Discover the Secret to AGING BACKWARDS & Living Your Healthiest Life NOW! | Dr. Mark Hyman

0:00I kept learning about this pattern and until I really healed that I wasn't able to be ready for love. Wow. So you kind of have to not find the right person. You have to be the right person. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to today's special episode. Over the last 1 ,300 plus episodes, there have been so many impactful interviews that I've been lucky enough to have, and I always like to reflect on some of the most powerful.

0:44And this episode was one that resonated with most of you guys in the past, and I'm excited for the value it's going to bring you today as well. So I hope you enjoy today's episode. You know, relationships then sound like a massive part of longevity. Absolutely. And the person you choose to be with intimately sounds like it could play a big part in you living longer or also dying quickly if that person's not there if you don't have the tools to recalibrate once that person is gone or if something happens to them, right? Yeah, but what happens is we're also part of a society where when your nuclear family, meaning your primary partner, goes, you're not embedded in a network of people, right?

1:25So in Sardinia and Nicaria, yes, people died and spouses died. So Carmine's wife died, but he was living with his family and his kids and his brother and it was like he had a whole ecosystem a community of people tribe where it's like okay one person's gone and it's really sad and you're grieving but you've got grandkids you've got kids you've got parents you've got uncles and aunts involving you in the community still right creating a process of integration in life exactly meaning purpose community so in america is what i'm hearing you say is we isolate ourselves more. Totally. Right? It's like, find your house in the suburbs and your parents go here and your kids go away.

2:02They leave you. They don't even know their neighbors. You know, they've lived this to somebody for 20 years. I don't even know who they are. Sure. What do you think we could do differently? And do you think American society will ever change with this, you know, parents leaving? Because I hear about some of the, I think it's in India, it's like they fight over who's going to have their parents sometimes is what I hear. It's like, which siblings are going to get to have the parents stay with them. It's like this argument debate. It's the same thing. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a hard society we live in, and it's such an individualistic society.

2:33It's not a communal society, and I think it's cost us a lot, and I feel like there are little pockets of people who are building community, whether it's online communities, whether it's in-person communities, whether it's communities that are in cities. So there is a sense of people starting to build community, and I'm involved in a lot of these, and I'm starting to see it pop around, but I think it's definitely not mainstream yet. Wow. I talked to one doctor on here and he said he got sick two different times in his life. He's an older guy in his 70s and 80s and then he recovered from it. I said, what happened?

3:10How did you recover? He said, I found love. He's like, I found love and it gave me that sense of meaning, that belonging, that purpose again. It got me back in shape. It got me making better decisions. It got me living life to the fullest. Totally. Why is love such a strong healer? Love is medicine. I mean, I think it's the same reason that community is, the same reason that belonging is. It's because when we have a deep connection and relation with someone, it literally changes our gene expression. So if you're in a loving connection with someone... Yes. It's this whole scientific field of sociogenomics, right?

3:47How our social relationships affect our genes. and we know if you're in a conflictual relationship you will turn on genes of inflammation which cause disease and aging if you are in a loving connected heart-centered relationship you are activating all the repair genes you literally through cuddling can change your epigenome right it's amazing so stay in bed for an extra five minutes and come I love cuddling I got home I got home last night and I just like laid there with Martha just like hugging her for like 30 minutes just like just want to relax and it feels healing because your body relaxes yeah it feels like whatever's going on you can calm it down and just be peaceful totally it's a beautiful thing so you've been you've been married a few times right married and divorced yeah i'm an expert in relationships three times what would you say is the biggest lessons from marriage uh and divorce that have taught you about health and longevity that's a great question i think you know everybody is different and for me the key to really finding happiness and the key to finding love that is a really good, healthy, solid love, which I have now, was really dealing with my original traumas and wounds.

4:57Really? Yeah. And I think, you know, you wrote a book about toxic masculinity. And I think, you know, we all, whether we're men or women, throughout our childhood have bigger, small traumas. You know, Gabor Mati talks about micro trauma, macro trauma. You know, micro trauma could just not be seen by your parents and not being loved well enough or neglected or not actual abuse, whereas there's actual real emotional or physical abuse or sexual abuse. So all that registers in our nervous system. And for me, I had corrupted love software and I had to heal that. A corrupted love software? Yeah. What did that mean for you?

5:36Well, I'll tell you a brief story. My mother was a child of deaf parents. Deaf? Deaf. They couldn't hear. So she was their ears and their eyes. Wow, that's a lot of responsibility. So she became a parent to them. She became somebody who thought that love was taking care of people who needed help or were broken. Wow, that's interesting. So she picked my dad and my stepfather who were very broken. And they were damaged emotionally. And that was because... That's what she knew. That was her familiarity. Ramiliarity. And my dad was broken because his mother was a child of 13 and accidentally killed her sister when she was two, pushing her off to swing.

6:19And it was the pariah of the family, had to sit at a different table, was completely neurotic and anxious. And that epigenome goes through, it's translated through generations. And so it all makes sense. And so then my mom was super depressed and unhappy, and she used me to be her therapist as a little kid, which is fabulous. So you repeated the pattern. And I thought, oh, love is taking care of someone who's needy and broken. Right. Who needs me. Oh, yeah. So I would have the savior complex, and I would try to fill this hole that I had, this emptiness that I had, because I thought that, you know, if I did that, I could kind of fill this emptiness that I have.

6:57Interesting. I was picking these people in a way that filled me up because I was, you know, serving them or taking care of them. And it wasn't always exactly like that, but I kept learning about this pattern. and until I really healed that, I wasn't able to just be ready for love. Wow. So you kind of have to not find the right person. You have to be the right person. That's so true. What allowed you to heal it? What allowed you to recognize it and then start the healing journey? Yeah, well, that's... Which is a journey. Yeah, no, I've been doing it. I intellectually understood it, but, you know, it's a physical feeling.

7:28Yeah, but I really went through a process of using psychedelics to heal a lot of the trauma, which, you know, is now emerging as a really valid way to start to re-pattern your neurology. It literally changes the structure and function of your neurons in your brain, these compounds. And I began to sort of do some inquiry. I decided to take like a break from relationships and really do a deep in dive, looking at my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs, every day writing them down, kind of rewriting it, the story from my higher self. Wow. And then I kind of unpacked my whole life with a friend of mine as a coach, really amazing woman, Lauren Zander.

8:06And I was able to kind of see my whole childhood very differently and talk about incest that happened to me and things that I just had buried for 50 years. And then I saw this movie, CODA, which was a Best Picture Academy Award winning film last year about children of deaf adults. CODA means children of deaf adults. And it was my mother's story. Not actually her story, but she was a child of here. Wow. of deaf parents. Because the child in the, I still haven't seen it yet, but the child has got a deaf family, right? Yeah, and she's hearing, and it's about her struggle to become, you know, like disentangled from the dependency her parents had on her.

8:48Holy cow. So what opened up for you when you saw that? That was like, that just like hit me like a lightning bolt. And I just was sobbing and sobbing. It took me hours and hours to watch the movie because I had to stop. Because I was just being like on the floor just in this cathartic process. And I know that never really happened to me like that before. And after that happened, I kind of got what happened to my mother. I got what happened to me. I got, you know, what was going off in my own nervous system. And then I just felt free. And like, I felt light. And I healed a lot of that. So it took me a while.

9:22I'm a slow learner. I'm good with medicine, but it's not. It took me a minute. It took me a minute. But now I just feel like I have such a different wiring and a different nervous system. And I feel way calmer and way less anxious in relationship. I mean, where would you be had you not talked to that therapist friend and kind of looked back at your entire history of your life and assessed it? If you didn't watch that movie, if you didn't do the psychedelics, kind of all those medicines in one, where would you be had you skipped it after your last relationship? I always joke, I said I had a broken picker.

10:03I still have a broken picker. I still have my, try to find someone who isn't really the person that's gonna be able to meet me, that's an equal, that can have a healthy attachment style, that can be independent but come together. And just like, it really was powerful. That's incredible. This all happened in the last couple years. Yeah. So there's hope after 60, even if you keep choosing poorly. Totally, totally. That's incredible. Yeah, and it just got me free. And I think a lot of these cultures don't have to deal with this stuff. I mean, of course there's always family drama and this and that, but I think there's such a level of connection and community and mutual support and happiness and joy as part of living that we've sort of lost.

10:47And I think that was a big learning for me. And how did you feel beforehand? Like in the previous 40 years of different marriages and relationships, You said you feel free and lighter. Did you never feel free in marriage or in a relationship? No, I didn't. What was the feeling? I didn't know until afterwards. You don't know how a horse is standing on your foot until it gets off. It was kind of like that. It's like, wow, I was always so anxious and kind of trying to hold on to love and keep love and be afraid of losing love and want someone to love me. It just was like such a weird dynamic that I was embedded in that I didn't even fully see.

11:22Really? Yeah. I'm so excited you're sharing this. This is powerful. I think a lot of people need to see this and hear this from you, Mark, because they see you as this, I don't know, what are you, 30-time New York Times bestselling author, this individual who's done so well and been so successful in many areas of life. And I'm not saying that the marriages and the relationships you're in were all failures. I'm sure you had great love and connection and moments and things like that, but they weren't, it sounds like, the right fit. and you didn't feel like you were free inside. Right. And maybe they didn't feel the same thing either.

11:58So I'm not saying they were bad and wrong or something. But to hear you talk about this, this healing journey at this stage, as someone who studies healing and as someone who studies medicine and that studies all these things, even you had to learn how to heal relationships. You knew about the body stuff and food and medicine, but it was the healing, the relationship, and the childhood wound that you carried with you all those years. And what's interesting now, Lewis is in our culture we're starting to have a language for this and the acceptance of this and you know the sort of not seeing mental illness as a stigma but as a consequence of a lot of cultural and personal trauma right I mean just living in our culture today is traumatic you just open the newspaper listen to the news or the amount of conflict and strife and you know just economic inequities and all the things that we're dealing with climate change I mean it's a very psychologically stressful moment of history.

12:49But we also can shift a relationship to that by understanding how our brains work and our nervous systems work and start to actually not necessarily get caught up in all that and kind of reset our systems. So one of the key things I talk about in the book is mindset, is how our minds really play a role in our longevity. And if we don't get that straight, we're screwed. When people kill themselves by their thoughts, right? Literally. Give me some examples. What do you mean? How do they kill themselves? I mean, if they have suicidal thoughts, they'll lead themselves to killing themselves. I mean, it's all about belief, right?

13:28So when you look at voodoo, for example, I mean, you put a voodoo hex on somebody, boom, somebody can drop dead. You know? One of my mentors who very much inspired me before I went to medicine was Bernie Siegel, who wrote Love Medicine and Miracles, who's this kind of Yale oncologist, bald guy, so cute, It writes with a purple pen, letters they used to write me, and that before email. And he talked about these studies where they would tell this cancer patient that they found this great new cure, and they gave them this pill that was a placebo, and their tumors shrunk overnight. And then they told them a month later, two months later, oh, they found it didn't work so well, and the tumors came flying back.

14:07So that's the power of the pharmacy in our mind. This is fascinating. I'm still kind of amazed that this all happened in the last couple of years. So after the movie, you had this catharsis experience, right? Yeah. And you felt lighter after that. Yeah. I felt free. I felt free. Right after this on-the-floor sobbing moment. Yeah. It's hard to explain it, but I just felt like I was flying. I just felt like I'd been carrying this weight my whole life. It just was gone. Do you feel like your body, your nervous system was fully healed after that? Or has there been moments of triggers and kind of the PTSD feelings in your nervous system?

14:44I think it's echoes and shadows more that come back now. Like I can recognize and go, oh, all right, whatever. It's not like it grabs me like it used to. Wow. This is fascinating. This all happened in the last couple of years. Yeah, pretty cool. And then I began to think about just aging and longevity in general and how do we build a life that creates healing in our body, whether it's healing or trauma. And I have a whole section in the book about healing trauma because that's a key part. It's huge. And some of the things that are now available, like ketamine and ganglion blocks, and increasingly, probably by 2024, MDMA will be available legally for psychedelic-assisted therapy.

15:26And maybe psilocybin, I think, was legalized in Colorado now and in Oregon. So it's all coming. And I think there's so many different modalities for people to choose from that we never had before. Sure. how important is expressing your emotions crying laughing in living longer and healthier well i do a lot a lot of laughing and i do some crying and i think my current relationship i'm the crier like if we're watching a movie or you know like whatever um where we're listening to a speech at a wedding i'm the one crying right it's so funny because yesterday i was on a flight and I watched Coco, the movie Coco.

16:04I'm literally, there's an older guy next to me and I'm literally, I kid you not, I cried four times watching Coco. The music and the storytelling, I'm like, this is a cartoon. I'm crying. But it was so beautiful and I was telling Martha about it and she was like, yeah, it's such a beautiful, because it's all about family. It's all about connection. It's all about like sharing your music with the world and this beautiful story. So you feel like you're the crier in the relationship. That's right. But how powerful is crying as an emotion and laughing? I think it's being able to be free and expressed, whatever it is.

16:39Being able to not have to shut down and shut off and to learn how to do it in a way that's not destructive. To do it in a way that's loving and kind and thoughtful. There's always a way of getting expressed without hurting somebody else. So I think we tend in our culture to lash out and to be reactive, and that's not good. So it's sort of like, it's like Viktor Frankl's idea of slowing things down. Like in between stimulus and response, there's a gap or a pause, right? And then that pause lies the choice. So you can choose to slow down the whole process. And I'm friends with Tom Brady and he's like, you know, when I snap the ball, everything's in slow motion.

17:20Like everything just slows down. It's like, you think it all happens like in seconds, but like he's like all the time in the world, right? Because everything just goes in slow motion because he's so present. So we can do that in every moment. It just takes practice. It's a skill. If you want to lift 50 pounds, well, you have to work at it. If you want to train your mind to work differently, you have to work at it. You have to investigate your mind. All these practices are ancient. We in our culture are really good with outer technology, but places like Tibet, they were really experimenting with inner technology for thousands of years and learned all sorts So scale is about mastering the mind.

17:58So mastering your body is key, but mastering your mind is also a key to longevity. And it sounds like mastering your emotions and your heart is a key as well. Yeah, but your mind is what regulates your emotions. Now people are arguing about this, but what happens first is your thought and then the feeling, right? And then the emotion. Sure. Right, because you have, even if it's an instantaneous thing, there's some thought that precedes it, even if it's a subconscious thought that precedes the feeling or emotion. So you never have the feeling first. Unless you don't have the ability to think, but then you probably want to be here.

18:33Right. Well, some people don't have that. But yeah. So it's always a thought. Yeah. Or it's a, so it can't be a feeling, huh? Because you have to think it first before you feel it? Yes, I think so. I think always, whether it's like. Like if you smell something that brings back a memory. Is that a thought first? Yeah. Or if you see you're about to get in a car crash, you have the thought I'm going to die, and then your body goes into reaction. And it can happen in a millisecond. You can have a millisecond thought, but it's always going to precede whatever it is. Sure, sure. So I'm curious about the relationship stuff because I think you don't talk about this a lot.

19:11I do a little bit. We can do it. And I think I'm starting to believe more and more that the relationship you have with yourself is massive. The way you view yourself, your beliefs, you're talking about this now, how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself is key towards living a healthy life now, but also extending your life. Totally. And the way you view and think about your intimate relationship. I used to feel like I was trapped all the time. I was fearful and I felt like I was trapped and there was no way out. I couldn't be myself. And that would make me feel unhealthy inside.

19:46It made me feel like I was a six out of a 10 every day. Yeah. Because I felt like trapped, right? No, I'm doing that to myself. No one is trapping me. It's my fear and insecurity of like leaving the relationship or whatever it might be or having the courage to communicate all these things that I needed to learn. And so the relationship we have with ourselves and with our intimate partner, I'm starting to learn is the most powerful. One of the most powerful things for longevity. because we're going to, it's going to shape the actions we have, the decisions we make on a daily basis, how we show up, what we eat, the environment, all that stuff.

20:20What is the, some of the conversations you're having in your relationship about longevity and about, you know, you're entering a new relationship from a different space, a healed space. Are you having different types of conversations than you never had before? If so, what are you? Yeah, I think they're really different. I mean, I think, you know. And are you showing up as your whole self finally? Is that what's... I think I'm able to. I think I'm able to be free and independent and still fully connected all the time. So as opposed to feeling dependent or needing... So you're unattached. You're highly engaged, but you have low attachment.

20:57Employee committed, but not like... Low attachment, yeah. I'm securely attached, what they say is securely attached, as opposed to being insecurely attached or avoidant. There's all these styles of attachment. But there's a healthy attachment style. A lot of us have attachment disorders because we weren't loved well as kids or we had various kinds of traumas. So we have these attachment disorders. And I think I had more of an anxious attachment disorder. And I think that through healing that, I'm able to sort of be able to just be present to whatever is and not be in reaction. And that's such a powerfully different way, whatever it is we're doing.

21:34And my partner's also extremely self-aware and extremely talented at communicating. That's beautiful. And she has her own stuff that she works through, but we do it together as if it's a gift that we are able to unpack together as opposed to something that's oppositional. Like, you have to fix this, you have to do this, you did this, you did that. Like, that's terrible. So we go, oh, here's a trigger. I felt triggered by blah, blah, blah. How do you handle it if you're in that? We really deeply listen to each other. We don't react. And then we take it as a third entity that's something for us to take care of together.

22:18As opposed to something, you better fix this or I'm out. And it's like, oh, you know, like today I was like, I learned from my partner that she doesn't like hosting parties. You know, we're having a party and I asked her to help with something. And she was like, I don't like hosting parties. I was like, okay. Now I know. But I guess I could have reacted and got upset and mad. It's like I kind of told a whole story in my head. It's this. But I'm like, oh, okay. Well, this is what she needs. She's like, I don't like doing this and that. So it's fine. Rather than having to fix it or figure out why.

22:49She doesn't like chocolate or she doesn't like strawberries or whatever. It's fine. I don't like doing everything either. I don't really like whiskey, but I like tequila. It's fine. Who cares? Do you think you'd be able to analytically heal, like just thinking, if you would have just thought about these things versus the physical releases that you had as well? I think it's somatic. I think a lot of this is buried near tissues. The book called The Body Keeps Score about trauma. And I think if we don't learn how to somatically release this stuff, it just is an intellectual exercise that doesn't happen.

23:23It doesn't work fully. It helps, but it's not enough. Wow. I'm curious about the, in terms of the things that will decrease your lifespan at night. You know, a lot of people talk about the morning routines, but I'm curious about the evening routines that will decrease lifespan. Holy cow. Well, that's a great question. You know, there's a really amazing book I read years ago called Lights Out. And it was a book that was looking at the research on the harmful impact of the light bulb on human health. And it was pretty convincing in showing that because we're not following the natural rhythms of the sun, we're actually altering our biology in ways that damage our health.

24:08So when you're exposed to LED nights at night, to fluorescent lights at night, to full-spectrum light bulbs at night, incandescent light bulbs, it's not normal for our physiology for 200 ,000 years. Sure. And all of a sudden, the last 100 ,000 of the last, I mean, the last 100 of the 200 ,000 years, we're all of a sudden exposed to this light bulb. Our brains don't process it properly. And so we inhibit melatonin. We don't sleep as well. We increase cortisol. And there's really crazy studies on how this can increase obesity, heart disease, cancer, dementia. And that's just being exposed to light at night.

24:49So now there's this advent of an understanding of how we might block blue light, which is what you need in the morning, right? You want to be exposed to bright light from the sun the first thing in the morning, 20 minutes with no sunglasses. That's great. But at night, it's not a good idea. So there are now red light bulbs that only have red light and no blue light. There's blue blocker glasses where you can put on glasses at night and wear those at night around the house. Screens are the worst thing at night. So that's a horrible thing that people do. They go to bed with their phone. and they wake up with their phone.

25:20It's like they spend more time on their phone with their partner. My nephew's like, look, my screen time is only five hours today. I'm like, five hours? Imagine what you could do in five hours. You had five hours, right? You could make all the food for your week. You could exercise. You could write a book. You could make a song. You could, whatever, you know, every day. And I think we also are not actually winding down. So we go, go, go, go, go, and then hit the bed and expect to sleep. but we can't do that so having a routine and I talk a lot about the power of sleep and longevity and the power of sleep in the brain but we're probably sleeping a couple hours less than we did throughout most of human history and some people even less than that and that has a huge impact on our cognitive function especially at night we have a brain cleaning system called the glymphatic system which is like the lymph system for the brain so it's like the cleanup crew comes at night and cleans up your brain from all the garbage that accumulates from metabolic waste and and stuff for the day.