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How To Age In A Space That Helps Not Hurts Your Body · The LIVING Room Podcast | Inside The WNDR Lab

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Clean air is absolutely essential.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: You gotta start with that.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: I want them to know that the physical environment around you is really important for health, not only physical health, and as I said, clean and green.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: It is the cumulative load of stress that wears down your chromosomes, that impairs your immune system to do its job, that predisposes you to all kinds of stress-related illnesses like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease and stroke.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: When it's less than 30% relative humidity and greater than 60% relative humidity, your stress response is 25% higher.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: When you wake up in the morning, you imagine you have an empty sack on your back, and every single stressful event you put into that sack.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: And by the end of the day, you are weighed down by that heavy sack.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter when in your life you start to engage in these integrative health activities, you can prolong your life, you can reduce that chromosomal shortening and have reap the benefits of less stress.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: It is wonderful.
1:15
SPEAKER_01: I want to start on maybe a slightly random question, but you're studying a field that I think even today is often ignored by regular doctors, and and we're we we don't often speak about this as a field.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: And it made me think like when you started in this field, did people just think it was just way out there and not give it the credence it deserves?
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Actually, I'm gonna go back before right now.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: The field you're talking about is place and well-being, right?
1:47
SPEAKER_00: How the environment that you live in.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: I gave no context to the audience there.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: We just went straight into it.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, carry on.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: So uh that field of how the physical built environment affects your health is the field I'm in now.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: But when I started back in 1979 as a physician, I was training as a rheumatologist and arthritis doc, I uh saw a single patient who had developed a severe scarring body-wide autoimmune inflammatory disease while being treated for a fatal form of epilepsy with an experimental drug that changed his brain serotonin.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: This was before SSRIs.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: This was and I was convinced from that moment on that the brain and the immune system talk to each other.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: And that if that communication between the brain and the immune system is intact, you have health.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: And if it's broken, you have disease.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: Back in 1979, the apparent disciplines of what is now known as the science of the mind-body connection completely dismissed this whole notion, right?
3:08
SPEAKER_00: Neuroscience, neurologists, immunologists, rheumatologists, to a certain extent endocrinologists, all said there's no such thing.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: The brain and the immune system don't communicate.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: And I had um I had supervisors who patted me on the head, this is a physician already, saying, Esther, you're going to ruin your career if you do this.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh one of them said, You will do this research when grass grows here on the palm of my hand.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Now, to his credit, after I wrote my first book, The Balance Within, the Science Connecting, Health and Emotions, which traces the journey of my journey in my research on the science of the mind-body connection, and my colleagues pioneering research, proving that the brain and the immune system talk to each other.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: And that communication is important for health, both physical health and emotional well-being.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: That supervisor, about I'd say about five or ten years after I sent him a copy of the book, sent me a very moving letter.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Esther, you were right.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Why did he say that?
4:25
SPEAKER_00: His daughter had developed breast cancer and she was young.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: And he realized that it was really, really important to do everything possible to have her reduce stress, enhance well-being, do what she could to um what we call mindfulness meditation now, to do all the things that we call integrative health.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: Um we can talk about uh the Andrew Wiles Center for Integrative Medicine's definition of the seven domains of integrative health, what you need to do to maintain that physical and emotional well-being.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: But it took, it took about 30 years for the field to be accepted.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: And and what it was what was needed was this rigorous scientific evidence showing not only how the brain and the immune system talk to each other through all those stress hormones and molecules that are released from the brain and that eventually have an effect on the whole body, and also the nerve, nerve pathways, the adrenaline-like nerve pathways that innervate every single organ of your body.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: And then you have the the reverse the immune system sends signals to the brain through immune molecules and pathways.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: So it took that kind of rigorous research to um for this for the scientific disciplines and the and the clinicians to believe that this was important.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: It seems remarkable to think that now, right?
6:10
SPEAKER_01: I I noticed yesterday, um, specifically in the Middle East, they've really adopted this, you know, building um your environment around your health and how we can and we we can optimize our spaces both for living and for working to improve those markers of health.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: How how did you go from you know that foundational research to then deciding to focus on place?
6:36
SPEAKER_00: So there were two two things.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: So I was doing research, I was at the National Institutes of Health.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: I was a senior scientist and section chief for 26 years there, and uh I was studying rats.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: And I was studying rats that were either high stress or low stress.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: We called them the laid-back California rats and the Taipei New York rats.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: No guesses for no prizes for guessing which way around.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: So there, but they had been developed for by um by uh animal researchers for their either susceptibility or resistance to arthritis.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: So I that's not part of this immediate conversation, but I was I was doing that kind of research, and I discovered that the brain stress center, the hypothalamus, was important in susceptibility to autoimmune inflammatory diseases like arthritis.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: The hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the adrenals release cortisol, when you're exposed to whatever it is in the environment that triggers inflammation, you're you give yourself a shot of cortisone, basically.
7:43
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: And that shuts off inflammation when as soon as it begins.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Um so the rats that were low stress didn't have enough cortisone to shut off inflammation, so they got arthritis.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: The high-stress ones pumped out a lot of cortisone, cortisol, and uh and didn't get arthritis.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: So that became an important proof.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: If you can show it in rats, that the mind-body connection is real.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: And we did hypothalamic transplants from one brain to the other, and we converted rats that were susceptible to ones that were resistant, and so on.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: So if you can prove it that way, then the the physicians and scientists finally believe the mind-body connection is real.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't the only one.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: There were others doing similar kinds of research proving that immune organs are innervated by uh nerves and and so on.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: So I was really studying stress, and uh two things happened that shifted me into the mode of um looking at how the physical environment affects your health.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: The first one was that I went through a period of extreme stress in my own life.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: Stress at work because I was my work uh proved that a certain natural product, L-tryptophan, made by the third largest petrochemical company in Japan, uh, caused 1,500 people to become ill and 45 to die from a syndrome that was called eosinophilia myalgia syndrome in the United States only.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: Um so I was involved in this very high-profile research, and it was very um controversial, and then the health food industry got involved, and um I testified before Congress a couple of times.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: I was at the receiving end of many subpoenas, and uh the company was being sued for between two and ten billion dollars.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: So they didn't like me because seems fair.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: I asked, I had some very, very helpful, powerful people in Washington helping me behind the scenes, and I asked one of them, why are they why are they going after me like that?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: He said, How much are they being sued for?
10:11
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Well, that's two to ten billion reasons.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: Ten billion will do it.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: Two billion will do it.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: That was uh in 1989.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: So that was real money then.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: So that's anyway.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: I was going through that stress.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: I was my mother was dying of breast cancer.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: My father, I was a long-distance caregiver.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: My father had just died after seven years of a Parkinsonian Alzheimer's traumatic brain injury kind of illness.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: I moved into a new house in DC.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: I was going through a divorce.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: I was a typical whistleblower.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: And so I had all of the big five of the severe stresses.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: And here I was, a rheumatologist, an arthritis doc, who had discovered the importance of stress and an autoimmune disease, and I developed inflammatory arthritis.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: And so I had knee biopsies.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: I was supposed to go into hospital for uh more uh knee biopsies and liver biopsies and an experimental drug for uh arthritis.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: This was again before the mabs that are used now.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: And um, and I moved into a new house, and I was sitting and writing what was to become my first book, The Balance Within, sitting on the deck, and um my neighbors rang the doorbell and they came in, they were Greek and they were carrying all sorts of wonderful Greek food, tsatsiki and dolmares and Musaka, and and and they said, Are you a writer?
11:49
SPEAKER_00: We see you writing on the deck.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I don't know, why do you ask?
11:53
SPEAKER_00: And they said, We've always wanted a writer to stay at our cottage in Crete.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: So I said, I'm a writer.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, stop, no, not me.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: So so I went with them, I ditched hospital, and I went with them to Crete, to this tiny village on the south coast of Crete called Lentas.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: It's been lived in for over 5,000 years.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: It was a uh the site of a temple to the Greek god of healing, Asclepius.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: And I was there for only about 10 days or two weeks, and I got so much better that when I went back and saw my doctor in DC, he said, What were you doing?
12:36
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, what was I doing?
12:39
SPEAKER_00: I was swimming in the ocean every day.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: I was eating a wonderful Mediterranean healthy diet.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I had my parents were Romanian.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: They had come to Montreal um my mother just before World War II, my father right afterwards.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: And um that was I I grew up on essentially a Mediterranean diet, but I fell into, you know, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, french fries every day for lunch.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: And um, and so I was eating a healthy Mediterranean diet.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: I was surrounded by my friends and the villagers and the grandmothers of the village who all took care of me, and we'd share ponai, polyponai, we'd talk about arthritis, and um and I was in nature every day.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: And I eventually was able to climb the hill.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: The village is this tiny, tiny village that hugs a steep hill up from the bay of Lentus.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: And uh at the top of the hill, there was the ruins of this temple to the Greek god of healing, Aslepius.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: And on top of that, there was the ruins of a Byzantine church, and on top of that, there was a tiny Greek chapel, uh, probably built in the 1500s or something, stone, cool stone, and Greek icons and candles, and the villagers would climb the hill to pray every day.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: And so I would sit in the doorway of that chapel because it was cool and dark and calming, and hours would go by, and I would listen to the birds and the goats and the sheep and the wind and the gardeners who would be script scratching on the dirt around.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I didn't realize I was meditating.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: I did a PBS television special, and in it I talk about what I was contemplating because I wasn't ready in 2009 before I went to the Andrew Wiles Center for Integrative Medicine to admit that I was actually meditating, but I was in the moment.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: And so really what I was doing was what we call the seven domains of integrative health.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: So, what are the seven domains?
15:01
SPEAKER_00: Sleep resilience, which is reducing stress, and how quickly you bounce back from any stressor environment, which is both clean and green.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: So it's important to have clean air, but also green environment and nature.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: And we can talk about that more afterwards.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Um relationships, close, positive relationships enhance both physical health and emotional well-being.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: Movement.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Movement reduces stress, and you know is important for all aspects of physical health.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, spirituality, um, which is the mindfulness meditation.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be saying a prayer to any particular god, um, and just being in the moment, being able to go offline, and then healthy nutrition.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: And I was doing that, and I did it only for about two weeks, but I felt so much better.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: I had this aha moment.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: I remember sitting at one of the cafes, the village had little restaurants and cafes along the beach, and I was sitting there and watching the fishermen come and go with the rhythms of the day, and thinking, if I could keep doing this when I got back to DC, I would continue to feel better.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: And if I don't, I will go back to feeling the way I did before.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: So for me, that was a huge aha moment that changed the course of my illness, the course of my life.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: And so part of that was what was it about the physical environment that I could bring home with me?
16:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: You know, yeah, it would be great to go to Greece every weekend.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: And except for You're making me want to go to Greece.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, except for the the uh flying, but never mind.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: But um, but what could I do to bring that home with me wherever I was?
16:57
SPEAKER_00: Around that time, I was at a conference, a Society for Neuroscience conference, and um the then research director at the U.S.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: General Services Administration, Kevin Campshire, was attending the conference also.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: We were talking about um the relationship between architecture and neuroscience at the conference.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: And um we were sitting, it was in San Diego, and we were sitting at a bar across the street from the convention center because there were no tables uh at the restaurant.
17:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: And he turned to me and he said, Um uh I want you to help me uh measure the impact of the built office environments that I oversee at the U.S.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: General Services Administration and uh help me uh measure the impact on the workers' stress and health and well-being.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: Um now the U.S.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: General Services Administration is the agency of the US federal government that builds and operates all non-military federal buildings.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: So over 374 million square feet of office space for over two million office workers.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: And what we know about indoor environments is that certainly in America, people spend uh over 98% of their time indoors.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
18:34
SPEAKER_01: 98%.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the estimate.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: And so to the extent that you can design the built environments where you're spending most of your time to help reduce your stress and enhance well-being, you will be contributing a huge amount to your overall health.
18:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: Um so we began this, what became about a 20 more over 20-year research project, first when I was at NIH, then afterwards when I went to uh the Andrew Wilde Center, using wearable health tracking devices.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: So we were using these health tracking devices to measure uh movement stress.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: You know, anybody who wears one of these watches or rings and so on, not you, not you, really.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I can't be without my ring.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: Really?
19:29
SPEAKER_01: We'll get into that later.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: Um but when we started back in the year 2000, the heart rate variability, heart rate variability is the is the way most all of these things are determined.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: It's the the the space between the beats, yeah, which has to do with how you breathe and your deep breathing.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: And it's when you inhale, the time that it takes between the beats increases, and when you exhale, it decreases.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: So with mathematical formulas, you can translate into the stress r response and the relaxation response.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: And so for people who are listening on on their wearables, that's represented as HRV, right?
20:10
SPEAKER_00: Yes, HRV, heart rate variability.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: So that's really the basis of all of these things.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: And um, but when we started, we had these things that were the size, the size of this microphone, actually, uh glued to the chest with with wires hanging out, and we had the workers wear them for two and a half days.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: We tried it also just to see how it was.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: It was not very pleasant.
20:35
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, true.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: But but by the time I got to um the University of Arizona, uh, we had the you know small chest-worn devices that were the size of a quarter.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: And we connected that data, the health data, to in real time, we worked with a company in the Bay Area called ACLA who had developed um methods and devices to measure continuously and in real time up to 11 different environmental attributes: light, sound, volatile organic compounds, particulates, um, humidity, temperature, and so on.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: And we also connected all of that data to the layout of the office spaces.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: So open office design, private offices, and cubicles, and so on.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: And we basically came out eventually after two decades with a prescription for a healthy well-being building.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, and um, that was we published our first paper summarizing all that in 2018, and then through 2023, we had a whole series of papers in you know, various journals, including uh one of the nature journals.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: And um it was just in time for COVID.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: So at the beginning of that whole experience in 2000, that was before 9 11.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: It was before the downturn uh in the US.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Economic downturn.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: And it was certainly before COVID.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: And when Kevin and I would talk to C suite folks about how important it is to design spaces for your workers that they should be happy and healthy, what a novel idea.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, they said, Oh, that's great.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: What can you do for$5,000?
22:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I bet.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, nothing.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: So, but with COVID, everybody wanted a healthy building.
22:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: And what happened is that during COVID, the huge focus was on clean air.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: So remember I said for the seven domains of integrative health, clean and green is important.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Clean air is essential.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: Getting rid of toxins, preventing viral spread, excellent filtration, uh frequent fresh air turnover, um, powerful ventilation, ventilation that is in line where the outflow is in the same line as the intake vents to prevent turbulence.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: All of that is really, really important.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I'm uh a commissioner, one of many actually, on a healthy indoor air initiative that was launched at the United Nations last year by the International Well-Building Institute.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: And it's really exciting to see how many countries, how many organizations, hundreds, around the world.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: This was led by France and Australia and a number of other countries, and uh how many are signing on to this and saying we need clean air.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: Really essential.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: During COVID, that was the whole focus, which is important.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: But you're not going to get people to go back to an office space that is dark, that has loud mechanical noise, that has six-foot-high wall cubicles, um, that has no space to move just by fixing the air.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: You have to fix the air.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: But people are not going to want to go to that common space unless you make it pleasant.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: Like this.
24:24
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, I wrote an op-ed piece after COVID when organizations were mandating people to go back to work.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I live in Tucson, Arizona, 10 at most 20 minutes from five world-class spas.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Nobody is mandating anybody to go to those spas.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: They're going to those spas because they want to go.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: So we need to learn from the uh the entertainment industry, Disney.
24:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, Disney, the Disney Imagineers, in my second book in Healing Spaces, um, I got a wonderful behind-the-scenes tour by Bruce Vaughn, who at the time was the um uh vice president of Disney Imagineering.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, and we we he showed me how they developed the concept of how do you move people through a space when you can't tell them where to go, where you um make them want to go to a certain place at the pace that you want them to go to.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: Because you don't want them to run to the castle, you want them to walk quietly along Main Street to get to the castle.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: And so there's there's a whole science to that, and it's it's fascinating.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: But we don't do that in office spaces.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: Where we spend a lot more of our time.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Where we spend a lot more of our time.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: And um so other things like one of the things we found in our research with um uh with the uh federal office buildings, we eventually studied five federal office buildings and hundreds of uh workers.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: We also did some private sector office buildings as well.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: And what we found was people in open office design move 32% more during the day than people in private offices, and that's accounting for their what they do, where they are in the organization, and so on.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: 20% more than people in cubicles.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: And the people who move more during the day are 14% less stressed when they go home at night, and they're less stressed while they're sleeping by heart rate variability.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: And they wake up in a better mood, they're less fatigued, they're uh more productive during the day.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: Energy levels have improved, I imagine.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: Their cognitive performance is and this is just um the difference between like an open floor plan office where you get to movement.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: Move move around, and then just these cubicle, like old school cubicle style offices.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: Right.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: And and that was actually the concept when it was developed, when the open office design was developed by Robert Propst in the 1950s, he called it active office design.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
27:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: But what happened is that because these walls of these open office spaces were movable, companies began to say, ooh, let's just squish them in and put as many people in as possible.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I remember telling my uh scientific director at NIH when I was studying the rats that there are very, very clear guidelines for the number of square centimeters of space per rat or per mouse in a cage.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: And you can't put more rats in that cage than are allowed by, you know, because otherwise they get stressed, they start attacking each other, they they can kill each other.
28:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's terrible what happens to these rats if you squish them in.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: So I told that, I was so naive, I told that to my scientific director here.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: I was I was a very junior scientist, and I said, How come we know this about the rats?
28:20
SPEAKER_00: And we look at my space here.
28:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I my office space, you could hardly put a chair in it.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, if you uh don't like your space, there are a hundred people waiting to take your job.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, rats don't pay the bills.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: Right.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: So, but um, so what is the biggest complaint that people have about open office design?
28:45
SPEAKER_00: Noise.
28:47
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: Now you have a studio here.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: I talked to the general manager of Arizona Public Media when they were building their new uh studios for television and um and radio and uh in Tucson, and he said, we start with an acoustical engineer.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: Everything is designed around the acoustics.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: And so it's not rocket science to design an office space to take into account acoustics.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, in our new Andrew Wiles Center for Integrative Medicine three-building complex, we with Line and Space, the architects, did that.
29:26
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: It is essential.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: And if you walk through our open office design, it's really quiet.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, there's ceiling um panels that absorb sound, there's um carpeting in some places, there's um uh ceiling baffles that are very beautiful that people don't realize are actually sound directing, you know.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of things you can do to minimize and direct sound uh in any space.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: And once you do that, then you can have the ability to move around in a space um in an open office design and get the health benefits of that.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: So can I ask you a question then, given that we now know that?
30:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: Do we have data to show the improvements that the office workers or employees make when they are working in an environment that has been intentionally built to optimize for health?
30:23
SPEAKER_00: So actually, we do have from so the Andrew Weil Center, we built according to the seven domains of integrative health.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: But partly because Andrew Weil, Dr.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: Weil, um wanted us to embed integrative health into those buildings.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: That's the mission of the center.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: And he asked me to convene a committee uh to work with the architects to make sure that at every level, every stage of design, from the concept to the schematic design to the actual building, embedded these seven domains.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: And uh, and then we did pre-post-occupancy surveys.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: And the way that the buildings operate best compared to where people were working before.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: Now, the pre was happened to have been during COVID, so people were working from home.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: Now, you would think working from home is the best thing, except, and in some cases it is, but it really depends on your own situation.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: If you're a caregiver, if you have young children, if you're you know where you live, yeah, yeah.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: Where you live and your socioeconomic status, and if you don't have your own private office, there's all kinds of variables.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: Um but people who work from home do tend uh to have more access, for example, to green spaces, at least in Tucson.
31:43
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: Probably not so much here.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, so much here, and we can talk about that here being New York.
31:49
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: Um but um but the way that the buildings operated best was in social connection, connection to colleagues, connection to the organization, to the organization's mission, and to the larger community.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the things that was found post-COVID with so many people, with everybody working from home, yes, you can be more productive from home, that's true.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: But you get video conference burnout.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you have isolation, you have loneliness, you move less, you move about half as much as if you're in an office.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: And um, but people don't really pay much attention to that.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: I I think that goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: You're not really aware of how much the physical space affects your behavior and your movement and your and your health.
32:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: And so, but people who are in these office spaces have the opportunity to connect with their colleagues.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: And social connection and relationships are nurturing, they are sustaining, as opposed to being lonely, which we know carries with it huge health risks, it carries with it a shortened lifespan, um, it carries with it depression and all the diseases that are associated with stress.
33:26
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: And when you go to a common workspace, you are instead nurtured by those positive relationships.
33:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it used to be thought before before COVID that the reason that people should go to a common workspace, I mean, what happened with COVID is there was this huge existential crisis in all work uh in all organizations.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: Why do we need these big towers in downtowns?
33:57
SPEAKER_00: We could save a whole lot of money by shrinking the footprint, and and then it had the the downtown apocalypse happened, right?
34:04
SPEAKER_00: Where everybody is pulling back their uh their footprints, their workers, and all the the restaurants and the the um you know shops and so on, and the downtowns are dying.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: Um but the the it used to be thought that the reason to go to a common office space was this chance connections with people to give you creative ideas.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: That hasn't really been borne out, but the real reason is for relationship building and connections, yeah.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: And that is health sustaining.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: And I think like cultivating culture, right?
34:50
SPEAKER_01: Like I think that's part of the relationship piece.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: And and cultivating culture is also part of uh spirituality.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: Feeling connected to a larger purpose, a shared common goal, yeah.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, is part of spirituality.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: And um and so that's really important.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: That does not happen when you're on a a screen looking at 10 people on the screen, or you can't see people at the end of the table there because the the camera isn't set up so well.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, you it I mean very difficult to replicate digitally.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: I spoke about this on a clip recently about this concept of collective effervescence where you know you bring together big groups.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: We've just seen it in New York, it's been amazing, the Knicks.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: And now, actually, even on a bigger scale with the World Cup, yeah, I mean, it is remarkable.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: And I think that is going to be extremely difficult for any AI tool or technology to replace.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: That would be great.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think that is something actually we're going to need more of, not you know, we're gonna the the desire for that, you know, human connection is real, like you really feel it in a way that is very kind of profound, right?
35:59
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that we did on purpose.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: So when you're designing a building for health, you have to build it, you have to balance it with sustainable design.
36:10
SPEAKER_00: So we wanted lots of circadian light because light is really important.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: Light is important for health, for sleep, for mood.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, we are tuned to the rhythms of the sun.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: And all of our cells, all of our body, uh, the stress response, all of your hormones, everything operates on a circadian clock.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: When you wake up in the morning, your cortisol is high, and then as that's so it gives you energy, it gives you focus, it gives you, you know, the stress response is not a bad thing.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: You need it to survive.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you mentioned this and you speak about this in the book.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: In the book, while at work, yes.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna bring this out.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: In fact, let's bring it out now so that people know what we're talking about.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: This is your book.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna show it to the camera while at work.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: One of the things you mention in the book is that all not stress is not the enemy necessarily.
37:06
SPEAKER_00: Right.
37:07
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, you need the stress response for focused attention, for vigilance, to fight or flee.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it and it gives you energy.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, so you wake up in the morning, you have this.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: Actually, it's your circadian clock that gives you a shot of cortisol that wakes you up.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: And and then throughout the day, the cortisol comes down and it sort of bottoms out at about four in the afternoon.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: That's when you want to have a cup of coffee, or you know, you're feeling a little logy.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: And and then, and you need to get that to come down so that you are able to go to sleep.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to have a shot of coffee, and then you're gonna be wide awake and wired, and you can't go to sleep.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, light does that.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: So bright uh full spectrum sunlight in the morning will wake you up and you need 30 minutes of um bright, full spectrum sunlight to give you that energy to continue throughout the day.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: If you have that later at night from your blue screens, from your your computers, from your devices, um, that will be as a way alerting as a cup of coffee.
38:25
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: So but you need, and and the other studies have been done that show that it's not only that 30 minutes in the day, what's really best for health is for the lighting to follow the rhythm of the sun, to change not only in terms of intensity, but also the quality of the light, the color of the light, go from bright bluish light to dimmer reddish light.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: Just think about the sun.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, sunset.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: Is that why, Esther, that um often we're encouraged to see evening light because it's changing that.
39:06
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
39:07
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: You want your body to be in rhythm with the sun.
39:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: And if you're indoors, it is it can be done.
39:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's smart lighting, there's all kinds of ways to do this, and I talk about that in Well at Work, um, to have lighting to help your body gradually um calm so that you can go to sleep.
39:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, the other thing that you know your your members will know very well in the entertainment industry, and I just I just saw Shmigadoon on on Broadway.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: Oh I don't know what that is.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it just got the Tony.
39:47
SPEAKER_01: Really?
39:47
SPEAKER_01: Or is it a broad it's a show?
39:49
SPEAKER_00: It's a show on Broadway.
39:51
SPEAKER_01: Who knew?
39:52
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: I literally live right next to it.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: You should go see it.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm indoors all the time.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: I can't.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's right.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: But okay, the reason I'm saying this is that what happens when you go to a theater?
40:02
SPEAKER_00: What's the first thing that happens when you go to either a movie theater or a or a show?
40:09
SPEAKER_01: It gets very dark.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they turn the lights down, and that allows you to focus on what's going on and to become part of the world that's going on on stage.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: So lighting and lighting is can change your mood and can help you sleep.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: So lighting is really important.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: So, how do we get back to the buildings?
40:34
SPEAKER_00: So we wanted glass walls on the Andrew Wiles Center buildings because we wanted circadian light for everybody.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: We wanted a narrow footprint because if you have a very wide footprint of a building, the people next to the windows are the only ones who get the benefit of the circadian light.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: The people in the middle don't.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: Um so that's what we asked for.
40:57
SPEAKER_00: And the sustainability experts on this committee that I uh convened, which included the Dean of the College of Architecture and other faculty members, and of course the architects uh from uh Line and Space, and my colleagues from the U.S.
41:13
SPEAKER_00: General Services Administration.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: And they all said, you can't build a glass box in the desert.
41:18
SPEAKER_00: You'll you'll get heat gain.
41:22
SPEAKER_00: Well, again, we live in this amazing technological world where there are solutions for this.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: High performance glass to prevent too much heat gain.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: External shades that um actually that's not a high-tech thing.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: External shades were around for uh hundreds of years.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: But um, external shades angled exactly to the uh angle of the sun.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: Um actually, if you have the money, you can have the shades moving.
41:53
SPEAKER_00: If not, you can calculate the general uh maximal shading that they provide.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: Um placement, we have two two buildings.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh we have three-building complex, we have mind building, the body building, and the spirit building.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: So two of the buildings are placed so that the prevailing breezes come through the um the space in between and through the Bernoulli effect uh or the venturi effect.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh so you're a physicist?
42:25
SPEAKER_01: No, no, I was literally reading about it last two nights ago.
42:29
SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, yeah, that's great.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:31
SPEAKER_00: Um so what happens is natural air conditioning.
42:34
SPEAKER_00: It pulls the hot air off the glass walls.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: And then you have landscaping.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: We put in mesquite trees on the southern wall of the mine building.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, mesquite trees grow in the desert very quickly.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, and when we were doing a walkthrough of the construction site just before it was finished, we noticed that they had planted ironwood trees instead of mesquite trees.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: Now, ironwood trees are very short and they take uh 50 years to grow.
43:05
SPEAKER_00: And we said, no, this is not, and they don't even grow as tall as three stories.
43:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: Um so we said to the to the facilities folks, why did you do this?
43:13
SPEAKER_00: We specifically asked for mesquite trees.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: They said, well, mesquite trees drop too many pods.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to pick up the pods and make mesquite flour, then that's fine, but we're not doing it.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: It's too expensive.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: And this is this is often a problem.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: It's often a problem.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: The balance of the cost of maintenance with what's important for health.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: So, to the credit of the architects, they went back and found low pod, no pod mesquite trees and planted them, and they are up to the third floor now.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: After the building opened in 2024, it's only two years, and they are just bursting.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: So, um And they don't block the light.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: They don't block, in fact, they give a very beautiful light.
43:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, seeing light through Through the leaves of the trees.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: It's like this green calming light.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:05
SPEAKER_00: And what there is in this space around the buildings is a garden, a desert garden.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: Because when you think about an office building, you usually just think about the inside, right?
44:20
SPEAKER_00: But it's really important to give people access to nature, not only with green space.
44:26
SPEAKER_00: You have at Wonder Health this beautiful waterfall when you come in with the plants, and that's so calming.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: But you also need to have access to outdoor nature spaces.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, forest bathing, Shinrin Yoku, is a tradition in started in Japan and uh Korea, and it's a method really of walking meditation in the forest.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: You when I first heard about it, I thought it was taking a bath in the forest.
44:56
SPEAKER_00: And no, no, you go into the forest and you leave all your cares behind and you breathe deeply and inhale the wonderful scents of the plants, the volatile, biogenic, volatile organic compounds, which are released just before or after a rain, you know, the scent of rain, um, petrachore, that's a calming experience.
45:20
SPEAKER_00: And that's actually hundreds, there are hundreds of biogenic volatile organic compounds released from plants, which, and I talk about this also in Well at Work, that um they have anxiolytic properties.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: They reduce anxiety, they reduce stress, they improve moods.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, some of them, like lavender, can help you sleep.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, the other thing that happens in the forest is light, the green light.
45:46
SPEAKER_00: Green light is not only pleasant, it actually reduces pain.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: There's a researcher, and I talk about this again in Well at Work.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you should read my book.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: No, I know you have.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: I have.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: Believe me.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:00
SPEAKER_01: And we've spoken about it in depth.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: And we've, you know, we were lucky enough to have you right at the very beginning of this process of building this facility.
46:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I was thrilled to be part of it.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: And to see one of the things that's great is to see ideas put into practice.
46:13
SPEAKER_00: It's just beautiful.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: But getting back to the green light, there's a professor at the University of Arizona, Moab Ibrahim, who's an anesthesiologist, and he does basic translational research.
46:25
SPEAKER_00: And um his brother, he tells a story, his brother had severe migraines.
46:30
SPEAKER_00: And as an anesthesiologist, he said, Well, I'm gonna, I can treat you, I can give you injections, I can do all kinds of stuff.
46:36
SPEAKER_00: And the brother said, No, no, no, I just go to the park and I sit in the park.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: And Professor Ibrahim said, Maybe it's just he's calm in the park.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: And then he thought about it and he said, Well, maybe it's the green light.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: So he created tiny green contact lenses for his rats.
46:55
SPEAKER_01: No way.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
46:58
SPEAKER_00: And he also put them in cages that were lit with LED green lights.
47:04
SPEAKER_00: And he found that green light significantly reduced pain.
47:09
SPEAKER_00: So then he had people with fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain syndrome, look at green light for uh, I think 40 minutes or an hour every evening, and it reduced their severity of pain, their types of pain, they were able to sleep better.
47:27
SPEAKER_00: Um and uh there's it it's it's sort of surprising.
47:32
SPEAKER_00: You're looking at me with a puzzle.
47:33
SPEAKER_01: I am, I'm confused.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: What the thing I'm thinking is twofold.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: One, that to me is indicative that there's some sort of endorphin release associated with it.
47:44
SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
47:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: So let's go back.
47:47
SPEAKER_00: We know that looking at bright light, glare, is very stressful.
47:53
SPEAKER_00: And in people who have migraine, it can trigger a migraine.
47:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
47:57
SPEAKER_00: Now, that we take for granted, right?
47:59
SPEAKER_00: Or people, strobe lights can trigger epilepsy.
48:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: Right.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: So there are connections between the visual pathway in the eye and two different parts of the brain.
48:12
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I was surprised too when I heard this.
48:16
SPEAKER_00: But why is it so surprising that certain wavelengths of light should be connected to parts of the brain that reduce pain?
48:27
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's basically what happens.
48:29
SPEAKER_01: No, you're right.
48:29
SPEAKER_01: Right?
48:29
SPEAKER_01: But but why then don't we know why doesn't everyone know about this?
48:34
SPEAKER_01: Like why everybody I don't know about.
48:37
SPEAKER_01: Are we using them in hospitals?
48:38
SPEAKER_01: Like uh hospitals, I I've never seen green light and treating pain.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: No, there um there are um clinics that are uh recommend, certainly the Andrew Wilde Center, so integrative medicine.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: What integrative medicine does is it takes these kinds of simple interventions, non-drug interventions, that you can add to the drugs through to this, you know, high-tech surgeries and everything else that you're doing to help your body do a better job of healing.
49:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:15
SPEAKER_00: You know?
49:16
SPEAKER_00: So, um, but you can actually go on the internet, and there's a lot of companies that are selling green lights, green glasses.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, same thing with now blocking out blue light in the evening.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: I have a pair of glasses that blocks blue light.
49:33
SPEAKER_01: Yep, same.
49:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh, so that if I I try not to work on the computer at night, but if I for whatever have to, whatever reason have to, then I I wear them.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: And they have blue um frames.
49:45
SPEAKER_00: So I remember which are the blue light blocking uh frames, uh glasses.
49:50
SPEAKER_00: Um I have also a uh a little red LED reading light that I use in the middle of the night.
49:58
SPEAKER_00: If I wake up in the middle of the night and I have some ideas and I jot them down in my little pad next to the bed, um if I were to turn on the light, it kicks off, it I it would wake me up.
50:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I just use this red light and then I go right back to sleep.
50:15
SPEAKER_01: I've got one of those also, um, and I love it.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: I use it just before I go to sleep.
50:19
SPEAKER_01: So when I'm reading on a Kindle, yeah, I I put that on.
50:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm actually gonna add that in the show notes.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll add both of them because I think they're really affordable and really, really useful for me specifically.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: They've been very useful, very, very useful.
50:34
SPEAKER_00: So so those are those are the kinds of simple life hacks that you can do um to help you um sleep.
50:44
SPEAKER_00: So getting better to getting getting back to the um the concept of designing the the office spaces.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: So we have this beautiful desert garden with um many um medicinal plants, because that's our mission, right?
51:01
SPEAKER_00: We have um and and we created a uh a walk, a QR code guided walk in uh honor of our former executive director, Victoria Mazes, who just retired.
51:15
SPEAKER_00: And you can aim your phone at the QR codes and learn about the plant and how it helps in various ways with your mood and so on.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: The other thing that the the garden is connected to a next door park, it's also connected to the rest of the community.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: And what happens is people are always walking through there on purpose instead of crossing you know the street or walking through a hot parking lot.
51:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: So people will, getting back to the Disney Imagineers, people will, if you design it right, they'll do what you want and what they want because it's just natural.
52:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: And and it seems to me that lots of companies are adopting this kind of um and even hospitals now.
52:09
SPEAKER_01: I know in the UK there's a the the first ever roof deck was just built in one of the the big hospitals there.
52:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
52:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's had a tremendous impact.
52:19
SPEAKER_01: And I know being next to a window in a hospital, also you spoke about that in the past.
52:23
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
52:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, actually, funnily enough, I was I re-listened to your TEDx talk not so long ago, and one of the things that you mentioned there was if you Google the word paradise, it comes up with millions of pictures of nature.
52:37
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, that's it.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: It's all pictures of nature.
52:39
SPEAKER_01: Why do you think that our brains have evolved to respond so positively to being in spaces like that?
52:47
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
52:48
SPEAKER_00: Why?
52:49
SPEAKER_00: Um well, there are various theories.
52:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I actually talk about this in Healing Spaces in my second book.
52:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, fractals.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: For some reason, we like fractals.
53:02
SPEAKER_00: Fractals are um the same geometry at different scales.
53:07
SPEAKER_00: So think of uh veins on a leaf, leaves on a twig, twigs on a branch, branches on a tree.
53:13
SPEAKER_00: Um they're all the same geometries, but at different scales.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: And if you think of the Hokusai wave, the the Japanese um print by Hokusai, if you look at that, you'll see the curliques of the waves and then the larger waves and then the mountain.
53:33
SPEAKER_00: And there is something calming about that.
53:37
SPEAKER_00: Now, why that is, I don't know.
53:39
SPEAKER_00: But there is a whole field now that's developed of um sort of art and neuroscience, yeah.
53:46
SPEAKER_00: Of trying to figure out what it is about certain kinds of images that we prefer.
53:54
SPEAKER_01: Looking at like big having like views of nature like mountains or rivers or canyons, that seems to be extremely pleasing on the eyeballs as well.
54:04
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
54:05
SPEAKER_00: So I was um I did this PBS television special in in 2009, which was basically the story of me going to Greece and healing and asking what was it that I experienced there that helped me heal.
54:18
SPEAKER_00: So we went back and forth to different labs in the in the US, and one of them was a lab at the University of Southern California where um they were doing uh brain imaging, uh, fMRI, and I was the guinea pig.
54:31
SPEAKER_00: On all of these things, I was the guinea pig.
54:33
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
54:33
SPEAKER_00: And um, so I was in the uh in the imaging machine and looking up, and they had a a kind of a mirror above me so I could see images that they were projecting.
54:44
SPEAKER_00: And I had uh clickers in my hand, and I was supposed to say, you know, if I liked it a lot, click here, if I didn't, I like click there.
54:53
SPEAKER_00: And um so they showed images of sweeping views of uh mountains, of you know, meadows, of forests, and so on, and belching smokestacks and garbage dumps and so on and so forth.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: So um, and and the part of my brain that processes beautiful views lit up when I was looking at the beautiful views.
55:22
SPEAKER_00: And that so what happens when you're looking at any image?
55:27
SPEAKER_00: The image goes onto the back of your eye on the retina, and it's upside down and backwards, and then it goes through the optic nerves to the back of the brain, and then it moves forward uh to this part of the brain that's called the parahippocampal cortex.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: Like it's a fancy name, but what the brain does is it's like a brilliant animator.
55:51
SPEAKER_00: Or we should say animators are like a brilliant brain.
55:54
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, yeah.
55:56
SPEAKER_00: As the image moves forward, it goes from a line drawing, black and white, to a more two-dimensional drawing to colored three-dimensional image that we then see.
56:11
SPEAKER_00: And that part of the brain that produces the final three-dimensional, richly colored image is rich in endorphins.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: Would you say, is it this does the same thing apply for scent and and audio, like sound and and because you know sometimes you can hear a song that elicits an emotion, or you can smell something that reminds you of a time in your life.
56:36
SPEAKER_00: And yes.
56:37
SPEAKER_00: So that's so the so well at work, I I structured on the seven domains of integrative health.
56:44
SPEAKER_00: Each chapter is how do you embed one of these domains into your built environment.
56:48
SPEAKER_00: In healing spaces, I structured on sensory neuroscience.
56:52
SPEAKER_00: How is it that what you heal, what you hear and see and smell and touch, how do they affect your physical health and emotional well-being?
57:02
SPEAKER_00: And yes, there are no question um uh pathways in the brain that go from the auditory cortex to uh the dopamine reward cortex.
57:16
SPEAKER_00: Daniel Leviton, who's a Yeah, he's he's on our uh advisor.
57:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, he he wrote this fantastic book called Um, I hope I get the title right, um uh Your Mind on Music.
57:29
SPEAKER_01: This is one of the things he's written a bunch, right?
57:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, your mind on music, but it was like sex, uh, rock and roll, and uh so it's all about the dopamine pathways.
57:38
SPEAKER_01: We'll get him on.
57:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
57:40
SPEAKER_00: So he can tell you much more about this.
57:42
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, there's no question that each of these.
57:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the things about smell, it's the it's the fastest route to the brain.
57:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
57:51
SPEAKER_00: The the olfactory bulb is really just right underneath the brain.
57:56
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to take a very long course to get there.
58:00
SPEAKER_00: And um, so the effect of fragrances on the brain uh work two ways.
58:10
SPEAKER_00: One is it's actually a chemical effect, it's a drug effect.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: Um uh lavender is thought to relax you, it can put you to sleep, the scent of lavender.
58:23
SPEAKER_00: Well, lavender can actually put anesthetized rats into slow wave sleep.
58:29
SPEAKER_00: So it's not because rats went to their therapist and told, you know, were told smell lavender.
58:35
SPEAKER_00: It it has a chemical effect.
58:38
SPEAKER_00: Um but the other way that scents affect your emotions is through memory.
58:45
SPEAKER_00: And that also has to do with with what you see.
58:49
SPEAKER_00: It's memory, you know.
58:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
58:52
SPEAKER_00: If you have so the it's thought that the scent of of um fresh mown hay is supposed to be calming for most people.
59:02
SPEAKER_00: Well, it has to do with what you remember as a child or when you were in a positive uh space or place, and the fragrance reminds you of that positive experience.
59:12
SPEAKER_00: It's you know, the Proust, the Proust and the Madeleine, you know, the the French in remembrance of time past, the um um the Proust was a a writer in the late 19th, early 20th century, and he wrote about how he dipped this Madeleine cookie into tea when he was sick, and he tasted it, and it suddenly he had this sense of wonderful warmth and comfort, and he kept doing it again and again.
59:47
SPEAKER_00: It took 45 pages to to get no way just for one cookie.
59:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because he was trying to figure out what it reminded him of, and it finally he realized it was his uh aunt who, when he was sick as a child, would give him this Madeleine in the T.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_00: And and that's that's how how it works.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: Can that work the other way?
1:00:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, if you had a bad, like traumatic issues.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_00: For sure, for sure.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_00: No so uh so there's the placebo effect and there's a nocebo effect, which is if you've had negative experiences, and that's post-traumatic stress.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_00: When I was at NIH, uh I worked with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and they were designing um uh a clinic, an outpatient clinic, on the what is effectively a military base across the street from from NIH in in Bethesda um for wounded warriors who were coming back from the um various wars.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_00: Um it used to be called the Naval Hospital.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of an iconic building that you've probably seen in movies and so on.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_00: And um, so it's the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, is this outpatient clinic for uh wounded warriors with post-traumatic stress.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_00: There are very, very clear criteria for how to design for people with that condition.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_00: You do not want to have glaring lights, you do not want to have loud sounds, you do not want to have shadows and corners where danger could be lurking.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_00: So there are a a lot of ways to design spaces to reduce uh spaces that trigger stress.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, going back to what we started talking about before, in you know, the late 20th century, early 21st, organizations didn't so much pay attention to what stressed people in those spaces.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_00: Noise, foul smells, musty odors, lack of light, um you know, lack of spaces to move.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_00: So there's definitely uh elements of the environment that from all of your senses that can enhance well-being, that can trigger dopamine reward pathways and um and anti-pain pathways, um, and those that do the opposite.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_01: So I want to I want to move on to talk about some like really practical takeaways.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, so much about what we talk about on this on this podcast is like giving people agency.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: And I think you know, a lot of people listening might be thinking, yeah, right, we know, okay, now we know, and the the evidence is very clear that if we optimize the workplace and our home, our living environments to um you know be mindful of these metrics, then we will see this uptick in our but in our markers of health, but so much of that feels so out of our control, right?
1:02:51
SPEAKER_01: And so maybe the a first sort of segue to that would be if there are any like leaders, employers, founders watching, how do we do this in a way that doesn't bankrupt them?
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, because it doesn't, you know, these things are not free.
1:03:08
SPEAKER_01: That's the first part of the question.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_01: Then perhaps the second part of that is as a way of convincing them that that investment is worth it.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: Do we have good evidence that productivity, um, you know, performance improves um by by making these adjustments?
1:03:22
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:03:23
SPEAKER_00: Yes, and yes.
1:03:26
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of research that's now being done to figure out return on investment.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: When you look at a 30-year life cycle of a building, about 90% of the costs is in your employees.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_00: And if you can keep your employees happy and healthy, you're gonna reduce that cost.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_00: Now the problem is if the people building the buildings are not the people who are gonna see the benefit, that's a problem.
1:03:58
SPEAKER_01: Do you think that they're they're move we're moving into a time though where you're gonna have to do it to just keep up?
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, if you're if you're in construction, you have to be mindful of this because people are gonna be demanding that you they set the bar higher.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_00: So there are calculations which can be done based on um uh presenteism, absenteeism, health of co- of workers, um, turnover.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, every time you hire a new person, it costs a lot of money to train them.
1:04:27
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_00: So turnover is important.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_00: And you there are calculations which come out in the millions of dollars um to um uh design buildings that enhance all of these aspects of well-being to um to keep the people in there happy, healthy, and productive.
1:04:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's a company that uh creates smart glass that uh changes with the um sun.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: So that, I mean, one of the problems if you have glass walls is you get glare in the afternoon, and glare is stressful, and there's heat gain and so on.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_00: And so what people do is they pull down the blinds.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, that gets rid of the circadian benefit.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_00: So you can have this smart glass, which is expensive, but they've done studies that show that productivity is much higher.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_00: They set up two spaces, one next to the other, one with a smart glass, the other with not.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_00: And uh the productivity was higher, the um uh health aspects were higher as well.
1:05:31
SPEAKER_00: When you when you paid attention to these things.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_00: So I think there's more and more data coming out now uh that there is a return on investment.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_00: There are companies like um Apple and Google that pay attention to this in their headquarters.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, putting green spaces around, access to nature, all of these things, spaces to help people gather.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_00: And when we talk about open office design, it's not just the field of desks.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_00: It's many different kinds of spaces to go to to do the kind of work you need to do.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_00: Heads-down work, quiet work, gathering, small gathering spaces, larger gathering spaces.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_00: Give people choice.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the things we found with the GSA studies is that people who are more introverted, yes, they do prefer quieter, darker spaces.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_00: People who are more extroverted do prefer broader, wider, sort of a little bit more busy, noisy spaces.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_00: Those are the people working in the in the uh cafes all day.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: Um but the the solution is not to give everybody a personality test and say, you sit here, you sit there.
1:06:41
SPEAKER_00: You give lots of choices for people to sit wherever they feel more comfortable.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_01: Optionality, yeah.
1:06:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:46
SPEAKER_00: Control.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_00: So and there are times when even an extrovert wants to be in a quieter space, and uh times when an introvert wants to be in a busier space.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_00: So so it's really a question of choices.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_01: What about for the people who are, you know, they're sold?
1:07:05
SPEAKER_01: We know that it works.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_01: I want to do it, but I've already got this long lease or or this office or studio that that you know I can't make these structural changes to.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_01: Are there any sort of um high-level strategic things they can do to gain a slight edge?
1:07:20
SPEAKER_00: So when when I was talking about this with Kevin Campshire, who eventually became director of high performance federal green buildings for the GSA and Chief White House Sustainability Officer for the GSA, so he was able to implement all of our findings into these federal spaces.
1:07:37
SPEAKER_00: He was in a position of power to do so.
1:07:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, I was talking to him about what do you do?
1:07:43
SPEAKER_00: Because they have a lot of old office spaces, old buildings that would need to be retrofitted.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, and you can do that.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_00: Um but ideally in the future, what we really need to go towards is individual spaces.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:08:01
SPEAKER_00: Like spaces that you can't so temperature and humidity.
1:08:07
SPEAKER_00: We found that uh when it's less than 30% relative humidity and greater than 60% relative humidity, your um stress response is 25% higher.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_00: But people have different comfort levels.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: Right, yeah, yeah.
1:08:22
SPEAKER_00: And you know, the thermostat wars, you know, some people want to we have that internally all the time.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, yeah.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_00: So it is again not rocket science to design your own little space, and there are office chairs on the market now that are either cooling or heating.
1:08:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, just like in your cars, yeah, right?
1:08:43
SPEAKER_00: You can have cooling and heating and cooling steering steering wheels and so on.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh that saves energy.
1:08:50
SPEAKER_00: That can be, you know, that gives people agency, and they can have their own space.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_00: Um humidity.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_00: You it costs a lot to dehumidify a whole building.
1:09:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh it costs, it's costs and potentially risky to humidify a whole building because there's a potential of mold uh if you're not cleaning the humidifier out frequently and so on.
1:09:15
SPEAKER_00: Um local desk humidifier.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, there are simple fixes.
1:09:21
SPEAKER_00: Um sound.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: When you go to a museum, you are standing in front of a painting, and all of a sudden the cone of sound comes and it tells you what the painting is about.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_00: The person looking at the painting next to you doesn't hear it.
1:09:34
SPEAKER_00: You can direct sound.
1:09:36
SPEAKER_00: There are all kinds of technologies now that allow for individualized spaces.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_00: And and I like to think about the, you know, the the movie and the old TV show Um Get Smart with the cone of silence that comes to.
1:09:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we can do that now in the office.
1:09:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it doesn't have to be this clunky cone of silence.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_00: It can be just, you know, you can do a cone of music.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: You can do a yes, you can put on earphones, and but that isolates you, right?
1:10:07
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to do that.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: I I I want to mention something else that we have at the uh Andrew Weil Center.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's and also started here in New York.
1:10:16
SPEAKER_00: Um it's a uh it's called a recharge room, started by, and I described this in the book, a young woman, Morel Phillips, who used to be in the video game industry, and she was in a severe accident and had neurotrauma and was in and out of hospital and was desperate to be in nature and couldn't be in nature.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_00: And so she decided to quit the video game industry and turn her skills to creating immersive nature environments.
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: And she worked with Mount Sinai Hospital.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_00: She set up her studio, Studio Elsewhere in 2019 in 2020, realized.
1:10:52
SPEAKER_01: So it's called Studio Elsewhere.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_01: I love that name.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_00: So do I.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: It was well, she told me, uh, I don't remember if I put this in the book or not, but she told me that she had the idea when she read my second book, Healing Spaces, while she was in hospital.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_00: So I was really truly touched by that.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, but she so it's these immersive spaces where she goes around the world and she films and she has this fantastic audio that picks up the nature sounds and so on.
1:11:21
SPEAKER_00: And um, and it's an immersive space.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_00: And she realized in 2020 that New York was ground zero for COVID, yeah, burnout, suicidality, uh, depression, anxiety, uh, stress in healthcare workers.
1:11:39
SPEAKER_00: So she worked with Mount Sinai and she actually set one up in one of the uh COVID triage tents, but started with Mount Sinai Hospital here in New York, and now has over 70 around the country, including one uh in our office space.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_00: Most of these are in hospitals.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_00: Um we have one set up in a local high school, uh South Point Catholic High School in Tucson.
1:12:03
SPEAKER_00: And we are Morel Phillips and Studio Elsewhere are finding with Mount Sinai, and we're working with them, that there is a um uh there is a dose effect of how long you need to be in these spaces to reduce your stress, improve depression, improve sleep quality, and so on.
1:12:22
SPEAKER_00: It's about uh 20 minutes a day.
1:12:25
SPEAKER_00: And it can be longer, but you need to be there for about 20 minutes.
1:12:30
SPEAKER_00: And um, we're also measuring sweat cortisol, it takes that long for the cortisol to come down.
1:12:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so if you can't be in nature, there are these kinds of um nature experiences that can mimic.
1:12:46
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, the high school uh is finding the same uh degree of improvement in their students and then their teachers.
1:12:53
SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine that K through 12, certainly high school, is very stressful right now.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_00: So um I want one of these.
1:13:01
SPEAKER_01: Feels like everyone should have one of these in their office.
1:13:03
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:13:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, you can talk to Morel, you can interview her.
1:13:06
SPEAKER_01: Hook me up.
1:13:08
SPEAKER_00: And you know, one of the things that that people say, well, why not use the the goggles, the oxygen?
1:13:15
SPEAKER_00: Well, that gives you an experience that that may help with your stress, but maybe isolating, is is isolating.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: Yes, you're not in it together.
1:13:25
SPEAKER_00: What she found during COVID, and especially because anybody could come into these rooms in the hospitals, there were people from uh the cleaning staff all the way up to the CEOs, the doctors, the nurses, the patients, and and they would bond in there and they'd be crying and and helping each other.
1:13:42
SPEAKER_00: And it comes back to my experience in Greece.
1:13:45
SPEAKER_00: That human bond, anything that you can do in these spaces to help people connect with each other is is really, really important for health.
1:13:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's it's not one of these things in isolation that gives you the highest ROI, it's a bit of all of the above.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_00: Everything, all of the above.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_01: Can I can we talk about what we can do to empower ourselves as individuals, right?
1:14:10
SPEAKER_01: So say I'm, you know, we're spending so much of our time at work.
1:14:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, it's a big portion of our life.
1:14:16
SPEAKER_01: Quite often we are rightly or wrongly stuck in a job that we don't love, that doesn't give us purpose, that doesn't, you know, make us want to jump out of bed in the morning.
1:14:28
SPEAKER_01: For the people that are listening that you know perhaps feel like that or or or are feeling overwhelmed or stressed with their with their workload, and and that can be personal life as well, like just this accumulation of stress.
1:14:42
SPEAKER_01: Is there are there things that that they can do regardless of the position their employer takes?
1:14:48
SPEAKER_00: Yes, and it comes to these individualized spaces.
1:14:51
SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, it doesn't have to be a large space.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_00: So say at home, a comfortable chair in the corner of your bedroom, or you know, uh, you can put a screen to kind of set things off.
1:15:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh I do talk about that in the book.
1:15:10
SPEAKER_00: I talk about um start with a window.
1:15:14
SPEAKER_00: If you're and actually I had a one of my one of my readers wrote to me and said you should call it well at life, because he took these ideas and he said he used to have his workspace in the basement.
1:15:28
SPEAKER_00: And when he read my book, he moved it up to be in somewhere in front of a window in in a corner of the living room.
1:15:36
SPEAKER_00: And he said it just made the world of difference.
1:15:39
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm sure.
1:15:40
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, look around your space.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_00: And the reason for a window, you can look outside for a moment, go offline literally, and be in the moment and look at the trees outside, or look at the birds, or if you if you don't have that luxury, you know, get up and walk outside.
1:15:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, in New York, we said you know, there aren't that many green spaces.
1:16:03
SPEAKER_00: New York has been amazingly uh proactive.
1:16:07
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:16:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh the Million Tree Um Initiative that was started by Bette Midler back in 2007, I think it was, that was completed in 2015.
1:16:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, I when I was in DC, I used to come to New York a lot, and I've noticed, certainly since COVID, a lot more roof gardens here.
1:16:28
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful roof gardens.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, I was in Singapore, which is very, you know, dense.
1:16:35
SPEAKER_00: Dense, right.
1:16:37
SPEAKER_00: They have these amazing roof gardens.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_00: Take advantage of the roof garden.
1:16:42
SPEAKER_00: That's not an individual, isn't going to do that.
1:16:44
SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna build a roof garden.
1:16:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, but companies can can do that.
1:16:49
SPEAKER_00: But if you don't have access, make a point of getting up and walking out to wherever you can have, even a tiny amount of access.
1:16:58
SPEAKER_00: I work with uh an organization, a nonprofit called Nature Sacred that builds healing gardens, uh especially in um in areas of devastation, like after tornadoes and floods and so on.
1:17:13
SPEAKER_00: We worked with them uh to uh retrofit a uh forest glen walking path at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
1:17:24
SPEAKER_00: Um and uh they did the uh old um, I think it was called the Naval Cemetery in Brooklyn.
1:17:31
SPEAKER_00: It's called the Greenway now in Brooklyn, and they create these beautiful walking paths and gardens with community members, so it builds community.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_00: Um there's the Highline, which is right here.
1:17:44
SPEAKER_00: Um so New York has been really, really proactive in in all of this, in creating spaces.
1:17:50
SPEAKER_00: I grew up in Montreal and I took it for granted.
1:17:55
SPEAKER_00: Really, I until I left Montreal, I didn't realize how lucky I was that I was walking distance even as a child to about five parks, green parks.
1:18:07
SPEAKER_00: Um there was skating in the winter and there was hockey for, you know, also in the winter they just put you know uh hose the the ground and yeah, just for as I know.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_00: Um then the summer the trees and and so uh well you have Central Park here.
1:18:26
SPEAKER_00: Um it's um we need to to to think about these um interventions at every scale your individual room, your individual home, the surround of your home.
1:18:43
SPEAKER_00: Even if you you don't have a garden, if you're in an apartment, if you have a if you have a window box, if you have a balcony.
1:18:51
SPEAKER_00: Um when I was in DC, I and and here actually, I um put jasmine trees um on in pots on the deck so that I could sit in the evening and inhale that wonderful fragrance that I reminded me of Greece.
1:19:09
SPEAKER_00: Um and that takes you back right away.
1:19:12
SPEAKER_00: So there are fragrance, you have to be careful with fragrances because you can get um the chemical fragrances that are not natural, that are not aromatherapy, essential oils.
1:19:23
SPEAKER_00: And I think you know that from Wonder Health that can be um counterproductive, yeah.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_00: Well, you have allergies and toxic and so on.
1:19:32
SPEAKER_00: But um, so there are individual things that you can do um that I do talk about in well at work of to create your own individual spaces, but also to think about the larger surround.
1:19:44
SPEAKER_01: Given that, you know, so much of this certainly our level of stress, but our you know, subjective feeling of joy and happiness and connection is is based on the people around us.
1:19:56
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
1:19:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, is there anything that we can be doing as individuals to help other people in our in our spaces feel less stressed?
1:20:05
SPEAKER_01: And and the reason I say that is, you know, you could get all of this right, and then if you've got a really annoying person next to you or a really toxic boss, or you know, people that are um you know adding stress ore to your day, it doesn't matter how good your environment is because you're gonna that's gonna accumulate.
1:20:23
SPEAKER_00: I think at that point, that's a little outside that that's outside my area of expertise.
1:20:29
SPEAKER_00: You need to go to a a counselor or and and this is why, you know, again, integrative health.
1:20:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, you can go to the Andrew Wells Center for Integrative Health website, find a practitioner near you to help walk you through what you can do.
1:20:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean, sometimes the solution is to leave that space.
1:20:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:20:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh go to HR, but I that's not my area of expertise.
1:20:49
SPEAKER_00: However, there are many, many stresses that we cannot control.
1:20:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:20:55
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:20:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we can't control what's going on in the world today.
1:20:58
SPEAKER_00: Forget about it.
1:20:59
SPEAKER_00: You can't control what somebody else is doing, um, but you can control your environment.
1:21:05
SPEAKER_00: So when we talk about the wearing effect of stress on the body, it is known that chronic stress can make your telomeres, which are the ends of chromosomes that shorten as you age, they can look 10 to 17 years older than your biological age if you are chronically stressed.
1:21:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can believe that.
1:21:33
SPEAKER_00: So, to the extent that you can reduce any of those stressors, you can help with that.
1:21:40
SPEAKER_00: Um so Dean Ornish did a study on um uh men recovering from prostate cancer, and he had them on for five years on a healthy Mediterranean diet, 30 minutes of walking a day and um uh mindfulness meditation three times a week.
1:22:02
SPEAKER_00: The men who did not follow that regime, their short their chromosomes continued to shorten.
1:22:07
SPEAKER_00: The men who followed that chrome that regime, their chromosomes not only stopped shortening, they actually lengthened.
1:22:15
SPEAKER_00: So if you think, well, I've been a couch potato my whole life, I've eaten hamburgers and French fries, I've I mean, I'm just it's no point.
1:22:24
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:22:24
SPEAKER_00: Well, there is a point.
1:22:25
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter when in your life you start to engage in these integrative health activities, you can prolong your life, you can reduce that chromosomal shortening and have reap the benefits of less stress.
1:22:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, going back to we have all of these stressors in our life.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: And when we talk about chronic stress, we talk about what's called allostatic load of stress.
1:22:56
SPEAKER_00: Um, so what is allostatic load?
1:22:59
SPEAKER_00: When you wake up in the morning, you imagine you have an empty sack on your back, and every single stressful event you put into that sack.
1:23:08
SPEAKER_00: And by the end of the day, you are weighed down by that heavy sack.
1:23:12
SPEAKER_00: It is that cumulative load of stress that wears down your chromosomes, that impairs your immune system to do its job, that predisposes you to all kinds of stress-related illnesses like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease and stroke.
1:23:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, so to the extent that you can remove some of those stressors that come from the environment, you will have less of a load of stress on your back.
1:23:38
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
1:23:39
SPEAKER_01: And what I love so much about that is these things are not continuous points of friction, right?
1:23:46
SPEAKER_01: And so we know with a lot of the lifestyle interventions that we need to do, we need to keep doing them.
1:23:52
SPEAKER_01: Whereas like once you have, you know, created that environment, that place that you know removes those stresses, it's done.
1:23:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:24:00
SPEAKER_01: And there may be some maintenance involved, but like that is a friction-free intervention that can improve markers of health across the board.
1:24:07
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
1:24:08
SPEAKER_00: And and you don't even realize it.
1:24:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:24:10
SPEAKER_00: And and if you're going to your office, you don't even realize it.
1:24:13
SPEAKER_00: If you come home and you're exhausted and you say, Oh, I'm just gonna go sit in my little, my little meditation chair over there behind the plant in the corner that has the lighting that's calming.
1:24:24
SPEAKER_00: You want to go there.
1:24:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:24:26
SPEAKER_00: It's not like, oh, I have to go to the gym and be 90%.
1:24:29
SPEAKER_00: Right, yeah.
1:24:29
SPEAKER_01: It's actually in it's a nice feeling.
1:24:32
SPEAKER_00: It's like me going to the five spas near my bus.
1:24:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:24:35
SPEAKER_01: Do you think people should be more urgently carving out time for these things?
1:24:40
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes.
1:24:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:24:42
SPEAKER_00: I think the pressure to um to work 24-7 is a very bad thing.
1:24:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:24:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, the pressure to be constantly on is a bad thing.
1:24:55
SPEAKER_00: It's going to prevent you from sleeping.
1:24:57
SPEAKER_00: There are studies talking about ROI, return on investment, studies that show that impaired sleep from any cause, whether it's sleep apnea or just being awake for any cause, can cost an organization about$3,000 per employee more per year.
1:25:15
SPEAKER_01: I bet.
1:25:16
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't sound like a whole lot, but my goodness, if you have a lot of employees, it behooves you to make sure your people are sleeping well and making them work up until 11 o'clock at night on their computers is not going to help.
1:25:31
SPEAKER_01: Esther, do you think we're going to, as um, you know, business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, do you think we're going to look back in 10 years' time when we have more data about how impactful this is on bottom line that we're going to be embarrassed that we didn't weave these things in earlier?
1:25:46
SPEAKER_00: I hope so.
1:25:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's sort of the same thing as what happened with the science of the mind-body connection.
1:25:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, and there is a philosopher of science who says that it takes a minimum of 17 years from idea to implementation.
1:26:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, it just takes a long time and it takes a lot of data to be gathered um and proven.
1:26:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, but what's exciting about now, and especially post-COVID, the the um silver lining of COVID is that more and more organizations are doing this.
1:26:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:26:23
SPEAKER_01: That 17 years might have taken even longer.
1:26:26
SPEAKER_01: Or or or certainly it might have some of these things might have not happened at all, right?
1:26:31
SPEAKER_01: Right until we had more urgency to actually do the thing.
1:26:34
SPEAKER_01: And I guess that that's exactly right.
1:26:35
SPEAKER_01: That's the the good takeaway from that happening in the first place.
1:26:39
SPEAKER_01: Where do you see this in 10 years' time?
1:26:41
SPEAKER_01: You know, what what developments, tools, technologies do you think are coming that we're not we don't yet have evidence for their efficacy?
1:26:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think there's going to be more and more development of these local individualized environments.
1:26:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:26:56
SPEAKER_00: There are people working on special um wall um coating or mechanisms to have regulating temperature and and humidity for optimal environments.
1:27:09
SPEAKER_00: There's, like I said, the individualized chairs, there's the lighting, there's the smart lighting.
1:27:14
SPEAKER_00: All of this is going to become more and more um accessible and and user-friendly, I think.
1:27:21
SPEAKER_01: And hopefully more affordable as it scales as well.
1:27:24
SPEAKER_01: We've seen a lot of different startups focusing on environmental health as uh as the sort of core of their offering.
1:27:30
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
1:27:31
SPEAKER_01: Which is really exciting.
1:27:32
SPEAKER_01: And in the same way as we now have much more agency to do our own little N of One studies with our wearables and you know, our CGMs and trackers, I think the same thing's gonna happen maybe a little bit further down the line, but we we're getting more agency, which I love.
1:27:48
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:27:48
SPEAKER_01: When you when you look back at your career, if you go back to day one, what would you have done differently, do you think?
1:27:59
unknown: Would
1:28:00
SPEAKER_01: With when it when it comes to your own health, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?
1:28:07
SPEAKER_00: I probably wouldn't have eaten those hamburgers and french fries as much.
1:28:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:28:20
SPEAKER_00: Um I I you know, I wouldn't in terms of my career, I wouldn't have done it any differently.
1:28:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:28:26
SPEAKER_00: I I mean, I am where I am today because of all the experiences, negative and positive that I had.
1:28:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:28:32
SPEAKER_00: Um in terms of my own health, if I would have continued with the Mediterranean diet that I grew up on, I probably would have been healthier.
1:28:44
SPEAKER_00: Um on the other hand, I went through all those stresses.
1:28:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:28:49
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of arthritis in my family.
1:28:51
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that we know in in the arthritis field is that the number of that that there isn't a single gene that causes it.
1:29:00
SPEAKER_00: There are many genes, each with small effects.
1:29:02
SPEAKER_00: And this is going back to the laid-back California rats and the type A New York rats.
1:29:07
SPEAKER_01: The New Yorkers.
1:29:09
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, New Yorkers.
1:29:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm East.
1:29:12
SPEAKER_00: We can take it.
1:29:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:29:14
SPEAKER_00: You can take it.
1:29:15
SPEAKER_00: Um the there are many genes with small effects.
1:29:20
SPEAKER_00: And if you inherit all of the genes for some illness like arthritis, you're you're gonna get it.
1:29:28
SPEAKER_00: You know, the fact that I um developed arthritis is not a coincidence.
1:29:33
SPEAKER_00: My grandmother had lupus and probably psoriatic arthritis, my mother had rheumatoid arthritis, a cousin has scleroderma and mixed connective tissue disease and on and on.
1:29:42
SPEAKER_00: So I have a lot of those genes.
1:29:45
SPEAKER_00: The fact that I got it when I was going through chronic stress, that is not a coincidence.
1:29:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:29:51
SPEAKER_00: I got it then because I was going through that extreme stress and it weakened my body's resilience.
1:30:01
SPEAKER_00: The fact that I got better when I started changing that through those integrative health interventions, that's not a coincidence.
1:30:11
SPEAKER_00: That's because I removed that trigger to the immune response.
1:30:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:30:18
SPEAKER_00: So um you you're stuck with your genes, but you can do a lot to help reduce your um tendency to get those diseases.
1:30:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, control the controllables because you have some agency over those, right?
1:30:35
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was just reading an Arianna Huffington.
1:30:37
SPEAKER_00: Arianna Huffington gave me a very nice quote from my book, and I was reading one of her blogs, and she talks about that.
1:30:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, that we really think about those five lifestyle changes that you can do and really focus on them.
1:30:53
SPEAKER_00: And and those are low-tech, low cost.
1:30:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, it's helpful to have a wearable device to remind you, up, get up.
1:31:02
SPEAKER_00: You've been sitting too long.
1:31:04
SPEAKER_00: Sitting is a new smoking, that is true.
1:31:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, sometimes I'm irritated at my ring that tells me to get up.
1:31:11
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:31:12
SPEAKER_00: But but it's important to have those reminders.
1:31:14
SPEAKER_00: It works.
1:31:15
SPEAKER_00: It works.
1:31:16
SPEAKER_00: Um and but you don't have to have a wearable device to do it.
1:31:20
SPEAKER_00: You can set an oven timer next to your desk to go off every 20 minutes.
1:31:27
SPEAKER_00: I I toured a teddy bear factory in in Vermont once.
1:31:31
SPEAKER_00: I think I put this in the book.
1:31:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, and you see all the workers hunched over sewing machines making these little teddy bears.
1:31:40
SPEAKER_00: And every 20 minutes there's dance music that turns on, and everybody has to get up and dance.
1:31:48
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you can do that too.
1:31:50
SPEAKER_00: You can set your smartphone to, you know, have a get up and do a jig.
1:31:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:31:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:31:56
SPEAKER_01: I do love, I love these little like the concept of the uh sort of movement snacks throughout the day.
1:32:01
SPEAKER_01: I think it's tremendously tremendously beneficial.
1:32:04
SPEAKER_00: Well, you can do movement snacks, you can do meditation snacks, you can do walking snacks.
1:32:11
SPEAKER_00: You I think that's a great idea.
1:32:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna use that.
1:32:13
SPEAKER_01: And I and I think for for young people or younger people, you know, we they have access to information that we didn't have 10, 20, 30 plus years ago.
1:32:26
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, in the same way as you know, if you begin contributing to your pension fund earlier, you have to contribute less.
1:32:34
SPEAKER_01: Like we can we can be carving in very small periods to focus on optimizing health without sucking the fun out of life.
1:32:41
SPEAKER_00: It's it's absolutely true.
1:32:42
SPEAKER_00: When I uh when I was at NIH, you know, having complained about the rats, and yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, I was given the opportunity to move off campus to a new building that they were building up in Rockville.
1:32:53
SPEAKER_00: And I moved and I just loved it.
1:32:56
SPEAKER_00: And I had this big private office, and it was right next to a restaurant and uh and also near uh shopping.
1:33:05
SPEAKER_00: So when I went back to see the uh executive secretary back on the main campus, she said, So how are you liking your new space?
1:33:11
SPEAKER_00: I said, I love it.
1:33:13
SPEAKER_00: It's great.
1:33:13
SPEAKER_00: I have this beautiful view, and I said, The only problem is I'm eating more, I'm spending more money, and I'm gaining weight.
1:33:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:33:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:33:22
SPEAKER_00: And and I I said it as a joke, but it was true.
1:33:25
SPEAKER_00: I was in a private office, I was right next to a whole lot of food.
1:33:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:33:28
SPEAKER_00: And so what would I have done differently?
1:33:30
SPEAKER_00: I would have probably stayed in my cramped space where I could on purpose move out, walk around to get out of the cramped space.
1:33:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't know if I would have done that, but yeah.
1:33:43
SPEAKER_01: Didn't happen.
1:33:44
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:33:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm mindful of your time and I could talk to you for hours and likewise, this is lots of fun.
1:33:49
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna ask you three more questions.
1:33:51
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:33:51
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of us um and a lot of the listeners will have parents that are at the age where, you know, they are either having to care for them or they will have to care for them in the not too distant future.
1:34:06
SPEAKER_01: Those parents didn't have access to brilliant science like this or information like this.
1:34:11
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we know that this loneliness epidemic is probably the biggest problem that we have in healthcare today.
1:34:20
SPEAKER_01: Um is there are there any tips, tools, strategies that we could be helping our parents to weave into their life in their home environment that would that would yield a good return?
1:34:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh all of the above.
1:34:35
SPEAKER_00: Um and actually I talk about this in Well at Work.
1:34:37
SPEAKER_00: We did some work with a local um uh developer who uh runs um intermediate-size senior living communities.
1:34:48
SPEAKER_00: And we especially were looking at lighting during the day and glare and shading and those kinds of things.
1:34:55
SPEAKER_00: And and I think a lot of these senior living communities are paying attention to that.
1:35:00
SPEAKER_00: Aging in place is a very important field, you know, creating spaces where people can move about with agency without having to rely on another person.
1:35:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, if you have lost an arm, you can have a prosthesis for an arm.
1:35:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you're losing your memory, there are mental prostheses that can be put in place uh in the physical environment because uh it's memory of place that goes first.
1:35:33
SPEAKER_00: There's a part of the brain, the hippocampus, that's your GPS in your brain.
1:35:37
SPEAKER_00: And it you remember place and space.
1:35:43
SPEAKER_00: So uh, you know, why not have sight lines to the bathroom so you don't have to remember where the bathroom is?
1:35:48
SPEAKER_00: You know, things like that.
1:35:50
SPEAKER_00: So those kinds of things can certainly be applied to not only senior living communities, but aging in place at home.
1:35:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, love that.
1:35:58
SPEAKER_01: Okay, last question, Esther.
1:36:01
SPEAKER_01: If some were someone were to tune in to the last 60 seconds of this episode, what would you want them to take away?
1:36:11
SPEAKER_00: I want them to know that the physical environment around you is really important for health.
1:36:17
SPEAKER_00: Not only physical health, and as I said, clean and green.
1:36:21
SPEAKER_00: Clean air is absolutely essential.
1:36:24
SPEAKER_00: You gotta start with that.
1:36:28
SPEAKER_00: But add elements that enhance your emotional well-being, which includes green spaces, access to nature, vision, seeing nature, nature sounds, um lighting that follows the circadian light, the rhythm of the sun, um, optimal temperature, basically all of those seven domains of integrative health that I talk about in Well at Work, creating well-being in any workspace.
1:36:55
SPEAKER_01: Which, by the way, we will add into the show notes.
1:36:57
SPEAKER_01: I encourage everyone to buy, read.
1:37:01
SPEAKER_01: Is a and and all of your books, in fact, are remarkable.
1:37:04
SPEAKER_01: I'll put a link to all of them.
1:37:05
SPEAKER_01: How about thank you?
1:37:06
SPEAKER_00: That would be wonderful.
1:37:07
SPEAKER_00: That would be wonderful.
1:37:08
SPEAKER_00: Esther, thank you so much.
1:37:09
SPEAKER_01: I love speaking to you.
1:37:10
SPEAKER_01: It's always a pleasure and a privilege.
1:37:12
SPEAKER_00: Likewise.
1:37:13
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I'm glad you persevered when they said that that research was not worth persevering for if it wasn't future.
1:37:22
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, I should have some therapist figure this out why it is that I've it spurred me on.
1:37:28
SPEAKER_00: Let's put it that way.
1:37:29
SPEAKER_00: I had to prove them wrong.
1:37:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I know that feeling all too well.
1:37:33
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Esther.
1:37:34
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.