How to Vibrantly Live Past 100 Years Old with Dr. Mario Martinez

Trevor:                                      Hi there, I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to the Spa Doctor Podcast. Have you ever wondered what it would take to live to be over 100 years old and be healthy and happy? That’s exactly what we’re talking about on today’s podcast. We want to not only have longevity, but quality of life also. My guest today is Dr. Mario Martinez, he is a clinical neuropsychologist who specializes in how cultural beliefs affect health and longevity.

He proposes, based upon credible research, evidence, that longevity is learned and the causes of health and inherited. He has studied healthy centenarians worldwide and found that only 20%-25% can be attributed to genetics, the rest is related to how they live and the cultural beliefs they share. He is author of the best-selling book, The Mind Body Code: How to Change the Beliefs That Limit Your Health, Longevity, and Success. In addition to longevity, he also explains why our immune system is not just a protector, instead it responds to the cultural premises we learn to perceive the world.

In this interview, we talk about how to live a healthy long live, which behaviors, and thought patterns, lifestyle choices, hold us back, and, which ones help us. I really enjoyed interviewing Mario and I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I did.

Mario, it’s so great to have you on my podcast.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Thank you, finally we get together. It’s been a while.

Trevor:                                      Yeah, fantastic. Well, I know you’ve done a lot of really interesting research, and I’m excited to delve into this today. I love the study of looking at longevity, and what helps us with that, and what are the key factors. I know you’ve studied a lot of centenarians, right?

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes.

Trevor:                                      Tell us about what got you interested in this in the first place?

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yeah, I’m a clinical neuropsychologist. We studied how the brain, when the brain, that’s pathology, what the deficit is, the cognitive, and the physical, and so forth, and so we knew a lot about the pathology of the brain, but not about how the brain works when it’s at maximum health. Same thing with longevity, we study gerontology as if it’s a deteriorating process because we borrowed a model from physics to make biology more acceptable, and we are closed systems. We are self-organizing and the model of Newtonian physics doesn’t work really well, because the entropy is like we go from order to disorder. The thinking is that as you grow older you get more disordered and more disabled.

Well, the model that I use is a model of complexity, which says that for closed systems that are alive, you go from simple to complex, so as you grow older, you become more complex, the brain becomes more complex. Then I wanted to … Good science looks at what works and then creates theories to see if it works. What works is centenarians who are healthy, people who are over 100 and they’re healthy. Again, with my reductionist training I thought I was going to find genetics. I thought it was genetics and well, if you have good genetics, and they talk about the Methuselah gene and all of that, which is really not good science.

I found that genetics only accounts for about 20%-25% at most. The rest is what I call bio cultural, the way that we live. Not even what you eat. What you eat is important, but these people, some eat meat, some don’t, so it’s really a bio cultural assimilation that allows you to live longer.

I interviewed a zen master in LA who was 107, and I asked him, I always try to get the anthropological part. I said, “Well, when did your parents die?” And he gave me the typical zen answer, he said, “My parents will die when I die,” but I asked his assistant, I went, “Please tell me when did his parents pass away?” The father at 70 and the mother at 75, and he was 107. Now, genetics helps, it doesn’t hurt if you have good genetics, but it’s not sufficient to actually account for the healthy centenarians.

That’s basically what I came up with, which is totally incompatible with what we are expecting from conventional science. Gerontology studies the pathology of aging. I studied the health of growing older, it’s totally different. What are the causes of health as you grow old?

Trevor:                                      Right, and so what are the things that really make a big impact on longevity? We want to live longer, but we also want to have quality of life, right?

Dr.Mario Martin:                Exactly.

Trevor:                                      What are the things that help us have that quality of life rather than just technology that keeps us alive?

Dr.Mario Martin:                That’s right, that’s a good point. I didn’t study centenarians who were in nursing homes, vegetating, or sick, I didn’t study those because, as you said, what’s the point of living without quality of life. What I found first is that culture has a lot to do with our longevity, the perception that we have of our culture, and even the immune system responds to our culture, the brain responds to our culture, which I’ll explain if you want me to.

But what centenarians do is they have a … I had to create a theory to explain what they do. The theory is that we have portals, what I call portals, that are cultural portals, and the society will put you in those portals, like newborn child, adolescent, middle age, middle age especially as a marker, but it’s culture, then elderly, and then you’re dead. Each portal is determined by what the culture tells you. If you want to retire in Turkey, you can retire at 45. In Australia, you have to wait until you’re 75. The middle age marker is the most important component of how you’re going to look.

Ellen Langer, my colleague at Harvard has done a lot of work in the area similar to I have how context affects the longevity and also the biology, and she looked at people that look significantly younger, and people that look significantly older than their age, and after she factored out all the other factors that could be contributing, the main contributing factor was when you thought middle age started, the ones that look significantly younger thought that it started 10-15 years later, so now if you want to believe in middle age, I would say it starts at 90. Just to have a marker if you [inaudible 00:06:47] that.

But those are the things, and it’s a cultural component, because when we created consciousness, the immune system had to pay attention to the consciousness, and when you’re born you have a physiology, and when you’re hungry, and there’s hormonal, as you know, all kinds of things going on, and then when you see a breast or you see a bottle and you satiate that hunger, that also changes your biology or psychoneurology. There’s no language for it, but we’re designed to pay attention to what I call the culture editors. These are the people that cultures give them a lot of power, a mother at home feeding a child, a doctor at a clinic, clergy at church, and so forth, so we’re designed to pay attention from day one.

Then you pay attention to that and it has a major component of survival. Later you find out, “Oh, that’s a breast, that’s a bottle, that’s my mother.” You give it a symbol, but that symbol becomes a bio symbol already because it has a biology, so that’s why the immune system has to respond to our symbols.

For example, if you shame somebody, the person will have inflammation, you have molecules of inflammation that are secreted when you shame somebody, a word, shaming, but only … It depends on the culture. If you shame somebody in this culture, they take it personal and they have interleukins, and tumor necrosis factor release as if they were pathogen. If you try to shame someone in Asia, for example, there would only have a shaming effect if they perceive that you’re shaming their family, their group, or their country, not be individual. It’s very collective, but that’s all culture, not physiological in a sense.

Trevor:                                      That’s really fascinating. What are some of the things that people do in the U.S. that are negatively impacting our ability to live a healthy, long life? Like, culturally, what are we doing?

Dr.Mario Martin:                The creation of the “iSelf,” what I call the iSelf. We have an identity where we take our iPads for lunch, and our Mac for dinner, and, as you know, our physiology is not made for that. We have a sympathetic and parasympathetic system for eating, and for working. You can’t mix the two. I work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies and 75% of their executives have gastrointestinal problems because that’s what they taught the iSelf, to go from parasympathetic to sympathetic. It doesn’t work. There’s a learning of an illness. Acquired illnesses have a learning process.

In this country, we also over prescribe antidepressant medication. Now we know pretty much that serotonin is really not necessarily the model, it’s not serotonin. It’s really inflammation, but also, we don’t let people mourn. Your mother dies and you get depressed and you’re given an antidepressant. Well, we have 150,000 years of trial and error on how to do our mourning. If you take that away from a person, what you’re doing is you’re creating a plastic self that doesn’t allow what the system knows how to do really well. Sometimes people need antidepressants, but this country prescribes more antidepressants than any other country in the world. France; liver medication. Everything is the liver. In Germany, heart. In the U.K. the gastrointestinal. Even medicine has the propensity to be cultural in that sense.

Trevor:                                      Interesting. Why do you think that is?

Dr.Mario Martin:                Well, because everything is cultural and medicine is cultural. If you have a doctor in Cuba, he would say, “Have an espresso and a cigar,” even though he’s your doctor. If you have a doctor somewhere else, he’ll say, “Have some yogurt.” There are universals, no question. If you have an infection, you need an antibiotic, but if you have an antibiotic here for an infection in the U.S., your perception is, “This is a pathogen. This is some bacteria.” It’s something you need. If you go to the Amazon and a shaman says, “Yes, you have an infection, but you have a malignant spirit that has gone in through the infection,” you’re gonna need a lot more antibiotics because your body’s already set up where it’s a nocebo effect, and the antibiotic is not going to work as well as if you were in Brooklyn or somewhere else. It’s all related to the cultural beliefs that we have and that we inherit, or that we assimilate.

Trevor:                                      What are some of the healthier patterns that we  can learn from other cultures and that we can start incorporating in our lives with our families and communities?

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes, well, what I consider the causes of health are inherited and longevity is learned. Longevity is a culturally learned process, but the causes of health have to be triggered. We’ve been trial and erroring for 150,000 years.

For example, one of the causes of health is breaking bread without technological intervention. You’re gonna eat, you eat with family and discuss. In fact, there was a study that was done on people that … By the way, bio commission is about outliers, to getting word from the pale, living beyond the pale in a healthy way, that looked at … As you’ve been around alcoholics, if you have parents who are alcoholics, five times as much possibility of becoming an alcoholic. They looked at the ones who didn’t become alcoholics and they looked at factors. The main factor was that those parents, although they were alcoholics, they always broke bread and had meals without any intervention, even if they were drunk or arguing, it was a family because it’s in their DNA and in the caves and in the forest, we needed to have those meetings to let us know where the food was, where the enemy is, and it’s built in. So what do we do now? We watch television. You go to restaurants and you see kids playing with their videos, and the wife is texting, and the husband is somewhere else. That is not good for the immune system. The immune system responds to the breaking bread not with the iSelf. That’s one.

Another one is setting limits, setting emotional limits. We don’t do that very well because we have this political correctness about it. It’s kind of what I call intellectual fascism. That’s what political correctness is. In Cuba, for example, they don’t say, “I’m an Afro-Cuban,” they say, “I’m a Cuban.” The white and African-American thing, for example, I have a good friend who is a black professor at a university up north, and he says, “You know what’s so interesting? When I was a kid, I was black. Now I’m an African-American. That’s not even a country. It’s a continent.” Those kinds of things really add to the iSelf that we create. This is proper, this is improper. It goes totally against those 150,000 years that we had of homo sapiens. An example of setting limits, in psychology, they tell you assertiveness, you have to set limits, but they don’t tell you how. I think that you have to set limits. The second part is we have to give people permission to not like them. You don’t like my limits? I’m sorry. I’ll give you permission to not like them. That’s important.

I was interviewing a centenarian. They’re very helpful, but they’re not caretakers. That’s another thing. You don’t wanna be a caretaker. I asked him, “Could I see you on Saturday because I’d really like to talk to you, but you’re live.” He said, “Sure, sure. What time?” I said, “9:00 in the morning.” He said, “No, no. I have tango lessons at 9:00. I can do it later.” See what he said? Benign limits. They don’t say, “Oh, I’ll give up my joy to be with you.” They respond to emergencies like anybody else, but they don’t give up their joy just to be politically correct with you, to be lying to you. They don’t need to be liked. They already like themselves. If you like them the way they are, they accept you. If they don’t, well, it’s your problem.

Trevor:                                      Very interesting. Now, you mentioned that food, diet doesn’t necessarily play a role and from what you’re saying, but what I’m wondering is is that when you’re looking at these cultures with the longevity with the people that are living a healthy many years, they’re probably not eating a lot of processed foods I’m guessing.

Dr.Mario Martin:                No, no they’re not. Also, you know the marketing that was done against coconut oil and butter and replacing it with margarine, all of that is terrible because coconut oil is actually good for you. Some of them … Now tomatoes are bad because they have lectins. Every day is something new, but you’re right. The consistent thing is that they don’t eat processed food, very little processed food. Everything is from the earth. They eat meat, they drink, they smoke, but everything moderately. I’ve never found one centenarian with excessive behaviors. Not one addictive behavior.

Again, I went to Cuba because there are quite a few centenarians there, and this woman, I asked her, “So, what are the things that you do that are regular in your life that have meaning?” She said, “Oh, I have a shot of rum before I go to sleep every night.” I thought at first that’s gotta be the Cuban rum. Then I asked another one, he says, “Well when I wake up, I have a good Cuban cigar.” So, I thought it’s gotta be the nicotine. It’s the ritual that they have that allows them to have immune enhancement. Immunology don’t understand that, but psychoimmunology does. The cultural psychoimmunology. Those are some of the …

Another one of the causes for health is forgiveness, being able to forgive not just intellectually, but as an act of self love to release whoever has you enslaved by your anger that you have toward, and so forth. A few others, but those were some of the things that I talk about in the book, and give specific techniques on how to apply centenarian consciousness to be learned at any age. So, you’re starting early because you’re young.

Trevor:                                      Wow. It’s funny because I love this idea of discussing what mid-life is because I’m 44 years old. Some people might consider that mid-life, but I don’t consider it mid-life because I’m planning on living to be a lot older than 88. It’s interesting.

Dr.Mario Martin:                No, of course. I asked one centenarian, “What is middle age?” And he says, “That’s a dumb question. You’ll find out when you die. You don’t know what it is.” So, they I don’t talk about age because you will be boxed into … If you say, “I’m 44,” you have a preconception of 45. If you say you’re 80, the preconception is totally different. I treat you differently. The attributions of what you do are different.

For example, the cultural portal of 25 in most cultures will allow you to have a sports car. They’ll allow you to have a Porsche and you’re on the portal. If you get out of the Porsche and your back hurts since your portal says it’s okay to have a Porsche, your attribution will be, “My back hurts. I need to do some stretching and it’ll go away.” Let’s say you’re 75 and just out of the portal, you have to be talking about Preparation H and diapers and those things at that age, but you are an outlier. You’re driving a Porsche, your back hurts, and then the attribution because the culture is always admonishing you, “Well, I think I’m getting too old for this.” Then you go to a conventional doctor and say, “Oh, yeah. I mean, look. Let me give you an anti-inflammatory and some analgesics and take this for two weeks or whatever.” You give up your joy, you buy a big car, and you bought into a cultural interpretation of an event that has nothing to do with physiology. It’s a cultural interpretation.

So, those two are examples of when people ask me how old I am, I just tell them I was born in the 20th century.

Trevor:                                      That’s fantastic.

Dr.Mario Martin:                [crosstalk 00:19:00] after we’ve talked online she said … When people ask her her age, she says, “Mario won’t let me tell my age.” She blames me for it.

Trevor:                                      That’s so great. I think it’s great that you’re talking about genetics and how genetics doesn’t play as big of a role as people and scientists originally thought. With your research, it doesn’t really play a lot of the impact. Certainly it seems like maybe it plays a little bit of a role, but what we’re learning about epigenetics and genetic expression and the lifestyle choices that we make and how that changes our genetic expression makes a lot of sense that some of the things that we do in our life can change our genetic expression. It ends up that just because our parents maybe didn’t live a long time doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t, or because we lived a long time doesn’t mean that we’re going to.

I look a lot to people in my family, and they tend to be very healthy much later in life, continuing to be healthy. I know a lot of that has to do with the lifestyle choices that they make and the attitude, the positive feelings that they have about … And not being opposed to the process of aging. It’s not such a bad thing. It’s how you look it. They don’t slow down. They keep doing it, they keep exercising, and riding their horses, and doing the things they love to do. That brings me to asking you about exercise and movement. How much do you see that playing a role?

Dr.Mario Martin:                I think it’s extremely important, but it has to be something that you like. Many centenarians walk, or they tend to their garden. They’re active. They’re not sitting at home watching television. There are very few that are doing that. Movement is extremely important, but you have to do something that you love. If you go to a gym and you hate it, it’s not gonna help you as much. In fact, it’s harder to lose weight because hating it causes pro inflammation and pro inflammation makes it difficult to lose weight. When I work out, and I’ve always worked out, I was noticing that I didn’t like going to the gym for a while. Well, why is it that I don’t like it? Well there were some machines that I didn’t like, and there were some things that I was doing that I did like. So, I switched to something that I enjoyed, and replaced it with what I did like. All of a sudden, it’s okay, I enjoy it. So, centenarians don’t jog if they don’t like to jog. They walk if they like to walk. So, really, the movement has to be joyful movement and that works really well.

Trevor:                                      That makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about the immune system and how that can be cultural, too.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Okay. I propose that the immune system has morals, but not self righteous morals about you’re good or you’re bad, not anything based on that, but it does assimilate the ethics of your culture. For example, you look at somebody and you smile at that person. Do you like that person? Is it liking that person? Your IGAs will go up, which, as you know, are antibodies that fight upper respiratories.

You have oxytocin, which regulates the heart, but if someone, as I said, shames you, you have inflammation, but even more importantly, that if … There’s a set of immune system response called CTRA. It’s about 21 genes that have to do with anti inflammatory, antivirus, and antibodies. Aristotle, almost 3,000 years ago, said, “Well, hedonic pleasure, just pleasure for the sake of pleasure, is not as good as what they called eudemonics pleasure, which is pleasure with service, pleasure with something that has value for you and someone else in your life.” He always thought that. Now, there’s a very recent study, it was done looking at CTRAs.

They divided people into the hedonics and the eudaimonics. The eudaimonics, which are the ones that have pleasure with meaning, pleasure with not just drugs, or sex, but with meaning. Then, they have a better CTRA response to adversity, than the ones who just have the hedonic. So, the immune system can discern between one type of pleasure, and another type of pleasure, that has some level of ethics, or some level of evolvement. So, those are some of the examples.

Trevor:                                      Well, that’s really interesting, and so, if you participate in things that are considered, maybe not, particularly healthy, if you’re doing it in a way that you remind yourself, you’re doing this for some sort of good. Can you give some examples in people’s lives, where they might really incorporate this.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Okay, for example, what I call horizontal love. Those are the people that do all kinds of things. You have multiple sex, just for the sake of sex, that’s it. Sex is wonderful, great. As opposed to having sex with someone that you love, someone that you have connection with.

You will have the oxytocin and you’ll have all the CTRA, I know that, in one and not in the other. In fact, the other one is not good for you. It’s stressful because you’re really not making any commitments. It’s totally devaluing the person. I’m here just to have a good time with you. That’s one example.

Another one is, the things that you do, ask yourself if you’re doing excessively. If its excessive it becomes hedonic. Like, the centenaries, they don’t do anything excessive. And, are you doing something for pleasure because you’re trying to do something that the culture tells you that it’s okay. Like, for example, you play golf and you don’t like golf, and you consider it to be pleasure because doctors play golf.

That’s hedonic. It doesn’t really do anything for you. So, those are examples, and what you wanna do, is be able to ask yourself, what am I doing, with meaning, in life? What is meaning? For example, once animals stop reproducing they become infertile, most of them die, with the exception of human beings, and killer whales. They call it the grandmother effect.

Because, women that can no longer menopause, and can no longer bear children, they continue to be a source as a grandmother for the family. So, what the immune system requires is, that you reproduce and after you reproduce, you reproduce something, doesn’t have to be children.

The killer whales, they have this grandmother effect also, because once they can no longer reproduce, they become guides for the new generation. To take em to the food and the places that are safe. That’s another way we have evolved from just reproducing.

Trevor:                                      Yeah, I love that. Thinking about it, if you’re a grandmother or your past menopause, a woman can no longer have children, reproduce in that way. A lot of times, I see women develop some sort of creativity that they didn’t have before. They start drawing, painting,-

Dr.Mario Martin:                Sure.

Trevor:                                      Knitting. Whatever it is, they start creating things and it’s just another way for us to create, so I think that’s a beautiful thought there. Yeah.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes and that’s right, because you’re producing, and it’s something produced for the good of you and others. But, even more specific, in some countries, in like, Bolivia, in Uruguay, and those countries in South America, they’re very sophisticated in medicine, but the culture says that when you have the menopause, and you have hot flashes, they call it bochordna, which means shame.

And even the doctors, although they know that he’s hormonal, they say she’s having symptoms of shame. Well, shame causes inflammation. These women have more inflammation, lower self esteem, more need to hormone replacement, then women in Japan that call it kininki, which means the second string. They don’t have the inflammation, they don’t have the pain, they don’t have cultural imposts.

Then, their self-esteem goes up because they become a source of knowledge for the community. Again, that grandmother effect.

Trevor:                                      Yeah, it’s really interesting, the word choices of different cultures and languages, I think that’s fascinating and I wonder how you create your own, sort of, culture and community, to protect yourself from, maybe, the negative influences. I’ve got three kids and I can’t help but know that they’re gonna be out in the world and have those kinds of negative words and connotations and misbeliefs and misunderstandings about the aging process. So, how do you create this kind of culture, and bubble, or community for your family?

Dr.Mario Martin:                Well, that’s a great question, and what you do is create subcultures of outliers, who, if you say, “I don’t wanna talk about my age.”

“Oh great, I don’t talk about my age, either.”

Or, “I’m brilliant.”

“Oh, wonderful I’m glad you’re brilliant.”

Sometimes I’ll do workshops in different countries, and I’ll say, “I want you to introduce yourself.” “My name is such and such,” and you can either say, “I’m Brilliant,” or “I’m lovable.”

They have such a hard time, but once they do it, you see cohesiveness. People start laughing and having a great time. Their cultures won’t allow you to say that, you can say you’re a good mother, and you’re honest, but you can’t say you’re brilliant.

Because, then you’re conceited. So, if you don’t believe you’re brilliant, who’s gonna believe it? And our cultures teach us pseudo humbleness. A little girl goes to her mom and says, “Mommy, look how pretty I am.” “No, no, darling you don’t say you’re pretty. You wait till somebody says it, and then you deny it.” So, “I like your hair.” “Oh, I haven’t washed it in three days.”

It’s a lack of gratitude, which is incredibly powerful for immune function. Gratitude is very good for the heart, by the way, also. So, you’re taught that, but in the subcultures of wellness that we create, you don’t talk about your age, you talk about the things that you’re excited about, and people support you.

But, as far as your children, if you’re an outlier, they’re gonna pick up a lot from you. My kids, when they were nine and 10, on Saturdays I would say, “Let’s get lost. We’re gonna navigate on certainty with chaos as our guide.” So, they say, “Go the right, go to the left.” And, we get lost.

“Okay now, let’s discover.” They’d start discovering a little park or a restaurant or something, and then, finally, they knew that they would always find their way around. Both of them are just, very really well adjusted kids, with their own beliefs, but they have that base of resilience that they learned by not buying into the cultural admonitions about, life is rough, and life is this, and life is that, and you buy it. But, when you see it at home, you’re getting really, a powerful fabric of what you are, of what you could be.

Trevor:                                      I love that. So, going back to, say a little girl says, “Mommy, I’m pretty in this dress,” or “I’m pretty.” What would be a better response for the mother in support of, what would be an example of something that mom could say.

Dr.Mario Martin:                “Yes, you are pretty, and I love that dress.” That’s it.

Trevor:                                      Yeah. It’s that simple. Right. And why do we have to … An adult woman gets a compliment on her dress. “Oh, this old thing, I’ve had it forever, it’s been in the back of my closet.” Instead of saying that, just saying, “Thank you.”

Dr.Mario Martin:                Exactly, because of the pseudo humbleness that we were taught that you’re not supposed to say any … For example, I lived in Uruguay for a few years. In Uruguay, they tell you, and it’s a great country, great people, they tell you, we forgive everything except success. So, a friend of mine bought a new car. He bought a gray car. Why gray? He said, “I don’t want people to notice, because you know then, they think that I’m …” That’s what they tell you.

Number one country in suicide in South America, because of the repression, and that you can’t succeed, you can succeed, but you can’t fail. If you go through bankruptcy, there’ve been many, many suicides because bankruptcy, you’re completely isolated from the culture.

But, if you do really well, you’re also isolated. So, mediocrity. Non-existence is the way that it works. So that’s why we’re taught, for example, you say to your partner, “I love you.” And your partner doesn’t have to say I love you back. He says, “Thank you.” So, it’s not automatic.

It’s like, “I love you.” “Thank you.” Then later if you want, “I love you.” But, it’s not like, quid pro quo kind of thing, because then, it’d become so robotic that the value is lost and the immune system is paying attention to whether it’s real or it’s just robotic.

Trevor:                                      I love that. That’s fantastic. Yeah, so you want it to be authentic, and you want it to be real, not forced, or feel like, okay, quid pro quo, you did this for me, I’m gonna do this for you. You want it to carry that, and I can see that, as a family, to create that kind of culture, you just model that for your kids, just as with your partner and with other people around you. With your children, and you keep modeling that, you kind of create that. So then, they go into the world and they still have that sensibility.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes.

Trevor:                                      And maybe even, kinda spread that around to other people. And, maybe, hopefully it rubs off.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Exactly. And they become outliers. I remember when my son, he went to Columbia University, when he started was nine 11. So, you know how it was back then. You couldn’t communicate for hours. All planes, all communications, and I was really concerned for about eight hours I couldn’t get in touch with him. I called him and I was getting ready to treat him for post traumatic stress and all these kinds of things. I said, “Patrick, how was it?” He said,”Ah, it’s terrible. We could see the smoke and it was terrible.” I says, “Well, what are you doing?” He says, “Well, I’m writing a poem about it.”

So I know he was gonna be okay. It’s that resilience that you learn that that adversity has to be dealt with a certain amount of cogency and it doesn’t mean you don’t feel. You feel. You don’t wanna be Pollyanna. But, what you don’t wanna do is, font over respond and confirm that the world is a dangerous place. Two days later, I took a plane, just for the hell of it, to show that I’m not gonna let terrorist control me. If the plane gets bombed, okay, my karma.

But, you can’t live with fear, because it’ll kill you before the bombs kill you.

Trevor:                                      So true. Fear is definitely something that will age people quickly, cause them to pick up disease more quickly, and cause people to rapidly progress in disease. I’ve certainly seen that with patients that have a fearful mindset, and they have a disease, it tends to progress more rapidly than someone who has a disease but has a more positive outlook and a great community, and they practice forgiveness and gratitude, and community, those sorts of things.

They tend to recover.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes.

Trevor:                                      Yeah, have an easier time-

Dr.Mario Martin:                Of course, because, it’s an immunological enhancement or depletion. Admiration is another powerful, what I call, the elevated emotions. Admiration definitely works against envy, but it allows you to celebrate someone else’s exceptionalism, but you can imitate it. It’s really built in to our system that whatever you admire, you can imitate. You don’t want to admire somebody doing cocaine. But, you know, you wanna admire Mandela, and people like that, who then, bring you some qualities that are actually immune enhancing.

Mandela lived to be in his 90s and after all the adversity that he had in his life. So, it really … Desmond Tutu has had prostate cancer for years, he’s in his 80s ans still going around and lecturing, so it really does have an effect on your health and your wellbeing.

Trevor:                                      That brings up a really interesting point. You’re saying that because somebody has been through adversity, doesn’t mean that that’s going to cause them to age more rapidly, that they can actually turn that around. Because, one might think that you have to live this really sheltered life, your entire life, to life past a hundred. But-

Dr.Mario Martin:                I don’t know- [crosstalk 00:35:28]

Trevor:                                      It really doesn’t-

Dr.Mario Martin:                I’ve interviewed centenarians who had been in Auschwitz, and in concentration camps in the Soviet Union. Now, the latest that we know from psychoneuroimmunology is that, you know we have the same hormones. You have cortisol and epinephrine, or epinephrine. Then you have a potential adversity. If you see that stress as a menace, those hormones will come out and they will constrict the cardiovascular system. If you see it as a challenge, and curiosity comes in, it’s a dilation. The same hormones. By the interpretation of … So, stress with a challenge, that actually will cause you to have creativity, great for you. Stress with, just a little bit of stress with a menace, not having access to resources, that’s the stress that hurts you.

Trevor:                                      Yeah. Maybe taking it into a learning opportunity and how you can grow and learn from it and turn-

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes.

Trevor:                                      Turn things around. Sometimes, even maybe, teaching other people about how they’ve, being a storyteller or telling your hero’s journey, those sorts of things might be a good way-

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes.

Trevor:                                      To help turn it around.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes narrative is really good. Narrative medicine is using that a lot, because, you know, medicine says that it’s an evidence based medicine, it’s not. It’s this one sided evidence.

No evidence from the patient’s cosmology, and they’re interpretation of what’s going on. When you have a patient narrate to you, they’re giving you their hope, their attributions they give to the illness, the sense of helplessness.

Someone will say, “Well, you know, it’s in my family. Everybody’s got this in this family.” So what do you … And, that’s a myth. The conventional medicine will say look, your father has diabetes and your uncle has diabetes and so, you’re gonna have diabetes.

No, it’s a potential expression of a gene. And, the reason it’s so prevalent is because they all eat together, drink together, act together, and do the same thing together, so therefore, they’re all triggering the potential, not the genetic sentencing.

Trevor:                                      Interesting. Yeah. I wanna ask you about retirement. How do you feel about retirement?

Dr.Mario Martin:                That people should not retire. They should shift their joy. If you retire into going to some beautiful place in Tahiti to watch a sunset, you’re gonna live four to five years. The brain needs information, it needs to … The brain needs, the way that I look at the brain, is that, the reason we don’t have to have an upgrade, the most recent upgrade we had was 150,000 years ago, even might be longer. Apple can’t do that. Why? Because, it has what I call an incomplete relatio … it’s a relational incompleteness.

That can allow you to have, we’re not a computer, but if we were a computer, we have software that can modify hardware. Our thoughts can modify the morphology of the brain and then our chemistry in the brain, but, since it’s an incompleteness, you know you’re a woman because they’re  a man, and you know that you’re tall because they’re short. But, if there’s an incompleteness, then there’s no meaning but, in the in completeness in the relationship, you say, “Okay, this person is from another planet, but his ears are like mine, but he doesn’t have a head.” “Oh, okay.”

And, you start then interpreting. So, it’s set up for the future, and if you don’t use the future, and you go watch a sunset every day. When you were, let’s say, an executive of a company, or a doctor or something, it just begins to deteriorate.

Dementia comes in, and all kinds of things come in. Because it wasn’t built for that. Like a Porsche’s not built to be driven at 30 miles an hour. Same thing. So, another thing is that joy is very dangerous unless you have good worthiness. You notice that good things happen to them and they get sick? It’s too much. They don’t feel worthy, so there’s too much for them.

So, worthiness is something that needs to be built. But if you worked all your life, let’s say you work and work and work and then, then you know you’re gonna retire. What you’re teaching your system is that you have to work for something in the future. So when the future comes, you still have to work for something in the future. You can’t enjoy the future.

So, it’s set up for failure that way. I will never retire, I will just go from one joy to another.

Trevor:                                      Right, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has to be a doctor in clinical practice forever, if that’s what they’re doing.

Dr.Mario Martin:                No.

Trevor:                                      But if they find another role in life, and maybe they-

Dr.Mario Martin:                Of course.

Trevor:                                      Can still use their skill set in another way. Maybe not seeing patients in a clinic but writing books or lecturing.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Exactly, or teaching, or mentoring, or coming up with, for example, you’re a doctor and you’re allopathic doctor and all of a sudden you wanna learn about herbal medicine. Whatever it is that has joy for you. What has joy for you means that your brain can do it really well, and that it’s immune enhancing, but has joy. Joy has that really powerful component there.

Trevor:                                      Awesome. Well, Mario, it’s been such a pleasure interviewing you and getting this information.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Same here.

Trevor:                                      Tell people about where they can find you, and you also have an event coming up, right?

Dr.Mario Martin:                Yes. That’s gonna be in April, it’s gonna be in Costa Rica. It’s at a spa. It’s one of those integrated spas called Rhythmia. I’m gonna be there for five days. It’s a beautiful place in the rainforest in Costa Rica, and it’s on my website. It’s Biocognitive.com, is the website.

Then, Facebook, Mind, Body, Culture or Dr. Mario Martinez. There’s a lot of information. Of course the book’s ‘The Mind Body Self’ and ‘The Mind Body Code.’ Oh, ‘The Mind Body Self’ was number one, two weeks ago in psychology at Amazon.

Trevor:                                      Great. Fantastic. Congratulations.

Dr.Mario Martin:                It dropped to number four now but that’s okay.

Trevor:                                      Great, alright. We’ll put up links to these things under your podcast interview on the website.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Thank you. Thank you. Stay in touch. It’s a pleasure meeting you.

Trevor:                                      Yes, thank you so much, Mario. It’s been fantastic.

Dr.Mario Martin:                Thank you, have a great day.

Trevor:                                      I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Mario Martinez. I got some great information about how you can live a longer, healthier life. To learn more about Mario, you can go to the spadoctor.com, go to the podcast page with his interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there.

While you’re there, I invite you to join the Spa Doctor community, and you could also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. And, also I invite you to go theskinquiz.com, it’s a free online quiz I put together to help you figure out what messages your skin might be telling you about your health. What root causes might be holding you back from having that healthy life, the skin that you wanna have. Just go to theskinquiz.com it’s free and takes just a few moments.

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And, I’ll see you next time on The Spa Doctor podcast.