Could You Halve Your Visits to a Doctor or Hospital in 2024? - Guptacise Your January!

Hello there and a warm, warm welcome to our event today, which is called could you halve your visits to a doctor or Hospital in 2024? What an intriguing title that is. And I'm really glad that you could join us for this live event. And what I'd love for you to do is to share this on your social media. So please do share this on your Facebook, your YouTube, your Instagram, and we can get this message out to more and more people that, yes, there is a way that scientifically shown to halve your visits to a doctor or Hospital in 2024, it's available to you right now, it's free, has shown very little side effects. And if this was a drug, if this was a drug that was marketed today, this would be seen as the miracle drug of the 21st century. And doctors around the world would be prescribing it to their patients. And yet it is available to us. So first of all, as a disclaimer, I want to make sure that you realize that when we say halving your visits to a doctor or hospital, this is as a natural consequence of this particular activity that we're going to talk about. And of course, we don't encourage anybody to reduce any of their healthcare visits deliberately. Of course, health is wealth. We know that the health is most important to us and if we don't have our health that we can't function in society. And yet, despite all the medical advances over the last hundred years, as a civilization, we are getting sicker and sicker. Health costs are spiraling around the world. In fact, in the US we spend 20% of our GDP on healthcare costs, which is twice the average of OECD countries, normally about 9 to 10%. So this is one in five dollars is going on health care and we're getting sicker and sicker. And certain statistics show that actually in the US life expectancy itself is reducing. And today I want to talk about the science behind how we could become healthier ourselves without relying on medicines. So it's from medication to meditation. So yes, you guessed it, the answer is through regular, daily, deep relaxation. And I'm going to show you this study that was a Harvard study published in 2015, which really for me was a groundbreaking study and it should have been worldwide news, it should have been front page news. But of course, it's not the way society is set up and unfortunately it didn't get that much coverage. So I want to talk about that study today and how you can benefit from its findings. So, yes, the core of it is stimulating your daily deep relaxation response. And in the month of January 2024, we are offering everybody on the planet free access to something called Gupta Size. So we want you to Gupta Size your January Gupta Size is a daily 15 or 30 minute relaxation response program or session run by one of our coaches here at the Gupta Program. And it involves bodywork, breath and meditation over a 30 minute session. You can just join for 15 minutes if you like. And it's each weekday in January and it's available to anyone, as we said, for free. And to take advantage of this, Simply go to guptaprogram.com and sign up for the free trial. Or you can go to App Store or Play Store and download our free app. Simply search for Gupta Program and there you will find the app, there you can download it. And just within those, within the app, just look for events and then you'll find your daily Gupta Size. And the timings for this are 7 o' clock Pacific, that's the earliest time zone, 10 o' clock Eastern. So that's New York time, 3pm for the UK, 4pm for Europe and 8:30pm for India. And we have a few hundred people joining us each day. So it's a wonderful experience to feel that sense of healing, that sense of community. And this is all about regulating our nervous system each day. And as I said, we're going to go into this Harvard study and look at how we can almost halve our visits to a doctor or hospital just through these few basic things we can do each day. So join us please in January for our daily Gupta size. Okay, let's get into the science of this then. And by the way, I will myself be presenting the very first Gupta size on January 1st. So like all New Year's resolutions, this is something that's about developing a habit. So I'd love for you to just make it that habit that in January, no matter what, you will come to join us for Daily guptasize Live at those times. And if you can't make it live, it is recorded. And so in January, you'll be able to watch the recording. But making that commitment for those 30 days in January, in fact, it's 20 days because we don't run it on the weekends, but you can join us live for Monday to Friday. So making that commitment is incredibly important. And as we know, most people make those New Year's resolutions and then don't stick to it. And the reason for that is that we think we're a failure if we haven't done it every Single day. But what I encourage you to do is to do the days that you can manage and then obviously weekends you can catch up as well. But there's no failure in this. This is all about you enjoying it, seeing the health benefits for yourself. And of course, there are mental, physical and emotional benefits that we're going to talk about shortly as well. Okay, so let's get into the study because I'm sure you're interested to know how has a Harvard study that was published nearly eight years ago not make front page news, where they were able to halve the number of times someone saw their doctor or hospital? How is this something I'm only hearing about now? Okay, so let me share a slide here which has some information about this. So this study, as I've mentioned, was published in 2015. And in this Harvard study, they followed patients for four years and they taught about four and a half thousand people daily mindfulness and relaxation. So there are four and a half thousand people in the active group that were learning a program called 3 RPM and 13,000 in the control group. So this is a massive study. This was classed as a phase three study, which means it's very scientifically valid as a randomized control trial. And so they took these patients, they followed them for a year and saw how many times they visited a doctor or hospital. And then they taught them this particular relaxation response and some other things as well. We'll talk about some resiliency training. And then they followed them for another year and, and they controlled them to. They matched them to controls who also had similar billable encounters. And what they found, and this is really miraculous, that in the following year, the year that followed, when they learned this daily meditation, their number of visits to an emergency department halved. Yeah, let's just think about that. It halved. There was a 43% reduction in all billable encounters. So that means when a patient is visiting a doctor or hospital or getting a scan, There was a 43% total reduction in those encounters, and specifically 42% in clinical encounters, 50% reduction in imaging requests, 43% in lab encounters in general, and 21% reduction in procedures. And those are procedures that generally are very difficult to change. And for each patient, we estimate that this would be saving tens of thousands of dollars each year, and either the patients would be saving or more importantly, the insurance companies or the healthcare systems. So right now there is a huge conversation going on in both North America and Europe about health care costs and how they're spiraling out of control, especially as we have an aging population, and yet here right now, we have this massive study. And this isn't the only study. There are plenty of other studies out there which is showing that we could almost halve this, the number of encounters. Imagine that. Imagine if with this even reduced healthcare cost by 20%, never mind 40%, just 20%, how much of a saving this would be for Western governments, governments around the world. But not only that, we ourselves as human beings, just becoming happier and healthier. Now, what is in this 3RP program, you may ask? So this included eliciting the daily relaxation response. And this is something very important. We here at the Gupta program have found that when people engage with our overall brain retraining program, at least six days out of seven, those are the patients who get the best results in terms of the brain retraining for chronic conditions like Long Covid and various others that we treat. And therefore, it is that regularity that matters. Now, in the 3RP program that they taught as part of this study, they also looked at stress appraisal. So how do we assess and become aware of our stress levels and how do we cope with those stresses? So that was something that they also learned, as well as some very basic guidance on sleep, exercise and diet. But mainly the course was about eliciting the relaxation response. So I hope that this is something that you can join us for in January, and we'd love for you to bring your friends and family. So once again, please do share this stream on your socials, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Please do share this stream and this video. And we want to really get the message out because this is such an important message. How many people do you know right now who are potentially suffering from chronic illness or chronic disease and finding it really hard to cope with? How many people do you know who are suffering through mental health challenges? Perhaps they've been through a divorce or a bereavement, and they're finding it really hard to cope and experiencing that stress, or they're going through a chronic disease, such as long Covid or fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue or mold illness, something that's chronic, that is really debilitating their quality of life. This is important for everyone that you know, to really give them that hope and inspiration that healing is possible and we're able to take charge of our health. Now, you may ask, in this particular study, how did they measure those benefits? Okay, so I'm going to come on to that and the way that you can benefit from this, as we mentioned right at the start is join us for our daily Gupta size in January. Download the free app through App Store and Play Store, or go to guptaprogram.com and you can sign up there as well. So the month of January, our lovely experienced coaches be able to take you through your daily relaxation response so that you also potentially could halve your visits to a doctor or a hospital. Wouldn't that be incredible? A great start to 2024. And so simple and free. And once again, this isn't just about the physical benefits. There are so many mental and emotional benefits that we will go through shortly as well. And as we said, it's about developing a habit. So keeping up that daily connection is incredibly important. And finally, I'll just share the timings with you again. So each day in January, I'll be presenting the first one on the 1st of January, 7 o' clock Pacific, 10am Eastern, 3pm UK, 4pm Europe and 8.30pm in India. So please do share this with your family and friends. So now let's look at the science behind the benefits of that daily relaxation response. Now, why do I call it the daily relaxation response? Why don't I just call it meditation? Well, it is true that not everyone connects with meditation. Some people do find it very tricky. Now, of course, with anything new that you are experiencing, it's not something that's going to come to you straight away, just like going to the gym. If you go to the gym on the very first day and somehow expect to be lifting the heaviest weights, that isn't going to be something that's going to be conducive to your health, because you're going to start and think, oh, this is too hard, and then give up. And so the thing about meditation is it's something that is a training. You're training your nervous system to meditate. There's both the act and the end result. And this takes time. And most people give up far too quickly. And therefore, if you are starting meditation for the very first time, I do encourage you to try some of our meditations on the Gupta program app because they are designed specifically for people who say, I can't meditate, right? They say, oh, I try to meditate and I close my eyes, but there's all these thoughts running around in my head. And I say, good, because if there weren't thoughts in your head, just check your pulse. Are you still alive? Because when you first meditate, of course you will have lots and lots of thoughts. That's perfectly normal. So when you first start meditating, imagine Your mind is like a pressure cooker. It's built up lots of thoughts and emotions and negativities that you haven't cleared out of your mind. So when you first meditate, you're going to be aware of all that pressure that has built up within your mind. And meditation is like lifting the release valve at the top of the pressure cooker. And therefore you are going to just feel like you're sitting there and there's lots of thoughts coming up in the mind. Perfectly normal, run the gauntlets, Just be patient and eventually you'll let go of a lot of steam out of the pressure cooker. And then over time, and sometimes it can take one or two days, sometimes it could take a week, sometimes a couple of weeks. Eventually enough pressure has been released from the pressure cooker and you begin to really enjoy those little glimpses of stillness and of silence. And that may just take some patience and time to really enjoy it. Okay, and in terms of some of the benefits of meditation, I could just share this with you now as well, because it's very important that we understand our motivations as to why we would invest that time. And I can assure you that this is some of the best time that you will ever invest. So let's look at some of the benefits that certainly I've experienced and we've researched here at the clinic. So first of all, starting in the left hand corner, physical health. We know that chronic inflammation is the root cause of so many different diseases or certainly a risk factor. So things like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, when we've got an over inflamed system, we're. Our immune system is being triggered in the background unnecessarily. This can contribute to so many different illnesses. And we know that meditation has powerful anti inflammatory effects. Now we know turmeric, we say let's take turmeric or curcumin every day. But actually meditation is even more powerful. And when you meditate and really get into that deep relaxation response, 20 to 30 inflammatory genes are actually switched off at an epigenetic level, which is incredibly powerful. We know that regular meditation and deep relaxation boosts our immunity, it boosts our immune system. And many diseases ultimately are caused by an immune system that either doesn't detect threats well enough or is not able to deal with threats well enough. We know that we have a natural increase in our NK cell count. So these are very important cells within the immune system that fight off disease and viruses and bacterial infections. NK standing for natural killer cell. So increasing your cell count has Been clinically shown. Now this next one, longer telomere length. Now what does that mean? So as we age the strands of DNA within our cells, they actually begin to shrink. And that is a classic sign of aging. And what studies have shown, those who regularly meditate, actually the shrinking of their telomeres inside their DNA is not as fast, so it doesn't shrink as fast. And therefore those who regularly meditate are clinically younger. Because we have our chronological age, but we also have our biological age based on our DNA. If we get all these anti aging creams and all these different things we're trying to do, we have a very simple way of anti aging and that is to regularly indulge in our relaxation. And once again we're saying relaxation because within our app we also have other exercises. If you absolutely don't like meditation, it's increasing your anxiety levels, then there are other relaxation techniques that can also experience the same effect for you. And some studies have even shown a 50% reduction in heart attacks and strokes with those who regularly meditate, as well as reduction in overall inflammation. So this is real critical information that we need to get out there to the public. We know that the regular healthcare system is not set up like this. It's not set up to support people in their preventative health or indeed even if you are unwell. Meditation can be incredibly powerful. But that seven or ten minute interaction with your doctor is not enough time for people to really have this as part of the overall solution. So that's why getting this information out there to the public, getting to your friends and family is so important. So please do share this. Let's have a look at the mental health benefits. So we know that regular meditation increases gray matter volume. So that's the certain type of neuron or neural connections in your brain. It can reduce anxiety and stress. It reduces the subjective experience of loneliness, which is incredibly important, and improves your sleep as well, which has knock on effects to your physical health. And that loneliness part is incredibly important. So when they've looked at studies that are overall risk for mortality, which essentially means our overall risk of death in any particular year, what do you think the number one factor is? Now classically we'd think it must be smoking or obesity or alcohol. In fact, loneliness is the number one risk factor for all cause mortality. Now isn't that an incredible concept that actually when people feel lonely, that degrades their health to such an extent, even more powerful than smoking? I think it's equivalent to 20 or 30 cigarettes a day. It's just that experience of loneliness. So that's also a benefit of the Gupta program app, is that you really feel a sense of community and the interactions that you can have with other fellow retrainers and brain retrainers. So that's something that we're doing encouraging within the app as well. Let's look at that third box on the left. Our emotional health. So we know that people who regularly meditate having reduced emotional reactivity. And there's a part of our brain called the amygdala, which is the kind of storehouse of our emotional reactions. So our fight or flight responses, our freeze responses, our guilt responses, our addictions, and we know that regular meditators have a less reactive amygdala. And something that's very important part of meditation is that when we meditate, we let go of being involved in our mind and all the stresses and strains of our mind, and we gain insights into our emotional reactions. So meditation open up, opens up a whole area of self awareness that previously we weren't connected to. We were just on autopilot, living unconsciously. But meditation, through the practice of meditation and also the after effects, enables us to become more of the witness of our mind. We say, oh, how interesting. My mind's bringing up this thought or bringing up this emotion, whereas previously we'd have been involved in the reactivity and we wouldn't have even noticed. So we get insights into our patterns, our behaviors, our responses, our reactivity. And it enables us to. To become more aware, to be able to moderate these responses or reactions and have better relationships and just feel happier. So all round there are incredible benefits. And finally, from a spiritual perspective, we know that people who regularly meditate talk about this idea of self love, this idea of compassion that builds up within them, that becomes easier to connect to. They feel a connection with their deeper self as well as having these transcendental experiences of connecting to that higher self. Whether you call that the universe, God, nature, love, these are all concepts that people find they can have a deeper connection to. Now you may ask, why are people getting sicker? What is going on? And why is meditation and this relaxation response even more important in modern society? Well, we as a civilization, as a species, are no longer living according to our genetic inheritance. So for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, we lived in small communities and tribes. We mainly lived outdoors. So we were exposed to daylight, sunlight on our skin. We lived according to the rhythms of nature. And suddenly, over the Last hundred to 200 years, we now live inside in boxes, mainly sedentary not getting as much exercise and sleep as we used to. And also having foods which are more toxic and being surrounded by pollution. And therefore, we're becoming less able to handle the environmental factors around us. And so we're becoming less resilient at a physical level, an emotional level, at a mental level. And let me explain what I mean by that. So let's take this glass of water here. So this glass of water represents your resiliency to your environment. And that is both your physical, mental, emotional resiliency. And there are different stresses that go into this cup of water. And when the water flows over the edge, that's then when we experience illness. So the first stress that goes into here is the mind stress that we've talked about. So psychosocial stress, loneliness, emotional stress, burnout, relationship issues. All of this builds up the water inside the glass. The second one is a lack of exercise. So a lack of exercise then means that we're not relieving the stress and using up the stress hormones that build up in the system. The third factor is our nighttime routine, essentially our sleep. We're not getting enough sleep. This also builds up the stress. And finally diet and the things we're taking into our bodies through our breath or through food. So the more toxins are in our food, the more pollution that we're surrounded by. That is all impacting on our stress levels and our resiliency and the shape of this glass and how big this glass is based on our genetic factors and our upbringing. And also, indeed, whether we experience adverse childhood experiences and trauma. Now, the good news is we are not our genes. Our genes are not our destiny. We do have massive influence and control over this glass of water. We can make this bigger. And we can also drain the water out of this regularly. And the process of draining the water, draining the stress out of our system, I refer to as the MEND protocol. Okay, so the MEND protocol, essentially four things that you can do. Five things that increase our resiliency and enable us to handle more stress in the glass. So let me share this with you now, what these four are. So the men's protocol. The first is mind. So that's something we've always talked about, which is that daily relaxation and learning to become more resilient can actually drain the water out of this glass. And each day we take a shower for the mind because we become physically dirty. But our mind becomes stressed and tensed and dirty each day through all the negative emotions that we experience. And it becomes a brain that keeps ruminating on our negativities and our stresses. So that daily cleanse is incredibly important. So that's our regular meditation daily. Gupta size in January that we've talked about is for exercise. So we know that a big pillar of health is making sure that at least for 30 to 40 minutes a day, you go for a brisk walk, elevating your heart rate at a gentle level. So obviously, please do check this with your doctor before you change any of these aspects of your life. But we know that mild to moderate exercise, regular each day is incredibly powerful, especially in nature, because then you get the mental and emotional health benefits of that as well. That drains some of the water, some of the stress out of this glass. N is for nighttime routine. So making sure we get at least seven to eight hours of sleep each night, sleeping regularly at the same time to get deeper sleep, having relaxation in the evenings that we aren't on our screens. All the good stuff we know about having a good nighttime routine drains the water. Finally, D for diet. And interestingly, D for diet is the one that most people focus on. So when people get ill, the first thing they think of is going to a nutritionist, a naturopath, introductory functional medicine doctor. And those are all great sources of things that can support you in your diet. But we've got to recognize that those practitioners also do recommend as looking at the mind aspect, looking at the exercise aspect. And I do believe that the mind aspect is actually the most important in draining the water out of this glass. So it's important that we make that a part of our day. And finally, the men's protocol, social, making sure that we are re engaging with joy, connecting with people around us. We are designed as human beings to be social creatures and to have that connection. Therefore, that is a way of draining out the water. So, yes, our modern lifestyle is increasingly physical, mental and emotional stress and our capacity to handle it. But at the same time, we can drain a lot of this out. Okay? So I want to thank you for joining us today here on our live event. And please do share this very important video. And I'm not just saying this for any personal gain. I really do. We here, all at the Gupta Program are here to support people's health around the world. And this important step of taking charge of our health based on the scientific findings of the Harvard study for us is a very simple step. Share this with everyone and please do join us for our daily Gupta Sai. So Once again, from the 1st of January onwards, Monday to Friday, you can download the Gupta Program app. Just search Gupta program on App Store and Play Store. Click on events and you'll see daily Gupta Sais and then you can join these live Zoom calls. We have two or three hundred people each day joining us and there our wonderful coaches will take you through some body work, some deep breathing and some meditation. And I remember someone giving me a beautiful comment. They said, oh wow, I feel like I'm enveloped in a blanket of love when I come to your daily Gupta Sai sessions. And that because our fantastic coaches are so loving, warm, support, supportive, it's that big hug that we need each day. And I want to thank all of our Gupta size coaches for being so wonderful and being there for our retrainers. So thank you for the great work that you do. And as I said, I'll be presenting the very first one on the 1st of January at those timings. So 7am Pacific, 10am Eastern, 3pm UK, 4pm Europe and 8.30pm in India. So once again I want to thank all of you for joining me today. I hope you've had a wonderful Christmas and holiday season and I wish you all the best for your new year as well for 2024. And as I said, the best way to start 2024 is to make that commitment for that daily relaxation. It's the quickest and easiest way to take responsibility for our own health. Let's not wait for medicines and the mainstream medical profession to somehow be able to look after all of our health needs, although of course they're very important. We need to take charge and this is a quantity, quick and easy way that we can do this. So thank you so much for joining and I look forward to seeing you on the 1st of January. See you soon. Thank you and goodbye.