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Stress as the Core of Mind-Body Connection 0:00

- As we begin. Day 6 of this program, I've mentioned that stress is at the heart of the mind body connection. It's the main mechanism by which our mental and emotional conditioning, our psychology, if you will contributes to physical symptoms and survey after survey, be it in the public or private sectors validate that people view stress as their biggest problem. That's what led me many years ago to offer stress management programs for corporate as well as the public. And I remember people coming up to me at the end of my talks and they would say how impactful my talks have been and how they plan to follow through with some of my suggestions. I also remember coming up upon some of them a few months later and invariably, none of them have followed through.

None of them were continuing to do a lot of the behaviors that were discussed during my talks. And I began to wonder what's going on here. People talk about how important stress is, but when it comes down to it, they have tremendous difficulty following through. And this took me on a path in which I was exploring people's resistance to managing

Why People Struggle to Follow Through 1:32

stress. And while there are many reasons in my talk uh today, I want to identify and, and focus on three of those. And they're all factors interestingly enough that to a great extent are out of our control, at least until we become aware of them first, is that our stress response isn't all bad. In fact, our stress response is adaptive and helps prepare us to perform at our best to be better focused, motivated and act. If you think about the successes in your life, you will quickly realize that they were all accompanied by stress, big decisions, important performances, deadlines all led to success and all accompanied by stress.

One of my early mentors, Donald Hebb, one of the pioneers in neuroscience coined the phrase neurons that fire together, wire together. And so think about that. If all of your successes are associated paired with stress, the result is that stress is something that your body, your mind is attracted to, wants to actually create more of. And so your brain again is automatically geared to create stress.

Three Reasons Stress Management Feels Hard 3:04

Second, I refer to a developmental mismatch between the environment in which you learned how to use your stress response, which is your childhood environment and your current environment. Now, your childhood environment that you adapted to you had to adapt to it. That was your survival, that was instinctual. Now we don't go out and do our own gathering of food as a child. No, we are dependent on our primary caregivers. And so our early adaptation, our early survival learning is based on the lessons of that early childhood environment.

The problem is that while this was appropriate as a child, those lessons that you learned, there are no longer appropriate, but you continue to play by those rules. And our earliest learning because it was survival learning goes in very deep establishing neural networks that support those early lessons. So what I'm suggesting is that literally your brain developed got structured based on those lessons. What's more is that the voice you hear? 24/7? What I refer to as your internal parent is essentially the spokesperson for those early lessons and it's operating 24/7.

So this voice and these patterns exert, exert a gravitational pull, keeping you stuck in those patterns. And finally, the third key here that I want to emphasize is another mismatch, this mismatches between the environment in which our stress response, our fight or fight flight response developed. That's the hunter gatherer and environment of our asset ancestors and our current environment. And even though our current environment looks nothing like that early hunter gather environment, we still carry that same stress response, the fight or flight response. So think of all the stresses in your life,

Neuroplasticity and Building New Pathways 5:38

how many of them can be addressed by either fighting them or running from them? Really? Almost none. Thus, what happens is our bodies mobilize to that to either fight or run. But then we have to hold in this energy. So the mobilization requires burning more fuel in every cell of your body to engage muscles and art and your brain and this produces byproducts toxins and inflammation. But there's good news in this story. So on the one hand, we have this gravitational pull to the old pattern, but there's another very strong mechanism and this mechanism of our nervous system that we can engage and that can support change is neuroplasticity.

We now know that a 30 minute impactful experience can literally trigger new neuronal growth in your brain. And so when you start changing your behaviors, when you start engaging in new behaviors that support healthy development, healthy lifestyle, your brain literally starts to make new connections. And so the way the process works is moment by moment, you have a choice. If you follow the old pattern, it reinforces the old circuitry. If on the other hand, you engage in a new behavior, you develop new nerve pathways and the more you choose the new, the more the old pathways actually fall by the wayside.

I like to think of how as you approach, say a forest. When you look at this forest and you are going to walk through the forest, you will see one heavily trodden path and the tendency is to go down that path. That's the old pattern. That's the tried pattern. I wouldn't say the true pattern, but it's the tri pattern. It's what you've learned. It's where of the path is already created. The problem is that path doesn't take you where you wanna go. Where do you wanna go? Well, it's over here where you first have to create that path. So you gotta take out your machete and you have to start whacking those weeds and cutting down those trees to begin creating a new path.

It's hard work.

Choosing the Path of Healthy Aging 8:34

However, the more you do it, the more that new path gets created, the more the new path gets created, the easier it gets for you to walk down that new path and make that choice. Instead of the old choice, the more you do that, the more weeds and growth occur during to the old path. So that soon, well, soon is a relative word. Ok? But if you are consistent with this approach, eventually the new path becomes the easier path. The go-to path I like to say that it has to do with where we are grounded right now, we're grounded in the old pattern.

But you wanna get grounded in the new pattern where you look to new, healthier behaviors, new and healthier thinking patterns, positive thinking, you remove the tendency to be hard on yourself to put yourself down and you'd be more accepting of yourself. And these will help you on your right new path. Now, Rob and I realize that this is the direction of healthy aging and longevity, as well as what you're listening to during these 7 days. We also realize that it requires an ongoing process. This is at the heart of the path of longevity.

So we are so happy that you join us on this journey and we realize that true change requires an ongoing commitment. And as we like to say the path, so we encourage you all to find the path, find your path to support you in this process. We will be offering programs that will help you find and then stay on the path of longevity. Good luck.