From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We are all headed towards aging populations because we are living longer and measuring GDP growth is not the way to decide whether a society or an economy are flourishing. Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right.
My actual definition to describe mental fitness is your ability to remain in a neutral to positive state for most of your day, regardless of what the day is throwing at you and that is not the state people are in nowadays.
That's the future of medicine… being able to see a doctor before something happens, not after… seeing a doctor when you need to, not on some random annual check-up day once a year. Data can create a real story for how the body is evolving and what's happening right at this very moment.
Songs are like a cleanse for the nervous system. I put on She's Always a Woman by Billy Joel and I just suddenly felt psychologically lifted. There's something in the essence of this song… it's not just beats and energy. It felt this song was filled with beauty, mystery, and love.
A lot of people assume that I would choose not to have bipolar disorder; but I'm grateful for it. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, because I feel like all the ups and downs have formed who I am, and made be braver, tougher… more creative and more capable.
When I sense stress, I allot three minutes to fully immerse myself in it. Many individuals attempt to escape stress, but evasion often amplifies it. It's akin to instructing someone not to think of pink elephants; the very command makes it impossible not to.
The sleep revolution is finally hitting the workplace. It's not in full swing yet, but you can see the evidence all around. But now the business world is waking up to the high cost of sleep deprivation on productivity, health care, and ultimately the bottom line. I expect the nap room to soon become as universal as the conference room.
Growing up in Pakistan, I saw so many people with heart disease and having heart attacks – it felt almost biblical – it was catastrophic. Unlike a lot of diseases, there wasn't much a cultural footprint for heart disease – it's not something you hear about on news or TV shows…. You don't see much advocacy done around it.
The stress response is designed for '3 minutes of screaming terror across the Savannah.' If you're not experiencing such an intense moment, it's likely that your stress response isn't calibrated right. In our digital age, it might lead to an inadvertent 'reply all' or perhaps a hastily written email.
The essence of public health as a field of action is that it tries to stop problems from happening where possible, and prepares societies for problems that are unavoidable. That's why it requires us to understand the entire population.
In the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, we observe a consequential 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the Autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a corresponding 21% reduction in heart attacks.
Our number one instinct is survival, followed by reproduction. People started to realise that if they took care of themselves, they would live longer, have better sex and have healthier children.