How Inflammation Is KILLING YOU & Ways To REDUCE IT TODAY! | Dr. Emeran Mayer & Lewis Howes

I tend to think that every complex system ultimately develops a mind. So this is not just the gut microbiome, but the microbiome on the planet. Because there's microbes everywhere. It's the most abundant life form. And we are connected in some ways, our microbes and the gut are connected to the microbes in the soil, microbes in the air, in the water. Does that system have a mind? So coming back to this concept of interconnectedness, I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. studies, what are the biggest triggers for inflammation in the body? Is it environment? Is it what we consume? Is it toxins on our body that we're putting on ourselves? Is it stress hormones? What are these biggest triggers for inflammation?

Well, I mean, you listed them all. So, the way the body works, it integrates influences from multiple sources, particularly the central nervous system, the brain. And it's sort of like this supercomputer applying artificial intelligence to these influences. And then it extracts patterns and decides on relevance and salience. And based on that salience, it makes responses in terms of this needs to be, we need to adjust this system, we need to adjust this system. And it's doing obviously a phenomenal job because a lot of the influences that we're exposed to the brain in evolution is never encountered, you know, the chemicals, the kind of food that we eat, we never, humans never were exposed to that kind of food. The visual experience is, you know, so, so, yeah, the brain and the brain gut system, because I really always like to link, keep those together. We can talk about this later. Why is a master in this.

In.

This computation of salience and responding to it. And that system has worked so well that it's kept us alive as a species. And we're thriving. I'm not sure what's happening now. There's some sort of a mismatch now between the salience assessment and what's good for us on the planet. But there will be corrections in that as well, I'm sure.

Right. Now, do you think the, is the brain influencing the body more or is the gut influencing the brain more?

So you could, you know, I've compared this to a central government and local governments in the states and counties.

And.

There'S a lot of influence that goes, that comes from the body and, that plays a big role in our emotions, in our emotional states. And as I'll talk about, you know, there's a lot of stuff now going on with this low-grade immune system activation that we all, most people are now exposed to because of our diet. And that's a stream of information that constantly goes to the brain. You don't feel it. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't generate any symptoms, but over time it does change your brain structurally and functionally. So a big influence subliminally that goes to the brain all the time. And also big things, so people have said, yes, we can generate artificial intelligence, but it won't have emotions because it doesn't have the body to send this constant signals to it. But then on the other hand, I mean, the brain is obviously the most sophisticated computer in the universe up to now. And it sends signals to the body all the time. There's a part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system that reaches pretty much every cell in your body. You have a sensory part, the vagus nerve, that reports anything that goes on anywhere constantly to the brain. And then the brain as a system to respond to that. And again, it can influence every cell in distinct patterns. It doesn't always kick in because they would be overwhelmed. It kicks in when it's necessary. There's a threat, throwing is, you know, I'm curious about.

I don't know if you've studied this, but I'm curious about when human beings look themselves in the mirror and they see themselves and they shape an identity, they perceive an identity, and maybe they look. chiseled. They're like this Greek god that's just chiseled. They're athletic, but they don't believe they're healthy or fit for whatever reason. Their identity has made them look like they're not, they don't love themselves or they don't believe that they look good or whatever it is. Does there anything to play around identity that we shape for ourselves, the image of ourself and making us either healthier or more susceptible to diseases or a weakened immune system? Am I out there too much by asking this, but I'm curious.

Yeah, no, no. So, I mean, this is definitely something that happens a lot. I mean, to a lot of people that their identity is obviously shaped early on in life. You know, typically, there could also be genetic factors, but most of it will happen early in life. The feedback you get from your parents and from your friends, if that's generally positive or or negative. If it's negative, you know, it can have two effects. One is it can really damage your self-identity and your self-worth or you could rebel against it and say, I'm not going to accept this. You know, I'm creating my own, my own identity. I, I think it will have almost certainly it, it does have. I mean, anything that happens in, in the brain in terms of these emotional, like, or identity. In my own research, I've always been more concerned about the emotional influences on the body. So any emotion that you experience either chronically or so more of these emotions that are present all the time, background emotions, that has a mirror image in your body.

Really? So give me an example. If you're thinking, if you're feeling an emotion of not enough or lack or sick or stress. If you're feeling and thinking that consistently, then the body will mirror that.

The body will mirror it. And so, I focus primarily on the gut, you know, because it's kind of a unique organ because it has all these other things in it, not just the gut wall, but the immune system and the nervous system of the gut. and hormonal system. But that will, so this is not separate, you know, this is like just as some people, you look at them and you look at their face and you can tell what's going on, you know, if you're good in that, the, you know, the furs between your eyebrows and, you know, it's, it's, unless you're a poker player, you, you exhibit these emotions in your face. But the same thing happens in every part of your body, you know, your, your heart and your I'm not sure about organs like the kidneys and the liver. They're not sort of more mechanical devices or chemical devices, not as much these computational. So the heart is also the heart is basically a pump. But the gut is something that is in a different realm. It's very sensitive to emotions and I would say...

The gut, is that why you feel butterflies, you feel sick when you see something, to feel it in your gut?

Yeah, and also this self-identity. I'm, you know, quite honestly, before you ask the question, I never even thought about this, but I'm absolutely convinced.

I'm fascinated by this.

I'm absolutely convinced that your gut has a mirror image of your sense of identity.

Really?

Yeah. I think if you have an inferiority complex, that will affect the gut. And now, you know, since we talked a lot about the gut microbiome that that lives inside the gut, which communicates very closely with the gut. Even that system gets these messages from the brain. And this is different. So if you are threatened by a wild animal, you will have a peak in your stress response, and within a couple of seconds or minutes, it will go down and be normal again. With these with these background emotions or something like sense of identity that's with you all the time.

Always. Always thinking and feeling like I'm not enough or imposter syndrome or something.

And it's ingrained in your unconscious. It comes out in your dreams.

So what does that do to the body or the immune system if you're constantly thinking these things or have a belief system that I'm not enough or comparing to someone else or something else or in lack or in scarcity. What does that do to the immune system, the gut, the body?

Yeah, so I'm talking about the immune system. If you have this, you know, I talked about this acute threat or this acute emotion of an acute stress, it will temporarily increase the activity of your immune system because like spike of cortisol or something. of your stress system. But if it's chronic, it has a totally different effect on it, so often the opposite effect. And it will, I mean, there's many studies coming out on this now, that even early adverse life events that play a big role in shaping this identity, have been found to have an effect on the gene expression pattern in your immune cells, in some of your immune cells, which in an adult person. So you can, there's a memory in these immune cells that reflects what happened to you at age of, you know.

Five, seven, nine, whatever.

And that obviously shapes when these immune cells are called into action, that shapes the immune response.

There's a trigger that you'll feel when you see something that reflects what you went through, right?

So there's a memory, there's an immune memory. I mean, there's clearly also this brain memory in our unconscious. It's probably the way the body's organized that some of the systems, particularly the nervous system and immune system, can form these memories that then later really influence many functions in your body and also your behavior.

So, how do we heal these things? If we have this memory of something from the past in our immune system or in our DNA and our cells, how do we heal or move beyond it so it doesn't hold us back?

Well, there's different ways. There's some people that do this on their own. They pull themselves out of it. There's other people that go into psychoanalysis. So, I mentioned in my first book, I went through Jungian dream analysis for several years at some point in my life, during an existential crisis, and found that extremely helpful connecting to, I mean, just watching your dreams for a while and realizing some are recurring. I mean, those are the ones that obviously have a big influence because they're there all the time. So if you imagine every night, these experiences are recalled and even during your sleep effect, you know, systems within your body. So that's another way. There's ways today, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't deal with the roots of it. They just change your behavior. It's another way of dealing with it. So forget about reversing or patching up what happened early on. And then there's the most modern way, it's the psychedelics, you know, I'm not an expert on this, but I've gotten really interested in that for a variety of reasons, because when I first came to UCLA for, for training, I was fascinated by this whole counterculture. You know, there were Workshop in, in eseln and by the organized by the Orville Foundation. And I listened to many of these leading figures at the time, you know, giving these workshops. And so this was in the in the early 70s, you know, and they, well, early 80s, I say, when I experienced it. And they talked about, you know, psychoanalysis with LSD or with ketamine. And then it was completely, you know, closed off for science for decades. And now it's coming back rapidly, you know, and there's some fascinating stuff coming out. you know, and also in my travels during college in South America, I've stayed with some of these tribes on the Orinoco River, and they use, you know, the same substance, a similar substance to what's in ayahuasca. And we've seen, you know, how they get into these trance states. And so now, you know, fast forward 35, 40 years. I find it fascinating that this is not back in the mainstream, you know, and it will. So this is just a way of removing the control. If you say it in a simplistic way, removing the control that we have, but prefrontal cortex to suppress these things, you loosen that control and then this stuff will bubble up. Maybe very painful. I think you shouldn't do it without the guidance of an experienced, you know, shaman or psychotherapist. But that's another way of processing. And the majority of people go through life without ever dealing with this. They get sick, they get their heart attack, diabetes, they never think about this.

Wow. I'm curious about the gut. When you say the gut, what is included in that? What are all the elements of gut?

Yeah, so let's start with, you know, when I went to medical school, the gut was basically the digestive organ.

The digestive organ.

So something that we know very well from the esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine, large intestine, each of those regions has a special task. And the ultimate goal, we thought, is the breaking down of food into absorbable and components that are then provide the nutrients for our body. That was the thought. But then, you know, when I came to UCLA initially as a research fellow, worked in the lab, late John Walsh, and so they found at the time that there were molecules in the gut that somewhat didn't fit that description, you know, there were, there were neuro, neurotransmitters. And so make a long story short.

Transmitters from the brain to the gut.

Same, same molecules. Yeah. And the receptors. And, and then people thought about, why is that? And it was the discovery of a nervous system in, in the gut, you know, 150 million neurons that are there and very similar in their 150 million.

Neurons in the gut.

And in a gut, sandwiched, so if you look at a gut, you wouldn't see it. Gut has several layers and in between these layers there's a net of nerve cells that wraps around it. But because the gut is so long, it ends up with the numbers. And the main function of that system is really to completely regulate the gut. In an animal model, you can take out the gut, put it in a test tube, and this gut will still have the same functions, peristalsis and secretion, as it has when it's connected to the rest of the body.

You can put it in a tube and it'll still like process food, it'll still run it through the same way. So what does that tell us?

So it tells us that gut or this little gut in the brain is really the primary regulator of our gut functions, the digestive functions.

But.

Then there was another sort of realization that these same transmitters were also present within the brain, as in the gut. That caused a lot of surprise, you know, that why would he have that? Then again, the long story, the evolution. In evolution, we started out the most primitive organisms with that gut brain. And then gradually as animals, this was marine creatures, tiny marine creatures in the oceans, as we, as in evolution, polar animals developed with a head, then some of these nerves migrated to the head and formed, you know, the beginning of the central nervous system. And then there was some division of labor at some point that before the gut brain did everything because there was no head and no other functions, no other organs. So later our big brains then took over the regulation, the response to the environment, the coordination of organs within the body. And the digestive side was left to the brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system. But that means there's a very intimate relationship between these two, you know, more than with any other organ in the body. Clearly, the heart gets a lot of signals from the brain when we're stressed or the blood vessels, the blood pressure goes up. But it's nothing compared to what goes on in this multi-lane highway between the brain and the gut.

So.

And yeah, I would say, so a lot of people then think, you know, Are our emotions processed by the gut's nervous system? That's very not the case. I think there's still that the more sophisticated things happen at the brain level. But it's this constant signal in a bi-directional way that... Like, can we see something?

We feel triggered or we see a threat or... see something we like or we don't like, and then we feel it in our gut. Is it first processed through the eyes into the brain and then connects down to the gut, or as we see something and it goes from the gut up to the brain?

No, I would say this happens first in the brain and within milliseconds, as a signal down.

Instant, right.

And as you said, it can be good or bad, this arousal mechanism.

Yeah, it can be pleasure or pain or stress, right?

Yeah, it can be, you go on your first date and you have people talk about butterflies in their stomach. and it can be when you have to give a speech the first time, when you're nervous or an actor, you know, so it's the same mechanism. It's value neutral, you know, that arousal. But then there's also emotion specific signals, you know, that happen. So anger, anxiety, we don't know about something like jealousy, you know, that hasn't really been studied, but anger and fear. That has been studied. We know exactly the patterns that happen in every level of the gut when you have these emotions. And one of the reasons that these emotions then hang around for a long time, it's not like you can turn them off. Anger, you know, so some people train themselves, you know, to be, to have more equanimity and not, not get carried away by the anger, but. A lot of people, that anger sticks with them or the fear. And then that's because it reverberates in these gut circuits.

Really.

And between the gut and the brain and, you know, sets up this vicious cycle. And the brain cannot easily shut it off unless you train it, train yourself to do it.

How do you train yourself to let go of anger?

Well, it's a lot of the meditative techniques of, you know, mindfulness that you.

It's the practice. It doesn't happen overnight. It's like a practice of doing it over and over.

It's the practice you experience that emotion and you train yourself to let it go, to see it blow away.

Not hold on to it. You studied Buddhism for a while as well, right?

Yeah, and this is something I've always been fascinated by. Looking back, I don't even know why I was interested. It's probably my own personal issues. But that stuck with me, that interest. And I find now more than ever the wisdom that is in these Buddhist concepts, both in terms of emotional regulation. I mean, who would have thought that mindfulness-based stress reduction would become a commonly used, like a household name, or an app? When I was first interested, it was an esoteric thing. People say, yeah, it's crazy, you know, Buddhism.

And the last decade has become the mainstream, you know, mindfulness, meditation.

And that all has to do with these Concepts that we just talked about, you know, to train yourself not to be stuck with these emotions, because these emotions that if they hang around, as we now said several times, it's not just within your brain. They circulate through your body. The whole body. And it's, it has, you know, It's a very unhealthy situation to be in that state.

Now, how I've been studying a lot of breath work over the last four or five years, I was studying, you know, to become a meditation instructor in India. Then I've been learning from Wim Hof. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Wim Hof and his practices. There's the yoga practices in general of breath work. How much connection is there between the way we breathe, the style of breathing, the shortness or the length and the calmness, the intensity of breathing in affecting the immune system and the gut-brain connection. Is there science around breath?

Yeah, there's a science. And I have to admit, I'm not an expert on the various techniques that people have been using. So we have been using in our work the simplest form, the abdominal breathing. with diaphragmatic breathing, where you basically just switch from your typical adult pattern. So if you have 10 people and you tell them, take a deep breath, they all take it into their chest.

Yes.

You know, this is it. And to switch that pattern to inhaling into your body, into your stomach, does wonders. And the reason it is because The diaphragm is closely connected and the lung closely connected to the vagus nerve with the brain, with these emotional centers within the brain. So if you're stressed and you consciously now tell your diaphragm to go into a pattern that is associated with relaxation, the body sends signals to the brain now. that are incompatible with the stress perception. And if you are good in doing this, train yourself, then you will be able to overcome it quickly.

Really?

So, I've been doing this again. You ask me why I started these things. I mean, I had some issues when I was younger where I thought this was, somebody taught me, a psychologist taught me this. And I've been practicing this for 60 years. I do it in the car, if I have to give a talk in the car, and I've gotten so good in it that within seconds I can switch it.

What is the practice?

Well, the initial practice is you just spend 15 minutes, three times a day, lying down.