Announcer:
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Amidst all the holiday festivities, it’s crucial to acknowledge that along with the fun, there often comes a fair share of stress. That’s why I’ve decided to re-air a special conversation this week, featuring none other than Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post and Thrive Global.
In this episode, Arianna opens up about her mission, highlighting its significant impact on helping individuals just like you confront the pervasive stress and burnout epidemic faced in our daily lives. We dive into invaluable tips and insights, offering guidance on how to unwind, disconnect, and maintain a healthy lifestyle while pursuing success.
Plus, as the esteemed author of The Sleep Revolution, Arianna shares her personal sleep routine and imparts wisdom on preparing for a restful night, even tailoring advice for me.
So how the heck do you do all this? You’re going to tell us that you can avoid stress and burnout with what you do?
Arianna Huffington:
Well, what happens is that not that you can avoid stress, but you can avoid stress becoming cumulative until it becomes burnout. And I actually reached that conclusion the hard way. I actually collapsed in 2007, two years into building the Huffington Post. I was the divorced mother of two teenage daughters, and I had bought into the collective delusion that in order to succeed, you have to be always on, you don’t have time to sleep, to take care of yourself. And I collapsed. I literally hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone, and that was the beginning of my studying all the latest science, because I’m a nerd like you, and realizing that, in fact, all the new scientific findings make it clear that when you take care of yourself, your performance and productivity improve. It’s not just your health that improves, but your cognitive performance improves.
So I became more and more of an evangelist. I wrote a book called Thrive, and then because everybody wanted to talk about sleep, I wrote a book about sleep. And two years ago, actually, I left the Huffington Post, which was a very hard decision because it was like a third child and it was a global media company with my name on the door, but I felt that I wanted to spend 100% of the rest of my life helping people lead lives with less stress and avoiding burnout. Because as you know, stress is so connected with disease, and it is preventable. That’s really what Thrive does. It’s both a media platform, think of the Huffington Post. Without politics-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
It’s hard to separate those two.
Arianna Huffington:
… hard to separate. And also B2B, we go into companies and help them improve their cultures and see the return on investment, see the impact on productivity, on engagement, on attrition, on healthcare costs, et cetera.
And then we’ve productized all that into behavior change micro steps, because as you know, there is a new year resolutions don’t work is because they’re so big and people do them maybe for a week, two weeks, and then they give up. So our behavior change prescriptions are all based on what we call micro steps, too small to fail.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Okay, so it’s the new year. Give me an example of a micro step that you can’t fail at.
Arianna Huffington:
Great. Let’s say that you want to reduce your addiction to your phone and to social media and to technology, which as you know, is a growing source of stress, because we are all increasingly addicted to this thing, and we find it hard to disconnect at night to go to sleep. 72% of people sleep with their phone by their bed.
So if they wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, or for whatever reason they’re tempted, even if they tell themselves, “I’m not going to look at my phone, if they can’t immediately go back to sleep, they go to their phone.” And that again, all the science tells us is incredibly disruptive to getting deep sleep.
So one of my favorite micro steps, and we have like over 700, is pick a time at the end of your day that you declare the end of your working day. It’s an arbitrary end, because the truth is that anybody who has an interesting job does not really have an end to their day. You could spend all night answering emails and handling things.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Correct.
Arianna Huffington:
I could do the same. And if anybody tells me, “Oh, I can do everything I could possibly have done by the end of the day,” I say, “I think you should change jobs. Your job isn’t interesting and challenging enough.”
Dr. Steven Gundry:
You’re right, yeah.
Arianna Huffington:
So given that we need to pick an arbitrary end to declare an end, and we declare the end by turning off our phone and charging it outside our bedroom. So that’s a little step, it’s a ritual, but it’s very significant because you have a clear demarcation between your day life with all these challenges and problems, and your nightlife, which should be all about recharging and reconnecting with a deeper part of ourselves.
We’ve even produced a little product, which is a charging station that looks like a phone bed, and it has a little blankie. It can charge up to 10 phones and iPads. So it could be for the whole family. And you’re supposed to put your phone under the blankie, tuck it in, say, “Goodnight,” and reconnect in the morning, and you are fully recharged, both the phone and you.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Perfect. Now, my friend Dr. McCullough would say that the other reason not to have your phone by your bed is the electromagnetic waves that are constantly coming out of your phone and disrupting almost every cellular function that we have. And you’re right, sleeping with a cell phone near your bed is a really dumb idea.
Arianna Huffington:
And even if you turn it off and you don’t have to worry about the electromagnetic waves, it’s still a reminder of everything you have to deal with in your life. Because our phone should never really be called a phone anymore. The last thing we do on our phone is phone anybody. It’s really the repository of every challenge, every problem, every demand on your time and attention; and we need to disconnect from that.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Is there a time during the day that people should have a timeout from a phone like we used to have in kindergarten… We had to take a half an hour nap whether we wanted to or not?
Arianna Huffington:
Absolutely. First of all, at Thrive, for example, all our meetings, leadership meetings, product meetings, anything, are device free, because you know what happens at meetings? People claim to be taking notes, they’re not. They’re alleviating boredom. They’re texting, they’re updating their Facebooks, whatever. And we tell everybody, “Listen, if you have something more important to do, don’t come to the meeting.”
If you’re in the meeting, you need to be 100% in the meeting. And what’s happened at the moment, our attention span has been dramatically reduced. It’s now actually lower than that of the goldfish. And so anytime there is a moment of boredom in the conversation, whether it’s over dinner or in a meeting, we automatically go to our phone looking for stimulation.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
What were you saying? Oh…
Arianna Huffington:
Exactly. So if we can stay present, then we’re really going to be able to contribute.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Right. So you’re a woman and I have two girls and a wife and three female dogs. One of the things that I’m particularly empowered by, what do we do with teenage girls and young girls whose lives have suddenly become focused on their phone, and Facebook, and Instagram and how they appear? How is Thrive going to help with all this?
Arianna Huffington:
So here’s what we’re doing. First of all, that’s such a major problem. And we have the data that mental health problems, especially among teenage girls, depression, anxiety, are skyrocketing and it’s a global problem.
I just got back from China and India, we have an office in Mumbai. Thrive is doing a lot in India. Our biggest investor in our series A was Jack Ma, and Joe Tsai from Alibaba, so we’re doing a lot in China. And the mental health problems among teenagers are a real epidemic right now.
So what we are doing at Thrive is bringing them all the latest data, ancient wisdom, and new role models, because people’s minds and hearts are more likely to change through storytelling than data. So we bring them the latest science, but frankly, what moves the needle is bringing them people they admire who are talking about why they’re going on a digital detox or why they’re disconnecting from social media.
We had Selena Gomez, for example, writing on Thrive about her digital detox and taking time off social media, and that moves the needle. In the same way that among business people. When I had Jeff Bezos write on Thrive, why he sleeps for eight hours a night, it went crazy viral. People could hardly believe it, but he had this whole analysis of how it improves his decision-making.
So you can give people the science, you can give them ancient wisdom, which is validated by modern science, but the stories we tell are what help convince people that there is another way to live and to work.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, all of our cultures are based-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
All of our cultures are based on verbal storytelling. Up until just a few thousand years ago, there was no written word, there was no other way to communicate.
Arianna Huffington:
Exactly.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And almost everything, we’re hardwired to receive stories and that’s a brilliant idea. There’s a professor of neurology at Arizona, University of Arizona, and I’m blanking on her name, but she says that knowledge does not imply action. And so you can know what you’re supposed to do, but actually doing that. I think having somebody like yourself or Jeff Bezos say, “If I don’t get eight hours of sleep, I’m not going to be a good captain of industry.” Just as one example.
Arianna Huffington:
He actually analyzed and he said, if I get less sleep, my decisions he said, are five to 20% less good. And the future of Amazon depends on the quality of my decisions, not the quantity of my decisions. We have a lot of people who are going to be listened to either in business or media or entertainment, writing about what they’re doing to take back control of their lives.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Now, I approach this as you know, from the gut and food. And the longer I’ve been at this, the more impressed I am with the power of not only foods, but also the microbiome, the guts that live in our gut, the bugs, to actually affect our anxiety and depression. And I have some personal experiences with that with one of my children. And it is amazing, at least in my humble opinion, the power of food, certain foods, to absolutely make your brain crazy. Any mother of a four-year-old knows that a trip to Disneyland with simple carbohydrates, you get a hyperactive child who suddenly then collapses, screaming and crying. And you can see just immediately the power of certain foods to affect brain function. I’m sure Thrive is incorporating that into your plant.
Arianna Huffington:
Absolutely. And we have incorporated the number one Gundry rule, which is that your health depends more on what you don’t eat rather than what you eat. Because people may follow different prescriptions. Some they may be vegan, they may be meat eaters, but if they can stay away from sugar and simple carbohydrates and processed foods, that’s already a big victory. And also, as you know, this sleep movement and diet are incredibly interconnected. I have all the science in the sleep book that if you are sleep-deprived, your body physiologically craves carbs and sugars. It’s not even a mental decision, it’s like physiological.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
No, you’re absolutely right. Years ago in my first book, Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution, I had a study of actually college students who were put in a sleep lab and they were allowed to sleep for eight hours. And then they were awakened and they looked at a hormone that suppresses hunger called leptin, and the leptin level was nice and high. They then took them and allowed them to only sleep six hours, and their leptin level was very low, but the hunger hormone ghrelin went sky-high. That actually proved, in fact, what we’re talking about, that lack of sleep makes you hungry and it makes you hungry for simple carbohydrates.
I learned that as a heart surgeon to stay awake all night, I just eat simple carbs to stay awake. But the interesting thing is they took the same students, they told them that they were going to let them sleep for six hours, but they let them sleep for eight hours. Interestingly, they behaved as if they only had slept for six hours. Their hunger hormone was sky-high, so psychologically they were prepared for a short sleep period.
Arianna Huffington:
Amazing.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
It’s amazing the power of even anticipation of what’s going to happen. Do you ever use an Oura Ring?
Arianna Huffington:
I love the Oura Ring and I used to use it, but now after all the work I’ve done on sleep, I’m good on sleep.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
You don’t need it anymore.
Arianna Huffington:
Well, it’s like I do get my eight hours and 95% of the time in all our lives, something happens. There’s a delayed flight or there is jet lag. But 95% of the time it’s my biggest priority. And I tell a lot of my friends, if they are trying to lose weight or get fit and they wake up before they’ve gotten enough sleep to go to the gym, I said, “No, turn off the alarm and sleep. It’s more important to get enough sleep.” But enough sleep, as you know, varies. 99% of people need seven to nine hours. Your number may be seven, somebody else, maybe nine, mine is eight. But there is one to one and a half percent of the population that has a genetic mutation, and they don’t need a lot of sleep. We know it if we have it, I know I don’t have it. They’re the people who wake up after four hours and they’re feeling great and-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Well, Michael DeBakey, one of the most famous heart surgeons in the world, only slept about four hours and he lived into his late nineties on four hours of sleep.
Arianna Huffington:
The problem is the people who worked for him, if they thought that because Dr. DeBakey had slept for four hours, they should too. That’s the problem. And there are some people in positions of authority who have this genetic mutation, and that’s why we need to inform people. There is a test, as you know, there is a genetic test people can take if they’re not sure. But normally I think if you have any kind of awareness, you should know if you have the genetic mutation or not.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
No, it’s true. My brother-in-Law, who’s a cardiologist, really wanted to be a heart surgeon, but he knew that he could not go without the sleep that heart surgeons often do. And so he became a cardiologist so he could sleep more. And he’s obviously much more intelligent than I am. The longest I ever went without sleep seriously was 72 hours on call in my residency program. And then I went for… And then I slept for four hours and actually went to see an Orchid show. It’s a true story. Now, looking back, most residents before the rules of how long a resident could stay in the hospital, we were so sleep-deprived and made quite frankly bad decisions. But our mentors had done that and doggone it, if they were going to do it, you had to.
Arianna Huffington:
You would do it. But we’ve done a lot on the Thrive Media platform about doctor burnout. As you know, it’s a real crisis and the increase in doctor suicides. And we had a great surgeon from Cedar-Sinai who wrote a very powerful piece about his own experience and the changes that have to happen. We are trying to put a spotlight on this crisis in the same way we’re trying to put a spotlight on the crisis you mentioned among teenagers. And we’ve launched a program of mental health on campus. We have at the moment, Thrive editors in over 70 universities working with students, writing about what’s happening because as you know, a lot of colleges don’t have enough mental health facilities or the ability to provide the help that students need, which often is incredibly simple. Just the right foods, the right sleep and movement can deal with an enormous amount of mental health problems. We’re not talking about bipolar disorders or schizophrenia, we’re talking about garden variety depression and anxiety, and they’re so connected to what we eat, how much we sleep and are we moving.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And those three things are the things that really are lacking in most colleges. Plus most of us were away from our parents for the first time and often extended different distances. And you don’t have the family unit to pull you back together. In campuses, can you get units as Thrive forming communities and campuses where-
Arianna Huffington:
That’s what we’re trying to do to form communities, to give people a platform where they can share their problems, where they can support each other, and to also offer them knowledge and micro steps. I love what you said. Knowledge is not enough.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And fortunately it’s not-
Arianna Huffington:
I have my Apple Watch. It can tell you a lot of things and it’s going to be able to tell you more and more things. It can tell you your heart rate variability, your blood pressure, but if it doesn’t tell you, so what can I do?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
Arianna Huffington:
My blood pressure is high. What do I do? Do I go to emergency?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Maybe it says to chill out, go to bed. Maybe it should do that. I don’t know. Actually, this crazy thing says… This morning it says, “You should try to go to sleep between 7:45 and nine o’clock to night.” And I’m looking at my phone going, “7:45? I’d love to do that, but I’m actually probably going to be driving back from Gundry MD up to Santa Barbara about that time.” But the watch is actually right.
Arianna Huffington:
Yes.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
The ring says that’s what you should do. And in the good old days, and it wasn’t that long ago, we slept with sunlight when the sun went down, time to give it up, and when the sun got up, it’s time to give it up. And I try to learn from my dogs. Dogs, when the sun goes down, they start looking at you like, “Hey, let’s get to bed.” Now, unfortunately when the sun comes up at 4:30, one of my dogs is on my face saying, “Time to get up, the sun’s up.” But even speaking of sleep, up until the light bulb was invented, our source of light was candlelight or gas lamps, which have a lot of red and yellow spectrum.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
… lamps, which have a lot of red and yellow spectrum light, which actually is very calming and sleep inducing. Now we have very white light, which has a lot of blue light in it, and most of our devices are blue light. And as you and I know, blue light is what keeps us awake. And I think one of our struggles with sleep in the modern era is we’re just constantly bombarded with blue light. It’s on our TVs, it’s on our phones.
Arianna Huffington:
That’s why it’s so important to disconnect from screens and leave yourself a little time for a transition to sleep. In the sleep revolution, I write about what we do with our babies. We don’t just drop them in bed. We lower the lights, we give them a bath, we sing them a lullaby, we prepare them to disconnect from the world. We read them Goodnight Moon, which is a very psychologically profound book, disconnecting from every item of your room and your world. I actually recorded on Audible a parody called Goodnight Smartphone, because we need to help ourselves with a transition. I get a transition to sleep. I try to make it 30 minutes before I’m going to turn off the lights, but even if it ends up being 10 minutes, I like to have a hot bath or a hot shower, which is really like a ritual cleansing away of the day. And wear dedicated sleep clothes. I used to sleep in the same clothes I went to the gym in. Not literally the ones I wore that day, but the same T-shirt and sweatpants.
And then in bed, I only read physical books and books that have nothing to do with work. Reading poetry, philosophy, novels and all those things prepare our brains to go to sleep, because it’s not our bodies that need preparation. Our bodies are exhausted by the time we get into bed. But if our brains are going, going, going, we need to slow them down.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So what I’m getting from you is I’m going to call Penny, my wife, and so I want her to give me a bath and sing me a lullaby before I go to bed every night. Is that a good idea?
Arianna Huffington:
Well, you don’t need your wife to do it now. You can do it for her.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Okay, that’s a great idea.
Arianna Huffington:
Tell Penny, I’m coming tonight and I’m going to prepare you for bed. I’m going to get you for bed. And then you can get into bed and read Rumi or your favorite poet together.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
All right, I’m going to pet my dog or something. So you are the epitome of the powerful successful woman. What does success mean to you? Do you have any definition?
Arianna Huffington:
Well, in Thrive, the book I wrote before the Sleep Revolution, I try to redefine success, because success in modern life has been reduced down to these two metrics, of money and power/status. And I feel this is an incredibly shrunken definition of success. So I wanted to expand it to include what I call the third metric, which includes wellbeing, our health. If you don’t have your health, it doesn’t matter how much money or how much power you have, your life is so diminished. Wisdom, how can you tap into the wisdom we all carry in us but so often we’re disconnected from?
The third part of the third metric is wonder. Life is so filled with wonder, whether it’s nature or the goodness of human beings or music or anything that we are drawn to. And so often we’re so distracted, that we miss it. I mean, I remember when I started changing the way I worked and lived walking down the streets of New York in Soho where I live as you know. And for the first time, I actually looked around as opposed to being on my phone or texting while walking. And I was with a friend and I remember saying to her, this building is so beautiful. When did it go up? And she said, 1930. And I wonder, what else have I missed?
And the final part of the third metric is giving. A full life includes giving, whatever form it takes. It doesn’t have to be financial giving, it can be giving of yourself, it can be having personal connections with people that we normally tend to have in personal transactional connections with, whether it’s the barista in the coffee shop or the person who cleans our office. And so I think that’s what creates what the Greek philosophers called the good life.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So that’s success.
Arianna Huffington:
That’s success.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, I’ll tell you an interesting story that I talk about in my next book, the Longevity Paradox. During college in medical school, I was a scrub tech, a scrub nurse in inner city hospital in Atlanta called Grady Memorial, and I worked the night shift. And we had a black gentleman who mopped the floors and he always had an unlit cigar, and he always had a giant smile on his face and he was always singing as he mopped the floor, humming. And one day I said, I stopped middle of the night and I said, you are so happy and here’s a menial job, I said, why are you so happy? And he says, are you kidding? I have the best job in the world. And I’m looking at him like, really? And he says, you guys, you doctors and you nurses and you techs, have to see to do the operation, and to see you have to have good light. And you see, if I don’t get these floors mobbed clean, there’s not enough light reflecting off the floors. So my job is the most important job for you to do what you do well. And if I don’t keep these floors clean, you guys can’t save lives.
And that was great success and great happiness and it stayed with me ever since. And I actually write about it in the next book.
Arianna Huffington:
That’s amazing, because he had found meaning in his job.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Exactly. And he was right, and that’s why he was singing all the time and happy. And so yeah, you’re right, we got to find meaning, and that’s success. I agree with you.
So similar thing, why are so many people afraid about failing? Nobody wants to fail anymore.
Arianna Huffington:
I know. Well, I [inaudible 00:31:34] like to have a mother, who would’ve loved you and you would’ve loved her. She drummed into my sister and me the fact that failure was part of life. There is nobody who has succeeded who has not failed along the way. We could do an entire podcast on my failures. And so she used to say, failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is a stepping stone to success. So she kind of made us be willing to take risks, because if you are not willing to fail, you are not going to take risks. And anything interesting in life has no guarantees.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
True. Yeah, it’s very true.
Arianna Huffington:
And so I feel very lucky that she gave us unconditional loving, meaning her love wasn’t conditioned on whether we succeeded or failed. And that was a foundation for us to aim for whatever we wanted to try and do.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So she didn’t say, you only got an A and why didn’t you get an A+?
Arianna Huffington:
Exactly, no. She would come home from school with our grades, with flowers for both of us no matter what we got.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
No matter what?
Arianna Huffington:
Yeah, because she knew we were making an effort. So you know effort, it’s not like if we’re lazy or not working, but her love was not just conditioned on whether we got the A. And you see now, we talked about teenage girls and mental health problems, we see so much pressure being put on them to excel, to get into an Ivy Leagues college. Again, none of that is really what determines a good life, even a successful life in a broader sense of success.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So what do you tell like a tiger mom, just to use an example, that maybe getting your kid into the best kindergarten and they better have a straight As and they better have SAT scores off the top or they’re failures? How do we help this current trend?
Arianna Huffington:
Well, actually I love Amu Chua who wrote The Tiger Mom. When my book Thrive came out, she actually invited me, she’s a Yale law professor, and she invited me to Yale and she and I did a conversation called Striving versus Thriving. And we talked about that, and my argument to the ultimate tiger mom was that, look at the data, it’s not working. It’s like it drives kids to major problems and to lacking the self-confidence, which is so key to achieving things and trying for things. And so I think we need to look at the data of what pushing our children too hard is doing, the over-scheduled child that goes from violin class to and additional reading class and another preparation for SATs, et cetera, et cetera. And what for?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, I mean, nobody has a time to be a kid anymore as far as I can tell.
Arianna Huffington:
And that need for playfulness, which is part of our own need as adults too, to ability to play, to ability to enjoy life no matter what, because there is no life that doesn’t include challenges, is something that you learn as a child.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So at Thrive, do you have playtime? I mean here at Gundry MD, I mean we have gym, we have dogs, is there playtime schedule?
Arianna Huffington:
Yes, first of all, we have our cultural values, and one of them is relentlessly prioritize and get comfortable with incompletions. Because if you’re not comfortable with incompletions, you are never going to have that arbitrary end to the day, which always includes incompletions. During the day, we have free-
Arianna Huffington:
During the day, we have free chair massages, healthy food that we bring in. We have our own workshops that we provide for companies. We also provide for our own employees. And I think one of my favorites is whenever we hire somebody, part of the onboarding is what we call the entry interview. Everybody does exit interviews, we do entry interviews. And the first question is, “What’s important to you outside of work and how can we support you?” And our chief content officer, for example, said, “What’s important to me is to be able to make my therapy appointment every Tuesday at seven o’clock.” Whatever, it’s a very reasonable request. And she had not been able, in her previous job, to go on time forever. So she found in the company, we call it an accountability body. And the accountability body is responsible for getting her out of the office by 6:00, so she can make her appointment at the other end of town by 7:00, literally. She could take her things and put them by the elevator, since you are leaving now.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
You’re leaving.
Arianna Huffington:
And I feel this is just a small example of how you can support each other at work, not just in terms of what you are doing for work, but what you are doing to actually make your life healthier and more effective as a result. And then it also creates real bonds among co-workers.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So Thrive Now is teaching companies how to do this, right?
Arianna Huffington:
Yes.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Because you mentioned earlier, and I totally agree, that if you don’t have healthy employees, everything falls apart. The days lost from illness in this country, the insurance costs are really killing companies. You may have great people, but if they’re not doing well-
Arianna Huffington:
Yes.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So give me an example. How do you come into a company and affect change?
Arianna Huffington:
So we come into a company and we have a lot of multinational companies like Accenture, J.P. Morgan, Nestle, the Hilton Hotels, and we do pro workshops, which can be half-day, day-long, two-day leadership workshops, executive workshops. Call center employees, at every level, we work with them to reduce stress. And one of my favorites is the call centers because a lot of companies have terrible problems with attrition among call center employees. And as you know, attrition is very expensive. But they told us, “Listen, we need you to fix our problem on call center employees, but you can’t take a lot of their time because they’re hourly employees.” So we created these minute interventions. As you know, because you’re a scientist, it takes less than 60 seconds to course correct from stress.
So we know through machine learning, when a call center employee has gotten a particularly nasty, stressful call from a customer and the next call is a Thrive call that, in under one minute, tells them, “We now want you to stop and remember three things you’re grateful for,” or, “We want you to stop and stand and stretch,” and we guide them through a stretch sequence. “We want you to stop and breathe consciously, inhale and exhale for forty-five seconds.” And these simple interventions have a game-changing impact because as we said at the beginning, you are not going to eliminate stress. What we can prevent categorically is stress becoming cumulative until we get home and we can’t go to sleep because we’re so wired and our cortisol levels are up or we have to self-medicate to bring ourselves down.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So instead, we’re going to have a hot bath.
Arianna Huffington:
A hot bath.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And a lullaby.
Arianna Huffington:
A lullaby, light a candle, whatever works for you.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So tell me about your experience with The Plant Paradox.
Arianna Huffington:
So I loved reading The Plant Paradox and practicing it because it rang so true. And then I saw how good I felt when I avoided the simple carbohydrates, the processed foods, the meats that were not grass fed. And I love the sort of how deep you go into this distinction between really grass-fed and quote-unquote “organic”, which may mean simply that the chickens or the cows have been fed corn or all the things that actually are not what our bodies need. So it’s been really great and I love that I can eat good cheeses since that’s my weakness. I can give up sugar, but a good Swiss cheese are good cheese that’s not processed and found already pre-wrapped and everything, just changes the way you feel and your energy and how you wake up.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Well, and I haven’t seen you in a couple months now and you look fantastic.
Arianna Huffington:
Thank you. Thank you. And you make it also science-based, which I love, and simple to practice.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Now it’s time for the question of the week. The question of the week comes from @Thissilvava3078 who asks, “Could you please tell me what is the best way to eat walnuts and pistachios, raw, roasted or sprouted? Should I soak the nuts in water for a couple hours before I eat them? Thank you.” Well, that’s a great question and there’s no perfect answer. Many of my female patients seem to react to the tannins in walnuts with almost a burning sensation in their mouth. And if that’s you, I strongly suggest that you buy sprouted walnuts. They’re increasingly available in health food stores, whole foods, sprouts, and that should do the trick. Otherwise, whenever you can find raw pistachios, buy them, but they’re increasingly harder to find. Do be careful about buying raw macadamia nuts because they spoil very, very rapidly and often go rancid. So great question.
Now it’s time for the review of the week. The review of this week comes from @Ophala who says, “This doctor needs to be cloned and put into every medical school to re-educate doctors with correct information about health. He is brilliant and a genuine person to anyone with common sense about how to improve their health in a sustained way. I just love learning from his simple-to-understand videos. I respect this man immensely.” Well, thank you very much. And as they say, the check’s in the mail, really thank you from the bottom of my heart. Just this week, I was on Dr. Mark Hyman’s podcast and he was telling me that his daughter is now a third-year medical student, and they have yet, after the third year of medical school, to learn anything about the human microbiome. And he was absolutely shocked. I suppose we shouldn’t have been, but unfortunately, our medical school education is so far behind what we should be teaching that it never shocks me anymore. So thanks for that. I’m trying, but we’ve got to stay together on this.
Announcer:
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