How Your To-Do Lists Are Killing You, Reaction Kills Creativity, Listener Questions & More!

Episode #177—How Your To-Do Lists Are Killing You, Reaction Kills Creativity, Listener Questions & More—11-13-2013

Peter: I’m on here with Justin and Kate and my great partner, Tristan Truscott and we’re on Extreme Health Radio and we are excited!

Justin: Well, thank you so much, everybody, for joining us on another episode of Extreme Health Radio. As you probably know by now, the intro music is different. We no longer have our little friends. I don’t know. I just felt like that was a little explosive. Did you guys like that music, or that intro before? I’m not really sure about that intro. I don’t know. It always seemed to be so explosive and something about it was just too… a little too much for me and Kate.

As you probably know, this is just me on this episode. This is Episode 177 of Extreme Health Radio, a Free For All Wednesday, and I hope you guys are enjoying your day, whatever you’re doing. Today, for reference, is Wednesday, November 13, 2013. Yesterday was 11-12-13. That’s a weird date, isn’t it? So today is Wednesday, November 13, 2013, and Kate is on her silent retreat. She is being silent today. We’ve been calling her just about every day and talking to her and she’s having a great time. She’s actually going to be driving home right now, back to Orange County where we live, and she’s had a great time.

I think it’s really important, especially for someone like her, to get away, because in her salon and her life, is so busy; it’s so jam-packed with everything and she’s got people talking to her at the salon. It’s really interesting. For people that are hair stylists, you guys probably know this, but for people that don’t know—and I didn’t really think about this much—but being a hair stylist is really a crazy job. She has to perform a service on people’s hair and do a good job—good enough to want to make them come back—but then she also has to make them feel good, you know? So she has to be interested in their stories and give her time and her energy and her emotion to whatever it is they’re interested in.

And she’ll talk to me about how people will come and sit in her chair and they will just blab on and on and on and on about stories in their own life without ever asking her anything about what’s going on in her life, and it’s just a fascinating thing, you know? A lot of people tend to do that, where they will talk and talk and talk and talk and never ask you any questions about what you’re doing. And then so she has to make them feel good and then she’s standing all day, so she’s interacting with all these people, trying to please them, trying to make them feel good, and then she’s also standing and performing a service with that stress and then on top of that, she’s breathing toxins and all of that. So she needed to get away and I completely understand that. She is in the hills. I’m not sure where she is—somewhere north of LA—and she’s having a great time. She took her books and she took her water enema kit and she is really enjoying her time out there and I think it’s really cool that she was able to do that.

If you guys didn’t know, we are live now. If you would like to join us on the show, there are a lot of different ways you can do that. ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Live and you can enter the chat room there and you can join the show that way. My goal for the Friday shows is to create an environment and a community for you guys to be able to get your health questions answered. Kate and I don’t purport to have all the answers to all of your health questions. We are just the same as you guys. We’re just interested in getting healthier and have been following a healthier lifestyle—I have at least—since 2003. 2003 is about when I became 100% raw food vegan and so I did the raw food vegan diet 100% for seven years and immersed myself in everything related to health and disease prevention. And subsequently, my world has been turned upside down. But back then, it was quite a novelty and a lot of fun and is still a lot of fun today.

So if you have any health questions, please email them to [email protected] or [email protected] and that would be a great way to send your questions in to Kate or I and we can do our best to answer your questions. And what we’ll do is from time to time we’ll post them to our Facebook community. All of you guys that follow us on Facebook, thank you for doing that and what a fun thing that is. And if you’d like to follow us on Facebook and keep up to date with our shows, you can just go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Facebook and you’ll be able to click the “like” button on there and follow us that way and keep up to date with our show. So we’ll post your questions on there and we’ll keep them on our Free For All Friday Show. What we’d like to do is create a situation where you guys can join the chat room and give your two cents and ask your questions or you could call us on Skype. Our Free For All Friday Shows, we are allowing people to call in through Skype. Our Skype ID is Extreme Health Radio, and the actual phone number, if you’d like to call in, is 949-505-9585 and you can call in from your phone—you don’t even have to use Skype—and that will patch you through to Skype and we’ll be able to chat. So that would be a lot of fun if you want to join the show that way or if you want to just join the live chat room, that’s ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Live.

It’s a beautiful day here in Southern California. Yesterday was a bit cloudy, a little bit cold; today… But the sunset yesterday was incredible. And then today it’s just clear blue skies and the sun is out. I took Maggie for a walk this morning. We went down by the park. She did her business. And let’s see… What else did we do? We walked down by the beach about 7:00 in the morning and had a great walk with Maggie, did a little bit of rebounding this morning…

You know, it’s interesting. I was thinking about this the other day. You ever think about how it’s just strange how in our culture we… I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s ingrained in us from the beginning, where we don’t like laziness or we don’t like people sitting around doing nothing, but it’s funny how we have our to-do lists, you know? I was just thinking about this this morning and I get up and you want to just accomplish things, you know? You want to just do things. You want to just get things crossed off your list. You ever get like that? Where it’s like all you care about is getting stuff crossed off the list? And then what you’ll do is you’ll put stuff on the list that you’ve already done just so that you can cross it off. I’m sure you guys have done that. You know, it’s just crazy, you know?

Why do we put so much value in accomplishing things? I don’t know. I mean it seems… It’s also not good to sit around and be a sloth and be lazy and not do anything, but at the same time, you get this idea that we have to accomplish things; we have to achieve goals and cross things off our list and do things. It’s so… I don’t know. I think it’s… I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s healthy. I think that we need to spend more time just relaxing and being and thinking about things, perhaps, or reading or… I don’t know. I mean those are all doing things too, but I just think that we run around so much in our culture and we place so much value on doing things and accomplishing things.

I think there’s a lot more to life than crossing things off a to-do list. And to-do lists… I think it’s really hurting people. I think it’s really a negative thing. I mean I have talked to people who—friends or whatever—have a to-do list, a honey-do list or something, that they have to get to on the weekend and their wife will get angry with them if they don’t complete everything that’s on the list that she made for them. I don’t know. I just think it’s backwards in our culture. I woke up today thinking, “What do I have to do? Okay, I’m going to walk Maggie before the show”—before I came into the studio—“and get my rebounding done and get my sauna done and get all these different things done,” but for what? You know? I mean I love doing those things. I love doing the sauna. I love doing the rebounder. And I love doing the show. And walking Maggie was fun. And at the same time, I understand—if we don’t have a to-do list, if we don’t have a list to get things done, then we don’t accomplish our goals, and there is such a fine line, isn’t there, between accomplishing your goals and also living a life of peace and relaxation and going inward and thinking about spiritual things and things like that? I mean there is such a fine balance.

And I think most importantly, about the to-do list, one of the things that’s probably most important is just to first have that awareness of what it’s doing to you and how you’re reacting to it, as opposed to letting it control you and letting it control your emotions and things like that because when you start letting your to-do list dictate whether or not you feel good, something’s probably wrong with that, right? I mean if you don’t feel somehow as good or as accomplished one day because you’ve crossed eight things off your list of ten things to do… It just seems like why can’t we look at that list and say, “Hey, we’ve crossed eight things off the list. Isn’t that great?”? Or what if we’ve crossed none off the list and we’ve just had the most amazing day?

I mean as a child, did we have to-do lists before we had things like school and things like that? I mean when we were out playing in the summertime, did we have to-do lists? I mean I understand that as adults and as responsible people, we have to get things done. I mean there’s no doubt about that. But letting these things control our life and letting these things control our emotions is really a negative thing in my mind. And taking the value off of these things and not placing so much value on accomplishing things… I mean it’s sort of similar to kids. You know how we want kids to be involved in school and practice and doing sports and running them around from everywhere to everywhere to get things done, to accomplish things? Pretty soon they’re 15 years old and they’re 30 years old. Then what? I mean what has all that really accomplished, except add a little bit of stress to our lives? I don’t know. I just see people running around here where we live and they are just running kids all around. They’re kids are involved in soccer and baseball and ballet and dance and all these different activities and then after school… They’ve got five hours of school and then we’ve got a couple hours of homework. When are we letting them be kids, you know? When are we letting ourselves live life instead of just accomplishing and doing things?

I think it’s okay to have a to-do list and want to get things done and want to be successful, but not letting those things run our life and not letting those things dictate how we feel and dictate the amount of stress that we have, you know? It’s just an interesting thought. I don’t know. I think that there are ways to deal with that. It’s funny. When I was on the walk with Maggie this morning…

It’s so funny how dogs do this. She ran up this hill to this house and there was a little dog there that she always plays with. But when the dog is behind the fence, she always barks and she goes and she just races off against the house and starts barking and wanting to start a fight. And so she did this the other day while I was walking her and the other dog was right there and they were barking, as if they were going to tear each other’s heads off, you know? But one was on the other side of the fence, the gate. And then it was so funny. I said, “No. Come on, Maggie. Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go.” And she’s just going nuts. She was about ready to… I mean they were about ready to go to war here and they’re just barking, barking, barking. I’m sure all the other neighbors were looking—“What the heck is going on?” And so it was so funny. I told her “Come on, Maggie. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.” And she stopped for a second, ran, and then she stopped again, and then she just shook it off and then she just kept walking towards the beach. It was so funny because her mouth was open, tongue hanging out because she was tired, and she was breathing through her mouth. It was as if nothing ever happened.

Isn’t that funny how dogs do that? Could you imagine if that were us? The equivalent of that for us would be maybe something like being in a road rage situation where you’re on the freeway and somebody cuts you off and you throw your hands up and then all of a sudden the guy stops in front of you, if it’s like bumper to bumper, and he gets out of his car. Then you freak out, right? And then your heart starts beating and “What’s going to happen?” and maybe you get out or maybe you don’t. But having a situation like that happen and your adrenaline is going, your cortisol levels are raised, every sense about you is heightened and aware and you feel like you’re about ready to get into a fight or perhaps an altercation that could end poorly. And then let’s say somehow it deflates and you yell at each other and you get back in your car, and then you get back in your car—you’re going to be feeling that for the next few hours, aren’t you? Feeling like that guy could have pulled a gun on you, right? Or that guy could have done something really, really bad. And so you’re going to be feeling that adrenaline. But with dogs, the same situation happens and they just keep running. They don’t care. They’re just running along and they’re just happy to be alive. “Oh, that was a lot of fun.” And they just keep going.

It’s so funny how dogs are, you know? It’s crazy. It’s such a cool way to be and it’s such a lesson for us, you know? It’s such a lesson for us and I think it’s something that if we can help regulate in our life—the stress and how we view stress and how we view our to-do lists and how we view these things—if we could just let those things go, we’re just learning so much on this show and from our past guests about stress and our mental state and our exposure to EMFs and all this kind of stuff, where our reactions to things has such a determining factor on our physiology and our health. It’s just really fascinating to understand what’s going on and how much of an impact our reaction and our mental state and our stress levels have an impact on our health and then on our life. You know, when we react to things, you can’t be creative, right? I mean isn’t it interesting how…?

Like for example, for me, we live in a very loud neighborhood and that’s just my opinion and my preconceived notion upon where we live, but it’s very loud where we live and so when I woke up this morning, there were a couple cars out with their engines—their diesel engines—running and they’d created this background noise. It was really loud and a bunch of people outside our place. You know, it’s funny our reactions to things because when we react to something… I mean think about that word, “react.” We’re “re” “acting.” You can’t be creative when you’re acting something that’s already been acted out. We’re reacting something. And what are we reacting? Well, we’re reacting this story that we tell ourselves, right?

So like this morning, I was taking Maggie for a walk, like I said, and I saw two different people driving while looking down at their cell phones, and that really… On one level, that really bugs me, right? That really bugs me because I think, “Okay, they’re going to…” Well, I mean one of these people was driving in front of a school, like a kindergarten or whatever, and all these kids were running around. And I see him driving by and he’s on his cell phone, texting. My first reaction is to get angry and upset, because this guy’s going to hit someone—that’s not good—and he’s going to kill someone—that’s not good. But what am I reacting? I’m reacting the story I’ve already told myself. I’ve told myself that this is how I’m supposed to feel when I am exposed to this. And so it’s almost as if when I tell myself that, God’s going to give me more of that in order to work on myself, in order to show me more about who I am and how I am acting in this world.

And so you see that all the time. It’s sort of like getting a car, you know? You buy a brand new Nissan—a white, four-door Nissan—and then all of a sudden, you start seeing everybody with a four-door Nissan, right? It’s just interesting to pull back and to look at the stories that we create because we all live in stories, right? We create a story for ourselves and it’s not necessarily even true, but we tell ourselves “This is how I react to things when certain things happen” or “I am this way. I am not a very creative person” or “I am not a good public speaker” or “I’m not very good-looking” or “I’m not very this or that,” and we tell ourselves these things that are just stories. We live in a story that we have created for ourselves and we can create any kind of story we want, can’t we? I mean we have the ability to create any kind of story we want, but we’ve created a story about—or at least I have—getting upset when I see people driving around not only just talking on the cell phones, but texting, because they’re going to end up hitting someone and someone I love is going to die or they’re going to kill themselves or something, and so I’ve told myself a story that I am the type of person that gets upset when I see something like that happening. But that’s just a story. I can choose to react however I want.

When I was a child, I would react out of my feelings at the moment, but now, it’s like all of a sudden something happens and boom—I slip right into that story, telling myself “Oh, this is how I react when I see this.” And so what does God do? He sends more of that to show you “Hey, you don’t have to react that way. You can act any way you want. You don’t have to react. You can act and choose to be creative, any way you want. You don’t have to react to the story that you have already told yourself.” And we’ve all told ourselves a story and the story is whatever makes us feel good or whatever causes us to have that buffer inside of ourselves that allows us to complain about certain things or be upset or angry or allows us to solidify a preconceived notion or story about who we think we are in order for us to make ourselves feel better. So a lot of times we’ll be upset about something or we’ll tell ourselves some story so that it allows us to complain about something, because if we complain, we get sympathy from people, and if we get sympathy from people, then we feel like people will understand us, right? And if people understand us, they’ll understand where we’re coming from and they’ll maybe give us some more attention or they’ll do certain things so that it makes us feel better.

And it’s all just stroking the ego of which we’re not anyway, right? All these stories and egos and all these things—they’re not really us, right? I mean that’s not us at all. So what story are you telling yourself? Are you able to tell yourself a brand new story about who you think you are and what you’re doing here in this world and what God has told you or what God has given you in terms of gifts to give to the world? We’ve each been given gifts by God and what are those gifts and can we tell ourselves a story that would facilitate us living in such a way that would be able to expand those gifts to help more people and to be able to actually use those gifts to create the kind of world that we want our children to live in, that we would want in 30 or 50 years? And so telling ourselves a story of who we think we are, we just snap right into these pre-defined modes or roles, I should say, of reaction.

And like I said before, there is no creativity in reaction. When you are reacting something, you are living it over again and basically, you’re creating a deeper groove in your neurobiology that will cause you to continue on the path of that same reaction in the future. So you’re just carving out a deeper groove in your neurobiology that will cause you to continually be subject and to be a slave to your preconceived story that you’ve told yourself. And so having the ability to say, “Hey, I can act any way I want in this situation. I can choose to be anything I want. I can choose to react any way I want. I can choose to say, ‘Hey, maybe that guy is texting his wife who is going into the hospital and maybe everything is going to be okay’ or maybe I could pray for him and say, ‘God, please allow him to realize what he’s doing so that he doesn’t hit somebody,’” because I almost got hit by a car last week and I’m sure that many of you have heard that episode where a guy almost ran right into my door. And so perhaps he was texting, perhaps he wasn’t, but… And so really giving the person the benefit of the doubt and forgiving them and forgiving ourselves for snapping into a role like that, I think is really important.

It’s funny. If you start to really be aware of who you are and what types of mental reactions you have to things, it is really important, because you can choose to be a person that reacts like that and as a result, your cortisol levels go high and your stress levels go high, and pretty soon, when you’re 50 or 60 years old, you’ve aged a lot more than you would have wanted to, but not only that, the aging process has caused stress and those sorts of hormones like cortisol to cause damage to your internal organs and a disease could manifest as a result of years and years and years of settling into a groove that you’re a person that acts in a certain way. And it’s really important to realize that we can act however we want. We don’t have to re-live or react to the story that we’ve told ourselves. And the beautiful thing is that we can just tell ourselves any story we want. We can do anything we want. We can be anything we want.

And so being able to realize that and have that awareness instead of just snapping right into those modes is really a cool thing, because when you realize that you can choose these things, then you have that awareness and then when something like that happens, you’ll start to realize that “Hey, I have that awareness and not only do I have that awareness…” Sometimes you might have that awareness and still react and you get into that emotional state and you cause stress and anxiety to happen in your life, but that’s a cool step because you have that awareness. That’s the first step, right? Realizing that “Hey, something more is going on. There is a third-party witness here,” almost, you can say. And that third-party witness is really who I am. It’s really the essence of who I am and that person is witnessing how I am reacting.

And so then, if you have a few times of just having that awareness during a stressful situation, then you can start being in a situation where you have that awareness and then you can take it to another step and you can almost control the situation. You could say, “Okay. Okay. Step back. Step back. Step back.” In your mind, you can do this. “Okay, step back. Step back. Step back.” Take a deep breath and realize, “Okay, what am I doing here? I’m just acting out a role that I’ve told myself I am, which I’m not. But I’m just acting this out and now I can take a deep breath and I can just choose to not have any reaction and let it bounce off of me or I can choose to act in a positive way” and then I could do that. And when you start realizing you have that power, it’s amazing. I don’t know. I’ve been noticing it in my life over the past six months and it’s really, really an amazing thing. So think about trying to do that, if you can. Yeah, if you can, that would be just a cool experiment, I think, to do.

So we’ve got to take a little break here. We are going to take some listener questions people have emailed in. We’ll try to get to some of those. Let me run this ad for our favorite sauna. Have you guys tried out this sauna yet? Really, really good. I don’t just talk about things on our show to try to sell you these things. Just about every single thing that we sell on our site, we used or have used or own or have or use on a regular basis, and so I really, really stand behind everything that we sell, and this sauna is so good. I’m telling you. If you get it, please let me know what your experiences are. If you’ve bought one through us, please let me know. I’d love to hear your experiences with it. It’s really an incredible machine and I’m going to use mine today. I use it every single day. I will usually watch a documentary in there and it’s a good time. You sweat out toxins and all kinds of good stuff. So let’s run this ad and we’ll be right back after this break.

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Justin: Kate and I have had our sauna for about a year now, I’d say, when we first got it from Phil Wilson. It’s an incredible machine. We use ours about every single day. Kate sits in about 20 minutes and I sit in there for about a half hour, usually watch a documentary, and it’s extremely relaxing. It’s a really, really incredible machine. And if you go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Sauna, you can learn all about it. We did an entire hour interview with Phil Wilson. You can check that out. You can look at the pictures of us with it. Then you can watch videos on that page. It helps you to sleep really, really well. You can lose a lot of weight with it. You can burn, I think, around 600 calories in about 20 minutes or so. It improves your skin, increases circulation all over the body and circulation is critical for your health. You can prevent and reverse diseases with it. If you have a cold or a flu, it’s incredible; it heats you down to the core. It heats four to six inches inside your body, so it’s really incredible. A lot of people use it for cancer as well, so if you have any kind of “incurable” disease, you can use it for that. And Dr. Shade is the foremost authority on detoxification and listen to what he says about it.

Shade: How do I detoxify from plastics? I mean you guys are using a sauna and what does a sauna do for us? A sauna is great. It’s moving a number of different toxins. Remember we talked about the mice that if you put PCBs in there, then that made the mercury all that much worse? And sweating moves out a lot of plastics, volatiles, fat-based toxins. It’s really good at moving those out, sweating those out. So that’s how you’re getting those out and those are contributing to this synergistic soup inside the body, and so that’s why they’re good is they’re taking out a bunch of the different things in the soup.

Justin: And Daniel Vitalis, one of our favorite guests, what do you have to say about the sauna?

Daniel: When you go into the sauna, like a far-infrared sauna like you discuss, your body goes into a deep relaxation mode and your sympathetic nervous system shuts down and your parasympathetic nervous system turns on. And when that’s active, that’s the nervous system—part of your nervous system—that’s active when you meditate. That becomes active and your detoxification pathways open up wide. Why is this important? It’s important because when you go running and you sweat, you’re not necessarily eliminating very much toxicity from your body. But when you sweat in the sauna, you eliminate a lot of toxicity from your body. So sweating in a relaxed state is how we eliminate. The other thing is that what’s wonderful about the sauna is that it puts you in a parasympathetic nervous system response as if you were meditating. So it’s almost a hack. It’s like a trick to get yourself into a meditative, relaxed state, to decompress stress, to reverse the effects of stress, and to get your body eliminating deep, deep toxicity that’s stored in your body fat because it can come out in the oils of your skin. So I think sauna is one of the most crucial detoxification… really health practices that we can take on, especially in this era of heavy toxicity, particularly fat-soluble toxins.

Justin: This sauna is really, really great. They offer payment plans because if you buy it through PayPal, it’s 100% secure; you don’t even need a PayPal account. I think you can do a payment plan through PayPal. It’s got low EMF electromagnetic fields coming off it. It’s portable, so that means you don’t have to knock down a wall in your house. You can just move it from room to room. It sets up in about two to five minutes. It’s super easy to clean. All you’ve got to do is wipe it down when you’re done and wipe the neck down. It produces energy and heat inside, very, very evenly throughout the whole machine. All you have to do is sit in there for about 15 minutes a day. And the great thing I like about it too is it requires zero preheating. So you turn it on and you’re starting to get warm and you’re starting to detoxify with that far-infrared light almost immediately. So it’s really great. It comes with a one-year warranty. It’s about $990 plus $25 shipping and that’s really, really a good deal because if you look at most of the regular saunas out there, they are in the $2,000-4,000 range, so this is really, really a good deal so check it out at ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Sauna.

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Justin: All right. We’re having a good time here on ExtremeHealthRadio.com/177. So if you have any questions or any comments about this show when you’re listening to the podcast, just go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/177 and you’ll be able to enter your comments at the box below and we’d love to have you join the comments there and add anything that might help people or have any questions. Feel free to do that as well. We love that. And also, if you’re listening live, you can always go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Live and you’ll be enter to answer your question in the chat room. And for those who are braver among you, please call up. As the lady said, we’d love to have you join the show. You can call up on Skype. Our ID is Extreme Health Radio. And if you want to just call from your cell phone, you can call 949-505-9585 and we would love to have you call up and chat. I love all the listeners and I love all the emails that we get. It’s just a lot of fun. And I’d love to have you call into the show and all that.

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And Stella says here “You know what I keep thinking about? How Constantine does not have fruits or veggies; he just has white rice and protein and says that we don’t need fruits or veggies but he has no problem with them. Very interesting and controversial for sure, compared to David Wolfe or Markus Rothkranz.” I know, Stella. I totally agree. It’s so interesting. I remember talking with him off the air as well as on the air and he was talking about how he doesn’t eat fruits or ve