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136. Heart Centered Healing for Health and Wellbeing with Cardiologist Jonathan Fisher

• Dr. Adrienne Youdim

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How do we spread the message of understanding that health has to be approached holistically?

Jonathan Fisher is a Harvard and Mount Sinai-trained physician, practicing clinical cardiologist, certified mindfulness and compassion meditation teacher, and a healthcare organizational resilience and well-being leader. He is the Co-Founder and Chair of Ending Clinician Burnout Global Community, showing how he’s committed to ending the crisis of burnout in healthcare and optimizing the well-being and peak performance of its people. After he’s gone through bad depression, he has made it a goal both for himself and for other people to learn how to be happy again, to feel deep happiness, meaning, joy, and connection.

Together, let us heal our hearts and understand what love really is, because it is only then that we’ll get to live life in a healthier and happier state.

 

What you'll learn from this episode:

  • The artificial divide for 400 years in the West about the mind-body split, how that contributed to the disconnect in the society when it comes to healing, and how George Engel’s biopsychosocial model helped bring things back towards the missing piece—that health and healing has to be a holistic approach
  • The importance of relationships—and nurturing them—along with practice of positive psychology in accordance to holistic health
  • The real essence of holistic health, as recognized and experienced by Jonathan himself
  • How and why loneliness is a public health crisis, same as how smoking and having diabetes are, and how that comes back to our cultural norms of connection and isolation
  • How the voice in our head—which is not really ours—tend to push us to do something unhealthy, and why we should recognize that this voice is normal and not fight within ourselves in order for us to be able to develop a more healthy, best friend-like voice
  • In order to help others, you should first develop self-trust, self-acceptance, self-embrace, and self-love, so that now you know what love means
  • Discover what you can do when you feel like you don’t know what it is that you want in your life

 

Ways to Connect with Jonathan Fisher:

 

Just One Heart: A Cardiologist’s Guide to Healing, Health, and Happiness Pre-order your  copy at

Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

  1. Join the Monthly Free Mind-Body Workshops: Participate in engaging mind-body practices designed to help manage your stress response. Register here.
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  3. Freebie alert. Register for our monthly free MindBody Workshop and receive a downloadable guide on emotional labeling to help you manage your emotions effectively.


Connect with Dr. Adrienne Youdim

THE JOURNEY TOWARDS BECOMING A DOCTOR: GOING THROUGH ANXIETY, WORRY, AND DEPRESSION, THEN LATER ON LEARNING ABOUT WHAT HEALING IS


Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Welcome, Jonathan. I am so thrilled to have you here and so thrilled for this conversation.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Adrienne, it's my pleasure. I love your work, I love your book, your podcast, and your message is so needed right now. Happy to be with you.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Thank you. I think our message and our messaging is very aligned.

And so, before we get into more about, well, I want to get into more about you, and you are a cardiologist, you're also very mindful and compassionate in your approach. And so, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be in this kind of space.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Thank you for asking. I was going to begin with why I became a doctor, and as you were talking, I remembered that my real drive for going into medicine was because I was kind of a nerdy, shy kid, and I was actually bullied. It's something maybe we'll talk about during this conversation—about how these parts of our past, we can kind of put them into our distant memory and tuck them away and hide from them because it doesn't feel good to remember them. But if I really think about why I ultimately became a physician, it was because it felt good to care for other people and protect them in a way; in a way that perhaps I didn't feel protected myself when I was a kid and then a teenager at times. And it happened that I grew up in a medical family, and there are very few families like mine; I've done the research. My dad was a physician; he's going to be 97 next month. And my mom was a nuclear physicist before that was cool for women. And I'm the youngest of seven children, and one after another, everyone followed my dad into medicine and all became physicians. So downstairs, I have that old, black leather doctor's bag that he used to take on house calls, and we have an old electrocardiograph from 60 years ago, wooden box. So, it's kind of part of my legacy, part of in my blood, and some of it I went into unconsciously because everybody around me that I admired was becoming a doctor and that's kind of all I knew about.

And then my very left-brained me found safety and security in studying science, which also met the approval of my mom and my dad; like, that's what they were all about—science and service. And so, I went through school; I went to medical school. I decided that since my mom was a physicist, I was looking for organs in the body that had the most movement that were interesting, also had electrophysics involved and chemistry, and the heart really fit the bill; it was the most kinetic, dynamic organ. No offense to the lungs or the kidneys, but the heart for me really had so much going for it to appeal to my more intellectual, rational side.

Little did I know that as I was doing all this intensive training and competing in order to get good grades and to get to the next step, there was this darker force that was eroding me on the inside, which I later learned was severe anxiety, chronic worry, and undiagnosed depression. All I knew is that I couldn't feel feelings like other people would talk about them. Maybe if I saw in a movie somebody was crying or in love or happy or sad, I could feel these emotions coming up, but I didn't know what they were and I didn't experience them on a day-to-day basis; I was very regimented, almost robotic in my approach. Until one thing led to another. In training in my residency, I watched a number of young people die, and I experienced deep trauma—emotional trauma—at that time that no one has ever called it that. I went through therapy subsequently, and we talked about it. And I remember crying in the stairwell after a 25-year-old man came in, cardiogenic shock from a helicopter and we couldn't save him, and I remember young women dying of various cancers. I felt this sort of cracking inside of me and into my shell, and I didn't have any words for it; I didn't know it was grief.

I'll pause there just to say that my early years, while exciting because of the passion for science and pursuit of helping people, there was this parallel, darker pathway where I had untreated anxiety and depression and eventually led me to burnout a decade ago. And looking back now, that was the beginning of the best part of my life—the last ten years—where I've had the fortune of pursuing self-discovery and also seeking out teachers and mentors in the space who've really taught me what I didn't learn in medical school, which is what is healing.

 

THE MISSING PIECE: UNDERSTANDING THE DISCONNECT IN OUR SOCIETY, ESPECIALLY IN MEDICINE, WHEN IT COMES TO HEALING, AND HOW THAT RELATES TO THE MIND-BODY SPLIT BELIEF

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Wow. I just want to let that sink in because the story is beautiful and the approach is beautiful, and I know we're going to get into this but it's what's really missing. You describe so beautifully what's missing in medicine and in our world at large. I mean, we don't have to be physicians or even professional caretakers to take on the vocation of healing. In fact, we'd be better off as a society if we didn't delegate that to just a certain population. But what you say does set us up for this next big question that I have for you, which is why? And you talk about the heart-mind connection, if I’m saying it correctly. Why is there such a disconnect in our society, and in medicine where healing actually needs to happen?

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Yeah. I really like your approach to this, which is to ask how did we get to this place where we have a health care system that's bursting at the seams, we can't care for all the patients struggling with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and we found ourselves chasing the tail. We're so far behind the eight ball; we have not at all focused on prevention. And a lot of it stems back to this artificial divide that we've created in the Western world and in Western medicine between the mind and the body. And my passion is within the heart itself, which happens to be the core pump and driver of blood and nutrients to the rest of the body, so I take a little pride there.

If I look back, and I've examined this, we have to go back over a thousand years. A long way back, Aristotle's days, ancient Egyptians, ancient Chinese, this was not the case. We believed that the heart was the center of emotion and the source of all of our desires and needs. Now, medically speaking, perhaps, that wasn't correct, and there was some learning to do, but from a spiritual standpoint, there was a correctness to that, that our body held the deepest secrets and wisdom in terms of what healing means.

And so, I think, Adrienne, some of it roots back to religious tradition and dogma, where certain religions said that the spirit exists in the mind and the body is just flesh. And this led, famously to Descartes in the 1600, French mathematician who many people blame for this division that you're asking about, this mind-body split. In fact, it's named after him; it's called Cartesian dualism, which is this idea that everything that happens above your neck are just thoughts and beliefs, and that's separate; that's the realm of things that you can't touch or see or feel. And then everything below the neck, in the body, that's medicine; that's the body, that's things that break and we can fix them. And so, there was this artificial divide for 400 years in the West. Again, I'm emphasizing, in the West. In the East, if you look at Hindu tradition, Buddhist traditions, Chinese medicine traditions, Yogic traditions, none of this duality exists. So, this is a Western phenomenon relating to Western religious traditions, and also the path of industrialization, where we thought that since we could build machines that reach the sky like the Eiffel Tower, we began to think of the body as just this structure that could be built, broken, and rebuilt, with little room for what was then separated as the spirit.

Without getting too esoteric here, fortunately, in the last 100 years, a couple of compassionate caregivers in medicine have realized the shift of medicine and the way we have this medical model, it's called the biomedical model which is treat the body as if something's broken; our job as doctors is simply to find what's broken and to fix it. It was George Engel from the University of Rochester in 1977; he was a psychiatrist. He said, there's something wrong about this mind body split; it doesn't make sense. We're having patients who are jumping from one doctor to another to another to another with symptoms that are never going away. And some of that is because of our cultural beliefs that we talked about, but some of it is the way that medicine began to fragment and subspecialize so much information. If you were going to be a cardiologist like me, you couldn't study the mind and emotions. If you were going to become a psychologist, you would never learn about the pathophysiology of the heart in deep detail. And so, there was this separation, and George Engels said, let's bring it back. He developed the biopsychosocial model which, as you know, says that all health and all healing is holistic. The health of every cell in our body depends on the health of the organ that that cell lives in, and the health of that organ depends on the health of the organ next to it. And the health of those two organs depends on the health of the whole body which depends on the health of the environment where we're breathing, what we're putting into our minds, into our spirits, into our stomachs. And the health of our environment depends on the health of our culture and our political system, and on and on and on, to the health of our Earth and the health of the cosmos.

There is this holistic, deeply interconnected belief which fortunately, as I see it, parallels the return of some seeking of deep spiritual connection in the West that's been missing. There's been a longing, or as you might say, a hunger that many of us have had something missing and we can't put our finger on it, and I believe that it's this hunger for deep spiritual and emotional and psychosocial connection that Engels was pointing to and many others like Dean Ornish in the 1970s and 80s who founded preventative and lifestyle medicine we’re on to. And my hope is that through your work and my work and many other people, we can now ride this wave and drive this wave, so that we can spread the message of understanding that health has to be a holistic approach.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, absolutely. And it's true; there is this kind of renaissance, I think, of bringing that spiritual side back into our day-to-day lives as well as into the practice of medicine.

 

ON DEEP SELF-REFLECTION: HOLISTIC HEALTH IN THE EYES, MIND, BODY, HEART, AND EXPERIENCE OF JONATHAN FISHER

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

You bring up this word holistic, which we've used in different ways over the years and has almost become kind of trite, but does capture kind of the essence of what you're trying to say. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about what that looks like for you. How does that come to be in your personal life? And if you would share as a practicing physician, what does that look like in how you care for others?

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Sure. Making it very practical, there was a time when I was interested in sports and athletics and I focused on my body. I was doing triathlons, and I didn't realize that I was not paying attention to the health of my relationships—with my children or with my wife or with my friends. I thought, “Well, if I just build up my body, that's enough; that's health.” And there was this piece that was missing. I might come home from a race or come home from training and I would feel miserable because nobody wanted to be around me. And so, that led me to the practices of deep self-reflection.

I had always been a sensitive kid and really thinking about things, but it was mostly directed in kind of like neurotic worry about what will happen. I was able to turn that and look at the parts of my health and well-being that were not physical—my emotional health, my social health, and spiritual health. And for me, what it looked like beginning ten years ago or more was this practice of positive psychology. After my sister passed away twelve years ago—she was my best friend—I hit my lowest point and I realized that I didn't have a deep well of inner resources, of inner strength. I felt myself broken even while I was out, supposed to care for others.

And so, for me, holistic care meant starting to learn about my psyche, and how do I heal from trauma (number one), how do I learn not to accumulate stress in each moment and to create stress by my own imagination (number two), and then three, the most exciting part of holistic health is how do I cultivate qualities in my own mind and spirit that emanate from me, that others can feel, and others can feel healed in a way, healed within themselves? How can I model those characteristics of kindness, empathy, warmth, compassion, openness, wisdom, whatever they are, for each person?

And I realized that as I started to develop those traits by studying positive psychology, going on week-long silent zen meditation retreats, going for a yoga teacher training, by doing all of these things, reconnecting with my body and these patterns of thinking in my mind, I suddenly felt healthier and I was happier. But I wasn't always happy. Sometimes, I was deeply sad and crying, but I could—for the first time in my life—actually be with the crying, be with the pain, be with the sadness without having to repress it or suppress it or deny it and have it bottle up in my body and come out in terms of a migraine headache or a tight jaw or something else like that, or neck problems, torticollis.

And so, for me, it's very real; this beginning to approach my own personal health, not just looking at what I feed the body in terms of nutrition, how I rest the body with sleep, but how I nourish my soul and my spirit. And I realized that the use of the word soul can turn off people in the medical community, and I understand that; I'm sensitive to that. At the same time, that word just came out. Don't mean it in a religious sense, but more in a spiritual sense; something that's ineffable, untouchable.

So, that's the answer for me. And then maybe, if you want, we can talk about how I approach the 3000-4000 patients I see every other year.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, I do want to get to that. There's so much wisdom and so many nuggets in what you've said.

 

THE FIRST STEP OUT: LONELINESS AS A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS, AND HOW THAT COMES BACK TO OUR CULTURAL NORMS OF CONNECTION AND ISOLATION

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

The first thing that kind of came to mind as you were speaking about holistic health was your inclusion of relationships. And of course, we all know that our relationships, our partners, our relationships with our children are impactful, important, require nurturing and time and attention and care. But I like how either you brought up friends or platonic relationships or that's what came up to my mind. And why that's notable, I think, also relates to something you said later on in terms of how do we connect this to kind of our Western and medical mindset, which is, I think, for a lot of us in medicine and I think for a lot of us professionally, so this is applicable to the many listeners who are not necessarily physicians but just engaged in either a profession or even in the profession of caring for their families exclusively, we put so much emphasis on our profession, of course, and we put so much emphasis on our relationships that are, I would say, mandatory, cultivating romantic relationships or the relationship with our spouse or our partner and also maintaining relationship with our children because that's what we're responsible for at the exclusion sometimes of platonic relationships, because for many of us that's a luxury. I know I thought of it as I don't do luncheons with women; I'm at work, right? Until I reached a stage that has been amplified quite recently, actually, where I realized that I not only want female or platonic relationships, but it's become like oxygen; like, I need that relationship. And if you want to tie it to science, which I like to do because I'm a nerd too, there's actually so much data about platonic relationships and the lack thereof and how cultivating it actually improves cardiovascular health and is associated with reduced heart attacks, if you want to be really granular.

Can we talk about that a little bit? Because I think, given that we are in this present state, Vivek Murthy just put out a New York Times article this past week about the state of loneliness; we're still lonely. And I hate to end; I don't like to sugarcoat, but I also don't like to make people feel disempowered. So, that wasn't a question; that was like a handoff.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Yeah, I'll take the handoff for sure.

Going back to when I was a kid, I was lonely. I had some good friends, and most of the time, I felt like I was stuck in my own mind. It was this harsh critic that said you're a loser, you're a nerd, nobody likes you, you're never going to have close friends that way. And so, part of my own journey was out of loneliness, really out of loneliness, and I think this is true for a lot of people.

The solution to loneliness is not always joining a club or joining a religious group or meeting somebody at a volunteer organization. So many of us haven't even gotten to the point where we're comfortable being friends with ourselves. And so, I really believe that the first step out of loneliness and disconnection, which, as you said so eloquently, and Vivek Murthy wrote in his book together a few years ago, he's really led the charge against loneliness, not because it feels good or it's nice to be connected, but loneliness is a public health crisis. It's the same as smoking cigarettes. It's the same as having diabetes. If you compare two people, someone who's lonely has the similar risk of a smoker to having a heart attack, exactly like you said. And the mechanisms, that's where we could nerd out another conversation, but the mechanisms are fascinating when you look at them. And there's so many pathways that connect the mind and the heart, leading to those heart attacks, to the strokes, to the high blood pressure.

But in answer to your question, it is one of the greatest threats to our health as a society, and it goes back now to our cultural norms of connection versus isolation. I think, again, in the West, there was this idea of discovery of radical individualism. “Go west, young man.” And if you need to lean on other people, it's a sign of weakness. Similarly, we view mental health as a sign of weakness. We used to lock people up for basic mental health challenges. So, a lot of the trouble we're seeing today, the swamp that we're stuck in, is because of a legacy of biases and discrimination, and I think that spills over. If you're alone, it must be your fault. It must be something wrong with you. We often blame the victim instead of taking an empathic approach, which is to say, I haven't seen Adrienne around lately. Maybe there's something we can kind of lean in and be together and connect. Because in my own experience, when I'm feeling nervous or stressed or burned out, the last thing I want to do is to connect with someone else, but it's the most important thing that I need to do. We have this counter pressure pushing us in the wrong direction, and we have to overcome that, and that really is rooted in awareness, which you were alluding to.

So, part of what I do—this is getting back to real world—with every single one of my patients, I know we don't have much time in the clinic, 15 minutes per visit, seven and a half to 8 minutes spent on the computer in the room, and then we have all these other things, but I always start with tell me about your family. “What's happening? Tell me about your friend situation. Do you have friends? Do you have no friends? Do you have a church group? A synagogue? Some other activity? How do you connect with other people? Do you connect with nature?” We didn't learn this—you and I—in medical school. I mean, there was a social history, but if you think about it, and just thinking now, what was the social history? It wasn't “how social are you?” It was “do you smoke cigarettes?”

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Right.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Nothing to do with it. So, I take a real social history because I realize that all of the studies, the Harvard study on who lived longest, if you look at the Blue Zone research by Dan Buettner from Time Magazine, it all points to the same thing, which is if you want to live to be 100 and you want to live and feel good, the only way is by getting over obstacles to connection with yourself and with other people.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, absolutely.

 

THE POWER OF SELF-COMPASSION: IN ORDER TO HELP OTHERS, YOU SHOULD FIRST DEVELOP SELF-TRUST, SELF-ACCEPTANCE, SELF-EMBRACE, AND SELF-LOVE, SO THAT NOW YOU KNOW WHAT LOVE MEANS

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

And I just want to reiterate a point that you brought up, which is this is really kind of hardwired in our cultural norms. And as you were speaking, I was remembering something that my grandmother shared, which I actually included in my book Hungry for More, that when they were childbearing and childrearing, they used to feed each other's, breastfeed each other's children. When I told my kids this, they were like, “Ew, mom.” But wow, how beautiful. And I contrast that with my own experience, especially with my first child that I had while I was a resident; I felt so certain that I had to do everything on my own, particularly because I was a working mother, to prove that I wasn't inept as a mother, that I pushed people away. My mother-in-law wanted to bathe the kids and I would say no or would feel shame that the nanny would give my child formula when she was eight months old because I felt like it had to be exclusively breast milk. All of these ways in which we create disconnection based on what we believe to be right and how it is to our detriment.

And I bring this up because of another point, because you mentioned kind of your feeling of disconnection as a child or your bullying as a child or your experiences of I think you said negative self talk as a child or inner critic, I think you said. And the fact that I want to bring up, at least for myself, that just because we're in the business of talking about these things doesn't mean that by any shape or form we have overcome these things. This is part of the human condition. And I think just naming that and saying it like it is hopefully will give people permission that we need to question these cultural norms and biases, these expectations we have of ourselves and the impressions that other people somehow have their shit together. Because we will never allow ourselves to fully engage in these practices that you're talking about—about self-compassion and empathy towards oneself, which ultimately trickles into empathy for others—if we're still under this notion that we are somehow more—and I try and control myself, but I do curse—more effed up than people around us, right?

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

You know, there's studies that say that people who curse are more trustworthy, so I trust you.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Do you know how many people have told me that? It just is a testament to how much I curse in my day-to-day life. That study has been sent to me multiple times.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

When you're talking, there's a couple of streams there that I love that you highlighted. One is this idea that I take it for granted that I've come to recognize this inner voice that wants to keep me playing really small and not taking risks and that it still comes back, but I know how to work with it. I recognize. I see him when he's coming and he wants to keep me in the corner, and I say, no thanks; I hear you're worried, but we're not going to play that anymore. That's a little kid who's afraid; I'm not afraid anymore, okay? I'm going to bring you with me; you're going to be okay. Almost like being a parent to these parts of myself that were broken or scared. And just to say that even though we may realize that now, most people, I would say, are not aware that that voice in your head is not necessarily your voice. It may be the voice of your mother or the voice of a mean teacher or the voice of yourself 20 years ago that's saying you're horrible. And then you and I both know that when we don't hear these voices for what they are, which is not reality, they end up making us do things that make ourselves unhealthy, maybe overeating or binging, television, all sorts of things. And I strongly believe, and I have a sense that you feel this way, too, that these unexpressed frustrations, resentments, even denial of past parts of our self, they have a way of coming out in our behaviors and on our impulses. And for me, I love that you brought up that this inner voice is something that is normal; it's so normal. And once we accept that it's normal to hear it, there's wonderful ways to work with it, and to develop a healthier, nurturing, cheerleading, like best friend voice. Wouldn't it be great to have that voice, instead of saying “Oh, you screwed up again”, saying “Hey, you did a great job. You tried. Let's try again.”

So, for me, actually, the most important part of my journey—and there have been many aspects—was to learn to not just accept myself and the parts that are scared and angry and lash out and have addictions, all of these things. The most important part was to accept that those parts exist within me and not try and fight within myself. Because I realized that when I fight inside myself, I always lose, whichever side I'm on. And so, for me, the whole journey that we're talking about in order to help others was to develop self-trust, self-acceptance, self-embrace, and self-love. Now, I know what love means; it means loving all parts of me. And that way, if you behave in a certain way that someone else may say, “Oh, she's terrible,” I will say, “No, there's one part of Adrienne that was behaving that way, but I can still love Adrienne because we all have all of these aspects of ourselves.” And this is where the work of Carl Jung talking about shadow theory and the shadow self and shadow work. Even to more modern times, internal family systems in modern therapy looks at this.

 

EACH ASPECT OF THE MIND IS RESPONSIBLE FOR FILLING A DIFFERENT NEED: JONATHAN AND THE CULTIVATED PRACTICES AND PROCESSES HE INCORPORATES IN HIS DAY-TO-DAY LIVING

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

This guy is getting nerdy again and I know I'm kind of riffing here like on a tangent, but if it's okay---

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

I love it.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

There are these aspects that modern neuroscience says that there isn't just one self in our brain. You can't find a self in the brain that's feeding you your thoughts and ideas and your plans; that doesn't exist. Instead, what we have are these different aspects of our mind. Each one is responsible for filling a different need—a different hunger, as you would say. There's a need for acceptance, there's a need for safety, there's a need for physical nutrition, there's a need for movement, a need for novelty. And often, these come into conflict with each other. And sometimes, that conflict ends with one of the needs and the voices getting pushed to the side without that reconciliation, that holistic internal peacemaking. And that little voice is the one that drives us to do things, to fulfill needs that it still wants to have met. This is, for me, fascinating.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

It is fascinating. And it's a perfect segue, actually, to talk about actionable bites because the podcast Health Bite, I talk about actionable bites and I like to bring this up in the sky and then bring it back to practicality.

For a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast or who know my day job, I'm an obesity medicine specialist and work in weight loss, and this is very relevant to that topic, as I mentioned in Hungry for More, that, yes, we can give Ozempic or Wegovy and suppress people's hunger, and I'm all for it; they’re effective drugs in the right people. I'm prescribing it in the right people. But ultimately, when we ignore these different facets of ourselves that you so beautifully described, it does result in a hunger; it results in a discomfort that we then seek to soothe with whatever thing we choose to soothe with, whether that's smoking, drinking, gambling, working. And I always say, if you're a goodie two shoes, you're going to do it with a chocolate chip cookie; that's how you're going to soothe. So, it is applicable, and the science is there that shows that when we have these uncomfortable feelings, they literally trigger our hunger hormones.

But there's also very practical and concrete connectivity between these kind of esoteric things that I think we've spent the first half of the podcast talking about, to what our end goal is, which is, oh, shut up already; I just want to know how to lose weight. It is applicable, but hopefully, applicable in a more enduring and important way.

So given that, I would love for you to share with us the applicability in your own life. How do you practice? What do you practice? How do you remind yourself? Because God knows we need remembering in this work. What does your day to day look like? I want actionable advice on how to make this practical.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

There are many aspects of my life that I have cultivated, practices and processes that sometimes I verged on overly detailed checkboxes, like ten checkboxes. You have to stretch, you have to drink, you have to meditate, you have to exercise. And then my therapist was like, “Yeah, I get that that's helpful, but isn't that driving you towards this overly analytical, rigid way of being and maybe making you a bit uptight?” And I was like, “You know, you're right.”

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

So very doctor-y of you.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Exactly! Check boxes. Getting very practical now, depending on whether we're talking about if we want to eat healthier, if we want to move more, if we want to have more social connections, whatever it is that we want more of, the very first step is to answer the question—what do I want more of?

And I'd be interested in your thoughts, but for me, the whole field of weight loss, I think it's asking the wrong question. It's asking, what would you like to get rid of? What would you like to run away from? Instead, I find it's very, very helpful instead to ask people. It's so easy to focus on what you don't want but it's a little harder to actually be brave enough, to be courageous enough to take the bold act of saying, “Oh gosh, no one asked me before. What is it I really want?” And I guarantee nobody said that “my whole life's dream is to lose 20 pounds.” That's a life where someone would look back and say, “I spent my whole life going on a yoyo and spinning in a circle, but I missed out on all the beautiful people around me.”

So to answer your question on a very practical basis, every morning, get up in the morning and you set an intention. Say, what is it that I want from today? For example, for me, my intention is often very boring. I want to feel loved and I want to give love to other people; very, very simple. And I want to learn something new and I want to share something with somebody else. And how do I manifest the love? I manifest it by saying something nice to my wife and trying to not get pissed off at my children. And it also means how can I love every patient? The 20 to 24 patients I see in my office every day. When I open the door with a smile and a warmth, I don't know what's happening; I have no idea. But I found a way where I can, no matter where they're coming from, whether they just came back from a cruise somewhere or whether they lost their sister or best friend a week ago, to connect in a way that's deeply human and deeply loving, so they can feel supported before we even talk about the heart.

So on a practical basis, I would encourage every listener right now, even, you're going to be listening for the next, let's say 10 or 15 minutes. You can do it anytime. What's your intention in this moment? Why are you listening? What need is this filling in you? Are you trying to avoid doing some work? Are you enjoying doing this while you're watching something else? Just pause for a moment and say, how do I want my life to feel when I'm done with this podcast? Do I want to feel a little bit more hopeful after hearing this conversation?

And so, Adrienne, I think it begins with what do you want in your life? What meaningful goal? I'm not talking about I want a new Chanel bag because the price is going to go up and it's going to be worth more. I'm talking about something like, do I want one of these core virtues and values that human beings have found meaningful for thousands of years? Do I want more balance? Do I want more courage, more wisdom, connection, truth, justice, humanity, expression, creativity, curiosity? Pick something that's deep and meaningful. Go after that thing every day with all of your heart. And all of the other details are just details. We can talk through what happens when the heart says no and when the mind says no, and how we sometimes are tricked by our own minds and our own hearts, and we can learn to see more clearly through the practice of mindfulness, somatic experiencing yoga, qigong; this is where those practices come in. But it starts with asking, what do I want that's meaningful for me and that may be helpful to others?

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

I have to say this. I love the fact that you know that Chanel bags’ prices are going up. I don’t know your partner, but please have a conversation with her because that was good.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

I’ll have to thank and I’ll tell my wife to listen to this, because I was just talking to her. She said, “You know that Chanel bag we got?” No, I’m kidding.

 

TRY THIS WHEN YOU’RE TOO SCATTERED TO KNOW WHAT YOU WANT

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Aside from that, though, what if someone who's listening to this right now says, “Okay, that sounds great. I have no idea what I want.” And I love that you bring up pause. I talk about this in the Ted Talk as, like, the critical peace. What is your favorite practice that helps you when you're too scattered to know?

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

This is where I'm going to go back against what I said a few minutes ago for a very specific reason. Before, I said that it gives us more energy and fulfillment when we chase after something than it does to run away from something. But in this specific answer, in this question you're asking, if someone has no idea what's important to them, really important, just today, notice the times you get upset or irritated or frustrated. And instead of doing the normal, which is to let that become a roller coaster of emotions and you get upset at one person, you take it out on another, you curse at another person, and then woah, it’s me, instead, just pause the moment you feel irritated by something and ask a very important question, which is going to get to your answer, which is, I'm having a reaction now to something in the world or it could be a pain in my body or it could be someone cutting me off in traffic. I'm having a reaction. Instead of resisting that reaction, really get curious about it and ask yourself, what is this reaction telling me that’s so important to me? And it may be you value time alone. It may be you value having uninterrupted time with a loved one. It may be you love reading a book and you hate it when someone bugs you when you're reading it. Whatever it is. It may be that somebody stole an idea that you had or somebody said something negative to you in front of other people. In that case, it's important what other people think of you and you can ask, well, where does that come from? So, I would say we can use the negative here to illustrate what's really of value for us.

And then another way to do it, here’s another approach, is just look at your life. What people do you love to listen to, you love hanging out with? What books do you love to read? What movie or heroes do you just say, oh my gosh, for me, it's Dr. Strange. And so, I would ask myself, okay, you don't know what you want in your life, but you love this Dr. Strange. What is it about him? What is it about this, let's say Vivek Murthy, who's another role model of mine. What is it about this person?

So, to answer your question to the person who doesn't even know, like, how do I want to be in the world, look for the role models that you've already chosen and ask, what do they all have in common?

 And for me, well, Dr. Strange is a doctor. He's a guy who was suffering and struggling on the inside, and he actually closed himself off to people, was kind of a jerk, which I was at times. But then he found a way to self-reflect and develop these inner skills and resources to help other people in a very big way. So I'm like, cool; I'd like to do that.

Vivek Murthy, he's a physician who isn't talking about how to do good surgery or what antibiotics to use. He's a physician responsible for the health of America who's talking about how we can overcome loneliness and connect with each other, and I say that is compassion; that is humanity.

So, those are two two ways. There are many more ways we can find what it is that we really strive to be in our lives and to go after that each day with intention.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, I just want to pause and kind of take that in. I think there's some really good practical wisdom in there.

 

HERE’S WHERE YOU CAN FIND DR. FISHER AND LEARN MORE FROM HIS EXPERIENCE AND WISDOM

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

I would love to have you back to talk a little bit more, particularly about the nuances of the practices that you just brought up. I'm always mindful of our collective ADD, and so we should keep these podcasts under or around 40 minutes; we're hitting that mark. Tell me where people, I mean, I'm like hungry for more. I want more, more, and I know you've got a book coming out. I love your Instagram page and the things that you talk about. Recently, you put up a post about, was it kintsugi?

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Yeah.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

And we took our family to Japan several years ago, and I actually bought one of those crack pots that were filled with, like, probably pretend gold, but it's such a great reminder. So if you're curious about that, you need to follow Dr. Fisher on Instagram. But where can we find you and learn more about the book, especially when it comes out?

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

Thank you. It's very simple. Just remember @happyheartmd. One word—happyheartmd. Because my goal for myself was to learn how to be happy again after I went through bad depression. And I'm a heart MD, and my goal and hope for other people is not just to help prevent and treat heart attacks, but for other people to feel deep happiness, joy, meaning, and connection. So one word—happyheartmd. You'll find me on LinkedIn. I'm probably the most active there. I post about 20% more than I do on Instagram, and they're longer and more detailed. And then Instagram, and I have a YouTube channel. And the book is coming out early 2024. It's called Just One Heart, and it explores many of the themes we were discussing today.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Personally, I’m like, I cannot wait for the book. I can't wait.

I want to thank you. This has been so lovely, and I learned from you, so thank you for being here. I really appreciate it.

 

Dr. Jonathan Fisher

It's my pleasure. And thank you for creating this space. I can see that it comes from a place of love that you have for yourself, but also for other people. And the book that you put into the world, Hungry for More, I'm absolutely loving it; I'm devouring it. It's so rich. You cover all the themes that we discussed during this conversation. Thank you for having me.

 

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

My pleasure.

 



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Adrienne Youdim MD

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