WHOOP Podcast - Exploring the Link Between Light and Health with Dr. Roger Seheult

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

On the third installment of our Longevity Series, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance Principal Scientist, Dr. Kristen Holmes, sits down with Dr. Roger Seheult. Dr. Roger Seheult is an Associate Clinical Professor at University of California, Riverside School of Medicine and Assistant Clinical Professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University. Dr. Seheult is a critical care physician, practicing in Beaumont, California and is a quadruple board-certified doctor of internal medicine, pulmonary disease, critical care medicine, and sleep medicine. He focuses on promoting healthy lifestyles and making medical concepts more understandable to everyone. He actively lectures at schools, hospitals, and across media outlets. Dr. Seheult is the co-founder of MedCram, founded early in the pandemic to educate people world-wide about the spread of viruses. MedCram is now an online educational company that aims to clear up misconceptions and provide understandable medical videos for all.Dr. Holmes and Dr. Seheult discuss the effect of light on circadian rhythm (00:42), how light and timing affects brain circuitry and mood (02:42), melatonin’s important role in longevity (05:31), why we need to be outdoors more (09:58), the importance of sleep-wake timing (14:46), slow-wave sleep and growth hormones (16:31). Dr. Seheult illustrates the foods that may be impacting your circadian health (18:42) and practical sleep changes that will help improve your sleep quality (24:25), the 8 pillars of sleep (25:15) and the importance of living for purpose (30:32).Follow Dr. Roger Seheult:Dr. Roger SeheultMedcramSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

The way that our lives are right now is really to work against us. We have traffic in the morning that we have to get up early for. We come home late. We have a lot of homework, extra work that we have to complete. That requires light. That requires working on a computer that moves things forward. We don't get the benefit of going to bed early. And what's the first type of sleep that we get when we go to bed?

It's slow wave sleep. And this is the best type of physically restorative sleep. And then, of course, we need to get up early in the morning. We're not getting as much sleep because we need to get on the freeway to get to our work because we live in places where housing is cheaper, but we want to work in places where the cost of living is higher. Modernity is just crushing us. All of these things are pushing us away from health.

Dr. Schwalt, welcome. Thank you so much, Kristen. It's great to be here. I am so excited for this conversation. I think we're kindred spirits and that we both believe light is the path to human health and longevity. So I'd love to hear your thesis around that. Yeah, I mean, I came into this late.

I'm a pulmonary and critical care specialist. When I joined a group, they said, no, you're going to need to know about sleep. You're going to have to train in sleep. And I said, okay, I'll do it. And you know, it's interesting. As I began to study more and more about sleep, those sleep journals became more interesting. Isn't it interesting how that works?

It's so cool. And one of the things that I found was that sleep is highly tied to light, of course. And having light at the right time and having light at the right time and having darkness at the right time. But there's something else about light, and we can talk about this as well, is that light not only affects us through the eyes, but it also affects us through the body. Our bodies are optical creations, and it's quite actually very interesting. You know, the way I divided it up in my head in terms of the divisions, there's the effect of light on circadian rhythm, and that's based through the super chasmatic nucleus and all of the

things that are affected from that, and that's a whole topic right there. But there's also how light affects the mood. And that's a, that's a little bit of a different pathway. That's the perihabanilinear nucleus. It's a little bit different destination, but one that's actually very important, especially for people at high latitudes who get seasonal affective disorder through the seasons. Then there's that third category, which is just mind-blowing to me, and it's really exploding right now. If people are interested in learning about it, they can look at something called photobiomodulation. That's one term that we like to use. Basically, for me, it's just going out into the sun and getting the benefits of getting outside. So those are the three areas

that I think that light really affects the human body. I love that. Why don't we start with the timing of light? I know there was a paper published in 2017. The timing of light affects brain circuitry and mood. I think it was done on animal models, but it suggested that viewing light between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. has a pro-depressive effect, and that it impacts the next day, the dopamine system next day, motivation and reward. Can you talk about timing? Yeah. And why does this matter? So timing matters a huge deal. Just to sort of step back in terms of how important it is and how wide ranging it is, the schools of pharmacies are looking at this and pharmaceuticals are looking at this because what they're finding out is that they may have

to do a lot of research to start over because the efficacy of the medications that they're giving and the side effects of the medications that they're giving. They never took this into consideration, but it actually may depend on what time of the day you're giving a medication. Because, Kristen, you and I are different people at 8 o'clock in the morning than we are at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And I'm not just talking about being, you know, fatigued after a long day of work. I could do a pulmonary function test on somebody at 8 o'clock in the morning

and I would get slightly but significantly different results than if I did it at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And it's because our circadian rhythm is the master clock that, dictates what happens. And one of the major affectors of that circadian rhythm is light. So this is huge. This is a huge deal. So what does light do? It's interesting because the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in the back of our retinum are not so sensitive in the morning, but they're extremely sensitive at night. And so it's a huge dichotomy. It takes, you know, 100,000 lucks of going outside to affect change in the morning, which is really important because what it does is it stabilizes it sort of sets the watch, if you will.

And in some cases, it may actually slightly advance your circadian rhythm, which may be actually something that is beneficial, depending on what you do at night. If you're viewing light earlier in the day, it's going to advance in that you're going to fall asleep earlier, right? So it's going to impact the release of melatonin. Exactly, exactly. Whereas, unfortunately, for us, especially living in the 21st century, they become extremely sensitive, these, as you call them, photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, become even sensitive

down to a photon of light that can activate them and shut down. It does two bad things. Number one, it delays the circadian rhythm, messing up the timing, but it can also shut down melatonin production. And I can't, I can't understate how important we are finding out that melatonin is. It's actually the most powerful antioxidant that we know of. A lot of people, people are really gung-ho on glutathione. Check it out. Melatonin actually regulates glutathione. So it's the king of antioxidants. Let's talk about melatonin for a second, because I love that you pointed that out. And I think people, to your point, I think they see melatonin as this, you know, this sleepy hormone. In fact, I don't think it makes us sleepy. It just is activated in

the presence of darkness, right? But I don't think melatonin itself is soporific, right? It has a very small effect. There are medications. It's the darkness that's making us sleepy, right? So, but melatonin has so many protective effects. So I think when people, I always say, you know, people want to fix their sleep if they want to fix their hormones, if they want to fix just their mood, fix your light behavior, right? And part of that light behavior is protecting your melatonin.

Yes. Right. So how do we protect our melatonin? and maybe just talk a little bit about the relationship between circulating melatonin and longevity. Yes. Okay. So this is really important to understand because when I get done, people will say, I'm just going to take melatonin tablets. And that's not really the answer. So the issue is, is that melatonin, which comes on as the night progresses, around 9 o'clock or so. Only if dim light.

If dim light. That's it. Like dim light, melatonin onset, DLML. Right. People need to know this. Right. So it gets released from the pineal gland, but it will not release if there is abundant light or even a small amount of light. That's why it's important to have your bedroom as dark as possible to put tape over those clock radios, et cetera, making sure that there is an ambient light from outside coming into your room. It'll shut down if you don't have darkness. So melatonin will then be secreted in through and throughout the vascular system. So that's blood melatonin. That's important to understand because we were, were able to discover this melatonin simply because it was in the blood. Remember we talked about at the very beginning where there's different types of light and how it affects the human body? We're finding out that there are orders of magnitude higher melatonin concentrations in the mitochondria itself, which is there to help out with oxidative stress, just to sort of give you why that's so important. First of all, mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell, yes. What people may not

realize is that many of the chronic diseases that we see today in the Western industrialized world, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, inflammation, dementia. They're all related to each other in the terms that they're mitochondrial dysfunction issues. Right. I mean, not to mention infertility and, you know, I mean, the list goes on and on. A list goes on and on. So the mitochondria, goes to this whole thing about mitochondrial aging is that as we get older, the mitochondria produce less and less and less energy. And it's like an engineer car. It produces heat. The heat could shut it down. What's the heat in the mitochondria? Oxidative stress. What is the antidote to oxidative stress? Apparently, it's melatonin. Why else would it be being produced on site

in orders of magnitude higher than it's being secreted from the pineal gland? Now, realize, this melatonin is now being discovered simply because it doesn't get out into circulation. It's harder to discover it. You've got to go down into the intracellular organelles to find it, but it's there. So, in fact, here is nature's solution to the oxidative stress problem. At night, the solution is secretion of melatonin from the pineal gland. What's the solution during the daytime? It's not that. The solution is production of melatonin on site in the mitochondria. Now, how could you go about disturbing the situation very easily? Either by exposing your eyes to bright light at night and shutting down melatonin production

from the pineal gland or not going outside and having melatonin not being produced. There's an issue that I need to talk about very briefly. We are finding out through studies that there is a way of boosting melatonin production in the mitochondria on site. and that is through infrared radiation. And people need to realize that more than 50% of the photons coming from the sun are in the infrared spectrum. So what does that mean?

The bottom line here is that you need to get light when the sun is up and you need to avoid light when the sun is down. It's that simple. Right. Yeah, I love that you put it in such clear terms. And I think that that when we zoom out and look at the population at large, I mean, we're spending 93% of our time indoors. Right. So this is a huge problem and that people are looking around, oh, what are all these, you know, we're cardiovascular and metabolic disease and, you know,

cancer proneness. And, you know, we're in an epidemic right now in terms of disease, right? And and I think we can safely say, and you tell me if this is wrong, but I think light is at the root. I think it's certainly one of many things at the root. And I'll tell you why it's important And because we're not only like frogs going into the pot and the water is heating, we're, first all, more frogs are getting into the pot and secondly, the water is heating it faster. I'll explain. A hundred years ago, we did not spend 93% of our time indoors. I'll date myself here and I'll say I'm a Gen Xer.

I remember when my parents told me, come home when the street lights come on. So we were outside. We were playing. I have kids, and I can tell you that they would much rather be inside playing video games than being outside. So that's the first thing. We're inside more. But there's also things that are going on

in terms of energy efficiency. So what's going on in terms of energy efficiency? Well, you know, our incandescent bulbs, which used to give off quite a bit of light in the infrared spectrum, are now being replaced by LEDs, which give off no light. It was considered to be a waste.

It uses less energy, absolutely. And in places like in Southern California, where I live, all of the windows have to be what they call low e-glass. what this does is it prevents the heat contribution from infrared light from coming into the building and it reduces the cost of air conditioning. So really what we're finding is that infrared light inside of buildings are becoming more and more scarce, which makes it even more important that we get outside. Yeah. So you know, you're a sleep, a scientist, sleep specialist. What is interesting is that when we're talk about how to improve sleep, it's actually

via our circadian rhythms, right? So we're not really, you know, yeah, cold or quiet. You know, there's all these sleep hygiene things that are really helpful to promoting sleep. But if we really, really want to fix our sleep, we got to address kind of our circadian rhythms first. So this entry point of light, I think that's amazing. So just within the first 20 minutes of waking up, you need to see as much light as possible, right? Get your eye. out into the sky, you know, if it's cloud covered, it's okay, right? It's just going to take a little bit longer to get to that 100 lux, kind of. Correct. So 100,000 lux is what you might get outside on a very bright and sunny day. If you've got cloudy, it's still going to be brighter than staying

inside. We need that signal. We do. We do. So typically what we like to see is something called around 3,000 lux hours. What does that mean? That means if you're getting 3,000 lux, then you should be out there for an hour. It's usually going to be 100,000 lux if it's a bright, sunny day. And so therefore, you could be outside for just a few minutes. But if you're inside where the lux is 50 to 100, you can see how long you're going to have to be inside before you get that amount of light. It's not going to happen. So what some people do if they live in areas where the sun doesn't come up before they go to work is they buy, you know, you can buy this online for about 20 bucks is a 10,000 luxe lamp. You hold it between 11 and 15 inches from your face. And of course, if it's 10,000 luxe, you only

need to be in front of it for a third of an hour, 20 minutes, and you're ready to go. So while you're cooking breakfast, or I'd recommend this for our shift workers, you know, just to try to manipulate, kind of their exposure and get enough, enough light at the right times. The way that our lives are right now is really to work against us. We have traffic in the morning that we have to get up early for. We come home late. We have a lot of homework, extra work that we have to complete. That requires light.

That requires working on a computer that moves things forward. We don't get the benefit of going to be. bed early. And what's the first type of sleep that we get when we go to bed? It's slow wave sleep. And this is the best type of physically restorative sleep. And then, of course, we need to get up early in the morning. We're not getting as much sleep because we need to get on the freeway to get to our work because we live in places where housing is cheaper, but we want to work in places where the cost of living is higher. Modernity is just crushing us. All of these things are pushing us away from health.

what's up folks if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health performance fitness you may really enjoy getting a whoop that's right you can check out whoop at woup dot com it measures everything around sleep recovery strain and you can now sign up for free for 30 days so you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free you get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. Let's talk about the timing of sleep. There's a recent study that came out suggesting that, you know, earlier is indeed better. I think midnight is kind of the middle of the night, right? But I think that when I think you suggest to folks like, hey, generally speaking, you probably

want to go to bed a few hours after the sun goes down, people think that's insane, right? They think you're just like talking gibberish. I always try to point to Kenneth Wright's work because I think that that is just a great illustration of the fact that this whole notion of kind of evening types and morning types, it doesn't vary as widely as people think it does in that. In the study that he did where he put everyone on a mountain, you know, I think there was roughly 40 people in this study and they all went on a camping trip. They didn't have any exposure to artificial light. So all natural light, they were all falling asleep within three hours of sunset, within 30 minutes of each other and waking up within 30 minutes of each other. So this notion that we've got these

really wildly varying kind of circadian rhythms is potentially not true. It's not true. They do exist, but they're more rare, and people use them as an excuse. I'll give you an example of what happens. The behavior of a night owl actually perpetuates the phenotype of a night owl. Because you're shifting your circadian rhythm later. Exactly. Yeah. So if you were to just make a decision to go earlier. And just because you've adapt to it, doesn't mean it's healthy. Exactly. So just be really clear.

Exactly. Just because now you can fall, you fall asleep at 1 a.m. does not mean it's good for you. Right. And there's this old expression that says, you know, the hours of sleep before midnight are worth twice as much as the hours after midnight. And people are like, where does that come from? Does that even make sense? Turns out that's true. Yeah. You know, the type of sleep that you get early in the night is what we call end. 3 sleep or deep or slow wave sleep. And this is the sleep that is associated with growth hormone.

I mean, remember what people used to do 20 years ago. They used to get cows pituitary glands, grind it up, extract the growth hormone, and inject it. I mean, it didn't work out so well. Yeah. But this is what people were going after because that growth hormone makes you feel young. It makes, and if you want to get your own growth hormone produced naturally by your own pituitary gland, the way to do that is to cash in on that early sleep. Well, the way to do that is is to go to bed early. And to wake up and do light. So you can actually release melatonin at a reasonable time after the sun goes down and restrict

the light after the sun sets. Exactly. Now, it's hard to do because what you have to do, let's face it, professional people like you and I, we got this way because we, what, we delay gratification. We see sleep as gratification and we see us doing work the thing that we need to do to earn it. So it's hard for us to go to sleep knowing that there's X, Y, and Z to do. But we just have to realize that sleep is not just a gratification. It's actually essential for us to be able to do what we're doing.

And so getting that rest, putting it in, if you need to write down on a pad saying, this is what I'm going to do in the morning when I get up and I get my light. I'm going to work on this. But this is something that it's hard to do, but it's worthwhile. Yeah. I mean, I've noticed just in myself, you know, I suppose going on about 10 years now of just really consistent sleep wake time and, you know, pushing for my sleep timing, you know, So, I mean, I used to be that person.

You know, I'd go to bed at midnight, 1 a.m., consistently. And it just, I realized it just wasn't serving me. And when I made the change, I noticed a huge difference in my productivity and just my mood. My disability generally just to live my values, you know, I improved. Yes. I seriously believe there's so many chronic diseases that people perpetuate. It's difficult because when you tell them that you just need to get more sleep or you should at least try getting better. sleeping, going to bed earlier. From their viewpoint, it almost seems dismissive because they don't

understand the power of sleep and getting enough of it. What do you think about, because this is kind of a circadian behavior, one of the things that we see very clearly in our data is that when folks are eating meals, report eating a meal within two hours of bedtime, they have more disruptions in their sleep, more disturbances, less time in restorative sleep, so I've sleep and REM. And Slightly shorter sleep duration and compromise markers of recovery. I completely believe in. In fact, we did a video on our Med Cram channel. I think it was titled, These Foods Are Killing Your Sleep or something like that.

Let's talk about it. Give me the laundry list. No, I mean, really any foods. So let's go back to circadian rhythm. I love talking about this. I know. So I had a friend that used to work at Disneyland. You like my soul brother.

Yeah. So I had this friend that used to work at Disneyland, living in Southern. in California. But he did not work during the day. He worked at night. So he was part of the crew that basically turned the park over. So it was ready the next day. He said, yeah, he said, you would not believe the stuff that goes on in there. The cash registers are empty. The stores are restocked. The engineers are checking out the rides, the gardeners, all the stuff that you cannot have during the day is going on during the night. And this is exactly what's happening in our body, because our body is a whole lot more complicated than Disneyland. So generally speaking, during the

we are eating. The sun is up. And we are in a situation of building. What's happening at night is we're breaking down. We're finding things that aren't working and we're trying to break those things down. When we eat right before we go to bed, we're not allowing those processes to occur. Imagine if we let people in on the rides at night at Disneyland when the engineers were trying to fix the ride. That wouldn't go well, right? Yeah, no. So we know for a fact that let's just talk about eating, since we're talking about eating, that the time of the day we're in insulin is the most sensitive is in the morning. We're most primed to metabolize our food.

Ready to go. So you eat so many, a standard meal in the morning. Your glucose is going to go up yay so much. Do the same exact meal at 8 o'clock at night. It's going to go up a lot more. Right. More insulin resistant at that time. Because our body is not ready for that.

I got a lot of patients refer to me for shortness of breath after COVID. Long COVID. I had this one gentleman, he came in, and we checked everything. He didn't have blood clots. He had gastrosophageal reflux disease. He had some of this stuff. And I told him, okay, after everything we tried, it didn't work. I said, I want you to do this.

I want you to not eat after 530 at all. So basically intermittent fasting, but not just intermittent fasting. It's blocking off the nighttime. Right. It's time strict eating, which I like to, I'm trying to get out there. This has a circadian, time restricted eating has a circadian component. Interventant fasting is calorie restriction. There's different dietary strategy, like different timings.

but time retreat to eating is literally eating when the sun is up, boom. Exactly. Okay, thank you. Let's, we need to socialize that. This is exactly what I tell my patients. I said, you should be eating when the sun is up. That's exactly what I tell them. That's simple.

And when the sun is going down, you should not be eating. Why? Because our body is entering a new circadian epic. We're in the inactive phase of our circadian rhythm. We're just, their body wants to shut things down and focus on sleep. And the other thing I told them is to get outside and into the infrared light. So what was I doing there? I was trying to feed his mitochondrial.

I was trying to make his mitochondria more efficient because we know that long COVID is associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. And the other thing that I wanted to do was to allow the body to find those mitochondrial units that are not working and allow them to be turned over. When you're eating food, that doesn't happen. He came back to me three weeks later. He says, Doc, it's amazing. I've had these symptoms of shortness of breath, eight out of ten for a year. And in three weeks, my shortness of breath is gone. my shortness of breath is now three out of ten it doesn't even bother me anymore he had literally

had tears in his eyes and and i didn't have some magic potion no it gives me chills i simply allowed his body to do exactly what it needed to do it just needed to be allowed to do it's so powerful the circadian rhythm we can do that these are like free behaviors like this is democratically available to all of us right no supply chain needed no at all right light the timing of light the timing of of meals, these are just so central to really healthy sleep and just healthy human functioning. Give me your laundry list of foods that are really crushing sleep. Okay, so I've kind of try to remember back and look at those. So I mean, if I could put it into a nutshell, it's more plants, less food.

More plants, less food. Okay. And I think that's been said before. I didn't make that way. Yeah, yeah. Let's put it back into the context of light. Okay. We want to get as close to the sun as possible, that's where we should also intervene in the food chain as close to the sun as possible. That's where we're going to get the best efficiency. Plants, sun connection, yeah, got it. Okay. But the most important thing, and this is what I told the gentleman that I talked to you about, I didn't tell him what to eat. Yeah, just the timing. Yeah, and there's been other studies that, you know, haven't been perfectly controlled, so they get a lot of criticism. But, I mean, I think the evidence is pretty,

clear that timing of when you eat matters. You know, that means very, very clear that we are more insulin resistant as the day goes on. We're less primed to use nutrients because we're supposed to be shutting it down after the sun goes down. So it's just, yeah, it's all seems very, I think, logical when you think about it in logical terms. But it doesn't fit into people's life, right? So it's inconvenient. So, inconvenient. Can I share with you what we've done in our family. So when I first did intermittent fasting or time restricted eating, whoever you want to call it, it was so easy for me to skip breakfast. Why? Because when I came home, that's when my kids were there. That's when we could socialize at the dinner table. It was a really social event. We've replaced

that social event at the dinner table with sauna. Fun. It's so fun. You cannot bring your iPhones into the sauna. That is such a good point. They will fry. Yes. Oh my gosh. That's so perfect. So everyone's in there. There nobody is distracted. And we sit there and we all sweat. together. And it's like the funniest thing. You know, and it's just, it's this great. We look forward to it. I need to get a bigger sauna. I didn't put my, they're not cheap. No, I know. I have, it's like you can barely fit two people. Well, I love that. That's such a great strategy. So yeah, I was going to say to eight pillars. Yes. Nutrition. Start to look at nutrition. Food is your medicine. And it can be. Exercise. Huge pillar. Water. So what I mean by,

water, not only the internal use of water, but sauna. So, you know, steam. Yeah, sweating. Something really interesting about water is that has a very high amphip, which means that it takes a lot of energy to raise it in temperature, but it also can give off a lot of heat and not drop its temperature. So if you want to deliver heat to people, and there's a lot of emerging evidence that delivering heat to people and increasing their core body temperatures can have a multitude of benefits. Water is the way to do that. So that's W. S. sunlight. We've just talked about that. T, temperance. There's a lot of things that we do, poisons that we put into our body that we need to watch and we need to cut back on. The one that I

encounter on a daily basis is smoking as a pulmonologist. I see that so much. And, you know, it's not even now where it's getting tricky because I can ask, I used to be able to ask people, do you smoke? And they'll say no. And I would just move on. But it may not be smoking. It may be vaping, it may be a whole host of other things that people are breathing and putting into their body. What goes along with that is air. Yeah. And as a pulmonologist, you'll be really excited to hear this, that we measure respiratory rate and we're within one breath of the gold standard as measured by pie mesmography. Amazing. Amazing. So, yeah, we're really good at detecting COVID. Yes. I heard about that. Yeah, we're a COVID detection.

Yes. Device, but yeah. That is great. That's better, almost better than a paper test. I know, I know, exactly. Air, so that's A. And then R is rest. So we just talked about rest for a lot, that's sleep. But rest is more than sleep. Like, imagine if you did this on a daily, imagine if there was no weekends. So it's really important.

And it seems as though every single culture in the world seems to pick the number seven for how many days there are in a week. And it's really not tied to any astronomical events. Like the month is tied to the moon, the year is tied to the sun. There's no astronomical event that made, you know, China, South America, we all settled on seven days. There was a period of time when France, after the revolution, wanted to go to 10 days. It didn't last very long. Nobody could do a 10-day week.

But getting a day of rest every seven, there's a story on the Oregon Trail. You may have heard this story. People wanted to get out to the West Coast along the Oregon Trail. And the people that did not rest one day a week. they flew off and they were way ahead of everybody this other Oregon Trail participant that was going out there and they made it a point to rest one day a week and eventually

they caught up with the other people that had gone on why because their animals came down with disease the oxen that were pulling the cart the wheels fell off and they passed them and the reason is is that we as human beings I believe need one day and seven to sort of pull back to get out of the rat race, to figure out where we are, to redirect ourselves. It's almost like you're swimming underwater, and you know you're going in a direction,

but every once in a while you've got to put the periscope up, take a breath, see where you are, and then go back down and go into water again. And I think that's really important. That's one thing that we sometimes fail to talk about when we talk about rest. Yeah. And I think that that's reconnecting with the self in a way, like just kind of finding that interstability and you kind of need to push out the distractions in order to do that properly, right? kind of find your center again.

Exactly. And then the last one is, the eighth one is trust. And it's kind of, I heard you speak upstairs a little before this about the spiritual. So trust in a higher power. If you put all those things together, it actually spells something called New Start, N-E-W, S-T-A-R-T. That's crazy. Yeah. And it's actually, I'm not the first one to have found this.

There's a group at Weimar University on the West Coast outside of Sacramento that actually uses those pillars in a program that they have. They have an outpatient program that I visited. And they've, the types of stories where people come into this with depression, they come in with anxiety, they come in with metabolic problems. And the stories that I've seen are just incredible using these eight pillars. Obviously, you've got to take people who are on medications. You can't just stop these things. So it's under a physician's care. And they're there to manage those things because, let's face it, I'm a pulmonary and critical care specialist. I use medicines all the time to save people's lives, and I'm glad we have those things. But we don't always have

those things. And sometimes the supply chain fails us. And in those situations, and even in times when we have it, I think going to these eight pillars of health are really the key. And I think what's exciting is that if we can apply some effort and some discipline, you know, these are things that are available to all of us. You know, these are lifestyle modifications, you know. And if we can do as many of those things consistently, you know, we pay down the risk of illness and injury and burden, you know, the disease and, you know, we pay down that burden. And let's face it, I mean, most of these things are really inexpensive. I think the most expensive thing that we've talked about here is a $20 light box. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Pretty available. Yeah. Right. So this has been such a fun conversation. I know we're getting toward the end of time. I'd love to ask you a final question. So of all the behaviors that you engage, in across the day, do you have one behavior that's kind of like your anchor, like you're absolute

non-negotiable that kind of sets you up for all the other behaviors that are important to you in your life? Yeah, I think it's actually for me, spiritually it's devotions in the morning. And I'll explain why. It's, I think longevity is really important. But it's not as important if it's just for me to enjoy life than it is for me to be around as a tool to help other people. I think, think that the motivation to help other people is such a strong promoting a motivation. It's even stronger than the own need to just be around for longer. And I think that that is probably the most, that's the most drive for me. Yeah. And I think if you look at cultures that look at that, if they believe that there has a service, I mean, you'll see this. How do we explain,

how do we explain when a husband or a wife is taking care of their spouse? And until finally they pass away. What happens? Their purpose is now gone and they're no longer living for someone else. They're living for themselves. And it seems as though that doesn't last as long. So I think a purpose in life that's tied to that it's tied to I think is very powerful. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Well, thank you for sharing that. Thank you. And thanks for the conversation today. Great to be here, Kristen. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question to us answered on the podcast, email us podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-4334952.

If you think about joining Woop, you can visit Woop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code Will W-I-L to get a $60 credit on W-W-A accessories when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. as always, stay healthy and stay in the green.