Architects of Change: Dr. Dean Ornish

okay welcome to architects of change live which are conversations with change makers who are moving humanity forward the kind of people I love to be in conversation with and connection with and certainly dean ornish fits that bill he and his wife have just written this new book it's called undo it how simple lifestyle changes can reverse most chronic diseases and it's really here a wheel that talks about moving more eating well loving more and stressing less and that is the wheel of undoing and the wheel of health right that's right welcome Dean and we know each other and I'm a big fan of his and I was saying that by the way thank you thank you thank you and that I was reading through his book last night and underlying it in preparation for this and I wanted to begin with the idea that undoing it is the key to doing your health well that's right and what is radical about that in your estimation well my favorite key on the computer has always been the undo button I thought wouldn't it be nice if we had one in our lives and now we do and the book starts with a quote by Albert Einstein that says if you can't make it simple you don't understand it well enough so I tried to take the 40 years of work that we've done yeah showing that these same lifestyle changes can reverse the more diseases we study the more mechanisms we look at the more reasons we have to explain why these simple changes are so powerful and so we started with heart disease we found that you know with all this talk about personalized medicine it was the same lifestyle changes a Whole Foods plant-based diet moderate exercise meditation and other stress management techniques and social support er eat well move more stress less love warm boom that's it can actually reverse these actually these the most common chronic diseases and so what that sounds so simple really simple great but I think people are like okay well you know I'm I'm working I'm getting up at 5:00 in the morning I've got kids in school I'm taking care of aging parents I've got a boss that wants me on email seven days a week 24/7 so it's really hard for me to stress less love more eat great relax all of that given the way our society is it's true but there are ways that we've learned over the last four decades to actually show people how to give them the tools that they need to actually be able to do those things because the stress comes not just from what we do but how we react to what we do amen and if you can practice some simple techniques five minutes of meditation walking you know I used to get upset because I couldn't find a parking near the gym you know some park farther away just incorporating things into your daily life that really don't take a whole lot of time if you for example meditate five or ten minutes a day even get up five or ten minutes earlier than you ordinarily would so you're not actually taking extra time it's time you might have been spent sleeping but you can actually get to a deeper place just by doing this meditation people often say things like you know I just have a short fuse and I'd explode easily but now life is longer in other words I'm in the same place I got the same kids I've got the same family but I don't react in the same way and you know Elizabeth Blackburn who got the Nobel Prize for discovering telomeres and she and Elissa EPEL did a wonderful study and they found that women who were taking care of parents with Alzheimer's that the more stress they felt and a longer they felt that way the shorter their telomeres were and the difference between the high stress and the low stress women was to shorten their lifespan by 9 to 17 years huge difference but what was even more interesting to me was that it wasn't an objective measure of stress it was the woman's reaction to it so you could have two women in a very similar life situation with it better they were meditating they were eating healthier they were walking they were more social support in their lives so it really can buffer the effects of those stress and then we can accomplish even more and do what needs to be done without getting stressed and without getting sick in the process so kind of the idea that stress is making us sick is a little bit of a new kind of concept so people are like well I know that but I I'm stressed right I'm and I my Constitution is to react by ruminating to have anxiety to keep going over the same thing over and over yes but the book also takes us to having myself [Laughter] and the reason I actually got so interested in doing this work I was suicided depressed when I was in college that was my doorway into this whole area that's how I got interested in doing it and part of what I've learned is that it's really not what's out there and if you really take it to its deepest level we're born fine you know we think that anything and we deep ourselves by thinking gosh if only I had more you know I feel stressed I feel lonely I feel I say if only I had more blank more money more power more sex more Beauty more accomplishment and I'd be happy then I wouldn't feel so stressed fine no one set up that view of the world and our hold up well as an industry kind of it's that myth right and social media and social media all of it in fact there was a study that came out showing that more time you spent on Facebook the more depressed you are and the more stressed you are because it looks like everybody has this perfect life for you because it's not an authentic intimacy it's like you know people don't talk about their demons and there are problems with drugs or alcohol or what's going on in their marriage or their kids or work of those things they just you know most people don't release on Facebook and social media that's why it's a problem but intimacy actually is healing and so once you set up that view of the world that if only I had more whatever then I'd be happy until you get it you're stressed why I hope I get it the stakes go up because it's not just you know getting or whatever it is you think you need it's like oh then I'll be mobile and happy and I'll feel good about myself so until you get it your stress if you don't get it you feel stress if someone else gets it then you feel really stressed and it makes you feel like there's a zero-sum game dog-eat-dog world the more you get to lessers for me very hyper competitive and even if you get it it's active I'm sure you've had this experience I know I have where you go I got it it's great now I'm happy but it doesn't last it's usually followed by either now what and one of my patients years ago said I can't even enjoy the view from the mountain I've caught and I'm already looking over the next one or if it's not now what it's so like big deal it doesn't really provide the lasting meaning that I thought it would so another patient said I'd the letdown that comes from accomplishing the goal is so great I always make sure I've got a dozen projects going at the same time so I can immediately shift my attention to that what's up with that well what's up with that is that's how most of us live so the point of all of this in this new book really is that these meditation techniques and stress management techniques the ancient Swami's and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn't develop these techniques to to manage stress to unclog their arteries to perform better in sports or whatever it can help you do all those things they're really powerful tools for transformation to help us quiet down our mind and body to experience more of an inner sense of peace and joy and well-being in fact I learned this from a spiritual teacher named Swami Satchidananda when I was suicidal depressed who helped me really use that experience of suffering as a doorway for transforming my life anything you'd like to make pause the second I think that that's a really powerful thing you just said is to allow your suffering and everybody has suffering to be a doorway to be a doorway to transformation exactly that is a very powerful thing for anybody who's out there suffering and I always think that in these holiday seasons people really do suffer they struggle and they you know it's for so many millions of people it's a tough time they're isolated they're lonely and if you think for a moment to just pause and a second and say okay I'm who Dean was many years ago and I want to use that to transform yes so how do you how do you do that yeah I love that we're going this direction whether I don't use it get a chance to talk about go back last role and blood pressure is much more interesting for me it's a it's a conspiracy of love in many ways because that's kind of the Trojan horse that allows me to talk about what's most important which is what we're talking about now this teacher of mine people say what do you Hindu we say no I'm an undo so part of the title of what kind of harkens back to that as well Amash to him that's right yes but the idea is that when you practice what in whether you do it in a secular or spiritual way whatever spiritual tradition you do it in when you quiet down your mind and body and you feel more a sense of peace and well-being to realize that these techniques didn't bring that to us that's our natural state is to be peaceful and happy and perhaps the ultimate irony is we end up running after all these things that we think oh if only I had this them to be happy and in the process of running after all these things we disturbed what we could have already stopped doing that and so it's a very radical idea in the sense that our health our well-being our sense of peace our sense of self love are not things that we get from ounce our selves we have those already we're both fine until we define ourselves stuck on all these definite there were literally isolate us from other people so what if somebody's out there and they're saying look at I'm you know suicidal I'm manically depressed I need this medication that's cool that he can say that but I can't do that well I came about as close to killing myself this was back in 1972 as you can without actually doing it and if I hadn't got a really bad case of mononucleosis at the time he didn't have the energy to do it this is before I met this spiritual teacher I wouldn't be here we wouldn't be having this conversation so I would just say to you and anyone watching this if I can do it you can do it these are their these are freely available techniques that are available to anyone and part of the value of pain if there is a value is that it's to say hey know pay attention you're not doing something that's in your best interest change is hard but if you're hurting enough then the idea that of why suffering can be a doorway for transformation is that if you're hurting enough it's kind of like my teacher used to say if you're holding on to a hot pan you let go of it you know it's like if you get tired of your bank well after a while you realize there are better ways to do that than banging your head that you don't blame the wall you say hey what am i doing and what can I do to change that not as a way of blaming but as a way of empowering yourself that's that once again very important not a way of blaming abusing criticizing yourself because everybody has that voice that just is banging around and they're beating you up that's right but as a way of saying okay I have the power to drop the pan that's right and let me ask a question so which organ does your heart pump blood first what do you think your brain that's what most people think or guys might think a different organ but anyway it's actually a post flood to itself first coronary arteries so that we can then do your brain and everywhere else it's a great metaphor so you know we get stuck in this am I being selfish if I take care of myself I have to be unselfish you know you can't you love yourself you take care of yourself so that you can then share that love and take care of other people and back you can't do what you don't have selfish that's certainly for many people like I certainly was not raised with a research of self-love I was raised with a message of that get going go through something so how do you kind of let's say that's the hot pan but get going do it yeah and the self-love and I love that you put in here along with eating well and moving because we here at this table we've talked to a lot of people who talk about you know what we should be eating and the benefits of exercise and how to decrease stress but very few people talk about loving yeah I wrote a book about love 20 years ago called lovin survival that reviewed what within hundreds and knows tens of thousands of studies showing that people who are lonely and depressed which i think is the real epidemic in our culture right but with a breakdown of the social networks real social networks you know extended families most people I mean 50 or 60 years ago most people had an extended family that saw regulation right they had a job that felt secure they've been out for ten years or more they had a church or synagogue that went to regularly they had a neighborhood with two or three generations of people and many people today have none of those and study after study has shown that people who are lonely and depressed or three to ten times more likely to get sick and die prematurely for pretty much everything when compared to those have a sense of love and connection a community I don't know anything in medicine that has that even smoking doesn't have that powerful and impact but it also has an impact on our behaviors because in doing these studies over the last 40 years I'd ask people I say you know teach me something why do you smoke why do you abuse opioids why do you even work so hard why do you depend so much time playing video games these behaviors seem so maladaptive to me and they look at me they go Dean you don't get it you don't have a clue I say okay well what happen they say these behaviors aren't maladaptive they're very adaptive they'll help us deal with our pain our loneliness our depression I've had patients say things like I've got twenty friends in this pack of cigarettes and they're always there for me and nobody else is you gonna take away much girlfriends or food fills the void or fat it's my nerves and numbs the pain or opioids them to pain or alcohol numbs the pain or video games them the pain are working all the time as a more socially acceptable way of distancing yourself from your feelings and so in ours and our intervention we have support groups that are not designed the way that support groups are usually around some kind of pathology but rather could really create that lost sense of community because if you grow up in a neighborhood with two or three generations of people they know you they don't just know your facebook profile or your biosketch they know where you mess they know you're demons they know your dark side and you know that great line in Jim Cameron's film Avatar it's like I see you you know it's not ice yeah it was really an African project it's a I see all of you and it's there for you so in our group somebody might say you know I might look like the perfect dad but my kids on heroin extreme example and so someone else instead of saying oh well why don't you send him to a drug rehab program like they hadn't thought of that you know it's like oh that must be awful to focus on what am i feeling and to express that as a feeling because it's our feelings that really connect us yeah and it's so easy to make fun of that oh that sounds so touchy-feely and I used to get defensive say I look at our PET scans and our angiograms and all the signs and I thought it is thought to be feeling we're touchy-feely creatures that's what's enables us to survive as a species so they're being able to express and receive love to me as if they is is that the one of the fundamental underlying precepts of where healing occurs even the word healing comes from their word to make hole and yoga comes from the Sanskrit to yoke or Union these are really old ideas that were rediscovered so is it your which i think is radical by the way another word radical comes with a word meaning the root the root underlying cause right so it is really radical to suggest to people that love will heal what ails them and that love could heal depression heart disease and other chronic diseases yes love not and not just love but when you love yourself then you're more likely to make lifestyle choices that are life enhancing than ones that are self-destructive that's right and so in here what since we talked a lot about Alzheimer's which is my passion trying to find a cure trying to help you think about your brain think about your mind and we talked a lot about some of the things but I haven't been talking about love is the only thing for your mind about you talking here about change your mind change your brain and the idea it's hard to get people to think about their brains because they don't look in the mirror and see it and particularly I find for women when we look in the mirror we're so sidetracked by everything that's wrong or that's meeting us in the mirror or changing about us that the brain is the last thing that we think about how do we get people to think about that that actually change your mind change your brain genes change your mind change your brain that's right well because so tamiya awareness is always the first step in a way and part of the value of science is to say these things really make a difference you know we think it has to mean a drug a new laser or something really high-tech and expensive yeah and something as simple as change your mind actually does change your genes so many studies have we did a study that showed that after just three months 500 genes we're over 500 genes were changed turning on the good genes to keep us healthy turning off the bad genes that cause us to get heart disease diabetes prostate breast colon cancer by doing this by making these simple lifestyle changes we're using these very high-tech expensive state-of-the-art scientific measures to raise awareness of how powerful is very simple and low tech and low cost interventions can be and the radical theory that I'm putting forth in this book with my wife Anne who's been my partner for twenty years is that these are not really different diseases that heart disease and diabetes and prostate cancer and Alzheimer's are really different manifestations of the same underlying biological mechanisms chronic inflammation oxidative stress changes in your microbiome in telomeres and angiogenesis in immune system and each of those is directly influenced by what we need how we respond to stress how much exercise we get and how much love and support we have so a lot of people say to me you know I know I hear you you have people come on and talk about the food we eat and the Mediterranean diet and then other people come on and they talk about the high protein the ketogenic diet then people come on and they talk about being a vegan and they talk about a whole whoa it's so confusing music well here's the thing in this book you know I debated dr. Atkins many times before he died of turns out his autopsy showed he had died of heart failure I did the Atkins diet in high school so you know but now it's that keto got the keto diet it's the Paleo diet I think it's the same thing it keeps you know researching one in one form or another telling people what they want to hear is always a good way to sell books and magazines it works it works in the sense that you can lose weight on it yeah but you can lose weight on chemotherapy or smoking cigarettes there are lots of ways of losing weight good for you right but this I'm taking the position like we've got 40 years of randomized control trials showing that the more diseases we've shown that these same lifestyle changes reverse heart disease we were the first to prove that the first to do randomized trials when we could reverse prostate cancer by extension breast cancer we did the first randomized trials showing that we can change lengthen telomeres with dr. Elizabeth Blackburn reverse aging at a cellular level we did studies with craig Venter who decoded the human genomes when we could change gene expression at over 500 genes and now we're doing the first randomized trial show and we hope to be able to show that we can reverse or early stage Alzheimer's disease yeah so let's talk a little bit about that I want to come back to or we can do it at the end because you talked about micro moments of positivity which I think are so I'll circle back to that so you're excited about kind of launching a study to look at Alzheimer's and many people as you know in this space said you know you could never and should never say you can reverse Alzheimer's because that's false hope to people who have mild or severe cognitive impairments so I want to be clear here that I'm not saying and you know and I don't know if you're saying let me be clear - yeah I'm not saying that we could reverse all time we're doing excited to find out if you know and and what sets my work apart from everyone else's is that we do research rigorous randomized trials published in the journal the AMA the New England Journal of Medicine The Lancet all the leading peer-reviewed journals Medicare is now paying for my program for reversing heart disease around the country it took 16 years for them to do that because I'm I believe that it's irresponsible to tell people something will happen unless you first proven it in rigorous randomized trials published in the leading peer-reviewed journals that's what that's what makes my work different and so there people get all this conflicting information high carb low carb low fat high fat whatever in this book I'm saying look we've done 40 years of work here are the references we want to look it up it works boom that's it is how you just ask you and I want to get to the Alzheimer's study in a second because if you have somebody out there who's got Alzheimer's or pause a second but when you talk about what to eat yes what should we eating if you want to reverse disease yeah I want to reverse aging if University yes it's basically a Whole Foods plant-based diet fruits vegetables whole grains legumes soy products in their natural unrefined form what does that mean that means it's low in fat it's low in sugar and it's predominantly just that fruits and vegetables and whole grains and legumes and soy products as they come in nature so let give us an example of a day so because people go fruits and vegetables and okay so like what do you eat okay so do intermittent fasting well I'm gonna do intermittent fasting every day because I try to eat a light I really light dinner and not to eat very late so that gives me like essentially eight to ten don't eat after like seven o'clock exactly okay I mean there are exceptions but generally speaking right and so just give us a kind of a day for dr. Ornish what does that look like so people who hear soy products what is that okay well for breakfast this morning I had some mackenz steel-cut oatmeal and with a pint of blueberries on it because blueberries are really good for your brain things and a tiny bit of soy milk just to give it some moisture okay and then at lunch and at lunch or dinner maybe lunch was my biggest meal of the day okay so it could be you know some anything from steamed vegetables to stir-fry to with tofu and then for dinner it would be like generally a big salad or something along those lines that's it that's it now for I wrote an earlier book called the spectrum that was based on the finding that in all of our studies the more you change the more you improve it's not all or nothing if you're just trying to stay healthy lose a few pounds what matters most is your overall way of eating living so if you indulge yourself one I mean the whole language of behavioral change is this kind of fascist you know manipulative the words you know like I patient compliance is such a creepy word you know one manipulate someone to change their diet or I cheated on my diet I want you to label foods good or bad it's a very small stuff that I'm a bad person because I bad food and then if you're a bad person might as well finish the pint of ice cream because you're a bad person right so that doesn't work on guilt and shame and humiliation of the most toxic emotions and anger so in the spectrum book I said low and so I didn't call foods good or bad because what you go on a diet chances are you gonna go off of it and once you call food is good or bad then it's a small step to saying I'm a bad person who's like bad food so I just categorize foods from the most healthy group one which are the plant-based foods to a group five the least healthy the usual suspects you know the high sugar high fat high animal present you don't need any protein like steak amber guards I grew up in Texas eating steak all the time three or four times a day Chili's cheeseburgers chalupas day no not since that no nothing no no hamburgers no steak chicken no no no fish occasionally that but not even that very often once a month or so once a month yeah mostly its I've been doing this way since I was 19 and I feel better again part of what I've learned is that fear is not a sustainable motivator but joy and pleasure and feeling good are there's this wonderful scene I was a part of this film that James Cameron did with called game changers coming out and if you see them I haven't seen it there's a wonderful scene with a urologist named Aaron Spitz where they have these three athletes in their mid-20s and they feed them a meat-based meal just one meal and then they measure at night the frequency and hardness of their erections because blood flow is so dynamic whether it's your brain to your heart or to your sexual organs yeah and then they gave them a plant-based meal and then measure them the next night and they found that all three athletes had three to five hundred percent more frequent erections and ten to fifty percent harder after the plant-based meal than the music every woman's gonna go put their partner [Music] like a vegan or no it said it that way that's the whole point of these are all these are all world-class athletes who elevated their game by by going on so what does it do for women well it does the same thing it makes you look you're in fact in Christy Turlington has this wonderful website called smoking is ugly calm because nicotine constricts your arteries so in your brain that could cause a stroke and your heart can cause a heart attack but in your fate and your brain your sexual organs that makes you impotent then in your face that makes you wrinkle because your skin doesn't get as much why do you look 10 or 20 years older and the same Monday same way with food wow the city I fear is not sustainable what sustainable is joy and pleasure and feeling good yeah and when you realize how and part of what I talk about in this new book and in the undoing book is how dynamic these mechanisms are how quickly you can feel better or worse when you make these changes so it's not fear of dying it's a joy of living that really joy of living so tell me what are you looking for when you say you want to do a study to look at whether you can reverse we are doing this study we've we've baldie more people in it we need more people we've raised all the funding for what we're doing with Bruce Miller and and we're at UCSF who are awesome they run the memory and Ageing center there okay so we're also we're also collaborating with Rob Knight at UC San Diego looking ok with David Sinclair at Harvard as some kind of lab looking at the gene expression and proteomics with Elizabeth Blackburn measuring the telomeres so we need people of certain ages we know we need a weave rate we've just started recruiting we've recruited about 20 of the hundred people we need ok these are men and women who have early early to moderate Alzheimer's ok who live in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area ok so if you live in that you have to live in the greater so they're willing to and you have to have mild cognitive impairment or do you have to be diagnosed with all times you have to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's you need to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's you can be male or female you have to live in the San Francisco area and if you look and if you think you might have Alzheimer's we will do the cognitive function testing on you to see if you have an independent necessary PET scan to see if we can document that ok where do you follow them for how long so we have a hundred men and women well randomly divide them into two groups one group will get the intensive intervention for four month we'll do baseline testing on both groups we'll do it for four months and it'll be the same lifestyle intervention that we found that Converse heart disease and diabetes and prostate cancer you know the same things that we write about of this book and then we'll test both groups again after four months then the first group that didn't get the program the control group will cross over they'll get it for four months okay the first group will get it for four additional months four total of eight months and we'll test in the third time after eight months and Louie Psihoyos who got an Academy Award for The Cove which was that fantastic documentary and the game-changers documentary will be documenting will be following the patients in our study all the way through as well and what about the role of supplements in all of that are you a believer in that yes we're giving them some supplements we're giving them some turmeric some coke q10 a good multivitamin some vitamin C I think some magnesium I think that's it but the supplements are just that they're their supplements they don't take the place of it and they're gonna be on a whole kind of whole food diet same diet and we're giving them all 21 meals a week for them and their caregiver it's all done for free to the Pierce it's all done through our nonprofit Institute and collaboration of UCSF and so the point is is that whatever we show it'll be of interest I think weird applies with Alzheimer's that we were 40 years ago with heart disease that there's every reason to think it'll work but no one's really done it in a rigorous way there if you look at the finger study you know showed that less intensive interventions which are now morphed into the Pointer study in the u.s. the men study the mind study the anecdotal studies show that less intensive interventions can slow or stop the progression more intensive interventions anecdotally may make a difference but no one's done at a systematic randomised trials those studies that dr. Ornish was talking about will really are talking about lifestyle things that you can do that's right you said you are in your power so it'll be interesting to watch how that unfolds and if you are struggling with any kind of mild cognitive impairment or any memory issues there are things you can do and you're not living in San Francisco trial it's not that many people think do have impact and slowing the profession of cognitive impairment that involve eating well holder's exercising more decreasing your stress loving more and just understanding that your brain like your waistline is malleable that's right right all of these things are so much more malleable so much more dynamic than we had once realized and talk to me a minute about horse I get worse quickly as well as yeah yeah I'm not going to say I like french fries but I liked this thing you talk about dr. Barbara Fredrickson and I just thought that this kind of micro moments of positivity yes and I thought that's really achievable yes so talk a little bit about that well we were both speaking at a conference on happiness it was the first time in us unhappiness in Austin and she was just talking about you know focus on things that really make a difference in your life that we we can direct our awareness to we can go to these really dark places but we can also go to healing places and it doesn't take that long we have a lot more choice about our feelings again not to blame but to empower and having experienced the most dark and horrible places when I was so profoundly depressed when I was in college the worst thing about being depressed is that you feel like it's a true reality distortion field you think you're really seeing things clearly for the first time when you're really depressed that things are bad they've always been bad and anytime you ever thought that they'd be better you were just fooling yourself that's what where the helplessness and hopelessness that's really a whole lot of depression come from it's from that distortion and so what meditation and what support groups and the concept that I write about in this book and for that not even changing your diet can do an exercise is it can reframe that for you and give you those micro moments and more than just micro moments of real clarity and and and to quiet down our mind and body enough to experience more of an inner sense of peace and joy and well-being and to realize that's really who we are that's our natural state and then and then we don't have and then when you're grounded in that state the paradox you can go out in the world and accomplish even more but the intention behind it is very different it's coming from a place of service not I have to do these things so that people will love and respect me because then the stresses go way up and that's when things really get dark I love that idea of like knowing why you're going out to do what you did I just saw over the weekend the movie free solo which talks about this young man climbing I heard him speak of the tech over yeah so it was so but it was really also about like why are you doing that and really the the question for all of us is you know why are we I saw that back to back with the movie Creed which is why are you walking into the ring and why are any of us doing I think that I'm so glad to talk to you because this is also what the book is about which is that I got in the habit of asking people why do you want to live longer you know people assume that everybody wants to live longer but they told me when I was about to kill myself that you're gonna live longer and say you don't get it I don't know if I could just a lot of people just getting through the day is really the issue yeah exactly and so Viktor Frankl wrote a wonderful book sixty years ago called man's search for meaning I'm sure you're familiar with the concentration camp survivors in world war ii and what he found was it wasn't the strongest and the healthiest had survived it was the ones who had the strongest sense of meaning and purpose you could have two people in the same bunker one was one survived in one didn't and it was the one who said I've got to survive so that I can whatever can be reunited with my loved ones or bear witness or write a book or whatever so if you're if you can help a person get remind themselves about why what the purpose in life what brings them a sense of meaning what brings them a sense of joy and connect to that then I find that you create these virtuous cycles and people are much more likely to make lifestyle changes that are healing than ones that are harmful but I find that so many people and I don't know if you know they'll say like I want to find my purpose but I can't and you telling me to find my purpose stresses me out because I can't figure out what my purpose is and I feel really bad that I don't have my purpose well so there's there's that right and so I try to think I said with what brings you meaning yes right I have written this book I've been thinking you know the reflections person meditations for a meaningful life so kind of what brings you meaning on a daily basis right yeah so it's maybe and I don't know but it's kind of the idea of what gets you up why are we why do I do this why do you do that yes why do you do this well this is what brings me a sense of meaning you know and meaning is healing if you can help someone get in touch with their sense of meaning and what a a very powerful technique that I found that I talk about in this book is that we all have an inner guru and in her teacher and in or sometimes called the still small voice within you know in our credit i also known her critic but it's the self small voice within that speaks very clearly but very quietly the inner critic is the one that's jabbering all day yeah but it's the one that the the still small voice within is the one that wakes you up at 3:00 in the morning and says hey Dean listen up pay attention you're not doing something that's in your best interest and you can access that voice very intentionally so at the end of a whatever way you meditate whether it's secular or whether it's spiritual whether it's religious when your mind is more quiet down you can ask that part of you to identify itself to you just say hello and interval and it will and you say okay I've gotten in the habit of saying what am I not paying attention to that I need to pay attention to and what's gonna bring me the greatest sense of meaning and joy today what do I need to do to do that and just listen and it will tell you it will speak very clearly but very quietly and and I just found that and I can do that now in the midst of a busy day even you know but if you do that as a matter of practice every day you learn to recognize that voice and that voice will tell you what brings you the sense of meaning and joy and purpose and happiness and in order to do that I think one of the other things that kind of we learn from teachers of centuries ago is stillness yes you can't hear that voice if you're on Facebook or watching this for the story or just busying yourself and so one of the things I think for type-a personalities is and others is to allow yourself stillness that's right and quiet that's right to hear that voice and you might hear it in your suffering once again that might give you your door that's right to transformation but I think the overall thing about all of this which is what is exciting is that you're in control that's you have the power you are not helpless right and you can just put them I'm a big believer in wheels actually because I think they're they're visuals yes and they're easy to follow and kind of you can you know put this up on your refrigerator you can put it on your mirror I love it it can remind you that you're the hub of your wheel these are the things to do and these are also different undo arrows as well that are all connected the undo button on the computer has this right right right right and I think it's easier to kind of think from me anyway about what I can do exactly as well as I do exactly yes do undo whatever anyway the book is called undo it exclamation like now undo it now but with more eat well love more stress less how simple lifestyle changes can reverse most chronic diseases it actually comes out in January so you can pre-order it on Amazon thank you and it's got recipes in it it's got a lot of facts it's got some pictures drawings all kinds of stuff on it so that's the book it's colorful it's gotta be hard back so this is just write your galley proof yeah this is just the galley proof but dr. Dean Ornish and your wife and Ornish are the authors and I think it's gonna be exciting to see what you come up with okay UCSF on that Alzheimer's because we've gone from thinking that it's going to be uphill or a discovery to that it you know might be multiple things and it's lifestyle that we there's so much we're learning we don't know and we're also I hope you'll look at how women in that study might be different that's right we are gonna be looking then in fact Leonard Lauder who started the Alzheimer's this is the first time they've given a large grant for a non drug intervention great there you go well I hope you'll work with the women's Alzheimer's movement we'd love to come visit us well I love Bruce Miller and we're big fans of heads in the big vision here so thank you thank you all for joining us thank you

Channel: Maria Shriver

Views: 12,192

Keywords: Dr. Dean Ornish, Architects of change, Maria Shriver

Id: VwJlJy3q0QA

Length: 36min 30sec (2190 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018