Doctor Explains: How To Reduce Stress As Fast As Humanly Possible

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Your labs came back normal, but you’re up at 4 AM running numbers you already ran, snapping at your kids, and crashing by 3 PM. That’s not aging. That’s chronic stress, a load your body has carried for years without the recovery it needs.

Stress isn’t the enemy. You need it to succeed. The problem is that your nervous system never gets the signal that you’re safe, so it keeps burning energy, driving inflammation, and speeding up aging.

In this video, I sit down with Dr. Stephen Sideroff, a clinical psychologist on the UCLA faculty in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences with a joint appointment in rheumatology. He’s spent 40 years on stress, addiction, and resilience, and he wrote The Nine Pillars of Resilience. We break down how to reduce stress fast and what chronic stress is really doing to men over 40.

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About Zac Armstrong & No Hype, Just Standards: Zac Armstrong is a former Marine, Naval Officer, and F-18 Pilot who coaches executives and high-performing leaders to optimize their biological systems, overcome burnout, and achieve peak physical and mental performance using precision data.

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Transcript

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly formatted. Each timestamp links to that moment in the video.

0:00 We engage in addictive behavior either to feel okay or feel better. My guest today is Dr. Steven Cidell, clinical psychologist, UCLA faculty in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. You want to find your stress sweet spot. We all have a stress sweet spot. He also carries a joint appointment in rheumatology, which is the interesting part because that’s the department where stress stops being a feeling and starts being a diagnosis. that took me on a path of wanting to address stress because it impacts everything in our lives. He directs the Wallingberg Institute of Ethics. 40 years of clinical work on stress, addiction, and resilience and he wrote a book called the nine pillars of resilience. Chronic stress, the master hallmark of aging, throws your body out of balance. It drains your energy. It’s like a car going up a hill, but the car is not tuned properly. The labs came back fine. Every number in

1:01 Range. The doctor says, “You look great for your age. You drive home, but you know something’s off and you just can’t name it.” You’re up at 4 in the morning doing math you already did. You’re short with your kids over nothing. The workout that used to fix everything now cost you two days. So, you do what you’ve always done. You just push harder, but it doesn’t work. And that’s the part that scares you. That’s not aging. That’s a load you’ve been carrying for 20 years without ever backing off. I’m Zach Armstrong, retired naval commander, F-18 guy, now a performance coach for high performing men over 40. And this is no hype, just standards. This one came to me as a referral. Robert Lufkin sent his name over and said I needed to talk to him and he was right. Here’s why I wanted this conversation. Dr. Steven’s position is that stress is necessary. Not something to escape, not something to breathe your way out of. necessary. 40 years of clinical work and that’s where he landed. And quite frankly, that’s the opposite of what most people are selling you. So, we’re going to get into the difference between what the stress that bailed you and the stress

2:01 That’s taken you apart. While your body reads a quarterly forecast the way it reads a predator and what he does when the panel says find and the man in front of him says otherwise. If this show has been useful to you, subscribe. It’s free and it helps other guys find it. Let’s get into it. Doctor, again, thank you for joining us. Um so let’s start off with this uh psychiatry and rheumatology same guy. How does a clin clinical psychologist uh start seeing rheumatology patients? How does that happen? Well, it’s a good question and uh it begins with me recognizing very early in my career the impact that stress has on all of us. It’s interesting when I first got into psychology and I was working with addiction, the big surprise was that I did I was doing a some research on looking at conditioned aspects of addiction and I was showing them images related to

3:02 Their drug taking behavior. But the amazing thing was that as much as that produced craving, the thing that produced even more craving was stress. And that took me on a path of wanting to address stress because it impacts everything in our lives physically, emotionally, mentally. And that’s what took me into looking at physical symptoms that are directly the result of of stress. And I began working in this area of how we best deal with stress which is a growing problem. And it took me into medical areas because for example rheumatology those patients one of the very factors that impact their symptoms is stress. So I began developing programs uh resilience

4:03 Programs that help people with various kinds of physical symptoms and that took me into collaboration with rheumatologists with cardiologists and other kinds of uh physicians. Okay. Speaking of the word resilience, you know, people have different definitions. Uh for someone who uh is using it in practice, what does that term mean to you? Good question because you’re right. It began, resilience began as coming back from severe hardship, severe trauma. But I’ve expanded the notion of resilience to really be a definition of optimal functioning. And my model that has nine pillars to it expands that into all areas that impact how we function, how we utilize the energy, our personal energy of which we don’t have a limited amount.

5:04 And when we drain it, right? And when we drain it because we’re stressed all the time, it leaves us uh impaired emotionally, physically, and mentally. Right. And you you were talking about, you know, stress and addiction, the connection. How how are they connected in the brain? Not not just metaphorically, but like mechanically. Well, you know, our brains are tremendously complicated. And uh in fact, we engage in addictive behavior either to uh feel okay or feel better. And so it involves the um the reward centers of the brain. It also involves the amygdala, the fear centers of the brain. And addiction puts connections between different areas of the brain that we don’t normally have and then that perpetuates the addictive behavior. And so really you uh when we

6:04 Talk about addiction, when we talk about anything, we’re talking about the patterns of connections that are developed throughout our lifetime. And I talk about it in my book. I refer to what I call primitive gestalt patterns. These are the patterns set up as a result of the lessons of childhood. And a simple way to think about it is that the voice we hear 24/7 is the voice that’s the spokesperson for those patterns telling you what you can do, what you should do, what you can’t do, telling you what to worry about, what to be thinking about. Those are patterns set up in the early years of our lives. But they set the course for our entire life. And so real change comes about only when we start to challenge those belief systems. I have a few questions that stem from

7:04 That. Number one, like you know, when you talk about childhood having, you know, a lasting impact, where do you feel like, you know, those years are? Are we talking like six years old, 5 years old? Where do you feel like it stops to where that directional, you know, that direction guy, the the kid that’s pointing in the direction of the 40-year-old, right? What does it say? Well, it it it it doesn’t stop at any age. It just decreases gradually in terms of lessons learned. So, um some people say it’s at five, some people say it’s at seven or at 10, but the earlier the impact, the greater the impact. That’s a that’s a it’s sort of on a gradient. Got it. That makes sense. Um, and then the second part I want to get to because I like when we’re talking about addiction here. Um, because almost anybody that’s listening to this will go addiction, they’re going to think drugs, alcohol. But that’s not what addiction is, right?

8:04 What What do you think addiction is? Addiction is any um dependence on it could be a drug and it could be a behavior that we’ve used to quash discomfort or to produce uh reward. Right? So it’s a it’s a broad context. It’s very broad. But the correlation between stress and addiction, there is no doubt that that’s probably the biggest correlation between the two, right? Not only that, but stress correlates with a lot of things. It correlates with um impaired functioning. It correlates uh with I last year I published an article where people in longevity field know about the 12 hallmarks of aging. These are biological markers, uh,

9:04 Mitochondria impairment, uh, DNA, all of these things. My article was, the title of my article was chronic stress, the master hallmark of aging because it impacts all 12 of the known hallmarks of aging. So stress throws your body, excuse me, throws your body out of balance. It drains your energy. It’s like a car going up a hill, but the car uh is not tuned properly. So, it’s not firing on all cylinders. And you go up a hill and you produce more exhaust. You uh produce more and tear on the engine and it uses much less uh much more gas per mile. So, that’s what stress does to us. It impairs our functioning. Yep. It’s like that bike that has no gear changes, right? It’s hard to go up that hill when you can’t change a gear. And right this and I, you know, I know

10:05 I’m harping on this a little bit, but I just think it’s very impactful for the audience that listens to this because most of the guys listen this have a lot of stress in their lives. And I don’t think they understand how what you just talked about, you said it very broadly, the 12 things that it impacts, but what they don’t understand is like it it’s a loop too that we get caught in. Do you do you think that kind of people can get caught in a loop in which that stress is this part of the life and it comes acceptable to them and that’s kind of where that addiction lies? Well, let me take a step back and and give a little foundation here that I think will be helpful to put everything in context. And basic [clears throat] basically our nervous system has two branches. Sympathetic activation parasympathetic recovery. Stress activates the nervous system, prepares us for dealing with the threat, the danger, and that’s a good thing. And stress serves us in many ways. But the

11:05 First problem is that we still have the biology of our huntergatherer ancestors. And our response to stress is the fightor-flight response. We prepare our muscles tighten up to either fight danger or run from it. But you know, Zach, how many of the stresses that you deal with in your day can you handle that way? Almost none, right? So, we mobilize the body and then we actually have to use additional energy to tense and hold that energy in. Okay, so that’s the first problem with stress. These two need to be in balance. Activation, recovery need to be in balance. But think of your day like my day. I’m continually activating for stress because there’s so many things in my day that trigger the stress response. It could be, you know, thinking about

12:05 Work and thinking about a problem at work. It could be a conflict in a relationship. Uh it could be paying a bill. It could be finances, worries. All of these things activate. But in your day, how many stimuli do you have that say you’re safe, you can relax, you could take it easy? I don’t have any. Yeah, me either. I don’t think a lot a lot of the guys, you know, that I work with the same can be said for them, right? Um so that so then you have this imbalance because you’re continually activating without recovery. And that’s the source of the problem with stress, the imbalance in the two two branches of the nervous system. And in in the world we live in too where it’s just natural, you know, reaction to everything and information is readily available. [laughter] We remain in that state so much. And that’s what I meant by the loop earlier. We get comfortable inside that loop that we live in to where each day, you know, all right, I can handle my stress by having two drinks tonight. And then that becomes their loop. But then that affects the

13:05 Sleep. So now they get less sleep. they don’t get the deep sleep or rim sleep and now that loop becomes now now they eat more or they you know they they’re shorter at work. Um and for you what what do you think some of the definitions of when people get in that loop and we’ll just call it chronic stress that chronic stress loop. What do what do you see that as? What what do you see chronic stress and what it does to somebody? Right? So chronic stress is when these two branches of your nervous system are out of balance. So, you know, we talk about burnout, but I like to use a slightly different term. I use burn up because when you activate the stress response, you’re literally burning fuel to produce the energy for this for the stress response. Well, if you’re burning fuel, you’re heating up the body. That’s inflammation. And so you need to be finding ways of cooling down your body to stay in in

14:05 This place of balance. Now the interesting thing, Zach, is if we think of all the successes we’ve had in our lives. Invariably, all of our successful behavior has been associated with a stressful situation. giving a an important talk, having an important meeting, meeting a deadline. What happens in our brain is that we have unconsciously connected stress with success. So this is an additional um cause for the imbalance is that we actually seek out stress because in in our history it’s been associated with success. Right? So again, it’s the subconscious, right? It’s what we do. Our our subconscious is way more powerful than people give it credit for. How much do you think the subconscious plays a factor in all of this? Well, the subconscious plays a huge

15:06 Factor as I’m just describing one situation, but our subconscious emotional subconscious in which we haven’t dealt with our emotions trigger additional stress. If if we didn’t get our needs met as a child, we will be directing our behavior unconsciously to try and meet those needs. But but since it’s unconscious, we go about it in inappropriate ways, making more money to try and fill that emotional hole. More conquests to fill that emotional hole. So it’s so important to understand your motivations. It’s so important to recognize emotions that haven’t been dealt with. But you’re you were alluding to something before about addictions, which is a is our unconscious way of trying to address the imbalance or alcohol or anything else that is an external

16:07 Source. Unless we address it directly, which means finding ways to train our body into the parasympathetic, train our body to relax. That’s the only real way to restore balance. How does one go about that? Because that’s not something that’s easy to do to train yourself that way. You know, I’ve had guest on, you know, had a Navy Seal on um who who does meditation now. you know that’s that’s hard in practice. What are some of the things you think can help in the nature? Okay. So you you you make a good point that uh it’s not easy since it’s it’s not part of what we’re we are accustomed to doing. And that’s why it’s important to realize that we can’t do everything at once to restore balance. It’s like the patient that goes to the to the doctor because of stress related

17:07 Problems and the doctor says, “Well, you have to get more exercise. You have to relax more. You have to stop drinking and you have to get to bed on time.” And the patient walks out saying, “I got to get a different doctor because he because he doesn’t want to hear all of that.” So, it’s he doesn’t want to do all that. Right. Right. So, it’s important to realize that and that’s why I created in my book the notion of the path. Um, and every day if you do a couple of things that put you on the path, that’s success. And you don’t have to worry about, well, I didn’t do this and I didn’t do that and feel bad about it. Instead, you say, I’m on the path because I took a few steps. And those steps can be um practicing some form of relaxation for 10 or 15 minutes. Uh it could be treating yourself in a healthy not abusive way. It could be just a few

18:07 Things that are important to put you on the path. And when you’re on the path based on my nine pillars, now you know you’re going in the right direction. You can relax. you could feel good that you’re doing what you can do and that encourages you to do more tomorrow. Yeah. It because I have a lot of guys that I work with and it’s not abnormal to hear it from a lot of the people that I speak with as well. Hey, Zach, I’m dead tired at 3 p.m. in the afternoon, but then I’m at 11 o’clock at night and I’m laying in bed and I can’t go to sleep. What’s going on there? Well, what’s happening in the middle of the day is that they’ve used more energy than they have resources for because of stress. And what’s going on at night is that their their mind is going a mile a minute thinking about problems, thinking about things that need to get done or didn’t get done. And when you’re thinking and going through problems,

19:10 That’s activating the left side of your brain. To go to sleep, you have to shift into the right side of your brain. So there are good reasons why people are exhausted in the middle of the day and good reasons why people are having difficulty getting to bed. Because to get to bed, you have to come down this continuum of activation. And many of us have literally lost the ability to come down that continuum. And so you keep saying the word energy and I and when people hear the word energy, they don’t associate it with what you mean. Well, I don’t think what you mean. Um they associate it with energy like going out and running. Okay, I just lost a lot of energy. But what you’re talking about is, well, at least I believe so, is the cognitive energy that you’re using each day. And you know, studies that I’ve seen show that, you know, cognitive energy can take 20 to 24% of your whole energy sources through the day. Is that kind of what you’re talking about? And can you kind of explain what your thoughts on that?

20:10 Okay. Yeah. What I’m talking about is each of us has a certain amount of personal energy. What’s energy? Energy is you’re metabolizing uh food and your body, every cell in your body is acting like a little uh uh furnace to burn that fuel and turn it into energy. Whether it’s the brain, whether it’s running, all of it is th this process, this one basic process. We don’t have an unlimited amount. And so when you are worried, literally your body goes into a stress response and the energy goes into your muscles to prepare you for fight or flight. Now your your brain body literally has two choices of what to do with the energy.

21:10 It could send it to fight or flight, protect and defend, or it could send it to grow, heal, and maintain. And your brain body is always making choices. But it prioritizes, defend, and protect because that’s survival, right? Even when it’s not really necessary. But danger, threat is a subjective uh perspective that we all have. But when we do that and we do that consistently, your brain is saying, “Well, I got to send my energy into my muscles to defend and protect. And I guess I’m going to have to take it from my kidney that needs that blood to that needs that energy to filter blood. And literally, our brain body makes those choices.” And and so you just said something that you know it will it’ll resonate with a lot of guys when you you probably explain this when you say it sends it to your muscles. What do you

22:10 Mean? So if you’re going to use your muscles, you your muscles need energy and the energy comes from what I just said. So you mobilize the energy of those muscles and that takes energy away from uh growth, maintenance, other very more vital uh aspects of the functioning of your body and which you also talked about earlier leads to inflammation and so how much that leads right? Yeah. How how much do you when you talk about inflammation we talk about especially in the area you work in in rheumatology how much stress can impact inflammation in your opinion? Uh stress tremendously impacts inflammation oxidative stress and other uh biological processes that don’t that really break down break down the body. A

23:10 Couple of years ago, I hosted a a summit on inflammaging the body and mind aspects of inflammaging. And we had experts all over the world talk about this very problem of in inflammation which contributes to aging. And we know research now research studies have now shown that stress speeds up the aging process. Can you maybe dive into that um how that summit went and maybe a couple of the highlights where if you had to name a couple highlights for people to hear because I don’t think inflammation g inflammation g is given the credit it’s due and what it can do to someone. Can you maybe touch on a few things there? [snorts] Well, uh, physically it, um, you know, one of the biggest problems in our society is sleep, and that’s because people have difficulties as a result of stress. But

24:10 We have cardiovascular problems because of stress. We have high blood pressure problems of course because of diet but stress is another leading cause of rises in blood pressure. It’s like you activate the body. Think about it. You’re activating the body. When you do that, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, but and your muscles tighten. And what happens? the the your body begins to adapt and adjust to these higher levels. If it keeps going in raising blood pressure, pretty soon your body raises the the the set point of blood pressure, raises the set point of heart rate, raises the set point of other factors in the body that are literally bringing your body out of this place of optimal functioning and optimal balance.

25:11 Right. And you use the term inflammation, which I like a lot. I’m going I’m going to use that from now on. Um, how much impact does this have on aging? Because I think that’s something everybody would like to know or hear because that’s what nobody wants to do. Most people don’t want to age. Right. Right. So again, the article I wrote showed how stress affects all 12 hallmarks of aging. A study um uh that was done looked at high stress and low stress people and looked at their tieumir length. So tieumirs are these caps that sit at the end of our DNA, the strands of DNA. And every time cells divide, these tieumirs help keep the DNA optimally functioning. it it’s like a cap, a protective cap. But over time, the tieumirs get shorter until they get so short that the cell can no longer

26:14 Divide. So the tieumir length is an indication of aging. This study showed that the high stress people had much shorter tieumirs than the low low stress people. So one of the basic hallmarks of aging the the the fraying of the tieumirs has been shown to be related to stress. Now I’m doing a study right now with a company called Glyen Age. Glyen age is one of the companies that measures biological age and where all the people that are take getting their biological age we’re giving them my resilience questionnaire based on my model nine pillars of of resilience and we’re looking to see if those who score the highest on my resilience questionnaire show the slowest aging biologically and We should

27:16 Have results of this in a few months. What’s your prediction? My prediction is that uh the more resilient you are, the slower the aging process. I would assume so too. And speaking of resilience, like I would say in the United States, it’s very common. Um hard day at work, come home, you have a glass of wine, couple drinks. What does that do as well? So, you know, in the short term, you the the alcohol has a sort of a calming effect or relaxing effect, but it does stuff in the brain that’s not so great. Um, it throws off your electronphilogram, your brain wave patterns. It um it actually causes body uh damage. Alcohol to some degree is a is a toxin. So the

28:16 Goal, what everybody should be thinking of as a goal is how do I start creating healthy behavioral patterns that become habits for me that make it easier to follow and find healthy ways of restoring balance rather than external. Because if you take anything externally, whether it’s a a pill, whether it’s alcohol, your body begins to adapt to you using an external source. So your body becomes even less capable of giving it doing its own balancing because it’s becoming dependent on some external factor. This is why doctors if they give you a a sleeping pill, they say don’t take it longer than a week or two for acute reasons because it’ll actually start to lose its effectiveness. And that’s true

29:16 For anything. And what you want to be doing is you want to be learning healthy habits that begin to help you get into this place of balance on your own. And you know, exercise is good to do. Exercise is one of the reasons why exercise is so good is I’ve been talking about how stress causes muscle tightness, muscle preparation for fight or flight, right? Exercise releases a lot of that tension in your body. So, it serves a very useful purpose in this goal of keeping the two branches of your nervous system in balance. Okay, let’s talk if the guy who has a long day at work or the female that has, you know, the lady that has a long day at work, they come home, they have kids running around, they got to make dinner, like where is the ability for them to find that moment of, like you said, a healthy habit. What

30:16 What are some recommendations you have in that kind of environment? Okay. The first suggestion is that when someone leaves work and heads home, right then and there, they flip a switch. They say to themselves, “I’m no longer at work. I can now relax. I’m now not under the pressures of the day. I can now turn down that activation.” So, giving yourself permission is an important first step. Letting yourself know you’re no longer in that environment reminds you that you can relax. So the first step is simply the mindset. I’m no longer in a dangerous situation. And this is true for anybody at any time when you sit down for a meal. And so even even at work when you sit down for a meal and you give yourself a half hour for it, you start the meal by saying,

31:16 “I’m safe. I can relax. I can enjoy my meal.” Because most people, even during the day, they’ll gobble their food up and they’re staying in the stress mode. You don’t want to be in the stress mode when you’re having a meal because the meal requires going into parasympathetic recovery. And if you’re stressed, you are not allowing your digestive system to do its job, right? Because the digestive system tends to shut down during stress. So, and then when you get home, you you want to enjoy being home. So you want to be again thinking how do I enjoy my experience with my kids even though they may be you know uh rambunctious how can I appreciate that set boundaries but how do I love and enjoy being home

32:16 That’s the best thing you can do to recover and restore balance that’s great and I think that long-term chronic stress especially with a lot of you know high performing people at least a word that we call burnout. [snorts] Um what would you associate you know someone who is in burnout? What are some of the symptoms that they would see after years of chronic stress and where now they’re reaching the word or terminology which we would deem them burnt out? [snorts] So recently I I saw in consultation a a senior executive, a president of an organization and he was dealing with physical symptoms because of the stress that he’s been under for so long a period of time. And so the the first step the first step is to put him onto a path to actually have a

33:18 Mindset of okay here’s where we are. You’re in burnout and you have the signs of burnout. You’re not thinking as clearly. You’re having difficulty with your sleep. You have various physical symptoms. let’s start the process. And that’s the first step is okay, here’s here’s where I’m at and I know what’s caused it. Let me move on to the path. And so I sent him a a 15minute visualization relaxation that he’s doing on a daily basis. And I’m asking him to notice if he feels different at the end of those 15 minutes because it’s not only doing the things that are going to help you, it’s recognizing that in fact they make a difference. And a 15minute relaxation exercise at

34:18 The end you can feel more relaxed. So now you know this is doing something to my body, reinforcing, doing it again, encouraging, doing it again. Then we addressed the mindset and there was a a mindset of looking for the danger. Where’s the next danger? What do I have to prepare for? And we began shifting into a positive mindset. It doesn’t mean that you don’t address problems, but once you come up with a solution to a problem or a plan, you want to shift your mindset into positive and you want to be looking in the positive direction because that has a different impact on your body. Next we talked about emotions and he was carrying a lot of anger for the situation he was in and a sense of loss as most are I imagine.

35:18 Right. Well anger the emotion of anger has energy to it. Yes. And you know I I asked him put your hand on your chest and it he felt like a vibration there. And that of course was because of the stress, but it was also because he was carrying that anger. So you have to work through the feel. You have to recognize and then work through feelings because they carry energy and they carry a drive to want to complete that anger unconsciously. And so other things will trigger that anger. We’ll express that anger inappropriately because we haven’t dealt with the real sources of that anger. So it was a whole process step by step to realize I want to deal with my feelings. I want to deal with my mindset. But one key that I want to share with you that’s most important and that’s my first pillar and that’s our relationship

36:18 With ourselves. And it’s important to start tracking how you treat yourself when you make a mistake. How do you deal with yourself when you make a mistake? Are you do you beat yourself up for the mistake? Are you hard on yourself? You critical? Or do you have compassion? And I vote for compassion. If I made a mistake and I’m already suffering because of that mistake. I don’t want to pile on to myself and make it worse and undermine myself. I want to be caring, loving, compassionate toward myself. That’s the best approach. So most of us are a little too critical, a little too hard on oursel. We’re comparing ourselves with others and then we’re feeling we’re falling short. the healthy internal voice because the we talked about old patterns earlier, Zach, and one of the aspects of the old pattern is

37:21 The voice we hear and how we talk to ourselves, which is also learned from our childhood. It’s not the best approach. We don’t even consider whether it is. We just learn it. And so now if you want to be more resilient, you have to look at how you treat yourself and how you talk to yourself. And the qualities of a healthy internal parent are coming from a place of love, compassion, acceptance, support, care, and joy. That’s the healthy internal voice that everybody should want to model and begin noticing where you’re doing it differently. I like that. Being being good to ourselves is a a good a good pl point to kind of stop on because there’s no better way to treat yourself than just to be good and take a breath and give

38:21 Yourself that grace that you’re talking about. Now, how I like to end these things are I like to ask uh 10 questions. They’re called rapid fire. I don’t want you to put much thought process to it. Just try to name the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? All right. Here we go. Uh the nine pillars. Name the one you break most often. That’s a good question. Uh because I’m I’m working on this all the time. But um sometimes uh pillar number two is relationship with others and sometimes I don’t set appropriate boundaries which is an important part of that. Okay. Number two. Now Traxxon or neuro feedback which one surprised you most in your data? What surprised me most in my data was a recent study that I did with breast cancer survivors and we did before and after electroinsphlloggrams and we showed severe impairment in their

39:21 Brain before the neuro feedback and we showed almost complete recovery after 18 neuro feedback sessions. So I was amazed at the ability of the brain to recover and heal. You run Wallingberg Institute of Ethics since 1990. What made you say yes to that endeavor? I want to my my mission in life is to help people be the best version of themselves and I took on that role because I wanted to do my best so that everybody has that opportunity. That leads me right to my next question, Mr. Wallenburgg. What does his story have to do with resilience? Well, he he took a huge challenge to save many people’s lives. And what it has to do with resilience. When when we have problems in our lives, I like

40:23 People to think of them as challenges where the bigger the problem, the bigger the challenge and the greater the opportunity for growth. And so you want to embrace the challenges in your life. You want to refer to them as challenges, not problems. You want to embrace them because it’s the greatest way for you to grow. Agreed. Rheumatology or psychiatry? Which one did you enjoy the most? Well, uh, [laughter] I like how I integrate the two and I and I like how I integrate so much into my model of resilience because the more you integration you get, the more you bring the different parts of yourself together in coherence, the greater your health. the treatment programs you run outside the university, which one taught you

41:23 Something UCLA could not? So, one of the treat treatment centers I directed was called Moon View. And in that in that we worked with very high-profile people, celebrities, and we put a team of tr of of of professionals together to to work with them. And so it was a very intense program where they were seeing three, four, five different people each day. And again, what that showed me is what’s capable change that’s capable and has led me to my concepts of transformation and that everybody has the potential for transformation. I agree with that. I agree with that wholeheartedly. Um, the title on your UCLA door right now, what does it exactly say? Well, it just has my name. [laughter] All right.

42:26 But but again, if I was uh to put a title, it’s helping each person be the best version of themselves. I try to live my day, my life like that every day. So, I love hearing something like that. Of everything you’ve put out in public, which one have you, which one’s traveled the furthest? How many languages did it reach? H uh well you know I I I was the one of the people who brought neuro feedback and BOF feedback to the people’s republic of China and set up training programs there. So that was probably the furthest that my work that my work has gone. But my book has has I’ve heard from people all over the world that my book has changed their lives. has has helped them in immense ways. So that I would say that’s my biggest uh reward so far. Yeah.

43:28 Cuz what you’ve done there is you created a ripple effect that just touches lives and then it continues to touch other lives. And that’s amazing. That’s good on you. All right. 40 years in now. What did you believe in 1985 that you no longer believe now? I would say that is is not to put a ceiling is like having the intention of seeing where you have a ceiling and removing it and setting goals. Here’s here’s what I would say is to set goals that you don’t know how you’re going to get to them. Because it’s when you don’t know how you’re going to get to a goal, it forces you to think outside the box. It forces you into transformation. Great. And last one. Your book says

44:30 Stress is necessary for success. Give me one sentence for the man who reads that as permission to keep grinding. You want to find your stress sweet spot. We all have a stress sweet spot. But if you go beyond that, if you keep pushing, you’re going to get into the zone in which your body breaks down, your thinking breaks down, and your emotions break down. So, you’re working against yourself if you keep trying to push that. is the sweat a stress sweet spot and it’s up to everyone to find what that is for them. I agree with that. Well, hey, I wanted to thank you again today for joining us. Uh I think anybody who listens would have gotten some positive feedback about that and how they should view stress and what it can actually do to them. Right. Well, thank you. It’s my my pleasure to be here with you. Here’s what I’m taking out of that. Stress is not the enemy. Your body needs

45:30 Load the same way a muscle needs load. What’s killing you is the load that never lets up in recovery you never schedule. That’s two different things. Most guys are trying to solve the second problem by getting better at the first one. And the other piece, the one I want you to sit with, if your panel says normal and you’re not right, you’re not imagining it. Normal is just the average of the population that’s inflamed, overweight, or exhausted. Being told you’re normal only means nobody’s ready to medicate you yet. That’s not a health standard. That’s just a threshold. So pick one thing this week. Not nine. One. The pillar you’re worst at. Whatever Dr. Cider’s list shook loose in you, do that one for 30 days and then look again. Dr. Ciderov, thank you. The book is nine pillars of resilience. It’s linked in the description along with everything we cited. If this hits something, send it to the guy you know who’s running on fumes and calling it discipline. Subscribe so the next one finds you.

46:30 This is no hype, just standards. See you next week.