09. From Rooter to Tooter

Hi friends,

Welcome to the ninth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive. 

I’m absolutely loving the conversations this newsletter sparks, and I’m thrilled by all of the ah-ha’s we’ve been experiencing together. Please keep writing to and contemplating with me– cultivating our healthiest self is a marathon and often takes some reconfiguring as we become attune to the specific conditions our bodies and minds need to thrive. 

The question I’ve been getting lately is about application– how should we incorporate the research shared here into our daily lives?

As I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters, there are five pillars of human flourishing: physical and mental health, close social relationships, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and happiness and life satisfaction. While all five are necessary, how these pillars coincide in our lives depends on circumstance and biology, both of which are inherently individual.

Why does this matter? Because application requires an understanding of our own individual mapping, but life is hectic and obligations abound. It’s often hard to juggle all aspects of our well-being in tandem with paying the bills, caretaking, and dealing with life’s unpredictable surprises. 

break*through was built to service busy lives by taking groups of like-minded new friends through well-paced challenges and games that provide a container to develop new and transformative wellness habits. The result is a stronger body, a calmer mind, and a deep sense of awakening. 

As a thank-you for being a member of this community, I’m opening up a complimentary break*through challenge for anyone wanting to go deeper on their health journey (and to gain some new friends for accountability). We kickoff April 1st and will rock out for 30 days. 

The challenge is 100% free for members of this community, but in the intake form there is an option to donate if you’d like to support this work. Your support makes all the difference.

Now, back to our new book of the month.

I recently listened to a clip of Elon Musk describing the way in which his teenage existential crisis was exacerbated by trying to answer the question: what is the meaning of life? He read and read and read and read until he came across “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” which offered him the following mind-bending proposition– people don’t know the right question to ask. “The universe” is the answer, and if the universe is the answer, the question cannot be, what is the meaning of life? We need a better question.

While Elon does not purport to have the exact question, he does believe the more we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask. If we become a multi-planetary species, we have a chance to figure out the answer that is the universe. 

If we take this line of reasoning and apply it to ourselves, a new query presents itself: if the body is the answer, what is the question?

I’d argue, if we expand the scope and scale of the mind-body connection, we have a chance to figure out what’s going on.

To really wrap our heads around the mind-body connection, this month we’re reading “The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health” by Dr. Emeran Mayer, gastroenterologist, neuroscientist, and Director of UCLA’s Center for Neurobiology of Stress. 

When appropriate, I’ll also include insights from “Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ” by Dr. Giulia Enders, whose Ted Talk is both hilarious and profound.

If you’re wondering why I’d pick the gut to delve into after a grand statement regarding the body as the answer, then the next four weeks are going to blow your mind… or maybe your guts! 

In the words of Dr. Mayer, “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, our GI tract, enteric nervous system, and brain are in constant communication. And…while few people paid much attention to the findings of investigators studying brain-gut interactions over the past several decades, in recent years, the gut-brain axis has taken center stage. This shift can be largely attributed to the exponential rise in knowledge and data about the bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses that live inside the gut, which are collectively called the gut microbiota… Dramatic technological changes in our ability to identify and characterize these microorganisms has occurred… and most of this progress occurred during the past decade…” (Mayer, pg. 15 - Kindle)

Dr. Enders similarly writes, “We humans are very proud of our particularly complex brains. Thinking about constitutional law, philosophy, physics, or religion is an impressive feat and can prompt extremely sophisticated movements. It is awe-inspiring that our brains are capable of all this. But at some point, that awe wears off, and we hold our brains responsible for everything we experience in life—we think up experiences of well-being, happiness, or satisfaction inside our own heads… Philosophizing and physics research are matters of the mind and always will be—but there is more to our self than that. And it is from the gut that we learn this lesson—the organ that is responsible for little brown heaps and unbidden sounds and smells of all sorts… The gut not only possesses an unimaginable number of nerves, those nerves are also unimaginably different from those of the rest of the body. The gut commands an entire fleet of signaling substances, nerve-insulation materials, and ways of connecting. 

There is only one other organ in the body that can compete with the gut for diversity—the brain. The gut’s network of nerves is called the ‘gut brain’ because it is just as large and chemically complex as the gray matter in our heads. Were the gut solely responsible for transporting food and producing the occasional burp, such a sophisticated nervous system would be an odd waste of energy. Nobody would create such a neural network just to enable us to break wind. There must be more to it than that. We humans have known since time immemorial something that science is only now discovering: our gut feeling is responsible in no small measure for how we feel. We are ‘scared shitless’ or we can be ‘shitting ourselves’ with fear. If we don’t manage to complete a job, we can’t get our ‘ass in gear.’ We ‘swallow’ our disappointment and need time to ‘digest’ a defeat. A nasty comment leaves a ‘bad taste in our mouth.’ When we fall in love, we get ‘butterflies in our stomach.’ Our self is created in our head and our gut—no longer just in language, but increasingly also in the lab.” (Enders, pg. 130-131 - Kindle)

She continues, “Our gut’s microbiome can weigh up to 4½ pounds (2 kilos) and contains about 100 trillion bacteria. One-thirty-second of an ounce (1 gram) of feces contains more bacteria than there are people on Earth. We also know that this community of microbes cracks open indigestible foodstuffs for us, supplies the gut with energy, manufactures vitamins, breaks down toxins and medications, and trains our immune system. Different bacteria manufacture different substances: acids, gases, fats. You could say bacteria are tiny factories. We know that gut bacteria are responsible for blood groups and that harmful bacteria cause diarrhea. What we don’t know is what all this means for each individual… Skewed proportions of the different bacteria in our gut have been detected in those suffering from obesity, malnutrition, nervous diseases, depression, and chronic digestive problems. In other words, when something is wrong with our microbiome, something goes wrong with us.” (Enders, pg. 154 - Kindle)

Until next week.

With gratitude,