Beyond Physical Health: A Cardiologist’s Whole-Person Guide to Wellness

Todd: [00:00:00] By the end of this episode, you’ll discover a cardiologist’s view of the role that the mind and emotions play for your physical health.

Todd: Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

Todd: In this episode, you’ll discover what Dr. Rosansky means by mental vitality and the role it plays in health, why emotions are key players in the growth of wellness, and how to transform emotions when they get stuck. This is an edition of Strategy [00:01:00] Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

Todd: This episode follows as part two of a special interview with Dr. Allen Rozanski. You’ll be, you’ll find part one in episode 1 92, uh, called Beyond Physical Health. A Cardiologist’s Whole Person Guide to Wellness for Highly Sensitive People. If you haven’t listened to the other episode yet, Dr. Rozanski, uh, has been a cardiologist and researcher in MINDBODY Medicine for over 40 years.

Todd: He has co authored over 300 peer reviewed medical articles, uh, and book chapters, many of which are regarded as seminal contributions in the field of medicine. During his long tenure at Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West Hospitals in New York City, he has served as professor of medicine, director of nuclear cardiology, and the leader of the [00:02:00] cardiology fellowship training program.

Todd: He also previously served as chief of cardiology. Dr. Rozanski brings a unique and holistic view of health. In the last episode, we gave an overview of Dr. Rozanski’s six domains of health, and we dove a little deeper into the domain of physical health. Today, we will look more closely at some of the other five domains of health, um, mental vitality, emotional mastery, social connectivity.

Todd: Purposeful living and stress management. And as we are diving into this, we’ll see how far we go and we may even break it up into another, uh, episode. So we’re going to take our time and really enjoy the content that Dr. Rosansky has to offer here. So, I’m grateful to have you back with us today, Dr.

Todd: Rosansky. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Rozanski: Thank you. My pleasure to be with you again. Thank you so much.

Todd: Yeah, you’re so welcome. It’s just great to connect, [00:03:00] and it’s just an exciting area to explore with you. So, um, since we already have a good overview of the six domains of health from the last episode, and we also looked at physical health, Uh, which is the first domain.

Todd: Let’s dive in and look at some of the other domains. And we’ll, in each of these, we’ll be looking at two main things. Again, the main research that provides evidence that the domain is important, as well as, um, some practical things we can do to improve health in that domain. So I think the next in order of, uh, of your Uh, the way you’ve set it up is mental vitality, is that right?

Todd: That’s correct. Okay, so tell me a little bit about mental vitality and what that means in relation to health.

Dr. Rozanski: Sure. Well, when you, anytime you get into the brain, into thinking and so forth, you got to be [00:04:00] careful to define your terms because there’s so many ways we can look at the complexity of how we think and so forth.

Dr. Rozanski: So basically the way I think of it is that mental vitality is the, um, uh, characteristic of the way you think, your mindsets and so forth, and how that promotes your sense of well being, your happiness, um, your attitudes, your behaviors. But also to think of the brain kind of like a muscle in a way. It’s not a muscle, obviously, it’s The collection of neural systems, but you know, we find that the brain works better when we attend to making sure we get enough rest, when we protect our focus, and when we nurture the variety that the brain likes to have.

Dr. Rozanski: So that’s also an aspect of that. So I break it up into those two parts. Now, why would I, as a cardiologist, be interested in, you know, mental vitality? You know, so we go back to, well, what’s the evidence that it’s a health domain? So here it’s, [00:05:00] it’s pretty profound. First of all, we see Going back now, I’d say, I’d say generations that there’s something about cardiologists which look at the head and the body, you know, the mind and the soul or the mind and the heart.

Dr. Rozanski: However you want to look at it. There’s a tradition of people who influenced me and so forth. And so it’s kind of interesting. In fact. The earliest work on personality and, um, and a lot of these areas was by, uh, two people, Roseman and Friedman, who developed something called the Type A behavior pattern, which was something years ago that people all knew what Type A is and Type B is.

Dr. Rozanski: The proposed Type A people were people who were competitive. Uh, they had a sense of time urgency, and there was a certain level of hostility that could be brought out in these people, so these are like hard driving people. And their initial research, they found that these people were more prone to heart disease.

Dr. Rozanski: Now, this was a certain complexity that when people looked at it [00:06:00] over time, it did not hold true. So, it’s kind of been kind of abandoned. But, the pattern of looking at hostility and chronic anger did hold true. pen out over time. When people just looked at that specific mindset, then that was, uh, that was, um, important in terms of people having a high risk for heart disease and, and other medical conditions.

Dr. Rozanski: So that was the beginning. But the big breakthrough was when people began to look at optimism versus pessimism. Uh, why that? First of all, by folklore, people have always been interested in the concept of hope and people who look at the glass half filled versus half empty. But the medical world didn’t begin to look at this till around the year 2000.

Dr. Rozanski: So it’s really kind of a new field. It was spurred by, um, Dr. Seligman in part where he started to look at optimism and pessimism in terms of one’s explanatory speaking style, how they explained events as being pervasive or being [00:07:00] tempered and so forth. But over time it gravitated into more looking at it as a, a certain characteristic thinking pattern.

Dr. Rozanski: Um, and we were able to develop. I mean, research is a, uh, a, uh, a scale. It’s called actually the life orientation, uh, test. Uh, and it revised a version of that had six basic items about optimism versus pessimism asking, for example, in uncertain times, I usually expect the best I’m always optimistic about the future.

Dr. Rozanski: on a pessimistic side. If something can go wrong for me, it will or I hardly ever expect things to go well for me. So it’s like a six point scale. Well, it turns out that this scale has been very reproducible over time. When you give people this scale, you find that people who score low on optimism, high in pessimism, have a higher rate of heart disease and a higher rate of cause of [00:08:00] mortality.

Dr. Rozanski: Now, this has been shown in Younger people, older people across countries, and meta analysis showed that there was a very substantial size, you know, size effect in terms of this, of this mindset. So this becomes, opens up, wait a second, it’s not just that thinking affects my quality of life and how I do, but it can actually affect, uh, my health and mechanisms have been worked out.

Dr. Rozanski: A lot of it is they affect that. Uh, and I think we discussed this on the first podcast. And when you look at all these domains of health that are not physical, they all affect the physical. In other words, people who are pessimistic, who are lonely, people who, um, have a low sense of purpose, uh, chronically stressed, they have poor health habits and less likely to exercise, more likely to go for the quick fix and so forth.

Dr. Rozanski: So that’s. One of the profound ways in which affects health and the other is actually direct [00:09:00] physiological effects when you have a high level of Negative thought patterns and negative emotions and so forth So those are the mechanisms by which this becomes an important health domain and become a target for improving The quality of your health as opposed to the quality of just your lifestyle

Todd: Yeah, yeah, I can see so clearly the connection between the body and the mind here.

Todd: You know, we’re talking about optimism versus pessimism. And, and we know it has an effect. Psychologically, we kind of feel it in everyday life. But to see that it actually affects your heart health and your overall health, not and also integrates with the other domains, uh, and can mess them up or can it.

Todd: uh, improve them if, uh, if it’s in a good place. So yeah, this is very interesting. So any other, um, any other kinds of research that’s been done on mental vitality [00:10:00] versus, uh, as it affects the body? Well,

Dr. Rozanski: sure. If you take, uh, these factors, let’s say, you know, and it’s, it’s hard to study the other mindsets.

Dr. Rozanski: For example, we don’t have a good mindset on people who feel a high level of regret. I think that there’s a tendency in some people to have excessive worry, excessive rumination, excessive regret, perfectionism. These are harder things to develop reliable skills for. But we see that when we look, for example, people who are pessimistic, there’s a much higher, or they should say higher, but in proportion to the magnitude of risk for depression over time.

Dr. Rozanski: So a ruminator. There’s somebody who would be at increased risk for depression. And then depression itself is a tremendous risk factor for illness. You find that when people get depressed, well, actually just about every physiological system of the body begins to go haywire. You start to develop more insulin resistance.[00:11:00]

Dr. Rozanski: autonomic dysfunction. Uh, the brain changes adversely in its plasticity. You get enlargement of the amygdala and actually some shrinkage of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex and, you know, immunological dysfunction and a much higher risk for heart disease and so forth. So not just looking at these factors in terms of their effects.

Dr. Rozanski: on heart outcomes, but looking at what leads to depression and so forth is also a clue as to what’s a health factor. But we have to emphasize the opposite. And this was not done for a long time. That when you look at the other end of the scale, people who are happier. actually have better health outcomes.

Dr. Rozanski: They have more resilience, they suffer less heart disease and so forth. So we want to work on being more happy or being more with more positive emotions and decrease the opposite. And so that has intrigued me for many years. And over time, I’ve thought about how can we [00:12:00] develop, you know, practical ways to help people on this, that become more than just Someone going, let’s say, to a therapist.

Dr. Rozanski: What can the individual do to, you know, work with this in terms of improving their own lifestyles?

Todd: Yeah, great. So what have you, what conclusions have you come to of what could be effective to help people move towards optimism, towards happiness, and maybe less in the depression or, or pessimistic side?

Dr. Rozanski: Sure. So, you know, just as background, When we look at people’s thinking patterns, and I venture into this with a little bit of caution because there’s so many ways to divide how we think and so forth, but I think people would agree that, first of all, there’s a certain temperament that people have, it tends to be genetic, anybody who’s had two or more children will realize that, you know, one child tends to be more calm and other more agitated or, you know, more, you know, uh, A bit [00:13:00] different personality types that these people have, that kids have.

Dr. Rozanski: And, uh, it’s so, I, I, I know someone who has 13 kids and said to me, It’s amazing how every single one of them is different. Amazing. Yeah. Everyone knows that, uncovering the temperament that a child has. And then on top of that, you overlay a person’s, personality, which is a little bit broader, but pretty consistent with people too, right?

Dr. Rozanski: You know that one person may be open minded, another less open minded. A certain person is more conscientious than another person. Another person’s more humorous. Some people tend to be more calm. Some people very sensitive. We’re talking about highly sensitive people, right? This is kind of like in the personality of a person.

Dr. Rozanski: And then you have a person’s character. So you’re going up the scale here. That’s also pretty stable in people, definitely more malleable as we go up the scale, there’s things that are more malleable. So, you know, our character traits involve [00:14:00] also behaviors we’ve modeled, let’s say, based on people who’ve influenced us, so that we’ve taken by choice and include things like compassion, integrity.

Dr. Rozanski: Patience, you know, these may be in things of, you know, definite choices you made in life to develop something in terms of a moral bent or in terms of a compassionate bent. And that is cooked into a person can be changed, but there’s things that we associate with people in terms of the character. And then you get to the area of mindsets, which are, you know, the attitudes and beliefs that people have, which, through which, they filter how they look at life and how they behave and how they feel.

Todd: So

Dr. Rozanski: optimism versus pessimism, you know, in other words, the ability to look at things at half full is half empty. That’s a mindset. Um, gratitude is a big one, right? It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a way you you can work on things. There’s many [00:15:00] types of mindsets. So I differentiate these between cognitive mindsets and more deep seated thought patterns, if you will.

Dr. Rozanski: The cognitive mindset is an area where, you know, I got work to do in this area, but I have to think about it intellectually and so forth, and I have to be consistent to change it. But still it’s something which is cognitive. It’s on a conscious level. It’s on an intellectual level, but when you get into more deep seated mindsets, let’s say someone who’s a ruminator, someone who worries excessively, someone who feels regretful excessively, this is where I think you have to say you have to go under the hood.

Dr. Rozanski: Because these things, these, these mindsets tend to be, uh, working in the subconscious, more automatic, more deep seated with a lot of emotional overlay. So there you have more work to do. So when you [00:16:00] take that differentiation, I’ll give you an analogy from my work as a cardiologist, and something I’ve had to work out over time is how do we approach people?

Dr. Rozanski: Let’s say you want to go from being sedentary to being physically active, but they’re not there. You know, and if I’m going to just tell a patient, well, you know, here’s the guidelines, 30 minutes, five times a week, you know, that’s, that’s what the guidelines say, just do it. People shut down because they don’t feel.

Dr. Rozanski: They can do that. So, you know, a smart cardiologist will work with the patient in terms of what we call self efficacy. What’s the thing that you think you can change? Begin with the easy and get on the playing field. So if you think of what I just said, temperaments, uh, personality, character traits, deep seated, Thinking patterns and cognitive mindsets.

Dr. Rozanski: The easiest place to start is with cognitive mindsets and say, what are things [00:17:00] that I don’t have a lot of resistance to, but I’m not there yet with it, but I want to change it and begin with that and then begin what we, what I call, you know, mindset work. You begin to change something and you feel better and you start to feel, wait, I’m learning things about how to change my mindsets.

Dr. Rozanski: I’m learning the concept of reframing. I’m learning the concept of, you know, being aware of my thinking and catching myself in the moment and saying, wait, I have a choice to keep thinking like this or change it. And then you can build out from that. So that’s, that’s kind of how I approach that.

Todd: I love it.

Todd: Yeah, you’re working with the most malleable part first and getting some wins and then you can go deeper. Yes, yes. Interesting.

Dr. Rozanski: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Todd: So, okay. So you mentioned reframing, you mentioned, um, I can’t remember what else. Um, if you like, there’s

Dr. Rozanski: many, many things [00:18:00] to do, you know, let’s take, let’s take gratitude, for example.

Dr. Rozanski: You know, if I’m going to start with a mindset, I would start with gratitude because generally speaking, nobody has a resistance to the concept. Everybody understands intellectually that, you know, this is good, you know, but it’s not so easy. Oh, and it’s profound in terms of you really get there. In other words, if you, what I mean by mindset, it’s not just, I feel grateful if something does.

Dr. Rozanski: Someone does something for me, but I feel I’ve become a grateful personality. It’s in my background. I naturally feel grateful. That’s what we want to get to, but it’s not easy. And I’ll tell you, it’s not easy for me. I mean, I’ve done, you know, work on gratitude for a while and on the scale, um, somewhere in the middle, you know, and that’s, that’s having talked about it.

Dr. Rozanski: And. And, uh, and cherished it, you know, uh, so it’s, it’s a process, but [00:19:00] what I mean when you do mindset work is you first have to work out why do I want to take this on? Why is this important? You know, so when you think about gratitude, you have to define it. You have to say, what, what do I mean by gratitude?

Dr. Rozanski: You know, yes, it’s feeling appreciation. for the good things in my life or feeling appreciation for what someone has done for me. But you have to go deeper. And I think one of the aspects, one of the tools for this sunset, what is the opposite of gratitude? The opposite of gratitude is a sense of entitlement that I feel entitled to the things I have.

Dr. Rozanski: I feel entitled to my health. You know, of course my eyes will work fine. My ears, you know, I can. Walk fine. You know, I don’t have any shoulder pain. Do we feel grateful for it? You know the we are built in to take what we have for granted and that’s not a knock on us It’s just the way we’re [00:20:00] built. I mean think about it.

Dr. Rozanski: You know you you’re if you have a young child you see that They have no perspective on what to be grateful for but I was thinking about it. So what changes at age 10? Or 20, you know, I mean, where are we doing that work on gratitude? We continue to take our blessings for granted until we experience contrast, you know, so that’s one of the aspects.

Dr. Rozanski: Another. challenge to it is, um, Dennis Prager wrote a book he called Happiness is a Serious Problem. And in it, there’s a chapter called The Missing Tile Syndrome. What’s that? He says, let’s say you went into the Palace of Versailles, and it’s an amazing sight to see all the gilded, you know, staircases, the old furniture.

Dr. Rozanski: And, but he said, let’s say you walk in there, but you’d see a tile missing on the ceiling. He says, where would your eyes go right away? We’re kind of built that way. [00:21:00] But here’s the thing. If you say, if you think about the entitlement, say, wait a second, was I really entitled to get into the city quickly today when I was driving?

Dr. Rozanski: You know, if a traffic accident occurred and everything got backed up, how are you going to feel? You’re going to feel frustrated. You’re going to feel resentful. You know, why did this happen? But what about the other 99 times when you got into the city right away? You don’t feel grateful for that. You know, the work of gratitude is to say, what am I feeling entitled to?

Dr. Rozanski: And then flip the switch and say, wait a second, what should I feel grateful for, you know, and see as a gift. Oh, wait a second. Hmm. I got to see that my health is a gift, that the fact that my eyes are working fine, that I don’t have any arthritis or, you know, other thing going on and feel that that’s a gift.

Dr. Rozanski: Now that is where to go. And the payoff is tremendous [00:22:00] because it is, I think, the most assured way to start to feel happy and resilient. You have perspective in life. And I think you know, we all have a certain level of that, but we can go much further with that. What’s the challenge? A, you got to work it out.

Dr. Rozanski: B, you know, there’s a certain consistency and persistence you have to do with it. Many of us have tried gratitude, you know, exercises before last year, I started a WhatsApp with my family and, you know, we said, okay, every day we’re each going to What’s that one thing we were grateful for and we did it for a couple of months and we were liking it.

Dr. Rozanski: Well, the third month it started to fall and in the fourth month it was gone, you know, so you gotta come back to it. Don’t get discouraged from it. You know, the problem is Gratitude is in that domain that we call quadrant two. I think we talked about that But if we didn’t, [00:23:00] you know with things are important, but not urgent.

Dr. Rozanski: We’re always falling back into what’s more immediate, what’s more urgent. So you have to have a good deal of intentionality and you can then work on mindset. So mindsets is where I would begin in terms of, of, uh, of this. And there’s many types of mindsets. You have mindsets about how you manage your time.

Dr. Rozanski: You have mindsets about how you, um, want to be in terms of, um, I distinguish between Teflon and Velcro. Do you want to be more of a Teflon personality or velcro personality. You want to be a person that, you know, things can bounce off of you and, or things stick to you, you know? So I think we want to be more Teflon, but then you have to say, well, wait a second, what’s the mindset work I need to do to get there?

Dr. Rozanski: And what are steps that I can work on to improve myself 1 percent and then 2 percent and then go from there.

Todd: I love it. I love it. Yeah. It’s, [00:24:00] um, I really appreciated when you said, uh, that the opposite of. Of grateful is entitled because I hadn’t really thought of that before but that is absolutely correct and We just take something for granted and then there’s no gratitude for it.

Todd: It’s just it’s just automatic So I love that as a starting place for a kind of practice where what am I? What am I feeling and what am I just taking for granted here? What am I feeling entitled about and then could I actually put my attention? And say and find gratitude for that. It’s a real turnaround of sorts that can, could really, um, I can see that really being a valuable practice and so, yeah, I think this is a, this is a rich area.

Todd: It also touches on some of the work that I love to do, which I, it’s called the work of Byron Katie, where we actually, um, start with sometimes stressful [00:25:00] situations and find. What’s good about them? Actually, it’s kind of ah, and it’s a process and it does tap into kind of feelings and almost on unconscious a bit.

Todd: But it it can shift the perspective. It can reframe and it can open the mind a lot. But you know, whether it really doesn’t matter what practice you do. It’s the idea of shifting attention from from One side to the other side. And, and I love that, um, that this can be something to put attention on. Uh, I think it’s something that if we do it can actually have a impact on not only our feeling of vitality, but on our physical health.

Dr. Rozanski: Well, what you say about Brian Katie and this concept of what can I find good in stress, which is a very Profound concept and maybe when we talk about the overall domain of stress management, we’ll get [00:26:00] into that in more detail, but it immediately brings to mind what I think is an important mindset, which is related to that concept, which is what I’d call making meaning mindset.

Dr. Rozanski: In other words, that you can choose, you can choose to take things which seem just like a frustration. was something that occurred and say, wait a second, I can choose to make some meaning out of this. Uh, I’ll tell you a story. Very, uh, very interesting story. Cause it was kind of recent in my mind. Um, my son called me, he had, uh, gone from his school.

Dr. Rozanski: to, he was going to go with his wife to a wedding and he leaves and he finds his car’s missing. Can’t find it. Look, he’s sure he parked it. After about five ten minutes, he calls the police and then he figured out that, you know, his car had been towed. because the registration had expired. Now, it was flagged because he actually parked his car in a place which was not legal.[00:27:00]

Dr. Rozanski: Okay. Anyway, he called me because he was, he was very frustrated. So how did I respond? Because he was calling for some consolation and so forth. So remarkably, something Similar to that occurred to me about, oh gosh, this goes back almost 30 years ago. What happened was I was moving from Los Angeles to New York, and I had to find an apartment within two weeks before my job started.

Dr. Rozanski: And after a few days, I figured, oh, I wanted this West Side apartment, you know, near the Hudson River. And I found, I was looking for, you know, a good view place, not something that was going to just overlook another building. And after all, I had been in a beautiful place in Los Angeles. So then in one morning I went and I found this apartment that was on the 12th floor overlooking the Hudson River.

Dr. Rozanski: But I’d heard also of another apartment overlooking Central Park. And I was very curious about that. And this apartment had been on, you know, on the block for a few weeks because Dorman had told me [00:28:00] that. And I walked over to the other apartment, saw it wasn’t appropriate and walked right back and it was gone.

Dr. Rozanski: Someone had walked in. doing that 25, 30 minutes and took, and I ended up in a prominent facing. you know, a, uh, whatever. So I called up a dear friend, uh, someone I looked up to as a role model because I was very, very, uh, very angry with myself and disappointed. And he said to me, well, Just make sure you get your tuition’s worth from the experience.

Dr. Rozanski: And I have to tell you, when he said that, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t feel consoled by it, but somehow, it’s stuck in my brain. Get your tuition’s worth from it. You know? I didn’t come to the realization till later, that wait a second, this is a way to look at something that happened.

Dr. Rozanski: Okay, this happened. Oh man, I don’t [00:29:00] know what it’s going to be, but I’m determined to get my tuition’s worth from this.

Todd: Hmm.

Dr. Rozanski: And then I learned that I started to integrate that into my life prospectively. When things wouldn’t go well, I’d say, well, you know, either I’d look for a, you know, some meaning in it, or I would think about using it as motivation to create meaning.

Dr. Rozanski: So now when my son called me, you know, of course I, you know, sympathize what happened, but I told him, you know, please make sure you get your tuitions worth from this situation. What are you talking about? Now, what I’d called this, this mentor years earlier, he hadn’t kind of explained it to me, but I’d worked it out in my head and I explained it to my son and I hope he will use it prospectively.

Dr. Rozanski: So that is the concept of. Make, you know, meeting making would became a mindset in my mind, but it didn’t come overnight. It came by working on it and, you know, reaching out to the, [00:30:00] to this person was an example of something I also do as a mindset that I look for help. I look to reach out to people when I feel like Something’s not making sense when I’m feeling more frustrated or anxious than I think I should feel and so forth.

Dr. Rozanski: So it’s, it’s very simple, similar to this, you know, finding the good in a stressful, maybe it’s the same thing. Actually, I think it’s the same thing, right?

Todd: I think so. I think so. Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t have to look a particular way to be the same essence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah. Okay, great. So, this um, I’m, I’m sure there’s more.

Todd: Obviously, we could probably spend a lifetime in this one domain alone. Mental vitality is uh, super important. Right. And there’s a lot that can be done. Is there anything else you’d like to add? Yeah, I think

Dr. Rozanski: we should come back to the other side of it, you know, because I mentioned there’s a side to it where you’re treating the brain like a muscle.

Todd: Okay. Yeah. And what

Dr. Rozanski: you want to [00:31:00] do there is you want to think about it. You know, first of all, making sure that you protect your ability to focus, you know, we live in a generation where that has become an issue in a way it hasn’t been before, because we can get easily distracted, you know, we could call it the scrolling generation and so forth.

Dr. Rozanski: And, you know, we’re always getting pop ups, we’re always getting texts, you know, people can get at us many different ways and also multitasking has become popular and yet. When we can focus and tune out the distractions, we have more peace of mind in a sense because peace of mind isn’t just about not having worry and so forth.

Dr. Rozanski: Peace of mind is also letting the mind do its work without the distractions. And the analogy I use is between a laser and a candescent light. See lasers are, you know, one, one monochrome, right? It’s, it’s, it’s green, coherent. It’s very focused and it can cut through tissue, right? [00:32:00] And concent light is all of the different parts, and it provides light, but it doesn’t have that energetic ability, and that’s the value of focus.

Dr. Rozanski: So you really have to work on your focus, protecting that and say, wait a second, how can I. You know, create zones of time where I’m not going to be interrupted, you know, and, and, and the techniques are obvious. For example, turning off your cell phone, you know, uh, there’s, there’s many different things that people can do.

Dr. Rozanski: So I don’t think we need to run through that. So that’s number one. Number two is the mind kind of likes variety. You know, when we are doing the same thing all day long, what happens is we start to lose steam. And very often, we don’t understand that we’re losing the steam. It’s not like, you know, a muscles that are working out and you can’t do it anymore.

Dr. Rozanski: You’re running, you can’t do it anymore. We start to lose the steam, but we don’t necessarily notice it. So the mind thrives on variety coming, you know, [00:33:00] to do different things. Now we can understand that easily. Let’s say you’re doing some work. Cognitive work in your job. It doesn’t mean that variety has to be that all of a sudden you’re turning on music or, or whatever it turns, if you can change your focus.

Dr. Rozanski: to something else. Let’s say something you enjoy. You know, something that you’ve wanted to work on that isn’t part of your job. Maybe, maybe you’re writing a journal or something and just changing your focus makes your mind more energetic again. Then you can come back to the first thing you have to think about in terms of your day, how to build in some variety in terms of the things you’re doing.

Dr. Rozanski: And then the mind needs rest to, you know, we have limited willpower and so forth. And so people are high performers. These are All these different techniques have now been developed where I’m going to work for 45 minutes hard or 90 minutes, but I’m going to have a 10 minute break and then go back. You know, um, sleep is a paradigm there too, right?

Dr. Rozanski: I mean, we don’t [00:34:00] think as good as when we don’t sleep well, sometimes a strategic nap. So people have to realize for themselves what their, um, what works for them. And, uh, and, uh, but make sure that you protect your focus, that you are having some variety built into your day and that you give your mind some rest.

Dr. Rozanski: Those are things to nurture mental vitality as well.

Todd: Fantastic. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I really see the contrast now between the, the positive mindset work and that kind of work we were talking about at first, and then just, just strengthening the muscle, if you will, um, for providing the right environment for the, the mind to thrive, which is taking care of it.

Todd: Right. It doesn’t do well when it’s, uh, when there’s multitasking. Um, you know, I, for one, I have worked with a mentor some years ago and he just said, turn off all your notifications and pop ups on your computer. And I did it. And it’s just like, it’s [00:35:00] wonderful. I’m just focused during the time that I’m focused, but I love the idea of breaks.

Todd: Um, and I’m thinking you can even throw in the physical breaks like that, that, um, uh, exercise snack idea that you mentioned.

Dr. Rozanski: Absolutely. Absolutely. A little

Todd: variety in your day. Um, and it also takes care of the physical. Yeah. Yeah. Really cool. Really cool. Yes. Okay. So let’s look at the next domain then. So I think that one is emotional mastery.

Todd: Is that right? Emotional mastery. Yes. Okay. What do you mean by that? And how is that different from mental vitality?

Dr. Rozanski: Well, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap because our thoughts lead to a lot of emotions. But it’s bi directional. Our emotions can also affect our thinking. And our emotions are often bio physical.

Dr. Rozanski: You know, there was a, uh, Robert Thayer was a, uh, a psychologist who, in the 1970s, did very [00:36:00] classic work. He took individuals, in those days they didn’t have some of the sophisticated tools we have today, but he had these individuals wear beepers. And at the time that the beeper went off, people had to record what they were doing.

Dr. Rozanski: what they were feeling and what their energy level was, like how energetic did they feel in the tension level. And what he looked at is he, this was kind of like rough, but he divided people into times when they reported being common, energetic, common, tired, tense, and energetic, or tense energy and tense and tired.

Dr. Rozanski: And when he looked at The other aspects here, what were they doing at the time and how were they feeling? He found that the majority of let’s say what we’d call quick fix behaviors in terms of like reaching for the cigarette or a candy bar, turning on television, all that kind of stuff. occurred when people were feeling both tense and tired.

Dr. Rozanski: Okay. [00:37:00] So then the question is how did people feel when they were tense and energetic? Did it look more like a common energetic or did it look more like tense and tired? And what he found was lo and behold, that when you were tense but energetic, you were doing pretty good. Maybe there was a little more tension, but you weren’t doing all the quick fix behaviors and not much of it and so forth.

Dr. Rozanski: So in other words, it turns out that, you know, energy trumps tension. In other words, we handle our emotions better. We handle our frustrations better when we feel energetic. Okay. So this is profound because you think about sometimes when a problem is looming, when do you want to solve it? Most is also when you’re feeling, you know, uh, down from it down and out, you know, and that sometimes the role there is to say, wait a second, maybe I shouldn’t trust my energy, my [00:38:00] tent, my thinking so much now because I’m in a more constricted place.

Dr. Rozanski: And I’m more likely to be more touchy and less patient and so forth. Let me get to a better place, uh, good night’s rest and so forth. Don’t have an argument with your partner late at night when you’re not up for it. It’s not the best

Todd: time,

Dr. Rozanski: you know? So, uh, at least in my opinion. So this is an example where it’s, there’s the bidirectionality, you know, our thinking and our emotions.

Dr. Rozanski: It’s not just our thinking affects our emotions, but you can go the other way as well.

Todd: Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Rozanski: Yeah.

Todd: When you, when you compare, like, would you say that, um, calm, like calm and energetic would be the ideal place to be in? Or is it, is it, um, just to understand, like, tense and energetic is not too bad. It’s kind of what I’m saying, like what I’m hearing, as opposed to [00:39:00] tense and, uh, and Um, Not energetic.

Todd: Tense and tired is probably the least favorable. I use it as

Dr. Rozanski: a general paradigm for, you know, the principle I just, you know, was trying to explain. Common energetic is a very pleasurable state for people. It’s kind of comparable to this whole concept of flow. You know, where, you know, people get into something that they’re doing that’s in their zone without distractions, time stops, and they feel like it could be doing that forever.

Dr. Rozanski: Flow and calm energy is not the same thing per se, but there’s a, there’s, there’s an analogy between the two of them. In other words, there’s this really feel good feeling. When we’re feeling calm and energetic, life isn’t like that. Life is, you know, full of, of all the things we have to do during the day.

Dr. Rozanski: And there’s often a lot of tension and so forth. So part of it is working on, you know, our energy level. And by the way, this is why, you [00:40:00] know. What you eat and you, whether you’re exercising and feeling fit and getting enough sleep is all important because you’re keeping your energy level up and energy is important and also paying attention to the cues of your body, you know?

Dr. Rozanski: So say, wait a second, I got to go through this thing, but you know what? I really would benefit from 15 minutes of a break or a power nap or things like that. So that’s one of the tools in terms of emotional mastery. So emotional mastery is. really about using our emotions in the way that they can really serve us, instead of us being dominated by our emotions.

Dr. Rozanski: So it’s in other words, being able to get into more positive mindsets, being able to deal with negative mindsets, being able to shorten the duration of a negative mindset, because we’re generally better when we’re in a positive state of emotional well being, but it’s also using emotions to connect with people and to [00:41:00] enrich relationships.

Dr. Rozanski: So there’s many aspects to emotional mastery, but overall there’s a lot of tools to develop and use in terms of becoming that master.

Todd: Okay. Okay. So, um, tell me if you, about some of those tools, what, what are, have you found to be useful and what have you seen to be useful?

Dr. Rozanski: So again, here you can go from easier to more difficult and so forth, but you know, just as we might promulgate being aware of our thinking as giving us choice into how we want to manipulate our thinking, you know, People often are so busy during the day that they’re not aware of the emotions they’re in.

Dr. Rozanski: They’re not aware that their anger’s bubbling up, or they’re feeling more frustrated, or they’re feeling a bit down, and they’re just accepting it and saying, Wait a second, this emotion, emotions are information. They provide us with clues in terms of [00:42:00] how our overall being is, is feeling and doing. But when we’re so distracted, when we’re so into the things we’re doing, we often just let it be in the background instead of being information that could be used.

Dr. Rozanski: So part of this is learning just to be able to stop and be aware of your emotions. It’s a whole talent you have to develop. And again, you start with 1%. You know, start with, you know, just say, Hey, wait, you know, I’m going to, you can just set your, your, your, your cell phone to go off at 4 p. m. Or maybe twice a day and say, Hey, how am I feeling right now?

Dr. Rozanski: And get into the practice of noticing how you’re feeling. Okay, once you have awareness of your thoughts and emotions, now you have a say so in whether you want to deal with that. Now, one of the absolute key traits for anybody dealing either with what we’re talking about mindset work or in terms of emotional mastery is the ability to reframe.

Dr. Rozanski: learning how to [00:43:00] reframe, which is being, you know, which has levels to it. The first level of reframing, well, reframing is something that is a huge part, for example, of cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, that, that therapists are using, and it’s a very powerful technique, but it’s something available to all of us.

Dr. Rozanski: And we don’t need to go to a therapist to learn it. If sometimes you do sometimes, particularly if it’s a significant the entrenched thinking or emotional pattern that you’re having trouble dealing with, uh, as I mentioned, rumination or people who are suffering from a high degree of perfectionism or worry or things like that.

Dr. Rozanski: But basically the first level in dealing with reframing is to just recognize, wait, catch your thinking. Catch your emotions and say, wait a second. The thoughts I’m having at the moment are just the thoughts I’m having. It’s not necessarily reality. It’s just the way I’m thinking. See, so often we are more [00:44:00] prone to thinking it is the way I’m thinking.

Dr. Rozanski: That’s how things are. No, no, it’s, it’s, it is your thinking, yeah, and a lot of it is things you’re very sure of and how correct, you know, if you, you know, there’s principles that can guide us. But a lot of our thinking is things that we’re thinking, which are not necessarily so, but we live in terms of it as reality.

Dr. Rozanski: So you want to develop the muscle, which says, Hey, wait a second. Number one is I realized that this is just the way I’m thinking. Number two is to then say, can I reframe this in another way? Yeah. Now, when you’re not used to it, reframing is like trying to swing a, at a baseball when you’re a seven or eight year old.

Dr. Rozanski: You’re not necessarily so good at it at first, but you keep coming back to it every day. You get better at it. So you want to develop the ability to just say, I can create other reframes for this. Yeah.

Todd: You know, so you

Dr. Rozanski: do that. Then the third step is, now [00:45:00] of these reframes, what’s a credible reframe? In other words, you learn how to reframe, but now you say, what, what sounds credible?

Dr. Rozanski: This feels like this could be true. You know, it’s like when you’re shooting the ball at the basket, this one went in, you know, this one’s going to go in because it’s credible. So it’s just, we develop that over time. We learn how to reframe certain things and we all learn how to do this better as we get older.

Dr. Rozanski: This is one of the reasons why older people are wiser people because you’ve learned through life experience to, you know, See things in a way you didn’t used to see them, you know, and you’ve learned to reframe things and let things bounce off of you in a way when your younger self couldn’t do it, you know, but we can take this on as a practice.

Dr. Rozanski: And that’s one way to, to develop emotional mastery because as you develop, you replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, then you’ve, you know, [00:46:00] created negative emotions that follow them with positive ones. You know,

Todd: that’s it. That’s it.

Dr. Rozanski: Taking that one step further is to say. You know, what are the negative emotional generators in my life?

Dr. Rozanski: We all have one or more of those areas. Everybody deals with something. Either a tendency to worry, you know, be pessimistic, to be regretful or whatever. And this is where often you have to go under the hood. And you have to see what, what is there underneath here that is a, pattern that I get stuck in this.

Dr. Rozanski: And very often here, you do need the help of somebody else, you know, again, not necessarily a therapist, but someone wiser, a mentor, someone who can work through the areas where you’re stuck. But just to identify, this is an area I have to work on and move it from quadrant two, which is, you know, something in the future to something that I want to work now, what’s [00:47:00] something I can put into even my calendar that I’m going to work on this is a way to.

Dr. Rozanski: to deal with this. Uh, working on, you know, even being aware of, let’s say certain things to trigger you to get into a negative emotional pattern. Well, there’s utility in understanding that and to avoid the trigger, right? I mean, it’s, it’s, so that works for some people, some people journaling helps, you know, in other words, emotions are raw and you know, they’re, they’re free floating.

Dr. Rozanski: The minute you begin to journal and you bring your intellect into the emotion, you’re cooling off the emotion,

Todd: you know,

Dr. Rozanski: so that’s, that’s interesting. And then I would say, um, the role, all of the Things coming back to last week, all of the physical pillars of health, exercise, resistance training, diet, and sleep are great ways to help [00:48:00] deal with your emotions as well.

Dr. Rozanski: You know, if you look at exercise, it’s profound. The data, uh, my friend Jim Blumenthal was the, uh, creator of three randomized prospective studies. NIH. sponsored studies where they took people with depression and they randomized them to an exercise training program versus receiving an antidepressant and they followed them over the course of 12 weeks and it was reproducible in all three studies that you had a comparable reduction in depression with exercise and with you know, the use of an antidepressant medication.

Dr. Rozanski: Now, uh, that’s not to say that there isn’t a role for antidepressant medication and these were controlled studies. Um, so there’s always, you have to be careful to analogize, but there’s a lot of studies that show that if you look within communities, There’s a lower rate of depression among people who are physically active.

Dr. Rozanski: If you look at longitudinal studies, there’s also [00:49:00] evidence that shows that people who were exercising over time developed a lower rate of depression.

Todd: You know,

Dr. Rozanski: there’s a new field called nutritional psychiatry, which is beginning to look at the effects of nutrition. on our emotions and so forth. And here I have to say, you know, for a person, I find for myself, I am in a different mood sometimes based on what I eat, you know, I’ve taken cognizance of that.

Dr. Rozanski: And I think that’s pretty well accepted empirically. So work with that with yourself and notice and so forth. So that’s a way to deal with emotions as well. Of course, sleep’s a big one, right? That one, I don’t have to prove to anybody.

Todd: Yeah. So it’s like you can approach it from both sides. You can approach it from the physical side and that helps emotion, or you can approach it from the mental side and that helps emotion.

Todd: Um, you can, you can let the emotions themselves guide you because their [00:50:00] information, like these. I’m really starting to see how these domains are interconnected and how improving one starts to improve the other. And it’s just a matter of starting somewhere, uh, I think more than anything.

Dr. Rozanski: That is bingo.

Dr. Rozanski: That is exactly right. You know, it’s to separate the body from the mind and the emotions and these other domains of health is a very reductionist way to understand how we operate. You can’t separate them. So, you know, if we embrace that they’re interrelated, it gives you tools to work on any one of these domains and it gives you entree points to all of this.

Dr. Rozanski: So, um, that’s exactly correct.

Todd: Yeah, I like like you said earlier, just get on the playing field, you know, just just to get started in something can can get the ball rolling.

Dr. Rozanski: That’s correct. That’s that’s how you build 1 percent improvement. And that’s why I started off back with. mental [00:51:00] vitality, breaking that up the way I did so that to get at the most malleable part, which were cognitive mindsets, you know, and then that becomes fun then because you see, wait, there’s an area I can change and now I can improve from there.

Todd: Absolutely. Okay. So that. covers a couple more domains, mental vitality and emotional mastery. And I think we’ll break here and then that leaves us social connectivity, purposeful living and stress management for another episode. So thanks again for being here, Dr. Verzanski. It’s just, uh, I love hearing your perspective, not only as a human being, but also as a cardiologist and as a researcher.

Todd: It’s like the. The uniqueness of all three of those together is, uh, is very compelling. So thank you so

Dr. Rozanski: much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Todd: In this episode, we looked at what Dr. [00:52:00] Rodzanski means by mental vitality and the role it plays in health. And he really means two different things, cultivating positive mental habits, um, and keeping a positive mindset.

Todd: So positive habits, mental habits, are like. Uh, focusing and staying, uh, not giving yourself mental breaks and pacing yourself and those kinds of things. And having a positive mindset means more like optimism, uh, uh, gratitude, open mindedness, uh, that kind of thing. We also looked at why emotions are key players in the growth of wellness.

Todd: And, uh, he, I love this idea that emotions, negative emotions, are actually good things. They tell us of things that need attention or change. And they can provide insight into, uh, what we’re, what we’re really wanting or things to know about ourselves. They can be a window [00:53:00] inward. But it’s also important to have the idea of If possible, increasing the ratio of positive emotions in our life, uh, because joy is such an important, uh, thing for all of us.

Todd: So finally, we looked at how can you transform emotions when they get stuck, and one of the things he mentioned is reframing, looking at a situation from different angles. Um, as you know, this is something we do in the work of Byron Katie very, very much. It’s at the core of that. Um, and there are other things, even gratitude as a practice can be super helpful for Just transforming our awareness from some place where we’re feeling negative to positive.

Todd: And my favorite takeaway was that, that, um, the opposite of gratitude is entitlement. So just notice where you’re entitled. and see if you can find gratitude [00:54:00] instead. So thanks for listening. It’s always a pleasure to be with you, and it’s been a pleasure speaking with Dr. Rozanski, and we will continue. We have two more sessions with him the next two Fridays for our Strategy Fridays.

Todd: We’ll be continuing Rozanski first about the, um, the domains of The, uh, social connectivity and purposeful living and then finally the domain of stress management. So be sure to check those out and in the meantime, thanks again for listening and have a great rest of your day. And by the way, if you want to listen to or read more about Dr.

Todd: Rozansky, Go to alan rozanski.com. That’s one L and a z, uh, in Rozanski,

Todd: dreaming of a stress-free balanced life. Visit [00:55:00] true inner freedom.com and complete the HSP stress survey game. Clarity on your stress triggers. And enjoy a free 15 minute inner freedom call designed to guide you towards lasting inner peace and fulfillment.