to be very different from my qualities, whoever's listening out there, right? And that's exactly what you want to do right now is ask yourself, where do I feel the most energized? And then column three, perhaps the most important column, was all the qualities that I need to embody

in order to attract the friends that I want. All the qualities that I need to embody. So I need to be less of a workaholic. I love my work. I need to put my laptop down So I need to be less of a workaholic. I love my work. I need to put my laptop down. I need to be less judgmental and nitpicky and perfectionist. And I'm a CEO, right?

I run companies for a living. And so my job is to focus on what's going wrong, right? My job is to focus on how to improve what's going wrong. So if I bring that, I used to bring that into my relationships, into my friendships, I'd be nitpicking what's going wrong in those relationships instead of being grateful for what's going right. So that sort of understanding.

Yes, that compartmentalization of in my work, I'm gonna be focused on really kind of wanting to improve service and product and whatever, but in my personal life, to really compartmentalize and say, hey, wait, let me really focus on what's going right. Especially, you know, as an Asian woman, you know, you grow up in a household where it's like, you're only loved if you get an A, you know?

Right, A plus. A plus, you know, so it's... And you did all right. You went to Cornell and you were on the varsity soccer team. But yeah, so I think it's so important to take that audit and look in the mirror and ask yourself, how are you showing up for your friends too? So that was a really important.

So that's going in is doing an inventory of your life and what matters, looking at yourself. Yeah, looking at yourself. Where you're not the best friend and what you want. That's right, the qualities looking for. So what else is part of going in? So going in, there's also another exercise I do. And there's so many more, but I'll share one more.

By the way, the book is full of these amazing practical exercises. It's not like, oh, you should be in a community and you should go have friends. And it's like a roadmap, step by step, to take you through the process of how do you create community capacity in yourself and how do you build and find community. And it's really, really awesome. Thank you. And I i illustrated the book too so every page is fun to read like i you know it's not a bunch of words it's very it's like i really like pictures and colors and and it just makes the whole journey of of of community building a lot more playful and and and colorful so what are the other going in so yeah so one more going in exercise I'll share before we move on to going out is I have you also assess what I call your VIA chart.

So imagine a three sort of Venn diagram, three circles that you draw. So circle one is your values. The V in VIA is your values. The I in the VIA chart is your interests. And the A is your abilities. So just write down your values, your interests and the A is your abilities. So just write down your values, your interests and your abilities in three concentric circles

and sit down with yourself and ask yourself today, Mark Hyman, what do I value today? Because what you value today is going to be different than what you valued maybe 10 years ago. Maybe 10 years ago,

you're a big party animal and then now you still are. I mean, you know, you still, nothing's changed. I still see it burning man, um, fist pumping on the dance floor, but, um, but, but today, you know, maybe, you know, you're, you just got married to beautiful wife, you're nesting, you move, you have a house in New York now. And, um, and so maybe your values today is more family driven. And, um, whereas 10 years ago I might've been different. So I'm, you know, I'm seven months pregnant today

as well. So my values are different and values are sort of, um, kind of the guardrails through which you live your life. You know, what are the, what are the things that matter to you? And you can Google values and see sort of what values come up. And there's all kinds of lists that come up in my book. I list out about a hundred values that you can choose from but it's also mean you can find the internet and you can begin to sort of map out what do I care about today and really sit with yourself and and connect to that that essence so write that down in one circle and that will give you again at the beginning of roadmap for the type of other people you want to connect with

like what are you know so shared values are so critical, right? Yeah. And then the I. Because if you name it, then you can identify others, right? That's right. Exactly. And then the I in your VIA chart is your interests. So what am I interested in today?

So, you know, it's different from your values and your values is more sort of kind of intrinsic qualities, family, you know, community, um, work life balance, you know, that sort of thing. Right. Whereas your interests might be things like hiking and yoga and mindful meditation and music festivals and, um, you know, and daybreaker and daybreaker. Yeah. Thank you. Um, and all kinds of, right. So, so it's, it's what are you interested in tangibly doing today? And some people I do this workshop with will say, well, I don't know. We all have interests, right?

So dig deep. If you don't have an interest right now, then start cultivating them. And that's what's so fun about this going in journey is that life is, we have 100 years to live on this planet. Let's really begin cultivating our interests that are outside of just work. Only 100 years if you eat right and follow my advice and connect in the community and follow Radha's advice. Then you get to 100. Exactly.

If you read all of Mark's books, yeah, for sure. And then your abilities are, and I really think about abilities through the lens of what can you bring to your community? So what are your abilities, not just like I'm a good public speaker, but what can you bring to your community? So is one of your abilities to ask amazing questions? Is one of your abilities to cook? Are you a good cook and chef? Can you cook for your friends? Are you, what was one of your abilities to gather people in your home?

Is your home a really wonderful place to gather? You know, one of my, I tell you, you're a great DJ. Exactly, exactly. So like,

two of my friends, I love giving this example, you know, one of them, she always has a purse full of like electric candles so that when, you know,

she really, she like doesn't like neon lighting so she'll walk into any room and she'll just be like, oh no, no, no, this is like too harsh lighting. So she'll walk into any room and she'll just be like, oh, no, no, no. This is like too harsh lighting. She'll turn off all the lights and break out all these electric candles and like vibes out the place instantly. And it's incredible. And you have these other friends who are great sort of artists, musicians.

Exactly. They bring instruments. Exactly. Play great things and do skits. That's exactly right. It's just so fun. Yeah. So they bring instruments.

Like Eli and I bring gold stars often to gatherings. we'll say mark you did great you know it was a wonderful thing you just said here's a gold star for you right you know we went to the hospital um for when eli's father was sick and we gave um all the doctors and nurses um gold stars and said thank you for what you're doing great job you know checking his pulse you look at you like what and they all started competing with each other for how many the doctors like serious doctors for what you're doing. Great job, you know, checking his pulse. And he looked at you like, what the? And they all started competing with each other for how many, the doctors, like serious doctors were competing with each other for how many. Just like kindergarten.

Yeah, for how many gold stars they got and they put on their badges and it was this like hysterical experience and we turned this sort of otherwise scary place into a playground. And, you know, it's whatever we can bring that feels good for us, that feels natural to us. Bring that to your community and your experience and write down your abilities chart all right so we've got the inventory we've got your bia chart you've got three column three column list of where

they fit in terms of whether they're bringing you life and energy or taking it away so what about going out then you've done this inventory you've done all these things right what's what's the process of actually going out with this and finding your community and building it? So step one, and, and, you know, there's some people who are like, I'm shy or like, this isn't, it doesn't come naturally to me or, you know, it's so much easier for you, Radha, because, you know, you're naturally more extroverted. Um, which I, by the way, break those labels in my book too.

And part one is I, we talk about, um about the fact that we have begun to sort of label ourselves into corners. So I'm an introvert, I'm an extrovert. That's a good example with Carl Jung, who kind of named those terms, and people are really banding around those terms. I've seen friends who are definitely extroverted start dating introverts, and then begin identifying as introverts and disappear from the face of the planet. And so I think we've taken these terms too literally where Carl Jung himself, who defined these terms, said that if you are only introverted, you'd be in an insane asylum.

If you're only extroverted, you'd end up in an insane asylum. So we are on a spectrum of introvert and extrovert, which I call metavert in my book, right? We are all metaverts. So let's just stop. Some days I'm social. Some days I want to be at home by myself filling up on energy and so i think if we stop putting these

social limitations on ourselves we'll begin to allow so much more exploration in the communities that we're a part of um and and so so exploration so going out begins with first like removing all of these labeling and then getting sort of a deep understanding of who we are, like going in experience. And then it's just putting your shoes on. I usually say put your shoes on, write down five communities in and around you

that align with your values, interests, and abilities, and then begin exploring them. So it's a light touch, right? So for me, the first year was, okay, when I went on this journey, when I started at 30 years old, I realized I didn't belong and I was going to sports bars and doing kind of like the everyday thing. I asked myself, okay, what are the things that I really care about? What am I interested in?

So I realized I'm interested in entrepreneurship. I'm interested in music festivals, which I'd never really explored in my 20s, right? I just was kind of doing the city life thing. So I began looking up all the cool music festivals around and I stumbled upon Burning Man, um, lightning in a bottle and different music festivals. I started going to, and I started going to entrepreneurship summits, like summit series and, communities in New York and across like Nexus summit community. It's sort of a young global leader summit.

So I began sort of charting this on a little map as well. So you go to pre-existing gatherings of people who had similar interests. Exactly, interests, values. And all of a sudden, I started meeting people. And I started realizing, oh, wow, wait a minute. You're interested in the same things I'm interested in. We want to solve problems for the world. And I began to sort of find my people for the first time.

And one by one, I said, hey, let's hang out. And whereas before, I used to have siloed relationships right like I had my friends I work out with I had my friends that I go you know go travel with I have my party friends I have my intellectual friends but this is the first time in my life also that I wanted to remove all the compartmentalization and just bring everybody together fearlessly because I think so often, for some reason, we can get territorial with our friendships as well. I call that the oxytocin overload,

which is actually a term around when you become so close to somebody, as a friend one-on-one, there's this sort of animal instinct. Yeah, exactly, animal instinct that you don't want to share that person with somebody else. Whether it's your kids or your family and friends,

that overload is there. And it's on us to just recognize that it's happening, to know, wait, I'm feeling irrationally jealous. I'm feeling irrationally territorial over this friendship. And to name it and just say, hey, I just want to let you know that I'm feeling irrationally territorial. And I know that's an oxymoron because I care about you so much. But so that going out piece is so critical.

And first, like tearing down all the needs for those siloed friendships and just bringing everybody together, which is what I did. And again, it could work differently for everybody, but for me, just breaking down the barriers and sort of fearlessly introducing my friends and watching them develop friendships without me, feeling jealous of their friendship was actually something new that I didn't have in my 20s.

So in my 30s, I was like, wow, that's so cool. I did that. More is more. More is more. I connected them. They're now friends without me, that's so cool. I did that. More is more. More is more. I connected them. They're now friends without me. That's so cool. And they thank me when they see me.

Every once in a while, they're like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. This person is such a meaningful person in my life now. And more is more. So everyone listening out there, connect your friends fearlessly. Recognize that the rising tide truly lifts all boats. And, you know, when we actually courageously and fearlessly connect one another, life becomes far more rich. So, so yeah, going to, so then going out and exploring all these communities, I began finding these people, bring them to my house, hosting dinner parties, not that weren't just wine and cheeses,

everyone listening, let's stop doing wine and cheeses. I think we're past that. I think it's time that we really think about gathering as a more meaningful connection point. It's kombucha and kale chips now, right? Yeah, exactly. Kombucha and kale, exactly. But there's just, you know, I talk about entry rituals, like when someone comes into your home, how are they coming into your home? Is it just like, hey, I'm here with wine,

or are you greeting them with, you know, a little wishing well to say hey today when you're coming to my to my home i want you to share a little wish that you have for this gathering i mean tribes always had rituals that's always had that's right ceremony and that's right you're saying let's bring that back into our lives exactly because it creates meaning and context and connection and love and not just from a macro perspective right so daybreaker we have the method so also so let me just kind of start with everyone listening, sort of with this idea of when you go out for the first time,

you're now aligned with your inner values, interests, and abilities. Start exploring the communities around you fearlessly. Start connecting people around you fearlessly. And then start gathering people into your home. Yeah. So don't wait to get invited to a party. Create one.

That's right, that's exactly it. It's actually one of my favorite things to do is to actually invite people to my house, cook for them, and just hang out. Exactly. It's just my favorite thing. And that's exactly it. So don't wait for the invitation, create the invitation.

And then secondly is once you've kind of, so it's sort of like if I were to take 10,000 foot view of this whole experience of community building, it's self, you have to belong to yourself, right? Then you create a community, a personal community for yourself. But once you've built that personal community, then you build community at large. So it's inside, right? And then small community for self and then larger community for society. And how do you do that? So that's what I call the crawl method for community building.

I talk about this in my book. So once you've built a community for yourself and you've realized, okay, I have three to five friends that give me wings with whom I can call. I've done the exploration of my communities. I've gone in, I participated in those communities to get my hands dirty, connected with them.

Now, the most generous act we can do, like I keep saying, is to create community for others. So once we have that sense of safety and knowing that we have our own people, now it's a matter of creating community for others. So I really believe that if every single human being created community for others, not just for themselves, the world would no longer have any of our issues that we have today.

So sometimes you're like, wow, how do I begin creating a community at large? How do I do this? And so I distilled it into a very simple community building rubric that I call the crawl method for community building. So that's why I built the day worker movement around the world. Um, we can sort of dissect that for how you built your community, you know, of 2 million, you know, people or millions of people who, who listened to your, to your work and, and, um, follow your incredible teachings. But, but, but there's, there's,

you know, while community building sounds like a very squishy concept and sort of gray area, there are sort of defined rules that I've identified that can help anybody on their community building journey. 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 wanna 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 weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter, and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger, longer. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice

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