Episode 78

The Stress Psychologist: Stress Is Silently Aging You Faster | Dr. Stephen Sideroff

58:46 October 27, 2026 By Dr. Ravi Kumar MD
Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music Pocket Casts YouTube

Show Notes

Picture a lion charging out of the tall grass. You run, you escape, and a couple of minutes later your body relaxes. Now imagine the lion never stops chasing you. Today it’s the unpaid bill, the unending inbox, the meeting you’re dreading. Your stress response was built for a short sprint followed by rest, and for most of us it never gets the rest.

Dr. Stephen Sideroff is a psychologist at UCLA who has spent more than four decades studying stress and how to retrain the nervous system. He is the author of The 9 Pillars of Resilience, and he defines resilience in a refreshingly simple way: it is the balance between stress and recovery. The sympathetic branch of the nervous system mobilizes us for a challenge; the parasympathetic branch lets us recover and restore what we used. The problem is that we over mobilize for stresses we can neither fight nor run from, then skip the recovery and go straight to the next stress.

When that becomes chronic, Dr. Sideroff says, your range literally shrinks. You lose access to the deeper places of calm, and one of the first signals is trouble sleeping, which he calls the canary in the coal mine. Because these dysregulated patterns are cumulative, his advice is to take heed of that first signal and build a daily recovery practice, whether that’s a relaxation exercise, meditation, or biofeedback.

Then he makes his biggest claim. In his paper “Stress, the Master Hallmark of Aging,” he argues that every one of the roughly 12 hallmarks of aging, from telomeres to mitochondria to inflammation, is impacted by stress. Stress speeds up aging, and aging is the number one risk factor for nearly every disease. He walks through what that looks like in practice: digestion shutting down during a stressful business lunch, a hippocampus that can no longer put the brake on the stress response, and a prefrontal cortex that loses its ability to inhibit. Ravi adds a neurosurgeon’s view of the hippocampus, which relies on insulin sensitive GLUT4 receptors, and explains how a stressed, inflamed hippocampus can become insulin resistant and struggle to consolidate memories. They also cover the stress and testosterone seesaw, and Dr. Sideroff’s framing that the mind body is always choosing between “defend and protect” and “heal, maintain, and grow,” with danger always winning.

Importantly, Dr. Sideroff wants everyone to start from this: it’s not your fault. There is an evolutionary mismatch between the world our stress response was built for and the one we live in, and a developmental mismatch, where the survival lessons we learned as children become the inner voice we hear 24/7. That voice is the focus of his first pillar, your relationship with yourself. He borrows from John Gottman’s research on couples, where healthy relationships run about 20 positive interactions for every negative one, and asks you to check your own personal Gottman ratio with yourself.

The conversation closes with all nine pillars, a breathing rhythm of about six breaths a minute that synchronizes your heart, breathing, and nervous system, the idea of a healthy internal parent, and a reminder that if you’ve taken even one step, you are already on the path.

Episode Resources

In this episode, you will discover:

  • What resilience actually is: The balance between sympathetic activation and parasympathetic recovery, and why staying in that balance makes you more adaptive
  • Why your stress response misfires today: The fight or flight system that saved our ancestors from predators now fires at bills, inboxes, and meetings you can’t fight or run from
  • How chronic stress shrinks your range: Activating again and again without recovery cuts off access to deeper calm
  • The canary in the coal mine: Why trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping well is often the first sign you’re out of balance
  • Stress as the master hallmark of aging: Dr. Sideroff’s case that stress impacts every one of the roughly 12 hallmarks of aging
  • Why stress wrecks digestion: Your body shuts down the digestive system exactly when a stressful lunch needs it running
  • What chronic stress does to your memory center: How the hippocampus loses neurogenesis and its ability to put the brake on the stress response
  • The insulin resistant hippocampus: Ravi explains GLUT4 receptors and why a stressed, inflamed hippocampus struggles to consolidate memories
  • Inflammation and inflammaging: Why acute inflammation is healthy and chronic stress driven inflammation is not
  • Defend and protect versus heal, maintain, and grow: How the mind body allocates limited energy, and why danger always wins
  • The stress and testosterone seesaw: When stress goes up, testosterone goes down
  • Why it’s not your fault: The evolutionary and developmental mismatches behind chronic stress
  • How childhood sets your danger alarm: Why lessons learned as a child become the inner voice you hear 24/7
  • Your personal Gottman ratio: Using John Gottman’s 20 to 1 ratio from couples research to measure how you talk to yourself
  • All nine pillars of resilience: From your relationship with yourself to flexibility, presence, and power
  • Six breaths a minute: A breathing rhythm of about four seconds in and six seconds out that brings heart rate variability into sync
  • The healthy internal parent: Love, compassion, acceptance, support, care, and joy as the template for your inner voice
  • Unfinished emotional business: Why an outsized reaction to something small is a signal worth paying attention to
  • Getting on the path: Why one step counts as success, and why acknowledging it helps rewire the brain

Key Takeaways

Resilience is recovery, not toughness. As Ravi puts it at the end, you can take a lot of stress. Resilience is how quickly you come back to balance after an acute stress is over.

Treat poor sleep as an early warning. Dr. Sideroff calls it the canary in the coal mine. Dysregulation is cumulative, so the time to restore balance is when you first notice the signal.

Build a daily recovery practice. Meditation, a relaxation exercise, biofeedback, or slow breathing at about six breaths a minute all retrain the nervous system toward calm.

Stress shows up far beyond your mood. Digestion, memory, inflammation, hormones, and the pace of aging itself are all pulled along by chronic stress.

Start with how you talk to yourself. Notice the language you use, ban words like “stupid,” and aim for a ratio of kind to harsh thoughts closer to 20 to 1 than 5 to 1.

Lead with compassion and acceptance. When you make a mistake, compassion comes first. Accepting where you are right now is the fastest way to get where you want to go.

Take one step and call it a win. You can’t work on all nine pillars at once. If you’ve taken a step, you’re on the path, and acknowledging that is part of what makes the change stick.

Transcript

[00:00 –> 00:12] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. To prepare yourself for today’s episode, I want you to do this. Picture yourself on the savannah. A lion charges out of the tall grass. Your heart pounds.

[00:12 –> 00:33] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Your muscles flood with fuel, and you run. You run like you’ve never run before, because you know your life depends on it. A couple of minutes later, it’s all over. The lion is gone, and your body relaxes. Now, flash forward to modern life, imagine that lion never stops chasing you.

[00:33 –> 00:49] Dr. Ravi Kumar: It’s the unpaid bill, the unending inbox, the meeting you’re dreading. Your body keeps mobilizing resources to survive this predator that actually isn’t there, And your body never relaxes and never recharges.

[00:49 –> 00:55] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Every one of the hallmarks of aging are impacted by stress.

[00:55 –> 01:11] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Welcome to the Dr Kumar Discovery. My name’s Dr. Ravi Kumar. And my guest today is Dr. Stephen Sideroff, a psychologist at UCLA who has spent more than four decades studying stress and how to retrain the nervous system.

[01:11 –> 01:49] Dr. Ravi Kumar: He’s the author of The Nine Pillars of Resilience. We’ll talk about why resilience is really the balance between stress and recovery, why Dr. Sideroff believes stress speeds up every hallmark of aging, what happens to literally every system in your body when that figurative lion never leaves, and a simple breathing rhythm that tells your nervous system that it’s safe. This show is for informational purposes only, and this show is also separate from my role as assistant professor at UNC. All right, let’s get into it.

[01:51 –> 01:55] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Dr. Sideroff, thanks so much for joining me on the show. It’s great to have you here.

[01:55 –> 01:59] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: My pleasure. I always enjoy talking about these subjects.

[02:00 –> 02:21] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Well, so the… Today’s topic is something that touches, like, literally every single person who’s listening to this episode, whether they know it or not. And I think maybe the best way to start off would be to just ask you, what is resilience, and why is our stress response maladapted to our current evolutionary situation?

[02:22 –> 02:58] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Well, the basic ingredient here is our nervous system. And our nervous system has two branches. One is the sympathetic activation branch. So anytime there’s a demand placed on us, any source, it activates the sympathetic response, and we prepare to deal with whatever the challenge is, whatever the stress is. One of the first problems is that the way we prepare for it is by mobilizing our fight or flight response.

[02:58 –> 03:28] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: That’s our response to stress. It’s our response to survival that we still have based on the evolutionary process. And we have the same one that our hunter gatherer ancestors have. So this is the first challenge for all of us, is for everybody to think about the stresses that you deal with. Worrying about a bill to be paid, time pressure, a meeting that you have that, you know, is a little scary for you.

[03:28 –> 04:02] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: All of these activate our stress response, and that’s our fight or flight response. So our body’s mobilized to either fight the danger, what we interpret as the danger, or run from it. But again, how many of you in the audience have stresses in your life that could be handled by either fighting them or running from them? Very few, if any. And so that’s the first issue that we have is that we actually over mobilize for the kinds of stresses that we have.

[04:03 –> 04:35] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And our bodies are designed to be very efficient. That means that everything we do requires energy, the mobilization of our body, but we over mobilize. So we use more energy than we need to. And that’s a problem because we don’t have unlimited resources, unlimited amounts of energy. So that’s why we have the second part of our nervous system, the parasympathetic recovery branch.

[04:35 –> 05:14] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So you stress, you have a stress response, and then the body is designed to recover, take time to recuperate. And we have this kind of nice pattern if we keep these two in balance. We activate and use up our resources, and we recover, and we recover those resources. But if people could think about their day and realize that if it’s anything like my day, we go from one stress to another and another and another. And so we stretch the resources of our bodies in many different ways.

[05:15 –> 06:04] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: This becomes chronic, and it takes us out of this place of balance, and that is resilience. Resilience is when we stay in this place of balance, where we recognize that when we stress ourselves, when we engage in the sympathetic activation, that we need to take time to recover. And the more we’re able to stay in this place of balance, the more resilient we are. The more adaptive we are, the more we adjust and recover and stay in this place of balance. So that’s the best definition of balance, is that the resources we use up, we find the opportunities and the techniques, such as a relaxation exercise, such as a meditation, to restore this place of balance.

[06:05 –> 06:15] Dr. Ravi Kumar: I’m super excited about a new app that I’ve developed called Brain Gamer, braingamer.app. That’s braingamer.app.

[06:16 –> 06:33] Dr. Ravi Kumar: It’s an app that I’ve designed to intentionally exercise the different domains of your brain and your thinking. It’s super fun, and it’s very intentional. I’d love for you to check it out. Just go to braingamer.app and give it a shot. Given our modern lifestyle, is there a way to do that?

[06:33 –> 06:34] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Are there strategies for doing that?

[06:35 –> 07:07] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Yes, absolutely. Although it takes real intention. It takes real effort, intention, time, and awareness. So it means, number one, if you think about, again, the nervous system, and you think about baseline, and then you think about how stress activates the nervous system, and you think about how a relaxation exercise turns down that activation. So we have a range.

[07:07 –> 07:39] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Baseline, activate, recover, right? And so one of the things that happens when we are continually activating without the recovery, the first thing that happens is our range literally shrinks. It doesn’t shrink like this. It shrinks like this. And we lose the ability to go to the deeper places of calm and relaxation.

[07:40 –> 08:11] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And if people in the audience right now checked in with their bodies, they may notice tension one way or the other. And we begin to develop symptoms. One of the first that people notice as a result of this imbalance and the shrinking of the range of our abilities is difficulty with sleep, either with being able to fall asleep, stay asleep, or at least the quality of our sleep. And that’s like the canary in the coal mine. What’s going on here?

[08:11 –> 09:01] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And so that’s one of the important messages to your audience is to, when you get some kind of a signal from your body that says you’re out of balance, take heed, wake up to that signal, and realize that you have to do something to restore, to readjust, to adapt, and get back into a place of balance. Because these dysregulated patterns, and that’s what we’re talking about, dysregulation, are additive. In other words, it’s cumulative over time. So whenever you realize that there’s something out of balance, take the time right now to restore balance. So it’s the intention to find and get into a place of balance.

[09:01 –> 09:55] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: One of the best things is if I’m continually activating and I don’t take much time to go in the other direction, create some type of relaxation practice that you do on a daily basis. A simple relaxation exercise, meditation, biofeedback. This is my fourth pillar of resilience, which is physical balance and mastery. And you need to compensate for all the times that you’re sending your nervous system in this direction by literally finding a way to keep retraining, literally retraining your nervous system to go down in this direction. There are a few first steps, but that’s definitely one of them, to have some kind of a practice in which you’re telling your body, you’re telling your nervous system, hey, we need to relax, we need to recover.

[09:56 –> 10:33] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: For all those people out there who are more interested in say performance than your health, or you feel like, okay, for the time being, I’ll substitute my health for performance. It’s important to realize that what I’m talking about is not only important with regard to your health, it’s also important with regard to performance. It’s also important in regard to how well you think, how well your cognitive processes work, because they require the same kind of balance that I’m talking about as our health.

[10:33 –> 11:00] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. And I think that’s an important concept I want to come back to, is that these athletes, their stress might not be a boss that’s yelling at them or a relationship that’s bad. It might be overworking trying to train for this, you know, this thing that they’re they’re trying to be an elite athlete at. Tell me this, though. I wanna know what happens to the body and the mind when you are in this continuous state of stress and you’re not recovering.

[11:00 –> 11:08] Dr. Ravi Kumar: What what kind of things would people see? Because I think your answer is gonna surprise a lot of people that there’s a lot more than just a mental change.

[11:09 –> 11:35] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Right, right. And by the way, I’ve worked with Olympic athletes, professional athletes, collegiate athletes, and they realize the points that I’m making. The ones that I’ve worked with have found that when they have trained themselves to be in this place of balance, they perform better. They perform better under stress. They perform better in pressure situations.

[11:35 –> 12:17] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So it’s been validated in those kinds of environments as well. So last year I published a paper in the International Journal of Contemporary and Internal Medicine, and the title of that paper was, The Master Hallmark of Aging. So, some people may be aware that in the medical community, there are approximately 12 hallmarks of aging. Physiological, physical signals that indicate how your body is aging. There are things called telomeres at the ends of our DNA that unravel with time.

[12:18 –> 12:57] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: There are mitochondria in all of ourselves that don’t function as well over time, etcetera, etcetera. Every one of the hallmarks of aging are impacted by stress. In other words, stress speeds up the aging process. Now, I don’t care what illness you want to talk about, the number one risk factor for just about every illness is aging. And so you connect the dots here.

[12:58 –> 13:29] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Stress speeds up aging. Aging is the number one risk factor for just about every disease. And so if people are having digestive problems, a good possibility is part of that is due to stress. Because think of it, you’re at work, you’re working hard, and you sit down to have lunch, but you’re still thinking about your problems. You might even be having a business lunch.

[13:30 –> 14:21] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And so you’re eating a meal, but your mind body is saying, because of the stress you’re under, there’s danger. The body wants to go into fight or flight that I talked about before, mobilization, but your body needs something very different. Your body needs calmness and peace because when you’re under stress, your body wants to shut down the digestive system. And this is why we have so much digestive related problems, because we’ve got our body’s systems screwed up. When we need our bodies to be digesting food, we’re shutting down the digestive system, as an example.

[14:21 –> 14:54] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: If you’re having difficulty concentrating, that’s usually a stress distraction process and problem. And so when you’re under stress, again, your brain doesn’t function as well. There are a couple of areas of the brain that are particularly impaired as a result of chronic stress. One is the hippocampus. The hippocampus is instrumental in so many different primary functions of the mind body.

[14:55 –> 15:37] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Number one, it’s one of the primary areas for neurogenesis, generating new nerve cells, and that becomes impaired. But the interesting thing is one of the things that happens in the hippocampus is that when our stress response is activated, the hippocampus steps in and applies a brake to the stress response as a healthy mechanism. So it modulates the stress response. With stress, hippocampus is impaired. Our ability to modulate the very stress response that we’re talking about becomes impaired as well.

[15:38 –> 16:07] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And it also has important functions around memory and learning as well. The other area is the prefrontal cortex that becomes impaired. The prefrontal cortex is involved in all of our executive function. But one of the other primary functions of the prefrontal cortex is inhibition. It inhibits a lot of other things that with stress, it doesn’t do the same level of inhibition.

[16:07 –> 16:31] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And so again, we get a nervous system that becomes more and more out of control, out of balance. And so we notice this in emotional dysregulation, etcetera, etcetera. So anything that someone is recognizing as a problem, stress is probably an important contributor to that.

[16:31 –> 16:39] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. No, I think that’s fantastic. What about the connection between stress and inflammation in the body? Is there a direct connection there?

[16:40 –> 17:03] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Absolutely. So again, inflammation is one of the 12 hallmarks of aging. But stress also does that because think about it from an evolutionary perspective. The stress response occurs when there’s life threatening danger. Whenever that happens, the body wants to be prepared.

[17:04 –> 17:34] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: It perceives a danger. And one of the ways that we address injury is by creating inflammation, healthy inflammation, acute inflammation, to send what’s needed to a part of the body that’s injured, etcetera. Well, inflammation is part of the stress response. It’s okay if it’s acute. You have the stress response and then you pull back from it.

[17:34 –> 17:48] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: But if you’re going from one stress to the next, chronic stress, that’s where the problem occurs. It fosters greater levels of inflammation, which then has all kinds of other impacts on the body.

[17:49 –> 18:25] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. And I think that’s a really fascinating connection because inflammation and aging are so strongly tied. Like you said, it was one of the pillars of longevity or of aging. And there’s this term called inflammaging, right, where you’re inflamed and the tissues age quicker because of the stress that chronic inflammation puts on them. And one really unique thing about the hippocampus, which, like you said was our memory processing center, is that it has these GLUT4 receptors that bring glucose into the cell.

[18:25 –> 19:00] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And the rest of the brain mostly runs GLUT1 and GLUT3 receptors. But the GLUT4 receptor is very responsive to insulin. So insulin attaches to the insulin receptor, it activates a protein that brings GLUT4 up to the surface. And when you’re under high load of energy utilization, which the hippocampus often is, it activates these GLUT4 receptors, it gets the glucose in, it performs the work. Now, if you’re basically stressed and inflamed, you become insulin resistant in the hippocampus.

[19:01 –> 19:22] Dr. Ravi Kumar: You can’t basically consolidate memories properly or process memories properly. I think anyone’s noticed this. When you’re stressed, you’re like, God, I can’t remember that thing that happened just today or the day before or that we were just talking about. And I think that’s part of this problem with energy utilization in the hippocampus directly related to stress.

[19:23 –> 20:13] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Absolutely. A couple of years ago, I hosted a summit on longevity and it was called The Body Mind Approach to Longevity, because we recognized what you’re just talking about and its importance. And I think the key of what we’re talking about here is that stress throws the body out of balance, and we can identify all the different ways that then cascades down into problem after problem. Because when the nervous system in the body is dysregulated, every function of the body becomes impaired. And the more dysregulation, the greater the impairment.

[20:14 –> 20:44] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And as I said earlier, it’s a snowballing effect. One thing affects the next, the next, affects the next. Another simple way of thinking about this, which I like to use, is that your mind body is always making choices about where to send its energy because it’s not unlimited. So there are internal uses of that energy. And then as we engage with the world, are external uses of that energy.

[20:44 –> 21:07] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: But there’s two basic choices that the mind body is making. Do I send the energy into defend and protect, or do I send the energy into heal, maintain, and grow? That’s the dichotomy. Danger supersedes everything else because survival, we’re designed to survive. That’s number one.

[21:07 –> 21:50] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Nothing else is important if we don’t survive. And so defend and protect will always take priority. But today, the things that we see as danger are in many cases, just our interpretation of events based on our history, based on our childhood experience. So for example, if our childhood was dangerous, stressful, if we couldn’t trust things in our environment, then we grow up with an expectation of danger. So even when danger isn’t there, we’re hypervigilant.

[21:50 –> 22:05] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: We’re on the lookout for where danger is. And it doesn’t matter if the danger is real or not, there or not. If we’re anticipating it, we’re sending our body in to defend and protect. What does that mean? It means the mind body is making a choice.

[22:05 –> 22:23] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Well, I can’t send energy to my kidneys to properly filter blood because I have to go in to defend and protect. Your mind body is making those basic kinds of decisions moment by moment.

[22:24 –> 22:48] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Yeah. It’s fascinating because… And in the in the acute time period, say you’re, you know, you’re running from danger, that makes a ton of sense, diverting that energy away from these other functions so you can survive. But right now, you spread that stress over years, and the body starts to fall apart because you’re not reinvesting in these maintenance things that we need.

[22:48 –> 23:03] Dr. Ravi Kumar: I mean, I think a great example is testosterone. When stress goes up, testosterone goes down. It’s like on a seesaw, perfect seesaw. And that makes sense, right? If you’re stressed, if you’re running from danger, the last thing you’re gonna be thinking about is procreating, right?

[23:03 –> 23:21] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Creating the proper body habitus to procreate. Right. I mean, but you see the same thing with thyroid, testosterone, you know, digestion. It’s all perfectly linked. Our body is such a amazing machine at designing and controlling these things.

[23:21 –> 23:30] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And we just take this modern day evolutionary mismatch and we put on top of a body that was evolved for a different environment, and we get these problems.

[23:31 –> 24:23] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Yeah. You know, it’s important for people to realize that the place you want to begin is to realize it’s not your fault. You know, people hear what we’re talking about, and people hear that they’re not doing the right thing or their body’s out of balance, and they feel like, oh, there’s something wrong with me, or I’m not doing a good job. First, it’s important to remind everybody that we all have this problem, and that there are some structural factors in our lives that have resulted in this problem. We’ve mentioned the evolutionary mismatch between the environment in which our, stress response developed and the environment that we live in today.

[24:24 –> 24:58] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: We’ve gone way, way, way past in terms of our environment from the environment that we adapted to. And in fact, we’re moving further and further away with all of the technological changes in our society. And everybody listening will recognize how things just keep speeding up. Well, want you to realize that when things keep speeding up, we’re getting further and further away from where our biology is. Okay?

[24:58 –> 25:39] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So on the one hand, it’s not your fault, but on the other hand, it’s what you’re living with, and you either pay attention, do something about it, or run the risks. But there are other mismatches, and there are a couple I want to emphasize here, Ravi, that are so important. There’s a developmental mismatch. So again, just like with the biological, with our emotional, we adapted to our childhood environment. And the lessons we learned as a child were our original survival lessons.

[25:39 –> 26:10] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Okay? How do I adapt? You know, we’re not consciously thinking about this, but these are our instincts to adapt to our childhood environment. And that means really basically adapting to our primary caregivers. Because as a dependent child, what’s most important to us is that we are well connected to the source of our survival, food, lodging, etcetera, right?

[26:11 –> 26:30] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So we adapt to their rules. We adapt to the way they see the world. We adapt to what they think is important. These go in on the basic neurological levels, creating our neural networks, our default networks. Okay?

[26:30 –> 27:15] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And so they go in very deeply, very strongly, but then we lose some of our ability to adapt. And this is so interesting. We adapt to that environment, but because it works, and even for the people who get out of childhood and feel like it was a terrible childhood, from a neurological perspective, whatever we did and whatever we learned helped us survive that childhood. And for that reason, we hold onto those lessons very tightly, and then they get in the way of new lessons. And this is my first pillar of resilience, and that’s our relationship with ourselves.

[27:17 –> 27:48] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: The voice we hear 24/7 is the voice that developed out of those lessons of childhood. We didn’t go out and sample hundreds and hundreds of families and go around the world to see what’s the best way to adapt. We adapted to that environment and we thought that’s the world. Okay? So a big part of resilience is recognizing that we have to challenge those lessons and come up with better lessons.

[27:49 –> 27:53] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So can you give us a practical example of how you would do that?

[27:54 –> 28:32] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Sure. Sure. So for example, a lot of people will have part of their relationship with themselves, various negative judgments about ourselves in terms of what we can do and can’t do. And so we may be faced with having to do something, and our first response may be, oh, I can’t do that because of our relationship with ourselves, how we see ourselves, our identity. As soon as we say, I don’t know if I could do that, we already are going down the wrong path.

[28:32 –> 29:18] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: We’re already making it more difficult. And so we have to begin identifying some of the messages we give to ourselves about judgment, around negativity, around really, finding things in the world difficult versus being a challenge. This is a first step in paying attention to how you talk to yourself that may either support you going in the right direction or the wrong direction. So the key elements of a healthy internal voice. And so the first, the first step is to realize that what will serve you the best is a healthy relationship with yourself.

[29:18 –> 29:32] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: An example is if you make a mistake, a lot of people, when they make a mistake, they’re hard on themselves. They beat themselves up. You shouldn’t have done that. Why, you know, you got it wrong again. You can’t do anything right, etcetera, etcetera.

[29:32 –> 29:59] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Or even subtle versions of that. When we say that to ourselves, we are undermining ourselves. If we make a mistake, first of all, the mistake typically has cost us something. Right? So the first thing you wanna do when you make a mistake, and this may be counterintuitive, is to have compassion toward yourself.

[29:59 –> 30:27] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: You made a mistake and now you’ve made life more difficult for yourself. Have some compassion that your life is now more difficult because of that mistake. So compassion is one of the key elements of a healthy relationship with yourself. You want to come from a place of love, compassion, and another key is acceptance. So you want to be accepting of yourself.

[30:27 –> 31:13] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: It doesn’t mean you like everything about yourself, but you want to be accepting in the sense that, well, this is how I am right now. Let me be okay with it, even as I’m trying to get better. Even as I’m trying to minimize mistakes, even as I’m trying to learn to be a better person. Let me start by being accepting and loving of myself, because wherever you want to get to, that’s the fastest way of getting there. So this is the first piece of the whole puzzle of resilience is your relationship with yourself and working on developing a healthy relationship with yourself.

[31:14 –> 31:37] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: You know, there’s something called the paradoxical theory of change, Ravi. And it says that we can’t be in two places at the same time. And if you think about your life and your journey, at any one time you’re somewhere along this path. Let’s say you’re here. Most people when they’re here feel they should be over here.

[31:38 –> 31:51] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: I shouldn’t have made that mistake. Why didn’t I do that better? I should have done it better. We’re always giving ourself messages that we should be here when we’re here. Well, what’s the underlying message?

[31:52 –> 32:34] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: The underlying message is, well, must be something wrong with me if I’m here and not here. And so that’s why the first step in a healthy approach to life is accepting where you’re at. So you’re not undermining yourself by feeling you should be further along. I want to get there, but the fastest way to get here is by accepting that right now I’m here. So that’s an important lesson for everybody is coming from a place of love, acceptance, and caring, and compassion as you think about yourself.

[32:34 –> 32:48] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. And that’s fantastic advice. And my thought is that when people will hear that, they’ll say, that sounds amazing, Dr. Sideroff, but how do I actually do that? Is there a mantra I have to say, or do I need to…

[32:48 –> 32:55] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Is there a certain practice I need to do to be less hard on myself, to give myself that healthier internal dialogue?

[32:57 –> 33:18] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So I suggest to everybody that you start paying attention to how you treat yourself. That’s the first step. The first step is an awareness of the language you use with yourself. You call yourself stupid. That should be banned from your language as an example.

[33:19 –> 33:59] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So the first step is to monitor. You know, there’s a psychologist at the University of Washington who’s done a lot of work around couples work, John Gottman. And he has a studio where he have couples come in and there are cameras all around, they monitor their behavior. And one of the important things that he found was that the healthy relationships are ones in which there’s a 20:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions, 20:1. And when that ratio comes down to about 5:1, the relationship is in trouble.

[34:00 –> 34:33] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So one of the things I advise everybody listening here to do is to start looking at what I refer to as your own personal Gottman ratio. You know, am I giving myself 20 to 1 positive to negative, or is it closer to 5 to 1? Or for many people, it’s more in the opposite direction. They’re giving themselves more negative than positive. So yes, it’s paying attention, noticing, finding your starting point.

[34:33 –> 35:33] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Where am I in this ratio? With the first goal of being more loving and positive towards yourself. The other, suggestion I have is that if you’re upset about anything, check in with the messages you’re giving yourself, because I guarantee that one of the reasons is you’re coming from a more negative internal voice, giving yourself a message about what you can or can’t do, or what danger might be out there based on those messages. And then take a moment to imagine the healthy internal voice talking to you and notice what that he or she would say coming from a loving, accepting, compassionate place. And a lot of people, when they just do that exercise, find that they start treating themselves differently because they realize that they’ve been treating themselves so negatively.

[35:35 –> 35:56] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Well, seems like a very deliberate way to go about it. And I think, yeah, understanding and seeing where you are in a lot of places, including this aspect, is a fantastic starting point. And oftentimes, feel like it gets you almost 70% or 80% of the way there, just having a healthy perspective on where you’re actually at. Absolutely.

[35:56 –> 36:02] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So that was the first pillar of resistance. And you’ve defined nine Resilience. Resilience. Resilience. Sorry.

[36:02 –> 36:15] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Sorry. Resilience. Thank you. So that’s the first of nine pillars of resilience that you have defined. What are the other ones, and what are some of the ones maybe we can focus on that are very practically applicable?

[36:16 –> 36:46] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Yes, of course. So I want to first emphasize that in developing this model of resilience, I looked at everything that impacts our ability to be in this place of balance. Everything that goes into our ability to adapt to new circumstances, to make adjustments. And so the first three have to do with relationship. We’ve talked about the first is your relationship with yourself.

[36:46 –> 37:24] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: The second is relationship with others. And that’s being able to discriminate to begin with a healthy relationship from a toxic relationship, one that’s supportive versus one that’s stressful. Your ability to set boundaries so people don’t take advantage of you. And when you’re able to set boundaries, you feel safe. You feel a lot more safe going into environments with other people because when you know you could set a healthy boundary, you’re less worried about being taken advantage of or dangerous.

[37:24 –> 37:50] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: The third is your relationship with something greater. This could be your spirituality. It could be having purpose and meaning in your life, giving service, something that connects you to the larger community. A sense of isolation is one of the biggest problems of our day. And so it’s important for having connections and relationships that support you.

[37:50 –> 38:15] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: The next three have to do with organismic balance and mastery. We’ve touched on the fourth pillar, physical balance and mastery, and that’s being in a state of balance. And when you’re thrown off of balance, life is always throwing us off balance. Stresses are always in our lives. It’s how well do we recover that place of balance.

[38:16 –> 38:44] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: The fifth is mental balance and mastery. And this is our mindset. And this isn’t one that would be important to talk about because it’s about having a growth rather than a fixed mindset. So a lot of people, when they’re challenged in life, feel like, oh, well, I just can’t do that, or it’s not me, or I’m not capable. With a growth mindset, you handle that in a very different way.

[38:44 –> 39:09] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: You handle it by saying, what do I need to learn? How do I need to grow to handle that situation? Growth mindset fosters resilience. It’s also about a positive mindset going to what’s the potential positive outcome rather than the catastrophic or negative one. The sixth pillar is emotional balance and mastery.

[39:10 –> 39:58] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And so we have a mind body that’s designed to want to get to completion on anything that we start. I’m old enough to remember when cigarette commercials were on TV and radio, and there was a Winston commercial that went, Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. And they repeated that jingle maybe 15, 20 times during a 30 second commercial. But the last time they did it, they went, Winston tastes good like a… And they didn’t finish it because they know that our brain is going to spend the rest of our day going over that jingle trying to finish it.

[39:58 –> 40:34] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And so think about it. If emotions come up, they need to be addressed and dealt with so you can let them go. But what happens with many of us is emotions build up, but then we don’t have the outlet. We may feel like we can’t approach that person. They may get angry at us, or I can’t talk to this one about it, but we wind up carrying unfinished emotional business that actually drives stress, drives us into greater and greater levels of stress.

[40:34 –> 40:48] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So emotional balance and mastery is so important. The last three have to do with how we engage in the world. Seven is presence. And there’s two directions for presence. One is, am I aware of my surroundings?

[40:48 –> 41:18] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Do I notice so that I best take care of myself? I once had a client referred to me after she was in an automobile accident. And she came in and she had some emotional trauma from it. And toward the end of the interview, mentioned to me, oh, by the way, you know, this is my sixth accident in the last few years. And then the kicker came, she said, and I wasn’t responsible for any of them.

[41:19 –> 41:48] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And I was thinking, how do you get into six accidents in a few years and not be responsible for any of them? And then when she walked out of my office, she bumped into a desk that I had to the side. And I realized she was not present. She was not fully aware of her environment. And so when a car started to get in her way, she was not present enough to react and move away from it.

[41:48 –> 42:08] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And so many of us are so up in our heads thinking about a problem, what we have to do, that we’re not fully present. The other direction of presence is your presence. What’s the energy that you’re putting out into the world? Is it a positive energy? Is it a caring energy?

[42:08 –> 42:32] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Or is it a defensive? I like to say that we always are either coming from an open heart or a protected heart. And most people come from a protected heart. Now, here’s another interesting thing for all of us to think about. There’s a physiological process called heart rate variability.

[42:33 –> 43:03] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: You may have even talked about it on your program. It’s a very good indication of health. And heart rate variability has to do with how our heart rate varies as we breathe and for other reasons. That when we breathe in, we literally activate the sympathetic branch of our nervous system and our heart rate speeds up. When we exhale, we activate the parasympathetic and our heart rate slows down.

[43:03 –> 43:57] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Now, if you go into, and this is important, if you go into a breathing pattern of approximately six breaths per minute, So that’s about four seconds in, six seconds out. It’s a little longer for some other people where it’s more five and six. But if you get into that breathing rhythm, you synchronize your nervous system, your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system. Now, we now know that when you’re in a place of positive emotional state, gratitude, for example, you facilitate this optimal functioning of your mind body, heart rate variability. When you’re in a negative emotional state, frustrated, angry, etcetera, that becomes chaotic.

[43:58 –> 45:01] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: That rhythm becomes, you lose that rhythm. Now, this may be something that you’re aware of, is that if you and I, Ravi, were standing right next to each other, you know, like within a foot of each other, and I put an electrode on your scalp and I monitored your electroencephalogram, your EEG, I would be able to pick up my heart rate pattern in your brain waves if we’re standing close enough. Now put what I just said all together. So I’m standing next to you and I’m frustrated and you’re having this feeling about being close to me, and maybe you don’t feel as comfortable. Well, I’m projecting my energy and you’re picking it up in ways that are subtle and you may not fully recognize, but you’re picking up something that tells you to maybe step a little further away versus if I’m coming from a loving place, you may have a totally different response to me.

[45:01 –> 45:46] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And I’m sure everybody in the audience knows of situations where you felt like, hey, I want to get closer to this person, and situations where you said, hey, I want to move further away. And so the energy we put out into the world has all kinds of implications and consequences in terms of the results we get in our lives. The eighth pillar is flexibility. And this is the ability to make adjustments because life doesn’t always work in the order we want it to work in. And so if there’s an obstacle in your path toward your goal, you want to have flexibility to either change the goal or change the path around the obstacle.

[45:47 –> 46:25] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Flexibility is also being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to have empathy, to know a situation from a different perspective, which adds to your ability to solve problems. And then finally, the ninth pillar, power, which I define as the ability to get things done. And within the ninth pillar is having courage. So a lot of times we’re stopped by fear to take action. You want to raise courage above the level of fear so you could still take that action.

[46:25 –> 47:19] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Setting goals, being able to focus, being persistent, being consistent, being able to concentrate, all these contribute to power, the ability to get things done. Now, the more you feel successful in getting things done in your life, you’re literally increasing your capacity. And the more you increase your capacity, the more you can handle stress and not be impacted. It’s like if a car’s going up a hill and it’s struggling, it could be struggling because it’s out of tune, dysregulation, like the body dysregulation we’ve been talking about, or it could have difficulty because the engine isn’t big enough. So if you have a bigger engine, it’s gonna handle that hill better.

[47:19 –> 47:55] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So the more you feel capable, the ninth pillar, the more you’ve increased your capacity and the more stress you can actually handle. So ultimately, and finally, me suggest that resilience pushes our performance curve in the positive direction. In other words, the more resilient you are, the more stress you can handle before it begins to cause problems. Yeah. You have the whole picture.

[47:56 –> 48:07] Dr. Ravi Kumar: That was awesome. I mean, that was the book. Read it for more detail. But that was a fascinating lecture on resilience. And I think you’ve got this so well thought out.

[48:07 –> 48:26] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So we talked about what the things you can do in the first pillar, and I think there’s some implied things that we can do throughout these different strategies to improve our resilience. But for instance, how can we become more capable? Is it by working on the other pillars, or are there certain things that we can do to become more powerful people in this world?

[48:27 –> 48:59] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Well, again, if we go back to pillar five, mental balance and mastery, We start by really adopting this notion of a growth mindset. Okay? So we have the capacity. I just talked about a car going up a hill and the size of its engine. We have the capacity to have a bigger and bigger engine, a bigger sense of our capacity, which allows us to handle stress much more readily.

[49:00 –> 49:36] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: It results in us being less impacted by stress because we’re doing that. But it starts with the two things we’ve already talked about, having a growth mindset and engaging with the world from that perspective. So one result of that, Ravi, is that when a problem occurs in our lives, than going, oh my goodness, do I have to handle that? Or we do it reluctantly. Instead, go, hey, this is a challenge that’s challenging me to grow.

[49:37 –> 50:11] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And the more I grow, the more resilient I get, and the better I handle the next challenge in my life. And it really works that way, that whenever you engage in a challenge, you’re learning something. And if you have that equation, challenge equals learning, learning equals growth, growth equals becoming more resilient, then you will embrace the challenges. This is an opportunity to grow. Now, you want to be careful.

[50:11 –> 50:49] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: You don’t want to, embrace a challenge that’s way beyond your capacity, but you do always want to embrace challenges that are just slightly beyond, that you’re capable of stretching to achieve because that’s where the greatest growth occurs. So next we go back to the first pillar and your relationship with yourself. You want to be striving to source yourself from the characteristics of a healthy internal parent. That’s the optimal. That’s the ideal.

[50:50 –> 51:11] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And whatever you’re doing here needs to be compared to this. And this is where you want to be heading. So the healthy internal parent comes from a place of love, compassion, acceptance, support, care, and joy. You need joy in there as well. Okay?

[51:11 –> 51:53] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So that would be the place to begin. The next is with the physical balance and mastery we’ve talked about, and that’s finding some practice that you engage in on a regular basis to restore your body’s ability to be in balance. And then the next one would be checking in and make sure you’re not carrying unfinished emotional business that can distract you, that can activate. When we’re carrying unfinished emotional business, for example, let’s say we’re carrying anger. Now it could be from yesterday, last month, or our childhood.

[51:53 –> 52:24] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: We will have a tendency when something happens in our lives for that to get triggered. And so we may have a bigger reaction than a situation requires. And that’s in fact a good way to notice if you’re carrying unfinished emotional business. If something small goes on and you have this big reaction, that’s a signal that it tapped into some unfinished business that you haven’t addressed. Those would be the ways to get started.

[52:24 –> 52:56] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Now, one of the things that happens with all of us is that we start to do something that, you know, it’s good, it’s taking us in the right path. But as soon as we start doing that, we go, oh, but I’m not doing this, and I’m not doing that, and I should be doing this. And immediately we become overwhelmed. We lose sight of the fact that number one, we can only do one thing at a time. And number two, we’re already doing something that’s a step forward.

[52:56 –> 53:18] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: It’s good for us. And so that’s why I developed this construct, this notion of the path. And the path is defined by my nine pillars of resilience. So you know how you can get on the path. You take steps based on working on any one of these nine pillars.

[53:19 –> 53:51] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: But here’s the key. If you take a couple of steps and it puts you on the path, if you then look and say, oh, I’m not doing this or this, you can remind yourself, wait a second, I am on the path. I’m doing something that is taking me in the right direction, and I can’t do everything all at the same time. So if I’m on the path, I’m succeeding. Today is a success because I took some steps that put me on the path.

[53:51 –> 54:20] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And rather than feeling I’m not doing enough, I’m getting it wrong because I’m not doing these other things, I will feel good about myself and my day will be considered a success. And that’s taking me in the right direction. And it’s very important when you’re going in the right direction to acknowledge it to yourself. And this is one of the keys to neuroplasticity. When you do something good, it’s not enough.

[54:21 –> 54:40] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: You have to acknowledge it to yourself. I’m doing something good. That’s what helps rewire the brain, is the celebration of what you’re doing that’s right. It’s letting your brain know, yes, it is right. We can appreciate it and we can try and replicate it the next time.

[54:42 –> 54:47] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: So acknowledging when you’re on the path is a very important part of being on the path.

[54:48 –> 55:14] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah, I think that’s a great, just general rule, you know? And when gives you perspective, puts your mind kind of back in balance, especially when you’re worried about all these things that, hey, am I on the path? And I I’ve, you know, that’s the first time I’m hearing that. But I feel like I’ve asked myself that before, and it’s put me at great ease. And in fact, I think maybe my, when I’m fretting, my wife will say, Well, you’re on the right path, Ravi.

[55:14 –> 55:31] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And that just that one statement kind of like relaxes me. So that is a fantastic, I love the way you look at this, Dr. Sideroff. And I think it’s very relatable, very understandable, and it’s a definable pathway to resilience, which is really neat and really cool.

[55:32 –> 55:33] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Thank you, thank you.

[55:33 –> 55:42] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So let me ask you this. If people want to learn more about you, I’d say first step is get the book and read it. You can buy it on Amazon.

[55:42 –> 55:48] Dr. Ravi Kumar: It’s called The Nine Pillars of Resilience. Where else can they get ahold of you or see more about what you do?

[55:49 –> 56:38] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Well, number one, my website is drstephensideroff.com. So if you go there, you will be able to take my resilience assessment. This is a great first step for all of you because it’s a brief questionnaire and you’re able to self score and you’re able to get your profile along these nine pillars showing you your strengths and weaknesses. So I would recommend that. But also, I have my own podcast called Quantum Leadership, where I interview exceptional leaders and look at their habit patterns, look at what they think is important in terms of the success in them becoming leaders.

[56:39 –> 56:46] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: And there’s a lot of other my articles there, a lot of my research is there, so those would be the places to get to start.

[56:47 –> 57:07] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay, so I’ll link to your book, to your website, and to your podcast in show notes. People can get ahold of you there. And it’s been fantastic. You are such a smart guy with a great perspective on the world and and on how to live a resilient life, which is really, in the end, what we all want. We all wanna be resilient.

[57:08 –> 57:15] Dr. Ravi Kumar: It makes us more powerful, more effective, happier. And thank you so much for giving us your perspective.

[57:15 –> 57:21] Dr. Stephen Sideroff: Absolutely, Ravi. Great interview. Thank you for your good questions, and I’ve enjoyed it very much.

[57:23 –> 57:30] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Thanks, Dr. Sideroff. Cheers. Okay, I loved that conversation with Dr. Sideroff, and I hope you did too.

[57:30 –> 57:52] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Here’s what I want you to walk away with. Resilience isn’t how much stress you can take, because you can actually take a lot of stress. Resilience is how quickly you come back to balance after that acute stress period is over. And Dr. Sideroff gave nine pillars for achieving improved resilience, which I thought were very insightful and very practical.

[57:53 –> 58:22] Dr. Ravi Kumar: You can take his free resilience assessment at drstephensideroff.com, that’s Stephen with a PH, so drstephensideroff.com, and his book, The Nine Pillars of Resilience, takes a much deeper dive. I’ll link both, plus his podcast Quantum Leadership, in the show notes. If this show has helped you, please do me a favor. Leave a comment, a rating, or a review, and share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. That helps the algorithm put us in front of more people.

[58:23 –> 58:34] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And, you know, the show is already reaching a ton of people. I just wanted to keep doing that and reach more and help more people. Okay, folks. Until next time. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and stay healthy.

[58:34 –> 58:35] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Cheers.

Get Dr. Kumar's free health protocols

Evidence-based playbooks from Dr. Ravi Kumar, MD, a board-certified neurosurgeon, plus a weekly research review. Enter your email and I'll send you the relevant protocol.

By subscribing, you agree to receive emails from The Dr Kumar Discovery. You can unsubscribe at any time. Privacy Policy