DO THESE 5 Things To Help Heal The BODY & MIND! | Andrew Weil & Rangan Chatterjee

it's a revelation it's totally empowering and that method becomes more effective with repetition we're normally told that it's like this inexorable decline over time whereas actually we have plenty of evidence to suggest that we can reverse that as long as we improve some of these factors it's going to be good for your brain globally as your mind thoughts and emotions as well as the flesh that's that's one strong way to stave off dementia [Music] i mean you have widely popularized the 478 breath um can you tell us what the 478 breath is and you know when did this start coming into your awareness and when did you start talking about it it's a yoga technique so again thousands of years old and i learned it from dr fulford and i been practicing it since probably the early 1980s and i have taught it i teach it to every patient i come into contact with to all of my students sometimes to very large groups of people it's so time efficient it's just you know the method is simply breathing in quietly through your nose to a count of four holding your breath to account for a count of seven and blowing air out forcibly through your mouth to a count of eight and repeating that for four breath cycles when you're first learning it and doing that twice a day religiously and that's all and by simply doing that over time you know over the space of a month or two months you really change the dynamics of the involuntary nervous system decrease sympathetic tone increase parasympathetic tone the relaxation response uh lowers heart rate lowers blood pressure improves digestion uh i'm really amazing results and and it takes 30 seconds twice a day i mean i love recommendations like that you know very very effective but but free and accessible to everybody which i think is something that i always try and keep at the back of my mind when talking about health there's this theme coming up um andrew which is you know i mentioned inflammation before you were becoming aware in the maybe early 80s that there's this kind of root cause of chronic unresolved inflammation that may be behind or at least contributing in a large way to things like hypertension type 2 diabetes heart disease you know depression whatever it's like okay great you also mentioned that you teach the 478 breath to pretty much every single one of your patients so what i really love is this understanding and this idea that there are some basics of health right there are some there are some common commonalities if we focus on the creation of health in the body if we focus on reducing inflammation in the body through hopefully lots of you know lifestyle practices we can tackle multiple different diseases even though we're not targeting them specifically and it's you know as you say that 478 breath it sounds like you use that as prevention as prophylaxis but also as treatment when somebody has a problem and i think this is in many ways changing the way that we look at medicine because we have been taught in a certainly i was trained what maybe 30 35 years after you but a very sort of quite a reductionist model we're very good at giving labels to different diseases we we separate off the body into different specialities and that can have value but also we we forget that we want interconnecting system and if you change one part of that system you also have a knock-on effect on other parts as well yeah let me give you an example with the 478 breath this is by far the most effective anti-anxiety measure that i've come across it makes the drugs that we use for anxiety to look very pathetic by comparison and i have used that in patients with the most extreme forms of panic disorder successfully although in some cases it took some time of regular practice for them to get control of it but the the difference between treating an anxiety attack or panic disorder with a drug like a benzodiazepine and with the 478 breath it's a very stark contrast when people are panicked or in anxiety states the subjective experience usually is of being out of control if you deal with that by giving a a medication you reinforce the false idea that the locus of control is external and over time that method becomes less and less effective and often creates dependence if when a person discovers that they have within them the ability to control an anxiety state by regulation of the breath it's a revelation it's totally empowering and that method becomes more effective with repetition and creates greater independence and greater autonomy it just couldn't be a greater contrast of those two approaches yeah completely agree it's about putting it's just about it's about connecting the patient to what's going on the feeling that they have got some control over otherwise it's yeah i agree it's it's not only the fact that the treatment itself has very few if any side effects right so that's but it's awesome you know it's also about empowerment and i guess that kind of leads on to this term mind body medicine which i've heard you talk about a lot and i think it's worth kind of really trying to understand you know what do you mean when you say mind body medicine you know do you see the mind and body as separate does society see it as separate and you know what does that umbrella term really i think the only way you can separate mind and body is verbally i think they are two poles of the same reality uh and i think the the reigning paradigm in western science and medicine simply does not see that you know that we we have a materialistic paradigm in place uh that states that all that is real is that which is physical that which can be touched measured i guess in medicine taken out and that if you observe a change in the physical system the cause has to be physical non-physical causation of physical events simply is not allowed for in that paradigm and this is why mind-body interactions have been never accorded their proper due why research in that area has been stunted why hypnosis has never been fully accepted as a medical modality for example why we can't make sense of of uh wart cures i mean there's a whole range of things but that that is changing and some of the change has come about with validating placebo responses through brain imaging and showing that there are correlations with you know activity in particular areas of the brain so this makes it accessible to people gradually changing but i would say there's there's a whole range of therapies under the heading mind-body medicine from biofeedback hypnosis visualization and so forth in general these methods are very cost effective time effective even fun for both practitioner and patient and yet they are very underutilized in medicine and they're underutilized because we just don't take this kind of stuff seriously in my clinical experience i have again and again seen that the the root causes of illness are in the non-physical compartment unless that's dealt with um all the physical intervention that you do is not going to solve the problem it's tricky sometimes to present this to patients because many patients are very sensitive to being accused of making up their illness or imagining it that it's all in their head and that's not what is meant by this i i don't it's very difficult to use the term psychosomatic because of that connotation i don't think we've as a profession we've we've got a bit of a bad reputation in the past telling people that their ibs aerosol bowel syndrome is sort of kind of in their head or their fibromyalgia is sort of in their head and i think so there's a lot there's a real defensiveness from people understandably that understandably right the doctor's telling you ibs is clearly in the bowel as well as in the head and you know everything is is in both yeah it's uh it's really interesting that isn't that the mind and the body and i guess now we're getting this field of research which i'm interested as to what state this was in in the 60s and 70s but you know the last five ten years we've got the microbiome the gut brain axis lots of research showing this bi-directional communication between body or gut and the mind in our brains and you know did were you aware of this uh early on you know what what did the research say or did you just intuitively and through your experience know that this was going on i took a course in medical hypnosis at columbia university uh right after i finished my internship it was one of the most fascinating courses i ever took and certainly made me aware of the research that was out there and it and it totally resonated with my own interests so it's i've paid attention that for a long time i uh have a colleague that i worked with for many years who's on our faculty who is a teaching member of the american academy of clinical hypnosis and i've sent him many patients and i remember early on him saying to me that he thought that every dermatological patient and every gi patient should first go to hypnotherapy before they went to dermatologists or gastroenterologists because those two systems of the body have had the highest ratio of innervation and connection to the mind and i've absolutely found that to be true and and another uh experience i had uh shortly after he said that i the the leading gastroenterologist in tucson asked me to have dinner with him he's in his 60s and he was very depressed and said that he hoped that i had something that could help him because he said 90 of the patients that he saw had conditions for which his training did not equip them to do anything about i mean that's remarkable um and and i think this is absolutely the way it is and it's not just for gi disorders and terminological disorders it applies to many other things as well and that doesn't mean you should not work on the physical problem but you want to also be working on the non-physical aspect of it but there's two things that come to mind there that that 90 statistic is is a very striking one and what's interesting to me is i would agree with that actually there's that there's um so much of what we see we don't certainly as medical doctors we don't have tools that work really well for them yeah i feel i don't know what it is about i'm not trying to get too down on my profession at all i'm very proud to be a medical doctor i'm i'm pleased i went through like you that that conventional medical training but i do feel sometimes that there's a there's a certain arrogance within the profession or there's a i don't know what happens at medical school where you go in as a kind of open-minded curious individual and you come out or many of us come out quite close-minded thinking we know it all and actually anything that we weren't taught has no value and because you know a real striking moment for me uh andrew was one it was one of my days as a general practitioner you know i moved from specialism into general practice i was getting quite frustrated with just looking at kidneys and i really wanted to see how everything linked together and around one day i'd seen i think close to 50 patients and i was a bit frustrated and before i left the clinic to go home i went through the whole list and i asked myself okay wrong and how many patients have you really really helped today and i honestly thought it was about 20 i thought yeah those 20 i think i've really done something called the other 80 percent you know i've referred them somewhere i've given them something to suppress a simpson but i didn't really understand what was going on i knew that they would be back and i thought i can't do this for 34 years like there must be more to this than that right so why is it that it some of us look at that with honesty and transparency go actually we're we're really good at this stuff we're not so good at that stuff and why is it that others kind of almost ignore that and just stay within that system of going no no no this is the way to do it you know have you got any answers there what goes on there well i consider myself an open-minded skeptic i'm willing to look at anything believe anything but then i need to see proof i need to confirm that with my own experience a lot of people that i run into in medicine and science generally i would say are close-minded skeptics which is very different and uh i i think in medicine especially uh there is a tendency to be suspicious of defensive about any information that comes from unfamiliar sources uh so all of a lot of the ideas of that are out there in the world of alternative medicine you know anything of that sort is just dismissed as as nonsense without even paying attention to it the um the dean of the college of medicine at the university of arizona who gave me the green light to start this center years ago uh jim dolan he was a cardiologist and had had been a psychologist as an undergraduate which is probably accounted for some of his openness to this when he retired he said that the achievement he was most proud of in his career was starting the integrative medicine center and he told this said this about all the flack that he got for allowing this to happen and he he told a story about the attitudes of people in our profession and i think it's interesting the observation that aspirin was an anticoagulant and may have a preventive effect in coronary artery disease was first made i think was in the 1950s by a general practitioner in kansas who noticed that when he he was he was taking aspirin notice that when he cut himself shaving that his he bled more than usual so we thought maybe aspirin was responsible this he started giving aspen to some of his friends and confirming this effect and he wrote an article in the journal of general practice saying that aspirin had anticoagulant activities and might be useful as a preventive and coronary artery disease it took something like 30 years for the medical profession to come around to that point of view and a major reason why they didn't was that this had been proposed by a general practitioner and published in a journal that cardiologists didn't read and it was dismissed as an outrageous idea and that's within the profession so imagine when something comes from the world of traditional chinese medicine or the world of herbal medicine you know that that provokes this kind of the same sort of response when you were giving the definition of integrated medicine i think you use the word conventional medicine within it and you just mentioned the phrase traditional chinese medicine and it's an interesting thought isn't it when we we talk about conventional medicine or traditional medicine it's again there's a there's a sort of inbuilt arrogance there it's like well it is but it is you know our system of medicine is not that old and if you're gonna call something traditional i think it should be at least a thousand years old yeah exactly it's native american medicine ayurvedic medicine but not what we're doing today as allopathic medicine i mean that only goes back maybe a hundred years i mean what is incredible is to see as you said with with breathing but there's a lot of science now coming out isn't there to support what these ancient healing modalities you know traditional chinese medicine indian oye veda medicine have been talking about for years whether it's a period of time each day without food or you know a period of time every 24 hours where you're not pulling food in whether it's breathing practices whether it's um the fact that different organs have different genetic activity and that that they're more or less active at different parts of the day i remember the guardian newspaper in the uk covered a study maybe two or three years ago which was showing you know it was about the circadian clock and how the liver is more and less active at certain parts of the day other organs are as well and the and the kind of conclusion was also we can then use different medications at different times in the day and okay that may be one of the conclusions but i was also thinking have traditional chinese medicine and indian medicine not been saying this for thousands of years that there's a different rhythm to different organs at different times of the day and i guess for you as someone who's been preaching this message for a good 50 years you're now seeing a lot more mainstream support in a way that you presume you weren't 40 50 years ago i guess with some of these other modalities not that they need it i guess but it must be quite gratifying to see oh these guys are kind of catching up to what we already knew you know as i say there are ideas in these systems that to me seems so powerful and useful and there's other ideas that that don't seem that way and i i look at all this and i'm very selective in what i take from from other systems one idea that uh i find very powerful from uh chinese medicine i have a another colleague an md in new york who practices what he calls modern chinese medicine and he i once heard him say that if you could summarize all of chinese medical philosophy in one sentence it would be to dispel evil and support the good in in western medicine all of our focus is on dispelling evil you know we identify what we see as agents of disease or causes disease and we blast them with weapons usually pharmaceutical and we really pay no attention to supporting the good which are the intrinsic uh the intrinsic resistance or defensive functions of the human body and just as a concrete example of this if you look at the way we manage gastroesophageal reflux disease um you know we use these very powerful medications that suppress production of stomach acid you know we say that's the problem there's too much acid in the stomach and we stop it with a very powerful drug that's an example of the dispelling evil philosophy we do nothing to support the defensive function of the body which is how do you make the gastric mucosa more resistant to the erosive action of of stomach acid and there are various ways of doing that there are natural products that do that adjustment of diet i i see so many patients who are put on these medications without any dietary history being taken without any warning of the addictive nature of these drugs the long-term problems that they cause i mean that's that's the unbalanced uh western approach that could really benefit from paying attention to that uh idea from chinese medical philosophy yeah and the system the modern medical system really feeds that doesn't it because you know she said that i had i had a flashback to i don't know 12 13 years ago i'm going to guess in clinic you know a lot of patients waiting outside this is much more conventional nhs general practice and i can't remember the exact patient but they they'd come in they'd still got these uh gut acid type symptoms they'd already been on i think they started off on a mapresult the proton pump inhibitor yeah then the doctor had changed it wasn't working to lands operazol and then i think i had a protocol which said oh there's a new one called esomeprazole let's try that that's the third line that's recommended by the local hospitals and you just get into this maddening uh vortex where you know no one's understood the root cause of it they've been put on one proton pump inhibitor my understanding is that the early trials on pros and bottom inhibitors only looked at their use for a few weeks three four weeks exactly maximum exactly what's now and people are on there for ten plus years just on repeat prescriptions and this is a problem that i think is really not appreciated that i've been trying to call people's attention to both my colleagues and patients that when you use these powerful counteractive agents long term you run into a problem i call the homeostatic trap that the body will push back against what you're doing so if you try to block the production of stomach acid with a drug over time the body is going to try to produce more acid so if you lower the dose or stop the medication there's going to be an outpouring of acid much worse than you had to begin with and so people think well then i can't get off these i have to take them and over time you are worsening or prolonging the problem and the same thing happens with depression you give ssri antidepressant drugs to increase serotonin at neural junctions how is the body going to respond to that it's going to try to it will make less serotonin and it will drop serotonin receptors so that if after a year of use you try to get off that or reduce the dose depression is increased uh you know there's there's even a name for this now it's tardive dysphoria which is lingering lingering depression as a result of treatment uh and you see this again and again with so many of our pharmaceutical agents and there's a double problem isn't there andrew there's this problem that the person who initially came to the doctor with these heartburn acid symptoms that were causing them problems at work or that when they went to sleep because we didn't address the root cause then we gave them a pill which may unless we have been really clear that this is a short-term intervention to help your symptoms while we deal with the underlying root cause which is where i think those things can potentially have value sometimes for some patients short term yep you know if if we explain that but we disempower the patient they start taking the people think oh i've got a problem that i need this pill to fix and then when they can't get off it yeah it reinforces yeah i i have that problem i i need the pill or i can't function without realizing your body is reacting and this it sounds as though we're talking about rare cases i bet you if you go to any general practice in the uk it's all over the place you'll have hundreds if not thousands of patients every practice who are in this situation and it's so frustrating because once they're on it it is challenging to get them very challenging very challenging and by the way rongo when i was growing up in the 19 1940s 1950s reflux gastric reflux did not exist people had heartburn and they dealt with it mostly by taking calcium carbonate mint-flavored calcium carbonate which is relatively safe and i think most people understood that heartburn was your stomach's way of telling you that you'd mistreated it either you ate too much you ate the wrong things but now this has become completely medicalized into this condition you know due to too much stomach acid and you treat it with these powerful medications and then go about your business and as i say almost every patient i see who is in this situation where they're dependent on the drug and can't get off they were started on them without any questions being asked about what they were eating uh were they drinking coffee were they smoking what their stress levels was no no in korean any of that yeah or how stressful their lives were were they were they eating on the move while you know it sounds so basic but there is always there's almost always a way to help people with those symptoms if you take the time to understand what's causing them in the first place and it's you spot on it's this medicalization of symptoms whereas you know it's the body sign it's trying to talk to you and raise raise it's trying to scream at you you've got to do something differently right you're not treating me well but instead of listening i guess it's reflexive just how how busy and stressed out people are now whether it's the the doctors in practice whether it's the patients in their busy busy lives that it's almost it kind of feels like it's the perfect storm medicine has got these quick fix solutions for busy people who don't feel they've got the time and energy to make change and then you end up in this really problematic and quite toxic situation well this is this is the perfect opportunity for doctors to be teachers and to be able to explain to patients why long-term use of these counteractive pharmaceutical strategies is not wise that it's going to get you into worse trouble uh and may produce bad effects of its own and what the root causes of these things are and what changes you can make uh you know that's that's what we should be doing and it is very rewarding to do that and to see you know good results yeah you mentioned the placebo effect before and the power of the minds and i've shared on this podcast before that my realization over the past few years has been yes food movement sleep stress super importance they are very very important things to try and help everyone with but actually if you go one step further i really am feeling more and more that it's the mind it's our belief systems up here how we view the world actually determines a lot of those behaviors in the first place and unless we we tackle that yeah we can make big improvements with food and movement and stress but at some point to really get that long-term change we got to tackle what's going on up here and you mentioned the placebo and it's interesting that there's such powerful research behind the placebo but how do we talk about it in medicine it's it's the most derogatory thing in the world when we're talking about trials isn't it it kind of it speaks to how little credence we give or have typically given to the power of our minds yes the the two most common usages of the word placebo i hear in medicine are how do you know that's not just a placebo effect and the most interesting word there is just or we have to rule out the placebo effect you know we should be ruling it in he placebo responses are pure healing responses from within you know mediated by the mind and that's what we should be trying to make happen more often that is the art of medicine how do you present treatments to patients to get the maximum healing response with the minimum direct physical intervention again something that i began writing about long ago and and talking about and i'm happy to see gradually a a change coming about in that area but that word is so charged and so loaded and you know the thinking that placebo responses are imaginary and they're not as important here's a little there's a little uh assignment that i like to give to medical students and also to doctors in training as well is to go into pick up any medical journal at random that reports randomized controlled testing of drugs and look up an article and flip to the back where there's a table summarizing the results in the placebo group there will always be always one or two or a small number of subjects who show all of the changes produced in the experimental group in other words any change that we can produce in the human body with a pharmaceutical agent can be exactly reproduced in at least some individuals some of the time purely by a mind-mediated mechanism to me that is the most important single fact that's come out of this whole era seventy years of randomized uh controlled drug testing uh and that's what we should be trying to figure out how to take advantage of and make happen more time it's something that doctors who i train ask a lot they say this and i'm assuming you've heard this a lot as well you know dr weil dr you know i understand what you're saying but you know patients don't patients just don't do what i tell them to do and i find that language and that phrasing very telling in and of itself what i tell them to do i think is potentially problematic and there's this kind of thing that oh you know i know everything but the patients just don't do what i ask them and one thing i teach um doctors is when i get asked what's the most important thing i've learned in 20 years of seeing patients my answer is always connect first educate seconds and i always say yeah and also to model behavior for patients as i said this earlier that you have to model you have to embody the changes that you want to see in others so uh you have to model health for your patient but i mean i totally agree and i what i why i'm so passionate about that is i've realized that until the patient across the table from you has really connected with you made eye contact like really felt heard i just don't think they're that willing or that engaged to then take the next step whereas if we just rush in to give the solution it just doesn't work that well and then if you take that outside medicine because what is the patient doctor relationship well it's a relationship isn't it so how does it work with your partner or your wife or your children you know who responds well to just being told what to do it's always about feeling seen feeling heard really really having someone validate who you are and how you're feeling before you take that next step and i it's such an obvious thing again we're not taught it in medical school but for me uh that's why that is one of the big truths that i've learned from seeing thousands of patients and i'm i'm interested as to your view on that is that something you've come across before would you agree with that or would you modify that i very much agree with that by the way one of the reasons that i like doing the 478 breath with patients is that it establishes a very intimate connection with the patient to breathe with them uh they're not expecting that they're not used to that and i find that facilitates further connection uh also a a practical technique that we teach to the people that we train is motivational interviewing and this is a technique developed recently it's a dialogue that you have with a patient that helps you and the patient identify mental patterns that are obstacles to making changes in behavior and lifestyle and then helping them develop alternative mental patterns that facilitate the changes you want it's a very useful technique and it's something practical that can be taught i mean speaking of hippocrates that you mentioned before a phrase that popped into my mind was it's i think this is hypocrisy it's more useful to know what sort of person has a disease than what type of disease a person has and i think that really that is again something i figured out over over many years of getting frustrated and not being able to help my patients as much as i wanted to i sort of came to that truth that way and i i guess speaks to the power of the mind and how we're all sort of individual um you know you you mentioned the power of the mind sorry yeah go please no you made me think i just had a flash on being in medical school and being told by an attending physician here go see the gallbladder in room seven yeah it says it all doesn't it says it all yeah am i right in thinking that you've shared a story in the past where i think you had taken some form psychedelic mushroom potentially and whilst you were under its influence you were able to do a yoga pose that you had unable that previously you weren't unable to do only if you could just share that story because i i think that really speaks beautifully to how our mind can get in the way it's a an example of what the potential of these agents is it was actually lsd and i was i think 28 living in the in a rural area in virginia it was a beautiful spring day and i took lsd with a group of friends outside and i had been just starting to practice yoga i had been doing it for i don't know a month or so and one posture that i had a really hard time with is the plow where you lie on your back on the floor and you raise your legs and then try to touch your toes behind your head i got my toes within a foot of the floor and i had horrible pain in my neck and i just got stuck there i couldn't i couldn't do it no matter how much i practiced and i was on the verge of giving up i thought i was too old my body was too stiff and then under the on this day when i was under the influence of lsd i felt terrific my body felt really elastic i was you know wonderful i thought gee i ought to try that so i lay down and i was lowering my feet i thought i had about a foot to go and they touched the ground i couldn't believe it and i did it repeatedly i was just so joyful to be able to do that the next day i tried to do it and i got my feet within a foot of the floor and i had excruciating pain in my neck but there was a difference i now knew that it was possible and up to that point i didn't think so and so i kept at it in another couple of weeks i was able to do it if i had not had that experience i think it would have given up so you know i saw a possibility that i did not believe in and that motivated me and i think there's tremendous potential for uh psychedelics in in medicine not just in psychiatric medicine of showing people that it's possible to experience their bodies in a different way i think that's very applicable to chronic pain for example allergies autoimmunity uh but there's other ways of you know of of getting glimpses of that as well you know one of them is simply meeting a person who's had your illness and is now better and if i can arrange uh for patients to meet other people who have are well who've had their same illness that's a very powerful way of overriding any negative predictions they've had you mentioned psychedelics and sort of my feeling is that in america at least the things and the interviews and the conversations i consume from america a lot of quite prominent people seem to be talking about the potential value of certain psychedelics for certain conditions and i know i think johns hopkins i think lots of prestigious institutions research institutions are now studying this so i wonder you know you're someone who was i think studying marijuana and its effects on health in the 1960s a long time ago maybe one of the first people to do this yeah and one of you for any listeners who are naive to this who've never heard about this you're a super well respected doctor you train at harvard medical school could you just outline you know what are psychedelics uh how can they provide utility for people and why have they been demonized for so long well psychedelics are there there are two groups of them chemically there are natural sources of them and they're chemical sources of them these are substances that i think have extremely low potential for toxicity probably lower than any other drugs that we know of they can produce very dramatic psychological effects that are that are quite dependent on sentence setting on people's expectations and on the environment in which they're taken so the most common ones are lsd psilocybin uh masculine which comes from the peyote cactus psilocybin is from mushrooms there is a drug called mdma which is slightly different category marijuana cannabis is not a a psychedelic it's something else but there was a lot of research interest in these in the 1950s and some really wonderful research on them and then uh it all got shut down when uh in the wake of uh of the hippies and and uh timothy leary and uh very restrictive laws were passed against them and only now recently has this uh come about again and it's not just in the in the us although i think we're farther along canada is uh you know well along in making psilocybin available for the treatment of depression uh and there's actually a lot of activity in the uk with psychedelics as well and in some of the continental europes i think this is happening all over and that we're going to see very quickly that you know i think we'll see psilocybin made available for the treatment of drug resistant depression and anxiety mdma for uh ptsd which is a huge problem in in america among uh returning war veterans um so i think we're going to see these uh compounds made available for therapeutic use but at the same time there's tremendous interest in the general public in them in the free covid when i was traveling a lot and speaking uh whatever the subject i was talking about whether it was healthy aging integrative medicine nutrition uh the questions i got were about psychedelics you know where can we have can we make them how can we find guides experiences just tremendous mainstream interest i i think two months ago vogue magazine in the us had a cover story on psilocybin you know that that's the kind of mainstream interest that's really remarkable wow so you mentioned before when we were talking about um anti-inflammatory diets you mentioned green tea and i know you are a particular fan of green tea in in particular from what i understand it's matcha can you tell me about you know when you became aware of matcha what happened there and why you're so passionate about people drinking more of it when i was growing up tea was something drunk by old people and sick people and i drank iced tea heavily sweetened when i was 17 i had a chance to live in japan with japanese families and i really came to love green tea very good and i've seen nothing like that in america and i was also introduced at that time to matcha in the japanese tea sermon matches the powdered green tea that's whisked into a froth and consumed in the tea ceremony and i began bringing that back when i would go to japan and turn people on to it nobody'd ever heard of it in in the states and then sometime in the 1980s i think this was again way ahead of its time i formed a connection with a uh japanese company that produced matcha and tried to sell it through my website dr wild.com but it was not the right time for it and then uh it's been quite amazing to me to watch uh how fashionable matcha has become in recent years but i i was concerned that most of the stuff that people were drinking was not good quality because uh matcha is so finely powdered that it oxidizes very quickly and it loses its bright green color and and good flavor and so i wanted to make really good quality matcha available and i again formed a relationship with another japanese company near kyoto and uh formed a company called matcha.com machakari that's selling this and you know turning a lot of people on to this i think it's a wonderful product first of all there's a great deal of research on the health benefits of tea in general and green tea in particular a lot due to its antioxidant content matcha is different in that the leaves are grown in a way that increases the content of antioxidants and and it also has a high content of an amino acid called l-theanine that has a calming effect and i think that modifies the effect of caffeine and makes the stimulation of of tea and matcha in particular uh very different from that of coffee it does not have the jangling effect of coffee it does not leave you with a crash when the stimulation wears off people say it causes a state of calm alertness that i think is very desirable so i think it's a good thing much is also beautiful and and delicious and i'm going to have a bowl of it after we finish talking 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 uh 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 um 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 but 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 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 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 in 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 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 i'm trying 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 it 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 can 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 hamlet's 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 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's 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 what i was asked 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 so 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 have you 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 from his gp but nonetheless 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 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 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 if we move on to nutrition tommy in terms of what kind of things we should be eating to build a healthy brain i'd be interested in your view there and also i wonder if you could touch upon why a healthy brain is important because it's yeah we want to build a healthy brain and then often we think about the other extreme which is when our brain doesn't work when we're 70 or it doesn't work as well but we forget that there's this long latent period where our brain function can start to decline before we even get symptoms so just a couple of things there which i wonder if you could just sort of expand upon yeah sure so so actually before we um get into that you mentioned earlier about this hyper focus on on nutrition in terms of what's essential for for long-term health um and when i think about the things that a healthy body a healthy brain requires long-term right so nutrition is important um but so is sleep or circadian rhythm right like when it's light dark when it's dark movement um some kind of stress mitigation and then social connection probably those are the things that i think are going to underpin most of the stuff you know those are the biggest rocks that you know that you can move to to improve long-term health i i think that the more you neglect any one of those areas the more you have to become hyper focused in another so when people are talking about restricting restricting restricting from a dietary sense and that could be total calories it could be fat it could be carbohydrates could be protein all of them have been vitified by different groups for for essentially the same reasons um i think that the reason why we had to become so hyper focused and so restrictive to a large degree um and actually any one of those approaches can have can have benefit depending on the person in front of you um it's because we are neglecting the other things we're neglecting movement we're kept neglecting sleep and and circadian rhythm and neglecting social interaction social connection um and so so that's that's that's one reason it's also something that's very easy to sort of like quantify whereas it's hard for me to say you know it's easy for me to say oh you should stop eating carbohydrates it's much harder for me to say um oh you should go and make new friends right that's much harder um and so i think that's one reason why we're hyper focused so the more you neglect the others that you have to sort of like really sort of focus in on another one because those other systems are being uh are not getting the attention um that they should um in terms of building a healthy brain um i mean the easiest way to to think of it in my mind is well what is the brain made up of um and it's mainly made up of fat and cholesterol um and the you know that that in our modern nutrition environment sounds very scary i'm not telling you that you should you need to eat a whole load of fat and cholesterol actually your brain makes its own cholesterol the the and it makes it from from precursors that could be glucose or could be ketone bodies when you're a baby ketone bodies are essentially the preferred precursor for making new fats making new cholesterol um and but one of the one of the things that's very important um is dha the long chain omega-3 fatty acid that you get in seafood and there's going to be some variation in terms of what amount people need and it's probably going to be based on um their ancestral background so there's some evidence to suggest that people who are of a more northern um ancestry um so people like me uh we got most of our most of our long chain of polyunsaturated fatty acids from food from seafood so i'm probably gonna do better uh with more you know direct from the source whereas people who live close to the equator may have gotten more sort of precursors like alpha-linolenic acid which is the omega-3 that you might get in nuts and seeds and then we make our own dha and there's a whole whole host of other things that can influence that but there is going to be some sort of individual variation it's just the point that i'm trying to trying to make but dha is incredibly important and it's accumulated very actively in the brain in the last trimester of um of pregnancy so the last three months or so and it's basically being actively depending on the amount in the mother is being actively regulated how much is passed on to the baby and then basically all of it is ending up in the brain and then some is put in the fat stores um and humans are the only primate that has significant fat stores when it's born and that's largely because it's a repository of these important things to then support the brain and again because babies are born with an incredibly demanding brain human babies um and it's you know we need these fat stores to support to support it's one of the reasons that we have the brains that we do so dha is incredibly important um lots of other things you know will come up so uh things like choline can be very important again you might get that from eggs liver organ meats potentially and then when i think long term something that is probably having a negative effect on the brain is really large swings in blood sugar and there's there's a lot of data to support that you know if you're eating foods that cause very very big spikes in blood sugar that's probably over time going to have a negative effect on your cognition and there are some studies that suggest that people with diabetes if you improve their blood sugar control you improve their cognitive function and this can happen over years you know and you and again we're normally told that it's like this inexorable decline over time whereas actually we have plenty of evidence to suggest that we can reverse that as long as we improve uh some of these factors so so it's just um i think it's very positive and empowering to say you know wherever you are today there is potential for improvement if you're you know sort of capable and able and and and and you know interested in doing that there's a few different threads there so you mentioned dha you mentioned that potentially your ancestry may influence what you thrive best on so you were talking about yourself and how your ancestors probably got a lot of seafoods um and then you mentioned people who might like my own ancestry would have been you know from india sort of near the equator and potentially we can actually make that dha that typically you would get from seafoods we might be able to make that from non-animal sources yeah it's interesting that my ancestors potentially did that but they're not they you know my parents emigrated to the uk i've been born and brought up here so my microbiome i'm sure has changed significantly to adapt to my new environment so we can there's a whole world of complexity here to try and unpick as to what someone like me should potentially do then is it more to suit the local environment where i live is it more to do with how my ancestors lived but then i think the wider point for me is there is this big sort of debate isn't there you know dha imports it for the brain so typically you get that from seafood and animal products and then people who prefer plant-based diets are saying well you can take ala we can supplement to make that and i think the truth is that different people probably do well on different approaches depending on all kinds of different factors but how would you unpick your way through that i think where we are currently it's very difficult for me to say because of your ancestry because of um what generation of immigrant you are to your new to your current place um to then say this is how you should shouldn't eat i believe we'll get to a point where we can do that um i believe very strongly that you can't use genetic testing to tell you what you should eat most of that is complete nonsense um and so this is kind of in that box so so when i'm talking about so particularly polyunsaturated fatty acids there have been studies where they look where they look at whether uh populations based on their ancestry do better with plants or animal based sources of of poofers polyunsaturated fatty acids omega-3s and omega-6s and so in broad strokes i can tell you that people of your ancestry will probably do better or are are more likely to thrive using plant-based sources than than mine but that doesn't mean that you will do better uh on plant-based sources than i will or vice versa so i think a lot of the confusion um and this can come from you know pretty much any area in health the the confusion comes from conflating what can we say on a population level versus what can i recommend the individual and they are very very regularly not you know they are essentially mutually exclusive i can't take anything from a population level and and say this will definitely help this individual now both are important because you may want to identify groups at risk for certain conditions and then you know all of medicine is is applying statistics and hoping that you're going to improve an outcome right so when you do a clinical trial you see you know you give half the group an active drug you give half group placebo you generate something called the number needed to treat how many people do you need to treat so that one will benefit and often that number is quite high right so you're treating a lot of people so that one will get benefit on average right so there's almost no example in medicine or health where the same thing helps everybody so so all we're doing is playing the statistics and this is just this is just unfortunately how we have to work currently and and things will improve over time so for for fats is i think it's very difficult um we'll get to a point where you know we can measure some of these things but if i measure the omega-3s and it makes omega-6s in your blood it's a very very poor indicator of what's in your brain because there are transporters other mechanisms that are regulating that um so so that some people would say well you just measure the omega-3s in the blood that will tell you something about the brain unfortunately that's not the case but again these things will improve uh however one one area where we have made some improvement is in blood sugar control and there have been some really interesting studies first from the weissman institute in israel then um tim spector's group in london have done some some similar work and basically looking at based on an individual food a person you know when they're eating it what what the uh um sort of the context of that food is have they exercised recently is it breakfast is it lunch is it dinner um their genetics their microbiota um all these you know their their metabolic health in general uh you know what their fasting blood sugar is then there's a huge amount of variability in how and how different people respond to the same food so if i eat a banana i'll have a very different blood sugar response to when you eat a banana and all of those factors are going to play a role there so i think we can to a certain extent um that we get we're starting to get to a point where we'd hope to be able to predict it right so maybe i can measure some things in you and then i'll say well this is how you're going to respond to bananas so you're going to respond to pasta this is how you'll respond to a cookie um but um we can also do it ourselves to a certain extent um so we can you know there's this increasing uh interest in continuous blood sugar monitoring or just testing your blood sugar after meals see how you respond um and again this is this is kind of this is not something that i'm not saying everybody needs to do it i'm just saying this is probably the area where we're the closest to being able to understand her like into individual variability and even then it's quite uh an intensive process and that's just with blood sugar so then when you think about all the different fats all the different micronutrients protein carbohydrates um you know we're really miles away from being able to understand how one person should should eat for their for their uh individual health so then it really comes down to um personal preference to a large extent and then some kind of iterative process whereby you know maybe you measure maybe you do use the blood test or maybe you just like how do i feel right subjective quality of life subjective health is one of the best predictors of long-term health um and and so we at the moment we just have to be guided by some of that because the rest you know people are working on it but it's incredibly complex and we're not there yet yeah i mean that question how do i feel so so powerful but just hardly ever spoken about it's about you know like i say on this podcast this is about helping people become the architects of their own health which is the place i want to put them into where they feel yeah i can i can absorb this information from the experts or from you know people who've got experience in a certain area but then i can start to put it through my own filter and go well does this work for me does it work in the way i live my life with my family with my work patterns um you know and i think i think we've forgotten a bit about i don't know that autonomy that sort of sovereignty that actually sometimes we know what's best for our bodies not somebody else yeah absolutely and i think there has to be more humility in in people who talk about any given approach to improve health because if you actually go out in the real world and apply it you're gonna see it fail yeah a lot um and again that's not i i don't think that's a depressing message i think it's just a reminder that humans are incredibly complex um and we we essentially are the species that we are because we can thrive in almost any environment right there is no other you know multi-cellular organism that can thrive in the variety of environments and with the variety of exposures that we can and so all of those things are going to change what is going to be best for an individual so when you when you see any given approach fail you then have to step back and say well hey well this is a useful tool it's going to work for some people um or you know this is this is a useful tool for some people but it didn't work for me and that's fine right there's no arguments to be made there um and like like you said the question like how do i feel how does my you know how do i view my health even you know 30 years ago a question of somebody's subjective health how do you rate your health was one of the best predictors of longevity and mortality right on a scale of one to four you know very good good not very good or poor something like that you know and and so just asking yourself that question over time as you make changes being mindful of you know how is my body responding am i moodier you know do i feel less good when i go for my walk do i feel less able to concentrate um you know these can can be really good indicators um but again becoming really hyper focused on something does have its detriments but looking inwards and just you know you're checking in on yourself how do i feel after i've made this change is it you know positive or negative um i think it's going to get you a good chunk of the way yeah that's the brain health we were searching on dha we were talking about ancestry and just to sort of complete that then um you're saying that dha the fat is an important component for brain health in the womb when you're growing but also throughout life and if so what are those sources and how can we think about taking practical steps on that yes so particularly important um in the womb um or potentially if you're born prematurely which is a group that i frequently uh work with then you know making sure they're getting that um during that during that lot during that period when they would have otherwise been in the womb and then throughout life as well and so the your fat tissue um is incredibly important and one of the reasons why it's incredibly important is because it acts as a store for dha so some people estimate that the average person has maybe 10 years worth of dha for their brains stored in their adipose tissue so that means in their fat tissue so that means that you don't need to have it every day you don't need to be overly worried about how much you're taking in uh because you have a buffer that's one of the best ways to describe your fat tissue is an incredibly important buffer and but you know if you were to take in no dha and you're somebody who isn't very good at converting it from plant-based sources so you're not getting plant-based sources um because you eat a highly refined uh modern diet then you know there is you know you're going to run out of that store eventually and so you know i'm a big fan of seafood small fish um you know if we think about you know there is a risk of mercury contamination some other things in larger you know uh tuna and swordfish and other things so sardines um particularly good uh shellfish oysters um you can take you know there are there are algal sources uh krill sources you can take um a a as a you know as a supplement like if um if you're taking it as a supplement you know one or two grams a day is probably going to be enough for most people um you know if you're eating it from from seafood you know a portion once or twice a week is probably is probably going to be enough so it's not a huge amount um but but longer term i think it's definitely going to have an effect the other side of that is vegetable oils and there's there's uh if you exist in the nutrition space there is a huge amount of controversy around around vegetable oils because some people will say if you replace saturated fat with vegetable oils your cholesterol will be lower and that's going to lower your risk of heart disease other people will say the vegetable oils are incredibly inflammatory they're easily oxidized and then that can then cause issues including heart disease um and so i think there's a varied amount of evidence in both directions for those and that's why it's complicated but for the brain particularly when we look at um both the the data that we have from humans and it mainly comes from uh autopsies in children and from animal models including pigs which are very similar metabolically in terms of their gut and their brain to humans you see that if you have a large amount of linoleic acid which is an omega-6 largely found in vegetable oils in our diet if you have a large amount of that in the diet it seems to out-compete dha getting into the brain so in you know if we're just thinking about simple heuristics not eating a lot of fried foods is probably going to be number one for a number of reasons but that's going to be one because those that that's that's makes up a significant portion of the the caloric intake of or caloric content of fried foods and a lot of processed foods um and then just um you know making sure that you're eating some kind of whole food sources of some some omega-3s at the same time so reducing reducing your intake um you know just just if you're eating whole foods and cooking them at home as much as you can and again there's a lot of privilege that's involved in being able to do that it's not something we've talked we've talked about yet but but you know that's that we have to remember that as well but if you're reducing the intake of those vegetable oils um again just from sort of processed and fried foods then i think most of the problem goes away so you don't need to be like overly overly worried or um you know really hyper focused on that you know just just removing that component there and then you know making sure you're getting some um from from whole either seafood or plant-based sources that's probably going to be good enough right it doesn't doesn't require anything harder than that so you're saying that the the we've got these omega-3s as dhas and we've got these omega-6s which we were talking about a lot of them come in their vegetable oils and in highly processed foods and fried foods and they're sort of competing so one option is to increase omega-3s but you're saying actually a really good option that will have multiple benefits is reduce how much processed food you're having how many vegetable oils are in your diet and actually automatically that's going to mean ratio wise there's more omega-3 there and you're going to get all the knock-on benefits as well uh beyond just vegetable oils and sort of oxidized vegetable oils that you that you get from whole food diets is that effectively what you what you're saying there tommy yeah exactly and and you know depending on the nutrition camp that you're in uh people get very hyper focused on a specific a specific intake a specific ratio you know they start looking at the omega-6 and omega-3 contents of all their foods and trying to increase you know decrease one and increase another to improve the ratio i don't think that anybody really needs to do that i think if we just focus on reducing the most significant contributors which have a number of potential negative health effects which are processed and fried foods um and then we are just getting some whole food based sources you know if it's fish once a week or you know chia seeds in your in your in your morning porridge or something which is a good plant source of ala which is a precursor to dha you know just just by doing that is probably going to going to get you most of the benefit when we do talk about vegetable oils is it the vegetable oils per se or is it how they're cooked and if they're fried and if they're heated yeah i i think both is actually important so the linoleic acid the this main omega-6 in in vegetable oils in its native state seems to some i don't think we necessarily understand exactly how or why but it seems to compete with dha getting into the brain um and so you know and if you have a huge amount of of that as forming part of this the fat content of the diet then you seem you seem to see less dha in the brain um and that's regardless of how that oil comes um but equally there's also some some increasing literature on the breakdown products um where it's become oxidized you know which which happens with high heat repeated heating cycles so if you think about the the uh the fryer at mcdonald's it's you know goes through multiple cycles on and off being heated and cooled heated and cooled and that's something that definitely increases the oxidation of the oil um and that seems to have a negative effect on brain health as well and there's some data in humans and also in animal models so i think um i think it's a bit i think it's a bit of both uh really um however i i don't think we should be demonizing these things and just saying they're definitely bad they shouldn't be in the diet so you know when we talk about vegetable oils what are we talking about um so i'm talking you know sunflower oil um refined rapeseed oil uh which again is uh soybean oil these are very you know these are the ones used in commercial fryers in um you know fast food restaurants um sunflower oil not as bad actually because there's a lower little layeric acid content it's more modern unsaturated fats more like olive oil so again olive oil uh a very good option um coconut oil avocado oil butter tallow if you're a carnivore you can use the rendered fat from your cow so when you're cooking with these in normal amounts at home i don't really think it's worth it's worth worrying about obviously if you're deep deep fat frying at home the same applies but if it's just in a pan to saute some vegetables or you know cook a bit of chicken or something i'm much less worried about that you know what you know i think again if we think about the the big rocks that you want to move if you can if you're using a bit of sunflower oil at home to cook yourself a stir fry um rather than getting a big portion of chips um that was sort of you know the the the the the total exposure and the nature of it is very very different um so so again if you can bring it back to cooking whole foods at home you're able to do that you have the facilities and the resources to do that then i then i i think a lot of the problem goes away there's talk that these oxidized fats can stick around in our body for a long period of time um and is that something you know that we should be thinking about so you know a lot of people like some fries for example which of course is likely to have been cooked in multiple reheated vegetable oils which presumably will be super oxidized and drive inflammation in the body i would imagine um crisps are a very common snack here in the uk i think even people who uh like to follow whole food diets find it really hard to resist you know fries and crisps and those things of course are highly processed and just in terms of you know one thing i love about your approach and why i think i resonate with it so much is because it's there's real balance there there's there's real sort of it's not about extremes necessarily it's about saying look here are the big levers to turn don't worry about these small things if you're turning those big ones and i just wonder when it comes to things like fries and crisps you know that oxidized fat can stick around i think in the body for quite some time so it's not about demonizing it necessarily but just helping people understand why they may not be the best choices certainly in high amounts i don't want to be too prescriptive but i think we need to talk about these things yeah it's it's a very important question and i think the the natural tendency is for people to basically say they're terrible for your health you should never eat them um and there's really no evidence to support that idea although like mechanistically like you say biochemically yes these things can hang around for a long time um but the one of the most important aspects of all of this to me is to control the things that you can control and then the ones that you can't control or you're not willing to control for whatever reason are things that you shouldn't worry about right um and because i think that the process of worrying about it is worse than the process of doing the thing itself right so if you have a bag of chips once a month because it's your treat on a friday night um i would much rather you do that and enjoy it and it's you know part of your overall you know health and well-being then worry about what the fat that's on those chips is gonna do in your body like i would really hope that you never that you don't do that because the the effect of worrying is probably going to be more significant than the effect of the fat on the chips so it's very much about just thinking about you know what am i trying to achieve what can i meaningfully control that doesn't have a negative effect right because if if you feel like you're being restricted because you can't have your monthly friday night chips that's going to have a negative effect on your physiology and and people who you know who feel more um restricted dietary then have some knock-on effects like they have higher stress hormone levels and things like that like it has an effect on your physiology so to the extent that you can and are willing to change something do that that's great um it's going to have you know it's definitely going to have an effect on your health but when you get to a point where it feels restrictive long term a it's not going to be sustainable and b is going to have a negative effect on you so so yes i think that people should minimize their intake of vegetable oils and fried and processed foods i still eat those things and it's a big part of you know occasionally and it's a big part where it's important to me to if i'm going to do it i'm going to enjoy it and then not feel guilty about it because the guilt is going to be worse than the food itself sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation hi there this is a series of videos that gary and i have created to help teach you about something called the desk jock you work out which is one of the workouts in my book feel better in five like everything else is designed to only take five minutes and it's particularly good for people like many of us these days who actually sit down at desks we're at keyboards we're looking at screens we're sort of hunched over and that can have a lot of downstream consequences whether it's a bit of pain a bit of stiffness or an impact on our posture so this is a really great little um workout i guess that i use with many of my patients gary taught it to me and i think it's gonna have a lot of benefits so this video we're gonna teach you how to do movement one there are four movements and there's gonna be three more videos where you can see movement two three and four but movement one is called war cogs now it's probably not a movement you're familiar with so this one i think is quite careful it's quite important that gary actually shows you guys how to do it whilst teaching me i mean i do do this movement it's very easy to get wrong you don't need to worry about it too much but you know hopefully gary you can find a bit of guidance here yeah sure a couple of things we have this idea of good posture we have a secondary idea of bad posture and we've compartmentalized those in in in that way whereas what i'd like that to be able to do is to for us to explore both good posture and bad posture using the wall um so that our brain can get a sense of how we move into both ends of that spectrum and mobilize all of the muscles tissues and bones so the wall gives us a opportunity to experience this movement in line with gravity whereas we normally have a forward head or forward pelvis or something that's pulling us forward and out of that gravitational line and the cogs is because we're looking with the idea of them operating like cogs on a clock and so the first cog is your pelvis and the second cog is your rib cage and the third cog is your skull um and effectively what we'll do is i'm going to guide you to tilt this cog and you'll see an opposite movement at this cog and an opposite movement at this cog and that will create the spinal shape that we're getting so you just pretend i've never done this before and you just taught me through it yeah sure so there's a few stages um the the first thing is your feet won't be flat against the wall because you'll feel like that will pitch you forward so an inch or two forwards but generally your heels will be under your hip bones your back your bum and your back upper middle upper back and the back of your head will go against the wall now some people will actually find that their head is so far forward it's a long long way back and i think i must say that's something probably that i find quite difficult and it's maybe because i've developed a forward head posture like many people have these days um but you can still do the movement right you can still do the movement and if it's really far forward you can you can even use a book to support it just to create a wall reference for you and so you can see with the lean back the the chin is lifted quite high so the first thing we're going to ask you to do is you take this part the occiput this lower part of your skull here and you're going to slide it up the wall and when that goes upwards against the wall it will bring the nose down and what you might notice with roman is as the nose come down you notice his rib cage starts to lift up and then i ask him to soften off again so just goes back here and the rib cage drops down again and slides up the rib cage comes up and softens down again and what we're effectively doing is starting to make the shape so if you lead with the skull the rib cage comes up you'll see that he creates a space against the wall in the back and then soften off again so the ribs come down and i want you to go all the way until you flatten your spine against the wall so there's no gap so there's no gap anymore so and what we've got here is a little bit of space so i'm going to ask where i'm going to lift this up at the pelvis and you flatten the whole spine yeah and then from here you lead pull yourself up tall and let everything follow again so keep going up up up with the back of the head and that creates the arch in the back and then to drop down again and use that pelvis and rib cage pushing back to fill the space in the wall and then rise up again cool so just a couple of those and i'll just add in this idea of breath so as you slide the head up the wall you breathe in so as you get this expansion of the rib cage you breathe into the lower ribs and then breathe out as you as you go back in the opposite direction now we're going to look at in another video we're going to look at arm spirals but i'm going to show you how they contribute to helping this movement as well so as you are sliding this contact point up the wall ribcage is rising you generally gently start to rotate the arms out oh that's lovely and that will start to expand this even more and open up the um the the chest and as you come out again so breathing out bring the contact point all the way back to the wall let this rib cage just drop and the arms have rotated in then you can lead with your hands and slide the back of the head up the wall and sequence that all together and so here this is what i called at the beginning of the video good posture and if you flip out again breathing out arms rolling in find the contact point against the wall and this is starting to look like our bad posture albeit head still over rib cage over pelvis in that gravitational line and so you're actually able to experience one position the other position which is a full um opening of the front of the spine and an opening of the back of the spine so that all the muscles yeah on the side get to be working what i'll add because i learned this a few years ago actually um when i first started studying with you and it does take a little bit to get your head around this movement it is quite a foreign movement to what we're used to but it's worth persevering because you really do feel um a really sort of refreshing kind of mobility in your spine and your chest and um you're kind of teaching that the optimum way for the various parts of the body to actually move aren't you these these three cogs how they should be moving in conjunction with the other ones well they should be moving one on top of the other that's the biggest challenge that we have when the idea of forward head that everybody knows about a forward head but what it does is it brings these three things off axis so the head comes forward leaves the hips behind or leaves it pulls the rib cage forward and no longer can they articulate in this way that they're able to and therefore no longer are they able to target the muscles on the front of the neck and the back of the neck you're going to end up in a very limited position so exploring both and i like what you were saying you will find it hard many people find it challenging it's not the easiest sequence to put together but if your head is forward for the first time you come back and start this movement it's a brand new experience yeah and it is it'll be easy to give just really simple exercises that are easy you're sort of familiar with but i think this one's a very very important one because it addresses one of the big issues out there i guess mobility and posture wise today and there's many reasons for that which we can maybe expand on another time or maybe in a podcast um but it's it's just something i think that really i've experienced a huge benefit um this one as well as the other three movements in the desk jock you work out once you get the hang of it you can do it in five minutes right it doesn't say long you don't need any equipments you don't need to go to a gym you don't need to buy anything you don't even need to get changed i've got many patients actually who do this particularly once you have sat down in offices you know and hence the name the desk job they do it at lunch time right right at the start of their lunch break they just spend four to five minutes doing this and it just almost kind of resets things and for many people it can really help with back pain neck stiffness at the end of the day and all kinds of other issues so i'm a big fan of really encourage you guys to to give it a go i think a lot of the movements come down to this idea of choice so when i sit at a desk all day long i'm in a fixed posture all day long and i choose to sit in that posture all day long and i then begin to forget all the other choices i've got the one of standing up tall and so we talk about making sure you can access both so if you're going to live here we don't need to come out and be here and categorize this as good by by being able to go in and out on a regular basis means that i'll choose somewhere that's more comfortable where i can easily access both and that's the choice and that's one of the things i really like about gary's approach is it's not really about good or bad or good posture or bad posture it's about these are the range of movements that a human being can experience and should be able to experience i guess if we're all there in our bone structures yeah if we're functioning optimally and because of the way many of us live these days and again this is not me putting blame on people i also live this way a lot of the time it is having a consequence and actually by putting in five-minute workouts a 5-minute movements like these into your day actually you can change the consequence of the fact that you have a desk job even at 60 or 70 years old a few simple lifestyle changes with patients or with the public has been shown to increase their performance on cognitive tests and i think that's really empowering for people when they think oh well i didn't do this i've had a stressful life yeah wait a minute there are still things you could do too late so let's go through what are some of the things that people can do let's do a 24-hour day consider skipping breakfast a couple of times a week in neuroscience journals and from what we know about the biology of it that intermittent fasting going 16 hours couple of times a week without eating glucose will your liver will run out of its glucose reserves it'll burn fat into these things called ketones the brain is a hybrid vehicle it's not all gas it's not all electric it likes both and so if you have dinner at eight and it's monday evening consider having your next meal be midday the next day that's an easy way to get to 16 hours it doesn't mean you're fasting for days and days there is neuroscientific literature that intermittent fasting is good for attention and focus i would consider taking five minutes to just breathe deeply like you're doing now just bake deep breaths a couple of times a day three times a day for three minutes make it easy see how that works for you just the pause might be helpful now it's time to eat the food you choose is important and there's delicious food to eat that's actually good for your brain and how do i know that well we don't have a pill for alzheimer's but we do have the mind diet which is essentially mediterranean food that if you look at a group of thousands of people over a long period of time they had less dementia so now that you've figured out the cadence of eating which is intermittent fasting skipping breakfast a couple of days a week now that you've brought in uh pre-lunch three minutes of just deep breathing that's meditative breathing choose plants choose nuts choose occasional fatty fish the fatty fish has omega-3s which is an essential component of your of of your brain it's the wrapping around all those connections that keeps those electrical signals firing faster and if you want to eat meat uh consider the mediterranean diet where it's fatty fish and poultry pass on the beef pass on the fried food pass on the processed food now if you do have a burger you're not going to undo what you did just make those things an indulgence rather than a habit a bit of exercise is great the brain likes exercise because it is flesh don't don't clog the plumbing to your garden because swaths of your garden will wither so people have strokes and injuries it's because blood flow is not getting into their brain that's the way to hurt the structure of your brain so what's good for the heart is good for the brain then the other thing it does is it bathes itself in these uh neurotrophic factors that's what my science is on bdnf brain derived and so that's what my grants are on when the brain exercises it showers itself it's not like thigh muscles release healthy brain chemicals that swim up there it's got its own pharmacy you give it the right behavior and interaction it'll reward itself so exercise keeps the plumbing open to the flesh of the brain as well as releases molecules that serve as miracle growth for the brain a couple times a week is a good place to start do we know what specific exercise is good for the brain to good for bdnf levels some people are starting to suggest uh some strength training is an essential component so if you're just running a marathon you might want to throw in some light weights but more a little bit more exercise than you're currently doing is is what the brain is going to say hey i like this direction i'm going to shower myself with bdnf yeah exactly and i think we can look strength training i'm a huge fan of strength training i do think we undervalue muscle mass in society and in health but generally speaking for most of us if we just increase how much we move get vertical even yeah get out of the chair that's gonna that's gonna help just the postural elements of standing yeah is a first step next thing you know you're walking make sure you know you're taking the stairs uh so these are simple things these are free things uh if you can i like to read something completely unfamiliar i've got a stack of old magazines and just flip through just just new new content for your mind and i think it's since it's thinking flesh and of course it likes blood it likes to be irrigated of course it likes a certain kind of diet because of the components and needs but it also wants to think if you ask usain bolt how do you get your thigh muscles stronger it's take some stairs well how do you get your brain to be healthier think and everybody's level next level of thought and challenge is individual we don't all have to do the same puzzles we don't all have to have the same career but get out of your comfort zone if you will just with the thoughts so flip through something different on your phone read something different on your phone develop a new habit i think that's important and then for those of us who have creativity as an ambition and have the luxury of having creativity as an ambition because we're all wildly creative in our dreams and people are finding that when you uh on the transition from awake to a sleep and from sleep to uh waking up it's called hypnagogic and hypnopompic there's actually those same alpha waves that we've been talking about just for 10 20 minutes as you drift into sleep and your tasks are done and salvador dali mentioned that like he uses sleep as a psychedelic tool for creativity to solve problems it's not going to happen every time but i like to look at my riddles at the end of the night in my and i have a notes app and i write a few things and i wake up and i write a few things that transition is like sort of a strange portal to your subconscious and again based on science if you put some electrodes on a brain at that time you have those alpha waves that we talked about awake but focused and calm and you also have these other waves these delta waves that waves that are light sleeping early dreaming it's the only time where you have both awake and asleep waves and i've heard in one of your articles sorry i've read to one of your articles that you say leave a pen next to your bed so that you can actually take advantage when those creative thoughts come just before that or just when you wake up you can actually just jot them down and yeah and uh yeah that's that's incredible you said learn new things yeah and how important can learning a new language be oh it's an essential thing and whether you get it right is actually secondary it's the it's the process of trying to learn so language music the act of learning makes your brain say god i gotta pull from different pathways i gotta get to different corners of my mind it's actually an energy consuming activity and and that's what engages the the greatest corners and recesses of your mind is to learn new things particularly music particularly languages social interactions we know these things and now i'm just trying to give you a biological basis brain's efficient if it wants to fall into its rut and breaking the rut in a constructive way is going to be good for your brain globally as your mind thoughts and emotions as well as the flesh that's that's one strong way to stave off dementia yeah and that's very powerful you know keeping your brain active trying new things and i think what you said was super empowering it's not about whether you can actually master that language it's not about whether you master playing the piano just the process of trying to yeah that's going to do all the groundwork and all the sort of heavy lifting in the brain which which is super empowering what impact does music have on our brains that we know and there's actually uh somebody in san francisco or somewhere else he's putting musicians in fmri scanners and those scanners don't tell the whole story but they do tell something new compared to just putting electrodes on somebody's head our brain flesh is electric it's i think of it as a jellyfish it's the tentacles are spraying chemicals and electricity we can detect it from the surface of the brain and we can actually put people in machines and look at blood flow and when you do that for musicians it's really interesting because it's a physical performance if you're learning to play music i think i want to pivot from listening to music music to learning to play to me learning to play music that seems to be the thing that leads to the most left right right left connections and electrical currents passing through the corpus callosum your brain's like a walnut there's a bridge in the middle and music hearing it playing it thinking about it using your fingers to control it seems to pull from the most corners of her mind and i can't imagine that not being good for you because as you know with the brain if you don't use it you lose it it will down regulate it will let wither certain corners of the brain if they're not actively engaged so i think music especially when you're a kid learning to play music has to be good for the brain you know what kids learning a new skill whether it's a sport or a musical instrument is likely to yield benefits um i think one of the one of the reasons for me that might apply is because it often puts you into flow states um you know and i think for adults as well you know when it when something's that you know it's not too difficult that it's unachievable it's a little bit a little bit harder that we have to concentrate you have to you access that flow state i find those people who get into the flow state and i think some people have uh you know may not know what that means and they may think that's kind of fluffy but there is a measurement for that so uh when you're awake the and resting in focus those are alpha waves if you look at for example sharp shooters just the moment before they hit a target likely athletes of football are scoring something nfl quarterback ballerina the the release from the constraints of thought that come from your frontal lobe and letting a well-trained behavior exert itself the brain is actually less active it lights up less brightly it's more efficient in its pathways and that flow state is an alpha wave that's detectable similarly with buddhist monks likely with deep divers before they do their dive it's a state of being focused awake and calm and i think our phones and the technology and everything we're doing is pushing us away from that so if we can find skills and habits that let us harness that channel it know how to get into it that would be great i think learning music and like to say with music learn it and then let it go that's that alpha wave flow state that i think could be very beneficial for anybody to learn music when we learn a new skill we are you know rationally we're thinking about it we're trying to learn all those movements that we need but then when we need to perform you know we just want to have absorb that forget about you know rationally thinking about everything and just let it go is is that the key to allowing our brain to function at its peak it's you learn and you then develop mastery and then you let it go so you just allow it to perform yeah and i think let's let's dig into that a little bit deeper i don't think when a surgeon is is moving swiftly and with minimal trauma to tissue or a footballers making their moves and you're thinking well this seems effortless they look relaxed they're moving in a way that is is efficient it's not it's not strained you can see it in their face they're not trying and thinking most people will have a flow state when they're not under pressure and the lights aren't on the challenging thing for athletes is how to deliver that under the stress of a game-winning situation and and clutch performance to me that flow state is not performing better than what you would do in practice but just doing what you would normally do under these extremely anxiety provoking stressful conditions so for people listening to this who are not high performing athletes i think there's a lot of take-home there for them so i submit that we all want peak performance in our lives whatever whatever our life entails whatever we need to do whether it's be a father whether it's to be a good office worker what would be a neurosurgeon whatever it is we are all i think on some level wanting to perform at our peak so what can somebody listening to this or watching this on the video learn from what you've just said that athletes can do how can they use that to help them in their daily lives the lessons we learn from athletes in ballerinas and other people apply to everybody and so when we speak about what people can do uh when they're stressed out on an l.a freeway when they're about to go into a meeting with a boss and you're anticipating something not going well when you're coming home and your relationship hasn't been good the time tested method and the one that we now know see i don't want to just tell you things without telling you how i know and why i have the privilege to be even asked that question to me is meditative breathing it's a very powerful way to quell that anxiety storm that those instinctive structures have done i'm going to see my boss and those subcortical structures are firing and they're unhappy much like you'd see a snake or you're at the edge of a cliff there's certain things that should be released in your body but those have been repurposed in a negative destructive way where we feel that at work we feel that at home we feel that when we look at certain social media how do we tap that down just like we would slowly walk away from a fear of heights how do we walk away from just the general anxiety that's filled our life during the day and i deeply uh believe and particularly now because there's hardcore data i'll go into this a little bit is meditative breathing i don't know what mindfulness is i don't know what your mind is thinking or my mind is thinking or your mind is thinking but i know that that the brain is connected to the lungs and the heart through this thing called a wandering nerve it comes down and that that the brain can send signals down to your heart and buddhist monks can slow down their heartbeat i know when i put a little coil on there for people with epilepsy kids with epilepsy a vagal nerve stimulator and we send electricity the electricity can actually go upward into your brain and quell epilepsy epilepsy seizure is an aberrant uh electrical activity of your brain think of it as an arrhythmia your heart is epilepsy the brain it's called a vagal nerve stimulator it's been around for a while this is something you can look up right now we put electrical coil on this nerve and it calms electricity it's not even in the brain but meditative breathing deep breathing an in in a count of four to go in a count of three or two one to hold and slow release if you do that just a little bit before you engage in that next stress-provoking task it too works like a vagal nerve stimulator without us having to do a little surgery to calm the electricity in your brain and you're saying okay that sounds where did you get that well well you know you know meditation's been going on for a long time we've seen buddhist monks do certain things and others deep divers are a great example of that but we we know this now because the study came out last year they went through like meditative breathing with these patients and these kids and these young people and they're watching the electricity change and get closer to that alpha wave get closer to the calmer electrical signals in their brain after just deep slow deliberate breathing it is a resource available to you that has been harnessed for for millennia and that now you have crazy brain surgeons providing you the electrical proof if you're a skeptical kind of person to me that's magic yeah absolutely and i think you know it brings a lot of weight to this to this term just breathe i mean it's it's deceptively simple but it really works and i know this year i'll be giving a lot of um talks to companies about wellness and how they can improve productivity and what's really interesting is that a breath that i sort of use with my patients something i've written about a lot is the three four five breath when you breathe into three you hold for four and you breathe out for five yeah and when i'm talking to people a group i'll i'll often will collectively do just one of those breaths together which takes about 10 or 12 seconds and i ask people straight away how do you feel how can you feel a difference just on one breath and about 80 percent of people put the hand up and that's just one bread you do that a few times as i say to them five of those three four five breaths takes one minute you will put your body in a different state because breathing is like information for your body and it's responding so it's interesting that you know you as a neurosurgeon before a big operation will use breathing yeah thank you for that and thank you for um allowing people to find things about themselves uh that can help themselves you know because that in itself is power also i always like to lead the listener with some really actionable practical tips that they can apply in their own lives immediately to improve the way that they feel or improve the way that their brain functions so what are your top four tips for people listening to this that they can think about applying into their own life um one would be uh get vertical that's the most essential thing when i see our patients who can come out of a bed and stand they grow you can see a withering flower come back to life if they can get vertical being standing and moving is very important for you wherever you're at just do a little bit more two make subtle but important changes in your diet get rid of the red meat and fried food add in some more of the mediterranean diet you're still going to enjoy what you're eating you can have a glass of wine salmon red wine yogurt fruit it's not a tough thing it's just changing the direction of what you're eating find some puzzles find some content read a book do something unusual that will also be good and the fourth one i would say is you know try to find happiness it's the most elusive thing but we also know that people who have mental health issues or people who are depressed their brains start to change they are brain injured from the way they are thinking so if it's within your power to be happier to pursue relationships and crafts that make you happy that will probably be the best thing for your brain if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one that i really think you're going to enjoy give it a click and let me know what you think we shouldn't apply that same sledgehammer approach to these chronic diseases that actually have got lifestyle as a root cause that's going to have an impact on your alertness on your mental functioning on your mood but it's more than that

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 110,224

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: N1uAUP50ShA

Length: 123min 25sec (7405 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021