DO THIS TODAY! - The Daily Routines That Increase LONGEVIY & LIFESPAN | Dr. Mark Hyman

Everything that happens to grief, joy, sadness, anger, they're all translated into biological signals that change your gene expression, impact your immune system, hormones, microbiome, brain chemistry, pretty much everything. It's not your genes that really determine what happens. It's what you do to those genes. It's the food you eat, it's exercise, it's stress, it's your thoughts, your relationship, your feelings, toxins, all of it washing over your genes. And the good news is that your genes aren't your destiny. They load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. and that's good news because your daily behaviors, things like sleep and stress management, self-care, connecting with others, community purpose, meaning, they're the single biggest factor driving your health and determining your health span and your lifespan. So what's a really important practice to stay young forever? Sleep. Now we've kind of neglected it and I neglected it for years as a medical student. I remember a surgery resident telling me, You know, sleep is optional. Basically, real doctors don't sleep. I'm like, what? And I delivered over 500 babies. I worked in the emergency room. I stayed up all night. I mean, many, many nights without sleep. And I really learned firsthand the dangers of sleep deprivation on my health and my mood, my energy. It may seem not such a necessary thing, like why sleep? But it's really critical to health and longevity. And the whole idea that I'll sleep when I'm dead. will actually lead you to have an early death. So don't do that. Now, what aspects of health does your sleep affect? Pretty much everything. Your metabolism, your weight, your mood, your brain function. Over the last 100 years, we've kind of cut about an hour off our sleep every night. 70, maybe up to two hours, 70 million Americans have sleep problems. And lack of sleep not only impairs our ability to focus and learn and concentrate, but it's basically like being drunk during the day. It decreases our attention to detail or increases the risk of car accidents. And regularly sleeping less than seven hours a night has really profound negative effects on our heart, on our hormones, on our immune system, and our brain. And the side effects include obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, alcohol abuse, stroke, and even certain types of cancer. So if you sleep less than seven hours a night, get in bed a little earlier, make sure you get your sleep because having less than seven hours of sleep a night increases your risk of death by 24%. That's an easy way to extend your life. So what is sleep essential for? Basically healing and repair, clean up, cellular clean up, longevity. It's when your body does all the repair functions. autophagy and growth hormone production and repair regeneration. There's a whole new system in your brain we've discovered called the glymphatic system, like the lymph system in the brain. And it. It cleans up all the metabolic waste that accumulates over the course of a day. And if you don't get enough sleep, you know, your brain's foggy. That's because you basically are having metabolic waste in there. Also, your muscles, your organs and your brain, you just need to repair every day. Your hormones and your sacking rhythms have to be reset and be in balance for. health and longevity and sleep and getting enough sleep is really critical for maintaining that balance. So if you want to understand the importance of sleep, I encourage you to check out a book. It's called why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. He's going to be on the podcast soon, so listen up for that. So you may be saying, okay, great. Well, how do I improve my sleep? Well, it can actually be pretty easy. You just have to commit to daily practices. I was talking to a patient yesterday and she was struggling with her sleep and wants all these medications. I'm like, tell me about your day. She says, well, I have new kids. I, you know, read in bed and I I basically put them to bed and then I work. And then I get on my computer, I do emails, I deal with all my obligations, commitments, and then I lay down and try to go to sleep. Well, of course that's not gonna work 'cause you're getting one, overstimulating your brain, two, you're activating all the things that you wanna be calming down, and you're getting all the blue light from the computers, which is not great. So make sure you try to practice good sleep hygiene, which means regular rhythm, waking up and going to bed at the same time every day. Using your bed for romance and sleep, don't work in your bed, don't do TV in your bed. That's terrible. I don't know why people have TVs in their bedroom, but it just should be banned. Create a nice environment. It's calming. I have a dark shade in my room. I have super quiet. So you want soundproof, lightproof, total darkness really helps 'cause it affects your pineal gland and get some nice colors and calm things and get a comfortable bed. That's also important. We spend basically a third of our life in bed, so don't skimp on that. Also, I sometimes use earplugs or eye shades if it's a noisy environment, I make sure I do that especially. Get rid of all the blue light exposure two or three hours before bed off the computer, phone, or there's the settings on your phone, you can turn it to red light. Computer's a little harder, but you can do that. Wear blue blocker glasses, that's also great. Also, don't drink coffee afternoon. If you're really overstimulated by coffee, don't have it at all. It can really affect your sleep. Also, get a morning light. 20 minutes of bright light in the morning can have a huge impact on resetting your circadian rhythms, your pineal gland, you have light receptors in your eyes that go to your brain, and that releases certain chemicals and hormones that reset your circadian rhythms. They help with mood, longevity. I mean, red light is super important at night because blue light at night often can increase cancer risks I've seen in animal studies. So, it's a little worrisome. Don't eat late. I have an aura ring and I use other sleep tracking devices. And it's interesting to see if I eat late, I don't sleep well, my heart rate doesn't go down. If I drink alcohol, wine, have a glass of wine, I go, oh, what's a glass of wine? It makes a difference. So try to cut down on alcohol or eliminate it and don't eat three hours before bed. Also, you can use herbs, things like passion flower or valerian, helpful. Magnesium is great as well. I take a hot magnesium bath often almost every time I can, which is great, Epsom salt. And you can try my sleep master class, which is available at DrHyman.com/sleep. That's DrHyman.com/sleep. So what else matters in terms of lifestyle besides sleep? Well, self-care. Now, a lot of us put ourselves last on our to-do list. Bad idea. I have a lot to do and to do, I mean, my joke is, on their tombstone, nobody said, he got everything done on his to-do list. No, I actually am working on my to-don't list, which is, I think, a better idea than working on my to-do list. And you've got to kind of prioritize what matters first. Work is going to be there, but friends, family, and the needs of others often get prioritized, but you often have to kind kind of make time for self-care and nourishing yourself and replenishing your own tank makes a big difference. So try to kind of calm down your calendar. Don't over schedule. You know, it's a lot. Building careers, raising families, taking work home, self-care has kind of gone on the back burner. And that's why we have such a mental health crisis, a sleep crisis, stress crisis. So if you, if you go to these blue zones, they're just having fun. They're enjoying life. They're they don't have a giant to-do list and they're doing a lot of activities, but they're often in community and they're really, really wonderful. So I encourage you to realize that your ability to live a long, happy, fulfilled life is not really possible if you neglect your own well-being and your mind and your spirit. One of the other things that I've kind of learned, which is really remarkable from the science, is that your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, everything that happens to grief, joy, sadness, anger, they're all translated into biological signals that change your gene expression, that impact your immune system, that impact your hormones, your microbiome, your brain chemistry, your neuroplasticity, your mitochondria, pretty much everything is affected by your thoughts and feelings and beliefs. So it's really important to get your mindset straight. So let's talk about what are the studies about that? Well, getting your mindset straight is super powerful. It has profound benefits on your health and study after study has shown that, for example, like repressed anger can predict who gets breast cancer and other cancers. If your emotions are inflamed, so is your biology. If your relationships are inflamed, so literally is your biology. Carolyn Mays, who's an author on medical intuitive, she said, you, biography becomes your biology. So it's important to pay attention to your quality of your thoughts. Neuroscientist Candace Pert talked about the molecules of emotion. She was an NIH scientist and she had incredible, incredible research showing how your immune cells listen to your thoughts and change by what you're thinking. So be careful of what's going on in there. And there's a lot of practices you can do to sort through that. One of the things you could do to actually help nourish your spirit and help get your mind right. Well, simple practices, self-compassion, you know, often we are so hard on ourselves. And if you literally recorded your inner dialogue, what you said to yourself about yourself and you actually wrote it out and then gave it to people or told other people or you said that to anybody else, you wouldn't have any friends or family if they were very long. It's pretty scary what goes on in there and what we say to ourselves. So really loving yourself, having some compassion is really important. You know, and often, you know, there's struggles we have with abuse and different things that make it difficult, but there are therapies and things that I talk about in Young Forever that can really help with that. so self-care self-compassion really, really important. It can really, by doing simple self-compassion exercises, it helps improving physical symptoms, mental health outcomes, blood sugar control, resiliency against certain kinds of cancers. So it's really powerful. Also, build your social networking community. It's super important. I'm not talking about Facebook or Instagram. I'm talking about your true friends, your, your community of friends. It's important to build communities, important to build strong relationships, and it's been associated that increase lifespan with better mental health, physical biomarkers of health like blood pressure, your waist circumference or your belly fat, your overall weight, inflammation, your mindset's important too. So I think it's really key. Just another feature of spiritual health which is really important is the whole idea of how we see ourselves in our life and people who ruminate have negative thoughts tend to have poor life expectancy and poor mental health and those who focus on positive thoughts and future goals and rewards, you really have much better physical well-being and mental well-being. Also having a sense of purpose, you wouldn't think that is a big deal, but it can extend your life by five to seven years. So it increases telomere length, it slows telomere shortening and chronic stress does the opposite. It causes telomere shortening and more accelerated aging and increased oxytative stress. So everybody's got to find their own way to heal their mind, their heart and their spirit. And then there's some simple, simple ways. Develop a growth mindset. Explore ways to learn, be curious about yourself in the world, explore different avenues for personal development. Create a personal vision statement. What matters to you? What are your personal goals? What are your dreams? Think about that. Do stuff for others. You know, I was recently in Rwanda, and I got to go to a little village, and you I gave them a bunch of money to buy clothes. And, you know, I mean, these kids barely had clothes and they were poor. And I bought clothes for the entire school. I bought them for the village kids. And the lady who helped me do that, she sent me all these pictures. And it was just a simple act, but I got so much joy from it, so much happiness, and it's good for you. Discover what you love. Discover your passions. Find time to do the things that you really love and they give you joy. Make sure you, again, as I said before, build community, really important. Connect with friends or colleagues who inspire you, do things that are inspiring, listen to things that are inspiring, watch things that are inspiring. There's so much bad news out there and it does affect us. Learn, read, learn about yourself, learn about different ways of thinking, being, expand your mind, and learn to love and be kind to yourself. It's not as easy as it sounds, but it's super important. I mean, as I said, if we talk to our friends the same way we talk to ourselves, find ourselves pretty lonely and block out time in your schedule for self-care when you can meditate or exercise or go on a walk or be with a friend. It's really important. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. What's going wrong? How do we work on it? What are the reasons why we have to do the things we have to do in order to increase our health span and our lifespan? And once you understand that, you're more motivated to go, oh, geez, if I do this, it's gonna screw up this Hallmark. You might think twice about it, and then.