The Habit That's Killing You 10 years Earlier

[00:00:00]So, maybe you've never smoked a cigarette a day in your life. Not a single one.

[00:00:04]But, your body is aging like you've got a pack-a-day habit anyway. It's not the beers on the weekend. It's not the burger you had on Tuesday. It's something you're doing every single day, probably today actually. Something we're all doing.

[00:00:18]And it's quietly taking close to a decade off your life.

[00:00:22]I spent years training, defusing bombs in war zones.

[00:00:27]Iraq specifically. Real ones. Real stakes. Couple hundred actually.

[00:00:32]After that, I became a federal agent.

[00:00:33]Protection details, running security all over the world. Never really knowing what the next day was going to bring.

[00:00:39]And then four more years of medical school, then residency, then I became an ER doctor.

[00:00:45]The kind of job where somebody's worst day just happens to be your Tuesday.

[00:00:52]Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also had four kids.

[00:00:55]And you might look at that list and think that guy's tough. He's built different.

[00:01:00]And for a long time so did I.

[00:01:03]But, there was something happening to my body that whole time. Something I didn't understand until years later when I was staring at the research with my own name basically written all over it.

[00:01:15]It wasn't the deployments. It wasn't the trauma days. It wasn't even the four kids as much as they'd like to take credit for it. It was something quieter, running in the background every day, whether I was overseas or sitting in traffic. And it was aging me.

[00:01:30]Fast.

[00:01:31]Just like it is you.

[00:01:33]If we haven't met, I'm Seth. I'm an ER doctor from a special ops guy and dad of four.

[00:01:37]And now I focus on simplifying health to keep people out of the ER.

[00:01:41]Today, I'll tell you exactly what that habit is and something you can actually do about it.

[00:01:47]And that habit is chronic stress. Not a bad day. Not a rough week. The kind that never really turns off. Background noise you stop noticing because you lived with it for so long, you think it's just what life feels like.

[00:02:01]I know a lot of you are just going to roll your eyes and say, "Ah, stress, stress, whatever, this new trend of stress or whatever."

[00:02:08]But, it is so important that you understand the ravages of what it does to your body. When I say that, I literally mean taking up to 10 years off your life. So, just hear me out. Here's the mechanism that happens inside your body.

[00:02:23]Every cell in your body has these little caps on the end of your chromosomes. So, I think of your DNA creating your chromosomes, and there's little caps on the end. They're called telomeres.

[00:02:34]Think of them as like the plastic tips on the end of a shoelace.

[00:02:38]Every time a cell divides, which it does through your life, that cap gets shorter and shorter and shorter. Eventually, it's too short, and the cell can't divide anymore. That is called cellular aging. That is your biological clock.

[00:02:53]When your cells can no longer divide, well, that's when things start dying off.

[00:02:58]Researchers at UC San Francisco directly measured this. Women under chronic, sustained stress, like caregivers, people with real no real recovery window, year after year, the most stressed had telomeres shorter by the equivalent of at least a decade of extra cellular aging. That's measured, not a guess.

[00:03:20]Now, smoking, the thing we all agree is terrible for your health, cost the average smoker somewhere around a decade of life expectancy.

[00:03:29]Different measurement, different mechanism. I'm not going to tell you they're the same thing, but look at those two numbers sitting next to each other.

[00:03:37]A decade from stress, a decade from cigarettes. I didn't make that up to scare you. That's just where the research landed. You're not doing the thing that kills you fast, like smoking or, I don't know, skydiving. You're doing the thing that ages you very slowly, and slow is exactly why nobody catches it, including me, for about 15 years.

[00:03:58]So, what do you actually do about it?

[00:04:01]You can't remove stress from your life completely. Anybody who tells you that the goal is is trying to sell you something. You've got a job, you've got kids, you've got bills, and traffic, and all the is not going anywhere.

[00:04:13]The real goal is building in windows where your nervous system actually gets to come back down from that sympathetic state. Your body's got two settings, fight and flight, and rest and digest, or rest and repair. Most people are stuck in the first one basically all day, every day, and never give the second one a chance to switch on. That switch runs through what's called your vagus nerve. It's one of the longest nerves in your body, runs from your head all the way down through your gut.

[00:04:41]And it doesn't flip on by accident.

[00:04:44]You have to create conditions that allow it to turn on.

[00:04:48]So, I can only tell you what it works for me, because I'm not you. I don't know what works for you. I can tell you what works for me, though.

[00:04:55]Something I do every day, I schedule into my day, is 10 minutes outside in silence. No phone. This isn't like a, you know, mindfulness trend that you see on TikTok.

[00:05:07]When you sit outside in nature, and you remove noise and stimulation, your vagus nerve actually gets a chance to fire.

[00:05:14]Your cortisol, which is your stress hormone, starts dropping within minutes of real quiet. 10 minutes doesn't sound like much, but it's enough.

[00:05:22]It's the same thing that I have the people who run through my Primal 60 Challenge do every day, and it is the one thing that oddly enough people struggle with the most out of the diet and the exercise and everything. People say that they struggle the most with sitting outside in silence for 10 minutes, and allowing their brain to just calm down.

[00:05:45]The first few times you try it, you're going to feel very antsy. You're going to feel your mind racing. What do I do?

[00:05:52]Uh what do I do with my hands? Where do I put them now? But like your brain's going to keep running and you're going to wonder how you do this for 10 minutes. It's going to feel like an eternity.

[00:06:01]After you start doing it for a couple of weeks, you will start to adapt and you will start to crave it because you'll realize that after 10 minutes of sitting and just watching the leaves and the trees and the wind blow and the birds chirp and whatever it is for you where you're at, everything calms down inside. You start to feel like yourself again. You start to feel your mind clear like you can think again.

[00:06:26]You start to feel the anxiety and the weight lift off your shoulders.

[00:06:30]Just give it a try and let me know what you think. But from the thousands of people that I've put through it, they all end up loving it.

[00:06:38]Next, a daily walk. No headphones, same mechanism, kind of different delivery.

[00:06:43]Movement plus quiet is a bigger lever than either alone.

[00:06:48]In fact, this was one of the things that I used when I was really struggling with PTSD and anxiety after my military and State Department years. I would do a morning walk. It's pretty early in the morning, usually around 5:00 or 5:30 so that the streets were empty. I would walk and I would just be in silence. It would take me about 30 minutes and it was like the start of every day, but it was the start of one of the most healing and changing parts of my life. So, something you can try.

[00:07:15]Next, 2 minutes of slow breathing before you go into something that's uh really strenuous or after you come out of something really strenuous.

[00:07:25]This one is like not as passive as the other two, but slow deep breathing directly signals to your vagus nerve that you're safe.

[00:07:32]It's one of the only ways that you can consciously uh reach in and like flip that switch in real time. You want to breathe through your belly. You want to do like, you know, 4 to 5 seconds in, you hold it, and then you do 4 to 8 seconds out, hold it, and then you just repeat that for about 2 to 4 minutes.

[00:07:51]And then there's the stuff that sounds really soft, um but I don't think it is. It's It's really uh life-changing if you actually implement it.

[00:08:01]The first one is what you tell yourself on repeat. So, what you tell yourself repeatedly actually shapes or reshapes the neural pathways in your brain and the pathways that your brain defaults to.

[00:08:15]If you think of your brain as a forest, and you're cutting pathways through it for roads, whatever you do, whatever you tell yourself, what does other people tell yourself, what you see, and what you watch, and what you do create roads through your brain.

[00:08:31]And that is the way that your neurons fire is through these roads.

[00:08:35]The more you tell yourself something, the wider that road gets, and the faster the traffic can travel down that road.

[00:08:42]Now, if you're telling yourself negative thoughts or if negative things are being said to you over and over, that pathway gets wider, and your brain starts to think in negative thought patterns. Now becomes who you are.

[00:08:56]You can change that.

[00:08:58]If you begin telling yourself good things, if you begin feeding your brain good thoughts, positive thoughts, you tell yourself, you know, I'm the person who does what they says they're going to do. I'm the person who's always on time.

[00:09:10]I'm the person who uh chooses to eat the healthy thing, or I'm the person who work out work works out daily.

[00:09:18]That path becomes wider in your brain, and it becomes who you are. And the other negative or unhelpful paths that have been wide, telling yourself you're fat, or lazy, or slow, or whatever it is, become narrower and narrower until they disappear. Okay? That is called neuroplasticity.

[00:09:37]If you tell yourself something enough times, your brain gets very efficient at believing it. The same mechanism runs the other way.

[00:09:44]If you smile on purpose, even when you don't feel like it, if you laugh, even when you don't really feel like laughing, your body can't distinguish real from manufactured, and it responds with the signal the the same way. It's just the opposite way around. So, laugh more, smile more. There's been studies where they have shown that if you smile on purpose, it actually makes you happier. So, too many people rely on external circumstances to make them happy, and then they think the smile results. But, you can actually smile or laugh on purpose enough to make yourself happy. And the more you do that, the more happy happy you bring yourself, the more happier you are, the more it trains your brain to be happy, just like we talked about with neuroplasticity. So, smile more, laugh more, be around people who add to you instead of drain you. Learn to say no to the stuff that doesn't matter to you, so there's room for the things that do.

[00:10:43]Do what you love, and then give less about the rest.

[00:10:49]These are two things I wrote on my whiteboard in my garage. Do what you love, and give less And it's not to be some vulgar term that I just throw around.

[00:10:58]It's to remind myself to really orient my life around the things that bring me joy, to do the things that I love, whether it's certain exercises in a workout routine, or whether it's doing hobbies that I love, or focusing my work around the things that I actually love, and delegating or getting rid of the things that I don't, and then giving less cares about the things that bring me a lot of stress or anger or resentment in life. Getting rid of those, and filling my life with the things that I love.

[00:11:28]All right?

[00:11:30]None of this is complicated, because it's not supposed to be. Complicated is how you talk yourself out of doing the things you should be doing. None of this is about becoming a monk. It's about noticing where your nervous system never gets a break, and giving it one on purpose.

[00:11:44]15 years of running hot all the time taught me that the hard way, and I'd rather you learn it from this video than from your own body forcing the lessons on you later on.

[00:11:56]Every month I run a couple of hundred people through a uh something I call Primal 60 Challenge. It's not a fad diet, it's not just a workout plan. It's 60 days of training, nutrition, and daily habits, all laid out for you inside one simple app, accountability, a community of people doing it alongside you, and the thing people bring up to me over and over months later is not the workouts, it's usually the daily habits, the stress piece specifically, people telling me that part alone changed their entire life.

[00:12:27]If you want in on the next one, the link is below.

[00:12:31]No pressure either way.

[00:12:33]But, if you're not going to do it, or if you are going to do it, take care of yourself. Your health is the most important thing in your life.

[00:12:39]Put it first, prioritize it, everything else will be much easier. Until next time, y'all.

[00:12:45]Keep moving.