Episode 3 Small impactful things you can do daily to decrease stress and increase longevity

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You don't have to go get surgery. You don't have to take this pill. You don't have to live in pain. You don't have to walk down this path of I'm this age so I.

Have to feel this way. All things that make you feel good.

All the things that make you feel good.

Hello friends. You are listening to the All Things Good for your podcast. I'm your host, Brian Bowen, founder of Integrative Health Income.

And I'm Amy Christiansen, your co host and creator of Amy Christensen Health and Wellness Coaching.

Join us as we explore the world of health and wellness and all things that make you feel good. From ancient traditions to modern advancements in technologies that give you the tools for.

A life well lived, what new paths might you discover on your health and wellness journey? Tune in each week as we deep dive into a variety of concepts and hear from other fun, passionate health and wellness experts on their experiences and philosophies.

And remember, stay open minded and integrated. Well, the CDC says that we're going to live an average of 78 years, 78.8 actually. And so what I've noticed, and I'm sure you have, and this is kind of a fun thing, is that most people spend the first halves of their lives or using their health to chase their wealth, and then the second half using their wealth to chase their health. And so talking about quality of life, I think we focus on that quantity and we need to be focusing more on that quality through all of those years. And I think prevention can be a challenge for some people because if you're feeling good, right, most people don't tackle their health. It's once people start feeling bad, typically whether it's a pain or whether it's an emotional thing or whether it's a digestive thing or whatever it be, maybe people start feeling bad, a lot of times they just think it's gonna pass, right? And so, you know, a week goes by, two weeks goes by, three weeks goes by, and pretty soon they have a chronic health condition. So the idea of prevention is of course to prevent all of those Things from happening before you get to that point. And then once you are feeling or experiencing something and be able to have the knowledge and the visceral experience of being able to listen to your body and be. Those are all signals and saying, no, let's tackle this now. Right. First, let's get to it before we get to that point.

Right. And I think that we are starting to grow as a society a little bit more. Being aware at a younger age. I do think just with the idea of yoga and mindfulness and awareness of how we're living and what we're living, I do see a slight trend of younger people being more aware because we've seen it. People will come in and I'll be working. I know you've seen the same thing. But they'll come in with a shoulder pain or an injury and be like, well, you know, it just. I'm old, I'm 40. It's all starting to break down. And I just. We know that it's not. You didn't just turn 40 or 45 or whatever and suddenly your shoulder starts hurting. You know, most of us did something to ourselves in our teens or our 20s in college or, you know, sports that your body just kind of ignored. It may or may not have actually healed itself. Yeah, we do have better healing properties in a younger age. But we say this whole thing about K being resilient, and that's not entirely true. I think most of the things that are showing up in people's 40s or so are really things that happen to them in their younger, younger years. And it's just your body has finally said, enough's enough. And I've been ignoring and dealing with this injury for 10, 20 years. And now I want you to pay attention. So I'm going to scream really loud. So you start listening and it's kind of that same thing, right? Like, the disease process starts really quietly. It starts in the gut, or it starts with a poor posture, or it starts with poor sleep, or we ignore it because we're kind of created to do that. Right. Reptilian brain just says, just get up and go and move and make life happen and ignore the little things until it's big enough that it's scary and your brain's paying attention to it, whether it's a threat, usually by pain and suffering. Right.

So there's a. There's a word I kind of want to throw into there and pull into that mix that comes up as the word compounding and, you know, as like going back to that wealth chasing your health kind of thing. We do that because we want to compound wealth, right? Where we put money in our 401k because of the compounding effect, which is very real. But those other areas, those compound too, right? So stress compounds. Stress leads to inflammation. And a little inflammation, you add a little bit more inflammation on top of it, you know, through dietary stuff, or a little bit more through stress and a little bit more through here, and pretty soon it turns into this thing. So there's another saying out there that genetics loads the gun, but society pulls the trigger. And just meaning that we can have a predisposition for something or a genetic disposition to something, but really it's those other compounding variables that then can activate that thing. So I had this, er, journal or medical book one time, and literally this book was 2,000 pages. And pretty much everything in there, stress was one of the aggravating, if not causing factors. So it was just, you know, and again, going back to what you were saying, whether it's postural stress or emotional stress or whatever, these compound. So I think when we are moving through this world, like, just to even have that knowledge base that we were not giving. And certainly, you know, my parents never, you know, we didn't come with that handbook. Right. The parents didn't have this book saying, oh, it's important to teach your kids about compounding stress. Which, these are the things that we, you know, we're hoping that people are getting from this podcast to pass down to even their kids. Like, we're helping, you know, try to help things evolve and push the needle forward.

Right. And I think we were kind of on an upward trend for a while, having longer life. I think now we're starting to trend back a couple years.

Well, you know, that's just because Social Security, they're out of money and they have to make us older before we can cash out of our Social Security.

I know. Don't get us going down that route. We're gonna avoid. We're gonna avoid any political conversations.

Well, I was in. Literally, I was in a class one time in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And so during a lunch break one day, I was taking a walk, just out and about, enjoying outside, breathing the fresh air, and just decided to wander into this old cemetery with this rickety old fence around it that you could tell was just ancient. And I walked in and I was walking around the cemetery, and I was shocked that the majority of people were in their 80s in this cemetery. And then you'd have, like, the infant or a child, you know that maybe was an accident or who knows. But so these were all in the 1800s, these headstones. So I was like wait a second, like doesn't match up to. But in Stockbridge, Massachusetts back then, that was way, way out there, like way away from the city and people were farming and obviously away from as much disease and concentrations of population and stuff like that. But my point to that is like I still am a little confused on that hole. I still question a little bit the age stuff.

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Well, you know, again, I think for our purposes, it's not necessarily that we want to live a long time. I do. I've always aspired to live a very long life. My great grandmother lived to be 102 and she was working on her farm and gathering her own water and taking a quarter mile walk on the farmland every day until she was about 100. And then she ended up kind of declining those last two years. And I would say even that last year was her probably worst. And I just always thought, man, I really just want to live a really long time. I want to be here and experience life. I don't know if that'll continue, but it makes me go okay. We talked just a little bit at the first podcast about the Blue Zone and Dan Butner. I'm not sure if I say his name correctly, but he studied the longest living cultures or people in the world and found several little pockets and kind of delved into why they're living longer. And it wasn't just that they were extending and holding on to life with medical interventions. These people were very active and functioning up until the within months of their end of their life. So they have the most centurions, like people living over 100 years old, and they're still functioning part of society. And he found nine basic tributes that seem to be consistent with these different people all around the world. And one of those cultures was in California. Even so it's not necessarily where they are, but how they were choosing to live their life. And it's surprising that it's not that difficult. And it's about balancing a bunch of different things. And so I think we have to look at kind of how all of that plays in together. Like, what are we looking for? To whether you're going to live for 75 years, 80 years, or you're going to live 100 years. How do you live well? What is living well to people? It's not just moving around. That's definitely a part of it. And not having pain and dysfunction. Sure, that's part of it. Right?

Yeah. I think one question everybody needs to ask themselves who's listening to this right now, and they're listening to this for reasons, so I think they've already made that decision, is, do you want to survive or thrive?

Yeah.

Right. And knowing now that we know there's a compounding effect of all of this stuff, right. There's things that we can do to prevent or change, and it is a lifestyle. And I know you and I read a lot of different books that are all helping us in many different ways, whether it's from growing on a personal level or from a business level, or from a physical level or from this. So it's not just a one thing. And that's why we use this word, integrative, Right? It's a lot of different things. It's a lot of different aspects of yourself, whether it's tackling things that's going on inside your own brain or whether it's tackling things going inside your body. You can't. You know, it's a whole thing. The Chinese, in Chinese medicine, they define kind of qi as energy, right? We have this life force within us. And so the whole thing about Chinese medicine is balancing that energy within our body, balancing these in the meridian systems and so forth, that then translates to disease or stagnation and disease later. And so they have what we call prenatal qi and postnatal qi. So prenatal qi is the energy that you are constitutionally giving by your ancestors, right? So by your mom, by your dad, by your grandparents. So you can kind of think about that as genetics. And then postnatal qi is the second bucket, if you will, that you get from good diet, from Good exercise from decreased stress, good mindset, good sleep, just good behavior. So you have the second bucket that you want to be thriving on, you want to be living on. So the better balance, your sleep is your nutrition is your movement, your body posture, your mindset, all of these things that helps us cultivate Qi that we want to live and thrive on. If there's a leak in any of those components in that bucket, if you have a crack in your bucket, then that slowly leaks out and you start to tap into that first bucket, which is that prenatal Qi. And that prenatal chi is non replenishable, you can't get it back. Right? And so I always think about, like when you see a president, you know, take office and it doesn't matter who they are, Democrat or Republican politics, it doesn't matter. Well, we're not. I'm using this as an example because this is a very obvious one because it happens in a four year period. They go in and within four years they look much older, right? Like, you know, their hair is graying already. So because you know that their stress levels out the roof, you know that all of they have this crack in the second bucket. The other example of that is most of you have known somebody that unfortunately something traumatic happened and they had to been hospitalized, and when they come out of the hospital, they look like 10 years older, right. And you're like, oh my God, like what happened? And again, there was a traumatic experience or whatever, and they just had this massive kind of leak in the second bucket, if you will. And so the point of bringing that up is you have two batteries, we'll call them batteries instead of buckets. You have two batteries. You have the first battery, which is your prenatal gene, non replenishable, right. You want to conserve that energy. You don't want to tap into it. You have your second battery, which is rechargeable from recharging from good sleep, recharging from your nutrition, recharging from movement and exercise, recharging from mindset and those things. And so we always want to be recharging that battery. Once you stop recharging that battery and it's not even on a trickle charge anymore, you start tapping into that first one and then next thing you know, boom, the compounding effect has taken place and the disease process is kicked into another level.

Right, right. You know, I was doing some stat research for presentation stuff, and it's funny, I was looking over my notes here and it says, I wrote it down from the CDC's website. And the 80% of this health and wellness is based off of lifestyle and environment and 10% is genes. And I'm just looking at this going, well, what's the other 10% here? That's only 90%.

That's your prenatal qi.

Exactly.

So if we're approaching life from that mindset, knowing there's a compounding effect, knowing that all of these things are important from an integrative perspective, not just from, you know, looking at one aspect, then that means that right now the percentage of people using at least one prescription drug is 48.4%. So 48.4% of people are using one drug, 24% of people are using two or three more drugs, prescription medication, sorry. And then people using five or more is 12.6%. So ideally, if we're coming from that model, we should see those numbers drop. Right? And that, that's a huge goal. 83% of US workers are suffering from work related stress, which costs businesses $300 billion yearly. Hey guys, it's Brian. I just wanted to take a pause for a moment in the middle of this podcast to thank our sponsors, Ouch, who's helping to make this podcast possible today. Ouch believes everyone should enjoy what life has to offer without enduring pain. They are a pain relief company. Listen guys, I use their products a lot. They're proprietary herbal formulas built on top of a 2000 year old formula, giving it time, tested, effective results and I'm going to listen to that any day but week. The combination of that with the founder having over 22 years of actual hands on experience treating patients for musculoskeletal pain makes Ouch a very special company. Ouch is made with the highest quality of certified herbs and CBD from organic hemp oil. Their ingredients are extracted with the utmost integrity to ensure the healing properties remain pure and concentrated to promote natural, natural muscle pain relief and other benefits. I gotta tell you, I appreciate that so much. As a consumer, I want to know what I'm getting is exactly what's being sold to me. So they take it a step further. They have a certificate of analysis for all their ingredients before it goes into production and after production to ensure that you're getting what you're paying for. Listen here guys. Don't settle for a lesser version of your best self today. When you can feel your best today, check out Ouch Shop, that's spelled O U T C H. Shop for a full line of their products. They're an amazing company. I use their products on a daily basis. So check them out. That's huge, right? So that kind of stress is overwhelming and that leads to a restriction of mobility, opioid independence, anxiety, depression, reduction in quality of life. And that's estimated to cost 560 billion annually in medical costs. So, you know, if we want our insurance premiums to go down. There you go. Let's tackle this from a different perspective.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean we spend $500 billion on the big disease processes, right? Like cancer, diabetes, heart disease. And those are.

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Preventable things almost every time. Not some of the cancers aren't entirely and some diabetic issues you're born with, but most of them are preventable by making decisions every day to just do small things to make our lives a little better, decrease our stress and just do a little bit of what we're talking about, prevention and maintenance, and it doesn't even take that much. Honestly, it really doesn't. Like you're saying, when we look at what it's compared to on the money side of things, the prevention part is actually you're just kind of paying it forward in a different way. It costs a lot more to be sick than it does to prevent sickness.

I'm going to use that old car metaphor just because I think that because we do live in a material world and I think it's easy for us, you know, when we look at our house as an investment or we look at our cars as mode of transportation and stuff like that. So think about like the car as your physical body, right? And so once your car starts getting out of alignment, we were like, oh, well, our tire, we need new tires, right? Otherwise if the tires are bare, the alignment starts to go out, the alignment starts to go out, it starts to wear down. The ball joints right in your bearings and then maybe the tie rod. And if so. So if you don't fix this thing, the problem gets more expensive and it gets worse. Right? Because that is stress. Tires that have worn down tread create stress. That stress leads to an alignment issue. The stress on the alignment issue that transfers to the joints then gets worse, which then transfers to the tie rod, which is worse. So that's the same thing as your body. Right. And then we know we need to go change our oil and we need to put good gas in our car. So we need to do these things internally for our car so that there's not friction and heat inside of our engine, which then causes things to erode, which is the same as our body, the things we put in our body, not creating inflammation, causing that internal stress. But it's so easy for us to do that to our car because we just know when you buy a car, here's the book, here's what you're supposed to do. We have this manual that says every 3,000 miles changer and it's common knowledge. And so that's the exact same thing with our body. And so the structural, the physical part is, hey, look at your posture, look at your postural stress, look at your ergonomics, because eventually that's going to cause wear and tear in your joints, causing bursitis, causing blah, blah, blah. So whether you do physical exercise, corrective exercise programs, you know, egoscue, postural alignment stuff, chiropractic massage, whatever you can do to help take care of that external, if you will, the physical part of the body, like plug those things in and have fun exploring with those. And then again on the internal side, like looking at your mindset, looking at your nutrition and what are you putting into your body. Question all those things and just think about the compounding effect. But the best time to have a car is when it's brand new, right? We want to keep it in that state. So this is our vehicle, this is our mode of transportation. And so how can we keep it in a new like state? How can we keep it running smooth and sports car like.

And how many lights are on your dash right now? How many things are lit up? Yeah, I always laughed at some of the older generation. They never let their cars go below a fourth of a tank. And I know there are still people out there that do that, but you can think about it. Not you. I don't want to even confess what I do. But we can look at it like that. Are you going to be somebody that waits for all the check engine lights to come on and the gas light to come on and the oil light to come on. And we kind of depend on that now. But how many lights are we going to wait to show up before we start paying attention and take care of our engine, our car? And if there was a time frame where I believed it was probably important for the health of the car, that was what I was told was that you never let it get that low because it was hard on the engine. But nowadays I'm not sure if that's true. But it's a good reference to remember. It's like, man, maybe if you're going to really care for your vehicle, maybe you should take care of it before all the warning lights come on.

Well, I love your building onto the car thing because I do feel like it's something everybody has, but you're right. Like now and today, we have sensors for everything in the car, right? Sensors that tell you about your tire pressure now, sensors for this, sensors that. But you know what? The body has been that advanced forever. So we have these sensors all over. We just don't pay attention. We just need to learn how to pay attention to them because we commonly don't pay attention to them.

Right? Our skin, our hair, eyes, our heart rate, all of it.

Yeah. No, that's good. So we just need to think about if we could. We might have to have a whole talk about the different sensors and, like, little signs and cues and things of that nature, but certainly some obvious ones. I mean, if you're having pain, that is a sensor going off that says, hey, let's do something. If you're having digestive disturbance, there's a sensor going off. Like all those, you know, some are more obvious than others. But we do need to learn how to pay attention to those sensors. And don't just stare at the sensor. Like, do something about it. And it's not necessarily like we want everybody to be, like, super serious with their health, but my philosophy is the least invasive therapies first. You don't necessarily need to be one of these 24% of people that are on three or more medications. Right. So this goes back to, like, our last podcast. Like, you know, we respect Eastern and Western, if you will, just to keep the terminology simple, or complementary medicine or integrative medicine. So the diagnostics, you know, are important to make sure there's not something super serious, you know, going on underneath, like a cancer or something like that. But don't just jump in there like it's okay. To question your healthcare practitioners when you're doing these things. You know, certainly musculoskeletal don't just jump on opioids. There's so many things you can do that are proven effective for musculoskeletal pain. So that's an obvious one. And then some of the other ones. There's so many avenues out there to take and so much information available to take that challenge on without jumping on some meds.

Yeah, absolutely. And we are definitely becoming more heightened and aware of that epidemic that's happening in our culture today, for sure. And just more information, like what we're doing, like other people are doing. Just you trying to. But you know, with that, it's okay. You said take it very serious and you do take it very serious, but don't make it. We all have to have stress and then you gotta bring it back down. I think people get stressed about being stressed, just adding it on top. We are designed to sometimes work hard and do without and change our process a little bit. And as long as we don't make that a continuous process over time. But on that note, like the stress and the idea of how we have to make it a formula and we have to put, I mean, we start to kind of westernize everything right in our good American tradition, or even just human tradition of trying to simplify, find a regimen and make it happen. What that Blue Zone people showed was that it doesn't have to be that hard. He narrowed it down to nine things. And I'm not necessarily a huge proponent of Blue Zone. I haven't even done that much research on it, just did the basics. But I appreciate that what he found was they had nine things and I'm just gonna walk them really quick. Is that okay?

Oh, yeah, go for it.

One was a purpose to get up and you had a reason to matter. In every different culture, they found ways to downshift every day, decrease their stress. They ate to be 80% full. So none of them were in gluttony. Just overdoing it and being stuffed. They tend to eat more of a plant based diet, but they still ate meat. It wasn't their main process. They had a lot of fresh vegetables and they took care of their own gardens. My favorite one that I appreciate is they had wine at five with friends.

Nice. Love it.

So they had some way of kind of sitting around and taking a little bit of an enjoyment. Different cultures had different types of wine, I think, but they were enjoying time with friends. Right. And then they had a culture that supported what was important to them. So they had tribe, as they call it, and they took care of their loved ones so their elders didn't go off and be by themselves or weren't discarded necessarily. They were actively involved in every part of life until they passed. And then the last one was they all had some sort of faith based process, you know, something bigger than them that they participated in on a regular basis. And those were the four things they didn't work out really hard. They weren't some medical miracles. They moved their bodies naturally, they went walking, they cooked food more actively, they gardened, they sat on the ground, they rode bikes around. And just those little bits of things make them live 20 years longer than most of the people in the world.

Well, sounds like they were taking really good care of their postnatal qi, that's for sure. And again, that points to that. And I think, you know, one of the things that is huge for this is that mindset and how to not just buy in to what we're talking about. And what really is, you know, maintenance is prevention and really taking that on to the next level. And is the neuroplasticity component of that about changing the way our brain sees and think and can take some of this stuff on because it all should be enjoyable no matter what, right? Because joy and even like having that glass of wine, that's community, that's happiness. You know, so you don't want to force yourself to do something and, you know, drink this green, horrible juice that tastes disgusting to you, but you find what tastes beautiful to you and what makes you happy. And so, you know, you can find those things. But the brain, we have to change the mechanisms within our own brain because you can teach an old dog new tricks and we can learn new behaviors and we can learn new patterns and habits and all of these things. So I think our next podcast, we're going to jump deep into that for sure. And then I am super excited and counting down to when we can talk about purpose. I think we need to have a whole thing just on purpose because all of those things you were talking about there, a couple of them for sure, pointed to having that purpose. So if we're walking through life and we're not connected to purpose, then, yeah, we're not in the best place. That's for sure.

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm excited about all that too. And just to wrap up our conversation today, I don't think we've really nailed it to the wall, like, what is health and wellness? And I just Did a couple of different searches. And basically it's defined as a conscious, self directed and evolving process of achieving or working towards your full potential. An active process of being aware, making choices towards a successful existence. And you know, I think when we take that framework, that is purpose that we're looking for, that whole process of a successful existence, whatever that might be to somebody.

Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think that that quality speaks to that too because you know, at the end of the day, if something doesn't feel good and it's slowing you down from feeling your optimal self in this human existence, then change it, right? Like that simple. If it doesn't feel good, if something doesn't feel right, if it doesn't feel good, you have to put steps forth to change it to maximize.

Right. If it's not aligning with where you're seeing yourself be and what you want to be as a human being. And most people, I honestly, I mean, we're wrapping up, but we'll get into talking more about the neuroplasticity mindset. But more and more people just taking a break and asking themselves that question, like, what is a successful existence? Who am I and what am I doing each day to make a step forward, to have a life and a person that I am designing?

You know, I'm going to strive for that just so I don't become that older person that sits around and talks about all their health ailments to their buddies. Like, I promise you, when we are in our 60s or 70s, I'm not going to be talking to you about my IBS and my hemorrhoids and my acid reflux and my, you know. Yeah, so let's not become our disease.

Or dependent upon winning the lottery. Well, you know, somebody said that just recently a couple, two people said it to me. I was like, no, do not start saying that is like a pure direct sign that you are getting old and giving up. It's like, well, I just kind of hope for the lottery to come through. No offense to the folks who are playing the lottery. It's a joke.

No, I think that that's fantastic. So. Well, cheers. Greatly appreciate you getting up at 7am to have this conversation. And I know, I know today I'm gonna go pack my lunch and make sure I am fulfilling myself with good nutrition today. And I'm gonna go have fun with my patients today and connect with them and have fun at work. And that's the attitude I'm going into my day with. And I hope you guys go into your day with that attitude as well.

And you're really good about that, Brian. You really do. I think it's so important we find those things that make us happy and find the ways to enjoy what we do and who we interact with. So appreciate that about you.

Awesome. Appreciate you.

Yeah, thank you. Have a wonderful day. It only takes a couple of things to make our days great, right?

That's right. Thank you. And thank you everybody for listening today.

Have a good one.

Bye.

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