Dr. Mark Hyman's SELF-CARE Routine For Maximum Health & LONGEVITY (Try This!)

in our fast-paced society with to-do list calendars schedules extracurricular activities building careers raising families taking work home emailing at night I mean it's made self-care and mental health pretty low on the totem pole many of us put self-care last on our to-do list we literally are the last thing on our to-do list and I know what that's like because I've done that for a lot of

my life to the detriment of my own health you know work family friends the needs of others all usually come first but nourishing our own spirit and our own Mental Health on our own bodies it's so important and it should not be an afterthought in fact many of us never think about it at all but in places like the blue zones they've naturally Incorporated in many

practices that help them live to be well over a hundred that we can learn from they focus on community and connection and meaning and purpose and rest they have a lot of chilling time and hanging out uh in our fast-paced society with to-do lists calendars schedules extra critical activities building careers raising families taking work home emailing at night I mean it's made self-care and mental health

pretty low on the totem pole of sort of priorities for our lives but the truth is you really can't live a happy healthy fulfilled life and a long one if you neglect to nourish your mind and your spirit and your body so it might be hard to imagine but your thoughts your feelings your beliefs uh grief Joy sadness love anger they're all transmuted into biological signals

that change your gene expression that regulate inflammation in your body that alter your hormones and your microbiome literally your bacteria in your gut are listening to your thoughts and changing for good or bad depending on what you think or feel your neurotransmitters are regulated by your thoughts obviously neuroplasticity your mitochondria pretty much every aspect of your biology is regulated by what you do and what you

think and how you live so I'm going to focus today mostly on the mind and and your spirit and how do we how do we take care of those things in a way that nourishes us it gives us energy that allows us to live a long and productive healthy life so how do we do self-care how do we change our mindset how do we learn about

how Community impacts our health well there's a lot of information about how self-care or mindset or Community all help improve factors for Health and Longevity for example if you're lonely your risk of death is equal or more than that of someone who's obese being lonely is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and many people in the world in America particularly don't have someone

they can call if something bad happens or they have a thing they need to talk about or someone is really a deep intimate connection even one person which is really tragic um so practicing behaviors that focus on self-healing self-compassion connection with others are really important and and self-love is hard but it's got to be your focus because until you take care of yourself you can't take

care of anybody else so focusing on things like improving what you eat and exercising and stopping smoking practicing simple self-care improving your overall health and well-being and optimizing your sleep are so important for your overall quality of life um self-compassions pretty important because when you are loving towards yourself I mean think about it most of us if we put our inner thoughts on a loudspeaker and

we broadcast into the world people would think we're crazy first of all second of all if we talk to our friends the way we talk to ourselves we wouldn't have any friends so be nice to yourself self-compassions associated with fixing a lot of problems including physical health symptoms mental health outcomes blood sugar control people with diabetes improves resiliency in in cancer outcomes mental health and mental

health and people actually have cancer so it's really important to practice self-love and self-compassion also nurture your social connections your community your relationships uh doing that has been associated with dramatically increased lifespan improved Health span I was just talking to somebody whose grandmother died at 103 and she loved donuts and she was overweight they called her uh chubby Bubby which is Bubby is a Yiddish word

for grandmother and uh she'll be 103 years old but what she did have was a joy for Life what she did have was a deep group of connected friends and social network what she did have was a great sense of humor and she she through her mind was able to overcome a lot of the things that she was doing bad to her body so when you

actually have these connections and you have a deep social network it will increase your lifespan it will improve your mental health it helps physical markers of Health including blood pressure your weight circumference body mass it reduces inflammation and this is because of this phenomenon called social genomics social genomics is the idea that our social interactions regulate our biology they regulate our immune system so if you're

having a conflict with somebody you're gonna turning on inflammatory genes if you have a loving deep connection with someone you're going to turn on anti-inflammatory genes that's how powerful this stuff is another really important thing is your mindset if everything is always a disaster a crisis a problem versus everything's a gift and you're grateful and happy it has a huge impact on your health and honestly

you know uh my it was a joke that worrying works because 99 of the time what you worry about doesn't come out I'm true so the point is that you know we make ourselves crazy most time by our our thoughts and by our beliefs so people who ruminate with negative thoughts people who have a kind of a homogeneity negative outlook often tend to have a shorter

life and poor physical mental health and those who focus on positive thoughts and future Golf and rewards are much better like a chance of having a long life a healthy life and a better well-being physically and mentally uh my joke always is that optimists live longer even if they're wrong and it's true if you look at the data your mindset plays a huge role optimism plays

a huge role on your longevity uh anger is also a big problem we have unresolved anger that eats at us and also spills out and hurts others but anger is often repressed emotion and and when people are not expressing themselves when they're not able to share their truth it comes out often as kind of very harsh and aggressive anger but what's really interesting is and this

is really from a lot of Dr Dr gamber mate's work in looking at breast cancer studies he he pointed out that those women who had uh inability to express their anger who were always nice actually had a much higher risk of Cancer and a bad outcomes from cancer regardless of the stage or the grade or any type of the biology of the cancer if your emotions

are inflamed so is your biology Carolyn mace who's an author and a medical intuitive says that our biography becomes our biology it's true the other way our biology can become our biography our our microbiome for example affects our mood our thoughts and so forth but are also our life story can become transmuted into biological signals that can really hurt us Candace Byrd talked about the molecules

of emotion based on our work at the NIH which established the whole field of psychoneuroimmunology about how our emotions and our hormones and our you know transmitted our immune system are all constantly in dialogue with each other so you literally your immune cells are listening to your thoughts and it's important because uh if you if you don't address this in yourself um it actually can lead

to bad Health outcomes and by you know changing your your perspective by actually learning how to tell the truth by expressing your feelings in a way that's kind not with meanness and aggressiveness but with kindness it can have a profoundly liberating effect on your life and also improve your biology tremendously I think that's really critical for your health and for longevity is having a sense of

purpose just having a sense of meaning and purpose extend Life by seven years if you eradicate all heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet the total life extension would be seven years so having a sense of purpose is hugely important that's what's going on in the blue zones they all have a sense of connection and purpose and belonging uh it's a social well-being

with a physical and cognitive Health lower rates of depression slower aging even psychological well-being and having a sense of purpose at least increase telomere length and slower shortening of the telomeres whereas chronic stress does the opposite it decreases telomere length and accelerates aging and oxidative stress so really important to look at your life and see while you get up in the morning you know I think

Steve Jobs said once in a tremendous speech you know if you look in the mirror in the morning and you don't love what you're doing and not excited to go to work you better change what you're doing because this is the only ride we get this is not a dress rehearsal so what are the ways practically that you can start to reclaim your life one of

the ways you can prioritize self-care and reset our stress response um well the first is Just Breath we all walk around breathing and it's available to US 24 7 and it's free so I like the simple take five breath there's a lot of ways to do it but you take five breaths in and out slowly so into the count of five out to the count of

five you can hold for five at the bottom if you want and then five that's five breaths in like that to the count of five and then the count of five out you do that when you wake up before each meal and at bedtime and that's five times a day and I can have a profound effect on your health it only takes a few seconds uh

mean the effects of meditation and stress reduction in the body are huge uh and if you don't have 10 minutes to meditate or do something like that every day you might want to look at your life and see what's wrong with it because that is not good if you don't have 10 minutes to take care of yourself uh start a regular yoga practice just moving your

body stretching things out getting all the nuts and tensions now really helps even 10 minutes of yoga a day is really great 15 minutes 20 minutes there's all kinds of great resources online for free yoga classes so breathing and stretching can really help reset your nervous system being on the woods in nature we all have a nature deficit disorder they now call it Forest bathing we

used to call it taking a walk in the woods but the basically ideas get out of Nature and get close to the Earth and feel the elements it really helps bring your nervous system back into alignment also write down what's going on inside that we found from journaling was really interesting if people journaled about their inner feelings for 20 minutes a day like their true thoughts

and feelings if they had rheumatoid rise or asthma um versus them just writing about like what I did yesterday for example which they did a control group they found that the people who wrote about their authentic feelings had a dramatic reduction in in autoimmune symptoms and inflammatory numbers on lab tests in asthma symptoms and an objective lung function so this is just writing in your Journal

can have profound effects in that way also get connected right get someone in your in your world who you like and make them close right whether it's a friend or family member a spouse um even if you're not around in the same areas your close friends maybe from college when you're younger get them on Zoom get a group together meet every week in person get a

support group going so you can get a safe healing environment to share your life all the parts of your life the opposite Downs um the good the bad so being seen and known is really some of the best medicine out there um start exercising and doing strength training because exercise helps you boost the feel good they are transmitters and also through serotonin dopamine resistance training helps

actually reduce the decline in testosterone so basically it actually helps your energy motivation and mood so it's basically a win-win-win so these are simple things that we can incorporate in our life on a daily basis and have profound profound effects so uh remember you can't just go around doing doing and giving giving giving you need to pause and take care of yourself because if you don't

you're going to pay the price so make sure you take care of yourself practice self-love self-compassion work on building a mindset that helps you have a positive outlook on life build your relationship and Community figure out what your purpose is and it doesn't have to be grandiose like saving the world it can be simply just being a good grandparent or being a member of your community

or whatever it is um that's really critical and all these things are essential to having a long fulfilling healthy life if you loved that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here high blood pressure is a real killer it's the silent killer you often don't know you have it but it's a huge driver of kidney failure Strokes heart attacks dementia it's

a big deal now normally it's treated with medications