Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.
I'm Dr.
Robert Puff.
We spend billions of dollars on anti-aging creams,
Supplements,
Ice baths,
Trying to add years to our lives.
But sadly,
We often ignore the one thing actively aging us from the inside out.
That's our emotional baseline.
What do I possibly mean by that?
Did you ever see the movie Mary Poppins?
It was one of the first movies that I ever saw.
I was four years old and my parents,
My sister,
And I went to the drive-in theater.
It was so exciting.
I was mesmerized by Dick Van Dyke's energy,
Enthusiasm,
And overall just character.
He was great.
Did you know he's still alive and that he just turned 100?
And he's actually doing quite well.
So as you can imagine,
People wanted to find out what is his secret to aging so well.
And he gave his secret.
He didn't credit a strict diet or an intense workout.
He attributed his century of life to maintaining a positive outlook and making a conscious choice not to get angry.
One of my first childhood heroes ended up living a life that he was portraying on the silver screen.
What a beautiful and informative real life story.
And what he shared is exactly what I have found in exploring the higher reaches of human nature over the past 30 years.
A long,
Happy life isn't about avoiding tragedy or frustration.
It's about cultivating an internal environment where anger cannot survive for long.
So what is the physiology of anger and why is it bad for us?
What does chronic anger actually do to our bodies?
When we hold onto resentment,
Our body stays in a constant state of fight or flight.
It floods our system with cortisone and adrenaline.
Think of it like pouring cortisone acid on our body.
It's going to wear us down and age us.
Over time,
This chronic inflammation damages our blood vessels,
Weakens our immune system,
And literally accelerates cellular aging.
There's a very famous quote that goes,
Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Dick Van Dyke made a conscious choice never to get angry,
But he also talked about maintaining a positive outlook.
So not only was he not feeding his body cortisone and adrenaline,
He was feeding his body positive,
Uplifting,
Beautiful messages in his heart.
And what do you think these things do to our body?
Wonderful things.
Anger is like drinking poison,
But having a positive mental outlook is like eating an organic fruit or salad.
Now some of you may be thinking,
Well,
Dr.
Puff,
If I never get angry,
Am I not just creating an emotional suppression?
Never getting angry does not mean practicing toxic positivity or pretending bad things don't happen.
When we suppress valid emotions,
This can lead to depression and illness.
I've seen this so many times in my practice where people are so kind and gentle,
But they have a lot of pain inside and they act like it's really not there.
And I warn them if they don't deal with these emotions,
It may make them sick or turn into some psychological disorder.
So let's look at how to appropriately deal with our anger so that we don't hurt others or hurt ourselves.
Dr.
Jill Bolt Taylor is a neural anatomist who did a lot of research on anger.
She found that when we're triggered by anger,
The chemical flush of anger takes about 90 seconds to process through our bloodstream.
After 90 seconds,
The physical reaction is over.
But if we remain angry after a minute and a half,
It's because our brain is choosing to rethink the thoughts that initially triggered the chemical loop.
And then we go through it again.
So this is what I do when I feel angry.
I call it my bear inside of me.
My bear is coming out for 90 seconds and it's there.
I watch it.
I understand it.
I don't deny it.
I just don't act on it.
I don't feed it.
I don't do anything with it.
I just let it run its course for 90 seconds.
I become the observer of my anger.
I just know in 90 seconds,
It's going to be gone.
I'm not doing anything wrong for being angry.
I'm just letting that feeling come.
But the most important thing,
I don't act on it.
I wait and then decide once I'm calm,
If I want to do something about what made me angry.
And usually I don't.
And when we understand,
Really understand that anger,
The emotion of anger in and of itself isn't wrong.
It's just that bear inside of us,
Acting the way it acts.
We let it run its course for 90 seconds and then it's gone.
And as long as we don't feed it,
Then we can make conscious choices about,
Do we want to do something about what just happened that made us angry?
Or do we want to walk away and let it go?
But so many of us,
When that bear comes out,
They feed it.
They think about it.
They stew on it.
They create stories and make it worse and worse and worse until that bear wants to come out and rip people apart.
And that does not go well.
Dick Van Dyke too,
Most likely experienced frustration in his life.
After all,
Being a famous celebrity comes with a lot of stress and a lot of negative experiences,
As you can probably imagine.
And yet he attributes his longevity to staying calm.
He didn't feed his angry loop.
He stayed calm.
He let the 90 seconds pass and returned to his joy.
He didn't hold grudges either.
It doesn't mean that we can't set boundaries with people that hurt us.
It's just very important that we have to let go of that anger and move on.
If we keep feeding the anger loop,
We're just going to have a very hard life.
Have you ever heard of the cellist Pablo Casals?
He's widely regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time.
He's particularly credited for rediscovering and popularizing Johann Sebastian Bach's cello suites.
He lived to be 96 years old.
In his later years,
He suffered from terrible arthritis and emphysema.
In the mornings,
He could barely walk and stand straight.
But what he discovered was,
If in the morning he made his way to the piano,
The moment he began playing Bach,
His breathing stabilized,
His posture straightened,
And his arthritis seemed to vanish.
Think about that.
He lived to be 96 years old,
And though his body aged and he struggled,
By creating a passionate and positive engagement with life each morning,
He physically lubricated his own body.
Don't we all know people who struggle with physical pain as they get older,
And that's all we hear from them?
My own grandmother lived to be 90 years old,
And I would visit her often.
We were very close,
And often when I would see her at first,
She'd start telling me about all her aches and pains.
But she loved to play games,
And we would sit down together and play games,
And I never once heard her complain about her aches and pains when she was playing games with me.
Never once.
You've probably heard about the blue zones in our world.
It's where people live the longest.
Okinawans have some of the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world.
They actually don't have a word for retirement.
Instead,
They use the word ikigai,
Which can be translated as a reason for being,
Or a reason to get up in the morning.
What we've learned is their culture emphasizes low stress,
Frequent laughter with their tribe,
And moving past disagreements quickly.
They choose not to carry the heavy,
Aging burden of chronic resentment.
It's like having a whole community of Dick Van Dykes.
Wouldn't it be wonderful?
So how do we start cultivating our hundred-year smile?
Here's three things that we can do.
The first one is,
We can ask ourselves,
Is what's making me angry right now going to matter in five years?
The next time someone cuts us off on the freeway or makes a rude comment,
We ask ourselves,
Is it going to matter in five years?
If the answer is no,
Don't give it more than 90 seconds of our energy,
Because in 90 seconds,
That bear is going to go back into its den.
The next thing we can do that Dick Van Dyke was a master at is hunt for the humor.
When things go wrong,
We train our brains to look for the absurdity rather than the offense.
This humor immediately breaks the cortisone loop.
There's a famous story in the stoic camp where Epictetus talked about how if someone speaks ill of you,
Not to take offense,
But instead reply,
The man did not know the rest of my faults,
For he would not have mentioned these only.
Taking things lightly,
Laughing things off,
It's a good way to live a life.
And it just makes life easier when we don't take things too seriously,
Particularly when it's with a stranger or someone that isn't a big part of our lives.
When they're a big part of our lives,
We do need to talk to them.
But when it's someone we're not going to see again,
Or they have very little influence on our lives,
Sometimes just laughing it off is much better.
And then the third thing we can do is create an anger expiration date.
Let's say,
For example,
We have a legitimate disagreement with a spouse or a friend.
We allow ourselves to feel angry,
But we put a hard time limit on it.
We can say,
I'm going to be mad about this until dinner,
But then I'm going to choose to let it go.
One of the sad things I see in my practice is that a couple has been together for a long time,
And there's a hurt that happened many,
Many years ago.
And it's been worked through,
It's been talked through,
And it's been healed.
But then the person gets angry,
They do something different,
And they bring it up again and again and again.
Letting go is so good for our souls.
I've lived a while now,
And I've had people that haven't been very nice to me,
As we all have.
But there's not one person I can think of that I hold anger towards in the world,
Not one.
In life,
There's so many things we can't control.
We can't control the traffic,
We can't control the economy,
And we can't control the way other people treat us.
But we do possess absolute sovereignty over how long we allow our anger to live in our bodies.
When we get stuck,
We can say this,
I refuse to let resentment age my spirit.
I choose to let anger pass through me and anchor my life in joy.
Though not most of us will live to be 100,
However many years we're blessed to have,
May we live them well.
And one last thing,
If you haven't watched Mary Poppins in a while,
Perhaps watch it again.
I think it will bring a joy to your heart.
Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.
Until next time,
Accept what is,
Love what is.
