(Breather) In episode one of these potentially life-changing Breather shows, I talk about insights from Dr. Bruce Lipton’s transformative book called The Biology Of Belief.

Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad: 00:00 Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author an athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit and happy in hectic, high stress modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge and expertly balance that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go.

Brad: 03:31 This breather show is about how our thoughts determine our reality. A fantastic book I read recently called the biology of belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton. Referenced this extensively in Mark and my new book, Keto Longevity and I want to share with you some executive summary, big picture insights. Uh, me and [inaudible] told me that was one of my skills and my contributions is I’m the guy who’s super into health and looking into things, investigating, researching, summarizing in case you don’t have time or energy. And I think that’s a good service. I appreciate that. And I’m trying to do that, man. So, so I’m enjoying sharing with you all manner of insights about diet, exercise, health, fitness, peak performance, happiness, relationships, longevity, personal growth. Is that how the description reads? I think so. Thank you for listening. Let me know what you think. I don’t want to pass myself off as an authority in areas that I’m not, but it might intrigue you to listen further or go investigate some of these topics and get further into it yourself if it’s of great interest.

Brad: 04:41 And this biology of belief book has the potential to be life changing. I’ve been thinking about these insights all the time since I read it. Oh my goodness. So the description, uh, is that stunning new discoveries have been made about the interaction between your mind and body and the processes by which cells receive information. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology, that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our thoughts. Okay, we’re going to get on little sciency during this recording, but I don’t want to turn anybody off or push anybody away, so we’re going to try to keep it in plain talk and we’ll go slow when you get profound insights like that. But what Dr Lipton is talking about, his, uh, let’s call it the central premise, is that we spend 95 to 99% of our time in daily life operating from subconscious programming.

Brad: 05:50 We are literally sleep walking through life in a daze. By Age 35, 90 to 99% of your thoughts and actions originate from the habitual programming of the subconscious mind. This is a combination of memorized behaviors, emotional reactions, beliefs, and perceptions that run in the background, like an APP on your smartphone. Brain scientists report that we think between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day, and that 98% of them are identical to yesterday’s thoughts. And that 80% of your subconscious thoughts are negative. Does any of this stuff hit home? Sit back and reflect for a moment? That’s a me quoting from Keto Longevity, our book. So, uh, when I quote Lipton and I will definitely, uh, alert you. So anyway, what about this programming? The programming happens when we are these sponge like creatures from the ages of zero to six. We’re taking in everything around us in our environment or extremely impressionable.

Brad: 06:59 That’s why it’s so important to give your child a healthy, supportive, loving home environment from the ages of zero to six. Listen to my show with Gita Savander her and she’s talking about her parenting insights. Remember, it was a great show. She talked about the cultural differences between parenting in Europe, a little more loosey goosey, giving the kids more freedom and the helicopter parenting observations that we’re all so familiar with in the United States. Uh, but that zero to six timeframe is when it’s a really great idea to read to your kid every single night and give them positive, encouraging messages rather than criticisms and scoldings because guess what? Everything’s getting programmed in. So if you have dysfunctional family interactions, your kid is sponging that up. What about the teachers that are scolding and criticizing little kids? And we know adults many times we’ll reference these past programming, these past traumas and be making them as excuses or rationalizations even decades later. So the programming happens between zero and six, almost all of it. And then we’re going into the feedback loop. The tape is running all the time. So then as an adult you’re trying to get conscious work through your shit, your past programming. So you go to therapy. And Doctor Lipton informs us that when you repeat these stories, relive these stories in therapy, these past traumas, your physiology is reliving them as well.

Brad: 08:32 There’s got to be some better ways and there are. Doctor Lipton gives some suggestions about how to unwind these harmful past programming, uh, past traumas. But we have to understand that genes are controlled by epigenetic influences. Those are environmental influences have an effect on gene function and these are mediated by our perception of these environmental influences. Quick example, a traffic jam. Oh Darn. I hate traffic jams. They frustrate me so much. I’m angry, I’m negative, I’m honking my horn, I’m looking to a different lane to make up 12 seconds. Or Hey, here’s a traffic jam. Looks like I’m going to be behind schedule. Take a deep breath, go with the flow, turn on some classical music, turn on a podcast, relax and go with it. That has a hugely different impact on your genetic function, on your health, on your biology, on your hormone flows and you are completely in control of your thoughts and your response to something like a traffic jam.

Brad: 09:35 Uh, we talked about ruminating and past shows with Dr Elisha Goldstein and a future show coming up with Dr. Ron Sinja? He’s a medical doctor, internal medicine specialists. Talking about how his practice centered upon these high tech workers in Silicon Valley that suffer from a variety of health disturbances associated with the consumerism and the fluid nature of their environment and the competition and the fear of missing out. He talks about how his practice is really focusing in on how rumination is a disease that manifests with all manner of physical problems. Okay? So the moment you start worrying about the past or the future, when you go into rumination, you are operating from your subconscious mind that most likely is not supporting you. Remember 80% ,This is brain science. It’s not just woo people making this shit up, but 80% of our ruminating thoughts are negative. Can you relate to that?

Brad: 10:36 Do you spend time going through all these wonderful positive scenarios, uh, when you’re ruminating or is it mostly, Oh gee, I’m worried about this. I’m worried about that. All right, so the moment you kick into past or future ruminations, you’re operating subconscious mind that does not support you. The great news is you can interact with your thoughts and change them in real time by becoming mindful, becoming conscious. That’s why we use these buzzwords all the time. Bring it into mindfulness. How about a relationship interaction that is triggering a reactive behavior, right? Defensiveness. Well, I thought that I put it there because you told me yesterday. Uh, what about taking a deep breath, becoming mindful, realizing that you’ve just been triggered. Remember on the Mia Moore show how she said she hates that word triggered because it’s sort of placing blame on the person you triggered me as if you pulled the trigger.

Brad: 11:37 No, you’re getting yourself triggered. So when you notice that moment when you allow yourself to become triggered by an outside influence, whether it’s someone cutting you off in traffic or a dysfunctional relationship interaction that’s sending you back into subconscious programming such as defensiveness, that reactivity, you can take that deep breath, become mindful, realize what’s going on and take control and perhaps let’s say instead of jumping into the fray with an interruption, a defensiveness reaction, listen and hear the person out. Seek to understand and then go from there. Perhaps offer a supportive comment back and own your own defensiveness and your own flaws rather than engaging over and over again. It’s so obvious to see how we get stuck in these reactive subconscious patterns and fight about the same shit all the time. Tony Robbins said that is the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Brad: 12:36 Other people said that too, but he really hits that theme hard in his effort to reprogram you and achieve that breakthrough. So Dr Lipton suggests there are some other good ways to uh, try to unwind harmful subconscious programming and become more conscious including meditation, clinical hypnosis, taken a plant medicine trip. Yep. That’s on the list. Oh my gosh. That’s such a big deal these days. And I have a podcast coming up, uh, with my good friends, Adam and Vanessa Lambert. These are fitness experts and peak performers of the world. They operate a website called be the wellness.com Bee the wellness.com and they are big into plant medicine and we have an hour long conversation to learn all about this crazy stuff. The IOWASCA retreats where you go down to Peru, expand your consciousness and come back with profound life changing insights and behavior changes. Let’s see what that’s all about.

Brad: 13:35 Uh, personally I was open minded enough to record a show about it. It’s not on the top of my to do list to go off into a plant medicine consciousness expanding retreat anytime soon. But Hey, maybe I’m stuck in subconscious programming instead of being open minded about this stuff. Okay, so let’s uh, carry on. We have meditation, clinical hypnosis taken a plant medicine trip, uh, energy psychology using EMDR. Maybe you’ve heard this new modality that’s getting a lot of attention and great success and then slowing down your thoughts in general will help you change and transform self limiting beliefs. Just slowing down your thoughts. So when you have a reactive comment like, oh, I’m terrible with Xcel. Can you help me over here and my cube? Wait a second, take a deep breath, read the directions a little more slowly. Maybe go and type in a query into youtube or Google. Formulate an empowering positive attitude about solving a software challenge yourself instead of reacting and going and getting help from the smart guy who can fix everything really quickly and take it out of your hands. Okay. So we have a nice list of ways to help you reprogram .

Brad: 14:56 What is one area where this reprogramming, these formulating of empowering new beliefs, playing out really importantly, that is the area of longevity. So that’s why I got into some sharing some insights from Doctor Lipton and also Dr Deepak Chopra, uh, who has a similar message communicating, uh, putting this into heavy mix when we’re talking about the aspect of longevity, that is mental flexibility. That’s one of the four pillars of longevity that we present in the upcoming book. This is coming out in the fall of 2019 Keto Longevity. Oh, we’ll be hearing a lot more about that. Uh, maybe you’ve heard of the great research, the Blue Zones project where they identified these pockets of centenarians around the globe.

Brad: 15:45 These communities, cultures that are exceeding longevity standards significantly. Eh, there are five of them featured in the book Okinawans in Japan. You’ve probably heard about them. They’d been lauded as longevity superstars for a long time. Uh, a pocket of seventh day Adventists in Loma Linda, California in southern California have some amazing statistics where they’re outliving the other SoCal homeys around them by a significant number of years due to their healthy lifestyle practices and community aspects. Uh, working our way across the globe. We go to Costa Rica and the isolated population of folks on the Nicoya peninsula primitive living. Then we go over to the Europeans and we have Ikaria, which is an isolated island, uh, belonging to Greece. And then we have the Italian island of Sardinia and, oh my gosh, so many great factors to study. What do they eat? What kind of exercise patterns did they do?

Brad: 16:47 Did they sleep a lot? Yeah, everything’s going great. But one of the most profound common longevity attributes, uh, in the Blue Zones populations as well as other centenarians, is a youthful psychological age. And there’s significant scientific studies supporting this idea that we have, not one but three relevant ages toward our longevity. Of course, chronological age of the year. You were born, how many years you’ve been around. Then we have the psychological age, which is how old that you feel and the biological age, the state of our physical condition, our fitness capabilities, uh, state of health, organ function. And, of course, the biological age can be measured with a blood values for peak performance, fitness tests, all kinds of trackers. And we get into that in the book. It’s really fun, interesting to be able to disengage from this fixation on our chronological age and making weird conclusions like when you’re 43, it’s time to start that steady, gradual decline downhill where you go to your kid’s soccer practice and sit in a lawn chair and read the paper rather than participate. Oh Man, the dad’s on my team. I didn’t have any of that going on. I’m like, up, up, up. Okay, we need some more defenders. Come on, let’s go. Uh, but all kinds of these associations and attachments that we make to chronological age that don’t serve us. And the reality, the science reveals that your biological age and your psychological age are vastly more relevant to your longevity prospects. One of the most common factors found across the Blue Zones population is this characterization that Dr Chopra has talked about for many years, uh, called youthful spirit.

Brad: 18:39 Centenarians don’t feel that old. They are fiercely committed to independence and self sufficiency. Oh my dad, Walter Kearns, check him out@waltercurrent.com. He’s 97 now, not playing golf anymore. Uh, but for many years he was undisputedly the finest golfer in the world over the age of 90. He would routinely shoot in the 70s, a few strokes over par. Uh, in his nineties, he twice shot 16 strokes under his age on the golf course. Uh, one was a, for example, 71 at the age of 87. That’s even par for an 87 year old dude. And then he shot a 76 at the age of 92. And for those of you who are not familiar with golf, the challenge of shooting your age on the golf course is a highly esteemed, uh, performance that is very, very difficult to attain. Obviously when you’re talking about, uh, the typical par on a golf course is 70 or 72, uh, you’re going to have to be pretty good as an old person to shoot par or keep going until you’re really old to get under that magical age barrier.

Brad: 19:47 So basically my dad destroyed this virtually every time he played golf for many years, starting at the age of 67 when he went out there and shot four under par at a very challenging popular golf course in Los Angeles called Lakeside. He shot a 66 at the age of 67. We’ve got the scorecard man. It’s pretty amazing. Uh, but when he would have a bad round when he was 92 and he’d come home with an 82 or 84, he was pissed. He wanted to shoot down there near par and you couldn’t talk him out of it saying, but Walter, you were 10 strokes under your age. That’s fantastic. It’s a miracle. Nope. He had a mindset that he still deserved to and expected to shoot around. Par on the golf course, even into his nineties. A funny anecdote from his playing partners where suffering from macular degeneration. He was complaining that he was having more and more difficulty seeing his ball and uh, one guy shot back and said, Walter, the reason you can’t see your balls because you hit the ball too goddamn far. I can see every shot I hit because it’s 10 feet off the ground and it only goes a hundred yards. So don’t complain.

Brad: 20:55 All right, so that’s going to the concept of psychological age. Feeling like a young par shooting player out there instead of an old guy. You think this is just breezy pep talk with stuff. It’s time to expand your mindset. We’re going to get a little sciencey here in the latter stages of the show. Uh, but when you go back to Dr Deepak Chopra’s fabulous book published in the early nineties called Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,. He corrects the flawed layman’s notion that we are physical beings separate from the world around us. What we perceive as our physical body, our head, shoulders, knees, and toes is literally a swirling mass of atoms that are constantly dying and renewing based on signals received from the environment. Uh, I went to see Deepak speak in Sacramento many years ago and he conveyed this insight and then he suggested that you turn to your, a person sitting next to you and introduce yourself.

Brad: 22:00 So I said, hi, I’m the swirling mass of atoms known as Brad Kearns, just so we could grasp the concept appreciated fully. Uh, but this is proven true on a quantum physical level. Okay? This means that we have the power at all times to influence gene expression and cellular function through the thoughts that we think the foods that we eat, the movements we engage in, the environmental signals we send to this swirling mass of atoms. Here’s a quote from Biology of Belief. The function of the mind is to create coherence between our beliefs and the reality that we experience. Your mind will adjust the bodies biology and behavior to fit your beliefs. If you go to a boring party that you declared to be boring or you drag your feet there cause you don’t feel like going, you will manifest your beliefs that it will become boring and you’ll become tired and lacking energy.

Brad: 23:00 If you walk in after an exhausting, tiring day to a lively gathering of friends and family and loved ones to do some fun stuff, watch a great playoff game during the NBA playoffs, whatever it is, watch Tiger Woods when the masters, what an amazing performance. 2019 guess what? Your biology and your behavior will fit your beliefs and you will become energized and excited. You’ll forget about the fatigue that you brought there from the traffic jam and the lousy day at work. Guess what? That wasn’t a quote from the book. That was me. Mouth enough. Let’s go back to Biology of Belief. If the perception in your mind is reflected in the chemistry of your body and if your nervous system reads and interprets the environment and then controls the bloods chemistry, you can literally change the fate of your cells by altering your thoughts end quote problem.

Brad: 23:54 What is the problem? Oh, maybe you guess from previous show topics. Yes. We’re too maxed out with stressing, obsessing, ruminating, complaining to ponder these evolved concepts to become mindful and conscious. We’re too busy interacting with our smartphone or engaging in reactive behavior. Huh? Back to some more quoting and explaining this stuff. The subconscious mind, this is from Biology of Belief, has the tendency to interfere with our conscious desires by programming undesirable thoughts and behaviors which could lead to a great deal of stress and turmoil in our lives. End Quote. So we have that dysfunctional childhood programming we talked about before and accordingly we adopt an assortment of shitty, narrow, flawed and self limiting beliefs. One of them comes in the area of the influence of genes on our cellular function. We have this concept floating around long programmed into conventional wisdom called genetic determinism where your genes are erroneously believed to be self actualizing.

Brad: 25:06 That’s when we’re talking about family history. I was with Mia Moore to doctor’s appointment recently and there were lengthy questions about family history. How old was your mother at this time? How about your sister? Anyone else in the family? This, that and the other thing. And of course this stuff is relevant. Of course, our genetic predispositions have a strong predictive factor on how we end up. If and only if we align flawed lifestyle behavior practices, flawed dietary practices with these genetic predispositions. If you have a family history of obesity and you go to family reunion and there’s a lot of heavy people walking around with large frames, yes indeed that will be a strong predictor of how you end up if and only if you eat the standard American diet like all your relatives have for the past generations, you get the difference? So if we want to break free from this flawed programming from this consideration that we are directly attached to the family history of heart disease, obesity, breast cancer, depression, impatient temperaments, whatever it is that we think is part of our DNA, realize that we can affect our DNA moment to moment by sending different thoughts and different environmental signals.

Brad: 26:24 So the environmental signals, you’ve probably heard this content, uh, talking about in the whole premise of the Primal Blueprint that genes don’t determine our destiny, but rather our behaviors, uh, thoughts are now in the category of one of the major environmental signals that we send to our genes. Uh, other ones are the foods that we eat, the muscle that we lift off the ground and do 20 bicep curls and send that environmental signal to our biceps to grow bigger and stronger. Okay. So in the reality we create virtually every genetic and hormonal function that influences health and longevity is a product of environmental signals combined with your perception of the environmental signals. So I gave the example of the traffic jam and the disparate perceptions of the traffic jam. Going back to the longevity aspect, we all know senior citizens who are cranky and lonely as well as those who are vibrant and happy.

Brad: 27:25 This is not a random distribution of genetic good fortune, but rather a product of intention and execution. Dr Chopra calls this expectations determining the outcome. Okay. Can you go a little overboard on this concept and get into the woo woo area of manifesting everything in your life and calling in the, the man of your dreams in the suit with the five o’clock razor stubble and the Porsche and everything’s dreamy and you just sit back and, uh, manifest more money, more income, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. That stuff turns me off too. But I don’t want to throw the baby out with the brand new Porsche. I mean the baby out with the bathwater. Uh, changing our thoughts, controlling our thoughts coming into consciousness rather than operating from subconscious programming can change your life starting right now in every way imaginable. Perhaps we can end this show.

Brad: 28:21 I’m going to do a second show that gets a little more sciencey and techie to make a more convincing argument that this stuff is really important and really works. But maybe we can leave with forming a new intention about our health and longevity potential that no matter where you are right now by changing your thoughts and of course changing your environmental signals, you can turn your health around. And we have some great research in the book, Keto Longevity whereby some of the most profound longevity markers that they use are everyday stuff like your performance in the one mile run when you’re 50 years old, that has a strong predictor of your chances and your vibrancy when you hit 80. So if you can break eight minutes in the mile for men, nine minutes for females, when you’re 50 years old, you have a very good predictability of smooth sailing all the way up to age 80 on the other side, if you cannot break 12 minutes for males or 13 minutes for females, which pretty much equates to a brisk walk or a slow jog.

Brad: 29:24 And remember this is a performance test to track your longevity potential. So you do your very best, you go as fast as you can and if you can’t hit 12 minutes or 13 minutes, you have placed yourself in the high risk category and you have a strong predictability of a decline and demise, uh, on your way to 80 because of your lack of fitness at age 50. There’s also great research associated with simply doing pushups. They studied, I think it was a thousand firefighters and those who could do 40 pushups or more had a tremendous longevity potential and very good survivability decades later. And those who could do less than five when they were 40 years old were in deep trouble. They were headed down to decline and demise. So if you’re listening right now and think, um, maybe you can’t drop an eight minute mile or a nine minute mile and you’re 50 or you’re 45 and you’re headed there, do something about it.

Brad: 30:23 Get out and start walking around the block. You can improve very quickly and easily and also change your mindset that this is an important matter that needs your attention and prioritization. And just by opening your mind to thinking that you can do better and improve, you’re going to set yourself up for success and have an enthusiastic, positive approach to lifestyle change rather than something negative because you’re judging yourself against your peers who are fitter than you. And so you’ve formed a negative self limiting belief. Started back when you were six years old and you were picked last on the playground and you didn’t show natural athletic ability, time to reject all that, get present, get conscious and make some good stuff happen in life.

Brad: 31:05 Oh, right. Thanks for listening to this show. Stay tuned for the second phase where we get into the science. It’s fascinating. It’ll give it even more motivation and comfort that this stuff really works and it’s really important. So that’s the Biology of Belief.

Brad: 31:22 Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com and we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop, iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews, and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars. And it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves because they need to. Thanks for doing it.