Secrets to Grief Recovery with David Kessler

Quick Disclaimer this podcast is not meant to be professional advice of any kind. It is meant to be informative and entertaining. If you plan to make any changes to your health routines, please see the appropriate professionals before doing so. What kind of superager are you? Go to ageist.com quiz take the superager quiz and we'll send you directed personalized information to help you superage the best that you can. Welcome to Superage. My name is David Stewart. I am the founder of Ageist and your host. On the Superage show we we talk about how to live healthier, how to live longer and how to be happier. And who doesn't want that? Today's show is brought to you by Timeline Nutrition with their breakthrough product Mitopure, the first clinically tested Urolithin, a supplement which is showing tremendous results for mitochondrial health. Go to timelinenutrition.com aegist Use the code AEGIST at checkout and save 10% off your first order of Mitopure. Today's show is also brought to you by our place. I've just started using some of their pots and pans. Oh my God. Okay, so they're beautiful. And guess what? They don't have any of those nasty chemical coatings on them that are unfortunately forever chemicals. I don't want to be eating that stuff. You don't either. Go to fromourplace.com Enter the code AEGIST at checkout receive 10% off site wide. Our place offers 100 day trial with free shipping and returns. Today's show is also brought to you by Divi Hair Care products specifically designed for men and women who are concerned with hair loss and scalp health. Go to diviofficial.com Aegis Save 20% off your first order welcome to episode 193 of the SuperAge podcast. We'll be dropping this on July 10th, 2024. This week on the show we have David Kessler and David is one of the world's foremost experts on grief and loss. His experience with thousands of people on the edge of life and death has taught him the secrets to living a happy and fulfilled life. He's an author of six books. His new best selling book is called Finding the Sixth Stage of Grief. We're going to talk about a few things that may be a little unpleasant to talk about and they are grieving and dying and what that's about. Something that we're all going to have to face. Please join me for a fascinating, provocative conversation with David Kessler in just a moment. After a quick word from Our Sponsors Today's show is brought to you by Our Place. I recently swapped out my old toxic kitchenware for Our Places and couldn't be more satisfied. Not only are Our Place's pans and appliances beautifully crafted with a range of fun colors, they are also made without toxins and chemicals. We talk a lot about health and wellness on this show. One of the main things to do is remove toxins from your life. If you make it a priority to eat healthy food, make it a priority not to cook on unhealthy pans full of forever chemicals. Our Place has completely upped my kitchen game along with many others. Just look at their 75,000 five star reviews. Go to fromourplace.com that's F R O M O U R P l a c e dot com and enter the code AEGIST at checkout. You get 10% off site wide. That's fromourplace.com code AEGIST and get this Our Place offers a hundred day trial with free shipping and returns. Check it out and get those toxins out of your kitchen today. Today's show is also sponsored by Divi, whose products take hair, scalp and self care to the next level. Hair loss affects 80 million Americans and it's not just men. Over 40% of Americans who experience hair loss are women. Divi was created when Danny Austin went through an emotional hair loss journey. She took it upon herself to research and learn about the importance of and the routines behind scalp health. Divi is not just for those experiencing hair loss. It can be used by men and women of all ages who want to start or continue their scalp care journey. Do you want to take back control of your hair and scalp health and do it with clean science backed ingredients? We have a special offer for those listening to the Superage podcast and for the Ageist audience go to diviofficial.com ageist that's D I V I O FF I C I A L.com aegist or enter aegist at checkout and get 20% off your first order. I'm gonna ask all of you for a favor if you could please leave us a rating. Please leave us a comment and please share this podcast with someone who you think could use it. We would really appreciate all of that. Hi David, how are you today?

I'm glad to be with you.

Where are you today?

I'm in Los Angeles.

Oh, a lovely city. We're into the heat season, right?

It's a little warm here. We're finally. Oh boy. I feel like we had a lot of June gloom. So I'm excited that we're coming into summer finally.

Ah, wonderful. You know a lot about grief, and you've written a couple books. Your first book with Mother Teresa, the Needs of the Dying. And then we have Finding Meaning, the sixth stage of grief.

I think the first one is obviously about when a loved one is dying. That's the needs of the dying. The last book, my most recent, is Finding Meaning, the sixth Stage of Grief, as you mentioned. And here's the thing. You know, many of us know of Kubler Ross's stages. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, she was my teacher. We co authored two books together, and she talked about denial, the I can't believe they're gone anger, angry that they're gone, bargaining, the Wait, wait, you know what? If only this and if only that, and then the depression, the sadness, and then acceptance. Here's the thing, David, I don't think we're a generation that just wants to stop at acceptance anymore. I think we want more. I think. And that's Finding Meaning. And I was, first of all, you know, as I dealt with my own losses and horrible losses, I really thought about this concept. I went back and I reread Viktor Frankl's work and Man's Search for Meaning. And I really wanted to how do we apply it to our modern lives? And one of the things about meaning that I think was confusing to people, as people often would go, no, there's no meaning in a horrible death. There's no meaning in the death of my parent or my spouse or my sibling or child. There's no meaning. And I would go, oh, that's the disconnect. And I would realize, as I did the research, there's no meaning in the death. The meaning is in us, the survivor. It's what we do afterward. It's who we become. It's how we become changed. And I was so honored that the Elizabeth Kubler Ross foundation and family gave me permission to literally add a six stage to her iconic stages. And so I have loved that that book has been out there and resonating and helping. And as you and I were talking before, I just finished the workbook, I have a waiting list that I'll never be able to see this lifetime. And I want to be able to help people. And so I did a companion workbook because I wanted people to be able to, like, sit down with me and go, here's what I would ask you. Here's how we would excavate the pain together. So I'm so excited that Book's finally going to be coming out soon. It's on Amazon already for pre order. I'm excited that it's there, and I can't wait for it to go out into the world to like, help people really get into the meat of this.

Help me out here. I understand that the meaning is not so much the loss. The meaning is what we do after the loss. Right?

Correct.

And give me some thoughts on that transition.

Well, here's the thing. We have to be careful not to do what I call a spiritual bypass. You can't skip the pain and jump to the meaning as much as we might like to. I mean, who doesn't want to skip the pain? But the reality is we have to go through that pain. We do have to go through it. Now. I think of like, Michelangelo, who was asked once when they looked at his amazing statues, how do you create these statues? And he said, I don't. They're already there. I have to chip away the excess. It's the same with us. If we can chip away at the pain, the meaning gets revealed. And it shows up differently for all of us, David, that for someone else, maybe they're changed by that person that they loved. Maybe their death made them look at their own life, made them realize the brevity of life. I don't have forever here. Maybe the way their loved one died, they don't want other people to die that way, so they want to do things in the world to stop that. So we become changed and we find a way to not just go through the grief, but actually grow through it. We all talk so much. It's so common for us to talk about post traumatic stress. We're really talking here about post traumatic growth.

I mean, that sounds great. It sounds super hard. What are some of the tools that you offer people to make this transition? Because it's really hard.

It's really hard. Here's the thing. It's hard. And it's the simplest thing. I. I tell people, I'm always teaching people what our great grandparents knew. You know, we actually know how to do this.

I always tell people, you come from a long line of dead people. Like every person, every person in your family, every ancestor has died. You know how to do this. A modern society that wants us to move on and get over it and, and skip it and find the gratitude without ever going through the pain gets in the way of it. So partly the work is to allow this. And like, who wants to do that? So one of the things we need is grief, needs to be witnessed. We need other people. Study after study is showing us that grief and trauma are healed in connection with other people. What's the cruelest thing we can do to someone in war? We isolate them. Next to killing them, we isolate them. So a lot of times we can think we should go into isolation to heal, but it doesn't help. So our friends are get over it. Don't talk about it. Don't dwell. That actually doesn't help us. We need to talk about our feelings. We need to talk about what they're going through. Easier said than done. Our friends don't want to hear about it. Our grief scares our friends. The death of your spouse makes every couple friend, you know, afraid. The death of your parent makes every other person who's got parents who are alive afraid. So no one wants to go in this with us. It's a strange thing. Since the beginning of time, people in grief have been gathering with each other because there you can talk. I run over 25 online grief groups because people in grief want to talk to one another and they want to connect and they want to talk about their loved ones and they want to talk about their feelings.

Now, just for anyone who's listening, who's going, that's not me. We know there's a group of people out there called practical Grievers, Practical weavers go to the funeral and they're done. The rest of the world has a lot of feelings about it that they need to go through. We have to talk about this is.

Part of the process, looking back and reviewing the relationship one had with them and with a certain amount of, not just entirely gratitude, because relationships with people are not entirely positive, whoever they are, and sort of getting real about all that, does that help us move forward?

It is the remembrance. It's, it's, you know, it's remembering and restoring, restore our life. And we have to remember what happened and we have to remember that person. The goal to me of grief work is to eventually remember with more love than pain.

I remember everyone who's died in my life. I have a happy life. I've got a great life. And I remember them with love. But I, I had to walk through the pain, get to skip. Now, here's the thing. If anyone's listening who's in deep grief, one of the things I tell people that's so helpful is when you're in the enormous pain of grief.

It feels never ending. I remind them, no feeling is final.

No feeling is forever. That intense pain you're in, it's going to change. It's going to change. It's going to continue to change.

No feeling is final.

Talk to me about how current grief connects to past traumas and wounds and injuries and how we sort of link.

Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. You think, especially as we get older, you would think grief comes along and we're just present for the grief, and we walk through the pain and eventually, in our own time and own way, remember the love and find the meaning. That sounds great. What happens to a lot of us is grief. And this is a little bit of bad news and good news. I think it's good news. But what happens is some old wounds and trauma comes up. Grief is actually a window that a lot of old trauma wounds come up. Now, our first reaction is, oh, for goodness sakes, why is the abandonment coming up? Why are those old feelings coming up? Why is the feeling of no one there for me, or I'm always alone, or why does everyone die? Why are those feelings coming up? I thought I dealt with them. They're coming up for healing. I often remind people, it's like an old friend knocking at your door saying, heal me.

I want to still be healed.

And so grief becomes one more chance to heal all those feelings, all those old wounds, all those things that came up, we get to really heal them, to really have.

As much of life as we can.

As you're saying this because I'm thinking to myself, like, why would this happen? What comes to my mind is that, you know, whatever the neural pathways, the memories that were in there, they're there. And we've sort of. We don't access those pathways. And then an event happens, we lose someone, and suddenly all those neural connections are lit up again, and we're back there again. And now things have compounded.

It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. And when you make a commitment, anything unlike the belief comes up when you say, oh, my gosh, mom and dad both have died. It's me. It's me. This is my life now. This is my life. I got a holy cow. I'm not here forever. Let me make the most out of it, out of this life. The universe doesn't open up and go, you want to make the most out of life. It's all wonderful for me. Here it goes. Oh, you want to make the most out of life? You got to heal this first if you want the most out of life.

Right.

Those old wounds come up.

And how does that happen, the healing? Because now we're. We're talking about, there's A tragic event, and now it's bigger. And so now we have to deal with all of this healing. How are you suggesting, when people are faced with this, what are the actions that they should take?

Well, it's interesting. I'm a big believer in groups, as I mentioned, whether it's your local group, whether it's an online group, I'm a big believer in group. And I think, here's the thing. We hear ourselves in each other's stories, and we find our healing in each other's stories. And, you know, it's a strange thing, as I mentioned, in grief, your friends and family can feel like strangers, and strangers can begin to feel like family.

Friends, right?

We begin to talk about it. We allow the feelings to come up. We allow these old wounds to come up. And not everyone goes through these old wounds. I don't want to make anyone think, oh, there's old wounds on top of it. But this is an important process we go through in life, and it's important we find our life again after loss. We lose our balance in grief. Whether it's grief or there's trauma or whatever comes up, you really need to find a way to live again and to do that. And, you know, life after loss, as we get older and have more losses, gets harder. But I think at the same time, with age comes wisdom that helps us enjoy life more.

If someone is having trouble looking to the future, as you said, whatever you're feeling today, it's going to change. How do you help them navigate forward? How do you give them that vision?

Well, I'll tell you, if you saw me working with people, the first thing you would see is, I would say, when did your loss happen? When did they die? If you tell me three months ago, six months ago.

And then you say to me, life doesn't feel the same, I would go, of course it doesn't. You're not ready to find the life after loss. Here's the thing most people don't realize. We think of grief as TV grief. TV grief. The first episode, someone dies. The next week, they have painful moments. They talk to someone, they go to a group. The third episode, they get back to their life. That's how we think it works. Grief has a much longer shadow. In real life. I talk to people about early grief. If I went down to the local mall or the local downtown area and just randomly ask people, when's early grief? People would say, I don't know. First week, first month, first three months, maybe first year. Early grief for me is the first Two years. Well, the first two years.

Now that's an average. Everyone's different. Depends on who died and how they died and all those factors, but that's an average. And so, you know, it's interesting that when did they die? Helps me understand. If you're getting into nine months, a year, two years, we're going to then begin to talk about finding your way back to life. But I can't dive into that too early now. One of the things people are often curious about, how do I know if there's an old wound, an old trauma? If someone says to me, in grief, at three months, I don't know if I'm ever going to be happy again. My spouse died. I don't know if I'm ever going to be happy. Of course, if at two years they say I can never ever be happy, I'm always going to be in pain, Always, never. Everyone, no one are clues to old trauma, they're clues to old wounds. If at two, three years you're still saying those things, oh, the grief got blocked by some old wounds. We got to work on that. But, you know, we. We might feel those ways early on, but we eventually transition out of them.

There's sometimes the cases where someone will be in the process of dying for a considerable time. Yeah, there's this sort of odd grieving while the person is still there. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, that's called anticipatory grief. It's funny, I'm actually doing a class on that that'll be available. People will be able to find it. Anticipatory grief is the grief before the death.

And when someone's dying. I always say, because dying looks differently, people can be dying for a week, they can be dying for six years, or life can be winding down and changing and declining. You're not really in the dying process for six years, but the winding down can be happening depending on the illness. So I always say there's two things to do. Do the anticipatory grief and don't attend the funeral early. Like they're still alive. You still got moments, you still got days, you still got weeks, you still got months with them. Still show up for them. You know, life isn't over till it's over.

I want to ask you a little bit about the earlier book that you wrote, the Needs of the Dying. What do dying people need?

They need to be seen. A lot of times we begin to talk about them, like, who was she? Wait, they're not a was. They're an is. They're literally an is. You know, so we need things like we need the need to be treated as a living human being. We need to have a sense of hopefulness. We need to be cared for by people who can maintain a sense of hopefulness. We need to participate in decisions concerning our own care. You know, we need to know we're going to be free of physical pain. So we have, you know, in that book, I really covered 16 needs. Those are a few of them. You know, we need to know that we're not going to die alone. We need to know that our body will be respected. So, you know, here's the thing, David. I feel like in some ways, in our modern world, death has become sort of throwaway chapter, and it's maybe the most important chapter in our life. And it's interesting. In our modern world, death isn't around us anymore. Illness has moved into the hospital. Death moved into the funeral home. I tell people, like, even the history of that surprising that if you live in a house that was built before the 40s, you have a large front door so the casket could get through. It used to be displayed in your parlor. Do you know what happened to your parlor? Because you may remember, like, you may have heard, like, great grandparents talk about the front parlor. The parlor got moved to the funeral parlor, and you no longer have a parlor room because one of the big magazines at the time said your front parlor room shouldn't be a room to display the dying. It shouldn't be a dying room. It should be a living room. So now we have a living room. So it's interesting. We have all these pieces around us, reminiscent of death being close, but we move it away from us now, and we don't have an experience of it, and we don't know how to be with the dying anymore.

I never knew that the parlor was a death parlor, and it got rebranded as the living room. Right. That's fascinating. Wow. You said that maybe the most important chapter in our lives. Why is that?

Well, I think the. The first chapters are really important, and the last chapters are important. You know, transitions are big. So I think, you know, we all need a lot of extra kindness at the beginning of our lives and at the end of our lives.

Really important that people are there for us. And, you know, here's the thing. One of the things that is an old saying is a parent's last lesson is teaching their child how to die.

Oh, a lot of us don't even see that. You know, where. Where could you just visit at the hospital, the nursing home. And that whole process will happen without us being there. And I, you know, I ask people not to be afraid of that process. There's nothing to fear.

We do fear it, though.

Oh, my gosh, of course. But here's the thing. This is really important if you want to live a full life, to understand this concept. Fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life. So, yeah, we're afraid of death.

And we can be so afraid we quit living.

But we can face it and live fully. Here's the things, like, look, and I so appreciate you doing this podcast. Death, grief. These are things we'd rather not talk about.

But.

What we run from pursues us, and what we face transforms us.

Here's an interesting thing. Most of my work now is online because I can, you know, just work with the whole world now fairly easily. But a few years ago, before the pandemic, I'm one of those people that had a 30 city, three country tour, and I was in a big hotel meeting room teaching. Until the next day. I go to the big hotel meeting room in the next city. Imagine these meeting rooms, few hundred people there.

In the next room is the nurses, in the next room is the realtors. Down the hall is the accountants. At the end of the day, the staff would come by and say, hey, what were you teaching? And I said, oh, why are you asking? And they would say, because your group was laughing the most. And I would say, grief. And they would go, grief? How can that be? Here's what I don't think people understand.

Grief, facing these things.

It absolutely expands our bandwidth for pain. We can sit in a little more pain, but we also laugh a little harder. It expands our bandwidth for joy, too. You walk through these dark nights and you appreciate the day even more.

I'm trying to connect the dots here a little bit. There's something with our culture today where we want to take the edges off of everything.

Yes.

On both sides of it. Right. Like, don't get too excited, don't get too happy, don't get too sad. Don't get too. To whatever. As you're explaining this, I'm thinking that there are places where I've been in the world where that's not the case.

And the emotional latitude, the allowable emotional latitude is greater.

Correct. I'm a believer there's more joy in that. You know, it's fascinating. Once in a while, someone in my own personal life has a loss, and I have to remind them I could help. And they'll go, oh, my Gosh, I always forget you do that because. And the flip side is I ran into a friend who I grew up with, and they said, oh, I know all about you and your work. I'd love to be friends again, but it would just be too sad to be friends with you. And I said to them, I said, believe it or not, I have a really happy, full, joyous life. I mean, you might be surprised. My life's not. My work is obviously all about grief, but that makes me live fully.

Talk to me for.

For you.

What does it mean to live fully?

I really enjoy.

The ups and downs of life. You know, it's interesting, when I sit with someone who's dying, I'll sometimes say to them, who's your favorite thing in life?

What were the roses? What were the thorns? We, like you said, we're taking the edges off. We live our lives now that we think it's about climb every mountain, go to the peak. But I'll tell you, anyone you admire, living or dead, anyone you admire, read their biography, look at their life. They really walk through some valleys.

I want to. When I go, I want to remember it all. I want to be used up. I want to have enjoyed it all and been present for it all.

I talk a lot, at least recently, about this fear that we have, fearing one's greatness. There's something related here. We're stronger, more capable, and braver than we think. And I think that embracing death and grief and dying people is part of that. And we want the TV version, right? Went the social media version. That's not going to do it.

And, you know, it's interesting, that group I mentioned, I call it Tender Hearts. And the subtitle is A courageous group, right? And people say, oh, we're not courageous. We're in pain. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, do you know how many people push this grief behind them, don't feel it, and make every decision of their life from their grief, from their pain, from their sorrow? And, you know, I love the people who do the ice bucket challenge and all that for charity. But, you know, as much as people talk about, wow, I've got a lot of courage. I'm, you know, go diving into the ice. I'm like, that's great. But you really want to do a challenge dive into the. My parent died Challenge dive into the. My spouse died. Challenge dive into. My child died. My sibling died. Most of us right now have a friend who's a little lonelier than we know, and they're in a Little more pain than we know over a loss. You want like to really be with life's challenge. Go spend a little more time with them. Sit with them where they are. Don't like try to take them out to something fun, but go sit where they are.

That's right. I'm so glad that I'm going to get in some trouble for saying this. There's a certain sort of bro culture out there about exactly what you said. Like, okay, we're going to like run up this mountain. We're going to jump in an ice bath. We're tough guys. Yeah. Maybe like what you're talking about. That's real tough guy stuff. And that's really hard to do.

Face your feelings, face those demons, face your old wounds, face everything your parents who were wounded and wounded you. You sit with, you know.

Right. That's an interesting thing. You've brought up a lot of things that I'm going to puzzle about for a little bit. The whole idea of the death parlor to the living room and that whole cultural shift from death being part of life.

Are death denying society?

Well, it's, you know, I grew up in a little farm town and you saw it there were, you know, the animals would die, people would die. It was a. It was, it was a different thing. And now that becomes something like avoidable. And it's. I mean, I know a lot of people in the longevity space. Brian Johnson, just don't die. Brian's an awesome. I love Brian. He's a great guy. Brian's gonna die. I'm sorry. At some point that's gonna happen. I don't want to pick on him. I really like him. I think that there's something about embracing of that fact that expands our capacity for life. Is. Is yes. Hearing fear.

And I'll tell you, when that moment happens for me, I don't want death to appear.

And me go, there you are. I've been kidding, Granny. And winding down and slowing down for you. I want death to take me in the middle of the lot of life. Enjoying it, being full. Oh my gosh, there you are. Well, I'm still living life, but I guess it's time to go. Okay.

And look, I. I mean I want to make sure anyone listening? I'm. I'm not a right side silver lining. This is like painful stuff we're talking about. When it happens to you. A loved one dies. You sit with a loved one. But there's a lot of people who just unfortunately don't have support, don't know where to get support. We get stuck in our grief and life kind of ends for them. And that's the second death that they don't deserve. The first death was bad enough, but to stop living because you didn't know a way out of their grief. And how many of us can tell you of like someone we know, a friend, family that, well, Jane's never been the same since whatever happened. And Jane won't be the same. But Jane ultimately shouldn't stopped living. Something went wrong there. And one of the reasons I love doing this work is no one's teaching about this. No one's telling us about this. You know, I do this whole big grief educator certificate program and train therapists. Do you know you can become a therapist and not take one death or grief class? Don't even learn about it. And they're realizing now with the population, oh, I got to know about this. Train coaches. I train people who have been through dark nights who want to turn their pain into purpose. This is like the unspoken stuff. And we, I, I, you know, I don't think it brings me down. I think it lifts me up, actually.

Absolutely. If people are listening and they want to get in touch with you, they want to join a grief group, they're having trouble or they're just grieving. What would they do?

Sure. The best thing to do is visit grief.com G-I-F.com grief.com there under resources. There's tons of free videos that folks can watch. There's also my pay group that's available. It's a reasonable price, small monthly fee, and no one's turned away for lack of funds. And we also have like the grief certificate program. We do things on trauma, old wounds, different kinds of losses. We have a lot of resources out there. I don't want people to have to go through this dark night alone. And it's unfortunately not all night. It's a long time. I don't want them to go through it alone. I'm also on social media. I just entered the TikTok space. It wasn't easy, but I did it. So you can find me on all the social media platforms. My handle is I am David Kessler. I am David Kessler. The latest book is Finding Meaning, the new workbook that I'm so excited about. It's on Amazon. We're going to have it on a lot of other places. They can find out about it by going to griefbook.com griefbook.com or it'll be on the website. It's the blue Book On Amazon or your local bookstores. Make sure you get the blue one. And I'm excited that, like, there's help out there. Don't do this alone.

You can have a bigger life.

You can have a bigger life. Or let me tell you this, I'll say it a bit differently. A loved one's death doesn't have to constrict our life. We have to go through it. We have to walk through the pain. I like virtually or some way holding other people's hands as we walk through it. And instead of it constricting, it expands grief. Loss doesn't have to constrict our life forever. It. It feels that way for a while, but then it can expand our life. Here's the thing, David. Everyone I've ever known who's died, I keep them all alive. I bring them with me. I show them this amazing life through my eyes, and I continue in their honor.

That's right. We owe it to them.

We owe it to them.

David, this has been remarkable. Thank you. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate the work you're doing, and this has been personally quite meaningful to me. I appreciate it.

Right back at you, David. Thank you so much. And I'm so grateful to those of you who have tuned in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, you got someone out there, whether it's you or someone you love, that needs help. So thank you so much.

Appreciate it. Take care. Now. My takeaway from David Kessler is that to live life fully, to really have a big, big life, we need to recognize that it's probably going to end. And we also need to embrace people who are in that last stage of life. It may be really some of the most meaningful experiences that we have. Thank you so much, David Kessler. We're going to get with a little bit of what's going on with me recently after a quick word from our sponsors. Today's show is brought to you by Timeline Nutrition and their product, Mitopure. I started taking Mitrepur after I ran their science through our science review board, and they were very enthusiastic about it. In fact, most of the people on my science advisory board and their families now take Mitopure. So why do I take Mitopure? I take it basically for health span, because, like, the truth is, I want to be 90, and I want to be able to ski and hike and play and do all the things I do. Now. Think of Mitopur as these little pac men in your cells chomping up the damaged mitochondria that make you feel old and tired and recycling them into new healthy ones. And mitochondria are our cells, power generators. They're a key influence in how we age. However, as the years pass, and I've passed a few years, mitochondrial efficiency naturally declines, representing a large gap in the quality of life we can expect in our later years from the ones we actually experience. So do what I do and do what my science advisory board does. We take it every day. You're going to notice a difference in four to six weeks. Timeline is offering 10% off your first order of Mitrepure. Go to timeline.comaegist that's T I M E A L I N E.comaegist get 10% off. Last week was the 4th of July holiday here in the US of A. Which we call Independence Day. And I guess other parts of the world call it, I don't know, American Rebellion Day or something. I don't know what people call it in the other parts of the world.

I don't know.

I'm sure that, you know, we eat hot dogs and hamburgers, we have cookouts, there are flags on everything and fireworks and. And it's kind of fun. What I do on these long weekends is, and this is a little embarrassing, I sleep. I am an epic sleeper. So if I'm, you know, having sort of a normal, stressful week running, what I do here, and then there's a lot of physical training, I probably sleep between eight and eight and a half hours a night. But that's not entirely what I need because when we have these holiday weekends, I'll sleep nine or 10 hours. And we're talking sleep, not laying in the bed waiting for sleep. We're talking sleep as I have a wearable that measures my sleep. And that's what it tells me. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I feel rested. I love the feeling after I have one of these epic sleeps. But on the other hand, I find it like. Well, couldn't you cut that down to like. I mean, other people sleep seven, eight hours and they seem fine. Like, think of all the time that I'm wasting. But we're all different. That's my thing. If there's like an academy of the Olympics of sleeping, I think I would be a contestant. I think I would do well. The other interesting thing that's been going on here recently is, you know, I have this like ongoing multi year saga with my left knee, which I don't want to bore you with, but I had Some injections. And the result of the injections was they didn't want me to really load the knee capsule for like three weeks, which was irritating. Which meant that a lot of my cardio exercise, really all of my cardio exercise took place on a spin bike, but that was over on Sunday. So I can actually do a lot of things that I normally like to do. And one of them is hiking with weight. You know, some people call this rucking. They have other words for it. Basically what I do is I live on the side of a mountain, I live on the side of a ski resort. And I will just walk up. I go up one of the sort of very gentlest access roads. I don't go straight up the mountain, which is, you know, like 45 degrees. When doing this, I have this 25 pound weight vest. I think it's filled with like BBs or something. So I walk 20 minutes up at a reasonably good pace and 20 minutes down. This is why I'm doing this one. I get to spend time in nature. I can't tell you all the different animals and birds and stuff that I see in the morning. It's really lovely. I get my cardiovascular exercise sort of like high zone 2, which is really great. It's much better than just, you know, spinning on the bike, which I find a little boring. And the other thing is, if you get these £25, it doesn't go around your waist. It's like sort of up on your shoulders and you're working on uneven terrain. It's a lot of balance that's involved in core stabilization. And one of the things I found from my skiing last year, I'd done most of my cardio on a spin bike, which is great for that, but it's really uni dimensional, right? You're not using any other muscles. You're not going to tip. I mean, you guys, you could tip over a spin bike, but, you know, you don't really have to tighten up your core the way you do when you're, you know, hiking up uneven terrain with £25 sitting on the top of you. So I find it really enjoyable. It's something that I like to do every morning. Really sets me up for a good day. So this week on just try this, what I'm going to do is give you a little thought on sort of the opposite of what I was talking about. With the weight vest on the mountain. With the weight vest on the mountain, I'm doing a number of things at the same time. I get some really nice time out of nature. I get some cardiovascular exercise, I get some balance and I get some stamina with my core. So all that stuff can happen at the same time. That's great. But if we want to actually get serious mental work done, we want to be doing things not stacked, meaning we want to be doing one thing at a time and just stay in that mode, stay in the flow of that for however that long is good for you. 20 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour and a half. But. But we don't want to be doing what Cal Newport would call deep work with other things going on. And other things being phone calls, text, social media, surfing the web, all this sort of stuff. If you do that, what you're doing is you're causing your brain to constantly switch channels. And that takes a lot of effort. It's a lot of work. It's a lot easier on your brain to just stay in one channel and focus on the thing that you're doing. So this is sort of the exception to stacking things together. There's a real time to stack things together and there's another time to just single mindedly focus on something. And I know for a lot of us that can be kind of tricky because there's a lot of distractions in our life. So this week on just try this. My suggestion is if you're doing work, something that requires thinking, writing things in that mode, maybe you're playing a musical instrument or something, something requires a lot of focus. Turn everything off, turn off the notifications on your phone, resist the temptation to find out what the latest news is, what's going on out in the world, and just bear down on the thing. And the other trick is that I've learned, once you get going, leave a little bit at the end that's unfinished and that sounds sort of counterintuitive, but say you're writing five paragraphs and the first four are awesome. Write four and a half and stop. And then you can go back to it the next day. And the energy that you brought in from the day before is not fully exhausted and not completed and it's really easy to pick it up. So that's this week on Just try this everyone. If you haven't left us a review, if you haven't left a comment, please do that. Wherever you're listening to this podcast, please share it with your friends. If you need to contact me directly, daviduperage.com I answer all of my email directly and promptly. Everyone, have a wonderful week. It's a great time to be alive. Life is a wonderful thing. We'll see you next week. Take care now.