Dr. Mark Hyman explains how stress and the mind-body connection drive disease and mental health problems. He outlines lifestyle and biological strategies to achieve ultra wellness through managing stress, shifting attitude, and restoring balance in the body.
Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome back. What's more important than almost any other factor in your health? Before I get to the answer to that, I want to just remind you what we learned last time. We learned why we lose energy and age more quickly than we should. and we learned why fixing your metabolic engine is a key to ultra wellness. We also gave you a few tips about how to get a metabolic tune-up. In this session, you're going to learn how the mind affects the body and the role of stress in causing disease, but you're also going to learn about how the body affects the mind and how changing your body can actually help you change your mind. So, what am I talking about when I say almost any other factor is not as important as this one factor? What is it? Well, it's the cause of 95% or worse than 95% of all disease. And it's been associated with dramatic also reductions in disease and increase in longevity. And it's more important than cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, smoking or any other risk factor in determining whether you will live a long and healthy life. What is it? It's your attitudes, your social network, your community and your spiritual beliefs. and also how your biology in turn affects your attitude and mental well-being. It's that bi-directional communication between your mind and your body and your body and your mind. So it's one system, it's one entire interacting system. So what are the consequences of imbalance in the system? Well they're manifested as often mental symptoms, depression, anxiety, ADD, autism, memory disorders, dementia, and almost all chronic illness. The effects of stress are profound. Low socioeconomic status has been associated with poor health outcomes, but it's not from actually bad habits. It's from feeling powerlessness and not bad lifestyle habits. Damage to the memory center occurs with stress. And just being part of a group like a bowling club or a bridge club or a knitting or a quilting club will actually help you increase longevity and reduce disease. One interesting study they found in doctors, when they studied them when they were young in medical school, the ones who were more hostile had a higher risk of heart attacks than those who ended up having higher cholesterol, higher blood pressure, who smoked, and even had high blood sugar. So that's a much more important factor is your beliefs and your attitudes. I had actually a patient of mine who came to see me who had a broken heart. literally his wife died, he had a broken heart and he developed heart failure. And those grief molecules literally damaged his heart. So what I recommended for him was not medication to fix his heart, but healing touch, touch, not medication healed his heart and he got better. So think about what the stresses are in your life. What are the things that lead to the disturbance in your stress response? Things like grief, poverty, divorce, isolation, work stress, relationship stress. and one of the physical stressors, things like sleep deprivation, loss of your daily rhythms, waking and sleeping at odd times, toxic foods, infections, allergens, trauma, all these things will damage your stress response. And we have a balancing antidote to that stress response. We have a relaxation response which is just important to learn how to activate. So in order to work with the body, you have to work with the stress levels, but you also have to work with finding the biological causes, the underlying reasons in your nutrition and your lifestyle, in any of the other seven keys to ultra wellness that lead to imbalance. Things like B12 deficiency or low thyroid or magnesium deficiency or mercury problems or gluten problems. These all affect you. If you're B12 deficient, you can take all the Prozac you want but you're not going to feel good, you're not going to be happy. unless you address that. So remember, the body affects the mind, just as the mind affects the body. So if you change your body, you can change your mind. Okay, what are a few quick tips? First, you have to learn to actively relax. Things like meditation, yoga, deep breathing, there's a whole list of things, but you have to actually learn how to switch on that relaxation response. I call it the pause button. You have to learn to find your own pause button. And you have to also do things that balance that system, things like exercise, eliminating junk food, processed foods, eating smaller and more frequent meals, taking a multivitamin, making sure you have enough B12, B6 and magnesium which help to balance the mood. Try certain herbs, things like ginseng or licorice or rosyola which will help to balance the stress response. And take time to look at your attitudes and beliefs. You become what you believe. What you think is what will happen to you. And we attract those negative beliefs and thoughts and behaviors to us by our beliefs and it's very powerful. We actually have huge impact. We wake up in the morning and choose to have a positive attitude rather than a negative attitude. So it's important to think about those things to get enough sleep, to expose yourself to bright light, to exercise, to eat well. All these things help to balance the stress response. Now this whole body-mind thing that I'm talking about in this session is an entirely new field. It's actually the subject of my a next book next year. I'm working on it about how the body affects the mind, not just the mind affecting the body. It's a new frontier. So now we've come to the end of our series of blogs on ultra wellness. And I hope this has been useful to you and helped you learn how to transform your health and also how to think about how to transform health care. This whole concept of ultra wellness is a fundamental change in our worldview. And it goes from treating and diagnosing disease to helping the body regain balance to self-regulate and to heal. And it does so by addressing the roots of illness, the seven keys that I talk about in Ultra Wellness. And it teaches you things like self-care. It empowers you to not be just a victim of your illness. And we can hopefully together change our sick care system to a true health care system. Each of us can contribute and make small changes in ourselves, our families, and our communities. It will make a big difference for everyone moving toward Ultra Wellness. One of my favorite people, Margaret Mead, said, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. So thank you for joining me, and I hope to see you again next week.
