How Community Shapes Your Mind, Body, and Well-Being

0:00Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. It wasn't career achievement. It wasn't exercise. It wasn't a healthy diet that determined the quality and happiness of your life. It was good relationships. Good relationships keeps us healthier and happier. The holidays are supposed to be joyful, but for many of us, they're stressful. Between travel, family, busy schedules, and late nights, our bodies burn through magnesium past. Magnesium is responsible for over 600 processes in the body, including sleep, muscle relaxation, mood, and stress response. Most of us are deficient without even knowing it.

0:33That's why I take Magnesium Breakthrough from Bioptimizers. It has all seven essential forms of magnesium in one capsule, so your body can actually absorb and use it. This holiday season, give your body what it needs to feel calm and sleep better. Visit bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code hymen to save 15%. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I've built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive, for live Q &As, exclusive content, and direct connection.

1:09For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at drhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. What do the longest living and most joyous people in the world have in common? Well, they all share one common trait, a sense of belonging, of community, of connection. You know, when we have a tribe to live on, when we are connected to others, we have a sense of belonging.

1:46When we feel there's a worth outside of ourselves, we can really tap into an incredible array of our own inner pharmacy, not the doctor's pharmacy, but our own inner biochemistry lab in our brain that regulates so much of our health. So when we're talking about today is how the strength of our relationships is one of the key factors, maybe the key factor in determining longevity. I'll just tell you a quick story about a community I might've mentioned before, but it's Rosetta, Pennsylvania. And it was read about this years ago in one of Deepak Chopra's books. and they found that there was this tribe of not tribe but community of italians that came over en masse from italy from this little town italy and there were you know all different levels of society wealth and you know achievement and success uh at least monetarily and but they all came over but the thing that was unique about them was that they had a deep sense of community and no matter what station life you were who you were everybody celebrated everything together All the holidays, all the birthdays and the weddings and the funerals and everything was in community.

2:57And then when they came to the States, they adopted the same crappy lifestyle habits as Americans, but they didn't die at the same rate because they had this sense of connection. Now we know a lot about this research because one of the biggest factors in terms of your risk for premature death is loneliness. Being lonely and socially isolated is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's really serious. So biological aging, as a result of all of our stressors and our psychological stressors and relational stressors, our lack of connection is really important. Lack of physical touch, lack of intimacy, plays a huge role.

3:36Lack of being understood and seen and witnessed plays a huge role in so much of the ailments that we're suffering, not just mental illness, but also physical illness and our longevity. So this whole idea of sociogenomics, I actually came up with this term years ago when I was in Haiti, and then it became part of medical literature, not because of me, but because other people also started glomming onto it. And it was this idea that our social relationships and our social networks may be more important than our genetic connections in determining our health and our health outcomes. And that our lifestyle certainly influences our genes, but so does our social connections, our relationships influence our gene expression.

4:14and it's really not an abstract theory or notion it literally is biology our thoughts our beliefs our relationships all drive real changes that we can measure in our gene expression that can join inflammation stress hormones so for example you're having a conversation with somebody if it's a loving connected intimate conversation your anti-inflammatory genes will turn on your healing and repair genes will turn on whereas if you're in a conflictual relationship or a conversation with somebody you're going to have your stress hormones increase you're going to have inflammation increase. You're going to increase all sorts of bad things in your body that are produced by your body that cause harm.

4:50So we have huge, huge, huge motivation, I think, to focus as a key part of our health strategy and just life happiness strategy, a deep sense of community and making sure we build that. So our social connections, our community and relationships, all are associated with long lifespan with a better mental health with improved physical health and things like blood pressure waste circumference body mass inflammation now i was in icaria and sardinia which are two of the blue zones and the peninsula and one of the things these communities have in common where people live to be longer than anywhere else and i wrote a lot about this in young forever my new book was the power of community they all were part of this fabric and they all had their place they all had their role they all had a meaning and purpose even if you're 100 years old i remember julia It was 103 months, she said.

5:41And she basically was still working at 100 years old, making all sorts of wedding accoutrements, like doilies and little lace things. I don't know what they do in Italy, but it was kind of cool. She was constantly working and making stuff for all these weddings and was still involved in the community life. So I want to share a little bit about a study that kind of reflects the power of this. And it was an 80-year study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. And it had been producing data on so many different things on who lives longer, happier, healthier lives. And they wanted to understand not what makes people sick, but what makes people thrive, what makes them well.

6:18So what were the lessons from this study? It was an 84-year study, right? A long study. They were tracking the same people and over generations, asking thousands of questions, hundreds of measurements to find out what really makes people healthy and happy. And these people were giving regular updates on their life, their health, their income, their employment, their marital status. They filled out questionnaires and were part of interviews where they revealed their fears and their hopes, their disappointments, their accomplishments, their regrets, life satisfaction, and lots more. And this had a really incredible impact by providing lots of data.

6:57the researchers use this data to assess how people's lives their experiences their attitudes affect their well-being and one of the thing that's was so powerful from this study was sort of surprising it wasn't career achievement it wasn't exercise it wasn't a healthy diet that determined the quality and happiness of your life it was good relationships good relationships keeps us healthier and happier that was powerful and the studies leaders that are I I mean, obviously the people who started the study are dead, but the current leader of the study, Robert Waldinger from Harvard and Mark Schultz, have a new book.

7:32It's called The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. And it's a great book. I actually had Robert Waldinger on the podcast, The Doctor's Pharmacy, and you can learn more about the book and things there. But what are the things that we can do? What are the lessons learned from the study about how do we improve the quality of our relationships? First, we have to look at ourselves, right? Who are we? What is our life like? What are the choices we're making? How are we not prioritizing relationships? So we can get really busy. We can do all sorts of stuff that we think is helping us get ahead.

8:05We can spend too much time on social media. But we often don't really think about building and investing in the quality and the number of our relationships. And for me, I know personally that my relationships, my friendships, my community is the most important thing for me. It really is what keeps me grounded, keeps me healthy, keeps me happy. And then more and more as I get older, I focus more on this as opposed to like when you have kids and a career and you try to just kind of get by. And it's like sometimes friends can fall by the wayside, but it's really important to find. And it even can be just one or two good friends.

8:44It makes a huge difference.

8:49Now, when these people in the study actually were interviewed, they really actually benefit from this interview because it helped them realize where they neglected their relationships. And then they considered sort of looking and finding, well, how can we improve that? So maybe look at your own life. What's your social life like? Who are the people in your life that you care most about, that you want to have a relationship with? Think about how they support you and how often you spend time together. and maybe do a little bit of effort to actually focus on what matters to you most and help you make decisions that actually can enhance the quality and number of your relationships.

9:26So maybe spend more time with people who make you laugh and who elevate you and less time with people who drain you and are energy sapped. So I think it's important to find friends and community members that help bring you up and not take you down. Sometimes you meet with people, all we want to do is complain and go on and on about everything. And I think there, you know, there are, there are other people who you, when you're around them, you laugh, you have fun, you play, and it's just, that's what you want. You know, prioritize your relationships. We schedule an exercise. We make ourselves maybe time to make a healthy diet.

9:59We, we focus on our career and work, but we don't focus on prioritizing those relationships that matter and being showing up and being present for us rather than zoning out on social media, you know, rather than like, you know, doing a million things at once, focus on, on your relationships. You know, when during COVID, I, I think we all felt a little isolated. And so I reached out to about six of my close male friends and we all have known each other for 40 often plus years, maybe 35, the small, the fewest I think was 25 years. And so we, we've known each other. And we formed this group. And every Tuesday at six o 'clock, we meet for an hour and a half and spend time together and share about our lives.

10:43And it's been one of the most impactful things I've done. And it's something that you can do. It doesn't take any organization, you just need a Zoom link or it's really pretty easy. And you can have these deep connections and relationships that allow you to be seen and known and can really help activate so many healing pathways in your body. Make time to talk to people, right? And it came in sometimes with small relationships that matter, but a study in the University of Kansas found that the simple act of just reaching out to somebody, a friend for conversation once a day, dramatically increases happiness and lowers their stress hormones.

11:18So hanging out with friends lowers your stress hormones, pretty good. And also, it's not all about you, right? So take time to ask questions, find out what's exciting for them. Find out what they're struggling with. Find out what makes them happy. Have them share their life with you and value their opinions. Be present, focus, and don't just kind of be superficial with them, but go deep. So maybe try to have one conversation a day and put that in your calendar and see what the effects will be over time. Super important. Next thing is be kind. You know, my grandmother used to ask my mother when she came home and said, I met this new friend.

11:55She says, are they kind? And I think kindness was such an important value in my family. And how do we be kind to each other? And, you know, the relationship happiness is determined by how you are in that relationship. And there was a research study in Michigan State that looked on data for 2 ,500 married couples. And they found they were, you know, how good they were in five different dimensions. Were they extroverts? Were they agreeable? Were they conscientious? Were they stable emotionally? Were they open to doing new things and experiences? And the ones who had higher levels of agreeableness and emotional stability also had higher happiness.

12:37So the more kind of kind and positive you were, the more likely you were to be happy. So people invest a lot of time in finding someone who's perfectly compatible, but that might not be the whole story. It's more about being kind to the people you care about and fostering those deep connections. Also, a friend of mine had a word that I really loved, which is called cop-tuitiveness, which is where you cop-tuit. If you screw up, if you make a mistake, you cop-tuit. And it's really about learning to apologize, learning to repair relationships, learning how to have nonviolent communication and owning your stuff.

13:17Like I said, also a great way to build a relationship is to ask questions. Instead of talking about yourself, ask questions about somebody. Show that you care. Show that you're interested in what they care about or thinking about. If someone wants advice, don't just give them your opinion. Ask them questions to guide them to the right answer that they know themselves. Also, don't be shy about expressing your love. There are lots of ways to love and lots of ways to express it. Maybe it's simple things.

13:49I had a flight that came in the other night late, and I usually take the Uber home. And my partner, she showed up unexpected and picked me up at the airport. It just brought me such joy and delight. It was such a simple thing, we're 15 minutes from the airport here, and it wasn't a big deal for her, but it made a huge difference in terms of my own happiness, and it was really powerful. So help your friends with a project. Ask them what they need to do, whether it's clean up the garage or work on a project together, call an old friend. Maybe they haven't heard from you in a while. Maybe you just want to check in on them, ask them how they're doing.

14:26Maybe you want to focus on helping somebody who's trying to do something that may be difficult for them, trying to support them and give them some love. Also, when you have a partner or a close friend, do little acts of kindness. Give them a little gift. buy them something they like, get them something that makes them smile. It can be super simple. When you often don't do these acts, life just is a little bit flatter. And when you do them, it's super fun. Like I said, when my partner picked me up at the airport, it was like, wow, I got that she really cared. Also, tell people how you feel about them.

15:07Don't wait until their eulogy to tell them all the things you like about them. Be specific. Give people feedback about what you love about them, what you like about them, what makes you happy, and how you feel in their presence. Who would you be without them? Who would you be now that you're with them? What do they inspire you to do? And thank them for what they do and how they show up for you. Don't be shy. Like I said, don't wait until someone's dead to write a eulogy about them. It's better to have eulogies when you're when you're alive and i you know i actually had a group friend group where we would get together and on people's birthdays we would basically go around and for everybody's birthday we would share a little bit about what they're um like and what we what we like about them what we love about them something that inspires us about them and it's like it's like getting a living eulogy it's pretty awesome the holidays are supposed to be joyful but for many of us, they're stressful.

16:05Between travel, family, busy schedules, and late nights, our bodies burn through magnesium past. Magnesium is responsible for over 600 processes in the body, including sleep, muscle relaxation, mood, and stress response. Most of us are deficient without even knowing it. That's why I take Magnesium Breakthrough from Bioptimizers. It has all seven essential forms of magnesium in one capsule, so your body can actually absorb and use it. This holiday season, give your body what it needs to feel calm and sleep better. Visit bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code HYMAN to say 15%.

16:44We are literally born inside of a mother's womb. So we are born in, right? We're born in community and without it, we cannot survive or thrive, right? And it's so clear that our lack of belonging or isolation is the actual essential issue that ladders down to every other societal problem that we are facing today. So gun violence. Unpack that for us because this is a big statement that loneliness is a cause of so many societal illness. It's every societal illness. So obesity epidemic, our lack of, so. So tell us how each one, obesity because. Because so being socially isolated is as harmful to your physical health as being an alcoholic and twice as harmful as obesity because cellularly, right, we end up storing more.

17:32And again, you're the doctor here, but as there's so much sort of knowledge around and studies around when you don't belong, all of a sudden your cellular reactions become slower, you're metabolizing food less fast. And there's actually a lot of studies that I've read around that. Maybe you're depressed and anxious and using food as your source of comfort. Well, that too, of course, that too. but it actually sets off a cellular chain reaction. Our lack of belonging and isolation sets off this sort of cellular chain reaction that sort of slows down our metabolism as well. But also, you know, every anxiety and depression, you know, one in three college students are anxious or depressed today.

18:15One of the reasons we launched Daybreak on College Campuses is because my fiance's little brother, three of his best friends commit suicide in college and turns out it's, what's the word? It's contagious. And so he... It's true, both positive and negative behaviors are contagious. Absolutely, exactly. And so we looked into it and we realized, oh my gosh, there's such a huge issue on college campuses around drinking and binge drinking. And so he wanted to create Daybreak on college campuses to inspire connection without substances. as well. So we're now on 15 campuses. Because we're getting up at six o 'clock to go dancing.

18:56Well, we start a little bit later because they're definitely not going to come and we have to lure them with burritos, but it's cool. Dancing with burritos. No, but I, you know, I, and so like unpacking some more, like our political strife right now, you know, the, the political polarization that we're facing today, you know, I think the Make America Great again hats, you know, the red hats that people are wearing in the, on the Republican side, it's a statement of connection and community. I'm a part of something. And these are disenfranchised community members often who are being recruited who are saying, hey, join our barbecue.

19:31We're cooking for everybody. Here's some hats for you guys. And all of a sudden I went from feeling like I don't belong to here's a community that really is welcoming me with open arms. The pipe bombers, all of the gun violence that we're facing today, many of whom have mental illnesses. Well, 85 % of people experiencing mental illness are isolated or alone. and so because we ostracize them from society they're not welcome because they're not mentally sort of abled right so um so that piece of it only sort of creates that um that that sense of anger um and so it's on each and every one of us to um out there who's listening on this you know on this podcast right now to really make friends with everybody whether it's someone who's older than you, younger than you, someone who's mentally, you know, sort of experiencing mental illness, how can we actually bridge those divides that every single human on this planet can belong?

20:29And so the cover of my book has a doorway on it, right? Because the concept of neighborhood, neighborliness is also lost. You know, I live in New York City. We live in New York City. We don't, do you know your neighbor's names? Do you know the neighbor across the street? Yeah, we just moved in. I don't know my neighbors. I've been there for three years, you know, and I've tried to make friends with them and there's sort of this kind of don't talk to me type thing and and so we're making a big effort you know we we have a welcome committee like little figurines outside our door that says you know welcome to our home you know if you need salt come and borrow it yeah um and and we're trying but it's on all of us society needs to embrace the concept of neighborhood again good thing if you not need sugar but if you need salt yes yeah exactly you're not gonna get a bag of white sugar and brought his house.

21:15Definitely. But I think community, the most generous act we can do as human beings is to create community. The most generous thing we can do for ourselves and for each other is to sort of extend our hand and say, hey, will you be my friend? So that's true for me when I turned 30 years old. I looked myself in the mirror and I realize I didn't belong. And that was the beginning of my journey to community. And that's the first page of my book. Yeah. In my twenties, I spent sort of sleepwalking. I was in sports bars, watching football, drinking beer that I didn't want to drink and trying to be cool and relevant and hanging out with what I thought society, you know, sort of deemed as cool, like going to clubs and getting drunk and blacking out all the time because I'm Asian and I can't handle my liquor.

22:05and and then at 30 years old i woke up and i had this like whoa aha moment where i was just like what have i been doing like who am i and that the light in my eyes was dim and and i just could hard to imagine i mean right but in this last nine years like headlight high beams shining in the world well this is the last nine years right like we totally and and you know you're such a and you know you're such a dear friend now and um my our community is what gives us that life and so from 30 to 35, Mickey and I spent all of our effort and time focusing on community. And I'd create all these exercises for myself.

22:42And in my book, I talk about going in, right? You have to go in first to belong to yourself. So often with community building, we're grasping outside of ourselves to find those friends. But it really starts with this journey of self-exploration first to get to know who we are, what we value, what we can bring to a community and how we're showing up how are we at listening how are we at um connecting with you know um with everyone around us and and it's almost like focusing on not only how to find a friend but how to be a friend yes that's exactly right that's exactly right so the first half of my book really challenges the reader in a gentle and loving way to go inside and ask themselves how are we showing up and how can we um how can we sort of shine a light on ourselves first in a beautiful way in a glorious way before we go out.

23:29I think so much of self-help today also, it traps us. We get trapped in self-help. We get trapped in personal development. That we forget that the whole point of personal development is to do what? Is to better relate to the outside world, right? We go inside. It's self-care, but it really should be we care. Yeah, right? Exactly. It's like I'm going to get a massage. I'm going to take care. I'm going to eat healthy so that I can take care of my children better, so I can serve my community better, so that I can show up for the world better. And yet we forget that. We just get trapped in the look-at-me selfie moments without realizing that that's actually the ladder down to isolation, loneliness, and sadness.

24:07So in Okinawa, which is one of the longest-lived people in the world, they form a community at birth of babies that are kind of connected by their parents that go through life together and go through all the ups and downs and trials and tribulations from birth to like 100 years old, and it builds a sense of, and it's not like 100 people, it's like five people or four people. And it's, you know, most people can't even say there's one friend they have that they can call up when they feel bad or sad who they can have an honest, transparent conversation to. That's really heartbreaking, and it's so much of a driver of so many of the ills of our side.

24:43It's something people don't talk about, and it's what, you know, when we were with Rick Warren in Saddleback Church, I had the insight of using the power of community to help people create health. So suicide's contagious, but health is contagious. That's right. And obesity's contagious, but so is, you know. Good health. Good health, right. And I think that's such an important thing you're creating in the world, is this call to belong. And not only to belong, but actually you've created a very specific roadmap. So I want to get into that now. You've talked about going in to go out. So let's talk about going in and what that means and how do you do that.

25:18Right. So I have about 20 exercises in my book that really take you by the hand. The whole point is to get dirty in this journey of self-exploration and have fun. But going in starts with first an audit of who are you spending your time with. Just take a moment to write down who are the people I'm spending my time with today at work, at home, around me, family, friends, relatives. Who are all the people you're spending your time with? and just write that down on a piece of paper and take a look at this map, right? And this map will begin to, and what I like to do is color code it. So work friends, I'll color code in green, right?

25:58And family, I'll color code in red. And friends that I choose, I'll color code in orange, right? So different colors, just to sort of see, ah, okay, cool. So, you know, and then I have this kind of axis of energy that I created in my book, in chapter one, or in part one of the book, where you sort of assess, okay, who are the community members who are bringing me up? And who are the community members in my life who are bringing me down? So looking around, you begin to see, ah, cool, so all the green quadrant sort of is up and to the right. So therefore, I realize that my work life is very positive.