#1 Thing CAUSING DISEASE & Lowering Your LIFE EXPECTANCY! | Rangan Chatterjee

i i really do want to spend the next 20 minutes talking to you about what i think is possibly the most serious but also undervalued um components of our health and and that is stress so stress is the health epidemic of the 21st century now that's not me who's saying that does anyone know who says that the yeah maybe the u.n does i've seen it on the world health organization websites and i think that's pretty striking statements because they're not saying that about our poor diets although that's clearly an issue they're not saying that about physical inactivity although that's clearly an issue but they're saying that about stress now there was a paper published in 2013 in the journal of the american medical association that suggested that between 70 and 90 percent of what a gp like me sees in any given day is in some way related to stress does that surprise you yeah see this is and whenever i ask a question it's always a mix half of the people saying yeah that's really surprising how people saying no and i for me when i read it it was quite surprising until i started to review the patients that came in and had to think about what was driving actually their real health and the reality is i think it's true i think it's spot on because as a gp i see symptoms every day such as insomnia poor memory hormonal problems inability to concentrate low libido gut problems even things like obesity type 2 diabetes and actually all of those things they might seem quite unrelated and quite separate but you can make a very good case that all of them have stress as a key key driver so why is that how can stress cause such a diverse range of symptoms well to understand it you just have to go back maybe two million years ago or so when our stress response was evolving because once you understand what stress is you can start to apply that understanding to all the stressful episodes that you might experience in your life and the impacts they're going to have on your body so let's go back a couple of million years ago we are in our hunter-gatherer tribe in our little community going along with our business and then there's a predator attacking let's say a lion is lurking so what happens well in an instant our stress response kicks into gear a series of physiological changes and biochemical changes all over your body kick in with one goal to help keep you safe right so what happens well many things happen but to give you an idea your blood sugar will start to rise that's going to help you run faster that's going to help deliver more glucose to your brain that's a good thing if you're running away from a lion what else happens your blood pressure goes up your blood pressure again is going to deliver more oxygen to your brain that's a good thing that's a part of your brain called the amygdala okay that's part of your emotional brain that goes on to high alert right so you're hyper vigilant for all the threats around you again that's a good thing in the short term what else happens your blood becomes prone to clotting right that means if you were to get cut and attacked by that predator instead of bleeding to death your blood's going to clot and that's going to keep you safe right these are fantastic mechanisms that help us in the short term the problem today is that for many of us our stress responses are not being activated by real danger right they're not being activated by lions and predators for many of us they've been activated by our daily lives by our email inboxes our to-do lists conflicting demands two parents working one trying to finish early go home pick the kids up three social media channels we're trying to stay on top of elderly parents who might also be having to look after the list goes on but for many of us those same things right are driving the same stress response and it's problematic because in the short term those things are really helpful but in the long term there are problems so your blood sugar going up in the short term to help you run faster if that's happening day in day out right that's going to lead to excess weight ultimately type 2 diabetes just from being stressed blood pressure we know high blood pressure is a big problem in the short term a good thing running away from a line if you're in a spinning class at the weekend you want your blood uh your blood pressure to rise that's an appropriate response to a short-term stressor but day in day out if your life is stressing you out the high blood pressure is going to increase your risk of getting heart attacks strokes etc etc what about your emotional brain the amygdala right again i said it when you're being stressed and you're running away from that lion it becomes it goes onto high alerts you're hyper vigilant for all those threats around you appropriate in that environment appropriate if tonight you're walking down a dark london street and you think someone is trying to attack you you want to be hyper vigilant but if that's happening day and day out to your life and your email inbox right well that's one of the things that we call anxiety you see all these things in the short term help us but in the in the long term they can be very very problematic so as well as those things that actually the stresses want switches on what about some of these things that switches off well as a gp i can tell you today even more than five years ago we're seeing more and more cases of low libido and we're seeing it in younger and younger people and there are many many reasons for this but stress is one of the main drivers so why would that be well if you are in danger and you are running away from a lion you don't need to be able to chill out and procreate with your partner so your body switches it off yeah gut problems a survey by mintel suggested that 80 of the uk population in any given year suffer from at least one gastrointestinal complaint they are so so common and everyone goes to food as the key driver and food is clearly a significant uh player here but i've got to tell you stress is an even bigger driver than the food that we're eating running away from a lion the last thing you need to do is be able to digest your food and how many of us right and i include myself in this are having our healthy lunch while we're also trying to juggle a million things and answer emails at the same time i'm sure nobody in here dreams of doing anything like that but certainly that's that's something we're all faced with so once you understand what the stress response is you start to understand how it can affect so many different complaints now i actually contend that it's not that hard to manage the stress off the modern world okay it's getting harder and harder but i think there are some simple strategies and that's why i wrote my book the stress solution because i don't think stress is getting the air time it deserves i think when we talk about health and well-being that the conversation is dominated with diet and exercise and of course they're important but more often than not stress is the reason why we're choosing the diets and choosing those to be physically inactive you know how many people in january want to give up sugar or give up alcohol right it's common and for a week or two you know they might manage it but then what often happens is that the sugar or the alcohol was there to soothe the stress in your life so if you don't address the underlying stressor you're very very unlikely to change your behavior long term so look i cover in the in my book i cover all the simple strategies that you would expect like breathing meditation nature all kinds of things that absolutely do help meaning and purpose and give tips on how you can start to get meaning and purpose in your life but i want to touch on two areas today that i think aren't spoken about enough of in the context of stress the first one is loneliness okay so loneliness is on the rise some people say that we're living in a loneliness epidemic and when we talk about loneliness we immediately start to think of the elderly and i understand that i understand that loneliness affects a lot of the elderly and it is a problem but one of the loneliest groups in society are young men between the ages of 30 and 45 and at this age group tragically there are growing growing rates of mental health problems growing rates of male suicide if that was just a few days ago it was national suicide prevention day and it's a big problem in that age and loneliness is a key driver of that you see we're living these ultra-connected lives right and we say we're more connected than we've ever been before and sure in a digital sense i think that's true but in terms of real deep human connection i don't think we've ever been this isolated recent research is suggesting that the feeling of being lonely is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day does that surprise people yeah unless you're nodding your head so why would that be why would the feeling of being lonely be that damaging for you it all makes sense if you go back a couple of million years ago right back when we were in our hunter-gatherer tribes if you are by yourself you're not part of that supportive community your body's smart your body knows that you are vulnerable to attack so it prepares you for that it ramps up your immune system it makes you inflamed it makes your blood prone to clotting it does all of these things so that if you do get attacked you can protect yourself the problem is now in this era where we're so busy we don't have time to see our friends we don't have time to do the things that mean the world to us and see those people you know our bodies are reacting in the same way it was just last year i had a patient who came to see me a 37 year old chap and on the outside he was really really successful he's running his own business self-employed he drove a sports car you know you would have thought hey this this guy's got it all together he came to see me and he said uh dr look i'm i'm a bit worried here i'm i started to get out of bed some days so i'm just to stay focused at work i'm really struggling with motivation and and i'm really worried that i've got something called depression you know can you help me so i spent time talking to him trying to understand what was going on in his life we did do a few tests and investigations everything came back normal and as i was getting to know him i realized actually he was quite lucky in the sense that he lived in a village where he grew up and he had lots of his friends around him but he never actually saw them he was too busy he said you know i see what they're watching on social media that's that's the funny thing about social media right isn't it you can see what your friends are up so you can see the holiday snaps you see where they were last night you could see what they had for dinner last night right but you don't actually see them and i said to him look what i'd love you to try is for the next six weeks i'd like to see one of your friends at least once a week in person and when you're with them always put your phone away be really really present for that interaction he said yeah sure okay give that a go so he goes away i see him in clinic six weeks later and i asked him i said how are you getting on he said dr jesse i feel like a different person i can't tell you the difference it's made i feel motivated my self-esteem hasn't improved i'm more productive at work and my concentration's better i said well what did you do we said the first time the first couple of times i played five-a-side football with my friends which we haven't done in years but then after that all we did is on a sunday morning we'd go to the local cafe and chew the fat over a latte so you know my question is did did that young lad well not a young lad did that young man have a mental health problem i mean he certainly had symptoms that would be consistent with mental health diagnoses potentially but was it not that what he really had was a deficiency of friendship in his life and when he corrected that friendship deficiency other things started to come back online for him now i'm not trying to say this helmets in every single case right medication has a role at times i do have to think we are over medicating people up and down the country with a whole variety of basically lifestyle driven symptoms i certainly think that's happening in medicine today but isn't that powerful so my my question to all of you in here is to ask yourself when was the last time you saw one of your friends in person right because i say that seeing your friends in in person is not a um i could have put it it's not a luxury for good health it's a necessity and if you haven't got a date in the diary if you haven't seen them recently maybe at your coffee break or your lunch break send them a text put a date in the diary it is good for your health right prioritize it in the same way that you would prioritize eating your vegetables with your dinner and it's something that i think the modern world as it steals more and more time away from us seeing our friends is something that actually for many of us falls by the wayside the other issue i want to talk to you about which i don't think is being spoken about in the context of stress and well-being is passion right so the research is pretty clear on this regularly doing things that you love makes you more resilient to stress right and we are living in stressful times so you know yes we would ideally reduce how much stress is in our lives but that can be challenging so making ourselves more resilient to stress it's a fantastic way of tackling this right so regularly doing things you learn makes you more resilient to stress but it works both ways being chronically stressed makes it harder for you to experience pleasure in day-to-day things right your brain is always responding to the information that you feed it so give me another story 53-yard chap came into my clinic okay he is uh the local cfo of a plastics company very successful job um and again he's concerned that he might have depression so it's not strategy i just i just feel indifferent um i just can't get going i've don't have time to do the things i want to do i'm just disinterested in my job in my work in my family life is this depression that's why i started to ask him about his life you know what's going on you know so you've been married for 20 years okay how's your marriage yeah so so i don't really see my wife that much but things are okay you know he was very very indifferent about it it's all about work you've got good jobs you enjoy it really pays the bills i've got to do it you know put some roof over our heads i said do you do anything that you love you know what do you do as sort of recreation i said dog i don't have time for that i'm busy so what about weekends weekends i've got the household chores to do i've got to take the kids to sports classes i don't have time so you know again i did what is appropriate off me as a gp to sort of check other aspects of his life but then i i started to really push him on this passion piece i said did you ever have any hobbies so doctor i used to have hobbies yeah as a teenager i used to love train sets i used to play with them loads i said okay do you have a train set at home he says yo i've got one at home but it's in the loft i said okay look what i'd love you to do tonight is when you get home let's get your train set out i appreciate that may not be the advice that he was expecting to get uh from his gp but no nice that's the advice i gave him then he goes away and i get on with my day and as typically hammers in general practice you cannot follow up every single patient that you see we see sometimes 40 to 50 patients a day you cannot follow them all up so i hadn't seen him for a while three months later i finished my morning surgery i was in the car park about to go out to do my home uh home visits and i bumped into his wife and i said hey look you know how's um how's your husband getting on he said oh my god that's jessie i feel like i've i've got the guy i'm married back again i said well what's been going on he said well i come home from work and no he comes home from work and he's straight away playing around on his toy set he's on ebay buying collector's items um and he's and he's subscribed to this magazine now and he's he's just so happy now i didn't see him for another three months when he came in for a well man's check and he came in to see me with his blood results and uh i remember him coming in and i said hey look how are you getting on he says doc i cannot tell you the difference things are so much better i love that train set um and i said what about you know what how's your how's your uh marriage goes things from my wife are much much better i said how's this job that you weren't enjoying because i love it really really enjoy my work and the point i'm trying to make there is that did he have a mental health problem again he had symptoms that were consistent right you could make some sort of diagnosis there if you wanted to potentially but i'm just trying to make the case that he probably had a deficiency of passion in his life right and when he corrected his deficiency of passion things started to come back online so again my request to each and every single one of you is when was the last time you did something that you absolutely love if it's recently great if it's not i'd love you to think about giving you know regular doses of passion the same priority that you would go to the gym or moving your body it's as important yet we don't feel we've got time for it if you think you don't have time even five minutes a day we've all got five minutes a day it could be reading a book going for a walk listening to a podcast coming home from work putting on youtube and watching your favorite comedian for five minutes it doesn't matter but a daily dose of pleasure and passion is super important there are so many other things we could talk about when it comes to stress but i really want to touch on those two things because i don't think we're talking about them enough and i think they're important i just want to leave you with this stress does not take a day off in the 21st century so i don't think we can take a day off from managing stress i think we all need a stress reduction uh strategy these days i really do and what we don't realize is that stress is everywhere okay just because we can't see it like we see the food on our plate doesn't mean it's not there it is there it affects our short-term health and our long-term health i mean the research is now suggesting that chronic stress is a causative factor in the development of alzheimer's disease and alzheimer's doesn't happen overnight alzheimer's starts about 30 years before you get it in your brain i'm not saying that to scare you i'm saying that to empower you so that you actually take this seriously and start doing simple things each day that really make a difference i promise you once you make managing stress a daily priority not only will your stress levels come down but you're going to start being you're going to start feeling calmer happier and i think you'll start to lead a much more fulfilling life and what could be better than that oxygen is the most important molecule we've got right um it's like in terms of for for energy right um maybe it's not the most important it's the thing that's allowing us to exist right in the manner that we are uh 500 million years ago multicellular organisms figured out how to use oxygen for fuel and thus aerobic metabolism began the evolution has continued for that long right so going on that timeline and seeing that we have not turned back from the most efficient way to produce energy which is aerobically and bringing oxygen into the system and that's what the design of the inhale of our lungs does is it brings oxygen in the system the only way to make that oxygen available though is another thing you know another gas right that's carbon dioxide and so the carbon dioxide is a response to a hostile environment i guess you could call it and that's what we that's what this planet was right before multicellular organisms figured out everything right and then plant a little algae figured out how to convert sunlight into energy and convert the sunlight in and the byproduct of that became oxygen right so the planet got engulfed in algae and this is a gross basic overview of some serious stuff that people have done real work on right but that that's toxic environment left for anaerobic metabolism primarily in single cell organisms to work now not all single cell organisms will function off of anaerobic metabolism but it is a default system that we use and they work congruently in our system right so when i don't have enough oxygen present right being used i will my body will just it instantly beautifully starts to switch over to this anaerobic system so if there's not enough oxygen present in something we default to another energy system and that would be the anaerobic system right and so using more sugar and glucose for energy because the brain and the nervous system actually require glucose as as its only source of fuel right and this is 20 percent of the energy we use right so as i inhale i draw oxygen in it enters the bloodstream it goes to the bloodstream then the mitochondria which are the powerhouses of the cell the organelles of the cells go to work and use the oxygen the only way for that oxygen to come off the red blood cell through blood is by carbon dioxide replacing that molecule in the red blood cell and so i need to have enough carbon dioxide present in order to make the environment let's call it perfect for oxygen to work now we're doing this in a very regulated way all day long 26 000 breaths right you're using oxygen predominantly but how much are we using that oxygen and that starts to show up in things like if we look at respiration rate well like the buteyko method i think the buteyko folks believe um and this is a method that was designed by constantine buteyko out of russia the former soviet union that 80 of the population roughly chronically hyperventilates which means they're over breathing and so when i over breathe when i breathe have a high respiration rate i'm actually blowing off or getting rid of more carbon dioxide then probably necessary so hyperventilation becomes a stress reaction right a higher stress reaction i breathe more think of working out you start running your respiration rate you're you know you start to breathe more frequently right yeah stress is the same thing if i'm sitting here and you're stressing me out in any way shape or form my respiration rate will tend to follow if i am stressed out unless i'm actually aware of this this is where consciousness and awareness have a game or a play right so where i can take volitional control over my breathing and manage that or train that in a way to bring me back to a place to where i'm actually using that oxygen and this is also known as the bohr effect to a large degree is having enough acid in the environment in order for the oxygen to be used and so that's why breath control becomes such a big player in things i can actually optimize myself to use more oxygen yeah i mean super incredible and you know in the morning if your arse and breath clinic uh course i don't know what you call it yesterday um that was it was really great to understand that that of course we need oxygen we know we need oxygen but actually in order for that oxygen to to come off and do them do you know the magic that we want it to do in our body we need enough co2 carbon dioxide but we have become a carbon outside intolerant society you know eighty percent of us potentially are over breathing which means we're blowing off too much carbon dioxide so yes the breathing is you know we want oxygen but without enough carbon dioxide we can't use it yeah and i say when i when i talk to people and it says how i wrote about breathing in in this resolution was about breathing is information breathing is information for your body the way you breathe what's give your brain information are you in danger or are you safe and i say to some people look when you are on deadlines and you have 10 emails to get back to you and a few projects to finish you are probably changing your breathing without realizing it you are probably breathing more from your chest and your diaphragm you're probably speeding up your rate and that is sending information to your brain that is again is like a vicious cycle um and i love that that test you guys do um with your students the the co2 tolerance test yeah um which i found super super interesting so i want to just unpack that for you know maybe layman who might be listening to this um you know what does it mean to be co2 intolerant or common outside intolerance yeah so we're we're currently working on defining this um and a lot of the work rob does who is my uh partner in this with the art of breath um and who's my counterpart and what we do has come up with a term that i think is probably going to take off and that is how what this is psycho-metabolic reactivity and so the stop it yeah isn't it i love it but i do actually yeah well i i i look at this as how well we're willing to optimize this so psychometabolic optimization and how you react to what is the metabolic waste product of energy that is co2 so it's it comes down to our relationship to co2 and so we'll take this to when you were swimming and you went into that panic attack and you know not seeing the bottom of the floor of the ocean anymore and you went into an override i can guarantee you based on our work now we'd have to prove this but we're currently have plenty of research starting to show this that your co2 tolerance hit the floor when that happened meaning there was elevated levels of co2 and you started to react to that because of the context of the story and what was going on hold on so let's go through it so i was swimming yeah okay no problem higher levels of co2 because of work okay so i was working and therefore i'm starting to build up common outside in my blood why your respiration rate run up so everything goes up to you know and this presumably will happen if someone's running or anything that they're doing correct so but then i hit a point where i got scared yep so i've already got raised levels of co2 so i'm hyperventilating to i'm assuming to get rid of that co2 you got it you literally so the only time that you don't react to anything with your breath is when you're dead your brain stem is online it's a part of everything you're gonna do so you're gonna react in any instance to your environment to what your perception is hearing smelling seeing taste touch right so your five senses are here by design to help with all of this and signal even to that to to that respiration pattern what i need to do based on how i need to optimize myself self-regulate right well my thinking's off so self-regulation right now i'm responding to the co2 that's in my blood now it didn't need to be that high your co2 did not need to be that high you could have dropped that with like if you're like let's say you hate flying like like i'm not a big fan of flying i've gotten good at it right because i've i've done work at it right control your breathing while you're doing it so that when things start to shake or start to do things and you think the plane's going to go down or whatever that's just a story like that's really just a story and so it's the content that and so now i'm responding through the limit like these emotions that are happening through this story right and my respiration center responds to that so controlling my breathing allows me to manage the carbon dioxide and what happens in a panic situation what what's one of the you know things we do for people when they're freaking out and brown paper bag bingo brown paper bag on the face breathe into it co2 is you're re-breathing you're actually using more of the oxygen that you've got right just unpack that for people listen to this you're having a panic attack you're over breathing yeah so you're blowing off a lot of commodore outside yeah and so remember what i said about how we default into a so we have an aerobic system or we default into anaerobic what happens when we don't have enough carbon dioxide in the environment we're not able to utilize any oxygen that we have we're not able to get what does the brain need to function oxygen but doom so suddenly we don't have enough oxygen so what is the brown paper bag doing it's recirculating the carbon dioxide that you're you're re-breathing it's basically a rebreather so you're putting more you couldn't do this you couldn't breathe into this bag for five minutes you know you you it's just a few breaths right but you're re-breathing and getting your treat you're basically tricking the brain yeah and there uh dr justin feinstein out of oklahoma is doing work on bolus hits right now of carbon dioxide with super high anxiety patients and having insane results like people getting one hit and just like this freak out mode thing happens but because it doesn't happen in these successive breaths that people regulate and the brain start and you calm down you're like oh this isn't as bad as i think it is and i'm able to control this so if i was trained had i been trained at that point in breathing and done a bit of practice and been in the ocean before um in theory are you saying that i could have switched off that hyperactive stress response that was going on in my body i could have actually switched it off maintain control maintain calm and carried on swimming that is where choice enters the situation and choice of breath i choose to breathe and control my breathing right now now i need to choose and change my narrative because i'm now exacerbating a situation that is counter in to what i want to be going on i'm freaking out there's no need for me to freak out i am not an imminent death and if i am freaking out then get the [ __ ] out of there excuse me but get out of there yeah like right if it's truly a freak out or if you want to participate in this and change how your brain works plasticity lay back on your back and control your breathing until you can calm it down yeah if you're in the water and you're in a wetsuit you're going to float trust me you're not going to sink there's a reason why free divers need a weight belt to go down right like so even even that you say i i've sort of tried to um dissect what happened and i think for me there's so many reasons why i freaked out one i never wore a wetsuit before oh i i didn't even know you absolutely made it you broke every rule of like going into a competition for the first time or doing something i've never worn a white suit for i didn't trust the guy behind the guy next to me said look wrong and just lighten your back and you'll float i thought there is no way i'm lying on my back at the moment i am going to sink so i didn't know that the water was cold and if we have time we can maybe explore what that cold does to people um and yeah sure i hadn't been in the ocean before so all these factors together it's like almost like a perfect storm but i would probably have had to do a lot of training to but the fact that you unpack it like that like you're able to do that like look so what does this mean for rangan what does this mean like oh i tend to over pack put things like jump onto things and do everything for the first okay maybe i should start dissecting that a little bit further back in my life when that started how that started why that started you know and for brian you know especially like you know i think it really comes down to a lot of the relationships and things that we've done and so i you know i look at like my childhood it was like i was rebellious man i got attention i got a love because i rebelled like i got attention when i was rebellious hence look at me like when i've got my shirt off and i'm in short sleeves i am you know i'm covered in tattoos i grew up in an environment that was very rebellious i looked up to people that were punk rock you know it was like this whole thing and it garnered me attention so i felt love that way so that then transcended into aggression and what that meant and oh this is my default for survival like so i i tend to overdo things right and be ugh i'm going to do this i'm responsible for everything or uh you know or you know like it just and we think that's our personality it's not how we are exactly and i i sort of gavel mate i spoke to him a few months ago do you know gamble's work i mean i do yeah i love gabby's work i think he taught us was such competitive telling ghosts or hungry ghosts hungry ghosts yeah yeah and one of the one of the funnest conversations i've had on on the show for sure and he talks about how we use the language and how that determines a lot of the way we think we are and you know what we think is our personality but we could we could go down a big rabbit hole right here if we want to i'm going to pull this back to the breath because yeah i'm keen that people listen to this who think okay look i get it guys i get it breathing's important somebody listens this who has not a clue how to start yeah right i got a simple solution for that well let's let's let's dive right in we all have apps on our phones we designed an actual app based off the work we've done and what we saw was that not everybody responds to the same patterns in the same ways because our physiology and thinking and emotions aren't always in the same place right like you deal with things very differently than i deal with things that would make sense right like if we were training for the same event we could follow the same training program but we're probably not going to get the same results because you've got asymmetries i don't your physiology is starting off in a place mine isn't right like all these things are variant right so we saw pretty early on that people responded very differently so we did we learned how to put what patterns work with kind of specific ways of dealing with things emotionally right and so we based this algorithm off of how people emotionally handle stress and their co2 tolerance test and so it starts people off and it gives them the state app um starts off by taking people through this test and it gives you four exercises to do and there's one for feeling alert which is waking up in the morning there's one for being present which is maybe throughout the day there's one for feeling calm which is whenever you need to feel like you're calm and then there's one for which most of us most of us are dealing with is to help you fall asleep to downshift you big time so there's two on the end that are kind of really important about downshifting and something we need to take more um into account in our lives because that's the thing we're not doing is it's not that like stress stress isn't the problem we need to lean into stress we need to understand that it's what we're doing between stressors like you know so we're gonna have had this conversation for you know 90 minutes or two hours right and it's like when i get out of here i'm gonna get in the car i'm gonna do some bri i'll probably do a few breathing exercises as i do because i'll just come down a little bit and then i can hop back on a phone call and do things again and you know regulate i can process what we did and then i can move on to the next thing and that's the thing we're not doing is we're not processing these things we're not actually going through the process we're just jumping from one exposure to the next and so that's what the app is really designed to do and it's like hey here's four exercises you can do that are actually customized to you so your app is very different from my app and very different from rob's app and it changes and evolves with you based on how you respond to carbon dioxide because when you can actually get better at these patterns you're increasing your tolerance to co2 which only means you're creating more room and the ability to shift down or up in an instant on the whole point of co2 tolerance yep in that incident when i was in the water when i was panicking yeah you said that actually my co-tolerance changed or i was at that point intolerant to co2 so i'm breathing fast to blow it off is that an acute thing that happens or had i been training my breathing consistently and i had raised my tolerance to co2 on a um on a consistent basis would i not have felt that intolerant to it in that incident in that particular moment does that make sense at that particular moment most likely maybe a little bit further down the swim you may have because it may have required more work or more more uh storytelling negative thinking in order to exacerbate it right what we're doing is pushing that envelope like we're building that gap of choice right like that you know you got stimulus and response you're building a bigger area for just going i'm cool i know if i continue to push this a little bit harder i'm i've got a problem but here's the thing is you were combining emotions with work right and it's not that we're not doing this when we're training or working out but we're not doing it in that context where i'm exposing myself to an environment but the thing is is it should be an acute response it should be it should not be chronic and this is where we start to see long-term like chronic stuff like being emotional and not dealing with the stuff that we should be dealing with like at the heart of it when we you know like victimizing ourselves this inevitably does not deal with things like i'm not at fault i don't have any play in this well if you're thinking about it you've got plenty of play in it i hate to tell i hate to break it to you all right so understanding that there is that thing there your emotional your having emotion stress to emotion will will hold on to a lower c so it'll affect your co2 tolerance more than physically affecting remember how we did the test yeah after we worked out and your co2 tolerance test plummeted then we did the breathing exercises and that should have gone up and we saw a lot of people in that room where for the fourth co2 tolerance of the day granted the first two were done when we weren't even working right we weren't even really doing any real work the fourth one after you'd done two workouts was the best for a lot of people in that room right and it's that's the power of what breath can do is it can change that co and people felt calmer the whole room looked like it was just docile afterwards yeah that was it was it was so amazing that those sort of five ten minutes at the end where everyone had just done this down regulating breathing pattern you could just feel the energy it was just chill yeah it just felt calm and it was it was amazing and you four minutes of breathing that was when it was four minutes of breathing and four i just thought wow wouldn't it be amazing to feel this way at one point in the day at least every single day but with that you absolutely can you mentioned the breathing practices make that space in between stimulus and response bigger is there anything in life that is more important that is going to have more impact on your well-being on the well-being of people around you than actually making that space big i i don't know if there would be anything else i don't think there could be because yeah that is what gets us into trouble in our life whether we make poor choices whether we fall out with our wife or our husband or we shout at our kids and even this is not like this is not new this is old old old old thinking i mean look bruce lee literally conceptualized and brought the idea of self-actualization that is that if you don't build that gap of actualization you're just a reactive species in an environment that is chaotic and you give your power to other people 100 like i got i know way too many people that are running around pretending to be happy yeah thinking happiness is the key to everything and happiness isn't by my in my opinion is not it's contentment you got to understand and this is my buddy fergus connie and i talk about this all the time and this is the big problem with what we're doing right now is everybody's chasing happiness yeah [ __ ] happiness like they're gonna have times where things are tough but you should have the tools to understand that that gap and that hey you know what this too shall pass like this i have the tools in order to manage this stressful situation like i'm going through something with my wife that like i'm you know like i've got to have the tools like i'm in an argument and it got bad and bad and bad and i'm just this isn't this is you know and out like just making this up but it's like hey i've seen this people with with people all over the place and it's like does this need to be this bad no it doesn't it does not and if you actually reflect on yourself and use breathing to actually control that response to what's going on that psycho-metabolic reactivity becomes optimized and you start to actually work through hey i can actu this isn't rebellious brian is just an identity bingo i that is not me that was just who i thought i was i am actually much more than that and i have the ability to choose how i am i'm not anywhere near the rebellious person i was now there's aspects of me that's pretty rebellious you know going and getting out of a cage with sharks and you know but but those are experiences you know and and these are things that i want to be able to go and do and exp and that's that's what living is that's life if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are really going to enjoy the one i had with the former monk jay shetty on the simple things that you can do to train your mind it's right there give it a listen and let me know what you think the monk mindset is about pursuing your truest goals your truest self and your most authentic aligned goals

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 13,160

Rating: 4.9193082 out of 5

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: n3b7rr8exWs

Length: 46min 51sec (2811 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021