How Small Wins Build Big Health: The Vitality Framework Explained

Introduction to vitality and health 0:00

People intuitively understand that health is more than the absence of disease. But when I put that very question to physicians, I train a lot of fellows and residents over the years, and this has been a pet question of mine. And I ask them, okay, so what's your definition of health? And people are all over the place with it. So it's something I've thought about for years. And if you look, people will understand that good health is about physical health and also good psychosocial well-being. But another aspect of it is that sense of vitality.

So when you have, you know, that sense of vital, that vitality is like a North Star. It's like a North Pole. My vitality is down. in one way or another, my health is down. So then you look and say, wait a second, what's dragging down your vitality? And that's, so health is not just about the absence of disease, but it's, you know, feeling a sense of vitality. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Well, welcome to Vitality Made Simple. This is the podcast that equips you to feel better, look better and to enjoy better relationships.

Well, you know how I love to talk about vitality and I love to talk about relationships. This is the most awesome interview coming up. Welcome Dr. Alan Rozanski. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Oh, well, Dr. Rozanski is a breath of fresh air. He has done so much in his life as a physician in the area of cardiology. He's at the Icon School of Medicine as a professor at Mount Sinai. He is the director of cardiac education and fellowship, the director of nuclear cardiology.

You know, super smart, but I mean, he is a nice person and that really matters to me. You all know how much that matters to me. And so today we're going to talk about vitality. Thank you for reaching out to me, Dr. Rosansky. I really do appreciate that. You're my pleasure. Well, so I started researching you and then I came across this most awesome research paper that you're the sole author on with a hundred and seven references. It's called the pursuit of health, a vitality based perspective. Now you have to know vitality made simple has been we've been doing this for four years, have almost 230 episodes, only missed one week.

And so When it first started though, some of my friends said, uh, one of my really super smart friends, I thought she was smart before she said this, but she said, um, well, Debbie, nobody knows what vitality means. That's a terrible name. And I said, well, you know, if they don't know what vitality means, they need to listen to some other podcast.

Defining vitality and Viktor Frankl's influence 2:50

So you hear you are all about vitality. So Dr. Rosansky, tell us your definition of vitality. Sure. Well, Vitality is actually defining the literature, interestingly enough, if you look deep enough, in papers that were published in 1990 by a series of investigators in the psychology world. And they discovered, or they discussed it as a sense, an inner sense of pleasure, a sense of feeling energetic and alive. And they described it as something that's activating. You know, we take our energy, we take our sense of vitality for granted.

You know, we don't people notice they lose it is, you know, short term is when they have a common cold. And for a few days, they're dragging. And the first day the cold clears, they feel, ah, that feels great. You know, and they're so happy, but they only hold on to it for a couple of minutes, because it's so ubiquitous in earlier years. But if you go on the flip side, what I deal with is patience. on many patients just would love to have the vitality back. So it's in a sense of feeling pleasurable.

Why is it activating as described in literature? Because we have a basic psychological need to pursue a sense of meaning. It's just part of our DNA. And when we have that sense of energy, we want to do something with that. We want to pursue goals. One of the worst feelings people have is waking up in the morning and not having something to live into. So that's basically how I would define by telling. Yes. Oh, it's so key. Um, and you know, it's, I thought it was so interesting since you were a cardiologist and you're, you're looking at other aspects besides cholesterol, besides, you know, the, you know, cardiac calcium score.

Um, so I know you also like to talk about Victor Frankel. Dr. Frankel is one of my favorite dead guys. Um, the, my listeners know I have a lot of favorite dead guys. Tell us about Victor Frankel. Well, he was a psychiatrist, he was a Holocaust survivor, and he was a keen observer. And he noted that the people who were surviving in the death camps, the concentration camps, were people who had something to live for. He described it for himself. He wanted to see his wife again. And that image kept him going, and other people likewise.

And he said, the minute people gave up hope and no longer had some sense of living for it, it was intolerable. And they perished very quickly. So that was his keen observation. And it's a truism. So it's one of those quoted books, I believe, of the 20th century, a key important book. Yeah, I would recommend Man's Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankel wrote it like eight days after he got released from Auschwitz and didn't even put his name on it or initially because he didn't think anybody would believe it.

And, you know, sort of talked about logo therapy with three basic characteristics of a purpose beyond yourself, a few good friends, and I think an internal perspective was one of those. So just really what we can still learn so much from. Well, in your work, Dr. Rosansky, you talk about healthspan and lifespan and I think that's so key because, you know, many of our listeners might be thinking, oh, I'm getting old or, you know, oh, and I think that's the completely wrong mindset. So so talk to us about just the definitions of health span.

We know what lifespan is. I've done a lot of work in that area. And and I think it's important for people to fully, fully understand. Sure. Well, before you talk about health span, you really have to talk about what is health, then you have to define it.

Healthspan, lifespan, and the six domains of health 7:00

So people intuitively understand that health is more than the absence of disease. But when I put that very question to physicians, I train a lot of fellows and residents over the years, and this has been a pet question of mine. In fact, I'm giving a lecture next week to fellows just on that subject. And I asked him, okay, so what's your definition of health? And people are all over the place with it. So it's something I've thought about for years. And if you look, people will understand it, good health.

is about good physical health and also good psychosocial well-being. But another aspect of it is that sense of vitality. So when you have, you know, that sense of vital, that vitality is like a North Star, it's like a North Pole. My vitality is down in one way or another, my health is down. So then you look and say, wait a second, what's dragging down your vitality? And that's, so health is not just about the absence of disease, but it's, you know, feeling a sense of vitality. If you're a young man and you're depressed or you're feeling very lonely and down and blue because of that, you really aren't so healthy.

And by the way, I don't say that just like a euphemism, I've said for years that the body testifies as to what's healthy. It's clear, we don't have to debate it. Anything that promotes longevity, anything that promotes or protects your physiology, anything that decreases your sense or your, let's say, your chance of illness, chronic illness, those things are healthy. So exercise is healthy, sleep is healthy, the lack of sleep is the opposite, smoking is the opposite. So that's in the physical domain.

But people who are pessimistic people who are depressed in the emotional domain, the body actually physiologically doesn't work as well. It goes haywire. You have much increased incidence of heart disease and people are depressed. Same with people who are lonely, same with people who have a low sense of life purpose, and people who are dealing with chronic stress. So these are all domains of health that will affect your health. But the thing I'll have in common is when you're functioning well in each of those domains, you have more vitality.

So vitality is the sum index, if you will, of the leading indicator of health from multiple aspects. Yes, you talk about how the pursuit of vitality actually, well, the byproduct of the pursuit of vitality is health, which is a really interesting way to look at that. So vitality is sort of the motivational tool, correct? Motivational tool. Think about it this way. You know, in life, we want to pursue goals. We want to be effective. We want to be happy. We want to feel socially expressed, but we want to be high performers, whatever we're doing.

When we are functioning well in all those areas, a byproduct of that is good health. You know, so if I take a younger middle-aged person, I start talking about, well, you know, if you start exercising, you know, you'll live longer. You'll have less heart disease in the future. They'll say, okay, that's nice. And they'll go back to their work. But if we can get people and say, wait a second, health is a verb. I want to be healthier, but what I can do now, in other words, is a great return on investment and exercising because of what it does for you in the here and now, instead of just talking about in terms of the future benefits, which are profound for sure, but there's also present benefits.

And that's what we under emphasize, unfortunately. Well, you don't come from the fear based direction. I mean, I thought that was so different in a lot of your writings. I mean, you you come from it from a positive way, a positive standpoint. And Dr. Zansky, so that people can enjoy now, like you said, and then then have more benefits later. Now, you even created a fellowship in behavioral cardiology. Is that correct? Am I? remembering that correctly. It's so unusual. I've never heard of a cardiologist who talks about behavior, really.

I didn't create a specific fellowship in behavioral cardiology, but I began this work by accident in the 1980s, and I can explain why. But it was an exciting time when the field of behavioral medicine was first emerging. And interestingly, a number of cardiologists got involved in it. It morphed into a field called behavioral cardiology. And so it was looking at the effect of stress and depression and all these other factors I'm mentioning in terms of cardiovascular health. So it became a term that we used called behavioral cardiology.

Today, we know it's much more expansive than that because everything that affects the heart affects the brain too. So it's more than just about cardiology. So, so what would surprise our listeners the most in terms of some area of behavior that impacts heart attack and stroke risk? Well, the behaviors that are key and important in terms of behavioral factors would be, you know, what you're eating, the quality of your food, how much you eat, you know, you're watching your weight, exercise, resistance training, particularly under emphasized area that I kind of separate from exercise because the muscle care is, it's got its own discipline and its own synergistic benefits to aerobic exercise and so forth.

Sleeper being very important, you know, avoiding substance abuse. These would be the big areas. But yeah, in your writing where I was trying to get to you talk a lot about optimism. I think that surprises people that that impacts heart attack and stroke risk. So tell us about that. Sure. So I was just, what I just said was just dealing with the physical factor, right? You know, in each of these other domains, the quality of your thinking, your emotional wellbeing, the quality of social life, how you pursue life goals and how you manage stress, all of those areas.

But the good news are all entrees for more vitality and better health. So specifically with optimism, which would be in the thinking area, we can do things to promote more optimism. You can't, optimism is like a catch term for all the things that produce a sense of being or feeling more optimistic. Before we talk about big optimism, we wanna talk about small optimism, which comes from, can I handle things on my plate? How am I doing with time management? When I make a list for the day, do I get it done?

If I don't, what's holding me back? Looking for those small wins, because as we handle the things in our life, successfully redevelop more optimism. Yeah, and then there's people that are more naturally optimistic, just they're bent. I was sort of born on the happy side of the mountain, and that doesn't make everybody else happy in my world, I've noticed. Have you had any experience with that, with people who are just kind of naturally optimistic, but maybe they get a little pushback from people in the world that don't really like optimism, maybe.

Well, I'm smiling because, you know, I have a friend down the street who was the most sunny side person I know. I mean, he is really optimistic all the time. And as a result, there's a certain charisma. So everybody, even the little kids hang around him. But you know what, we all have to be who we are, and we're born with different talents and so forth. And the issue isn't about, you know, comparing to other people, but can I be a little bit more optimistic when I was you know, a month ago, a few months ago, we can all work on our optimism, all the things that you build it, you know.

And there's so many other mindsets to work on. Someone can be, you know, an optimistic person, but suffer from a lot of resentment, or, you know, dealing with a lot of regret all the time, those regretful personalities, and so forth. A big one is gratitude. That's one that's available to everybody, and highly ignored, and yet the data is pretty profound. how important that is in terms of wellbeing and health. So the many entrees besides optimism to feel better in terms of your thinking. Well, I think many of those things cultivate optimisms, you know, such as forgiveness.

I mean, there's so much data on the power of forgiveness and the physiological benefits. I mean, how just your metabolism improves, you know, with forgiveness. Do you see that in your practice?

Behavioral cardiology and the role of optimism 16:20

Well, you know, the area with forgiveness is interesting. We don't have a hard outcome data. But there's a lot of data in terms of looking people's physiological responses, the heart rate and blood pressure response and the more forgiving trait person. Definitely things bounce off of them more. I talk about, you know, being more of a Teflon personality versus a Velcro personality. You like things you know, bounce off of you or whatever. That's one of the kind of benefits of aging. I think that people, as they get older, they learn to let things bounce off of them.

And it's one of the things why, and it surprises a lot of people, that people often, when they're older, can be happier in middle age. In young age, people are happy because of the optimism they have about life or everything in front of them, that sense of possibilities. In older age, you develop different sorts of ways that make you feel happy. Learning how to be a more forgiving personality is one of them, for sure. Yeah, I think that's really key. And I think just the whole decision to not be pulled down by age.

I mean, our society, you know, there's this whole area of ageism that I've been hearing about lately, Dr. Rozanski, and I think it starts, though, with those of us over 50. I mean, it starts with us having a positive attitude toward aging and not being afraid of it. and not feeling victim to birthdays. And I think if we show the younger population, hey, it's awesome to be 66. It's awesome to be, I think you're 75. I mean, you're still doing so many incredible things, whole new adventures. And so I think vitality is all wrapped up in that mindset.

Well, sure, you know, the approach to aging is one where you have to have a little bit of a realistic balance because you need to know, we're going through different passages in life, wonderful, which is aging, we can't ignore that. The challenge with aging in part is that we are losing physical energy, muscle mass, muscle strength, just overall energy a little bit as we age, but we can compensate for that. In fact, I know too many people. I don't know too many people, but I know enough people who are in their 80s and 90s who are quite vital and quite energetic.

So I say you can't have the same physical energy when you're older, but you can be every bit as energetic when you're older. In other words, you can be physically fit enough if you take care of yourself. And you can have a strong sense of purpose. And often without the weighted pressures of middle age, you can be more creative and The things you do, people pay more attention to the social life as they get older. There's many things that are very terrific benefits with aging, no question. Yeah, there sure are.

Dr. Dale Bredesen was on the podcast and we talked about, of course, memory. And we talked about this woman who's 102 years old that I saw on Instagram. She's called the Dancing Nana. And, you know, the thing is, she's She's just hilarious and she keeps on dancing. So I think a real key to vitality is to keep looking for new adventures. Keep looking for ways to use your brain, to use your body, to use your resources. It doesn't have to be a time to really slow down. You may be just speed up in other areas.

That is absolutely true. You know, at any age, you can pursue a sense of purpose and so forth. You can always be involved in as a volunteer. For example, the data is very clear that older adults are involved in a giving mode who do volunteer and belong to organizations and enjoy it, actually enjoy tremendous health benefit and a mortality benefit. There's no question about that. Hmm. Yeah. Lots of data in that area. And I've seen that in my clinical practice when, uh, say a busy executive who had a job they loved retires, you know, they either find a new thing to pour their energy and, um, skills into, or they decline fast and, you know, mentally as well as physically and just lose their life.

It's really amazing. Sure. It really comes back. Yeah, it does. Dr. Frankel was so amazing. Well, I want to talk about your you have these six domains of vitality. So tell our listeners about those. Sure. So this began years ago when I was doing a study in the laboratory. I wasn't interested in psychology. Although if I go back and connect the dots, it really was in college, but I'd forgotten about it. But I had long forgotten about it. But we began to notice that patients with heart disease, we developed this ambulatory technique where we could look at the electrocardiogram of patients while they were doing the daily activities.

And we were surprised. We were finding people when they were driving the car, you know, doing household activities, and not exercising, we're developing abnormalities that indicated a lack of blood supply to the heart. So it led me to construct a study where we said, let's examine the heart under not just physical stress, but also under mental stress. What happens is that what we do is we image patients' heart directly with a scintillation camera, where we've injected a radioisotope, but we can look at the wall motion of the heart.

And if you have normal function, with exercise, the walls just are more vigorous. But if you have a blockage on your core arteries, then the wall starts to slow down, or can even stop moving in a given area if you have lack of blood supply. I said, let's do this on the mental stress. And so we started to do this in patients and we gave them a battery of mental tasks. And I did not, you know, perceive this could happen.

Aging well, purpose, and social connection 22:40

speaking about the stress in his life, he was about to lose his job. And, you know, this one portion of his heart stopped moving while he was talking about it. He stopped talking about the stress of losing his job, and the whole notion came back. Similar to what happened when we put people on a bicycle in excess, but this was stress. So that was my aha moment. and it led me to pursue this. I got exposed to what other people were doing, learned about the role of depression and chronic stress and heart disease, later gravitated into looking at the positive domains, and then realized that the body was testifying to what was healthy or not healthy, as I said before, and it came up with these six domains of health, six areas where when you function well in them, you're actually promoting your physiology your sense of wellbeing, decreasing your risk of chronic disease and actually promoting longevity.

And one is the physical domain, which I say there's four pillars there, exercise resistance training, sleep quality, and your nutritional health, if you will. Then the area of your mindsets and mental vitality, which has even more to do with it in terms of how you can focus and whether you're getting very distracted in life and so forth. The emotional domain, which has many aspects to it from happiness to depression, anxiety, and other factors. The social domain and how we satisfy our social well-being, our sense of life purpose, which includes even time management if there's an area.

Sixth domain is how you manage stress. If you manage it well, actually, You know, there's good stress and bad stress. Good stress, taking on challenges in the pursuit of a sense of purpose, builds optimism and confidence and well-being. But there's also toxic stress, which is overwhelming with a lot of negativity. You don't feel you can control it. And that can be very harmful to your health. So those are your six domains of health. Yeah, it really makes sense. I think we try to silo things and separate things out, but everything affects everything.

And that's why often, you know, Dr. Rosansky, you'll see somebody who maybe is, I don't advocate this, but who's eating Oreos and Cheetos every day, but they have a, you know, a positive attitude and they're really focused on, say, you know, helping children learn to read. And, you know, they're doing a lot of the other things of your six domains. They still need to be doing, you know, the physical health areas. But a lot of that has so much weight in compensating for the others, it seems like. Well, they're all interrelated, you know.

Interestingly, One of the ways you improve physical health behaviors is often by addressing these other areas. The data is very clear from empiric studies that people who feel happier, people who are optimistic, people who feel socially positive with good relationships in their lives, only on people who don't have a sense of purpose or people are pessimistic or depressed. So there's this very intimate relationship. So what's the point of dividing these things into this is medical and this is psychological?

That has been a huge divide in medicine for not just decades, but going I have to tell you, I'm optimistic. Well, it's just like the area of the mouth and the rest of the body. Thank you for watching my TED talk called, you know, The Forgotten Orifice, because it's just been so ignored that the oral pathogens in the mouth affect the gut. And of course, we know the gut greatly affects the brain, the psychology. So it's just all there. Yeah, you know, I was thinking of doing your TED talk as I listened to it, that there's a certain truism.

In other words, you're talking about oral hygiene, and when you aren't careful, you develop inflammation, which can affect other parts of the body. So there's this whole health care mindset, if you will, that want to take care of my health. And if it shows up in one area, it often shows up in other areas. So usually people are more, you know, I think you tell me, because you're the dentist, is that all this experience? I think that people who are tending to be very, you know, rigorous about their dental care and so forth, and you sense that, are people who tend in general to probably eat better and have other better health habits.

It's not one on one for sure, but I think there's a general tendency. No, I think you're you're so on target because people who say understand that it matters understand it's not just about, you know, white teeth or not just the teeth that show Dr. Rosansky, you know, it's not just the front teeth. But they understand that it's part of their whole life. It's part of their ability to eat healthy food. It's part of their ability to smile and laugh and throw their head back and not be embarrassed. It's better breath.

And then when they start learning and there's so much all over in the media now, the health media, functional medicine, integrated medicine area, about how much it affects other parts of the body. And I tell my patients, it's really not about your teeth at first, it's about your blood-brain barrier, it's about your gut, it's about your cancer potential. You know, these microbes, they travel and they affect everything. That's why I really liked your six domains of health because everything affects everything.

And once in a while, you know, Dr. Rozanski, I'll see somebody who's very health conscious, in fact, overly health conscious to the point that they're so stressed out. And so, you know, they need like relax, you know, eat a few something you like and go sit by the lake and enjoy the sunset. You know what I'm saying? They need they don't need health advice from me. They need to learn to relax. You're so right. You know, and you know, it's just that there's no perfection here. You know, we all have areas and it's not about perfection.

It's about the direction. Right. Well, and I think there's where that's where, you know, Dr. Frankel had it so right. You've got to have an eternal perspective because if you think you can cheat death, you're really going to be stressed out.

Small steps, habit change, and practical vitality strategies 29:20

You can't cheat death, but you know what? to have a choice in how well gracefully or strong your age, that is a choice we have. It's only, not completely predetermined, but you increase the odds, and then you just pray and hope that it all goes well. Yes, and hopefully you have this long and vibrant health span. You know, being so impressed with your paper, I'm going to link this, folks, on my free research tab on my website, because you're going to want to read Dr. Rosansky's paper. It made me kind of look at the more recent numbers of health span, life span, and there was a 20, I think it was 20-24.

study of health span, lifespan and out of over 180 countries, United States was the worst. We have the biggest gap between health span and lifespan and this is very objectively formatted folks because it's the HAL index, the H-A-L-E index, the Health Adjusted Life Expectancy Index and there's a whole lot of factors on that. So, you know, we were number one in the longest gap, you know, the lowest health span. Well, it would be the you start losing your health span at the youngest age. Well, I said that very backwards, and I'm very sorry about that.

Clarify it. It's interesting. There's many ways to look at data. And by certain indices, we lag. But we do a terrific job in the US when people are older, when they have health problems of really helping people a lot to recover and so forth. The issue with health spend, I think it's a useful metric to some extent as a concept, because it's advocating, wait a second, it's not just about longevity, but it's about having more life in your years as opposed to more years of your life. That, by the way, is a phrase that was coined about 50, 60 years ago.

So there was this whole concept of health span from way back. But the problem is that, you know, if we are defining health span as the absence of disease, we're still defining health in terms of the absence of disease. And as many people who have hypertension, heart disease, even heart failure, and they're thriving, they're doing really well because they have compensated with this tremendous sense of feeling energetic and vitality from all these other domains of health. So it's a little bit of a tricky metric in a sense.

Um, I, you know, I think the main thing is, is to point out, uh, I would say, look, you know, how energetic are you feeling? Finally, you're feeling, you know, you, there's, there's, uh, I like it to be, uh, what I call the, uh, the, uh, ride the glide in the slide, you know, the early years of life, you know, you can abuse things and, you know, you're going to feel healthy because your body is an amazing adaptive thing, you know, unless you're I've got a real substance abuse problem or something like that.

In the Middle Ages, just like a glide is like losing you know, three to 8% of your muscle pass per decade and so forth. And then there's the slide in old age where if you're not careful, if you don't take care of your muscles, bones, your metabolic health, you may have a surprise in terms of the onset of frailty before you thought you could be living for 15 years, 20 years sometimes in poor health. And that's what I think is we need to work on and focus on. how we're building that reservoir of vitality and good health so that we can age well and gracefully.

And it's not just measured in a metric of the absence of disease, it's much more than that. Oh, it is. And I think it all affects relationships so intensely because when people don't feel good, they stay home and they stay home. They don't get invited again. And, you know, it just, it's just such a catch 22. Well, in your paper, you talk about the power of small suggestions. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So it's so easy to talk about, you know, let's do this, let's do that. This is like, you know, the to improve your sense of vitality and so forth.

And when we give people a list, they're just overwhelmed. You know, it's hard to change health behaviors. It's hard and it's easy. It depends how you define it. But generally speaking, the key thing is to get on the playing field with something you want to change. And once you're on the playing field, which is called such a small step, it's that first step on the playing field, then things can happen. Let me give it to you by the power of suggestion of what I do with patients who are sedentary, because I've had experience with this for many years because of my background and the kind of clinical work I've done over the years.

We will tell patients that, or I won't say this to patients, who are sedentary, but the recommendations are that people should get approximately 30 minutes of exercise five days a week. And this would mean, you know, like a brisk walk, for example, five days a week and so forth. And the data shows that this is very good data in terms of promoting health. So that's aerobic success, if you will. But if you take a sedentary person, the goal is to get them on the playing field and to be doing something.

Well, it turns out, if you look at the greatest bang for the buck, it's when you take a person who's been completely sedentary and get them to do something. If you can get a sedentary person, I mean, talking about somebody who hasn't done any exercise, and you can get them to, let's say, the data show that you are going to, you know, over the following, let's say, 10-year period, decrease the mortality risk by about 20%, which is huge. That's the, you know, power of a statin drug, for example. So that initial step of getting people to do something, because how does that work?

So I might suggest to people, can you give me even five minutes per day of intentionally doing a brisk walk? And I can tell you many patients who've said yes, then didn't do it. But what happens if you do do it, one day you happen to do it for 10 minutes. And then, you know, you started to build the 10 minutes. One day you ran into a friend and you took a walk for 20 minutes. And then you started to build more. Everybody has the experience when they're trying to train. And at first it was hard to run a quarter mile.

Once you could do a quarter mile, it was easy to do a half mile. Once you could do a half mile, it was a lot easier to get up to a mile. It's that initial entree that's in the exercise domain, for example. But you can apply that in the mental domain. You can apply it in the social domain or working on, let's say you want to, you said, wait a second, I'm not really happy in my job. It's not fulfilling my sense of purpose. Maybe I thought I wanted to be a writer, for example. Well, can you start with the first step?

Can you take out 10 to 15 minutes per night stop, you know, that's that is the place to start. That's the power of the first step. And we underestimate its power. It is a tremendous power. It is. I 100 percent agree. It reminds me, Dr. Rosanski, about a patient I had who was drinking eight Dr. Peppers a day. And obviously her blood sugar was crazy and her teeth were rotting and she was, you know, feeling rotten and feeling guilty about it. And so I do coaching and so I said, well, let's just can you do can you do seven and a half Dr.

Personal vitality, modern medicine, and closing thoughts 37:40

Pepper's a day, you know, do that for a while. And anyway, through, you know, the same method, she worked herself down. I said, you never have to stop Dr. Pepper if you want to have one a day. We're going to call it a win, you know, from that far down. And so she eventually stopped, though, because she saw the momentum of her success. And she's like, well, I really don't have to have this, Debbie. I can, you know, I can drink water or I can drink tea or kombucha or something, you know, something else.

So it really does, I think, give people a mental acceleration to know they can start slow. Yes, yes. Yeah, really fun. So what do you do for your vitality? Well, I do exercise. I have meaningful goals in multiple domains. I take it up blogging. I enjoy it very much because it's an expression of, you know, 40 years of work in the biobehavioral area. And I was focused on just academic papers for many years. And that's a slow process, you know, very, very rewarding process, but this is a home and ball game.

So it's like, you know, you have new goals and so I'm having the time of my life with it. Well, and people can learn so much from you because you've seen such a transition in medicine. I mean, just what I've seen in 40 years, and I think you're at 45 years. I mean, it's pretty incredible what we've learned, isn't it? It is. It is incredible. And, you know, all the time it's, it's progressing in so many different domains, you know, the whole AI revolution and how it relates to healthcare. You know, in the biobehavioral area, we have progressed so much in the last 20, 30 years, just our understanding of the role of optimism, really, you know, covered in terms of our medical data about 20 years ago.

The first data in terms of the importance of the sense of purpose was about 15 years ago. These are new areas. When it died, they were looking at like GLP-1 agonists and these incredible new medications for control and weight. So it's just so many exciting areas. It's like, you know, it's just a tremendously part of that. Yeah, no, we've lived at a wonderful time. I mean, in my world, you know, we've seen salivary diagnostics being able to test the DNA. We've had lasers come, you know, to be we've had implants.

I mean, so many wonderful things that, you know, in 1981, it would have been like, no way, you know. Yeah, no way that surgery has progressed. to more, you know, robotic techniques, non-invasive techniques, or minimally invasive techniques. It's incredible. Yeah. I had a patient who had one of the first heart transplants in Oklahoma. I mean, that was incredible to watch him thrive. Yes, absolutely. Well, how can people find you? They can find me on my website, alanrosansky.com and on LinkedIn. Those are two great areas.

And on LinkedIn. Okay. So your blogs are on your website. Yes, they are. Okay. That's fantastic. And I will also link your awesome article about vitality and you've really defined it well for us today. And I love that it's a metric in, in health. Yes. Anything else you want to tell us before we close? No, I think that everyone should just that find that one step that they want to take towards better health. and be encouraged that, you know, just after the evening, a physical domain, any of these domains, you know, giving more smiles to people, you know, spending more time with your children.

So many different ways you can promote your vitality and then health follows from them. Oh, that's great. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Rozanski. I appreciate it. I wish you well. I know you're going to, we're going to be hearing from you in all kinds of Great areas and thank you listeners. You're spreading the news of Vitality Made Simple. Send this podcast to anybody that needs more or even if they have a lot that they're going to appreciate it because they already have it. So also please subscribe, please share and blessings until next time.

Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks.com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on Doctor Talks, real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.