MindBodySpace Podcast Boosts Your Mental And Physical Resilience So You Can Stress Less While Achieving Your Highest Potential

Hi everyone, this is Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a big fan of podcasts and I've been thinking about doing one for a while now, so I'm thrilled to finally launch. In this podcast, we're going to be discussing a wide range of topics that stress us out. Then we're going to talk about the science-backed antidotes to these stressors that actually work. As long as I can remember, I've always loved giving advice, always loved sharing what I know, and when I find something that works, I get really excited and I can't keep it to myself. I guess you could say some of it stems from anxiety because, you know, having kind of an anxious personality, I always wanted to prevent things. So instead of letting the anxiety get to me, I kind of, in retrospect, used it as a strength because it makes you look at all the different ways that things could go wrong. And in my case, I wanted to prevent it. And now I know anxiety has a bad rap these days, but it is an evolutionarily sound strength for survival of the fittest. I mean, after all, the person who can predict something that could go wrong and try to prevent or solve that beforehand is the one that will survive. Unfortunately, as we all know, anxiety can go overboard and you can go in circles about things that you can't do anything about. So that's where acceptance comes in, and I've learned to do that a little better by understanding the neurobiology of my brain. And now going to medical school really didn't help much with the anxiety because you learn about every single disease under the sun. And as a radiologist, I specialized in learning about every single disease that even your usual doctors don't know about. We had to know about the rare things because that's what we could pick up when we looked inside people's bodies with imaging studies. So as I learned about all the things that could go wrong with the body, I had huge interest in prevention because as we all know, preventing Fixing something is much easier than fixing something after the fact. So this super heightened interest in prevention grew by the thousandfold, as you can imagine, once I had kids. I was lucky. I realized that this was the part of my job that I was most passionate about: helping people prevent disease, managing their health anxieties, and empowering them with knowledge. During this midlife crisis, I reached out to a physician, and he said, Start paying attention to what really excites you, what gets your curiosity going. At that same time, my incredible OB-GYN, Dr. Kris Kriatora, who is still practicing in Manhattan, gave me my first and only prescription that I ever got that wasn't for a medication, but actually for a book. She recommended it to me because she had heard a lecture by him when she was a medical student at Harvard. The book was called "The Relaxation Response," and that changed my life because that's when I found the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. It's a mouthful, but I love that place. The first person I spoke to there was Peg Baim, who was incredibly informative and wonderful from the very beginning and has since become my mentor and friend. And she convinced me to come up to their annual meeting. I remember going up there and feeling so elated to be surrounded by like-minded physicians and clinicians And the first lecture was by Dr. Herbert Benson himself. He talked about the chemistry behind the relaxation response and the work that he did on meditation. He coined the term relaxation response in the same laboratory that Walter Buchanan discovered the stress response. It was amazing. And at the end of his lecture, he led us through a 10-minute relaxation response. That was the first time I ever meditated, and I still remember it vividly. It was a much-needed feeling of calm, and I remember feeling safe and quiet after the morning rush. The remaining conference was just as incredible, with cutting-edge research supporting meditation and yoga and the science behind sleep, circadian rhythms, food, exercise, and all the lifestyle factors that could truly prevent disease. Even down to the cellular level. I was excited like I had never been before in medicine. I signed up for practically everything they had with intensive one-on-one trainings for stress management and resilience, as well as for resilient youth. I was so excited to bring this back to my children and my husband. Then I started to bring it into the community, doing as many lectures as I could, and I took the amazing opportunity opportunity to launch Wellness Wednesdays at my alma mater NYU School of Medicine, as well as at Columbia Law School and many other school settings. I have been at Juilliard Pre-College Division for 4 years now teaching the science of resilience to their amazing gifted kids, as well as giving workshops at Manhattan School of Music, Meadowmount School of Music, and Morningside Music Bridge. I am now fully committed to sharing these mind-body skills and practices, as well as the science that can give credibility to these practices, especially to young kids and teenagers. They grew up in the age of information, and science can really back these practices and convince them to do something that they may not be interested in otherwise. My mission now is to bring this to as wide an audience as possible so that everyone can benefit from the cutting-edge science for antidotes to stress that actually work, and to build up the skills needed with character strengths that actually increase resilience in our day-to-day lives and all the way down to the cellular level. And decreased stress means improved performance, whether it's on exams or public speaking or performances, musical or sports, or just day-to-day relationships, everything in life. Please click on the link in our show notes to join a growing community of resilient moms and kids to share your story of everyday resilience. Resources and support. We have amazing guests lined up, and if you have a topic that you're interested in, you can send an email to info@mindbodyspace.com. Until next time, this is your host, Dr. Juna Bobby MD, wishing you and your family wellness.