Dr. Tara Swart Bieber

The basics like sleep and diet, particularly taking care of your gut, but also understanding where stress shows up for you.

You have to be sleeping enough, eating well, hydrated.

Things like spending time in nature, immersing yourself in the arts and culture.

That's gratitude to the next level.

Yeah, so I just want to segue on from what Will just said, which is that in terms of longevity, you can do all the good things that we know we're supposed to do, and you can stop doing all the bad things that we know we're not supposed to be doing, but the single critical factor that will impact your longevity is low-level chronic stress.

So not having that is the single most important thing.

And the answer to your question is because every thought correlates with a range of emotions.

and every emotion correlates with certain hormones like cortisol for the stress and survival emotions and oxytocin for the bonding emotions and serotonin also for mood but a lot more which I'll come to so basically every time you have a certain thought if it's inducing a survival emotion like fear or shame or sadness or self-disgust

then that's increasing the levels of cortisol in your blood that's going around your body, corroding your immune system, creating inflammation and dehydration in your system, and obviously impairing your ability to heal or perform.

On the other hand, if you have gratitude and you look at beauty and you spend time in nature and you indulge in the arts and culture, then you induce the hormone oxytocin, which helps you to build up your immunity, build up your resilience, perform better.

heal quicker, there's a really interesting new hypothesis called the serotonin hypothesis, which is about how trauma is stored in the body.

So most of you will have heard of Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Holds the Score.

And we now understand that serotonin is not just to do with mood.

Actually, more than 95% of our serotonin is produced outside the central nervous system and mostly in the gut.

The word itself means serum and tone.

So that's your blood and plasma products, and tone means how it asks the vessels to constrict to either push more or less nutrients and oxygen into the tissues and fascia of your body, therefore creating bracing patterns in your body created by trauma or not.

So I always say that serotonin could be...

producing the impacts of trauma in your body, or it could allow you to release hidden wisdom and intuition from your body through somatic practices like the kind of things you'll see here today.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think we're so lucky to be living in an era where we have all of these