Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How Modern Life Makes You Sick – And How To Fix It | Jeff Krasno About this episode You're getting the wrong kind of stress. Here's how to change that.
Jeff Krasno https://www.jeffkrasno.com/ is the co-founder and CEO of Commune https://www.onecommune.com/, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being, and co-creator of Wanderlust https://wanderlust.com/, a global series of wellness events. He hosts the Commune podcast https://bit.ly/Communepodcast and his new book is called Good Stress: The Benefits of Doing Hard Things https://www.jeffkrasno.com/book.
In this episode we talk about:
Practical strategies for bringing "good stress" into your life Fasting Communication techniques And much more Paid subscribers of DanHarris.com will have exclusive access to a set of all-new guided meditations, led by friend of the show Cara Lai https://www.caralai.org/#/, customized to accompany each episode of the Get Fit Sanely series. We're super excited to offer a way to help you put the ideas from the episodes into practice. Learn all about it here. https://www.danharris.com/p/a-month-of-guided-meditationsjust
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Transcript 13,996 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hey, gang. Today, we're going to challenge the way you think about stress. That word, "stress," has negative connotations for pretty good reasons. Stress is often what kills us in the end. It corrodes the mind and the body. You want to avoid it as much as possible. Except, there are certain kinds of stress that we actually need. It's what my guest today calls "good stress." My guest's argument is that many aspects of modern life are making us sick. Our chronic need for comfort, our sedentary lifestyles, our constant feeding. These things put us out of alignment with evolution. In other words, we live in a world with too much bad stress and not enough good stress.
1:04 Dan Harris? So, how can you change that? Today, we're going to talk about a bunch of practical strategies. My guest is Jeff Krasno, who's a longtime stalwart of the wellness world, who, a few years ago, learned to his shock and dismay that he was actually quite unhealthy. And that led him to do a deep dive, not only into his lifestyle, but also into the science of good stress. So, he's got a new book, and it's called "Good Stress: The Benefits of Doing Hard Things." Aside from being an author, Jeff is also the CEO of a company called Commune, which is a masterclass platform for well-being, and he's the host of the Commune Podcast. Just to say, we're now in the last week of our month-long series, which we call "Get Fit Sanely." As with every episode this month,
1:49 Dan Harris? this episode comes with a bespoke guided meditation from my friend, the great Dharma teacher, Cara Lai. Today's meditation is all about how to make a radical and counterintuitive move. Instead of your habitual move of either being overwhelmed by stress or pretending it's not there, can you actually let your stress in mindfully? This meditation is available to paying subscribers on danharris.com. Speaking of danharris.com, we're now going to start releasing companion meditations for all of our episodes in July and August. This experiment has worked so well that we're going to keep it going. I'm excited about that. We will get started with Jeff Krasno right after this.
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4:03 Dan Harris? Jeff Krasno, welcome to the show.
4:05 Speaker 03 Dan Harris, welcome to California.
4:10 Speaker 03 No one has a sense of humor out here.
4:12 Dan Harris? Really?
4:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's no irony. I mean, for a guy coming from the East Coast, you know.
4:17 Dan Harris? That's true. I mean, I pulled up in, had an Uber drop me off and in the driveway, there was a self-described witch with a feather and a rattle and she was going to commune with your wife in some witchy way. So that seemed.
4:32 Speaker 03 Yeah. I mean, here, we judge authenticity by the circumference of the brim of someone's hat.
4:39 Dan Harris? I thought you were gonna say by the circumference of their aura.
4:42 Speaker 03 Oh, well, that's true, too. They are often correlated. Yeah, we're more, we're better at sarcopenia out here than sarcasm.
4:51 Dan Harris? Wait, wait, wait, I'm laughing, but I actually don't know what sarcopenia means.
4:54 Speaker 03 It's a muscle loss, generally associated with getting old.
4:59 Dan Harris? Oh, I see. Or GLP-1s.
5:01 Speaker 03 GLP-1s, yeah, we can talk about that.
5:04 Dan Harris? We should talk about that. Let's just start at a high, high level. You've got this new book, Good Stress. Congratulations.
5:09 Speaker 03 Thank you, sir.
5:10 Dan Harris? There's a backstory that you tell in the book about a kind of unpleasant surprise in your own life as a wellness entrepreneur and teacher, et cetera, et cetera. Can you tell that story?
5:20 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, this actually does have some irony in it because I've been in the world of health and wellness for as long as you've ever known me, you know, 20 years. But somewhere along my foray into health and wellness, I took a U-turn into what I call wealth and illness. So, you know, I was running this concern called Wanderlust, at which you appeared numerous times. I think that was our point of initial intersection.
5:50 Dan Harris? Yes.
5:50 Speaker 03 Of course, this was a wellness-based festival, essentially, based upon all of the principles and the modalities and the practices and praxis of wellness, of the well-being, yoga, mindfulness.
6:05 Speaker 03 Organic food, biodynamic wine, regenerative agriculture, you name it, we've we folded it in.
6:11 Dan Harris? It was the first place I ever heard the word kombucha.
6:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, yes. All right. Well, that's jumped the shark. I was deep in kombucha, but I wasn't really drinking the kombucha. I was primarily focused on the business of Wanderlust and the business caught up with me. You know, I was very enamored with the notion of growing this concern with the best of intentions. I mean, it was like, can we create the world's biggest yoga retreat? Because I saw firsthand the power of yoga and community to really heal. And my wife, as I write about in the book, started a yoga studio at ground zero. But along the way, as we expanded, I was on an airplane 200 days a year.
6:59 Speaker 03 I was constantly insomniatic. I was chronically fatigued. I was brain fogged. I was irritable. I needed to check my phone every two seconds, you know, all of these incredibly anodyne, common presentations that we've essentially accepted as normal, but they're totally abnormal. Hundred years ago, no way. And of course, what I subsequently learned is that all of those symptoms or presentations are just barely upstream from what we call chronic disease. And about five years ago, this was the big bucket of ice water that I got over my head,
7:42 Speaker 03 which was at that juncture not a chosen protocol. This was a diagnosis of diabetes. And so I found myself at 49 and I'm 54 now. Yeah, chronically fatigued, brain fogged, about 60 pounds heavier than I am now, a lot of kind of.
8:01 Speaker 03 Abdominal fat and man boobs and I started growing these ghastly little brown skin tags in my armpits and things like that, that I later learned were indications of insulin resistance. And, and then, yeah, you know, there I was with a chronic disease. That was a massive wake up call. And then I just dove headfirst into really trying to unpack the etiology of the chronic disease epidemic that we're experiencing here in the United States through a very, very personal lens. So it was half intellectual inquiry, half physiological necessity. And over the last five years, I've interviewed some 400 or
8:41 Speaker 03 500 doctors and read hundreds and hundreds of books and dove into endless me search and jumped into the little N of one Petri dish of myself to try to actually understand the origin of why we're so sick as a society.
8:57 Dan Harris? So you're 49 year old wellness entrepreneur who is unwell, pretty holistically unwell, sounds like psychologically, physiologically. And you get this diagnosis and you're like, all right, this is the wake up call. I'm going to investigate what's going on with me and what's, and by extension, what's going on with the larger culture and our health. You sum this all up in a book, the title of which is Good Stress. What does that refer to?
9:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, as I began to untangle and unpack why I was so sick, what I ended up putting my thumb on is this general concept is that chronic disease is really the result of chronic ease. Essentially, since the industrial revolution, but really accelerating in the last 50 to 70 years, we've engineered our lives at every single turn for convenience and comfort and ease. And that is really undermining our health. It's really hijacking our biology and turning often adaptive physiological mechanisms against us. And there's just myriad
10:12 Speaker 03 examples of that as it pertains to our food and our consumption of food, our consumption and our relationship with light, with temperature, with community or lack thereof. It just riddles our society at every turn. We've essentially In the pursuit of ease, actually discovered a lot of dissies.
10:34 Dan Harris? The term used in the book is evolutionary mismatches.
10:37 Speaker 03 Right.
10:38 Dan Harris? You touched on a few of them there, but it might be worth going deeper into them. I'll just list, and this will be repetitive and I apologize for this, but I'll list a few of the evolutionary mismatches that you list in the book. And then you can just start unpacking them if you're cool with that.
10:53 Speaker 03 Sure.
10:53 Dan Harris? Constant feeding, temperature control, light pollution, sedentary lifestyles, and chronic comfort of many different varieties. Can you just hold forth on the aforementioned?
11:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, let me, I'll paint a portrait of something that seems so normal, and this was a portrait candidly of me. But imagine a midlife male in, at eight or nine PM, kicking back on a lazy boy chair in a 72 degree thermo-regulated environment, binging Netflix, eating Chick-fil-A. Okay, now that sounds like actually a pretty delicious way to spend an evening, right? It's like, okay, and so incredibly common. But everything that I just described is antithetical to how we were engineered. So let me just unpack that for a second.
11:49 Speaker 03 So we were engineered in relationship to our environments. We evolved all of these kind of genetic adaptations in relationship to, let's say, some degree of calorie paucity. So we used to experience a winter in which there would be essentially a dearth of calories. And it was quite actually adaptive to become a little bit fat, you know, on the Serengeti in the late summer or early fall. Your loincloth might get a little tight around the middle, but that was totally good news because. Your body knew winter's fallow was around the corner.
12:30 Speaker 03 And that paucity of calories where you'd only get maybe a thousand or 1,200 calories a day. Yeah, it definitely kept you lean. You know, there were no obesity rates, you know, on the Serengeti, or even in 1900 candidly. But now, as we've discovered, calorie restriction also triggered all of these other incredible adaptive mechanisms and pathways in the body that are related to resilience and longevity. You know, I won't get too geeky with them, but you know, it triggers a pathway that sense this nutrient deficiency called AMPK, which is associated with this process called autophagy. So your body then goes into this process of breaking down these dysfunctional senescent
13:14 Speaker 03 zombie cells that are causing all sorts of disease. And it breaks them down into their amino acid building blocks so your body can upcycle them back up. So that's an amazing part of actually calorie restriction. It's not just about staying lean. You know, it also produces more mitochondria. So we were essentially balanced between the abundance of the harvest season and the scarcity of winter. But now we live in an environment where essentially, from a calorie perspective, winter never comes. So at a whim, you can dial up, you know, a summer squash in the middle of winter, whatever, on your iPhone.
13:57 Speaker 03 But of course, generally what you do dial up has nothing to do with a vegetable, right? It generally is some sort of ultra-processed fast food. And that could be here before we finish the podcast. So essentially, we have created this mismatch that has now led to, you know, a 45% obesity rate in the United States. But this is just not just quantified to the United States. I started to look at obesity rates around the world. I mean, they hover around 38 to 40% in like 40 or 50 countries. So, you know, this is not just a Western or American phenomenon now. So that's one example. You know, we used to have exposure to massive fluctuations of temperature.
14:39 Speaker 03 So we lived on the savanna and these tribes of 70 or 80 people would wake up, it would be freezing cold before the sun came up. And then, of course, across the day, you know, it would raise up to 90, 95 degrees. The body is miraculously designed to have adaptive responses to these massive fluctuations in temperature. So what happens when you get really, really, really hot? Well, guess what? The body is designed to perspire, to sweat and move your core body temperature down into that little warm porridge, if you will, of 98.6. Your body is always seeking that homeostasis, the Goldilocks zone.
15:23 Speaker 03 But now, as we've found out, getting hot stimulates all of these other incredible proteins. For example, it stimulates the production of what's known as BDNF, this brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that even later in life will maintain the function of neurons, but it will actually grow new neurons, which is like big news because, you know, when I grew up, there was no such thing as neuroplasticity. We were told basically by age 25, your brain stops growing and then it's like this slow dirge of a decline, you know, right? Getting hot, like for example, deliberately in the sauna, also produces what's called
16:06 Speaker 03 heat shock proteins, these proteins that maintain the three-dimensional shape of other proteins. It's really amazing if you've ever seen sort of how proteins form into these three-dimensional shapes. I've only seen it on a computer screen. That's pretty amazing. But they need to have these three-dimensional shape in order to function. Getting deliberately hot will actually maintain the functionality of those proteins. And they stimulate endorphins and they have great cardiovascular impacts and things like that. Getting cold, kind of same deal. It's like you get super cold, what do you do? You start to shiver. Your body is built in with that mechanism to up-regulate your body back into that homeostatic zone of 98.6.
16:50 Speaker 03 And associated with that is all sorts of other good things, like the long protracted production of dopamine, for example. But now, we generally live in these hyperthermoregulated environments. In fact, there's a smart thermostat probably somewhere in this room that knows that Dan Harris is here and Dan really just likes it, right about 72 degrees. Like, we literally don't have to even get up and set the thermostat anymore. And what does that do? Well, that undermines our body's ability to find equilibrium and homeostasis. Never getting cold, never getting hot. We miss out on all of these other miraculous mechanisms that are inherent to our engineering.
17:34 Speaker 03 Obviously, the same thing goes with light, right? So we used to experience light in harmony with nature, let's say. We used to wake with the sun and more or less go to bed with the sun. And it turns out that our relationship to light is central to what is known as our circadian rhythm. Circa means approximately, dia means a day. So approximately a day. We knew our bodies were programmed to release cortisol at a certain period of time in the morning to get sleepyhead out of his jammies and get into the day and do a podcast, and then release melatonin sometime around 8 or 9 o'clock to go to bed.
18:16 Speaker 03 That teeter totter between cortisol and melatonin was actually set by these specialized neurons in the inferior part of our retina that would get a certain slice of the electromagnetic wave spectrum called blue light. People have probably heard of blue light. And if you get that in the morning, as we did when we used to wake up outside or go outside for the first thing that we did, that sets your circadian rhythm through a whole series of interesting mechanisms. But these little sensory neurons in the inferior part of your retina send this little signal to the suprachiasmatic nucleus that sends a signal to the pineal gland to produce melatonin later in the day. Anyhow, now we get blue light.
19:02 Speaker 03 All day long, right? All the time, every time that we stare at a screen. And so I love binging Larry David probably as much as you do. But if you watch Curb Your Enthusiasm late into the evening, you know, you will disrupt this homeostatic balance between cortisol and melatonin. So yeah, our on-demand 24/7 access to entertainment has once again taken a mechanism that was adaptive, that was supposed to put us to sleep at one period of time and have us wake up at another time, and has disrupted sleep. And I'm sure there's been many people on your podcast
19:43 Speaker 03 that have talked about how foundational sleep is to health. And of course, we know that just by dint of our own experience. We're grumpy when we don't get enough sleep. We're foggy. We tend to misbehave in a lot of ways. We gravitate towards comfort foods. We overdrink coffee and then we probably drink wine. We basically start a downward spiral.
20:08 Dan Harris? Yeah.
20:09 Speaker 03 Then there's all these other crazy things happening that we don't know. There's like this whole glymphatic system that happens when you sleep. It's sort of the equivalent of the lymphatic system, but for your brain. So when you're asleep, your brain is essentially going through that cleanup and recycle mode, cleaning out those mean old Machiavellian beta amyloid plaques and tautangels that are sometimes associated with Alzheimer's, et cetera. So one bad night's sleep will also raise insulin resistance. And I was really prey to that.
20:45 Dan Harris? I see.
20:46 Speaker 03 So getting my sleep under control through getting outside first thing in the morning was key. And so my general thesis here is with all of these evolutionary mismatches that we're experiencing in our modern day, we now actually have to self-impose these paleolithic stressors in order to align the way we live with our biology.
21:15 Dan Harris? That was all very well said. It was actually quite an impressive soliloquy on the evolutionary mismatches, and I appreciate it. I want to go deep into the practical. What can you do about this? What have you done about this? What does the research say? But before we do that, there are these four principles that you lay out before you get into the practical. And they are impermanence, interdependence, the age of agency, and balance.
21:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:41 Dan Harris? The first two sound very, very Buddhist. I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to with the second two. But can you do another soliloquy for us?
21:48 Speaker 03 I'd love to. Before I really could be well, I had to understand what well-being actually was. There was essentially two parallel inquests that collided. One, which was sort of a spiritual inquiry. I was very, I would call spiritually bereft five years ago. So I went deep into Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, basically Eastern thought in general. And then I was really deep, as I probably revealed, into human biology and physiology. And these were two parallel inquiries
22:30 Speaker 03 that began to intersect in very, very interesting ways. They began to inform the sort of philosophical root system, I guess I would say, for how I began to understand well-being. I dubbed this the Tao of health. A lot of it had to do with my own kind of psychosocial bio intake that I had to do. I had to do a very serious self-inventory before I started fasting or doing cold plunges or something. I had long told myself a story about myself that I was just this chubby kid.
23:17 Speaker 03 That would do anything to be liked, that would essentially compromise any authentic aspect of himself in order to fit in. And that was my fate. And it was written in the genetic stars of the Ukrainian thrifty gene or something, right? That was somewhat useful in a famine, but not particularly useful in kindergarten or on Instagram or various other places. So I really had to tell a new story about myself that change in my life was actually possible.
23:58 Speaker 03 I think many, many people have experiences in their early childhood that they carry like rucksacks into their adult life and they become the story that they tell themselves about themselves. You know, I feel so fortunate to have had this spiritual U-turn. And it was based both in Buddhist thought and in human physiology. So let's start like with the concept of impermanence, for example.
24:36 Speaker 03 So we are, as humans, sort of anchored to this sense that we are a fixed self. A lot of that is underwritten by this sense of physical and psychological continuity that we experience day to day. It's like, I wake up in the morning, I go into the bathroom, flex my pecs, what I got of them anyways. I'm like, there's Jeff, more or less the same Jeff that was there yesterday, that was there the day before. And so we have this sense that we are fixed. But you know, the Buddha had this revelation 2,500 years ago, under the Bodhi tree,
25:19 Speaker 03 without the luxury of germ theory, or a heliocentric version of the world, or an electron microscope, or anything else, that everything was impermanent, right? That everything was subject to construction, and destruction, and decay, and clinging or craving to anything was futile, and the source of a lot of dukkha, a lot of suffering, right? But apply that to human physiology, that same concept. And as I started to look under the hood of my organism, what I discovered was, I am not fixed, or stable, or reliable at all.
26:01 Speaker 03 In fact, right here in this organism, there are seven octillion atoms forged in some crucible of a supernova eight billion years ago, that's all another topic, experiencing 37 billion billion, that is not an oral typo, 37 billion billion chemical reactions per second. I am not the same Jeff that started this interview with Dan Harris. I am totally impermanent in every single way. Initially, this was a bit of a scary satori, because whoa, there's nothing reliable to me.
26:43 Speaker 03 But in the end, I found it to be incredibly empowering. If I was essentially only process, evolving moment to moment in relationship to my environment, and not product, then so was my chronic disease, so was my brain fog, so was my insomnia. And I could take agency, moment to moment, to bend the arc of my own life, to essentially alter my trajectory along this spectrum of well-being.
27:19 Speaker 03 Towards wholeness, that's the process of healing, or towards disconnection and disease, the process of ailing. And so this was an incredibly sort of powerful awakening to my own impermanence. The next concept that I'll probe for a moment is also very Buddhist in nature, which is this notion of interconnection. Again, this violates our sort of sense of identity because, as you've probably talked about many times on the show, we tend to associate or anchor our identity with this locus of attention,
28:02 Speaker 03 crouching like a tiger somewhere here, right behind our eyes, looking out at some separate external world we're comparing to or in competition with, but certainly separate from. And it pushes us around. But again, when you start to unpack human physiology, there's a lot of metaphysical truths that bubble up in the physical. And this is what I actually learned is that if you're really interesting in grocking the metaphysical, then study the physical.
28:44 Speaker 03 Because this is where the foundational cosmic intelligence of the universe is patterned. So we know just by dint of like the most everyday kind of experience that our environment is inseparable from who we are. Now, the Buddha had, again, this wonderful, magnificent image of this. In Buddhism, it's often known as intrasnet, which I'm sure you're familiar, that the entire universe is this endless cobweb. And at every juncture, there is a crystalline diamond or a water droplet that reflects every other juncture, right?
29:28 Speaker 03 And this informed this theory in Sanskrit of, I think it's pratitya sumarpada or samarpada, which is essentially dependent origination, that everything spontaneously emerges in relation to everything else.
29:48 Speaker 03 And we see this echoed in Japanese aesthetics with this concept of Gigi Muje, or even in spiritual African cultures with Ubuntu, like I am because we are. And again, you know, this violates our sense of this locus of attention, you know, but like, you know, I started thinking of it in the simplest of ways. Like, when I walk down the street, I'm a sidewalk. I'm walking at about three miles per hour. I had to look on Google for that. But when I walk uphill, I'm gonna walk slower. And then when I walk in sand, I'm gonna walk even slower than that. And when I walk in the ocean, I'm gonna walk even slower than that.
30:29 Speaker 03 And the point here is that you cannot separate the behavior and function of your own organism from the behavior and function of your environment. It is one thing. It is one process, I should say. And again, this is a little bit scary at first, because if you are an organment or an environism or something, if it's one thing, you know, then you are sometimes a weather vane. You are subject to the vicissitudes of your environment, what you eat, the people that
31:13 Speaker 03 you're with, the toxins in the air, whatever. But you do have some agency over your environment and your behavior. Maybe not a ton, but moment to moment, you can shine the spotlight of your attention to adopting certain behaviors and protocols that change your environment or are more adaptive to your own well-being.
31:45 Speaker 03 And so this notion of interconnection and impermanence became kind of central to both my outlook as it pertained to spirituality and physiology. The last one, I'll just unpack quickly because I feel like I've taken up too much airspace.
32:02 Dan Harris? You're doing great.
32:03 Speaker 03 Another philosophy, I guess I would say to Buddhism, would be the middle way, so Madhyamaka. So this was like a great revelation for me, especially in this era that seems to sprint towards the binary poles, right? It's like, oh, no, there's a middle path available to us, a lonely one increasingly. But originally, this was a path between asceticism and hedonism, et cetera. But as I started to once again sort of superimpose this philosophical principle on my physiology, Madhyamaka, or the middle path was everywhere to be found here.
32:48 Speaker 03 It's like the body, as we've discussed, has this unbelievable ingrained innate yearning for the middle. You can make yourself so hot or so cold, your body will find that homeostasis. You can really try to disrupt your pH balance. You can hold your breath and accumulate a lot of carbon dioxide in your blood. It's called a hypercapnia. And you can make your blood slightly acidic. I mean, just slightly. And then you take a big breath of oxygen and back in, it goes boom, right back into pH balance, totally balanced. You have balance between excitatory neurotransmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitters. You have balance between,
33:32 Speaker 03 like we talked about cortisol and melatonin, between insulin and glucagon, between growth pathways and repair pathways, between mTOR and AMPK. I mean, literally everywhere you look in your body, there is a teeter totter. And well-being and health is to be found in the middle.
33:52 Speaker 03 And I started to actually think about this more broadly, that the signature or the imprimatur of health in every system is the capacity to find equilibrium. So if you look at that certainly psychologically, we're always trying to find kind of psychological homeostasis. You know, we engage in all these emotional regulation techniques. Why? To like pull ourselves back to some degree of centeredness, to the middle, to equilibrium. But you look in economics, what's the healthiest economic system? Is one that supports a thriving middle class, right?
34:33 Speaker 03 Where the distribution of dollars kind of sits there in a beautiful bell curve. That seems anathema to our times, right? What about ecology, for example? Well, the healthiest ecological system is one that thrives in biodiversity with a balance of all sorts of different species. What is the healthiest political system? One that has a strong middle, where there's a possibility of compromise and cooperation and, you know, middle ground, right? So I started to think of centeredness or equilibrium as synonymous with well-being.
35:15 Speaker 03 And that really had its provenance in this Buddhist notion of Madhyamaka. And so this sort of philosophical compost began to grow. The tactical garden of like, how do essentially I enhance my capacity for the middle? If I'm impermanent and interconnected with my environment, how can I take the agency to find and foster homeostasis in my body?
35:46 Dan Harris? Let's see if I can sum that up. And hopefully it's not either inaccurate or reductive. It may be both. But if the four principles are impermanence, we're changing all the time. Interdependence, we're enmeshed in the universe even though we feel separate. Agency, which is, okay, well, given those two things, we can take responsibility for our well-being. And balance, which is, okay, now that you know that, you may be tempted to either rush toward An unhealthy kind of biohacking mode of trying to wrestle your body into a arbitrary aesthetic
36:26 Dan Harris? imposed upon us by the culture, or you might go into denial and rush toward the lazy boy and the Chick-fil-A, but actually, there's a middle way where you can have well-being and an occasional cookie. Would you say that that is a fair summation?
36:42 Speaker 03 I think you should have been my editor on the book.
36:46 Speaker 03 And are you available for my next book?
36:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that's a fair summation. I think in the end, realizing that you are changing moment to moment in relationship to your environment, and you have some agency over that, what should you be pointing to? You should be pointing to enhancing your capacity to find the middle.
37:06 Dan Harris? Well, okay, so that may be the part where I summed up incorrectly, because when you say you should be enhancing toward finding your capacity to be in the middle, I took that as, in the Buddhist sense of, like, of the Buddha himself spent the first six years of his spiritual journey in what are now called the mortification phase, or the ascetic period.
37:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, a single grain of rice per day.
37:34 Dan Harris? Yes, or like standing with your hands over your head all day long, and he describes himself as his rib cage were like the rafters of a barn or whatever. And then, then the big moment for him is he accepts a bowl of milk or something like that from a local female farmer and realizes that there's a middle way. And the Buddha statues, not to be confused with the laughing Buddha, which is a large-bodied gentleman, but the actual Buddha, the actual historical Buddha, if you look at the statues, he's a skinny guy, but he has a little bit of a punch. He's not going for the eight-pack. And so what I heard, maybe because I wanted to hear it.
38:13 Speaker 03 Right, because I want, you want that cookie from time to time, yeah.
38:16 Dan Harris? Was that me extrapolating unfairly and inaccurately?
38:21 Speaker 03 Yes and no. I would say that being neurotic and fundamentalist about a biohacking journey is its own pathology. It actually has a name. It's called orthorexia. So yes, I do think that there is quote unquote sort of a middle way in terms of behaviors, you know, that you can enjoy yourself and have a fun life. Like, yeah, the optimal eating window might be nine AM to five PM because your body can metabolize protein better in the early part of the day. But then we wouldn't have dinner together tonight, right? That's not very friendly. And community is also incredibly important to health and
39:06 Speaker 03 longevity. In fact, it might be the number one determinant of health and longevity and happiness. What I'm referring to more specifically is that you want to help your body, both physiologically and psychologically, be able to move back to center.
39:24 Dan Harris? Got it.
39:25 Speaker 03 The ironic thing is that in order to sharpen the edge of that skill is that sometimes you have to push yourself into a degree of discomfort to train your body to be able to come back. And that is widely applicable. It applies to meditation, but it also applies to fasting. It applies to getting cold deliberately. It applies to getting hot deliberately. It applies to actually leaning into a stressful conversation and making yourself socially uncomfortable. Because it is through the right dosage of discomfort that we actually
40:08 Speaker 03 find real comfort in the end, the real middle, the real ease.
40:14 Dan Harris? I agree with all of that.
40:19 Dan Harris? Coming up, Jeff Krasno talks about some practices for good stress and we get into a debate about fasting.
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41:30 Dan Harris? So let's get into the 10 practices for good stress. You actually listed a few there, so we will end up coming back to those. But it starts, your list of these 10 practices, starts with fasting. Before we get into this, let me just say, let me state my priors.
41:48 Speaker 03 Yes.
41:48 Dan Harris? I am a recovering biohacker, orthorexic myself. Have had, gone through stages where I'm like counting calories in an app and working out to some crazy degrees, very specific diets, blah, blah, blah. I, in 2020, and many of my podcast listeners will have heard me tell this story, so I apologize for the repetition, but in 2020, I had a fateful interview with a woman named Evelyn Tribbley, who is one of the progenitors of something called intuitive eating. And she pointed out to me that the data shows that dieting is actually a reliable predictor of future weight gain. Her thesis is- Is that instead of operating with a hostile attitude towards your body,
42:32 Dan Harris? where you're trying to, as I said before, wrestle it into shape, but who defines what the shape should be? Right? And the culture is telling us that there's a certain shape we should inhabit. There's an enormous amount of misery available to you if you want to strive for that shape, but it's not actually your natural shape. And so fasting, I understand the data that it can be good for you, but I do worry that it feeds into this hostile relationship that we have toward our bodies, this kind of intrapersonal and interpersonal violence we do around judging ourselves and others with regard to these arbitrary aesthetic standards.
43:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And certainly fasting within the parentheses of fundamentalist biohacking, I think is quite dangerous. If you kind of take a broader, more agnostic view towards fasting and actually look at it from a historical perspective, for example, you can see that it was baked into many, many spiritual traditions, likely apocryphal, but apparently the Quran was received in a fasted state. Or Jesus embarked on 40 days in the desert and was not tempted, apparently by the devil nor by lunch.
44:01 Speaker 03 We already referred to some of the Buddha's forays around fasting. But this has been part of many, many spiritual traditions. And sometimes, actually, as I think of it in sort of unhealthy ways, because we have been taught that the body is bad and it's something to be sublimated and it's part of nature and nature shouldn't be trusted. And it comes up as weeds and pests. Like certainly the part of yourself that to nature shouldn't be trusted because it's susceptible to vice and cookies and porn and booze and pleasures of the flesh and all that. And so fasting in many of those traditions was a way to sort of transcend the base corporeal.
44:44 Speaker 03 Body that would return to dust, right? And actually transcend that into the ethereal realm. I think, though, when you look at some degree of time restricted eating in the context of how we treat food today, fasting can help people find a greater balance. Because, you know, let's say the very prominent fasting protocol is a 168 protocol, that's the most famous one, which seems to have the most data, in which you consolidate the consumption of your food into an eight hour window, right? But if people are truly honest with themselves, as I had to be, my schedule was reversed. I was essentially eating 16 hours a day.
45:29 Speaker 03 I tell a story in the book of how I ended up sort of haphazardly wandering into a Denny's, only to discover that there are no longer three meals per day. There are four meals per day. What, 11Z's? Breakfast, 11Z's lunch. Breakfast all day. Okay, let's qualify all day. Lunch, dinner, and the much beloved late night. You know? And I mean, I think the moral of that story here is that we never stop consuming. So we never end up balancing growth with repair. And I think this is where some degree of self-imposed restriction
46:14 Speaker 03 can come in very handy, because we shouldn't be stuffing our face all day, every day. And there is also a very potent psychological component to fasting, I think goes undervalued. Yeah, fasting can calorie restrict. I mean, yeah, you can eat 20 pints of chubby hubby in a very short period of time. So it doesn't necessarily calorie restrict. But generally, if you're on a fasting protocol, you're making other conscious decisions about your food. You know, there's other physiological impacts around new mitochondria and, you know, autophagy and all these other things.
46:54 Speaker 03 But what I found with fasting was that even though I was restricting my eating to an eight hour window, pretty fundamentally at first, that didn't mean that like I didn't get hungry at 9pm, right? But instead of mindlessly meandering over to the larder, I was a disciple to this practice. So I had to say, no, stop. What is the actual provenance of this hunger? Is it a biological need? Or is it an emotional desire?
47:34 Speaker 03 And the fasting protocol almost forced me into finding that Viktor Frankl-esque space between the stimulus, the hunger in this particular case, and the response, the mindlessly wandering to the pantry. Right? I had to put the space in there. And in that space, there was not only a choice in my liberation, or whatever the quote goes, but also that ability to witness that difference between a biological need and an emotional desire. And 99.999999% of the time, I was eating for psychological reasons. I was bored, something didn't go well at work,
48:19 Speaker 03 someone insulted me on Instagram. I didn't feel complete, whatever. And I had enough stored energy biologically to last a month, you know? So I was fine. It was not a biological need. And I think this is really the source of a lot of illness right now is because we have this endless surfeit of always available nutrient deficient, shelf-stable calories at our beck and call. And then so many of us are psychologically dysregulated through constant bad stress and social media and 24-hour news and neglect and racism and abuse and keep going, right?
49:07 Speaker 03 That we find temporary comfort in being able to assuage our perceived deficiencies or discontents in the refrigerator, but we know that that dopamine spritz is very, very ephemeral. I think Judd Brewer wrote quite a bit about this, about essentially we're eating our feelings.
49:29 Dan Harris? Yes.
49:30 Speaker 03 And it's really about actually understanding the feelings and doing, potentially excavating a lot of your own trauma. That has to happen side by side with like an intermittent fasting protocol or whatever. But I have found that, you know, it was this element of fasting that was probably the most potent for me was this kind of psychological skill that I got to find space between stimulus and response. And candidly, it started to spill into the rest of my life and punctuate other elements of my life. When my like annoying, obstreperous children that are trying to aggravate me at every
50:12 Speaker 03 turn, like, am I just gonna have a knee jerk response? Or am I gonna find some appropriate space to at least ask the question, no, wait a minute, what is the provenance of their behavior right now? Did their teacher treat them badly at school? Did they get a bad grade? Do they have a social problem at school or something? And then that led me to have a more appropriate response. And so I do think that there are some other elements to fasting that are quite fascinating.
50:41 Dan Harris? Just to tie a bow around this part of the discussion, what's your bottom line recommendation to your readers and to my listeners when it comes to fasting? To just experiment with the eight hour feeding window?
50:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, I actually quite like the intuitive approach. I mean, there's a guy named, I think Will Cole, I'm not sure, but he wrote a book called Intuitive Fasting. And fasting is very, very different for different people. I mean, if women on their cycle, there's a lot of very intelligent people that are talking about like, oh yeah, you can fast during the follicular phase and not during the luteal phase, and that's better. There's different fasting protocols for menopausal women, for example. Yeah, I mean, for me, the sixteen eight protocol was a great place to start because it's very clear and there's a lot of data there. But after I got myself, I can reset my metabolism. Now, then you play with the edges of it. Now I'm like 12 12 on a lot of days.
51:38 Speaker 03 That's hardly onerous.
51:40 Dan Harris? Yeah.
51:41 Speaker 03 14 10. I think the main point here is that we just need to be more aware of our consumption patterns and stop stuffing our face at every moment.
51:52 Dan Harris? Where I've landed on this is almost by accident with a shortened feeding window, which again, I am really relaxed about. I'm done with dogmatism, but I, for a variety of reasons, don't eat breakfast, which I know is historically marketed as the most important meal of the day. But I wake up, I do a little bit of work, then I meditate for a little bit. I prefer to do that on an empty stomach. Then I work a little bit more, then I work out, which I also prefer to do on an empty stomach. And then I eat. So 11 to 12, and then I have dinner at around five, six or seven, depending on the occasion. And then I'm done.
52:32 Dan Harris? Unless I get hungry and I'm using my interoception, my ability to listen to my body's cues. If it's nine o'clock at night and I am legitimately hungry and it's not because somebody said something mean on Instagram, I'll eat. So I'm kind of loosey goosey about this, but have kind of landed in a intermittent fasting.
52:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think your quotidian schedule there very much resembles mine.
52:59 Dan Harris? We'll see if we can get through the rest of the nine here, but.
53:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, yeah. We'll, we'll, we'll leave some for.
53:05 Dan Harris? People should read the book.
53:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
53:07 Dan Harris? Cold. Yeah, we'll talk about heat too, but my understanding, and I'm not an expert on this, and maybe this is another one of these things that I want to believe. There's a lot of data on saunas, from what I can tell. Maybe it's more inconclusive when it comes to cold plunges, which I know are all the rage these days, and I don't particularly like, although I have done. Am I wrong about that?
53:28 Speaker 03 No, you're right. There's a lot of data around dry saunas, primarily from, guess where? Finland.
53:36 Dan Harris? Yeah.
53:37 Speaker 03 And there's a woman, Rhonda Patrick, who lassoed up a lot of that data into some like meta-analyses of sauna.
53:47 Speaker 03 Data that's quite conclusive, particularly as it pertains to cardiovascular health, but certainly other areas of health as well. Less around cold. And I think cold therapy should always have an asterisk next to it because it can be dangerous for some people. And that's why I always advise people with really all of these protocols, ease into it. Find just the very, very edge of your discomfort. Whereas a pericelsa said, the dose makes the poison. Hypothermia is no joke, right? Hypoxia, hello, you're dead. Right?
54:32 Speaker 03 But a certain level of hypoxia is actually quite adaptive. And a certain amount of cold, for most people, builds emotional resilience, is quite good for metabolic health. I do think that there's really interesting applications around addiction therapy or just given the protracted production of dopamine associated with cold therapy.
54:56 Dan Harris? I will say that the times I've done cold plunges, I fucking hate them.
55:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:00 Dan Harris? But I feel amazing afterwards.
55:04 Speaker 03 Yeah. I mean, I have now adopted it as a regular, everyday morning ritual.
55:12 Dan Harris? So you get in a cold plunge every first thing in the morning?
55:14 Speaker 03 Not quite first thing. I'll describe exactly the cadence. And I also share your absolute abhorrence for cold. I mean, I'm a neurotic Jew when it comes to cold. I was like, I just stare at a snow-fed lake. I've got a paroxysm of anxiety, right? And like, then this dude, Wim Hof, came and stayed with me for three weeks with his entire family. And he held court at our retreat center in Topanga. And just out of like, avoiding pure embarrassment, I had to get in. I mean, if you get Wim Hof to stay at your house, you have to get into the fucking ice bath, right? But this is not what I would recommend to most people. I mean, he, we were getting commercial ice deliveries and like, you know, he was getting
55:58 Speaker 03 it to like 34 degrees. I would never recommend that. In fact, The data around cold seems to suggest that the benefits will be conferred just if it feels cold, that temperature is actually completely subjective. So you can get into a 60 degree cold bath and provided that it actually feels cold for you, you will get significant benefits from that. And that's where, you know, a lot of the experimentation comes in and, you know, over time, you can increase duration and slightly decrease temperature and push the edges of your discomfort. I engage in the, in heat and cold together and this kind of contrast bathing technique
56:43 Speaker 03 where I'll get very, very warm in a sauna and then get very, very cold and go back and forth. And, you know, there's some great circulatory system benefits to that because the heat is a vasodilator. So it'll open up blood vessels and then you get into the cold and that's a vasoconstrictor. And so if you're going vasodilation, vasoconstriction, back and forth, that will begin to move blood around your body. So it's good for your circulatory system, good for your lymphatic system. And also getting your core body temperature really warm makes getting in the cold way, way easier.
57:16 Dan Harris? Yes. And you're doing this every day?
57:18 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
57:19 Dan Harris? And how long are you doing in the sauna and, and the cold plunge and how many rounds?
57:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, it kind of depends a little bit on my schedule, if you will, but always one round at least. I always do the sauna first, always finish cold, always finish cold, that's the rule. If you want the metabolic benefits of the cold, and you do. The data seems to suggest that, you know, 20 minutes in the sauna at a temperature of somewhere between 170 and 200 degrees is kind of the sweet spot. That's where the data seems to. Coalesced. And then cold, like, quick, I'm in and out of the cold punch. Maybe it's 90 seconds or two minutes.
58:03 Dan Harris? That's long. The most I've ever been able to do, and I know there are people do five minutes. I was talking to a dude last night, did five minutes every morning, but the most I've been able to do is 60 seconds. And I get out and my extremities are in howling pain, like my feet.
58:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, the feet and the hands particularly. In fact, if you want to avoid getting your whole body in and still reap some of the benefits, feet and hands are very, very sensitive because you have a lot of nerve endings. You have more surface area to volume there. So for people that don't want to submerge their entire body and kind of want to inch into it. Try it with just your feet or your hands, or some people actually like dunk their face into a bucket of ice. But feet and hands are a decent proxy, if you will. I submerge myself, but not long, but just enough to make myself uncomfortable.
58:58 Speaker 03 And again, you know, I can trumpet the physiological benefits and I can get really, really geeky on it. But that's not where I've reaped the most reward from the cold. What happens when you submerge into a cold body of water, and this could be a lake or an ocean, right? You have a gasp, like, takes your breath away. And then what happens? You have an involuntary bottom-up response, right? Your heart rate and your respiratory rate increase and you feel that epinephrine starting to course through your veins. For me, I feel it literally coming up from under the crust of consciousness.
59:41 Speaker 03 It goes into my neck, into my carotid arteries, and I'm like, I'm about to have a panic attack, right? And then, again, you have that brief moment, that brief space to apply top-down conscious pressure on top of bottom-up involuntary response. Sometimes you can leverage your conscious breath for that. Sometimes you just leverage your.
1:00:08 Speaker 03 Miraculous neomammalian prefrontal cortex, your locus of reason and rationality and say, I'm gonna be fine right here. You put that top down pressure on top of that involuntary response. And I'm telling you, that punctuates other parts of your life.
1:00:29 Dan Harris? Yeah, I believe that.
1:00:30 Speaker 03 I'm getting a lot of dental work done right now. Nobody likes dental work, right? And when Dr. Nikki, bless her beautiful heart, is sitting there with a 12 inch syringe, poised above me, ready to stick it into the most sensitive part of my body, my mouth. And I'm in a chair and I'm helpless, I can't move. It is really helpful to be able to leverage that practice. Because it's a very similar physiological response. You feel that epinephrine bubbling up and then you say, no. Ah, I'm gonna put this top down conscious pressure on top of it.
1:01:13 Speaker 03 And so these are physiological techniques that actually bleed into your psychological capacities.
1:01:19 Dan Harris? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I have to say, I've, what I'm about to say is the most obnoxious thing I've said today. But my wife and I bought a house a couple of years ago. We're very lucky to be able to buy a house and it had a sauna in it. And for years I didn't use it. I was not interested. But I recently, on the encouragement of one of our friends, started to use it. And it's very uncomfortable, especially if you're gonna sit there for 15, 20 minutes. And meditating in the sauna has helped my distress tolerance. It's like I watched the aversion come and go. And that is scalable to other aspects of your life. It's beyond just the cardiovascular and. Benefits.
1:02:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, and all the detox and all the other stuff. But the one bridge between sauna bathing and meditation, for example, for me, is that it is a quiet place that I go every day at the same moment of time.
1:02:17 Dan Harris? Yeah.
1:02:17 Speaker 03 And that is really just practically helpful for me to do my meditation practice. And this is where I actually have a very, very goofy Nichiren sort of mantra practice in the sauna. Actually, this is not like a great visual for your audience, but I'm always naked in the sauna. Okay, you know, and I do the Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo chant. If you're familiar with that Nichiren chant in the sauna. And it's just a mantra, it's just like a gimmick for me to get myself into this kind of like non-symbolic vibratory place where I just am. It's just, I'm just right there and I'll be hot.
1:03:02 Speaker 03 And sometimes I'll be in not really a lotus position, but as close as I can get to one. And I'll be in my Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo sweating buckets naked and put that in your mind's eye. Sometimes I'll be doing air squats in a rhythm with the Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo. Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo, you know, just whatever, I'm gone. It's good.
1:03:34 Dan Harris? Coming up, Jeff Krasno talks about more practices for good stress and we talk about communication techniques.
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1:05:15 Dan Harris? We've covered the first three entries on your list of 10 good stress practices. Fast and cold therapy, heat therapy. You just brought us to the fourth, which is exercise. Maybe we'll go through some of these quickly just because we have limited time. How much exercise are you doing? What kind? What are your recommendations to the rest of us?
1:05:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, I would say that muscle hypertrophy as part of resistance training is probably like the most obvious example of good stress, if you will, of the sort of Nietzschean axiom of like, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I first heard that through Kelly Clarkson's song, but I later found out that it was Nietzsche. That shows you where my cultural anchoring is. Yeah, I mean, you overload a biceps muscle, for example, and what happens? You micro tear those fibers and you have an immune response and inflammatory response. And then your body summons in response these structural proteins, myosin and actin or whatever,
1:06:20 Speaker 03 and give that thing a little rest, you know, and eat enough leucine or whatever. And what happens? Grows back stronger, grows back bigger. That same adaptive response is all over the body. It's just most obvious in your muscles, right? You know, you hold your breath for enough time. And like we said before, you know, you build up extra carbon dioxide and your body miraculously starts to make more red blood cells. It just does it. It's just programmed. You don't have to think about it. It's just doing it because it senses that there's an oxygen debt. So it creates more red blood cells. Red blood cells are the couriers of oxygen to your cells for energy production. This stuff's happening all the time, all under here.
1:07:04 Speaker 03 You don't have to even worry about it. As far as just, you know, more practical things around exercise. For me, I sometimes joke, I don't think I've ever publicly joked about it, but sometimes I call it my, my Jesus protocol, which sometimes is dubbed Jehovah's fitness.
1:07:23 Speaker 03 It's 40 days of fasting, desert optional, tremendous amount of walking, right? On Fridays, your omega three rich fish, followed by a little CrossFit. I'm really going to take this metaphor all the way, right? And then by Sunday, you come back to life. That's the Jesus protocol. But resistance training was a big one for me. I always hated the gym. I was like never a gym guy, but I realized that as I get into midlife and beyond, that building muscle is important for a whole variety of different reasons. We lose 10% of our muscle every decade. You know, I want to be a grandfather that can bend down and pick up his little grandkid
1:08:05 Speaker 03 and raise him above my head and take him out for walks and mess around and wrestle on the floor. So building some muscle mass, I think is really important. I think everyone should commit to, you know, a few sessions of resistance training every week. But a lot of walking, you know, again, if you think through the lens of how did I evolve? I evolved, you know, for hundreds of thousands of years as Homo sapiens, but like millions of years as hominids before that. We evolved walking on the Serengeti. And even like the hunter gatherer tribes that still exist, like the Hadza and the Kung. You know, they're walking seven to 10 miles a day.
1:08:50 Speaker 03 If you're monitoring that on your iWatch, that's like 14,000 to 20,000 steps.
1:08:56 Speaker 03 So this is what we now dubbed zone two exercise, which is you get your heart rate into that 50 to 60% of maximum capacity, such that you can, like, sometimes it's described like you can still have a conversation. Yeah. Unless you're talking to your mom, that drives my heart rate up to 90% right away. And that's a way to immediately go to zone five. No, I love my mom. My mom's extraordinary. So I would say just walk, you know, every day. Then I would say raise your heart rate up to like, you know, 90% of maximum heart rate once or twice a week. And that can be categorized as high intensity interval training, or just playing tennis very vigorously, or sprinting up a hill, et cetera.
1:09:40 Speaker 03 I think the biggest reframing here around exercise is stop productizing it. Since the 1970s, I think we've built 45,000 gyms in the United States, 45,000 places to sweat and grunt. And over that same period of time, obesity rates have more than tripled. So there's something not working there. My philosophy there is that we didn't evolve to exercise in a per your Google cow. It wasn't just a 45 minute fluorescent block that you put at the end of your day
1:10:25 Speaker 03 to do some chronic cardio, you know, on an elliptical. And for me, I think the key to actually maintaining a healthy body is integrating movement throughout your day. And that can be as simple as just going on more walks, particularly right after meals, post-prandial movement, a few air squats at your desk, or maybe getting a walking desk, or, you know, if you like to do pull-ups, put a little pull-up bar in their doorway, or do a few push-ups, or et cetera. But essentially, just integrate more movement throughout your day. Get outside and move. And of course, now we have to give a fancy rubric for that.
1:11:07 Speaker 03 I think it's called NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis or something. But it's just really about thinking again through the lens of your own evolution. We walked all day, so let's take a walk.
1:11:22 Dan Harris? I like that. I've been trying to up my walking quotient.
1:11:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, I always see you making content while you're walking. I think that's great.
1:11:29 Dan Harris? I really hate Zoom, so I've tried to move all of my meetings to the phone and I take walks even in very, very cold weather.
1:11:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, I've seen you do that on social media. I think it's great. I was like, oh, good on Dan. I can't help but dissect all the things that you are doing that are good for you. I'm not actually listening to anything that you're saying. I was like, okay, he's walking. He's pushing the edges of his discomfort in the cold and like, look at all those things.
1:11:54 Dan Harris? I appreciate your appreciation. What is light therapy?
1:11:59 Speaker 03 Light therapy is really just getting outside in the morning and getting some blue light. Again, this goes back to a little bit what we were poking at earlier in our conversation around setting your circadian rhythm properly. So we have these little neurons in the inferior part of our retina. They're called intrinsically sensitive retinal ganglion cells. There will not be a test on that. They evolved there in relationship to our environment, right? So we would get up. We would look up at the sun in the superior field, especially in the morning. That light is very, very blue. That little strand of the electromagnetic wave spectrum around like 480 nanometers is what we call blue light.
1:12:42 Speaker 03 That interacts with these special sensory neurons and that will make sure that your body releases melatonin about 14 hours later. So just get out and get out and get some light in the morning. If you live at high latitudes and that light is not available, there are what are known as SAD lamps that are have been used traditionally for seasonal affective disorder, for depression. But you can get 10,000 lux SAD lamps for about 10 bucks or 20 bucks. And you just sit 12 inches from them and that will simulate essentially the same kind of blue light that you can get from the natural surroundings in the sun in the morning. So just, yeah, get your light in the morning and then, you know, there's obviously a ton of
1:13:27 Speaker 03 intelligent sleep hygiene and sleep architecture in terms of limiting your exposure to light at night and getting more amber light. I mean, this is kind of cool if you actually think about it. A lot of nightlights are more in the amber field and they're in the inferior field. So they plug into your outlets below. And that makes total sense. Why? Because we used to sit around a fire at night. Right? So the superior part of our retina didn't have these neurons. And we were looking down at amber light, more on the infrared spectrum. That didn't trigger the same physiological mechanisms. So really what we're doing is again, you're just always thinking about like, how did I evolve?
1:14:10 Speaker 03 And how can I recreate the conditions in which I evolved? You know, make your room cool and dark. I'm sure you've got, probably had Matthew Walker.
1:14:20 Dan Harris? Yeah, I have. One of the most successful physical health, but also mental health interventions I've ever done. It was recently after years of insomnia. That was provoked in part by the rather unpleasant business divorce that I went through. And also I think probably restless leg syndrome. I am often beset by this overwhelming ants in the pants.
1:14:44 Speaker 03 Is that the clinical?
1:14:45 Dan Harris? Yeah, I think it is. I'm trying to remember what our, my ancestors, like yours, are Ukrainian Jews. And they had a word for this, for ants in the pants, but I've forgotten what the Yiddish word is. But I get this heavy, heavy dose of restlessness at night. And so what I've done, I was querying chat GPT about this. And I basically started going outside first thing in the morning, even in the winter. I can't stand it for that long. So then I, when I come in, I sit in front of one of the sad lamps.
1:15:16 Speaker 03 Okay.
1:15:17 Dan Harris? And the other thing I did, which is unrelated in some ways, but I set a consistent wake up time.
1:15:23 Speaker 03 Hmm. Yeah.
1:15:23 Dan Harris? Which I always resisted doing because the great beauty for me of retiring from. Journalism was I didn't have to
1:15:30 Speaker 03 Have to do that.
1:15:31 Dan Harris? But but now I really am like seven or seven thirty. I'm up, even if I've had insomnia, I'm up. And so like my circadian rhythms are sort of really much more locked into place. And that with a little magnesium has really, really helped.
1:15:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, good for you. I mean, there's other adaptive components to light as well that that aren't necessarily related to sleep, you know, near infrared light that we actually get as a reflection off almost anything green can actually stimulate the endogenous production of these antioxidants at the intercellular level. So just getting outside in a greenscape will actually up your antioxidant gain. Uh, cause it's amazing those near infrared waves are like so long that they actually penetrate your skin like eight centimeters into your body.
1:16:27 Speaker 03 It's kind of similar to actually how probably driven by like a SUV that's pounding out bass.
1:16:33 Dan Harris? Yeah.
1:16:33 Speaker 03 Hear the bass coming through is similar.
1:16:35 Dan Harris? That's that's my SUV.
1:16:37 Speaker 03 That's your SUV, I thought so. With like nineties hip hop, that was my age.
1:16:42 Dan Harris? Always.
1:16:43 Speaker 03 Biggie, nice. So there's other protocols around making sure that you get enough light.
1:16:49 Dan Harris? We're not going to get to all 10 of your practices. There's one I do want to hit before we close, just to list them. You kind of just touched on one of them, which is nature, focusing the mind, which is meditation and other contemplative exercises, which we've also kind of touched on a little bit. Eating dirt and leaning in. And social fitness. You mentioned earlier the importance of having difficult conversations.
1:17:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:17:14 Dan Harris? Is that in social fitness or eating dirt or both?
1:17:17 Speaker 03 It candidly, it could crossover.
1:17:19 Dan Harris? Okay.
1:17:19 Speaker 03 It could bridge either. And I've heard you address this in your content and I've been really happy that that you have because of course we live in a moment where we just cannot seem to.
1:17:34 Speaker 03 Disagree without being disagreeable, let alone really engage in any sane public discourse. And in some ways, it's quite natural to avoid and want to avoid stressful, thorny, hard conversations. But again, if you ask yourself, like, how did I evolve? Well, I evolved in tribes of eighty. Didn't mean that we didn't have conflict, but we actually had to come face to face and talk through that conflict and find common ground and compromise. And that is just not emblematic of our time. And so I
1:18:13 Speaker 03 kind of walked backwards, as I often do, into 26 hour-long Zoom calls with people that really didn't like me. There was a great repository to choose from.
1:18:26 Dan Harris? Wait, well, how did you have a repository of people who didn't like you?
1:18:29 Speaker 03 Well, so I'll set a little bit of context. So as we kind of anchored into port lockdown in March 2020, my partner Jake at Commune convinced me to start to write a weekly newsletter, sort of dubiously called "commusings." And the intention was really, I think, a good one. He was like, "Listen, you need to deploy buoys of hope and sense-making so people can navigate the choppy seas of COVID." I was like, "Oh, that sounds poetic enough. Sure." You know, but of course, people were feeling very uncertain, very fearful, very alone. And, you know, the idea of like, reaching out to my community
1:19:10 Speaker 03 and providing some degree of solace seemed like a good one. There was a lot of people on that list, maybe 1.2 million people at that juncture. And so I naively agreed. And then about three or four weeks in, I was like, "Shit, I gotta produce 2,000 words every week." And these were very, like, middle-way, rigorously researched articles about the human condition. Fortunately, I suppose, I guess, for my column, maybe somewhat unfortunately, for the sake of the world, there was plenty of fodder in 2020 to write about. And I was tackling the most incendiary issues, obviously COVID, the national kind of reckoning around social justice in the wake of the George Floyd murder, the rise
1:19:55 Speaker 03 of QAnon, the development of the vaccine, all sorts of other emanations from Trumpistan, et cetera. And so every week I would put this thing out and I would connect my personal email to it. Yeah, so I put out on Sunday and on Monday morning I'd open up my laptop and the deluge of a program, you know, cresting the bow of my inbox was, yeah, serious. Many of the emails were actually quite encouraging and thankful, but there was probably 100 to 200 every week that found some bone to pick and did not hesitate to let me know, often
1:20:38 Speaker 03 in ad hominem form or with the more expletive written detraction, there was not much I could do. But some of the recrimination that was coming in was actually thoughtful. And I just vowed to engage with the more thoughtful ones and I'd send some emails back and forth. I would engage in what sometimes I call my David Copperfield routine. I would say, hey, let's get on a Zoom call and talk about it. And I call it the Copperfield routine because that's when I made most people disappear. And the people there, no, no, no, no, they don't want to do that.
1:21:14 Speaker 03 But 26 people took me up on it and I got a crash course in thorny stressful conversations. I don't think we've talked about this in this podcast, but we maybe have touched about it on it in our previous conversations. But, you know, I was a people pleaser guy growing up, part of my kind of traumatic upbringing. And so when I was kind of in receipt of a lot of this insult.
1:21:43 Speaker 03 Initially, I was very, very defensive. You know, I would stay up all night and brood over clever rejoinders, you know, like hold that ember of retribution, waiting to throw it. Of course, like I was the one getting burned, right? But, you know, over time, I built what I call my psychological immune system, you know, through eating a little bit of dirt. It's very similar metaphorically to how we build our physiological immune system through some low-grade exposure to pathogens, to bacteria and viruses. And our wonderful floating brain, our immune system, spin up these wonderful antibodies and we can neuter the antigens. And we have the B cells and T cells actually have memory.
1:22:26 Speaker 03 So I started to apply that same kind of idea to my psychological immune system. That some degree of exposure to insult was actually building psychological immunity. It's a very kind of stoic concept in some ways. So by the time that I started to actually engage in these conversations, I was very, very like emotionally regulated to the insult. What I very, very quickly realized as I would hop on these Zoom calls. And remember, we weren't as fluent with Zoom back then. So there would be a lot of jabbing at buttons that was humanizing almost out of the box.
1:23:08 Speaker 03 And then we would be sitting there with my detractor on Zoom. And I'd clearly be very emotionally relaxed, purposefully to create this set in setting of calmness and trust and safety. And people sensed that. There was an attunement to that. And these conversations took on the exact same pattern, one after the other, which is very much unlike this podcast. I would say nothing. And they would just tell me their life story for 45 minutes about their dogs, about their kids, about their divorce,
1:23:52 Speaker 03 about their house issues and the repairs of their attic or whatever. And I would just sit there and receive. You know, I realized that what I was really doing there was creating a container for people to be seen and heard.
1:24:12 Speaker 03 And that is really important in any moment, but particularly in that moment, it was a service for people and it was a service in the end to myself. And I didn't have any training at that juncture in nonviolent communication. I subsequently got like super into it and learned about Marshall Rosenberg, I think that's his name. And he had this whole codified system of nonviolent communication. But, you know, I just got better at it as I went. And so I started to develop a protocol around how to have stressful conversations. So the first component to a profitable one is being emotionally regulated yourself. So you have to pregame a stressful conversation
1:24:55 Speaker 03 through developing your own emotional regulation techniques. And yes, that certainly can be through meditation and breathwork. That can also be through building your psychological immune system, as I, as I mentioned. The second technique that I learned was listen to understand and not to respond. Listen to understand, not to respond. And this is a very, very difficult skill. Because even over the course of this conversation, we'll interrupt each other and, you know, I'll be thinking about things that I want to say while you're still talking. And that's just normal because we're excited and we're having a connection. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But in a stressful conversation,
1:25:39 Speaker 03 you really need to watch that. Yeah. Because so much of the time, we're actually creating or formulating that rebuttal while the other person is still talking. They haven't even made their point yet and we already have a rejoinder. So instead of listening to respond, just listen actively to understand, fully listen, let the person finish, allow for a pause even, that indicates that you're synthesizing what they've been saying and they feel seen and heard, and then formulate your response.
1:26:20 Speaker 03 And that was a very, very effective technique that I found. The third technique was something, again, that I just sort of naturally started to drift into, but subsequently learned was a part of the nonviolent communication technique, was seek connection, not solution.
1:26:40 Speaker 03 So as these people were talking and telling me their life story, I started to notate places of convergence between their life and my own. Like, maybe they were born in Chicago. I was born in Chicago. Maybe they're Ukrainian. My grandparents, my great grandparents came from Ukraine. Maybe they had daughters. I've got daughters, whatever. And once they were done, I would allow for that space and I would say, oh, that's so amazing. You know, I was born in Chicago. Yeah, I drove cross-country too. My car broke down too. Oh, my God, you know. And immediately, that connection created this deep sort of recognition of common humanity
1:27:20 Speaker 03 that in many ways transcended the original issue that had put us at loggerheads. In fact, 75% of the time, we never ended up discussing the original issue. And then, you know, I started to actually learn more about these techniques and I got into steel manning, if you're familiar with that.
1:27:39 Dan Harris? The opposite of straw manning.
1:27:40 Speaker 03 Right, right. So it's easy to knock down a straw man, very hard to knock down a steel man, which is, you know, instead of rebutting someone, you actually reiterate the best parts of their position. It's a great way to find areas of compromise, but it's also an incredible way to fortify your own opinion because you actually have to recognize the best parts of an opposing position. It's a wonderful debate technique. It's actually really a personal growth technique at the end. On the other side of these 26 stressful conversations, I had made this entire like rolodex of frenemies and they were like all over the place. They were like super, super Trumpers
1:28:25 Speaker 03 and super like left abolish the police. It was all over the political map, candidly. The tenor of my relationships with these people was completely different. There was one woman from Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, super Trumper. We'd always text me photos of her with, I'd barbecue's with the Trump banner up just to like needle me, but like in a fun way, you know? And she'd be like, look at me, look at me, you lip tart or whatever, you know? But it was like, it just totally popped the balloon of outrage. And I think just kind of like as a broader statement about good stress, yes, I write a lot about the physiological adversity memetics or eustress. And I think that those are very important. But I think that applying
1:29:10 Speaker 03 Discomfort to your psychosocial life, because that's where we live, right? This is where we live in connection with each other. I think can be the more important part of the work is actually trying to actually heal our social bonds and re-instantiate a greater sense of human connectivity in an era of atomization and loneliness.
1:29:36 Dan Harris? Well said. We're pretty much out of time.
1:29:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:29:39 Dan Harris? Before I let you go, could you just remind everybody of the name of the book? And then maybe say a little bit about what Commune is and how people can learn about that and get involved if they want.
1:29:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, Dan, thank you so much for this opportunity. I'm a huge admirer and you've built such an unbelievable community. So this has been a true pleasure and opportunity for me. The book is called Good Stress. I scooped up the URL, goodstress.com, so you can find it there. If you go there and preorder, you'll see that it is also connected to my platform called Commune. So Commune is a masterclass platform for wellbeing. It's where I host 170, I think now, online courses, anything from the mindfulness space, you know, Jack Kornfels, Sharan Salzberg, I've done work with, to the yoga space, my wife's a yoga teacher, God bless her, to the kind of functional integrative medicine
1:30:33 Speaker 03 space with, you know, folks like Dr. Mark Hyman, et cetera, even to like regenerative agriculture, we have a lot of stuff on there. And then there's a whole section around social wellbeing, where we have courses with congressional candidates on actually how to run for office, how to become involved in your civic life, actually how to even organize a march. So we've actually defined it, wellbeing in the broadest possible way. And there's just a wonderful repository of content there. And candidly, all of my work is really a distillation of the brilliant people that exist on that platform. And my fortunate circumstance that I get to be with people like Gavur Mate and Wim Hof
1:31:15 Speaker 03 and all the folks and kind of try to marinate in their brilliance and then distill it.
1:31:21 Dan Harris? Thank you very much for coming on.
1:31:22 Speaker 03 Thanks, Dan.
1:31:28 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Jeff. Always love hanging with him. By the way, the Yiddish word for ants in your pants is "schpilkies." Our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman, hooked me up with that word and she tells me that she's aware of the word because "schpilkies" runs in her family line as well. Per Marissa, "schpilkies" is Yiddish for pins, like sitting on pins and needles. Always nice to end a show with a little etymology for you. Two other things to say before I truly end the show. Don't forget to sign up over at danharris.com if you want the companion meditation for this episode, as well as the bespoke meditations that we've been releasing throughout the month of June that have come with all of the Get Fit Samly episodes.
1:32:09 Dan Harris? If you sign up, you'll also get the guided meditations that are going to be coming with all the episodes in July and August, plus you get twice monthly live guided meditations with me where you get to ask me questions. Lots of stuff going on over there. Lastly, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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