Use Your Mind To Heal Your Body

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

You could have the healthiest ketogenic, vegan, intermittent fasting, enzymes, food combining. And if you're living in fear, if you're living in pain, the cell is not in a state to actually absorb anything.

Hey, Doctor's Pharmacy listeners. If you're a fan of the show, I'd love your help. My team and I put together a brief survey to hear your feedback on the podcast and learn a bit more to learn more about our audience and continue to provide you with free content around the biggest issues of our time. We're going to be giving away five air doctors and five aqua true devices that are water filters. So by filling out the survey, you can enter to win one. You can do so by visiting Dr. Hyman.com slash fan again, that's Dr. Hyman.com slash fan fan. And just thanks so much for your support. I really, really appreciate it. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you are usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. And I'm sure many of you can relate how time consuming this process was and then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains and more. Rupa Health helped provide a significantly better patient experience and it's 90% faster. letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. This is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com that's R-U-P-A-Health.com One of today's episode sponsors is ButcherBox. With all the factory farm animal products at the supermarket, It's hard to find meat that actually supports your health goals instead of hurting them. Feedlot cows are pumped full of antibiotics and hormones and they're fed corn that makes the meat not so healthy. And that is why I love grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef from ButcherBox. Ground beef is probably the most dynamic protein out there. I love how quickly it makes up a healthy meal without a lot of fuss or muss. Grass-fed meat is also better for the environment so you can feel better eating it. In fact, grass-fed and grass-finished beef actually helps put carbon back into the soil, reversing climate change. And with Butcher Box, I get 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef delivered right to my doorstep. They also offer wild-caught salmon, which I love, including in my weekly meal plans too. And grass-fed ground beef is the first protein I recommend for people who are trying to get more comfortable in the kitchen because you can just throw in a pan with some salt, herbs, and spices, and it just makes a great meal. My favorite way to cook grass-fed ground beef is by sauteing it with lots of fresh garlic and onions and peppers and cumin and chili oil and oregano and tossing it over a bed of greens for a super easy homemade taco salad. Just talking about this makes me hungry. So if you've been looking for a way to get higher quality protein in your own diet, be sure to check out the grass-fed beef from ButcherBox, along with all their other humanely raised meats. that are never given antibiotics or added hormones. They make eating well, easy, delicious, and accessible. And now, new subscribers to ButcherBox will receive ground beef for life. That's right. Sign up today and ButcherBox will send you two pounds of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef, free in every box for the life of your subscription. So to receive this limited time offer, go to butcherbox.com/pharmacy. F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. That's butcherbox.com/pharmacy. Now let's dive into today's show, the next episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We have so much more control over our health than it may seem. With every thought we think, we have an opportunity to create a sense of ease in the body or create stress. Our thoughts are powerful and our bodies are listening. Negative thoughts can lead to inflammation and even disease, while positive thoughts can be healing. In today's episode, we feature clips from three Doctors Pharmacy interviews about the impact of thoughts on our bodies. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Joe Dispenza about how we can use our thoughts to control our health. He also speaks with Emily Fletcher about using meditation to reduce the stress response in the body, as well as Dr. Leonard Calabrese, who discusses how joy and.

Gratitude support the immune system. Let's dive in. Thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And how we think and how we feel creates our state of being. The problem is that the person thinks of the problem, feels the emotion, and that is a thought and feeling. That's an image and an emotion. It's a stimulus and response, and that starts the conditioning process to get the body emotionally conditioned into the past. Now here's the crazy part about that. The familiar past emotionally is producing dramatic effects on the body because the body is so objective. that it does not know the difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought or memory alone. The body's believing it's living in the same past experience seven days a week, 365 days a year. And the problem with that is that the environment signals the gene. That's epigenetics and the end product of an experience and the environment is an emotion. So the person is keeping the same gene regulated because the body's believing it's living in the same environmental condition. So getting that person to step outside of that familiar known territory into the unknown, where there is uncertainty and have them be comfortable there and begin to think about how they are going to think and how- you- are telling people.

To give up their identity of who they are, what defines them, their past, their stories, their beliefs, or, I mean, you're coming after it. You're going for the jugular in our in our old patterns and our old ways of being that keep us not well and keep us unhappy and sick.

Turns out that's 95% of who we are. So if we don't address those unconscious programs, you can and you're an integrated physician, you understand this, you could have the healthiest ketogenic, vegan, intermittent fasting, enzymes, food combining, and if you're living in fear, if you're living in pain, the cell is not in a state to actually absorb anything. It's in a state of emergency. In an emergency, there's no growth and repair. So, can you speak to that?

I've seen patients like that who do everything perfectly and they're still sick. And I've seen people who don't give a crap about their health but they.

Have the best attitude and they're fine. Because the body's believing it's in a different environment and growth and repair is what does it. So then we said, okay, let's see if we can demystify the process. So the concept, the word meditation literally means to become familiar with. If you look at the symbolism of it and you look it up, it's familiarization. So you sit down and you say, okay, I don't want to be unhappy. I don't want to be angry. I don't want to talk trash about people. I don't want to complain. I want to blame. I don't want to make excuses. I don't want to feel lack. I don't want to have an attitude that's telling me I can't, it's too hard, that's the old identity, right? So the moment you start becoming conscious of those unconscious thoughts, the moment you become aware of your automatic habits and behaviors, the moment you can notice that this is actually guilt that you're feeling or sadness or pain, the moment you can become conscious and familiar with those states of mind and body, if you keep becoming familiar with it, if you keep becoming conscious of it, you won't go unconscious. So sitting in a meditation to know thyself, most people all of a sudden here comes the barrage of thoughts, here comes the propensities and habits, and here comes the emotions. The body's saying, you, normally complain at this time. What are you doing sitting with your eyes closed? Let's think of a reason why you can complain, and the body starts influencing the mind. So if you break it down, if you break it down for a person to understand how many times Do we have to forget until we start remembering and keep remembering and stop forgetting? That's the process of change. So then you put a person in a meditation and they hear that voice, they hear that chatter, they want to get up and go to the bathroom, they want to check their cell phone, they want to feel angry. And instead of getting up and saying, I can't meditate, see they're coming to the end of the known. So they want to go back to what's known, right? If you teach the person what to do and you show them that on the other side of that is freedom, on the other side of that is joy, you've got to become so conscious and it takes a lot of awareness, it takes a lot of energy to sit with yourself long enough to disentangle from those programs. Now, we now know that it's a formula, that if you follow a formula, you will actually start pruning circuitry. You'll stop the conditioning process and move the body out of the past and it starts liberating energy. that's energy to heal with, that's energy to create a new life, that's energy to digest again. The body's no longer living in survival or living in emergency. The majority of people's emotions then tend to be derived from the hormones of stress. So that we started realizing that the arousal of the stress hormones, the rush of the chemistry, is actually tapping the body's resources and the stronger the emotions we feel, towards any problem or person in our life, the more we pay attention to them. And if where you place your attention is where you place your energy, then you're giving your power away to that person or problem. And if a person can learn to sit in the fire and say, it's not my boss, it's not my ex, it's not my job, it's not the pandemic, it's me. That this emotion isn't serving me because this emotion is the exact emotion that's pushing the genetic buttons that's creating disease. Okay, if I can keep practicing lowering the volume to that emotion, I'll keep taking my attention off that person or problem. And in a sense, the body starts moving back where into the present moment. It starts getting relaxed in the unknown. So we started teaching people the process and by a person overcoming their past, not the trauma, just the emotion. They just have to work on breaking that conditioning process because if you keep doing it over and over again, a habit is when the body becomes the mind. Now the servant, now the body's influencing the mind. So, you teach a person then how to break that conditioning process. The body starts moving into the present moment. It's no longer in the same environmental condition and then all of a sudden we start to see some pretty dramatic changes in people's health.

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable what you're talking about is helping people understand that the voice in their head is not them.

It's a program.

Who is it that's actually aware that you have a voice in your head?

That's the person we're after.

They call that witness consciousness, you know, or non-judgmental awareness or whatever they call it.

Mindfulness.

Mindfulness.

Yes.

And, you know, honestly, Joe, like, It's scary in there. Like, I like your lower self has literally hijacked the road trip. And for me, I'm constantly in relationship to my lower self, trying to see what it's saying, trying to ship the dialogue and flip it so that I'm not constantly repeating these same negative thought patterns that are causing me unhappiness or suffering or disease or pain or whatever it is. And I've been working on this for a long time and I don't find it easy. I find it challenging. It's like it's a four in the morning. My mind just kicks up about, you know, my ex-wife or like, you know, like, and I'm like, I'm like pretty chill most of the time. I'm like, God, it's just, it's so deep in this wiring and programming and, and your work really helps people with a methodology to, to deal with that. Right. And, and, and what, what happens in the work that you've done is so tremendous is that not only do you see the changes in people's lives, but you're seeing changes in their biology, which speaks to the underlying physiology of joy, happiness, freedom, you know, right? That is a very new thing. You are familiar, I am sure, with my friend Daniel Goleman and his partner, Davidson, Rich Davidson, who wrote Altered Traits about studying these Olympic meditators who have been in caves for nine years meditating all the time and their brains look totally different. And you are seeing this not in nine years of being in a cave, but after seven days, right?

-Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, God, if you were to ask me, Mark, a year ago or two years ago, if I would think in my lifetime that I would be seeing what we're seeing in our measurements, I'd probably say, wow, probably not, but it's pretty ambitious because sometimes we see such levels of order in our communities' brains when they when they apply that formula, that we just found the articles that said that the mathematical probability of this type of coherence happening in the brain is statistically impossible. And if it occurred, it would occur as a momentary phenomenon that's random. And our collective groups of people are sustaining these states for extended periods of time. So, We can see dramatic changes in people's brain circuitry, but not only their circuitry, but this thing called coherence. Coherence is order, it's rhythm. The antithesis is if you're living in stress and you're living in survival, you feel like you can't control something, you feel like you can't predict something, and you have the perception that something's getting worse. The arousal of those stress hormones causes you to shift your attention from one person to another problem, to another thing, to another place. every one of those elements has a neurological network in the brain. The arousal and the brain is saying there's an emergency, try to control everything, try to predict everything, prepare for the worst, and you start firing all these circuits individually. You shift your attention to your boss, to your co-workers or whatever, and you start causing the brain to fire very incoherently. When the brain is incoherent, we're incoherent, and when the brain isn't working right, we're not working right. The arousal causes us to narrow our focus on the material world. Our senses become heightened and we focus on everything that's physical and material and we start over-focusing. That's what stress does. So we thought, what if we taught people to do the opposite? Instead of narrowing their focus on whatever is material or known to them, let's have them open their focus and broaden their focus and put their attention on nothing physical and put it on nothing. On space, on energy. And if we can create what's called a divergent focus, is it possible that the brain would begin to fire more coherently? And all of a sudden we started seeing the front of the brain talk in the back of the brain and synchronizing areas together and what sinks in the brain links in the brain and all of a sudden you see the person starting to feel more whole. You keep doing that, more coherence creates more energy. The waves start standing and they start building on each other and when that happens, There's an arousal that ultimately takes place in the brain, but the arousal is not fear, the arousal is not pain or aggression, and the arousal is not anger. The arousal is ecstasy, the arousal is bliss, the arousal is love.

Sounds pretty good.

And the person who signs up... Here's the cool part about it is that when that occurs, the stimulation that's being created, and we see these high gamma patterns that are off the scale, The arousal that's taking place is not taking place from anything out there in the environment. It's not taking place from the sports car, the wardrobe, or the movie, or the cell phone. It's happening inside the person and all of a sudden that's a new feeling. They've never had that feeling before and they start feeling connected. The side effect of that is even greater levels of order in the brain and all of a sudden the heart gets very turned on, it gets very signaled and the person is moving into an elevated and that kind of combination of energy between the heart and the brain causes the person to become creative, not a little creative, but really seeing possibilities. They're conscious of things they were never conscious before, and that's a greater level of awareness, and that's a greater level of energy. And so people all of a sudden start seeing synchronicities that start taking place in their life because they have a coherent brain and a coherent heart. and you got a Wi-Fi signal and you feel connected to something. You don't feel separate. Stress causes us to feel separation and lack and this feeling makes you feel whole and all of a sudden all the things that you wanted because you were in lack, you no longer want because you feel like you have them. That's the kind of place where you can relax more into the present moment and enjoy the sunset and enjoy the meal and enjoy the conversation and enjoy the connection because you're present. I say that that's a skill. It is really.

And our whole society is geared to make us not present. I mean, the phones that we have are just these distraction animals. I think it's hard for us to come back to ourselves. And I remember, I'm old enough to remember when we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have computers, we didn't have anything except postcards and a landline. And I remember the quality of my experience was quite different and the quality of my inner joy was much higher. And, you know, I'm sort of inspired by what you're saying. And I, and it, and I've decided, I decided actually last week that I'm going to go for a month into a cabin somewhere where I'm going to have food delivered, not see another human, and go into a retreat and meditate and be, and have no phone, no computer, no books. I'm not even going to take your books, Joe. I'm going to take a pen and paper so I can write, but that's it. and it'll just be an interesting experiment to see what it feels like to just be with no distraction and to let all that settle and, and begin to get into the space of coherence. Because, you know, I've noticed that for myself, and I'm sure, like everybody else, that, you know, the, the mind is a hard monkey to tame, and, and it takes us down Pathways of beliefs and ideas and things that take us away from a vibrant, full, joyous, happy life. And what's great about your work is it's not just theoretical. And yes, you've got all the science behind it and you're really mapping out the changes that structurally happen in our bodies. But you talk about these four elements of healing your body with your mind and how we can rewire our brain by changing our thoughts. I mean, so it sort of implies that we have the capacity to master our thoughts, which a lot of us don't agree to. But can you take us what those four are.

Well, first of all, I want to respond to that because a lot of people don't know what to do when they have that thought. They have no formula that's scientific and practical that if they can practice enough times, if nerve cells that fire together wire together, the nerve cells that no longer fire together and no longer wire together. And if you stick with it, and we can tell you this, that sooner or later that thought is going to start to have a weakening effect on your mind until ultimately it's no longer gonna be there because you no longer paid attention to it, no longer accepted it, no longer believed it, no longer surrendered to it. And most people when they get to this point, Mark, they think, I'm doing my meditation wrong. And I always tell them, No, no, no, no, no. You're actually doing it right. That's what I want you to see. That's staying in the way between you and your happiness. On the other side of that is a whole new area that you get to wire your brain any way you choose. So then there's an unlearning process before the relearning process. There's a breaking a habit of the old self and a reinvention of a new self. You got to prune synaptic connections and then got to practice sprouting new ones. You got to un-fire and un-wire. You got to re-fire and rewire. You got to deprogram and reprogram. You got to lose your mind and create a new one. And you have to unmemorize emotions that keep you connected to the same familiar past and then recondition the body to a new mind and to a new emotion. So then that process, if there's a formula to apply, let's just say you sitting in your meditation, it means it sounds good, right?

But how do you get from here to there? I'm sure everybody's listening.

No, it's But everybody's done it. They've done it. They just haven't made it a habit. And so then, if you're sitting in a meditation and you have something to do and your body starts going, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, and it's my ex-wife, it's my whatever, and you go like this to your body. Okay, okay. Now listen, you settle down and you know exactly what to do and you tame the animal, you tell it to settle, stay, and you relax it back into the present moment. What I want you to know.

Down, sit.

That'S a victory. That's a victory. And then if the body starts going, I gotta get up, I gotta check my cell phone, I gotta go, I gotta meeting, I'm busy. And you notice that your body's habituated into the same predictable future and you settle your body back down into the present moment. Now you're executing a will that's greater than those unconscious programs, and that's a victory.

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Meditation is medicine. Talking about food is medicine, but I also have come to realize that meditation is medicine and that it can be applied for all sorts of issues that people have and that actually creates a healing response in the body. Drugs actually shut off a pathway or block something. They interfere with your biology to stop a symptom. Meditation actually is a tool that helps to activate all the healing mechanisms. So, what are those mechanisms that get activated?

Yeah, so when we get stressed, and what a lot of people don't know is that when that adrenaline and cortisol starts to flood our body, those chemicals are acidic in nature. So, when your body becomes acidic, it becomes inflamed. And that inflammation, as you well know, is the basis of a lot of different chronic diseases. And so with meditation, not only are we getting rid of that adrenaline and cortisol, but we're starting to flood the brain with dopamine and serotonin, which are alkaline in nature. So we're changing the pH of the body. And if we look at why the human body reacts to stress in the way that it does, we really need to cut back in time a few thousand years. Say we're hunting and gathering in the woods. Sabertooth tiger jumps out with the intent to kill. First thing that will happen is digestion will flood with acid because you can't afford to spend that energy digesting your food. You need all hands on deck to deal with a tiger. That same acid will seep onto your skin so you don't taste very good if you get bitten into by the tiger.

That's why stress can premature your aging.

Because it makes your skin- Dr. It makes your blood clots if you get bitten, you don't bleed to death. That's right. It makes your nervous poos. It makes your bladder and bowels evacuate so you can be light on your feet. And it also dampens your immune system because who cares if you're gonna get cancer if you're about to be killed by a tiger. Again, we need all hands on deck for this threat.

It basically activates you to be a super duper power machine to run as fast as you can or fight as much as you can. But if you're in that state all the time, it breaks down your system.

That's right. It's not bad for us to get stressed. It is terrible for us to stay stressed. And because our modern demands are no longer predatory attacks, When we get stressed when our boss yells at us, we never outrun our boss. We never fight, you know, physically fight our boss. We're not as physical as we used to be. Sometimes you feel like punching. Oh yeah, sometimes you might feel like it. But this is why a lot of people think that exercise is their meditation. I hear this all the time.

I'm like, I go to the gym.

And I run it off or I box it out. I go on a bike ride and clear my space. And look, exercise is great for you. And exercise is very good at getting rid of your stress in the now. But if you want to deal with a dog that barked in your face when you were 10 or your parents divorced when you were 12, we have to give the body rest.

That was five.

Sorry. Tricky. Right? And that stuff, it gets imprinted in our cells and we got to rest in order to get rid of it.

Yeah. So what are the other things that happen biologically?

Well, one thing that's a fun benefit that not that many people are talking about is the sex piece. There's a whole chapter in the book called From OM to OMG. And that's What's happening there is if your body's stressed, again, procreation is not really top of mind. The meat suit is not that interested in making mini meat suits if it's afraid for its own survival and its own life. So when you get your body out of that chronic fight or flight, you get out of sympathetic into parasympathetic, you can start to have some energy for.

Things like procreation or pleasure. You also mess up your hormones. Actually, they've done studies where they looked at guys who were watching their sports team. and if their team lost, their testosterone went down, the stress of the loss of their team. If their team won, their testosterone levels went up.

Man.

Which is pretty interesting.

Now, see, this is a great reason for people to be rooting for their partner's team. Yeah.

And infertility is a huge issue. You write about it in your book, and a lot of work has been done on this at Harvard and other places where people just couldn't get pregnant and they start meditating and be mindful.

Yeah, we have a bunch of ziva babies right now, myself included. I was 39. I got pregnant on my first try. There's a woman in the book who was 42 when she came to me. She was not even a candidate for IVF. And then she started meditating and two years later at 44, she went back to her doctors and she had the fertility markers of an 18-year-old. So we oftentimes conflate maternal health with maternal age. And so a lot of people think, well, as I age, my fertility goes down, but that's not always the case. If you are getting healthier, it's possible to a degree, to a point, you could become more fertile. -Absolutely.

-It improves your immune system. It actually lengthens your telomeres, which are these little end caps on your genes, on your chromosomes that determine your aging. So literally you can kind of reverse the biology of aging through meditation.

-And this is some fascinating new science, and I read the Telomere Effect, which I think is so exciting, but we've all seen it. We've all seen that 60-year-old yogi who's meditating and doing yoga her whole life and has the most glowing skin and bright, clear eyes and is super strong. And then we see go back to our high school reunion and someone's been drinking and sitting on the couch every day. You're like, whoa, you look 30 years older than you are. So we know that stress ages us expeditiously. You want proof of that? Take a look at any president the day they take office and that same president four years later. So we know stress is aging us, but now we have the proof.

Yeah, and then even stem cells, we're all talking about stem cell injections and stem cells, but meditation actually improve stem cells.

This is so exciting to me. I know you talk about this. I don't know a ton about the.

Stem cells, but I love that you do. It's great. And also it seems to have the ability to rewire your brain, like you were saying, to increase the connections, improve the connectivity of your brain, which helps you learn and focus.

Yeah, neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change itself. And I would also strengthen something called the corpus callosum, which is that thin white strip that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. and we've known for a long time that meditators have thicker corpus callosums than non-meditators, but we weren't able to prove if it was causal or correlated. But now we know that the longer you meditate, the thicker that thing becomes, which cool party trick, but why would I want a fat corpus callosum? Well, everybody should, because it's quite literally the bridge between your critical mind and your creative mind, your masculine and your feminine. It's the thing that allows you to come up with those creative problem solving ideas when your boss is yelling at you, or perhaps even more importantly, So you get into a fight with your partner and it gets really heated, and then you shut down and you retreat to the bedroom, and about two hours later you start coming up with all these hilarious witty comebacks and you're like, why? Why could I have thought of that in the moment? Well, my theory is that the thicker your corpus callosum is, the easier it.

Is for you to come up with.

Those creative ideas when it counts, when it's go time. Although it may not be good to.

Use those to undermine your relationship. No, not undermining it, but just responding versus reacting, even with your partner. Yeah, it's true. I think that's one of the most powerful things I noticed. is that, you know, I always was pretty good at being self-aware and not reacting. But the truth is, I would react inside. And I learned how to modulate that on the outside. And what happened to me as I started meditating and over time, I noticed that the activation wasn't happening. Yeah, it's really, it's really changed. And it does, it does lead to a much higher level of performance and function and stability.

If we go back to the fulfillment piece for the relationships, I find that a lot of us approach romantic relationships as a place where we want to go to fill ourselves up. We say, well, I'm 80% fulfilled. I'll get my partner to give me the other 20%, but that's impossible. No one can make you happy. Your happiness is not lying on the other side of any person, place, or thing. And then you get in the relationship and you're mad at them because they didn't deliver you that 20% that you wanted them to. They've now failed you. But what I think meditation allows you to do because you're tapping into the very source of fulfillment. You're flooding your brain and body with dopamine and serotonin. You're 100 fulfilled so you can bring that to your relationship. And it's their job to be 100 fulfilled on their end, and they bring that to the relationship. And then it becomes this beautiful dance.

And compliment versus a dance of neediness. Yeah, it's not 50 50. It's 100 100. Yes. Yeah. I think that's really true. I think the, you know, the, there's a There's also sort of something I want to bring up around the meditation, which I think puts people off. It's like, well, you know, I have to have a quiet room. I have to, you know, have my candles and my incense and my cushion and not be disturbed.

And my singing bowls and my gong.

You know, it's nice to be in a meditation hall in the mountains, and that's awesome, you know. But the reality is most of us don't live in that world, and I certainly don't. and I found that, you know, remember the first time I was sort of hanging out with you, we were at an event and we had a, as part of this event, there was a party on a boat, and we were coming back from the party, and the boat was just crowded with people, and it was loud and noisy, and you were just, like, sitting there, like, with your legs outstretched on the bench, just deep in meditation. I'm like, wow. that's impressive. That seems like doable because I often do it in places where I'm on a plane ride or where it's not your typical place or I'll just go in a room in my office in Cleveland Clinic and I'll shut the door and sit on the floor and meditate. It really changes my whole state very quickly. I often do it not to be enlightened, but I often do it because I feel the quality of my life improves literally immediately. It's not like, oh, if I do it for six months, I'll notice something. It's literally like, open my eyes, world's different. I'm happier, I'm more rested, I feel more energetic, I'm more focused, I have less anxiety. I just really amazed at how wonderful it is. Easy to kind of just think you can't do it because your life isn't structured for that. Yes, you can. And you might not always be able to do it twice a day, but it's so powerful and easy to do. So talk a little bit about the practicality of it and what it is and also the myth around the fact that people say, well, I'm not good at meditating because my mind won't shut the heck up. Yes.

So this is the number one reason why people think they can't meditate. They think that the the point is to clear their mind. And I don't know who this dude is who's telling everybody to clear their mind, but Mark, we gotta find him and we have to teach him how to meditate. Because then people sit down, they're like, All right, Brain, stop thinking. Sure would like a snack. I wonder what Mark Hyman, what snack Mark Hyman should think they should eat. Now I'm thinking about Mark Hyman during my meditation. Oh, no, I suck at meditation. I quit.

And that's the beginning and the end.

Of most people's career. And it makes me sad because they've been taught- Potentially they think about me that they go by my brain. Just think about Mark Hyman and then your enlightenment. But it makes me sad because people potentially rob themselves of a lifetime of bliss and fulfillment because they're judging themselves based on misinformation. So the good news here, if you've ever tried meditation and if you're sort of cooking dinner and tuned out, like listen up, this is super important. If you've ever tried meditation and felt like a failure because you could not clear your mind, the good news is that the mind thinks involuntarily, just like the heart beats involuntarily. So trying to give your brain a command to shut up is as impactful as trying to give your heart a command to stop beating.

It does not work. slow down, though.

You can.

Yeah.

Impressive. Oh, yeah.

And you just change your breathing.

Yes.

So. And then that's what a lot of techniques do. They use the breath as a tool to slow things down, or they use the breath as a tool to focus. And that's all great. But to your point, those are more monastic practices, and they require a little bit more quiet or calm or focus. Whereas what we do at Ziva is designed to be integrated into your life. So you can do it on that boat, you can do it with your kids on a plane, on a train. And so it's not about quieting the mind. It's not about clearing the mind. It's about inducing deep healing rest so that you can get rid of that backlog of stresses from your past that's making you stupid, sick and slow.

Yeah.

I have to admit, I once meditated while I was getting my teeth cleaned. I do it too.

I meditate at the dentist all the time.

Sometimes, if I don't have time, I'm getting a haircut and I'll tell them.

I'm just going to take a nap. I always do it at the salon. I'm getting a pedicure. At the dentist, my dentist this is like, you don't salivate, Emily. It's very odd because it's a de-excitation going on.

Yeah, it's powerful. So people are thinking about wanting to meditate. There's a lot of ways they can start, right?

This is the big thing I would encourage folks to do, is that if you have a practice right now, but you're not seeing a return on investment of your time, if your life is not getting better in marked ways, then maybe research and find another technique. Maybe find a teacher that resonates with you. Find something to where, If you're going to make an investment of your most valuable resource, which is your time, make sure that you're getting a return on that investment.

Stress is bad for your immune system. I mean, classic chronic stress, you know, acute stress, run from the saber-toothed tiger, that's really good. Chronic stress of my job, my life, the environment, politics, and the world is bad. We are now starting to appreciate that the opposite of that, the immunology of joy can be immunologically potentiating. And you mentioned a very nice example. I call this the immunology of gratitude. And gratitude has wide-ranging biologic effects. There's a recent study done at UC San Diego that showed that patients with asymptomatic echocardiographically documented congestive heart failure with six weeks of gratitude journaling could improve ventricular function.

Your heart pumps better and faster if you're grateful. Right.

So you've got to open your heart, essentially. Exactly. Let's take this a couple steps further.

By the way, before you go on, there's another condition which is the opposite, which is stress-induced heart failure.

Broken heart.

Broken heart. I literally had a patient with a broken heart. He was healthy otherwise. and he went into heart failure after his wife died.

Sure.

And through using various modalities around stress and energy medicine, we were able to get it better.

We think that that's the basis of, you know, of voodoo deaths.

Yeah.

You know, you're petrified and your heart. So it's all connected.

Voodoo toxin.

Right, right, right. So the immunology of joy, there's been some tremendous work in this.

It's such a great phase, the immunology of joy.

Yeah, so, Some people, Cohen from Carnegie Mellon has done such beautiful work looking at resistance to respiratory viruses and the effects of hugs and did this elegantly controlled study where they measured social interactions, the amount of touching that goes on in a person's life and then actually inoculated all the people in the study with cold virus and then measured their antibody responses and clinical things, and hugging was an important and significantly clinical variable. Even though the hug people were more exposed to viruses, they were protected. So, I mean, a small example.

That's great, so hugs so you won't get sick. That's why when Leni ever comes to see me, we always hug each other.

Exactly. It's therapeutic, right?

It's the only doctor at Cleveland Clinic who gives me a hug. It's pretty amazing.

That's good. I want to be known for that. Folvio DeQuista from London, who's going to be visiting us in May, where my immunology summit, which has been going on for 16 years, is actually going to start out full half day on the immunology of wellness, who does experimental work on the immunology of joy. And he actually has animal models. Mice, take mice and let them live in his little home, take another set of mice and put them in a dirty cage and they get all upset and you take the other set of mice and you put them in the Ritz-Carlton house and you pet them, their immune systems shift. So, we don't know how to quantify this but it certainly fits with our model that in those behaviors of diet, exercise, sleep and stress, we want to move our affect in a more positive manner. And I see this every single day that, you know, sometimes we see immunologic diseases that we just can't, we can't do anything about with targeted therapy. And we have to deal with it, you know, biobehaviorally. And people have to, they have to be empowered to do this. And that's where I think that you know, you guys have been doing this for your whole career. But 20 years ago, you were the wellness guys. You were over here, all right? You're over here. This was alternative therapy. I'm trying to bring immunologic strength, wellness, and immunologic health building to the mainstream of people, some of the people that you're interviewing on the show, who deal with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases every single day. you know, we're shifting the curve a little bit.

Well, what you said was really important before. You said before wellness was sort of a nice idea that we all believed in but didn't have a lot of data. Now you're saying there's a lot more data. And I saw a study recently where they literally injected cold viruses into people's nose and they looked at stress questionnaires.

That's the same work of Sheldon Cohen.

Incredible. And they found that those who scored high on the stress questionnaires got colds and the ones didn't, even when they injected the cold virus right in their nose.

That's right.

So what kind of data are you seeing around stress and wellness, diet? Let's just kind of go through it. I want to spend a little time digging in because it's such a compelling area and I think your work is so important and you're such a great voice for this.

Well, you know, we'll knock these down one at a time, but you know, one of the interesting things that has happened here is that, you know, a decade ago, I felt very comfortable talking about these topics to the wellness community and translating it for them. But it's taken a bit longer and only in the past five years am I now trying to take to the airways, literally, and in the scientific literature to bring it to my immunology colleagues. So it's a shift and the data speak for itself. Let's just take one disease. Let's take rheumatoid arthritis. So, okay, so for For the audience, rheumatoid arthritis, most common cause of inflammatory arthritis. You know, 100 years ago, inexorable, terrible illness. The great Sir William Osler, the greatest physician of the past century, said when he saw a patient with that disease walk in the front door, he would walk out the back door.

Yeah.

Even when I was a resident and fellow, we had very little to offer. Steroids and steroids were just in the dawn of them. Today we know so much more about this. So we have large studies. Who gets rheumatoid arthritis? Well, there's a genetic predisposition. You have the genetic makeup, but not everybody that carries the gene gets the disease.

So they have- Not everybody who has the disease has the gene.

Exactly. But most do. So we have hypothesized for a long time that there are environmental influences. gene plus environment. And that environment may be external, could be your own behaviors. Big studies like the Women's Health Study that have looked at, you know, 100,000 women for decades have found that if you take people, women who are predisposed to rheumatoid, it's a many autoimmune diseases are female predominant.

More, yeah, mostly.

Yes, and you look at certain variables, diet, okay? And if you, you know, just to make this understandable, if we take the dietary range here from over here the standard American diet, the sad diet.

Yes.

And over here, let's just call it the prudent diet and at the end we would peg this as a vegan diet. The further you go down toward a healthy diet, the more plant-based you become. Statistically for each quartile, for each quarter of dietary health, you statistically lower the likelihood of developing rheumatoid arthritis, particularly when you're young and active. It's an unbelievable and stepwise regression. And, you know, so we know that diet can be a tremendous influencer. Once you have the disease, once you have the disease, looking at dietary composition, we know that patients that eat fish twice a week will have statistically, and I'm not talking about trivial improvements, palpable lower disease activity than people who are non-fish eaters. And in fact, just eating any fish in your diet in these cross-sectional studies have suggested that it contributes to the so composition, healthy fats, things that we can dig into a little bit later. So this is hugely important. So we can take people who are genetically predestined to this and modify their risks early on, and once they have the disease, actually can make contributions to lowering disease activity.

So what are the kind of diets, besides for example, adding fish, what would be the dietary recommendations you'd give to someone with inflammatory disease or rheumatoid arthritis?

You know, so my recommendations are to, well, ultimately, you know, I'm very happy with someone who is a achieved a semblance of what we would recognize as the Mediterranean diet. I'm very happy with people who have achieved, you know, becoming either total vegans or close to that. Very good data coming out now that paleo diet also can have some anti-inflammatory effects and Pegan diet, you know, I tell, you know, so, you know, people are not coming to me. So what's different for people who come to see you and people come to see me? So people who are coming to see me are coming to have their disease sorted out, they're looking for the most advanced targeted therapies, and they're looking for a little extra. People coming to you are looking how to rearrange their lives and do this. So I have a very slow and stepwise process.

It might scare them away if you.

Told them to go to you. If you can do meatless Monday, I'm very happy. Let's start. and the one thing that we know in IBS diseases, it's not a foot race, it's a marathon. So I'm going to be seeing people for years and decades.

IBS diseases is immune-mediated inflammatory disease.

So rheumatoid, inflammatory bowel disease. So we try to take the low-hanging fruit and try to make little modifications and then over time, I'm so impressed that that people can make meaningful progress. So that in the dietary aspect, I encourage real food, get rid of the junk, plant-based, monosaturates. I have no problem with protein as long as it's high quality. I think there's a place for it. So that's where we start with people.

Yeah.

Step two, exercise. I am, I, I became.

By the way, for people, maybe not realize, but 60 of your immune system is right underneath the lining of your gut. So it's there because you're exposed to foreign molecules from food and bugs, and your immune system is the first line of defense. And so when that system gets disrupted, and you get what we call a leaky gut, it creates a lot of inflammation. And so changing your diet has a huge impact on there, working on inner garden, your gut microbiome plays a big role.

Yeah, you know, I'm glad you brought that up and diving into the science just a little bit. I mean, the microbiome, which is connected to every organ system in our body, and you've talked about it extensively on this show, is critical in both the development and the function of our immune system. I mean, you know, if you're born with a sterile gut and you, you're immune, you're immunodeficient. And we know that from animal models. We know it from people. We know a lot about. And you just, I, you've had Dr. Hazen on the shows, studied this in the most, you know, robust scientific way possible. You know, we know what healthy microbiome kind of looks like, you know, diverse. and rich. We've yet to dial it into this organism, that organism. So we know that good diets, people that eat real food, usually have a more diverse and rich microbiome and that supports immunologic health. I'm reluctant to tell people, Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data. Right. And so, you know, we don't know how to reduce it to that crystallized eat this, do this one thing. It's probably much more complicated than that, but we do know that prudent diets versus sad diets, a huge effect on the in the frame of functional medicine.

We often people fall on elimination diets, which is eliminating inflammatory foods and anti-inflammatory diet. Things like gluten and dairy can be an issue, processed food obviously, eating more whole foods, plant-rich foods is really key. sort of what you're saying.

Absolutely.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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