How To Align Your Attention With Your Intention with Pedram Shojai

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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Hi everyone, just wanted to let you know that this episode contains some colorful language. So if you're listening with kids, you might wanna save this episode for later.

Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you have trouble focusing and concentrating and paying attention and feel distracted all the time, Like I know I do often, this is probably the podcast you want to listen to because it's with my friend, Pedram Shojai, who's an incredible man. He's a leader in the field of rethinking how we approach our health. He's a doctor of oriental medicine. He's a master herbalist and acupuncturist. He's also written an incredible book, which I loved, called the Urban Monk and the Art of Stopping Time. He's the founder of whole.tv and well.org, and he's claimed Qigong Master, Taoist Abbott, with a pretty practical approach to living in a crazy modern world, which is getting crazier all the time. And he uses the thinking of Eastern philosophy and practices to help himself and others to overcome some of the challenges we have in the westernized world and to wake up and live their lives fully. And it's what we all want to be doing. So I encourage you to check out his latest book, Focus: Bringing Time, Energy, and Money into flow. It was just released and it's about bringing your attention in line with your intention to get the life that you want. So welcome, Pedram.

Hey, great to be here. Nice to see you.

All right, so here's the deal that most people find kind of bizarre. You were actually a real monk. You were actually a real monk for a number of years. Then you decided you could serve your real mission by being in the real world, but I don't know what that is. So how did you come to do this, what did you learn about yourself and the world during your time as a monk? And what it's been like after leaving a monastery, which is a very different kind of existence?

Very different kind of existence. I mean, look, the privilege I had of being a monk, being able to focus on oneself, really focus on one's breath, find the inner stillness, I mean, that is, It's the treasure that most of us don't get to even taste because we're so busy in the white water tumbling around trying to live this thing called life. We've never had a chance to slow down, to examine, to think, to question any of it. And so I got that. And once I felt as clear as I had felt in my life, I started to have doubts while up there. It felt really decadent. What was happening is-- Wait, being a monk felt decadent. It did. It's the weirdest thing. And people say, what are you talking about? That sounds like a lot of work. And like, no, for me, the honor of having the privilege and the space to sit in some beautiful setting and breathe to my belly and just recharge my batteries and feel full of life, I mean, it was amazing. And what was happening was the Western world was splashing against the beach, shall I say, of these Himalayan mountain top monasteries. And I realized people were, running from our world there. And the more I sat there, the less I felt like I was contributing to the world's problems. And the more I felt kind of disconnected with what was happening up there. It's like, okay, you're over here, you do this monk thing and poor humanity, they're never gonna get it. And I felt like, you know what, I grew up in Los Angeles, California. I think of all my friends and my family and all the people that are suffering. And there was just a juxtaposition of lifestyles that I couldn't reconcile. And I spoke with a couple of the Abbotts and the masters that I trained with and they're like, nah, man, you don't belong here.

Get out.

Get out. Yeah, back down the mountain.

I'm fired.

That's it.

I'm fired.

Yeah, they're like, we let you in, you drank from the well, now take this back. Take this back to your place because that's where it's needed. I gotta be honest, I didn't want to hear that. And I knew they were right. And so I came down and then had the rough re-entry of then saying, okay, I'm shifting from ascetic, which means I renounce the world, I'm up here breathing, doing my thing, enjoying the inner realms to householder, which is where the rest of us live now, which is I got bills, I got payroll, I got taxes, I got traffic. Now, take what you learned and apply it to the life of a householder and see if it works. A lot of it was lofty theory and the stuff that remained was the stuff that I know works because I then became CEO of a medical group. We had multiple offices. I had a lot going on. And that's where you know your meditation works. Not when you're on some sort of yoga retreat on day four feeling good about yourself. It's when the bullets are flying. Yeah.

And that really is a technique that you've used to help you navigate life and teach others how to do the same thing. So, what are the lessons that you learned as a monk that may seem a little abstract but actually help you deal with life and the real world?

Yeah. The real world is stuck on a story and it's this narrative, it's this fast-moving river. And we never stop to even question the cadence of how fast life is moving forward and how life circumstances get us tumbling up and down onto these rocks. And, When you learn how to tap into your breath, and we can get into the neurophysiology, there's all sorts of cool stuff about this that we can talk about. But when you get into the practices and you can still your mind by anchoring your breath and dropping into that place of no time, then you stand a chance. Then you start to power the prefrontal cortex. You have agency, you have higher moral reasoning, you have negation of impulses, which is big when we start talking about lifestyle. How do you say no to the cheesecake?

Right?

There's a part of your brain that's responsible for that. And, you know, just applying- Wait, wait.

So if you meditate, you can say no to the cheesecake. That's pretty good. Yes.

Yes. That is part of my premise is the people who learn to empower the part of their brain and water this field have much more capacity for negation of impulses and are in a moment where they can pop in the clutch and say, wait a minute, is this cheesecake gonna serve me versus being in just reactivity and hanger and whatever drives you to just eat the cheesecake before you know it happened. Right? And I think a lot of that is also predicated on this function of awareness, right? Of focus. And all of that, look, it's our birthright, but we think, you know, yoga is this 90-minute class that you feel guilty about not getting to and meditation is this lofty thing that, you know, is this super zen state that, you know, is blissful and these are all just misreads. I mean, yeah, there's stories of zen masters being in these deep meditative states, but that's not the day to day. The day to day is fetching water and chopping wood and just being in the moment with whatever you're doing, whether that's working in a medical office, whether that's being a paralegal, digging ditches, it's still a question of whether you are present and where you can access that presence. And I think a lot of people have misread this, right? It's just this lofty spiritual thing versus what I consider like an operating system that we all tap into.

So instead of meditating to get better at meditating, you meditate to get better at life.

Bingo. That's the literal translation of kung fu is hard work. And it applies to everything, it applies to all your practices. So when you're meditating to get better at life, that's also your kung fu, right? It's creating a circumstance within you that allows for you to roll with the punches and to be more adaptive and agile with whatever life is throwing at you instead of getting knocked off your perch. So that's 100% the case.

Powerfully. So you said in your books that we're experiencing as a society a crisis of consciousness. So what does that mean?

Well, the Buddhists called humans hungry ghosts. We're stumbling around looking for something outside of ourselves to fix us. Tell me what to do. Oh, I bought all these weights, but now I need a trainer because I can't just pick them up and start lifting them. Like, I have 150 recipe books, but I still can't cook. Like, tell me what to do. Outside in. And we've been trained to think that, right? Like, you know, so, you know, the doctor fixes me, the police protect me, you know, the politicians make decisions for me. And we're all just back on our heels, you know, basically without any agency. And the crisis of consciousness is we've evacuated. We are not here in our own bodies to be able to make decisions for ourselves in any capacity that's going to be sustained, right? Like you say, oh, I want to lose 40 pounds. Well, that's probably going to take a minute. And so, do you have the consciousness and the focus to stay on path to lose that 40 pounds and turn that into a lifestyle instead of just a yo-yo weight loss effect? That's not just intent. And that's my premise is everyone's like, you know, banking up intention and willpower and blowing it by January 4th or 5th, right? Because they can't hold a resolution. Is it a lack of willpower? Sometimes. But most of the time, I would put to you that it's a lack of focus because without that focus to get up and do the same thing every day and understand the why of why you're doing these things, you're going to just get distracted and then you're going to blow your willpower and you'll be right back in some circumstantial thing in life wondering why you gave up on another diet or forgot about the workout program. And, you know, we see this every day in healthcare.

So true. And we do have a crisis of consciousness. I think we're not really awake to what's happening a lot of the times for ourselves and really how to design a life that brings us closer into connection to things that matter for us, that we care about, that we want to do and be. And, and, and this is, this book is really important because if you can't focus your new book, Focus, you can't focus, you really can't do the things you want to do in life to feel the things you want to feel and love the way you want to love and do the work you want to do. And one of the things I loved about your book was you talked about something called life gardens, which is kind of a novel concept. I never heard of it before and why it's important that we tend our gardens in life and how it affects everything from our careers to our relationships to our finances and our health. So what are life gardens and how do we get one?

Well, here's the thing. The tricky part is we all have one. Right? But the question is when you start looking at your life garden, are you watering weeds or plants that you say you value? So if you took a look at your health, your family, your career, your passions, all these things that are important to you in life that you say are important, and then you look at how much water each of them will take to thrive. And to me, water is kind of the blended currency of time, money, and energy. We'll exchange those three for each other all the time, right? A lot of people trade their time for money. We put our energy into our work. And so you have a finite amount of water and you give even point. So you talk about work-life balance. Where's the date night with your wife? Where is hanging out at the kids soccer game? Are these things on your calendar? Where are the things that you say you value and are you watering them enough? And if you start looking at this landscape of your life as a garden, first off, any good gardener knows you could plant a seed and it takes 90 days to see the harvest. And so it teaches us to be patient and it teaches us to kind of methodically stay focused on what we said we want. I just planted a tomato plant here. Tomorrow, I'm planting broccoli right next to it. What's going to happen to the tomato plant? Right? That's what we do in life. Oh, I'm on this diet. Now I'm keto. Now I'm this. Now I'm that. It's just like you don't even, like, you don't even put the seed in the ground and you stop watering it. Right? Yeah. And so, looking at the life metaphor of the life garden, then it's on us, right? We get to decide where our water goes. And so, if you find yourself having stated goals and not getting there, it's almost like accounting. It's like, are you allocating enough budget of time, money, and energy there? Are you being realistic with what you say you want? If you're 150 pounds overweight, you're not going to be modeling underwear in a month. You might be there in five years. I don't know. But you got to be realistic about where you want to be based on your other commitments. like, I've made it. You know, we were just talking about this before we got on is I made a lot of adjustments in my life and. And stopped travel. I was traveling 80 days a year because of all the films I was making. And my kids were starting to be like, man, that dad guy's never around. And I was like, wow, if. If I have a stated goal of being a great husband and a great dad, I gotta change this. And I shifted my entire lifestyle around to, you know, being more remote and watching my kids grow up. Because that was important to me. And when you look at, you know, you look at that on paper, you're like, Ooh, I'm lying to myself. Like I'm cheating myself right now.

Yeah, yeah, well that's very honest. I mean, I think a lot of us do that. We say we value X, but we actually do Y. Yeah, follow the money.

Follow the money. Where's your energy going? Where's your time going?

Yeah, it's so true. And, you know, we only have time and energy and money. And where we spend those, it really reflects our values. And our stated values aren't often, the things that we focus on. We focus on things that just take up our time. It's really true. Things are really changing right now. We live in a very unstable, very unpredictable world. We're trying to figure out how to be happy in this time of COVID and everything else that's going on, the economic stresses, and how to focus on our health and our career, our friends and family, our passions, our desires. the biggest problem is time. I mean, I base this all the time. There's a million things I want to do. I wanted to take a long walk today, but I have too many things planned and I didn't manage my schedule very well. And I feel sort of disappointed that the thing that matters most to me, I'm probably not prioritizing. How do we manage our expectations for our time right now versus, you know, time in the future, how do we balance this between like doing, doing, doing and being, being, being? And I think, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to be more of a human being and less of a human doing because I've been doing so much for so many years and I'm like, wait a minute, there's a minute I need to sort of create.

A different balance for myself. Yeah, I mean for me, first thing I do is say, hey, you know, open up your calendar, let me look at your phone, right? And if it's a call, call, call.

Call, no, you're not a call.

Exactly. They're not looking at my calendar. Yeah, I mean you asked that and people, it's like you're asking to look into to their like lingerie, you know, it's like it's people are so protective of that because they're like, wow, yeah, that's not really a good reflection of what I say I want, right? And so for me, I'll block like from 11 to 12 every single day, it's my workout time. And, you know, that's it. And if I have to move it, then I'll look at where it needs to get moved that day and that time. And because we're homeschooling, it's also PE time for the kids. But, you know, you gotta, if you don't hold the wall. If you don't like, you know, man that gate, it's going to get taken. It's like, oh, Dr. Hyman, there's a so-and-so call, there's a this, there's a that. And, you know, if you don't hold the line, your calendar is going to basically reflect that. And then all of a sudden, it's.

Going to be like, you know, three.

Calls on top of your workout hour or, you know, schedule yourself first, right? You have to schedule yourself first and then you have to hold the line and you have to remember why it's important because work has this tendency to demand, right? Because that's, you know, work is technically where you get the money part of that equation. And so it's like, you know, we're spending money faster than we're making it and half the time. And, you know, people are so like lost in the debt income, you know, cycles of how America works, right? And so, you know, I have to work because I, you know, I have all these, you know, notions that, you know, I'm the breadwinner or whatever it is that makes you say, look, I got to do this. And so, look, I could work out tomorrow. I could take a walk tomorrow. tomorrow has its own walk planned. So it's not like you're walking double to make up for the time you lost today. And it's not like you're not getting the time. I mean, just that, just for this example, the cross crawl and the breathing and the three-dimensional movement and the dropping into parasympathetic nervous system and allowing the leftover thoughts to digest while you're moving your body and integrating what happened yesterday or yesteryear is a really important part of why walking needs to be there for your mental indigestion and your spiritual indigestion and your emotional indigestion. And so, like, but because it's not like, you know, it's not an appointment, we skip it. Right. And so first, first thing is hold the line with your phone. Make sure you schedule yourself first, make sure you assemble your day around the things that you need. And look, sometimes you got to make, you know, sometimes I'll take walk and talk to somebody and be like, Hey, listen, I need to go take a walk right now. Throw on your earbuds. I recommend you do the same. Let's walk and talk. You double down, right? Like, there's sometimes you gotta make that deal, but at least you're walking.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I definitely do a lot of walking meetings. People are like, oh, Zoom, Zoom. I'm like, I don't want to be on my camera.

I'm just gonna go for a walk and have a conversation and I can.

Focus and pay attention.

It's great.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

You know by now that I'm all.

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Now let's get back to today's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. And speaking of focus, your book, Focus, is just fabulous. Everybody should definitely go out and get a copy right now. because we all need more focus and we are really unfocused as a society and as individuals. And I notice it's something I struggle with as well. And in order to actually do the things that you want, to have the life you want, to be in service, to do the work that you care about, to show up for your family and friends, to learn the things you want to learn, to just be yourself, you have to focus. And the problem is, It's tough. How do people get focus and how do they make change so that they build the focus into their life?

Here's the funniest part about this story is we've already known the answer to this for years, but because we live in a culture that is dominantly selling sugar cereal to children, we sidestep the answer and say, okay, I can't wait till there's another shortcut. We already understand that mind-body practices like meditation, Qigong, yoga, breath work, all these things are absolutely proven to help with all of the things that we're saying we're lacking in life. I mean, it's, you know, there's the NF Kappa B pathway and inflammatory cascades and all sorts of wonderful medical stuff that we could geek out about. And then the empowerment of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that allows for you to stay focused and say no to impulses and stupid things that come by. Like, I was going to go to the gym, but the guy said, let's get a drink. like that's, you know, you got to be sitting in the perch of focus to get that. And so, you know, and I ask people, it's like, hey, so what are your daily practices to instill focus? And they don't have any, right?

Yeah.

So I meditate, like, you don't, the problem with meditation is what happened to meditation is it got basically supplanted for, you know, like a healthy alternative to a quaalude in our culture.

Right?

It's like, oh, you're so stressed out. You're about to have a panic attack. Now you're gonna, like, do that meditation thing. That's not what it's for. It's about doing it every single day to lengthen your fuse so that when the bullets start flying, you don't freak out and become non-adaptive and run for the hills, and you stand your ground and you make a conscious decision with your rational mind instead of getting knocked off your perch. And so, I teach a lot of practices to say, look, you do this every day, 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day. you're going to get better at life's Kung Fu. You're going to be more calm, more resilient. You're going to manage your inflammatory cascades better. You're going to be more in parasympathetic, rest and digest. You're going to be doing all these wonderful things that support your immunity and health. And like, it's this, the list is so long and you know this better than anyone, right? The list is so long of benefits and all you got to do is do it. But we've been trained in our culture to have someone give us a pill or tell us what to do, but not do the work that we know works and then wonder why our life doesn't work.

It's actually interesting because to me, this is one of the paradoxes of medicine is that we know you have to eat better to be healthy, you have to exercise, you have to sleep. But the fourth leg on that table is learning how to train your brain and its brainer size, basically, in a sense of how do you work with your mind? in a way that allows you to be more human, more engaged, more loving, more present, more happy, or happier. And when you look at the effects of meditation, it's actually, like I said, it's helping you be better at life, not just better at meditation. And the brain function that we have needs to be trained. We have very lazy, crazy monkey minds that don't have the ability to really be present and focus. And by using these techniques, it literally trains your brain in a way that it's like exercise training your muscles. But we don't value that in the society. We don't focus on that. And I think that's what's so beautiful about your book. It helps us connect to the science around it, but also the value to improving the quality of our overall life.

Amen. I mean, listen, you've known me long enough to know that I don't sugarcoat, right? And I'm just kind of a no-nonsense guy. because I've been, look, I've seen thousands of patients in my career. I'll tell you the ones that get better are the ones that decide they're gonna get better and do what it takes to get better. And the ones that are waiting for me to say some sort of magical thing that's gonna suddenly solve all their problems without them having to do anything are the ones that go from doctor to doctor, shopping from solution to solution, listening to every podcast, having notebooks this big, and still not being well.

Right, not doing it, not doing it.

You got to do it. It's action. And so, in the Life Garden, everything that you say you want, there's a column that says the action I will take to get there. And if you don't associate what you say you want with an action to get there, you're running around in a circle. You're just talking smack, right? And so, it's about reconciling and the word integrity comes in, personal integrity. if you don't have integrity with yourself, if you say, hey, I'm going to get up and I'm going to do this this morning and you're like, eh, never mind, you're more likely to flake on that lunch, who goes to lunch anymore, but you're more likely, you know what I mean? You're more likely to flake on some person and be late because you can't even hold the line for yourself. And so, it really is about establishing integrity with your own word and doing what it takes to get where you say you want. Like, I don't tell people what to do with their lives. That's not my position, right? My position is to give people tools to say, hey, I want this. Okay, great. Here's some ideas about how you can get there. But where I've seen in my 20 years of doing this lifeguard work is people just look around them and say, well, everyone else is doing it and they lose their integrity. And if you look around the world we live in right now, you can't even trust the news. You can't even trust anything because there's a lack of integrity. That doesn't start with fixing the political system. It starts with fixing what you said you were going to do this morning, and then establishing that core integrity with yourself and then rippling that out. And it'll reflect in your health, it'll reflect in your life, it'll reflect in your finances. Once you are back in the driver's seat, then you're not the one tumbling around the white water of circumstances asking what happened. You're at the rudder. And that's the difference between a master and someone who's making excuses for their life.

Yeah, that's powerful, Pedram. Thank you. One of the things that's happening right now, we're all in it together, is COVID-19 and the way it's changed all of our lives. It's dropped us back in our homes, stopped us from running around and traveling, which you seem like you were on that bandwagon before. And it's forced us to really look at our lives and how we spend our time and what we want and to reset things. and, and I think a lot of people are struggling with this. So how do you, how do you suggest people really reset and wake up to what's really happening that allows them to get more connected to what they want, what matters to them, how they want to live their lives? I know for me, it's been a huge change because I've spent half my life on the road and not just 80 days, but probably more than, more than that. And being home for the first time in many years, it's really kind of connected to me, the things that I really missed, just being in the same bed every night, being able to have a routine and a schedule and a rhythm to eat food that I cooked, to work out in a more regular schedule, to actually have the nourishment of the kinds of things that really make me happy. And I'm like, well, I don't want to go back to being on the road. So how do we help people wake up and reset?

Yeah. I mean, what a gift in a lot of ways. I mean, listen, I know people, I lost one of my groomsmen, my wife lost her grandma. I mean, COVID is obviously serious, right? But it's also a very interesting time. If you are doing what you're doing, banging around, running your life, and you get this really bad flu or fever and it knocks you down, and you don't have enough energy to do anything but just lie around and think about your life, I mean, when that's happened to me in my life, I start thinking, how the hell did I get here? Okay, I've been traveling too much. I've been on airplanes. I had that dairy at lunch, I had this, I had that. And I started thinking about going back following the breadcrumbs of what led me to kind of stumble and get sick and fall. And look, the world's thrown a fever right now. I mean, literally everything came to a crashing halt and we have an opportunity not just to think about how we run our own lives, but how we run our economy, how we burn fossil fuels, all of it. And this to me is a very important time for humanity. to take a proper accounting of where we are, what we value, and basically change things to stay there, right? Like for me, I'm not going back. I'm not going to travel 80 days a year. That was insane. I don't care. Like I'm on a couple shows right now where it's just you're zooming in and that's the new normal and thank God, I'm so happy. But like to go to New York for like, you know, four hours of TV time and fly back that's just insane. You're burning all this fossil fuel. I'm done with it, right? And so anyone who's listening right now, what is happening that you're valuing more now? Are you getting time with your kids? Are you having more access to healthy food in your kitchen because you don't have to go to Denny's for lunch? I mean, there's so many wonderful things that are now part of the new normal that you can keep. And then there's a lot of things that are stressing people out. I mean, for me, a lot of people in my academies and stuff, they have terrible boundaries. There's kids everywhere. There's noise. They don't have the work-life balance and they don't know how to adjust and say, I'm at work or I'm at home now. These are skills that you got to pick up, right? And you can feel sorry for yourself or you can just learn. There's ways to learn to do this. But to me, I see this as a gift. I really do. I see that COVID has slowed us down. to get us to be introspective as a culture. And you watch the political debates and stuff, they're insane, right? It's just a bunch of insanity on all sides. It's people just screaming at each other. So, you look at that and you're like, wow, the world is catching fire and it's all over. And the lesson there is peace, stability, community. They all start with you. they all start with how you're living your life every single day. Like, have you walked over to talk to your neighbors lately? Have you tilled your own garden? Have you gone out and cleaned up your yard? These are all opportunities we have now to kind of hunker down and reset and think about how much we consume and where our energy goes. If you don't take this chance right now, I think it's going to lead to much more mental health issues downstream for people who don't take this opportunity to to kind of think through what they want in life.

It's true. You know, you said very wisely, like, I am not going to get on a plane 80 days a month anymore. And, you know, what I've been thinking a lot about is, you know, we all have these giant to-do lists. And I've been thinking about my to-don't list. And I'm working on my to-don't list because I think I have a bad habit of saying yes. One, because I'm, excited to do many things and I want to contribute. Two, because I want to help my friends. Three, because I feel like it's important to help people, but I'm also have trouble saying no. And I think you talk about saying no as a really important way of actually helping yourself. Often when your heart says no, and your mouth says, yes, there's a huge cost to that for you personally. And I think many of us struggle with that. And so we have to learn how to be in integrity to be able to say no with love and kindness, but to really take care of ourselves. And I think that's, like I said, someone said saying no to your someone else is saying yes to yourself. So how do you recommend people do that? Because I know it's a challenge for me. People are now even having more difficulties working from home and trying to balance school and work and many more things. So how do you get people to the polite and loving no?

Yeah. And I find that it's easier for east coasters than west coasters. I mean, we all come from a people-pleasing culture in America in general, but no is a very difficult word. We want people to like us. We want to help our friends. We want all those things. And I would say that, you know, for me, the filter I put all of those questions through becomes my life garden. And so once I visualize my life garden, how much water it takes to manifest all the things that I do. And, you know, you do a lot. I do a lot. I mean, we're busy people. So it's like I'm constantly watering a number of films and books and, you know, all these things take a lot of time, energy, and effort. And so when some new opportunity comes up, I look at all the things I've already said yes to real quick. including my wife, my kids, my fitness, even my dogs. I mean, I have so many things that take time during my day. And then I have to ask myself, what do I have to say no to to make this a yes? And if this thing is so important to supplant one of my former yeses and stop watering it to allow for this to happen, then that's a conscious decision. And look, life if life brings new things and we have opportunities to go in directions, that's fine. But I have to make room somewhere else in my garden. And in keeping that visualization, it helps me from impulsively saying yes to everything. And you don't have to be like, no, right? You could just be like, Hey, listen, you know what? We're really busy this quarter. I think sometime in three months, I'll just pass you off to my assistant. I would love to do this. As soon as time opens up, And so it could be no for now, yes later, but not yes right now. And so we have this thing, this cushion called time. And because we're also like, I'm a quick start, right? Where I'm just like, hell yeah, let's go, let's go. And it doesn't have to happen today or tomorrow. It could be a yes maybe later, right? And let's book that six months from now. That's fine. And then, you know, I will adjust my life garden accordingly then. But the problem is we don't, Know how much is flying out of our pocket right now. And so we just spend the money, spend money really in terms of time that we don't.

Well, it's true. I haven't found myself going, you know, I've got nothing on the schedule in November. So sure, why not? I'll do that. It sounds fun. And then November comes around. I'm like, the entire day is full. Like, I just like, I thought I had, you know, Friday afternoon, I'm going to be getting a ride back to my house from Boston where I'm at. And I'm thinking, I'm going to great, I'm going to get to edit my book because I have like two hours to just focus and no interruptions. And the next thing I know, I've got the entire time booked with phone calls. This is important and that surgeon and this one wants to talk to me and that, it's all stuff that I want to do or that I care about, but it's like, wait a minute, what happened to that time? And so it's really... Yeah.

When I'm writing a book, my team knows, if I say, you know, writing a chapter, they know that that is sacred time unless something's on fire. they're not allowed to put something on top of that. And I'm willing to take a call at like 5:30 in the evening if it's urgent to kind of get that out of the way, but I'm not going to let the book time go because what's going to happen is then every time I'm on a phone call with someone, there's a subtle amount of resentment that, you know, I'm here and not where I said I was going to be. And after a while, that leads to anxiety. That's stressful.

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about meditation as a tool to sort of hook in. We've talked a lot about that on this podcast How do you start to do it? People are like, I have to get a meditation cushion. It has to be perfectly quiet. I have to be in a monastery, whatever, in front of the right music.

I gotta wear Lululemon.

I gotta have the right cushion. How do we start to build this in a really practical way in our daily lives?

I think what's happening is there's a lot of fluff. Everyone's taking meditation and trying to brand it in their own way because Lord knows Instagram needs constant feed posts and stuff. And, you know, my whole thing has been reductionist, right? I don't really think that you need to like make meditation fluffy. You don't have to, you know, change your shirt, get a tattoo or any of that crap, right? You just need to breathe. So, the three fundamentals that we know that will basically switch from sympathetic dominance to parasympathetic dominance is you want to relax, you want to relax your gastroc muscle. So, either be seated or bend your knees in a standing position. you want to do low diaphragmatic breathing down to your lower belly, and you want the tip of your tongue touching the roof of the mouth. Those three things to me are the trifecta of coaxing your nervous system back into parasympathetic dominance. And the more you do that, the more you train your body to go back to and live in rest and digest. And look, at first, you might get 30 seconds out of five minutes of actual, you know, Applied time there. And eventually you get better and better at it. And then you find yourself doing it throughout the day. And eventually that becomes home. And when that becomes home, that's when people go, Hey, Mark, what are you doing? You look good, like you look different. What's up? Right? And you're just in a different time zone because you're not in that weird reactive phase. And so literally it's low diaphragmatic breathing, relax your gastroc tongue to the roof of the mouth. That's the that's a trifecta from, you know, basically any meditation system worth its salt. There's different breathing techniques. Why tongue to the roof of your mouth? So in the Chinese system, what that does is it allows for the Dumai and the Ren Mai meridians to circulate. So it creates an electromagnetic circuit of connecting the dots, basically. In Western physiological model, what it does is it shifts and it opens up the airway. So you're doing more nasal breathing, getting more nitrous oxide and all sorts of wonderful things that happen. nasal breathing and it puts you in that position where you're breathing and moisturizing the air coming in and out of your nose. And we don't know. We just see it happen, right? It works. It works. It works. And so, you know, I've been at this for a very long time and I can tell you anecdotally it works and I can tell you there's a ton of studies coming out now showing that these things somehow are shifting nervous systems. They are helping the sensory motor strip relax. They're helping the limbic system move the blood back up to the prefrontal cortex. And so, I don't know how these guys knew this stuff. I'm not going to pretend I do. They knew it. And now we're starting to understand that it actually physiologically is doing what they said it does.

And again, well, what's interesting is that the tech revolution has just guided us to so many extraordinary discoveries. amount of intelligence and diligence and hard work applied to understanding our physical world and our outer world has just been staggering. We can send people to Mars and the moon and I mean just it's mind boggling. But what we've neglected in our culture is a real deep investigation into the technology of inner space and our own minds and the workings of them. And you know cultures like Tibet, I'm reading a book now called the Way of the White Clouds about this pilgrim in Tibet in the 1930s and the practices they did and the ways that they developed their mind. So they were experts at the inner technology. And these tools are something that you can use to start to get into that in a way that actually enhances the quality of your life. Because it's all about at the end of the day, the quality of your life, the quality of your interactions with other humans, your ability to show up in your life fully, to be connected and present and alive. And if we don't have that, we don't really don't have our life. we're just rushing through headlong, doing one thing after the other, and not really connecting to the things that matter. So I think it's important for us to understand these are little doorways. We know about exercise, we know about eating, but this is an important book because it helps us to draw back to some of those ancient practices that take us to a place that allow us to live better and feel better. Okay, so last question. You talk about your life being broken up into sprints. You call these 100-day gong. So what the heck is 100-day gong? What is it and why does it work for you and why does it work for all those people that you use it with in your practice?

So we know that it takes about 90 days to develop a new habit. And so people say, Hey, I want to do this multi-year goal of becoming a whatever, whatever. And there's just, there's not enough focus. Like most people I know do not have the, the mental fortitude to keep focused on something for five years, let alone five minutes. And so what we start doing is breaking it down into these little sprints. So, you get three of these sprints a year and you have something that you want to get to. Okay, so what are you going to do every day for the next 100 days to improve your vitality, bring down your inflammation, have more energy to then invest into this goal? Because a lot of us, what's the point of being healthy? what's the point of being fit? And we lose track of all those things because we just gas up the car and then it just sits around or we parade it around not having a destination or a journey. Once you start understanding what you need this energy for, what you need this clarity for, what you need this drive to take you to, then you start working towards it and remembering the why. And so 100 days at a time, every day you're 1% closer. And I've found with tens of thousands of patients and students at this point, and I've always had them give us feedback of what works for them is it takes that long to instill new habits. And people are like, well, that's a long time. I'm like, yeah, okay. So 100 days from now, you're going to be 100 days older one way or another. What did you do? Right? It's like, don't be so short-sighted to think that you're not going to live another 100 days. So how are you going to change your operating system and what actions are you going to take towards the goals that you stated, not that I gave you, but that you said are important to you to actually get there. And these 100-day sprints have been really effective. We break them down into 60 and 30-day goals. But then it just kind of boils down to what are you doing every day? Like if you want to, you know, write a book and you say, okay, I have 100 days to do it, then you better be 30% of the way there by day 30 or else it's going to be a rough end of the month. Or you better move things around later in the month and take care of other other plants in your life garden right now to make room for it. But just looking at how to budget your time, energy, and money is something that we weren't taught. I wasn't taught that in school.

No.

Right.

And so, we just run around just shooting our cannons, wondering why we're tired when we're eating calories and we're borrowing more calories with coffee to get through today. Yeah, we're tired. And so, you got to look at how your energy is going out. Where are you spending all this? and without focus, you're never going to get to where you said you're going to be. So 100 days is really the magic number I found in 20-25 years of doing this.

So any last thoughts, wisdom, for those listening about how to be more engaged in developing their focus, which really determines everything about your life, right?

Yeah. I think what you were saying in the previous segment is really the moral of the story. which is it's about inner space, it's about understanding who you are. If you don't ask who I am and what's this all about and what do I want to do with the 150,000 or 150 million heartbeats I have left on planet Earth, then you're just taking up space and eating food and I don't know, being fed media. And so the real question is who are you? What do you want out of life? And I don't know if there's reincarnation or not. And if this is your only chance on planet Earth to be Dr. Mark Hyman or whoever's listening to this, what do you need to get out of it? And then what do you have to do to get there? And those are deep personal questions. And we live in this thing called the information age where, you know, there's billions of dollars being leveraged and made on our attention, our eyeballs. So our attention has become the currency of the information age. And our attention is everywhere except on our own lives, on our own priorities, on our own families. And so if you take back your attention, you've taken back your power.

So, so true. Well, Bedros, thank you for the work you do in the world, the movies you make, the books you write, the teaching that helps people just get connected to what really matters with not just the grand abstract idea, but really practical tools. And I think everybody needs to pick up a copy of Focus, bringing time, energy, and money into flow. It's out now. You can get it wherever your books, Amazon, whatever. I also encourage you to recognize if you buy the book, you're going to get this amazing course called the 21 Days to Focus with the purchase of the book. So you'll have a real practical set of tools guided by Pedram to help you do that. And then please, if you love this podcast, share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you. How have you been able to focus and what tools have you learned? Maybe you can share those with us, learn some new things, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And we'll see you next time. on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and.

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