How To Prevent Chronic Illness In Your Household

Episode Transcription

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I am Dr. Nicole and on today’s episode we’re going to talk about a variety of really important health-related topics, including things like the gut microbiome, gut health and precision medicine. Our gut health is so connected to our overall health and particularly our brain health and function. That’s why I often cover topics related to that on the show. Last month, I had the opportunity to meet today’s guest, Dr. Marvin Singh at a conference we were both attending. I was really impressed with the story of his personal health journey and how he has used that to impact the work that he’s doing with patients as a physician and I knew I wanted to have him on the show and I am so glad he agreed to come on today. Let me tell you a bit about him, Dr. Marvin Singh is an Integrative Gastroenterologist in San Diego, California, and a Member of the Board and Diplomate of the American Board of Integrative Medicine. He is also trained and board certified in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology/Hepatology. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Dr. Singh completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Health System, here sort of local to me, followed by fellowship training in Gastroenterology at Scripps Clinic Torrey Pines. He was trained by Andrew Weil, M.D., a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine. He is currently a voluntary Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSD in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health; prior to this, he was a Clinical Assistant Professor at UCLA and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Singh is a member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, American College of Lifestyle Medicine, and many other societies. He is actively involved in the American Gastroenterological Association, and he is one of the editors of the textbook of Integrative Gastroenterology, 2nd edition, I believe that is the new edition that just came out, and has written several book chapters and articles. He is dedicated to guiding his clients toward optimal wellness every step of the way, using the most cutting edge technologies to design highly personalized precision-based protocols and to help them stay on top of their health, rather than underneath disease. Towards this end, he founded Precisione Clinic, to bring the best in preventive medicine to his clients.

It’s a pleasure to have you with us today, Dr. Singh. Welcome to the show. 

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Thank you, thank you, what an introduction!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

You’ve done a lot, which is great! So much is out there now about dealing with our gut and gut-health and how that relates to health. Almost, sometimes, people can feel like there’s so much information, they don’t know where to start with things. So one of the things I know that we’re going to talk about today is some basics or some really foundational things that families can do. But I’m curious to have you start with talking a bit your journey, because while in your bio, I read all the amazing things you had done in medicine and in your training for that, there is a pretty important part of your personal story and your personal journey towards health that weaves into that too, and I’d love to have you talk with us about that. 

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah, you know I started practicing gastroenterology after I finished my fellowship and as I was working in my first job, I kind of felt that there was something missing from how we take care of people. We were really good at taking care of people when they were sick and they are in the hospital but those aren’t the majority of people that are walking and talking, walking around the streets. Most of the people you meet are regular people that aren’t deathly ill in the hospital. I wasn’t really sure what to do. I reached a point where a year or two later, I kind of felt that maybe I just wasn’t doing it right, that there was something missing from what I was doing. I reached out to one of my colleagues at Johns Hopkins where I worked for the first time as an assistant professor and he mentored me and encouraged me to learn about integrative medicine. So I hesitatingly did because I was very traditionally trained. Michigan is a pretty traditional, conservative hospital, very good training, but now they actually have an integrative medicine program, but not back when I was doing residency.

So, I enrolled in Andrew Weil’s program at the university of Arizona while I was actively practicing, so I was being a student again, while I’m actually working a full time job. So that was another challenge, but when I went for the first week in person to Arizona and I was meditating, I was doing yoga at sunrise, all the tai chi, QiGong, all these things that I thought, “This is not for me, I’m never going to do this stuff”. Every morning, I was refreshed and totally reinvigorated and I learned so much about nutrition, just in the few days that I was there, that I didn’t even know or understand or appreciate, I was overweight, learning more and more and more and and made me really a believer. So that’s kind of my story and I really took that to heart and really kind of built on that and learned more and more and more on my own and started writing more and reading more and it just kind of brought me to where I am today. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And I think that it’s such a powerful story about how you were a bit skeptical at first, but implemented these things in your own life and saw the change and thought, “I need to bring this to my patients, and really, to patients that you felt like you hadn’t necessarily been reaching before, with the more chronic kinds of things, as you said, and I always feel like when we are implementing things in our own lives and we can be a model of that, it makes it that much more powerful, right? I mean sometimes people feel like, as doctors, as practitioners, we are just there to tell them what to do, but are we really doing it ourselves? And that’s what I loved about your story, it’s like no — I saw the difference for myself, which I think makes it that much more powerful. 

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah, and I learned that there are so many different components. You can’t just say, “I’m going to eat differently” and that’s going to be it. Nutrition and diet are a huge component of it, but interestingly, what kind of accelerated my weight loss in my journey was mindfulness, meditation. The stress really must have played a large role. And so, you know, sometimes you can tell, where there’s something holding you back from progress, despite your good intentions, you’re going to be held back. So it’s a multi-pronged approach, really. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, and I think that’s a really important point too, because I see a lot of kids and families at the clinic who have done a lot of things right as far as changing maybe their child’s diet or even their family’s diet, looking at things like specific gut protocols, supplements, things like that, but the stress level in the home, the stress level of the family, the stress level for the child is huge, and I have long felt like that can really sabotage progress, and what you’re saying is that that can really be the case.

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah, going on a vacation and having fun as a family might be just as good as doing a 10-day diet. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Right, right. A little bit later, I want to get into some specific recommendations that you have for people around stress reduction and things like that. So fast-forward to today and the work that you’re doing with people, you really focused a lot on this idea of optimizing health and wellness, of not waiting until there is an acute on major serious problem, but really taking the reigns and taking control of that at the current time. Can you talk a bit about what are some of the ways that you help people optimize that?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

It’s so much easier and better for you in the long run to understand what’s going on inside your body and understand what your risks are for certain things and making interventions on that before it becomes a major problem. We don’t want to wait until we have lupus. We want to know that there’s inflammation and maybe some early signs of autoimmunity going on before you have a problem, not at the time you have the problem, because the majority of the problems that we have are chronic diseases, and so these are the thing that are just kind of, “Oh, we don’t really know what causes it, it’s a chronic condition, these are the medicines you have to take, probably for the of your life.” That’s where a lot of the things are. Diabetes and heart disease and Alzheimer’s, all these things are also chronic diseases, because they come from a place where the inflammation and the changes that are occurring in whatever organ system we’re talking about have been going on for a while. So what I like to do is try to learn about as much of the information about somebody as I can as possible. Looking at toxin exposures, looking at the microbiome, looking at what the microbiome is doing, looking at the genomics, looking at the DNA. I even use whole body imaging. I’ve been utilizing Health Nucleus in La Jolla for whole body imaging and genomics and putting that together with the whole picture and talking to the person, learning about what their stressors are and what’s going on in their family and their friends, in their dynamics and looking at certain cardio-metabolic markers and just a whole wide variety of different things. I take all that information together and I literally spend a day in front of my computer looking at all that stuff and trying to build correlations and patterns and to help guide somebody as far as: This is how you should eat, this is what you should do to kind of clean up your environment. These are the risks that you might have and these are the things that you should do about it.

Then we have a place where we can kind of follow that along the way so we know what progress you’re making and are you on the right track? It’s a very kind of generic statement to say, but I say, “If you don’t know, you don’t know.” So if you don’t really know that you might have a problem, then you’re not going to know. So using some of these things, if we identify, for example, a 3 mm tumor in your lung, even if you’re a non-smoker, people can get lung cancer, for example. If we understand a 3mm tumor, one that’s very small and you’re asymptomatic. It’s much better if you think about it to remove it at that time than waiting until you start coughing and losing weight, maybe 5, 6, who knows however many years down the line. And then when it’s discovered eventually, because diagnosing these things is not necessarily the easiest to do and not the quickest way to diagnose — then you have other problems. You have to deal with other kinds of treatments that have other impacts on your life. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So the two things that stand out to me as you’re talking about that are that it’s individualized, focused on this individual person and it’s also very proactive, looking at really, what can we do to strengthen a person, what can we do to help them in a full-body way before they start to have lots of problems. Or maybe if they do currently have problems, before those get worse or take on other kinds of things, so I think that that’s really important and really the way that healthcare needs to go, I feel like we’ve been in such a reactive mindset for so long with how medicine is and you’re really on the forefront of saying no, actually we can start to address these things before they become issues.

Dr. Marvin Singh:

They say that there is a statistic that I saw that was pretty shocking, lately, that a third of the people that live to age 50, won’t make it to age 75. So that really hits the whole point home is because these things kind of brew for years and years and these are the things that actually cause us to pass away before we expect or want to. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

As you’re saying that, I’m thinking about one of the big concerns that a lot of parents have when they have a child, particularly with a more significant disability, whether that be more significant autism or cognitive impairment, those kinds of things, is that they are the primary caretakers for their child and what’s going to happen to their child if they get sick and are unable to care for them or what’s going to happen to their child when they pass away, and one of the things I focus on with parents is how to keep themselves as healthy as possible. Physically healthy, mentally healthy so that they can be there as long as possible for their child and that really struck me as you were saying that, that’s a big fear that so many of these parents have. It speaks to how, yes, we’re busy taking care of our children and particularly if you have a child with significant disability, but you also need to prioritize taking care of yourself.

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah. Healthy parent = healthy kid, and also implementing these recommendations, trying to use a lot of lifestyle-based approaches, learning and understanding good habits. These are also good for the kids because the kids are going to see you do this stuff, they’re going to learn it just by observation because kids are very observing beings and if they see you doing something bad, they’re going to think that’s okay, if they see you doing something good, they’re going to think that’s okay. So if they see you eating broccoli instead of french fries, then they’re going to think that broccoli is what you’re supposed to eat. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s right, that modeling is so powerful, so powerful. So you mentioned, a few minutes ago, when you were talking about some of the things that you look at with patients, you mentioned gut microbiome, gut health. let’s dive into that a big because certainly, many, many of the kids, the young adults that have developmental and mental health issues, whether they realize it or not, have underlying gut health kinds of issues that are perpetuating those problems. So for you, how important do you think gut health is to overall health and particularly to brain health and function?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Oh, it’s huge and it’s so individualized too because every person is only kind of 10-20% similar in their microbiome in the gut and these microbes. It’s not just bacteria, there are viruses, there are fungi, there are all kinds of little guys in there and they take the foods, they take whatever they’re exposed to and they process these things. And as a result, you get what we call metabolites that are produced. This is all this metabolome stuff if you heard this word, metabolome or metabolites. Metabolites are just, you can think of them as chemicals that are produced as a result of something breaking down or processing of some food or chemical or what have you. These are the things that actually influence our health and how we think, how we feel, our emotions, how we react. 90%-95% of serotonin is stored in the gut. That’s actually a good class A example we all talk about. Things like GABA and all these neurotransmitters are also produced and stored in the gut. So you could easily see that when you eat something in particular, you maybe get a certain kind of feeling or a couple of hours later you have a certain kind of feeling whether it’s a good feeling or a bad feeling and it could largely be related to the food itself but also what happens when the food enters the system. It’s just like you put a piece of something into your system and you see what happens, what reactions happen as a result. 

If you’re continuing to put all these things that are not good in the system that has chemical and additives and food dyeing, coloring, all those other kinds of things, then you know, the body has to process it. So when it processes it, it breaks down into certain other things and those certain other things can impact you and they can go to the brain, they can go wherever and that’s how it kind of affects you and there are so many different microbes and they shift and they change and their functions may also shift and also change and so it’s a very, very interesting, very dynamic system that we have, the microbiome is very dynamic. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, I think the sort of two different categories that I see with people: Sometimes patients will come in and they’re having brain-based symptoms, maybe it’s a child who is incredibly hyperactive, inattentive, struggling to manage their emotions and behaviors, sometimes as a child with learning problems, low energy, those kinds of things, but two categories: One category is also the kids who also are clearly having GI issues, right? Clearly having things like constipation or low appetite or irritable bowel or those kinds of things, and for those families, I think it’s a bit of an easier sell to have them understand that there is a connection between what’s going on in the gut and the brain, but then we have this other category where the kids aren’t having over GI symptoms and so it’s a lot easier, I think, to go — “Ah, I don’t think food or the microbiome has anything to do with that.” Do you find that too with patients?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah. It’s what I just tell them: Just try and see what happens because you’ll be surprised. Just taking gluten away or removing dairy. Simple things like that could make a huge difference or making sure that you eat organic and not eating things that have food dyes in them, because for example, I’m talking about food dye and food colorings because that’s a classic one, especially for kids because it’s a neurotoxin. It just messes up your brain, whether you’re an adult or a kid. But kids maybe more particularly vulnerable because they’re growing and changing and developing so they may not have as resilient of a whole system as an adult might. The early days of being a kid are also very vulnerable, even for the gut microbiome, so things can be influenced a lot. So the microbiome of an adult is really kind of forged by the age two and a half years old. So that early first couple of years is very important because that can kind of set the stage for what the rest of the life is going to be life. So early exposures, diets, stress in the home, sleep habits, all of these things, they all factor in. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

A lot of the times people think about the microbiome, their mind immediately goes to probiotics. “Oh, I’ve seen thresholds for those,” or “Somebody recommended that I take those,” or “That my child takes those” — How you just explained things and talked about it talks a lot about food, which I think is super important. What, as a gastroenterologist, when you’re talking with patients about these things, what roles do you feel like food plays, what role do you feel like probiotics play, what are some of the starting points, the things that you feel are most important if, for the parents listening, they say okay, “What are some things that I can do to support my child’s gut to be able to create a healthy microbiome?” Where do you think those pieces fit in?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

That’s a great question, you know probiotics come up all the time, it’s probably the most common word that comes out of my mouth in my practice: Probiotic. But one of the key things that I tell everybody is that you can not probiotic your way into health. You can’t use the probiotic as an excuse to eat pizza and burgers all day long. It doesn’t work like that. So you have to create, if you want the probiotics to work the best for you, you have to create an environment by which that might occur. It’s more as a supplement or an additive. Sometimes they have therapeutic benefits as well. So if you need it for a particular reason, like you have leaky gut or there’s a lot of inflammation going on and they can maybe help or kind of push you in the right direction, but still, at the same time, if you’re doing everything else that is not ideal, probiotic alone isn’t going to get you there. So you know, nutrition plays, obviously a large role because we’re talking about the gut and the gut processes of nutrition, but other things like making sure that you’re getting enough sleep, particularly for kids, they’re very sensitive, at least mine are if they don’t get enough sleep. Make sure they get enough sleep. Make sure that they’re fed and they’re fed well. Make sure that you learn and understand stress reduction. Even at a very young age, it’s actually best if they learn how to do yoga and meditate and all those kinds of things when they’re little, because these are the habits that are easily ingrained that they could take with them their entire lives to help them become more resilient people later on. 

Being out in nature, you know? Kids love to play! Every kid loves to play! So being outdoors in nature and learning and appreciating nature and just spending as much time as you can out there, that’s another good way to kind of optimize health, plus, you’re probably getting exercise, especially as a kid running around outside. 

And exercise is also very important. So exercise isn’t just for adults. Exercise can be for kids. It doesn’t mean they have to go work out in the gym and lift weights or anything, but running around on a playground is exercise for a kid. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And they need that, and that you know, people often think about that just from the behavioral standpoint of how it helps them burn off energy, but actually, from the standpoint of physical health and our gut working properly, and our brain working properly, we need movement. Kids need movement and sleep and all of those things. So talk a bit about what you think are some good starting points? So for a family who maybe is eating a pretty processed food-heavy diet, lots of packaged things, they’re hearing you talk about the dyes and those kinds of things, especially certain times of the year, where heading into the holidays and things like that, a lot more of that stuff around — what do you think are some good, basic starting points for families to think about with some of that? And maybe some things that don’t increase a ton of stress. Because that’s another thing that I find, parents go, “I know I’m supposed to be doing all of these things but I am completely panicked and stressed out thinking about it”, and it’s like, well, that’s not helpful either. So I mean some starting points that parents and that family can actually start to reduce their stress while improving their health, I think is so important. 

Dr. Marvin Singh:

I think there are two easy kinds of concepts. One is, I tell people, if it comes in a bag or a box, it means it was made in a factory. If it was made in a factory, then it was not made to make you healthy. It was made to make money. And so just understanding that concept and kind of letting that sink in, that’s pretty key because that helps you understand that if you’re buying something that is packaged, then there are multiple ingredients and most likely there are stabilizers and other things that aren’t really necessary for health and they’re just made to preserve the product on the shelf, not for your health, but so that they can sell more because they don’t want to sell you a box of cereal that’s going to go stale in two days, they want it to last weeks on the shelf because somebody has to buy it eventually. And so understanding that concept, and then the compliments to that concept is: Just start looking at the labels. If you look at a label and you don’t know what half the stuff is then you should think twice about it. I mean I don’t know the names of all these things. It’s kind of weird, you start looking these things up and you’re like, “Geez! What do I need to eat that for!” So if you don’t know what the name is, then maybe it’s not for you. They actually say — there is one tip I heard a few years ago, it’s like, if your grandmother didn’t know what this thing was then don’t eat it. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s right. That’s probably a safe bet. Sometimes I say to people, if you wouldn’t cook with this in your kitchen, if this isn’t something you have in your pantry, then it’s probably not a normal thing to be eating. I know that you talk with patients a lot about cooking more at home, doing more shopping and food prep at home. You and I talked about that that can be a barrier for some people too, especially if they’re not used to it. Where do you start? I’m a big proponent of families cooking and shopping together, involving kids in that. What are some of the tips that you found are helpful for your patients around just starting to make some shifts in that area, things that maybe make meal prep easier or less stressful?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Getting the kids on board is actually kind of fun too. If you have multiple kids, it might be a challenge to take all the kids to the grocery store at one time, so you know, sometimes I just take one of them at a time. And have them pick out which vegetables and fruits look good. Have them bag it so they kind of get through the whole process of looking at what the good foods are and picking them up and then spending time together as a family once a week on the weekend to actually prep the food can be very helpful on many different levels. One, you have an activity that everyone is doing together, and two, you’re getting the food ready for the week, so you’re kind of doing work as well. I mean other kids don’t — the kids aren’t going to be doing all the work. As long as they do something, even if it’s like hey, let me chop this carrot and smell the organic carrot as it’s freshly cut, it is different and almost 100% of the time, when you have a vegetable that they have not eaten before and they’re part of the process of either washing it or peeling it or chopping it, they’ll say “Let me try it, I want to try it”. What I used to do is I just google carrot and I’ll get a whole list of all the vitamins and minerals and everything like that and I’ll show them the picture, I’ll show them how it grows in the ground and I’ll say, “Look at all the vitamins when you just eat this carrot! You’re getting this, this and this,” then I’ll tell them, “When you have these ingredients inside your body, your body can do this, this, this and this.” And they’re like, “Whoa!” And I’ll say, “You don’t have to take your vitamins if you eat enough of these things! So this is your vitamin, it’s where it comes from.” 

So it really kind of changes their mindset and then they want to do that and it really even for the adults, you kind of — maybe sounds kind of cheesy but you kind of bond with the food a little bit when you spend the time to actually chop it up and wash it and prepare it and get it ready, because the smells of the freshly cut vegetables, the whole process of doing that makes you kind of really appreciate the food, as opposed to just taking the plastic wrapper off and dumping it in the microwave and pushing 3 minutes and you’re done. It’s a totally different type of thing and you know, it really, really makes an impact on how you look at food to begin with. 

It is effort, it takes time, but if you kind of work it out so that you go grocery shopping on Saturday and then maybe don’t worry about anything after that, and then Sunday, the next day, you get all the Pyrex out, you get all the cutting boards out, you get it all set up, maybe even Saturday night before you go to bed so you don’t have to do that on Sunday. You wake up and you wash everything and it’s just kind of like a little factory in your house, you chop, chop, chop, put them all in the pyrex containers and load them up in your fridge and it’s kind of cool-looking when you open up your fridge and all you see is glass containers going all the way down with all the different vegetables. It’s about two hours, which is what I kind of estimated when I did it for a family of four. You get pretty much almost a whole week’s worth of prep on that two hours. So it’s two hours on one day, but there’s not much to do the rest of the week. You can even pre cook meats if you want, if you eat meat and things like that. So if you want to make a salad, it’s just boom, boom, boom, it takes two minutes to make the salad. You want to prepare a dish, you have the broccoli and the cauliflower and the Brussel sprouts are already chopped up and ready to go. 

That’s the hard part. If you have to do that after work or when your kids are coming back from school or daycare or whatever, then you have to do all that stuff. You’re like who’s going to cook these gourmet meals, right? We say it’s gourmet because it takes a lot of effort to make. But if it’s already prepared for you, then it’s a matter of throwing it in the pan with a little bit of some salt, and let it cook. These things don’t take a lot of gourmet effort to make.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Right, and I think that’s such an important concept of just — it’s sort of redistributing our time, right? because the reality is, how much time are people spending driving to and from fast food places, sitting in line — all of that, it’s just redistributing that and planning ahead a little bit and saying, okay, we’re going to do this. And I love families doing that together because you get such great mileage out of that, not just as you said, the food prep, but also you mentioned the togetherness and the bonding that can happen and the communication that can happen with families and kids doing that stuff together, and I always say to people, “If you make it more convenient to eat healthy then you’ll do it.” So I love that you open the fridge, you’ve got all your pyrex containers with everything. Kids and adults are more likely then, during the week, to grab the kinds of things that are going to help them have a healthy gut microbiome and feel better because it’s all there and it’s ready. And so I think those are such practical suggestions. 

One of the things that I really appreciate that you talk a lot with patients about too is specific stress-reducing strategies. Not that people need to be sitting and meditating for hours a day because, actually, that’s not practical and most people aren’t going to do that, but I know you’ve got some even simple brief daily routines or things that you find are helpful for patients. Can you share one or two of those that you think are particularly helpful for people maybe even as a starting point?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah, as a starting point, I think breathwork is one of the easiest things to do because it requires very little training or understanding, there is no belief system involved in it. all you’re doing is just breathing, you’ve got to breathe every minute of the day anyway, so you might as well do it in a controlled fashion, that can be relaxing. So I like, one of the early breaths to try is called the 4-7-8 breath. It’s where you breathe in to a count of four with your nose, hold all the air in your belly to a count of 7, then you exhale through your mouth to a count of 8. So that’s 4-7-8. So you’re breathing in, then you’re holding it in your belly, not in your chest, then you’re blowing it out. It’s almost like you’re doing a sigh, because it’s more exhalation than you’re inhaling. When you do that, start at four times at a time then you can increase to eight times. And then after that I just ask people — that takes like 60-90 seconds, so you’re not spending a lot of time. And then I ask them to just kind of sit there quietly and breathe in and out through their nose. Then all they’re doing is watching their breath. They’re observing their breath, they’re following their breath. You might get distracted, that’s okay, just gently bring your mind back to the breath and sit there for as long as you feel comfortable, whether it’s a minute, five minutes or ten minutes. If you do up to 20-25 minutes, that’s even better. That’s a little bit hard to do in the beginning. So just do your eight breath cycles and sit there for another minute and just kind of appreciate what it feels like to be calm and still and that’s what we mean by being grounded. That means that you are centered. You really are just focused on you and the breath and being alive and being a part of the whole environment that you’re in. And then you slowly just open your eyes and get ready start the day and you can wind down the day that way too. 

You can teach the kids this because it’s pretty easy to do. So that’s one easy thing. And the other thing you can do is, I have a mantra that I wrote for the kids, actually, but I tell a lot of the adults to do that too. It’s just kind of like you’re setting the intention in the beginning of the day and you can use the same thing at the end of the day. So it’s almost like a poem, you can write your own, you know, may this day be of benefit, may I help someone today, may I not let minor things bother me — I’m just doing this off the top of my head. So these are the kinds of things that you do when you, say you have it on your mirror in your bathroom and the whole family can do it one by one or you can do it together or however you want to do it and you’re just kind of setting the intention for the day, and it sounds silly, and it may feel silly in the beginning, but that’s okay because that’s a normal feeling to feel because you’re standing here repeating those words, but you do it enough times and enough times over and over again, those words become ingrained in your being, that’s kind of who you become and how you feel, you’re kind of reprogramming how your mind thinks. And so you may say, “May this day be of benefit and you may have a bad day five minutes later and that’s okay, because it’s not like some magic that you’re putting a spell on yourself that you’re going to have a great day. Life happens, but you keep saying that to yourself over and over and over again, one day, you’re going to start seeing that, “I could have had a bad day if X, Y, Z happened after this event happened, but it didn’t, because this is how I reacted instead.”

So there’s the hidden benefit, that it actually works in the background.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And such a powerful strategy for parents, because especially parents who are raising challenging children, it’s easy to get so caught up in what’s going on with kids and then beating ourselves up over our reactions to them. So what I love about those two strategies is they give parents something they can do, even as a quick reset in the middle of the day. If you find yourself getting really overwhelmed with something that’s going on with your child or if you feel like you’re really losing it over what’s happening, just that simple 90 second breathing and just sitting as a recentering and sort of that setting a mantra or an intention around how you want to be with your kids and just centering yourself with that, I think those are such powerful — they’re very simple, but they’re powerful strategies that parents can use.

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah, these are the things that you don’t want to try to learn when you’re in the heat of it. You want to learn it when things are not in the heat of it, because when those situations happen, when it’s a tough day, it’s like you’re calling it to action, you’re activating that part of your mind and your body, so even if you take one deep breath in and one deep breath out, in the middle of that heated situation, that in and of itself might be enough to kind of cue in the brain and bring me back to that point where you’re in that 4-7-8 breath, when you’re sitting calmly by your breath and it will bring you that sense of calmness. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and it has not only an impact on just our mental wellbeing in the moment, but also on our physical health too because that chronic stress, being in that chronically over-activated state is really, really bad for every organ system and just our entire physical health. So even those simple tools, they not only help us in the moment with how we’re thinking and feeling, but they really are important for supporting our overall physical health as well, right?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Yeah, the microbiome very much adapts to that change as well. Even stress, when you have all the stress hormones released in the gut, it can actually cause the microbes in the gut to change. So a guy that’s a good guy might actually end up becoming a bad guy because you were stressed out. So this is where chronic inflammation comes from, this is one of the root causes, it’s stress and it sounds like it’s such a simple concept. It is a simple concept but what happens inside is very complex, actually. So this affects your microbiome and if this affects your microbiome, it’s going to affect the metabolites that we talked about, all the things that are produced as a result. And even epigenetic expressions can be changed. Your genes may work and adapt differently because the chemicals that are being produced in your body as a result of that stress impact cause other chemical reactions to occur. And before you know it, you’re angry and you’re road-raging on the way to work after something happened in the morning and you don’t really know why, but that’s why. It came from somewhere. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So important, the connections with all that. You’ve shared such great information and tips and it’s been such a wonderful conversation. I know you have patients that you need to get to for the rest of the day. I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more information about you and what you’re doing. What’s the best place for them to go online for that?

Dr. Marvin Singh:

I have a website, it’s precisioneclinic.com and I’m also on Instagram, Facebook and all the social media places @precisionclinic or @drmarvinsingh and there’s plenty of information there and I have another website that has all my video and blog stuff and that’s drmarvinsingh.com as well. So plenty of places to find me. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and we’ll have all of those links and the social media links and everything in the show notes, and I really do encourage all of you listening to go and check out those resources. Dr. Singh has got a wide variety of videos and articles and things available, as well as just some really cool and helpful stuff that you post as well on the various social media sites, so, great resources there. Dr. Singh, thank you so much for being with us today, really appreciate your time.

Dr. Marvin Singh:

Thanks, I appreciate it, it was fun.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And thanks to all of you for listening to this episode, we’ll see you next time back here on The Better Behavior Show.