hyderabadi welcome to the paranormal connection i'm your host on a wild bird well we're starting on a new year and the perfect thing to talk about is our health you know we're not going to make it through the year for feeling poorly so we've got two experts that are going to be with us this week and in two weeks first up is matt perry he's a health coach and he's going to be talking about the story we tell ourselves about our health so let me introduce him right now matt thanks for coming on the show thank you let's talk a little bit about your background how did you how did you begin and what possessed you to put it in that kind of format storytelling well it's interesting you know when i think i've been interested in health my whole life and i'm also writer filmmaker storyteller and in the last few years that whole those two worlds kind of collided for me and seeing a number of movies and studying the health system i'm also health care reporter and so when i looked at the world around us and i started to understand that our health the way that we experience life our physical health our emotional health our spiritual health had a lot to do with the story that we told ourselves and so much of the story of health itself is based on the existing health care system the paradigm that we have around us and anybody who spent any time in the health care system knows that it's a broken system that for the most part does not keep us healthy and so i wanted to help people reform that story about themselves and help them get healthy that sounds fantastic now what kind of stories should we be telling ourselves that's a great question so the first question that i ask anybody that i work with is what's the story that they tell themselves most of the information and the messages that we get from the society around us  that you're not good enough you're not smart enough you're not pretty enough you're not rich enough you're not whatever and so the first story the first thing to do is really tell us or ask ourselves what the messages are that we tell us ourselves about our life there's a strain therapeutic you know there's cognitive therapy there's freud in therapy young in therapy one area that's really interesting to me is what's called narrative therapy and so narrative therapy deals with the story that we tell ourselves so i ask my clients to journal ask themselves the messages that they tell themselves and their narrative therapy also deal that asks you know what what's the message that you tell yourself on daily basis and most of those messages are negative or what they call in the therapeutic world problems saturated narratives  when i talk to my kids when they were younger we would look at t v commercials and the great philosopher frank zappa said the whole point of advertising is to make you feel bad about yourself so that you buy the product that's being sold especially for women i mean if you look at most of the advertising for women and you know i would talk to my daughter what are they saying about women in this commercial most of time they're saying bad things about you and making you feel bad about yourself so that you have to you know get this plastic surgery or buy this car drink this beer whatever it is to be cool or hip or whatever and you know it's it's not surprising that we live in a sick society i think we're culturally sick we're spiritually barraged and you know because we're surrounded by so many negative messages plus you know that there are a lot of the advertisement is cured towards some of the pharmaceuticals which you know if you have these symptoms this is what you are you know go see your doctor because you know you've got this problem anybody that has followed the medical industry and being a health care reporter i see this all the time that there are problems that we have problems that we have have been created by the pharmaceutical industry and the interesting thing is most of the time they're herbal remedies that have treated number of our current diseases that could replace existing pharmaceutical drugs  there's a chris kill him who he specializes in herbs and he he's got a great site called medicine hunter i think it's medicine and he talks about that too so if you have an herb you're not going to be able to get a patent on an herb right so what do you have to do you create a pharmaceutical equivalent of that herb and you patent it and you make a million dollars but the herb still exists they just don't have a marketing budget for the year before the cures cancer all kinds of things but we never hear about those things and you know when the health care dialogue in this country is so small and when you talk about physical emotional and spiritual health that's exactly what i want to do with the people that i work with you know what is health what is good health ok you go to your doctor he gives you blood they come back normal and he says you're healthy well most people i know that  even if their blood blood tests come back healthy they don't feel you're all doctor i don't feel healthy i feel depressed i feel lethargic well there's i'm not going to come back and a blood test our concept of good health is so small we have to broaden and one of the things that i talk about is the idea of the hero's journey the journey that we're all in for a greater a larger purpose now does your doctor talked about that i don't think so far as you talk to you about your spiritual health  i don't think so so the what i call the holy trinity of health is lots of exercise physical exercise which i absolutely believe is the doorway to health for most people good nutrition and spiritual community connection if you have not reached out to a greater community effort it's really having a huge effect on your life in fact there's recent research that has shown that loneliness people that are lonely have detrimental health effects equivalent to smoking i believe about two packs of cigarettes a day one so if you're lonely you're having a very poor health outcomes based on you know the equivalent is great you know i like to i like the concept to add about and then always storytelling but you know that you're incorporating like exercise and stuff we need that we need that agitation you know our bodies crave that agitation if you've ever exercise for a half an hour you feel awesome you know it oxygenates your blood your your mind feels great your body is pumping  jefferson said you know half of our day should be reserved for for physical exercise and here's the funny thing i went to a health care conference several months ago and i sat around and i looked at the people at the health care conference they looked like the most unhealthy bunch of people i had ever been and they looked paced the way that you could tell they didn't exercise many of them were overweight if not downright obese a third of the people in the united states are obese not just overweight obese and you look at the people in the health care world and they're sick so are these the people that should we should be listening to for health care advice i don't think so look around you who are the people that look the healthiest in our society that the people who are outside all the time we were exercising all the time who are in a community i happen to be a runner by far the most supportive and healthy community i've ever been in in my life is the running community they support me i tell y u i run by somebody at a race they say good job you know my friends if i beat them or they beat me we are you know pounding each other on the back saying you look great today everybody wants everybody else to do well they're physically healthy the healthy we have the community support those people should be the ones that are leading leading our health care dialogue right that sounds good now what are people that that have this negative you sit down and you say at the end of the day or even at lunch time or whatever what are the messages that i'm giving to myself oh i did crappy on that report that was really stupid thing that i said to that person and if you start to identify those messages that you're telling yourself throughout the day you will be astonished at how many of them are negative once you become aware of those and you start replacing those with with more positive self talk your whole life your whole whole experience will change you know somebody who says well i don't exercise if you start doing twenty minutes a day and i can be just literally walking you don't have to be a marathoner or an ultra marathoner or a tr athlete or anything like that i've seen people just transform their lives just by doing twenty minutes of walking a day that's all you need and you know so much of it truly is about self love it sounds corny but if you ask people do you like yourself a lot of people say no you asked people i am a teacher as well i asked my students how many of you are your own worst critics every hand in the room will go up why why would why in the world would you be your own worst critic when you should be your biggest cheerleader that's a good question right so so that's the first question that i would ask somebody is why why are you your why why do you criticize yourself when you should be the one that should be building yourself up and and that's the first step so is that a personality type or is that just you know the way we've been we've been brought up to to strive for better you know there are you can always do better you can always you can always be a winner that's a great question and so real it's a juggling act because you want to encourage people to push the envelope and do better but still do it in an encouraging way i mean it with a kid with children i have twins you know how do you encourage them to be better yet still encourage themselves at the same time and that's a fine it's a fine line and i tell my friends i say my best friends will tell me the truth whether i want to hear it or not they'll they'll encourage me to be better but they'll  also ask me to look at myself honestly and fairly and look at my my faults and encourage me to get better at them so you don't you don't tell somebody oh you know it's not a way of like oh you everything that you do is a great in your life that's not really true you really want to look honestly i'm sleepy you shortcomings and work to overcome them  but loving kind of way not to think that through the years we've sort of shifted into this more positive talk that that's almost now it's become so superficial that you don't know what to believe it can be kind of there can be a kind of phony you know there are a lot of the self help gurus that you hear about that you know they have the secret kind of shadow life i think you know i think we should really target you know even from the kids you know used to be when you do something wrong you know about it you know no discipline is so different now the school system is seems like you know everything you do is absolutely wonderful oh yeah you know  really don't know what it's like to take criticism you know they fall apart as soon as you tell them that you know that something they they did is imperfect any of my students that have taken my classes know that  don't let them get away with half hearted work or half assed efforts and basically we have come to the point where we've lowered the bar so much for many of our students that if you say you know i can't tell you how many times i've told students look you're not doing your bust and they look at me like nobody's ever told me that before and i had a student recently sat her down after a class and we had a very long talk about that and i told her she she was selling herself and she didn't know what i was talking about at midnight that night i got a text from her that said you're absolutely right how can i change there so when you challenge people to do their best they have two options they will either ignore it and continue doing the things that will keep them a victim in fact joseph campbell the great mythologist he says you only you only go on the hero's journey once you stop being a victim and i completely believe that and i will challenge my students do you want to continue being a victim or do you want to walk on the hero's journey you want to keep climbing that mountain or you want to walk off that mountain that's the those those are the two choices this is interesting i talked to a buddhist monk once and i said if you had if you talk to your practitioners if you gave them two things to study either meditation or proper breathing techniques which would you choose he didn't he didn't hesitate he said proper breathing and there are a lot of breathing techniques that i think are really great for stress reduction first of all exercise is the best stress reduction i know but proper breathing techniques meditation is great but there's also also a lot of other meditation or breathing techniques that can be used and that's one of the things about that i try to do with the health coaching is that you know a lot of people come in and say this is the diet that you should eat or this is the breathing technique that you should eat or should he should try i really to customize that so that it works for my clients you know a lot of people will nutritionists will say here's the diet that you eat need to eat to be healthy encourage them to have to write a nutrition journal what do they eat and to customize it for themselves because they're going to know what's good for them same thing with any sort of breathing or exercise program i'm not going to tell them hey you need to run thirty miles a week like i do what exercise do you like let's talk about different breathing techniques that you can try and find ones that are customized specifically for them that will really work for them it's not something that comes from me it's something that should come from them  and i think you know laughing you know i've always felt that people are just too serious and it's you know a lot of the eastern buddhist philosophers look at the western buddhist philosophers like you guys are so serious what's wrong with you guys you know alan watts who hell helped introduce a lot of eastern philosophy especially and to the west he says meditation should be fun you know and so we're just so serious all the time everybody's super critical and you know i mean you should goof around you should be silly and most important you should not afraid be afraid to be to feel stupid but one of the biggest things i tell my clients is be imperfect every day everybody's worried about saying the right thing doing the thing right and it's like you know while it's ok it's ok to be stupid it's ok to say the wrong thing says just start off your day fifteen alan watts of the same thing sorry day off to a ten minute with laughter you'll change your whole day just loosens everything up your body feels looser you feel looser your brain loosens up you know we're so tight constricted with you know the political dialogue which is so vicious and so much you know we go through the day fraid of making mistakes are going to look bad in front of the boss you know i try to tell people not to worry look like that perry should or should i tell matthew perry should i tell you about the time i got dressed up in drag for one of my film classes oh please do while i screen the movie to see for my film studies class we were doing comedy and so i decided to get dressed up in a dress that i had one of my students come out and do make up for me and i told my students that there was going to be a guest lecture after the movie which is the famous film about you know dustin hoffman getting dressed in drag so he can become a famous actor and so i came out after the film and i said mr peru's call him home to do so i'll do you go slow by students absolutely freaked out it was it was one of the best  experiences of my life yeah i mean i'll remember that all the time i was terrified i was absolutely terrified that i was going to become a laughing stock and there was one of my favorite memories from teaching now well that's one thing you can't be afraid of you know making people laugh or trying to make people laugh yeah we're just way too serious most of the time ok so when a client comes to you matt you start them out with talking about their negative emotions or negative feelings or self talk and how many weeks or what kind of program do you have set up for everybody the first thing i ask them about is you know i form a lot of my work around the hero's journey and i think that we're all heroic journey to do something bigger than what we think we are doing you know i talked to somebody before tonight and  framing your life in a bigger picture you know what is it that you were put here to do put here to punch a time clock for twenty years and then retire i don't think so to get people thinking in a bigger purpose to paint their life on a bigger canvas i think is crucial to that so i asked them that and they're going to tell me what that is what are the barriers that prevent them from taking that step and i talk about i know a lot of people who run a hundred miles i know people who become famous in their profession and i don't you know when i think of athletes we think of them as being heroes i don't think those are those people are heroes i know a lot of ultra runners that they're kind of very nice people but the true heroes are the ones that put in the daily routine and the rigor they sacrifice for their children they practice they practice kindness on a daily basis to strangers and it's so but to find out what they are there bigger purpose is and help them get that path and especially what prevents them what are the barriers that prevent them from going on that journey so well let's give your information ok well the best thing to do is go to my website which is a health story now so it's w w w health story h e l t h story to your why net has all my contact information on there and a lot more information about my health care writing the health care coaching and that's one of the other things i to say i'm not just a health coach i understand the health care system about the importance of being your own health care advocate i have links to a lot of people in the community that do you know that have specialties in health care a woman who will help you get denise fitzgerald who will help you get the coverage with you're denied by your health plan for certain kinds of coverage i know people who will dig in there and help you get the coverage that you need so many people don't understand how to navigate the health care system so it's not just this you know the hero's journey it's the nuts and bolts about you know the right specialists to go to  you know if you have an event that happens where you're not getting treated properly it's just amazing the difficulties navigating our health care systems you know because i write about health care i know i know the tricks that your insurers will play to prevent you from getting the health care you need you know when you go to your primary care physician is it ok to see your nurse practitioner or your physician's assistant let me ask you a question if you sit down your primary care physician and they start asking you start telling you him about him or her about your symptoms symptoms how long do you picture of health for you it's not going to help i'm not going to happen so that's that's why i want to help people navigate understand how to get through that system get healthy call well we've got we've just got a minute left let me talk about paranormal connection where the first and third monday of the month you can contact me at donna's journey at s b c global dot net you can watch us on line go to access such sacramento dot org and click on watch seventeen you can also watch us on the web so and join us on facebook we've got paranormal connection page up there like us join us leave your comments we'd love to hear from you and before we for wrap this up i'd like to think the crew for coming out tonight we've had a lot of volunteers that have come out and really worked hard to get this show on the road for everybody to enjoy and learn something from so they're awesome crew i think they're all on steroids th