Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's really not Burnout is more about how your environment is malfunctioning rather than your body. The air inside doesn't circulate and carbon dioxide in offices especially builds, which reduces actually the cognitive function of the room. Sometimes you can even upgrade the room's IQ by opening the window. We're doing the same thing with screens, but we're not seeing it for what it is. We actually have this epidemic of digital obesity, but we haven't named it this until now.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Hey there billionaire. Yep, I'm talking to you. If you expect to live another 31 years, you're already a billionaire. Not in money, but in the real measure of wealth, time. That's because 31 years is roughly a billion seconds. But most of us waste time in ways we'd never waste money. The currency of time billionaires is micro moments, the 90 second to 15 minute gaps hidden between the structured parts of your day. This podcast is about reclaiming them with quick, research backed ideas to help you feel more creative, productive and alive. Welcome to Time Billionaires. Let's make your next micro moment count.
Thanks for joining today's episode of the Time Billionaires Podcast. Our guest is Dr. John Lapuma, a doctor, professionally trained chef, two time New York Times best selling author, and a TED speaker who helped pioneer the field of culinary medicine, exploring how food, nature and everyday lifestyle choices can function as powerful forms of medicine. He taught this topic at Harvard University and much of his work focuses on how small practical shifts in how we eat, move and spend our time can dramatically improve our health, energy and longevity.
So let's start there. When someone tells you that they feel completely overwhelmed by their schedule, what's the first piece of advice that you give them?
[00:01:57] Speaker A: What I say is step outside, but not for exercise, not for walk, not to get your steps just outside. Just find a doorway and look at the horizon for a minute. If you can't see the horizon, look at the furthest part that you can see.
Why does this help?
Because what you're doing is neurobiology.
You're relaxing the muscles around your eyes.
You're taking yourself away from the screen, which occupies 11 hours a day and makes your world smaller. We'll talk about that more in a little bit.
And giving your cognitive structure a break, you need this to reset.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: I loved how you explained the why behind the time outside.
I've seen the power of it.
Embarrassingly, a couple years ago I've talked about this in another episode, I actually got an MRI done of my brain because I was having such horrible Eye strain behind my right eye, that I was convinced I had some horrible illness. And it turned out I just needed to stand nor time outside looking farther. But when I tell people to just go outside, take five deep breaths, breathe deeply. I think a lot of people think it sounds too simple. It's like, yeah, yeah, I do that. I, I walk to my car, et cetera.
For people who really need to drive home, the impacts. I think you just did a really good job of that. That it actually does really quantifiably change our brains and our eyesight.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: No question. And here's another.
In the morning, and a lot of people's mornings are scheduled, but if you can find 15 within 60 minutes of waking, just 15 minutes to stand in a doorway or to go to a window with the window open and look through the screen, or actually physically go outside, maybe walking a dog within that time of looking at morning. Daylight does so many good things for you. It makes a day so much more efficient by boosting your cortisol level right away inside you so that you get a big burst of energy. It sets your melatonin for that night so you sleep better for 14 hours later. It helps to create this cycle of deep sleep in your brain or non REM sleep, where what your brain does is clean itself. The glymphatic system clicks in and you get rid of beta amyloid and tau, which are the proteins that accumulate during Alzheimer's disease. Plus this is a cycle in which you build bone. Especially important for women, particularly Caucasian women who are worried about osteoporosis. It's also the cycle where you repair muscle.
So you only get that when you reset your circadian rhythm by looking at daylight for 10 to 15 minutes from the first hour of waking. And if you can carve that out, you can make your whole day much better.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's powerful. And we used to work like that right when we evolved to look at the daylight and do different tasks during different seasons, growing and harvesting and just rising with the sun.
Post industrial revolution, it's easy to feel like we can do all of the same things really in any interchangeable block. My work at 8pm on a Sunday could be identical to 3pm on a Tuesday.
And the idea that our brains aren't wired for that is actually was hard for me to really just get behind at first. Like, well, I can do all of this. It's right here. And you've talked about how that's just not true. Right? We, we actually have to be in tune with the cycles of the days or else we're not going to be maximally productive.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. Our bodies evolved over 200,000 years outdoors. And what we've done, done in this first generation ever to be the victims of this, what I'm calling indoor epidemic, is move inside and never leaving.
And that move inside does all kinds of bad things for us. It makes our world smaller. It gets, increases chronic inflammation because of the toxins inside and because of the deprivation of the circadian rhythm, the air inside doesn't circulate and, and carbon dioxide in offices especially builds, which reduces actually the cognitive function of the room. Sometimes you can even Upgrade the room's IQ by opening the window.
People think better because that CO2 level drops, particularly if it's over 1000 parts per million. There's a lot of evidence that that impacts cognitive function and thinking.
What you want to do is change how you approach your environment. And it's really not burnout, is more about how your environment is malfunctioning rather than your body.
It's actually an environmental function. We're so surrounded by screens that those screens actually hit the same dopamine cortisol loop that ultra processed food hits.
What does that do? I mean ultra processed food is. We spent 40 years figuring out that ultra processed food causes metabolic syndrome and diabetes and obesity and premature aging. We're doing the same thing with screens, but we're not seeing it for what it is. We think it's productivity, but it's actually the same kind of impact on longevity. Being inside that lung actually frays your telomeres, shortens your biological age, reduces your health span. So the real change that is your micro moment, it should be to go outside, leave the phone, look at the sky at least a minute Every hour.
A 50 minute park walk if you're going to get much more about. This improves working memory by 20%. But even five minutes in a green space improves your mood and your focus measurably.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great advice. Even looking outside. When I worked at High Rise, I find that I couldn't really get outside between every meeting. But looking at the palm trees in the courtyard where was still helpful.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely correct. And yeah, please go ahead and, and that's because we begin to understand nature with our senses when we're outside.
So the fix isn't more time, it's better time.
And because we spend 93% of our time inside, we already spend 7% of our time outside, which is about almost 12 hours a week. But all that time that we Spend outside is incidental.
It goes from parking lot to parking lot or car to office, stepping outside to pick up a delivery. But that's incidental time. That doesn't do anything for our biology.
But this daylight time, this horizon reset green exercise, if you can, repurposed just 17 minutes a day, that's the minimum effective dose.
Where it's a clinical threshold where we begin to see changes in mood and focus and blood pressure and clarity and memory.
You do a lot of good things for yourself. It does take being in green or blue spaces intentionally and specifically, not just walking down the sidewalk in a big city.
But if that 17 minute minimum effective dose can begin to change and improve your longevity, your focus, your clarity and your mood. If you take that first step, when
[00:09:50] Speaker B: you say 17 minutes a day is the minimum effective dose, does it have to be consecutive? Could it be five, five, seven minutes or. Doesn't have to be.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Absolutely, yes.
It's your micro moments in action.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's fantastic.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Ten minutes of morning light. Yeah, ten minutes of morning light. You get a minute maybe twice during the day because you can't get up every hour and you look at the horizon or the furthest part you can. You don't need a forest, by the way, you need a sky view.
And maybe at night, you look at the dusk, you look at the sunset, and you get those red amber waves. And those red amber waves at sunset are the only waves, light waves, that don't suppress your melatonin level at night.
Every other light does.
And if you get bright light within an hour of going to bed from your phone, and by the way, if your phone's in your hand, your brain thinks you're still working.
That bright light at night suppresses your melatonin for up to an hour and a half and 80%.
So you've got to make it a comfortable, cool, dark place to sleep.
And that means bright light, blue stimulation off an hour, at least an hour before bedtime, even 30 minutes makes a difference.
And then you get some other nighttime ritual. You, cup of tea, meditate, write, play with your dog, talk to your partner.
Something other than looking at a device or a monitor.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, even just reading two pages of a book adds up. And it's I gave a talk about micro moments last week and somebody asked, well, sometimes I find that I'm reading a book, but I don't remember what I read. What's the point? And the point really is that you're training a habit other than mindlessly scrolling blue light. This addictive adrenaline constantly coming at your brain.
So even if you don't remember it, you can go back and reread it, but you're still building the habit of doing something other than this mindless dopamine that we actually can't totally see the impacts of. I think that's been interesting for me to uncover as I've read more and done more research, is that we don't. We're kind of all walking around without a clear counterfactual of what our life could be like if we didn't do these very normalized things in our lives. But these, they're normalized toxins really. And American prisoners are guaranteed more time outdoors than American civilians choose to take willingly. Because we know the impact on the population if they don't get it yet we have all the freedom to do all of that and don't choose to. And that's the reclaiming the agency that I think is so powerful in realizing that there is an opportunity cost to five minutes scrolling social media before bed, even if it feels like a break.
It's not to your brain, as you've said and as I've read in the research as well.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: That's right. It's not just an opportunity cost, it's a biological impact.
That's why there's a list of 50 analog devices that I describe in the book that are on the website. Because we want people to do something like write in a journal or read a book. Because that type of analog activity actually engages a different part of your brain than the addictive non nutritious blue light that you're getting from a device that as I've said, hits the same dopamine cortisol loop that ultra processed food hits. And that's something to train our brains away from so that we get restorative sleep, so that we engage that deep sleep that's coming to us. Because we got some morning light and we clean our brains using the glymphatic system that was discovered in 2013 by the way, and given the Nobel in 2017, the discoverer of it.
We want to be able to use our neurobiology to our advantage. And it just takes a few minutes here and there during the day to do that. We've covered morning light, we've covered going to horizon resets. I've mentioned the importance of sunset, where your body now begins to know that it's time to cool down, that it's your brain signal to sort of begin to power down and not so much engage in the activities of the day.
It's a way to experience nature and even being outdoors in any kind of green space where you're surrounded by green or blue space where you're near water uses a different part of your brain to than the one that makes lists and ticks off items and has to DOS and has ways to accomplish stuff and has new projects ahead. Your nature doesn't do any of that. And that's a good thing because you use your senses in nature which are complementary to your cognitive structure and actually help your cognitive structure make work better. How do you use your senses?
You first know what they are, which is touch, listen, see, smell and taste all on your face.
And when you are outside and you need something to do and you're not exercising, which is a really fun and easy thing to do when you're outside in nature or outside at all.
I tell people to start by listening for sounds that are close and then listening for sounds that are far away that are unique, or looking at shades of green and trying to figure out how many shades of green you can see in 30 seconds and then how many more you can see in the next 30 seconds and you always can see a couple more.
So this uses a different part of your brain that helps the cognitive structure in your brain work better because it doesn't use the same circuits that are burning out from too many pixels. I call this digital obesity, where like too much sugar burns out your metabolism, too many pixels burn out your brain, and that's more pixels than your brain can metabolize.
We actually have this epidemic of digital obesity, but we haven't named it this until now.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: Part two of this two part episode is coming to you next week. Week.
Thanks for spending this micro moment with me. If you found it valuable, share it with a fellow time billionaire and give us a rating to help others discover the power of micro moments. For more ways to reclaim your time, check out timebillionaires.org and follow me Rebecca Shadix on LinkedIn. See you next time.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Sam.
