The Mel Robbins Podcast - #1 Stress Doctor: 5 Tools to Protect Your Brain From Stress & Feel Calmer Now

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

After today, you will never think about stress the same way again.You’ll learn exactly what to do to take control of your stress, stay calm under pressure, and find instant relief.Harvard’s Dr. Aditi Nerurkar is here today to explain stress and how it relates to your body and brain. Dr. Aditi is a medical doctor, researcher, and world-renowned expert in stress and public health. She's a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and was the medical director of Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital's integrative medicine program, where she developed an enormous clinical practice in stress management using evidence-based integrative approaches to help her patients feel better.Today, she is going to give you a reimagined approach to overcoming your stress and burnout using five small but mighty mindset shifts.These mindset shifts are free, backed by science, and can be applied to your life starting today.By the time you finish listening, you will feel uplifted, empowered, and inspired to rest your stress, rewire your brain, move out of survival mode, and start thriving again.For more resources, including links to Dr. Aditi Nerurkar’s research, website, and social media, click here for the podcast episode page. If you liked this research-packed episode, your next listen should be Mel’s conversation with Dr. Tara Swart, MD, PhD: The #1 Neuroscientist: After Listening to This, Your Brain Will Not Be the Same.Connect with Mel: Watch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Mel on Instagram The Mel Robbins Podcast InstagramMel's TikTok Sign up for Mel’s newsletterDisclaimer

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Holy cow, are you in for a treat today? Because oh my gosh, I just had one of the most incredible conversations of a lifetime with a medical doctor, Harvard's Dr. Aditi Narukar, you are about to hear it. My jaw is still on the floor about how Dr. Aditi explains stress, how it relates to your body and your brain. I will never think about the topic of stress the same way again, neither will you. By the time you're done listening,

you're gonna feel so empowered and you are gonna know exactly what to do to take control of your life and manage your stress. And everything that Dr. Aditi is gonna share with you today, here's the cool part. It is free. It's Back by Science, and you can apply it instantly. In fact, she will tell you that just listening to this podcast today and taking it all in, you will be mentally, emotionally, and physically healthier by the time you're done listening. How to Make Your Life Better

The Best of Stress Alrighty, I'm so glad you are here. Are you ready to feel better by the time you're done listening to this? Because you're gonna. Today, you and I are talking about stress in a way that you have never heard it described before. And look, even if you don't feel particularly stressed right now, I promise you, this is information that you have never heard it described before. And look, even if you don't feel particularly stressed right now, I promise you this is information that you need. Because the same small research-backed approaches

that help you keep your stress at bay are the exact same things that will help you keep it away. Which is why this is an episode that I hope you will share with everyone that you love. It has life-changing information that you need. Dr. Aditi Narukar is in the house. She is a Harvard Medical Doctor, a researcher, and a world-renowned expert in stress and public health.

She is a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and was the medical director of Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital's Integrative Medicine Program, where she developed an enormous clinical practice in stress management using evidence-based integrative approaches to help her patients feel better. The title of her new bestselling book is The Five Resets, which she is here to teach you today. And by the time you are done listening,

Dr. Aditi says you will be mentally, physically, and emotionally better. And I am so happy to be able to share this with you today. So let's take a listen to that remarkable conversation. Dr. Aditi Narukar, it is such a pleasure to meet you. Welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I cannot wipe this big smile off my face. Hopefully you can talk through it because we have so much to learn from you. My cheeks are hurting already.

It's such a pleasure to be here, Mel, honestly. Before we dive into all of your research and your life-changing work, I would love to just have you speak directly to the person listening and tell them what they can expect if they listen to all of the wisdom and the research you're about to share and they apply it to their life. The last few years have been so difficult for all of us. That goes beyond what job we have, where we live,

how old we are, what gender we are, what race and nationality we are. We have lived through a tsunami of difficult experiences since 2020 to now. And most of us have very little left to give. We are spent and running on fumes. I want this conversation to be something that uplifts you, empowers you, and inspires you to know that change is possible.

It is within reach. And you can reset your stress and rewire your brain and your body so you are out of survival mode and finally thriving because you deserve this moment in time to celebrate your wins, both big and small, and to move forward into the future with a greater sense of resilience. If this can help one person, one person get out of their stress and burnout, feel seen, heard, understood, and in some capacity feel loved, then I've done my job. Wow. I want that.

There's something called the therapeutic encounter. And it's that feeling that you get when you are engaging with someone. So whether it be your doctor, it can be, you know, also your therapist, it can be a friend, it can be the Mel Robbins podcast. It's that feeling of feeling somewhat healed at the end of the encounter. And there's been a lot of science on this. I wrote about it in the book. It's that whole exchange of how are you speaking to someone, the energy, and that therapeutic connection

has been shown to have real health outcomes, like decreasing asthma flares, better glucose control, all of these fascinating outcomes, because it's that alchemy of the connection. I think the Mel Robbins podcast is something that does that. It creates that sense of therapeutic connection, and I hope that our conversation creates that sense of therapeutic connection. And I hope that our conversation can do that as well today. Not only will the conversation do it, but I

think the five resets are a way for you to use your groundbreaking research and create that connection with yourself. That's right. I think where we should start Dr. Aditi is, can you just describe and define what stress is so that we're all thinking about and talking about the same thing? Yes, you and I will often say, I'm so stressed I've had a really difficult week. Oh my God, this day was so stressful.

That word stress is thrown around all the time. And what you're describing is, scientifically, it's called maladaptive stress. There are, in fact, two kinds of stress. Not all stress is created equal. There is healthy stress and unhealthy stress. Healthy stress moves your life forward, and it is all of these wonderful things, like getting a new job, falling in love, getting a promotion, having a child,

doing things that help move your life forward. Unhealthy stress is what we talk about when we say I'm so stressed it's been a stressful day, it's been a stressful week. Unhealthy stress is maladaptive, healthy stress is adaptive. I won't use too many scientific words. I was just gonna say, what is maladaptive? Does that mean that we shouldn't be doing it? Like, what does maladaptive mean? So healthy stress moves your life forward. It is productive, it gets you up out of bed in the morning, it drives your life forward. Now, let me just make sure that I understand this because I think I already learned something from you, which is in those moments in life

where your heart is racing and you're feeling, we might call it nervous, we might call it excited. So right before you're about to give a little presentation in front of your class or at work, or you're about to ask somebody out on a date, or you're standing at the starting line of your first 5K, all of that sort of energy that you feel in your body, you're saying it's a really important part of life because that energy is

signaling like, okay, we got to get up and go, time to do the thing, time to ask the person, time to grow, time to learn. And so that kind of stress is really important because it fuels your growth, it fuels you trying new things, it's a little source of motivation. Is that what you're saying? Yes. So when you are excited about a marathon, an upcoming meeting, or afraid of an upcoming meeting,

that part of your brain is lit up and it is on. And so this way, when you are thinking about healthy stress, it's about reconciling this idea that fear and excitement live in the same part of your brain. And it's about understanding that. And so you can use that to your advantage. When you are feeling fearful about something new or exciting, tell yourself, okay, no, this is not fear. This is excitement. I can do this. And then once you move past that hurdle and actually do it, you feel a sense of accomplishment. We call it agency,

self-efficacy, like, oh, I did this, I can do it again, or I can do something else. So when you are thinking about healthy stress, those invigorating moments is really what it's about. And so healthy stress is positive. It moves your life forward. It gets you things that otherwise you wouldn't do. Otherwise, you'd be in your safety zone and comfort zone. Unhealthy stress is different. There are a million flavors of unhealthy stress. You could have, you know, mental manifestations, anxiety, depression, insomnia, hypervigilance, mood disorders, then physical manifestations, headaches, neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, GI symptoms,

the list goes on and on. The goal of life is not to live a life with zero stress. It is in fact biologically impossible. It is to live a life with healthy, manageable stress. When we have healthy, positive stress that drives our life forward, if it gets out of hand and becomes a runaway train, that's when it can become unproductive and that's when it becomes unhealthy. But the goal is to move away from unhealthy stress back to healthy, manageable stress so it can drive you forward rather than get in the way of your forward goals and dreams and hopes.

I am so excited you're here because the idea of being able to manage it in a different way so that your own life or work or the things that you're facing in your life, challenges, opportunities, are not running you over. That's right. And I can't wait to dive into the research, but I want to ask a question that might seem a little dumb. I'm not going to ask it anyway. How do you actually know if you're stressed?

And the reason why I say that is because I had this experience with our son Oakley where I had no idea how sad and lonely he was in middle school. Like I kind of knew, but I didn't know the extent of it until we moved to southern Vermont and he started high school there and I saw him happy. And I asked that question, how do you know if you're truly stressed or whether you just throw the word around. Because I think sometimes you get so used to the feeling of being on edge or running on empty or being overwhelmed or constantly overthinking that you don't realize the bigger issue. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense. So the first response to that question is that if you are wondering, am I stressed? Am I burned out?

Based on the data, the data shows that 70% of people, seven out of 10 people are feeling a sense of stress and burnout at this very moment. In a room of 30 people, that's like saying 21 people have stress and burnout. That is a vast number. So if you are feeling like, could I be stressed? Could this be me? The answer is likely to be yes. Stress and burnout currently are not the exception. They are the rule.

Think back to how you were back in maybe 2016. So 2020 onwards, it's a wash. Most likely you have had some form of stress and you've been dealing with it in your own way. But think back and are you different now than you were back then? Now of course, most of you will say, of course I'm different because I've lived through things that I have never lived through before, right? 2020, 2021, it was a very difficult time for many people.

But if you are different from your baseline, that means if your sleep is affected, if you are having some difficulty with socialization, if you are having challenges with productivity, with your mood, with energy, if you are having bodily changes that are different. So think about how you were at your baseline in 2016. Think about how different you are now. Chances are you will say, yes, I'm vastly different, and it's most likely because of stress and burnout. Wow. I think I just had this epiphany.

So I've always thought about stress as a byproduct of a super busy life, right? Or of challenges or of, you know, thinking too much or whatever it may be, okay? But as I listen to you and I think back to 2016 and as you're listening to us and taking us on a walk, or you're listening in the car, I want you to think back. Because I'm going, okay, our daughter's just graduating from high school, I'm definitely not feeling, I was more in my body back then in terms of feeling more present. I didn't feel this constant sense that something was looming.

And so as you think back and you notice this difference, I'm having this epiphany where I'm thinking, I'm realizing, oh, I think we're about to learn from you. That we think about stress as a byproduct of a ton of things that we can't control. And you're about to flip the paradigm on us Think about stress as a byproduct of a ton of things that we can't control. And you're about to flip the paradigm on us and say that actually the singular most important thing that you could do for your health, for your happiness, for everything, is to manage how you are feeling and to try these five resets and truly get your stress level under control

because that is impacting everything. It impacts everything. In fact, stress and burnout, I want to use both of those interchangeably for this particular... Under normal conditions back in 2016, 17, 18, 19, you know, if you don't want to go back into 2016, think about how you were in 2019. Most likely your brain was being led by the prefrontal cortex, which is this area right behind your forehead and it governs, it's like adulting, it governs things like planning, organization, memory. Many of you living your lives in 2016, 17, 18, 19, were using the prefrontal cortex to guide your decision making and your day-to-day life.

Stress is governed by another part of your brain, the amygdala. It is a small almond-shaped structure deep in your brain, deep inside between your ears, kind of lower down where your head and your neck kind of meet. This almond-shaped structure, the amygdala, is what houses your stress response.

In scientific terms, we call the stress response the fight or flight response. Under periods of normal functioning when you are thriving and moving through the world, your brain is governed by the prefrontal cortex. Then during periods of stress, your brain is governed by the amygdala. The amygdala is focused purely on survival

and self-preservation. It is cave person mode. You can function for short periods of time in cave person mode, but when it becomes chronic, that is when burnout sets in. If you are feeling a sense of stress and burnout, that is what has likely precipitated it. However, it's not just precipitated it. What has happened is your brain and your body need a reset and some sort of respite and recovery time. Yeah. So does the amygdala not reset itself? Like, you know what I'm saying?

Cause I'm sitting here thinking, well, every single human being on the planet has been under chronic stress for the last four years. That's right. You need to help your brain get back to the baseline. And if you don't, it's almost as if you might have these periods where you go on vacation or you have a little bit of time

off of work or it's really sunny for a couple days and you're like, oh, this is amazing. But you are easily, I'm sure, triggered, if you have not reset yourself, to go back into being chronically stressed or burnt out. So is that also why this is really important? Evolutionarily, your amygdala has focused on the fight or flight response. You saw a tiger in the forest, your heart starts racing, your lungs start breathing quicker,

blood is shunted away from the vital organs to your muscles so you can fight or you can flee. That physiological response takes seconds and once that acute threat is over, that tiger in the forest, then it comes back to baseline. The problem is that in modern times that metaphorical tiger is ongoing. We have so many tigers around us. We have financial stress, marital stress, we have stress with engaging in the world with news headlines

and all of these other things. Traffic, dwork deadlines, kids that are upset, people that you're worried about, endless, endless, endless. It never ends. And so that amygdala is on in the background at a low hum constantly. Over time, we're not resetting our stress if you just are on autopilot because of that low hum in the constant background, which then over time leads to burnout. When you think about someone who has chronic stress and burnout, they're apathetic, they're disengaged, they're not very motivated. In one study, 60% of people with burnout had as their

distinguishing feature an inability to disconnect from work. So they showed these manifestations of atypical burnout. And that is the real challenge. When we're walking around the world today, you might think, hey, I'm not stressed. I'm not burnt out. I'm engaging in the world. I'm going to work. I'm spending time with friends. I'm spending time with family. But how do you feel? Do you feel that sense of thriving and flourishing?

Or are you running on fumes and just trying to make it through the day? Hands up for that one. I feel like I'm very much in that second camp. of thriving and flourishing, or are you running on fumes and just trying to make it through the day? Hands up for that one. I feel like I'm very much in that second camp. Even though I know all of the science about stress and burnout, it's inescapable. Well, what you're making me realize, and I wanna just highlight this,

is I've never thought about stress and the fact that you are going to have good and bad stress, you are going to have stressful days, you are going to have periods where you feel a lot of pressure. What you're offering is a solution that we can use on a daily basis to recognize when your amygdala is activated, right? So now I'm thinking, oh, I'm gonna stop saying I'm stressed and I'm gonna start saying to myself,

oh, my amygdala is on fire. I'm in fight, flight or freeze right now. I need to do a quick reset and bring my body and my prefrontal cortex back online. Because if I don't do a reset, that amygdala is going to keep on firing because it's been firing nonstop for at least four years, and so I got to help it out. What are some of the surprising signs or symptoms of stress? Because you just started talking about irritability and this and this and this.

What are things that might surprise someone that are signs of stress? If you have that inner critic of that voice in your head that is berating you, that happens to me too when I'm feeling a sense of stress. It's like, you should have known better. How come you didn't do this? Or what if I can't do this? And what if I can't? So that inner critic in your ear that is constantly going and telling you all the ways that you are wrong or that you are dumb or you can't don't have what it takes or you're not enough. It's almost like you other yourself with that inner critic and that inner critic gets a megaphone when you feel a sense of

stress. We can talk about that. It's this it's because your inner critic is governed and powered by this by your amygdala, which is your fight or flight response. This makes so much sense. It's a way to keep you safe. It's to keep you in comfort zone, out of danger. You talk about this a lot in your work. You have to do things that are uncomfortable initially if you want to get out of that constant state of feeling low or down or stressed. Same thing, understanding that if you are having that voice in your head, you are down or stressed. Same thing, understanding that if you are having that voice in your head, you are most likely stressed.

If you are doom scrolling, knowing that it doesn't make you feel good and yet you are unable to stop whether it be- Why do we doom scroll when we're stressed? The reason we doom scroll when we are stressed is because it is a primal urge to scroll. To scroll? Evolutionarily, when you and I and all of the other humans

were living in tribes, there was a night watchman who would keep tabs and look out throughout the night while the tribe slept. And now we are all our own night watchmen. We scroll and scan for danger. It is a way for us to feel safe. The reason we do this is because when you are feeling a sense of stress, you are governed by your amygdala. It is

what's moving your brain forward and so when your brain is driven by the amygdala, you are thinking only about survival and self-preservation. And scanning for danger is a way you feel safe. So what do we do in our modern times? We don't have a night watchman, we scroll. It's a way for us to scan for danger, to make sure that we are safe, that nothing is happening. And then unfortunately what happens is, as we are scrolling, we see the headlines and the news

and social media, and these are not benign entities. They have a direct impact on our brain chemistry. Clickbait works on the biology of stress. And news consumption and media consumption has a direct impact on our brain circuitry. And so doom scrolling, I have had countless people say, I can't help myself doc, I just don't know. I remember several years ago during an election year,

I had a patient who told me, I watch TV day and night. I watch the news day and night. And I thought, I laughed like, oh, that's hyperbole. That can't be possible. And in fact, when I dug into his daily habits, his routine, he truly had his TV on day and night. So if you, maybe you hear this and you think, oh, I don't watch the news.

Of course, right? Like a lot of young people don't actually watch TV. They watch on their phones. But why is it that you were scrolling and consuming news until 2, 3 in the morning? Why? I don't know. We all do it. And it's because it is your stress response. Your amygdala is driving that behavior. Not you, it's your amygdala. And so when you reset your stress, get your prefrontal cortex back in control, decrease the volume of your amygdala, then you don't doom scroll as much.

Another way that stress can come up on you is that you may have emotional eating. We all have that food, that comfort food. For me, it's chocolate cake. It's usually high fat, high sugar foods. It's that 11 p.m. Oh, I'm just gonna grab a quick snack, a bedtime snack. We know what that does to your glucose, but the reason you feel that sense of compulsion,

you know, you've had dinner and then at like 9.30 or 10, you want to reach for that snack. There's a reason it's called emotional eating or stress eating. Because the amygdala is driving it. That's right. Why does your fight or flight or freeze response drive you to eat? How is that tied? Because it makes perfect sense to me that doom scrolling is the same thing as being on the night watch. Because if you think about your job, if you're the one that's protecting the tribe or your family, is you're standing there and you're

scanning. You're looking for anything that seems out of place. You're looking for anything that seems out of place, you're looking for anything that's surprising, which is the exact same thing that you do when you doom scroll. That's right. You're hypervigilant. Yeah. And here's the other thing that happens is because you are constantly met with a new post or something surprising, here you are. It's like hearing the branch snap outside the tent. What was that? And then there's another one, and then there's another one, and then there's another one. And so you're not going to go back to sleep because you keep hearing things that are keeping

you in a state of needing to watch out for the tribe. Now you're sitting in modern life and you are doing that same evolutionary behavior, only you're now staring at the phone and all the branches cracking or every single little thing that's going by which keeps you awake. Because I've often wondered, why the hell did I look at my phone at 8.30 last night and next thing you know, I look up, it's 10.45, I've bought three things off of Instagram that I did not need and now I'm pissed off at myself because I should have gone to bed and wanted to have been in bed and it is this constant loop.

But the way you're explaining it as your amygdala is activated, that's what's going on and that's what's having you fall prey to this behavior. And so the solution is to reset. The solution is to deactivate the amygdala because it is chronically screwing you up. Wow. Turn down that volume. The reason you from 8.45 till 10.45, you were experiencing something called revenge bedtime procrastination is something that all of us do, particularly women. revenge bedtime procrastination is something that all of us do, particularly women. When your day is not your own and you are moving in a million different directions, competing priorities, parenting and work and all of the things that we have to do to manage our homes, it happens to all

people, not just women, just parents and students. I talked to my sleep medicine colleague and I said, what is the number one tip you can give people for better sleep? And he told me, ask every single person you see who is struggling with sleep, what are you doing two hours before bedtime? So let's say you want to go to bed at 9 PM and you're up till midnight or one. What are you doing two hours before? And case in point, you just described what people do. You are on your screen. And revenge bedtime procrastination is a manifestation, a toxic manifestation of hustle culture.

When your days are not your own, the children finally fall asleep, everything is calm, your work emails have calmed down, it is 8.30 at night, and you finally have some me time. So you procrastinate bedtime. It's like a rebellious teenager. You have that sense of like, I'm not going to bed at nine.

I haven't even had any time for myself. I'm gonna stay up. And then you stay up and you make bad choices and you buy different things or you binge watch TV. Again, it's called hedonic happiness. A little bit of this is healthy, but when it becomes chronic and ongoing, and then you notice that you're going to bed every night

at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning, and you're unable to get good rest, and you wake up tired, and the next day you say, you know what, I am're going to bed every night at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning and you're unable to get good rest and you wake up tired and the next day you say, you know what, I am going to go to bed early. And then the same thing happens night after frustrating night. There was a study that found that it's not about knowledge and action. Every single person who was engaging in this revenge bedtime procrastination knew that they should go to bed early. That wasn't the issue. It was it's not that behaviors change because you know better. It's behaviors only change when you do better. You talk about this all the time, but the actual science showed that this is not a gap in knowledge. Everyone knows that early bedtime is important because even in spite of knowing that hey an early night would do me well,

Because even in spite of knowing that, hey, an early night would do me well, you still say, no, I'm not going to because I have had a crappy day and I'm not going to have a crappy night. I'm going to have a little bit of me time. So that's that. Right. And so I want you to imagine that you and your friend Mel Robbins are going to walk into a Dr. Aditi's office. What are the things that you would ask us? Can you just, kind of for the person listening and me, if we were coming to talk to you about stress, how do you assess how stressed out we are? What a beautiful question. The first premise I use when I see a patient is to recognize that stress isn't this vague,

mythical creature that's just all around us and ungraspable. when I see a patient is to recognize that stress isn't this vague mythical creature that's just all around us and ungraspable. That stress is something that can be measured, quantified, monitored, and ultimately overcome. So just putting borders around your stress and burnout. What is it? Why are you feeling it? And giving it a number. So the first thing I offer every patient is a stress quiz. And I have that in the five resets. And then you get your stress score. And then you start your various interventions.

And then you check your score again in a month and say, hey, did my score go up or down or is it the same? And that is a way that you can actually measure your stress. The second important piece in that interview process of figuring out what are the big areas of life that people are struggling with. What I have found in my research with patients, in the science, is that there's kind of five main areas. Sleep is a big one and this is in no particular order. Sleep, movement, diet, media use, and your connection with others, your sense of community. And so those are the five areas that I really dig into when I'm speaking to someone.

And it's about making small, very, very small, smaller than you think changes in your everyday life so that you can get to a better place. But unless that action happens, it's hard to get there. And so that inventory helps you figure out and assess where you are in that moment, that snapshot. Dr. Aditi, I already know the first person I'm sending this to is my friend Lisa. This could change her life.

And as we take a quick pause, we can hear a word from our sponsors, which allow me to bring this information to you at zero cost. Please take a moment and share this episode with somebody who you would love to see feeling less stressed because the information that we've already covered and all that is to come will help them feel better and it's something simple that you could do. Okay? All righty.

We'll be waiting for you after a short break. Stay with us. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel and I'm here with the amazing Dr. Aditi and let's just jump right back into it. You're going to teach us the five resets and how to manage stress and how to make it our friend. So let's talk about the first reset. What is it? The first reset is get clear on what matters most. When you are living in a chronic state of stress, you are being led and driven by the amygdala. It is fight or flight mode, self-preservation, and it is all about survival. When you are living in that immediate sense of stress, it is hard to get out of your own way and think about the future, which is why when you are feeling stressed, don't berate yourself when someone

says, how come you don't have a plan? Because often when you're thinking about what is a plan, a plan is forward thinking motion. It is strategic thinking. It is being organized. It is having some sort of structure. All of these qualities and all of these roles are your prefrontal cortex. And because you're stressed, the amygdala and the fight, flight, or freeze is what is running the show. It makes so much sense because you're right. When you are in a state of stress, you spin in circles, you feel totally overwhelmed, you completely overthink everything. For me, I get very scatterbrained. I also, I literally feel kind

of hopeless too when I'm stressed out, like the sense that there's nothing I can do about this but try to get through this thing. And when you said earlier that the tendency when you're chronically stressed or burnt out is to keep working. That's right. And so that makes a lot of sense to me. And so why though do you need to figure out like what actually matters to you when you're running around in circles, when you feel like you can't escape the problems that you have? Why is this important as the first reset?

The reason it's important is because it helps create a roadmap for the future. When you are in that present moment of stress and burnout and overwhelm, you are at a point where you cannot even see the next step, let alone the destination. The distance between where you are and where you'd like to be seems so vast, like a chasm, so you don't even take that first step. Why bother? It's not going to help. I'm not going to feel better. Forget it. It's the all or nothing fallacy. And this first reset, get clear on what matters most, helps you create that destination, a roadmap,

a north star, call it what you want. Could you do me a favor and talk to the person listening to you? And walk them through how you find a reason for why you wanna get less stressed. stressed. How do you do this? Can you just walk us through it as if we're sitting there in front of you? When you're feeling a sense of stress, you may say to yourself, because your inner critic has a megaphone, you may say to yourself, what is the matter with me?

Instead, ask yourself, what means most to me? This is not a big existential ask about what is the meaning of life and where do I belong. This is very practical. And so when you're thinking about your destination, why are you doing this work for less stress and less burnout? It's because you want to create a goal that means most to you and most stands for something. So M is motivating, O is objective, S is small, and T is timely. It takes eight weeks to build a habit. Understand that part of that eight weeks is falling off the wagon and getting back on the

wagon to continue. So give yourself a solid three months to reach your most goal. Understanding that you're going to fall off and get back on and fall off and get back on, it's all part of the process and trust the process. And then once you have your most goal of why do you want to do this work for less stress and burnout, it's not that much work, by the way. I'm thinking about a moment recently a moment recently where I absolutely hit like a medical state of burnout. And it was several months ago. And my why, if I were thinking about why, were things like, I want to sleep through the night. I don't want to dread the work that I have coming up this week. I don't want to feel like I am constantly behind the ball. I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night

and be thinking about work. I want, like, I need a fricking break. Like, it was all so much in the negative. So when you're doing this first reset, is it important that when you think about that small, timely, little goal of yours, that it be framed as something positive? Not necessarily.

It doesn't have to be something external. It can be something internal. But I would say that framing it as a positive and say to yourself, I want my future self to be X, Y, and Z. Fill in the blank. I want my future self to have better sleep. Or you can be fed up and say, I'm sick of not being able to sleep through the night. I want to sleep through the night. Motivation comes in many different forms.

It can be positive and energetic, but it can also be that you're just fed up of your own shit. What's reset number two? Once you have this why in mind, like I am thinking about why it matters to me to turn off the amygdala, hit the reset, get control of it. You say it's find quiet in a noisy world. What does that mean? This is perhaps one of the most important resets. You may think that when you have stress

and burnout, you need to check out and spend six months in Bali. At least for me, anytime I feel overwhelmed with stress, when I have a lot of stress in my life, I am irritable, I am so short, and I am just like constantly frowning. Yes. Or quick to anger. Yes. And I even knowing all of the science it takes me a little bit. I cannot tell you how much over the past like six months I've had my husband say to me, I think you need to start the resets again. Oh wow. And then I'll say oh yeah, oh my. Because I have doubled down on every single reset,

particularly over the past few months. Well, just to put it in context, doing a book tour for a book this important is probably like being a resident in medical school. Absolutely. And so part of the reason why is because again, what we're learning, your amygdala is like in charge and you got to reset it. What is popcorn brain? Popcorn brain is a biological phenomenon

coined by a man named Adam Levy. And it is when any time that you're waiting, you're in a grocery store in line waiting to buy food, you're on your phone. You are at the bank waiting to see the teller, you're on your phone. There have been more near-miss pedestrian accidents because of popcorn brain.

You are just always on your screen, always engaging all day, every day, during all waking hours. And it creates a sense of hyper stimulation in your brain, which makes it difficult to live offline. Because offline, life moves at a decidedly slow pace. The pace of life is very different offline. Think about when you've said,

hey, you know what, I'm not going to check my phone for a few hours and you're just hanging out. It's very eerie, it's slow. You can see if you have popcorn brain by doing a quick test. Keep your phone in another room. And if you can, for a couple of hours, even drive for 30 minutes, sit down with a piece

of paper and a pen. And every time you feel that compulsion to check your phone, just put a little mark and you will be shocked and appalled. Even me knowing all of the science, I had to keep my phone far away so I could write the five resets because it is has such a pull. Popcorn brain also is triggered by the amygdala because you are having that sense of hypervigilance, like, oh, let me check my phone. Let me check my phone. That sense of wanting to check. There's another phenomenon that's very tied to popcorn brain, which is even more concerning, which is called brain drain. So it's not just when you use your phone, which is what popcorn brain is, but there's a phenomenon where just that sheer potential for distraction,

having a phone close by can be incredibly distracting for your brain and increase your sense of stress and burnout. So the antidote to popcorn brain or brain drain is to create digital boundaries. In every relationship in our life with our with our partners, our colleagues, our friends, we have boundaries. But we have porous boundaries or often no boundaries when it comes to your relationship with your digital devices. This is not about becoming a digital monk and abstinence. We need to engage in news. It's important to be an informed citizen. What are your favorite boundaries? One of the most important things is to keep your phone

off your nightstand and invest in a low cost alarm clock instead. When you get up out of bed, over 50% of people check the news or check their phones and check their emails. Think about what that's doing to your brain, what that's doing to your amygdala. If you are stressed and burned out, chances are you didn't sleep very well that night or if you had a good night's

sleep, great. But then immediately it's triggering all of these chemicals in the cascade in your brain. Instead, keep your phone away from your nightstand. When you open your eyes, take in the morning light and then do the five-second rule and get up out of bed. Then, you know, maybe go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, do some stretches and then check your phone. Okay. So that is a key geographical boundary. What's another boundary?

During the day at work, keep your phone out of sight so you decrease that primal urge to scroll, keep it out of arms reach, 10 feet away from you in a cubicle drawer, just so it is not in your reach. The reason is because when you have that primal urge to scroll, what you want to do is you want to override it and you want to create more intentionality around your media consumption. You know, I'll share personally that our executive producer, Tracy, will not allow me to have my phone when we are in a meeting. She will reach over if I grab it and literally like a mom,

guide it out of my hand, put it away, and I'll tell you, she's right. Like you're just distracted. So even if it's near me and I have made it a habit, there's a kind of a task table here at work where I set up when I'm, you know, in Boston. And my phone is always right over there. I don't have it on my person. I try not to carry

it around. I try to put it back over there because I know how I just grab it and just grab it. What's one hack you can do for better focus? One thing you can do, Mel, is to put your phone in grayscale. When I really felt like my phone, you know, who's in control, me or my phone, and there were many moments in my life where I would say, uh, it was my phone. Now it's very much me. But I would switch my phone to grayscale. And just doing that with my screen made all the difference because all of the colors and the brightness and everything is just very enticing. So when it's grayscale, it makes it less enticing, it actively changes your brain. And how does it change your brain? Well, because it's, you know, big tech is, they know exactly what they're doing.

So when you have colors and patterns and beautiful images and this user interface, it makes it more enticing to continue using. If you switch your phone to grayscale today, try it today, switch your phone to grayscale and it just becomes less enticing because it's less, you know, the chemicals aren't going off in your brain, the neurotransmitters and because it's just kind of boring. Well, what I love about the way you're teaching this is that I've certainly heard a ton of

people talk about the connection between stress and social media and stress and your phone and the need to get off your phone and these topics. But when you explain it in terms of your amygdala turning on and that your amygdala putting you in fight, flight, or freeze, somehow knowing that makes this way more tangible, it also makes it way more important to me that I follow this advice and I pay attention to when the amygdala is running the show

versus when I'm running the show. And these boundaries and this second reset is a way for you to run your life rather than letting the amygdala just kick into high gear and keep you hostage to all of this stuff. That's right. And I think my approach comes from decades of being a medical doctor and seeing patients. So every single thing that I offer to my patients during my talks in this book, The Five Resets, every single thing is free. That was really important to me because

I have had patients from all walks of life with different resources and that was critical to me. The second thing that I really aim to do with every single strategy I offer, of course, it's science-based, but that it is time efficient. If we all could spend an hour getting a massage and then getting an acupuncture treatment and then going for a walk and all of the wonderful things that are available to anyone who has the means to do the time as well, then great. But for most people in everyday life,

you have in over-scheduled life, a million competing priorities. And often you put yourself last on that list. And so stress and burnout, your own stress and burnout on your own mental health is like, oh, I'll get to it when. But if not now, then when. And so really making sure that these strategies are easy and practical and can be something that you do today.

Many of these things you can start today. And it is all when it comes to your brain and rewiring your brain and body for less stress and more resilience or less stress and less burnout. These incremental changes a little bit every day can actually rewire your brain. It is not some big grand gesture that does it like a massage once a month. Great. A nice bandaid. It'll help you. It feels great for a day. And then the next morning I wake up and it's the same old stuff again.

Well, now I know why. Because the amygdala is the issue. It's, it's, that is a thousand percent what you're teaching us. It's always the amygdala. It's literally the amygdala. So if the person listening wants to get a better night's sleep, as a Harvard-educated medical doctor and professor, what would you tell the person listening to do tonight in order to get a better night's sleep? I always lead with self-compassion. So first is, if you are not sleeping well, you are not alone, it is not your fault.

When you have better days, you will have better nights. Take sleep and your difficulty with sleep as a simple sign or a symptom of something that you want to work on. You can target it head on with a lot of these strategies. Keep your phone off your nightstand, invest in a low-cost alarm clock. First thing when you wake up, don't scroll. Try to do something else. And the other thing that I would say is two hours before bedtime, limit your screens. Again, nothing is overnight. It doesn't work like magic. But if you start these today, give yourself eight weeks,

but you will see a difference within a week. By the weekend, you should start feeling better. These things take shape quickly because your brain and your body are rewiring all the time. Your brain is a muscle. Neuroplasticity, a very fancy science word, but it means your brain is a muscle. It's not a grab bag. Like what you got for birth is what you got for life. It's not what it is. Your brain is like a muscle, just like a bicep. The thing with sleep that's fascinating is that like with exercise, if you did, you know, two pound dumbbells, like a hundred curls with your biceps,

you'd know that it's doing something. I mean, it's not gonna do as much as like a ten pound, but you try it anyway. You're like, you know what two pound dumbbells, like a hundred curls with your biceps, you'd know that it's doing something. I mean, it's not going to do as much as like a 10 pound, but you try it anyway. You're like, you know what? I'm going to try it. So think of your brain as a muscle. Try things out. Experiment. Understand that doing a little bit, a simple change like keeping your phone off your nightstand could make all the difference and could be a game changer. It doesn't have to be this big, giant lifestyle overhaul. Also, your brain cannot

handle big lifestyle overhauls when you are feeling a sense of stress because even positive change, like all of these things that we're talking about, change is considered a stressor to your brain. Well, that's why you always recommend in your book, too, that rule of two. The rule of two. What is the rule of two? The rule of two is how our brain responds to change. When we are feeling a sense of stress, so think about in 2020, you may have had big lofty goals. Mine was to build a farmhouse table from scratch, to learn Italian, and to learn to play the guitar.

And now it's a wonder if you wear clean clothes and eat a few vegetables. At 2024, right? Like we're here now. It's because you cannot sustain huge lifestyle overhauls during periods of stress because even positive changes are considered a stressor to your brain. And this is a landmark study done in the 1960s by two psychiatrists, Dr. Holmes and Rehe. They studied 5,000 people and 43 of the most common life conditions, positive happy things like we were talking about, right?

Like getting a new job, falling in love, having a child, getting married, buying a new car, and the sad things in life, death, unemployment, divorce, lots of these horrible things. And what they found in this research was that at the end, when they added up, they tallied up every single person, all of these life events and found that the more life events that you have accrued, your greater chance of having stress and burnout

and greater illness down the road, which showed it's the basis of the rule of two to focus on two things at a time. Even positive change can be a stressor for your brain because your brain needs time to adapt and recover from this positive change. Again, the word stress, healthy stress being adaptive, it's your brain adapting to these changes.

So just aim to do two things at a time. You might listen to our conversation and we're offering so many strategies in this conversation. You may say, I'm gonna do everything all at once, everything with the kitchen sink approach. You'll do it for four weeks. And then you'll say, there's no way I'm doing this. So pick the most important thing to improve and then just for your sleep.

You were to literally just stop the doomscrolling and put your phone somewhere other than your bedroom at seven o'clock at night and you create that boundary and then you don't sleep next to it and you don't look at it first thing in the morning. If you were to simply do that, your sleep would improve almost immediately. Your sleep would improve immediately. The entire tenor of your day would change and you would feel so much more grounded. You would feel, you know, whatever symptom that you're having of stress, there are many, it would have an immediate impact on your stress and your burnout. And over time, if you continue to do that day after day after day, you will be a changed person.

Dr. Aditi, I know I've said it before, but I just love all of the wisdom and the science and the tips that we can put to use immediately. There are so many people that I'm gonna share this with. And as you're listening, please share this episode because it will really make a difference in someone else's life. And it's a simple way to say, I really care about you. And you can send them Dr. Aditi to help.

All right, we're going to take a quick pause, hear a word from our sponsors. We will be waiting for you with more tips, more wisdom, more science after a short break. So stay with us. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel, and we are here with Harvard's Dr. Aditi talking about the five resets. So Dr. Aditi, I'm so excited for the third reset because we're talking about the brain-body connection. So what is reset number three? The third reset is sync your brain to your body.

It is all about the mind-body connection. What does that mean, sync your brain to your body? When you hear the term mind-body connection, you may think that's total woo-woo, but in fact, there is a lot of robust scientific literature to support the mind-body connection, which is a fancy term for simply saying that your brain and your body are in constant communication and inextricably linked. What's good for your brain is good for your body and vice versa.

When you do better, you feel better and it's all in the doing. You may be hearing about the mind-body connection for the first time today, but you have been experiencing the mind-body connection forever. Butterflies that falling in love, your face flushing at an embarrassing moment, you're about to give a presentation for work and your heart starts racing. This is the mind-body connection. It's like gravity. It's happening in the background all the time. The beauty of the mind-body connection. It's like gravity. It's happening in the background all the time. The beauty of the mind-body connection is that while it is happening around us, in you, at all times, you can learn to tap into the mind-body connection, understand it, and most

importantly influence it to better serve you with your stress and your burnout. The quickest way to tap into your mind-body connection is with your breath. Your breath is the only physiological mechanism that is under voluntary control and involuntary control. So you and I could do a breathing exercise today, right now, and you would feel a sense of calm. And then we're just talking and your breath is going. Let's do it. Your brain can't do that, your brain waves, your digestion can't do that.

Nothing else in your body has that same under voluntary control and involuntary control. So that is the first kind of way that you can tap into it. So there are very quick and the other thing to mention is that when you are in amygdala mode or fight or flight mode, your sympathetic nervous system, again, a fancy scientific word, we have two nervous systems in the body. One is the sympathetic nervous system that governs fight or flight.

The other one governs something called rest and digest. It's the parasympathetic nervous system. The two can't be on at the same time, they're mutually exclusive. And your breath can help modulate, be the light switch between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic system. So when you are in sympathetic mode driven by your amygdala,

your heart is beating, you have quick shallow breathing. Think about when you're anxious, you're breathing, you know, you're anxious, you're breathing quickly, very shallow and rapid. That is because it's a physiological mechanism. You're trying to get the oxygen in to go to your muscles so you can fight or you can flee. Parasympathetic mode, you are breathing deeply

and slowly it is rest and digest. And knowing this very scientific explanation, it's simply to say that when you modulate your breathing and influence your breathing, you can switch one system on and off, and you can tap into your mind-body connection because of what you know now about the breath. Gotcha.

So as you're thinking about managing your stress and burnout, it's also important to think about your gut-brain connection. Can you explain to the person listening how physically the gut and the brain are connected and how they speak to each other and how I found it fascinating when I first learned that they were part of the same tissue

when you are being formed as an embryo and that during your development that they literally are one clump that then separates. And I always imagine that there's like this gooey, ooey, sticky stuff between your brain and your gut. But could you explain it as a medical doctor, what the brain gut connection is? The brain gut connection is that your brain and your gut are literally speaking to each other and there is cross talk at all times.

It happens through an ecosystem of trillions of bacteria, healthy bacteria, in your gut called the microbiome. I want to say that the gut is considered the second brain because there are three to five times more serotonin receptors in your gut than your brain. When you hear the word serotonin, you know the popular class of drugs SSRIs. These are medications that we use for depression and anxiety and a whole host of other things. And these are brain chemicals. Serotonin, when you hear the word you think, oh brain, brain chemical. But in fact, there are three to five times more serotonin receptors in your gut than your brain. And every week Mel, there is new, compelling, fascinating research about the gut brain connection. And so this microbiome, this ecosystem of trillions and trillions of healthy bacteria in your gut govern so many things besides digestion.

It is a bi-directional highway of information. Your brain is sending signals to your gut and your gut is sending signals right back to your brain. There is a new entity that is being studied called the psychobiome. Psychobiome is a part of your microbiome, but this psychobiome are dedicated bacteria in your gut whose sole focus is mood regulation. It's like mind blowing stuff. Wow. That is mood regulation. It's like mind blowing stuff. Wow. That is super cool. So as a Harvard trained medical doctor, what do you do for exercise

and movement? 25 years ago, I was a stressed patient looking for answers. And that is why that was that's my origin story of how I became a doctor with an expertise in stress is because I was a stress patient looking for answers. I found my way out of the stress struggle, put on my scientist hat, I had gone to see a doctor and my doctor had said, you know, go get a massage and just relax, just try to relax more. So I was like, okay, I'll get a massage, I'll have dinner with friends, I'll go retail therapy, all the things that didn't work. And so when I put on my scientist hat and I started looking and doing the research

is when I really found out, okay, this is how stress impacts the brain and the body. And this is how I'm going to find my way out of stress. Movement was one. And then when I came out of that, I said I wanted to be the doctor that I needed during that difficult time. So that's my origin story. I mentioned that because movement was not something I did every single day. I was working 80 hours a week and I don't know, I was running from one patient room to the other. I thought that was movement enough. And so what I did during that time, I was acutely stressed. I was so depleted and running on fume smell. I was erratic in my food intake, my sleep, seeing death and dying on a daily basis. Self-care and burnout or even

stress was not in my lexicon. It was not in my vocabulary. When I was training in my medical training, my motto, how I was trained was pressure makes diamonds. Someone sat a whole group of medical students down in our first year of medical training and said, I just want you guys to know where you're about to go through, pressure makes diamonds. So I was like, hey, diamond in the making, bring it on. And then my diamond cracked. So when I discovered all of the science around why movement is important, and exercise is like E, the dreaded E word, no one likes to talk about it.

So we can talk about movement, we can talk about exercise. To answer your question, it has changed. When I was a stressed patient or a medical resident working 80 hours a week and I was running on fumes and so depleted, I focused on gentle therapeutic movement. So I went to a yoga class several times a week. That was my gateway to,

I went to a couple of yoga classes. So just to say that doctors are socialized to play small. We don't share our own personal stories because we focus on the patient. So writing the five resets and sharing my personal story, I have to tell you, Mel, I might start crying, but you were an inspiration for sharing that story because you share so much of your own personal stuff

to help people. And I knew that the only way that people would relate to me is if I told them the truth and not, I'm just doing this for my patients them the truth and not, I'm just doing this for my patients. It's because no, I was a patient. I struggled with my stress and burnout. And that's when I became the doctor I needed during that difficult time. And so your story and your example was like a lighthouse that guided me. Well, I'm thrilled that you shared your story because you clearly are the doctor we all

need. Thank you. And so during that really difficult time, I focused on a couple of days a week of yoga, gentle stretching, nothing much, and a few walks. So I used to walk every single day, which is why in the five resets, when I talk about movement, walking, even if it's five or 10 minutes, again, you might say, what's a walk going to do?

It's going to do nothing. Because it's not about the promise of physical fitness, this is the promise of mental fitness. And so a little bit of a daily walk, and the reason I walked every single day when I was a stress patient, and why I suggest when people are feeling that acute sense of stress to walk every single day,

is because it avoids decision fatigue. If you say to yourself when you're deeply stressed, I'm gonna go to the gym three times a week for an hour long class, okay? Then Monday rolls around, a deadline comes up at work, you don't go. Tuesday, there's a family obligation or a conflict, you don't go.

Wednesday, same thing. And by Friday, you might've gone zero or one time. Your sense of self-efficacy goes down, you're like, oh, I can't get anything right. Why bother at all? And then your amygdala starts firing, right? Cause you're the forward future planning prefrontal cortex isn't working as great.

Instead aim to do something a little bit every day to avoid decision fatigue. Now to answer your question, it's changed. So initially I started my, I was a sedentary person. I didn't really exercise much. I was into dancing as a child, but not sports. Now I understand the value of sports for so many reasons. Gentle yoga and walks every day.

10 minute walk, that was like, yes, I walk, check. This is not about like walking five miles a day. I love that. Cause the person listening is like, okay, how long? What do I do? And it's just 10 minutes, just 10 minutes. Five minutes is fine too. If you can do 20 minutes of a walk every single day, great.

It's the equivalent of a Facebook scroll. Seriously, we all scroll. That's true. Or Instagram or choose your poison. It's the equivalent of a scroll. Opt out of a scroll and go for a walk instead. Do it in between your meetings if you can. Five, 10 minutes every single day.

It's that inertia that you're, sometimes it feels like you're wading through molasses when you're feeling stressed of like Lacing up your sneakers and going outside and if you say, oh, I'm gonna do this for 45 minutes. Forget it You're never doing it. But if you say oh five minutes I can do that It's about closing that gap between where you are and where you'd like to be and so five minutes So then now what I do because I am of a certain age. I focus on resistance training I probably I aim to exercise 30 minutes every single day. Does that happen every single day? No. But I probably get in four to five days of

exercise. And that includes walking or if I do a 40 minute walk one day, I won't do resistance training, but I do some form of movement every day. It is about making things small and tangible and decreasing the barriers to taking that step. So fine, you don't wanna put on your sneakers, take a walk up and down your hallway in your house, walk up and down a set of stairs. There was a study that was done that ultra short bursts of activity, one to two minutes.

So walking up a set of stairs or going to, parking far away when you're going to the grocery store. We all look for parking really close to the entrance. Park far away. Take a walk up to the grocery store. Run for the bus or walk quickly to go get the bus or the subway. These short, they're called ultra short bursts of activity, can decrease your risk of dying

from cancer by 40%. Wow. You heard the doctor. Get your walk on every day. 10 minutes, that's all she's saying, and it's gonna lower your stress. Dr. Aditi, what's the surprising connection between sitting and stress? As you may have heard in pop culture,

sitting is the new smoking. I hadn't heard that. The science shows that sitting, it's not just that exercise is good for you and moving is good for you. For your stress, anxiety, burnout, it's that sitting is actually bad for you. And it can increase your sense of anxiety, stress, and burnout. Wow. Maybe we should have ordered standing desks around here. And of course you want to sit and, you know you know for me when I can never use a standing desk

I can't think right. I need to sit down and do my work and have my deep thinking. I wanted to share a couple of pretty alarming statistics about sitting. There was a study of 800 people and the ones who sat the most, this is like knock your socks off data, the people who sat the most had a 112% higher risk of diabetes, 147% higher risk of heart disease, a 90% higher risk of death from heart disease, and a 50% higher risk from death overall. All to say that sitting is actually bad for our health,

our well-being, and as it turns out, your stress and burnout. How does sitting trigger stress? The mechanisms of action aren't entirely clear, but the data suggests that when you are sitting for prolonged lengths of time, you're stewing in your own emotions, so to speak. And so it's that getting up and moving creates a whole cascade of positive biological changes to your brain and your body. And when you're sitting for long periods of time, that doesn't happen. It also has a cardiovascular benefit

or rather it's detrimental to your cardiovascular health to just sit because a body is meant to move. Your body is the greatest machine and so use that machine to do what it's meant to do. It doesn't have to be, you know, you don't have to become an Olympian, but certainly getting up and moving a little bit every day, even if it means five minutes

between your Zoom meetings, get up, take a walk, stretch, sitting for prolonged periods of time because think about it, we sit all day at work, then you sit all day at work, and then you sit in a car going back home, and then you sit on your sofa all day. So our human body hasn't been designed to just sit all day. We are meant to move and move our bodies. As a doctor, what do you recommend? My watch has that stand-up thing. I love it. I don't realize how much time will go by and it's like, oh, I haven't stood in two hours? Holy cow. I love that. I would say there isn't necessarily a prescription, like a dose relationship for

sitting and when to stand up and what's the dose of standing and sitting? Just do it when you can. You have a two hour meeting, can't stand up right after that two hour meeting, instead of sitting on your Slack channel and responding to emails or doing all of those things, get up and walk around. There is something to be said, right? Like Plato, Aristotle, all of these greats talked about the benefit of a walk, that mental health benefit of taking a walk. And so it doesn't have to be this long, profound

walk. Just get up and stretch your body. Do some gentle stretching, some exercising. Connect your breath to your movement, to your posture. This is really important because that's like a way to tap into your mind-body connection as well. So your next reset addresses one of the biggest lies around productivity. Let's talk about it. So reset number four is come up for air. One of the biggest myths is that you are meant to be functioning at a high capacity without any need for rest or recovery.

That productivity is linear. The more you do, the more you can accomplish, and then the more you do, the more you can accomplish, and then the more you do, the more you can accomplish. It's just supposed to be this like thing, this feedback loop that's supposed to continue on and on and on. That's a myth. A break is not just a nice-to-have luxury. Your brain and your body need a break.

It is a biological necessity for your brain and body to rest and recover. Human productivity is not linear. It functions on a curve. Think of a bell-shaped curve. The left of the curve, when you don't have a lot of stress, you're not very motivated, you're not very productive. Think about the right side of the curve. So much stress.

You are keyed up. Many of us are living on this right side of the curve, right? There is a sweet spot of human productivity right in the middle. It's just right stress. I call it the Goldilocks Principle. And it's this idea of we all are to the right of that bell-shaped curve. We are anxious. We have so much stress. We're not productive. We can't focus. It's hard to get things done. So the science suggests that moving back, how do you get to that center spot, the

sweet spot of human productivity, is to scale back. But you can't scale back. That's not realistic, because we have real constraints. We have constraints on our time. We have obligations with work and parenting. You can't just jet off for six months to Bali on a surf holiday. I've mentioned that twice. Can you tell that's like a dream? Yeah, she kind of wants to. Yeah, my dream or eat my way through Paris for a month. Again, a dream.

Can't do it. Instead, you have to honor your breaks. How do you scale back? How do you apply this science to your everyday life? When you can't go to Bali or Paris, you honor your breaks. How do you do that? When you are taking a break during the day, what do most of us do? We mindlessly scroll.

We've already talked about what happens with scrolling. This isn't a benign thing that you are doing. You are actively influencing your brain and your body for more stress, right? More stress, more burnout, all of the things that we talked about. Let me just highlight that because you're right. When I step out of a meeting, the first thing I do is check my phone. And so I'm not actually taking a break. I'm re-engaging my mind and activating the amygdala and juicing up my stress. Never even thought about it. I always

viewed like, oh, okay, you know, I've got a couple minutes before my next thing, I'll just look at my phone. And instead, if I were to leave my phone where it is and walk into the kitchen here at work or at home, make myself a cup of coffee or step outside for a minute, I'd feel different. Try some heart-centered breathing. Take a little walk outside. Do some stretches. Touch your toes. Stand up. twist, do something where you're connecting your breath to your movement, tap into your mind-body connection, practice Stop, Breathe, Be. It's a three-second exercise and it can help. What is that?

The Stop, Breathe, Be method. The instructions are in the name. It's a three-second exercise. So you stop, you breathe, and you be. So you ground your feet on the floor. I learned the stop breathe be method. It was the first technique I learned to reset my mind-body connection when I was in the throes of stress as a stressed medical resident. I

was working 80 hours a week. I was seeing 30 to 40 patients a day and I brought the stop breathe be method into my life when I would knock on the door of the patient room before I would enter. It was my doorknob moment. So as I turned the doorknob, I would say to myself, often under my breath, in a crowded place, stop, breathe, be, and then I would enter. And I would do that incrementally,

over and over and over again, 30, 40 times a day. Over time, I could just do it anywhere. In fact, before we started speaking, I was so excited because I was having a total fangirl moment. Still am. It's been a long time my amygdala going off, but no, just kidding. I was having a fangirl moment. I'm not kidding about that. And I did stop, breathe, be. In fact, the entire time that we've been speaking, I've been very aware of my feet on the floor, my posture in the chair, and how I am breathing because that is important to manage and modulate

your stress response. You can practice Stop Breathe B during mundane, everyday moments of your life. So I did it with the doorknob. You can do it, you know, between Zoom meetings. Stop Breathe B. It's a little mini reset. Small, micro reset, three seconds. You can practice it when you're brushing your teeth.

I have practiced it in the morning when you're getting lunches ready for school, getting everything ready. I do it always at the doorknob before I'm about to go into the garage to do school bus drop off, stop, breathe, be. And I think, oh my God, we forgot the project. Did you bring your hat?

Oh, we need to get this, we need to get that. It's just the reset that you need. And the reason the Stop, Breathe, Be method works so well is because anxiety and anxious thoughts are a future focused emotion. It is about what if? What if this happens? What if that happens? What if I fail?

What if I can't do well? What if, what if, what if? And Stop, Breathe, Be gets you out of what-if thinking and gets you back into what-is what if, and stop, breathe, be, gets you out of what if thinking and gets you back into what is in the here and now. Beautiful. What is the fifth reset? The fifth reset is to bring your best self forward. And this is all about the inner critic.

We talked about it a little bit at the start of our conversation. That inner critic is that voice in your head that berates you. You may not even know that it is there. You might think, hey, that's my natural voice. That's who I am. In fact, I would argue that that is not who you are, capital Y-O-U. It is your amygdala speaking. The reason is when you are feeling a sense of stress, that inner critic, that voice gets

a megaphone because your amygdala is doing the driving of your brain. And your amygdala wants to keep you safe and small. That is why getting out of your comfort zone when you're feeling a sense of stress doesn't feel good. You want, you know, you have that what if thinking, all of these sorts of things. It's a self-sabotage sort of situation. And so you stay small, you stay in your comfort zone, you don't try new things, you don't try to get out of your stress because that inner voice. So how do you silence the

inner voice? How do you take that megaphone out of your inner voice's hand and say, no, you're not going to be speaking, I'm the one who's going to be speaking. There's a couple of ways to do that. The first is gratitude. Now you may hear the word gratitude and roll your eyes like, oh my God, gratitude, like, I'm not going to do this like teenage journal bullshit, right? In fact, there is a lot of science for gratitude. A written gratitude practice is vital to help silence your inner critic and to reset your stress and burnout.

Again, very simple practice. Keep a piece of paper and a pen next to your bedside. You know how you got rid of your phone on your nightstand? Keep a little gratitude journal there instead now. Every night or in the morning, whenever you want. Doesn't matter. Five things you're grateful for and why. Put the date, one, two, three, four, five, write down five things you're grateful for

and why. Some days you'll have like 15 things that you want to write down. You can only write down five. Other days you'll say, I have nothing that I'm grateful for. You have two arms and two legs. You can breathe the air. You have a roof over your head. You have food in your pantry that these are all wins because many people,

particularly now cannot say that. So write those down. The reason gratitude is so important from a scientific perspective is because when you are doing a gratitude, daily gratitude practice, it takes 60 seconds. is because when you are doing a gratitude, daily gratitude practice, it takes 60 seconds. You are rewiring your brain because what you are doing, it's a scientific, again, a fancy scientific name called cognitive reframing, what you focus on gross.

So Rick Hanson talks about this idea of when you're going through stress, he's a psychologist in California, negative experiences become sticky in the brain like Velcro. You hold on to them because it's a feeling of survival and self-preservation. And so when you start practicing gratitude on an everyday basis, it's cognitive reframing. What you focus on grows. So you shift your perspective. Gratitude helps

you move away from Velcro to Teflon. So even if negative and positive are happening at the same rate, good and bad things are happening in your life at the same rate, when you are feeling a sense of stress, you are focused primarily on the negative because you are thinking, danger, danger, danger, right?

Red alert. And so how do you decrease that stickiness of negative experiences in your brain when you're feeling a sense of stress? By practicing gratitude. So the negative experiences may happen, but it slides off. How does it happen? Through gratitude. So you write down those things every single day. And studies have demonstrated

that at 30, 60, and 90 days, there's improved mood, decreased stress and burnout, better sleep. There are so many benefits to an everyday gratitude practice. It also silences your inner critic because it dials down the volume of the amygdala in the background. Dr. Aditi, I'd love for you to speak directly to the person listening. And if they take just one of these recommendations, because you have just poured into us, but if they just focus on one action, what do you think is the most important thing to do? Of all of the things that you have heard today, perhaps the most important is to cultivate a sense of self-compassion and give yourself lots of grace on this journey for less stress

and burnout and more resilience. Self-compassion has been found to decrease your amygdala and decrease your cortisol, so it has an active effect on your brain. Over the past several years, we have had one onslaught after the other. We have lived through the perfect storm or the perfect tsunami, so to speak. You can't change the weather. What you can do is wear a raincoat to keep you warm, safe, and dry. And I hope some of these strategies can serve as that raincoat. I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes. You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather. Oh, that's beautiful. What are your parting words?

That's beautiful! What are your parting words? There is one quote that I always keep going back to, which is, Be kinder than necessary because everyone is facing and fighting a harder battle. And I would say that is so true, but don't forget about yourself, about being kinder to yourself than necessary. Because stress and burnout are a battle that we are all fighting and when you are kind to others yes it helps to decrease stress and burnout it helps to validate that difficult emotion in other people but turn that inwards and be a mirror for yourself so you are giving yourself the

same compassion that you give to others. Well Dr Dr. Aditi, thank you so much. You are such a gift, and you have a gift, for being able to take very complicated scientific, medical, neuroscience, all of this stuff and simplify it. I learned so much from you today. I will never think about stress again the same way that I used to. I feel very empowered, and I hope that as you listened to Dr. Aditi, that you did too, I know you did, because she gave us so much to do, and I'm grateful that it costs zero dollars. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

And I also want to take a moment and just thank you for spending time with us today. And I want to be sure in case nobody else tells you, you could feel the love being poured into you, but I wanted to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life. And what's very clear after hearing so much wisdom and so

many research-backed techniques and the impact that it has on your life immediately and long term, that perhaps one of the single most important things that you could do is to figure out why lowering your stress matters to you. And then start to practice these small resets so that you quiet the amygdala and you pull your prefrontal cortex back online because that's going to help you not only create a better life, but to feel really good as you're living it. Alrighty, I'll talk to you in a few days. Dr. Aditi Naruka. Oh, God, I said it wrong. Neurocar? Did I do it? Neurocar? Neurocar. Okay, so I'm like, Neura, Neura, I haven't practiced. I'm right. Neurocar.

Wow, I kind of did that well. Yes. Okay. I never curse. I just, that was like my favorite line of the entire conversation so far. Okay, keep going. I never curse. The only reason I'm cursing is because you curse. Like you're giving me permission to curse. The second kind of happiness. Sorry. Bless you. Allergies are coming everybody. Sorry. Go ahead. Bless you. My allergies are coming everybody, sorry. Go ahead. Bless you. And I just would be curious to know, do we have a,

is that like a, are they gone? What's that? Construction. Thank you. Now you're gonna make me cry. I also feel a little choked up right now, I'm not gonna lie. Well, I'm sure we won't get through it

without laughing and crying, so. Amazing. Oh my God. Cheers to you. Cheers to you. Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.

I'm just your friend, and I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor.

I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. I'm going to be your mentor. what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend.

I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode. ["The Daily Show Theme"] Stitcher.