The Hidden Hormone Disorder: How Isolation Disrupts Cortisol, Sleep & Emotional Stability | Shawn Stevenson

26:19Shawn Stevenson:He said specifically to me that it was because, and again, he did, I like him because he's skeptical like I am about stuff. And so he digs a little bit deeper and from his data, he, what he could gather was that it would add to do with stress and having healthy social bonds helps us to metabolize stress. And it's like having somebody just to be able to be there for you, somebody to talk to at the end of the day, this doesn't mean that they're helping you to deal with the problem. And I also asked him, so like, as far as like healthy relationships, does this mean you guys don't fight? Like, what does that look like?

26:53Shawn Stevenson:He's like, no. He's like, we have these people, we've tracked these people for 80 years. We have videos on them. We have all their family members. We've tested their blood. We track them down every year and all this stuff. We have videos demonstrating exactly what I'm about to tell you. He said that some of our healthiest relationships and longest living people, and this is his quote, he said, they fight like cats and dogs. But the difference was, he said, they have a bedrock of affection. Even if they're like talking shit to each other, you know, they're in a little conflict. They touch each other.

27:31Shawn Stevenson:They hold each other's hand. They rub each other's back. And there's this closeness and there's this ability also to let things go. Right. And so these are all qualities that we can pick up and, and utilize. And, you know, again, there isn't a perfect way to go about this, but we do have a pretty good success leaves clues type of situation with this. I want to get into, we're going to talk more like specifics and around the dinner table and things that people can do to start to improve on all of this. But since I have the opportunity to speak to a man and we're talking about loneliness, what are your thoughts about the male loneliness epidemic that's being reported?

28:16Shawn Stevenson:From my perspective, the reason that our relationships are so impactful on our longevity and our health is that our relationships impact these lifestyle factors that we have that we think are about living a healthy life more than anything. Your husband and your kids influence your sleep more than anybody. Oh, I could tell you that. I don't need a research study for that. They influence your exercise habits. They influence your eating behaviors. They influence how you process and metabolize stress. Every single aspect of your life that we attribute to longevity, health, or lack thereof, the people around us, our closest relationships, are the biggest influence, all right?

28:55Shawn Stevenson:That's why we need to focus on that. It's the top-down thing. If we can get a culture of wellness and support and like these principles and characteristics that we want, that's when we have stuff that happens on automatic. Not perfect, but more stuff on automatic. Now, as far as the loneliness epidemic, with men in particular, um this is this is tough for me to answer because i don't like to speak about things that i don't have firsthand experience with

29:33Shawn Stevenson:but as i say that and before i decided to you know how i was going to answer this question I remember a time that I was. And this is when, you know, I was 20 years old, 20 through 20 to 22. And there's a distinction here. Okay. So I had this chronic health issue, so-called incurable spinal condition, which is since been resolved, of course. That's what got me into the field. But at the time, deeply entrenched in that, uh definitely depressed i was not moving around i was eating 95 ultra processed foods i was living in ferguson missouri i was living in poverty uh the list goes on just checking all the boxes of like the conditions are stacked for you to feel like shit and to feel alone and my mom

30:31Shawn Stevenson:again she's a survivor uh the reason i was able to pay my rent in my college apartment in Ferguson was because I would get like a, I had scholarships and grants and I would get a refund check like every semester. And that's how I pay my rent. My mom reached out. She said she needed help with her bill. I think it was for her rent. And she was like, she'll give it right back to me. And I was like, mom, like I have to pay this rent or, you know, you know, it's going to happen. And so she's like, I'll give it right back to you, you know, at the, you know, first of the month. So I give her the money.

31:06And then when the time came around, my mom ghosted me. I could completely ghosted me.

31:13Shawn Stevenson:She wouldn't return my calls. Um, my own mother. Yeah. And so I'm already down and out and just feeling terrible. I'm only taking three credit hours now in school or from a full credit load to just one class, barely hanging on. Cause I was embarrassed to walk around campus could barely walk i was in chronic pain and now my mom left me to get kicked out on the streets and so how i got in touch with her is that i called her from another phone and she picked up and she said that she oh she she mailed the check to the leasing office and me but i know my mom i know she didn't but my hopeful self still hoping i went to lease an office like hey did my mom her name's linda like did she mail the check-in like and they're like no sorry they looked through everything like no sorry and so i felt like my own mother wasn't even there for me you know and um again she was just trying to survive she knew that i was strong i'd figure it out in her core or maybe she didn't but that's what i choose to believe and so to say that i was lonely is an understatement.

32:21Shawn Stevenson:Like, it was a dark, dark period. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com

32:57Shawn Stevenson:Now, all the while I had these little, you know, little relationships, you know, like different girls I was messing with and that kind of thing. But I was still lonely. I felt by myself. And what that did, it made me very self-centered. It made me very much concerned about myself. but I didn't want to be that person. Like I felt, and I had a good example for my grandparents. Like I want that kind of love. Like it was an imprint when I was younger. So it stuck around, but also, you know, I didn't feel, yeah, I just was doing, I was basically acting like my mom. Like if this girl can help me to do this, I'll be like, I'll spend more time with her, whatever, you know, that kind of, it's terrible.

33:40Shawn Stevenson:It's terrible. But this is what I was living through. And I'm saying this to say that I was deeply alone. And I couldn't have even seen the possible connection if I wanted to. Because I was just mentally not equipped to accept it. Right? And so I know what it's like to feel deeply alone. And this darkness that you could feel with that. And it was hard just to get out of bed. But I also know for a lot of men today, it's so much more complicated because of technology and how we're meeting people. And not to mention not you being seen, but you being prejudged and just all this stuff. We're rarely seeing the person in front of us, actually seeing them.

34:31Shawn Stevenson:you know and so it creates another layer of feeling isolated feeling alone feeling like you're not good enough we're constantly measuring ourselves against what we see on social media you know it used to just be tv you know yeah now it's just constant you know comparing yourself and so it's more and more isolating us and i get it i get it and sometimes because of that when we do find some attention it's not the right attention and both because we're not it's not even looking for love we're just looking for something looking for connection yeah and we'll start and we'll settle and what that tends to do is feed back into that loneliness because we didn't address the real thing right and which is and i'm just going to say what it is because i experienced it the remedy for loneliness and that social isolation for me was changing me.

35:30Shawn Stevenson:I didn't know that getting myself healthier was going to lead to me thinking differently. It just made it easier for me to think more aspirational, for me to start to see the potential opportunities and good people that were in my life just around. I walked past these people right and i started to see differently and as you know like our perception is our reality and even the solution for myself you know getting healthier and feeling better the like first quote health food store that i went to i went there with a girl that i've been like messing with you know but we never went anywhere she was in chiropractic school in logan shout out to logan in Missouri, one of the top schools, chiropractic schools.

36:17Shawn Stevenson:I just thought she was so weird, like super weird. As you took to the health food store, let me ask you, did it smell funky? It was, they had the wheatgrass right on the counter. Yeah. It smelled like wheatgrass. This is the thing, like people talk about like health food stores now, I'm like, you have no idea back in the day how funky they smelled. I remember just like, and like if you went in there, like you were a special type of person to like even go there. Yeah, it was wild oats. So like it was, the incense we're blending up yeah crazy you know the wheatgrass and um but that health food store i driven past literally i'm not exaggerating a thousand times because it's right off the highway going back and forth i didn't know it existed and there was a book there that changed my life what book was it it was called nutrition prescription oh i know this book right oh my god i bought that book at a health food store in like my 20s oh my god like with the orange white cover Yeah.

37:12Shawn Stevenson:It's one of those like quintessential health books. And for me, it was because like I was in college and I had all these different aspirations, but I was I'm very analytical and I'm very proof oriented. I want to see like, is this is this true? And so they had there were studies in there that was affirming the data. I look when it looked up my condition with this degenerative disc disease. And previous to getting that diagnosis, I broke my hip at track practice. oh my god right from running like there's no i didn't fall just my bone density was so low and so one of the studies in the book was on omega-3 fatty acids because i thought i was like calcium i was deficient in calcium my body's breaking down and so i'm guzzling milk every day it's just like and just getting worse and having all of these like allergy symptoms asthma all that stuff.

38:03And, um, so the study was, it was, it was done on, there was like, uh, 500 women in the

38:09Shawn Stevenson:study. There's hundreds of women in the study. And they found that when, when these women were deficient in these omega-3 fatty acids, their bodies, their bones, their bone density, their hips and their spine was degenerating. And so by increasing their omega-3 intake, they were able to resolve this issue. And that was my two problems, my spine and my hips. And I'm just like, this is crazy. Like what are the odds of this? And so I started to take all these supplements, right? Because it wasn't just that. I also asked if my spine is degenerating, what is my spine made of? Right. So the omega-3s are just one thing.

38:47Shawn Stevenson:So, you know, of course calcium, but like, is it bioavailable for me? What other nutrients help me to uptake that? My body needs calcium to clot my blood so it's a hierarchy of needs if i'm deficient in calcium and my body needs to clot my blood it's like fuck your hips right now like i'm just gonna just take that right and so that the omega-3s i didn't know how important vitamin c was for tissue growth and bone density line is falling is like oh yeah just all this stuff And I thought I was getting them on my, you know, you know, having the centrum one a day or whatever. But the big problem for me was what I was putting into my body that was leeching and robbing my body of all these different nutrients, trying to process all this garbage and keep me alive.

39:37Shawn Stevenson:right and so you know um long story long um you know having my awareness and my perception change about who i am about the people around me the world around me helped me to see the opportunities and really cultivate those relationships that i beyond anything i could have ever imagined but it's because i changed yeah and that's the hardest thing is to change ourselves yeah what i just heard as, you know, as I frame this question about male loneliness epidemic is that there's a lot of personal responsibility in cultivating who you actually want to be if you want to have that connection. And I think the really big problem that we're seeing right now, and as a mother of two sons, the fear is like going, you know, you're having your child go down like an Andrew Tate pipeline, right?

40:31Because they have loneliness and his whole shtick is that it's everyone else but you, women are the problem. Women are bad. And we start to see that these men, they're preying on other men who are lonely. And I'm not saying that if you're lonely, it's because you're the problem, but there are things to cultivate within yourself to make you a desirable person to be in community with. And this is something I've shared with several guests actually just this weekend is like I'm raising two boys. I have a responsibility to raise men that people want to be in relationship with. Like that is part of my responsibility and how I look at those things.

41:12I mean, even I had knee surgery. I told my husband, like, you need to take the boys and get me flowers. And he's like, are you saying I'm not doing a good job as a husband? Like I'm like, I don't even care about the flowers. Okay. I honestly don't care. I just want to go home and go to bed. But when I come from the home from the hospital, I want my boys to know that like there are acts that you can do, things to help someone feel better. And just the act of thinking about them is important in the relationship. And there's times there, there's just me as who I am. There's things I just don't care.

41:41I don't care if you got me flowers for that. Like, I don't care about those things, but I'm like, no, but these things are really important. Some people really value these things. And so we have to think about, you know, as parents, how do we raise them in a way and model those things? Because I mean, you have the model health show, you know it better than than anyone else is that it's not enough to say words. You have to actually show. And as you were talking about before, like showing in relationship, how, you know, that what you see as a child is what you emulate or what you have to break and breaking and breaking it down and leaving a model that was toxic is so much harder than building upon one that was solid.

42:22And like you said, we're not doing everything right. I definitely have my, like, and you were saying people listening, you're like, you have days where you're like, I'm the worst mother in the world. And then you're like, no, I'm not, but I want to try harder. I want to do better. In the same vein of talking about family, what's a belief about like health and the family dynamic that you think a lot of experts and even doctors are getting wrong? Wow.

42:48Shawn Stevenson:This one is tough because there's quite a few. yeah and you've spent a lot of time in the science that's why i'm curious because i know science is saying one thing but the practice of medicine and even what experts are out there telling people it's not it's not congruent with what the science says yeah this is the like the the undercurrent of a lot of things we're already talking about we're so disconnected from ourselves and we're we're programmed to look outside of ourselves for somebody to fix us and for somebody to see us, for somebody to help us. And that is wonderful. We're a human family and we are all connected.

43:28Shawn Stevenson:So that matters. But not being taught about how to care for oneself, how to pay attention to your own body signals and how to, again, even on the mental health side, just basic things. this is what we're getting wrong because we're unfortunately ending up in the doctor's office after things have broken down so badly right and so our physicians who i've got i mean my friends and colleagues top of the top best of the best in their respective fields i know the top gastroenterologists in the world top cardiologists that you name it rheumatologist um but they're in the business of fixing things, right?

44:14Shawn Stevenson:They're not in the business of preventing things. All right. And so what we have wrong, the biggest thing we have wrong is a lack of education on prevention and getting people out of your office to not come back because we're fixing the root cause. That's number one. So that's the big broad thing. All right. I agree. 100 % cosine. Yes. the the number one key to that we're getting wrong i was getting wrong right because i'm just like well they need to educate about food more and i was that person like my colleagues would be referring who were running their practices working in hospitals they would send them to me as a nutritionist to help people with their food right which is great but most of them didn't have access to me as far as like the medical community right and also i was just i was working inst Louis at the time.

45:06Shawn Stevenson:And there wasn't podcasting and all this stuff to get it out of a broader way. But food wasn't it. It was our culture around food. It was our culture in our household. Because what I found was that whenever somebody would be referred to me and I'd ask them like, okay, so we go through. So somebody comes in, we'll just say they have, they've newly diagnosed with type two diabetes. I would take them through, I had this big whiteboard, like we reverse engineer the disease like and here's this is your liver this is you know this is the you know your bloodstream and glucose and uh you know all these different enzymes and and and hormones and here's how it all works right you don't just eat a food and then you know it just does nothing right we go through and actually deconstruct how it works and every time i cannot think of a time when somebody's eyes were just like not lit up just like oh my god i can't believe that that's happening in my body this makes sense nobody's told me how diabetes works i just have high blood sugar right because of my diet apparently like if they get that piece and there's nothing i could do about it they put me on metformin you know or eventually i put on insulin and so we do that part I was like okay so now we figured out they would go home and so frequently if they struggled they would come back and report to me that it was because of their husband it was because of their kids it was because of their wife it was because of their friends it was because of all these their relationships were what were deterring them from doing the thing that they say that they wanted to do right so there's a lot of finger pointing a lot of blaming not to say that that did not matter because it did.

46:53Shawn Stevenson:Of course, there's a self-accountability part, right? We have to keep that in context, but also their environment was contributing to the choices that they were making. And so what we've got to do as practitioners in the medical field is help people to create a healthier culture at home. So the decisions are automatic. they're sending people well-intentioned into an environment that is sick and it's just feeding sickness and so it takes the will of like a thousand men or a thousand women to be able to make healthy choices in a wildly sick environment and that's what i was facing when i lived in ferguson like i go out my door liquor store every fast food you can name there's no organic Like, I didn't even know what that was.

47:45Shawn Stevenson:There's no, there's no gym. There's not even a gym in my community, you know, and going to the local park, like, of course, there's like a pull up bar there, but you can get shot. Yeah. All right. There's been so many shootings up there that particular, you know, I go up there and play basketball sometimes, but I know when I probably should, should not go right. Or head home. And so there are all these obstacles. and you know for me to change my health in that situation it took it took everything it took so much so much more than the average person has to give right i was laid out on the floor rock bottom i i felt like that was i didn't have a choice and my character is very like you you know very strong-willed and so but for most people it's not fair yeah it's not fair to even put them in that situation.

48:38Shawn Stevenson:So that's the big missing piece is not treating a person, but treating the family, not treating the person, but treating the environment, right? Stop sending people out to try to figure things out in an environment that is fighting against them. Let's, let's make it easier. Let's make it, let's normalize, let's normalize health and fitness. I appreciate what you just touched on because it is what gets left out of these conversations of like health, wellness, Maha, doctor's offices, like across the board is that not everybody has equal access to the things that we know make them healthy, right?

49:22So, so often people are like, you just need to eat this or you need to work out more and not having the understanding that there's an entire environmental piece, especially within the United States, that I think is being conveniently ignored. I think it's easy to put it like on the individual and say, you need to fix this. You need to eat better. You need to exercise. You need, need, need, need to do all of these things and negate the fact that access isn't there for everyone. And the very thing you're telling them to do. I mean, you're saying, I could go to the park, I could work out, but I could also get shot.

50:03Like, we are always doing risk-benefit analysis in medicine when we make recommendations, but does anyone stop to pause to think, like, I could tell you to go work out, but the risk there is dying instantly. Not working out is you die in 20 years from now. So, like, how do we find the middle ground there? I just think it's a really important part of the conversation to highlight, because too often, you know, you and I came from backgrounds that most of the people we interact with on podcasts in the health space, they have no idea. They have no concept of what it's like to have food scarcity, to not know, like, if you're going to be safe, to live under threat by the people that should have loved you unconditionally, but they are the biggest threat in your life on a day-to-day basis, lighting up your cortisol.

50:54It's these kinds of things that they're uncomfortable, right? Nobody wants to hear about it. Nobody wants to talk about it. And when we talk about it, they want to say, well, but you're the success story. But you made it out. So see, everyone can do it.

51:07Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. Okay. There are very few ultimate truths. All right. But from my spirit right now, what I want to say is that the truth is it's a both and world it's not an either or and why would there's a big reason we have so much dissonance and these two incredibly um i don't even know the word at this point i don't even know we're so opposing is because it's either or it is so it's this or that we're programmed to believe there's this or that. And I got to have some context. It's, I'm grateful that we have a this or that. I'm grateful we have two choices.

51:53Shawn Stevenson:Some countries have, there's one, right? But to think that it's black or white, this or that, either or is just stupid. All right. It's both. And it's a both end world. There is a huge space for your personal responsibility and accountability. There's also a huge space for you to understand the context of the environment and the social structures and the things that you're dealing with because they could be dramatically different and outright dangerous for somebody like when people talk about this stuff i come from that like i actually know what it's like and when we push it all the way on to not having access no that's not true i had access i just didn't have awareness and also sometimes capacity there's different things that can get in the hurdles to access but Like, I just needed to know it was possible, right?

52:49Shawn Stevenson:Because funny enough, as I'm saying, there was no organic section in the grocery store. There was a farmer's market that was five minutes from my house. I didn't know existed this whole time with prices, half the price easily of Whole Foods. That's the thing. I'm like, I look back at college and I'm like, man, if it wasn't for farmer's markets, sometimes. Here's the rub. The farmer's market was right next door to the police station. That's wise for them though. I mean, they're like, we want to be close proximity to like people, people are going to hesitate before they try to run off with my, like, you know, lettuce or pear, you know, whatever the context might be for that situation.

53:30Shawn Stevenson:I didn't want to, I didn't even want to drive down that street because again, I'm from Ferguson. All right. My plot, my plotted path to get to the university, a university in Missouri, where I was going was how do I void the police? Good sleep is everything. That's why Oli's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-theanine for both kiddos and grownups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. Erasing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Oli's sleep solutions for the whole family at Oli.com. That's O-L-L-Y.com. I'm curious, like, Are there things that people can identify about their health or maybe the way they're living their life that points to this isn't a diet issue.

54:19This is an exercise issue. This is a community relationship loneliness issue.

54:24Shawn Stevenson:This speaks to the importance of being able to self-assess, which is complex in of itself. awareness, being able to listen to a show like this or like my show and just being able to get these different data points and things to consider is very difficult to, you know, identify what a problem is if you don't know what it could possibly be, if that makes sense. Right. And so being able to tune into education, get educated, start to turn over some stones that you normally might not turn over. It's so unfortunate that for years, so many people didn't know that various chronic diseases were diet related.

55:07Shawn Stevenson:And the biggest data set that we have on chronic disease in America is published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association 2018, affirmed poor diet is the number one cause of our epidemics of chronic diseases. Diet is a huge thing. I didn't know that. I had no idea that the food that I was eating had any impact on this degenerative condition that I had. My physician told me that I had the spine of an 80-year-old. He told me that this was incurable. He said that he's sorry that it happened to me at so young. He's never seen a case like this before. We're going to get you a back brace.

55:43Shawn Stevenson:We're going to get you some medication. We're going to write you a note so that you don't have to work right nobody asked what caused this accelerated aging condition in a 20 year old body right and so being able to um get the relationship where this thing even matters right so we know that diet matters and that's changing right now thankfully is a bigger part of the conversation just in conventional medicine is it's amazing it's amazing what's happening how that happened technology. So it's not either or. Earlier, we were making technology sound pretty bad. Yeah. Well, it can suck sometimes. It can suck, but it can also be incredibly life-affirmative.

56:28Shawn Stevenson:This is how people are listening to this or watching right now, right? It's such a valuable gift. It's a both-end world, and it can also be something incredibly degrading. And so the right use of technology has really helped to change what's happening in medicine. And I've never seen, I mean, it happened very quickly where we have so many integrated physicians and functional medicine docs. Oh, trust. Just like five years ago, I was still a quack because I talked about nutrition that had no bearing on anything. I mean, it was the biggest, I remember when I was studying for my nutrition degree and hearing doctors saying like, nothing that you eat has any impact on your health.

57:11And I'm like, I eat something. It becomes me. It makes me run like every, you know, like a little machine that I am, like everything runs on what I am eating. Tell me how that makes sense. And literally they're like, there's no science. And I'm like, but there's common sense. Imagine that. Like, and there was science, but there's the choice to ignore science that happens. Exactly.

57:36Shawn Stevenson:When I was in college, studying biology, looking at the cell parts, cell membrane, mitochondria, nucleus, we're not taught that that nucleus is made from the nutrients you eat. The cell membrane is made from your meals. Your mitochondria is made from the menu that you choose to eat from. Our parts don't happen out of nowhere. It's coming from the food that we eat. and the quality of the parts that we make can be dramatically different. The energy that it's all running on can be dramatically different, but our bodies are resilient. That's the cool thing about it. We can do like the most messed up stuff.

58:14Shawn Stevenson:We can eat straight up fake food for years and years and years and our body will find another way to operate. And what we'll label that as is insulin resistance. It's just trying to protect us from all this abnormal amount of fake foods, sugar that we're bringing into the body, it's just finding a new way to operate, right? It's an adaptation. But we are calling these adaptations incurable diseases. And that is so unfortunate. So self-inquiry on nutrition, my sleep habits, being able to self-assess.

58:55Shawn Stevenson:jumping right to taking whatever i'm you know peptides incredibly popular but jumping right to that if you're not sleeping well or testosterone therapy and you're not even trying okay sometimes that can help you to sleep right taking a various peptide or hormone replacement therapy of some sort it could be helpful in you sleeping but if you just don't give a shit and you just want to binge watch TV all the time, be on your phone and then take this thing outside of yourself to try to make you better. We're missing the point. All right. So your sleep quality, um, being able to honestly self, self-assess that getting education around that.

59:36Shawn Stevenson:Uh, obviously the tip of the spear for me is, is, um, I was going to say exercise, but your relationships, right. Our relationships and investing in that, getting educated about that, you know, read a book on it, you know, tune in to podcasts that are helping to get some education and being careful about not buying in completely to one way of thinking about any of this stuff. Because what I found to be successful over time is that for most people, they'll find something that works for a certain amount of time, but then it will change. And because they're so bought into that thing that initially worked for them, they'll punish themselves they'll start psychologically breaking themselves down again beating themselves up i'm just doing it wrong i'm not doing it hard enough whatever the case might be instead of understanding that life is dynamic constantly changing you are dynamic constantly changing you have infinite potential but learning the tools having tools so that you can self-assess and change whenever the situation calls for it that's the most powerful thing you could do today by far.

1:00:42Well, let me ask you, you have talked a lot about family meals and how those are impacting the health of the adults and the kids in the family dynamic. Why are family meals so important and why are they basically on the endangered species list?

1:00:59Shawn Stevenson:So according to researchers at Harvard, only 30 % of families eat together now on a regular basis, right? This is something that's just a part of our culture for centuries right for thousands of years really and it's quickly devolved just in the last few decades and my question was is there is there a negative impact on our health by not eating together and one of the most interesting studies that i came across was published in journal pediatrics and they were looking at family eating behaviors and they found that kids who ate with their parent or caregivers just three meals a week at minimum.

1:01:39Shawn Stevenson:At least that was the minimum effective dose. Three meals per week eating with their parent or caregivers had dramatically reduced risk of developing obesity and disordered eating. There was something protective against chronic illness by eating with their children. All right. This is the first time I get to talk about this and have context set in advance. But another study was done on minority children who are generally in the context of this low-income environment. Because for me, when I heard the study about being protective against whatever, I'm just like, what about access, right? What about access?

1:02:19Shawn Stevenson:Like maybe they have the means, the money, whatever they can eat with their kids, right? They have the life structure. So they looked at minority children. And what they found was that eating four meals per week with a parent or caregiver, and it could be any meal, it doesn't have to be dinner, lunch, breakfast, any meal, four meals per week, led to these children eating five to seven servings of fruits and vegetables at least five days a week and dramatically lowered intake of ultra-processed foods, namely chips and soda. But the researchers noted it was when the TV was never or rarely on. Interesting.

1:02:59Shawn Stevenson:All right. That was the key. And so I'm saying this in having this context because if my mom would have known, I think she would have done it. She would have done it more frequently. I can count on my hands how many times I eat with my family. I eat with my brothers and sister a lot. But most of the time we just get food and kind of scatter, you know, get in front of TV, play video games, whatever. But it's usually outside of holidays, by the way. Holidays, yeah, we keep our family meal. but we just, it wasn't a part of our culture. And I feel that if my mom knew that it was protective for us, she would have done it, but she had no idea.

1:03:38Shawn Stevenson:No idea. She loved her kids. Whatever expression that looks like, she loved us. And if she can find a way to give us an advantage, because we're all eating anyways, why not sit down and eat together? And so it doesn't matter the income status, the environment, if we know this and we're intentional about it, it is protective for our children. All right. And we can structure that in a way that works for us. Again, it could have been breakfast. Maybe that's the only time you see your kids. Maybe you work the late shirt. Right. If you make it a mandate to do that because you know it matters, you can do it.

1:04:13Shawn Stevenson:uh lastly so what about us for as parents uh big study was done with tech workers at ibm and they found that when parents were able to make it home in time to quote have you know make it in time for dinner quote they had uh dramatically increased work morale productivity and when they were not making it home in time to have dinner with their families their work morale plummeted how productivity went down and overall job satisfaction went down and what it was goes back to dr waldinger's research as well eating with their family was helping them to metabolize stress to process stress again they don't have to go and talk about their work problems it's just being around people that you care about on other than consciously unconscious subconscious is metabolizing and processing stress rather than just go go go go go dealing with these problems at work.

1:05:12Shawn Stevenson:And so it's good for all of us. And we've already talked about some of the reasons why, but truly that table is a unifier. Psychologically for our kids, it gives us a chance. It gives our kids a chance to feel seen. And how rare is that in their lives today? We want to make it a phone free zone, a tech free zone, if at all possible. Now, I love watching a game with my son. He's a basketball player. I love to do that. But we also have to make sure that we carve out time to have technology out of the picture. We talked about how it distracts our brain just having at the table. So my kids already know, like we just created a culture, but I know that one of the things you would ask about is - You're like, I'm predicting you already.

1:05:58I learned your patterns, lady.

1:06:00Shawn Stevenson:What if our kids are like, they're mad about it. Like I want to be on my phone. What do you do? All right. So number one, they're addicted like we are. In dealing with kind of, I'm not going to say superficial, but I'll just say that superficial addiction. We have to utilize the principle of let's replace it with something of equal or greater value. don't just say we're gonna have dinner tonight because i heard this on uh dr jolene's show that we need to sit down and eat together to protect your health this will be you all right um you're like i have kids trust it will not work so we have to come to the table literally with something that is attractive because here's the thing we know our kids better than anybody on earth.

1:06:56Shawn Stevenson:We know them. We know what motivates them, what demotivates them. The same thing with our significant others. When they're nothing, I don't want to have to, I just want you to just do this and that's okay. But the truth is if we have, if we take care of ourselves a little bit more to give us a little bit more mental reserve, we can literally come to the table and know how to get everybody to get together here. And so it's definitely easier if your kids are born into it right and whatever age it can be more difficult but knowing my motivation like for my my my oldest son he loves to dance all right and so however it turned out when we start having frequent family dinners together we end up putting on music and having like dance battles or and then that evolved into to rap.

1:07:49Why am I not seeing this on social media?

1:07:51Shawn Stevenson:I was posting this back in the day. He's 25 now, but I was posting this back in the day. Okay. I remember you guys dancing, but I'm like, I want to see dance offs and rap battles. But then it would, sometimes it'd be collaborative. It evolved into being more collaborative most of the time than a battle. But it became like, it got to the point where I bought a microphone off Amazon that after dinner, we break that out. Somebody who created a beat on the iPad and then like we just passed the microphone around and we freestyle you know it's just like a part it was a regular part of our family dinners it was something creative it was something fun and funny or thoughtful right but it just worked for us i'm not saying everybody should try to you know whatever but it might be music it might be board games it might be asking you know really fun or funny questions, right?

1:08:44But it's just getting everybody in a collective energy, right?

1:08:49Shawn Stevenson:And so you know what that is for your family. It might be different for different family members. It might be leveraging food, right? Which we don't necessarily want to use food as like a reward per se. But if you tell your kids, like, we're going to have family dinner tonight and um it's going to be at seven what dessert do you want right oh i'm invite i'm involved in this you know what oh can we have the whatever you know from from our cookbook we've got some um uh these pumpkin muffins right oh we want to have the pumpkin muffins all right cool you know um this could be utilizing technology as well so sometimes after dinner yesterday actually i went and played uh ps5 with my son like 2k basketball which is it could get we can get chippy with each other that's the one thing um but we played after dinner we knew that we were going to game together so it was like something to look forward to like let's let's eat and then we go and game right uh some people play i didn't know this because i always thought about board games after dinner some families play board games board games during dinner right and this could be something fun there's so many there's so much new stuff now like you and me we play like sorry sorry not believe we played life uh we played trouble you know shoots and ladders did you know shoots and ladders is called something else in other countries what's it called snakes and ladders oh yes i did we came across that i think it was in uh the netherlands we stayed at a family's house and they had all these board games and my son was like snakes right it's like that's kind of a little edgy.

1:10:32Shawn Stevenson:I found out from my wife. She's from Kenya and snakes and ladders. I was like, no, it shoots and ladders, like slides and whatever. But now there's so many cool games. You can even use technology. Play Heads Up. We play Heads Up a lot. It's right there on your phone. You can download the app. There's different topics that you can use and you can get on Teams. There's a time my son was really, really, he's still into Marvel but he was really into Marvel so we got the Marvel kit. And we play like basically trivia with Marvel, right? And so whatever that looks like, I just threw out, and I'm just hammering them out, but there's so many different creative ideas that you can do as a family to get everybody together at the table.

1:11:14So let me ask you, with all of this in mind, if you could challenge the listeners to do one thing every day over the next seven days that's gonna have a big impact, mealtime, community, family mealtime, whatever it is, what would you challenge them to do that's going to have a big impact on their life?

1:11:31Shawn Stevenson:I'd go right off the data and use that minimum effective dose, three family meals per week. But how do you do that? You have to make it sacred. I'm sure you use some form of a calendar. We've got all this stuff on our calendar that is often not about our family, right? And so, but most of us, ironically, we do all that we do for our family. If they're that important, schedule that time, put it on your calendar. family meals, whatever works for you. This could be family dinner on Monday and Thursday and family brunch on Sunday. This could be, you know, breakfast together Monday through Friday, like whatever it looks like for you, put it on the calendar.

1:12:13Shawn Stevenson:Because for so many of us, if it's not scheduled, it's not real. And it's just like, you can start to debate yourself about it. Putting it on the calendar also starts to activate the planning, right? That comes along with, oh, we know we're having family dinner, so we plan a little bit more, right? So that's my biggest ask, biggest homework. Most important, it's going to have so many great impacts in your life. Schedule those family dinners or family meals, whatever that looks like, three meals per week. Put it on the calendar, make it real. I love that. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us today, delivering some mind-blowing science about loneliness and community, but also giving us actual items so that we can actually move forward to cultivate better health it's my pleasure thank you for having me your call has been forwarded to voicemail hi this is zoe deutch and nick robinson our brand new movie voicemails for isabelle is all about those little moments that feel like the universe is looking out feeling homesick then your sister calls hearing that perfect song exactly when you need it.

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