95 - Dr. Robert Barrett-How to Thrive in the Face of Stress When Our Hardwiring Can't Keep up with the Changes in Our Society.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about people who've turned their emotional shit into fertilizer for success. It's about seeing our darkest moments as opportunities for growth and transformation. Dr. Robert Robert Barrett has spent much of his life studying behavior, group dynamics and organizational culture, and he is the author of the bestselling book, Hardwired, how our Instincts to Be Healthy Are Making US sick. His primary focus is on why we do the things we do and the underlying forces that shape our lives. This intriguing theme has taken Robert to some of the world's most fascinating research and work environments.

He has traveled to rural Nigeria to interview recruiters and leaders of death squads on how they indoctrinate fighters. He helped build Canada's firstever patient safety officer program for Canadian hospitals. He lectured on intercultural negotiation to NATO officers deploying to Afghanistan, and he was lead researcher on a unique program designed to investigate ways to mitigate astronaut crew conflict in space for future Mars mission. Robert's work on motivation and team dynamics is also supported by 13 years as an elite athlete. He has written for The Huffington Post and has appeared more than 50 times on national television and radio.

He is the recipient of 13 major academic awards and is a human factors expert with over 17,000 hours of flying experience. His most recent work and the theme of his book, Hardwired, is to understand the growing disharmony between our slow evolutionary adaptation and our rapidly changing world and why this underlying friction is now one of the most critical determinants of our behavior and health.

Welcome Doctor Robert Barrett to the Ruthless Compassion Podcast again.

Hello. How are you?

I'm very happy to have you back on the show and we're going to have a fun and interesting conversation today, I think, based on our little chitchat beforehand.

Yeah. It's great to be back. And lot's happened to me in a year or so. Yeah.

Just a little bit.

Well, just before we start, maybe you can remind the listeners who you are, what you do, where you hail from.

Okay. Yeah. Well, I hail from Calgary, Canada, and I have a Ph.D. through the University of Calgary. It was actually done through the center for Military and Strategic Studies. At the time, there was quite a shift in that program, which is embedded in political science, international relations. There was a look at the types of conflict that were happening in the world that were more of a grassroots nature. So that was my interest. So, I started looking at a lot of the psychology of why people join violent groups; why they join groups at all.

And a lot of the intergroup dynamics that happen between those inflicting parties. And it kind of led me on a journey of it was quite a lot of psychology and combining that with a background that I have in aviation and athletics and started working a lot in health care. And deeply looking at some of the things that affect our behaviors and why we do the things that we do. Ultimately, working with some brilliant medical docs and psychiatrists and psychologists culminated in a book that was published last year through Springer Nature in New York.

And the book is called Hardwired: How our instincts to be healthy are making us sick. And basically, the bottom line of that book looks at how our very slow evolving brains and bodies are dealing with a very rapidly changing social world around us and all that friction point and what we're seeing in terms of the long term health trends and what we can do about it. So, that's kind of a nutshell of what I've been doing the last little while.

Well, how prescient you were to be doing the work that you were doing pre-pandemic, pre-crazy politics. It's almost as though you decided to do that research today because it's so relevant.

Yeah. These books are a multiyear project. They're big to wrap your arms around. And it was interesting. The last chapter that was written for the book was looking at from pandemic to prosperity and looked at the Black Plague and how the world changed and evolved out of the Black Plague, looking at how our brains and bodies dealt with that and were able to improve from one of the darkest periods in human history. So, that was written obviously before Covid as well. So, that was by luck, though I can't say that I foreshadowed Covid and wrote the chapter because of that.

I don't know if I were you, I'd start buying lottery tickets.

Yeah, I should.

With your kind of horse. I know, why.

Well, today I thought because of how much the world has changed since I spoke to you the first time and we talked about your book. Now, we are in a global pandemic. Our political system is more polarized than ever. There's more violence and aggression than ever. There's just a lot of darkness. And I thought it would be a really good time to talk to you about stress and the effects of stress on human interactions and human behavior.

Yeah, absolutely. When we look at stress, particularly during Covid, we all sense that we all know that Covid has exacerbated the already very high levels of stress for very common reasons. Many people are going through changes in their jobs, which is stressful. There are relationship issues can be at hand, and those are stressful. Covid tends to magnify the good and the bad. financial issues, issues with kids being at home and trying to negotiate that with time off all of these stresses. And obviously, the big one is the health, is the health implications, too.

And that is we have loved ones that we are concerned about, that they might be vulnerable to Covid, and they were concerned about those. So all of these things tend to come together and magnify the stress that we're seeing and my interest with the book and research is basically how all of these societal pressures that a lot of them tend to be of a social or societal nature, how they actually impact our biology and our physiology and can then manifest into negative outcomes. And we're seeing a lot of that happening, especially in the last year, with things like weight gain, substance abuse, certainly the stress levels that we feel and the linkage there to pain.

We see very high levels of chronic pain as well. All of these things are definitely coming together, and we see them in adults slightly differently. We see them in teens and emerging adults as we call them, and then also in children, too. Yeah.

There's so much stress now on everyone's plate. It's like a little bit of stress is tolerable but pile on one stress on top of another. And I think it has even a synergistic effect.

Yeah. The numbers are astonishing, really. When you look at during Covid, about one in five adults now experiencing symptoms of depression, anxiety, or even those PTSD synonymous with PTSD. Those data came right from Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada. You can go right on to the Government of Canada website, and you can see these numbers for yourself. They're astonishing the levels of anxiety and depression for people that are just walking around on the street. The greatest percentage is symptoms of depressive disorder. So, we see that in the magnitude of around 15% of the entire population now, and it's the greatest amongst young adults, those who are the late teens into early adulthood.

So 18 to 24, sometimes we call them emerging adults. They have about three times higher rate of these symptoms than older adults as well. So, it's really something with respect to levels that we're seeing.

So intuitively, my brain goes to well, young adults should be more resilient. They're young, they're energetic. They're at the start of their life. How much stress could they have experienced? They should be really able to cope better than the older adults who have gone through more difficulty. So what is it about the young people that is making them more susceptible to the stressors that are going on today?

Yeah. It's interesting. The term emerging adults, as you may know, is one that is somewhat recent. There's an argument that if you went back even a half a century, young people would basically go from being in high school and to almost the next day, they're married, they have a house, they have a car, they have a job, and that's it. And the way they go. Now, we have this kind of transition period that we're seeing with young adults that sometimes live at home a lot longer. They are waiting, sometimes have longer education periods or not getting educated at all.

There's a longer transition between youth and full-blown adulthood, and during that time, it's a time of transition. Everything is in flux, although they have their entire future ahead of them. There may be a. sort of, an apprehension about the future that it's more foreboding than generations previous that it's more unsettling, less reliable. And part of our happiness, much of our happiness, actually, that we experience, even on a day-to-day basis, is tied to our confidence in the future that the future is going to unfold the way that we think it is.

So if you are lacking that and the world seems like it's a dangerous place, then that can impact you. Also other things that are happening, too, with respect to the levels of stress that can cause a young brain to enter into a fight or flight type response. And over time, if there's no alleviation of that, as you well know, you can lead to a kind of a chronic toxic state of stress. And with that, there can be almost a hyper responsiveness to stress. If you've been protected from stress, everything in your life then becomes a stressful event.

And at the same time as the world is a stressful place, there also seems to be a lack of resiliency that we may have seen in previous generations.

Do you think that this kind of what they call snowplow parenting or smothering of children like doing too much for kids, coddling kids, rewarding them for just showing up? Do you think that's depriving children of the ability to develop confidence and resilience?

I think it is. You and I may be familiar, and your audience may be familiar with the book The Coddling of The American Mind, and that was basically the theme of that book was that we're not letting our children experience the ups and downs of daily decision making on their own and learning from that and building a resilience through that. That is doing them a disservice later on in life, especially again through this emerging adulthood period. They really haven't developed the normal types of skill sets that we would have seen perhaps in previous generations.

I know it's a derogatory term, the Snowflake generation. It's one that I don't like to use, but it's a label that's been used to say that we're all unique and we're all special and that we can essentially be harmed by the opinions of others. And so that is an idea that is pervasive as well in the literature when you look at young adults.

I think one of the solutions is that parents need to give kids more responsibility to not overprotect. Obviously, they need to protect them basically, but not over protect them, not do so much for them, not be so invested in hovering over them 24/7 involving themselves in every single decision they make so that the children can actually learn how to stand on their own feet, how to fall down, and how to tolerate disappointment or failure or frustration, and develop a sense of grit and confidence. Right?

Yeah. It's so true. It's really interesting. It's very interesting to tie that kind of thinking to what we're seeing when young people get into university and the rates of depression there, stress and anxiety. And most disturbing, the levels of suicidal ideation. in the book, when the book was written, some of the new research was showing that about 10% or so of college or university age students had some level of pretty significant suicidal ideation or intent. And now some of the research that's coming out of the reputable sources during Covid was looking at almost 25% of young people in the age 18 to 24 that have some level of suicidal ideation, which is pretty darn disturbing.

And that, again, may be linked to some sort of coping issues in terms of resilience. But it also may be a comment on some of the stress triggers that we're seeing in the world around us. In terms of all the divisions and the uncertainty.

There'S so many different things. So these kids go into school in general, less confident, less resilient, because possibly they've been over-protected over-parented. And then they're faced with a world that's much more challenging. And then, on top of that, a global pandemic. And it's not surprising, although it's very saddening, but not surprising that these rates of suicidal thinking are so high.

Yeah, absolutely. And during Covid, of course, young kids are now being exposed to some of the stresses at home. Hopefully, ideally, the home remains a calm and relatively stress free environment. But when the parents are going through job changes and uncertainty, and then you've got things like potential relationship issues between mom and dad and how that affects them in the home. So, you look at the biggest types of stressful events that kids can go through other than abuse directly, the separation of parents or observing that happening and also moving from their home, away from their school and their friends and everything else.

Those stressful events can cause levels of trauma that can then persist later in life. And we see those linked to pain and depression, anxiety, tiredness feelings of isolation, and even things like memory issues and some cognitive issues as well.

And I have a feeling it might also be linked to this other thing that I'm going to bring up. So I've been hearing about this kind of almost like a riot that went on in Kingston, Ontario, just recently during homecoming week. So all these kids were out in the street partying drinking, and then it turned to violence. Cars were overturned, lit on fire, crazy things were happening and police were called in and the crowd was refusing to disperse. I think they said they sent out half a million dollars worth of fines, really crazy stuff.

And I'm just wondering, how does the kind of stress that these young people, these adults in transition are facing? How do these stresses affect them in terms of this kind of wild mob of behavior?

Yes, it can absolutely lead to pent-up emotions. I think that sometimes the way that those and I've done some research in this area with respect to violence, sometimes they turn on a dime, essentially where there's a trigger and the members of the group or some members of the group may lack the sort of emotional stability to stand back and take stock of what's happening and not get involved or try to stop the violence. If there's any kind of emotional baggage or dysregulation that it's brought to bear on the actual situation can quickly turn violent.

And I think that I don't know the exact triggers that happened during this, but when you've gone through periods of isolation and you're not able to see your friends or you're not able to as young people, they're not able to party like they would like to and have that social interaction, then when you do finally get the chance, like at this home coming for sure, it's going to be a little nutty. And then all you need to do is add a little lubrication with alcohol to that.

And all of a sudden your brain starts, as you well know, starts detaching from all that executive function in that sound decision making, and you start to rely more on the amygdala and all the emotional stuff, and it very quickly can turn to negative emotions in terms of the violence and the fighting. There may have been just some triggers that normally you might have in terms of young people getting together, but there also could have been some political divisions and that exacerbated the conflict as well.

I'm not sure the exact triggers that started it.

Speaking of political divisions, they seem to be greater than ever. And yes, often at the heart of violence or a lot of difficulties in our society, people having conflicts within their families. I was reading something yesterday about this family that was split apart because two were pro vaccine, two were anti-vaccine and they don't talk to each other anymore. There's a lot of worrying on the part of the pro-vaccine people that the children of the anti-vaccine people are going to be sick. And it's just very painful.

And I wonder how much all the stress that we're going through is making people more rigid, more polarized and more aggressive and hostile toward people who don't share their particular points of view.

Yeah, there's no question that we are very very polarized. We think about the United States all the time, of course, dominates our media. So, it's right at our fingertips. Canada, as well, though in other countries, are also going through a period of polarization. So there's a lot of things that are happening. One is that the traditional sources of information that we might get. The 6-o-clock news has now morphed into social media. A lot of the information that we get is from social media for the average person, because it's just so pervasive.

Of course, I don't need to say that. It's just everywhere. And, so we have now the task of trying to wade through all of this neck-high information to try to make sense of it. And there's all sorts of mixed messages that are coming there. So, we have to have the skill sets to discern fact from fiction. And a lot of the time when the messages are coming at us so quickly. For one, it's difficult for us to take the time to digest it and research it and validate that information that's coming to us.

That's one thing. And the other thing is that with social media, especially, we tend to fall into like-minded groups kind of like little tribes that then make us feel a little bit better about our beliefs. And sometimes these little groups become or large groups can become echo chambers of the sentiment that they support. So, whether it's pro-mask or anti-mask or vaccines or anti-vax, they tend to reiterate the narrative that makes us feel good about what we believe in. And when we're actually confronted with conflicting information or counter-evidence, sometimes we discard it.

And this is a really interesting area of research is why would we discard that? So there's all sorts of psychological reasons. There's the illusory truth effect. So that means that the more times that we are exposed to a certain line of argumentation, the more likely that we are to adopt that. But there's also things in terms of, we wrote about in the book, too, is that we constantly are striving for status, particularly social status. And we're living a lot of our lives online when we're in so called lockdown.

So that the type of relationships and status that we're receiving are from these like-minded groups. So we want to be part of a group. We're social animals. And with that, we tend to not want to put arguments out there that will make us look bad or will create conflict with others in our group. We certainly don't mind doing that. You see, a lot of especially on some social media platforms when they get very conflicted with each other. We don't mind doing that with other groups, because then we get likes and wins with our own group.

But this in group outgroup effect has been very much fueled by social media. And so that in itself also helps create the divisions that we see and the perpetuation of misinformation.

Why it turns to violence, though, why are storming up the capital, these wild parties in the streets? Well, there was a group that tried to break into the Eaton Center in Toronto a few weeks ago. They were anti-maskers that were going to burst through the doors and go and eat in the food court without masks. And they were like being violent about it. And some of them got arrested. So what is it that makes these people turn to violence? Is it that the stress makes them regress in a certain way. I'm just wondering.

Yeah, that does hark back to the frustration aggression theory that our frustration can lead to aggression. I think first of all, we have seen on both sides of the political divide, so to speak, both camps, we have seen evidence of violence and rioting and burning and torching things. And I guess the first thing that I would say is in a lot of conflicts that turn violent, it can be kind of the pointy end of the pyramid, so to speak, where you have a small number of action oriented individuals who may be representative of a much larger sentiment, a much larger group of people who are essentially nonviolent or who won't necessarily take the violence.

But you have a smaller group that do take the violence. So we see that in some of the terrorism research as well, where you have a small group that are actually willing to carry out a terrorist act. But beneath them is a much larger support group that enables them essentially enables their thought patterns. So, that's one thing is that these groups may be a smaller slice of a bigger problem and that they're just simply action-oriented individuals. Yeah, the other one is that sometimes there's these triggers that we don't necessarily see that are behind the scenes.

They're perpetuating these conflicts. And if you don't have the means of resolving your conflict by peaceful means, that is, if you feel that democracy or your democratic voice is being lost, then you tend to move the action along towards violence. So, there's on one end of the spectrum, you do have this violence and on the other end of the spectrum ability to air your concerns peacefully. I think that what some people may feel is that they are lacking the ability for some reason to be able to speak their mind and have their voice heard.

And the other thing that we see is there is a world view effect going on where if you feel that part of your identity or your future is threatened at a deep level, then you're willing to fight for it. So in conflict studies and it was actually put forth by a psychiatrist years ago, Bamik Falcon, I think. And he said that if you think about yourself as like an onion, like layers of an onion, you can have the outer layers be removed or changed. Maybe you are a soccer coach, or you teach music or whatever it is.

Those things can change, and it doesn't necessarily affect your core identity. But as you peel the onion down, you get down to the core. If it's a core identity, so your worldview, your communal group, your religion, your ethnic identity. If those things are challenged, then people will fight to the death. And that was a very simple model of understanding why some things trigger violence, and some things may not. Some of the groups feel that they are now getting down to the center of the onion and some of their core beliefs, their worldviews, their idea of the future are now fundamentally being challenged.

And they're feeling that in terms of violence.

That makes a lot of sense. I can really see where that can go. So we're talking about a lot of very dark things. I want to kind of shift it a little bit and talk about some solutions. So you were saying earlier that our biology is not keeping up with the rapid changes in our society, right? We are not able to evolve cognitively, physiologically, spiritually, whatever in the way that our society is evolving. And there are so many changes and so many negative changes that we are facing.

So how do we then cope? How do we deal with all this stress without becoming ill, without becoming emotionally disturbed, without having our relationship fractured? How do we cope in a positive way with all the stress that we are facing and potentially going to face moving forward because the environment, for example, the economy, for example, these are things that aren't changing very quickly.

Yes. So the basic idea that was put forth in the book was that our brains and bodies are doing exactly what they have evolved to do. It's now that when we have everything at our fingertips, food, social media, everything, it's becoming oversaturated situation. And that's why we're getting an overload essentially. So, part of the solution is certainly not to try to change the way our brains and bodies work, because that's probably a fool's errand to try to do that to, first of all, understand it, why we're doing the things that we do, what is happening beneath the scenes that is making us decide and behave and think the way that we do.

And so that's part of it is understanding that and with that is to certainly know what the effects of certain things are in the way that we think, like, for example, social media and the way that we ingest the news and try to how that affects us. Does it make us feel good, bad? How does social comparison makes us feel on social media and the role of that and then understanding essentially our physiology and saying, okay, well, let's get the basics, right. So that's good sleep and good sleep hygiene.

And there's a lot of new information that you can access on that, how to do that. Good nutrition. And these things are just easy to say, of course, because in the background, we have our brains dopamine going crazy for when we're sitting at home on lockdown and we want the fatty foods and the salty foods. So it's easier said than done. But looking at some of the things that athletes do, for example, that's a really good example, because they're very in tune with what's happening in their bodies.

So they have a very good interoception, which is the ability to read what's happening or dissent what's happening in your body, and they can look at their stress levels and feel that. And there's some biohacks or ways to calm yourself down. So there are breathing exercises, for example, that can help with your stress response system, kind of breathing in through your nose, holding it and then breathing out through your mouth as if you're fogging up your glasses and then holding it and kind of calming that vagal nerve response, which is part of the ability to relax yourself and calm down.

There are techniques like that. There's lots of little hacks out there, and I think that part of it is really understanding what drives our motivations really to be online, eat foods that aren't great for us. So that's a big part of it. The other thing that is in the book that I talked about with athletes, and I've been there as an athlete for a while was to take what we call little tactical breaks. So you don't have relentless willpower or trying to have relentless willpower, which again, is not going to work.

So athletes, for example, not only do they have this great interoception, but obviously they work at extremely high levels of physical and mental intensity and like, unbelievable levels. But they have to offset that with periods of relaxation, where they afford themselves small indulgences, they don't have to be unhealthy indulgences, but it could be something that's totally different. Like you have a hobby and okay, well, I'm going to switch gears and allow myself to do this hobby, or I'm going to go and hang out with your spouse or your significant other or play with your kids or do something that allows your brain to kind of recover from that period of intense willpower.

And that cycling up and down does help the ability. There's some great experiments on that, but it does help your ability to then maintain focus on the things that matter in terms of the willpower aspect. That's another important thing to get

That sounds like a very good practical tools to help people.

What about these young people who are having suicidal ideation? What can they do to be able to function a little bit more normally with not such darkness inside of them?

I know. First of all, I guess it's important to say that for anyone that feels that way, that they need to reach out. And there's help lines that are available, certainly in universities or a health professional, even your family doctor. Get the ball rolling if you have any of those kinds of thoughts. So that's probably the most important thing. But what we know, aside from an actual chemical issue in the brain, is that being part of social groups, having family and friends to share time with you and laughing and having that social interaction is medicine. And it's medicine for your brain and ultimately through your brain, medicine for your body as well.

I'm having that positive influence. So I think the social aspects are really important, despite the fact that we have social media with the word social, we're seeing increased levels of isolation and loneliness. It's not just people who maybe later in life living it alone, which is an obvious one. It's also young people who are on their phones 7 to 9 hours a day on social media who are also feeling isolated and lonely, which is totally counterintuitive. And a lot of that has to do with again striving for status, feeling that they're never, ever going to get to the level of status because they're constantly, constantly competing on social media.

And when you're constantly competing and you're not at the top of the ladder, you're inevitably going to feel somewhat unsatisfied with your life. So that's a big thing to be aware of that for young people and be aware of what social media does to that feeling of unsatisfaction and how that ultimately makes you feel and try to turn that around by limiting social media or simply engaging in social media that's of a more positive nature. The other thing is being able to digest news in a way that allows you to vet the news for validity.

And it's a good chance for young people to exercise their educational prowess and try to find whether something is fact or fiction, because what that does is hopefully allow them to have a more solid interpretation of their own future. And when they have that feeling, then there's going to be feeling less rudderless and more in control and ultimately more happy. But I can't stress enough the social side of things and the fact that we know that loneliness is very harmful to your health. In some cases, there's some evidence that shows it can be like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day actually has that real biological physiological effect on the body.

So I think those things, the social media, looking at real social connections and then trying to understand the future in a way that brings about more certainty. I think those things are really powerful.

It's very hopeful to hear that there are some real things that people can do and that younger people can do to deal with all the stresses that they're facing. I wanted to ask you if there's things that you're hopeful about these days, if there are things that make you feel optimistic.

Yeah, there are. I mean, the thing is we have to look at what's happening in our immediate world. We think that whatever is happening is the new trajectory forever. And that's something that we see in science all the time. It's like, oh, this is the trend, and that's the trend. If we just keep drawing this line on the graph, it's not going to look good. But history tells us, and this was in the book as well. We talked about the Black Plague and the Renaissance is that humans as a whole historically are quite resilient, and we've gone through as a human species.

We've gone through a lot of very dark periods in our history, some quite darker than this one. We always tend to as a whole, bounce back and be resilient and make a better future. We're an industrious and innovative creature, and I have no doubt that we're going to build a better world now. There could be other political divides and hiccups and great power changes that come along the way. But overall, I think humans are going to do okay. And I think that is encouraging. I think the other thing that we see is now we have vaccines and we have fairly good uptake some exceptions.

But I do have confidence that we are going to see an end of Covid-19, make sure there's going to be other viruses that come out. It's going to be other pandemics, but this one, I think we're going to see an end to and going to start to see some normal life again and some real human connection. So I think that's promising. And that's something to look forward to.

Yes, definitely. I'm looking forward to that very much.

Yeah. Exactly.

What are you working on these days that the listener might be interested in hearing about?

I've been putting a lot of energy into looking at some of the aspects that were in the book that have to do with living longer and longevity, not just living longer, but we call a health span, so it's living longer better. I found that a real area of interest and so kind of moving in that direction, looking at some of the ways that with the full acknowledgement of how our brains and bodies are reacting to the world around us, how do we turn that around so that we can live the longer healthier lives that we want.

We see one of the things that was in the book was the midlife mortality, so called despair deaths that were coming around, obviously in midlife that were actually dropping the lifespan of the American population in other industrialized countries as well. But the Americans were hit particularly hard by that. And those are all directly linked to lifestyle and lifestyle choices. So that's the area that I'm really focused on and doing writing and research on health span and how to essentially hack what's happening there in the midlife so that we can live longer and healthier lives.

That sounds very exciting. I'm very interested in that.

Yeah, for sure. It's a growing field as well. And I'm not the only one in the world doing it, but it's really interesting and exciting, and it really combines a lot of the hard sciences in terms of what's happening chemically in our bodies and at the hormonal level with the social world around us and the lifestyle choices that we can make. So it's a really cool Nexus, and it really feeds on what the book was about and previous research.

Super fun. Well, where can people find you if they're looking to get your book or to look into your new work.

Yeah. Well, the book itself is available in most pretty much all bookseller platforms. There's just a new Audible book that was released via Audible, which is also available on Amazon. Anyone feel free to reach out and contact me through my website as well. So it's obviously www.drrobertbarrett.com All one word.

That's great. And just before we finish up, I wanted you to offer a call to action to the listener, something that they might want to consider or try doing apropos of our conversation today.

A call to action. Well, I think that the biggest thing that I have seen that we need to do is, it's a big theme, but really trying to understand why that we do the things that we do. What are the behaviors? Why are we doing the behaviors and the decision-making that we're doing? And a lot of that is happening behind the scenes. So other than finding out the answers in the book itself, I think that really taking stock in the basics. Let's just start at the basics, which are get enough sleep.

Have good sleep in hygiene prior to your sleep. Know how light affects your sleep patterns in terms of the evening and in the morning and your circadian rhythms, and just take the pause and look at some of the choices that you're making with respect to nutrition and exercise as well. So just small little things, small little changes. You can start to create bigger habits that last a long time. So let's just start the basics. And I think that's important. And that would actually help a lot of people just to take stock in those simple things.

Yeah. I remember being very surprised through my psychotherapy practice to hear how many of my patients have terrible sleep habits. They go to bed at 04:00 a.m. And wake up at 11:00 a.m. They'd be watching terrible TV till four in the morning and they were always miserable. You wonder why?

Absolutely. And the rates of sleeping medications, sleep aids have gone up astronomically. I think something like 30 times since the 1990s. People are hoping that pills are going to just help them, and sometimes they're necessary, obviously. But there can be some simpler lifestyle habits that people may not know about, just the role of light and looking at your phones before bed and how that negatively impacts your sleep. There can be simple things that you can adjust to really help once you have sleep and nutrition and exercise plugged into your life in a more positive way while you're able to function and make better decisions all around.

Yeah. The body and the mind are connected. They're not two separate entities.

Absolutely.

Well, it's been really wonderful having you back on the show. I really appreciate you coming back to talk some more. And certainly, like you said at the beginning, the world has changed a lot since our first conversation. So it's great to have a conversation sort of toward the end of the pandemic to see what's going on and things that people can do to make things better. And possibly we can have another conversation when the pandemic is completely over and we can see where we're at then.

Yeah, I know. I'd love that. I love that we talk about longevity and life and health. Span and lifespan. Yeah.

I would love to have that conversation.

Thank you again.

It's been great having you, and I wish you all the best.

Yeah, you too. Thanks for having me on that. It's really great.

That was the brilliant Dr. Robert Barrett and I'm Dr. Marcia, Sirota. If you'd like this podcast, please review it wherever you listen.

And you can sign up for my free Biweekly Wellness Newsletter at marciacarotamd.com, where you'll also learn about my online courses and my YouTube video series.