How To Prioritize Self-Care And Reset Your Stress Response

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

Our social interactions regulate our biology. They regulate our immune system. So if you're having a conflict with somebody, you're gonna turning on inflammatory genes. If you have a loving, deep connection.

With someone, you're gonna turn on anti-inflammatory genes. That's how powerful this stuff is. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark here. It's hard to overstate how important sleep is. Our bodies know this and that's why we spend on average a third of our entire lives sleeping. Now, I've had my own share of issues with falling and staying asleep over the years. And as a result, I spent a lot of time optimizing my sleep. And one of the best tools I found is BiOptimizer's Sleep Breakthrough. Now, most over-the-counter melatonin products can actually cause you to overdose on melatonin, which can be kind of dangerous. Sleep Breakthrough, on the other hand, is melatonin free. Instead, it gives your body the precursors to melatonin and the molecules that help your body produce melatonin naturally. That way, the body doesn't downregulate melatonin production and you don't become dependent on sleep supplements and you don't experience any sleep hangovers. Hangovers. With Sleep Breakthrough, you'll fall asleep in minutes and wake up feeling refreshed and energized. Now, Bioptimizers is offering my listeners 10% off Sleep Breakthrough. And if you buy two or more, you'll get a free bottle of Magnesium Breakthrough.

This is a limited-time offer, so go to sleepbreakthrough.com/hymen and use the code HYMEN10. People are always surprised when I tell them that even with a whole foods diet rich in plants, we can still be nutrient deficient. and addressing nutrient deficiencies is one of the lowest hanging fruits for optimizing our health and feeling better at any age. And that is why I'm a huge fan of AG1 from Athletic Greens. Since our soils are so damaged, the plants can't extract the nutrients because there's no living matter anymore. And we're up against issues like chronic stress and toxicity and sleep deprivation like never before. And our bodies need some extra help getting all the right information to work properly. That information comes in the form of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and good bacteria, all of which help ourselves remember how to efficiently tackle their important jobs.

So one of the things I use.

Every day to support my diet is AG1 from Athletic Greens. With just one scoop of AG1, I get 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole food source superfoods, probiotics, adaptogens, and more to.

Support my entire body.

Even with a really healthy diet, it's hard to hit the mark for all our nutrient needs, so I feel better knowing I have some extra help from Ag1. Unlike other supplements and powders out there, Ag1 is third party tested and made without GMO, nasty chemicals or artificial anything and actually tastes great, kind of like a tropical green drink.

I like it on its own mixed.

With water, but it also works really well in most smoothies. If you're curious about trying Ag1 from Athletic Greens for yourself, Right now, they're offering my community 10 free travel plaques with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/hyman. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/hyman to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance.

Now, let's get back to this week's.

Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. and this is a place for conversations that matter. And today I'm bringing you a special version of Dr. Schworm's called Health Bite because taking small steps to improve your health can make a big difference over time. And today the topic is how do we care for ourselves? How do I care for myself given my crazy busy life? Now many of us put self-care last on our to-do list. We literally are the last thing on our to-do list. And I know what that's like because I've done that for a lot of my life to the detriment of my own health. You know, work, family, friends, the needs of others all usually come first. But nourishing our own spirit and our own mental health and our own bodies is so important and it should not be an afterthought. In fact, many of us never think about it at all. But in places like the Blue Zones, They've naturally incorporated many practices that help them live to be well over 100 that we can learn from. They focus on community and connection, meaning and purpose, and rest. They have a lot of chilling time and hanging out. In our fast-paced society with to-do lists, calendars, schedules, extracurricular activities, building careers, raising families, taking work home, emailing at night, I mean, it's made self-care and mental health pretty low on the codem pole of sort of priorities for our lives. But the truth is you really can't live a happy, healthy, fulfilled life and a long one if you neglect to nourish your mind and your spirit and your body. So it might be hard to imagine, but your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, grief, joy, sadness, love, anger, they're all transmuted into biological signals that change your gene expression, that regulate inflammation in your body, that alter your hormones and your microbiome, literally your bacteria in your gut are listening to your thoughts and changing for good or bad depending on what you think or feel. Your neurotransmitters are regulated by your thoughts, obviously neuroplasticity, your mitochondria, pretty much every aspect of your biology is regulated by what you do and what you think and how you live. So I'm going to focus today mostly on the mind and your spirit and how do we take care of those things in a way that nourishes us, it gives us energy, it allows us to live a long and productive healthy life. So how do we do self-care? How do we change our mindset? How do we learn about how Community impacts our health? Well, there's a lot of information about how self-care or mindset or Community all help improve factors for health and longevity. For example, if you're lonely, your risk of Death is equal or more than that of someone who's obese. Being lonely is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. And many people in the world and in America particularly don't have someone they can call if something bad happens or they have a thing they need to talk about or someone who's really a deep intimate connection, even one person, which is really tragic. So practicing behaviors that Focus on self-healing, self-compassion, connection with others are really important. And self-love is hard, but it's got to be your focus because until you take care of yourself, you can't take care of anybody else. So focusing on things like improving what you eat and exercising and stopping smoking, practicing simple self-care, improving your overall health and well-being, and optimizing your sleep are so important for your overall quality of life. Self-compassion is pretty important because when you are loving towards yourself, I mean think about it, most of us, if we put our inner thoughts on loudspeaker and we broadcast in the world, people would think we're crazy, first of all. Second of all, if we talk to our friends the way we talk to ourselves, we wouldn't have any friends. So be nice to yourself. Self-compassion is associated with fixing a lot of problems including physical health symptoms, mental health outcomes, blood sugar control, people with diabetes, improves resiliency in cancer outcomes, mental health in people who actually have cancer. So it's really important to practice self-love and self-compassion. Also nurture your social connections, your community, your relationships. Doing that has been associated with dramatically increased lifespan, improved health span. I was just talking to somebody whose grandmother died at 103 and she loved donuts and she was overweight. They called her Chubby Bubby, which is Bubby is a Yiddish word for grandmother. And she'll be 103 years old. But what she did have was a joy for life. What she did have was a deep group of connected friends and social network. What she did have was a great sense of humor. And she, through her mind, was able to overcome a lot of the things that she was doing bad to her body. So when you actually have these connections and you have a deep social network, It will increase your lifespan. It will improve your mental health. It helps physical markers of health, including blood pressure, your waist circumference, body mass, it reduces inflammation. And this is because of this phenomenon we call sociogenomics. Sociogenomics is the idea that our social interactions regulate our biology. They regulate our immune system. So if you're having a conflict with somebody, you're going to turning on inflammatory genes. If you have a loving, deep connection with someone, you're going to turn on anti-inflammatory genes. that's how powerful this stuff is. Another really important thing is your mindset. If everything is always a disaster, crisis, a problem versus everything is a gift and you're grateful and happy, it has a huge impact on your health. And honestly, you know, I, my, I was a joke that worrying works because 99 of the time what you worry about doesn't come out. Come true. So the point is that you know, we make ourselves crazy most of the time by our thoughts and by our beliefs. So people who ruminate with negative thoughts, people who have a kind of a curmudgeonly negative outlook often tend to have shorter life and poor physical mental health. And those who focus on positive thoughts and future goals and rewards are much better chance of having a long life, a healthy life, and a better wellbeing physically and mentally. My joke always is that optimists live longer even if they're wrong. and it's true. If you look at the data, your mindset plays a huge role. Optimism plays a huge role on your longevity. Anger is also a big problem. We have unresolved anger that eats at us and also spills out and hurts others. But anger is often repressed emotion. And, and when people are not expressing themselves, when they're not able to share their truth, it comes out often as kind of very harsh and aggressive anger. But what's really interesting is, and this is really from a lot of Dr. Gabemonte's work, in looking at breast cancer studies, he pointed out that those women who had inability to express their anger, who were always nice, actually had a much higher risk of cancer and a bad outcome from cancer, regardless of the stage or the grade or any type of the biology of the cancer. if your emotions are inflamed, so is your biology. Carolyn Mace, who's an author in a medical intuitive, says that our biography becomes our biology. It's true the other way. Our biology can become our biography. Our microbiome, for example, affects our mood, our thoughts, and so forth. But also our life story can become transmuted into biological signals that can really hurt us. Candace Pert talked about the molecules of emotion based on her work at the NIH, which establish the whole field of psychoneuroimmunology about how our emotions and our hormones and our neurotransmitters and our immune system are all constantly in dialogue with each other. So literally your immune cells are listening to your thoughts. And it's important because if you don't address this in yourself, it actually can lead to bad health outcomes. And by changing your perspective, by actually learning how to tell the truth, by expressing your feelings in a way that's kind, not with meanness and aggressiveness, but with kindness. It can have a profoundly liberating effect on your life and also improve your biology tremendously. The thing that's really critical for your health and for longevity is having a sense of purpose. Just having a sense of meaning and purpose extend life by seven years. If you eradicate all heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, the total life extension would be seven years. So, Having a sense of purpose is hugely important. That's what's going on in the blue zones. They all have a sense of connection and purpose and belonging. It's associated with well-being with improved physical and cognitive health, lower rates of depression, slower aging, even psychological well-being and having a sense of purpose leads to increased telomere length and slower shortening of the telomeres, whereas chronic stress does the opposite. It decreases telomere length and accelerates aging and oxidative stress. So really important to look at your life and See, why you get up in the morning? I think Steve Jobs said once in a commencement speech, if you look in the mirror in the morning and you don't love what you're doing and you're not excited to go to work, you better change what you're doing because this is only ride we get. This is not a dress rehearsal. So what are the ways practically that you can start to reclaim your life? What are the ways you can prioritize self-care and reset our stress response? Well, the first is just breath. We all walk around breathing and it's available to us 24/7 and it's free. So I like the simple take five breath. There's a lot of ways to do it, but you take five breaths in and out slowly. So into the count of five, out to the count of five. You can hold for five at the bottom if you want, and then five breaths in like that to the count of five in, and the count of five out. You do that when you wake up before each meal and at bedtime, and that's five times a day. that can have a profound effect on your health. It only takes a few seconds. Also, there's things like meditation. You can use guided meditation. There's all kinds of apps out there like Calm or Headspace. You can do guided imagery. Yoga nidra is wonderful. I like that we just lay down. I'm kind of lazy. You can lay down even for 10 minutes. It makes a huge, huge effect on your health, improves stem cell function, reduces inflammation, improves depression, anxiety, sleep. I mean, the effects of meditation and stress reduction in the body are huge. And if you don't have 10 minutes to meditate or do something like that every day, you might want to look at your life and see what's wrong with it because that is not good if you don't have 10 minutes to take care of yourself. Start a regular yoga practice. Just moving your body, stretching things out, getting all the knots and tension out really helps. Even 10 minutes of yoga a day is really great. 15 minutes, 20 minutes, there's all kinds of great resources online for free yoga classes. so breathing and stretching can really help reset your nervous system. Beyond the woods in nature, we all have a nature deficit disorder. They now call it forest bathing. We used to call it taking a walk in the woods. But basically, the idea is get out in nature and get close to the earth and feel the elements. It really helps bring your nervous system back into alignment. Also, write down what's going on inside. We found from journaling, which is really interesting, if people journal about their inner feelings for 20 minutes a day, like their true thoughts and feelings. If they had rheumatoid arthritis or asthma, versus them just writing about like what I did yesterday, for example, which they did a control group, they found that the people who wrote about their authentic feelings had a dramatic reduction in autoimmune symptoms, in inflammatory numbers on lab tests, in asthma symptoms, and an objective lung function. So this is just writing in your journal can have profound effects in that way. Also, get connected, right? Get someone in your world who you like and make them close, right? Whether it's a friend or a family member, a spouse, even if you're not around in the same areas, your close friends may be from college when you're younger, get them on Zoom, get a group together, meet every week in person, get a support group going so you can get a safe healing environment to share your life all the parts of your life, the ups, the downs, the good, the bad. So being seen and known is really some of the best medicine out there. Start exercising and doing strength training because exercise helps you boost the feel good neurotransmitters and also boost serotonin, dopamine. Resistance training helps actually reduce the decline in testosterone. So basically it actually helps your energy, motivation and mood. So it's basically a win-win-win. So these are simple things that we can incorporate in our life on a daily basis and have profound, profound effects.

So.

Remember, you can't just go around doing, doing, doing and giving, giving, giving. You need to pause and take care of yourself because if you don't, you're gonna pay the price. So make sure you take care of yourself, practice self-love, self-compassion, work on building a mindset that helps you have a positive outlook on life, build your relationship and Community, figure out what your purpose is. And it doesn't have to be grandiose like saving the world. It can be simply just being a good grandparent or being a member of your Community or whatever it is. That's really critical. And all these things are essential to having a long, fulfilling, healthy life. So that's it for today's Health Bite. Hope you've enjoyed it. Please share it with your friends and family on social media. I'm sure they'd love to hear. Leave a comment. What are your self-care practices? What do you do?

How do you keep yourself healthy?

And mind and body and spirit. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.

Thanks for tuning into 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 that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter and in it I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger, longer. Hi everyone.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

Healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you.

Can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.