#1 Stress Doctor: 5 Tools to Protect Your Brain From Stress & Feel Calmer Now

(00:22:16):

I don't know. We all do it and it's because it is your stress response. Your amygdala is driving that behavior, not you. It's your amygdala. And so when you reset your stress, get your prefrontal cortex back in control, decrease the volume of your amygdala, then you don't doom scroll as much. And we can talk about digital boundaries. We can talk about digital boundaries in a couple of other things. Another way that you may, a sneaky way that stress can come up on you is that you may have emotional eating. We all have that food, that comfort food. For me, it's chocolate cake. It's usually high fat, high sugar foods. It's that 11:00 PM Oh, I'm just going to grab a quick snack, a bedtime snack. We know what that does to your glucose, but the reason you feel that sense of compulsion, you've had dinner and then at like nine 30 or 10 you want to reach for that snack. There's a reason it's called emotional eating or stress eating because the amygdala is driving it. That's right.

Mel Robbins (00:23:12):

Why does your fighter flight or freeze response drive you to eat? How is that tied? It makes perfect sense to me that doom scrolling is the same thing as being on the night watch. Because if you think about your job, if you're the one that's protecting the tribe or your family, as you're standing there and you're scanning, you're looking for anything that seems out of place, you're looking for anything that's surprising, which is the exact same thing that you do when you doom scroll.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:23:46):

That's right. Hypervigilant.

Mel Robbins (00:23:47):

Yeah. And here's the other thing that happens is because you are constantly met with a new post or something surprising, here you are, it's like hearing the branch snap outside the tent. What was that? And then there's another one, and then there's another one, and then there's another one. And so you're not going to go back to sleep because you keep hearing things that are keeping you in a state of needing to watch out for the tribe. Now you're sitting in modern life and you are doing that same evolutionary behavior. Only you're now staring at the phone and all the branches cracking are every single little thing that's going by which keeps you awake. Because I've often wondered why the hell did I look at my phone at eight 30 last night? And next thing you know, I look up, it's 10 45, I've bought three things off of Instagram that I did not need.

(00:24:42):

I have just mindlessly scrolled and now I'm pissed off at myself because I should have gone to bed and wanted to have been in bed well over two hours ago and I've spent money on things that I don't need that I now don't even remember buying. And it is this constant loop, but the way you're explaining it as your amygdala is activated, that's what's going on and that's having you fall prey to this behavior. And so the solution is to reset. That's the solution, is to deactivate the amygdala because it is chronically screwing you up.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:25:16):

Wow, turn down that volume. The reason you from 8 45 till 10 45, you were experiencing something called revenge, bedtime, procrastination. It's something that all of us do, particularly women when your day is not your own and you are moving in a million different directions, competing priorities, parenting and work, and all of the things that we have to do to manage our homes, it happens to all people, not just women, just parents and students. It happens to so many people. When you, again, a patient story in the five resets is about 

(00:26:09):

So let's say you want to go to bed at 9:00 PM and you're up till midnight or one, what are you doing two hours before? And case in point, you just described what people do. You are on your screen and revenge, bedtime procrastination is a manifestation, a toxic manifestation of hustle culture. When your days are not your own, the children finally fall asleep. Everyone, everything is calm. Your work emails have calmed down. It is eight 30 at night and you finally have some me time. So you procrastinate bedtime. It's like a rebellious teenager. You have that sense of I'm not going to bed at, I haven't even had any time for myself. I'm going to stay up. And then you stay up and you make bad choices and you buy different things or you binge watch tv. Again, a little bit of this is healthy. It's called hedonic happiness.

(00:26:53):

We can talk about that later. A little bit of this is healthy, but when it becomes chronic and ongoing, and then you notice that you're going to bed every night at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning and you're unable to get good rest, and you wake up tired and the next day you say, you know what? I am going to go to bed early. And then the same thing happens night after frustrating night, there was a study that found that it's not about knowledge and action. Every single person who was engaging in this revenge bedtime procrastination knew that they should go to bed early. That wasn't the issue. It's not that behaviors change because you know better behaviors only change when you do better. You talk about this all the time, but the actual science showed that this is not a gap in knowledge. Everyone knows that early bedtime is important. It's a manifestation of hustle culture because even in spite of knowing that, hey, an early night would do me well, you still say, no, I'm not going to because I have had a crappy day and I'm not going to have a crappy day go into my night. I'm going to have a little bit of me time. So that's that.

Mel Robbins (00:27:54):

I want you to imagine that you and your friend Mel Robbins are going to walk into a Dr. Aditi's office. What are the things that you would ask us? Can you just for the person listening and me, if we were coming to talk to you about stress, how do you assess how stressed out we are?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:28:17):

What a beautiful question. The first premise I use when I see a patient is to recognize that stress isn't this vague mythical creature that's just all around us and ungraspable that stress is something that can be measured, quantified, monitored, and ultimately overcome. So just putting borders around your stress and burnout, what is it? Why are you feeling it and giving it a number. So the first thing I offer every patient is a stress quiz. And then you get your stress score,

Mel Robbins (00:28:48):

And

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:28:48):

Then you start your various interventions and then you check your score again in a month and say, Hey, did my score go up or down, or is it the same? And that is a way that you can actually measure your stress. The second important piece in that interview process of figuring out what are the big areas of life that people are struggling with. What I have found in my research with patients in the science is that there's kind of five main areas. Sleep is a big one, and this is in no particular order. Sleep, movement, diet, media use, and your connection with others, your sense of community. And so those are the five areas that I really dig into when I'm speaking to someone. And it's about making small, very, very small, smaller than you think changes in your everyday life so that you can get to a better place. But unless that action happens, it's hard to get there. And so this helps you, that inventory helps you figure out and assess where you are in that moment.

Mel Robbins (00:29:47):

Well, I think that I just struggled for so long because I didn't know. Yes, you're going to teach us the five resets and how to manage stress and how to make it our friend. Let's talk about the first reset. What is it?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:30:02):

The first reset is get clear on what matters most. When you are living in a chronic state of stress, you are being led and driven by the amygdala. It is fight or flight mode, self preservation, and it is all about survival. When you are living in that immediate sense of stress, it is hard to get out of your own way and think about the future, which is why when you are feeling stressed, don't berate yourself. When someone says, how come you don't have a plan? Because often when you're thinking about what is a plan, A plan is forward thinking motion. It is strategic thinking, it is being organized, it is having some sort of structure. All of these qualities and all of these roles are your prefrontal cortex.

Mel Robbins (00:30:48):

And because you're stressed, the amygdala and the fight, flight or freeze is what is running the show.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:30:56):

That's right.

Mel Robbins (00:30:57):

It makes so much sense because you're right. When you are in a state of stress, you spin in circles, you feel totally overwhelmed, you completely overthink everything. For me, I get very scatterbrained. I also literally feel kind of hopeless too when I'm stressed out the sense that there's nothing I can do about this, but try to get through this thing. And when you said earlier that the tendency when you're chronically stressed or burnt out is to keep working,

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:31:29):

Right?

Mel Robbins (00:31:29):

And so that makes a lot of sense to me. And so why though, do you need to figure out what actually matters to you when you're running around in circles, when you feel like you can't escape the problems that you have? Why is this important as the first reset?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:31:46):

The reason it's important is because it helps create a roadmap for the future.

(00:31:51):

When you are in that present moment of stress and burnout and overwhelm, you are at a point where you cannot even see the next step, let alone the destination. The distance between where you are and where you'd like to be seems so vast like a chasm. So you don't even take that first step. Why bother? It's not going to help. Correct? I'm not going to feel better. Forget it. It's the all or nothing fallacy. And this first reset, get clear on what matters most helps you create that destination, a roadmap, a North star, call it what you want.

Mel Robbins (00:32:25):

Could you do me a favor and talk to the person listening to you and walk them through how you find a reason for why you want to get less stressed? How do you do this? Can you just walk us through it as if we're sitting there in front of you?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:32:44):

When you're feeling a sense of stress, you may say to yourself, because your inner critic has a megaphone, you may say to yourself, what is the matter with me? Instead, ask yourself what means most to me? This is not a big existential ask about what is the meaning of life and where do I belong? This is very practical. And so when you're thinking about your destination, why are you doing this work for less stress and less burnout? It's because you want to create a goal that means most to you and most stands for something. So M is motivating, O is objective. S is small, and T is timely. It takes eight weeks to build a habit. Understand that part of that eight weeks is falling off the wagon and getting back on the wagon to continue. So give yourself a solid three months to reach your most goal, understanding that you're going to fall off and get back on and fall off and get back on. It's all part of the process and trust the process. And then once you have your most goal of why do you want to do this work for less stress and burnout, it's not that much work. By the way,

Mel Robbins (00:33:48):

I'm thinking about a moment recently where I absolutely hit a medical state of burnout, and it was several months ago. And my why, if I were thinking about why I finally hit the wall 

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:34:51):

Not necessarily. It doesn't have to be something external. It can be something internal, but I would say that framing it as a positive and say to yourself, I want my future self to be X, Y, and Z. Fill in the blank. I want my future self to have better sleep. Or you can be fed up and say, I'm sick of not being able to sleep through the night. I want to sleep through the night. Motivation comes in many different forms. It can be positive and energetic, but it can also be that you're just fed up of your own shit.

Mel Robbins (00:35:20):

What's reset number two? Once you have this why in mind, like I am thinking about why it matters to me, to turn off the amygdala, hit the reset, get control of it. You say it's find quiet. In a noisy world, what that mean?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:35:38):

This is perhaps one of the most important resets. You may think that when you have stress and burnout, you need to check out and spend six months in Bali, at least for me, anytime I feel overwhelmed with stress, you say that you have that sense of overwhelm. When I have a lot of stress in my life, I am irritable. I am so short, and I am just constantly frowning or quick to anger. Yes. And even knowing all of the science, it takes me a little bit. I cannot tell you how much over the past six months, I've had my husband say to me, I think you need to start the resets again. And then I'll say, oh yeah, oh my. Because I have doubled down on every single reset during this whole I walk the talk, but particularly over the past few months,

Mel Robbins (00:36:24):

Well, just to put it in context, doing a book tour for a book this important is probably like being a resident in medical school.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:36:35):

Absolutely.

Mel Robbins (00:36:36):

What is popcorn

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:36:37):

Brain? Popcorn brain is a biological phenomenon coined by a man named Adam Levy. And it is when any time that you're waiting, you're in a grocery store in line waiting to buy food, you're on your phone, you are at the bank waiting to see the teller, you're on your phone. There have been more near miss pedestrian accidents because of popcorn brain. You are just always on your screen, always engaging all day, every day during all waking hours. And it creates a sense of hyperstimulation in your brain,

(00:37:59):

That sense of wanting to check. There's another phenomenon that's very tied to popcorn brain, which is even more concerning, which is called brain drain. So it's not just when you use your phone, which is what popcorn brain is, but scientists have found that brain drain occurs, meaning your phone like this phone, it's right next to me during this whole conversation. And so your brain, there's a phenomenon where just that sheer potential for distraction, having a phone close by can be incredibly distracting for your brain and increase your sense of stress and burnout. So the antidote to popcorn brain or brain drain is to create digital boundaries. We have in every relationship in our life with our partners, our colleagues, our friends, we have boundaries, but we have porous boundaries or often no boundaries. When it comes to your relationship with your digital devices, this is not about becoming a digital monk and abstinence. We need to engage in news. It's important to be an informed citizen.

Mel Robbins (00:39:04):

What are your favorite boundaries?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:39:05):

One of the most important things is to keep your phone off your nightstand and invest in a low cost alarm clock. Instead, what I love is your five second rule. When you get up out of bed, over 50% of people check the news or check their phones and check their emails. Think about what that's doing to your brain, what that's doing to your amygdala. If you are stressed and burned out, chances are you didn't sleep very well that night, or if you had a good night's sleep, great. But then immediately it's triggering all of these chemicals and the cascade in your brain. Instead, keep your phone away from your nightstand. When you open your eyes, take in the morning light and then do the five second rule and get up out of bed. Then maybe go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, do some stretches, and then check your phone. So that is a key geographical boundary.

Mel Robbins (00:39:52):

What's another boundary

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:39:53):

During the day at work? Keep your phone out of sight. So you decrease that primal urch to scroll. Keep it in a cubicle drawer, keep it out of arm's. Reach 10 feet away from you in a cubicle drawer just so it is not in your reach. The reason is because when you have that primal urge to scroll, what you want to do is you want to override it, and n.

Mel Robbins (00:40:16):

I'll share personally that our executive producer Tracy will not allow me to have my phone when we are in a meeting. She will reach over if I grab it and literally like a mom, guide it out of my hand, put it away, and I'll tell you, she's right. You're just distracted. So even if it's near me and I have made it a habit, there's a kind of a task table here at work where I set up when I'm in Boston and my phone is always right over there. I don't have it on my person. I try not to carry it around. I try to put it back over there because I know how I just grab it and just grab it. Dr. Aditi, what's one hack you can do for better focus?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:41:00):

One thing you can do, Mel, is to put your phone in gray scale. When I really felt like my phone, who's in control, me or my phone? And there were many moments in my life where I would say, ah, it was my phone. Now it's very much me. But I would switch my phone to grayscale and just doing that with my screen made all the difference because all of the lights and sorry, all of 

Mel Robbins (00:41:28):

How does it change your brain?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:41:29):

Well, because big tech is, they know exactly what they're doing. So when you have colors and patterns and beautiful images and this user interface, it makes it more enticing to continue using. Think about when something is black and white, and if you switch your phone to grayscale today, try it today. Switch your phone to grayscale, and it just becomes less enticing because the chemicals aren't going off in your brain, the neurotransmitters, because it's just, it's kind of boring.

Mel Robbins (00:42:01):

Well, what I love about the way you're teaching this is that I've certainly heard a ton of people talk about the connection between stress and social media and stress and your phone and the need to get off your phone and these topics. But when you explain it in terms of your amygdala turning on and that your amygdala putting you in, fight, flight, or freeze somehow knowing that makes this way more tangible, it also makes it way more important to me that I follow this advice and I pay attention to when the amygdala is running the show versus when I'm running the show and these boundaries. And the second reset is a way for you to run your life rather than letting the amygdala just kick into high gear and keep you hostage to all of this stuff.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:43:03):

That's right, and I think my approach comes from decades of being a medical doctor and seeing patients. So every single thing that I offer to my patients during my talks in this book, the five Resets, every single thing is free. That was really important to me because I have had patients from all walks of life with different resources, and that was critical to me. The second thing that I really aim to do with every single strategy I offer, of course, but that it is time efficient. If we all could spend an hour getting a massage and then getting an acupuncture treatment and then going for a walk and all of the wonderful things that we are available to anyone who has the means to do the time as well, then great. But for most people in everyday life, you have an overscheduled life, a million competing priorities, and often you put yourself last on that list.

(00:43:55):

And so stress and burnout, your own stress and burnout on your own mental health is like, oh, I'll get to it when, but if not now, then when. And so really making sure that these strategies are easy and practical and can be something that you do today. Many of these things you can start today, and it is all when it comes to your brain and rewiring your brain and body for less stress and more resilience or less stress and less burnout, these incremental changes a little bit every day can actually rewire your brain. It is not some big grand gesture that does it like a once a month, great, a nice bandaid, it'll help you when you get a massage or when I get a massage, it feels great for a day, and then the next morning I wake up and it's the same old stuff again. Well, now I

Mel Robbins (00:44:40):

Know why. Because the amygdala is the issue That is a thousand percent what you're teaching us.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:44:48):

It's always the amygdala.

Mel Robbins (00:44:49):

It's literally the amygdala. So what would you, if the person listening wants to get a better night's sleep, as a Harvard educated medical doctor and professor, what would you tell the person listening to do tonight in order to get a better night's sleep?

(00:45:56):

These things take shape quickly because your brain and your body are rewiring all the time. Your brain is a muscle neuroplasticity, a very fancy science word, but it means your brain is a muscle. It's not a grab bag like what you got for birth is what you got for life. It's not what it's, your brain is like a muscle, just like a bicep. So in exercise, the thing with sleep that's fascinating is that with exercise, if you did two pound dumbbells, like a hundred curls with your biceps, you'd know that it's doing something. I mean, it's not going to do as much as a 10 pound, but you try it anyway. You're like, you know what, I'm going to try it. So think of your brain as a muscle. Try things out, experiment, understand that doing a little bit a simple change, keeping your phone off your nightstand could make all the difference and could be a game changer. It doesn't have to be this big giant lifestyle overhaul. Also, your brain cannot handle big lifestyle overhauls when you are feeling a sense of stress, because even positive change, like all of these things that we're talking about, change is considered a stressor to your brain.

Mel Robbins (00:46:54):

Well, that's why you always recommend in your book too, that rule of two, the rule of two, what is the rule of two?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:47:00):

The rule of two is how our brain responds to change when we are feeling a sense of stress. So think about in 2020, you may have had big lofty goals. Mine was to build a farmhouse table from scratch to learn Italian and to learn to play the guitar. And now it's a wonder if you wear clean clothes and eat a few vegetables at 2024, right? We're here now. It's because you cannot sustain huge lifestyle overhauls during periods of stress because even positive changes are considered a stressor to your brain. And this was a landmark study done in the 1960s by two doctors, two psychiatrists, Dr. Holmes and Reiki. They studied 5,000 people and 43 of the most common life conditions, positive, happy things like we were talking about, right? Like getting a new job, falling in love, having a child, getting married, buying a new car, and the sad things in life, death, unemployment, divorce, lots of these horrible things.

(00:47:55):

And what they found in this research was that at the end when they added up, they tallied up every single person, all of these life events and found that the more life events that you have accrued your greater chance of having stress and burnout and greater illness down the road, which showed it's the basis of the rule of two to focus on two things at a time. Even positive change can be a stressor for your brain because your brain needs time to adapt and recover from this positive change. 

Mel Robbins (00:48:46):

This. So pick the most important thing to improve. And then just for your sleep, if you were to literally just stop the doom scrolling and put your phone somewhere other than your bedroom at seven o'clock at night, and you create that boundary and then you don't sleep next to it and you don't look at it first thing in the morning, if you were to simply do that, your sleep would improve almost immediately.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:49:10):

Your sleep would improve immediately. The entire tenor of your day would change, and you would feel so much more grounded. You would feel whatever symptom that you're having of stress, there are many. It would have an immediate impact on your stress and your burnout. And over time, if you continue to do that day after day after day, you will be a changed person.

Mel Robbins (00:49:33):

I'm so excited for the third reset, because we're talking about the brain body connection and how when this little amygdala starts going bananas, what is number three?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:49:48):

The third reset is sink your brain to your body. It is all about the mind body connection.

Mel Robbins (00:49:55):

What does that mean? Sink your brain to your body?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:49:57):

When you hear the term MINDBODY connection, you may think that's total woo, but in fact, there is a lot of robust scientific literature to support the MINDBODY connection, which is a fancy term for simply saying that your brain and your body are in constant communication and inextricably linked. What's good for your brain is good for your body, and vice versa. When you do better, you feel better. And it's all in the doing. You may be hearing about the mind body connection for the first time today, but you have been experiencing the MINDBODY connection forever. Butterflies at falling in love, your face flushing at an embarrassing moment. You're about to give a presentation for work and your heart starts racing. This is the MINDBODY connection. It's like gravity. It's happening in the background all the time. The beauty of the MINDBODY connection is that while it is happening around us in you at all times, you can learn to tap into the MINDBODY connection, understand it, and most importantly, influence it to better serve you with your stress and your burnout. The quickest way to tap into your mind body connection is with your breath. Your breath is the only physiological mechanism that is under voluntary control and involuntary control. So you and I could do a breathing exercise today, right now, and you would feel a sense of calm, and then we're just talking and your breath is going,

Mel Robbins (00:51:22):

Let's do it.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:51:23):

Your brain can't do that. Your brainwaves, your digestion can't do that. Nothing else in your body has that same involuntary control and involuntary control. So that is the first kind of way that you can tap into it. So there are very quick, and the other thing to mention is that when you are in amygdala mode or fight or flight mode, your sympathetic nervous system, again, a fancy scientific word, we have two nervous systems in the body. One is the sympathetic nervous system that governs fight or flight. The other one governs something called rest and digest. It's the parasympathetic nervous system. The two can't be on at the same time. They're mutually exclusive. And your breath can help modulate be the light switch between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic system. So when you are in sympathetic mode driven by your amygdala, your heart is beating, you have quick shallow breathing.

(00:52:13):

Think about when you're anxious, you're breathing, you're anxious, you're breathing quickly, very shallow and rapid. That is because it's a physiological mechanism. You're trying to get the oxygen in to go to your muscles so you can fight or you can flee parasympathetic mode. You are breathing deeply and slowly. It is rest and digest. Sympathetic mode is that quick, shallow breathing is thoracic breathing, it's chest breathing, parasympathetic mode, rest and digest. It's belly breathing. And knowing this very scientific explanation, it's simply to say that when you modulate your breathing and influence your breathing, you can switch one system on and off and you can tap into your mind body connection because of what you know now about the breath.

Mel Robbins (00:53:01):

Gotcha.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:53:01):

As you're thinking about managing your stress and burnout, it's also important to think about your gut brain connection.

Mel Robbins (00:53:06):

Can you explain to the person listening how physically, the gut and the brain are connected and how they speak to each other, and how I found it fascinating when I first learned that they were part of the same tissue when you are being formed as an embryo and that during your development that they literally are one clump that then separates. And I always imagine that there's this gooey, ooey sticky stuff between your brain and your gut, but could you explain it as a medical doctor, what the brain gut connection is?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:53:48):

The brain gut connection is that your brain and your gut are literally speaking to each other, and there is crosstalk at all times. It happens through ecosystem of trillions of bacteria, healthy bacteria in your gut called the microbiome. I want to say that the gut is considered the second brain 

Mel Robbins (00:54:42):

And

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:54:42):

Then another mentor said, forget the brain. We should be having our guts around our necks. That is truly the second brain.

Mel Robbins (00:54:48):

It's

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:54:48):

Like that's how much the science supports this idea of the gut being the second brain. And every week, Mel, there is new, compelling, fascinating research about the gut brainin connection. And so this microbiome, this ecosystem of trillions and trillions of healthy bacteria in your gut govern so many things besides digestion. It is a bidirectional highway of information. Your brain is sending signals to your gut and your gut sending signals right back to your brain.

Mel Robbins (00:55:17):

As a doctor at Harvard, what do you do for exercise and movement?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:55:23):

25 years ago, I was a stressed patient looking for answers, and that is why, that's my villain origin story of how I became a doctor with an expertise in stress is because I was a stress patient looking for answers. I found my way out of the stress struggle, put on my scientist hat. I had gone to see a doctor and my doctor had said, go get a massage and just relax. Just try to relax more. So I was like, okay, I'll get a massage. I'll have dinner with friends, I'll go retail therapy, all the things that didn't work. And so when I put on my scientist hat and I started looking and doing the research, is when I really found out, okay, this is how stress impacts the brain and the body, and this is how I'm going to find my way out of stress.

(00:56:02):

Movement was one. And then when I came out of that, I said I wanted to be the doctor that I needed during that difficult time. So that's my origin story. I mentioned that because movement was not something I did every single day. I was working 80 hours a week and I don't know, I was running from one patient room to the other. I thought that was movement enough. What I did during that time, I was acutely stressed. I was so depleted and running on Fme smell. I was erratic in my food intake, my sleep, seeing death and dying on a daily basis and burnout or even stress was not in my lexicon. It was not in my vocabulary. When I was training in my medical training, my motto, how I was trained was pressure makes diamonds. Someone sat a whole group of medical students down in our first year or second year of medical training and said, I just want you guys to know what you're about to go through.

(00:56:53):

Pressure makes diamonds. So I was like, Hey, diamond in the making, bring it on. And then my diamond cracked. So when I discovered all of the science around why movement is important and exercise is like E, the dreaded E word, no one likes to talk about it. We can talk about movement, we can talk about exercise. To answer your question, it has changed. 

Mel Robbins (00:58:06):

Well, I'm thrilled that you shared your story because you clearly are the doctor we all need.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:58:11):

Thank you. And so during that really difficult time, I focused on a couple of days a week of yoga, gentle stretching, nothing much and a few walks. So I used to walk every single day, which is why in the five resets when I talk about movement walking, even if it's five or 10 minutes, again, you might say, what's a walk going to do? It's going to do nothing because it's not about the promise of physical fitness. This is the promise of mental fitness.

(00:58:38):

And so a little bit of a daily walk, and the reason I walked every single day when I was a stressed patient and why I suggest when people are feeling that acute sense of stress to walk is every single day is because it avoids decision fatigue. If you say to yourself when you're deeply stressed, I'm going to go to the gym three times a week for an hour long class. Then Monday rolls around, a deadline comes up at work, you don't go Tuesday, there's a family obligation or a conflict. You don't go Wednesday, same thing. And by Friday you might've gone zero or one time. Your sense of self, your sense of self-efficacy goes down. You're like, oh, I can't get anything. Right. Why bother at all? And then your amygdala starts firing, right? Because the forward future planning prefrontal cortex isn't working as great. Instead, aim to do something a little bit every day at avoids decision fatigue. Now, to answer your question, it's changed. So initially I started my, I was a sedentary person. I didn't really exercise much. I was into dancing as a child, but not sports. Now I understand the value of sports for so many reasons. Gentle yoga and walks every day, 10 minute walk that was like, yes, I walked check. This is not about walking five miles a day.

Mel Robbins (00:59:45):

I love that everybody, because the person listening is like, okay, how long? What do I do? And it's just 10 minutes, just 10 minutes,

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (00:59:50):

Five minutes is fine too. If you can do 20 minutes of a walk every single day, great. It's the equivalent of a Facebook scroll. Seriously, we all scroll. That's true. Or Instagram or choose your poison. It's the equivalent of a scroll. Opt out of a scroll and go for a walk. Instead, do it in between your meetings if you can five, 10 minutes every single day. It's that inertia that sometimes it feels like you're wading through molasses when you're feeling stressed of lacing up your sneakers and going outside, and if you say, oh, I'm going to do this for 45 minutes, forget it. You're never doing it. But if you say, oh, five minutes, I can do that. It's about closing that gap between where you are and where you'd like to be. And so five minutes. So then now what I do, because I am of a certain age, I focus on resistance training.

(01:00:34):

I aim to exercise 30 minutes every single day. Does that happen every single day? No, but I probably get in four to five days of exercise and that includes walking. Or if I do a 40 minute walk one day, I won't do resistance training, but I do some form of movement every day. It is about making things small and tangible and decreasing the barriers to taking that step. So fine, you don't want to put on your sneakers, take a walk up and down your hallway in your house, walk up and down a set of stairs. Research has showed that it in fact to decrease. There was a study that was done that ultra short bursts of activity one to two minutes. So walking up a set of stairs or going to parking far away. When you're going to the grocery store, we all look for parking really close to the entrance park far away. Take a walk up to the grocery store, run for the bus or walk quickly to go get the bus or the subway. These short, they're called ultra short bursts of activity can decrease your risk of dying from cancer by 40%.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:01:47):

As you may have heard in pop culture, sitting is the new smoking.

Mel Robbins (01:01:51):

I hadn't heard that.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:01:52):

The science shows that sitting. It's not just that exercise is good for you and moving is good for you for your stress, anxiety, burnout. It's that sitting is actually bad for you and it can increase your sense of anxiety, stress, and burnout.

Mel Robbins (01:02:11):

Wow, maybe we should have ordered standing desks around here,

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:02:16):

And of course you want to sit and for me, when I can never use a standing desk, I can't think, right? I need to sit down and do my work and have my deep thinking. I wanted to share a couple of pretty alarming statistics about sitting. There was a study of 800 people and the ones who sat the most. This is like knock your socks off data. The people who sat the most had 112% higher risk of diabetes, 147% higher risk of heart disease, a 90% higher risk of death from heart disease and a 50% higher risk from death overall, all to say that sitting is actually bad for our health, our wellbeing, and as it turns out, your stress and burnout,

Mel Robbins (01:03:04):

How does sitting

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:03:06):

Trigger stress? The mechanisms of action aren't entirely clear, but the data suggests that when you are sitting for prolonged length of time, you're stewing in your own emotions, so to speak. And so it's that getting up and moving creates a whole cascade of positive biological changes to your brain and your body. And when you're sitting for long periods of time, that doesn't happen. It also has a cardiovascular benefit, or rather, it's detrimental to your cardiovascular health to just sit, because a body is meant to move. Your body is the greatest machine. We say that this little guy, this smartphone is like the greatest machine that man has invented. I would argue that your brain and your body is truly the greatest machine, and so use that machine to do what it's meant to do. You don't have to become an Olympian, but certainly getting up and moving a little bit every day, even if it means five minutes between your zoom meetings, get up, take a walk, stretch, sitting for prolonged periods of time. Because think about it, we sit all day at work that you sit all day at work and then you sit in a car going back home, and then you sit on your sofa all day. So the human body hasn't been designed to just sit all day. We are meant to move and move our bodies.

Mel Robbins (01:04:27):

As a doctor, what do you recommend? My watch has that standup thing. I love it, and I don't realize how much time will go by and it's like, oh, I haven't stood in two hours. Holy cow.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:04:36):

I love that. I would say there isn't necessarily a prescription, like a dose relationship for sitting and when to stand up and what's the dose of standing and sitting? Just do it when you can. You have a two hour meeting, can't stand up right after that two hour meeting. Instead of sitting on your slack channel and responding to emails or doing all of those things, get up and walk around. There is something to be said, right? Like Plato, Aristotle, all of these greats talked about the benefit of a walk, that mental health benefit of taking a walk. And so it doesn't have to be this long, profound walk. Just get up and stretch your body, do some gentle stretching, some exercising. Connect your breath to your movement, to your posture. This is really important because that's a way to tap into your mind-body connection as well.

Mel Robbins (01:05:19):

So your next reset addresses one of the biggest lies around productivity. Let's talk about it.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:05:25):

So reset number four is come up for air. One of the biggest myths is that you are meant to be functioning at a high capacity without any need for rest or recovery. That productivity is linear. The more you do, the more you can accomplish, and then the more you do, the more you can accomplish. It's just supposed to be this thing that this feedback loop that's supposed to continue on and on and on, that's a myth. A break is not just a nice to have luxury. Your brain and your body need a break. It is a biological necessity for your brain and body to rest and recover. Human productivity is not linear. It functions on a curve. Think of a bell shaped curve,

(01:06:09):

The left of the curve. When you don't have a lot of stress, you're not very motivated, you're not very productive. Think about the right side of the curve. So much stress, you are keyed up. Many of us are living on this right side of the curve, right? There is a sweet spot of human productivity right in the middle. It's just right stress. I call it the Goldilocks principle, and it's this idea of we all are to that right of that bell shaped curve. We are anxious. We have so much stress. We're not productive. We can't focus. It's hard to get things done. So the science suggests that moving back, how do you get to that center spot? The sweet spot of human productivity is to scale back, but you can't scale back. That's not realistic because we have real constraints. We have constraints on our time. We have obligations with work and parenting. Instead, you have to honor your breaks. How do you scale back? How do you apply this science to your everyday life? You honor your breaks. How do you do that when you are taking a break during the day? What do most of us do? We mindlessly scroll. We've already talked about what happens with scrolling. This isn't a benign thing that you are doing. You are actively influencing your brain and your body for more stress, right? More stress, more burnout, all of the things that we talked about.

Mel Robbins (01:07:25):

Let me just highlight that because you're right. When I step out of a meeting, the first thing I do is check my phone. And so I'm not actually taking a break my mind and activating the amygdala and juicing up my stress. Never even thought about it. I always viewed like, oh, okay, I've got a couple minutes before my next thing. I'll just look at my phone and instead, if I were to leave my phone where it is and walk into the kitchen here at work or at home, make myself a cup of coffee or step outside for a minute,

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:08:02):

I'd feel

Mel Robbins (01:08:02):

Different.

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:08:03):

Try some heart centered breathing. Take a little walk outside, do some stretches, touch your toes, stand up, twist. Do something where you're connecting your breath to your movement. Tap into your mind, body connection, practice. Stop, breathe, be. It's a three second exercise and it can help. What is that? The stop, breathe, be method. The instructions are in the name. It's a three second exercise. So you stop, you breathe and you be so you ground your feet on the floor. I learned the stop, breathe, be method. It was the first technique I learned to reset my MINDBODY connection. When I was in the throes of stress as a stressed medical resident, I was working 80 hours a week. I was seeing 30 to 40 patients a day, and I brought the stop, breathe, be method into my life when I would knock on the door of the patient room before I would enter, it was my doorknob moment.

(01:08:54):

So as I turned the doorknob, I would say to myself, often under my breath, in a crowded place, stop, breathe, be. And then I would enter, and I would do that incrementally over and over and over again, 30, 40 times a day. Over time, I could just do it anywhere. In fact, before we started speaking, I was so excited because I was having a total fan girl moment. Still am. It's been a long time of my amygdala going off, but no, just kidding. I was having a fan girl moment. I'm not kidding about that. And I did stop breathe bee. In fact, the entire time that we've been speaking, I've been very aware of my feet on the floor, my posture in the chair, and how I am breathing because that is important to manage and modulate your stress response.

(01:09:37):

You can practice breathe B during mundane everyday moments of your life. So I did it with the doorknob. You can do it between zoom meetings, breathe B, it's a little mini reset, small micro reset, three seconds. You can practice it when you're brushing your teeth. I have practiced it in the morning when you're getting lunches ready for school, getting everything ready. I do it always at the doorknob before I'm about to go into the garage to do school, bus, breathe, be, and I think, oh my God, we forgot the project. Did you bring your hat? Oh, we need to get this. We need to get that. It's just the reset that you need. And the reason the stop breathe B method works so well is because anxiety and anxious thoughts are a future focused emotion. It is about what if. If this happens, what if that happens?

(01:10:23):

What if I fail? What if I can't do? Well? What if? What if? And stop, breathe, be gets you out of what if thinking and gets you back into what is in the here and now. Dr. Aditi, what is the fifth reset? The fifth reset is to bring your best self forward. And this is all about the inner critic. We talked about it a little bit at the start of our conversation. That inner critic is that voice in your head that berates you. You may not even know that it is there. You might think, Hey, that's my natural voice. That's who I am. In fact, I would argue that that is not who you are, capital YOU. It is your amygdala speaking. The reason is when you are feeling a sense of stress, that inner critic, that voice gets a megaphone because your amygdala is doing the driving of your brain and your amygdala wants to keep you safe and small.

(01:11:14):

That is why getting out of your comfort zone when you're feeling a sense of stress doesn't feel good. You have that What if thinking all of these sorts of things. It's a self-sabotage sort of situation. And so you stay small, you stay in your comfort zone. You don't try new things. You don't try to get out of your stress because that inner voice. So how do you silence the inner voice? How do you take that megaphone out of your inner voice's hand and say, no, you're not going to be speaking. I'm the one who's going to be speaking. There's a couple of ways to do that. The first is gratitude. Now, you may hear the word gratitude and roll your eyes like, oh my God, gratitude. I'm not going to do this teenage journal bullshit. In fact, there is a lot of science for gratitude. A written gratitude practice is vital to help silence your inner critic and to reset your stress and burnout because again, very simple practice. Keep a piece of paper and a pen next to your bedside. You know how you got rid of your phone on your nightstand?

(01:12:10):

Keep a little gratitude journal there instead. Now, every night or in the morning, whenever you want, doesn't matter. Five things you're grateful for and why. Put the date. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Write down five things you're grateful for and why. Some days you'll have 15 things that you want to write down. You can only write down five other days. You'll say, I have nothing that I'm grateful for. You have two arms and two legs. You can breathe the air. You have a roof over your head. You have food in your pantry. These are all wins because many people particularly now cannot say that. So write those down. The reason gratitude is so important from a scientific perspective is because when you are doing a gratitude, daily gratitude practice, it takes 60 seconds. 

Mel Robbins (01:14:17):

Dr. Aditi, I'd love for you to speak directly to the person listening and if they take just one of these recommendations because you have just poured into us, but if they just focus on one action, what do you think is the most important thing to do

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:14:41):

Of all of the things that you have heard today? Perhaps the most important is to cultivate a sense of self-compassion and give yourself lots of grace on this journey for less stress and burnout and more resilience. Self-compassion has been found to decrease your amygdala and decrease your cortisol, so it has an active effect on your brain. Over the past several years, we have had one onslaught after the other. We have lived through the perfect storm or the perfect tsunami, so to speak. You can't change the weather. What you can do is wear a raincoat to keep you warm, safe, and dry. And I hope some of these strategies can serve as that raincoat. I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes. You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather. Oh,

Mel Robbins (01:15:30):

That's beautiful. What are your parting words?

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar (01:15:33):

There is one quote that I always keep going back to, which is be kinder than necessary because everyone is facing and fighting a harder battle. And I would say that is so true. But don't forget about yourself, about being kinder to yourself then necessary because stress and burnout are a battle that we are all fighting. And when you are kind to others, yes, it helps to decrease stress and burnout. It helps to validate that difficult emotion in other people, but turn that inwards and be a mirror for yourself so you are giving yourself the same compassion that you give to others.

Mel Robbins (01:16:09):

Well, Dr. Aditi, thank you so much. You are such a gift and you have a gift for being able to take very complicated scientific, medical, neuroscience, all of this stuff and simplify it. I learned so much from you today. I will never think about stress again the same way that I used to. I feel very empowered, and I hope that as you listened to Dr. Aditi, that you did too. I know you did because she gave us so much to do and I'm grateful that it costs $0. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And I also want to take a moment and just thank you for spending time with us today, and I want to be sure, in case nobody else tells you, you could feel the love being poured into you. But I wanted to tell you that I love you and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a better life.

(01:17:08):

And what's clear after hearing so much wisdom and so many research backed techniques and the impact that it has on your life immediately and long-term, that perhaps one of the single most important things that you could do is to figure out why lowering your stress matters to you, and then start to practice these small resets so that you quiet the amygdala and you pull your prefrontal cortex back online because that's going to help you not only create a better life, but to feel really good as you're living it. Alrighty, I'll talk to you in a few days. Please share this with people that you know and that you love, and please take a second and hit subscribe because it allows me to bring you world class medical experts to you at zero cost, and I love doing that for you. So just hit the subscribe. Thank you so much. Share this with people that you care about and that you love. Since we're on the topic of health, I want to point you to another video that you're going to absolutely love with another world renowned medical expert by the name of Dr. Mark Hyman. This one's called Reset Your Health. Stop feeling like Crap with Dr. Mark Hyman.