Amit Sood - The Mayo Clinic guide to stress-free living

2013 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research (MFMER)

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Mayo Clinic

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This book is dedicated to all my patients,
past, present and future.

Table of Contents

Cathy sat across the table in my office as she recited the lines, loosely based on a verse in the biblical book of Philippians, that had guided her for the past 40 years: Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right, and pure, lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

Cathy had a serious diagnosis; each jab of pain reminded her of the transience of life. She was also going through a difficult divorce. She peered into space, scanning the unresolved hurts in her memory bank.

Wiping tears from her eyes, she said, I have read and memorized the right verses and books. I know I should be in the now. Yet I dont know how to live in the now. I dont know how to keep the noble thoughts when the stresses of life challenge me. I know I should forgive, but I am not able to. Can you help me with this, doctor?

Never had I received a request so direct, so moving, so precisely articulated, and coming from such an inspiring person someone who was struggling with the vicissitudes of life, many not of her creation.

This book is written for Cathy and for each of you who believes that the brilliant sun is somewhere in the sky, but currently the clouds seem too dense. You have an inkling where you wish to go, but the obstinate fog wont clear this morning.

I see this every day the finest people, salt of the earth, suffering through no fault of their own. Based on my experience of practicing medicine for more than two decades and across two continents, and of observing the world and learning from numerous scientists, philosophers and spiritual luminaries, Im convinced of this: Human suffering is seldom a human fault. Most of our suffering originates in traits we acquired in our collective struggle for survival.

This book brings together the ideas, inspiration and instruction of the Mayo Clinic Stress-Free Living program, a course Ive taught to tens of thousands of patients and learners at Mayo Clinic and elsewhere. The program grew from my quest to understand and alleviate the suffering and stress I observed, not only in my hometown of Bhopal, India, where I experienced the tragedy of the 1984 chemical spill, but also in the United States, where I have been practicing medicine since 1995. After several years of research, I came to two important realizations:

Most of us have little information about how the brain and mind work.

Most of us do not use our brains and minds as well as we can or should.

In the past two decades, neuroscientists have made phenomenal advances in mapping the brains function. Using this base of medical evidence, scientists now have a much better instruction manual for the brain and mind than they did even a decade ago. But the bulk of this information remains in the confines of research papers. As a result, just as we dont read instruction manuals and thus use our electronic gadgets as if theyre 20-year-old technology we continue to use our brains and minds in much the same way our ancestors did a few thousand years ago. We havent translated scientific breakthroughs into practical strategies for taking care of ourselves and others.

In this book, youll learn important information that will help you use your brain and mind to live your life to its fullest potential. My colleagues and I have conducted several research studies of this approach among healthy volunteers, professionals experiencing stress, patients confronting serious illness and others. The results show remarkable improvements in stress, anxiety, resilience, happiness, well-being and quality of life.

In Part 1 of the book, Ill take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of your brain and mind. In the process, I hope you arrive at the same startling conclusion that I did a few years ago: Your brain and mind work very hard to keep you stressed. Your brain is wired to escape the present moment into a default mode of mind wandering. Your mind is gifted at recognizing threats and flaws, an essential survival instinct in the perilous past. Today, this instinct serves you well when confronting true physical danger. But if thoughtlessly applied to people around you, this instinct causes tremendous anguish. Further, the mind is a brilliant but restless and shortsighted tool that gets hijacked by impulses, infatuation and fear. As a result, we carry oversized emotional baggage in our heads. We crowd our memory banks with unresolved fears and unfulfilled wants. Fears and wants, in toxic overdose, generate stress.

Stress is the struggle with what is. A mind that doesnt have what it wants or doesnt want what it has experiences stress. The plethora of choices we have to sift through each day at lifes ever-increasing speed worsens stress. Saddled with hundreds of open files in the mind, we spend half our day physically here but mentally elsewhere. We get so caught up weeding the yard that we completely miss the tulips that nature gives us for a few precious weeks. We postpone joy.