Beyond Fight-or-Flight: How to Hack Your Genes with Your Mind

0:00This is Vitality Unleashed, the functional medicine podcast, your go-to source for better health, boundless energy, and peak performance. With Dr. Kumar's expert insights, we combine science and personalized care to help you thrive. Subscribe now and unleash your vitality. What if you could literally alter your own DNA and, you know, turn off the damaging effects of cellular stress just by sitting quietly for maybe 10 to 20 minutes a day? I mean, it sounds completely made up, honestly. It really does. But welcome to today's deep dive, where we are going to explore the actual hard science behind doing exactly that. We're coming to you from Dr. Kumar's team at LifeWellMD.com down here in Florida. Right, specializing in health, wellness, and longevity. Exactly. And we have a really compelling stack of sources on the table for you today. We are looking at a groundbreaking scientific paper, published in PLOS-1, plus an extensive historical interview with the legendary Harvard cardiologist, Dr. Herbert Benson.

1:00From memory lane TV. Right. And we also have the actual clinical training documents from the Benson Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. It's a really profound collection of material, mostly because of how it bridges the gap between what humans have intuitively practiced for millennia and what cutting edge genetic science can finally prove in a laboratory today. Our mission for you today is to understand what is known as the relaxation response. We are going to uncover the hard genomic science that proves its effectiveness. Learn how you can apply it to your daily life and look at how medical professionals worldwide are being rigorously trained to prescribe this exact method. And how we are actually using it right now to help patients. Absolutely. Okay, let's unpack this by going back to the origin story. Because the foundation of all this high-level genetics actually starts with a cardiologist, sneaking people into Harvard Medical School in the dark of night. It does sound a bit clandestine for a medical breakthrough.

2:01Right. Very cloak and dagger. But to understand why that happened, we really have to look at the landscape of medicine in the early 1970s. Dr. Herbert Benson was a cardiologist dealing with a massive surge of high blood pressure patients. And he started noticing a phenomenon that is fairly common today, but it wasn't well documented back then. White coat hypertension. That's when just like being in the doctor's office means you're so nervous, your blood pressure spikes. Precisely. The simple stress of a medical environment was artificially raising his patient's blood pressure during their exams. So he was getting false readings? Exactly. And he realized a very troubling implication. He was likely over-medicating people because he wasn't accounting for the baseline stress levels. Because the medical community at that time didn't widely accept psychological stress as a hard physical driver of cardiovascular disease. They didn't. So Dr. Benson decided to prove the link. He started trying to create animal models of stress-induced high blood pressure using operant conditioning. Let me stop you there for a second. Operant conditioning,

3:03are we talking about training animals with rewards and punishments to induce a constant state of stress? That is the basic idea, yeah. He was trying to establish a biological baseline for how chronic environmental stress physically damages the cardiovascular system. Right. But while he was focused on animals, a group of young people approached him with a radically different proposal. They were practitioners of transcendental meditation. Right. TM. And they told him to stop studying animals and study them instead, claiming they could consciously lower their own blood pressure simply by using their minds. Wait. In the 1970s, how did the Harvard Medical Establishment react to a claim like that? That must have sounded like pure mysticism to a serious, data-driven cardiologist. Oh, it sounded like professional suicide. Dr. Benson initially refused them outright. You have to remember, this was before the modern era of strict institutional review boards, but the stigma against anything resembling Eastern mysticism in Western medicine was intense. I can imagine. The practitioners were persistent,

4:07though. He finally agreed to test them, but he was so worried about his scientific credibility being ruined that he literally had them sneak into his laboratory through a side door in the evening. Just to hide them. Yeah. He didn't want his colleagues to see what he was investigating. So he wires them up in secret. He uses electrodes, breathing masks, muscle tension devices, and the results they got were undeniable. Completely undeniable. When these individuals meditated, their blood pressure dropped, their heart rate slowed down, their breathing rate decreased, and their brain weight shifted significantly. They were exhibiting the exact physiological opposite of the body stress response. And there is an incredible piece of historical irony to those secret evening sessions. What's that? Dr. Benson performed these measurements in the exact same room at Harvard Medical School, where 25 years earlier, Walter B. Cannon had first discovered and defined the fight or flight response. You're kidding. The very room where medical science to find how our bodies react to a severe threat is the exact same room where Dr. Benson discovered

5:10the biological mechanism for how our bodies completely reverse that threat. It is a remarkable coincidence. Cannon defined the physiological spike of panic and Benson in the same space found the physiological break pedal. It was literally the opposite of fight or flight. That's wild. But Benson was a scientist. He quickly realized this wasn't some magic trick exclusive to transcendental meditation. He stripped the practice down to its studs to see what was actually causing these physiological changes. And he found that you didn't need to be a master meditator. We're adhered to a specific belief system. He distilled it down to a universal formula consisting of just two simple steps. Step one is the repetition of a word, a sound, a prayer, a phrase, or even a repetitive physical movement. And step two is passively disregarding intrusive thoughts when they arise. You don't fight the distraction. You just say, oh well to yourself and return to the repetition. Those two steps serve a very specific mechanical cognitive function. They break the train of

6:10everyday thought, which is so hard to do normally. It is. But when Dr. Benson took those two steps into the historical archives, he found this exact process existed in virtually every culture on earth for over 4,000 years. It's everywhere. It's the foundation of yoga and indua. It is present in the Catholic tradition of the rosary with the repetition of the Ave Maria. It is in Judaism with the repetition of Shalom or Eshad. And the Greek Orthodox chance too, right? Yes, the Kairi Lyson. Or if you prefer a strictly secular approach, it is simply focusing on the number one, or words like peace and love. I found the anecdote about Dr. Benson testing a Zen Buddhist breathing technique on Ivy League students. Incredibly revealing. That's a great story. The traditional technique was to count from one to ten on the outbreath and then start over. He tried this with bright students from Harvard and Boston College and the experiment was a total failure. A complete disaster. These brilliant students kept losing count because their minds were racing too fast. He had to simplify

7:12the ancient technique to just repeating the number one. Which proves a crucial point. No single technique is functionally superior to another. The magic isn't in the specific word or the complexity of the counting. What matters is the biological state induced by breaking the thought cycle. And that brings us to the modern era, leaving the 1970s behind and looking at the hard genomic science. Because this goes far beyond simply feeling a bit more relaxed after a tough day at the office. Way beyond. Let's transition to the PLOS-1 study from our sources, because this is where the implications get massive. This study suggests that the relaxation response is literally rewriting your DNA on a cellular level. It is. But before we get into the results, can you translate the methodology? The paper calls it a whole blood transcriptional profile study. If I'm listening to this on my commute, what does that actually mean? Think of your DNA as a massive library of blueprints. A transcriptional profile study is basically looking at which of those blueprints are actively

8:12being photocopied and sent out to build things in your body. Okay. They draw your blood and look at the RNA. A messenger is carrying those blueprint instructions to see exactly which genes are turned on and which are turned off at that exact moment. That makes perfect sense. So they looked at three specific groups. The first group had 19 healthy long-term practitioners of the relaxation response people who had been doing it for years. Right. The second group was 19 healthy novices with absolutely no prior experience to control group. Exactly. And the third group was 20 novices analyzed after they had completed an eight week training program practicing for just about 20 minutes a day. The researchers analyzed the genetic expression using micro-orries, which is a technology that allows you to scan thousands of genes simultaneously. And the disparity between the groups was profound. Tell me the numbers. They found that 2,209 genes were differentially expressed in the long-term practitioners compared to the novices. Over 2,000 genes behaving differently just from sitting quietly. That is wild. It is. But the part that stands out to me is the

9:16short-term group. The people who had only been practicing for eight weeks saw 1,561 genes all to their expression. And 433 of those altered genes were shared between the short-term group and the long-term veterans. What's fascinating here is the mechanism driving these numbers. This is the science of epigenetics in action. Break that down for us. Epigenetics doesn't mean changing the fundamental sequence of your DNA. You aren't mutating or changing your eye color. Instead, imagine your DNA is the hardware of a computer. And epigenetics is the software operating system. So the hardware stays the same, but the software dictates which programs actually run. Exactly. When you evoke the relaxation response, the body attaches chemical tags called methyl groups to the DNA. These methyl groups act like volume knobs. Volume knobs on the genes. They can turn the expression of a specific gene up or they can turn it down or silence it completely. By changing the software, you change how the DNA translates into RNA, which ultimately dictates

10:18which physical proteins and enzymes your body manufactures. So by sitting quietly, repeating a word and saying, oh well, to your distractions, you are physically triggering your body to print a different set of biological building blocks. That is literally what is happening. But what do these specific genes actually do? The study lists things like oxidative phosphorylation and ubiquit independent protein catabolism. We definitely need to translate that. Let's break those down because they are vital to how we age and handle stress. Oxidative phosphorylation is just a complex term for cellular metabolism. It is how your cells generate energy. Okay. Think of your cells as tiny engines. The relaxation response makes those engines run much more efficiently. And when engines run, they produce exhaust. Does it help with that? It does. That exhaust is what the study calls reactive oxygen species. These are unstable molecules that cause oxidative stress, damaging cells and contributing to aging. The genetic shift reduces this harmful exhaust. That's huge for longevity. Absolutely. Then there is the ubiquitant system.

11:22You can think of this as your cell's internal garbage disposal and recycling center. Okay. So when we are highly stressed, our cellular garbage starts piling up. Yes. Stress creates damaged, misfolded proteins. If they aren't cleared out, they cause inflammation and disease. And the relaxation response helps clear it. The relaxation response turns up the volume on the genes responsible for that ubiquitant garbage disposal system, meaning your body becomes far better at cleaning up those damaged proteins. The study also mentions telomeres. If I remember correctly, those are like the little plastic caps at the ends of your shoelaces, but for your chromosomes. That is the perfect analogy. Telomeres protect your DNA from fraying when cells divide. Chronic stress physically accelerates the shortening of those telomeres, literally aging you faster at a cellular level. So stress is literally clipping the ends of our DNA. It is. But the altered gene expression from the relaxation response slows down that degradation. And comprehensively, it significantly reduces overall systemic inflammation.

12:23So if you're stuck in traffic, stressing about work or agonizing over a life decision, your body is turning out inflammatory proteins and shortening your telomeres. Correct. But this study proves that taking 10 to 20 minutes to break that thought cycle sends a new software update to your cells to start cleaning up that exact damage. The genes change in the absolute opposite direction of chronic psychosocial stress. It is a profound built-in biological countermeasure. And the data shows it happens rapidly within just eight weeks of daily practice. Which begs the question, how does this apply to the listeners' daily life? We've established the genetics, but what does this mean for everyday health? Well, Dr. Benson notes in his interview that 60 to 90 percent of all visits to healthcare professionals are somehow related to stress. 60 to 90 percent. That is a massive burden on our medical system and our personal well-being. Because of that burden and because this mind-body intervention is so biologically powerful, Dr. Benson issues a very serious, somewhat counterintuitive

13:25medical warning. What's the warning? If you decide to start practicing the relaxation response daily, you should consult with your physician or healthcare professional first. I have to admit, when I first read that in the sources, I thought it was a bit dramatic. Why would anyone need a doctor's permission to sit quietly in their living room and breathe? It sounds absurd until you look at the mechanism we just discussed. The relaxation response is so effective at lowering blood pressure, reducing heart rate and altering your metabolism that any prescription medications you are currently taking, like blood pressure pills or anxiety medication, might suddenly become too strong. Oh, I see. Because your baseline physiology is shifting, the dosage you needed a month ago might actually over-medicate you today. Exactly. Your doctor needs to monitor you so they can safely taper down your dosages as your body heals itself. That is amazing. It really validates how potent this practice is. It is not an alternative to medicine. It is a fundamental component of it. Dr. Benson advocates for what he calls a three-legged stool approach to modern healthcare.

14:28What are the legs? Leg one is pharmaceuticals, leg two is surgery and procedures, and leg three is mind-body effects. You can't have a stable stool with only two legs. You cannot. And the clinical training materials from Mass General highlight just how heavily they rely on that third leg. They use it for anxiety, mild to moderate depression, autoimmune disorders, and pain management. It's a huge list. It is utilized in treating angina, postoperative recovery for heart attacks, infertility, irritable bowel syndrome, and multiple sclerosis. Wow. Dr. Benson even notes its effectiveness in mitigating the sundowning effect, the severe late-day confusion and agitation experienced by Alzheimer's patients. Let's make this actionable for the person listening right now. The protocol outlined in the training documents is incredibly straightforward. You find a quiet space, you consciously relax your muscles, starting from your feet, and working all the way up to your neck and face. Then you sit at ease for 10 to 15 minutes, once or twice a day.

15:29Timing matters too. Dr. Benson strongly recommends doing it first thing in the morning before breakfast. This sets the epigenetic tone for your entire day, preventing the stress response from easily taking hold later on. You pick your word or phrase, close your eyes, and repeat it silently on the outbreath. When thoughts intrude, which they will, constantly, you don't get angry at yourself. You just say, oh well, and gently return to the word. It's all about that passive disregard. But what about kids? The sources mentioned that children and teenagers carry immense amounts of stress. Often manifesting is unexplained belly aches or tension headaches. Asking a seven-year-old to silently repeat a word for 10 minutes seems like a tall order. It is highly adaptable. For children, Dr. Benson suggests replacing the word with a visualization. They can imagine a flickering, glowing, golden orange entering their stomach, bringing warmth and light. Oh, I love that. The cognitive mechanism is identical. The visualization provides the required repetition, and it successfully breaks the train of every day's thought.

16:32It's amazing how accessible the practice is. Yet, the medical establishment is taking it incredibly seriously now. Very seriously. If you look at the Benson Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Mass General, you'll see they have created a highly structured professional certification called the Smart Program, Stress Management, and Resiliency Training. The existence of the Smart Program is the ultimate proof of how mainstream the science has become. Medical personnel from anywhere on the planet can undergo this rigorous training online to deliver it to clinical populations. Right, and this is actually where it hits home for us at LifeWellMD.com. Absolutely. Dr. Kumar has actually attended the Smart Program himself. He has, and he brought it right here into our practice in Florida to help our patients directly. It is a game changer for longevity and wellness. It's completely transformed how we approach stress reduction at the clinic. And if you're listening and want to start this wellness journey, with a team that actually understands the genomic science behind it, you can call us at 561-210-9999. Because it is vital to understand that this is not a casual weekend wellness

17:38seminar that doctors are taking. No, the fee structure and the requirements and the documents are intense. Healthcare practitioners have to complete continuing medical education courses. They have to participate as a patient in a live virtual eight-session smart group themselves. They have to experience it firsthand. Then they attend a two-day implementation training talked by the institute's clinicians. They have to undergo nine hours of direct mentorship while eating their first patient group. And finally, they must pass a competency exam. When you look at the financial commitment costing roughly between $8,709,200, it speaks volumes. It's a massive investment. Hospitals and doctors are investing nearly $10,000 per practitioner and dozens of hours of rigorous study just to learn how to properly teach patients to break their train of thought. It proves the medical community views the relaxation response as a highly valued evidence-based clinical tool necessary for modern patient care. It really is an incredible journey we have tracked today. We went from a rogue cardiologist,

18:41sneaking meditators into a Harvard lab through a side door trying to hide from his colleagues to a globally recognized genome-altering medical protocol. It's a massive paradigm shift. We are talking about a therapy that costs doctors thousands of dollars to get certified in. Yet it costs you the listener absolutely nothing to practice in your own home today. Nothing at all. And it is all based on the ridiculously simple act of breathing a word saying, oh well, and turning down the volume on your own stress teams. If we connect this to the bigger picture, it is a deeply humbling realization. Human beings across countless cultures and continents have known intuitively for over 4,000 years that this practice heals us. They built religions, philosophies, and daily rituals around it. And science is finally catching up. Right. Now, in the 21st century, we finally have the microarray analysis and the epigenetic vocabulary to prove that those ancient traditions were absolutely right all along. It forces you to reconsider the sheer mechanical power of your own

19:42attention, which leads us with a final thought for you to ponder today as you go about your routine. Yeah. If chronic stress physically shortens our telomeres and breaks down our cellular machinery and simply breathing a single word while saying, oh well, to distractions can literally rewrite that genetic damage. Is the most consequential medical decision you will make today, simply choosing which of your own thoughts to ignore. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. Give us a call at 561-210-9999 to start your journey. See you next time. Thank you for listening to Vitality Unleashed, the Functional Medicine Podcast. For more resources and personalized care to transform your health, visit us at LifeWellMD.com. Let's help you unleash your Vitality. One step at a time.