Mind-body harmony is discussed as the fourth pillar to Live Long and Well (along with exercise, nutrition, sleep, exposure to heat/cold, social relationships).
Mind-body activities encompass meditation, controlled breathing exercises, yoga, and spending time in nature.
Part 1: The Connection Between the Mind and the Body:
The mind influences bodily functions such as movement, heart rate, and breathing.
Conversely, the body communicates with the mind, signaling when to breathe, sensing pain, and indicating hunger.
Chronic stress can disrupt the mind-body connection, leading to health issues.
Studies show associations between stress and conditions like high blood pressure, asthma symptoms, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and mental health disorders.
Stress can exacerbate existing illnesses and affect overall well-being.
Mind-body harmony is discussed as the fourth pillar to Live Long and Well (along with exercise, nutrition, sleep, exposure to heat/cold, social relationships).
Mind-body activities encompass meditation, controlled breathing exercises, yoga, and spending time in nature.
Part 1: The Connection Between the Mind and the Body:
The mind influences bodily functions such as movement, heart rate, and breathing.
Conversely, the body communicates with the mind, signaling when to breathe, sensing pain, and indicating hunger.
Chronic stress can disrupt the mind-body connection, leading to health issues.
Studies show associations between stress and conditions like high blood pressure, asthma symptoms, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and mental health disorders.
Stress can exacerbate existing illnesses and affect overall well-being.
Hi, I'm Dr Bobby Dub ois and welcome. To Live Long and Well, a podcast where we will talk about what you can do to live as long as possible and with as much energy and vigor that you wish. Together, we will explore what practical and evidence-supported steps you can take. Come join me on this very important journey and I hope that you feel empowered along the way. I'm a physician, ironman, triathlete and have published several hundred scientific studies. I'm honored to be your guide. Published several hundred scientific studies. I'm honored to be your guide. Welcome everyone.
Bobby Dubois:
Today we're going to talk about mind-body harmony, our fourth pillar to live long and well. As a reminder, the other of the six pillars are exercise, sleep, nutrition, exposure to heat and cold, and social relationships. We'll talk more in a few minutes about what the mind-body activities are in some detail, but this includes meditation, controlled breathing exercises, yoga and even just being in nature. Well, in today's episode, I'd like to explore three topics First, how the mind and body are very much connected. Second, that this mind-body connection, if it's out of balance, can affect our health in a variety of ways. And third, we can improve our mind-body harmony and scientific studies in people have shown that it can work and hopefully will also work for you. For many of the studies that I mentioned, I will include links in the show notes, so if you wish to look at them in more detail, feel free to do so.
Bobby Dubois:
All right, let's dive in Part one. The mind and the body affect each other. Well, as we probably know, the mind tells our body to move, it affects our heart and our heart rate and our breathing, and in times of stress, the mind tells the body, through chemicals, to prepare our body to respond to that stress the proverbial tiger that's chasing after you. Well, similarly, the body affects the mind. Our body tells the mind when we need to breathe. The body senses pain and tells the brain to do something about it, and the stomach tells the mind when we need to breathe. The body senses pain and tells the brain to do something about it, and the stomach tells the brain when it's full and we don't need to eat anymore. Well, there are many, many ways that the body and brain are connected, for today I don't want to get lost in the physiology or the biochemistry or the neurobiology there's sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and there are many ways that these connections can affect the mind, the body and the body and the mind. If you want to know more, just look on the web. There's lots of information about kind of the biochemistry behind this, but I'd like to stick with what we know in people and what actually works.
Bobby Dubois:
Now, it is appropriate to feel stressed when the mind and body tell us we're in danger. As I mentioned the tiger, our adrenaline will arise, our cortisol levels rise and we're ready to combat that stress. The problem is when that stress becomes chronic and it's no longer related to an acute event that will end. That's where the problems may arise. All right, let's move on to part two, which is that problem when the mind and body connection isn't quite right and when that happens, our health can suffer.
Bobby Dubois:
Here's a simple example that we've all experienced we get car sick. If, for many of us, we try to read a book in the car, because the body tells the brain we're moving, because it feels the car moving, but the brain may not agree since visually we seem to be still. We're not looking out the window. We're looking because it feels the car moving, but the brain may not agree, since visually we seem to be still. We're not looking out the window, we're looking at our book. Now, being car sick is generally a temporary problem and we feel better soon after we stop, but if the mind and body remain out of harmony or if we have chronic stress, then the problems will arise.
Bobby Dubois:
Now this is a challenging area because we can't randomize folks. You know, in a perfect world you would randomize folks to one environment versus another and then we'd see what's going on. Well, we can't really do that. We can't say, okay, you are going to live a stressful life for the next 30 years and these other people are going to have a non-stressful life, and then we could see what happens. But in the absence of these perfect studies, there are a variety of what I would call not perfect studies, but important insights have been found in those studies and there are some things I want to share with you in that regard. And, as we've talked about, I really focus on evidence in people, not evidence in dogs or yeast or laboratory tests.
Bobby Dubois:
Okay, so let me touch on a few different studies that tell us that having the mind and the body out of whack and stress can be problematic. So the first one comes from Britain and it's what's called the Whitehall study, and they had about 7,000 people. Now they followed them for 18 years. What they did is they looked at where they were at the beginning of this study how much stress did they have? Did they have a lot of stress, little stress, medium stress and then followed them for 18 years to see whether they died, whether they had a heart attack, and what they found is the people that had high stress in the beginning had a doubling of their risk of a heart attack or a death due to heart disease. So that's interesting and important for our understanding. Now, that was in Britain. But there's another study that looked at 52 different countries. This one had about 25,000 people and they looked at people who had heart attacks, people who didn't have heart attacks, and it's what's called the case control study, and we will talk in a future episode about what the details are of a case control study. We'll talk in a future episode about what the details are of a case control study. But the punchline was that the people who had suffered a heart attack had much higher likelihood of stress in their life than the people who did not.
Bobby Dubois:
So again, this issue of stress stress that's ongoing year after year after year is a problem for our health. Well, here's a different kind of study which again relates to this issue that the health and the brain are very much connected. So there's been a series of studies that look at what happens when one spouse dies. So what happens to the other spouse? So it could be the wife that dies and the husband is surviving. It could be the other way around, so it could be the wife that dies and the husband is surviving. It could be the other way around. So this was called the health and retirement study and they looked at people who are 50 or older and who were married at the beginning and what they found is when the spouse died and this is for men, so when the wife died in the subsequent time period, they had almost a doubling of their risk of death. Now women, when they lost their husband, similarly had an increase in risk of death, although it was only a 50% increase, not almost a doubling, so a bit less.
Bobby Dubois:
Now we also know stress is associated with worsening of our blood pressure. If we have asthma, it can cause exacerbations. If we have migraine headaches, it can bring them on. Irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia all of these diseases have been shown to get worse or flare when folks are under stress. Now I want to underscore that stress by itself doesn't cause these illnesses. So if you've never had MS, stress is not likely to cause it. However, if you have one of these illnesses, then stress is very problematic in terms of it getting better. Illnesses then stress is very problematic in terms of it getting better.
Bobby Dubois:
We also know that stress just doesn't feel good and feeling of anxiety affects the quality of our life or live well. We want to live well and stress relates to depression. So that's another area. I want to point out that this is one of these fields where it's a bit hard to know where the chicken and the egg is, where the cart and the horse is. So I've been positing that, as stress in one's life can lead to certain diseases or worsening of diseases or worsening of diseases, we also have to be mindful that it could be the other way around, that people who have an illness are likely to have more stress in their life. But, as I mentioned, in that first study where they followed people for 18 years, the stress did seem to be before the cardiac events occur.
Bobby Dubois:
Now there are some people that stress, that believe that stress or lack of mind-body harmony causes all sorts of other things like cancer or autoimmune diseases. Now this may turn out to be true, but I don't believe today the evidence is yet convincing. So, again, it may turn out that some of these other illnesses are also stress-related, but we just don't know for sure. Now, stress, or anxiety, is a problem. The added problem to that is that it's really quite common, depending upon the survey or who you talk to, that it's really quite common, depending upon the survey or who you talk to, anywhere between 15 and even up to 50% of folks have anxiety symptoms, not all the time, but certainly at points in their life, and anxiety is often under-identified because a lot of people are like well, that's just the way life is, when, in fact, it may be more than what a typical individual might be feeling Now.
Bobby Dubois:
Later we're going to talk about how you can tell whether some of the mind-body activities that we're going to discuss may be helping you. So, in that, we'll do a baseline assessment of how much anxiety we have, and there are questionnaires out on the web and I will link to one of these, which is called the Perceived Stress Score Questionnaire, and this is a way that you can answer some questions and come up with a score that tells you how much stress is in your life and then, over time, you can see if it gets better or worse, depending upon what you try. Now, the perceived stress questionnaire or other questionnaires like this have questions like the following Are your worries hard to control? We all have worries, but does it eat us up on a daily basis? Is it hard to control? Have we been feeling more irritable or nervous or trouble concentrating of late? Do we have a sense that we have stress at work and at home? Do we have financial stress? Have there been any major life events in the past year, which could be anything from losing a job, divorce, loss of a loved one? So these will be questions you can ask yourself now and then. If you wish to do one of our end-of-one studies a bit later, you can incorporate that as well. All right.
Bobby Dubois:
So part one we talked about how the mind and body are connected, and in part two, we've just finished up talking about how, when that harmony is not right, bad things can happen. So now we're into part three, which is the good news. The good news is there are activities that we can do to improve our mind-body harmony and improve our health. They can help us to live long and well, which is the theme and the title of this podcast. So what I'd like to do is walk through a few of these. First, I'm going to list what some of them are.
Bobby Dubois:
Common mind-body activities include meditation, yoga, breath exercises and even a walk in nature. These are all activities which, at their core, are doing something. Again, it could be breathing, it could be just sitting and being aware of what is going on inside of you. So that's really the secret sauce. The secret sauce is pausing and being aware of what's going on inside you, which tends to be a very calming activity. Okay, so let's go through the evidence that these activities can help.
Bobby Dubois:
Again, I always like to focus on where we have evidence that shows that these techniques, these approaches that you can incorporate in your life, have been studied and studied in people and shown to work. And again, I'll include links in the show notes if you wish to look at this in more detail. So I mentioned earlier that even something as simple as walking in nature now you don't have to be barefoot, you don't have to go to the Rocky Mountains to do this, it can just be a local park. It could be something very, very simple that is easy to incorporate in your life. Well, now the question is does it work? It sounds like a good idea. It would calm us. We'll look at the birds, we'll look at the trees how wonderful, and that's all very nice. But do we have any data that suggests it makes a difference?
Bobby Dubois:
So there was an interesting study where they looked at brain activation. They did brain scans and such, and so they wanted to initiate something that was anxiety-laden. So sometimes they gave them a difficult task, which, of course, could be stressful if you're trying to complete something, and it's not easy to do so. They also put pictures of frightening faces in front of people, and they did this, and then simultaneously, they measured the brain activation more activation, more stress, less activation, less stress and this was located in the amygdala, which is an area of the brain where emotions are often processed, where emotions are often processed. So what they did was they took these folks and divided them into two groups. One group they said, okay, go for a nice walk in nature and enjoy whatever it is you experience. And others said, well, go for a walk, but it's going to be around the city, obviously more noise, more hustle and bustle, having to worry about traffic and being a pedestrian walking around. And they measured the activation in the brain before and after, and what they found is that the folks who walked in nature, that amygdala activation was much less so it looked like that vegan nature calmed them relative to if they had just walked on regular city streets. So an interesting bit of data that kind of gives us an inkling of how some of these mind-body activities could help us.
Bobby Dubois:
Well, let's turn to probably one of the most commonly talked about, which is meditation. Now, there's many, many types of meditation. The studies I'm going to talk about is mindfulness meditation, which is just being very aware of what's going on in your mind and your body. Typically, you sit. You could sit in a chair, you can sit on a cushion. Often your eyes are closed. This could be for five minutes, 10 minutes an hour, whatever folks wish to do.
Bobby Dubois:
So there's been a number of studies that folks who meditate show changes in their health. So in one they summarize what was known from 12 different studies. So it's 12 separate studies. They analyzed them together in what's called the meta-analysis and in this study people had weekly sessions of mindfulness meditation and what they found, which is really quite extraordinary, was that the people who had the meditation had a fall in their blood pressure by nine points for the upper number called the systolic, and over five points for the diastolic. That's really almost as powerful as medication. So this is something to keep in mind and it helps us believe that mindfulness meditation isn't just making us feel good in the short term. It actually could have long-term consequences that are beneficial.
Bobby Dubois:
Another study that looked at meditation looked at sleep and looked at depression symptoms. So they took about 60 people who were depressed and they had eight sessions of 90 minutes each week so they did it at least once a day and what they found was there were reductions in depression and improvements in sleep sleep quality. So that's very exciting that it helps people feel less depressed and sleep improves. And, as we talked about in our previous episode on sleep, getting good quality sleep and length of sleep that's long is really really important. Another study again another meta-analysis of grouping together found that folks who were meditating had a 10% improvement in sleep efficiency and their sleep time got better and their time to fall asleep got shorter. So this is very interesting and the good news is that these sleep benefits didn't go away the day you stopped doing the meditation. In fact, it went on for months after the study that those benefits remained. Now people might say, well, that's all very interesting. We heard about the brain scan study and the amygdala, but are there any other data that tell us? How might meditation have these really quite profound benefits? So in another study they looked at folks that went into a meditation retreat. This was a four-day retreat so it was pretty involved, but they found substantial drop in their cortisol, and cortisol is one of the hormones that is associated with stress. So a number of studies have been done again in the meditation space showing the strong improvement.
Bobby Dubois:
Well, the next one I want to talk about is breath work. Now, breath work sounds perhaps complicated, but it can be very, very easy. It can be simple, as what is called cyclic sighing and I'm going to do is breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, and in the accentuated or cyclic sighing, you're going to take two breaths in through your nose and then you're going to blow out through your mouth. So it's going to sound something like this and this very simple practice, doing this for five minutes. You're not hyperventilating, you don't have to meditate very simple, makes a significant difference in folks' measured anxiety and various other measures that suggest that they're feeling better and their health is improving. Now there is a podcast that you might listen to by Andrew Huberman and again I will keep that in the show notes and he talks about how to do this type of breathing.
Bobby Dubois:
What I find very interesting is that people who say, well, breathwork sounds a little odd and sounds a little, you know, kind of new age. Think about somebody who is a sniper that has to shoot very straight and not shake, and be very calm. They take a deep breath and let it out, and that gets them in a place where they are able to shoot much more accurately. So the interesting thing about breath work is it doesn't require you to have any kind of mental work going along with it. You don't have to meditate. It will happen. Whether you're being anxious at the moment or you're not. It's absolutely a sympathetic and a parasympathetic response and it's really quite powerful.
Bobby Dubois:
Well, the last that I want to talk about of the areas is yoga, and many of you may already do yoga. Yoga is a wonderful thing for strength and balance, but it's also very good for your health. So there's a couple of different studies. One was about 3,500 people it was actually 49 different studies that they brought together in the meta-analysis and these are folks that did yoga multiple times a week and they studied them after they had done it for 13 weeks and once again, as we heard from meditation, blood pressure fell, and blood pressure fell significantly about five points. Well, there was another study this one was done in mostly from China, over a thousand people, and they were looking at not blood pressure but what's called a metabolic syndrome, which is sort of a pre-diabetes or diabetes-like syndrome, and what they found is that people who regularly did yoga or Tai Chi or one of things like that, there were measurable improvements in their blood testing, their insulin resistance, their weight circumference went down, their weight went down and their fasting blood glucose went down. So I've summarized now in this segment various ways that you can work on your mind-body harmony, and now I'd like to sort of finish up with where we go from here.
Bobby Dubois:
Now, as we've talked about in sleep and other areas, I'm very fond of the N of 1 trial. So all of these studies work in general or for the average person, but that doesn't necessarily mean that meditation or breath work or walking in nature is really going to have a profound effect on you and for you to want to spend time on a daily or weekly basis, I think it's important that you actually show in yourself that it works. Now I mentioned the perceived stress score questionnaire and again I will link to it. So in the N of 1 studies, what we do is we take a baseline. Where am I today before I start meditation or anything else that I might add to my regimen? So we start with the baseline, answer the questionnaire, do it for a day or two, see kind of where you are as a baseline.
Bobby Dubois:
Now, pick an activity any of the ones I've mentioned or some other. It could be breath work, it could be a nature walk. Those are really really easy to do and, as I mentioned, I'll have the Andrew Huberman podcast that you can listen to or watch and learn how to do the breath work in a way that he's tested and shown to be very, very beneficial. Okay, so you've made your baseline. Now you're doing whatever new activity you think might help you and then you're going to come back in a couple of weeks and see if it made a difference. So the good news is it won't take you 10 years to know whether this works. You'll know in a couple of weeks. You'll redo your stress score. You'll look at your blood pressure if that's one of the things you were hoping to work on and you'll see if it got better or if it didn't get better. And if it got better, then that's really wonderful motivation for you to continue. So, as I mentioned, stress is very common in our lives and chronic stress is the one we want to avoid. But the good news is there are many things you can try and test in yourself to see if they will help you to live long and well.
Bobby Dubois:
Now, next time, we're on to the next pillar, which is exposure to heat and cold or sauna and cold plunge. I hope you'll join me for that next episode. Thanks so much for listening to Live Long and Well with Dr Bobby. If you want to continue this journey or want to receive my newsletter on practical and scientific ways to improve your health and longevity, please visit me at drbobbylivelongandwellcom. That's drbobbylivelongandwellcom.