Principle number one, it’s a very simple one. It’s a principle of nutrition. Nutrition is an important thing, and allow me to share with you something that some of you might know, some of you might not know. But a member, the name of Dan Buettner, he teamed up with people from National Geographic, and the mission was to find out a group of people or peoples around the world who can demonstrate that they can live healthier physically and mentally. These are people who the norm was to achieve 100 years or older. So as soon as they found them, they named these zones around the world Blue Zones, and they found nine characteristics. I won’t share them with you, but I would like to share one which is related to this concept. One characteristic was that centenarian cultures and centenarian groups of people have the basis of their diet as beans. Crazy, isn’t it? I have an advantage in there; I’m originally from Mexico, and Mexicans have a lot of beans. I’m not 100% sure I will live to 100, but I’m hoping I will because, like I said, I believe this and I practice it. What they have found is that people who live more than 100 physically and who are physically and mentally able above the average also only consume flesh or meat products only five times a month. And it shouldn’t be a surprise because even just recently, maybe a couple of weeks ago, the National Council of Australia who talks about dieting has remodified the pyramid. I don’t know how many of you saw it, but at the bottom, the greatest amount of it is plant-based. So, the message is go plant-based, and that’s what they found these societies have embraced. So, principle number one is nutrition.
Principle number two shouldn’t be surprising. Principle number two is exercise. Now what we have found is that exercise is a matter of life. We cannot achieve optimal capacity if we don’t become active. There is a lot of research that I could share with you, but allow me, and perhaps believe, get out of here, perhaps research it, that exercise alone can have a great contribution to the diminishing of symptoms of depression and anxiety. It’s very simple: you exercise and you generate endorphins, good happy chemicals. You exercise regularly, and you will also generate the production of a neurotransmitter in your brain called serotonin, neuropathy, and dopamine. All of these are related to depression, Parkinson’s disease, and also Alzheimer’s disease. So, to actively participate in exercise will definitely contribute to achieving an optimal mental health that will set you and the community above the average and will reduce visits to people like me.
Principle number three, that will be water. Water is so important. Seventy percent of our bodies are made out of water. Eighty percent of our brains are made of components that are water. That’s a lot; that’s a high percentage. So, it shouldn’t be surprising again that to achieve optimal mental health we need water, perhaps more than what we utilize now. Let me share with you something: there are certain chemicals that we can only achieve by eating foods, certain types of food. We already talked about food; we didn’t go into specifics, but there are certain foods that we can consume. One of the certain types of food produces something or gives you something called tryptophan. Tryptophan is a substance that if it reaches the brain to good proportions will allow you to secrete more endo-serotonin. So, tryptophan is the raw material that the brain needs to produce serotonin. And you might be thinking, well, what does that have to do with water? You’re talking about food now, and I’m confused. What allow me to share with you why water is so important. The reason why it’s so important is because water is one of the elements that allow these things that you consume and these nutrients to travel to the brain. The key is simple; the formula is simple: more water, the more tryptophan goes to the brain, the more raw material we have to generate serotonin, and the happier you become. Some of the things that water can give you is a great clarity in your mind. But some of the things that it could give you if you lack intake of water is a reduced ability to be happier. People who do not consume enough water become more frustrated, they have less clarity of mind, and then it will affect as a default your mental health performance.
The next principle is sunshine. I will keep this one simple: we need the sun, and that is basically it. And there are three reasons that I can share with you why we need the sun, or at least a couple. One is, if we allow ourselves to intake sunshine on a regular basis, you can actually achieve a greater level of sleep; your sleep will be increased, it will be sounder, and you will feel refreshed next time. That by default will increase your capacity to learn, to memorize, and to concentrate. It’s very simple. Sunshine as well, believe it or not, can also have an impact on the level of pain that you might have physically. If anybody here or if anybody in the community has some pain, sunshine can decrease the level of pain that someone has. It’s amazing what sunshine can do if taken in the right amounts.
Let me share the next principle. This is a principle that is very important: temperance. I don’t know if you ever heard these words; not many people have. But allow me to share what this means. Temperance implies that we are to create and practice in our lifestyle schedule a balance, a balance that will set you up above the average. What that implies is we need to make sure that we allow ourselves to introduce certain habits and behaviors that will provoke and will allow you to have a better mental health performance. You might be thinking, well, can you explain a little bit more? Let me share with you something: our societies are run in such a way that we tend to take something that is bad and make it good, and sometimes, unfortunately, we take something that is good and make it bad. One example is something that happened in the 1950s. In the 1950s, someone realized, I think smoking is related to lung cancer. So, what people did in the 1950s is they introduced what we call the filter in the cigarette because the tar of the cigarette was related to lung cancer. Today we continue to know that smoking is one of the greatest causes of disease and death in our societies. So, it didn’t fix it. Another thing that we know that is harmful and we tend to embrace it is the use of alcoholic beverages. Australia reported in 2011 to 2012 that 19.7%—that’s a reasonable percentage—of relationship breakups, of interpersonal relationship breakups, occur as a result of an alcohol-related problem. And that doesn’t account for a psychiatric condition. That’s a high percentage. What alcohol can do to us is it can impair the frontal lobe cortex that allows us to make good and sound decisions. Research has shown us that consuming such substance increases our likelihood of cheating between 30 to 50 percent. Funny that because a lot of the times when we do business, there is always something like this involved, so we kind of need to prepare ourselves to go to break a good deal. But I’m not saying that everybody who does that is cheating, but the research and the numbers, that’s what they indicate.
Another harmful substance that decreases our mental capacity and our ability to deal with things such as depression and anxieties is coffee, caffeinated drinks. Caffeinated drinks that stress our nervous system, and they stress it so much that can increase the level of depression or depressive symptoms and also the level of anxiety. So, what basically temperance is, we need to learn how to abstain from certain things that might be harmful and perhaps utilize certain things that are good for us within measure. It’s creating a balance, and I think the picture describes that. It’s creating a balance in our life. It’s not only about what you drink or it’s also about what we do in general. If we work too much or too little, it can perturb our performance, or if we play too much or too little, it can also have an impact on our performance.
Another one is, I would like to share with you a story, which is perhaps an incredible story. In the 1919, that’s a year, in Eureka, California, a hospital was facing a great epidemic of flu, and it was getting out of control so much that the chief physician said, “I think we need to call the army. I don’t know; we don’t have space.” So, the army came, and in turn, they brought tents, coats, and some blankets, and so the overflowing hospital, all those patients that were getting the infection, were placed in these tents. And the only thing that they had apart from the blankets were hot water bottles to keep the feet warm. What they found is that the people who were in the tents were not dying as compared to the people that were in the hospital. Once someone realized what was happening, they turned down the heaters in the hospital, they opened the windows up, and they put heavy underwear on the patients, and the death rate diminished. The key today is spend time outdoors. When you think about it, many of these things are interrelated with each other. If you exercise unless you go to the gym, and that is okay too, but if you exercise outside, you get that air that you need to have. Scientifically, it just makes sense. You get oxygen, and oxygen cleanses your blood. The blood is the same blood that will come to your brain, and we want to create the best environment that we can have in our brain, in our systems to be able to create those happy feeling neurotransmitters. The challenge is spend time outside and open our homes, open the windows, let the sunshine, and let the air do what it’s intended to do, do what it was created to do.
Now, the next one is rest. I would like to emphasize something here. We live in a society that is very outcome driven. Unfortunately, we live in a society that indicates that for us to be able to succeed, we have to achieve the greater goal of whatever position you might be having. It’s a society that says I have to put the top-level man or woman down so that I can be that person eventually. And that creates a lot of stress. We live in a society when we expect many, many people, many children to succeed to the top they can, and we should expect such a thing, but sometimes we push so much that we lack in the amount of rest that we should have. One of the things that we know is that the idea that staying later at night is better because I achieved better is a fallacy. It’s nothing else but a self-deception. Some of you and I had lived that too before I got to know about these principles and practices, and some of you will know that or would have thought of, I stayed late at night because I seem to achieve a lot more in the middle of the night, it’s like amazing. But research shows otherwise. A group of people have been taken, and they have been exposed to an overnight, an all-nighter party kind of thing, no alcohol, no substances. The key was the only key isolated factor was to keep them awake for as long as you can, and then the next day do a critical test, a critical thinking test. Were compared to a group, a controlled group of people who had slept eight hours in the night, the results will be quite interesting for you to know, and I’ll share them with you now. You will be expecting this: the eight-night control group, the eight hours of sleep control group, performed better in the test of critical thinking. But the next thing you might not be thinking of, the all-nighter group performed worse, but they have a perception that they did better. And then another test, self-reported test reflective, showed that they not only had a perception that they performed better, but they were more confident in their work. Was the other people that slept nicely the night before, they performed better; they were less confident, but the results spoke for themselves. Rest can give you mental clarity, can help you to remember and memorize things clearly, can enhance your ability to be creative, to think objectively and analytically. Rest is an important thing that we must not forget if we want to achieve optimal mental health and go above the average.
The last one is trust. There is an author in the 1900s who said that the greatest need of this world is that of people who stand for the truth as the needle of a compass to the pole. It is the need of the world to have people who extend strong to principle even though the heavens fall. It’s quite an interesting concept, might be a bit poetic as well. But today, it’s very hard to develop trust in many things. When you think about it, I talk about rest, and we have that tendency to be wanting to achieve the ladder of success and for that sometimes we have to put someone else down, so it’s hard to trust many people. But what we found, what they have found, what these investigators at the beginning of my conversations, they found in terms of the people who live long, healthier, and happier is that they have three things in their lives. One, they have people they love, close, and they invest in that. Number two, they also have an amount of time that they spend with people who are like-minded, people like you who meet here to talk about like-minded things and perhaps different ideas to enhance our community. And number three, I lost it, maybe I didn’t sleep too well last night. I’m kidding, number three was they also showed that they met with regularity with those people that they resonate with. So number one, they got the parents, grandparents, and children close by. Number two, they met together. As a matter of fact, the research goes deeper, and they found that people who have some kind of faith and gather together at least four times a month reach or have a likelihood of reaching a higher expectancy of life of 14 years. In simple words, people who gather and have some similarities in faith four times a month, they can expect to live 14 times, 14 years longer. That’s just research. I appreciate the presentation before that talks about the meaning of life and just having a meaningful life and knowing what your life is, knowing why you wake up every morning can give you seven years, seven years extra. I would like you to think about this because today, even though it’s hard to believe in people and society, we need to achieve a sense of trust. This new strategy goes beyond and declares, or rather and emphasizes the idea that we can achieve a level of trust in a superior power. You can call it God or you can call it whatever you desire, something that gives you a sense of purpose. What we have found is that it decreases anxiety, increases motivation, and gives you a happier life.
And let us just summarize because you might forget what these are: New Start—nutrition, exercise, water, sunshine, temperance, rest, and trust in divine power. Today, my challenge for you is to pick three of these. You can do it even today and tomorrow. One, go to your GP, your friendly GP in town, and say, “GP, what can I do to exercise safely? Do I have any conditions that will impede my exercises?” And if you don’t, and if he can give you some a hand to be able to develop a good exercise program with the limits and the capacity that you currently have, exercise. Number two, don’t wait too long. Let’s network after here, but don’t wait too long to go to bed. Try to do eight to nine hours of sleep. She liked that. She wants to go. And number three, make commitments. Get those people you love, those people that you embrace, get a sense of purpose, and make a commitment. Today, New Start is something that I challenge you to practice, and if you want to practice and achieve a higher, an optimal mental health, a higher capacity, this can be yours today. You don’t have to go to the psychiatrist; you don’t have to go to a psychologist unless you have a condition that needs that professional input, but otherwise, you can achieve a higher capacity that will set you above the average.