Well with Arielle Lorre - 154: Practical Ways to Improve Your Well-being with Dr. Robin Berzin

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

In this episode, I'm talking to Dr. Robin Berzin, founder and CEO of Parsley Health (@parsleyhealth) about preventative, accessible, holistic measures to feeling your best. We discuss disrupting an outdated health care system and how to prioritize your overall health when you're doing it all, especially as women. We also dive deep into stress; what causes it in our current culture, how to treat it (with and without medicine), the results she's seen from 'tech audits,' and one free thing she recommends to everyone for lowering stress.   www.Athleticgreens.com/blondefiles for a free 1 year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. www.Talkspace.com with code 'blonde' for $100 off your first month. www.Arrae.com with code 'blondefiles' for 10% off one time purchases or 25% off first month of subscription. www.Curology.com/BLONDE for a free 30-day trial, just pay $5 for shipping and handling.   Show Notes: Parsley Insights: https://www.parsleyhealth.com/insights?utm_source=the_blonde_files&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=insights_general_brandawareness_theblondefiles Parsley Website: https://www.parsleyhealth.com?utm_source=the_blonde_files&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=cc_general_brandawareness_theblondefiles   Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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without your rice-adviseur or sunnycars. The following podcast is a dear media production. Hey, welcome to the Blond Files podcast. I'm your host, Arial Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits. I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help

you navigate it all and live your best life. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm laughing because I feel like I need a better intro than that. But anyway, I have such a good episode for you today. I'm talking to Dr. Robin Berzen. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with Dr. Berzen or with her work. She's the founder and CEO of Parsley Health. Parsley Health is the nation's leading holistic medical practice designed to help people overcome chronic conditions. And we get into why she founded it in the episode. But here's just a little synopsis. She founded it to address the rising tide of chronic disease in America through personalized holistic medicine that puts food, lifestyle, and proactive diagnostic testing on the

prescription pad next to medication. Dr. Berzin attended medical school at Columbia University, and she trained in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. And she takes that background and really marries it with holistic care really beautifully. So she's also been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a tech pioneer. She's named as one of the 100 Most Innovative Women in Business by Inc. Magazine. She was praised by Fast Company for founding one of the world's most innovative companies. And she also has a new book, State Change, which is out now. So today we talk all about preventative, accessible, holistic measures to feeling your best. We discuss an outdated healthcare system and how to prioritize

your overall health when you're doing it all, especially as women. We also dive into stress. We talk about the different causes of stress in our current culture. We talk about how to treat it both with and without medicine. We talk about tech audits and she has a lot of practical things that she recommends to you guys today to implement in your lives to help lower stress and start to feel your best. So enjoy the episode. All right. Welcome. I'm so excited. excited to chat with you today. So excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Of course. So I'm sure a lot of my listeners are familiar with you and your work. But for anybody who isn't, could you just give a little intro on who you are and your background and what you do now? Yep. So I'm Dr. Robin

Berzin. I'm the founder and CEO of Parsley Health, where we are the nation's largest proactive, preventive, and holistic medical practice. I'm also the author of a new book that just came out called state change, which is all about how we can find a new baseline of energy and flow and understand the physical blockers to our mental health. I want to break down all of this, but I'm so curious, like, how did you come to start parsley and why? You know, so I went to med school here in New York. We were just talking about wearing our, you know, wearable sleeping bags here in freezing New York. So I've been here for a long time. I went to med school, Columbia, and I trained in internal medicine at a hospital here called Sinai. And,

I had an amazing training, but I saw in my training the ways in which our medical system was sort of a revolving door for people just to get sicker, not intentionally, but that's how it was. And the digestive issues, the mental health issues, the autoimmune conditions, the hormone imbalances, the migraines, the infertility, all the things that we all live with today for years, if not decades, weren't getting better. And we needed to bring nutrition, and mental health and lifestyle onto the prescription pad. We need to spend more time with people. And we needed to stop bouncing people from, you know,

specialists to Dr. Google to waiting lists for visits to primary care doctors. We needed to really take care of it all in one place. And so that was kind of my residency training aha moment, that there had to be a better way. And that led me to train in something called functional and holistic medicine in addition to my MD and ultimately to start my company. How was that received in the, the medical community. Oh, gosh, I don't know. You know, I think when I first started out,

it was just, you know, I had this deep calling and feeling that this was the right way to do things. And I saw, you know, I had the privilege of working in a wonderful practice here in New York City for about a year, working for another doctor doing functional integrative holistic medicine. And in that practice, I saw the outcomes. Like, wow, by bringing food and supplements and lifestyle and deeper testing into this realm, we're really moving the need of. for people, but oh my gosh, this world is very inaccessible, expensive. And so how do we bring this type of medicine and make it more technology smart and data smart and just more accessible financially? And so I just felt really strongly that that was the way to go. And I think what's

interesting now all these years later is that we're really plugging in with a health care system. I just actually right before this call got off a call with, like, Aetna and their national team. And that to me is a really big, like kind of, it sounds dorky, but like heart opening moment because this is what I'd planned the whole time. Yeah. And here we are. That's incredible. I mean, just as somebody who struggled with pretty much all of the ailments and symptoms

that you listed from hormones to gut issues, mental health issues, and seeing how they're all interconnected, it really is such, I mean, it's almost like a common sense approach. And I feel like when I was going through that stuff in my own experience, like, it was almost like playing whackamol. So if I just treated the gut issue thing, the other stuff flared up. And then if I took care of that, then the gut issues flared up. And I think so many people don't realize, I think it's becoming more common today, but like how interconnected all of this stuff is. And also something that we'll talk about today, like how interconnected the body and the mind is too. Yeah. Well, you know, I remember that song from when you're a kid, like the knee bones connected to thigh bone or whatever it was.

I just did that totally out of order. But you know what I'm saying? Yeah. You know, that's right. Like we are an ecosystem and we are connected to our environment, our food, how we manage stress, our emotions. And those things can't be ignored. And on top of that, what's going on in our guts is also impacting our brains. So what's happening in our hormones is impacting our, you know, immune systems. And so we have this healthcare system that's very focused on like the hearts over here and the blood sugar is over there and the brain is over there and the GI tract is over there. And we need 20 different specialists or 20 different things. And that is actually the opposite of what we learn in med school, which is that we are an interconnected ecosystem. So I wanted in Parsley Health to develop a health care system like a medical service that would treat people that way.

I knew and I saw that they would get better if we did, and that's what we're seeing. I'm just curious, like you said, that in medical school, you're trained that it's all connected. Do you think that that separation happens because then you have to choose a specialty? And that's like what you get focused on? I think it's the specialty choice. I think it's that the specialties exist, right? Because that's how we pay for stuff. So we pay for your, you know, vein to be ripped out of your leg and tied around your heart

when the arteries in your heart are clogged from the food. that you were eating your whole life. We don't pay doctors like, you know, to spend time with you to address what you're eating and address your behaviors and address your family risk factors and what came before that would impact you not getting that heart disease in the first place. And so the system is a product of the way that we pay for stuff. It's not necessarily that we want it to be that way, but that's just how it is. And so what I think is exciting is that at this moment, there's a big push in our healthcare system coming from various corners, partially one of them, but there's lots to say, we can't keep doing this this way because it's really expensive. It's ineffective. And it's not fair to patience.

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month if you use the promo code blonde at sign up. That's B-L-O-N-D-E. Again, that's $100 off at Talkspace.com with the promo code blonde. Relationships are hard and that's why I'm here. Hey friend, it's Kimmy Crawford. Think of me as your big sister slash audible BFF that you can always trust to give you the Realty. This is my show, Relationship, the advice podcast that covers all relationship topics, the good, the bad, and the straight up shitty. Need advice? Send your story to hello atrelationshippod.com or DM me at Relationship on IG and tune in for new episodes every Friday. Be sure to follow us and subscribe so you don't miss all the hot goss. And if you're loving the show, please leave us a review. Talk soon, Bestie. You listed a few common things that people seem to be

dealing with today. What have you seen are the most common issues, I'll just say for women in particular, from the people that you treat out parsley? You know, women are really unique. We are not little men and we have unique health needs. We're the chief medical officers of our families and our communities. We're driving health care decisions for our parents and our partners and our kids and our friends and our colleagues even. And we're driving 80% of our health care spend in this country, but we're not actually having services designed around us. The other thing I think is really interesting is that women are disproportionately impacted by the top chronic conditions that affect us today. So women are 80% of autoimmune disease, which is rapidly on the rise. This is our

arthritis and our lupus and our Hashimoto's and all of these types of inflammatory diseases. women are 70% of GI issues. This is your IBS and irritable bowel syndrome and illitable bowel disease and reflux. Women are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health issue, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue. Women are experiencing most of the fertility and hormone issues. And yet we underinvest in how we treat these chronic conditions and conditions for women that if when I say like, are you bloated, are you tired, are you achy?

a lot of people laugh and say, well, like, yeah. But I'm like, that's not normal. But we've sort of told women, I think, that it's just something they have to live with. And my message is that's not true. Why do you think that is or does anybody have insight? Like why it's disproportionately affecting women? You know, it's a lot of different factors. I think it's one, autoimmune disease being 80% women, the medical community doesn't fully understand why.

We know that there's a connection between estrogen and autoimmune. And that is like not great, right? Because women were actually not included in research trials and studies from 1977 to 1993. So we've really under research why are women different, how are women different in what's causing this? In other cases, I think, you know, women are, as we said earlier, our caregivers or the chief medical officers of their homes and families and communities and are kind of bearing. We know that women bear the brunt of like home life and home.

and family care in addition to everything else that we have going on. And so I think that women's bodies respond differently to some of those stressors. And then women are, of course, impacted by a lot of the things that are setting us up for sickness that men are, which is super high sugar diets that 74% of the American diet, sitting 11 hours a day and staring at screens, not moving, not getting quality sleep, not, you know, sometimes we're taught to manage our emotions through substances like alcohol, which is not helping and it's making it worse, right? So I think that we're living in this world where we're set up for sickness and then our bodies are responding to that world with unique needs. I feel like this could be a total

overgeneralization. So you can definitely tell me if I'm wrong here. But I'm just thinking like in my own experience, I admittedly, like I tend to run a little anxious. I tend to get overwhelmed easily. And I was having a conversation with my husband and I can't remember why I was prompted to do this. Maybe it was for a podcast episode or something. But somebody said to write down your two dominant emotions. And immediately I went anxiety and stress. Didn't even have to think about it twice. Even though there is so much good in my life, but those are like the dominant things. And I asked my husband and he was like, hmm, like happiness and joy or whatever. And he is a very stressful, you know, a high pressure job. But for him, like, that's just not his dominant emotion. And I feel like

when I talk to a lot of my female friends about it, they were kind of on my end of the spectrum. And I wonder if there is just kind of like a disparity in that sense between men and women. Well, there absolutely is, right? And it's in the data that there is. And I think that women both acknowledge their emotions, right? Men are socialized oftentimes to be like, it's fine, everything's great, right? And sort of not to feel those emotions or to deny them. And so that's part of it. It's cultural. And men, you know, in the data, have to be sort of dragged into the doctor or only engage in medical services, often when they're in crisis, which is often too late. Like, they've had the heart attack. And I think women are by nature more in touch with those emotions and also

more willing to own them. So I think that's part of it. I also know that, you know, when we live in a way that we're set up for sickness, our bodies are not designed to sit all day and look at screens that give us FOMO and inspire fear. And yet that's what we're doing. And we've proven that the social media platforms are damaging to mental health, particularly of young girls and adolescent girls, but that goes all, I'm 40 years old. That impacts me too, right? And all of us, our bodies are designed to process how we feel through moving, and yet we're not moving very much. And so then the emotions, which are actually a wave of neurotransmitters and hormones that go through our body, every time we have a thought, we have an emotional reaction to that thought, gosh, I hope I'm doing well on this podcast.

I'm a little self-conscious, right? I might not like see that thought across the billboard of my brain, but I had the thought and then it instantaneously had that minor anxiety rush, right? And that, if that's happening to you all day long of your email or the news or whatever's going on in your life, those hormones and neurotransmitters that are released throughout our entire bodies touching every single cell when we have those emotional reactions are creating damage, impairing our immune system, raising our blood sugar, making it harder for us to heal. And over time, like, disease happens, right? And patterns of always being in that state of anxiety and stress start to feel normal.

So I think for women, to your point, like stress, anxiety, feel like my dominant emotions, this series of factors around how we live, our relationship with technology and media, the foods that we're eating, all of these things are adding up to a body that is in a state of constant fight or flight. And then our brains become accustomed to that pattern and don't know how to go anywhere else. Yeah. I mean, it's just unsustainable. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially being like a content creator. And, you know, there are so many platforms from podcasting to Instagram to TikTok now, which is kind of taking over. And with TikTok, I mean, there's no downtime with any of it. You know, you're constantly connected to a screen. You're

constantly comparing yourself with what other people are doing. TikTok is this kind of like manic drive because you, you know, it's like a like positive reinforcement, but you never know when it's going to come. You never know when you're going to go viral. So it's very addictive, like that kind of thing. And I'm like in my mid-30s. And I'm like, how is this affecting people who are teenagers? I just can't even imagine. I would think that like it would also affect like the dopamine pathways in your brain and everything.

Exactly. Well, you know, these platforms are addicted. They've been proven to be addictive. They hit the reward centers, the dopamine centers in the brain the same way cocaine does, right? At a different level, but same pathways. And so they are just. designed to be that way. And so one of the things that we talk about with our patients at Parsley, we always do a little tech audit. You know, I had a patient with anxiety. She was in her 20s,

and she'd always had anxiety, it was like to some degree. And it would kind of get worse or get better. And she worked with a psychiatrist. And unfortunately for her, you know, about 50% of people don't really respond very well to some of the medications that are options out there. And so we have a set of patients who are just non-responders. Like the drugs don't work for them. If they work, that's great. But if they don't work, then what? And she was having a really bad anxiety flare to the point that she wasn't sleeping. And if you're not sleeping, it's the equivalent chronic sleep deprivation can lead to depression and can mask us depression. It has huge implications for your metabolism the next day. And then you

even worse to try to get your energy back. It can make you manic and it can make you almost like you're drunk if you're chronically sleep deprived. And so she really wasn't sleeping. And I was like, okay, we're going to go back to basics here. And during the pandemic, she was spending like six, seven hours on social platforms a day. Like not at a street clip, but like, you know, over the course of the day. And so I was like, you know what? I don't know, but let's try cutting it out for a week. She cut out all the social.

She logged out, deleted all the apps, news feeds too, because the news is part of this too. And within a week, she was sleeping again. And so she felt so good. She cut them out for a month. And now she does a week out of every month. and it was a huge unlock. And so I think sometimes we say, oh, yeah, these things create anxiety and FOMO

and, you know, mess with our self-esteem and are addictive, but like, not really. But really, they are. And they could be massively, your anxiety could be clue or a warning sign from your body that your relationship with technology, for example, is not serving you. Well, yeah, I feel like it just kind of becomes your baseline.

And so it's not until you take that thing away. where you realize that it's really not. But it's so hard, I think, especially after the pandemic. Like, I just feel like that really, at least for me and like a lot of people that I've talked to, really increased that screen time and created a whole slew of other issues, which we don't have to get into today. Oh, yeah. Well, it's very real.

Yeah. What are some other maybe less obvious lifestyle things that we might be doing that are contributing to things like anxiety and stress and burnout. Number one is food. People think about our diet as either like weight loss, get fit, look hot, right? Because that's how it's messaged how to think about food, right? Which is just come on. And then we also think about food as, you know, okay, we don't want to get a disease like 20 years from now.

But food is impacting how you feel right now. And if you're like the average person where you're eating instead of a, max of six teaspoons of sugar a day you're eating about 17. And your 74% of your diet is ultra-refined, also ultra-process packaged foods. That means that most of your diet consists of refined flowers, refined sugar, and omega-6 fats, which is our vegetable oils, which are in everything processed. And those fats are really problematic. They actually impair your brain from using the serotonin that's available to you, which is that feel-good neurotransmitter. So when we look at our diets, and I walk through and state change and in a parsley we prescribe medical food as medicine because

food doesn't like medicine. It is medicine. We really focus day one on trying to get people off of the refined flour, refined sugar, omega-6 fats and replacing that with fruits, vegetables, whole grains that you can see the actual grain, meaning it hasn't been pulverized into a flower, healthy fish, nuts and seeds, high-quality protein and meat, right? Healthy fats like olive oil. And when you eat this way, and I recommend in the book just at least giving it 30 days, people see dramatic transformations. They feel more energized. They feel more calm. They sleep better.

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I will eat this. I will show you. They could be a little bit better. But the reality is any grain or nut or a seed or anything that's been pulverized into a flower, so an unrecognizable form, enriched like added to, so a bunch of crap is added to it to make it into that perfect little square that was punched down in a machine. That is a refined and package and processed food. And it's not that you have to be perfect. You can have some of that stuff sometimes. But sugar, sugar, flour is flour largely. And when these things are making up the majority of your meals, you can't recognize that food item as something that might have walked, swum, or grown from the ground. then that means it's probably not good for you.

One meal a day, but not three, right? So I live in L.A. where we have like Airwan and all of this really healthy food is very accessible. But do you have any tips for people where it's less accessible, whether it's like a financial restriction or if they just don't have access to like really fresh fruits and vegetable produce and protein and all of that? Yes. Right now there are some mail order services. Like I love Thrive.

market, which is discounted online, like groceries that are relatively healthy. Trader Joe's has got some really good options in terms of healthier food. And they do kind of bulk rate buying, so it's often cheaper. And what a lot of people don't realize is a lot of people do live in food deserts, but even at your worst grocery store, if you stay on the aisles, the outside of the grocery store, as opposed to the middle where all the box and package stuff is, and you focus on meats, fish, vegetables, eggs, right, whole foods, and you buy those and you batch cook or cook them, that is cheaper than living in what is this, or living on, what is the sort of what I call like the dumpster fire of just package and processed foods that are making us sick.

And I think we have a culture of convenience. We have a culture of fast and go and whatever is here, but that is not serving us at all. when it comes to our mental health or when it comes to our physical health. And those things become pretty costly if they get out of control. Yes, I will admit, so I've been sober for eight years. When I first got sober, I had no money. And I would go to like the 99 cent store and they had a produce section. I mean, maybe it wasn't organic or whatever, but you can buy, you know,

I would buy fresh fruits and vegetables and also like frozen fruits and vegetables as well. Frozen's awesome. I buy the, you know, I buy a lot of the like, frozen broccoli, frozen veggie medley, have all that stuff in the freezer. It's great for kids because it's just like, you know, getting stuff into them surreptitiously or quickly is the name in the game. Right. Okay. So aside from things like screen time, tech, food, what are some other factors that could be contributing to these issues? You know, sometimes our anxiety or depression, our fatigue isn't in our heads. It's in our bodies. And it's a lot of. It's,

a message from the body that something is broken or it's an alarm bell ringing trying to get us to pay attention. And what I mean by that is, you know, 60% of Americans have a diagnosed chronic condition. 40% have two or more. Tens of millions of people are living with undiagnosed condition because 50% of millennials don't have a primary care doctor. So most people don't even know. And what I recommend and I talk about in the book and then obviously at Parsley, we do a lot of this testing day one is looking at some of the chronic conditions that are rampant that could be affecting you how you feel in your mental health. So this is blood sugar issues and looking at hemoglobin A1C, fasting insulin, fasting glucose to understand how you're measuring glucose

and blood sugar or how you're managing those things even before you get something like diabetes because we want to prevent that, then it's preventable. It's looking at thyroid hormones. It's looking at nutrient deficiencies. It's looking at heart health. And so I'll tell you an example, like one of my patients in her 40s was gaining weight, feeling tired, feeling low, digestion was kind of slow, like constipated and had gone to her PCP or regular doctor at some point who had just been like, you know, I think you're depressed. Here's an antidepressant. And she was just like, I don't know. I don't think that's it. Because one in five women get, feel dismissed or ignored by their health care provider, right? So we're not always heard or there's not time to hear

you in the first place because it is it's like 10 minutes. And so we did testing and she had a thyroid disorder and one in five women in her lifetime will be diagnosed with the thyroid disorder. And low thyroid function shows up as dry skin and weight gain and depression and constipation. And it was all very classic. And so we just treated her thyroid and she didn't need to be on an antidepressant. And she felt a million times better not just from mood symptoms, but across her whole body. And these tests are like blood tests. You can take to any doctor. They're covered by insurance.

If you don't have insurance from most labs, they're like pretty cheap. These are not fancy pants tests. But I think that if we've learned anything from this pandemic, is that being proactive about our health is the name of the game. Like I just saw the article come out today. The research showing that long-haul COVID is associated with type 2 diabetes, Epstein bar reactivation, autoimmunity. I'm sorry.

I'm like, our practice at Parsley, we have tens of thousands of members. members, we could have told you that already. But thank you, New York Times. But regardless, or you know, thank you that scientific literature for getting there because it is these underlying issues that are predisposing us or making things worse, but there's so much we can do about them. We've got to know about them to do something about them. Right. So you've referenced your book a few times state change. How did you come to writing that? And what does state change? Like, what does that look like for you? What does that mean to you? A state change is an elevation in our baseline of energy, focus, calm, positive outlook. And I believe that it's something that we have to

cultivate and find over and over again every single day. And I think that we don't have the tools for that in how we grow up and how we learn and how we live. And so I wanted to give people a concrete roadmap to follow that would help them achieve feeling that way every single day. And I felt like especially in the pandemic, we all kind of needed that more than ever. So what are some tips that you have for people without giving away the whole book, obviously? Oh my gosh. So many. So we go through the science of food and how to eliminate some of the foods. We go through the science of movement and I have a specific movement program. One of the things that I think is really powerful that people are sort of into or they're not as meditation, but the research and science of meditation is so awesome.

It rebuilds the gray matter in your brain. It improves brain plasticity so you can have new thoughts. And new thoughts are new, you know, tracks like railroad tracks through the brain to have new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. It lowers blood pressure and blood sugar and heart rate and so's digestion and helps people focus. And so, and it's free. And so I just think that there's sort of no better option out there. You can do it anywhere. You don't need like a special fancy room or like a gong or a pillow or whatever. And so I meditate every day and I practice this pretty religiously, but it could be five minutes one day and like an hour or another day. I'm really all over the place about when and where and how. And I walk you through some of my favorite

books and meditation apps. But we prescribe meditation and parsley 10x more than medication because it's that powerful and I believe it should be on our prescription pad. I started doing TM four years ago, three or four years ago. That's obviously a little more like regimented. It's not for everybody. I do tend to be a little evangelical about the things that have worked for me. And I always say on this show, like I don't want people's eyes to glaze over because sometimes when you bring up meditation, they do. But it was the single most impactful thing I've done for my health. Just my intuition with my body. Like it really helped me kind of tune in, like you said, every day. Like, I can't go off of what I did yesterday. I have to do it every day. But tune in to, like, what my needs are for that day. It helped with my emotional well-being, my relationships, my sleep, just my overall mindset. Like, it's, it really touches every aspect of your life. It's such a deep reset, right? Because we meditate. And meditation, by the way, everyone can just be like a breathing practice. Inhale for four, exhale for six, right? If you're not sort of into the

or esoteric versions, just think of it as a simple breathing, practice, but that breathing practice will trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest, digest, relax, and heal side of your nervous system. It's the opposite side of the fight or flight, which is our run from a lion, even if the lion is your email or whatever. So we need that balance and we need it when we're awake, not just when we're asleep. If the only time you're relaxed is when you're literally asleep, we have a problem. And so meditation puts that body in that parasympathetic dominant state, rest, digest,

relax and heal. And that can absolutely transform how you feel. I had a meditation teacher on my podcast recently, and he was talking about Vedic meditation as well. But he had a good analogy that I liked, which was that it's like laundering your brain. So whether you do it once a day or twice a day or five times a day or whatever, like you're just kind of laundering. And it, for me at least, really just kind of gets rid of like the residual buildup of like stress and just that accumulation of the fighter flight and and all of that. Well, it lets you process your emotions, just like movement processes your emotions. So does meditation. And I think back to what you were saying earlier about TikTok, we're sort of being trained not to feel. Like don't feel just be amused by this thing.

And when we don't feel or we don't spend time with our feelings or emotions, we still have have them and they still trigger that neurohormonal cascade in our bodies and they still do that damage. So they're still there. But when we feel them and we meditate and breathe through them, we can get through them. And I think that's a really powerful, powerful lesson for all of us. I think there's like a philosopher that said the mind is a thief. If you don't watch it, it will rob you. And so we just need to spend time with our own feelings and our own mind sometimes. from this conversation, I just keep having this question, which is, do you think that our thoughts dictate how we feel, not just mentally, but physically as well? I mean, do you think that our thoughts

can make us sick? And conversely, do you think that our thoughts can help us heal? Yes, absolutely, right? Because we train our thoughts like a muscle, just like we get repetitive in what we eat or what we watch or how we move throughout the day. We get repetitive in our thinking. And meditation, again, is a way to sort of build new railroad tracks, build new pathways. And that repetitive thinking can impact, again, through emotional reactions. We have a thought. We have an emotional reaction. We have a physical cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters to that emotional reaction. And when that's on repeat and we don't change it, it begins to shape our bodies. I like to ask my guests, one thing we should stop doing today and one thing that's

we should start doing today for our health or overall well-being. Stop looking at screens and scrolling before bed. Give yourself at least 30 to 60 minutes before bed because you're going to have an infinitely deeper sleep. And that is actually sleep is when your brain takes out the metabolic trash of the day. And I think start, you know, I've been on a movement kick lately, but I've just been processing all the stress of mom life and work and new year and just every. everything that's going on and the busyness just with like 20 minutes of stretching and moving

every night. And I kind of combine my wind down routine with that so that I'm doing a lot of yoga at like 9 p.m. lately. And it's not like crazy, super stressful hard yoga. It's like relaxing yoga, but it's my combo of how do I stop looking at screens and how do I do something that's going to help me feel better the next day. So I'm kind of double whamming it at night. I love that. And I was actually going to ask you, like, since you're so busy with your career, obviously, and being a mom and having a baby, do you have any tips for people who are in that same boat or who just feel like their life is so busy? Like, how can they possibly fit in things like meditation and movement and all of that? For me, it's really two things. And for most of my patients, I think, too, is that one, we just have to remember over and over again, we have to put our own oxygen mask on first.

When I, like, don't do any of these things and I start to eat poorly and I'm up late and I'm not taking care of myself, I'm not performing at my highest. I'm not able to be the mom I want to be or the leader I want to be. I start to fray, right? And so put your own oxygen mask on first. And then from there, find things you love because if it's a should, it's over. I hate the gym. Every time I go to the gym and I sign in, they're like, it's been 67 days since you were last here. And I'm like, oh, do I win like a battle? Cool. Like not my thing, right? You know, so I'm just not going to do it because I think I should go there. So if I've had to find yoga and online hit classes and walks with my friends and other ways of moving that are pleasurable and fun and positive and feel good to me. And so I think just remembering there's so much out there, do stuff that feels good for you. I love that. Well, where can everybody find you and find your book and all.

of that. Parsleyhealth.com slash state change is all the book info. And then Parsley Health in general, we have an amazing newsletter list where we share all of this kinds of information and we give lots of guides and articles authored by physicians on how to treat some of these conditions and foods and supplements and lifestyle and tests and all of that. And parsley is available nationwide online. So most of our many thousands of members today are working with us entirely remotely for

that more proactive, preventive. holistic care that's hard to find elsewhere. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it, and if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to with the Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there or over on my personal page at Ariel Lori.