Dr. Peter Attia – Inspired New Horizons

Better Out Than In

We have often heard the lament “hurting people hurt people”. That simple phrase resonates for many of us who have experienced being hurt deeply by the people we were trying to love; or whom we believed should unconditionally love us.

Where we become stymied is that we are not sure who to attend to — the hurting people or the hurt people. As a result, we haven’t effectively helped either. The problem just keeps perpetuating.

A few months ago, I wrote a Daily Gummy of Wisdom putting a twist on that old lament. It was “healing people heal people.” This insight came from personal experience as well as from stories I heard shared in my book club, with family and friends and most recently from strangers in a poetry writing class I am taking.

I do marvel at the healing that begins to take place when just one person makes space to listen to another’s story without judgement and most especially when they listen carefully enough to discover a knowing connection. This is precisely why support groups can have such a profound helping impact. There is a foundational promise that we can speak without interruption, that we can pour it all out — and that others will listen with all their human instincts. Everyone that is under that tent has had a similar life event that brought them in. The event is the catalyst for connection; for it is connection that heals.

Our stories and our hurts are better out than in.

I offered the metaphor of a splinter in my last post entitled Feeling Our Way Forward. If we ignore a splinter embedded in our skin, it never stops hurting. It can even fester and get infected as our body wants to eject this foreign object. We can go about our normal days, but every time we bump it, it is painful and serves as a reminder that we need to attend to it. It is the anticipatory pain of extraction that becomes an obstacle; and for some outrageous reason we think it will magically go away if we ignore it. We will not have to experience that brief extraction pain. But day in and day out, we come to discover that this is not true. And if someone else bumps our tender, painful finger, we blame them for their carelessness. That embedded splinter is also taking away our joy — even our ability to feel the softness of a consoling pet.

Eventually we face the truth — that splinter is indeed better out than in. Yes, the extraction does hurt. We may even feel some residual discomfort as though it is still embedded in our skin, but the healing is already starting. Our body is busy attending to the healing process and relieved that it is no longer doing a daily triage on something we refused to address.

A piercing splinter is an apt metaphor for our emotional wounds. Our emotions are better out than in.

In his book, Permission to Feel, emotional scientist Marc Brackett, makes this incredibly clear:

“The irony, though, is that when we ignore our feelings, or suppress them, they only become stronger. The really powerful emotions build up inside us, like a dark force that inevitably poisons everything we do, whether we like it or not. Hurt feelings don’t vanish on their own. They don’t heal themselves. If we don’t express our emotions, they pile up like a debt that will eventually come due.” – excepted from Permission to Feel, pg.13, Author – Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

Every single book I have read in recent months about emotional health, parenting, longevity and health span cites this one compelling factor: We got emotions all wrong and we only started to understand this in the 1980’s.

Just think about that — up until a few decades ago, we just kept ignoring and dismissing emotions all together. And even now, with more research, we are too slow to respond and integrate.

So let’s circle back to the lament that “hurting people hurt people” and take action to attend to both the hurting and the hurt. The escalating emotional and mental health crisis is proof positive that we can no longer ignore our emotional splinters. Everyone deserves to be attended with compassion, non-judgment and assistance to pull the hurting out.

We cannot address what we do not not know, yet there is growing evidence that not integrating our emotions was a huge mistake — a catacylsmic snowball rolling down debris-covered hill.

Remember when you were a kid and there was just a small dusting of snow on the ground, but you just had to make a snowman. You’d start with a tiny snowball and begin rolling it around the yard. As the fresh snow clung to that baseball sized snowball, it grew in size. It left behind a little swath cleared of snow, revealing green grass, brown decaying leaves and broken twigs. And that growing snowball — well it was mostly snow but it also had a lot of those decaying leaves and broken twigs projecting from it. That is what has been happening from one generation to the next with all our unprocessed emotions — they were the decaying leaves and broken twigs that got passed along with eye and skin color. The snowball full of emotional projectiles.

Unprocessed and unexpressed emotions have piled up; we are still carrying and paying the overdue debts of our ancestors.

I recently published a blog post “Learning What We Need to Teach.” That post was inspired by the work of Dr. Dan Siegel who wrote The Power of Showing Up, Whole Brain Parenting and No Drama Discipline. One of the fastest ways that we can implement real change is to teach our children that emotions are an integral part of who they are and how they learn about life. We need to teach them a vast and nuanced emotional vocabulary. We are the training wheels for this integration of big unwieldy and at times, scary, emotions for our children and their developing brains. But we cannot teach what we ourselves don’t know. It would be like us suddenly trying to teach our kids to speak a foreign language fluently. We might only know a few familiar phrases in Spanish or French. We are hardly skillful.

Can you imagine what it feels like for a small child to have big emotions wash all over her, out of the blue? My young granddaughter was standing in the bathtub, trembling with crocodile tears running down her cheeks. She was so angry at her brother and was yelling at him. She also had enough self awareness to recognize that her voice had changed and that scared her – what was happening? Her changing voice took precedence over her anger. In that moment, my granddaughter was feeling a natural and normal chain reaction that happens when emotions hit us.

That present moment is a teaching opportunity.

Her anger was simply an emotion that told her something wasn’t right. Her brother had not been respectful about her bathtub toys. Her anger was legitimate. Her anger caused her body and developing brain to react. Her heart was racing, the tears were flowing, her voice was amplified. All that happened in a split second. She was caught in an emotional vortex — angry at her brother and she was scaring herself with her own voice; one she didn’t recognize or like. “What is happening to me?” she asked me. “Why is my voice changing?”

Being the training wheels for these moments is a game-changer for everyone. It is how we integrate emotional awareness.

Step 1 of being the training wheels is to remain calm. We co-regulate each other and if we can show up calmly for our kids when they are overcome with emotions, it is soothing. Their heart rate will slow, their labored breathing will return to baseline, the tension in their tiny bodies will release. When we are initially learning how to be the “training wheels” this first step will seem like it takes an eternity. That’s just an illusion however. It actually takes much less time than we realize.

It is when we respond to our child’s normal and right-sized “out of control” emotional chain reaction with our abnormal, outsized adult emotional reaction that things escalate and can become unwieldy. Step one — stay calm. You are a first responder.

Step 2 is naming the emotions that our child is feeling. Name them to tame them. This is how we organically build our child’s emotional vocabulary. It not only helps them to have this valuable reference point for self-identification of their own emotions, it builds connection and empathy with others. If a sibling expresses “I am so angry right now” a child instinctively knows what anger feels like to them. They can relate.

At the risk of losing the flow of this lesson in “training wheels”, I will pull a strong thread from what we know is so helpful in support groups. It is empathy. It is being able to listen to someone’s story and have a basic human understanding of what they must feel like, using our experiences as the connector.

So when we help our children label their emotions, we are giving them context from their own emotional experience to be able to relate to others. They will intuitively know what anger or envy feels like. We are building their emotional vocabulary and cultivating their ability to help themselves and others in emotional discomfort.

I’m guessing that it is beginning to feel pretty obvious right now that if we had been raised this way, with a deep appreciation for our emotions and tools to help us express and manage them, our own lives would have been greatly improved. Stick with me — there’s more.

Back to training wheels – Step 3. Normalizing the emotions is powerful. Emotions are neither right nor wrong. They are simply a form of information. Anger is nothing more than a newsflash that something is important to us.

Even if that something important is just a few bathtub toys, it matters. It matters to my granddaughter who was very clear about what was important to her in advance. Anger was just a normal and appropriate reaction.

As for her voice changing, she just needed to be reassured that this too was natural. That our voice does change when we are angry and it won’t last. You should have seen the look of relief that washed over her precious face at that breaking news. Did you know that it feels very scary to small children when emotions are coursing through their little bodies. Of course they are worried that they are changing and just like imagining a monster under the bed, they are fearful that it is for real and forever.

Step 4 of being emotional integration training wheels for our children is helping them become aware that emotions often come packaged with other feelings. Anger can be accompanied by disappointment, confusion, envy, a sense of unfairness. Just as we would double check that there are no little fragments remaining from a splinter we removed, we should do the same for our emotions. Invite some exploration of the accompanying emotions. We are often deeply touched by what we learn when we really listen to our distressed child.

For the record, this is even more amplified for our teenagers. It is only when we become more skillful listeners that our adolescences open up to share what is under the surface. Be patient, don’t lecture or fix — just listen.

The bottom line is that so many of us grew up without an understanding of the integral role our emotions play in helping us build lives that are strong, healthy, supportive, connected, resilient and meaningful. We blamed emotions for getting in the way of our living a good life. If we could just ignore them, turn them off, shut them down, then we would be happy.

If we had only known that our emotions were the very first and most integral part of our human experience, we would not be awash in shame, blame, loneliness, judgment, dissatisfaction, addictions and estrangements. Emotions didn’t cause these issues — in fact, they are both the prevention and the cure.

I watch my grandchildren today – who are being raised with integration of their emotions into their developing brains and I marvel at their self-awareness, their growing confidence and resilience and most impressively their emotional navigational skills. They are so attuned to their emotions that they can anticipate when a situation might arise where they feel their “jealousy rising”. Rather than ignore it, they name and come up with a plan to address it. From birthday celebrations, to board game competitions, they can hold both their own feelings of envy and a stronger desire to pour joy on each other.

Just the other day, my granddaughter told me that sometimes she really prefers to stay in her mood for a while. She is not afraid to be with her strong emotions and to really feel how they show up in her body, and how long it takes for them to fade. Can you imagine having that much enlightened engagement with your feelings when you were a kid? She is processing her moods, her feelings in real time – without self criticism or parental judgment.

Can you imagine having an inner voice that was trained in curiosity, non-judgment and self compassion? That is precisely what is happening for my granddaughter when she sits with her feelings; she is training her inner voice to be a supportive internal best friend.

Hurting people hurt people – and usually this is unintentional. We simply were not taught and shown by example how to use our emotions in the positive ways they were intended. Our emotional health impacts our quality of life, our physical and cognitive health and our ability to care for ourselves and others in vastly beneficial ways.

We literally pushed away what we needed the most — emotional awareness and emotional intelligence.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

LISTEN TO DOUG BOPST’S INCREDIBE PODCAST EPISODE WITH NEDRA GLVOER TAWWAB ABOUT PARENTING, FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS AND BOUNDARIES
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-adversity-advantage/id1496406333?i=1000613941394

LISTEN TO THE MAY 22, 2023, EPISODE OF THE HAPPINESS LAB WITH DR. LAURIE SANTOS & THE TEAM FROM SESAME STREET –INCLUDING ELMO — TO LEARN ABOUT HOW WE CAN HELP CHILDREN IDENTIFY & COPE WITH THEIR BIG EMOTIONS https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040?i=1000613543742

Feeling Our Way Forward

When I was a teenager, I stood in my grandmother’s sunlit kitchen watching this tiny spry woman skimming cream from the top of a quart glass milk bottle. The bottle was as weathered as she was, no longer crystal clear glass, but almost opaque from the innumerable times it had been filled at a dairy, topped with a cardboard stopper, packed in a crate, delivered in a truck, placed in a metal silver box on the front door step, retrieved before the sun rose, its contents separated — cream for coffee and milk for oatmeal. My grandmother was about to turn 68 — for the 5th time according to my calculations. She preferred to stay lodged at 68 rather than admit to entering her 7th decade.

This confounded me. I marveled at the fact that someone could live to their mid-70’s or beyond. (Remember I was only a young teen and even 40 seemed old to me at that time,) Yet what transfixed me even more was all the changes that my grandmother had seen in her lifetime. I was so eager to hear her stories, to find it incredulous that her electric refrigerator had once been an icebox! Imagine having ice delivered to your doorstep just as the familiar milk was now delivered. She drove a big black Buick now, but what was her first car or mode of transportation? And that black and white TV that was the focal point of her tiny living room — what was it like to experience a TV for the very first time?

My grandmother rarely stopped her never-ending forward momentum to pause and reflect on these wonders. She’d wave her wrinkled hand at me as though swatting at a fly, smile and tell me to set the table for breakfast. I do believe my grandmother possessed a lot of wisdom from all that she had witnessed and experienced in her seven decades, but she was reluctant to reflect. What’s done is done was her motto.

Now I am the grandmother in her seventh decade. My six year old grandson held my gaze as he marveled “Gigi, it’s amazing that you lived in the olden days and you are living in the here days now.” Unlike my grandmother, I am equally in awe and I melt at my grandson’s observation. I will be an open book for any questions that my grandchildren have about all that I have witnessed and experienced in my life.

The truth is that I am so grateful to not only witness, but to be actively engaged in the profound changes unfolding in my lifetime that will be transformational for generations to come.

My own personal growth journey, started about 8 years ago, had me unpacking nearly 6 decades of emotional baggage, rummaging through long-forgotten but pivotal events that occurred not only in my life, but in the lives and experiences of my family’s prior generations.

As I was steeped in this personal development work, I began to notice correlations and coalescence of the sciences, psychology, modern medicine and mental health along with Brene Brown’s research on shame and vulnerability, Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion, and Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset and neuroplasticity. Suddenly things were beginning to feel very inter-connected and the common denominator was emotions.

Did you know that we never really studied emotions until the late 1980’s? This startling revelation blew my mind.

For all the discoveries, advancements, inventions and societal changes we have witnessed for centuries, the most transformational evolutionary breakthroughs are happening in this very moment – and it has everything to do with integrating our emotions into our human operating system. Nothing could be more impactful for all of mankind.

My grandmother’s generation, like those that came before her, knew next to nothing about the integral value of our emotions. “Psychological science was firmly entrenched in a “cognitive revolution” reveals Dacher Keltner in his latest book, Awe.

“Within this framework (of cognitive science), every human experience, from moral condemnation to prejudice against people of color, originates in how our minds, like computer programs, process units of information in passionless ways. What was missing from this understanding of human nature was emotion. Passion, Gut Feeling. What Scottish philosopher David Hume famously called “the master of reason” and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman termed “System 1” thinking. — excerpted from Chapter 1 of Awe by Dasher Kellner (renowned expert in the science of human emotion)

That old saying that “hindsight is 20/20” really rings true as I reflect back on how emotions were banished from one generation to the next. Old parenting models reinforced that “cognitive revolution” so we just kept stuffing our skeletons in the closet, and filling our human basements and attics with old baggage and unhealed emotional wounds.

We compounded the problem when we banished emotions from our human operating system. All those unprocessed emotions and related traumas got passed along from one generation to the next into our genes. So not only did we grow up witnessing and then modeling dysfunctional behavioral patterns, we actually carried generational emotional baggage in our genes. We were predisposed to perpetuate dysfunctional patterns. Here are salient pivot points that we are learning about our genes and their generational impact:

Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.

Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence. But they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.

Consider this: The first human disease to be linked to epigenetics was cancer, in 1983.

We are witnessing the big reveal right now — as our emotional health has hit the charts in revelatory ways. In just a little over three decades, we have advanced the ball on human evolution by recognizing that we got emotions all wrong.

Human beings are hard-wired for connection. The critical component of our motherboard that facilitates and integrates that lifelong need for connection is emotions.

Without this integral component, we have faulty, dysfunctional operating systems. Our immune systems malfunction and we get physically and cognitive sick. We have poor emotional regulation because we never got an owner’s manual. We struggle to make and keep relationships healthy and strong. We cannot teach our kids because we don’t know what we don’t know. They mirror us and we get mad, frustrated, discouraged and weary.

It should not be surprising at all that our teens are struggling with loneliness and depression. Imagine how many generations of unresolved emotions and trauma they are carrying in their genes. Technology and social media has exacerbated the problem as we become more socially disconnected while staring at our addictive screens instead of each other.

The bottom line is that we can all participate in this emotion revolution by embracing the need for integration of our emotions into our human operating system. We don’t think twice about upgrading our phones or devices. And when we get our children their first phone, we are not giving them a wall mounted rotary dial model. Why then would we have them operating on a partially installed top shelf brain/body/nervous system?

In prior blog posts, I have shared how inspirational it is to have prominent, respected younger men and women taking the lead by being so real and vulnerable in their podcasts, books, Ted Talks and social media platforms about their own emotional health journeys. There is a lot of generational baggage being unpacked these days to make room for a much healthier and more connected way of living.

Yes, it is incredibly sad to hear about the traumas and dysfunctional emotional underpinnings that people have endured. It is also not surprising to discover that these stories are not as uncommon as we think and have been the root cause of addictions, broken relationships, chronic and life threatening health issues and poor quality of life.

What I do know is that this is exactly how the healing begins and the evolution takes root. Unpacking unprocessed emotions is like having a splinter. We know it’s there. We can ignore it, but we will feel the pain every time we bump up against it…and over time it just might get infected. When we pull that splinter, we may still feel a little residual pain, but the reality is that the healing has already begun.

When my grandson tells me that it is amazing that I lived in the old days and I am here now, living in these present days, I can look at him and see him growing up in a world where he is a fully integrated human being, experiencing life with emotional meta vision and a self awareness that simply was not possible before. Oh yes, I have seen and experienced a lot in my lifetime, but just you wait — the best is yet to come.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

LISTEN TO THIS MARCH 3rd 2023 EPISODE WITH LEWISHOWES – Prepare to be amazed at what you learn from Lewis about the profound benefits of unpacking emotional baggage and trauma – and then helping others do the same. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/id1400828889?i=1000602927831

Emotional Health

Imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that emotional health is fast becoming a foundational pillar for the length and quality of our lifespan. A subject that was once relegated to the self-help and personal growth space is now being integrated into a healthspan revolution.

Healthspan is not just living longer, it is about living longer without chronic and major health issues, living with vitality, strong cognitive and physical abilities and strong emotional health.

Dr. Peter Attia, host of the very popular podcast, The Drive, and author of “Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity” emphasizes that while cognitive and physical health are germane to the quality and length of our lives, our emotional health may potentially be the most important component of all. “After all, what good is a long life if you are miserable?”

“Emotional health encompasses happiness, emotional resilience and distress tolerance, mindfulness, stillness and fulfillment, among others. It touches on our sense of individual purpose, as well as our ability to engage in meaningful and supportive relationships with those we love.” — From the Mental & Emotional Health Archives of Dr. Peter Attia (https://peterattiamd.com/category/mental-health/)

While listening to Dr. Attia discuss his new book Outlive with Dr. Andrew Huberman, I found myself completely captivated by the last 48 minutes of that podcast conversation. What he shared so openly about his own emotional health journey fit like a puzzle piece into my recent series of blog posts about the negative impacts of old parenting models. His personal story is so relatable on many levels – and proof positive that it behooves us all to take our emotional health as seriously as our exercise, nutrition and sleep.

From the outside, most of us would just assume that Dr. Peter Attia was living a happy, successful life. A Stanford/John Hopkins/NIH trained physical, he has built a thriving medical career focusing on the applied science of longevity. He has won prestigious awards, was the first person to make the round trip swim from Maui and Lanai, and has a huge following for his extremely popular podcast about longevity. He’s married and has three kids. Sure seems like he checked all the boxes for a good life.

Yet he shared both in his book and in the Huberman Lab podcast that he was driven to be a perfectionist and his inner critic was harsh and unrelenting. He also admits to becoming very skilled at drywall because he was prone to break a lot of things — both when he was younger and into his adult life. It took not one, but two, rock bottom moments in recent years to motivate him to get serious about his emotional health. The root causes of his core emotional issues were in his childhood — unprocessed trauma, lack of emotional language and lack of skillful emotional regulation.

Boom – there it is — the inescapable fact that what has happened in our childhood gets carried right into adulthood — and even when we work hard to build a successful life and check all the boxes, we still can get tripped up by our own unconscious obstacles.

In my recent blog post “Learning What We Need to Teach”, I shared that Dr. Dan Siegel recommends going back and examining our childhood so we can understand our relationship attachment style, how our parents influenced our development and how we made sense of what happened to us.

While Dr. Siegel readily acknowledges that most people are very resistant to revisiting a painful or dysfunctional childhood, it is a clear path to addressing the behavioral patterns and limiting beliefs that become our unconscious obstacles. Dr. Attia would likely frame this examination of our childhood an early intervention for our adult emotional health — and that framework comes from his personal experience and his scientific approach to longevity.

It was just a few years ago, as that second “rock bottom” was hitting hard for him, that Dr. Peter Attia’s good friend pulled him aside and told him he really needed this intervention. His good friend knew firsthand why unpacking family dysfunction and childhood trauma is of paramount importance for a good life. He is none other than Dr. Paul Conti, also a Stanford/Harvard grad, who is a psychiatrist and author of Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic; How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It.

The synchronicity of Dr. Paul Conti being a psychiatrist whose focus is on healing trauma and Dr. Attia being a medical doctor whose focus is on longevity and quality of life is not lost me. I have been witnessing the emerging integration of multiple disciplines and modalities for several years. So many significant neuroscience breakthroughs are deeply connected to the mind/body connection; the very integration of emotions with the lower and upper parts of developing brains for which Dr. Dan Siegel advocates the whole brain parenting approach.

We got emotions wrong for generations. Full stop. Emotions are the very first part of our human programming that needs to be installed. Emotions are how we learn to care for, and meet the needs of a precious baby. It is second nature for us to respond appropriately to an infant’s cries or their engaging laughter. How could we have been so blind to the obvious? The old parenting models actually had us overriding the most integral software component of being a human being. This is precisely why we have so many interpersonal difficulties, why our inner critic is so debilitating, and why we perpetuate problems from one generation to the next.

Peter Attia took Paul Conti’s sage advice. He did a deep-dive into this healing work in a 3 week program in Arizona, where he discovered a lot about his childhood that provided answers and insights. He learned tools and practices to help him pivot to the healthy end of his emotional health spectrum.

I was not at all surprised to learn that Dr. Attia was able to go back and look at blocked memories from childhood through the lens of an adult, who is now a parent himself, and discover deep compassion for a little boy who had no way of processing what he was experiencing; a little boy who strived to be “perfect” in order to feel safe and loved. His inner critic who was so hard on him when he missed the mark of “perfection” was parental message playing over and over….for 5 decades of his life.

This transformational experience was an enormous pivot for Dr. Peter Attia. He came to fully comprehend that all the work he was doing to help people live longer, without disease, chronic or major health issues, to ensure they stayed physically active and cognitively healthy was missing one compelling component — emotional health. In his mind, there could be nothing worse than living a very long life and being miserable, discontent and emotionally disregulated throughout it all.

As I listened to Dr. Attia convey all of this to his longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Andrew Huberman, I thought about a very familiar story that really brings this message home — Scrooge in the Christmas Carol. Past, present, future. See how our past influences our present….and where our present blindspots predict our future. We have instinctively known this for generations.

As he was going through what he calls his “rehab and recovery”, Dr. Attia was also deeply entrenched in writing his book, Outlive. There was no way he could not include his profound discovery about emotional health and it’s direct impacts on the quality of our lives — and although his editors and publisher thought it belonged in a separate book, he strongly disagreed. Integration of emotional health was essential to the pillars of longevity and quality of life.

This is so profoundly important, I am going to share it again:

Integration of emotional health is essential for our longevity, physical and cognitive health and the overall quality of our life.

Dr. Attia likes to create a dashboard for his patients as part of his comprehensive approach to mitigating health problems in the future. Not only does he seek to improve the length of their lifespan, he also wants to increase the length of their “healthspan” and shorten the length of “diseasespan.” He acknowledges that we have many ways to predict future possible health consequences by taking into account family history, genetics and using the wide array of medical tools (blood work, MRI’s, bone density, colonoscopy, mammograms, EKG, etc). There are many tools available for pre-screeening and preventive actions for our physical health; and a plethora of ways to measure and mitigate risk.

The same cannot be said for emotional health. There are no clearly defined ways of measuring it. As Dr. Andrew Huberman acknowledged, measuring emotional health is tricky — and language is our dissection tool. If we have a very limited emotional vocabulary and equally limited understanding of our inner emotional world, it would be like trying to do a biopsy with a blindfold on.

Not having a concise way to measure emotional health does not preclude Dr. Attia from adding it to the longevity dashboard for his patients however. He firmly believes that like cognitive and physical health issues, intervening early is key.

Can you imagine the positive and transforming impacts that are on the horizon for our mental health crises if there is a major pivot to include emotional health in comprehensive medical care? And it doesn’t stop there — we have growing evidence that stress and anxiety, unprocessed trauma, dysfunctional environments as well as generational trauma and addictions (epigenetics) contribute significantly to our physical health. Could it be that early intervention on our emotional health be the gateway to solving some of our most perplexing medical issues, including cancer, ALS, dementia and more. I firmly believe that it will.

For the record, Dr. Andrew Huberman was recently a guest on The Drive (Dr. Peter Attia’s podcast) and in that episode, Andrew really opened up about his own childhood, his parent’s contentious divorce and the debilitating impacts that it had on him for a great part of his adult life.

The candor and vulnerability that both of these dynamic, successful young men shared on each other’s podcasts is proof positive that we are witnessing a game-changing breakthrough that is long overdue. The skeletons are coming out of the closets! No more sweeping emotional health under the carpet.

Dr. Attia did not hesitate to point out that the top priority on his personal longevity dashboard is emotional health. He shared that “it is the easiest to get out of balance, the hardest to manage and the one that creates the most pain in his life.“

When Dr. Andrew Huberman pressed his friend for a definition of emotional health, Peter told him that it’s hard to specifically define it, and perhaps more relevant to recognize the components that make up strong, positive emotional health. The following is excerpted from his conversation in the HubermanLab podcast:

“Connectivity with others just seems to be an inescapable part of this (emotional health), so the ability to maintain healthy relationships and attachments to others; having a sense of purpose; being able to regulate your emotions; experiencing fulfillment; experiencing satisfaction — all of these things matter. And, if we take an honest appraisal of ourselves, we will notice that we have deficits is these areas.”

“Being “present” — which may have been less of an issue a hundred years ago than it is today — Being present is very difficult; thoughts about the future, not being satisfied with what is happening in the moment. I have to work hard to overcome those things. When you are present, you generally are in a much better frame of mind.” –Dr. Peter Attia

Connecting the Dots:

When Brene Brown began her research on shame and vulnerability back in 2001, she was an instrumental part of the necessary paleontologist team to excavate our human emotions. There were so many fossilized clues embedded in the stratifications of unprocessed emotions and traumas passed from one generation to the next over centuries.

When Dr. Bruce Perry published his book Born for Love in 2010, he unearthed what happens to infants whose basic needs and emotional pleas are not addressed in calm, loving and supportive ways. He was helping us grasp that there was a serious problem and he sounded an alarm for our growing empathy poverty. It was even more than a disconnect from our shared humanity and empathy – it was a snowball rolling down the hill toward our individual and collective declining emotional health — because we were not fully installing our basic emotional programming.

Also in 2010, Dr. Dan Siegel introduce us to his developing concept of “mindsight”- the newest science of personal transformation made possible through integration of the various parts of brain and mind/body connection. For more than a decade, Dr. Siegel continues to expand on his research and has introduced the most profound contemporary parenting model – The Whole Brain Child. Dr. Siegel is leading the charge for this dynamic pivot that “integrates” our fundamental emotional GPS system with all the parts of a child’s brain, slowly over time, as the child’s brain develops along with their physical bodies. Future generations who are nurtured with a whole brain parenting approach will most certainly be more “emotionally healthy” as adults and in turn, more physical and cognitively healthy as well.

This single pivot will have dramatic and positive impacts on our epigenetics and has the potential to stop generational cycles of inherited health issues, addictions, trauma and dysfunction in its tracks.

Stealing a line from Hamilton – “Look around. Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

We can all be participating in this evolutionary pivot. We start by attending to our own emotional health and then we teach and model this integration for younger generations – for our children, grandchildren and our grandchildren’s babies.

Take advantage of all the resources that are integrating and cross-pollinating to help us live longer, live healthier both physically and cognitively — and most importantly to live a well-balanced, emotionally well-regulated, purpose-filled, satisfying, deeply rewarding life.

Recommended Resources: