Harvard Professor: "You Will NEVER BE LAZY AGING After Watching This" | Daniel Lieberman

maybe we've got to broaden out what we recommend to people say you know it doesn't matter how you move your body you just want to move it more and find what actually works for you but are there any sort of universal principles when it comes to movement that actually do work for all of us in terms of getting us to move i mean i again i go back to the simple i mean my you know i think there's two again two basic impetuses that have you know over over millennia have been the basis for how and why people move and one is because it's necessary and the other is because it's fun and for most people fun involves social um so sometimes you know sometimes going for a run by yourself or a walk by yourself is meditative and it's nice to be by yourself and you can think through a problem but for most of us you know we like to be with other people and so that's why park run is so successful it's social here in cambridge we have the november project every wednesday people do these wonderful runs and they run up the stadium and they do all kinds of great stuff we have you know all around the world there are various kinds of of social events they're you know dancing is social um uh playing a game of you know soccer or football is social i mean the list goes on right um and um and there are many ways to do it socially and i think so so that's critical um but but that's never going to be enough for some folks and and and you know exercise physical activity used to be necessary in our lives and that was the impetus that people had to get out and every day and and do work and so we need to find ways without coercing them un unethically uh to make exercise to make physical activity necessary and because it's not appropriate to tell adults that you can't they can't have the benefits of society unless they exercise right um we we need to help people help help themselves and i think the way to do that is through what's called a commitment contract so let me go again back to education in education we have education works on a commitment contract basis for adults right so i'm a professor in a university where people pay ghastly sums to go to harvard right i mean i think the tuition is and and and room and board and all that costs like 60 to 70 thousand dollars a year that's full of course most students don't end up paying that i mean the vast majority get financial aid so so don't worry most of my students are not fabulously wealthy actually many of them are first generation students because we have we're lucky we have really good financial aid but anyway somebody's paying 60 to 70 000 every year for them to go to school and there's some commitment from them to go to school and what are they doing they're having people like me torture them right i make them take exams i make them read books i make them stay up late at night studying and if they don't do well i give them a bad grade which you know which you know stigmatizes them for the rest of their life and and and but they do it willingly because because they've signed a kind of a commitment contract whereas whereas they're paying money for me to make them do stuff which they know is good for them which they otherwise wouldn't do for themselves and we do all kinds of other commitment contracts in our in our in our world and and i think exercise is should be part of that we should we should find exercise you know there are many so there's a wonderful program called stick.com it's a website run through uh some economists they used to be yeah i'm not sure if they're still at yale where you can basically pick either a stick carrot or a stick right and i describe this in the book because yeah you did yeah because there's a friend of mine in in san francisco who was who's been trying to lose weight and she uh gave stick.com i think two thousand dollars so not not a small amount of money and every week she agreed that she was going to walk a certain number of miles and if she didn't get those number miles in and her husband was a referee if she didn't do those miles as affirmed by her husband they would automatically send 50 that week to the national rifle association that's the big association that tries to prevent uh gun control laws in the united states and she is very very much hates the nra and wants to see gun and she has never missed a week of her walking since she's been doing that so she she signed a commitment contract put somebody behind it now that's a kind of an extreme one but there are other ways we can do it just through a friend i mean a lot of my early morning runs i don't you know at 6 a.m i do not want to run i promise you i mean no but i want to be in bed with my wife right but i often meet a friend of mine who's a cardiologist and he's at 6am he doesn't want to be there either but we kind of agreed the day before that we were going to meet each other at 6 a.m um to go for a run and usually we're just like irritated at each other and we don't even speak for the first you know 10 minutes and then slowly we warm up and i'm never unhappy that i did that run at the end but i i did it because i coerced myself through a commitment contract yeah very very practical and pragmatic approach i guess what you're saying is that the way we've typically encouraged physical activity has been you know very prescriptive you have to do this um you know if you don't do it you're not really looking after yourself you sort of have to rely we're very much putting it down to individual motivation individual willpower and what you're saying i i guess is that this is not working right we've not evolved to exercise we we're now living in a society where we simply don't have to anymore that necessity has gone so you need to find a way to make it necessary and the way you found of doing it is you're meeting someone so if your buddy has gone to the trouble of getting up early in the morning and goes to your agreed spot and you don't show up there is a bit of you know you have social pressure to show up which is why so many movement programs talk about you know doing it with other people right because if you're leaving up to yourself to motivate yourself there's going to be times like i know when i got into park run i remember thinking at the time i wasn't really a runner right and we can we can uh let let me put that another way i didn't perceive myself as a runner whereas now i do but i still went because i did it with my son uh is reason one and reason two is there was this big community there this really friendly community at park run so i just had to make sure that my son and i were at the start line by five to nine on a saturday morning and if that was if if i got there i would complete a 5k but if i had to do that myself even if i had to do that myself with my son i bet you some saturdays we wouldn't do it and so i think that accountability pieces is i think it's really interesting now you mentioned you're not a fan of coercion yet you write a very surprising certainly surprising to me you write about is it the swedish uh is it beyond the the swedish underwear sportswear manufacturer and i was mesmerized reading that story so i wonder if you could tell that and because that's actually taking a quite different approach right yeah i had so much fun doing that so i i was i was thinking about this you know because i the last section of the book the last quarter of the book is really about how to apply the sort of natural history of exercise to the modern world and i was interested in this idea of coercion and i wanted to see if i could find an example of people who are forced to exercise adults i mean we force kids to exercise in school but nobody nobody blinks an eye at that because we force kids to do all kinds of stuff and think it's totally acceptable because children can't make up their you know children aren't responsible for their own decisions but adults are and as i was i was searching throughout the world i was looking i was thinking about like monks in asia who were forced to do things and whatever and i was i wanted to you know i'm very into participant observation i like to try what i study and so you know that's why i've tried barefoot running and i've you know i tried it i tried to swipe chased animals on you know done done races against horses and you know i'm into that i like i like and we're going to come to all that believe me i like to put myself in the shoes of the or the of the the people i'm studying and um and so i i found on the web a few articles about the bjorn borg company is a company in sweden that makes mostly underwear but other kinds of sports clothing um it's no longer actually no longer owned by bjorn borg but it's um and and you know you know how those companies have those like little contact me thing so i you know late at night i i remember telling my wife i'd found this company and i'd read some articles and she said well contact them so i i i got on the contact page and i said you know dear bjorn board company i'm a professor at you know whatever i mentioned in this topic and i'm kind of curious to learn more and i remember going to bed and saying to hurry up i'm sure i'll never hear from them and then the next morning in my inbox was an email saying come and come and join sports hour come any time you want what would be happy to show you so i uh so i was on sabbatical and i had some time so i got on an airplane and i went to you know they were very kind and they told me when to show up so i i i showed up and they basically said i could talk to anybody in the company and you know i had to go to sports hour because at bjornborg company everybody has to exercise it's it's it's a requirement and there's a sports hour every friday i think it's 10 a.m and and there's no excuses unless unless you're injured right whatever or something like that if you're a board member or if you're a visitor it doesn't matter who you are if you sweep the floors if you're the ceo doesn't matter you go to sports hour and so i went to sports hour which is a really hard kind of crossfit workout it was great it was exhilarating i mean you could do it as hard as you want or as light as you want um and um and then they have all kinds of other events where they you know instead of a christmas party where everybody gets drunk they run through the streets of stockholm and have hot chocolate afterwards you know i mean it's a it's a delightful environment but of course you know not everybody liked it and some people left the company but some people were in the company love it and i just talked to folks about it and see to see how it worked and to my surprise it was that it was actually pretty popular um and um uh the people actually kind of realized that it was a beneficial thing but i should also say these are people who've drunk the kool-aid as we say in the united states right that you know everybody who really hated it has obviously left the company you know you wouldn't be in that company if you didn't think this was acceptable but um but you know the fact of the matter is that's as far as i can tell the only company in the world that does that and we're not going to find you know that's just not going to work in most places and we have to find other ways to make exercise necessary what's interesting about that company for me and you know you're absolutely right there is there's that inbuilt bias isn't there because people i guess some people if they know that about the company and that's not their kind of thing they may not even apply for a job in the first place if they start working there and they think this is a good idea but then they feel it's too much pressure there's you know there's some sort of camera camaraderie that they don't like or they don't thrive on they might leave um but it's an interesting model and i appreciate this cannot be rolled out across society there's a kind of ethical point there i think as well but you know i i wonder what you think about the ethics of that where a company says hey look we i and again i'm i'm not speaking for that company because i don't know the the ideology behind it but let's say a company felt that well we know physical activities is important because it will help the employees that will help them with their health and well-being it's going to help them concentrate focus be more productive it's a great way of bonding um you know i guess what what would happen if companies started to some companies were like well this is part of the culture here and if you want to work here this is sort of what we would be supporting it's it's quite a tricky one ethically isn't it because it could be done in a way where it's very supportive and it's like well if you just want to walk for that hour round the gym that's fine you know there's going to be no pressure on you from your manager or from the boss you know i know i know it you'd have to demonstrate that there's no discrimination by doing that but it's working there i mean could that be could that be you know you're saying that we need to take personalized approaches so could that work for some companies well i mean let's um let's uh let's let's let the question and ask did that used to work for some companies so so in the united states uh as in every every you know in europe universities are kind of like companies and every university until recently required students to exercise uh in the united states physical activity physical education was a hundred percent every single university in the country harvard included required physical education um and and you know going back to to the ancient you know greek philosophers and then you know that traditions in india and china everywhere in the world where you had educational systems which of course were for elite people right because peasants didn't go to go to school but but but wealthy aristocrats did with no exception educ exercise became part of people's education because people understood that there was a relationship between exercise and you know the body and the mind right mental health and physical health and that exercise is good for students and um that was dropped in the united states since starting basically in the 70s so harvard for example got rid of its physical education requirement in the 1970s um and now you know we see the see the results but these are adults you know these are 18 plus year old people and it was required and um so you know i think this and of course until recently everybody had to be physically active to get to work they had to you know walk to get to work they didn't have elevators to get them to their floor you know i mean we could go on with all the things that have changed in the world so we've kind of shifted our our our workplace and shifted our our schools without shifting the the the kind of how we approach our bodies and so maybe bjorn borg company is going back to something very ancient in a new way um but um but you know we the fact that we're so uncomfortable with it i think it's interesting um we're we're just so worried about about about about coercion and people's rights and and for good reason um but we're also um i think i think sometimes we you know we also i'm gonna probably get myself in trouble now um but look i think it's as you can already tell i'm very opposed to body shaming and fitness shaming right it's it's it's unacceptable um but sometimes i think because we're so worried about body shaming and fitness shaming we we go we go to the extreme and basically turn off the whole system yeah and and i wonder if the if if we can't have our cake and eat it too so to speak right can we find a way to help people be physically active without engaging in body shaming without engaging in fitness shaming and i think we can and again i'm going to go back to my commitment contract model because if let's just say you're you're unfit you're overweight you're struggling you hate to exercise but you want to you want to get you want to exercise now if i told you i had you had to go to a crossfit you know workout every week and you know do 150 burpees with the with this you know highly muscled you know you know nut case in front of you who's your boss you'd hate it right but if you could just walk 20 minutes a day climb the stairs right pick your own goal and work towards that you know that would fit your your fitness level your your your you know you could do it on your own you could do it with friends etc not in a way that is we can find ways for people to be more physically active that can accommodate every disability can accommodate every level of fitness can accommodate you know but but we we as a society we've been very uncreative about it we're we're we're not really willing to put in the time and the money and the effort to make it happen yeah and i think a lot of people get put off by gyms for example they've sort of been sold this idea that jim's if i want to get fit whatever their interpretation of fit is you know i want to i want to do my physical activity then it has to be at the gym it has to have a particular name it has to have particular clothes that i wear because if i don't it doesn't count and i for me as a doctor i find myself trying to break down that barrier with patients all the time i've often said now i didn't know about the these sort of tribes and these cultures for years who've danced but i've often said to to patients i said look do you like dancing they go yeah like dancing i said okay well let's start there why not you know just before dinner every night for 10 minutes have a dance in the kitchen put on the tunes and dance go yeah but do i need something more i said well let's start there and i've seen i've seen families bond over i've seen people's mood get better just from the act of dancing every day and you know a lot of people are conditioned to think oh no it needs to have you know i need to go to this particular class and then i need to buy the latest outfits and it's again that's the commodification commercialization of exercise right it's if it's it's now a product and you have to spend money on it and you know you have to uh you know and there's some there's there are people there to to to advertise to us that you know you can't run unless you wear these fancy shoes and you you have to have your fancy watch and all this sort of stuff and frankly i i enjoy fancy shoes and my fancy watch when i go running but we don't need it actually um and and it works for some people but it obviously is not working for the for everybody and so yeah again i think we need to we need to kind of step back from our western medicalized commercialized attitude towards exercise and take a broader view a broader perspective and if we just simply do that which is what my book tries to do we'll we'll we'll come up with all kinds of other wonderful solutions dancing is just one of them going for going for walks with your your like why for example do we have so many boring meetings where we sit around in chairs or now we sit glued to our bloody zoom screens right why can't we can we get up and walk right and have meetings on the hoof right um yeah there's so many examples of ways in which we could we could we could just encourage physical activity in a way that will make it both necessary and fun yeah now daniel a lot of the research you you did for this book has has taken you to wonderful places around the world to do what sound like from from where i'm sitting incredible things you know uh in tanzania you know you've stayed with hunter-gatherer tribes you've i think hunted kudu you've ran with horses and i'd love to sort of explore some of those because these are things that many of us have never done and i think there's something to be to be learned from that so i was going to ask you what has been some of the most surprising things that you've learned when you've gone and lived alongside indigenous tribes and and communities you've mentioned dancing did that surprise you and was there anything else that you discovered that you didn't previously know well i mean i i'm really lucky person i have a i'm such a you know fortunate to have a great job that you know i get paid to go have fun and travel around the world and study things that interest me i'm a i'm a ridiculously lucky person and i would say that um you know what surprised me the most is really i mean quite literally it's the story i tell in the beginning of the book which is um so i so which is that no people in these in these societies don't think what they're doing is exercise and for me that was the that was the that was the spark that started this book because i it was 2012 and i was finishing my previous book which is called the story of the human body and and in that book the kind of message of that book is we didn't evolve to be healthy and that book is about mismatched diseases how the how the modern world that we're live in is we're very poorly adapted to it in some respects that makes it get us sick in various ways but um um so i was finishing up that book and i went to highland mexico so i went to the iron man competition in in kona um this is a true story i'm not exaggerating anything here it was i was part of the medical conference at that that precedes the this incredible race which is just amazing you know people do a 2.4 mile open water swim then they do a 112 mile bicycle ride across the desert and then they do a full marathon in like 90 degree heat it's insane right and and the people who win like do it in like a little over eight hours i mean they're they're like cyborgs they're not real human beings like you know they're this just it's astonishing and then i got back you know working on the book and then went to highland mexico where i hired a guy to help me um go to really really remote areas to study the tarahumara were so famous for their running and um and you know i'd read about how they barefoot run and do these long distances and what i discovered was that first of all i didn't see anybody running barefoot whatsoever anywhere and i was traveling all over the place and and when i asked people about their running they were like well people did run in these traditional races um but other than that they didn't run and i had this like list of questions being a good anthropologist i had a i had a questionnaire which i had you know designed carefully and one of the questions was you know how do you train for your running and my translator couldn't you know was struggling to figure out how to ask this question because there was no word for for train in the native american language robbery and so she was trying to you know you practice you know she was just trying to explain to these and there was this one 70 something year old guy she asked and i remember him because he was really he was really he wasn't i don't know maybe that 10th or 12th person i was i sort of was measuring and studying and and he was a very serious fellow um he was he was a runner too by the way and the vast majority of people don't run very much he was a runner and he through the translator asked me why would anybody run if they didn't have to and he at first i was thinking this question i wrote is really bad i mean i wrote the wrong questionnaire and then i realized actually this is telling me something that that that you know people there run when they need to and they're but exercise is just not part of their their lexicon you know um training is not part of their lexicon and that kind of just permeated my brain as i started you know i took every opportunity i could to to do something where i you know i was in i was in the western ghats we were looking for barefoot runners and we were you know looking for people who were running there we were you know been into greenland and various places in africa etc you know every place i've gone i've noticed that people who are very physically active don't think of what they do in any way whatsoever as exercise um and to me i think that's been most surprising that was initially most surprising yeah i mean it's very powerful even though i've read that to hear you explain it it's very very powerful because it gets to the heart of what the problem in society is about getting us to move more right it's it's like these these communities don't have words for exercise or training it just doesn't exist because it's i guess it's necessity driven or it's or or you know what's really beautiful in the tarahumara when they run their long distance races it's a form of prayer for them i mean that's to me that's really beautiful it's spiritual right they run because they believe it makes them closer to god um what if we adopted that attitude right i mean it's such a beautiful thought right and it and and and and it does right and for them actually the concept of chase actually i had one of the balls over here actually this is one of the the balls they use in their in their foot race um and when they chase this ball the ball gets dirty etc and it gets lost and for them that kind of the randomness is like a metaphor for for life and for the vagaries of life and and it's it's really beautiful what they do and and and that's true of of the a lot of the sacred dances that people do and and the list goes on will they kick that ball around and follow it is that what would happen so they kind of flick it with their foot and it as far as they can and then they chase it and they find it again and they flick it and they chase it they find it they flick it and they'll do this they're two teams doing this and they'll do it until one team laps the other in a course yeah and sometimes the race can be 10 miles and sometimes the race can be 50 miles and and it depends on how they set up the race and what they agree on beforehand um but and they're betting wildly so you know they're it's a big social event and and it's fun it's it's but it's also a form of prayer yeah this is something i explored in a conversation uh with sanjay rawal i don't know how many episodes ago who he was a director on a film called 3100 um if you've not seen it i i i've i've seen snippets of it but i have not had a chance to sit down and watch the whole thing but i can almost guarantee you would love this documentary because it's really in many ways showing tribes around the world how running is you know it is about transcendence it's a spiritual practice it's not for calories burned how many miles have i gone you know uh what did my heart rate do all this kind of stuff that again nothing necessarily wrong with it it's it's to get them closer to you know i guess being at one with the world sort of finding themselves and it it's really really interesting that because the way we do it here in the west by and large and of course everyone is different does seem to be quite far removed from that um it's interesting because you have been termed the barefoot professor in the past um and you mentioned when you went to mexico you didn't see that many people therefore i think you've been to other cultures like in kenya and india where you have seen a lot of people barefoot so what's the deal there well there's a story behind it if you don't if they have time i've got plenty of time and this is probably one of the things i'm most interested in so and i've got a sort of professor of barefoot running in front of me so you get as deep as you want here so here's the story so in 2004 dennis bramble and i published the border run paper um that was the title in nature born to run and and um and i it was fun i got invited to give all kinds of lectures and i gave a lecture uh the night before the boston marathon i think it was 2005 and it was a dark and stormy night literally i mean it was an incredible rainstorm that came in the just before the marathon everyone was worried about you know the rain and all that and it was packed audience and there was a guy sitting in the front row who i never i'll never forget him because i remember he looked kind of like a bum uh from harvard square and he had like his he had socks on that were wrapped in duct tape and he was very intent on the lecture and afterwards he came up to me and asked you know if people evolved to run um um um you know what did they run barefoot and is there any problem with that and i said well of course they ran barefoot because shoes were invented fairly recently and um and you know i don't know really very much about barefoot running um but you know and i started and i realized so at the time we were studying head stabilization now when you run when when your body hits the ground your head jiggles right and we were interested in how the body stabilizes the head you know how you prevent that jiggling from occurring so it doesn't blur your vision and most of the runners we were looking at were heel strikers right they would land on their heel and their head would jiggle and i remember there was a few runners occasionally would come into the lab and they would be forefoot strikers they'd land on the ball of their foot and their head wouldn't jiggle as much and i remember thinking they're like you're ruining my experiment and you know because you know we're not getting the hedge of going we wanted to measure and um so this guy comes in and his name is barefoot jeffrey um and uh he runs he owns a bicycle shop here in the area and he came in and we set up you know the equipment and he just ran light as a feather no head jiggling whatsoever and and you know he landed on the ball of his foot and i asked him why he landed on the ball of his foot he said well it doesn't hurt uh if you land on your heel it hurts and so we started doing some experiments and realized that that's how people ran when they barefoot they you can't slam into the ground like you can in a shoe because you have all that cushioning in the shoe you have to run lightly and gently and so we got to studying barefoot running and of course i've been working in africa for for many decades and i've seen people in africa you know running barefoot but i'd never really measured them so we went out and started measuring them and you know published another paper in nature with about the biomechanics of barefoot running but i always like to try what i study and we realize that that to me it's not about whether you're barefoot or not to me it's about how you run to me running is a skill just like swimming or climbing a tree or all many other things that we do and there are better and worse ways to run and and um and what barefoot running does is that it helps us learn the skill of running that i think i think there are advantages to not crashing into the ground and relying on some technology in your shoe to make that uh comfortable and so to me it's not about you know to me i think you know you can run beautifully in shoes and you can run terribly in shoes you can run beautifully barefoot you can run terribly barefoot but what really matters is how you run and that barefoot running gives us information and and sure shoes are comfortable and i i mostly wear shoes when i run i also wear minimal shoes and i also i agree with everything you just said you can't just throw away your shoes or transition your shoes and and immediately change your gate you have to transition gradually and slowly and you have to learn the skill of running but if you do the evidence suggests that there's a lot of benefits and you don't destroy your knees and you can you can do all kinds of good things in your body and and um you know there's a lot of evidence and there's mounting evidence i think that that supports that but it's of course it's still controversial because there's a lot of money in the in the in the in the you know in the shoe industry and and there are people who like what they do and they get upset if you tell them that you know they should be doing something different and you know for many of them they shouldn't you know if it ain't broke don't don't fix it but but many people are injured and they might benefit from changing the way they run yeah i mean that's certainly echoes what i've seen in my clinical experience and even a really good friend of mine actually who has very much been enamored with my journey to minimalist shoes he sort of transitioned to pretty much everything apart from running until maybe six months ago he you know he'd wear minimal issues for work for walking for going out with his family at the weekends and he really likes the connection it gave him he sort of felt it was he was moving differently but he said i've got no real reason to change the way i run because i can do it you know i don't get injured but something changed about six months ago i think just on that journey he was quite interested to go well what is it like if i actually try running so he went super slow you know he could only do three or four k i think initially but now he's uh you know he's he's a badge wearing sort of barefoot runner and i think i think all these things become quite reductionist don't they it's like barefoot running good or bad you know minimal issues good or bad it's like well it kind of depends on the context a little bit doesn't it yeah absolutely and and uh you know almost all the world's great best runners are i have what i call a barefoot style um and yet it's funny that there's some people get really mad like you know like you tell me i have to be a four-foot striker it's like no you don't have to be a four-foot striker um but you know some of the world's best runners are for strikers you might you know there's nothing wrong with it so people are very um because people are tribal right just like in the united states you know you've got republicans versus democrats you know forefoot strikers versus rear foot strikers it's crazy um yeah i mean i think actually uh it's interesting people often ask me what kind of shoes i wear well i wear many different kinds of shoes you know today i wore one pair but tomorrow i'll probably wear something other maybe thursday i'll go barefoot i mean you know why do we have to categorize ourselves and just do one thing um it's it's a fascinating um fascinating insight the other thing that's interesting to me about barefoot running is how out of touch we are with our bodies a lot of people they just the idea just makes them cringe like are you serious i mean well you like you're gonna cut your feet what about all the hypodermic needles and glass out there and you know i've heard it all right and and and and all these people haven't tried they have no idea and you know i think everybody should just try just you know go for a few hundred meters take your shoes off and run for just a few hundred meters down a street don't don't you know make sure it's a smooth street and you know don't do it at night so you can see the glass and the hypodermic needles depending on where you live right but you'll discover that it's actually kind of fun um but don't do too much too fast because you will injure yourself if you do too too much too fast but but people are just out of touch with how their bodies work i guess even just if people are lucky enough to have a garden or a backyard you know even just start by walking in your backyard are going to just get used to that feeling again you know i've always i'll tell you what i've always it's always fascinated me so i you know my parents uh immigrants from india to the uk my dad came over in the early 1960s and you know in asian culture certainly in indian culture you don't wear shoes inside the house right it's just it's just not done so i grew up we never wore shoes inside the house we'd always leave it outside or in the porch then you go in either in your socks or barefoots and it's only you know when you get older and you start interacting with your friends and go around to their houses you go i remember thinking oh well these guys wear shoes in their house oh wow you know because my norm is that you don't wear shoes in your house and it's just interesting how culturally things are different i'm not saying that necessarily plays out as we get older but it is interesting that i've certainly noticed some of my uh some of my friends growing up um one of my best mates in particular i remember he you know even at university going around he'd always like getting ready in the morning having a shower shaving would be putting his shoes on even if he was inside the house and i guess culturally these things are different i remember going to india every other summer when i was a kid we used to go to a city called kolkata or what used to be called calcutta for six weeks um and i remember my playing with my cousins and my my cousin who's about four years younger than me he'd always want me to come and play football i would go down to the to the apartment uh just underneath all the apartments there was a bit of a bit of land and they were all playing barefoot like properly tackling you know going in hards and i started playing it i found it really difficult at first but by the end of the summer you're used to it so it's it's different everywhere right in terms of how much they actually wear shoes right yeah i mean i've also had those experiences i don't obviously haven't gone maybe as much as you have but i've had those experiences and actually one of my favorite moments and was playing um i didn't didn't make it into the book but i remember playing qriket with a bunch of kids in in in that tiny little village in like in the got mountains um and what was terrifying was not being barefoot it was those bowlers boy they um they were terrifying but but but the way in which we but you used a very important term there which is this cultural is cultural ideals and they ex they translate into so many other ways in which we use our bodies so another example is sitting or another or sleeping right the idea that that it's you know that this one of the western ideas we have is that you should sleep in us in a quiet dark room with a soft comfortable mattress with nobody around you and no sound and no light and no nothing is kind of you know um stimulus-free environment that's a cultural norm too right and until recently even in the west people nobody did that right and and and yet people feel that they can't sleep properly unless they're in that kind of environment which is which is again it's a it's what you get used to it's a cultural norm and then and then if you're not in that kind of environment then you get you get stressed and your cortisol levels go up because you're you're anxious about sleep and of course that prevents you from sleeping in the first place uh how we sit like we're told you know we have to sit and chair with a particular posture that's also a cultural norm that's completely made up in the 19th century by german orthopedic surgeons who who for some reason opined that when you sit you should have the same curvature in your spine as when you stand there's no evidence to support that whatsoever it's completely made up and in fact there's plenty of evidence that that doesn't support that i could go on we have all kinds of cultural norms that we there's nothing wrong with them because you can't not have a culture i mean we all grow up in a particular culture but sometimes we need to step back from what we're told and question it or ask you know does that work for me particularly in our modern world in which which uh often it doesn't if you want to see the recent one-on-one conversation i had with the inspirational dr gabor mate it's a great conversation i really think you're going to enjoy it you can check it out right there but much of physical pathology can be traced to childhood experiences and how we cope with those experiences and what those experiences did

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 38,285

Keywords: excercise benefits, boost immune system, dr daniel lieberman, daniel lieberman, daniel lieberman running, dr chatterjee, dr chatterjee podcast, feel better live more, feel better live more podcast, rangan chatterjee, wellness, Daniel Lieberman, daniel lieberman exercise, never be lazy again, how to exercise, how to lose weight, how to get fit, how to workout, exercise tips, nutrition, health theory, live longer, age in reverse

Id: WWxM_gaVBzE

Length: 38min 0sec (2280 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021