#1 Stress Doctor: How to Turn Off Stress, Calm Your Body, & Rewire Your Mind to Handle Anything

21:40I might not be able to walk, see, finish medical school. It was, Mel, the absolute worst, most scary moment in my life. Because again, I had fought really hard to get to medical school. I was excited to be there. And now I thought the whole trajectory of my life is gonna go in a different direction. And my mother sent me on a card in the mail, the serenity prayer. And the first line is, God brought me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. And I read her words and she called me, she said, you can spend every day, the next two years of your medical school worrying about what might happen and wasting that time.

22:18Or you can imagine it might never happen, your worst thoughts, and just put one foot in front of the other and go day after day. And that advice really saved me. And that is advice I give many of my patients when things happen to them is put one foot in front of the other. This happened. Now we're going to move forward day by day by day. And the farther you get away from the event, the further the pain and the fear becomes. Just a few weeks ago, I had a patient who went in for a routine surgery, should have been in and out. Something went wrong in the operating room and he came out 70 % blind.

22:55And I saw him, you know, six months ago in the aftermath of that. And he was sort of broken. I mean, he didn't, he was as anybody would be. And then I saw him a couple of weeks ago and there was a lightness to him and he was smiling. And I said to him, you know, how did you get to this point? You know, it's been six months and you seem so different from where you were. And he said to me two things. He said one was acceptance. I couldn't change what happened and I had to learn to accept it. And then he said social support, his friends, those two things. But acceptance is the beginning of your journey.

23:30It is the opening of the door to everything else.

23:32Mel Robbins:So for somebody who's listening right now and you have felt so much pressure, you've been under stress, you can't even remember a time when you weren't stressed. Maybe you're caring for aging parents. Maybe you've got the new class of stress, which is parenting young kids. That's me. Yeah. You know, maybe like there's just, you don't even remember a time. Is what you're about to teach us for that person? And can you talk to the person who doesn't even remember life when they didn't feel pressure? It is for everyone. You know, what I'm going to tell you is for everyone. The resilience is something we can all use.

24:12And it is so critically important because we have stress at every angle, at every point in our life. Caregiver stress is real. And again, it's something I see, especially in a lot of my female patients. In the last month, I had three female patients who are married to male patients of mine talk to me about the stress that they are having because they're caregiving for their husbands, their kids, and everyone else in their life. I had one whose husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's. and she's trying to manage his failing health and dementia that's developing. Another one whose husband had a stroke is no longer who he was.

24:51And the third one was a woman who said her husband had his own mental health issues the last six months. And so all three of these women were talking to me about the massive stress that they were facing being caregivers. And we talked about how to manage that stress and how to handle that stress and the fact that they needed support and help in order to continue to be caregivers to their spouses, but also to protect their own health.

25:14Mel Robbins:Why do you think it's so hard when you're in the caregiving role to really understand the critical nature of taking care of yourself? Because you're so overpowered and overwhelmed by the care and love and empathy and responsibility that you feel for another human being. And so that's an amazing thing, right? To have so much love for someone that you're giving up everything, but you can't, you know, we have to take care of ourselves in order to be able to be there for someone else. You have to. Why? Because it is critical to your survival and it's going to be critical to the survival of the person that you're caring for.

25:53Because if you decompensate, if your health declines, it's game over, right? And so again, I think people just think of stress as this invisible force that we don't really understand. But Mel, I mean, I will tell you from a cardiovascular perspective, a whole cascade of events happens inside your body, particularly in your cardiovascular system, which are all negative. And cardiovascular disease is already the leading cause of death for men and women. And I'm telling you, I'm seeing it every day in my exam rooms, I'm hearing it. This is so important and we are not talking about it. We're not educating about it.

26:27We're not helping our patients manage it. We are totally living in a world where we have a divide between psychology and clinical medicine. We got to do a better job. We cannot have a siloed world of psychology and clinical medicine and no one bridging this gap.

26:42Mel Robbins:You know, I'm just so grateful that you're here. I'm already feeling better and a little bit more resilient, frankly, because I feel like I have some tools this early into our conversation. I know that you're feeling the same way. I think everyone would feel better if they listened to this. We all deserve to know how to be more resilient and we're just getting started with the tools. When we return, we're going to continue walking step by step through exactly how to move through a moment like this in your life. Stay with me.

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29:11Welcome back.

29:12Mel Robbins:It's your friend Mel Robbins. Today, you and I are getting to learn all about resilience, the ability to adapt to change that is hardwired within you and the people that you care about from Dr. Tara Narula. And I just want to jump right back in. So I'm glad you're here. Dr. Narula, on the topic of resilience, I was curious about this. Can you talk more about the role that resilience plays in your overall health? What's fascinating about resilience is it's not just a tool for healing, which, you know, the book is called The Healing Power of Resilience, but it is a tool for prevention. So the more that you practice this tools of resilience and utilize this blueprint and this roadmap, the more likely you are to not go down the road to develop chronic disease because you are going to be less stressed and have less inflammation and have your lower levels of cortisol, less vascular reactivity of your blood vessels.

30:05You are going to do those things we talked about that are going to keep you healthy, like exercising and eating well and sleeping well. So it really is both prevention in terms of chronic disease and also a way that you can move out of a diagnosis or a disease process.

30:18Mel Robbins:Well, that's why you're here, Dr. Narula. And I want to just bring back that beautiful image that you talked about, both as we've been speaking and that you write about in your book, that if you are under this chronic pressure, you are both the block of marble and the angel within it. And you talked about the first step being acceptance, accepting that you are in this chapter of your life. You are in the role of a caregiver or you are under the gun of severe financial pressure in order to pay off debt or whatever it may be. There's tons of ways that people find themselves in a state of chronic stress.

30:58Mel Robbins:Maybe you're dealing with a long-term diagnosis yourself for chronic pain. but acceptance that this is the way things are and I can't change that fact right now is step one. In your book, you also talk about a flexible mindset being the next step. That flexibility of saying, I thought my life was going down this course, but now it's going down a different course or direction and I'm okay with that. But I'm not okay with that. That's the problem with the flexible mindset. Part of it is, I don't want this. I know. And that's where acceptance commitment therapy and CBT therapy and other forms of mindfulness and meditation can help.

31:38But truly, again, referencing back to Lucy Hone, who I talked about earlier, she gave a great analogy of imagining you have these goalposts in front of you. You're kicking the ball in a certain direction through the goal. And she said she realized when her 12-year-old daughter died and she still had her husband and sons, she had to live for them. She had to keep going. So she picked up the goalpost and moved it somewhere else. So this, and I thought that was such a great, easy to understand image. You can still have a goal. You can still aim for it. It's just in a different place, right? And I see this a lot in medicine.

32:11You know, there are patients where I can't give them back the heart cells that have died. I can't give them back the movement of their arm when they've had a stroke. We can't go back, but we can still help them find a different path towards meaning in their life if they have that flexible thinking. I thought I might be able to do this. Okay, I can't do that, but I'm going to shift and I'm going to do this. And so really that flexible thinking is sort of the second key to remodeling, reshaping the vision for what you thought your life was going to be into something else. And that's okay. But the point is, you know, whatever life hits you with, if you can pick up that goal post and put it somewhere else and know you can still move forward towards it, that image can be lifesaving.

32:56Mel Robbins:Dr. Narula, I personally feel that the image of the goalpost is probably going to cause the single biggest change in people's lives that listen to this. And as you're listening, I want you to think about just in your own life, are you still trying to aim for a goalpost that's no longer there? Right. Because you can see how if you're looking at a goalpost that's no longer there, you're not going to find joy. You're not going to find meaning. You're not going to find all the things that you deserve in your life if you keep moving in that direction. So from a medical perspective, how does choosing to change the goalpost, accepting that you have a different life now, how does that help you get through a challenge?

33:48It's like the lighthouse that draws you forward. It pulls you forward. And that kind of goal, we all need that. We all need something to continue to strive for that gives us meaning in life, right? We all have our different meanings for why we're here. But I think when you lose that meaning, you lose that sense of like, I don't know why I'm here. It's like kills you on the inside. And so, and you feel stressed. But when you say, okay, I thought I was here for this reason, but now I'm here for this reason, it's like a light that turns on inside. And so it's just a reframing and reshaping of what you, again, the marble and the angel, it's a reframing and reshaping of who you thought you were, what your life would be, and recognition that like, no, life is change.

34:32It is constantly changing.

34:34Mel Robbins:If something in your life has changed, somebody's died, you didn't get into the dream school, you lost your job, the divorce has happened, like here's the diagnosis, your kid's really struggling and you are so stubborn or scared or whatever that you continue to look at the old life that you wanted, you're creating more stress for yourself. That's right. That's right. Because you're resisting what's actually happened. You're resisting the change. You're fighting against it. Yes. So, you know, we use the analogy in the book of be the river, not the rock, right? You have to flow with life to get the most out of life, right?

35:15That's that malleability, that flexibility is really critical. One of the exercises that one of the psychologists I interviewed told me about, which again, I loved because it was very visual, was the identity pie. He said he has his patient straw circle and cut into the circle pieces of a pie. I'm a mother. I'm a writer. I'm a dog owner. I'm an athlete. I'm a baker and a small slice of the pie is their medical diagnosis. And when you look at that and you see, that's right. I am not my diagnosis. I am so much bigger than that. I am so much more than that. And again, it lets you see my life is so much more full.

35:56It has so much more meaning. It has so much more direction for where I can go. I'm not stuck in that vision of being a victim of my disease process.

36:05Mel Robbins:That's really helpful because you're right. Kind of like the goalposts that when something happens, we kind of laser focus on that thing and you forget there's all these other aspects to who you are and what your life contains. That's right. And what your life can be. You have to see that, right? Now, what happens? You talked about the kind of be the river. Don't be the rock in the river resisting everything. Just kind of you got to learn to go with the way that life is taking you. what effect does that have on your stress and on the kind of physical impact in your body when you really start to accept and you have a flexible mindset and you use some of these tools like the identity pie to say well I'm more than this diagnosis I'm more than this moment I'm the kind of person that can get through something like this yeah well two things I mean when we turn off the stress response, it means that we are using our parasympathetic, for example, nervous system.

37:02So the one where we lower our blood pressure.

37:04Mel Robbins:So does accepting and does kind of doing these tools like help you turn on the parasympathetic response? It's not just intellectual? It's not just intellectual, but also you're not then activating the stress response. So there is a clear pathway when we activate a stress response, you know, our amygdala, this very basic structure in the brain that senses threat and fear is kind of the signal that sends a signal to the hypothalamus in our brain, these deep structures that then send signal to the pituitary and the adrenal glands and that whole cascade where you're essentially then releasing cortisol, the stress hormone from your adrenal glands, epinephrine, you know, adrenaline, norepinephrine, that's all turned on when you're under stress.

37:44But if you counteract that, and that's where things like therapy and meditation and mindfulness can come in or your thought process, you're not allowing that pathway to turn on. You're turning it off, number one. Number two, when you're not living in a state of stress, you're actually making lifestyle choices, which we haven't talked about, that help you live a healthier life. So you are exercising, you are eating healthier, you are getting more sleep, you're not missing your medical appointments, you're not maybe using substances. So it all kind of goes together. What's happening on the inside, you know, you're dialing everything down, but also you're making choices that are also helping you be healthier and lower your stress response.

38:23If you exercise, you're decreasing your stress, right? If you sleep more, you're turning down a lot of these hormones. So it all goes hand in hand. You know, I talk to my patients about sitting down with a therapist and many times they say, well, I don't have anxiety or, you know, I'm not depressed. I'm just caregiving and I'm under stress. And I say, that's enough. That's enough of a reason to sit down with someone. You can just download on. Somebody objective who can be there for you so you can just let go of your thoughts because that in and of itself will lower your stress. You are allowed to spend an hour, you know, a week or, you know, once every two weeks talking to someone who's in your corner to help you.

39:02So therapy can be just to help you through a stressful time. Maybe you don't do it forever, but do it while you're in this period of stress to help you get through the caregiving journey. And then people are really surprised when I say they're like, really? I should see a therapist for that? Yes. Yes, you absolutely should.

39:20Mel Robbins:Let's talk about just like ways to calm yourself when you get that wave, you know, like comes in waves, whether you're like, oh my God, the text that comes in or, you know, layoffs are coming. I need to see you in the office tomorrow morning or a million ways you could feel stressed out. Is there, is there something that you love, Dr. Yarula that you do when you feel the quick wave? I love exercise. So for me, you know, finding a way to get my heart rate up and exercise and move my body is my stress relief. So I find time to carve that out. Being outside, I feel like in nature is a very underrated way to feel better.

39:57We have a home in Connecticut, which is like very rural, just taking a walk, seeing the birds, seeing the trees, getting the fresh air. I feel like nature is extremely powerful. And then breathing exercises. And I think some of the techniques that I've learned about taking five breaths in and then letting them out, a lot of these things we can do, the breath work can actually help sort of, again, in the moment, really turn down the stress response.

40:23Mel Robbins:I am learning so much today. I feel better just listening to you tell all these stories and walk us through exactly what we can do. All right, don't go anywhere. After a short word from our amazing sponsors, Dr. Narula will be back. We're gonna be talking more about hope and about purpose and more tools to get yourself through moments like this in life. So stay with me.

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44:10Mel Robbins:Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. I'm so thrilled that you're still here with me and Dr. Narula. We're talking about resilience and walking through a step-by-step simple plan for how you can tap into your ability to navigate change and still find purpose, joy, and meaning regardless of what life is throwing at you. So Dr. Narula, let's go right back into the tools. I'd love to talk about negative and positive self-talk and how the way that you talk to yourself in your own head can compound the stress and make it worse. What did you discover about the way that negative self-talk versus positive self-talk can increase stress or even have a physiological, like, do damage to you.

44:57Nobody's perfect. We're flawed human beings, but that's okay. And I think the moment we show ourselves the same love and the positive talk that we would show our child or our spouse or anyone else that we care about, that is the moment where we start to kind of become more resilient because we see ourselves in the same way that we would see someone that we're caring for as a caregiver. But that positive self-talk is really critical. That's self-love.

45:24Mel Robbins:I always tell people, I don't know what's going to happen, but you're not going to go through this alone and you're capable of managing this. That's right. Yes. You're so much stronger than you think. And that is really what the book also was about, was this idea that we are so much stronger than we think we are. We all have this capacity and we're not going to crumble and fall apart. We can get through it. Again, if we put one foot in front of the other. Let's talk about social support because it is one of the pillars in the book. And I know when I'm stressed out, if I'm going through something traumatic, I tend to become a little bit of a hermit.

45:59Mel Robbins:And what does love and support from other people do? And like, how do you get it? Social support, again, is something that's so underrated, but so easily accessible to all of us. And my friend, my former resident at the Brigham, Vivek Murthy, I was his intern. He thankfully, I think, opened our eyes in this country to how negative loneliness can be and how important it is for us to cultivate social relationships for our health. The famous study out of Harvard, Robert Waldinger's study that followed men for years. What was it that sort of translated into the best quality of life? It was the quality of their social connections.

46:42It wasn't anything else. And so we have just this growing body of data and literature showing the power of social connection. And I think for a lot of people, you know, they think, oh, well, I need to have a big group of friends. And so for a lot of my patients, we talk about, it doesn't have to be, you know, a large group of friends. It can be one friend that you pick up the phone and call. It can be joining an art class because you love art. And so there's so many outlets that we can explore to find that. You know, I recently told the story of, again, another patient of mine who retired and he started smoking marijuana and felt very depressed, wondering where am I going with my life?

47:18And one of his friends said, you know, Central Park is right there. They have a group, the Central Park group that goes and picks up the garbage and trims the trees and we meet twice a week. And he joined the group and he said just that one step of joining that group. but now he does it twice a week for about an hour, saved him because it gave him a group of people who he could meet every week. He was outside and he started to feel so much better about his life. So it's these micro, small changes that we can make and all of us can do it every single day.

47:48Mel Robbins:It is easy to sit on the couch and feel sorry for yourself. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the state of the world. It is easy and it's an appropriate response to be shocked by life when it's not how you want it to be. That's right. But at some point, you got to do something. And just this social support, going to bingo night, joining a, it seems so dumb, but when you're in the throes of the stress and the overwhelm, you don't feel empowered to do it, but it works. And that's an example of you putting a deposit in the bank of resilience. It is an investment. And I tell people, resilience, training, and the skills we're talking about, it's work.

48:34It's work. Just like exercising. I hate getting up at five in the morning and exercising during the week. I knew I liked you. I don't like looking at the nutrition labels to figure out how much saturated fat it is. Do I want this one or this one? But every single thing we do in life, everything, whether it is for our career, our family, our health, it's an investment and it's hard. And no one is going to say that becoming more resilient is easy, but the investment, the payoff that will come by building this toolbox of skills is so important because the next time something happens, you will reach back in and say, I can do this.

49:14Mel Robbins:I think it's also important to say, if you're going through a very difficult time, it is human nature to not want to reach out. And you shouldn't have to. But if nobody knows what's actually going on, they don't know to show up to support you. And they might be drowning in their own issues. and I know a lot of the times if you're really struggling, the last thing you want to do because you've been thinking about it all day, you've been talking about it all day, particularly if you're dealing with a diagnosis, you don't want to call a friend and then have to talk through it all again today and that's really understandable but also recognizing that if you simply were to text them and to say, I have a lot going on, it's exhausting to share the details but I could really use a morning out on Saturday with a friend right now.

50:04That's right. That's right. Just those small, little, tiny changes. And speaking to what you said about a diagnosis, that's a whole other topic. But for patients who've been diagnosed with something, joining a group of other survivors can be really a powerful way to build connection. I volunteer for the American Heart Association and Go Red for Women. And seeing a community of other female cardiac patients and connecting with them and learning that you're not alone and sharing your struggles, those kinds of community advocacy groups for whatever your concern or health issue is can be really helpful as well.

50:40Mel Robbins:You have an entire chapter, chapter nine, on the critical importance of finding hope. and I'm reading to you from page 191. Sometimes a health event can be so scary that a patient can't believe another day will come. Sometimes a diagnosis can be so dire that a patient can't imagine what the next day will look like. When we learn we don't have much future left or if what lies ahead looks completely unlike the life we have known so far, what happens next? That's when we need hope the most. Hope is the foundation that allows us to build a resilient response in the moment, whatever happens next. What is hope?

51:28Mel Robbins:And why does having hope, especially in moments, whether it's the world at large that feels lost and things feel hopeless, or something going on in your family makes you feel like all is lost. Why is hope important and what does it actually mean, Dr. Narula? I had a patient in my office. Again, I told you a wife and a husband. The husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's. And he looked at me, Mel, and he said, how do I not lose hope? Yes. He said to me, how do I not lose hope? And you can imagine as a doctor, that's a very, very hard question to answer. and I'm a cardiologist and this was about a neurologic degenerative condition.

52:10It's not my field. And I, but I could see that he was struggling and his wife was in the room with him. And he said, I still have so much I want to write. I love my wife so much. I have so much I want to do with her. I'm getting like emotional thinking about it. And I'm falling apart, you know, from my disease. And so, you know, I just sat there with him and I said, you know, you have to find hope in the small moments of every single day. So every day that you wake up and you see your wife and you can say, I love you and hear her say, I love you, that's hope, right? Every day that you can sit at your computer and still write your book that you're writing, that's hope.

52:47It is the fact that there could be a treatment tomorrow that you don't know about that comes down the pipeline for your condition. It is literally finding those small moments of joy and looking for something that you may not know that exists and believing in that. something that is further down the future. That's hope. And I want you to lean into that. I said to him, I want you to kind of fall towards the side of hope and not towards the side of, you know, despair.

53:15Mel Robbins:You know, one other thing that I think helps a lot, or at least this helps me in regard to the state of the world is if I read something that makes me feel despair, I then look for someone doing good. I think you're totally right. And, you know, as someone who works in the news, I've had several conversations with the networks that I've been at about how we need to tell more stories of hope. Yes. We need to put that out there because people need to see it. Is there a daily habit that you can practice to help you cultivate this hopefulness as a skillset and a mindset? Because I refuse to succumb to the despair.

53:53Mel Robbins:And that's not being naive. It's I just choose to believe there's always something you can do. So my husband gave me the book, The Secret and the Magic. Yeah. Yeah. Because he knows I believe in manifesting and dreams and all that sort of stuff. Proven by neuroscience. I mean, it's not even believing in it. It's proven. Yeah. So one of the exercises says, you know, in the morning when you wake up or before you go to bed at night, you think about six things that you're grateful for. And at first when I started doing it, I thought, oh my God, six, that sounds like a lot. Six things. But then you start to think about it and there's small things there.

54:27You know, my daughter told me about something that really great happened in her day today. You know, my patient, I helped them, you know, with this, I was able to get up and exercise on the treadmill today and walk because I'm able to use my legs. The subway came on time today and I didn't have to wait 10 minutes. And suddenly as you're doing, you start to realize there's actually a lot of things that really went well that I'm grateful for and your mindset shifts. Well, the way you described it, Dr.

54:51Mel Robbins:Narula, you're intentionally directing and programming your mind to notice what's going well, which if you notice things that are going well, you naturally start to feel more hopeful. Is that how that works? That's what I'm saying. Yes, exactly. You start to feel more hopeful. I think, you know, putting out, we talked about manifesting, but putting out into the universe, the energy that you want to bring back to you, that gives me hope because you feel control. You feel like I'm putting out this and that's going to help me get what I want. So as a medical doctor and a cardiologist, talk to me a little bit more about using the tools of manifesting, which is really getting intentional about what you want to see.

55:36Mel Robbins:We've moved the goalpost. How could you use this to help you move toward a goalpost that has shifted in your life and to change your own attitude? My kids and everyone, you know, talk to me about, you're a cardiologist, but you talk so much about psychology. Yes. And that's because they really are intertwined. Do you think it has a health benefit to manifest? I do. I mean, I think, again, anything that gives us a sense of agency over our life, I think, helps us feel better and less stressed. And so when you feel like you have the power to get things that you want by simply believing in them, that makes us feel better.

56:15Mel Robbins:Well, if you really think about it, stress is the same thing as manifesting. It's just doing it in the negative. That's right. Because you're allowing all of the things that are happening outside of you to become the things you're expecting to have happen. And that you're focusing on and like an endless loop and thinking about. But is there anything specific that you personally do, Dr. Nerula, as a manifesting practice, like to really train your mind? I'm serious. I love this stuff. I have written down things that I want, you know, and put them on a piece of paper and put them up in my home or in my office.

56:49Yeah. And then I look at it and I say, this is where I want to be and this is what I want. And there it is. That's it. I'm putting it out in the universe.

56:57Mel Robbins:So when you write something down that you really want and you're signaling to your mind, Dr. Nerula, like do you, is there a specific time of year you do it? Is there? No, it's whenever there's something that I want to achieve in my life. Okay. And is there a certain way that you write it down? I just write it on a piece of paper and take a little thumbtack and put it up on the wall. And I have my kids doing it now too. We sit at the dinner table and I'll say, let's manifest that this is gonna happen. We talk about it out loud in my family because I want them to start to do it at this age, they're 13 and nine, to believe that they have control and power over their future and what they want.

57:34And yes, I agree with you. I think when you're living in a state of constant stress, you can't refocus your brain. And the brain is plastic. We keep saying that. It is plastic. It can change. We can rewire it. And part of the way we do that is by the thoughts we choose to focus on. Dr. Nerula, can manifesting help even during times of stress? Manifesting can help at all times, Mel. Why? Because again, you're taking your mind and you're taking it from one thought process and you're literally picking it up and putting it in another thought process. Oh my God, it's like moving the mental goalpost.

58:04It's moving your mental goalpost from a negative thought process to a positive, I want this thought process. Again, it just, you know, the hope is that people start to recognize we have so much more power over our bodies, over our lives by what we do up here, by how we think, by what we believe, by how we talk to ourselves. We have that ability. We just don't teach people to harness it. We don't teach people to use that.

58:28Mel Robbins:I agree with you. Even the identity pie, which forces you to see that your life is bigger than the current circumstances or the caregiving role or the job that you have, that there are so many different parts of you and taking a moment to remind yourself of that lowers your stress. It reminds you of who you are. It gives you an access point to start to shift your life in a different direction. And I believe that the intentional act of manifesting and allowing yourself to say, even if you're writing down, I am capable of getting through this. I want to carve out six hours a week, which seems unthinkable just for me.

59:10Mel Robbins:I am going to be singing in the choir this fall again. There are ways that you can grab onto what you're talking about because stress and pressure and the world around us is bombarding us and it's changing the way we think about what's possible. And so I think you We need to fight back. And this is an important tool. Yes. Yeah. And it's so simple. We can all do it. And it's free. It's free. My daughter's turning 10. And last night she took my laptop and she came and showed me. And I said, what are you doing? And she said, I made a vision board. My 10-year-old daughter for where she wants her 10-year life to go and what she wants to happen.

59:47And I thought, okay, I'm doing something right. You're doing a lot right.

59:49Mel Robbins:You're doing a lot more than that. But you're doing a lot right. That's fantastic. It was very cute. Why shouldn't she? That's what I said. I said, this is great. Society's telling her. That's right. And her friends are telling her she can have a vision for her life. Great job, mom. Great job. I want to read you again from your best-selling book. This is page 211, chapter 10, Pursue Your Purpose. It happens to all of us. We find ourselves at a moment when the life we know and are accustomed to is suddenly and alterably changed. It often arises unexpectedly. It may be that we don't get into the college of our dreams or land the job we had been working toward for all of our career, or our partner of 30 years announces that she wants a divorce, or we're diagnosed with heart disease and we're told that if we don't alter our lifestyle quickly, as soon as possible, we run a high risk of soon having a heart attack or stroke.

1:00:41Mel Robbins:These moments create a sense of great vulnerability. Our sense of who we are, our identity is called into question. What all of these wake-up calls offer us is a chance for introspection, to take a closer look at our priorities and our path and to see if they are aligned toward what we might call our purpose. How does having a sense of purpose help you live a happier and more fulfilling life, especially when the world or when life just feels really awful. Yeah. I mean, this, as I said, was purposefully the last chapter in the book, because as I mentioned, I call it, your purpose is your lighthouse.

1:01:27When things are dark, when you can't see how you could possibly be happy or have meaning in your life, your purpose calls you there. And we all have it. We all have something that really drives us in this life. And for everyone, it's a little bit different. And I think what can happen is when something happens to us that challenges us, that stresses us, it forces us to either reevaluate the purpose that we never pursued. So for a lot of people, they have the purpose, but they were too afraid to go after it. They didn't think they should, they didn't think they deserved it. And, you know, a stressful traumatic event will open your eyes to saying, my life is short and I'm going to make the most of it.

1:02:06I'm going to go after that purpose. The other thing it can do is really open your eyes to a purpose that you never thought would be your purpose. So we talked about advocacy. So for a lot of people, you know, it shows them that they want to become the voice for other people who have survived what they have survived. And that becomes their purpose for living, for kind of changing the way other people see whatever the disease process is or whatever the issue is that they're fighting for. And so the purpose is just such an incredibly amazing force. And I think I would just encourage everyone to seek that out inside of them.

1:02:41Mel Robbins:So Dr. Nerula, for the person who's listening, I have no idea what my purpose is right now. Do you have any really small examples of how some of your patients might have found a sense of purpose while they're going through a really difficult time that you might overlook? Because I could see a sense of purpose might be, my purpose this year is to take better care of myself while I'm caring for my parents. A sense of purpose might be, I want to be part of the wave of positive change that needs to happen in the world. Yeah. A sense of purpose might be, I don't know, going back to school because you haven't really learned anything new in a very long time.

1:03:22Mel Robbins:I mean, can you give us just a sense because I think that how do I vote my bourbon? That's a big topic. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think I see it in all of those aspects in my patients. I do have patients who've had something happen to them and they were in one career and they have said, you know, I am going to go back to school and study something else that I didn't pursue before, but now I'm going to do it. Or other people who have been maybe miserable in their jobs, close to retirement, didn't want to retire, but say, you know what, it's time. I'm going to stop. I'm going to travel. I'm going to spend time with my husband and my dogs, you know, and I'm going to enjoy my life.

1:03:55So I think purpose can be as simple as that. It can be as simple as, you know, finding what you want to do at that point in your life and going after it.

1:04:02Mel Robbins:Well, it's kind of a reason to get out of bed. And if we go back to the story in the beginning about your friend Kaz, her sense of purpose became to live the biggest, fullest, boldest life she could with the time that she had. Exactly. Exactly. For the person who's listening right now and is just kind of wanting to know what to do, what's one small thing you could do today to start to build the skill? Is it to start with acceptance? I think acceptance would be key of whatever your condition or state is. But I think the social connection is a big one. And that is the easiest one, I think, to start.

1:04:37I mean, some of these tools are inward and some of them are external, right? Some of them are, yes, flexible thinking and acceptance. But some of them are, you know, getting fit and getting up and exercising or eating healthier or sleeping more. That's something that people can easily start to do is changing those little things in their lifestyle or reaching out and developing your social connections. And it's maybe just saying, I didn't talk to this person in the last six months, but I've been wanting to. I'm going to pick up the phone today and give them a call and have a conversation, you know?

1:05:04Mel Robbins:Well, I think it's really helpful to hear that because think about it. You've already mentioned this word like an investment, that you're making a deposit in the bank of resilience. That's right. And if your world's not falling apart at some point, you're going to be just like the rest of us and it will at some point. At some point. And reaching out to somebody or finding an interest and getting into a group or getting yourself out of your house and going for a walk with somebody is a small investment that you can make in terms of the resilience that we all need to tap into when the fight comes.

1:05:40Mel Robbins:That's right. And, you know, again, not to bring love back into this, but I think, you know, we all usually have someone in our lives, whether it is a sibling who is still living or a parent or your spouse. And that love, that deep, intimate connection is something that we can, again, easily focus on and cultivate. I think of the story that we put in the book of my colleague at ABC, Will Reeves' father, Christopher Reeve, and his wife, Dana. And if you haven't seen the documentary about their life, I suggest it. It's beautifully done. But there's a moment in time where she says to him, you're still you and I love you.

1:06:16And he said, had she not said those words, I don't think I would be here. And it just speaks to the power of one person in your life, one sentence, one love that can kind of draw you out of something so devastatingly difficult and deep. And so that's worth the investment. Those relationships in your life are worth the investment.

1:06:37Mel Robbins:Well, Dr. Nerula, I cannot thank you enough. enough the visual examples the framework that you gave us the redefining of what resilience isn't bouncing back what it is adapting to change and being able to adapt and still find all the meaning and purpose and joy in the life that you now have and the strength that we have inside each and every one of us to do it but you have laid out a roadmap for us to be able to tap into to this innate strength. And I am so grateful that you spent the time to write the book and that you're here today sharing it with us. That's worth everything. So if one person comes away feeling that they are better off because they realize their resilience and how they can build it to tackle life, then I've done my work.

1:07:32Well, you did your work because there's

1:07:34Mel Robbins:no doubt that as you've listened today, you have come away feeling stronger and more resilient and able to face whatever it is that life is going to bring your way. One of my favorite things that Dr. Nerula said, I'm gonna come back to this over and over, you are the marble and you are also the angel. And if you put the tools to work, there is no doubt in my mind that whatever it is that you're facing or seeing in the world, you will be able to adapt and change and be part of the positive wave that comes with it. Alrighty, in case nobody else tells you, as your friend, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you.

1:08:10Mel Robbins:And I believe in your ability to create a better life. And the fact that you spent time listening to this particular episode proves to me that you will create a better life because you got the tools that you needed in order to adapt to any change that's coming. All righty. I'll see you in the very next episode. I'll welcome you in the moment you hit play.

1:08:34Mel Robbins:Okay, you ready? Here we go. And the best-selling author, and the New York Times best-selling author of the book. You can't even remember a time. Oh, great. Keep the whistle wet. That's a good idea. And let me spray with some bee honey stuff here. Dr. Naluru. Dr. Naluru. Oh, my Lord. Dr. Naluru. Thank you. Do you need anything? No, I'm good. You are fantastic. Oh, you're so sweet. Oh, my God. The stories are fantastic. Your passion is fantastic. Your clarity is fantastic.

1:09:09Mel Robbins:Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.

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