How The Four Longevity Circles Transform Your Life

Life, Energy, Longevity, and Performance Circles 0:00

Hi, doctor. Jeffrey Gladden here. I want to continue to walk you through these circles that we just talked about the life, energy, longevity, health and performance circles and how this approach creates an exponential response to an exponential problems opportunity. So those circles are related this way. Also. And that is that the life energy circle is really the circle that binds them all a little bit like Lord of the rings, the one ring that binds them all. And so when people get to a point in their life where they don't feel like they want to, can't do what they want to do, don't look like they want to.

They have a decision to make. Either I'm going to acquiesce to the aging process, which is what I was told to do. Why don't you just realize you're getting older and take an antidepressant, or we fight back. We say, no, I'm not going to go down that path. That doesn't look very good to me. I want to go a different direction. And so what we do is we actually take a get healthy strategy. I'm going to start exercising, going to eat better I'm going to replace my hormones. I'm going to learn to meditate.

I'm going to decrease stress in my life that all those things are absolutely critical, but it's ultimately just a linear response to an exponential problem because it's only addressing the health circle. What's required is to actually address the longevity circle, which is revolves around the actual drivers of aging as well as performance. When I'm 100, I want to be fast, agile, strong, quick, balanced,

Choosing Growth Over Aging 1:31

with great cardiovascular capacity and or reserve rate recovery and flexibility. Right. And if I want to be that at 100, I need to be that today. And so we train specifically when you're 18, you can go out, lift some weights and go for a run and everything's good. But as you go through the decades of life, the way that you've worked out in your 20s is not going to be what you need to do in your 30s. And what you did in your 30s is not going to need to be what you do in your 40s in every decade. You need to up your game and think about it differently.

And ultimately, performance is about optimizing the nervous system from the standpoint of how we lift, how we move, how we run, what our balance is, what our flow states are available to us. So this becomes very, very important. And then the life energy circle really is a psycho spiritual space. This is the one that really binds all the circles together. So this is the life energy circle. It's built on a growth mindset. Are you married to your questions or are you married to your answers? Right.

So in my journey, I realized that as a cardiologist, I'd been trained up and my colleagues had been trained up to have a set of answers, and we'd almost been brainwashed to the point where we felt like those were the only answers that were available. And yet, in my own health crisis, what I realized was those answers failed me. And at that point, I had to start asking different questions like, how do I actually fix this? How do I not feel exhausted all the time? How do I lose this weight? How do I get my brain back?

How do I stop feeling depressed? And it was in asking those questions that I found the answers. And so I think all progress is basically based on asking the right question. So it's very important, as you've claimed your age. It's very important now to claim your questions. What are the questions that you're asking for us? We have four questions or primary questions. How good can we be right? How fit, how strong, how mentally sharp and for how many decades can we carry that forward? And an additional how relationally complete, how spiritually connected, right.

That's all part of how good can we be?

Training for Longevity and Performance 3:30

How do we make 100 new 30? How do we live young for a lifetime? And how do we correct the Hayflick limit? How do we live well beyond 120, not just survive to 120? How do we actually live well beyond 120, right? These are the questions that drive us every single day, and we literally have thousands of answers in our practice. We have access to every technology you can think of. And yet we're only married to those questions because things change and we need to update and add new things and find new solutions for people all the time.

And that's the way we think. So this greatest growth mindset is critical. The other thing about a growth mindset is that it moves you from being a binary thinker, where one person's right and the other person's wrong, and to being a quantum thinker like a quantum computer. It doesn't just have a one and a zero, it has a plus one, a minus one, a zero in the middle, and a sphere of all possibilities. That's how quantum computers work. And our minds need to transition into quantum thinking, where we actually move out of the binary, where we become defensive when somebody doesn't agree with our answer.

Right. And we actually move into this sphere where we want to look at all the possibilities and basically pull out the right solution in this moment for this situation. That creates lots of flexibility, and it basically enables us to continue to progress not only in our health journeys, but as human beings and then optimizing mental health. This is such a critical thing. So many people are living in reaction to traumas that we've all experienced. I don't know anybody that I've ever met

Growth Mindset and Quantum Thinking 4:59

that has an experienced trauma in their life. And if you're listening to this, I, I would probably bet that you've had trauma too. And what happens to us is we end up living in reaction to those traumas. Right. We're on tilt, if you will, like a poker player that's lost three hands in a row. Now he's on tilt. Everybody at the table knows he's on tilt and they take advantage of that. When we are living in reactions to trauma, we are living on tilt. When we walk into a room, other people read our energies right.

We have six senses, not five. The six senses. We read each other's energies. We do that all the time. So when you're living on tilt, you're basically encumbered. You can't really be the full expression of who you are. You can't step into that 300 year old mind when you're encumbered by these traumas that you're living in reaction to. So what's critical? And this is a mental health and also a psycho spiritual conversation, but it's how you dive into those traumas. Okay. Let me understand those traumas.

Let me deconstruct those traumas. Let me understand what happened, what I contributed, what the other people contributed, what actually went down. And then you get to a point where you can deeply understand it, then you can start to heal it, and you can forgive everybody that's involved, including yourself. And from there, you can actually move into a place where you start to transcend that trauma. And at that point, you become grateful for everything that ever happened to you, because it brought you closer to where you are today.

It brought you to this, to this seminar today where you're learning about how to optimize longevity, have a 30 year old body and a 300 year old mind. And that's a beautiful thing. And when you actually optimize mental health, it unencumbered you now you're free to actually live this unencumbered life where you can be step into the full expression of who you're really here to be. And that's a beautiful thing.

Healing Trauma and Mental Health 6:46

The next thing is feeling loved. So many people don't have unconditional love for themselves, and I think it's so important that you visualize yourself as a little two year old, a little three year old, just cute, sweet, so lovable. Right? And just if you see a little child like that, it's just like, oh my gosh, I just want to scoop them up. They're so lovable and that's who you are. You're that lovable. That's how lovable you are. And you need to shower yourself with that same kind of unconditional love.

It's so healing and it decreases so many elements of stress in your life. The next is optimizing relational health. This is absolutely critical. You know, every blue zone basically has had been vertical integration across generations and social connection across the community. And it's so important for us to have that in as well. So what's the definition of a great relationship. What does that look like? Well, for me it's knowing and being known and loving and being loved to know and be known and to love and be loved.

And when you know somebody deeply and you're willing to be vulnerable, to allow somebody else to know you deeply, that leads to very courageous conversations between the two of you. You bring up topics that it's like, she's like, if I bring this up, this may destroy the relationship, I don't know. But this is on my heart and I need to bring this forward. And I'd like for you to listen to this. And and, you know, let's take a look at it. And if you're working with a partner that's empathetic and sympathetic to that process, when you do that and it's scary, I will tell you it's scary.

When you do that, you build intimacy in a way that you will never build intimacy in any other way. Relationships are not about maintaining or feeling well. We have this great feeling. It's about really knowing and loving from that deep knowing. And then it's really important to understand that language is a very poor form of communication. We think it's the holy grail of communication, but it's really not. If we could communicate telepathically right now, if I could just do that with you, that would be communication.

But we're dribbling out words here, trying to basically create context

Unconditional Love and Strong Relationships 8:49

and construct concepts in your mind. And you would do the same if you were able to talk back. And you'll probably ask questions which will be that conversation. But language inherently is flawed. And when you understand that it's flawed because it says one thing, but you know that in your psycho spiritual space, many things can be true at once. You can love something and hate somebody simultaneously, right? And yet it's very difficult to communicate that in just a sentence or two. And so when you understand that language is a poor form of communication, it makes you very empathetic to the process.

All of a sudden you find yourself asking questions like, geez, it sounds to me like this is what you're saying. Did I get that right? It feels like this is what's happening for you. Is that is that close to the truth? And when you ask those questions like same kind of questions, quite honestly, the therapist or counselor might ask, you start to actually build trust and confidence that this is a safe place for people to actually bear their souls and come forward. We move away from judgment and to understanding, and that's so critical for a great relationship.

And then feeling joy. This is really become my North star, if you will, feeling joy. If I'm not feeling joy doing something, I probably shouldn't be doing it. And maybe the same is true for you too. I've had some really deep meditative experiences that have shown me that when we're connected to source energy love, the consciousness that everything is love.

Joy, Creation, and Purpose 10:20

It's pure love. Like the love that if you have an experiences, it's like love that you can't even describe. It's ineffable. And from that love. Love loves to create. And in those creations we have this self-perpetuating universe, and we ourselves have the ability to create. And I believe humans are at their best when we're creating and when we're creating. What are we creating for? We're creating to create joy, to create joy for others. Whether it's a business that you've started, a relationship that you've started, a family that you've started, ultimately it's about creating joy.

And if you live in that triad of from a loving place creating to bring joy, this will transform your life. This is amazing stuff. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the other areas in the next talk.