Why Are Chronic Conditions Increasing In Society?

Hello and a warm welcome to our Facebook live where we're talking about today the reasons that we have chronic conditions increasing in the population. Why are chronic conditions increasing? I think it's a fascinating subject and today we're going to be looking at the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual reasons why I believe this is happening. Now, first of all, just to introduce myself, my name is Ashok Gupta and I'm founder and CEO of of the Gupta program. And our aim is to come up with neuroplasticity and brain retraining techniques to support healing and health from a wide range of conditions. So we mainly treat main and chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, but also long Covid very recently as well as sensitivity conditions like mould illness, food sensitivities, environmental sensitivities and a whole range of different conditions that the mainstream medical profession perhaps find it challenging to treat. And what inspired my own journey was my own experience with the illness where I also suffered from me and chronic fatigue syndrome managed to retrain my brain. This was in the late 90s, get myself 100% better and then have been treating people around the world ever since. So when we're talking about chronic conditions, which conditions are we talking about? Well, there's two types that I'm going to refer to. The first being what we call the all risk mortality type conditions. So heart disease, cancer, diabetes, all of the conditions that we know increase chances of passing away, they reduce our longevity in life. And there's a whole other suite of conditions that I call neuroimmune condition syndromes. And they're the conditions that I've just mentioned to you in terms of for instance, long haul Covid and with those particular conditions. And the difference between the two is that in the latter they may not necessarily increase mortality or there is some evidence of that, but more they reduce our quality of life. Whereas the first group actually do what we call contribute to all risk mortality. And what are the factors that contribute to that? We were looking at those common factors between these two types of conditions and then what we can actually do with it about it individually and as a society. Now, why are conditions increasing? Well, one thing to refer to is this idea of our genetic inheritance. So genetically right now we're not living according to that inheritance, which is our system has evolved over millions of years from plant life to single celled organisms to invertebrates, vertebrates, reptiles, mammals, human beings. In fact, I find it fascinating that our DNA contains the same DNA, or 40% of the same DNA as a banana. Isn't that fascinating that all of that growth and that adaptation to our environment is contained with our DNA in terms of all the plant life, the fauna, the flora that has gone through that trajectory to enable our survival, which I think is really fascinating. And by the way, as you're listening, we'd love for you to give us a like, give us a hello in the comments. Please do share this on group feeds or your own feed. We do want to get the word out there about this particular Facebook life wherever you're listening or watching. So we're on Instagram and also YouTube as well. So once again, we're not living according to our genetic inheritance that is contributing to so many different conditions in the modern world. I think it's a fascinating discussion to say, well, what's increasing the number of these conditions, why are they decreasing and what can we do about that? Good. So I'm going to share some slides here. And so I think the first comment that we can make is that a lot of these conditions are difficult to treat by the via the mainstream medical profession. Now why would that be? And that's something that we can also explore today. So I want to introduce you to the bucket hypothesis. So apologies to those on Instagram who are watching me right now. You won't be able to see these slides, but hopefully we can provide these afterwards. So what are the contributing factors? Well, I want you to imagine that stress is like a bucket. And we all have these buckets and there are different sizes and different shapes and we can handle a certain amount of stress in that bucket. And that stress includes physical stress, mental stress, emotional stress, social stress. And what I'm even defining here is spiritual stress. And that bucket is our sense of resilience. How much can we handle in terms of those different stress factors? And what happens is when we become overwhelmed with the amount of stress in life from all those different factors, the water builds up, builds up, builds up, the stress builds up in the bucket. And when it flows over the edge, then we experience illness or chronic illness. So that's the model that we're using here. And in terms of once again, those two types of conditions we have the heart disease, the cancer, etc. And also these more modern conditions, what I call functional conditions or neuroimmune conditions. And both of these, I believe, have a common factor, which is that this overwhelming amount of stress causes both psychoneuroimmune effects. So that reduces our immune system, but secondly contributes to what we, what I call an ant over inflammatory bias. Now what do we mean by that, it means that our immune system is being triggered unnecessarily in the background, continually inflaming our system, inflaming our body, inflaming our brains, which then makes us more prone to both types of conditions. And how should we look at this? Well, one way to frame this is this idea that imagine you are the king or queen of a castle or a kingdom, okay? And in that kingdom, you have an army and a navy. So the army represents your nervous system, the navy represents your immune system. And the number one priority of this whole kingdom is survival. Of course, it is to protect yourself, to ensure your survival so you can pass on your genes to the next generation. And so survival being the number one priority, your brain and your body prioritizes survival over wellness. Wellness is not so important for the brain and body, in fact. And so when an invading army comes over the hill, the army and navy are galvanized, they fight off this invader, and then the system goes back to balance. And that's how it's supposed to work. Now imagine that in that kingdom, there are now other stresses going on even before an external invaders come in. And those stresses, what I'm terming physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, social stresses, they make the kingdom weak. Okay? So when an invading army does come over the hill, the system is now compromised, it's stressed, and therefore is more likely to over respond to that incoming threat. And once the threat is gone, even though the threat is gone, the system is still in this over defensive bias, this inflammatory bias, where the army and navy come to you as the king or queen and say, listen, we only just managed to save the kingdom. You need to give us all the resources of the kingdom, the metal, the corn, the wheat, our nervous system and our immune system say we, we are now the priority, we ensure survival. So give us all the resources you possibly can. And that means that the kingdom is weaker, but the army and navy are in a state of readiness, constantly defending the kingdom against potential threats, which once again means that the system is prioritizing survival over wellness. So that's our first piece of the jigsaw puzzle. And then when we look at these different contributing factors that we're going to talk about now, these contributing factors essentially are the triggers that cause more of this over defensive bias in the system, which cause as a secondary effect, this over inflammatory bias, where our immune system is continually triggered in the background. And in terms of the first bucket of diseases that I described, the kind of what we call mortality diseases. So the heart disease of cancer we know that over inflammation of the system over a long period of time can be a risk factor in those conditions. And then when it comes to the second bucket of conditions that I call neuroimmune condition syndromes, nics such as ME pain syndromes, long Covid mould illness, all of those I believe are even more directly impacted by this over inflammatory bias. So us understanding how these are increasing in the population and in society and helps make sure that we can take action to reduce the effect on us, but also our families, our friends and society at a wider case. So let's start off with looking at the physical aspect. So why do we have this over inflammatory bias? Well, compared to previous generations, we are now living in a more environmentally toxic environment. And the main culprit there is actually, well, two areas. One is pollution, so general traffic pollution. And another are household items, household toxicants such as cleaning products. And so we're having more of those in our environments, which means that our immune system treats these chemicals as invaders and starts triggering itself in the background. Once again, of course, the second one there, the most obvious, are food toxins in our diet. So compared to 50 years ago, 100 years ago, we eating far more of an inflammatory diet in the sense that all of these little toxins, these little E numbers, these little artificial chemicals that are put in our food, the pesticides, the fertilizers, they go into our system and our gut treats them as predators on the system and therefore once again inflames the system, especially a TH2 bias in the inflammatory system attempting to remove these toxins from our bodies, reduced sleep. So we know that as a society we're sleeping a lot less than we used to. And reduced sleep directly has an impact on our inflammation in the body. So we want to do whatever it takes to increase the number of hours that we sleep. And it has been shown in many studies actually that the immune system balances itself at around seven and a half to eight hours sleep. So if you get a minimum of eight hours sleep, your immune system not only rebalances itself and reduces this inflammatory bias, but, but it actually makes your immune system stronger to respond to real threats rather than continual background threats. And finally, of course, the big one, the sedentary lifestyle that we are leading. So we're exercising and physically moving a lot less. And physical exercise, physical movement, we know decreases inflammatory bias and has so many positive effects on our system, which we won't go through. Now looking at another contributing factor here, the mental, what we call the mental contributing factor. So this is the idea of the competitiveness that we're experiencing. So we're experiencing a lot more competitiveness in society. Especially workplace stress is increasing once again, increasing that mental load, that mental stress, which is increasing the inflammatory bias. And something that is contributing massively to this is the idea of comparison, that before when we lived in small villages, so foraging villages, fishing villages, hunter gatherers, we would compare ourselves to the alpha females or the alpha males within that small group. Whereas now we're comparing ourselves to the entire planet, all the top celebrities, the richest, the most famous, the most good looking people in the world, comparing ourselves and then having the expectations that our lives should also be at that level, then feeling bad about ourselves when they aren't increasing this sense of mental pressure. There's a very famous author, this is Oliver Sacks, who wrote this book, Affluenza, which was all about this idea that we are afflicted with this virus, this affluenza, thinking we have to be as affluent as those around us, otherwise we can't be happy with our lot. So that's the state of mental pressure. And allied with that is this idea that we are no longer processing our emotions. What do I mean by that? Because we are hooked on our devices. What is happening is that before in society when we would have a difficult challenge, we went through a difficult argument with somebody or a workplace challenge, we would have moments during the day where we would reflect on how we're feeling or process that emotion. For instance, when you're driving and you're daydreaming, you're reflecting unconsciously at the challenge you faced and coming up with solutions, which is why you can wake up in the morning suddenly and you have a solution to a particular challenge you've had. Whereas now, as soon as we experience uncomfortable emotions, we reach for our phones, our tablets, our screens to the television to distract ourselves from uncomfortable emotions, which then means we are no longer processing emotions effectively, which is then also reducing the depth of our sleep. And if you look at graphs that show uptake of social media on phones, which kind of took off towards 2010, 2011 and went up in a curve, and you map that against anxiety and depression in the general population, the correlation is unbelievable. It really is. As soon as we started having these addictive social media apps on our phones, the level of anxiety and depression increased in the population, almost a direct correlation. So it's a really big factor in this. Let's have a look at the emotional factors that contribute to this bucket. So the idea that in our modern lifestyle there's more family breakdown than they used to be. And also a hypothesis that I have that I'm researching is this idea that actually baby boomers were one of the first generations and certainly their children who lived in nuclear families. So before the world, before probably this First World War, Second World War, we tended to live more in communities, in family groups. There was less social mobility or certainly physical mobility in terms of where people settled. And therefore, if a child had one or more parents who perhaps suffered from a personality disorder or perhaps wasn't nurturing, it didn't perhaps have so much of an effect on a child. Once again, this is a hypothesis because it was the tribe that brought up the child and there were far more options for emotional support. Whereas these days most of us have been brought up in nuclear families. And therefore, if one parent is absent or there is a parent that perhaps has one of these particular traits, it can probably contribute more to trauma than perhaps previous generations. And this is all contributing to a lack of resilience. So more and more of this stress pouring into this bucket and the size of the bucket does represent our sense of resilience. How much stress can we handle in our general lives? Another contributing factor, social. You know what the number one factor for all risk of mortality actually is? You'd think it's, is it smoking, drinking? It's actually loneliness. The subjective experience of loneliness is the number one factor in diseases like heart disease and cancer. All these conditions. And despite us having 500 people on Facebook that we're friends with, we still have to take a selfie in the mirror, right? It's that idea that no matter how many connections we have, actually to overcome loneliness, we need four or five or six close friends, close connections that we can rely on that reduces that sense of loneliness and isolation and improves our overall health and well being. And then once again, under the social bucket, increasing competitiveness, not just in a workplace situation, but at a personal level, and more social anxiety that people are experiencing in the population contributing to this bucket. And finally, I put here spiritual stress. So in previous generations there was tended to be people who were more religious or more spiritual and therefore had a philosophy of life. Now this once again isn't an argument to become religious or spiritual, even you could be an atheist, but it's having the idea that there is a philosophy of life that you have one being the biggest one, why do bad things happen? And if we don't have a philosophy around that, we are more likely, it has been shown to kind of more drop into, I suppose, a melancholy lifestyle or attitude, more depression, and therefore, often religious and spiritual organizations in the past have provided a social connection, a philosophy about life and how to think about life, and connection with self. Most importantly, that many of us are missing. So all of these factors of how we are living life over the last, Certainly the last 20 to 30 years and has accelerated in the last 10 years has contributed to more and more of the stress entering this bucket, the water overflowing over the edge of this bucket, then seeping into chronic illnesses once again, the mortality, diseases, cancer, heart disease, etc. And then also we're seeing a big increase in, in these what we call neuroimmune conditioned syndromes. And this is as a result of conversations that I'm having with functional and integrative doctors, with nutritionists, with acupuncturists. We're seeing a wave of people where everyone almost seems to be living life on the edge, as it were, that people are just getting by. And it could only take one small thing, one little trigger in life that could push people over the edge. And I don't know if that rings true for you in some shape or form. And once again, just saying hello to everyone. I'm just reading some of your comments here. So thank you for joining us here on our Facebook Live, and we're also live on YouTube and Instagram. So hello to all of you and I'd love for you to share this on your feeds because this is a really, really important topic that we're addressing and I'd love for you to share this far and wide. Now, of course, the million dollar question, what do we do about this increasing inflammatory bias, this increasing defensive bias, and how can we support ourselves and each other through this? All right, let's just show another slide here. So I think the protocol that we use is something called the MENS protocol. Okay? And so the men's protocol, some people find it really funny. They say to me, ashok, this is a bit sexist. Why is it the MEN protocol? Why isn't the women's protocol? I said, no, it's not the MEN protocol, it's the MEND protocol. So the five pillars of health that we believe has the greatest impact on stress and inflammation, how can we incorporate this into our life to improve our overall health and well being? So the first one there, and I hope you can see this on the slides for those of you on Facebook, is this idea of the mind that in those different risk factors I've talked about, what can we do to improve the state of Mind and it has been shown that mindfulness, meditation, breathing, they can all have a really positive impact on reducing inflammation. So when we meditate, over 30 to 40 inflammatory genes are actually switched off epigenetically to reduce inflammation and resettle and reset, recalibrate our immune system. So that's one recommendation as regular meditation and connected and allied to that is obviously this idea of having time and space to yourself, so reducing our screen time, making sure that we are indulging in self care and taking time out and reducing this affluenza, this idea of competing with the people around us and actually getting into ultimately a state of contentment with ourselves and our lives. The second one in the MEND protocol is exercise. So physical activity and movement and obviously for those of you who are suffering from a chronic condition such as Long Covid or me, it's obviously a lot harder to engage in exercise and it's very important that people pace themselves. The third one there, nighttime routine, this idea of increasing our depth of sleep, but also the length of our sleep. And there's obviously lots of information on the Internet. We're also going to be putting more information on the website soon on this MEND protocol of how do we improve our sleep? What exactly can we do and how it can reduce inflammation. So once again, when you're sleep deprived, you have more inflammation, more stress the next day. And then finally, D for diet. We know that there are things that we can do in our diet and there's lots of information about this that can reduce inflammation. For instance, reducing alcohol, reducing smoking, reducing caffeine in our diets can also contribute to a more anti inflammatory supportive diet. There are anti inflammatories, natural and artificial, that you can also take to reduce inflammation. And finally, S is for social. Once again we said loneliness is one of the biggest risk factors and you can be in a marriage and you can be lonely. So it's about deep, meaningful connections with those around you. There are billions of people on this planet and probably hundreds of millions reaching their hand out, saying, I'm lonely, I'm isolated. How can we reach out our hands first? And when we relieve the loneliness of another, we actually relieve our own loneliness. Because what you give to another, you give to yourself. And therefore what societies are there that we can join, what community groups are there, what hobbies can we undertake that support us at a mental, physical and emotional level? And in fact, here in the uk, when someone comes to their GP with depression, they can't just prescribe antidepressants now they have to look at other things such as physical exercise, such as hobbies and social interaction, because we know that when people engage with those things, they're actually more powerful than antidepressants. So what I've done today is go through once again, some of these contributing factors and then secondly, some of the initial things that we can do to support our overall health with a MEND protocol. Now, of course, for many people, the. These inflammatory conditions, these background inflammatory conditions then spill over into chronic illnesses such as the one we've mentioned, M.E.CFS, fibromyalgia, long Covid, mold illness and similar. And with those particular conditions, we recommend neuroplasticity and brain retraining approaches. So in our analogy, going back to our analogy of the kingdom and you being the king or the queen of the castle, those army generals, the army and the navy generals have come to you saying, our kingdom is under threat. We need all the resources of the kingdom, the corn, the wheat, etc. Because we need to continually defend the kingdom. And that's why, for instance, people can have Covid. But even once the original virus is gone, the system is still responding as if we are under attack. And we believe this conditioning occurs in the part of the brain called the insula, the insular cortex and the amygdala. And brain retraining, or neuroplasticity, is this idea that when the generals check in with you each week, let's say you as the king or the queen of the castle, inform those generals that, yes, we were under threat maybe six months ago or a year ago, whenever this condition started, but we are now safe, we are no longer under threat. Therefore, you can stand down the army, stand down the navy, get off DEFCON 1 or DEFCON 5, I always forget which way around it is. Stand down. Reduce that propensity to defend the kingdom unnecessarily, and then all of the resources can go back to the kingdom so that the kingdom and the people in the kingdom can live a good life. And that is brain retraining, summarized in a nutshell. That's what it's all about. It's training the brain that we are no longer under threat. And for those of you who know about the Gupta program, we have an interactive video program which has 15 interactive video sessions, lots of audio exercises, a 12 week webinar series, as well as lots of supporting materials to help you through. And in fact, we have a webinar series starting this coming Monday, 27th February, and we'd love for you to join us on that Webinar series. And therefore you can go to our website, guptaprogram.com and there you can find lots of information. Sign up for a free trial of our Gupta program. And if this feels right to you, if it makes sense and you're suffering from a chronic condition that perhaps the doctors have said there's nothing they can do about it, then please do consider taking on the Gupta program. And that could be a journey for you back to health and happiness. We also have a laughter workshop every Friday where we know the impact of laughter on the nervous system. It's incredibly powerful, some say even more powerful than meditation. And we hold a laughter workshop every Friday at 6pm and right now what we're going to be doing is we're going to be having a Q and A on a Zoom call, a private Zoom call where we have a Q and A with myself, where I'll be taking you through some materials telling you more about the Gupta program. And so if you haven't got the Gupta program, so this Q and A is only for people who don't have the Gupta program. If you'd like to find out more about neuroplasticity, more about your illness and how we can support healing, then you can join us on that Zoom link. So that Zoom link will now be pasted into the Facebook comments. Hopefully, if you're watching us on YouTube, it will be posting these YouTube comments as well. And then you can join us for that live Q and A where we'll be going through that information on Instagram as well. We'll post the Zoom link into the Instagram, feed the comments for this particular live video, and then you'll be able to join us. And in that particular one hour Zoom call, what I'll be doing is telling you more about the Gupta program and answering your questions and seeing if it's relevant for you. So once again, we've covered lots today in this Facebook Live, really helping us go deeper into understanding the contributing factors to increasing stress, increasing inflammation in the population, which then becomes a risk factor for certain types of diseases and also these neuroimmune condition syndromes. And I hope that we've just initially given you some ideas about how you can support your own health and well being and also if you have a chronic condition, how you can engage in neuroplasticity and brain retraining, which really is at the cutting edge of treating these conditions right now, and how that can be on your journey to health and happiness. And I also just want to add that whatever your doctor has said, whatever support groups have said. Every day we're seeing people healing effectively from these types of illnesses that perhaps you've had for years or decades, and people have told you there's no way of treating it. I want to give you that hope. Whether it's our program or some other treatment, there is hope you can get through this. Healing is possible. So thank you so much for watching and please do check us out@guptaprogram.com please do share this video widely and I look forward to seeing you next time on the Zoom call we're about to have. Thank you so much everyone and see you next time. Goodbye. It. Sa.