yamtimsina – Page 2

Are you sure your mitochondria are happy?

“Mitochondria seem to be able to exist, in the form of free-living bacteria, without our help. But without them, we die in a matter of seconds.”
-Lyall Watson

I was in my mid twenties.
I first got sick and that was followed by having chronic fatigue.
It was such a heaviness I’d never experienced before.
It didn’t matter what I ate regularly or how much I slept in those days.
I felt really heavy and unmotivated, no interest in anything.
It was an exhausting feeling and it took me a very long time to go away.
Eventually I was free from chronic fatigue but I learned a big lesson about our cellular mechanism especially about regeneration of power houses in our body for healing.

Few weeks ago, I was with my eldest daughter in a doctor’s clinic.
She had some health issues and we were in her doctor’s clinic for a follow up visit.
I met a middle-aged man in the clinic and he initiated the conversation while waiting for the doctor.
Immediately after a couple of minutes of conversation he said,
“Some days, for no reason, my body feels like it is made of nothing. My muscles feel like they just can’t do anything, I feel very tired, soft and fatigue very quickly. I was a very strong, energetic, and efficient person before. It feels so sudden, like I’m physically moving through quicksand, my doctor couldn’t relate my past and present life.”

Disconnected human body and its whispering: ME/CFS

I went into flashback immediately and correlated his story with my situation many years ago.
Of course, he was very dissatisfied and unhappy about what’s going on in his body.
What to say I just listened to him and politely asked him for any progress of diagnosis up to now.
He said, “I was diagnosed with CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome. My doctor did not even address the issue of my physical exercise pattern, even though it was an important part of my life and it’s such a key issue for managing ME/CFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.”

When I heard the word CFS, I immediately realized the disconnection between our human body, it’s whispering with us, and disease diagnosis.
In my own experience as well as acquired knowledge, the real understanding this disconnection is very crucial for healthy living.
His feeling was saying that his doctor isn’t getting ready to know him properly.
His doctor was looking for a problem, trying to fix the problem, and telling him what to do.
But he is looking for a conversation with his doctor, not his instruction, for that, I’m sure his mind is coming up with many questions for the doctor and the doctor should be very patient with him.
This, in my view, is a disconnection in our health system, his body wants a conversation and his doctor wants to give him an instruction.

In our short chat, he showed the curiosity to know the strength in our body, its origin, good and bad parts of it, and the role of genetics.
After passing half-way through life experiences and being a science researcher, I’ve realized that nobody in this world knows everything, we all kind of know one area that we study and spend time on it.
The only way we can uplift one another in society is by contributing and sharing the knowledge and information to each other about what we know.
This man’s curiosity which is also related to my past experience is the reason why I am writing this post.

After the conversation with this man in the doctor’s office, I realized immediately that very few people are aware about why our body becomes tired, fatigued and lethargic so quickly.
I asked him if he was exercising regularly and all of the sudden he started to feel tired and fatigued quickly.
I wasn’t testing his medical or scientific knowledge which I never do because we all have our own life, own circumstances, own choices, and experiences in life.
We all should respect each other and appreciate what we have to offer.
I only wanted to know how much he is aware about our biological body and its relation with energy, food, and regular lifestyle choice.
I asked him if he knew the power house of our cells, mitochondria, and how they operate in our body which are basically the center of our tiredness, fatigue and lethargic body.
He said, “no.”
Ultimately, this “no” initiated me to go a little deeper into mitochondria and let people know about them and their specificities.

Mitochondria and our energy

Among many reasons, one of the most probable causes from research is that there are probably differences in mitochondria in people who suffer from ME/CFS.
And these problems may be associated with detoxification pathways which are related to mitochondria.
Mitochondria are powerhouses of cells, they are basically the batteries in our body.
There could be many other reasons but defects in mitochondria are very concerning in overall health and especially fatigue and tiredness in our body.
Our body’s energy storage and production systems play the key role to our body’s ability to produce energy, fight fatigue, and protect our body from inflammation.

Energy metabolism is the phenomenon by which our body converts food, water, and oxygen we take into energy.
Proteins are broken down into amino acids, the most basic components of protein that our body absorbs.
Likewise, fats are converted into fatty acids.
And carbohydrates are converted into sugar.
Once these simple products get into our cells, they are taken apart by a complex set of reactions to power our body.
The excess energy that we produce is stored in special fat cells called adipocytes.
To access this stored energy there is a requirement of coordinated hormone signals in our body.

So in simple terms, energy is generated in the factories of our cells, the mitochondria.
Every cell in our body except red blood cells has hundreds of them.
They have their own genes called mitochondrial DNA, because a long time ago they were their own organism before they came to join our body.
In reality, mitochondria were so powerful at converting oxygen into energy that other organisms absorbed them and they became part of us.
Our mitochondria are essentially batteries or energy sources of our body like the batteries in our cell phone or laptop.
The air we breathe and the food we eat charge these batteries so what type of fuel we take inside our body determines the health and longevity of our cell batteries or mitochondria.

Remember, all the mitochondria in a cell are in constant contact, communicating with each other about what is going on in their part of the cell.
They know whether they are happy or sad or frustrated.
They sense fluctuations in stress and sex hormones, blood pressure, blood sugar, and even how much ice cream and pizza we just ate.
They know when we are sleeping or reading or working.
They know when we are awake and doing meditation or sexual activities.
It all means that they are completely in tune with our body.

Dr. Martin Picard, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University says “It makes more sense to think of mitochondria as the information processors of the cell. They are equipped with a surprisingly wide variety of receptors to sense what’s going on in the cell, they integrate all this information to maintain the health of the organism.”

Since the mitochondria know all the internal communications, they influence the activity of the cell and get it to send signals to our body.
If things are quiet and smooth, they may lie low, relax, and enjoy.
If things are busy or stressful like we are doing heavy exercise or weight lifting or running a marathon then they ramp up.
Sometimes, the stress for mitochondria is too much and they get damaged, therefore, too much exercise is also not helpful, and the body treats damaged mitochondria as a foreign invader.

Supporting our mitochondria is not only charging our batteries but also promoting their longevity to run our body machine efficiently.
Fatigue is the result when the batteries run low.
One reason that happens is because mitochondria cannot keep up with the behaviors and choices of our current lifestyle.

Low physical activity, ultra processed food, bad breathing habits, poor sleep, and high stress cause life altering changes in cell metabolism.
In response to all of these cellular stresses, our cells make more mitochondria.
Quickly made mitochondria are sometimes damaged and cannot run smoothly, causing the body’s battery to run dangerously low.
It is useful to explore what supports our mitochondria and to make small shifts toward supporting our health.

Happy mitochondria and diet

Now the question is what makes our mitochondria happy.
Plant based foods, intuitive eating, adequate hydration, regular exercise, restful sleep, and managed stress are keys to make our mitochondria happy.
Ultra processed foods and extreme or minimal exercises both are responsible for making our mitochondria unhappy and sick.
Poor sleep in both quantity and quality, poor oxygenation, limited microbiome, and high stress are equally important to make our mitochondria unhappy and sick.

The concept of mitochondrial nutrients has been adopted in recent years through research.
It indicates the adequate nutrients to keep proper mitochondrial function in our body.
Different research experiments have shown that components of polyphenols, plant-derived compounds, and polyunsaturated fatty acids, can improve mitochondrial metabolism, biogenesis, and antioxidant capacity.
Such effects are valuable to counteract the mitochondrial dysfunction associated with many abnormalities.
The beneficial feature of polyphenols-enriched olive oil, vegetables, nuts, fish, and plant-based foods are the key nutrients to make mitochondria happy.

L-carnitine is one of the key nutrients that has been studied for its role in mitochondrial health to help in the elimination of toxic metabolites.

Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is another dietary enzyme that has also been researched for its role in mitochondrial health and on fatigue symptoms to restore fatigue, sleep, and quality of life among ME/CFS patients.

Ari Whitten, The founder of The Energy Blueprint and author of “Eat for Energy” gives a deep dive into supercharging our mitochondria with a framework for restoring cognitive function, alertness, and an abundance of energy.

Mostly what research tells us is that health problems don’t just jump out on us from the dark room randomly.
They come through the accumulation of our life choices over time.
It’s not about just making our mitochondria happy, it’s about life, it’s about connection, it’s about love and it’s about all these things that mitochondria have given us.

I still think that our body is a temple, a sacred place and mitochondria are the batteries to light the temple.
They are the foundation of doing work for people around us, doing work that we like in community and connecting humanity because they give energy to perform such work.
The more we better ourselves and become clearer and healthier, the more we treat our bodies as temples and mitochondria as batteries of the temple.
Better we become healthy human beings, the better we can contribute towards the community.

Conclusion

Finally, I would like to share one of the lessons I learned recently.
In order to be proactive about our own health, we have to take personal inventory of our lives honestly.
We have to sit, think, and start a conversation about what we want out of this body, life and whole experience, and what actually we are doing everyday.
We have to think proactively about what we are looking for because health is very personal now.

It’s becoming the conversation with the body itself, it’s not all about only medical intervention by medical professionals.
For example, if we have a tumor in our internal organ then we have to seek help immediately from a medical specialist, but if we want to live a happy and healthy life up to age ninety, then we have to start conversation with our own body immediately.

Steve Sisgold’s book “What’s Your Body Telling You?” is a best resource how to know our body’s clues so that we go through life fully connected with our true desires.

It’s an integration of a holistic but personalized approach in life.
Please, don’t ignore the conversation with your body, the earlier we start the better for our psychological well-being.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Is my happiness similar to your happiness?

Whoever you may be: step into the evening. Step out
of the room where everything is known to you already….
-Poem by Rilke

When did you feel happy last time?
Have you ever realized or experienced it?
You never know when and how it appears.
The truth is, enlightenment of happiness doesn’t come only with philosophical reading, it might come with a very short conversation with our friend with the quality of tea in the tea shop.
It’s amazing when our subconscious mind recognizes it.

I’ve had some experiences with it.
I’ve found some unusual inner realization about happiness and, of course, it’s not about monetary, prestige or any grand achievement in life.
It’s happiness not in something I gained material but in something I lost.
You might be surprised once you attain it.
I’ve found the most happy moment when I lost myself in something else, actually, when I lost myself in something to find myself.

Running and my happiness

Here’s how I found one.
When I was thirteen years old, I started running in middle school.
I had no athletic gift, nor family history in running, nothing like that.
I just started to run, teachers pushed me a little bit with encouragement, that’s it.
I ran in many school competitions, I didn’t win a lot but I felt really good when I used to run.
I ran through middle school to high school and local tournaments.
No one around me including my family and friends asked me to run, no one wanted it actually.
But the sense of happiness I felt during those years remains resonant to this day.
I didn’t understand back then because I wasn’t mentally mature to understand.
It’s hilarious when I reflect back and visualize those moments.

Through my undergraduate to graduate school, I didn’t run at all but jog a lot due to various reasons.
I would say life happened so I became busy with many other things.
Actually, I didn’t find any environment in college to run, I kind of forgot about running.

Fifteen years later, I am not a much better runner now than I was then, but something followed me constantly inside without my pure realization.
I don’t know why and how I resumed my running again.
I realized that what sustains me in my life is my moment of interiority when I run and finish it.
What excites me in my present running is the moment when I forget other tasks of my present life or give up some tasks just for running regularly.

You might not believe I’ve read Haruki Murakami’s book three times “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running“. Such a fantastic book, if you love running, don’t miss it. What a gem!

In the book, Haruki Murakami says, “All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”

Sometimes we think that getting something tangible will make us happy.
What do you think?
Maybe it won’t be for some people.
Or maybe it will be for others, I don’t know.
I think for many people, maybe it’ll give them more power because they just might feel pride for taking some control on something they like.

One thing I’ve noticed is that doing something hard that interests us can still be rewarding for us.
Hard remains hard only in the beginning after that it becomes our ritual and if we follow that ritual then comes immense pleasure.
I can correlate this when I ran my first half marathon after a few 5Ks and 10Ks.
I had never run 13.1 miles before.
But the feeling of pride and satisfaction after finishing the run changed everything.

Habit is a muscle: an origin of happiness

Gradually, I developed a running habit as a muscle.
More I work on it, the stronger it becomes.
I believe it applies to any activity that we do in life regularly.
The pride inside us pushes us further when we finish it and forces us to repeat it again.
The more we feel pride about it, the more we become sensible and responsible, and we become a part of our routine and ritual, which I realized is another ingredient of happiness.

When I run I feel pride in my mind and a kind of rushing in my body.
I make many of my mitochondria, the batteries of our body, a lot happier by running.

Remember, all the mitochondria in a cell are in contact, communicating with each other about what is going on in their part of the cell.
They know everything, they know what we are doing: sleeping, eating, running, relaxing.
They know all the activities, they influence the activity of the cell and get it to send signals to our body.
Running has become my self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may sound to outsiders, it has become a foundation of my sense of self and sense of happiness.
Losing myself in an all absorbing running, I’ve become myself.
The feeling of accomplishment by running, becomes another truth in my happiness.
As I move in my age, I feel this sensation more potent.

You don’t know your happiness until you try

Nowadays I always tell the younger generation that we should always be on the lookout for right opportunities for body and mind, and we always stress getting what we’re worth.
When was the last time that you were presented with an opportunity to try something you liked but you didn’t try for some reason?
What’s something that you have always wanted to learn about but never try?
If you are turning something down because you’re not good at it or you know nothing about it.
Then you are not only cutting off any opportunity to learn or get better at it but also blocking your own inner growth and happiness.
Because you never know where your happiness is.
And to grow inside is to be happy.

What is supposed to be the habit of being happy?
I think it is a habit of mental growth in any area, personal, professional, vocational, hobby, whatever?
Habit of mental growth means we troubleshoot, pivot, fail, we try again and troubleshoot again because we love to do it.
Every attempt becomes a lesson to help us in the next adventure, no pressure and no time bound.
For example, when I started running, I didn’t know how to breathe from my mouth which is essential for long distance running, but eventually it became normal.

We just have to risk failing but still it gives us inner satisfaction.
There could be something on the other side of our fear that will be so damn great, that I experienced when I passed the finish line of my first marathon.
We just have to start doing what we like and then have tenacity to stick with it.
Giving up midway would be like turning the stove off just before the water boils.
The one thing we can rely on in life is the force of doing and repeating things that interests us as we get older, and as we age.

There is a difference between achievement and accomplishment especially when we age.
Ambition is a good thing at all times, especially if it is the drive that lets our accomplishment turn into a vocation.
We all have to make a living doing some work, and one of the worst things in life is making a living doing something we hate to do.
This would never be the happy ending of life, this would be the only thing to talk about as a regret later in life.
This is not my personal experience because I’m not there yet, but I’ve heard, read, and experienced multiple such stories when I talk to older people.
They look depressed and sad when they share their past stories.

There is no ending in happiness

There is no such thing as happily ever after in real life.
There is just after.
And more after if we’re lucky.
It’s up to us to face every moment with a challenge and joy to do our best and to make the most of it.
Every attempt is a chance to recalibrate and reflect.
Sometimes, especially in the ups and downs of life, all of us forget what will truly make us happy.
That’s ok, it’s normal.
It’s in the mistakes and in the challenges that we can discover and rediscover our happy hormones.

All of our thoughts, feelings, diets, and habits are interconnected. Understanding this connection is key in life.
In my past life, I would think I have nothing to be excited and I would never get better at anything.
This thought would bring me feelings of sadness, frustration, and sedentary life.
Then rather than go for a run or walk, I would decide to stay home and bring more unnecessary harmful thoughts in my mind.
The more I would avoid physical activity outside, the weaker I would feel.
My thought would say, “I will never get better.”
And then would come my feeling- “Sad, angry, frustrated, lazy.”
And then I would change my behavior and habits, “I would stay at home instead of going out for a run.”
This is a glimpse of my past life experience, a vicious cycle of life-trap.
If you have a similar life-trap, you need to disrupt this feedback loop to be happy in life.

Charles Duhigg‘s book “The Power of Habit” is one of the best resources for how habits are formed, how to kick bad ones out and hang on to the good ones.

Conclusion

Remember, being happy isn’t all about adding positives for better results, it’s also about nullifying the negatives wherever possible on the life road.
Life doesn’t come with traffic signs and exits, it’s a freeway without any speed limit, traffic lights and signals, we have to make those all of them ourselves.
By sharing this joy of riding with others, we’ll always be happy.
First we must be happy ourselves and we have to make happiness a mutual thing with others.

Mutual happiness teaches us mutual reliance, what matters most to our happiness is the strength of our connections to family and close friends.
The good thing is happiness is an adhesive and an expander.
First we share happiness with our parents and spouse or children, just within a family,
then with our close friends,
and then with a small group of people around us,
and finally with a bigger audience circle.
Ultimately, we go outside and make the world happy.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Do you feel psychologically well-being and content?

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
– Jim Rohn

In March of 2020, my whole family including me had Covid.
Then, about six months later, I again had Covid.
Then, about one year later, Covid invited me again.
I don’t understand why Covid attacked my body so much even though I consider myself a pretty healthy person.
After this I began to have a new experience of minor pain in one of my internal organ spleen, I suffered from partial thrombosis in the spleen.

I consulted many medical professionals including hematologist and oncologists, they cured my partial thrombosis but nobody found out the cause despite many medical tests and interventions.
My emotional state was being impacted so I started to become more curious about what’s going on in my body.
I started researching and reading many different books and medical journals, basically related to medicine, exercise, physiology, mind-body relationship, and nutrition.
Reading many books had a very deep positive effect on my knowledge, thinking, habit, and most importantly, the perception about health and life.
If we become unhealthy and ill then nothing remains important in life, every other achievement or success in life just becomes empty.

After reading many books, I realized there are only certain things that we can control but many things are beyond our control, for example, genetic diseases.
Sometimes, genetics is also contributed by environment, personal history, education, poverty, and community characteristics.

Moreover, I understood that our healthcare system is misguided in treating illness as an isolated case and taking medication for an isolated case only approach.
In reality, any illness responds best to treatments that consider the whole body and underlying causes.
But, in many cases, especially in finding causes and origin of illness, science is not there yet, we have to wait and see how fast we can make progress because our biological body is inherently complex.
There’s just so many unknowns and limitations.

Good habit is a compound interest

Eventually, reading multiple books written by specialists helped me to develop many different habits.
I started doing yoga regularly.
I used to run long distances everyday before which I changed to walking and running every alternate day.
I started doing ten to twenty minutes of meditation practice everyday no matter what early in the morning before starting my day.

I looked at how I became a different person after coping with Covid and health challenges that I’d been dealing with.
And I just try to remind myself of the knowledge, tools, and skills that I learned from different books written by specialists.
Utilizing them by taking action in life, especially by making a simple habit change is the key, and it is very powerful.
Any good habit in life contributes tremendously because we compound its benefits over time, but practicing these activities collectively is what makes a big difference.

We overestimate what a tiny good habit can do in a week or month but we underestimate what it can do in years from now.
I always say a good healthy habit- I don’t say just habit, I say a good healthy habit, if we follow everyday, shows an astounding compounding effect on the whole body in the future.

James Clear, the author of the “Atomic Habits” says “Success is the product of daily habits-not once-in a lifetime transformations.

I can share a simple personal experience.
If you have poor sleep, that obviously increases inflammation in your body and that eventually becomes chronic if not taken the proper steps on time.
But as a simple solution, if you start to take a more plant based diet as a simple habit change, then inflammation decreases gradually, it doesn’t happen overnight but it will happen eventually.
This is the power of daily habit which compounds over time.
If we make small positive changes to our daily habits, thoughts, and routines; that can have profound effects on the well being of our body.

Habit, value measurement and price

We take everything for granted in life.
We try to value everything in life as much as we can.
But, it’s harder to quantify being a healthy dad or healthy mom or a healthy son or a healthy friend.
How do you quantify these values?
I am a scientist so I want to quantify these values otherwise it is just a vague idea.

One way I do this is compare the progress with time like day, month, year whatever it could be.
We have been hypnotized into the thinking that we can measure the value of our lives by our net worth.
If we look at the empirical evidence, people who make $1 million a year are only incrementally happier than McDonald’s workers who make less than 30K a year.

This statement is not from me, this is from research finding.
Sometimes we find that some people have a lot of money but they don’t have anything else except money because they value everything on money, they sacrifice everything including health for money.
I have worked and experienced these types of people in my life, this is the life trap we should be aware of.

Last month I met one of my high school teachers in a hospital and he said he loved traveling and spending time with loved ones and the family.
He loves to read inspiring stories, biography and history books and wants to travel but he can not do so now because he has to be in the hospital most of the time.

My teacher said, “I didn’t see the value in free things in life. I didn’t value napping, walking, running, and reading when I was young. These were free when I was young. I can’t do all of these now because my ill body doesn’t allow me to do that anymore.”
“Any long illness like mine can mean a demanding life struggle to survive only, this struggle is my full time job now and it’s hard for me,” he added.

Neural connections and positive thoughts

When we become positive, we turn into more positivity as the saying goes positivity creates more positivity, this is another secret sauce of life.
The longer we focus on a positive thing, the more we linger on a happy moment in life.
Then more likely our brain will create a neural pathway for more positivity.
The brain is a superhighway system in our body, the neural network that controls emotions, pain, and movement are like roads.

We generally think of these networks as isolated roads, but they are actually highly interconnected.
So we need more positivity inside us to be healthy.
We have a natural inclination to obsess more over negative thoughts especially of past events, but it’s our evolutionary gift to keep us alive but it doesn’t make us happy and healthy so we have to practice positivity regularly.

For example, research says for every negative thought that you have, think of four good things you’ve accomplished in life.

Life learning experiences and introspection automatically teaches us how to be happy and healthy in life.
Sometimes these experiences would be different on an individual basis but the theme is the same: enjoy the present moment and cherish it wholeheartedly with good healthy habits.
Experience the results physically, mentally, and spiritually by taking actions.

Life is one step at a time

These are some of my personal experiences to explore life and create habit.
Be kind and generous.
Read many different kinds of books that you like, by reading many books we live more than one life which is the essence of living.
Spend time with your family as much as you can, these are the only people on the planet who care about you.

Talk to your real friends more often and do activities with them frequently, learn to know the difference between real and fake friends. Surround yourself with uplifting, supportive friends. Some friends bring you down, they are fake.

Go to the beach and play volleyball with your kids.
Go long distance running or hiking with your loved one or spouse on Sunday morning, you both live different lives on that day because of the hormone produced by exercise.

Kiss your cat or dog and talk to them with eye contact, they respond to your feelings with universal language and unconditional love.
Surprise your grandpa and grandma with their favorite food, and watch the overwhelming love and care in their eyes for you.
Meditate five minutes for seven days if you have never done meditation before and feel the differences in your body and mind.

Take little time and effort to connect with another human being especially different from your profession or society.
These are nothing but the ingredients for a happy life which eventually lead to a healthy life and they don’t cost a lot of money.
It’s just a way of living and a choice of a happy lifestyle.

Remember, we invest a lot in our careers and pursuit of wealth, but we don’t care about our body.
We need to invest more in our health otherwise all the careers, wealth, stocks and vacation homes won’t be of any use.
We need to be happy in the face of work, career, life pressures, and it is possible only if we take better care of our body and mind.
And, one more time, it doesn’t cost a lot of money, it only needs a little bit of self-discipline and intention.

In today’s modern technology world, we are sleepwalking through life and ignoring the most valuable thing about our life: being happy and healthy.
We just have to start and go with the momentum of the body and mind.
At some point our body and mind speak with us, we just have to understand that language, for that we have to listen very carefully to what they are saying.
After listening, changing just one small bad habit into a good habit can create a chain of reactions in a positive way affecting so many other habits.

Any new habit looks like restriction in the beginning, but eventually it can provide freedom, the value of which can not be measured.
Freedom for us to be true to our life goals.
Freedom for us to see our life without any guilt.
Freedom from debating every little life issue that we encounter.
With a small right habit, our life will get a purpose and meaning.
We will be living, enjoying, and cherishing life with intention bringing well-being, content, and prosperity together.

Today’s fast changing world has taught us to chase and spend money in the pursuit of happiness.
But once we become exhausted with plummeting blood sugar, the pursuit of happiness changes into a chronic problem.
Health does not become wealth in our twenties and thirties, but when we touch forty we realize it.
Once we realize it, it is already late, then the only time we have is to regret, we know regret does not solve the problem.

Conclusion

We know that science doesn’t have the answer to every problem yet, but there are many common lifestyle habits that can minimize many life risks.
Many times, healing is not only dependent on pharmaceuticals but on the understanding of the body, mind, and spirit.
Body, mind, and spirit asks nothing else, just a little extra time with us.
This is nothing but becoming aware of our body, also called “mindfulness”.
Just keep in mind, good health is nothing but a good lifestyle and ongoing journey.

A good and healthy lifestyle is a process created by many tiny habits, not always a destination.
A good healthy habit is about reclaiming our identity, managing our thought process, and becoming empowered to build the life we deserve.
Our health is an investment and worthy of our effort and long term planning.
Let’s figure out where we are now and where we want to be.
Remember, for most humans, any kind of change is hard, but it’s normal, gain confidence by starting.
Just take a small action step, give it a try.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

How often do you do introspection of your life?

“Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway.” -Mother Teresa

Last few weeks, my life was in a kind of paradigm shift, and a deep thought process of introspection.
I was taking longer breaths because I needed some extra oxygen to get out of my linear thinking.
Just to understand the correlation between my body and mind, I registered and attended a spiritual session where a spiritual leader was giving some hidden truths of life.

Gathering was in a big hall.
Spiritual guru was centered on the topic of pain and suffering and he was addressing how love and respect are still in the center of pain and suffering.
Around one hundred people were attending, and suddenly, one attendee said, “I don’t visit my father often, my situation is different now. My father and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other that we used to have in the past. I guess I just don’t love him anymore and he doesn’t love me either.”

“Please, love and respect your father, whatever the conflict is, he gave you this life,” the guru replied.
“I told you, the respect and feeling just aren’t there anymore,” the attendee replied.
“Whatever, you respect and love your father,” guru said.
“The feeling of respect and love isn’t there,” the attendee repeated.
“Then love and respect your father. If the feeling of respect and love isn’t there, that’s a very good reason to love and respect your father.”
“But how do you respect and love when you don’t respect and love?” the attendee replied.
“Because, respect and love both are verbs. Respect and love both are feelings and they both are products of respect and love. Both are verbs. So always respect and love your father.
Show your sacrifice and listen to your father.
Always empathize, appreciate, and affirm him because he brought you into this world.
So, please, if you can, respect and love your father unconditionally, even if he did something wrong to you.”
“Are you willing to do that?” the guru asked.

The whole hall was in a pin drop silence during this exchange of words.
During that moment, I came across my father’s face multiple times, and it happened automatically, and his face was constantly coming in front of me, even though he was on the other side of the planet physically.
Pictures and snapshots of my last face to face conversation with my father constantly hanging over my head.

Introspection: my father and humility

“You know,” my father said, “our whole lives, your mom and I never made our kid’s life easier” my father stared out the window behind me.
I saw dark shadows under his old tired eyes.
My father was almost 90 years old and had worked actively for close to 60 years.
My father’s mouth was turned up in the tiniest smile when I was listening to this, but I wondered if it was a smile at all.

My dad and mom raised our family, including me and my two younger brothers, and two elder sisters.
They started from nothing and built a great life through hard work and they taught us many core values of life, especially when you are in life’s punishment.
I could say a lot of things about me, my want, my desire, but that wasn’t how I was taught in my family.
One thing they taught me which I will never forget is to bring good health, satisfaction, and trust into life.
They consistently taught me not to let these three things down in life even if we are in distress, pain and suffering.
In my house, humility was valued more than anything else in life, but that’s not how it works in many places where we work nowadays in this modern world.

I was in introspection but who can understand this better than my father and mother.
I constantly relied on my father’s advice not to let my trust go down during turmoil.

After the meeting with the spiritual guru, I called my father in the evening at home and talked to him.
I always get relief and start to think differently when I communicate with my father, I reach a new level of understanding that almost runs by nuance.
Because each conversation contains the cumulative effect of the previous conversations, that is hardly anything to catch upon.
Instead, I can share deep insights and feelings rather than just my current understanding about life.

I don’t see life as a fixed piece of pizza where there is only so much time.
Time with my father and mother doesn’t mean time away from my wife or kids.
I started to see the effect on my kids.
I see time with my father and mother would actually increase the depth of our kid’s relationship with me and my wife as parents.
Kids experience by seeing how much we love our parents and it helps to continue the cycle moving forward.

I have read about a parable from Roberto Assagioli, a pioneer of psychosynthesis movement, about three stonecutters who were building a cathedral in the fourteenth century.
The first one says, bitterly, “can’t you see what I’m doing? I’m cutting stones into blocks and I will be doing this until the day I die.”
The second one says, warmly, “I’m earning a living so I can support my lovely family. I can provide clothing and food in our home filled with love.”
The third one says, joyfully, “I’ve the privilege to help build a great cathedral so magnificent it will inspire people and lift their spirits for a thousand years.”
Same work, but each person brings very different meaning to it.

“We often have more choices than we realize.
We must never cease from exploring inside us, even if we are in pain and suffering at the moment,”
At the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we began and know the place for the first time,” the spiritual guru said.
That’s what I’m getting from my father as we are celebrating his 91st birthday soon.

A lot of times, especially in the past, I didn’t have time to go and see my parents every year. I didn’t have time to call my mom everyday or every other day.
And the truth is, we can’t introspect in front of other people even if we are happy and satisfied, but introspection along with our parents is normal.
To introspect along with our parents is to release the stress out through tears so we become stronger.

Peace, satisfaction, and undoing

As we all know we have only 24 hours in a day, so the question is how to manage to be with our parents in times of distress.
The secret I learn is this.
Many times, in life, if we think deeper, peace and satisfaction comes not from doing, but from undoing.
Peace comes not from getting, but from letting go.
I let go of my past.
Peace is there with me already until I disturb it.
Behind the dramas of our everyday lives is always the light of the projector.
I am just that.
If I start to undo, I get a lot of time.

I learned the task of undoing.
Many people are not happy on this planet and maybe you are one of them right now.
So what they do, they fall into the trap of codependency that spawns some very metastasizing emotional cancers.

Stephen R. Covey, a renowned leadership authority and author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” says “criticizing, complaining, comparing, competing, and contending are emotional cancers.”

To be honest, I also do one of them many times.
How much time is needed to do these?
I know I need a lot.
If I start to undo these emotional cancers, how much time I get, I’m just guessing, maybe a lot.

The essence of being human is being able to direct our own life.
We are human so we can do more than an animal or recent AI robot, because they can only react.
We can make choices based on our values, these values can be transferred from us to our kids, same like from our parents to us.
This concept of undo also applies in today’s fast moving innovative areas of research, development, and technology.
We all know how to get new innovative thoughts into our mind, but we’re struggling right now to get the old ones out.
This is one reason our generation is always suffering.
The old one never wants to leave, it is with us all the time consuming our energy and time.

From my father’s lesson, I learned that we are not made or born as great thinkers or innovators, we’re self-made thinkers or innovators, this should be our trust with us.
We are a function of our choices.
I have read in books that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are also products of their choices by undoing many things in their everyday lives.
It gives at least motivation to us when we go for introspection.

Introspection habit and home

Good choices are built by unwavering habits.
And, these habits lie at the intersection of knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Most of the time, people cry at home in private when they are suffering.
We all do the same.
But the reality is we have to make our home a productive place to synthesize our knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Because, if you look around, the most important work people do in the world will be within the walls of their own home.

As you can imagine we work 8 hours outside home but we are 16 hours at home.
There are many successes but no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
For example, we can visualize anything that we want in life at home, we can pen down that visual form in printed form.
Visualization is very powerful but there is more powerful than this, that is writing down on paper.
That’s what I’m also doing at the moment.
I’m releasing my introspection through a pen into the paper, I feel relaxed.

I’m writing so I’m connecting my conscious mind with the subconscious mind.
I’m writing which is a psycho-neuromuscular activity and literally it is imprinting my brain.
Based on this sketch, we can get our hands dirty, we can cry, we can make mistakes, we can take risks, and perform whatever we want.
We can communicate to our mind about our worth and potential so clearly that we can come to see it in ourselves.
Our minds always try to do the right things for us but our bodies always try to do things right. We must try to seek the best path moving forward.

Conclusion

At the end of the spiritual session, the Guru said, “Life is about coping with change, it is also about coping with complexity, so you are the architect and manager of your life.”
“You cannot innovate inventories, cashflow, and costs of your life, you only have to manage all of them, they don’t have the power and freedom to choose because they are as they are.
Only you have the power to choose, choose what you like, and live with intention” the spiritual guru added.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Are we really resistant from outsourcing and offshoring?

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”
-Abraham Lincoln

My friend said, “my father recently passed away. When my father was in deathbed, he talked to my mom and me to say good-bye. My father could barely speak. I remembered, my mom was crying all the time during the entire conversation.”
“At one point my father drew me closer to him and whispered to me in my ear, “son, don’t live life like what I did. I’m telling you now, I didn’t do many things right in my life. I didn’t do many things right for your mother, your sister, your younger brother and for you. Son, promise me you won’t be outsourced or offshored like what happened to me.”

This conversation with my friend shocked me and I started to think how does anyone carry one past life experience so heavily till deathbed.
I’m still thinking is it possible to carry such a regret in life all the time.

Outsourcing and offshoring the jobs

I understand losing our job to outsourcing and offshoring is no more fun than losing it to a robot and automation in the future.
Outsourcing means a company hires a third party to do our job.
Offshoring means a company replaces us with someone else in a different country.
Offshoring currently appears the far bigger problem to many expensive countries like USA jobs.
The recent study suggests that a quarter of all jobs could be offshored in coming years.

Let’s put this into perspective why this is happening so quickly.
First of all, we are no longer in the industrial age, we are in the knowledge worker age, this will eventually bring down the industrial age workforce.
Now we have to be open to knowledge workers and their productivity and it can happen anywhere on the planet because of accessible technology.

Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of Stanford and author of “The Second Machine Age” says, “how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication.”

I strongly recommend to watch Erik’s TedTalk “The key to growth? Race with the machines.”

When we face a challenge, we tackle it, which is called success.
And suddenly we face a new challenge but we try to tackle it in an old way which no longer works for some reason, this is called failure.
We have to understand that today’s knowledge worker age is different from past industrial age models.
This is one of the big reasons for outsourcing and offshoring which will remain prevalent in today’s knowledge worker economy.

Human beings: a combination of body, mind, heart, and spirit

Do you think that the big tech companies are spending money on machines and equipment or knowledge?
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft alone spent a combined $125 billion in R&D in 2020 and it’s increasing every year after that.
These figures are larger than the total country budget in many parts of the world.
These companies are not treating humans as machines and equipment, they are treating humans as potential knowledge power.
They are playing the game of human knowledge transfer across many fields on the planet.
If we start to think and manage people as equivalents to machines and equipment then there is a serious problem.
Human beings are not things, as Stephen Covey, the author of “The 8th Habit” said, humans are four dimensional in nature: body, mind, heart, and spirit.
The new knowledge worker age at present is emerging at a rapid pace by giving equal opportunity to each of the four dimensional human components.
They are basically the combination of four intelligences that we have: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

We have a highly productive economy with a highly productive workforce in the USA.
But our workforce isn’t productive just by virtue of everyone with a college degree, because college degrees still have many reminiscences of the industrial age.
Sixty four percent of the US population never get a college degree.
Just for the sake of information, in Switzerland, this is even higher, 75 percent don’t have a college degree, yet they are far more productive on average than USA workers.
So, somewhere something needs to be re-evaluated.

In the recent past, a college degree was a prerequisite for employment in cutting-edge companies.
That’s no longer the case at present and probably will be more in the future because knowledge, nowadays, is found everywhere, not confined only in college classrooms.
The world has changed and is still changing.
New knowledge is being distributed globally via the internet technology, we are no longer constrained in a particular area, school, or university for specific knowledge.
We can take Harvard and MIT courses, if we want, from Kathmandu and Johannesburg at the same time.
Just check Apple, the giant trillion dollar company.
Half of its new hires haven’t graduated from college but they might have real world application knowledge or Apple trains them once they get hired.

College degree doesn’t bring success

If we go at the core of our human potential and spirit, there is certainly no college diploma needed for becoming amazingly successful.
Here are a few examples of amazingly successful people without fancy college diplomas.
Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, are the richest people on the planet as proof.
Here is another astounding list of top multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies whose founders didn’t go college or didn’t make it through.
Twitter, Fitbit, WhatsApp, WordPress, Tumblr, Square, Stripe, Spotify, Oracle, Napster, Uber, Dropbox, Virgin, Dell, DIG, IAC, just to name a few.
Many of them are top technology companies in the world and they do businesses based on knowledge workers.

The point I’m trying to make is that a college degree is not the only means to success in today’s knowledge based world.
Let’s be honest, I’m not discouraging any of you or your children from attending or finishing college.
I myself have a PhD and Ivy league training.
But what I’m saying here is my understanding based on my last 15 years of research, reading, work, visit, communication, and whole life experiences in poor, developing, and most developed countries.
My whole purpose is to change the conversation to real knowledge or education that gives real value to society rather than a diploma on the wall.

One more time, I’m not saying lightly, as I said I’m a PhD and Ivy league trainer.
I think higher education is of enormous individual and social value.
But we can receive a fine college education anywhere if we become intentional about our core career, values and success.

One more point, we can’t eat and live with the prestige of school that we attend, especially in the future, which we always emphasized in the past.
The person who stands out in the society would be irrelevant to his educational degree or background very soon.
For example, where the person went to college or, indeed, whether he or she finished college or not, those factors won’t be huge.

Highly successful people work their tails off, they learn on the work what’s required to accomplish their tasks. They think about big problems, try to solve these problems, and end up becoming very successful themselves.
Because of these traits, they make financial independence no matter what their precise educational background is.
Remember, elite Ivy League schools gather many successful people from across the globe; they rarely make people successful in their classrooms.
In many cases, connections matter in today’s interconnected world but that helps to access the first job.
But if we aren’t performing up to good standard expectations, then the Harvard or MIT sweater that we like to wear won’t save our job in the future.

Today’s knowledge world is a link of a chain

Successes are built on trust and power of knowledge transfer, but most of us think more in terms of me, my wants, my needs, my rights.
This “my” mentality doesn’t help in this global knowledge age.
Many successful businesses are run by the diverse economic rules of the global marketplace and many organizations are run by the respected cultural rules of the knowledge workplace.

We have to understand that nobody is a whole chain in today’s knowledge world.
Each one of us is a link of a chain.
But if we take away one link and the chain is broken.
You guessed it.
Core sciences and medical sciences are no more isolated sciences and are more connected to information technology.
For example, one whole body MRI powered by AI can detect early stage cancer, brain aneurysms, Alzheimer’s, visceral fat, and liver fat.
Similarly, business, finance, and accounting are equally interconnected to information science.

Software drives today’s economy and software requires very few assets to generate large income streams. Many physical assets are becoming more and more irrelevant.
Today, we need each other’s expertise to be happy, healthy, and successful in any area.
We need someone and someone needs us.
Isolated islands we’re not anymore.
To make this thing called “life” work, we gotta lean and support, relate and respond, give and take, reach out and embrace.
These all are core human values in the knowledge worker age.

Let’s just take Facebook.
Why do you think that Facebook has over 2 billion users?
Because humans are hungry for a strong sense of connection.
Unfortunately, Facebook is not meeting the need for authentic intimacy at the moment but it’s still connecting us anyway so that Facebook is growing every single day.
At the moment, the majority of people show only the best parts of their lives on Facebook.
Who knows, in the future, people might bring their real or worst parts of lives on Facebook and could be the real world education platform for many of us.
Facebook is a global tool for us, how we use it is up to us.

One more example of the knowledge world, how it is shaping us, we are learning new and new things on the web each and everyday so quickly.
I was watching a TED talk the other day from Sam Berns on you tube, I saw how life treats some of us.
Sam was born with Progeria, a rare genetic disease that speeds aging by a factor of eight.
I didn’t know about this disease at all but now I know through technology.
Progeria is triggered by a single devastating typo in our DNA code.
That one mutation floods the body with progerin, a toxic nasty protein that weakens cell nuclei.

Recently, I read a research article, again on the web, about the relationship between the brain and gut as a two way street.
I knew that, in patients with Alzheimer’s, the gut microbiome gets out of balance.
When researchers altered the diets of mice in a study, they found a dramatic reduction in amyloid, killer trash of Alzheimer’s, and neuroinflammation.
They take these bacteria from the gut, figure out which metabolites within them are useful and make them available to people.
I learn all of these from my comfy sofa, no need to go Stanford’s library or attend professor’s classroom.
This is the power of the new knowledge world, we can get whatever we want from our living room.

At present, I am also learning to meditate through an app at home.
I don’t have to walk to a meditation center, I don’t have to pay money to meditation instructors, I don’t have to drive and spend money on gasoline, but I just need internet in my phone or laptop.
Remember, meditation is an important lifestyle habit to establish.
It is a process, when our mind wanders in this busy world, we have to bring it back to our focus, that could be a word or breath, or sound but we have to bring it back over and over.

Everybody’s mind wanders, no question but only the regular practice of bringing it back, over and over, makes it powerful.
Researchers at Harvard University found that meditation alone can change the expression of genes that regulate inflammation, programmed cell death called apoptosis, and oxidative stress in only a few weeks.
Many studies have shown that our brain waves become more coherent when we meditate.
It increases the gray matter in the frontal cortex of the brain which is related to working memory and executing decision making.

Conclusion

Here is a small snapshot of how we can become resistant proof of outsourcing and offshoring.
Let’s say you are happily working as a financial manager.
Ask yourself the basic question.
Do I still enjoy my quiet and sober clients?
If the answer is no, increase the knowledge in other occupational areas, otherwise digital advisors will replace you soon.
If the answer is yes, study the global financial market.
Who knows, maybe the financial business in India could use your service.

One final note, I would like to add.
All of these founders or CEO’s of these multi-million or multi-billion dollar companies that I mentioned above who don’t have college diplomas know the value of real knowledge.
They read a lot, they experiment a lot, they research tremendously.
And almost all of them meditate so that they remain focused to solve our problems to make our lives easier, and eventually we make them amazingly successful financially.
If we don’t want to be outsourced and offshored then let’s learn a little bit from them and be a value creator.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

How did I start to live a life with intention not by default?

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us.”
– Richie Norton

Many years ago, I was with my wife in a mall to buy a wool coat to escape the winter in Columbus, Ohio.
My wife asked me, “Is that wool coat really worth $100?”
“If you decide to buy it, the answer is yes; If you decide not to buy it, the answer is no,” I replied.
“Your decision is based on your feelings about the coat, its price, and the money that you have at the moment. You make the decision by incorporating your feelings and these other factors about the coat,” I added.

Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we compare our precise benefit of anything from owning it with its price.
We always seek a balance of a few factors to make a decision which is beneficial for us.
And we come up with anything’s value to us by posing a simple question.
What’s the most I’d pay for it?
When valuing anything in life, the question turns into: what’s the most I’d pay for it?
We make decisions by being really intentional.

Intention is precursor for joy and growth mindset

Intention is a precursor for our actions.
It means we only ever take action on things that we believe bring us joy and satisfaction.
Actions means taking risks, there are many types of risks in life.
I have gone through many of these, bigger or smaller, and I’m pretty sure you have also gone through many of these.
Sometimes, we fail, sometimes, we succeed, but always learning and moving.
When we start to live with intention, we start to enjoy our life, at this point, the lines between work and play begin to blur.
We start to do what we love and we start to love what we do.
Everything becomes a learning experience and a part of lifestyle.
This is not only my experience between work and play but also from many other happy people around the world.

Strengthening our capacities in life is a continuous process.
It’s a practice, not a one time and done deal.
We can always revisit, refresh and retune, if we have intention, and there will not be a pop quiz next month or next year like what we did in the school.
At the end of the day, it’s not just about learning how to be better at something that we are working on.
It’s all about building our sense of what’s possible and bringing it into our sharp mental focus.
It’s all about changing ourselves from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and understanding that we can always expand our capacity, no matter what.

Dr. Carol S. Dweck, PhD, Stanford Professor and author of “Mindset” says, “People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower.”

Dr. Dweck’s TedTalk “The power of believing that you can improve” is around the research of fostering success.

When we start to live with intention, by doing some internal homework as I told in my wife’s coat purchasing process, it’s about knowing and trusting ourselves better, and valuing things properly.

In most cases our life goals change every five years on average.
Remember, life is the thing that always seeks intention and happens between our goals in different stages.
The specific steps on our predetermined goals might look different, depending on what we’ve been taught primarily on how to see “success”.
But whether the steps are high school, college, grad school, beginning career, better career, settling down, getting engaged, getting married, having kids, getting early retirement, or fishing in Thailand during retirement, there’s always something laid out.

Micro moments and compounding effect

This is all about being proactive and intentional.
Even as we’re working to achieve small things like getting kids ready for school, or cleaning the bathtub, or saving a little bit extra money for house downpayment or taking a course for weight loss program.
We still have to go through an intentional life one moment at a time, these everyday moments which look mundane but are what make memories in life.
These are nothing but the micro moments of positivity with intention.
Small changes with intention are the beauty of life that are sustainable which for most of us does not cost even a penny.

Let’s take one example of how small things accumulate over time.
The average person eats approximately one ton of food in a year.
If we think about sitting down to eat a ton of food, there is no way it’s going to happen all at once.
But bit by bit or piece by piece or meal by meal, by eating food every day for 365 days in a row, we can eat one ton without even imagining the final amount.
This is compounding and compounding is a macro effect.
Compounding happens faster if we start to live a life with intention, not only in money, in everything, the only thing that makes it very special is our awareness that compounding is playing a profound effect in our lives.

Darren Hardy, business leader and the author of “The Compound Effect” says “success does not come from radical shifts or big breakthroughs but from the accumulation of small choices and behaviors compounded over time.”

Life by default doesn’t bring joy, stability, and freedom

As we realize, life with intention serves three core purposes- joy, stability, freedom.
When we rely on only past life stories without questioning them, we aren’t making our highest and best decisions.
We’re not making decisions at all, not really. We’re living by default.
And default life is not a life actually, it is just an automation without any joy.
And, no one lives their best life by default.
Do you?
I don’t.
We have to live with intention, not by default.
Because we only get one life to live, we have so many aspirations to fulfill.

Then why don’t we go to seek joy, stability, and freedom?
Because, we have beliefs and attitudes that have developed over time inside us.
The experiences of growing up with our parents, our friends, our community is rooted with us.
Many things that were taught by parents, teachers, friends, community, and things that we learned through personal experience are with us.
We still have an echo of “you can’t do that from our uncle” when we were 12 years old.
Something happens good or bad, and it becomes incorporated into how we see the world.
It’s all wrapped up together into a mental pattern that influences how we think and act about everything in life.
But the reality is everything can be changed gradually, if we start to live with intention, one step at a time.

Our path to a life with intention is open and out there, it doesn’t have traffic signals, but only we can drive it. No one else can or will drive it for us.
If we want to raise the odds of living with our dreams, then we have to design our life with intention.
And only then will whatever tools we have for us will truly serve us in creating joy and freedom.

As I said, life with intention is a pure independent life.
If we don’t live our life with intention then we start to live in excess.
In reality, excess of anything can be a problem, a long lasting problem.
It doesn’t matter if it’s money, or sex, or alcohol, or drugs, or facebook, or parties, or rice, or broccoli, or sugar, or exercise.
Even excess water can kill us.
Even excess exercise can kill us.
Even excess broccoli can kill us.
Everything in life is designed for intention, because everything requires balance and balance is achieved by intention.
Used smartly, as a tool, intention is a vital resource, an essential component for survival.

How far we go in life depends on how soft and tender we are with the young.
How compassionate we are with the old, how sympathetic we are with the suffering, and how tolerant we are of the weak and strong.
Because in life with intention, we have to go through all of these, it’s just a matter of time.

Awareness of bigger picture is intention

Let’s take one example related to health of how things are interrelated and why we need intention in life.
This is from Dr. Michael P. O’Leary, professor of surgery, Harvard Medical School.
Blood vessel problems are the leading cause of erectile dysfunction.
Erections serve as a barometer for overall health and it can be an early warning sign of trouble in the heart or elsewhere.
Erectile dysfunction affects more than 18 million men.
Over half of men with type 2 diabetes also have erectile dysfunction.
In reality, men with erectile dysfunction have higher risks of having heart disease, memory loss, dementia, or stroke as their arteries are often clogged throughout the body.
So the fundamental question is almost everybody with the problem goes to a doctor to treat only erectile dysfunction.
Why?
Because they are not aware of what’s going on, they are not aware of power of simple exercise in life. Awareness is a synonym of intention.

In reality, the same biological mechanisms that control blood flow to our brain and to our heart also control blood flow to our sexual organs.
There is a word called “macro”-that means we always have to look for the bigger picture, the truth is we are just a dot of a bigger picture.
The bigger picture at this time is the whole body, the machine, and whole body mechanism.
If we don’t want to be aware of what’s going on in our body in today’s technological age then we are not living with intention.
Remember, most of us aren’t trained to live with intention because it needs a little bit of extra effort.

Let’s take another example which is also related to health and diet.
I learned this late in my life when I started to live with intention.
I learned that we need to be healthy in life, and good health doesn’t come free, we have to be intentional on what we do and what we eat.
But I also learned that we don’t have to go too far to seek a healthy life, it’s again awareness.
It’s about building our sense of what’s true and bringing it into our sharp focus for our benefit.

A lot of people, especially Asian people, don’t see the benefit and value of our everyday food, rice and beans.
They always look for something exotic food outside where they see value.
Here is the hidden truth.
There are 22 aminoacids.
Out of 22, 9 amino acids are essential, our body cannot make, we have to eat as diets.
Out of 9, 3 are kind of not available everywhere: they are lysine, tryptophan, and methionine; but rest are found in many different foods that we eat everyday.
Legumes like beans are high in lysine but low in tryptophan and methionine.
Grains like rice are high in tryptophan and methionine but low in lysine.
Look at the meal that we eat everyday of rice and beans- you got the point, it is ideal if we broaden our horizon of understanding at a macro level.
But, of course, we have to eat it in balance.

If anybody says meat is required instead of rice and beans for strength, remind the person with the elephant.
The elephant is vegetarian.
I am bringing these examples just to show you the macro picture of life, if we really want to live with intention.

Conclusion

If we become too much intentional, it might be harmful, we always seek balance: good intention and easy approach.
What is your understanding of stress in your life?
We have to find the right balance of stress in life.
We, of course, need enough stress but not too much like a guitar string.
If it’s too loose, there is no music, if it’s too tight, it breaks, and there is no music.

When stress becomes chronic, out of balance, it increases inflammation in our brain which exacerbates depression.
Once we’re depressed, our immune system is also depressed.
Keep in mind, chronic stress shortens our telomeres.
Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that regulate cellular aging.
When our telomeres get shorter, our lives get shorter.
Chronic stress also adversely affects our gene expression and has a harmful impact on the balance of the trillions of cells in our microbiome.
Again, we have to live with intention but not with over intention, otherwise, our guitar string will break.

There is a basic truth about a life with intention.
If you go only to other people’s carved path based on their mission then only they will enjoy the ride, not you, so live with intention.
We need intention because it creates macro understanding and that brings balance in life and that ultimately provides happiness, health, and prosperity.
Remember, we only get one life, so live with intention, enjoy the present and look forward to the future.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Are you a value creator CEO of the 21st century or just a classic CEO of the past?

“Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Few years ago, I was in my home country to visit my family.
I met the CEO of a startup company in the USA on one occasion, as he said, he was there for vacation with his family.
I asked, “How long is your vacation?”
He said, “four months.”
“What?” I was shocked.
His plan of scaling the various peaks and embarking on treks within the Himalayas in Nepal was monumental.

If you ask many people how they can increase their results in life, they’ll tell you by working more.
By hearing this new CEO’s vacation plan, I realized that either I’m not understanding something or there is a huge problem with us.
I’ve seen some of the ultra-performers statement that more work will not necessarily increase more results.
Ultra-performers mostly say that more of the same usually results in more of the same, when what we actually want is better than what we already have.
I learned from this new CEO that effectiveness wins over effort and we eventually lose if we start to do a lot of things instead of the right things.

Richard Koch, the author of “The 80/20 Principle” says “how we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts.”

During our conversation I said, “I’ve read your book. You say that you want to add value to people’s lives through sustaining innovation, but that’s not easy in my home country.
People don’t trust business people and entrepreneurs.
General public has a good reason for this: they say business people, especially classic business people are corrupt, don’t add value to other people’s lives here.”
Then I added, “I’m sure and hopeful that you can help them in some ways.”
In the meantime, I asked him, “what does your company do?”
He said, “we are developing a drink which can replace the sugary coke type of drinks that people can enjoy without much concern about their health status.”
“Awesome.”
“What inspired you to start this beverage company?” I asked.
“Because my whole family is obese and diabetic. Somewhere somebody has to start because we are 21st generation people now, we can’t just sleep with coke and Mcchicken,” he added.

I said, “Maybe obesity and diabetes are in your family genes.”
He said, “nope.”
“The culprit is our daily food.”
“Remember, only in America and the most developed world, the unhealthiest foods are the tastiest, the cheapest, the large portions, the most available, and the most fun foods.”

Modern CEO and vision for future

He said that he is unconditionally convinced that the quality of any 21st and future company is a direct result of the quality of smart CEOs and the vision they pursue.
As a civilized human being on earth, the general public must focus their attention and analysis on the quality of products and services in any organization that they are using and investing in.
It is the CEO who creates the sustainable business plan that endures for the next generation, who build the processes that work, who create the technology that simplifies our lives, who execute the tasks that deliver the quality healthy products and services to ordinary people, and who determines the success or failure of a business based on the value they provide to the general public as a whole.
It’s the CEO who captures vision and resources to generate other healthier next generation people on the planet.

“People are suffering from wrong foods and wrong lifestyles, people are dying by consuming wrong and unhealthy foods.
Eventually, people will pay for brands and they will pay for quality and health, there is nothing more important than people’s health.
People will pay for their health and quality lifestyles no matter what, only time will tell them when to start.
If you go back to 30 or 40 years ago, Whole Foods was not a place to shop. Today, Whole Foods is the place to shop, it’s picking up.
Sometimes we need a little bit of a kicker and that kicker is a little bit of education,” he continued.

“Many professionals in any field still employ esoteric language to make their job appear more difficult than it is.
For example, take an investment officer, accounting should not be complex, it is the language of business.
It accounts for what a company owns and what it owes, and it helps companies keep track of the money that’s coming in and the money that’s going out.

It should be different for any 21st century CEO, don’t use esoteric language, show everybody what the product or service it provides to the public is, is it making the public more healthier or less healthier.
We need judgment to run a company as a CEO, and judgment is qualitative rather than quantitative and, most importantly, judgment can not be searched in google,” he said.

Desire, customer emotion, and its impact

Desire is a powerful emotion and many durable and valuable businesses of the past have been built upon it.

There is an article published in Harvard Business Review that tells about the new science of customer emotions for better way to drive growth and profitability.
As an example, Coca-Cola began in 1886 and has a market value of $260 billion.
Coke’s main ingredients are sugar and water, and the company has habituated consumers to believe that “coke is the pause that refreshes” and it is a “real thing”.
But in today’s world, soda and sweetened beverages are one of the main causes of inflammation in our body.
Researchers have found that sugar can also disrupt healthy functioning of the immune system by causing inflammation.
Eliminating soda from our diet is one of the quickest and simplest ways to protect the public’s health.

Not only those, many refined carbohydrates, white bread, pastries, processed meats like hot dogs and sausages, french fries, and any fried foods in general are inflammation booster foods.
So, the question is who will start and who will replace Coke, who has that responsibility for the next generation healthy society?
Mark Twain says beautifully, “it ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Remember, more than 34 million Americans have diabetes, about one in ten, and approximately 90-95 percent of them have type 2 diabetes.
We have to create a desire not to be diabetic in the 21st century and after.

As we all know, highly processed or refined carbs like white flour, white bread, and pasta are not our friends.
They behave almost like sugar in the body.
According to David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and author of “Always Hungry” “Highly processed carbohydrates are among the lowest quality components of the food supply, accounting for the majority of diet-related diseases in the United States today.”
As the new slogan goes, “sugar is a new poison.”

To a great degree, we are what we eat and what we do everyday.
Losing weight rejuvenates critical insulin-producing cells in the pancreas known as beta cells. And regenerating those cells can actually put type 2 diabetes into remission.
We have to promote healthy fats instead of coke to actually stabilize our blood sugar.
The fastest way to lower insulin levels is to substitute fat for processed carbohydrates.
But the question is how.
The biggest challenge is not how to develop these healthy food habits but how to replace these old junks which are everywhere with new healthy ones.

Convenience is value at modern time

Let’s take one simple example, how we become habituated with business.
Shoppers don’t go to Walmart because they love the experience, they go to Walmart because the company acquires everything from wine to broccoli to indoor plants to school supplies more cheaply than competitors and then passes those savings on to the customers.
Walmart sells convenience at a cheaper price so we go to Walmart.

Let’s take another example of a different company.
Google is not selling a status symbol or a fizzy drink, it’s selling a reliable search engine that consumers have become habituated to in their daily lives.
Because Google’s brand has nothing to do with creating just desire, it’s more likely to endure very long because it’s creating value to the general public’s own professions.
Because they need information for their daily work and they do it by sitting on the comfy couch in their living room.

One of the reasons I am optimistic about next generation CEOs is that they must demonstrate an ability to disrupt themselves before a competitor does.
Google should disrupt itself with driverless cars and artificial intelligence so that we can read in the car while going to the office in the 21st century.

Amazon is a leader in e-commerce and cloud computing now but it must disrupt itself for the whole food business so that we can eat healthy food and snacks at home at the price of Mcdonald’s McChicken.
By the way, McDonald’s does not only sell McChicken, it sells franchises, which is a system not a product.

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and author of “Only the Paranoid Survive” says, “there is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss that moment, and you start to decline.”

Conclusion

Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017 but it doesn’t mean that parents are not buying toys for their children. Similarly, it’s not that Brick-and-mortar stores didn’t have the stuff in their store that we needed but the same stuff people started buying from Amazon without leaving their comfy couch at home.

For 21st generations, companies’ CEOs must disrupt themselves to keep obsessing over the public and putting them first for their health, healthspan, longevity, time, and fulfilling healthy lifestyles.

I was about to say goodbye and I asked the CEO of new startup company, “do you succeed in beating coca-cola?”
He said, “Everything looks like failure in the middle.
We cannot make tasty mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner without getting the kitchen messy.
Halfway through a heart surgery, the operating room looks like a battlefield of murder.
If you plan to send a rocket to space, about 95 percent of the time it becomes off-course and it fails.
But finally, all of these works give results by making mistakes and correcting them.
I’m just trying to be that CEO, that’s it.”

I noticed that the new CEO was still doing the work of creativity which is thinking at the banks of the Himalayas in Nepal, and he innovates once he goes to the USA which is doing the real work.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Why did I write this letter to my pessimistic ex-girlfriend?

“Be the change that you wish to see in the World.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

My ex-girlfriend said, “I feel so sad and pessimistic about the World. I couldn’t do anything for my mother when she was alive.”
Though she was my ex-girlfriend, we are very good friends now.
As we all know, time is the best teacher in our lives but no regret, lives move on.
I Interrupted her and said, “My friend, can I ask you a question?”
“Question, sure,” she replied.

“How often do you get these feelings of pessimism and sadness? I believe you didn’t have this habit when we were together,” I asked.
She said, “What do you mean “how often”? What kind of question is this?”
Once again I said, “Do you remain pessimistic all the time or few times in a day like early in the morning or late in the evening or most of the week or month or one or two times in a season?”

She paused for a moment and then said,” I guess I remain pessimistic and sad all the time, especially after my mother’s death.”
She felt pessimism, sadness and guilt about her situation, working too hard and not having enough time for her mother.

Guilt, loss of mother, and Alzheimer’s disease

In “Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety” the author Dr. Peter R. Breggin, MD, talks about how to take back our life, get rid of negative emotions, and follow our principles to find happiness.

Dr. Breggin says, “Obeying negative legacy emotions is like feeding wild critters. They will take over and grow in power until we have unmanageable beasts trying to overwhelm us from inside our heads. We need to stop feeding the squirrels in our heads. We can start by refusing to listen or respond to them.”

My friend always felt sad about not being a good enough daughter.
I said, “Can I tell you something?”
She nodded.
“We have to change our focus from what happened to our father or mother or sister or brother to what we can do for all fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers who are alive now.
We have to find a way to connect to help the ailing fathers and mothers, sisters, and brothers who are alive now.
This is the only way to get rid of your sadness and pessimism,” I said.

When my friend was a child, her mother was everything for her.
When her mother died, her mother didn’t know who she was.
Her mother died by her side with a disease called Alzheimer’s.
“I will never forget this moment in my life when my mother died in my arms without knowing that I was her daughter,” my friend said.

Alzheimer’s disease is the dominant form of dementia.
There are at least 50 million people suffering from it worldwide and at least 6 million only in the USA.
This touches roughly 10 percent people over 65 and more than 33 percent over 85 and up.
This disease kills more Americans than breast and prostate cancer combined.

By the way, a bit of science behind Alsheimer’s disease.
It is a serious plumbing problem in our brain.
We suffer from neuroinflammation and that leads to loss of brain function.
When the aging brain is unable to drain away the unnecessary protein that accumulates over time, billions of neurons die.
The neuroinflammation fuels the build up of two very specific proteins that cause plaque in the brain, amyloid and tau.
The cerebral cortex of our brain which is a center to our awareness, memory, language, and consciousness become non-functional.

Dr. Rudy Tanzi, PhD, a key expert for Alzheimer’s disease and professor of Neurology at Harvard University says, “we have to make a few things a habit to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.
First, we need enough sleep which is mental floss that clears out amyloid naturally from the brain.
Second, we need social interaction that cuts Alzheimer’s risk by twofold especially when we enter adulthood.
Third, we have to control the stress which releases cortisol chemicals that cause neuroinflammation and kills neurons.”

Quality of life and sharing intimate emotions

Good health is our foundation, no question about it.
My friend was physically healthy and active but she was still missing the quality of life.
Our quality of life is based on healthy mind, healthy thinking, and our perception about it.
Quality of life means stopping whining, worrying, complaining, and regretting.
It is spending quality time with family and quality friends, one more time quality friends. We have to know the difference between friends and quality friends.
Quality life means giving, connecting, and sharing our honest and intimate emotions.
Just think about when you can not share your intimate emotions with your dying parents as a son or daughter, what does it feel like?
My friend was carrying the same emotions all her life.

But the truth is, we don’t know how many days we have left in front of us but we absolutely know how to use the remaining days, which are under our control.
The quality of our life is the quality of our everyday emotions.
It’s good to occasionally focus on what we missed but we shouldn’t make it a habitual thing.
If we always focus on what we don’t have, we never sustain happiness and quality in life.

Tony Robbins, a motivational speaker and author of “Life Force” says “We don’t experience life, we all experience what we focus on and the meaning we give to it, so we have to be very selective how we operate daily.”

Happy life, optimism, and future

My dear friend,
We had a very memorable past and we are quality friends now so today I would like to take you on a journey back to history.
Probably, it will help you as well as others why we should be optimistic and happy in life moving forward.

In the time of early hominids, one million years ago, our ancestors would enter puberty at age of 12 or 13 and by the time they were 28, they were already grandparents.
The average age of early humans was only 28 years old.
In the middle ages, the average human lifespan was 35.
In 1900, the average lifespan was mid-40s.
Today, we are touching 80.
This is one snapshot of our life that tells why we should be optimistic and happy.

Let’s take another small picture of human life.
In 1347, we had the most fatal pandemic, bubonic plague, that killed around 200 million people.
Nobody found a cure of bubonic plague.
There was another pandemic in 1918, Spanish Flu, that killed at least 50 million people worldwide.
This virus is still around so we take an annual flu shot every year.
Recently, COVID-19 happened and hundreds of thousands people died but we discovered a vaccine for it in 12 months so that many of us survived.
Many advanced technologies like mRNA vaccines, high speed data connectivity, supercomputers helped to design, test, and distribute COVID-19 vaccines worldwide so that we controlled the loss of COVID-19 pretty quickly.
For this progress, big technology companies like Amazon, ZOOM, Google helped tremendously.

I remember, a few years ago, I would go to the library to find books, journals, or any literature. Today, I use Google.
Not only that, today, everyday, people around the world search on Google 5.5 billion times. These technology applications are a part of our daily life around the world.
And most importantly, everyday, the use is bigger and bigger.
As a result, the majority of the world searches, shops, chats, banks, and performs many everyday activities online.
Our life has become faster and better.
Technologies have saved our time, money, and made our lives easier and better in many ways.
The amazing thing is that they have made our lives interactive globally.
My friend, this is another reason we should remain optimistic and happy. We are progressing all the time.

One more snapshot regarding our health and well being.
In 1981, we paid half a million dollars for 1 GB hard drive storage.
Today, it costs us 1 cent per GB.
In 1971, Intel’s first computer chip used to cost us $1 per transistors, and there were 2300 transistors.
Today, we have Core i9 and has 7 billion transistors in less than a millionth of a penny each.
Our smart phone now is more powerful than any country’s computational power in the early 90’s on the planet.
We have exponential growth in technology and we are not stopping.
We have 5G mobile service now, but we are not stopping. We are going in 6G soon and that can download 142 hours of Netflix in a second.

This fast technology will be life-changing for the health sector.
We can upload health and exercise data or get help from AI wherever we live in the world.
Just think, at the moment we connect more than 125 devices to the internet per second.

Conclusion

Very soon in future, we will have the ability for real time monitoring of our health from sensors in our body.
Sensor measures everything from blood glucose to blood pressure to micro RNAs that indicate an impending heart attack and the quality of our sleep, diet, and lifestyle.
All of these information will be uploaded to an AI which monitors and advises our exact health status.
My friend, we should not be pessimistic, we should be optimistic all the time, that’s the only reason we are human, and we are here.

This is our opportunity to grow in science, technology, and human health.
As Dr. George Church, professor of Harvard Medical School says “Exponential technology growth is especially effective in biology, which is now an information science.”
He is one of the hard core believers that even we, humans, can reverse our age.
This far we’ve come now.
There is already precedent for it.
Dr. David Sinclair, PhD, Harvard professor and author of “Lifespan” says “there is a backup copy of youthful information in the cell that we can access which gives us the ability to reboot cells.”
The crux of this discovery is if we can do this in mouse cells, then we can do this in humans.
There is a possibility that we can reverse our age.
I’m just reminding you, my friend, this is the time to be optimistic and happy.

Let’s not take anything for granted.
When we find a bigger cause in our lives, we heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and that is the ultimate goal of living.
I wish you all the best, my friend.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Do you know the science-power behind simple exercise?

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

My friend was a very unsatisfied and unhappy person back then, it was almost more than a decade ago.
I knew that he had a family tragedy, his mother died at age sixty seven due to heart disease.
He used to think personally that he is the most difficult and arrogant human being on the earth but for his family and friends, he was amiable and very helpful.
“Worst of all, for me, I was a procrastinating lazy dude in my personal affairs,” he told me.

“I had no knowledge of differentiation between important and urgent activities in my life.
I would give hours to others without thinking about my health and well being, I never had any idea of the intangible value of life, for example, long term personal health and prosperity,” he further added.

One day, at night, all of a sudden, something unexpected happened to him.
At midnight, he’d walk from one corner of his bedroom to another corner to watch his surroundings.
He said “don’t ask why? I don’t know.
Sometimes, this happens to everybody’s life.”
He saw his wife in deep sleep, his only daughter back then surrounded by her stuffed animals with her favorite Dora the explorer.
Peeking through the window, he saw a quiet dark night outside, all were good outside, all were in deep sleep inside, he felt that his wife and his daughter were happy and, most importantly, very safe.
His mind whispered, “you have everything you could possibly have at the moment, yet you are completely failing to appreciate it.”

The following morning turned out to be different from his usual mornings.
He committed himself that he would change, he didn’t know how but he would change everything, his health, his mindset, his thinking, and most importantly, his habits, the root cause.
The first thing he would change is his health status which was at the moment very poor.
Every morning he would start his day with some minor physical exercise so that he would renew his body early in the morning for the day, a new and fresh day every single day.

Dr. Ernest Becker, PhD, author of “The Denial of Death” says that death is life’s ultimate motivator, that what gives us a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives is an attempt to create something that will outlive us when we die.

Triggers for mind and habit change

“From that day forward, I started to work and think of my life as a matrix,” he said.
He didn’t pay much attention to what others were saying, though he gradually became a good listener but always made decisions by himself.
He developed some fundamental and tacit knowledge about his life, his health, and his family.
“I learned to know the value of my people around me, and I began to take these different components of life and synthesize them into a coherent whole. I got a clear picture of me and the rest of my life,” he said.

It was a cold morning, he saw some ants on the floor, and realized how they were sharing information with each other.
He would relate that to how he should share information around his close friends and family members.
He visualized how bees colonize and compare what would happen if all families colonize in the same way as bees.
He compared his mind with a pure glittering diamond to view the world.

“I have read that a diamond that has the most glitter has fifty six different angles, so I have to look at something from many different perspectives.
I needed some mental training in my mind but personal habit comes first to check who we are and where we stand,” he added.

First, he changed one very bad habit of spending hours on the phone before and after bed scrolling about people who have zero to negligible influence in his life.

James Clear, an author of “Atomic Habits” says “it’s not sufficient to simply change our behavior, but we also have to change how we see ourselves and how we relate to others.”

He almost stopped using his phone in the bedroom. His whole health was affected by poor sleep in different ways.
“I didn’t need LED or any light in the bedroom because it delayed the release of melatonin, a sleep signaling hormone.
I needed darkness to release melatonin for my good night sleep, a key component of a healthy lifestyle,” he commented.

Remember, melatonin is a hormone created by the pineal gland in the brain that’s released directly into the bloodstream.
Darkness initiates the pineal gland to start producing melatonin but light causes it to stop.
“By adopting good night sleep, we can create more focus in our own life rather than focusing on someone else’s pictures on facebook and instagram because focus creates change.
If we gradually measure the different components of our life we always see noticeable improvements,” my friend added.

Second, he completely changed his sitting habit.
His BMI, body mass index, was still in the normal range but moving beyond the upper range of 25.
He remembered his mother and her heart disease which was somehow also associated with obesity.
So, he decided to be more of a moving figure, a person of movement.
He would even start reading a book or watching a movie and walk at the same time in the living room.
Once he starts talking on the phone, he would start walking simultaneously.
“I would read fifteen pages without stopping walking, I would feel so much clarity in my mind that led to my clear thinking pattern and subsequently the productivity skyrocketed.
I would remind you of the saying, sitting is the new smoking,” he added.

Science behind exercise

Pretty quickly, he learned the chemistry behind physical exercise and why he was having more clarity in his mind.
Do you know physical exercise motivates our body and mind in positive thinking?
For those of you who still are not clear about this powerful science or you know but don’t practice, I’m telling you the secret sauce, exercise does amazing things for our body chemically.

When we start to exercise, our body makes an important chemical called adenosine monophosphate (AMP).
It informs our entire body that we are exercising, this internal communication is key and very powerful.
This chemical causes muscle cells, brain cells, and liver cells to break down stored glycogen and fat to use as energy.

A simple exercise not only improves the health of many vital organs like the heart, it increases the blood flow to our brain, improving our cognitive ability.
Once we develop the habit of exercise, we gradually change the quality of our life mentally, emotionally, physically, and even sexually.
We change everything from our sense of awareness to attractiveness and our sense of power to health and vitality.

My friend was very weak from many angles from a health perspective.
His doctor said his bone density degraded pretty badly even though he was not even 30.
For most of us, bone density peaks by age 30.
Once we hit 40, we begin to lose up to 5% of our bone density each decade.

His cardiovascular system was very weak, he could feel that while running for a few minutes.
He started to learn about life, vitality, health, and endurance.
“If I’m not taking care of my body, exercising and eating healthy foods, I can suffer gradual heart failure or a sudden heart attack,” he said.

In his reading, he found an eye-popping scary fact about cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer, one American dies every 36 seconds from it.
Globally, one out of five people die from heart disease, more than any other disease on the planet, 18 million deaths per year and 50 thousand deaths everyday.
Research shows the amazing thing about heart is that simply walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.

Heart disease and stem cells

Can you guess why so many people die from heart disease?
Because, the heart is the least regenerative organ in our body, meaning there are no stem cells in the heart.
What does it mean?
Stem cells are used for regrowth in all kinds of tissue repair, they have regenerative in the body.

In general, the native stem cells are also known as mesenchymal precursor cells, the body’s most versatile and potent building blocks.
They differentiate into bone, cartilage, muscle or fat whatever we need.
After an injury, they are crucial for two reasons: they keep inflammation normal and they repair damaged tissue.

The problem is that stem cells grow scarcer with age especially with people of chronic disease.
The other bigger problem of the heart is that the heart can’t heal itself on its own after an injury like a heart attack.
Let me tell you why.
Our heart contains 6 or 7 billion heart muscle cells.
If we have a serious heart attack and are lucky enough to survive, we can lose more than one billion of those cells.
The heart can not replace them, so it never replaces their ability to function either.
Ultimately, the problem becomes severe, that is why it’s the world’s leading cause of death.

Dr. Stephen Hussey, DC, an author of “Understanding the Heart” says, “We cannot hope to successfully understand and address modern chronic diseases without evaluating them in the context of a toxic modern world.”

Conclusion

The good news is that prevention is the single best defense against heart disease and many other life threatening diseases.

Therefore, this is worth repeating one more time: just walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.
Remember, this is research proven published data.

One more thing regarding cardiovascular disease.
One natural therapy called sauna or hot shower, is very effective for cardiovascular disease.
This actually started for my dear friend personally because in one of his health issues, modern medicines didn’t work.
The reality is our body is so complex that sometimes doctors couldn’t figure out the cause of the problem despite visiting many specialists.
One of the habits that he developed is getting in the sauna or hot shower because he noticed the improvement.
At that time he was using primarily a hot shower but a little longer shower probably 15 to 20 minutes.

I will take you a little deeper in the science of sauna and what actually happens chemically.
Sauna generates heat stress responses within the body, including the activation of heat shock proteins.
This protein family is produced by our cells in response to stressful conditions, such as excessive heat and are important to many cellular processes.
It regulates the cell cycle, cellular signaling, and functioning of the immune system.
By adopting a sauna at least 4 to 7 days per week at at least 73 degree celsius, our risk for cardiovascular diseases or any premature deaths decreases significantly.
We also reduce the risk of cognitive disorders like dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, skin disease, depression, and stroke.

“We must be the CEO of our own health and body, we have to educate ourselves and make solid independent decisions for our well being and longevity.
Remember, in reality, who we are is what we do in our free time and what we eat normally,” my dear friend added.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Why do we get chronic disease despite adopting a healthy lifestyle?

“While the science is complex, our application of it is both straightforward and practical: eat well, stress less, move more, and love more.” -Dr. Dean Ornish

Few months ago, in a casual conversation among friends, one of my friends asked, “why do I get sick even though I have been adopting a healthy lifestyle for so many years?”
There were some biochemical and biophysical scientists at the moment.
For me, this was a simple question but very difficult to answer.
I said, “there are lots of pieces we have to put together regarding our body, its construction, its functional mechanism, and obviously our ancestral evolution.”

This question really intrigued me because I’ve also experienced the same thing in my own personal life.
I plan to write about this in my future posts.
Not only myself, I’ve also experienced the same thing in my family as well as in my extended family, so the question was worth digging a little deeper.

Some of my family members never get sick even though their lifestyle is not healthy, especially in practice of diet and exercise, but some other members whom I’ve seen for many years always get sick despite their adoption of a healthy lifestyle for a very long time.

I read pretty regularly in areas like health, technology, biology, biochemistry, medicine because this is my area of interest, so I did a little more digging in reading and I found some devoted scientist’s work in the area.
The group of Dr. Valter Longo from University of Southern California, Dr. Dean Ornish from University of California, San Francisco, the work from Nobel laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn from University of California San Francisco, and Dr. David Sinclair from Harvard University are some of them.
These are the people I would recommend to go after to find the answer to my friend’s question.

Health, food and genes

Of course, one fundamental aspect of our health is our everyday fuel.
The fuel that we take everyday as food to run our human engine is our key component for health and well being.
The common food for most of us has loads of carbohydrates and fats.
The other part we have to keep in mind is how our body utilizes carbohydrates and fats genetically, which is very difficult to know.

Before the mass migration in human history which is not that old, people used to have marriage within the same cultural population, the genetic pool was the same.
But now there is tremendous mass migration internationally and cross marriages are common across cultures.
This is the key reason in gene variations.
This also answers my friend’s question partially, but at the moment we are not able to understand the genetic implication regarding individual human biochemistry yet scientifically.
We are making progress but it will surely take some time to make genetic technologies available in our local hospitals and clinics.

It appears that humans from different ancestral backgrounds utilize foods especially carbohydrates and fats differently, the main energy source in our body.
This is one of the reasons that people who are on a ketogenic diet gain weight immediately when they start a normal diet.

The role of genes in our body is key to knowing what makes our body happy and healthy.
We are opening the door of genetic diet but still we have to go a long way.
As an example, genetically preferred food is the key whether our body prefers carbohydrates, fats, or a combination of both.

Let’s put it this way to make it a little bit more clear.
Some people burn carbohydrates very quickly so they eat without gaining a lot of weight.
If they don’t eat they can go into hypoglycemic state, that lowers blood sugar and that is very dangerous.
Biochemically, carbohydrates burn very quickly in our body.
Whereas some people burn fat as a primary source of energy which burns slowly so they go many hours without seeing much drop in energy.
This happens due to different genetics set up in the body.

On the negative side, in general, when we eat too many refined carbohydrates like pizza, pasta, sodas, white bread, pastries, fruit juice with high fructose corn syrup, we are adding too much sugar and it goes straight into our bloodstream and blood sugar spikes.
Our pancreas makes insulin to bring our blood sugar down, which is good but insulin also accelerates the conversion of those extra calories into fat.
It causes chronic inflammation and many of these mechanisms lead to chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.

Data driven individualized health

To answer my friend, many biotechnology companies are leading a data-driven future to make individualized interventions for our health.
In the future, we can optimize our eating, fasting, exercise, rest, and sleep based on our genetic and microbiome map.
That would only answer my friend’s question completely.

Some biotechnology companies are already doing tremendous work in this area.
Biotechnology is about using biology as technology on many fronts.
The fundamental components of life like genes, proteins, and cells are behaving like tools to shape and improve our life.

In the book, “Life Force” authors Tony Robbins, Peter H. Diamandis, MD, and Robert Hariri, MD, PhD, bring many world’s top medical minds and the latest research, inspiring stories, and amazing advancements in precision medicine that we can apply today to help extend the length and quality of our life.

Our body is a collection of billion cells and the function of these cells determines our actual health.
Each cell contains 3.2 billion letters from our mother and 3.2 billion letters from our father, these came with us as gifts at birth.
This is our DNA, our genome, the software that codes for everything: our hair color, our face appearance, eye color, our lip size, our height, our voice, our personality, exposure to many diseases, our lifespan, and many others.

Not only that, there is one more factor that plays a key role is called epigenetics.
The epigenetic controls how our genome functions and is more powerful than the genetic code itself.
Epigenetic is affected by various factors, some are diet, obesity, physical activity, tobacco, alcohol, environmental pollutants, stress, and working at night as well as many others.

Habits, lifestyle, and quality of life

Our basic day to day lifestyle has a profound impact on our quality of life, our healthspan, and our lifespan.
These lifestyle choices are entirely in our hands.
For example, moderate exercise can halve our risk of dying from heart disease.
Recent research has suggested that careful dietary decisions can reduce our risk of death from any cause by 36% while poor diets can increase our risk of death by 67%.

The importance of moderate exercise is even higher when we enter old age.
When we get older, our common occurrence is that our hormone levels get changed.
We develop fatigue, insomnia, depression, no interest in sex, loss of our youthful appearance, loss of our muscle mass, accumulated body fat, and many others.

Healthy lifestyle also includes good night sleep.
It’s not only a sufficient number of hours of sleep but a sufficient number of hours of sleep at the right time especially at night.
It’s possible to get a sufficient number of hours of sleep each day, but there is a caveat – our body is designed to follow the sun from evolution.
Our hormones, cardiovascular system, microbiome, and immunity all are coordinated to follow a circadian rhythm.
Staying up all night forces these systems to be out of sync with their coordination and our health defense becomes weaker and we become vulnerable for chronic diseases.

Dr. Matthew Walker, PhD, author and professor of University of California Berkeley says routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes our immune system and we become vulnerable to chronic diseases. The shorter we sleep, the shorter our lifespan.
From his book “Why We Sleep”, Dr. Walker says, “sleep is probably the foundation on which the other two pillars of diet and exercise sit.”

One more example is Parkinson’s disease.
It is caused by the loss of neurons that manufacture dopamine, a natural chemical messenger that controls our muscle movement.
Dopamine also helps to regulate our sleep patterns, our recall, our appetite, and our mood and self control.
If we don’t make enough of it, we will have a serious problem.

One more cause of chronic disease is severe stress.
Severe stress increases cortisol secretion from our adrenal glands, places undue demands on our heart, alters our microbiome for the worse, disrupts angiogenesis, impairs the function of our stem cells, and lowers our immunity.

One of the secrets for a happy and healthy life I found in the work of scientists is eating plant based food, plenty of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and brussels sprouts during lunch and dinner.
There are many factors but one key bioactive in cruciferous vegetables is they contain sulforaphane, a compound that reduces inflammation in our body and can even slow the growth of tumors.
Inflammation is the main cause of many chronic diseases including cardiovascular diseases.
As Michael Pollan, author of “How to Change Your Mind” and professor of Harvard University says, “if it’s a plant, eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

Another secret for a healthy and happy life from Dr. Valter Longo, PhD, from University of Southern California is intermittent fasting.
The beauty of intermittent fasting is it involves harnessing the healing and protective powers of letting the body rest from constant consumption, breakdown, and digestion of food.
This is the strategy for preventing disease and staying young for a longer time.

Dr. Longo’s research suggests that a combination of prolonged fasting and chemotherapy can be highly effective in fighting various cancers.
Cancer cells rely on glucose as a source of energy so cancer cells become weaker by starvation.

Conclusion

During fasting, our energy reserves are depleted and our body undergoes a metabolic shift from a sugar burning mode to a ketogenic mode in which we use fatty acids and ketones for fuel.
Due to fasting our cells shrink and enter into a protected state.

When we start to eat normally, cells rebuild.
This cycle of starvation and refeeding triggers regenerative and self-healing processes.
This process reduces our biological age, which means the age of our cells and organs decreases.

For a happy and healthy life, I would like to repeat Dr. Matthew Walker, PhD, “sleep is probably the foundation on which the other two pillars of diet and exercise sit.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.