You can control your health and how long you live by examining your deeply held belief systems and resolving generational trauma. How? This episode with Dr. Mario Martinez explores the links between cultural beliefs and longevity.
Or listen & subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts | Android
About Dr. Mario Martinez
Dr. Martinez is a clinical neuropsychologist who specializes in how cultural beliefs affect health and longevity. He proposes, based on credible research evidence, that longevity is learned and the causes of health are inherited. He has studied healthy centenarians (100 years or older) worldwide and found that only 20 to 25% can be attributed to genetics - the rest is related to how they live and the cultural beliefs they share.
He is the author of the bestselling book, The MindBody Code: How to Change the Beliefs that Limit Your Health, Longevity, and Success that teaches his theory and practice of biocognitive science to the general public. In addition to longevity, he also explains why our immune system is not just a protector. Instead, it responds to the cultural premises we learn to perceive the world.
In this episode, Dr. Mario explains why some cultures live longer and how we can adopt some of their beliefs and practices in our own lives. He also shares the scientific basis for how generational trauma happens and what we can do to heal from this. Dr. Mario also talks about the creative outcome from discipline and positive patterns.
You know one of my favorite hormones is Oxytocin - the love hormone - well, Dr. Mario talks about what some daily activities are that will increase our Oxytocin and why we should. His research into centenarians has revealed the true role of Oxytocin plays in our longevity. He also shares how creating and following simple rituals can increase your lifespan.
We talk about how this collective quarantine we’re experiencing with the Coronavirus can actually alter the way our minds work. What was important to you before this supervirus might not hold the same weight when we’re through this health crisis.
What we need to do in order to increase our longevity is to create our own eudemonic pleasure. This is a simple part of your daily life, like taking a shot of rum at the end of the day, which brings you pleasure for no other reason than creating joy. For you, this might look like regular phone calls with your friends, an indulgence that fills your cup, or even a morning run.
Do you have any daily rituals or eudemonic pleasures you participate in? As always, you can ask me anything and let me hear your thoughts in the comments below. If you have questions, email team@drannacabeca.com.
In This Episode:
- What some of the cultural standards are that lead to longevity
- How you can be experiencing generational trauma
- What discipline and positive patterns create
- Why you should practice compassion
- How to increase your Oxytocin
- What power there is in rituals
- How a long-term traumatic experience, like collective quarantine, can change your perspective on what’s important now
- How to create your own eudemonic pleasure
- What a subculture of wellness is and why you should create one
Subscribe to The Girlfriend Doctor Podcast w/ Dr. Anna Cabeca on Youtube
Quotes:
“That’s a powerful statement. Embody your truth, essentially, embody what is true to you versus the lies that have been told about you. Embody what’s true to you and practice it.” (19:15)
“Find out what is good about your culture and see what you’re not doing that your culture taught you that you can incorporate. Then, also look at how your culture limited you. And, sometimes even berated you, and begin to question that.” (43:22)
“The antidote for shame is honor-consciousness. And I use honor-consciousness as an anti-inflammatory.” (49:39)
Links
Pre-Order Keto-Green 16 to get a sneak peek and free gifts!
Buy The MindBody Self: How Longevity is Culturally Learned and the Causes of Health Are Inherited
Find Dr. Mario Martinez Online
Find Dr. Mario Martinez on Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn
Transcript:
Dr. Mario:
The sense of self is usually around the middle part of the prefrontal lobe and in the insula deeper but they'll have someone from the U.S., for example, who's an individualist and they'll say, "Talk about yourself," and that part activates. They say, "Talk about your mother, your friends," it goes somewhere else. You would think okay, that's a universal neuropsychological process and that's how it is. But you go to a collectivist culture like Korea, Japan, China, and you ask them, "Talk about yourself," and that lights up. "Talk about your mother, your friends," and it stays there. It's a collectively learned brain function.
Dr. Anna:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Girlfriend Doctor podcast. It is Dr. Anna Cabeca and it is my mission and my passion to help women live better lives before, during, and after menopause. Welcome. The Girlfriend Doctor podcast as you know, it is an intimate place for intimate conversation and I am here for you. You can ask or tell me anything. No shame, no guilt, no apologies. We pull back the curtain on all things related to perimenopause, hormones, sexual health, libido, PMS, you name it, we're going to talk about it. Our goal is to shine light on your overall wellness. Physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually.
Dr. Anna:
Let's get started. Today I have as a guest Dr. Mario Martinez. He was highly recommended to me by a dear friend and founder of Paleo f(x), named Keith, and so I want to share with you a little bit about his background and you'll quickly know why I was so excited to bring him on the podcast and share him and his vast research as well as his perspective with all of you.
Dr. Anna:
Dr. Martinez is a clinical neuropsychologist who specializes in how cultural beliefs affect health and longevity. He proposes, based on credible research evidence, that longevity is learned and the causes of health are inherited. He has studied healthy centenarians, that is 100 years or older. He studied them worldwide and found that only 20-25% can be attributed to genetics. The rest is related to how they live and the cultural beliefs that they share.
Dr. Anna:
He is the author of the best-selling book, The Mind Body Code: How to Change the Beliefs that Limit Your Health, Longevity, and Success, that teaches his theory and practice of biocognitive science to the general public. In addition to longevity, he also explains why our immune system is not just a protector. Instead it responds to the cultural premises we learn to perceive in the world. His area of interest, that I just find fascinating, can be wrapped up in the term psychoneuroimmunology. I mean doesn't that just sound fabulous? He's just fabulous. He's been all over the internet. He's been featured with Deepak Chopra, with Dr. Christiane Northrup in the Huffington Post, Medium journal, I mean just name it, and is just a powerful resource. I welcome you, Dr. Mario Martinez. Thank you for being here today.
Dr. Mario:
Thank you. It's fun being here.
Dr. Anna:
It's a good place. Welcome to the Girlfriend Doctor podcast. Tell us a little bit about how you evolved into studying centenarians on this journey.
Dr. Mario:
When I was training to be a neuropsychologist we learned what happens when the brain, when there's sickness or when there's trauma, so we knew a lot about the pathology of the brain but it was very little studying on what is the healthy brain and what are the expansions of the brain. I was always very interested in longevity and healthy longevity, so I thought that the best way to do something in science is to go to where it works and then to come up with some theories on what was going on and how it works. The best way to go to find out about longevity is with healthy centenarians, people who are over 100 or over.
Dr. Mario:
I went all over the world and I also looked at areas where others have looked, the blue zones that they call them, five areas in the world, but in the United States, for example, centenarians are the fastest-growing segment of the population. There are about 90,000 centenarians so far in the United States. It's really happening in a way that we really need to put some more focus on it because I thought, and most people with reductionist medicine, think well, it's got to be the genes and it has to be they even have some genes that they call them [inaudible 00:04:55] gene and all the long telomeres, things like that, and it really is not that. As you mentioned earlier, it's 20-25% genetics, and the rest is just what I call biocultural, which is not only the food that they eat and the place where they live but the way that they look at the world based on the culture that they learn.
Dr. Anna:
What are some of these ways? What are the longevity pearls? We know about the blue zones. What did you find that were the cultural habits or the cultural perspectives views that create longevity?
Dr. Mario:
When I worked with them I was looking for the causes of health and I argue that the causes of health are inherited. We have over 150,000 years as Homo sapiens with trial and error in how to keep the body healthy, not how to break the body down. But those causes of health need to be triggered, and I think that's what centenarians do. They trigger the causes of health.
Dr. Mario:
For example, a typical centenarian, number one believes that everybody loves them. They have this, what my mentor George Sullivan called healthy narcissism. They feel that everybody loves them and immunologically, psycho-immunologically, it's not whether people love you or not. It's if you believe that you're being loved. Love is a very powerful immune enhancer, a very powerful cause of health. That was one of the things.
Dr. Mario:
They have what I call inclusive narcissism. To give you an example, I went into Cuba to study some of the centenarians and there was one centenarian, 102-year-old, and they give a little cocktail party for him after we had the interviews and all that, and there were women and men and he comes up to me and he says, "Have you noticed how the women are looking at me? They love me." Then the inclusivist, "But have you noticed how beautiful they all are?" He brings them into his narcissism. Not the pathological, which would be how can I manipulate someone? It's they love me because they're beautiful. That's one example. Many of them have that sense.
Dr. Mario:
They are outliers. They don't buy into the cultural components of things. For example, they don't buy into the usual, what I call false humbleness that we're taught in our cultures. We're taught succeed, succeed, succeed, but don't brag about it. When people tell you that you're smart, say, "Oh no, I'm not that smart." You have to learn to succeed and then when you succeed you have no way to show it or express it with anybody. A little girl will say, "Mommy, look how pretty I am," and you say, "No, no darling, you don't say you're pretty. You wait for people to tell you, and then you deny it." "I love your hair." "I haven't washed it in three days." That kind of thing. Centenarians are not that way.
Dr. Mario:
Centenarians, a 101-year-old woman who is very attractive, I said, "You know, you're very attractive," and she said, "Yes, thank you. I've always been very attractive ever since I was a little girl." You see, they're outliers. They don't buy into the cultural restraints that actually keep you from thriving and from keeping yourself healthy.
Dr. Anna:
Wow. They don't buy into ... I'm writing this down. Don't buy into the cultural restraints.
Dr. Mario:
The culture will tell you, and the way that I define culture because what I'm bringing to psycho-immunology is a new component, is cultural anthropology. I'm creating cultural psycho-immunology, which means that how does the immune system, nervous and endocrine system respond in a cultural context? Culture is really the collective beliefs of anything that's important in life, like aesthetics, ethics, wellness, longevity, illness, all the important things that we believe as a collective is what we would call culture.
Dr. Mario:
The way that I look at the brain, the brain is cultural and the immune system responds to the cultural brain. The world can be interpreted in many, many different ways depending on your culture if it's individualist culture or collective culture. Then what the culture does is creates a fabric around the world and what the brain perceives is the fabric that it learned to perceive. It even goes to the brain. It even goes to the neuroscience.
Dr. Mario:
For example, most cultures in the west are an individualist. The individual is valued more than the group. In social settings of the Asian cultures, they're more collectivist. For example, when they do an MRI, a functional MRI, which it does a scan and it looks at how the brain responds to different things based on blood flow, so the sense of self is usually around the middle part of the prefrontal lobe and in the insula deeper, but they'll have someone from the U.S, for example, who's an individualist, and they'll say, "Talk about yourself," and that part activates. They say, "Talk about your mother, your friends," it goes somewhere else. You would think okay, that's a universal neuropsychological process and that's how it is. But you go to a collectivist culture like Korea, Japan, China, and you ask them, "Talk about yourself," and that lights up. "Talk about your mother, your friends," and it stays there. It's a collectively learned brain function. [inaudible 00:10:06] that way.
Dr. Anna:
Wow. Wow. That's interesting, so it's inherent wiring of our brain. Something I've been talking about a lot lately is post-traumatic resilience or post-traumatic growth and how do some people bounce back after trauma and others continue on in victim mode? Certainly, there's some psychoneuroimmunology at play here.
Dr. Mario:
Yes, yes, and as you know the post-traumatic stress model suggests that what happens is you have a traumatic experience that you can't process at the time so the brain compresses it and puts it away and to bring it out later when the trauma's over, but you don't bring it out later because it causes anxiety. Then you have post-traumatic stress and you have all these other things happening. That's the compression.
Dr. Mario:
What happens though is some people who are not as resilient then will use that as a way of dealing with the world and controlling the world, that's the victimhood. Other people want to come out of it and want to be resilient and in American psychology, there's a lot of work in resilience, but in French psychology, there's resilience plus thriving. They look at the thriving component of the resilience and that usually happens when a person does not adhere to the benefits of being sick, of having the attention of a doctor or the family, where they say, "No, I can't do this because I have post-traumatic or because I was abused," or whatever. That gives you a lot of power so it has a lot of secondary gains.
Dr. Mario:
But also something that I don't think most people talk about is that when you have any kind of illness, any kind of disorder or any kind of problem that stops you from being what you could normally do, one is that it allows you to not have to do things that you don't want to do. That's the secondary gain. The other one that I study more, which I think is more interesting, is what is it that is coming up that's good in your life but you don't feel worthy of accepting and you stop it with your illness or you stop it with your disorder? I think in any healing, whether you do allopathic medicine or any kind of medicine, two questions need to be asked. What could you do if you didn't have this illness that you don't want to do when you [inaudible 00:12:24], and what would you like to do that you can't do but you might feel unworthy of? It's usually good things.
Dr. Mario:
Those two things need to be asked always because you will find that it's related to the lack of growth and it's related to what the culture teaches you. For example, some cultures will teach you that 45 is middle age and after that you go downhill, and that's exactly what happens. Some cultures in Europe, the social services will give you a cane at 55 because it's said eventually you're going to need it, and there's a higher level of use of canes because of that. In fact if you use a cane, if you don't need it, your body will adjust to the cane rather than you to the cane or the cane to you, and you begin to walk with cane consciousness.
Dr. Anna:
Wow. I mean, it makes sense. I love this. For me, from post-trauma, understanding also the physiology behind it that allows immunocompromise. The cortisol, cortisol, cortisol, and then that I would say from my understanding cortisol goes up, oxytocin goes down. When cortisol's up too long PVN of the brain, the paraventricular nucleus of the brain shuts down cortisol. Now you're in this very dangerous disconnect state. Oxytocin's down, cortisol is down, it burns out, social isolation, depression, and then there are series of steps that I had to learn to reset my circadian pattern, to reestablish my oxytocin, to master oxytocin in my life once again and to pull myself out of what I mentioned before we started, that deep dark hole of despair.
Dr. Mario:
Yes, very much. As you know, you're right about the stress hormones, the cortisol, and epinephrine, norepinephrine, but you actually can do a trans-generational epigenetic transfer. For example, people that their great grandparents or grandparents were in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, they pass on epigenetically the high level of cortisol even though those people were not in concentration camps. You're passing on epigenetically to your next generation the kinds of traumas that you had.
Dr. Anna:
Even to the third or fourth generation?
Dr. Mario:
That's right. Yes.
Dr. Anna:
How do we get out of that?
Dr. Mario:
Well, there's some methods that I talk about in my books, but basically the idea is that that is a learned process. Even if it's epigenetically learned, that can be unlearned but you first have to be aware that that's what you're carrying and it has to do, what the neuroscience, they call it the default mode. The default mode is the lens that we use to look at the world. That default mode is learned by your culture, even epigenetically, but for example, if you do a relaxation or some contemplative techniques or whatever you can get very relaxed. When you come out you go back to default mode and you're in alarm again. The way to change the default mode is to be aware that they're terrains that support default mode and the terrains that don't. You have to be aware that you're most susceptible to your default mode just when you wake up and just before you go to sleep.
Dr. Mario:
When you wake up you're getting into that dumping your dreams into the day, and at night you're dumping the day into your dreams. One way to check out the default mode is you wake up in the morning and do a stream of consciousness and find out what kind of things come to your mind. You find some kind of lens there. For example, some could be one that you're excited about what's going on for the day. The other one is you have to be on alarm because some people are out there to get you. Others are to punish yourself. They have a way of archetypal living it out.
Dr. Mario:
Then what happens is that the brain, anything that you repeat will consider it to be important for survival. If you repeat bad things, that's survival. Then what it does is a cognition will try to confirm what the brain is repeating and if you have an alarm mindset, you're going to look for alarms throughout the day to support your belief system.
Dr. Mario:
I do some work with Fortune 100 companies and management and that kind of thing, teaching them these things, and you could put a crisis intervention manager who deals with crisis in a particular department and within two weeks there's a crisis every day because they create what their brain tells them that is the world.
Dr. Mario:
Learning these things, and there's some techniques that you can do that actually teach you to change the neuro maps that maintain that default mode because there's a network of the prefrontal lobe and the part of the brain that deals with registering anger and fear and the hippocampus, the amygdala, it's a network, but that could be changed by the work that you do with learning that you have evidence that that's true based on what you believe, but you can begin to create some evidence that counters that belief.
Dr. Mario:
I'll give you an example. Your tribe tells you that women are not good with directions. Okay, so you buy that. Then what you do, since culture editors, people who are very important that we pay attention to when we're born, then we begin to buy it and we begin to confirm that we're not good. Then if one day comes and you're very good with directions, you say, "Ah, that's just lucky. I'm not good with direction because I'm a woman." Then what you do is you begin to defy the culture. You begin to defy the tribe and say, "Now let me see if I become mindful and I become aware of my abilities to do things like I have in other areas, to see how well I can do with directions." Then you begin to look for evidence that existentially confirms that what they were telling you is wrong. Then you begin to create neuro maps.
Dr. Mario:
But you can't just do affirmation to say, "I'm good with direction." No, the brain doesn't work that way. It requires embodying the information and practicing it so then the perceptual system changes and then you defy the tribe and be aware that the coauthors of the tribe and the culture editors of the tribe are still going to persist in seeing you as not being good with directions. You have to be aware of the dialogue that you're going to have with those people because they'll say, "Well you're not good with direction." "Well that's what you think and I can accept that, but let me tell you, I've found some really good evidence that that's not true." "Oh no, you're bad," and then don't argue. Never argue because you're rerunning old scripts and you go back into being the little girl.
Dr. Anna:
That's a powerful statement. Just embody your truth essentially, embody what is true to you versus the lies that have been told about you, like not being good with directions. Embody what's true to you and practice it. Disciplines and practice recreate positive patterns. Or negative ones, depending on what we're rerunning as far as a script, in the same way post traumas.
Dr. Anna:
Things that make one person a victim versus another person grow and flourish. I like the word flourish instead of thriving. Thrive sounds like I have to work for it, but just flourish is that opening up. Maybe it's more feminine, it's my bias.
Dr. Mario:
Well, you have to work for both, but yes they're both good. They're both good names for it.
Dr. Anna:
Yeah. Centenarians, so in your journey around the world, what are some other ... Right now, let's just actually, let's step back. One of the main reasons is what I've seen happening in my community groups and certainly, in many of my clients, past triggers and traumas are resurfacing and negative behavior, short tempers, lack of tolerance is also resurging, and why at this time? Then what do we do, we don't need to know why, but what do we need to do as leaders of our community groups, what do we need to do to further inspire, change that direction, pull them up, pull them out?
Dr. Mario:
First I'm going to give you some good news about centenarians. About three days ago there was a report that says a 102-year-old woman from Italy beat the coronavirus. And a 95-year-old man from the United States beat the coronavirus. So much for age. It has nothing to do with age. It has to do with your immunological defense that you have.
Dr. Mario:
I think what happens, in times of trauma, post-traumatic stress and traumatic kinds of situations are very contextual. If you have a car accident and you have post-traumatic stress and you smell the gasoline from the leaking car, any time you smell gasoline you'll have a reaction. It's very contextual.
Dr. Mario:
Any time that there's a trauma, like for example, or a pandemic like the coronavirus and other things, it'll put you into alarm even more than other people if you had other traumas because the brain is saying this is the history of what I have from trauma, so let me throw the history in here, even if it's related or not. The first thing to do is to be aware that it's contextual and then to be aware that the worst thing you can do during a traumatic situation is panic because panic is the best friend of viruses or anything else because it suppresses immune function.
Dr. Mario:
Then second, to learn some of the contemplative and meditative techniques that most people do and begin to look for outliers that are defying the normal, and the outliers that I mentioned today are the 102-year-old woman, the 95-year-old man, which defy the system that says if you're over 65 you're at risk. You're at risk if your four if you have an immune deficiency. There are children that have died already. Half of the people that have been infected or that test positive in New York are under 45. Age is irrelevant. It has to do with the person and the individual.
Dr. Anna:
How do we strengthen our immune system from the perspective of psychoneuroimmunology?
Dr. Mario:
Well, I wrote an article, I don't know if I sent it to you, that just came out in Medium. I had over 40,000 reads, about how to actually increase immunological strength for the coronavirus or any upper respiratory virus. Okay, what we know is that IgAs are the antibodies that fight the upper respiratory viruses. Many years ago David McClelland, who's a psychoimmunologist, did some research where very interesting, he had a video of Mother Teresa doing all the compassionate things that she does, or she did, and he mentioned the IgAs in the saliva. IgAs are in the saliva and the blood. The saliva's a really good indicator of your IGA population and strength and so forth.
Dr. Mario:
Then he had another group where he had them watch the atrocities that the Germans, the Nazis did in concentration camps and he measured the IgAs pre and post and for the first time in psycho-immunology they found that compassion brings up the IgAs significantly and it can stay up to six hours, but these kinds of atrocities bring the IgAs down significantly. One protects you against the virus, the other one makes you more susceptible to the virus. There have been many, many other studies down after that and it consistently shows not only IgAs but interleukins and CTRA and other kinds of things go up when you're experiencing compassion or dealing with compassion.
Dr. Mario:
Now there's a study that shows that it's even stronger than watching a video of Mother Teresa if you go into technique, and that's what I talk about in the article, where you do heart breathing, what they call heart breathing. You breathe as if you're breathing from your heart. Although you're not, you pretend, you imagine as if you're breathing from your heart. You get the brain coherence, or coherence between the brain and the heart rate variability in between beats and that makes you much more susceptible to accepting new information. That's the first part.
Dr. Mario:
Then after you do that after you relax and you meditate, you breathe from your heart as if you're breathing from your heart, and you bring back memories of any compassionate act that you can remember. You were compassionate, somebody is compassionate with you, you saw a compassionate act. You do it for 15 minutes and the IgAs will go higher even then with the Mother Teresa video. You do that twice a day, it'll last six hours each time. That's one example of what you can do.
Dr. Anna:
I love that. You know, as an obstetrician I spent decades of my life listening to heart rate variability in the womb. Right? Fetal heart rate variability. Then somehow, and then for lack of variability, I need to stat get that baby out. Right? That baby is stressed. Once the baby's born we forget about that. But heart rate variability is so important and understanding part of my journey is after my son's accident, my heart physically hurt. It physically hurt, Mario, and then understanding that there are oxytocin receptors in a heart. Not only are there oxytocin receptors in our heart, but the heart also produces oxytocin. It's a physical phenomenon that's absolutely real. Can you explain that a little more?
Dr. Mario:
Yes, well that's right. There are portals, I call portals of wellness, and one of the portals is the heart and they each have a biosymbolic linguistic correlation. People will say, "She broke his heart," so it's there. It's there. What happens is that the heart, as you know, is more an endocrine gland than anything else. Not a pump. It produces its own hormones and it has more connections with the brain than the brain with the heart, so the heart has an intelligence. It has receptors that are intelligent. But look how interesting. If you look at somebody, and you smile at that person, you have a warm smile for that person, both of you will secrete oxytocin. If you do it on FaceTime, it takes the immune system longer to respond and the endocrine system to respond to the oxytocin because it's not in vivo. It's not real. It picks up on the I self.
Dr. Mario:
One way to bring up oxytocin is of course to love, orgasm, breastfeeding, but the most powerful way to bring oxytocin is to again do a technique where you get yourself relaxed, you create a terrain where you think about all the people that have loved you and all the people that you love. Oxytocin will go up again.
Dr. Anna:
That's right. Then feel it. Not just to think about it, but to feel how that love feels.
Dr. Mario:
That's extremely important. That's why affirmations by themselves don't work. They have to be embodied, which means where does it land in my body, and what is the sensation and the emotion that I feel? That's why creates neuro maps. Not just the intellectual.
Dr. Anna:
In these times where we want to support our immune system and always, that we're looking to our centenarians and for me it was looking at family members that came to the U.S. versus family members that stayed in war-torn countries and how they survived all the family members that came to the U.S, despite being older. That was really fascinating to me to see okay, what are the attributes, what's going on besides the polypharma, that was a big one and something I'm so against, but besides the polypharma, but what were the cultural habits that people participated? Certainly, it was food as medicine, and you eat together, there's community. We talk about the Mediterranean diet, how healthy that is, and the red wine. I'm like, it's the people you're drinking that wine with.
Dr. Mario:
That's right. That's right. It's one of the causes of health, by the way. Breaking bread is one of the strongest causes of health without the I self, without the computers, and it's powerful because it's in your DNA from the time of the caves and the forest. That was very important to break bread for survival reasons. Now it's for survival and for meaning. I think one of the causes of health is breaking bread. I'll give you an example on the resilience.
Dr. Anna:
Are you saying the causes of health? Like the cause of health?
Dr. Mario:
Yes. It's one of the causes of health that triggers that wellness and immunological response.
Dr. Anna:
Love it.
Dr. Mario:
Ritual is very important. Rituals are powerful, and all centenarians have rituals. When I first studied one centenarian it was in Cuba also. I went to Cuba, there's some centenarians over there. Not because of the revolution. They're way before that. I asked her in an anthropological way so I wouldn't bias, that I wouldn't say, "What are your rituals?" Because ritual could mean one thing for ... I said, "What are the things that you do that you enjoy and that give you a sense of connection with yourself and it's something that you really look forward to?" That's another way of asking for a ritual.
Dr. Mario:
She said, 102, "I have a shot of rum before I go to sleep." I thought oh, it's got to be the Cuban rum. There's got to be some qualities in the Cuban rum. Next day I interviewed another centenarian and I asked him the same thing and he said, "I have a cigar when I wake up in the morning." Finally, I got to a point that it's really the ritual, the belief system that you put into the culture component and connection that you make, but they never abuse rituals. I asked all of them, "Why don't you have another shot of rum?" "I don't need anymore. That's all I need." "Why don't you have another cigar?" "That's all I need." I never found a centenarian that was addictive or compulsive about anything that they had to do. They had a sense of balance. Benign boundaries.
Dr. Anna:
I like it, so you say things you do, so the question you ask, what are things you do or things you enjoy that is a connection with yourself and you look forward to?
Dr. Mario:
Yes.
Dr. Anna:
Okay.
Dr. Mario:
Of course, there's a difference between routines and rituals. Routines are things that you have to do because they have a function. You have to take a shower because you want to smell good and brush your teeth and that kind of thing. But a walk in the park, really not with your phones or anything, but connecting with nature, that is a ritual. A dinner with family is a ritual. Celebrating birthdays with family is a ritual. Then a funeral is a ritual. These things come from way back and they have an epigenetic transfer that allows people to then live in the wellness, what I call the centenarian consciousness when they do those things. When they live like centenarians.
Dr. Anna:
Nice, nice. What were some other things that you found?
Dr. Mario:
The ability to forgive is very important. To forgive experientially, not intellectually. It's so important that I have a chapter in my book, The Mind-Body Code, about forgiveness, the whole chapter, to explain that it has nothing to do with the perpetrator, it has to do with your interpretation and it has to be dealt with experientially, not intellectually. That's a really important one.
Dr. Mario:
The other one is they have a sense of humor. They all have a sense of humor. And getting back to the resilience, they're not pollyanna-ish. They're not "Everything is wonderful." They know how to be sad, but they have a sense of humor. I'll give you two examples.
Dr. Mario:
One I interview, and he was I think about 101, I can't remember very well, but over 100. I asked him about, again, anthropologically, what are the things that have happened in your life that have been challenging lately, anything that concern? He said well, he lost his vision when he turned 100. I said, "How did you feel about it?" He said, "Oh, it's really devastating. It was terrible." I said, "How do you deal with it now?" He said, "It's really good because when I see a woman now I have to touch her to see who she is."
Dr. Anna:
I love it. The perspective, right? Perspective.
Dr. Mario:
Yes, because another cause of health is righteous anger, which is being angry about things that are appropriate like for example losing your vision, or an insult to your innocence or somebody else's innocence. That anger is extremely important for the immune system. If you suppress it's bad for you. But if you take it out of context, it's bad for you because it becomes chronic anger. The other one becomes suppressed and repressed anger.
Dr. Mario:
If something happens you can get angry about it. Example. You're driving in the middle of traffic and a car just gets in front of you and almost hits you and you get upset. That's righteous anger. But if you take it to work and you just can't wait to tell people what happened, that's no longer righteous anger. People love misery so they can out-victimize you. They'll tell you, "Oh, let me tell you what happened to me," and then they engage in immune-deficient behavior by doing that because it's out of context.
Dr. Anna:
Wow. Let's practically think three tips you want my audience to do on a regular basis that will boost their immune system and give them this peace, we talk about the peace that surpasses all understanding. The peace, bring them into the eye of the storm and out of the storm.
Dr. Mario:
The thing to do is always look for an outlier in the family so you don't buy into the family history of diabetes or whatever. You find Uncle Joe who didn't have diabetes and look at how they function. You'll see that they're different. They're outliers. They don't buy into the culture. That's the first thing to do.
Dr. Mario:
Then second is that we have, again, 150,000 years of trial and error on how to deal with trauma and adversity. If you tune in to yourself rather than to outside of you, you begin to get intuitive information on how to deal with things and you put them in perspective also. The coronavirus, there are more deaths in car accidents than the coronavirus, and yet it's become what I call a pandemic of panic. It's serious and needs to be taken seriously, it needs to be addressed, but it doesn't have to be an overwhelming thing that actually makes you more susceptible to the pandemic.
Dr. Mario:
The other thing is that there was a major study, it's the longest longevital study that has been done, by Harvard. It's been done for 75 years. What they found, they looked at all the latest diagnostics of the time. EEGs, now they do brain scans, to see what is it that allows a person to have the healthy longevity and to be happy in their lives? What they found, the most important component is that these people believe that there's someone in their lives that they can count on. That's extremely important. Isolation, when it's forced, is not good, but then you can make something of isolation like monks do. Monks have a very good health and they're in isolation but it's a choice that they make.
Dr. Mario:
The isolation now, you go back into cave consciousness and you begin to do the things that were done in the cave. For example, you can't have a fire in the middle of the house but you can have candle dinners, which is in your DNA. You see the fire and immediately you begin to soften and relax.
Dr. Anna:
I'm excited. This week I just purchased a fire pit table.
Dr. Mario:
Oh, perfect.
Dr. Anna:
I just felt like I needed to be outside more from inside so much and I just [inaudible 00:36:05] this every morning and every evening, not just me but me and my daughters are sitting around this fire pit, so that must be cuing into that instinct-
Dr. Mario:
[inaudible 00:36:14] intuition, yeah, you're tuning into that process. Another thing you do is that you ... Another very important thing that's a cause of health that is also very recent research, Aristotle, way back 2300 years ago, said that hedonic pleasure was not enough. That pleasure for the sake of pleasure is not enough. He said that what he called eudaemonic pleasure, which is a pleasure with service, is better for you and for your wellness.
Dr. Mario:
Well, 2300 years later in psycho-immunology, they looked at that and they thought okay, let's see if we can measure what's called the CTRA, which is 21 genes in the immune cells that have to do with antiviral, antibody, and anti-inflammation. It's a conserved transcriptional response to adversity. Okay. They did psychological testing to see what group was hedonic, mostly pleasure for pleasure. For example, drug addicts are the most hedonic you can get. Then there's a range. The hedonic that are mostly pleasure-seeking, and the eudaemonic who are pleasure-seeking with service with meaning. They measured pre-post CTRAs and they found the CTRAs of the eudaemonic people that have pleasure with service was higher. Aristotle was right.
Dr. Anna:
What are some examples of eudaemonic people?
Dr. Mario:
For example, if they recycle they recycle with pleasure, not because they have to do it, because they're a good citizens. The really take pleasure in keeping the environment clean and enjoying going to the recycling places. Another one is if you, for example, now in the time of the cave you know the people that are isolated are living alone, you go ahead and you call a friend who's alone and you have a conversation with them. You create a ritual that as long as you're going to be isolated you can call them once a week or call her twice a week. That's eudaemonic. It has to be a pleasure not based on fear.
Dr. Anna:
Right. Or duty.
Dr. Mario:
Or duty, that's right.
Dr. Anna:
Right, I enjoy doing this. I want to.
Dr. Mario:
You enjoy doing that. Then embody it. Then after you said, "Okay, I called my friend. I felt really good calling my friend and I felt a lot of compassion for my friend." Then see where it lands in your body and let the emotions settle. That's what affects a CTRA.
Dr. Anna:
Mario, because I don't want to let you go quite yet. [inaudible 00:38:39] I know, I will let you go, I promise, but I could talk to you for hours if not days, for sure. I enjoy our conversation [crosstalk 00:38:46] habit. I wonder now, what brings up what is shifting in people where they stop doing activities they usually enjoy during these times of chronic stress? What is shifting in those people?
Dr. Mario:
When they have to change their activities?
Dr. Anna:
No, like say for example they used to enjoy doing the recycling, now they're like, "Screw the recycling. I'm not doing it anymore." There's a shift there. Like that shift, but I noted in some people that I've been coaching. What is that shift? What is doing that? The chronic cortisol? Obviously it creates leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky heart, leaky everything.
Dr. Mario:
Yeah, it's really fears that's masked as anger, but it's really fear. It's, "Oh, I'm not going to do anymore. Look what's happening. It doesn't matter if I do that kind of thing." That helplessness is what creates that. I think that when people go back to a norm, they have to go back and look at maybe recycling doesn't give me that pleasure anymore, but maybe calling a friend once a week who's alone might give me the pleasure, and you shift but you keep the eudaemonic. It doesn't have to be all the time. You can have eudaemonic pleasure. I'm having a wonderful meal and I'm really enjoying it. That's good. But it can't be just that. It's got to have the service in it. [inaudible 00:40:05].
Dr. Anna:
And to feel that, to actually not just think it but to feel it and to [inaudible 00:40:13] in your body, in your heart.
Dr. Mario:
I didn't start recycling until about a year ago because I didn't think I wanted to do it. But then I thought, I saw a lot of waste and then I read about this area in the ocean that's almost the size of Texas with plastic and I thought no, this can't go on. At least I have to do something. I started recycling, I said, but I'm going to do it at first to learn to enjoy it. What I did is at first I didn't care about recycling, so I thought okay, there's a restaurant that I love, Indian food, and then the other one is Mediterranean food, and I would do my recycling and then I would go do my lunch every Saturday. After awhile the recycling became very, very pleasurable for me because of what I was doing, so I created a ritual that has eudaemonic quality.
Dr. Anna:
I love it. I love it. That's fabulous. You created, just like we could negatively, Pavlov's dogs, right, you created a positive association with an act and so that you would do that more. I can't quite do that with exercise yet, but I'm working on it.
Dr. Mario:
Well exercise, you know what I found with exercise is that I exercised all my life and I never wanted to go work out. What I found is that there were certain things that I didn't like to do and there were certain things that I liked to do. Then you look for alternatives. For example, I didn't like to do crunches. They're not really that good for you, but I had to do the crunches. Then I thought, how could I really enjoy doing crunches? Then I found that Swiss ball where you do the crunches where you have that core balance, and now I can do 300 crunches a day without any problems and enjoy it. Enjoy needs to come into the picture.
Dr. Anna:
Always, always the more we can bring it into. Centenarians have eudaemonic pleasure?
Dr. Mario:
Yes.
Dr. Anna:
Can you spell that for me? eudaemonic?
Dr. Mario:
Eu is e-you, and daemonic is d-a-e-m-o-n-i-c, and it's Greek, eu means good and daemonic means spiritual. Good spirit or wellness.
Dr. Anna:
Oh, thank you. Thank you I was struggling with that. Eudaemonic. Eudaemonic. I love it. Okay, so creating pleasure with activities and bringing pleasure in not for the sake of pleasure itself, but with a concept of service. That's a characteristic of centenarians, and movement, exercise, community, faith, right?
Dr. Mario:
Yes. There's some atheists and most of them are spiritual, but even the atheists have some kind of cosmology that there's something greater than they are.
Dr. Anna:
Anything else you want to tell our audience today to take home?
Dr. Mario:
Well, the positive of the culture and the negative of the culture. The positive of the culture, it has a lot of good things and healing, it has the elders, for example, and Native American tribes. When the generation disconnected from the elders they develop all kinds of illnesses and problems and alcohol and I'm working now with some people who are actually bringing ... Healthcare systems were bringing them back into connecting with the elders, connecting with the cosmology that they have. Find out what is good about your culture and see what you're not doing that your culture taught you that you can incorporate. Then also look at how your culture limited you, and sometimes even berated you and begin to question that.
Dr. Mario:
If you have that then you create what I call subcultural wellness, which are hybrids, where you take the best of your culture and the best of your experience and you create something wonderful and then you have to create, it's amazing and how important it is that you have to create subculture wellness because we're social beings. We need to connect with people. When I say, "Look, I'm 45 and I'm middle age and I want to go back to college," for them to say, "Oh, what major?" Instead of saying, "Why don't you start saving for your retirement? You're getting too old to be doing those things." You don't need the admonishments. You need encouragement. That's what I would recommend.
Dr. Anna:
I think that's great. Something you talk about too is an abundance of so that we can own our abundance of health, love, and wealth.
Dr. Mario:
Yes. I think that that's an inherent quality that we have, but since we go with the merit system, and I teach how to get away from the merit system, the merit system, if you look at it, why is it that bad people have good things happen to them? Why the opposite? Why is it that bad thing happen to good people? It has nothing to do with merit. It has to do with chaos, sometimes it comes in no matter what, but also it has to do with how much you tune in to the inherent qualities like you have already for your abundance of health, wealth and love. They're all there, you just have to bring them out.
Dr. Mario:
I think it was Loyola, yeah the founder of the Jesuits, he said, "I pray to God to help me in my life as much as possible and then I rely on the work that I do."
Dr. Anna:
I like, there's a quote, I have it all over, I have it on my wall in my house, on my coffee cups, it is, "She believed she could, so she did."
Dr. Mario:
Yes. Yes.
Dr. Anna:
I think that's so strong. It's not just about faith, right? It's a faith with action.
Dr. Mario:
It is, and we tend to humanize things and God and make them a he or a she or whatever, and my favorite mystic, Meister Eckhart from the 13th century, he said, "I pray to God that he rids me of god." He wanted to get rid of the image that humans create of God so God would be not this, not that, not via negativa, so it would be something beyond words. Ineffable.
Dr. Anna:
Okay. I love that from Loyola. Pray to God to help me, then I do what I need to do. I love these quotes. I have written down pages and pages of information, Mario. Tell our audience where they can get your book and learn more about you and connect with you.
Dr. Mario:
Well now definitely Amazon. Don't go to bookstores. You can look up biocognitive.com, that's my website. You can also go to, I have a lot of free stuff on Facebook. Videos and my walks that I do, which is my ritual I do, topics, and that is Facebook.com/ and then just put MindBodyCulture and there my page shows up.
Dr. Anna:
Oh perfect. MindBodyCulture. I love it. I love this concept of biocognitive and psychoneuroimmunology and how we have so much power over our physiology, that our mind can direct our physiology with the right steps, with the right actions, in the right environment, and that for me definitely love is the best medicine.
Dr. Mario:
I agree. [inaudible 00:46:51] if you feel that you're worthy of what you're doing.
Dr. Anna:
I love that. It's really hard. It's hard for women especially I think. Maybe-
Dr. Mario:
Oh yes.
Dr. Anna:
To feel worthy, and then the concept of in the menopause, post menopause, where our society in America has diminished us, in other culture have you found that the older woman is widely revered?
Dr. Mario:
I'll give you one more pearl of wisdom here that I learned about menopause that is cultural. In some countries in South America, they call the hot flashes bochorno, which means shame. Shame causes inflammation. Shame causes the immune system and the endocrine system to secrete, especially in the immune system, pro-inflammatories like tumor necrosis factor and other kinds of molecules. Even the doctors, although they know it's hormonal, they call it she's having the symptoms of shame. Shame is inflammatory.
Dr. Mario:
Other cultures begin to see or see menopause as some kind of a problem of decreasing sexuality and beauty and all that. And you have all kinds of problems, as you know well, and you have the hormone replacement and you have pain and you have depression. But you go to Japan and other countries and in Japan, they call it konenki, which means the second spring. Women increase their self-esteem, the hot flashes are not causing any problems, and they don't have the pro-inflammation that you have in other countries. Totally cultural.
Dr. Anna:
I love that.
Dr. Mario:
With konenki they become sources of wisdom for other women.
Dr. Anna:
Sources of wisdom for other women.
Dr. Mario:
That's why they call it the second spring.
Dr. Anna:
Thank you. Say that word again. Konenki, and that's in Japan [crosstalk 00:48:36].
Dr. Mario:
Konenki, it's k-o-n-e-n-k-i. Konenki.
Dr. Anna:
Konenki, and that's in Japan?
Dr. Mario:
In Japan.
Dr. Anna:
In Japan. What was the one for shame in South America?
Dr. Mario:
Bochorno. B-o-c-h-o-r-n-o. Bochorno, which means shame.
Dr. Anna:
Bochorno.
Dr. Mario:
Shame we know now psychoimmunologically causes inflammation. I've worked with many, many, many fibromyalgic patients and every single one of them had some kind of a major shaming trauma.
Dr. Anna:
Increase inflammation and tumor necrosis factor?
Dr. Mario:
Tumor necrosis factor and interleukin-2 are secreted during ... And look how biosymbolic the immune system is, because if you say, "Look how stupid you are," those are words but the immune system is biosymbolic in response to language. Just like the pathogens.
Dr. Anna:
Conquering shame through positive understanding your own self-worth?
Dr. Mario:
Well shame, there's some techniques that I use in shame. The antidote for shame is honor consciousness and I use honor consciousness as an anti-inflammatory.
Dr. Anna:
That's in your book? Is that in our [inaudible 00:49:47]?
Dr. Mario:
Yes.
Dr. Anna:
Okay, tell us the name of your book.
Dr. Mario:
The Mind-Body Code.
Dr. Anna:
Mind-Body Code. All right. Well, thank you very much.
Dr. Mario:
You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Anna:
It has been a pleasure. What a gift to have you.
Dr. Mario:
Thank you. Congratulations on your work.
Dr. Anna:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Dr. Mario:
Okay. Bye-bye.
Dr. Anna:
Wow. Now that was a fabulous interview that we just ... It's just so timely. We definitely needed it. I know I needed it too and that reminder. I think ending on that concept, there was so much. I took pages of notes. Talking about longevity pearls and how, again, epigenetics can be passed down to the third to the fourth generation. It gives us the opportunity to break that passage, break that nail, to be an outlier for our families, and to create wellness from our families and lead in this realm.
Dr. Anna:
I love the concept of how we go into resilience and thriving and move away from victimhood and he said the first step for that was about being aware. Being aware and just buy into the beliefs that you can embody and practice the positive characteristics. Don't buy into the disease mindset. Like when I had patients come into my office and tell me, "Hysterectomy runs in the family. I'm due for a hysterectomy. I'm 43." We can break those ties and what is the epigenetics? 25% of genetics. 75% environment. Just like with diet. 25% about what we eat, 75% about the rest. That's all in your book, The Keto Green Way.
Dr. Anna:
Definitely check out, I am purchasing Dr. Mario Martinez's book, The Mind-Body Code. I think that is one for us to all read together and to continue to learn and to study this powerful connection as I share this with you as well as Keto Green 16. Let's create the disciplines and practices that improve our immunology, improve our psychoneuroimmunology as it is all connected. We cannot separate our mind from our body.
Dr. Anna:
With that, I want to thank you for being with me and listening today. I am loving your testimonials and your reviews, so please continue. Continue to share your reviews and remember, because I am your girlfriend doctor and I am always here for you, please, any questions that come up that you don't want to share publicly, you can always connect in our community groups, but email my team at DrAnnaCabeca.com and just say, "This question is for Dr. Anna. I heard her on this podcast and I have this question for her," so I can address that in future podcasts as well as in future lives that I do and share the answers with you and answer you and your concerns because I am here for you.
Dr. Anna:
I encourage you right now if you haven't already purchased Keto Green 16 with the bonuses that are available for you, which are just amazing. I have them here. The quick start guide. I printed mine. I love it. The food roadmap, and the feast recipes. Fabulous bonuses that come, plus all the resources that we built into the Keto Green book resources page, which if you have a copy of my book you will see where those resources are so that you can share in all that additional abundance that I want to give you.
Dr. Anna:
I want to thank you for being here and I am so happy to be your girlfriend doctor. Bye 'til next time.
