Author Kathleen Hall sits down with Dr. Oz in intimate interview detailing what she calls “The Four Roots” of ultimate happiness. Kathleen credits her amazing life lessons from following the Dalai Llama and studying with world-renowned medical experts, to even living alone in a cabin in the woods for a year in order to fully understand the deep roots of joy and applying them to your everyday life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My point is, when you wake up in the morning, before you get out of bed, take a deep breath and go, okay, I know these are the four roots of my life.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
I'm Unfortunately for a lot of Americans, although they are pretty willing to acknowledge that stress is a problem, they're not willing to acknowledge how much of a problem it really is in their lives.
Let me just say as a medical doctor, putting that hat on for a second, that one of the things that we know is associated with aging, in fact it's one of the three agers, the arresting of your arteries, weakening of the immune response, and an inability to deal with the environment, which is basically stress.
Stress comes in many forms.
A thousand years ago, it was starvation.
Today, it's being late for a deadline or making too much out of nothing.
But it is a reality that many of us have a difficult time with stress.
And the first response to a lot of folks is to run away from it.
But I'm hoping today we can talk a little bit about how you respond to stress, because that's really where the winning logic lies.
And Dr. Kathleen Hall has written a book called A Life in Balance, Nourishing the Four Roots of True Happiness.
She's founder and director of the Stress Institute.
It's a great name for an institute, by the way.
I'm surprised it wasn't taken already, Kathleen.
I know, I was too.
That's how I knew it was a sign.
I believe in all those signs and all that stuff.
She offers us simple methods for reducing stress and living the balanced life.
Trained at Jackson State, she studied with the Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, President Carter, who's from your hometown of Atlanta, is that right?
Absolutely.
Got some great stuff coming out of there.
Do you ever go peanut farming with them or anything like that?
No, but actually my husband is seven miles, his whole family is seven miles from Jimmy Carter's family in South Georgia.
Oh, is that right?
Absolutely.
So I've spent a lot of time down in Plains, Georgia.
Dr. Hall's advice has been on all national media.
She's done every program you can imagine.
And in addition, her book, A Life in Balance, won the 2007 Nautilus Book Award.
So you live in a horse ranch.
You maintain a bird sanctuary.
Oliver, our now eight-year-old, and I rescued a bird last weekend from one of the cats.
And it had a broken wing, so we took it upstairs.
And after spending most of the evening, if I'd known, I would have probably pretended I didn't see it.
But most of the evening, nursing it back.
He was driven off to a bird sanctuary where they rescued the bird.
How do you actually help an animal that's been rescued?
What does that mean?
Well, it's all different kinds.
We live next to a million acres of national forest, so we live really in the wild.
So we rescue everything from fawns to...
I rescued a hummingbird.
As a matter of fact, the other day I went to saddle my horse and I saw something in the corner of the straw and it was a little hummingbird.
And I picked it up and couldn't figure out what had happened to it.
So I raced over to my office and I do heart palpitations.
I have a teeny tiny straw that I use.
My husband happens to be a gastroenterologist.
My daughter's a critical care doc.
So we have all kinds of equipment.
So I'm a para-doc, a para-vet.
And so anyway, I got her little mouth open and put a little red sugar water and she laid there and I kept doing palpitations and kept breathing into her for five minutes, no response.
And then I did Reiki on her for about five minutes and then all of a sudden that little tiny red tongue came out of her mouth.
And I just, you know, almost came apart, but I kept my little palpitations and kept blowing in her mouth.
And then all of a sudden, five minutes later, her one eye opened and then her head twisted.
And I swear to God, the universe opened up for me.
I just, I couldn't believe it.
So anyway, long story short, back to practicality.
I went and got the laundry basket.
Put it over her, let her get ready for about two hours, and then I released her into the woods.
But I want to tell you, she went out into the woods, Dr. Oz.
Five minutes later, I'm sitting there fixing to go back into the house, and she came back three feet from my face, twiddled those little wings, looked at me, tilted her head, and went off into that national forest, and I shall never forget it.
So you said you're actually doing chest compressions on the bird?
Yeah.
You have to do them very light, very, very, very, very soft.
Absolutely.
Oh, sure.
I do it on all the animals.
I had a fawn the other day that got attacked by the dogs.
We rescue dogs.
I have as many as 20 and 25 at a time, 15 cats, 60 horses.
It's a zoo up there.
And what we do is it's in the woods, so a lot of the animals get shot by people.
They get hit by cars.
So we work with the University of Georgia, go over.
But then when we bring them back, a lot of them have like two casts on or something.
So we have Ziploc bags.
And let me tell you, after 32 years of marriage, what my husband and I do at night is we get Minnie Mouse pull-ups and Jim takes a knife and puts holes in for the tails.
And we put them in the laundry basket for our incontinent dogs because we have some that are unadoptable.
So yeah, it's a life.
It's a life, okay?
And it's less stress.
It is.
We love it.
We love what we do.
Before we get back on stress, I'm curious about these rescue habitats.
There must be some animals that aren't salvageable.
What do you do then?
Well, as a matter of fact, I built a cemetery.
I went and got myself a seven-foot angel.
She's absolutely, well, it's androgynous, but I call her a she.
And so I have this huge pet cemetery, and I have a great relationship with the crematorium close to us.
And so I have God knows anywhere from maybe a hundred and some pets up there.
And we all have services and all that kind of stuff.
It's at the peak of the mountain where we live.
So what I did was, when I was doing my doctoral work, I spent a lot of time with Aboriginal tribes and also stayed in Buddhist monasteries, Taoist and Christian monasteries.
And I realized that every single place that I went to, they all had a cemetery.
They believed that the souls wanted to rest there.
So I came back and told my husband, I said, well, I know you think that I built the stables and guest houses, that I built the learning center, 10,000 square feet and blah, blah, blah.
He said, you don't want to build anything else.
I said, Yes, we have to have a cemetery.
And of course, you know, he lost, he's going bald living with me after 32 years.
But you know, hey, it's love.
What can you say?
I love the shiny head.
So walk me through how you got involved.
I mean, most folks are interested in stress a little bit, but a lot of us don't spend our lives becoming experts at it.
I came from a very afflictive family, very violent, alcoholic, and I was quite bright, and I was the oldest.
And so what I did was I let stress drive me, meaning I said, I'm going to get an education, I'm going to know money, I'm going to control the world, and I did.
I worked with a Wall Street firm, was a venture capitalist, lots of money.
My mink cones matched my cars.
I mean, I went the whole over-the-top way.
And then one day I had a panic attack, and I couldn't overrun the stress anymore.
So I literally had this huge panic attack and I saw people that were becoming alcoholics.
I saw people that were going through serial marriages.
I saw people that were handling stress in very profoundly bad ways.
And I said, you know what?
This is intriguing.
I am bright.
I'm healthy and everything.
But this panic attack has stopped my life as I've known it.
So, at the same time, Bill Moyer had just done a, and I don't know if you remember this, Dr. Oz, if you're old enough to remember, it was called Healing in the Mind.
He did a series for PBS. Oh, I know of him very well.
Okay, and Dr. Dean Ornish at the Preventive Medicine Institute, the pioneering cardiovascular person was there, and Herb Benson up at Harvard, who was there.
I was doing hypertension studies.
Jon Kabat-Zinn was at UMass.
Naomi Raymond was out at Commonweal studying cancer and stress.
And Dr. Nicholas Hall was the psychoneuroimmunologist.
So what I did was I quit Wall Street.
I went and bought a 300-acre farm, and there was a cabin on it.
And I made a list of the 10 things that I was most afraid of that I thought could be causing my panic attack.
And I said, I will face every one of these monsters, demons, whatever you want to call it.
And as I did, I watched that program and I said, the mind-body connection is where it is.
I think it's going to be the future of medicine.
Again, being married to a physician and I ran a hospital at one point.
That's how my husband and I met.
And then my daughter at a young age became very interested in science and physics.
So I said, this is really the future.
And I was fascinated with spirituality.
So that's kind of how the love affair was born.
I called every single person in the series, everybody from Dean Ornish to Jon Kabat-Zinn to everybody.
And I spent four years doing clinical trainings where I would learn how stress at the symptom reduction clinic at Harvard, how you could get over insomnia, infertility, hypertension, you name it.
And so I got fascinated with it.
And then I would go stay with tribes like the Hopi, the Navajo, the Tlingits, the Athabascans.
And then I would watch shaman and different people handle as opposed to the way that my husband and regular traditional medical doctors handled depression, handled stress, handled anxiety, handled disorientation with your spiritual life, meaningless.
The way that they handled, this is what I love, the way they handle the stages of life.
They look at life like seasons.
So you have the season of your youth and then you get married and then you have babies.
And then you have those tween years where your kids are 10 and 12 and 13.
Then you have empty nests.
And then you have this boomer stage.
And in tribes, each one was almost glorified.
And I was coming back into the Western world where each one almost became like a more stressful curse.
And so I was fascinated with our mental and spiritual psychological construct of health in our country.
So if I could, Kathleen, I'm just curious about the Life and Balance book you wrote.
Let's start off by talking about some specific things that folks should know when they think about stress.
And I'm looking for a construct, a way of describing how we should deal with stress.
And you've done it very beautifully.
That's a little different from how a lot of folks wander into it.
Because a lot of us give kitchen advice.
We thought about it for a few seconds.
And we say, oh, you know, just don't worry about it.
It'll be okay.
And as you go further and further into the deeper stresses that cause the breakdowns that you were alluding to, the ones that I see frequently in practice, these people are in need of more than just a little pat on the shoulder.
So give an idea, for example, how you define self.
Let's just start with that issue at all.
Self is, to me, it's your soul.
And Carl Jung talks about the self.
And when he talks about the soul of the self, Carl Jung, of course, who's the famous psychoanalyst, he talks about the lowercase self, lowercase S-E-L-F, and what our life is about from the time of our conception, the time we incarnate, until the time that we transition and die, is about the lowercase S-E-L-F evolving into the capital S-E-L-F, the divine and holy self.
And that's what the purpose of our life is.
That's what this transformation and this journey is all about.
And it is suffering, meaning I love the Dalai Lama.
I love the four noble truths.
And the first noble truth is life is suffering.
I don't care who you are.
From the minute you are conceived and in your mother's womb, you find out that there's only so much room.
Then you come out of that wonderful dark path and then you get smacked or you take your first breath So it's not a bad thing.
It's how you negotiate it.
And that's why it's caused by your cravings and attachments.
If you're not attached to the cars and things that I used to be attached to, and you can detach, you can be pretty darn happy.
So anyway, what I learned was that people get dismantled.
Their whole lives go off the road.
They lose their way with stress.
Instead of seeing it, this is what I found.
This is what I know after living in the woods for 20 years and living for a long time of it, Dr. Oz, in a cabin with no plumbing.
I literally went to the opposite of my house next to the governor's mansion on West Paces Fair in Atlanta.
I literally went to a cabin with no water, no heat, no nothing.
Did they have showers there?
No.
No, no.
We had a rain barrel and there was a creek with a spring where I put the milk and the melons and anything that was cold, the orange juice, and had to walk down every day.
No, I was committed, meaning I had read every work of Emerson.
Every work of Thoreau during the Transcendentalists.
And I said, this is the way through.
This is the way through meaning and living an intentional life.
And I will not take a shortcut.
Now, this took some negotiating with my husband.
Yeah, I was going to say, how'd you get him to go along with the program?
And remember, I've got two kids.
So I've got two small children and a husband.
And he had a practice, I assume.
And he has a huge practice.
Massive practice.
So how'd you get him to move to the woods?
No, he didn't move to the woods, dear.
Oh, you moved without him.
Yes, yes.
So what I said was, it was an hour north of Atlanta.
So I said, here's the deal.
You can have me one-fourth sane, one-tenth sane for the rest of your life or however long this tenuous marriage lasts.
Or you can release me like a bird into the wilderness knowing that I'll return, but I have to ferret out, just like Emerson and Thoreau.
I must ferret out who I am.
I mean, I profoundly had a...
I'm very serious.
This was a profound calling.
And I felt like Emerson and Thoreau were, from the last century, calling me too.
Seriously.
So I did.
I went to the woods and lived deliberately.
Cut wood.
Worked with a neighbor man down the road.
He taught me about electricity.
Another thing I was afraid of, I was afraid of horses and large animals.
I had been so abused as a child.
We got into the horse business.
At one point, I was foaling out 20 mares a year.
And for those of us who have had stress problems and have phobic attacks, let me tell you, if you want to get over it, sit at the rear end of a 1,300-pound mare that's been in labor for about an hour and a half, laying in the straw, groaning.
And she sits and she puts her head up.
And looks at you with that twisted look like, I hope you know I could literally kick your brains out in about two seconds if I so choose.
And so, very humbling, tremendously powerful situations in nature where I was faced with the rawness of myself and choices that I had to make.
We're only just scratching the surface here.
We've got a whole lot more to discuss after the break.
With that raw insight, Dr. Kathleen Hall talking about a life imbalance, nourishing the four roots of true happiness.
What I found, Dr. Oz, was when I traveled, whether it was to Harvard, Stanford, UMass, at all these programs, whether they were working with people with hypertension, pulmonary disease, or cardiac diseases, or whatever, that they had the same four Four quadrants is what they called it, the four quadrant approach for stress reduction for cardiovascular disease.
One was stress reduction, second was diet, third was exercise, and fourth was group support.
And I headed a cardiac rehab program for 10 years and happened to be a member of the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation.
So I kept coming back from these meetings and my patients wouldn't remember it.
They wouldn't remember it.
They would come back, they all had zippers, you know, all had papoose oxygen, you name it.
And I got frustrated.
And I said, I've got to think of a way that they can remember this.
So one day in a meditation, which of course I do every morning, I sat there and SELF came to me.
I went, this is it.
S is for serenity, which is the stress reduction, because stress reduction just kept negatively reminding people that you have stress, whereas everybody really wants serenity.
They want peace of mind.
So serenity, E was exercise.
L is love, which helped the problem of group support, because every time I would say group support to my patients, they would go, I don't want a therapist, and I sure don't want a therapist.
Go into one of those crazy groups where people listen to me.
So love was a very different concept.
Everyone needs love.
And just say the word.
It was amazing.
And F is food.
I hate the word diet.
It's a billion-dollar industry.
I have this absolute dislike for it.
But food is holy.
Food is sacred.
We were meant to eat.
It's a source of celebration in every spirituality and every religion.
Food is good.
There is no bad food.
So my point was that's how I came up with SELF. So S is for serenity.
If you do any serenity practice at all, it lowers your blood pressure, your heart rate, you get an immune boost.
We know from research at Harvard it reduces pain, and we also know people that meditate, your brain can actually get larger.
So something like a five-minute meditation.
Start with something small.
I call it baby steps.
You know, I don't expect people to get out there and ohm for 20 or 30 minutes.
What we know about plasticity in the body and the brain is even five minutes resets the thermostat.
So, wake up in the morning, go S-E-L-F care.
Okay, start with S. Serenity.
Okay.
I am going to be quiet or I'm going to listen to music.
I am going to say I'm grateful.
I'm going to do something for five minutes that will quiet my brain.
So another choice besides a quiet meditation of being silent would be a lot of my patients are very anxious.
They've just had heart surgery or they've gone through a tremendous divorce or some problem.
So listen to music.
Music even helps because it helps you create serotonin in the body.
We also know if you bust out singing, you get an immune boost of 250%.
Another easy thing to do is affirmations.
We have a new study out of University of California that show that people that have memorized a mantra or a short phrase, like, I am strong, I'm letting go, they produce, I think it's right at 60% less cortisol, which is the stress hormone, than people that just get stressed and don't have a positive thing to say back to themselves to retrain their brain.
Another thing is laughter.
When you laugh, it's an amazing thing for the body.
When you're stressed, the artery diameter decreases as much as 35%.
When you start laughing, it increases your artery diameter by 22%.
That's a University of Maryland study.
Gratitude.
It is physiologically impossible to be stressed and grateful at the same time.
And finally, for the serenity one, something as simple as guided imagery, like if when you're stressed, on the way up here we had terrible turbulence and people were screaming and doing weird stuff, or at the airport, memorize a place where you're at peace and love.
If that's with your bird, if that's on a horse, if that's at the farm, your brain doesn't know any difference.
It thinks it's there.
Lower your blood pressure, lower your heart rate.
You get a sense of control almost immediately.
So that's for S for serenity.
Kathleen, so if I can just ask you questions about each of these as we go along because I deal with these different solutions so frequently.
And you do cover them in A Life and Balance, which is the title of your book.
But I must say, you're a smart person.
As you mentioned, you're an investment banker.
You run hospitals.
But you felt necessary to move to the woods for 20 years.
To do this.
And I find, and I have a discussion with Lisa whenever she talks about one of these new fasting diets she wants to go on.
Because to do the fast, if you're around food all the time, it's hard to do the fast.
Because you're continually reminded about how good that tiramisu looks.
It's challenging, I think, to do a lot of these serenity exercises when you're working two jobs, your kids are yelling.
You've just broken up with your spouse.
You've got a hundred things that are pressing on you.
It's just hard to get all those issues of bankruptcy and work-related and home-related stress out of your mind in order to gain those precious moments every day.
And as I mentioned, even you felt it necessary to go to the woods in parts of the world.
Well, you know, but here's the deal.
Those are two different things.
I went to the woods because I wanted to ferret out my own fears.
My fears were being alone, being in the woods, not status.
I had wealth and power and beauty and intelligence.
I had every benchmark of what we sustain as power in this country and in the world.
So what I wanted to do was renounce all those and see what it was for me personally.
But I've got news for you, Dr. Oz.
If you haven't worked on a family farm lately...
I want to tell you about getting up at 5 every morning in 20-degree weather in sleet, having to feed 40 to 60 foals, 60 mares, 20 dogs, 20 cats, get on the tractor, break up the ice on the lake so that they can get water.
Living on a family farm.
People that think only urban people have stress.
What folly.
Going to the bank, making mortgage payments, sitting there with my neighbors and talking about what the cost of the commodities is.
What's your corn going to get?
What are your beans going to get?
What are we going to do?
Then, for my own garden, my own organic gardens and my own stuff, I canned.
So, you know, the only time I had to can was from 10 o'clock at night till 3 in the morning during canning season, and you have to get it while it's fresh.
So I challenge you to come up to my farm and think that you are at some estate with 10 servants waiting Well, I was copying for an invitation.
I got one, I think.
Okay, yeah.
And then also, I want you to know that I did have to move back to the city two years ago with the Stress Institute, so I do have my two-hour commute to Atlanta, and commuting is very stressful, and I get all that, plus my farm stress now.
And do you ever see your husband?
Of course we do.
Don't be silly.
Did he move out to the farm?
Yeah, you can tell you about that story.
Of course we do.
He works four days a week.
He has an incredible practice.
He does 30 surgeries a day.
He's got an amazing, his own clinic.
So he works three to four days a week.
We spend three to four days a week.
We have an apartment in Atlanta.
We've never spent more than two days apart.
I went through that part, and then, you know, I only did the year alone.
The one year.
Other than that, I'm very close to my children and to Jim.
And again, two weeks we'll have our 33rd wedding anniversary.
And we're more in love than we've ever been in our life.
The reason I asked the question wasn't so much to say that living the farm life is an easy life.
But I... I did want to be clear that you had felt it important in your own life to make a major break from what you had been doing.
Absolutely.
And in retrospect, if you had done, for example, the serenity step that you described, would it have averted that?
No.
When the energy runs out, and this is part of my body of work, Dr. Oz, when it's gone, it's gone.
I knew the money business.
I knew how to make money.
I'd made a lot of it.
I had clients all over the world.
I was bored.
It was rote.
I was like a zombie, like most people are nowadays.
I tell most people to go rent the movie Groundhog Day.
Watch it, and if that is your life, stop it.
Whatever you're doing right now, have a family meeting and stop your life.
Because you are not living the passionate life.
You are not living the intentional life that you're supposed to be living.
And again, you're right.
Somebody who has a mortgage, they work at a bank every day, they've got three kids, they can't stop today.
They need their health insurance.
I mean, that would be ridiculous and irresponsible to say that.
But what we know about stress, Dr. Oz, is that they can create a plan.
They can say, you know, I always wanted to have my own landscape company.
So you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to go on the internet and there's a class at the college that I can take on the weekend.
And you know, Susan, in five years, I can have my own landscape firm.
What we know, data shows us that they immediately shift from cortisol production and stress and ulcers and headaches and all the physical and psychological symptoms to HOPE, H-O-P-E. And then they get all their friends and their family on board.
And they start taking classes.
And they start thinking about buying the truck.
And when they're going to have this future.
So the point is, find out what your dream is.
That's what this whole boomer thing is about everybody over 50 who's, you know, put their time in 30 years at IBM or whatever, and then they go, I have my whole life ahead of me.
Yes, and that's also why this SELF program is so critical.
It's not about living older anymore.
And you know that better than anybody, Dr. Oz.
It's about living independently.
Living independently and being able to make choices in your own life, and that's what SELF, self-care, is all about.
Right, so I got the serenity.
Exercise?
Exercise.
Any type of exercise reduces dementia and Alzheimer's, we think, in five recent studies by at least a third.
And exercising three to four times a week with just 20-minute exercises reduces the risk of death from all diseases by one-third.
The fact of the matter is...
Within the next 20 years, our health system is falling apart.
I think our comorbidity will be tremendous in the next 20 years, which means more than one disease as you well know.
The future is horrendous.
We were meant to move.
Again, the word exercise turns people off.
We were meant to be in motion.
The law of physics says anybody who is not moving, anything that's not moving is dead.
And it really, really is.
I was blessed to be a chaplain at Northside and St. Joseph's in Atlanta for a long time.
And what that taught me right there, and I did hospice, was the difference between the moment of somebody living and somebody dying and their total energy being gone.
We were meant to be in motion.
Exercise is critical.
I think the next stage of exercise is to quit pushing aerobic exercise on everybody and telling everybody they have to do a certain kind of exercise.
I work with very at-risk, inner-city, violent children, and I have found out that by giving them other alternatives like yoga, tai chi, qigong, moving their bodies in very different ways has given them self-confidence.
It's given them the ability to move, and then once they start exercising, Feeling their bodies move and they feel the power of that motion.
Then they may start to take walks and exercise and get into the exercise program at the school.
But I think we have to stop telling everyone that they were meant for aerobic exercise.
I understand violence more than anybody.
And people that have lived in poverty or lived in violence or survived interesting circumstances...
Sometimes we have to go into exercise as something loving, something nurturing, like Tai Chi, Qigong, or yoga, instead of something that can be perceived as something more violent, which is jogging, running, and jerking the body.
So, again, I love the idea that you used the word serenity instead of stress reduction, because I think it sends the right message, and used love instead of group support.
But you kept exercise.
Now, I understand you have to have it for the self part, but I wonder if it should be smooth, it should be motioned.
I thought of motion, but do you know what else I thought of?
That I love this more than anything.
And this is after my Buddhist studies and my Taoist studies.
I love alignment.
I love alignment because I think exercise is alignment.
When I work with people, I use that.
I use the SELF in my work because it's easy to remember.
But Dr. Oz, when I work with, whether it's somebody with a zipper that's scared to death to exercise because they've just had their heart cut open, or whether it's my inner city kid that's scared to death, is that when you use the word alignment...
You're asking them to align with some form of motion or movement that is who they be, not what they do.
And then I'm a cafeteria.
That's what my body of work is.
I just give choices.
And then I work with them to see what resonates.
Because you and I both know, if you want long-term complicity, if you want somebody to do it, it has to be something that they love.
Right.
Well, you know, the other word, I guess, it could be slaff, I guess.
Serenity, love, alignment, and food.
But the other thing, why don't you change exercise to energy?
Yes, I love energy, too.
I love energy.
So define energy for me.
But the point about energy, too, is for my being, I get more energy out of serenity than I do out of exercise.
See, I'm an A, type A person.
I mean, that's what I do.
And it's who I be, so I have to meditate.
And when I meditate for 20 or 30 minutes every morning of my life, it resets my thermostat.
It's kind of like being a class 5 tornado.
It is kind of how a lot of people like me wake up.
After they get in the shower, they brush their teeth and get going.
And what meditation does, it takes and fine-tunes and hones that energy into a four, into a three, into a two, into a one, that you can get into a cadence, that you become more receptive, and you become more functional, and you can get more done, more organized, and you can follow a better pattern.
There's lots more where that came from, but first, a quick break.
We're speaking with Dr. Kathleen Hall, author of A Life in Balance, Nourishing the Four Roots of True Happiness.
The third one is love and realizing your intimacy.
Absolutely.
What we know is one of many research studies says that people in cardiac rehab groups reduce the risk of death.
From a subsequent heart attack by as much as 50% just by being in a cardiac rehab group.
And what we keep studying is what happens when people are together.
We were meant to be in community.
Fozzie and Fozzie have done some great research work at Ohio State on a lignant melanoma.
And it's pretty fascinating.
When people are in a group, even if they're in a group post-traumatic situation for six weeks, and they leave, I think in this study they've been apart 10 years, what we find in the outcomes is that people live longer and have less recurrence of diseases, even if they met for a short time after they've had some critical thing happen.
And what I think, after doing this body of work I've done for 20 years, is that whether you've lost a child, whether you've had malignant melanoma, whether you've had a heart attack, That there is this tremendous grief, fear, anxiety that the body has.
We know about cortisol.
We know what happens to the brain.
We can look under fMRIs and see.
That I really think that there is something holy, H-O-L-Y, that makes us W-H-O-L-E when we get in that whole group, that communion, those people that have gone through the same thing we have.
I facilitated groups where women lost babies.
They'd gone through full-term pregnancies and lost a child.
It's devastating.
Neonatology, when we would unplug infants and facilitated those groups, when the mothers would meet and their babies didn't survive, there's a like-mindedness in loss like that, that even if they meet for a short period of time, there's some amazing surrender, a radical acceptance, anger, rage, grief.
Every thought...
Every emotion, every feeling that you have has two components attached to it.
An electrical component and a chemical component in the brain.
So if that is so, which we know it's so, and if the brain and the body is as plastic as we know, it just makes sense that we were meant to be with each other, and especially after traumatic situations.
But what I'm saying is, when I say S-E-L-F, L for love, you need to, every week...
Be in touch with somebody.
And I mean, I don't care if you have to work all the time.
Like you said, Dr. Oz, you've got two kids, you're working 8 to 5, 40. What is she talking about?
How can I meet in a group?
Get a group at work.
Take one day a week, whether it's 20 minutes, you guys start a book club, go for a walk, study spirituality, study gardening.
I don't care what you do.
The data shows us.
I don't care if you're playing bridge.
Get with a group once a week for 20 to 30 minutes.
There are great health benefits to it.
Also, When I say L, love, it means intimacy.
Please, no matter what happens, keep in touch with your friends.
What we know about women is when they work and run families, lots of times they lose their friends.
Make sure on your calendar, just like you make a doctor's appointment and just like you make your other appointments, make an appointment to text message, to call, to email a friend Monday and Wednesday, one day a week.
Have lunch with a friend or breakfast.
We also know people that meet people in close, intimate contact.
They produce a hormone called oxytocin.
It's a feel-good hormone which has great health benefits to the body.
So we were meant for L. We were meant and created to love.
What about the last letter?
Food.
F part.
And this is what you learn when you stay with Aboriginal tribes.
And also, again, the Dalai Lama was a teacher of mine.
And Thich Nhat Hanh, who is the South Vietnamese Buddhist monk, is still my teacher, as a matter of fact.
I've been a student of his for nine years.
And what I found out when I went to them was I was very aggressive, again, trying to work through my type A, blah, blah, my lists every day.
And one of the first things that when I went to these people and went to a shaman in a tribe was they changed my food.
They immediately believe that food is medicine, food is nourishment.
So we've got great science now that shows that food is hugely healing.
It does change the outcome.
Dean Ornis showed that, of course, in cardiovascular disease.
He was one of the first people in the medical field to reclaim that.
We know that omega-3 is one of the biggest things going on.
It changes the outcome of heart disease, dementia, depression, anxiety.
I think everybody, they need to put it in the public drinking water.
I think omega-3 is the most amazing thing.
I've seen the Sago cold mine disaster when I did that with Paula Zahn.
One boy that made it out.
The first thing the neurosurgeon did when that young man went into the intensive care unit was gave him 8 to 13 grams of omega-3 fatty acids every day to coat those brain cells, and now he's doing fine.
Blueberries is another one.
We call them brain berries.
We call it youth food.
They actually grow dendrites in rat studies we have.
Very fascinating.
Bees.
Most women ought to be taking bee complexes.
We know that stress immediately drains the bees out of the body.
Serotonin.
You can eat for serotonin.
My point When you wake up in the morning, before you get out of bed, take a deep breath and go.
Okay, I know these are the four roots of my life.
Self-care.
So S, I need to spend five minutes.
When can I do that today?
I've got to drive carpool.
I've got to be with Dr. Oz this morning.
I won't have time this morning.
How about after that in the car if I sit there for five minutes?
E is exercise.
It's motion.
By the way, we have a new study that shows even if you do two to three ten-minute increments of exercise, it's the same as doing it all at the same time.
So I'll walk up and down the stairs at work at lunch for ten minutes.
L is love.
Gosh, I think I'll text Lisa today or email her and just tell her, how are you doing?
I haven't talked to you in a long time.
F is food.
I have this huge meeting this afternoon at 5 o'clock, and I'm going to be stressed out because I'm going to ask for a raise.
So I need to take some omegas.
I think I'll take two grams of a capsule.
I think I'll eat blueberries for lunch, and I'm going to have a banana loaded with serotonin for lunch.
My point is, it's a prevention, it's a prophylaxis, and it's a way of life.
I thought you'd find this interview soothing.
You said it would be stressful today.
It's not stressful.
I've heard about you, so no, it wasn't so stressful.
And I live with two docs.
You talk about type A. I live with a critical care doc and a gastroenterologist who does 35 surgeries a day.
Hello.
Now, let me ask you a question about the minor, because I was unaware they gave him high doses of omega-3s.
Yes, yes.
I can send it to you if you want to study.
No, I've seen discussions about it, but it was a pretty gutsy thing to do that to someone with such a high profile.
The neurosurgeon in West Virginia or the neurologist had the foresight to offer the...
The injured minor omega-3 fatty acids?
Yes, and I find out this information through Andy Weil.
You know, he's a big omega-3 freak like I am.
Also, with my past, too, not only being a type A personality, I've struggled through since 50 with menopause and stuff with somewhat little, not deep, but little slips into...
What do I want to say?
Little attractions towards moments of a little depression.
And I've tried to handle it with omega-3s and it's been incredibly successful.
So my husband also.
So it's been great.
Also, you know, I think it's hilarious that everybody's running to plastic surgeons for all this aging and we're exercising and having to get new knees, hips, joints and everything because we're running trying to out, you know, outdo ourselves not to age.
I think it's amazing that we don't like the self-care, serenity, exercise, love and food.
These are the four roots to anti-aging.
I mean, healthful aging, whatever you want to call it.
It's amazing.
And my point is the days that you know it's going to be off or if you know you're going home for the holidays and it's going to be stressful or if you know that you've got to go to a funeral.
Whatever.
Big meeting.
You do the SELF and you just get more intentional about it.
And again, the four roots of life.
It's an amazing, simple way to live.
You have another acronym, if I could speak, which is ACE, Awareness, Choice, and Energy.
Could you talk about that a little bit?
Yes, I talk about people, Lisa, who really live life like a zombie or, again, like Groundhog Day.
They live in a cloud.
So this body of work is about living an intentional life.
And what does intention mean?
It means you designing your life.
And ACE, your life, was another acronym just so people can remember.
People are so flooded.
The reason I use acronyms is so that they can remember.
A is awareness.
And I ask people to first stop, take a deep breath.
And again, I come from a financial background, and it's who I am.
I'll always be that.
So I say, do it like a T account, credit and debit.
On the credit side, put every person, every relationship.
Put every task that you do during the day that brings you life.
Put a big plus on the credit and put it in that side.
Then in the debit side, put every task, every person, every relationship, everything you do during that day that irritates you, makes you angry, if you feel that your blood pressure is going up.
And by the way, if you feel like your heart rate and blood pressure is going up, go ahead and buy yourself.
A cuff and take your blood pressure and your heart rate, you will pretty soon get a flow of what is tearing you up.
That's the debit side.
So that's the ACE. Then once you do that for about a week, kind of show your family.
The other thing is when people go into these health programs, whether it's self-care, ACE or whatever, I have to do it by myself and I go home and my family...
Let me tell you something.
Tell your coworkers, tell your family, you have to not only spread the knowledge, you've got to get the support of everybody on there.
So anyway, once you get the credit and debit on the ACE and you find out the pluses and negatives of your energy, which is what we talked about, what is giving you the source of your life, then comes the C is choice.
You've got to make choices.
You've got to make choices to what is giving you energy.
What is the source of your life?
What do you love?
What you love is on that credit side.
It's the purpose and the reason you're here.
It's why you're taking every breath.
So make sure that you have the power and the authority to make the choice.
And I promise you, make small choices.
You don't start with going, hey, here are the divorce papers.
Start with very small choices, like maybe what you eat, when you go to bed, taking care of yourself.
And I promise you, then you'll get more energy and it becomes a cycle.
Then when you get more energy, you'll get higher self-esteem.
And then you'll become more aware that instead of being a new friend for three months and going, I really don't like her.
She sucks the life out of me.
Your lapse time will get shorter.
You'll meet the person in an hour or two.
You'll go, you know what?
She was nice, but she's in that debit side.
So I think I'm going to avoid that.
And that's a choice you made.
And so you get more energy.
So that's a cycle of bringing energy back to your life and power.
I was speaking with Kathleen Hall, author of Life and Balance.
Dr. Hall, there are a lot of us who see America getting more and more stressed out, not less and less.
Of course.
And there's legitimate sources for that, Dr. Oz.
Number one, technology.
You know, iPod, iPhone.
My husband, I just got a new Blackberry, so I refuse for him and I to be on separate technologies because we're married and we have to go through states and countries.
And I travel to Europe all the time with my new contracts over there in Asia.
Well, when I gave him the new Blackberry, we almost had a divorce there in singular, with him screaming and talking about stress.
But the point is, technology is a huge stress.
That's a fact I do a lot on technology stress.
It's hugely stressful for children.
70% of children report after the first month of school that they are extremely stressed in their lives.
70%.
A lot of this is technology stress.
Another stressor is commuting.
The average commute is an hour to an hour and a half in every city.
And we know that 1 in 12 heart attacks is directly related to the commute.
We know that a recent study shows us that a fighter pilot in battle actually has less stress than a person on a commute.
So we have a new study testing cortisol on people that commute in Atlanta, Georgia.
The levels are through the roof by the time they leave home and get to work an hour later.
So there are legitimate reasons.
Throw in global warming.
Those of you that have younger children who are coming home going, am I even going to have a life?
Is my life sustainable?
I think the word sustainability is what we need to think of in our body, our minds, our soul, and the planet.
So you have 25 tips to maintain a life of balance to help us deal with stress.
Do you want to give us a couple of those?
We only have time for one, but let me hear about journaling.
That's the one that Oprah talks about all the time.
Why do you pick journaling as one of your top 25?
Because we've got a good cardiovascular study and some other studies that show that it reduces the amount of meds people take there.
They get out of the hospital sooner.
So we've got some good, Pennebaker's done some good science and research that shows that I call it disclosure.
And again, a lot of my people don't want to write anymore, so I tell them, do it on your computers during the day.
Schedule it a couple times a week.
It doesn't matter.
It's called disclosure.
It needs to be done.
And they write about their deepest secrets, or just what the heck's going on?
What's the difference between a diary and a journal?
No difference, really.
But also, please remember, people have different brains, and we're finding this out now in our new brain science.
So I have a lot of people painting, coloring, taking pictures, cutting things out of magazines.
So journaling has taken on new generations instead of just the script.
Dr. Kathy Hall, thank you very, very much for joining us.
Your book, A Life in Balance, Nourishing the Four Roots of True Happiness.
