(upbeat music) Hello, this is your first time.

Welcome to Adventures Through The Mind.

This is a podcast that explores topics relevant and related to psychedelic culture, medicine, spirituality, and research, and always with the underlying question of, "What is the How can we work with and through our psychedelic experiences to become better people, not just for ourselves, but for all those with whom we are nested in relationship, presently and across time, human and non-human alike?

I'm your host, as always, James W.

Jesso.

And again, if it's your first time, welcome.

If it is not your first time, welcome back.

This episode was actually recorded quite a long time ago.

I recorded the interview that is probably about a year ago, sometime in March of 2025.

And I'm releasing it as the first episode of 2026 because, well, first off in the curation scheme of things, it didn't entirely fit just yet.

And it is fitting now because it feels like it speaks to something that is important at the time in these times, which is how much biological process might be impacting and being impacted by larger socioeconomic political conditions.

What does that mean?

Well, you've read the title, I assume, but what it means is that we're going to talk today about how stress and inflammation, the dynamics they have with each other, how they compromise perception and behavior, and how they can actually be spread between people through perception and behavior, as well as how it spreading between people can impact a population kind of a...

like a contagion that infects the social political body as a whole, compromising even the very leadership, the controllers that would normally keep that social or political body from entering into a disease state.

I probably sounds like a lot, but I promise you it is progressive and clear to understand as we go through the interview.

Part of what is going to make this interview comprehensible, despite being very large and complex topics, has to do with our guest and his ability to speak in ways that are understandable and accessible for a wide audience.

That guest is none other than Dr.

David Katz.

Now I'm going to read Dr.

Katz bio here.

Dr.

David Katz is the founding director of Yale University's Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center, past president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, founder president of the True Health Initiative, and founder-CEO of True Health ID Incorporated.

Dr.

Katz earned his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1984, his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1988, and his master's in public health from the Yale University School of Public Health in 1993.

Katz is a board-certified specialist in preventative medicine and public health, He's the recipient of many awards for his contributions to public health and has received three honorary doctorates.

He holds five U.S.

patents with others pending.

He invented the research methods known as evidence mapping and evidence threshold pathway mapping.

He's the principal inventor of the overall nutritional quality index algorithm and invented the first fundamentally new dietary intake assessment method in decades called diet quality photo navigation.

He has authored roughly 200 peer reviewed publications, many hundreds of health columns both online and in print, and 17 books to date including leading textbooks in both nutrition and preventative medicine.

He has served as one of the expert judges for the annual rankings of diets by US News and World Report for much of the last decade, and he was a 2019 finalist for a James Beard Foundation Award in the category of health journalism together with Mark Bitman.

And he's on the show today to talk about the contents of a paper he was co-author on titled A Multiscale Inflammatory Map Linking Individual Stress to Societal Dysfunction.

With that said, what are we going to talk about today?

We're going to talk about what is stress, what is inflammation, what are the dynamics between them, how they influence individual health, how The systems of stress and inflammation and the resolution processes can get distorted and we can end up in states of chronic inflammation.

We talk about inflammation's relationship to the brain as well as the brain's relationship to inflammation.

That two-way path is going to be talked about.

We talk about how inflammation influences compromises at times, our perception and behavior, and how it can then spread like a contagion through a population that's spreading over time, degrading not only the...

social dynamics of a particular population, but going as far as to degrading the institutions, the social institutions, political institutions, and even political leadership of a given country as well as international affairs between countries.

Do-do.

Inflammation in a bottom-up, inflamed people to inflamed system, and top-down, inflamed dysfunctional system into greater inflammation in individuals.

And we're going to do so in a way that's progressive and features quite a lot of information, not only on what's happening and why, but what we can do about it.

Each of us right here, right now, in ourselves in ways that contribute to our own health, and the health of, at the very least, our small communities, perhaps even the world at large.

That's all for the intro.

Please enjoy this interview with Dr.

David Katz here on Adventures Through the Mind, episode 204.

Dr.

David Katz, thank you for coming on Adventures to the Mind and welcome.

Thanks very much, James.

Good to be with you.

So I'm not sure how it came about, but somehow I got exposed to your paper, the name of which I did not write down, so I'll get you to repeat in a second.

And it explores the sort of link between inflammation, stress, mental states, behaviors, and then the links between how those unfold in the individual with how they unfold interpersonally, and then upwards into society in ways that impact human health, human society, and even planetary health.

And I was-- Well, very impressed.

And also, like, impressed is like good work, but also impressed in the sense of like, "Wow, I'm so happy to see this explored and explained in such a coherent way in a time that it feels so relevant." So first up, I'll thank you for that and for your work.

That's very kind James thank you so yeah I don't know how you found the paper either I'm glad you did I suppose it is about altered states of mind and so that there's there's clearly some overlap.

But not exactly in your wheelhouse so thanks for reaching out I appreciate it just a shout out so the papers called a multi scale inflammatory map linking individual stress to societal dysfunction.

And we publish this with a great deal of excellent editorial support, by the way, from Frontiers in Science.

So, really nice journal.

We did a symposium based on the paper that they hosted and we had people attend from all over the world.

So, it's had quite a lot of traction.

And a shout out to my co-authors, in particular, Yoram Bodevots, who's in the immunology and surgery department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Yoram was our captain.

I was a member of the crew as we worked on this paper, but Yoram as an immunologist led the charge.

And then we had a mathematician, Julia Arciero, and a neuroscientist, Paul Vershure.

So really interesting team.

I'm a lifestyle medicine specialist myself.

So in some ways, I'm the right person to talk to about the translation from individual factors to society.

But the contributions everybody made were extremely illuminating.

So it was a great learning experience for all of us as the best of academic papers are, because as your colleagues are working on the paper, they're taking you on a deeper dive into aspects of it that aren't quite your area of expertise.

So we all learned a lot from one another.

It was a good project.

And this kind of multidisciplinary approach to an issue, a hypothesis, a concern, I think is something that I think there's a lot of value in high specificity and narrow focus on a particular aspect of something that is being researched.

But when it comes to the kind of things that we will eventually be getting into talking to today, the kind of interdisciplinary approach seems to integrate things in a way that our society a lot of the times these days anyway seems to be lacking in this kind of like integration of what's all happening and then try to make it work.

choices and observations that are based on a lot of different factors rather than the particular silos that a person or organization is specializing in.

So that's really great to hear.

That's an interesting observation.

And I think our society is lacking in three things right now, fundamentally important.

One is basic civility, the idea that we could agree to disagree and still respect one another.

The other is nuance.

Everybody seems to be shopping for answers that are yes or no, right or wrong, left or right, as opposed to, well, it depends.

It's context-dependent, it's circumstance-dependent, and most things in the real world actually are.

It depends, is almost always, a valid answer.

And the third is just as you suggest, the failure to see the big picture, the forest through the trees, a singular issue in my field, the biomedicine, Where we have more and more ultra specialization you can see the world's leading authority in the treatment of some particular injury of your left knee The only problem being that if there's anything else wrong with you as a person in the world It's apt to go over look for many years.

You'll be interested to know I started many of my public talks reciting the blind man and the elephant that parable is owned by John Godfrey Sax.

It was six men of indistinct to learning much inclined who went to see the elephant though all of them were blind that each by observation might satisfy his mind that goes on from there.

Each of the six takes part, takes hold of a different part of the elephant, reaches a completely different conclusion.

No one obviously gets their arms around the whole elephant and understands the big picture.

So I do think that's a fundamental challenge these days and and to be clear science has advanced tremendously on the power of reductionism scrutinizing up close the smallest parts of the smallest parts of something But you're not going to understand an ecosystem that way.

You're not going to understand the connections among many levels of influence that way.

The influence of stress on inflammation in the immune system, the influence of the immune system on other organ systems, the influence of the organ systems on the behavior of the organism the influence of that behavior by that individual on a community you can't get that with reductionism you need a different approach so i appreciate the observation and we agree.

Yeah, the, what was the three there?

You said civility, nuance, and then the ability to...

Yeah, basically the ability to see the whole, which is often greater than the sum of its parts.

So if you just scrutinize the parts, you'll have a distorted perspective on the whole.

So there's a case to make for both.

There are times when up-close scrutiny of small parts is the way to go.

but not to the exclusion of seeing the big picture.

And in fact, that adage about missing the forest for the trees is a fundamental liability in academia and certainly in academic biomedicine.

- And perhaps is a...

heart and parcel to what we'll talk about today with respect to stress, perception, behavior, and the sort of lack of nuance, the grasping for certainties and hard lines of definitions and stuff and not being able to relax into looking at the whole picture and not become adversarial with those that you disagree with.

But let's leave that for now.

First point I'll say with respect to your other colleagues on the paper throughout the course of the interview.

I'll refer to it as your paper.

I mean that in the larger sense of it yours as a part of a larger team.

And so getting into the basics, you know, the value of reductionism to some extent, I want to look specifically at the most kind of foundational part in this, which would be the basically inflammation stress in the individual.

So my question here to start is, you know, what is, I guess, kind of a multilayered question, but like, what is inflammation?

[BLANK_AUDIO] what is stress, what is linked between them, and where do these stress inflammation processes go right?

Like where are they to the value of the individual?

And then where do they go wrong?

And keeping this at the scope of the individual for now.

Yeah, that's put together very nicely.

So I think most people have a basic understanding of inflammation.

If you are stung by a mosquito, for example, and it gets hot and red, you have an inflammatory response right there.

If you're stung by a bee, you have a larger inflammatory response.

If you get a cut as it starts to heal, there's a tension in that tissue, and that's an inflammatory response.

And the idea that you can have an inflammatory response to pollen or a bee sting or wound healing already starts to tell us, "Well, wait a minute, that doesn't sound all bad.

Maybe the body should react to bee venom and certainly the body should react to a wound and do what it needs to do to heal it." And that's the point.

So, inflammation is a key core function of the immune system, generating a response to a provocation.

And so when we talk about inflammation, we're not making a value judgment.

And most things with regard to human physiology are a question of appropriate equilibria and homeostasis.

There is a healthy degree of inflammatory response that allows us to do a couple of critical things.

First, to fend off foreign invaders.

That would be viruses, bacteria, parasites.

That's how we fight them with an inflammatory response.

And so it's mediated by the immune system, although the immune system is part of a greater whole, that in turn is regulated by other systems in the body and we'll talk about that.

But think of this primarily as a core function of the immune system to levy a defensive response.

And then it does the same thing engaging in surveillance within.

So not all the threats to the human body come from without.

We can have rogue cells.

That's what mutations cause.

And of course, some mutations are potentially carcinogenic.

So not all mutations have the potential to lead to cancer.

Some do.

For the scope of this discussion, we won't get into the exact genetic mechanisms of that, but let's just accept that some mutations can give a cell cancerous potential.

Not every precancerous or potentially carcinogenic mutation in our body does us harm, and that too is because of inflammation.

The immune system levies an inflammatory response and dispatches cells that don't look like they should and don't act like they should.

So more often than not, If you have a healthy immune system, it's cleaning how so it's defense against what assaults us from without.

It's surveillance within all of that is inflammation.

It's mediated by white blood cells to be distinguished from red blood cells which carry oxygen in particular.

And there are many different families of white blood cells.

There are chemical compounds that serve as messengers.

So there's crosstalk among the different families of white blood cells.

That too is all part of the immune system.

And on and on it goes, these cells are generated in the bone marrow.

And I say these things only to start to give a very basic sense of the elaborate choreography involved in even talking about just one organ system in the body.

Just one simple thing, inflammation.

We tend often these days to talk about inflammation as a bad thing because we're over inflamed.

And the best way for people to think about this, I think all too often, as I mentioned, we have a problem with nuance, so we tend to render judgments about things as if they're always good or always bad.

You can't think about inflammation that way.

If you had no inflammatory response, you wouldn't live very long.

It's essential.

On the other hand, if you're too inflamed all the time, that will degrade your body's healthy systems, accelerate aging, and do you all sorts of harm.

You can think of the immune system in some ways as an army within, and you can think of damage to healthy cells as that army engages with an enemy as collateral damage.

So too much aggression, you get an awful lot of collateral damage, you damage your healthy cells.

and all sorts of mayhem and sews.

So inflammation is neither good nor bad.

Balance in this system is good.

Inbalance is bad.

Too little, you're vulnerable to foreign invaders and to rogue cells.

Too much, and you degrade your healthy cells and tissues and accelerate the aging process.

So you're looking for the sweet spot.

You want a primed immune system that can defend you with inflammation when you need it, but isn't turned on and overactivated all the time.

A lot of people, given that the ambient stresses were having this conversation, I would include myself among them are subject to too much unhealthy inflammation and we'll talk more about that.

Then you asked about stress and then i'll talk about the interaction between the two so stress is in some ways a little bit more abstruse and harder to define is the kind of thing where you know it when you feel it.

But basically for scientific purposes we talk about stress as any sort of provocation.

that is a harsh stimulus on the system, the system being our bodies, our minds, our perception.

And not all stress is bad either.

We actually differentiate between you stress where you're stressing something in a way that actually makes it stronger.

The most obvious example there would be lifting weights to build muscle.

you're actually degrading muscle tissue when you stress it with heavy weights, but then it rebuilds in the aftermath of that stress and comes back better, stronger, faster.

So stress can be a good thing, and of course the same can be true for mental stress.

You can stress yourself and habituate to it so you have a greater tolerance so that you can work through distraction.

There are all sorts of potential advantages of overcoming stress.

And when you use stress to build, It's largely you stress when stress is deconstructive rather than constructive.

It's distress So what really talking about here is distress as a problem So not all inflammation is bad not all inflammation is good.

Not all stress is bad not all stress is good stress Evokes primitive responses in our body because basically those provocations I'm talking about if you transplant them to a primitive world and we talk about this in the paper.

They would look like a predator coming at you or the threat of starvation so we can play out over span of perhaps days or it can play out over the span of seconds.

In a primitive world where we're living naturally.

There are probably no stresses that play out over years.

It's all compressed.

We live in a very different world today, and of course we get into that in the paper too, and it's a big part of this conversation.

So what should happen if you are motivated to find food or water and are struggling to do it?

what should happen if...

In your peripheral vision you catch the fast movement of a predator coming at you Well, you need a a brisk response in the case of finding food and water or shelter You need stamina.

You need to be focused.

You need to be strong.

You need to be persistent you need to have endurance you need to keep going because your life is on the line it's playing out over hours and days.

So that stress basically should contribute to all of those factors enhancing cardiovascular strength and stamina by increasing blood flow.

directing critical nutrients to muscles, enhancing your ability to access oxygen, and all the more so.

So think of that as sort of the slow twitch response to stress, which is stimulating your adrenal glands and other organ systems.

And then there's the fast twitch response, where a predator is coming at you and you need to fight or you need to flee and you need to do it pretty much instantaneously.

That's really what stress is for.

And James, I know in your work, you're very focused on psychedelics.

And it's interesting just to digress for a minute and note when we think about drugs and the effects they have, obviously the human body did not build pathways to respond to specific compounds it had never seen.

It's just that in certain instances, those compounds interact with systems and pathways in the body that serve some fundamental purpose.

And so the same is true with factors that stress us.

We basically have aspects of our nervous system that support survival.

If someone gets away from a predator and someone else doesn't, it's the person who gets away from the predator who lives.

to pass on their genes so essentially genes reward the ability to get away from the predator if someone persists long enough to find essential food and water and shelter and someone else doesn't it's the person who does who makes the much better ancestor there's people who don't live long enough to make babies make very poor ancestors so we're really talking about survival traits and so things that stress us trigger these pathways.

that were laid down by evolutionary biology to favor our survival.

So stronger, faster, brisk responses.

But they obviously have implications for the immune system, which is triggered by this and affected by blood flow and affected by circulation and affected by hormonal stimuli and all these different pathways interrelate.

So, In a nutshell stress is provocation.

It can be use stress.

It can be dress distress Inflammation is the immune system reacting to a provocation It can be constructive or it can be destructive and then the two interrelate because chronic stress stimulates the immune system producing chronic inflammation Which is much less constructive than the immediate primitive Response to a provocation for which the immune system is really designed.

I'm not going anywhere But I am getting up for a second because I have a pesky dog at the door.

Okay [BLANK_AUDIO] And there's apt to be another soon.

Definitely they're part of my de-stress mechanism.

I tend to spend as much time as possible with dogs and horses.

Yes, animals.

Our relationship with the non-human world as an essential, I think, as in we needed and without it we suffer is an important aspect of our health that I don't think is regularly talked about.

Although you could comment on that, but we could also move on.

You know, it's interesting.

We didn't really get into that in the paper, but it is relevant because we had those relationships in primitive times.

I mean, certainly our relationship with dogs and before them wolves goes back a very long time and And we probably need it more now than ever our ancestors did they needed that relationship for hunting and survival but i doubt it was a big factor in their mental health because the world.

Was fairly simple and in tune with our native adaptations we live in a world that's totally out of sync with our native adaptations.

And the purity of emotion in those relationships with other species, the way it grounds you and takes you into the realm of honesty and pure devotion and faithfulness.

Yeah, I find it extremely therapeutic.

So again, as much time as I can with my dogs and my horses.

So, going back to what you're saying about this interaction between the neither positive nor negative necessarily between inflammation and stress, what I read in your paper is that the way that we have our...

And I don't want to spend too much more time on this, but I think it's important for people is that One of the things that is interesting about our inflammatory response is that we are very quick to launch an inflammatory response, but there's a long tail for resolving it.

And so if, for example, stressors can stimulate distress in a system in a way that doesn't resolve the stressors, external or internal.

Don't resolve, then there isn't an opportunity for the inflammation to resolve.

Is this what you mean by things can become, we could be in chronic inflammation?

Because there's no break from the stressor and thus the stress response that would allow inflammation to finish its process and come back to a non-inflammatory homeostasis?

those are all very astute observations change but i would say it's not so much a long tail as the failure of the provocation to abate so example think about those times you're driving you get that sudden flash of red and blue in your rearview mirror you feel your adrenal gland respond to that.

That's a response.

It's just, you know, and there are other things that do it.

Anytime you're severely startled, you feel that tingle in your adrenal glands.

You can almost locate them anatomically.

You feel it begin in your flanks.

And the adrenals sit on top of the kidney.

So it's actually in your, the lower back out to the side.

And you feel it there.

And then it radiates through your body.

And it's almost like an electrical charge.

But if it's a siren or if it's a sudden startle, the tail isn't all that long.

There was a provocation, you feel instantaneously that your body is supercharged.

And it's not necessarily a good feeling, because there's often nothing to do with it.

And you have to contain it and that that's frustrating But if you had to fight or if you had to flee it would be just the thing.

It's just what you need So it's it's it's the right response for the wrong circumstance But then if it was a sudden startle sudden provocation that goes away You actually feel that adrenal stimulus mediated by catacolamines epinephrine nor epinephrine the fight or flight hormones and then others cortisol that they get into the act but principally that immediate surge is it's adrenaline, it's epinephrine.

But you feel it dissipate.

You actually, you know, it's almost like going up to a peak, you know, where there's a sudden neurological discharge.

You feel that peak.

You're supercharged and then you come down and yeah, you know the descent is slow relative to the ascent The ascent is instantaneous that you feel it release and it's like throwing a light switch But then it dissipates pretty quickly.

We're talking about minutes Assuming the provocation goes away the problem with chronic inflammation And and this of course is the reason we wrote the paper is that we think chronic inflammation abounds is that the provocation is abstruse, that the the provocation is lives in your mind and doesn't go away.

So you think about stresses of finance, for example, or politics or what we all went through during the pandemic and you know just sort of you know worrying about the future and all the things all of us worry about all the time.

You ruminate on those things.

They take root in your mind it's not a sudden provocation so periodically something will happen that that's a trigger.

the stock market will tank and all of a sudden you're more concerned about your finances for instance.

Very germane at the time we're having this conversation.

So, but you know on any given day it's any given thing but then if that thing.

Doesn't go away completely it's not like the siren that came or went it's not like the startle that came or went it's real.

In your mind that it's there is there's something to be concerned about that doesn't fully subside.

Well, then neither does the inflammatory response.

So, essentially, you don't get that sudden release of norepinephrine and then an abatement.

You get a constant lower-level push on your adrenal gland.

Still stressed, still stressed, still stressed.

That's not normal in the sense of our native adaptations.

And it leads to dysregulation in all the other organ systems.

It affects the cardiovascular system.

It potentially affects the microbiome, which is best thought of as an organ system in its own right, a critical part of who and what we are.

most indelibly it affects the nervous system, the immune system, and those two interact very extensively.

Some of the very same hormones that influence inflammatory responses function as neurotransmitters in the brain, even catecholamine hormones.

So that sudden response to a stress, That actually is part of what regulates brain activity, nor epinephrine is not just a hormone and it's not just about fight or flight.

It's a neurotransmitter as well.

And again, I know these things along the way just because this is, you know, if you will, mini med school, right?

It took us years to learn how all these things fit together.

It's extraordinary.

The more you understand about the human body's choreography, How everything fits together with everything else it's a wonder that any of us ever makes it through a day fully intact how many things need to go right how much cross talk there needs to be and how much understanding of one organ system by another organ system.

It's really quite extraordinary but that.

chronic provocation that never fully subsides because it just takes root in the back of your mind and periodically moves to the front of your mind but it never goes away completely that predator that chased you.

If you got away and predators off another Aaron hunting something else now you know there's still a predator out there.

There are the predators out there.

So, I suspect we were always subject to some level of low-level worry, low-level anxiety, and perhaps low-level inflammation in response to it.

It's unlikely that our Stone Age ancestors had completely worry-free days even when they weren't running from something because they knew they might find themselves running from something.

But on the other hand it was much more a matter of acute provocation relief of that provocation and return to a baseline for which we are adapted.

I don't think in a world of stock markets and taxes and geopolitics and climate change and everything else we could throw onto the heat.

I don't think we ever get to a healthy baseline or at least we have to really struggle to get there and consequently we have chronic inflammation in response to all of that.

Hmm.

And...

And we're gonna explore that a little bit more because you had...

you did say, well two things.

You talked about the brain.

I'm gonna ask you about that in a second.

And you said that the stressors are...

they're in our mind.

And then you said take root in our mind because they are in our mind and what we'll get to in the interview here, what you talk about in our papers, it's...

It's also not just in our mind, although the stock market might be an invention of the human mind that kind of in some respect other than literal physical buildings exists entirely through constructs in our mind and in our relational dynamics is a very real thing external to us that has an effect that can be a stressor and often is.

But before we get there, I want to go a little bit more into the brain because I want to use that as a stepping point to talk about how stress and inflammation is going to spread out beyond the individual, but still staying with the individual other than the response of catecholamine, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc.

Where does the brain fit into all this?

And I mean this with respect both to the brain's role in inflammation regulation, but also with respect to inflammation's effect on our thought and behavior through its effect on our brain.

So, two separate questions really and two separate answers.

So first, what is it the brain should do to regulate the system, this response?

So let's think of the brain first as the master regulator of our responses.

That's really what the paper is about.

So that's where we needed a mathematician and you could think about being trained and coached and schooled in ways to manage and mitigate stress so that the provocations are out there in the world but the way you respond to them is cultivated and honed and productive.

So essentially you would be training your brain or mind to be a better regulator and to dampen down, to filter stress and determine what is constructive, what is destructive responses.

And with that filter operating at a high level, you would literally filter out some of the provocation and prevent it from triggering the immune system.

So the psychological response to stress.

Is a direct factor in the immune system response distress and psychological response comes first So if the very same thing happens to you and me and I get wildly upset about it and you stay calm Even though we both experienced the exact same provocation.

I'm going to have more inflammation than you are because my brain didn't filter it as effectively, right?

So we can train the mind to be the master regulator.

And that's where our colleague, Julie Arcearo came in helping us to build this mathematical model.

Okay, so let's think about all the stresses in the world that we routinely encounter.

They're not gonna go away anytime soon.

What can we do about this?

Well, let's think about if we had better suppression.

Of the response to those dresses and then what stress does to the brain looking at it from the other direction.

Is essentially it invites a reaction right so if we go back to the primal origins of all this.

And we go back to the primitive role of catecholamine hormones and other hormones and neurotransmitters that are all configured into the stress response in a primal world where the particular concern was predators and starvation and such.

You're supposed to do something when you're provoked.

You're supposed to climb the hill to find the plant or find the animal that you need to eat.

You're supposed to soldier on to get to water when your weary muscles are saying stop.

You're supposed to fight, you're supposed to flee.

So essentially the provocations, whatever they are, are urging our brain to do something fairly urgently and sometimes dramatically.

Fighting, for example, I would consider a dramatic expression of a stress response, but it's a totally logical one in primitive context.

But what if that's not the right response?

What do you do with that?

You contain it and so you see it, you cultivate resentment.

Let's just for a moment reflect on you feel an intense urge to react and there's no obvious productive reaction.

To the thing that just provoked you to the argument you had to the unpleasant interaction you had at work to difficult situation with a member of your family to the person who cut you off on the highway right.

What is road rage?

It's a primitive response.

It's this person threatened me.

It's the absence of that cognitive filter that says, you know, may have been intentional, may not have been intentional, whether intentional or unintentional, escalating this is not going to be good for anybody.

I'm not going there.

Well, every day, hundreds of times, probably thousands of times across the country, people do go there.

Why?

Primitive stress response.

So essentially what stress does to the brain is invite it to go primitive.

And push the response.

And there's even talk in neuroscience about the different layers of the brain, the reptilian brain.

As you move closer to the brainstem you're actually getting to the more ancient parts of the brain.

You go further back in evolutionary biology all the parts of the brain that we have in particular the prefrontal cortex which helps us understand consequences and implications and Anticipate where our behaviors will take us into the future that didn't exist So stress pushes you back toward the reptilian primitive brain where it's all about fight or flight And that's highly problematic.

So one of the issues we wrestle with in the paper is, how do we tip that balance?

How do we protect the brain from the provocation that undoes it?

So we engage in dysfunctional responses.

And sadly, the answer is currently, "We all too often fail to do that." And so there is an escalating dysfunction and we'll talk about that.

And how do we empower the brain, train the brain and mind to be a better filter so that we don't let stress take us back into our most primitive cells?

Being a primitive person in a primitive world is perfectly reasonable.

You've got saber-toothed cats to worry about, you know, fight or flight is just right But when you're on a highway It's almost never right when you have an unpleasant exchange with a co-worker.

It's almost never right.

So I Think we should be fully conscious of and this James takes us back to your earlier observation about The big picture and holism if we understand ourselves in context, what kind of animal are we?

Where did we come from?

What are we adapted for?

Well, we're social animals.

We need one another We need to understand one another there has to be some level of trust and and and Respect and civility for social animals to function.

We need common cause on common ground But then we are adapted to defend ourselves against Provocations many of which in a primitive primitive world are potentially life-threatening How do we deal with all of that in a modern world of our own devising that is far removed from everything we're adapted to?

It's a real challenge for sure.

Yeah, definitely.

I want to see if I can just summarize what you just said somewhat, you know, simply so we can move on to like how this spreads between people is that The effect that the brain can have on stress is kind of psychological.

It's how we navigate, filter the stressor such that we can appropriately respond to that stressor to calm the nervous system down either by being like, "That's actually not relevant, so we can calm down," or, "That is relevant.

I need to take action towards it so that I can resolve it," and thus calm the stressor response down.

And then there's the other way, which is the stress.

Does something to the brain that triggers the need for response in some way.

In the acute situation you're talking about, okay, Cybertooth cat, okay, I need to respond to this situation or I saw something, analyze, okay, actually I'm recognizing, I just thought it was a thing, but it's not there, I'm calming myself down.

So I don't unnecessarily respond.

So this is the both sort of like sides of this.

So what you're saying is that stress source can cause changes, they can manipulate the way, like manipulate our thought and behavior through its activation of the brain's inflammatory and stress response.

And in a acute situation, it can help us mobilize towards resolving the stressor.

But in a chronic situation, it can just cause low-level perpetual distortion of our thought and behavior in ways that can be used to help us.

not do well for us in a modern society, in their modern civilization, because they're sort of perpetually somewhat or increasingly more or less primitive responses rather than [BLANK_AUDIO] may lack a better terminology, like evolved responses to the situation.

So in this way, stress and inflammation can manipulate thoughts and behaviors in ways that can actually have detrimental effects on ourselves and on our world rather than having the sort of positive effects of helping us resolve or regulate to whatever that stressor is.

Is that about right?

Yes, all reasonable, all well said.

The only thing I throw into the mix, you're talking about the brain, the mind, and so am I, and we should not convey to those listening that it is a monolithic thing.

So yes, these responses are intrinsic.

But as noted, you and I may...

react to the same provocation very differently.

So inter-individual variation in that response was always important.

Is all the more important today?

Even if we go back to primitive context, right?

If there's a saber-toothed cat and you and I are both reacting to it, and you are provoked, but in a constructive way, and I completely panic.

You know i'm the one more likely to run into something and trip over it and become lunch right so even then the mind acting as a filter so there's an interpretive lens says what is the provocation how do i most constructively.

address this provocation that was always important that much more so now when the nature of the stress.

Is less clearly linked to an obvious response right we have to deal with subtleties like conflict resolution and you know we have to essentially do judo.

with our native inclinations.

If our native inclinations are fight or flee and neither of those is the right thing to do, say, okay, how do I translate the fight or flight response into something that is constructive here?

For instance, a dialogue where we actually try to understand one another and come to some comfortable resolution 'cause we're starting out in conflict and we don't wanna stay there.

And I neither want to react in a dysfunctional way nor just see the, So what can I do with the response to this provocation that's constructive?

So, so it's not just the brain.

It's the individual.

The individuals preconditioning is a huge part of this equation as well.

And I don't want to I want to move on from the brain here pretty pretty much right away But there's one thing I want to just like get clarification on or have you you know quickly give us the breakdown on which is that?

the brain itself, from what I understand, can become a driver of inflammation as a consequence of the brain being damaged or made dysfunctional through chronic inflammation or through some sort of something that managed it.

For example, I have previously had a head injury and I experienced lots of what I assumed to be the damage on or the dysfunction of my thought and behavior as a consequence, not of an external stressor per se, but as a consequence of inflammatory responses in my brain.

My brain is being on fire all the time as it responded to this event.

And so it is also possible that the brain itself can become a driver of inflammation.

Is that correct?

It is.

There's actually just a few quick remarks and then we can pivot.

But a recent study actually looking at the mechanisms of sleep linked to brain health, showing that there's a lymphatic system in the brain, particularly active during sleep, that clears toxins from the brain.

So even just as simple as impaired sleep.

greater accumulation of toxic metabolites in the brain, the failure to clear those out, brain dysfunction associated with increased inflammation, just there.

But then, as you say, injury to the brain, and that can be...

something purely psychological, it could be organic.

They're really, we're talking about brain and mind.

I think we should probably just say, you know, they're essentially the same thing.

One is a manifestation of the other.

But think of something like PTSD, right?

So there was a trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder.

And the trauma could be any one of a number of things.

Probably most widely known would be exposure to war among combat veterans.

And then post-traumatic stress disorder is a brain disorder and a mind disorder.

And it does all sorts of terrible things to all of the organ systems in the body and leads to physical ailments because the brain is the source of the inflammation, the bad inflammation, the excessive inflammation.

The constant stress reverberating throughout the entire endocrine system, the system of hormones in the body.

all of that equilibrium is thrown off because of a malady that if you will originates in the brain so absolutely the brain is the critical filter regulator we need but it can be the primary source of the problem.

And in those kinds of scenarios, we get stuck in a particular sort of response loop, which can instead of moving us towards the restful sleep that resolves, you know, that activates the glum fatic system, and we can sort of like squeeze and release our little brain vesicles and get that fluid in and out of there.

And that doesn't happen.

And what happens is just like progressive, compromising of the systems that would otherwise regulate or control our inflammatory response.

Exactly.

And it can progress over time.

You know, thinking, I'm giving a webinar later this week on sleep and nutrition and the interactions there.

And in that talk, I'll be showing slides that look at the cascade.

So essentially the ways that stress can compromise sleep, poor sleep can reduce our tolerance for stress, stress and poor sleep.

Gang up on the brain and the nervous system, increase the inflammatory response, the inflammation leads to increased risk for chronic disease, disrupts appetite-regulating hormones, makes us more likely to eat bad food, which further compromises neurotransmitter levels.

you get the idea to degenerating spiral right it's the classic case of going down the drain.

The good news and it's important to append the good news quickly here.

Is that you can reverse engineer that and think of it in just the opposite way so if I become a bit better at at mitigating and managing stressful provocations in my life.

I can sleep more restfully I can better detoxify my brain making me even better at handling stress the next day.

which will increase my energy, allow me to be more physically active, shield my healthy cells and organ systems from the onslaught of inflammation, make me a bit more robust, maybe making it easier for me to make healthy food choices because my appetite hormones are not out of balance.

which will improve the quality of my sleep, which will further improve the quality of my stress tolerance and round and round we go.

So one direction this cascade leads is down the drain.

The other direction the very same cascade can lead is up a spiral staircase to the best version of your vitality at the top.

And obviously as a specialist in internal medicine, lifestyle medicine, and preventive medicine, that's what I've been trying to do my whole career is help people climb that spiral stair.

I want to ask you specifically about intervention for the individual a little bit later on.

I imagine for listeners, you know, they've probably already got a sense of what the general answer to this next question is.

We've been talking about, you know, behavior and how stress and inflammation influences behavior.

And we've also been using examples of, like, the behaviors of other people as a potential stressor that would activate an internal stress inflammation response.

But I'd like you to talk a little bit more about how it is that inflammation can spread between people because this is one of the sort of central arguments you're making in the paper is that this stress inflammation process is not contained into the individual and because of that it's not an individual issue.

It is something that can spread between people.

How does it spread between people?

Yeah, actually how does it spread between people?

Yeah, so so there's a lot there and and I'll state the case pretty succinctly We've recently discovered there there've been Many papers published on this topic that what we used to think of as non Communicable diseases like for example obesity and diabetes are indeed communicable They run in social networks because behaviors do people behave the way the people around them behave, we all influence one another.

And we influence one another with our reactions to provocations.

So we take the simple example of road rage.

Let's say that you're a very reasonable person and you have pretty reasonable stress tolerance.

And let's just say somebody else is having a particularly bad day and they're in a rush and they're being rude and they cut you off.

They do something unpleasant on the highway.

And you're provoked.

And maybe it doesn't quite rise to the threshold where you do something dysfunctional.

But what if you are a reasonable person who's also having a bad day?

You're subject to chronic stress and you're worried about friends and family and job and money and all the stuff that stresses everybody out all the time.

And so you're tolerant and maybe you slept poorly the night before and we can talk about all the reasons you ate poorly You didn't exercise you're not that that vortex you're talking about exactly you're caught up And maybe not in a way where anything bad would have happened absent a provocation, but but your threshold for tolerating A stressful provocation is lower than it ought to be.

Fight with your spouse, a bad night's sleep, the usual stuff.

You're just a human.

A perfectly reasonable human, but not at your best and most tolerant.

And then somebody does something.

that is a fairly significant provocation.

In fact, you get that response where you feel your adrenals tingle because something happens while you're driving your car that you know could have been lethal, but for your quick response.

And then suddenly you're seething with fight or flight hormones.

Now your brain, if it were in a good state, if it were well rested and detoxified, would step in here and down regulate this response.

But what if it's not?

Well essentially you just had the transmission of somebody else's.

Badly handled stress response so that person's in a rush and they're stressed out that's why they're behaving badly behind the wheel in the first place.

It just was transmitted to you and now everything comes down to your stress response which may be impaired.

Now, if the two of you engage, and now we've got a road rage incident going on, others may get involved because the way you're driving irresponsibly is going to start to affect any other vehicles in the mix.

And we all know what kind of mayhem can result from this.

And that's just one example.

Well, another example might be that, you know, say I'm that person who got all stressed out because somebody cut me off or whatever.

I might not realize it, but then on my way home, I have to stop at the store or something, and I don't realize that I'm just acting kind of shitty, so that impacts the person who checked me out at the till, or maybe I get home, and I argue with my partner and I don't our child is there, so now they're being impacted by the buffeted of the stress between my partner know what to do.

and arguing, and it actually was me just being triggered by something because I'm stressed by something else.

I completely agree and absolutely, and I was going to take it up a notch.

We live in the age of interconnectivity.

So you take it to the internet.

So, you know, all these negative feelings We have a massive megaphone all of us do and and so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the effects of Social media on mental health.

This is a huge part of it.

So we can we can inflame Multitudes with our own inflammation.

So this is highly transmissible.

So, you know, essentially we take this This tendency to see then we express it on social media platforms and we're less tolerant of what others may say we spout things that are emanating from frustration from resentment from Anger and you know all of these emotions that if you think about it have something to do With handling acute provocations in the world, but that's not what's going on here.

We can't react to these acute provocations.

We don't know how to react to these acute provocations.

There is no good response.

It's not like running away from a predator and saying, yes, I made it.

I live to fight another day.

There's none of that.

There's a lack of clarity.

So it just festers and ferments.

So we look for ways to express it.

And we all have ways of expressing it to large numbers.

And you can, I think without too much difficulty, translate this all the way up to the level of geopolitics.

Let's pause for a second here.

I want to make a quick comment, and I think this is a really important factor in what you're saying with, "We go on to the internet, and that's a way that we could respond." Like, "I'm angry.

Here's my whatever." The complication in that is that the places that we do that are platforms that are profit-driven, and we're, in some respect, we are the product in these profit-driven networks.

And part of what those networks do to profit is to keep people on the platform as much as possible, and they've designed algorithms to see what content has people most engaged on the platform.

one of the styles of those content is angry outrage because if you're triggered, you engage.

It's driving engagement.

So these types of things end up getting pushed to the front of people's feeds and then people are being validated and reinforced.

good job for being angry and shitty and then somebody else gets validated because they responded and we get this loop where it's not only spreading now and being pushed by algorithms to more people were also getting rewarded for the spreading of this stress contagion.

Yeah, I just want to react by saying how easy it is to engage in that.

that particular cascade and why it happens.

So think about the difficulty we all have in looking away from a car wreck.

- Oh yeah.

- What's going on?

I mean, why does traffic get backed up on the side of the highway where there isn't the crash because of rubbernecking?

You know, you could be stuck for hours only to learn that the problem was on the other side of a divided highway.

Why do humans behave that way?

Well, again, adaptation, evolutionary biology, primitive impulses.

it's that sudden disruption in your normal environment that most requires your attention.

And this, by the way, is trans species.

There are many other species that have the same tendency.

If something has changed in their environment, that's where their attention is drawn.

So it's a native tendency to have our attention directed there.

And it's easily exploited.

And obviously the people who control social media platforms have a great deal of expertise in capturing our attention and commandeering it.

But we shouldn't be too harsh with ourselves as we think about our vulnerability to this.

It's hardwired into us.

It all does make sense.

But absolutely, the more extreme position is going to be more captivating than a, well, I think it might be, and I think it might not be.

It's interesting just for a second to digress.

Bertrand Russell famously said that the whole thing wrong with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure and Wiser people so full of doubts if you're wise and if you're knowledgeable You know what you don't know and you're almost never a hundred percent certain of anything Good scientists are rarely a hundred percent certain of anything, but that's why the public flock to con artists who are absolutely sure and make them all sorts of promises.

So in every domain, the extreme provocation, the titillating thing, effectively captures our attention.

And then we engage, and then there's all sorts of psychological research showing how we push one another to more extreme.

So this is part of it too.

There's a good book.

by Thaler and Sunstein going to extremes, looking at religious radicalization and political radicalization, but it extends to our daily lives.

So, you know, I'm kind of angry about a particular thing and I opine about it on social media.

Who's going to react to that?

Well, maybe somebody who thinks I'm getting carried away, but most likely somebody who agrees with me, is going to give me a cyberspatial pat on the back.

And now i feel vindicated and validated and so whatever ambivalence i had about my own reaction you know maybe i'm getting carried away but i really feel that blank.

As my fists clench and now somebody tells me yeah you're so right and it happened to me and i was so pissed and well now you know i feel it more strongly some of that ambivalence is shaved away.

So now I express it more strongly and now somebody who even has a more radical view of the same issue than the two of us chimes in We radicalize one another Well, this this is contagious inflammation.

This is social inflammation and if we are members of a group or a tribe or a clan all moving in one particular direction with our Emotion feeding off of one another there is apt to be a countervailing clan that's expressing just the opposite point of view and doing exactly the same.

So whatever hope we had of meeting in the middle is rapidly dissipating as we gravitate in one direction becoming ever more extreme in our shared view and the other group gravitates in the opposite direction becoming ever more extreme in their shared view.

And the next thing you know, We're at war with one another and I mean that either literally or figuratively It can be among individuals.

It can be arguments in cyberspace where it can be the real deal But it's the same basic process every time Let's take a little break here from the interview as we do and I want to give a big thanks to my patrons on Patreon especially the people whose names are listed on the screen here on YouTube These individuals, the people on the screen, as well as my patrons as a whole, you listening, maybe one of them, you make this podcast possible.

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David Katz right now.

So, with respect to the constraint time, I'm going to try to change some of the things I'm going to ask and then invite you to be as somewhat, without feeling rushed, concise as possible on the question so I could try to fit the sort of most and what I think are the most important ones.

Yeah, so talking about, you know, first off, this not being too hard on ourselves, one of the things I've heard a sort of a thinker on this, Tristan Harris say is that it doesn't make sense to think about it in the sense that these algorithms or these platforms are trying to defeat the best of us, but they're designed to sort of hijack hijack our weaknesses rather than fight our strengths.

And I once made a video where I talked about being addicted to social media, and I used the metaphor of being upset with myself that I lost a fight to Mike Tyson.

And yeah.

the whole Mike Tyson and Jake Paul thing aside.

But like, it's not reasonable to think like, oh, I really failed because I got lost in this thing or caught up in this thing.

Like, no, they're designed to make sure that we get caught up in them.

They're literally designed based off of gambling technology to keep us engaged and stuck.

And I also want to talk about, you know, the you spoke of this like the the The impact of these stressors all collectively pushing certain behaviors we get on social media and it spreads in this way and it spreads at a rate and an expansiveness as far as modern, as far as the history we know of, the narratives we have for the history of humanity, at a speed and a reach.

that we've never known before absolutely like almost literally the speed of light in some instances, you know with fiber optic cables and these kinds of things, right?

Absolutely.

And again, I feel like it's quite logical for people to take what we're talking about here.

and we can see how that would then spread because whereas we have this sort of polarization that's happening and the sort of ongoing stressors would influence the way we engage socially and culturally and what kinds of social or cultural sort of Factors we would then be inclined or disinclined towards, which on a larger scale would influence what sort of rises to the top of our society or our culture rather than and what sort of like fades into the background.

For example, reading fading into the background as social media rises to the top or short form videos rise to the top or just television in general.

And then that would also influence our political views, what we would celebrate or reject politically, or in response to say there's the fight for it, vote for who I vote for, but then there's also the flight from it.

It's just too much.

I don't want to engage at all.

Either way, we can now see how this this sort of stress contagion you're talking about can influence politically, which would then change the shape of our society on multiple levels.

And then...

Okay, so where's the link here?

So I feel like that's logical for people, so feel free to comment on that or expand.

Let me step in.

So all good reflections and important.

One of the things we failed to say, and let's go with the simple example again, because it makes everything clear to have a picture in your mind.

So let's do the road rage thing.

So, you know, it's you who had the difficult day and the difficult night and you are obligated to react to somebody being very Irresponsible in another car on your way to work kind of thing.

What we didn't talk about is what set that person off Maybe there's they've got all the same good reasons, right?

They had a their child is using drugs, some terrible thing happened.

The reason that they're out of control is because some provocation got the better of their tolerance mechanisms.

But then they're effectively paying it forward to you.

So, you know, you were doing okay.

You were basically keeping it under control, but your stress tolerance is down.

and maybe they make you snap.

Now, if you snap, you're going to affect somebody else and they're potentially going to affect someone else.

This is very much like the model of infectious disease contagion.

And by the way, all the things we're talking about are highly relevant to the COVID pandemic, the way the internet affected our response to the pandemic, the way we polarized.

But we could have a whole separate conversation for a couple of hours about the pandemic, which we're obviously not going to have.

But one of the interesting things to do is simply think about the spread of stress and inflammation person to person, the way we think about the spread of virus.

Effectively, it goes viral.

Every person who has it and is carrying it potentially can transmit it to someone else.

What determines whether or not that other person succumbs are the same three factors that we always talk about in epidemiology host Agent environment right so the environment is that highway where you're driving and if there are all sorts of engineered safeguards against Calamity results on that highway engineered safety features in the cars Bells and alarms that go off when you're driving irresponsibly the environment actually may constrain the interaction between host and agent so mayhem doesn't ensue that would be a good thing so we can engineer solutions into the environment.

The agent in this case is the provocation but the host is you and if you've been trained to be meditative or reflexive if you've learned to you know count to ten take a few deep breath before you react to something if you just have a little bit.

of that constructive ability built into your stress tolerance.

You, as the host, can cut it off at the pass.

It's a lot like being immunized.

So you can imagine you've got stress and reactive inflammation being propagated through social media or on the highway or anywhere you like.

But in any given individual who is not overcome and undone.

It hits a wall because that person now isn't affected, isn't drawn in to the inflamed response and consequently can't become a vector to pass it on to others.

you can essentially think of this in terms of stress, herd immunity, or inflammation, herd immunity, where every one of us who acts as a barrier prevents others from ever being exposed.

Because if I'm not undone, I behave much better than if I am undone.

And if I behave much better, I'm much less likely to set you off whether your tolerance is higher or low.

So in other words, you may be immunized too.

or you may be unimmunized and completely vulnerable, but if I never trigger you, it doesn't matter because you don't get exposed to the inflammatory provocation and we should be thinking of it that way.

And simple examples could be in real space, could be in cyberspace, same basic thinking.

So that translation from the individual to the collective invites thinking about this like the spread of a viral contagion.

There are some really very potent parallels.

I think a kind of missing piece that isn't entirely spoken to yet and I think is absolutely essential before the interview here is over is how this spread of this contagion moves upwards into the social political body which changes the body, changes the environment as you talked about.

because if you're saying, "Oh, this person's stressed," because of all the regular stresses that we're all experiencing, well, those stresses are responses to our social, cultural, political environment.

And as these inflammatory loops and this can change and spread to to create dysfunction socially and then politically, it alters the environment.

And you speak about this in the paper.

It's not just a bottom-up process of the inflammatory response spreading between people and out.

It changes the very environment that they are in, which then has a bottom--or sorry, a top-down effect on the individual, creating a And more likelihood of stress response.

So it's not just like a, oh, it gets more and more stressful.

It's like a back and forth.

I believe you use a term something like a runaway, feed forward process that just increasingly compromises human decision making, behavior, which I'm trying to push some stuff in here that normally we would have regulators like in the body, we have the brain.

Or the mind in society we have political leaders and/or bodies of political leaders that represent multinational interests to help sort of regulate the effects things that are happening in society so they don't explode into literal war or civil war or collapses of various institutions we rely on.

But those regulators can get damaged as well.

Those functions can degrade.

And we can be in a situation where our political leadership, our geopolitical leadership, can be compromised by the same feed-forward process, which then changes our environment only further advancing the inflammatory contagion, the stress contagion that you're talking about until we live in a world similar to where we are now, or in the midst of using the the paper, Paul The Crisis and the dread and all of that that comes with it, which only then further feeds the process.

Did I miss anything there?

That's about it.

Sadly, I'm feeling a lot of that these days and you likely are and certainly many listening, whatever.

side of the political spectrum you're on, you recognize that we're very polarized and there's a lot of pain that we're all wrestling with.

In my case, I have real concerns about our lack of civility, our lack of inclusiveness.

I'm a humanist and I'm deeply concerned about the fate of the planet.

We have some hope of being healthy, vital people on a healthy, vital planet.

or we have no hope of being healthy vital people.

And there is no planet B as the saying goes.

So yeah, all that's true.

And we could connect the dots in all sorts of ways, but you could think of these primitive responses, the dysregulation of the inflammatory response by excessive chronic stress.

By the way, one thing we didn't talk about is that chronic inflammation is a critical pathway to all major chronic disease.

So all those other things are going on, but now you're also dealing with the fact that you've got type 2 diabetes or coronary artery disease.

Which puts more stress on the medical institutions which makes healthcare harder to access.

You're spending time in doctors' offices, it's disrupting your work, you're more stressed.

That's not helping.

So another feed forward loop is that chronic stress leads to chronic inflammation leads to chronic disease, which leads to more chronic stress.

So all of that.

And then sure, the frustration people feel in the modern world having no clear action plan to address the sources of stress.

Have us looking for some way to lash out and that can be what we express in social media But it can also be you know I just I want somebody to blow up the system that's making me so unhappy and so it can be a vote directed at disruption And so we wind up with disruptors in chief and you know a system that isn't operating as that rational regulator of provocations but actually becomes a source of provocations.

So if we become highly polarized as individuals we radicalize our own views because.

we never feel fully relaxed or fulfilled or satisfied.

We're just constantly subject to stress.

And we have chronic inflammation in response to that stress.

And we have chronic disease in response to that inflammation.

And chronic unhappiness and frustration in response to all of that.

And then we express it in our behavior and we grow a tribe of like-minded people and we talk ourselves Into finding those who share those views to represent us out in the world So we don't feel quite so helpless Somebody is going to do something about that.

I want someone in a position of real power who can Represent my unhappiness.

Well, then you get the representation of this inflammation inflammation.

in the halls of power, which obviously has the potential to interact with other people in other halls of power and inflame them.

And so we're talking about a massive effect amplifier.

So you could think of politics simply as the connection between individual and community level stress feed forward loops.

and transcontinental stress feed forward loops.

We're seeing all of this in the world around us today.

And I think a critical question obviously becomes, what on earth can we do about it?

We can talk about that to bring us over the finish line.

But it's certainly important that we all recognize our vulnerability is not just isolated within us.

Let's keep in mind one of the other sources of stress and we address this very briefly.

I think some of my particular contributions to the paper had to do with studies looking at crowding.

Crowding is a source of stress.

Well, there are eight billion homo sapiens.

That's not the normal state of our species.

We were foragers in a great big open world.

We get time to ourselves.

And the time we spent with other people was people we actually knew.

We're now immersed in a crowded world where we're obligated to interact very extensively with people we don't know at all or know quite nominally, and almost never.

Some of us are privileged maybe to be able to get into the woods, but most people just don't ever have a chance to really be entirely off by themselves.

And that's another effect amplifier.

So if you could just find that quiet, restful meditative time in a great big open world with ample elbow room, it would also be brain room and it would let you decompress.

That would be time alone that doesn't include the content, the consumption of content, right?

I want to also say crowding, there's also scarcity as well.

So crowding is not just people around, but it's the sort of decreased access to vital resources.

However, the brain, however our ancient nervous system perceives that, or however our modern nervous system perceives it, including scarcities and things like access to food, or just access to money, or employment which is money or housing, things that are getting increasingly more difficult to access as we're in this inflammatory runaway, feedforward thing in our society bottom up and top down.

All that, but also just keep in mind, we really are talking about a world and a social dynamic where everybody around you is inflamed in all the ways that you are.

And so when you're interacting with them, you're interacting with their inflammation.

So A, you needed tranquil time.

to be alone at peace to decompress within yourself and be When you do interact with other people you need them to be reasonably under control and at peace in order not to re-provoke you and increase that inflammation And if you can't get either of those, if you can't decompress or you're already operating at a high level of stress and inflammation, and everybody else has that same problem so they can't decompress and they provoke you and you provoke them, you can see how this situation rapidly gets out of control.

And you have a problem of global inflammation.

And we're talking about literal inflammation in our bodies affecting organ systems, driving the pandemic of chronic cardiometabolic disease, driving social unrest, and occurring in bodies and in the body politic in exactly the same ways for all the same reasons.

We've got about five minutes left of recording time here.

There's so many more places we can go, clearly, like so many more avenues to discuss how this is playing out.

But I think what I should hope, I hope there is a good answer to this question I'm about to offer you.

And I also hope that people are, you know, not so distressed now that they're not able to hear what you're about to say.

what can we do about it?

And I understand that there's ways that we can engage in politics maybe differently or how we engage in society and so on and so forth.

And those are relevant questions.

But I want to take it to zone zero, as I would say, in permaculture.

Me, like I'm asking literally for myself, but also for people who are listening, what can I do for myself to help intervene in this spiral down the drain such that I can have to become more of a net positive effect?

on this cascading event around me in myself and on others.

What can I do?

Where can I intervene?

- Yeah, and I like to start with what's actionable by the individual.

So James, I very much appreciate the invitation to have this conversation with you because I think we're helping.

So anybody listening, I mean, I hope we're not distressing people too much.

Sorry, folks.

I mean, it is what it is, right?

So we're all in the same boat.

But if you understand that these reactions are not about being a good or bad person, that they're about physiology and the nervous system and hardwiring and evolutionary biology, profound forces that shape to and what we are, if you understand, A native impulse you can control the native impulse far better if it's happening in the background Where you're unaware of it you have no opportunity to control it, but if you know How you can be triggered and and you know what's going to affect your Tolerance threshold for for stressful provocations if you're just just being conscious of that puts us in I'm reluctant to use the term but the driver seat puts us you know gives us potential control over that It also invites you to then ask yourself where do my particular vulnerabilities reside on any given day You know if I'm having a hard time Paying forward good emotion and I feel like I'm likely to contribute to this chronic inflammation What are the primary reasons is it because I'm in pain?

A lot of people are in chronic pain.

That's a factor.

Is it because I'm unhealthy and it's making men happy?

Is it because I sleep so poorly?

Is it because they're particular sources of stress in my life?

I actually went through this exercise with my patients for years.

They called it holistic profiling.

I said, you know, we talked in these literal terms.

So years before this team came together to write this paper, I essentially was doing this with my patients.

Okay, so there are lots of things that can make you unhealthy and unhappy.

Let's line them up and talk about them.

And then each one we fix has the potential to make it easier to fix the next one.

So we can go from that circling the drain and downward spiral to a spiral staircase up.

Our goal is the best vitality, both physical and mental, you can achieve.

What one thing would you like me as a doctor to help fix?

That would give you the greatest boost and the greatest inclination to say now i want to fix the next would it be pain because of arthritis would it be disrupted sleep is it is a chronic stress.

Let's start with your priority some inviting everybody listening do this exercise yourself.

What stands between you and being the best version of yourself?

What what makes it hard to be the kind decent caring person you really want to be for everybody you encounter every day because I think we all want that We all feel the same things we all know You know that kindness feels good both to express and receive so if we're not doing it if we're not receiving it or we're not delivering it We're not happy about that.

So what's in the way?

Each of those things is potentially fixable.

And then the second question, so the first question is what are your priorities?

Second question, is it something you can address on your own or do you need help?

Very often we need help.

That's perfectly okay.

We all need somebody to lean on.

Who can help with that particular issue?

And can you access that?

Now, if the answer is no, we get into a complicated realm where, you know, we need to be talking about things like social services and, you know, there are social workers who can help people get the resources they need to access critical help.

So if your particular source of stress is your health and you don't have insurance, you don't have the means to address your health, and okay, so then we need to step back and say, the first problem here is access.

and social resources, we need a social worker.

And they're available and hospitals often make their services available for free.

And so there's one whole path to go down.

But I don't wanna make this too specific.

I just wanna talk in general about recognizing our vulnerability to be part of the problem of propagating stress and inflammation.

and each of us has the potential to both feel better individually and be part of the collective solution if we get a better handle on it.

So ask yourself on any given day if I feel the temptation to be undone and behave in a way I'm not proud of, what is the particular driver of that?

And how do I fix it and whose help do I need?

Start there.

And what we then did in my clinical practice is the next visit, say, okay, if we're effectively addressing your sleep with better sleep hygiene, for example, and some just simple education there.

And because you're sleeping better, your pain tolerance is higher and you're less burdened with pain.

What's the next thing you want to do?

Can we now start talking about a little bit of more physical activity?

Physical activity, you all know how important it is for your physical health, but it's an incredible tonic for the brain.

It relieves stress.

And just a quick aside here, James, even though you asked for short answers, you're I would note that in my particular case, I've been advised on the value of meditation from no less than Deepak Chopra himself.

Actually, no Deepak, he's told me personally how important it is to meditate.

I've tried.

And every time over the years I've tried to meditate, I keep coming back to the same basic place, which is, hmm, how many emails could I be answering now?

I just can't get past it.

But a hike in the woods for me, is both physical activity and meditation.

Riding a horse for me is both physical activity and meditation, being outside in nature is meditation.

So I double dip.

I no longer worry about it.

I don't think I need to find time to meditate.

I think taking my mind to a peaceful tranquil state in whatever way works best for me, that is my meditation.

And it just so happens that I meditate best.

And I feel best and I'm most creative and most productive when I'm physically active.

Well, I'm actually feeding two birds with one sesame seed there because it's important to be physically active and it's important to meditate, to unclutter your mind.

I do them together, that kind of thing.

So you all need to figure that out for yourself.

What stands between you and your best vitality, mental and physical, What do you need to do to improve that one thing and you do it without help and if not who's helped you need and do that one thing.

Do that as a gift to yourself and as a gift that you'll be able to pay for and then parlay that progress with that one thing into attention to the next and then the next and the next and it's really a very short menu of items.

Physical activity, eating well, avoiding toxins like tobacco and excess alcohol.

Sleeping enough, managing stress, you're not going to avoid exposure to stress, but managing it, filtering it effectively, and healthy social connections.

Feet, forks, fingers, sleep, stress, and love.

The six-cylinder engine of lifestyle is medicine.

So let's just think about those six.

Get it any one of them and improve it and then use that Motivation to improve the next and the next it's not long before you're starting to see that the top step of that viral staircase leading to your vitality is in reach and all the while While you're improving your internal environment, you are improving the external environment because you are now projecting a more positive version of yourself.

You are no longer as likely as you were yesterday to be somebody else's intolerable provocation.

And eventually, perhaps no longer being a negative impact, but even getting to the point of being a positive impact on those around you.

Not just a neutral non-negative, but even a positive impact on the days because the same kind of upward spiral that can happen within us can also happen between us in the same way the downward one is happening now.

Is that correct?

It's absolutely correct.

So you are you're both, you know, you're you're a wall that contributes to herd immunity because you're not provoking other people, but yeah when you really feel good and you're really a source of positive emotion You brighten somebody else's day and so they may have been headed toward the point where their tolerance was compromised and you may fortify their tolerance because use a fuse their day with some sunlight absolutely so all these things work in both directions we can't say that stress and inflammation travel.

In social networks without acknowledging that.

gratification and contentment and equanimity also travel in social networks and you can be a source of any of those you can help.

Elevate other people's tolerances for stresses they may encounter and then they become an additional blocker.

And the probability of truly effective herd immunity where we stop propagating stress and inflammation in one another gets ever more realistic.

Dr.

David Katz, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for your work.

I'll be sure to link the paper in the show notes this episode for people who want to check it out.

But is there anything you'd like to leave the listeners with before we go, be it a final word or your social media?

Because again, you could be a positive effect on social media.

So anything you'd like to leave the listeners with in our closing here.

Sure, James.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I like to think that I am a positive influence.

I certainly try to be and aspire to be I We talked about my dogs along the way Every day I strive to be the person my dogs believe I So yeah, I mean the just just to close out first of all, thank you for finding the paper that there was no high probability That was ever gonna happen Thank you for the invitation and this conversation.

I'd simply close by noting i am a lifestyle medicine specialist and if we get the things right that we've been talking about so in particular dealing with stress and and managing inflammation but those other things i put on that list just now so physical activity getting diet right sleeping enough and so forth.

we could eliminate 80% or more of all the chronic disease in the world around us.

And just think what a stress relief that would be.

All the times that somebody we love succumbs to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, dementia.

Those are terrible days.

Those are tremendous sources of stress.

We actually know how to prevent that at least 80% of the time.

So you can reduce your own personal risk by 80% by getting this lifestyle formula right.

And you then become a source of light for the people around you.

You inevitably wind up paying it forward, because it's easier for other people connected to you to be active and eat well when that's what you do.

So we focus today on mental aspects and brain aspects and stress and inflammation.

But we're really talking about a fundamental formula for advancing the human condition, adding years to lives and adding life to years.

So by all means, start with yourself, focus on yourself, figure out what you need to address to achieve your best vitality, but understand how high is up.

The value proposition is truly incredible and inevitably, if you can become a master of this formula in whole or in part.

you wind up paying it forward to the people you love.

And maybe that's the greatest gift of all.

- Beautiful.

And do you have social media?

Is there somewhere you want people to go?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't want to take away from how beautiful what you just said was, but yes.

- Thanks.

Sure, so I have a primary website, which is kind of a hub to all things I'm involved in.

That's davidcatsmd.com.

My principal work is in the area of nutrition actually where I founded a company and you can learn more about that at dietid.com.

And James maybe you'll make this easier for people and post the links and then the one other thing I tried to do.

I believe in science.

I believe in the sensible interpretation of science, and I believe it's important to avoid the stressful conflict of he said, she said, by representing the global consensus of experts regarding the sensible interpretation of science.

So I created many years ago a nonprofit called the True Health Initiative.

It was all about bringing together disparate experts from countries all around the world.

We have about 50 countries represented.

To say to the public, we agree about the fundamentals of a health promoting lifestyle and diet that it, you know, it there isn't nearly as much conflict as you think and you don't have to choose this expert versus that expert.

This is 500 experts from 50 countries all coming together across a spectrum of activity to say we agree and you can learn more about that effort at truehealthinitiative.org.

Okay, thank you so much for that, Dr.

David Katz, and thank you again for your time today.

I really appreciate it, and I imagine my listeners do too.

Thank you, James, likewise.

And cut.

Okay, that was our interview with Dr.

David Katz here on Adventure to the Mind Episode 204.

The links that he mentioned there at the end will be included in the show notes of this episode at jameswjesso.com, which there will be a link to jump over to.

Yes, I'm trying to get you to go to my website.

Honestly, there's not really anything to sell on there or what, but I just put a lot of time into making stuff to go on the website.

So if you go over there, it also, I don't know, it really means something that you took a chance to check out the website that I built.

I'm pretty proud of it.

And I'll also include links to support the show if you'd like to do that.

Financial ways are mentioned in the middle there of the episode, and non-financial ways include any kind of social engagement on the internet as well.

You might know if you're following me, I'm kind of, you know, pretty critical of what the algorithm is doing to us as a species, as individuals, and I feel disgusted that I need to participate in it to try to grab and steal to trick your attention into engaging with this content.

I don't like that.

It disgusts me, and I try to avoid it as much as possible.

And so I get that these podcasts take more than just five seconds and a quick double tap to engage.

But if you even just want to give it a quick double tap, that does mean something.

You know, double tap like thumbs up subscriptions, all the rest.

It means something.

And I guess that's it.

You can follow me on those questionably ethical questionable ethically questionable platforms.

You can follow me on my newsletter I've got a couple of different options listed below Instagram, Blue Sky, LinkedIn Twitter, probably, Substack, eventually.

And it's all linked there, so go check it out in the description.

And I think that's it.

I don't talk about this much directly, but if you're ever looking for any integration coaching for psychedelic experiences, I offer that as a service.

Leave a link to that there too.

I'm actually about to be further upskilling my integration coaching capacity by participating the ICIRS integration course.

this year, which will help me have a better understanding of how to support people in acute crisis after disturbing psychedelic experiences.

It's got a pretty good handle on it, but hey, it never hurts to get better at supporting people.

I mean, unless you're...

codependent and erasing yourself in the process, in which case it would get, it would be better to get good at supporting yourself.

Anyways, I'm rambling because it's the end of the episode and I can just do that I suppose and you'll tune out when you tune out which I suppose you already either already have or you're about to because I'm ending the episode.

At the end of this episode, sorry at the end of the interview, this is the last thing I promise.

It was left with a sense of what we can do about this situation that we export in the interview.

I don't want that to be lost because I got swept up enjoying rambling at the end of the podcast, so I want to double down on that within each of us as a capacity to interrupt the spread of stress-induced inflammation as best we can.

And each of us are capable in some way or another.

I'm doing my best.

I bet you you're doing your best.

And hopefully at the end of this podcast, after this interview, you have an even more refined, more granular, more engaged, more aware sense.

of what our best might look like and why and how.

And that's it.

Thank you for tuning in all the way to this episode of Adventures Through The Mind.

I've been your host James W.

Jesso.

And until the next one, take care and stay curious.