Health Podcast: Scrabble For Health; Skiing is Better Than Snowboarding; Sleep Hygiene.

In this episode we feature:

An interview with the director of Performance Psychology at West Point Dr. Nate Zinsser.

Scrapbook your dementia away.

Talk to yourself… for motivation.

UNLearning Insomnia.

And more ways you can improve your health today!

Stream the John Tesh Sports Album now. Available on all platforms.

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

Unknown: 0:45

Gib, hello and welcome to another edition of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard here with another special intelligence for your health with Connie Celica. Edition of the podcast this week, her guest is none other than Dr Nate Zinser, he's the director of the performance psychology program at West Point, all kinds of tips coming at you for boosting confidence in any situation. So that's I think we all need that. I know I do. All right, here we go, without further ado. Here is intelligence for your health. With Connie Celica, your favorite hobby is good for your health. For example, gardening or even just caring for plants inside your home, increases your heart rate, challenges your muscles and improves joint mobility. Playing backgammon or scrabble spurs new connections between brain cells, reducing your risk of dementia. The rhythmic movement of knitting relaxes you the same way meditation and yoga do and scrapbooking stimulates areas of the brain responsible for intelligence and memory. The foods you eat have a huge impact on your lifespan. In fact, a study from the University of Michigan found that even one serving of some foods can increase your lifespan by up to 80 minutes or decrease it by over an hour, the researchers developed a nutritional index ranking nearly 6000 foods based on their impact on our life expectancy, right down to the minutes gained or lost of healthy, good quality, disease free life per serving overall sugary drinks, fried foods and processed meats like ham, bacon and hot dogs were linked to the most minutes of healthy life lost. For example, a serving of chicken wings translated to three minutes of life lost from the sodium and trans fats, and a single beef hot dog translated to 36 minutes lost, mostly from the detrimental effects of processed meat at the other extreme, fish, fruit, vegetables and whole grains were linked to the largest gains in longevity. For example, baked salmon or rice and beans added about 12 minutes to a healthy life, and a serving of nuts added about 33 minutes. So what's the easiest way to eat your way to a longer life? The researchers say trading just 10% of your daily calories from junk food and processed meats for fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans and fish could add 48 minutes to your lifespan every single day, time to book that ski vacation, according to research, skiing makes people happier and healthier. The study was published in the journal applied research in quality of life, and it found that the pleasure gained from a ski trip is enough to improve a person's overall happiness, even if they only get to the mountains. Occasionally, the skiers who got the most benefits were those who became most engaged in the activity and who forgot everything else in their lives while they were on the slopes, the researchers found that even a one time ski trip had a positive impact on participants. They also found that skiers showed a greater level of enjoyment in their activity than snowboarders. How do you normally spend the last hour of your day before bed, watching TV, reading, checking email? You may want to adopt what sleep expert Michael Bruce calls a power down hour. It refers to breaking up the last hour before bed into three crucial 20 minute segments. First, spend 20 minutes preparing for the next day, say, by packing lunches for your kids, choosing the outfit you'll be wearing, and writing down a list of the top tasks you'll need to conquer. Dr Bruce says, The more prepared you feel before bed, the more relaxed you'll feel in bed. Also devote 20 minutes to personal hygiene, that includes brushing and flossing, showering and any other routine that helps you feel your best before bed, having a wind down routine primes your brain to get into sleep mode. Finally, Dr Bruce recommends devoting the last 20 minutes of your power down hour to relaxing, whatever that means to you, from reading to meditating to not watching the news. So again from sleep doctor Michael Bruce, devote your power down hour to 20 minutes of preparing, 20 minutes of hygiene plus 20 minutes of relaxing. Okay, listen to this. If you want to start working out more, tell yourself I'm an exerciser or I'm a runner, instead of telling yourself I'm going to exercise or I'm going to run, according to the journal self and identity, when people used that strategy, they were better at sticking to an exercise regimen. That's because you're giving yourself an identity, not just a command, and that makes you feel like exercising is part of who you are. It also makes you. Feel like you belong to a community of exercisers or runners, and feeling that you're part of an active tribe makes you more motivated to keep up. Today, our special guest is Dr Nate Zinser, director of the performance psychology program at West Point. He's got a new book out called the confident mind, and he says one of the most powerful ways to build and maintain our own confidence is with positive or constructive self talk. But many times, we talk ourselves out of being more confident with negative thoughts, like, I can't do this or I'll never be good enough. So I asked Dr z where our tendency for negative self talk comes from, to a certain degree. There is some evidence to suggest that we are wired, at least partially, to be somewhat negative and to be aware of the things that can and often do go wrong. There's evidence to suggest that because our prehistoric lives were rather uncertain. That we're wired that way to anticipate some stuff going wrong, so we're a little bit more vigilant about, you know, potential threats, because the majority of our human history was spent in very uncertain situations. Now that is long gone in terms of our ability to feed ourselves, close ourselves, etc, but we still have some of that primitive wiring operating. I would say, however, that by far the most powerful source of this tendency to be negative is indeed social. We are criticized at an early age. Our incorrect answers on the spelling test tend to be the ones that are highlighted with the red pencil. So the answer to your question is, it's a little bit biology, but it is much more sociology and societal today, we're talking to Dr Nate Zinser, director of the performance psychology program at West Point, and he was just saying that many of us are wired to engage in negative self talk, because focusing on potential threats and failures is part of how we survive. But in order to build up our confidence, Dr Zinser says we need to fill our mind with positive, encouraging and constructive self talk, and the more specific our self talk, the better. I'm not a big fan of the more general, generic, so called positive self talk points. I'm getting better every day in every way I think people can do a better job making it more personal and more specific to their desired outcomes. I am smooth and graceful coming out of the starting blocks. If you're a sprinter, I easily read the movement of the safeties when you're a quarterback. I am calm and in control during the most intense moments of the heart transplant surgery. So it's really a matter of thinking about what's a skill that you want to have, what's a quality that you want to have, what's an outcome that you want to have, and you phrase a statement about it in the first person in the present tense, with affirmative language for each of those so that you were affirming. I achieve this outcome, I display this quality, I possess this skill, and I bring it forward in each and every situation. Here's a fun way to boost your immune system play a game like Scrabble. According to a UCLA study, your body sees competition, even in a board game, as something it might need to defend itself against. That increases immune cell function, making them more active. So immune cells move more quickly into the bloodstream, where they spread throughout your body, and that protects you from illness causing pathogens, so play a friendly game against someone to boost your immune system. Today's medical term prolonged grief disorder, or PGD, that's a newly recognized mental health condition that refers to having unusually persistent symptoms of grief. And while there's no such thing as a normal time frame for grieving, PGD is typically diagnosed when grieving lasts at least six months in children or more than a year in adults. And it's not necessarily that you're still crying and sobbing all the time. In fact, many people with PGD report feeling no emotions. They just have a general numbness or a sense of disbelief related to their loss that will not go away, and you may also feel some guilt over the fact you're not getting over your grief. According to the American Psychiatric Association, prolonged grief disorder usually comes from the fact that some deaths or. Makeups are so sudden and unexpected it's almost impossible to get proper closure, and we feel like there's unfinished business. But remember, there's no right or wrong way to grieve, and if you think you're experiencing PGD, you may want to think about seeking counseling or joining a grief support group, and that's today's medical term, prolonged grief disorder. Here's the definitive answer, should you cover a cut or let it breathe? Cover it. So says a report from the Academy of Dermatology, they found cuts heal 40% faster when they're covered with a germ killing ointment and a bandage. If cold weather is getting to you, you can warm up by increasing your circulation. Here are three ways to do that. First, you can warm up with a cup of hot cocoa, not just because it's physically warm, but because the cocoa boosts circulation. According to Harvard researchers, study participants who did nothing but sip a mug of cocoa every day, increased their circulation by 10% in two weeks. Cardiologist Dr Stephen Gundry says it's due to the polyphenols in cocoa powder, which dilate blood vessels and increase blood flow from your toes to your brain. Another way to warm up watch a comedy. The University of Maryland School of Medicine says laughing increases blood flow by 35% which is similar to an aerobic workout. One final way to get your circulation going and warm up, eat some pomegranate seeds. The antioxidants in the seeds increase blood flow by 17% all you need is a half cup of seeds, or three ounces of pure pomegranate juice a day. Okay, listen to this. So you blew your diet and had three pieces of pizza for lunch. Cut yourself some slack and move on. Research in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that beating yourself up about diet mistakes increases the chance that you'll repeat the mistake by over 20% that's because when we dwell on our slip ups, it creates self doubt. We see it as a personal flaw, and that depletes our willpower, so we're more likely to eat half a gallon of ice cream after that pizza binge. So acknowledge your mistake, forgive yourself and move on, you'll be less likely to do it again, back with more health intelligence from Dr Nate Zinser, director of the performance psychology program at West Point. And have you ever been in a situation where your talents and skills suddenly abandon you when the pressure is on, like when the best player in a basketball game suddenly can't hit a single free throw. Athletes often refer to that as getting a case of the yips. So I asked Dr z where they come from. I think it's generally a lack of confidence at that moment of truth. Suddenly their certainty about themselves takes a back seat. They are in a position to sink the putt, sink the free throw, make a wonderful closing argument, and suddenly they get the thought, what if I mess this up? I've really got to do this right. And that second guessing, that tension creates just enough of a wiggle in their hands or their feet or their tongue and they misspeak or create a mistake. In order to prevent that, man, you got to be really good at being aware of your own self talk, and should those doubting statements come up, which they do, even for the best of us, you got to be able to acknowledge them. Oh, yeah. Oh, here comes an attack. Stop it and then replace it with some kind of thought like, well, I've done this a million times before, or let's see how well I can do it right now. And that way the tension tends to recede a little bit to the point of allowing your skills to express themselves most fully back with more health intelligence from Dr Nate Zinser, author of the confident mind, and he was just saying that in order to avoid getting the yips or choking when the pressure is on, we need to get really good at recognizing our own negative self talk And then replace our unhelpful thoughts with something more positive. So I asked Dr Zinser what he recommends to get that process started. Well, the most important step that I recommend to get going is to start building up a conscious awareness of a lot of your previous successes. A lot of your well developed abilities, have a greater awareness and appreciation of how far you have come and what kind of skills that you've developed. You know, in the case of the golfer or the basketball shooter, who's got a Yip once in a while, well, they seem to have forgotten all the time. Times that they've done it well, I asked my clients to develop a list of their most successful moments, and I asked them to screen their memories day in and day out, looking for little examples of quality effort and small success and indeed progress week by week, so that they have this accumulated sense of how good they can be, and that allows them to be more certain of themselves when it's time to sink that clutch putt. A big reason a lot of people have trouble falling asleep is that they put too much pressure on themselves. It's known as learned insomnia, and it happens when you worry so much about whether or not you'll be able to fall asleep that you can't. Then the next night, you start worrying again, leading to increased stress before bed. Pretty soon, it becomes a conditioned psychological response, and every time you even think about going to bed, it ratchets up your stress. So stop pressuring yourself to fall asleep. In fact, force yourself to stay awake. When you focus on staying awake, it frees you from sleep anxiety, and people who use that technique fall asleep faster than those who don't. More intelligence for your health. From Dr Nate Zinser, director of the performance psychology program at West Point. If you'd like to know more about him or his new book, The Confident mind, check out. Nate zinser.com His name is spelled z, I N, S, S, E, R, and typically, before any big pressure situation, whether it's giving a presentation at work or wanting to perform our best in a game, we're taught to take a deep breath. So I asked Dr Zinser how that simple move, just breathing, helps make us more confident. We all know it's important to take a deep breath in order to calm ourselves down. The great thing about breathing is that if you're paying attention to your breathing, by definition, you are present. You are in the moment, because your breathing is happening right now. And that's a good place to be. If you're focused on your breathing, you probably can't be thinking too much about something that's happened before, nor about something that might happen in the future. You're here. You're now. So as far as breathing techniques go it sounds like we don't really have to focus on say how many seconds we should inhale or how long we should hold a breath. It's more about focusing on how we feel with each breath. Indeed, there are all kinds of different recommendations on the length of inhale versus length of exhale versus holding those are all fine to practice. I spend 15 minutes every morning just sitting quietly, actively working my breathing muscles. And I think I'm typically a count of eight in and a count of eight out. But the numbers aren't all that crucial. It's are you taking control of yourself, or are you let the situation? Are you letting the situation take control of you? That's the crucial part. The next time you're sidelined by a headache or backache, take some ibuprofen and listen to classical music. The Journal frontiers in neurology found that combination increases the effects of over the counter pain relievers by 93% study subjects who took a pain reliever and listened to Mozart had a greater reduction in their pain response, and it worked faster. The experts say it works because classical music boosts the production of a brain protein called BDNF that reduces pain sensitivity, plus classical music taps into our parasympathetic nervous system, lowering heart rate and blood pressure and stabilizing blood sugar. So classical music makes it much easier for our body to absorb medications, which makes them more effective. So try some ibuprofen with a side of Mozart. The next time you need to stop a headache cold, here's an email I received at Connie at intelligence for your health.com. It comes from Dave Burke, who writes, I joined a gym for the new year. What is the best machine to use for overall fitness? I want to make the most of my workout. Well, Dave, experts from Ohio State University say the rowing machine gives the best workout at the gym. First, you don't have to already be in shape to use it. You can adjust the resistance to your preference. Another benefit of a rowing machine, it's an all over body workout that boosts your cardiovascular health and endurance. Other machines target just your arms or legs, but the rowing machine works your shoulders, your chest, arms, back, core, glutes, quads and calves all at once. So it's a great machine to use if you're short on time and want to maximize your workout. Rowing burns roughly 500 calories an hour. That's about double what you'd burn walking on a treadmill. And even though it works out your entire body, it is gentle since you're sitting, it's low impact and doesn't stress your joints, plus it's good for stress. Rowing at a moderate pace of seven miles per hour relaxes muscles in a way that counteracts tension. Thanks for your email, Dave. I hope this helps. Okay, listen to this if you're outside in frigid weather, protect yourself from an asthma attack. Dr James Wegner is an asthma expert at Washington University in St Louis, and he says there's such a thing as winter asthma, and for many people, asthma attacks may happen more often in the winter. That's because cold air can narrow the passageways to your lungs and cold, dry air can make the muscles inside your throat start to spasm, so wear a scarf around your mouth and nose that'll heat up the air before it gets into your lungs, so it won't shut down your airway. If you reach for high fat comfort foods when you're stressed, you are not alone. But we now know that eating high fat foods when you're stressed can lead to more weight gain than eating those very same foods when you are not stressed. That's according to a new study in the journal Cell Metabolism. What happens is this, when we're stressed, our brain increases production of a molecule that prompts us to not only eat more, it also reduces the amount of calories we burn for energy. In short, this stress induced molecule leads us to gain weight. So save comfort foods for when you're feeling good and relaxed and when you're stressed. Reach for foods that give your body the nutrients it needs to battle tension, like fresh produce. In fact, a study in the journal Social Science and Medicine found that getting one extra serving of produce every day has a powerful soothing effect, and people reported higher mental well being after eating one extra serving of produce. So the true comfort food is produce, and it won't make you gain weight when you're stressed, more intelligence for your health. From Dr Nate Zinser, author of the new book The Confident mind, and one of the strategies he recommends for building more confidence is visualization, where you simply imagine what it'll be like, performing at your best and being successful. And while visualization techniques can vary from person to person. Dr Zinser says there's one rule you absolutely must follow, always close your eyes. Well, if we want to envision a quality performance, we kind of have to shut out what's in front of us at the moment, because we are indeed time traveling. We're going into the future. So let's create a nice gray or black slate in front of us, and now let's get the theater of the mind working. Let's get that fantastic Go Pro perspective video playing right in front of us, living color, surround sound, great special effects. I think it's useful to close your eyes when you really want to create something in your own mind that is not what's right in front of you at the moment. That's it for our show today, our special intelligence for your health with Connie Selig, edition of the podcast, I'm Gib Gerard. Don't forget to rate comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It helps us out a lot. And also you can reach out to us on social media. On social media. All of our links are listed down in the show notes. We try to respond to every DM, every mention of the show, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.