Dr. Juna Bobby presents seven micro-habits called RELAX that take minutes daily: relaxation response, restful sleep, eating clean, love and connection, avoiding toxins, and exercise. She built this system for busy students drowning in time poverty, distilling lifestyle medicine into habits you can stack in a planner.
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The thing that every student complained to me about was time poverty. That's a real word, time poverty, like the feeling that you don't have enough time for everything, often, often fueled by procrastination, more procrastination, and a feeling of overwhelm. Hi, I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a mom, NYU School of Medicine graduate, double board certified in radiology and lifestyle medicine, earned my master's in education at Harvard in learning design, innovation, and technology. So I spent 20 years diagnosing disease from the inside out, and I built this method, Relax to Soar, because I wanted to prevent everything I was diagnosing for my kids and my family. And I started to teach high achievers at Juilliard, NYU. So a high-performing wellness plan that takes hours to do is dead on arrival. So I created this method, Relax to Soar. It's baked into a planner And it has every evidence-backed microhabit that you need to keep yourself healthy, thriving, and, and that helps you perform at your peak because wellness and peak performance go hand in hand. So here's the whole thing. Relax to Soar. Relax is what you practice. To is how you build the habits in your brain. And soar is who you become as you make these healthy habits a part of your day. So relax. R is for the relaxation response, a physiologic opposite of the stress respond. It was coined by Dr. Herbert Benson, a Harvard cardiologist who studied how stress and meditation could affect blood pressure, and he identified a few common steps that any type of meditation or repetitive behavior could bring on that would elicit a physiology, like, you know, your blood pressure, your heart rate, respiration rate, all of that, that is the complete opposite of our stress response or our fight or flight response. So that's the first R. Yeah, there's two Rs in relax. The second R is restful sleep. We all know that so many things happen while we sleep. I mean, consolidation of memory, emotional regulation, growth hormone, just overall repair. I mean, it's amazing how much happens during our sleep. It's a very active state, unlike what most people think. That's the second R in RELAX—restful sleep. E stands for eating clean food, mainly the Mediterranean diet or the MIND diet, which is Mediterranean plus a low-salt diet. It's mainly just fresh vegetables and fruits, um, a healthy fresh food diet. L is for love and laughter and connections. We now know that human connection is a very powerful indicator of overall health, and some have even likened it to— and we're going to go into detail on that on the following episodes. A is for avoiding toxins, mainly in modern life. It's still smoking, believe it or not. Smoking is one of the biggest toxins, drinking alcohol, and also avoiding environmental toxins when you can help it. And finally, X is for exercise. So exercise is one of the most amazing things for our brains. The brain has evolved so that we could move in 3-dimensional space, so nothing keeps our brain happier and healthier than movement. In the coming weeks, we're going to go into each of those pillars of lifestyle medicine, and we'll go a little more into depth on how to optimize that and how to use the planner to track it. And, uh, you don't need to have the actual planner, you can order it, but And I highly recommend writing it down, but you can also use a blank piece of paper if you like. If you want to order one, it's in the links below. And then after that, we'll tackle 2, which has to do with habits, and soar, which is what you will achieve once these microhabits are in place. I love these ranunculus, right? What do you think? See you in the next video.
