The Resilient Mind
Can Forgiveness Heal? A Conversation With a Cardiologist - Dr. Alan Rozanski
09 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the connection between emotional health and heart health?
It was such a remarkable finding at the time. It was stunning to me. Looking back 1970s, there was three times as many people dying from heart disease compared to cancer.
The data we have right now shows how does chronic stress currently affect our health.
Have you seen cases where people might be undergoing like chronic stress or experiencing chronic stress, but they're just not aware of it? Living with depression untreated is one of the most toxic things to your health. Under chronic depression, the body seems to go haywire. It does not tolerate depression.
Why do you think people are not happy today?
Chapter 2: How does chronic stress impact our physical health?
There's a U-shaped relationship. People who have a moderate amount of stress are actually doing better than both ends of the spectrum. They do better than people who have toxic stress, but also they do better than people who don't have stress. So if your vitality is down, if that sense of feeling energetic is down, then you have to think about it.
You have to say, wait a second, how can we better manage our time when we feel like 24 hours is not enough? Just answering that question would be a whole podcast now. So welcome. Today I'm super excited to be joined by Dr. Rozanski. We're going to be talking about the heart, how it connects to health, and look at it from a more holistic perspective so we can help develop a more stronger mind.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Rozanski.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
So you have spent decades in traditional cardiology before you shifted to what we call holistic model of heart health. Was there like a single defining moment that made you have that shift?
Absolutely. It was one of those epiphanies, if you will. This was back in the early 1980s. We were studying cardiologists, but also specializing cardiac imaging techniques. We put people under stress on a treadmill and we look at the heart wall motion or the blood flow. And so one of the techniques is specifically that we have patients on a bicycle and we have them exercise.
And the wall should be more vigorous with exercise. But if there's a blockage in one of the coronary arteries, the wall motion starts to slow down. That's how we diagnose heart disease. And we do it with exercise.
But there was data coming out in the 1980s that people using ambulatory electrocardiograms during daily life activity were getting abnormalities in function, indicating lack of blood supply while driving the car and doing household activities. And we didn't understand it. So I got the idea to study this under mental stress. And my goal was just to understand what affects the heart.
I wasn't interested in mental stress. But we came up with a protocol to look at patients with subtracting zero sevens, a four digit number, something called the worst troop task.
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Chapter 3: What role does depression play in cardiovascular health?
And the third task was called, it wasn't a task, it was just having patients speak about the stress in their lives. And lo and behold, as we started to do this, I remember the second patient we did was a man about 59 years old. And he was talking about the fact that he was going to become an employee, he was going to lose his job. And as he did so, his war motion
almost about a third of his heart stopped moving while he was talking about this stress. It was such a remarkable finding at the time. It was stunning to me. And that was my aha moment to the mind-body relationship. So I began to study the effects of acute stress And over time, that gravitated to the effects of chronic stress.
And then that gravitated over time to looking at what are all the factors that might affect the heart besides just the physical factors we would look at like exercise and diet and so forth. So that's how I got going.
Wow, that is fascinating. And so you're one of the first people to show that mental strength can literally cause, if I can use the word, silent ischemia. What has that told us about the biology of emotion? Not just something that might be seen as being metaphorical, but also physiological.
Well, you know, it's kind of interesting because at that time I was focusing on acute stress and it was compatible with data that we've seen that during heart attacks, even during world-class soccer matches and so forth, there are some people who will develop heart attacks and so forth. Fortunately, that doesn't happen to most people.
And I emphasize that the data we saw when people with advanced heart disease, when we give those tests to normal people, that wouldn't occur. So I'm not sure it taught us much more than that. What was much more important was when I began to look at the effects of chronic stress and other factors.
And the data we have right now, so how does chronic stress currently affect our health?
So it's very important here to distinguish between, let's say, good stress and bad or chronic stress. I think we've
created because of the medical findings in terms of what stress can do to the heart i haven't looked at the flip side in terms of the good things that challenge that managing stress does for us but in short if you have stress that we would call toxic which might be stress you can't control with a lot of emotional reactivity reactivity to the stress um if it's an abating stress for example
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