Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Dr. Sanjay Gupta On The 5 Pillars Of Brain Health

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Dr. Sanjay Gupta is the multiple Emmy Award-winning chief medical correspondent for CNN and host of the CNN podcast Chasing Life. Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon, plays an integral role in CNN’s reporting on health and medical news for all of CNN’s shows domestically and internationally. In addition to his work for CNN, Gupta is an associate professor of neurosurgery at Emory University Hospital and associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. He is the author of four New York Times best-selling books, “Chasing Life” (2007), “Cheating Death” (2009), “Monday Mornings” (2012), and “Keep Sharp: Building a Better Brain” (2020).In this episode we talk about:Sanjay’s origin story and how he got interested in the brain in the first placeThe mysteries of consciousnessWe dive into his five pillars of brain healthHow you can grow new brain cells by moving the body (but in certain ways)Key skills for challenging your brainWe hear about some meditation tips Sanjay picked up from the Dalai LamaWhether we should worry alone or with other peopleAnd lastly, why it’s so important for men to have vulnerable conversations with each otherRelated Episodes:The Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness#230: The Power of Rest | Alex Soojung-Kim Pang#614. Your Brain on Food | Dr. Uma NaidooThe Science Of Memory: How To Get Better At Remembering And Be Okay With Forgetting | Charan RanganathSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/sanjay-gupta-836See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, everybody, how we doing? Today we're going to talk about how to keep your brain, that mysterious three and a half pound organ between your ears, sharp and healthy no matter what your age is. My guest is the legendary Dr. Sanjay Gupta, practicing neurosurgeon, chief medical correspondent for CNN, host of his own podcast called Chasing Life,

and past designee of People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. I forgot to give him shit about that, which I regret. Just to say, this was actually the first time I've ever met Sanjay. I had admired him from a distance for decades. We have some mutual friends who rave about him. So I was prepared to like the guy, but he, as you will hear, exceeded expectations.

We spent most of our time talking about a book he wrote called Keep Sharp, in which he lays out the five pillars of brain health. We dive into those five pillars, which include move, discover, relax, nourish, and connect. We talk about his origin story, how he got interested in the brain in the first place, the mysteries of consciousness, how you can grow new brain cells. We talk about key skills for challenging your brain.

We hear some meditation tips that Sanjay picked up directly from the Dalai Lama. And lastly, we have a pretty candid talk about why it's so important for men to have vulnerable conversations with each other. We'll get started with Dr. Sanjay Gupta right after this. You know, I'm never sure how long to keep up an announcement here on the show because on the one hand, I don't wanna bang you over the head with something you've already heard me say a million times. On the other hand, there's some evidence

that you need to hear something about seven times before you take action. I leave with that caveat because I'm aware that some of you might be annoyed that I'm reminding you yet again about this big new venture I just launched called danharris.com. But I'm doing so because I really do want you

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Visit audible.ca, audible.ca. Hello, I'm Dax Shepard. visit audible.ca, audible.ca. Hello, I'm Dak Shepard. And I'm Monica Padman. Monica and I do three weekly shows with celebrities on Monday, experts on Wednesdays, and crazy stories from listeners on Fridays. We're so excited to officially be a part of the Wondry Network.

So follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Armchair Expert on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Armchair Expert on YouTube. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, welcome to the show. What a pleasure, Dan. I've been watching you for years. I'm a huge fan of yours. I gotta say you're one of those guys who on television, even when you're not speaking, you convey a lot. And it always makes me feel better as a viewer. Just wanted to tell you that. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Yeah, my wife says I have a very bad resting bitch face. So with all due respect to your wife, I would say the opposite. You always seem like you've got a little bit of a smile on your face. Sometimes whimsical, sometimes I don't know what, but it's always there. Well, thank you for that. Right back at you. It feels like a kind of a version of malpractice that we haven't had you on the show until now, so I apologize to our listeners

for that oversight and very excited to have you on and big admirer of yours. And so a lot of questions I wanna ask you. Excellent, yeah. Well, hopefully we can make up for this lost time by doing a really good chat today. Yeah, I have full confidence in that. You wrote a book a few years ago that I'm regretting not having talked to you at the time, but I have full confidence in that. You wrote a book a few years ago that I'm regretting

not having talked to you at the time, but I have you now. It's called Keep Sharp and it's really something that I think is of universal interest, which is how do we maintain brain health for as long as possible? And you had this very handy sort of five pillars, five ways that we can think about keeping our brains healthy. I was gonna move through these sequentially.

The first is to move your body. Actually, you know what, before we get into that, let me ask you a higher level question, which is a little bit of your origin story. Like, how did you get interested in the brain in the first place? You know, it's interesting. I started medical school at a pretty young age.

I was accepted to medical school out of high school. And when I first started medical school, I thought I was going to probably go into pediatrics. When I watched pediatricians in the hospital, they were kind of always the best doctors, Dan. I think it's something about taking care of sick children that galvanizes teams and these doctors were just, they were such pleasant human beings. They never wanted to check out early

They wanted to take care of their patients and I thought pediatrics and then I did a rotation in neurosurgery When I was in medical school, and I think this is sort of a common story for a lot of medical students You get this exposure. You didn't even know you had an interest and all of a sudden it sort of changes your whole trajectory So I became very interested in the brain My grandfather had a stroke when I was in my early teens. And that was the first time I thought about the mysteries of the brain. He had this really interesting condition where he could write, but he could not read, he could speak, but he could not understand.

So he was able to express, but not receive to the point where he could write something down and not read what he just wrote. And it made me very just curious. Like, how does this work? So he was able to express but not receive to the point where he could write something down and not read what he just wrote. And it made me very just curious, like how does this work? Like the heart's a pump, the pancreas makes insulin. You kind of have a functional sort of idea, but the brain was just so different. That got me sort of interested as well. So you know, I went to seven years of neurosurgery training, a year of fellowship, and my love

for the brain continued to grow. It is a three and a half pound mystery that we're carrying around in our skulls. The most enigmatic three and a half pounds of tissue in the known universe. Yes, that's what I was gonna ask. And there's so many mysteries too, like in the connection between the brain and the mind.

I know you've spent some time with the Dalai Lama, and I have that on my long list of questions for you, but in the Tibetan tradition, if you ask for a monk or a nun to point to their mind, they will point to their heart. But most of us think of the mind as predicated upon the brain. And so there's just a lot there that we don't understand.

Yeah, I mean, I think for a long time, the emotional centers of the brain versus the intellectual centers of the brain and the thinking brain versus the reactive brain, all of that, I think gets at this notion of the mind-brain dichotomy. And it's interesting because being a neurosurgeon, you're taught in a very sort of functional way.

Here is the right frontal lobe. It is responsible for XYZ, left temporal lobe does this. And yet as we learn more and more about the brain and we can peer inside the brain in ways that we couldn't before, we see that it's really like this constellation of things in the sky that are happening all at different times. So even though you're speaking, we thought that was all left temporal lobe. You see the right parietal lobe linking up as well. And I guess my point is those connections between things is probably the mind. Whereas the brain is kind of like the big

cities of a particular state. All the roads in between that sort of connect those cities that make it all work is the mind. People have different views on this. I think it'll be something that won't be settled maybe in human history. And it'll be a topic of discussion like where does consciousness really reside? What does that mean for the mind versus the brain? It's fascinating stuff. And I love having this kind of conversation. It's literally why when I was a medical student,

I decided to do this as much as I wanted to do the technical aspects of brain surgery, I love these conversations. I just knew that if I was a brain guy, I'd get to have them all the time. Yes, there's a reason why they call consciousness the hard problem. How did we go, as one poet has said, from gases and rocks to opera? How did that happen is very interesting

and nobody that I know of has the answer. Can I just say something? If you wanted to apply the functional aspects of what you just said, so the brain functional aspects, left motor strip controls right side of body, right motor strip controls left side of body. We have these direct sort of relationships we make.

But gas and rockss to Opera, that is not a direct connection. There's no part of survival of the adaptive traits of human beings that would allow us to better survive. Opera was probably not on the list. Yet somehow it is there. Your whole podcast is about happiness,

but I think one would have a hard time making the case that happiness is a necessary trait for survival Right and yet we desire it deeply The same sort of metaphor that we use for the mind of the brain we could make for opera to gas and rocks Exactly what you're saying and then you get into the question of You theorize that maybe the brain represents the major cities and the mind is the connection among all of these faculties of knowing that we have within the organism. But I've spent a little bit of time in the Buddhist world and one of the main contentions there is that it is unknowable. There's

this great Zen parable of this. I think it's a Zen parable. I'm going to probably mangle this, but some aspiring meditation student is waiting outside of a cave where a great master is studying and he's trying to get this master to come out and help him. And he asks the master, hey, can you help me pacify my mind? And the master says, bring me your mind and I'll show you how to do it.

And the point is you can't find this thing. And in the not finding, that is the finding to get familiar with the fact that if you close your eyes and look for Dr. Gupta, you can't find him. There's something healing in the proximity to the mystery. Am I making any sense here as I ramble? Yeah, totally. I had not heard that parable before, but I totally, I get it. You know, I think these things are sometimes hard

to get your head around or your mind around, if you will, in the moment. But I will say that I'm in my mid-50s now. And I think for a long time, I was sort of under the belief that I needed to find answers to questions. And I still have that desire. It's not like it's gone. But I think I'm much more comfortable with what you just said, the idea that maybe some things are just unknowable. I mean, I've always

known that, but it's like, I, you know, we need to be figuring it out. We need to do the best we can to figure out the answers to these questions. But the idea that is unknowable, maybe that is the answer is liberating. Yeah. Way, you know, it's sort of freeing makes you take some of the pressure off. Do you think there's something about the human animal that with age, our brain, our mind, whatever, gets more comfortable, at least in some individuals with ambiguity, with open-mindedness, with intellectual humility, which by the way, as a side note, maybe not even that much of a side note, seems desperately lacking in our modern political culture.

The way I'd answer that is that I think it is the case for some people, but not for everyone who ages, do our brains develop that comfort with ambiguity or whatever it may be. I was having this conversation with someone recently about confidence. This was a confidence researcher and he was basically making the case that confidence in and

of itself is a virtue and almost advocating for the fake it till you make it sort of thing. Because through that, even if you're faking it, you will be more likely to try things. And the more shots you take on goal, the more likely you're to have success. So if you're to have success. So if you're to teach your kids some sort of trait,

teaching them to be confident is really important. Now, some would say, well, you gotta make sure they're not arrogant. And that's true. You gotta have the right amount of confidence. But I think how you sort of balance that in your life is important. So I think as I've gotten older,

maybe I've gotten more comfortable with ambiguity, but I would also say this, in some ways I've gotten older, maybe I've gotten more comfortable with ambiguity, but I would also say this, in some ways I've become less confident. I think I've become somebody who, the more that I know, the more that I realize I don't know. I'm not sure that gets at your question of ambiguity, but I think that's kind of how my mind

sort of responds to that. I'm less confident and that doesn't paralyze me, but I'm aware of it. It makes me a better listener, I think. I don't talk as much and I listen more. Well, I wonder, it's kind of like a definitional question of how are you defining confidence? Because I scan your decreasing dogmatism

as a form of confidence. Like it takes confidence to get comfortable with open-mindedness, with intellectual humility, as a form of confidence. Like it takes confidence to get comfortable with open-mindedness, with intellectual humility, to admit that you don't know. Right, I guess you're right. I mean, the confidence in the sense that why didn't you do that before

because you were afraid you'd be judged, maybe diminished as a result of coming off as someone who wasn't confident about something. And now I guess I'm confident enough not to care about that as much. I care, but I don't care so much how other people view me. Does that happen in the mid-50s? I don't know, I think I'm probably older than you,

but I think over the last few years it's become more pronounced, I would say. Yeah, well, I'm 53. I feel it's starting to happen with me. I have lots of insecurities for sure, but it's getting better. Yeah, I don't want to sound like I'm being polyamorous here. I still have insecurities. But I think for some of the big issues, not the superficial stuff, but the bigger issues, I'm more comfortable not being so dogmatic about it.

I tell my friends, I like spending time with people I disagree with because the people I agree with, I don't feel like I'm'm gonna learn anything and not to malign them and I'm just saying that that conversation I know it's well worn people I disagree with as long as they're not malignant jerks are actually pretty fun conversations to have yep just to put a plug in here your reference to having a conversation recently about confidence is a reference to your podcast chasing life which people should check out and I saw that you had a confidence expert on there and actually sent a reference to your podcast, Chasing Life, which people should check out. And I saw that you had a confidence expert on there and I actually sent a note to my team to say,

hey, we should look into this person, the confidence expert. So if you hear a confidence episode in your feed soon, you can thank Dr. Gupta. And you can be confident it will be a good episode. Exactly. All right, well, let's talk about the five pillars for better brain health.

The first is moving your body. I guess it's sort of a somewhat performatively naive question here is like, what's the connection between moving your whole body and having a healthy brain, which is just a small part of it. Right. Right. I'll preface by saying this, even since I graduated from medical school, which was 30 years ago now, one of the big sort of things that's happened in the world of neuroscience is the understanding of how possible neurogenesis is. Neurogenesis,

the growing of new brain cells. When I was in medical school, the general belief when it came to certain tissues in the body, including the brain, was that once the brain was fully developed, you had a certain number of neurons, certain number of supporting cells to those neurons, and that was it. You had that amount of brain, and over your life you would drain the cash, and certain things would speed up that drainage, like alcohol, for example. But I think we know that that's not the case now. We know that we can grow new brain cells at any age. we know that that's not the case now. We know that we can grow new brain cells at any age. And I'll tell you, it's really interesting. We only really looked at the brain when there was a problem, when there was a tumor, when there was trauma, something like that. Once we started to be able to look at the healthy brain through this really remarkable technology, we saw that there was evidence of neurogenesis happening all the time. There was this turnover of brain cells and

new brain cells being replenished all the time, which was pretty revelatory. We didn't really know that that happened. And then the question became, okay, now we know we can grow new brain cells at any age, how do I do it? You can't inject it, you can't eat it, can't take it as a supplement.

The only way you can do it is to make these new brain cells yourself. And one of the ways to do that is through this factor known as BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor. You may know all this, Dan, I'm sure this is maybe hit your radar, but it's pretty interesting. BDNF is sort of, as a very famous neuroscientist put it to me, it's like the miracle grow for the brain.

You sprinkle the stuff on the brain and you get neurogenesis, I'm simplifying, but that's kind of the idea. And what they found when they started to look at lots and lots of data was one of the best ways to make BDNF was through movement. And when your body was in movement, you actually were actively expressing BDNF. They got so granular about it.

They realized that if you were moving too lightly or too slowly, you probably weren't making much BDNF. Moving moderately or excessively or, you know, sort of intense exercise, you're making a lot of BDNF. But the difference was when you're intensely exercising, you're also making a lot of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and that stress hormone actually inhibits BDNF. So you find that there's a sweet spot when it comes to movement and the brain. Too little is not making enough BDNF, too much is making BDNF, but also making things that suppress BDNF. So brisk movement,

more moderate movement is actually better for the brain, whereas intense activity may be better for the heart. So we always say that exercise is good, but we're starting to get to the point where we can be pretty prescriptive and granular about what types of movement is better for what. I love exercise. I've been doing it my whole life. I will do an intense exercise every day, swim, bike or run. And I'll probably go for a kind of briskish walk with my wife and my dogs at some point as well. I try and do that. Some days are a lot harder than others,

but one's good for the heart, one's good for the brain. That's so interesting. So if you're doing a HIIT workout, high intensity interval training, which you can get in a spin class or doing sprints while you're running or swimming or whatever that is good for the heart but it's not going to lead to a lot of bdnf whereas if you take

a brisk walk every day that's probably not as good for the heart but it's better for the brain that's right and to be clear with the intense exercise you're making a lot of bdnf but you're also suppressing it because you're making a lot of cortisol. Uh, it's fascinating. And I'll keep coming back to this brain mind thing again, because functionally you can kind of get that you raise your heart rate, you improve oxygenated blood, all that sort of stuff. But the fact that we evolved into making moderate activity, the type of activity that was more likely to make adequate BDNF and not suppress it is interesting.

Right. I mean, the longest lived societies in the world, they don't really run. They walk. I mean, these guys in Bolivia, the Chimane tribe, which was considered sort of the healthiest people in the world for a point. They would walk to hunt.

They didn't outrun their prey. They outlasted their prey. And on average they do about 17,000 steps per day, but there was, there was never like these intense activity, maybe just at the point where they're actually throwing a spear or bow and arrow, whatever. But most of the time it was moderate activity, probably making a ton of BDNF

and really seemed to work for them. I'm not an evolutionary expert, but it does make sense if you think about the fact that we evolved to be walking and thinking at the same time. A lot of our, you know, we had to have situational awareness moving through the Savannah for hunting and for threat detection, et cetera, et cetera. So I've heard from experts on this show that actually movement is good for decision-making and creativity. And it would also just go to follow that a good

amount of moderate exercise given our evolutionary history would be good for the brain. Yes, all those things. And you can almost imagine the BDNF being sprinkled on your brain when you're taking a brisk walk. And the fact that you're like, ah, I just thought of this other thing, I want to ask for a podcast, or all these things come into your head all of a sudden as you're doing it. It's kind of amazing.

It's kind of like that's the way the body was designed to be in motion and to be better when it was in motion to do things that we think of as intellectual. But actually when you're in motion, we think of those things sitting at a desk because that is how we evolved. But as you just said, you know, who was a proponent of this was Steve jobs. I don't know if you had that that. Yes, Walking Meetings. Isaacson's book, Walking Meetings. That was the big thing. I think a lot of people do that now, but there's some scientific underpinning to why that would work. One of the things that I imagine comes up in people's minds when they hear us talking about

the value of exercise for brain health is I can't make the habit stick. I'm one of those people who starts to exercise on January 1st or maybe January 2nd once I get over the hangover and I, like most people, lose the habit before February arrives. What do you say to people who struggle in that regard? I think they're viewing it as a punishment almost, something they have to do with the obligated broccoli eating. Frankly, since I've been a medical journalist, this has been one of the biggest challenges and I think we see it in the medical world as well, but I think as a journalist, it was more clear to me that we are fundamentally telling people to do things like eat right

and exercise and guess what? Nothing will happen to you. It's not the most inspiring message in the world. The benefits that you're going to accrue are 30, 40, 50 years down the line when you delay that heart attack or stroke or whatever it might be. I think with all kinds of messaging, including this, breaking your habit within the first couple of months, you got to close the loop for people. If you do these things, you will be better now. It's not just about warding disease off 30, 40 years from now.

You will be better now. You'll feel better. You'll be a better spouse, a better brother, better sister, better employee, better colleague, whatever it might be. You will be happier. You'll be more productive. All those things now as a result of those things. I think that's always been the challenge.

Prevention as a conceit in medicine. It's hard for people to get their heads around that. I got to do all this stuff to prevent something that may or may not happen in the first place. Here's the secret is that you will feel better now. I tell people when it comes to habits like that to keep a journal, keep a food journal, and keep a journal sort of how you're feeling. And I think you'll realize that when you're adopting

these healthy habits, some of the ones that we're talking about, you'll feel better now and you won't feel as good if you stop doing it. That can be motivating for people. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If we're gonna go from extrinsic motivation, meaning Dr. Gupta tells me I should do it, to intrinsic motivation, which is I'm doing this exercise

because I want to do it. One way to get over the hump is to pay close attention through a journal or any other tracking mechanism to how you're feeling, like the upside, the dopamine that you're getting out of this thing that you're dreading as a way to convince your system that like actually, no, you wanna do this if for your own reason. Yeah, yeah, totally.

And the journaling really helps because the biggest lies we tell are the lies we tell ourselves. And if you keep a journal, I think it kind of forces you to be honest. I don't know if you've ever kept a food journal, but you have a meal and then a few hours later, really ask yourself, how do you feel?

How did that meal make you feel? I found something interesting, which is that whenever I fermented foods, like pickles or something, actually a few hours later or a couple hours later, I felt really good. I felt, I don't know. I felt like I would be a better writer. I would be more creative, whatever. So fermented foods, probably nourishing my microbiome in some way, which is our second brain, our gut is.

And I feel better. So here I got this secret weapon now, pickles, as a result of keeping a food journal. It really helps. Good to know. I'm taking a lot of notes here. Okay, the second pillar, stretch your mind. So the first was move your body. The second is stretch your mind. What do you mean by that? It's really based on the adage that you should try and do something that scares you every day. Do things that get you outside of your comfort zone. Try new things. Here's the basic idea is that when we think about the brain, people often ask, do you use your whole brain or is it more like the Cheech and Chong movie? You know, we only use 20% of our brain, so you can do whatever you want with the other 80%. That's not the case. We use our whole brain. But kind of like I was describing earlier, there are the cities and then there's the roads.

So the cities are the most important part of the brain, and that's probably 20% of your brain. But unless you can get from city to city with those roads, those cities are isolated, they don't do anything. So you need the roads, even though the roads aren't populated all the time. Does that make sense? So you do use your whole brain. And so when you stretch your brain, what I'm basically saying is that most of us, even though we use our whole brain, we probably use 10% of it, 90% of the time.

So it's kind of like Dan Harris lives in his house, lives in his neighborhood and never travels anywhere else. And he gets so good at living there that he can drive those roads with his eyes closed. He knows everybody. He knows every cashier at the supermarket, you know, everything, everything about that place. But there's 90% of the world still left that you haven't really explored.

If you do things that you do over and over again and get really good at them, like crossword puzzles or Sudoku, things like that, it's kind of like getting even better at knowing your city. But once you start to do things that are uncomfortable, that are unusual, that maybe even get you outside your comfort zone, make you a little scared even. Now you've become a psychonaut. Now you can travel around your brain and try have other areas of your brain actually do things that you hadn't done before. For example, during the pandemic, I took up

painting. I am a terrible, terrible artist. Awful. I draw stick figures. But I said I'm going to take up painting and I started doing it with my left hand. So here was a brand new activity that's outside my comfort zone, using a little bit of a motor component, because I'm painting with my hand, using my non-dominant hand, because I'm right-handed,

was a way to do something that totally stretched my brain. It stretched my brain. I mean, I could feel my brain stretching as I'm trying to like you know draw the perfect thing with my left hand. Brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand. Eating with your non-dominant hand. Every door you open never reach with it for your right hand. If your right-handed always open a door with your left hand. All that stuff trains your brain in a different way and stretches it because your mannerisms, your habits at 53 years old have

created really, really deep crevasses in certain parts of your brain. Think of those as really, really established roads. But a lot of your brain out there is smooth, doesn't have a lot of roads on it. To get those roads, you have to do new things. That's really what it is. It fights a little bit at this notion of brain training overall as a conceit. That's really what it is. It fights a little bit at this notion of brain training overall as a conceit. That's kind of like, again, driving the road even better, driving it faster, driving it with my eyes closed. But you've already driven that road. You know that road. So it's like how to drive new roads, I think, is what stretching your brain really is. So you said this before, but I want to make sure that I understand it. I think there are non-trivial percentage of people out there who play the

crossword or word or whatever it is because they enjoy it, but also because they're hoping to keep their brain healthy and stave off dementia. But I think what you're saying is fine. Probably not bad for you, but it's really when you get into areas of novelty and fresh challenge that you're gonna stretch the mind in a way that helps the brain. Yeah, that's right. I get a lot of emails after I wrote the book about these puzzlers.

They feel very strongly about their crossword puzzles and they're like, wait a second, you know, I've been doing these. And I think the way you framed it is exactly right. It's not that that's a bad thing, but just the analogy I'm sort of giving is that you're getting really, really good at doing this particular type of activity. You know, if people said, what does crossword puzzle sort of behavior, people who do these sorts of things over and over again, make you really good at? What it makes you really good at is crossword puzzles. So great, that's terrific. But there's a lot of other things out there. That's sort of the point. Maybe a lot of crossword puzzlers who are listening to this will also start painting with their left hand or their non-dominant hand. Who knows? But I'm saying there's different ways

to stretch the brain. Even just doing the crossword with their left hand and writing the words in there. That strikes me as a very small but eminently operationalizable hack for brain health that I had never thought of before, which is, can you get into the habit of opening doors but eminently operationalizable hack for brain health that I had never thought of before, which is can you get into the habit of opening doors, in my case with my left hand, my non-dominant hand, and you're saying that that actually is potentially quite beneficial.

Yeah, like look, so from a motor standpoint, most of what you do is probably with the right side of your body. Even the more forceful step that you take going up a flight of stairs, you're probably going with your right and then sort of dragging your left up a little bit. Everything. So if you were to look at the now left motor strip, okay, because the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body.

If you looked at that, that's probably really, really well established. You know, it's not as well established as probably your right motor strip. Think about it from a functional standpoint. If you had a stroke one day and you really were now counting on the right side of your brain to become plastic and to be able to take over activities, the better sort of established it is now earlier in life when you don't have these problems, the more likely it is going to be resilient later on when you need that sort of hemisphere of your brain to be doing other things.

So tonight, try brushing your teeth with your left hand. I won't suggest drinking soup with your left hand right away. I got a couple cleaning bills from that, but just little things like that that you can adapt, I think do make a big difference. Okay. So other things that you've listed in the stretch your mind category, learning a new language, taking a cooking class. Also you've talked about something called speed processing games, what's that?

There was several of them that came out a few years ago, but basically trying to look for patterns very, very quickly and to eliminate other patterns very, very quickly. That's a lot of processing speed. If you think about the types of functions that we think about in terms of a healthy brain, memory, obviously, executive judgment, skills, and then processing speed. And processing speed really ends up being probably the most important thing to people when you really start to really survey what they want out of their brain,

what they wish their brain would do better. The memory, really, for most people, it's there. They're just not processing it fast enough. There's a lot of brain training around that. Despite what I just said about brain training, sort of making those roads even deeper and more traveled, I think certain brain training exercises that focus on processing speed can actually be really beneficial.

If we want to find one of these, do you have recommendations? It's gonna sound funny, but I can't remember. Give me a minute. I'll get back to you. There was one that was called double something. I will get to it. You're losing it.

You're losing it, doctor. I know, right? I mean, does that just obviate everything I've just said? Nothing working for this guy. You were starting to say something and I rudely cut you off. Something about when you wrote the book. When I wrote the book, obviously nothing working for this guy. You were starting to say something and I rudely cut you off. Something about when you wrote the book. When I wrote the book, it was interesting

because I remember thinking, keep sharp, who is mostly gonna wanna read this book? I didn't want it to be just for people who are imminently worried about brain health. I want it to be for everybody, like anybody who writes a book does. But it was interesting when I, in the areas that I wrote about processing speed,

I got a lot of feedback and comments and response from Wall Street guys, people who are trying to make lots and lots of decisions very quickly. And they're looking at lots of data and then trying to see these patterns. And I think the question they were sort of asking is, okay, I'm kind of practicing this all the time because that's my job. But the guys who are really good at this are the guys who are the most successful. How do I get better at this? Which I thought was interesting. I expected people who were worried about dementia and these are guys who are trying to look

at complex patterns of numbers and geopolitical events and make these big decisions on investments. I just thought that was kind of interesting. What did you recommend to them? Same sort of thing. Some of these same brain training exercises that focus on the idea of being able to recognize a pattern like one of the games i remember was a really crowded highway of cars. And to quickly be able to pick out a specific pattern of car within all of that.

Chaos out there the blue convertible car with a certain type of hubcap. Obviously, if you scan the whole photo, you can find that, but how do you start to develop patterns in your own brain to rule out other things very quickly and focus in on what you think is the most important? That's really what a lot of these processing speed brain training exercises are really focusing on. As much as what it's telling you to do, it's telling you what not to do, meaning what to ignore, which is really important.

What's your take on video games? Does that stretch the mind in a healthy way? I think they can. There was a company called Achille which created these games, for example, with children with ADHD. And they were looking at some of the speed processing stuff that we're talking about, and they were trying to measure it. So they were trying to figure out, like, if you did these games regularly, did you actually get better? Not just at the game, because they would test you in different ways, but did you get better with your processing speed overall? And I think there was data to suggest that was the case. Like a lot of things, it depends.

But I think there can be a role for video games. This doesn't all have to be real life sort of stuff. Doing stuff on the screen can actually be quite helpful. Yeah. I had a friend years ago who went into hospice and was told he had three days to live. He ended up in hospice for six years. They finally sent him home. Wow.

I think it was multifactorial. They might have been wrong about the diagnosis slash prognosis. When he went into hospice, he was like the mayor of that place. He was very happy. And I think that extended his life, but he also played a ton of video games. I used to play, you know, call of duty with him all the time. I hate video games. And I just wonder a little bit about whether that helped his brain. You could see he was leaning forward in his bed.

He was deeply engaged. He wasn't just sitting back and sipping apple juice. Yeah. about whether that helped his brain. You could see he was leaning forward in his bed. He was deeply engaged. He wasn't just sitting back and sipping apple juice. Yeah. That's quite a story by the way, man. I'm glad he lived six years. You know, it's crazy. What I think is interesting is that simply thinking about things

activates parts of our brain. So if you think about music, you're not singing, you're not playing an instrument, not at a concert, you're in an MRI machine. And you can see parts of your brain light up as if you were actually singing or playing an instrument. So when you think about that with regard to video games, obviously, the knock on them is that you're just sitting there doing nothing, except moving a joystick around or whatever it might be. But your brain is actually quite active in those situations. I think it gets in the way of physical activity for our kids and things like that. So that's a problem. But beyond that, I think there can be a real brain benefit to it. As long as it's not too toxic

or taking too much of your time. Coming up, Dr. Gupta talks about resting the body and how to make long-term memories. Some meditation tips he picked up from the Dalai Lama, and his fourth pillar, along with some specific food recommendations for brain health. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing,

but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Even the Royals is a podcast from Wondery that pulls back the curtain on royal families, past and present, from all over the world to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty. Like the true stories behind the six wives of Henry VIII, whose lives were so much more than just divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Or Esther of Burundi, a princess who fled her home country to become France's first

black supermodel. There's also Queen Christina of Sweden, an icon who traded in dresses for pants, had an affair with her lady-in-waiting, and eventually gave up her crown because she refused to get married. Throw in her involvement in a murder and an attempt to become Queen of Poland, and you have one of the most unforgettable legacies in royal history. Follow even the Royals on the Wondery app

or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge even the Royals ad free right now on Wondery Plus. A quick reminder to come check out what I'm doing over at danharris.com. This is a huge new venture for me. I'd love to get your support and your feedback. And a reminder that the 10% Happier app

is now called Just Happier, and they've got personalized meditation plans and fresh ways to meditate on and off the cushion. Download the new Happier Meditation app today to discover meditation that evolves with you. The third pillar is resting your body and brain. Mm-hmm. Yes, hold forth on that if you don't mind.

Everyone knows we should sleep more, right? I mean, I remember when I started to write this part of the book, I was thinking, and I think I felt like this for a lot of my career, frankly, is that telling people things they kind of already know, but the what of it is interesting, but the why behind it is far more interesting. So when it comes to the idea of rest or sleep and the brain, it's a little counterintuitive because there can be a lot happening in our brain when we are sleeping. There can be a lot of activity happening in our brain. We think of ourselves going into the state of sleep paralysis, you know, where just everything is sort of hibernating. And with your brain, you could have a lot going on, a lot of

activity. And there's two really important things beyond the fact that you might be consolidating thoughts and things. One is that you're taking short-term memories and you're moving them into the long-term memory stores. And that's really important. I mean, I have three teenagers, 19, 17, and 15. And this always comes up with their studying. You know, they're studying late into the night and trying to pull an all nighter before an exam. And I'm telling them that by not sleeping, all the stuff that they're learning right then is not going to get stored in those long-term memory stores for the exam.

So they're kind of shooting themselves in the foot. Long-term memories get made while you sleep. That's an important thing. The other thing I think is really interesting and we've learned this recently is that there's in our body that the lymphatic system, your lymph nodes and they clear the waste from your body. That's what your lymph nodes do. In your brain, you have a glymphatic system, which is sort of the same thing you need to clear waste. You have all these cellular byproducts, you have a glymphatic system, which is sort of the same thing. You need to clear waste. You have all these cellular byproducts.

You need to clear that waste. That's happening all the time in the brain, but it happens much more efficiently when you sleep. The what is that you should get enough sleep. The why is that you're not going to remember long-term things as well. The why is that you're not going to clear the waste out of your brain as well. And the why is that there's a lot of consolidation of thoughts that happens. Why you dream.

It's why you have all these various sort of thoughts that happen in your brain. Even when you're at rest, there's a lot that's going on there. And I think when you imagine that and picture that when you're trying to get a good night's sleep, I think it makes you more likely to turn off the TV or put away the phone or do whatever and actually go to bed, go to sleep. What else falls into the category of resting the body and the brain? We really wanted to use the word rest, maybe even more so than sleep, because rest I think comes in all sorts of different forms. Some very specific things happen when you actually cycle through the stages of sleep, but even getting rest, meaning as my mom always said,

the best form of rest is a change of activity. So really just being able to change up your day, change up what you're working on any given time that ended up being really important as well for your efficiency. It's very hard to micro task, meaning going back and forth between these tasks. We're not very good at that, you know, to multi several different things at the same time. We lose a fair amount of efficiency when we task switch.

But changing up your activity from time to time actually does seem to make a huge difference. It's a form of rest. Right. So I don't know if you've ever had Alex Soo Jung Kim Pang on your show. He wrote a book called Rest. No. He's been on this show. I'll put a link to him in the show notes, but he would be a good guest.

Okay. He has a broad, capacious understanding of what rest is that seems to jive with what your mom says, that it doesn't necessarily mean lying in a hammock, although that is rest, but it could also, exercise in Alex's view is rest because it's a change of activity. Right, right. Moms are always right, first of all, that's the headline. Also, the idea that it can be physical, it can be a physical activity still

that would be from a brain standpoint be defined as rest. So you can have the brain really active when you're asleep and you can have the brain really active when you're asleep and you can have the brain very rested when you're very active. It's counterintuitive. So would you put meditation, would you put that under rest or stretching the mind?

I would put it more under rest for me. And I'm sure maybe people would give different answers on this, but the same sort of benefits I get when I am resting, I get from meditation as well. So that's why I put it into that same bucket. It's always a change of activity, I guess, at the time, because I'm doing something else and I set aside time to meditate. So maybe that's why it's a form of rest as well. But I feel like I have the same benefits as if I had just truly rested in the hammock as you described. You wrote an excellent piece on CNN.com and I'll put a link to it. But it was about this extraordinary opportunity you got to meditate one-on-one in the middle of the night or very, very early morning with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Can you tell that story here?

Sure. So this happened in Mungod, India. His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Can you tell that story here? Sure. So this happened in Mungod, India. As you may know, Dan, the Dalai Lama is very interested in some of the same stuff we're talking about. He's got a brain consortium that he's put together and he's also a visiting professor at my university. So when he comes to the States,

he will give lectures and stuff at my university. And then we get to know each other a bit. And I think the sort of substrate, the common substrate, was our shared fascination for the brain. So he invited me to go to Mungod and I took my wife and, you know, extraordinary sort of opportunity, as you say, attended a couple of lectures that he gave mostly to neuroscientists about the inflection points, if you will,

between meditation and brain health. And then we had lunch with him and he asked me if I wanted to meditate with him the next morning. It's a very daunting thing. He's the guy, he's the world-class, in this case, meditator. But you know, think about the world-class baseball player or whatever, and you know what, you want to go hit with me or golfer. It was a little intimidating. But he starts his day super early.

As you mentioned, I think around three 45 or four o'clock in the morning. And he meditates for about three, three and a half hours. And so four to seven or four to seven 30 around there. Then he sort of takes a shower, has some breakfast and things like that. And then he meditates again until nine o'clock. And then he starts his official day. It's a very early schedule. So I showed up there and his folks took me into where he was meditating

already and sat down. He was sort of on this little ledge. So I was sort of looking up at him. So the whole thing was like this very, very spiritual experience. And I was sitting on the floor for an Indian guy. I can't even sit cross-legged that well. It's embarrassing, you know, Indian styles. They call it.

I can't even, like my hips hurt when I do this for a long time. So I'm doing this and there's not a lot of instruction. It's just like, okay, now you meditate. So I'm doing this and I'm trying to really do it. I'm having a really frankly, hard time. The whole situation feels uncomfortable, frankly. And I keep looking up at him, you know, with one eye sort of open and he's deep in his meditation.

He's really like the breathing has gotten slower and just everything. Then one time I look up at him and he's looking right at me. I don't know if you've heard him speak. He's got this very deep voice. How's it going? Or something like that. Like it's not going so well. I just can't seem to, you know, I'm having a really hard time with this. And he basically told me, Dan, that he had had a hard time meditating as well for a significant number of years. You know, he'd been to Dalai Lama since he was two or three years old. When he was really starting to meditate in earnest, he said he had a hard time with it. He gave me some tips, which I thought were really helpful. And he sort of referred to it as a type

of analytical meditation. So he was sitting there explaining this to me. He said, a lot of people will want to clear their mind. And that's actually a really hard thing to do for most people to actually clear your mind. Other people will think about single point meditation. Like I will think about a waterfall. I'll think about a point on the horizon or something. It can work, but it can be challenging. But instead to lean deeply into something that you're already thinking about really deeply

into a problem you're trying to solve, a book you just read, you know, whatever it might be, and spend a lot of time just making a bubble around that thing. Because when you make the bubble around that thing, it forces you to define it. Because if it doesn't fit in the bubble, you haven't defined it well. So once the problem is X, you can have really defined it and put it in the bubble. Because I hadn't really defined it before. I kept commingling it with other unrelated issues. None of the bubbles there, and you got it totally defined in there, whatever the problem is you're trying to solve, and now let the bubble float up. And the purpose of letting it float up, he said,

was to further disentangle it from emotional attachments. Just look at this problem in isolation, well-defined, hovering above you a little bit, you can spin it in your mind, you can do whatever. And when you spend the time to first really put it in the bubble and imagine the walls of the bubble really enveloping the problem, and then spend some time just letting it float up on you. And I close my eyes for that meditation, and it might take me 15 minutes just to get to that point, where I've now levitated the bubble in front of me.

And then I just spend another 10 minutes or so spinning the bubble around, letting the problem sort of become increasingly defined. And I think solutions sometimes emerge or maybe things not to do, not to overreact to it or whatever it might be. I find it really helpful for my life. And I never really thought about that sort of deep thinking as a form of meditation. But again, that's something I got to learn from the Dalai Lama, which was pretty cool.

That was pretty cool. Just to say to the listeners, not to you. I did an interview with the Dalai Lama, where we talked a little bit about analytical meditation. So I'll drop a link to that in the show notes for people who want to learn more. But back to you, Dr. Gupta. They can call me Sanjay now, can't you? Or do I have to call you Mr. Harris? Back to you, Sanjay. In your essay that I referenced on cnn.com, you wrote the following sentence, and I just want to read it to you

and get you to talk a little bit about it. You write, in the past, my family and friends would have typically described me as pleasant, but hurried. My baseline restlessness and edginess, however, have now nearly vanished. That was a few years ago. Are you still meditating? Are you still seeing the same effects? Yeah, I meditate every day, at least 15 or 20 minutes. I think that if we were doing this podcast before I started analytically meditating, it would have been a different podcast. I kind of always felt hurried.

Even if I wasn't necessarily hurried, I felt that I'm missing something. Why am I not hurried? I should be hurried about something. You know, I should be sort of in a rush to do something. And I'm really not as much anymore. I'm not sure that, look, to be fair, I don't want to attribute that all to analytical meditation. I think there's like these ripple effects that come from it.

And some of it's probably age as well. But the idea of meditating for me, it allows me to think deeply for at least 15 or 20 minutes a day, which I think is just, it's like opening up the engine on your mind, letting it go out for a joy ride, number one. But number two is the fact that I can do it and just carve out even those 20 minutes in my day, give me some sense of control. I feel like, hey, if I can do this, I'm not totally out of control here that I've just lost my schedule altogether. I can really sit down and do something that's

very, very healing, frankly, for me and my brain. And I can just find that time every day. So that alone is really beneficial. I thought about getting a tattoo that says, unhurried, just to remind me that that's the state I want to be in because the rushing brain is a dumber brain than the calm one. As I mentioned, I have three daughters. I asked one of my daughters, I think she was around 12 years old. I was like one of those dinnertime family dinners, which are always fun. And somehow the idea of future partners came up. And I was like, what are you, what are you looking for?

And with that single trace of irony in her voice, she looks at me and she goes, someone who's not in a hurry. And I said, I don't know if that's an indictment of your dad or like where that came from exactly, but I love it. Actually, it's a really wise, wise response. She's a wise one for sure. There's something about whatever form of meditation you're doing, I think for some people, myself for sure.

Something about taking yourself out of the forward momentum for five, 10, 15 minutes a day to meditate in again, whatever form that I think at least turns the dial down on the toppling forward. Yeah. That's my experience. I think you're absolutely right. I know you don't do evolutionary biology, but have you ever read the

book, why zebras don't get ulcers? I'm familiar with the book and I think we've talked quite a bit about having its author. Is it Somebody with a Z Robert Sapolsky. Yeah, we've talked about having him on the show. You should he's great I've been lucky enough to talk to him a few times sometimes for shows But sometimes just to catch up with the guy he's fascinating. But here's the point. It's a thick book, but the title sort of Says it all. Zebras don't get ulcers. And the reason they don't get ulcers is because when they're being chased as potential prey, they're running their hearts out, but as soon as they're no

longer being chased, they're happily raising. So they can go from being super stressed to super relaxed, just like that. We humans are not very good at that. This is the points of Polsky makes is that stress in and of itself is not the enemy. When I'm not meditating, there are moments of tremendous stress in my life, but stress is not the enemy. In fact, we need it, get you out of bed, study for a test, do better at your job, whatever. But the relentless nature of the stress is the problem.

And so just to your point, Dan, I mean, meditating for me sort of, first of all, I really honestly will not check my phone for those 20 minutes. It seems like a lifetime to not look at your phone for 20 minutes in the middle of a work day, right? Or end of a work day, whatever it might be. I hope my bosses aren't listening. The idea that you just have that true break from the stress, I think is really important. Cortisol levels go down. Stress is not the problem. It's just that we never can get away from it. Meditating helps me a lot.

The fourth pillar is fuel your brain. What do you mean by that? The most strategic signal we give to the inside of our body from our outside world every day is our food. It's the food we eat. Obviously the air we breathe as well, but we don't have as much sort of domain over that. And so how we nourish ourselves has a tremendous impact obviously on our bodies, but also our brains. And some of it is non-intuitive. I think the idea that the microbiome, which so many people have written amazing books about, is so important for our brain health is well known. But I think the idea that, for example, we make more serotonin in our gut than in our brains is something that's not as well known. So much of our mood, how we feel, how likely we are to try something new as a result of how we feel, whatever it may be, our optimism is a result of our gut health, even more

than our brain health. So paying really close attention again, as I was talking about with the journaling, everyone's different, but you will get a sense if you journal what kind of foods are your sort of superfoods that you're gonna feel really good two to three hours later in terms of your mood. You just got to pay attention to this. We don't draw the connection so easily, so that's why the journaling helps. But then there's other things about the way that we nourish ourselves that I think are pretty unique to the brain. So for example, sugar.

Everyone knows that too much sugar is bad for you. That's no surprise. What is interesting is that when you eat a lot of calories in the form of sugar, a lot of energy in the form of sugar, your body will just basically store it. Assuming that the body functions in this aspect of, I don't know when I'm going to get my next meal, so I got a bunch of energy here, a bunch of calories here, let me store that, store it as fat. We all know that. What is different about the brain though, it's a very narrow window of absorption in the brain. So as soon as you get the glucose levels too high in the bloodstream, instead of

absorb, absorb, absorb, the receptors just turn off in the brain. You could be stuffing your body and starving your brain simultaneously. It's part of why people crash. You know, you eat a bunch of sugar and then you crash because the brain receptors essentially turned off. They're not absorbing the extra energy. They've decided to absorb no energy because you've exceeded the therapeutic or the sort of the window of what the brain is willing to accept from a glucose standpoint. That's just an example of the what and the why again. Again, we know sugar is bad. Here it gets really fine tuned when it comes to the brain.

You need some sugar in your diet, that's energy. But as soon as you get too high, you can actually get into the point where you're starving your brain. The mechanisms go on and on, which I won't get into, but you may have heard that people have started to come to think of dementia sort of as type three diabetes. And a lot of this has to do with how we think

about sugar's impact on the brain. When we nourish ourselves, we're nourishing our microbiome, we're nourishing obviously our brain, but all these systems are working sort of in different ways and we have to sort of pay attention to that. Do you have specific recommendations when it comes to how to eat? Yeah, don't eat too much.

You'd mostly plants eat real foods. I think most of our medical problems, frankly, in the United States, 70% of our $4 trillion healthcare budget is due to just poor eating. A lot of it, I would say is probably not our fault. I mean, you can eat the same meals in Europe that you eat here and have a totally different experience. You'd have fewer calories. You'd have fewer additives, you'd feel better. You know, have a huge pasta dinner in Italy and you won't gain any weight and you'll feel great. You know, it's like, it's what we're putting in our food.

So some of it is not our fault. But I think paying attention to I use an app, I don't know if I'm allowed to plug apps, but I like this app called Yuka. Why UKA? I use it to basically scan my food and tell me what's in it. And if there's too many additives and preservatives, things that I know are going to make me feel pretty crummy a couple hours after I eat it, I don't eat it. It's not that it's not tasty. It's just that I know now is because I'm a deep observer of my own sort of things

through journaling, what kind of foods don't make me feel well. These aren't allergies per se. I just don't feel well when I eat those things. So I think the biggest thing is don't eat too much. Eat mostly plants. Pay attention to what you're eating. Recognize that a lot of the additives, which you may not be aware of, you should become aware of. And then understand which of those are really bad for you in terms of your overall productivity and your mood. That's basically it. I like food. I eat food and I like to go out to dinners and stuff like that, but I plan and I pay attention to it.

I think certainly more than I used to. The tricky thing there is, and my experience, one can get pretty obsessive about food and how your body looks in ways that I don't know how it ramifies in the brain but it's just not good for your psyche. Yeah that's definitely true being a dad of three teenage girls you know it's something I think about a lot as well and luckily we have very open candid conversations in our family about those topics. What I think surprises me sometimes is people will talk about calories and things like that, which is an important measure, but I think how food actually makes you feel. If the food that you eat makes you more likely to want to go out and do something active

later on, that's the kind of food you should be eating as opposed to the kind of food that may be really tasty, but makes you just very sluggish. Most people just never pay attention to it. Spend a week, just one week eating your normal diet. And then two hours later and three hours later, just creating a little checklist for yourself. How do I feel? How productive am I? Am I sleepy? Do I think I could go out and do something right now? Could I be active? Am I in a good mood?

Do I want to go hang around my kids and just be fun dad for awhile? You know, whatever it might be. That is something that I think is, it's incredible insight for yourself. So that's kind of it on food. I mean, there's a lot to say about food, obviously. Again, I think most chronic diseases in this country in some way or another are related to how we nourish ourselves. For a certain percentage of people, no matter what they do in terms of eating right and exercising and everything, they have a really hard time losing weight. And again, some of it may not be their fault because even though they think they're eating well, they're eating foods that may have a lot

of preservatives in them and other things. But I think another thing that we're seeing in the this new weight loss drug revolution has sort of taught us is that for some people, they may not be making the same amount of hormones after they eat that you or I do. You eat a meal and then you release a bunch of post-nutrient hormones, they're called. And these hormones stimulate your pancreas to make insulin, they tell your brain that you are full, and they slow down your gut so that you can actually digest the food you just ate. Some people probably just don't make enough of that. And so they don't ever really feel full. And they constantly have this food chatter. They're already thinking about their next meal,

even as they finished the one that they just ate. When you look at these new drugs like Ozempic and Legovia and Manjaro, in some ways they're replacing those hormones and allowing the body to do what it should be doing, telling the brain that you're full after you've eaten, making a little bit more insulin, which helps diabetics and slowing down your gut a little bit so that you can actually absorb the calories as opposed to it just moving through you quickly. I'm not saying those drugs are for everyone, but I do think that they can play a real role for people. 40% of our country is obese right now. 40%. I don't think you probably knew anybody who was obese when you were growing up.

Or maybe very few now almost four in 10 people, which is incredible. On this question of fueling the brain, where are you on alcohol? I don't really drink. I was never a big drinker, you know, doing seven years of residency, working a hundred hours a week, drinking became something that was just so obstructive to me being able to do anything. I try and run every morning. And if I drink, look, I, I have drank. It's not like I have no moral quandary with it.

I probably will have some drinking this Friday because there's a big event my wife and I have to go to. So I'll probably have a couple of glasses of wine. So it's not like I'm totally against it, but I pay the price the next day. I probably won't do the morning run as early or if at all, probably won't sleep as well. So I'm not a, not a big drinker. Yeah. How about you? I stopped drinking just because I developed, I don't know if allergy is the right term, but if I have so much as a sip of alcohol, I feel hungover immediately. It's not like

the next morning I just go right to the hangover. So it just doesn't agree with me. So I don't do it. Some people call that being drunk. You call it a hangover. No, cause I know what it's like to be drunk and that can be well, or at least buzzed and that can be mildly pleasant, but there's nothing, there's nothing pleasant about this could be nature's way of protecting me because I have some very prominent alcohol abuse disorder in my lineage. So I'm glad for this allergy or whatever you want to call it, this intolerance.

It sounds like you developed it later in life, but there is a thing known as alcohol dehydrogenase, which is what breaks down alcohol. And some people don't have enough of that enzyme that breaks it down. Gets to toxic level pretty quickly, which makes people feel pretty miserable. Certain populations, you'll see it because their skin will turn bright red, right as soon as they even have a sip of alcohol. It's a lack of that enzyme. So maybe you have that. Not that you need to get tested or anything, because I think it's working for you. Yeah, I'm good.

Coming up, Sanjay talks about the connection between connecting with others and brain health. The question of whether we should worry alone or with other people. I think you know the answer to that. And lastly, why it's so important for men to have honest, open, candid conversations with each other, and we actually give it a go.

All right. Well, so the fifth pillar is connecting with others. So what's the connection between connecting with others and the health of our brain? From a sort of strictly functional standpoint, when you are actually part of the community and connecting with others regularly, you do tend to make more oxytocin, which is a particular hormone. Some have referred to it as the cuddle hormone. Moms make a lot of it when they have

baby and cuddling with baby makes you very empathetic towards people, but it also acts synergistically with that BDNF that I was talking about earlier. So having cultivated connections, making them more oxytocin can help that process of neurogenesis. That's the dot connecting on that. What is interesting about it is that defining what that means is I think where the area of research has really gone here. Researchers who study loneliness, for example, using that to sort of say, well, what can we then construe about the impact of loneliness on the brain, but also the impact of connection on the brain? Are they the opposite of one another?

And what you find is that they're not necessarily, I was never a particularly social person, especially when I was growing up and then during medical school and residency, I think you just, you gotta get pretty siloed being social. It was sort of seen as an extravagance to me, a luxury, something to do if I didn't have anything else that I should be doing, as opposed to something that had real value. Probably it was during the pandemic that I realized that I was not feeling very good when I was isolated.

I wasn't around people. I was like, wow, even though I'm not a very social person, I miss actually being around people. And so when I started to be around people again, it scratched that itch. I felt better from that. What I think is interesting though, is that like, what does it mean to have a strong social connection with somebody? How do you define that?

If it's not the quantity of those connections, it's the quality. How do you define the quality of something? And I've spent a lot of time thinking about that when I was writing the book. And I'm not sure I, I think it's different for everybody, but people have their criteria. Like, do you have a few people in your life beyond family that you could call in the middle of the night with a problem? Can you identify those people? Things like that.

Made me realize when I read all these papers on it, that every paper in some way was showcasing a part of vulnerability. Like can you be vulnerable around somebody was really what they were getting at. Calling about your problems is one way to demonstrate vulnerability. Asking for help is one way to demonstrate vulnerability. When I put it all together for me when I was thinking about that, I realized for example with my parents, together for me when I was thinking about that, I realized, for example, with my parents, I would call them, they're both in their early 80s and say, how you doing? And they'd say, well, we're doing fine. How you doing? Well, I'm also doing fine. It was like this kind of superficial conversation. I love my parents. We're very, very close. But at the time, I'm not sure I would have defined our connection as really, really deep. And so I put into practice a little bit of this concept.

And the next time I spoke to them, they're both automotive engineers. They're retired now, but they were automotive engineers. I said, oh, by the way, my wife Rebecca, she's had a little trouble with her car lately. There was a little smoke coming from underneath the hood. Oh, my parents both put on their reading glasses and FaceTime us and I had the hood open

and I'm showing them the thing and pulling out their manual. And I'm not sure that they helped at all. But the next morning they called again about it. The point is not obviously what they did for the car, but all of a sudden we were having a more profound conversation about things. I had showed vulnerability to them and I'm still their son

and they still wanna be able to help me and feel like they can be of help to me. I tell you that story just as a sort of an example of developing profound connections. If you can be vulnerable around somebody, ask them for help is a hack in a way to demonstrating vulnerability. I told my mom when I finished writing the book, I said, if I had to distill it down for you, I would say take a brisk walk with a close friend and talk about your problems. That kind of gets at this idea of really developing strong, strong connections with people. There's a lot of evidence as to why that's good for your brain. Something I repeat is not an original insight of my part at all, but a phrase that I repeat over and over because it's so resonant and it's right on point, I think,

to what you're talking about comes from Robert Waldner, who I'm sure you're familiar with. Yes. Yeah. I love him. Just for the uninitiated, he is the current head of something called the Harvard Study for Adult Development, which has been running for eight or nine decades in the Boston area where they've looked at successive generations of Bostonians to figure out what are the variables that lead to a long and healthy life. And number one is the quality of your relationships. And the mechanism for that is that relationships help you reduce stress and stress is what kills. And Dr. Waldinger's pithy little exhortation is never worry alone. That seems to be like the actionable advice

under this fifth pillar of social connections. You know, it's funny, I had not heard that. I really liked that. Again, I'm forgetting the title of the recent book he wrote, but I read that and I followed the Harvard study. I think he's the third person to run the study right over 80 years or something. And, uh, such an interesting guy, but never worry alone. I think I do worry alone.

Do you worry alone or do you share your worries with your family or with who? My wife, number one, I don't want to say I never worry alone, but I rarely worry. My instinct is to ask for advice, to do what you're describing. I've made it a deliberate practice as I've gotten older to really be very intentional about developing, cultivating, and maintaining relationships. And one aspect of that is if I have a problem, I'll talk to my wife, I'll talk to my brother, my colleagues, friends. Yeah, I have a lot of people I could call in the middle of the night.

That's really great. I think the balance sometimes, I don't want to saddle my wife with my worries. I don't know if you ever covered conflicts as part of your journalistic career. Yeah. Come back from a conflict zone and you had this intense experience and you probably wanted to share, but at the same time, I felt like it would be too emotionally disturbing to saddle my wife with some of that. And she was just happy that I was back in one piece, you know?

So the idea of then, not that you would worry because I'm back. It's one of those things I'm going to have to think about the not worrying alone thing. I definitely have friends that I call for simpler things. I don't know, big life sort of worries, existential things. I try not to saddle people with, but, um, giving me something to think about. I think it's possible that an error in your thinking might be embedded in this word choice of saddle. Because when somebody comes to me with a problem, I don't view it as an imposition. Generally, this is not an invitation for everybody listening to email me with all

of your problems. But if I have a friend who comes to me and asks for advice, that can release a nontrivial amount of dopamine. People like to be asked for advice and I get also some oxytocin released because I feel honored that somebody would confide in me. Yes. I'm not sure if we had your wife on the horn that she would view it as being saddled with something. Yeah, I think you're right. That might be more my perception than the reality. The only distinction I think I would make is if might be more my perception than the reality. The only distinction I think I would make is if there's sometimes there's things that I worry about that there's

really no actionable, there's no advice to be given. It's not that it's even necessarily big, it's just that I'm just worried. I worry about the world. I worry about what's happening geopolitically. I worry about these things. And I have an intellectual conversation with my wife about it, but I think the idea, especially for some people, depending on how you were raised, you want to project optimism, more than saying, hey, I'm really worried about how things are going in the world right now. So I'm probably not saying this very artfully.

I'm thinking out loud with you, but I think the idea of worrying alone sometimes, keeping some of it to yourself, if there's not something that can be done by the other person, may be beneficial. But I think to your point, the other person may feel good that you just shared this with them, and it strengthens the relationship. I think this is quite a fruitful, improvised conversation here, because I think that I, fruitful improvised conversation here, because I think that I, in a very friendly way, disagree with the notion that it might be not beneficial to share problems for which there is no solution

with somebody else, because the advice part of it, you don't want to get too quickly to the advice. What people want generally when they're sharing anxiety from you is just an empathetic witness. They want validation. They just want to feel like they're not crazy for worrying about this. They want to be heard, seen, understood. That's generally what they want.

If you go quickly to the advice, that can be annoying. My daughters have shared that with me, yes. Because I think if they're sharing something with me, I must be required to fix it in some way. Yes. And I think it took some time for me, and my oldest is now 19 years old, so it probably took 18 years for me to sort of figure out that exactly as you're saying, Dan, all she wanted was an empathetic ear.

And to smile and nod and keep silent, absorb, but not to necessarily fix was really helpful. Renee Brown, the great sociologist and author and incredible communicator, she was on the show once and she said something about with her own kids, it's like, I can't fix this problem, but I can sit in the dark with you. That I feel like encapsulates what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I really like that.

This is a good conversation because I think even at this age, I, we grow. I think I'm probably transitioning from the guy that's willing to sort of keep it more buckled in under my own brain and body and not share as much. And also be the guy that feels that he needs to offer up a solution slash fix for any problem that I'm dealt with. And I probably need to think about different ways to handle both those situations, share more and fix less.

Yeah, I mean dude just to cut you some slack here. I think there are two factors that would make this more difficult for you. One is we're both Gen X males. We were raised on the Beastie Boys screaming about conquest with women, etc. It was not an enlightened era in which we came of age. And so the second thing to say is that you work on the news. It's not a medium that encourages this kind of rawness and realness. And I know it intimately from the inside. So I hope you're not telling yourself too self-critical of a story.

No, I don't feel like I'm being self-critical, but you know, it's funny when you're only context, this kind of conversation is very interesting because how many times do guys like you and I really sit down and have a conversation like this? So the only context that I really had for this is me. I didn't have anything else to compare it to. It's not like I'm, Chris Cuomo and I are hanging out saying,

hey man, so do you share your worries with, you know, are you Mr. Fix-It? I didn't have anything else to compare it to. It's not like I'm, Chris Cuomo and I are hanging out saying, hey man, so do you share your worries with, you know, are you Mr. Fix-It? We don't have those conversations. He's actually a good friend of mine, but I'm saying that these conversations don't happen. So how do you get the context of life sometimes? From your parents, I guess, to some extent, close friends,

but even then people don't usually have these kinds of conversations. You end up learning a lot. I actually have tried to make it my business to have these conversations. I have three or four groups of men who I have standing dinner or lunch dates with and actually one group where I'm the only man

and it's all women. Really? And yeah, we talk about this kind of stuff all the time. One of these groups has been running since 2008. Incredible. Yes. That's incredible. I've gotten much more intentional about this later in life

and after I retired from the news, but it has made a huge difference. And I think for men in particular, and I think there's some data around this, men have fewer friends and that leads to more loneliness and depression and anxiety and all that stuff. And I think for men in particular, we're getting all these messages men are about optimizing,

Huberman's telling us to, you know, get extra sleep and track our calories and all that stuff. But nobody's talking about optimizing the one thing that actually is the most powerful lever, which is the quality of our relationships. And I actually think this is a thing that many more men should be thinking about. I, I agree.

And I would put myself in the bucket of one of those men that should be thinking about it more. I write about it. People are introverts, maybe less likely to do this. People who have spent so much of their time. I mean, so many hours of my most formative years of my life were literally spent in a windowless operating room under a microscope. Yeah. That is my life. It's built for not being distracted. You're built for huge attention to

very small things. So it makes for fun, deep conversations, but not as likely to have large groups of friends. You know, so I have friends, don't get me wrong. I'm not some total curmudgeony who's, you know, very very isolated but not like you have and so I demand an invitation to one of these lunches or whatever if I'm up in your neck of the woods you may regret that I've really held you much longer than I thought I was going to but this has been a total pleasure before I let you go can you just remind everybody of the names of the books you've written and the podcast you host and the network on which you report? Just plug everything, please.

Well, thank you. So I've written Chasing Life, Cheating Death, Monday Mornings, Keep Sharp, and World War C. Five books and a couple of workbooks in there as well. Work on CNN. I'm the chief medical correspondent there. My day job is neurosurgeon. I'm a neurosurgeon at Emory Clinic, Emory University in Atlanta. And the podcast is Chasing Life. Funny thing is it was named after my first book, although the first book was back in 2008. So thought that name went away and it came back on the podcast and we've been doing it for some 10 seasons now. So a lot of fun. Huge pleasure to meet you, albeit virtually. Thank you for spending all this time with

me. Appreciate it. What a pleasure, Dan. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Great to finally meet him. Thank you to you for listening. Thank you finally to everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager.

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