The Secret to Living Beyond a 100 Years Old (& being happier) with Dr Mario Martinez

Content by: Dr Mario Martinez

Dr Mario Martinez

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Guy:  Get ready to strap yourself in, as our interview with this weeks awesome guest Dr Mario Martinez could quite possibly change the way you think about your health forever!

Dr Mario travelled the world interviewing people that are living happily over 100 hundred years old as he wanted to know what was their secret. Today he shares his discoveries in this fascinating interview and why he believes longevity is learned, not inherited.
Dr. Mario E. Martinez is a clinical neuropsychologist. In 1998 he developed his theory of Biocognitive Science based on research that demonstrates how thoughts and their biological expression coemerge within a cultural history.
Sit back and enjoy as we dive deep into what he calls ‘The Mind-Body Code’.
Use Snapchat? Follow me at: GuyL180 or Click Here. 

 

Audio Version

 Dr Mario Martinez 2016 Australian Tour

  • Melbourne
  • Sydney
  • Auckland

13th – 20th July 2016. CLICK HERE for more information.

 

downloaditunesListen to StitcherQuestions we ask in this episode:

  • You mentioned ‘Illnesses are learned; the causes of health are inherited’, please explain.
  • How much of our beliefs affect our immune system?
  • What have you learned by studying stress?
  • How do we change our beliefs?
  • What is the ‘abundance phobia’?
  • What are your non-negotiable practices?

Get More Of Dr. Mario Martinez:

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Full Transcript

Guy:
Hi, this is Guy Lawrence at 180 Nutrition. Welcome to today’s house sessions where of course we cut through the confusion by connecting with leading global health and wellness experts to share the best and the latest in science and thinking, empowering people to turn their health and lives around. Boy, do we have a pearl of an episode for you today. Our special guest is Dr. Mario Martinez. To sum it up, I loved this episode and I love everything that he has to talk about. I’m not going to run long too much in this because I just want you to get into this topic and absorb it, and even listen to it twice or three times if you have to, to fully understand what Dr. Mario is saying because I think this information is crucial and we’re just not talking about it in the health industry enough.
[00:01:00] In a very, very confined nutshell, we talk about how longevity is actually learned, how we can actually learn to live longer and happier lives and how that affects our health as well. He talks about cultural beliefs to affecting even our immune system. Of course, if you’ve been listening to our podcast on a regular basis, we all know how crucial the immune system is to stay healthy. It’s just a fascinating topic. Dr. Mario is coming to Australia and New Zealand. He’s going to be in Auckland, Melbourne, and Sydney in mid-July. I’ll link to the show notes. Check it out. I’m going to go down to the workshop with Mario in July. I just think this is awesome stuff. If you have the opportunity, just go. Be open. Check it out because I really think it will help people empower themselves and to turn their lives around.
[00:02:00] We’re going to get into Mario. If you’re enjoying this episode, all I ask is if you can subscribe to our iTunes channel. That little subscription tells iTunes that hey, we’ve got a good podcast going on and it helps with our rankings. 5 star it. If you’re feeling really frisky and adventurous, leave a review. That’s all that we ask. We do these podcasts for nothing. We get them out there. We want as many people to listen to this information as possible. That would be greatly appreciated if you do that. Of course, come and hit me up in Snapchat. GuyL180 if you want to see anymore about what my day looks like. Anyway, let’s go over to Mario. Enjoy.
Guy:
Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I’m joined by Stu Cooke as always. Hi, Stu.
Stu:
Hello, mate.
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Guy:
Our awesome guest today is Dr. Mario Martinez. Mario, welcome to the show.
Dr. Mario:
Oh, thank you for having me.
Guy:
Look, it’s a pleasure. This is a topic that really excites me. I’m very much looking forward to delving into this for the next 45 minutes or whatever we end up talking for. Yeah, it will be awesome. Mate, the first question I like to roll with people just to give a bit of context to it is if you were sitting on a airplane and a complete stranger sat next to you and asked you what you did for a living, what would you say?
Dr. Mario:
I’d tell them, “Look, I’m on vacation. I don’t want to talk about it,” but yeah, that’s a good way to start it. What I would say is that my background is in neuropsychology. I’m a neuropsychologist. What I’m doing is everyone pretty much accepts that mind and body communicate with each other and that the mind and the body have some connection and some influence. What’s missing is what is influencing the mind? What is influencing the belief systems? What I’m bringing in is the culture. The culture components are really what makes people have beliefs and have scripts that they live out. The culture will actually train the brain to perceive. We perceive culturally. I’ll explain as we go along with the program. What I’m saying is it would be mind-body culture or mind-body in a cultural context. It can never be a vacuum of culture.
Guy:
Right. Right. The other thing I like to ask as well at the beginning of the show is could you give us a little bit of background into what made you start looking into this work in the first place? I’m fully aware as well. You traveled the world and interviewed people that were over 100 years old as well.
Dr. Mario:
The centenarians. Yes.
Guy: Yeah, the centenarians. That’s funny. I had to look that word up at first. I thought it was a Roman gladiator, but then I realized. Yeah. What sparked the curiosity in the first place to delve down this route? I just think this topic is so important. It’s not spoken about enough in the health industry itself.
Dr. Mario:
[00:05:00] Yeah, you’re right. First, anything that’s valuable in science comes out of frustration or out of helplessness. What I was noticing was that as a therapist, as a clinical psychologist, I was seeing that people knew what was wrong. They knew what they needed to change, but they couldn’t do it. You would give them techniques and you would give them ways. You would see this resistance. You would see their inability to make the changes, even if it had something to do with their lives. Life threatening kinds of things. Then, as a neuropsychologist, I was taught that your genes are going to be structuring your life. If you have cancer in the family, that’s what’s going to happen. Longevity is genetics.
[00:06:00] If you have good genetics, you’ll live long. If you don’t, you won’t. Then, I began to question that, but I needed evidence. I needed a way to really show not just something that I made up. I started studying centenarians, people who are over 100, but healthy centenarians. Not people who are in nursing homes vegetating. I’m not interested in longevity when you’re sick. I’m interested in healthy longevity. What I found was astonishing. I found after hundreds of centenarians that I interviewed all over the world that genetics only accounts for 20%. The rest is what I call cultural beliefs, bio-cultural. They are healthy people.
They don’t go to doctors a lot. I asked one. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to the doctor, but I’m just reporting anthropologically how they are. I asked one. “When was the last time you went to a doctor?” He said, “Oh, about 70 years ago.” I said, “Really? So, what do your doctors have to say?” Very innocently he said, “I don’t know. They’re all dead.” That’s how they are. I had to create a theory around what I learned from them. A theory so I could explain it with science, so I could explain it with biology. They taught me what I’m trying to teach people now, putting it into a scientific model and putting it into a testable way of looking at what they do.
Stu:
[00:07:00] I’m particularly interested in centenarians and Blue Zones as well. Just super interested in why a particular pocket of people are living well into their hundreds and don’t seem to be riddled with the issues that we are hit with today. In terms of centenarians, what three key things do you think you’ve learned from interviewing them?
Dr. Mario:
[00:08:00] That it’s not the region. It’s not their diet. It’s not their healthy living. That helps. That’s necessary, but not sufficient. That’s what I learned, and that independent of their culture, there’s a universal way that they have of looking at the world. Some of them smoke. Some of them are slightly overweight. 38% of them are hypertensive. It goes totally against the logic that we’ve learned from regular science. I think that what I’ve been able to extract as something, first that healthy longevity can be learned at any age first. Second, that actually the causes of health are inherited. Illnesses to a certain degree are learned. We learn them.
Not consciously saying you’re going to have cancer, but with the way we live, of course the way we eat, but the way we think creates either a helplessness or an empowerment in the immune system. If we don’t allow the immune system to do its work, then you have cancer and you have different things. Now, I’m oversimplifying because it’s a lot more than that. Really, we have much more control over our lives than we think we do or that we’re told that we have. The reason I say that the causes of health are learned is that as modern homo sapiens, we’ve been around for 50,000 years. We’ve had trial and error of what works. We don’t learn how to get sick. We learn how to get healthy and how to maintain our health.
[00:09:00] There are ways to actually bring out, to trigger out the causes of health that we inherited. We have a constant trial and error. The immune system 100,000 years ago was not as powerful as it is now. There were no T-cells. It wasn’t as sophisticated. It’s constantly learning, constantly developing. It becomes much more powerful than the cavemen and women. We inherit what makes us healthy and we learn what makes us sick with some exceptions, because there are about maybe … 2, 3% of illnesses are genetic flaws. You’re born with it and it’s already expressed when you’re born. Yet, 96, 97% there’s a learned process, including the environment and including the foods that we eat.
Guy:
Could you give us an example of a learned process from a cultural perspective?
Dr. Mario:
[00:10:00] Okay. Let’s say that you have a propensity of cancer in your family. That culture teaches you that you’re supposed to be subservient with authorities. One of the properties, one of the characteristics that we find in cancer is inassertiveness. An inability to set limits. That’s one of the causes of health to be able to set limits. Emotional limits. A fear of the world. A fear of not being liked. All of those things cause an under immunity. When you have an under immunity, you’re going to have very inefficient and also very reduced colonies of NK cells, natural killer cells. Those are the ones that kill the pre-cancer cells and so forth. You have a propensity in the family already for cancer.
[00:11:00] The propensity is there’s some genetics that could be expressed, but don’t necessarily have to be expressed. That family teaches helplessness. That family teaches subservience. Then, what happens is that you trigger, you teach your body to get sick. Now, you should never blame yourself. It’s very important not to blame yourself because you didn’t cause that consciously. The other way is if you can learn that there’s a way to get sick, you can also learn to trigger the causes of health that you inherited. It just throws science upside down completely, but I can back it up with their discipline is now cultural neuroscience, neuroanthropology, inherited medicine that are actually being able to show the things that I’m talking about.
Guy:
A question that popped in my mind is that the centenarians that you interviewed, you mentioned that it wasn’t their diet. Some smoked. What were the common denominators that they were all doing to make them live into that age?
Dr. Mario:
That’s a great question. This is the fountain of youth I’m going to give you now here.
Stu:
Get ready, Guy.
Dr. Mario:
[00:12:00] Get ready. First, they intuitively express the causes of health. They’re all assertive. They’re assertive in a way that they know how to set limits which is good for the immune system. They have righteous anger which is good for the immune system. Righteous anger is they get angry about appropriate things about someone abusing your goodwill, someone abusing your innocence. It’s good for the immune system for you to get angry. I call this righteous anger because you’re protecting innocence. Now, if you’re angry all the time, then that’s chronic and we say that’s bad for the immune system.
[00:13:00] They have righteous anger. They know how to set limits. I’ll give you an example. 102 year old centenarian. I went to see him and I said, “I’d like to interview you. I’d really like to learn from you.” He said, “Sure. When do you want to meet?” I said, “Well, almost anytime.” I said, “How about Saturday at 9am?” He said, “No. I have tango lessons. Sorry. Not Saturday at 9.” They know how to set limits. They’re not caretakers. They have healthy narcissism. That’s another quality that’s very important. My mentor who discovered that the immune system responds to psychology, he called it psychoimmunology at UCLA.
George Sullivan found that righteous anger is actually good for you. They found that setting limits is also good for you. When you tell them that they want something or you want something, they will say, “Sure, I can do this for you, but these are the limits.” Now, the healthy narcissism. That’s another important component. They are what I call inclusive narcissists. For example, a psychopath or a sociopath would manipulate you. They think they’re great, but they have a self-esteem problem. They have low self-esteem. They over compensate. They try to make themselves better and they manipulate and they’re pathological.
[00:14:00] Now, healthy centenarians. I’ll give you another example of their healthy narcissism. I was talking to one of them. There are a bunch of people. There were some women. This guy is 103. He said, “Did you notice how the women were looking at me? They love me. I’m so damn good looking.” Here’s the inclusive part. He said, “But you notice how beautiful they are? They can see I’m beautiful because they’re beautiful.” Inclusive. That’s different than the pathological. That healthy narcissism is good for the immune system because if you don’t acknowledge that you’re worthy, that you’re excellent, how can you project that out to the world?
[00:15:00] Our cultures teach us what I call pseudo humbleness. A little girl goes to her mom and she says, “Mommy, look how pretty I am.” She’ll say, “No, no, darling. Don’t say you’re pretty. Wait until people tell you and then you deny it.” It’s a pseudo humbleness. It’s not real. You’re teaching helplessness. You’re not teaching people to say, “Hey, you’re beautiful.” “Yes, thank you. I appreciate that.” I told a 101 year old woman. I said, “You’re really a good looking woman.” She said, “Yes, I am. Thank you.” It’s so refreshing to hear that. That’s a healthy immune system in this culture.
Guy:
Yeah, wow. Didn’t you interview a guy I thought ran a marathon as well?
Dr. Mario:
Yes. Yes. Yes. He was of course in his class. He said, “I’m running with youngsters who are 90 or 80.” He was 104.
Stu:
104? That’s amazing.
Dr. Mario:
They don’t like to hang out with old people. They say, “Old people. All they want to do is talk about sick and talk about the doctors, and I don’t want to hang out.” It’s contagious. Old people can be 30 years younger than they are. They have a totally different way of looking at the world. That’s what I teach. That’s how people can learn to have centenarian consciousness at any age.
Guy:
It’s so inspiring.
Dr. Mario:
It is.
Stu:
It’s clear that our beliefs can affect our immune system. How can we change that path? I wonder if we could do perhaps just one thing right now to boost our immune system. Where would we start? What could we do?

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Dr. Mario:
All right. The first thing, you notice what I said earlier that you have a belief and you want to change that belief. It doesn’t work when you say, “Okay. I believe I’m a bad person so therefore, I’m going to start believing I’m a good person.” That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because you didn’t learn to be a bad person in your head intellectually. You learned it experientially. You embodied the whole information. Your immune system embodied the badness, the hormones. The whole process. It’s an embodied process. You’re trying to change an embodied belief with a disembodied intellectual process and it doesn’t work. Here’s what you would do. Also, affirmations don’t work unless you embody them. You could say, “I’m a good person. I’m a good person.”
[00:17:00] It doesn’t work because the brain works on evidence. The brain needs evidence to change the neurotransmitters and to change the neuro maps. I’ll give you a simple example. Let’s say you think you’re not a good person. All right. You say, “I’m not a good person. What is the evidence of me not being a good person?” You go through that evidence. You say, “Well, I remember I cheated my friend,” or whatever. Then, you embody what you’re feeling from that memory. You get a print. You get a signature of what it feels like to be a bad person. You embody it. Okay. To be a bad person, I feel tension in my chest. My heart’s pumping. I feel my hands getting cold. That’s my signature for bad person. Okay. Then, you take them back.
[00:18:00] You do this under relaxation because if you don’t, then your head won’t let you get into your body. Then, you ask them. “Okay, tell me something that you did that you considered to be a good person. Honorable. Something good.” Usually, they say, “No, I’ve never been a good person.” You have to teach them. “Well, let’s go back. Tell me something that you did that was good.” “Well, I remember when I was a kid. I helped another kid. I protected him from a bully and I felt really proud of myself.” “How do you feel now when you bring back that memory?” “Oh, my chest is expanding. My breathing is opening.” “Okay. That’s your signature for a good person.”
Now, you know when you’re playing out that person’s consciousness and good person consciousness, you have an embodied signature, which one feels like what. Then, you need evidence. The brain has a difference, but it needs evidence to see which neurotransmitter it’s going to allow to grow and which it’s going to allow to die out. Then, on a daily basis, you do things that give you evidence you’re a good person. You embody. You go out. You help somebody cross a street. How does that feel? You embody it. That’s how you change the neurotransmitters because the brain needs evidence, not words or thoughts.
Guy:
It just makes me think because I can speak from my own experience as well. We’re not even aware that we’re doing it half the time.
Dr. Mario:
No, we’re not.
Guy:
Most of the time.
Dr. Mario:
No, we’re not.
Guy:
We’re just consciously … We could be just living the negative patterns over and over and over and over again.
Dr. Mario:
Yes. Yes. We have a default mode. That default mode is when everything settles, your brain goes into a default mode and that’s your script of how you’re going to look at the world. That’s why sometimes people will do meditation. They feel great. As soon as they come out, they start feeling tense again because the default mode is really your goggles of how you look at the world. Let’s say you have a default mode that says, “The world is dangerous.” You meditate. You do all your mantras and you do all that. Then, once you come back, you go into default mode.
[00:20:00] The world is dangerous. You built up the cortisol, the adrenaline and everything goes back into … That’s why it’s so hard sometimes to meditate unless you make these changes, because it only takes you to a place, but then when you come out, you still look at the world with a default mode, the scripts that you learned. Those are the things that guide the beliefs. Look at it as like the [inaudible 00:19:54] ship is the default mode, and then the different behaviors are the ones that come from the default mode. For example, you’re trying to change. You want somebody to quit smoking.
You say, “Okay. Let’s work on … ” Behavior therapy does that. Behavior therapy works well with some things, but not with overall kindness of consciousness changing. All right. “We’re going to get you to stop smoking or doing drugs. Why don’t you try to smoke a little bit less each day?” That doesn’t work because that is coming from the mothership, or it’s coming from the default mode that says, “You have to avoid anxiety. You have to avoid connecting with social people, with the social connecting of people.” How can I do that? You have to be able to feel sociable.
[00:21:00] “Okay. Then, I’ll smoke and I’ll feel more comfortable because I’ve taken away the anxiety that I have.” All excessive behaviors, all addictive behaviors are dysfunctional behavior that take you away from social connection and from dealing with your anxiety. Let’s say you stop the person from smoking. You haven’t dealt with the default mode. Then, they look for another distraction which is eating or porno or gambling because you didn’t go to the basic. You’re putting out fires rather than the source of the fire. That’s why it’s so frustrating.
Guy:
Go ahead. My next question is those two. How do you get to the source of the problem if the people don’t even know that it’s there? Is there a tip, a tactic? Is there one thing that somebody listening to this will go, “Oh, I wonder what my source is.”
Dr. Mario:
[00:22:00] Yeah. No. That’s a great question because if a theory can’t be applied, then it’s not very good. If I tell you, “Get in touch with yourself, hug a tree, that’s not going to work.” You need something of substance. What I found in looking at all the cultures that I looked at in five continents is that the cultures in order to keep you within the [inaudible 00:21:54], keep you within the culture, have three ways of wounding. Archetypal wounds. You can be wounded with shame. You can be wounded with abandonment, or you can be wounded with betrayal. Usually, when you have a problem dealing with your anxiety or dealing with something that is an excessive behavior, it’s because you’re trying to deal with one of those archetypal wounds in a very dysfunctional way.
[00:23:00] You have to go to the wound. There are ways to go into there, techniques. You get the person in a contemplative state. Not just relaxed, but just to let the mind clear out and so the nervous system doesn’t protect you from the anxiety. I’ll give you an example. We know from psychoimmunology that if somebody shames you, they say, “You idiot. You don’t know what you’re doing.” You’re going to have inflammation as if you had an infection. That’s why many people with rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and other kinds of inflammatory illness have some kind of connection with a wound of shame. They’re living out their shame. They have a pro-inflammatory molecule secreting all the time because they live a consciousness of shame.
In order to deal with that shame, they start doing drugs or smoking or being unfaithful to their partners or whatever. Then, you have to go to the source which is the shame. You find out that person was consistently … If it happens once, it’s not a big deal because we’re very resilient, but if you have a pattern of shaming in your family then you learn shame consciousness and you speak it fluently. Not only do you speak it fluently, but you look for people to shame or people that can shame you. This is why in relationships you see people that say, “I’ve been married four times and each time I’m abandoned.” You look for abandonment not knowing it.
[00:24:00] The good news is that each of the wounds has a healing field. For the wound of shame, it’s honor. Abandonment? Commitment. Betrayal? Loyalty. We’re doing some research now. We know for sure. It’s been consistently shown that shame causes inflammation. In fact, you can do it in a laboratory. You can have somebody write shameful things for 15 minutes and you check their interleukins and tumor necrosis factor. It’ll go up. Those are inflammation. That’s inflammatory molecules. The immune system is biosymbolic. It responds to words, especially words that are powerful coming from culture energy as if you were having some kind of pathogen. Inflammation is to protect you from a microbe, from a pathogen. If I say, “You’re an idiot,” that’s a word. How can that change? It’s a biosymbolic process.
[00:25:00] Now, one of the things we’re doing is some research now looking at honor as an anti-inflammatory agent, teaching people honor consciousness with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis because it has an anti-inflammatory component to it. If you ask people … For example, “Write for 15 minutes honorable things that you’ve done, things that you’re proud of.” You will find that there is a psychoimmunological difference in how they respond, how their body responds. Clinically, we’ve been able to show it. Now, we’re beginning to look at it into the immunological level. Clinically, many, many cases where there was rheumatoid arthritis and we were able to really reverse it or improve it significantly using our consciousness.
Guy:
Wow. It’s interesting, hey, Stu? We’ve interviewed dozens and dozens of guests on here. Inflammation and stress always keep coming up. It’s like these are the two things you’ve got to pull back, otherwise chronic disease kicks in.
Stu:
I think as a nation, and I speak for probably most people, everyone is suffering a degree of stress and it’s just building, whether it’s stress from work, pressures at home with children, finances. We’re so stressed as a nation. I’ve wondered what you’ve learned by studying stress.
Dr. Mario:
Stress is a cultural interpretation. For example, I work with a lot of Fortune 100 companies and help them. Their biggest expense, their biggest cost is chronic illness. Chronic illnesses in the world. The cost for the chronic illness is $7 trillion a year of chronic illnesses reversible and preventable. What causes … ? What is the bad stress? Stress is an interpretation based on your culture. For example, we’re in a workshop and I’m talking about health and I’m talking about longevity. All of a sudden, a tiger comes in and the tiger is out of context. The tiger doesn’t belong there.
[00:27:00] It’s not contextually relevant. Everybody has cortisol release and epinephrine and norepinephrine. Let’s say I’m doing a workshop on taming tigers. The tiger comes in. You say, “Oh, wonderful. Okay. Bring him over so we can tame him.” It’s contextual first. Second, if you’re doing a job or if you’re doing something, if you have meaning in what you’re doing, and if you have authority with the responsibility that you’ve been given, stress doesn’t do anything to you. In fact, it’s good. The longest living professions are the orchestra conductors. They have very stressful jobs. They have to deal with [inaudible 00:27:38]. There’s travel.
[00:28:00] They have very close to centenarians. Why? They have responsibility with authority and they have meaning in what they do. It’s not the aerobics of moving their hands directing their orchestra they say. It’s not that at all. You have to do some incredible aerobics. It’s really if you want to get somebody sick in an organization, you do two things. You give them a job, responsibility without authority, not authority to access the resources, and a job without meaning. They get sick within six months. They develop some kind of problem within six months.
Guy:
Wow. Purpose is everything.
Dr. Mario:
Pardon?
Guy:
Purpose is everything.
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Dr. Mario:
[00:29:00] Everything. Exactly. It’s been shown over and over again. For example, you go to a place. I’ll give you an example. I went to [inaudible 00:28:28] right now. I went to a hardware store. I wanted to buy three steel nails so I could hammer something in to put some paintings up. I go up to the guy and I said, “Do you have steel nails?” He said, “Yes, I do, a box of 1,000.” I said, “No, but three.” “I don’t think I can do that. Let me ask my boss.” He goes to the boss. He said, “Are you stupid? Of course, no you can’t. You can’t. He’s got to buy the whole thing.” I said, “Okay. Forget it.” I went to another hardware store two blocks away. I say the same thing to the guy and he said, “Yeah, here. Take it.”
That’s an empowered individual. He can make decisions where the decision needs to be made. That’s what we teach Fortune 100 companies. He doesn’t go to the boss because the boss gives him responsibility with authority. Where do you think I’m going to go next time when I need something? I’m going to go the place that’s empowered. Not to the other place. It’s an example. Why does it work immunologically? It works immunologically because the physiological definition for helplessness is not having access to resources to overcome a challenge. If you’re not given authority, you have a challenge without resources. I’ll give you an example. Rats could be trained to be empowered or disempowered.
[00:30:00] You put rats in what’s called a type of condition. It’s called non-escape condition. You put them in a cage where they can’t run and you shock them. They can’t move. They don’t have access to resources to move. Okay. You shock them. You shock them. You shock them. After a while, the rat gives up. They begin to secrete a lot of endorphins and they’re [inaudible 00:30:15]. You can shock them and nothing happens. You take them out and you inject them with cancer cells and the cancer cells grow very fast. Now, you take a rat and you put him in a cage and you teach him. You give him access to resources.
[00:31:00] You teach him that if they press a little button, they hear a little sound. They press a little button. They don’t get shocked. The rats learn very fast access to resources. Okay. The rats learn. Every time there’s a sound, they press a button. No shock. You let them do that for a while. You take them out of the cage. You give them a shot of cancer cells. Nothing happens. The reason? They’re empowered. When they’re empowered, their natural killer cells can kill the cancer cells. When they’re disempowered, natural killer cells are very weak and the cancer grows.
Guy: Wow. This is so fascinating because I think about society. We live in a society that’s if you think of the media, it’s bombardness with fear based principles. [inaudible 00:31:15] is good news. We never hear about the wellness that’s going around. We’re meant to feel almost disempowered.
Dr. Mario:
[00:32:00] You are. Then, let’s say you have a family propensity for illness. You trigger it, that propensity. I’ll give you an example how you can learn an illness. Let me tell you how you can learn. Gastrointestinal problems. Okay. 75% of successful CEOs have gastrointestinal problems. How do they learn it? We have a nervous system as you know that has the sympathetic and the parasympathetic system. The sympathetic speeds everything up and it slows down digestion because you’re fighting or you’re doing your work and you’re into action.
Then, when it’s time to eat, the parasympathetic takes over and it slows everything down and it speeds up the digestion. When the food goes into the saliva that’s a signal. The parasympathetic comes in. What happens if you go and you sit and you begin parasympathetic and all of a sudden say, “What? What do you mean? No. No, you can’t do that. You can’t sell my stock. No. No, that’s not … I have to do … ” That kind of thing. You go sympathetic, parasympathetic, sympathetic, parasympathetic. You stop digestion. You start digestion. The system is made to eat when you have to eat and to work when you have to work.
[00:33:00] In order to get into sympathetic, parasympathetic mode what you do is before you eat, you sit. You never have lunch with your iPad or you never have lunch with a computer. You never take your iPad to dinner. You don’t go to bed with your iPad. You have partners and that’s what you do. To get into a parasympathetic mode, simply you stop and you breathe in a count of six and you breathe in out the count of six. You do it for about 10 times. That kicks in parasympathetic, but you’ve got to eat. You can’t go to the phone because then you go into sympathetic. That’s how you learn gastrointestinal problem and reflux, by the way.
Stu:
That is fascinating. It’s fascinating, I think, because most people nowadays, at least when they’re at work are eating that way. If they’re at lunch, they’re on their iPhones and their iPads and text messages. We are so distracted and it’s very rare that we’re actually prepared and focused and ready for a meal.
Dr. Mario:
[00:34:00] Yeah. Then, you get medication to deal with the symptoms, not to deal with the cause. You get medication for antacid for reflux. By the way, the reflux is that you’re lacking acid, not that you have too much acid. It’s a crazy world because it’s set up for a reductionist medicine that looks at things at the smallest level, at the most simple level. Then, it comes up to upward causality to look at how they need to deal with things. It’s a mechanical model that if something breaks, you change the organ or you fix something and you have another 25 kilometers. You come back and bypass all these kinds of things that they do without changing the lifestyles, without changing the consciousness. It doesn’t work.
Stu:
Yeah, and saying you are then worried about the fact that you’re on medication and that in turn is going to create more stress.
Dr. Mario:
That’s right. You have side effects. The side effects will reduce your productivity. What we teach these companies is that productivity and wellness are inseparable. The moment you separate them, you have problems.
Guy:
With people, because I think about if you’re in stress, the hardest thing you can do or tell someone to do if they’re stressed, “Just stop, breathe, slow down.”
Stu:
Yeah, relax. Yes.
Guy:
You just pump. I know many people that automatically go into stress response. As soon as a bill comes through the door or something, it just keeps triggering that automated response. If they were to avoid that, the best thing they could do is just stop and breathe.
Dr. Mario:
[00:36:00] For it to stop. That’s right, but remember now that you know the default mode, what happens is that when they have a challenge, that default mode for those people says, “Catastrophe. Difficulty. Challenge without resources.” All of a sudden, they get all stressed out. First, yeah, breathing is very important to stop the … When you get stressed, you’re going to have a lot of adrenaline and noradrenaline coming out quickly, but cortisol takes about a half hour to get through the blood levels. You have a way to stop the cortisol. You can’t stop the adrenaline. It’s too fast, but what you can do is you can breathe slowly, as I mentioned.
Then, you go into parasympathetic which slows you down, but then you have to ask yourself, “Okay. What is stressing me? Here’s a challenge. What are the resources that I have?” Then, there are two levels of empowerment what I call E1 and E2. You can do this with a partner. You can do this at work. Running a 22,000 company, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same. Okay. You have a challenge. Empowerment 1 means what can I do for myself that nobody can do for me? Once you exhaust that, then you go to E2 which is what can others do for me that I can’t do for myself?
[00:37:00] That’s how the immune system works. The immune system is complex, but it has simple rules. It took me about 10 years to figure out the language, but look how simple it is. Nature has simplicity that becomes complex, but it has some simple fundamentals. The immune system is either empowered or disempowered. The immune system has two rules. Local intelligence and distributed control. If you do that, you can deal with any stress in the world. How does that work? Okay. A neutrophil is the first line of defense. It’s a little immune cell that goes and attacks the first line of germs or whatever it is.
[00:38:00] The immune system doesn’t ask the brain for anything, only on major things. It has local intelligence. It goes wherever the source is. That’s the CEO right there. The neutrophil is going around in the blood and all of a sudden finds a little pathogen. It stops. If I could be anthropomorphic, the neutrophil would say, “Okay, this is a little bacteria. I can take care of that.” It takes care of the bacteria. The brain doesn’t even know anything about it. It has local intelligence. Then, here’s where distributed control comes in. It looks at the infection and says, “Wait a minute. No, no. This is a pre-cancer cell. I can’t kill pre-cancer cells. Who do I need to call in? Interferons, natural killer cells.
[00:39:00] They make the decision at the local level to distribute the control. Once it’s over, the neutrophil goes on its way and releases the power, and the NK releases the power. You’ll find that when you teach a system … By the way, the immune system can make about 150,000 decisions a second without consulting the brain. When a CEO told me once … He runs a company. It’s 30,000 employees. He said, “Look, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I have 30,000 employees.” I said, “Well, I know an organization that has 50 trillion employees and it makes 150,000 decisions a second. He said, “It’s not possible.” I said, “Yes, within you. It’s your immune system.” He said, “I can’t believe this.” He starts listening.
That’s why it can do that. I’ll give you an example. One of the best run organizations is the Vatican because St. Peter was the first CEO. They really have a lot of experience. With all the problems they’re having and everything, I’m taking that out of the way. Right now, I’m talking about the organization. They have the Camerlengo. Camerlengo is a cardinal. The only job of the Camerlengo, like the neutrophil, for example, is very specific. When the pope dies, the Camerlengo becomes the operating pope. He has to dictate after the doctor says, “Okay,” that he’s clinically dead, then he comes with a silver hammer and he says, “John Paul II. John Paul II.”
[00:40:00] Three times. If he doesn’t respond, then the Vatican determines that he’s dead. At that moment, he becomes the head of the church and he does all the planning with the counsel of cardinals who choose the new pope. Why? It would be chaotic if you don’t have a person specifically after the pope dies. Once they choose the pope and you see the white smoke, the Camerlengo goes back to his little office and he loses all the power. That’s local intelligence and distributed control. We teach that to organizations, especially. You could relate to this if you could think about it. There are people that are power hunger.
[00:41:00] They have a power hunger. They’re control freaks. When they’re out, nothing happens. “I need a check.” “Well, the finance director is not here. We can’t do anything.” Why? They accumulate power because they’re afraid of losing it. Once you give them power and you tell them that they have to give it up, but they’ll get it back when they need it, the micromanagers and the control freaks stop because they know they can get it back. We teach the principles of the immune system for an organization, but you can do it for individuals. You can do it for coaching. For anything. Same concept.
Guy:
Do you think we need challenges as human beings?
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Dr. Mario:
[00:42:00] Oh, yes. Yeah. The brain isn’t perfect. This is something else that I’m bringing to science is it has a relational incompleteness. What that means is what computer can work without an update and without new applications for 50,000 years? The brain hasn’t had an update in 50,000 years. Why? It has a program that the software can modify the hardware. What computer can do that? Thoughts can change the chemistry of the brain. The chemistry of the brain can change thoughts. First. Second, it’s always incomplete. It’s incomplete because it doesn’t know what the future brings. It finds completeness in whatever the future brings. You know you’re a man because there are women. It’s a relational incompleteness.
[00:43:00] If there were no women, you would be something until a woman appears and then you’re completed. “Oh, I’m man. This is woman.” That’s the reason why it doesn’t need updates, but it has to be used. Centenarians don’t retire. If you retire and you go to a beautiful place to watch the sunset, you’ll live four to five years or you’ll get sick because you don’t have a challenge anymore. You have to have a challenge. When you ask a Centenarian, “When are you going to retire?” They’ll say, “That’s a dumb question. I love what I do.” You have to have passion for what you do. You have to have challenges, and you have to have access to the resources to overcome your challenges. Challenges are good. You don’t want to avoid stress. You want to confront stress with access to the resources. That’s the difference.
Stu: When you said that thoughts can change the chemistry of the brain and on the subject of stress as well, if I have a stressful situation and I’m feeling stressed, I can feel blood pressure, and I’m just feeling revved up, would it be right in thinking that if I simply think why am I feeling this way? I’m questioning the way I’m feeling. Would that switch off the stress responses?
Dr. Mario:
No, because that’s the first step. That’s intellectual. That’s cognitive. It’s a good question, but it’s cognitive. What you have to do is embody. What am I feeling now that I’m calling stress? Then, you identify it and you say, “Okay. My jaw is tight. My chest is tight. My breathing is fast and all that kind of … ” Okay. That is my mind-body state of stress right now. Okay. When you stop, you breathe, that’s the mechanical part.
[00:44:00] You breathe and then you say, “What is stressing me now? What do I have to face or what did I just face before and after?” The interesting thing about it is that we can get stressed out about things that we don’t want to do, or things that we want, but we don’t feel worthy of. People can get sick when that happens. You notice that sometimes people when things are going extremely well, they get sick because it’s too much. One of the questions that you wanted to ask me, I think we can bring it up now is that [inaudible 00:44:34].
Guy:
Yeah, the abundance phobia, because I’m pretty sure I had that for a long time. Yeah.
Dr. Mario:
[00:45:00] Here’s another sign of brilliant people. They think alike. We have three brilliant people here. The culture will say, “No, I’m not that bright.” [inaudible 00:44:53] You helped your immune system. Right? You boost it. That’s good. It’s great. Our biology has boundaries. Okay? I’ll give you examples. When the train was invented, it was running at blinding speeds of 35 miles an hour, faster than a horse. The horizons of the speed was a horse. You shake that up and people were beginning to have what they call rail back disorders. They were having back problems because the body is not made for that speed. When Otis invented the elevator or the lift, people were having nose bleeds because you’re shaking up the horizons of the stairs, not something taking you up.
[00:46:00] The airplane when it became commercial, vomiting. Who vomits now? The horizons are extended. The cultural horizons are extended. Same thing happens with individual horizons. One of the things you could do, you could say, “Okay. I make X amount of money a year.” You get yourself contemplate. “This is what I do. I pay bills. I do this. I do that,” and then embody it which is manifested in your body. How do I feel it? I feel good. Okay. Now, I’m going to multiply it times 10. What do I do with that money? I could give it to friends. I could buy a house. I can go around the world. You’re going to feel tension because the turbulence … You’re shaking up the horizons of what you are believing that you’re worthy of.
[00:47:00] Your biology gets used to that. Then, you take it up and you take it 100 times. You just can’t believe it. You could have an anxiety attack. What you do is stop and do the right and you do the breathing. You allow it to happen. Then, you ask yourself, “Who taught me that I’m not worthy of better things? I learned it one way or another from a culture editor.” Culture editors are people that have power in the culture. Doctors and clinics. Parents at home. Teachers at school. Very powerful. We’re designed to pay attention to the culture editors and to buy the biology of what they’re giving us. Why? When you’re born, we’re the only animal that needs years to be taken care of. We learn biosybolically. You’re hungry. You’re a newborn. You’re hungry and something is very uncomfortable. All of a sudden, you see a breast.
[00:48:00] You don’t know what it is, but the breast quenches your hunger. It satisfies your hunger. I’ve got to pay attention to this breast. I have to pay attention to this person. In fact, within a few days a child can identify the mother’s face. We’re designed to pay attention to the culture editors. When you’re 10, it says, “You’re too dumb to go to college. You shouldn’t go to college. You’re dumb. Your brother is smart, but you’re dumb.” That biology creates helplessness. That biology sets you up where you then begin to challenge what you were taught. When you begin to challenge what you were taught, there’s some turbulence because you’re challenging an authority that’s biologically already built in.
Guy:
Right. What I used to do is every time I got uncomfortable with these things … We could use money as an example. I would try and step into that uncomfortability when I had the opportunity. Is that a good way to go about these things? Every time it arises, actually … ?
Dr. Mario:
Yes, go within.
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Guy:
Go in and I don’t know. It was almost doing did reps at the gym. The more I did it, the more it didn’t have such a connotation or a relationship with it. It dropped away all the time.
Dr. Mario:
[00:49:00] Yes. Yes. You desensitize yourself, but then you have to have evidence. Always evidence. All right. Let’s say, “Okay. I’m making so much and I’m doing well and I’m feeling tense, but I’m going in my tension. Okay. What do I do now to give myself evidence that I’m worthy?” Number one. Take the opportunities to allow that to happen. I’m worthy first, but you have to find evidence. If you don’t do anything, the brain says you are not worthy. You’re going to stay at the horizons of 20,000 a year. If you go to 30, you’re going to have an anxiety attack. You need evidence, but you also need to know where that came from. Who set the boundaries for you? Who set the horizons for you? I call them horizons because they’re pliable.
[00:50:00] They’re not boundaries. Here’s another very interesting thing. Let’s say that your dad never succeeded. Your dad tried and tried and he taught you by what he did, not what he said, that no matter what you try as a man, you’re not going to make it. Even though he may have said to you, “Son, don’t be like me. You can make it.” Blah, blah, blah. What you believe is what you see. Okay. Then, somehow you believe, okay. He’s right. I’m not going to be like him. I’m going to start doing well. You start doing well, but then you notice that you start sabotaging yourself. The reason you’re doing that is you’re challenging your dad who is a good person and who you love, and now you’re going to have to betray him and be better than him.
Stu:
Oh, very interesting.
Dr. Mario:
There’s some techniques that we use to actually confront the father and there’s no betrayal. It’s just that you’re confronting an authority that by his actions told you this is all you can do. Then, when you actually do it, you start sabotaging.
Stu:
Boy, there’s just a lot of programming, isn’t there, that happens as parents raising children?
Dr. Mario:
[inaudible 00:50:33]
Guy:
As a parent as well, they can only help but love you, but at the same time, they beliefs of how they see the world is just imprinted on you. They don’t even know they’re doing it.
Dr. Mario:
That’s right, but here’s the good news. They have to leave something to screw up so you can fix it. It’s okay.
Stu:
All right. Now, that’s good.
Dr. Mario:
They have to screw something up so you can fix it and take responsibility that it was yours.
Guy:
Exactly. It creates a challenge and then … Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Mario:
That’s right. It’s necessary.
Stu:
We wanted to touch a little bit based on just into you, as well as a person. My first question is what one strategy or practice has enhanced your life the most?
Dr. Mario:
[00:52:00] Knowing the power that I have to challenge genes and challenge all the things that I was taught, that I was a helpless person. Number one. Number two, that the culture has so much power. I’ll give you an example. There’s some countries in South America and some other parts of the world where when the woman has menopause, when she has the hot flashes, in Spanish they call it [inaudible 00:51:46] which means shame. Now, you know that shame causes inflammation. These women have high levels of inflammation. They have no self-esteem. They have more pain than women in Japan which call it konenki which means the second spring.
Cultural beliefs that actually affect the hot flashes in menopause. In fact, their self-esteem goes up because they’re going into their second spring. The culture says, “Oh, now you’re wise and now you’re worthy and now you’re a source of wisdom.” They don’t have the pain. They don’t have the need so much for hormone replacement. They don’t have the osteoporosis. The pain is a process of learning the second spring. The pain is minimized. A cultural interpretation.
Stu:
For you to acknowledge and build it into a daily practice, do you have non-negotiables that you perform each day in terms of perhaps meditations, thankfulness?
Dr. Mario:
Yes, but it’s very important to know what kind of subculture you’re living with. I had to access who was going to remain as my friend in my subculture of wellness and whom did I have to drop? I had to drop some people or reduce the amount of time that I spent with them. Let me give you an example. Why? They will toxify you. Let’s say you have a mother who’s toxic. You decide you don’t want to give up your mother. What you do is you set limits. You set benign boundaries. The way that you set benign boundaries is you’re seeing two negative emotions. Let’s say that you live close to your mother.
[00:54:00] You say to yourself, “Okay. I’m going to use resentment and guilt to calibrate. If I don’t see her in a year, do I feel resentful or guilty?” You might say, “Well, guilty.” What if I see her every day? Resentful. You find the middle ground and you say, “Once a week for two hours. I’ll give her everything I have, but no more.” You’ll find people that are toxic, love is a toxic emotion for them. They can’t handle love. They’re with you with a couple of hours. After a couple of hours, they’ve had too much love. They say, “You’re not looking that good. You’ve lost some weight,” right there doing [inaudible 00:54:20] and negativity so you can get the hell out. You have to leave.
Guy:
Yeah. You really need to kill them with kindness.
Dr. Mario:
Yes, but limited. You say, “Okay. Absolutely right. I don’t. I may not look good, but I feel good. Mom, I love you. I got to go.” Stop there because if you go beyond, you enter toxicity and you co-author toxicity with her.
Stu: That’s interesting. Guy, I was going to have a lunch date with you today, but I think I’m going to can it. Would you like another time? Maybe next year.
Guy:
[00:55:00] Yeah. It’s so important the people you put yourself around with. We don’t realize it half the time, especially at work. Now, I wanted to touch on because I’m aware of the time. The show is getting on, Mario. You’re coming to Australia in July and New Zealand. Is that correct?
Dr. Mario:
Yes. From the 13 to the 20th I’ll be in Sydney, Melbourne. Then, in Auckland, I’ll be there the 20th. At ChrisHooper.com would be all the information there. I hope that as many people can come as possible because Australia has a lot of resilience, but I think if you don’t look at the culture components that actually make you helpless, you can’t use that resilience to a maximum degree.
Guy:
What can we expect from your workshop? Is it going to be a hands-on approach where you’re going to talk us through different techniques?
Dr. Mario:
[00:56:00] Yes. There are going to be some. Lectures are going to be more an introduction to how to trigger the causes of health and so forth. The workshops are going to be a lot of hands-on applications on learning longevity at any age, on learning how to not trigger potential family illnesses, how to improve relationships, and how to actually trigger the causes of health which we all have. As homo sapiens, we have 50,000 years of knowledge of how to actually bring out the causes of health. We’re not taught that because we don’t think that the causes of health are inherited. We think that illnesses are inherited, but it’s the other way around.
Guy:
Yeah, fantastic. I’m certainly going to come down to Sydney.
Dr. Mario:
Wonderful.
Guy:
I look forward to it. Yeah, yeah. I connect all the appropriate links when this podcast goes live anyway so people can check out the workshop for sure.
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Dr. Mario:
I was going to say both of you look very brilliant to me. Am I right?
Guy:
Oh, yeah.
Stu:
Yes.
Dr. Mario:
All right. That’s the subculture of wellness that I try to create.
Stu:
Fantastic. It’s working.
Guy:
[00:57:00] It is. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, we have one question, Mario, that we ask everyone on the show. That is what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Dr. Mario:
That I ever been given? That I’m a worthy person.
Guy:
Perfect.
Dr. Mario:
My mentor told me that. I had a sense of it, but when he said, “You’re worthy,” and it came from somebody who’s worthy, that allowed me to challenge anybody and to not allow anybody to put me down at my expense. You have to have somebody that validates you in your life. Anybody that says to you, “You’re worthy. You’re worthy of good things.” Somebody that you respect. That’s all you need to start.
Guy:
I love it.
Stu:
Fantastic. Excellent.
Guy:
For people that want to learn more about your work, what would be the best website to go to or reach you.
Dr. Mario:
Just Google biocognitive.com or Facebook. The mind Body Code. That’s the name of the book, The Mind Body Code.
Guy:
I have it right here.
Dr. Mario:
There you go. All right.
Guy:
Yeah. It’s fantastic. Is this your most recent book?
Dr. Mario:
Yes. There’s a new one coming out from Hay House. It’s called The Cultural Self. That comes out March 17th, 2017. That’s more the anthropology of biology.
Guy:
Fantastic. We’ll keep an eye out for that as well.
Dr. Mario:
Lots of pressure.
Guy:
Yeah. Yeah. Look, thank you so much for your time today. That was fantastic.
Dr. Mario:
Yeah. Congratulations to you both for the work you’re doing which is outstanding, I think.
Guy:
Look, we love it. We feel blessed to be able to come here and talk to people like yourself and just gain more knowledge. Mario, thank you for your time.
Dr. Mario:
My pleasure. Have a great day.
Stu:
Cheers.
Dr. Mario:
Cheers.

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Dr Mario Martinez

This podcast features Dr Mario who travelled the world interviewing people that are living happily over 100 hundred years old as he wanted to know what was their secret. Today he shares his discoveries in this fascinating interview and why he believes longevity is learned, not inherited. Dr. Mario E. Martinez... Read More
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1 Reply to “The Secret to Living Beyond a 100 Years Old (& being happier) with Dr Mario Martinez”
Jean says:

I am totally in love with this guy. His warmth and humor comes through, of course, he’s brilliant too. He needs to be cloned! The world would be a better place.

Comments are closed.