Dr. Kavin Mistry’s research has discovered that some people are aging biologically faster than they should, putting their health and wellbeing at serious risk. He joins Zach Gurick to present seven paradigm shifts you can make in life to slow down and even reverse your biological age and reclaim your optimal health. From returning to the core principles of your body to connecting with your tribe, Dr. Mistry talks about practical ways to go against this accelerated aging trend. He also discusses the importance of understanding and aligning with your purpose, how to live with intention, and the immense power of community connection.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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How To Reverse Your Biological Age With Dr. Kavin Mistry
My guest is Dr. Kavin Mistry, a Neuroradiologist, Author and Founder of Primal Health Design. Dr. Mistry has a unique way of looking at health. He doesn’t just see people chronologically by the number of days they’ve had. He sees them biologically, and his research shows something alarming. As a population, most of us are aging biologically faster than we should.
In his new book, Primal Health Design: 7 Key Paradigms to Reverse Your Biological Age, Dr. Mistry lays out a roadmap to help us reclaim our health span, restore our humanity, and reconnect with what he calls the seven primal connections. His work blends cutting-edge science with timeless wisdom showing us that aging well isn’t about chasing the latest trend. It’s about returning to the core principles that our bodies and minds were designed for.
In our conversation, we’re going to explore why biological age matters more than chronological age, what’s driving this accelerated aging trend, and the practical steps you can take to not only slow it down, but actually reverse it. We’ll also dive into the power of community, connection and shared experience and creating lasting transformation. Get ready to rethink what’s possible for your health and longevity as we welcome Dr. Kavin Mistry to the show.
Kavin, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s really exciting to have you here. You have a wealth of unique knowledge and experiences, and I’m really excited for you to share those with our audience. I’ve been really looking forward to having this conversation with you. Thanks so much for being here and for joining us.
Pleasure, Zach.
How A Neurologist Started To Study Biological Age
You’re a neuroradiologist by training, but you’ve really developed this passion for helping under people understand their biological age. Now you have this amazing new book out, the Primal Health Design. You’re helping people reverse their biological age. Can you share a little bit about your journey and what led you to where you are? How did this all come about and how did you come up with Primal Health? I know you have a unique background, so I’d love for our audience to know about it.
Zach, a lot of times it’s hard to connect the dots until you’re well past all those experiences. I was born in India, but then my dad worked with the United Nations, and we were all over the world. We changed 22 houses in my lifetime. I grew up in many different countries, including Africa, which was a good chunk of my childhood. I gained experiences there with the native tribes. I came to the US when I was very young, and then also went on to radiology and became a neuroradiologist.
To answer your question, in terms of what led to the book and with all these rich experiences, when I started radiology, one of the things that I noticed is that when I looked at scans of 30, 40 year olds, their brains in terms of the brain volume and in terms of the body, in terms of degenerative changes in the body, abdomen, pelvis, and bone structure, everything, 30, 40 year olds looked like they had bodies of 60, 70 year olds.
When I started asking that question to my attendings and my senior residents, I said, “Isn’t this odd that this guy looks like this?” The answer I got is, “Just read the film. Just do your job. You’re here.” It just stuck with me. I said, “Why is it this the case?” On the flip side, occasionally I would come across 70, 80-year-olds whose brain looked like 30-year-old brain or a 40-year-old brain. That made me ask that. I said, “This guy’s doing something right. It can’t be all genetics, for sure. There is something in terms of a lifestyle factor or some intervention and that is playing a role here.”
That sparked the journey, and I dug deeper, and as I dug deeper, I found that there were a lot of different levers people were pulling at. What it wound up in the past 25 years is all these different levers, all these different switches, I found seven master switches, which govern all these other switches. Hence, the book Primal Health Design. The subtitle is 7 Key Paradigms to Reverse Biological Age.
Using AI To Study Brain Activity And Behavior
You spend your days looking at people through a very different lens than most of us spend our days looking at people. You really see people biologically. As a radiologist, you’re looking at our insides. Maybe say a little bit more about that and how that’s shaped your approach to health. You talked about a little bit of seeing this person’s brain looks like it’s 30 years older than it is, and this person’s brain looks like it’s 30 years younger. What does that look like and how do you determine that?
Sure. To add more color to that, Zach, for example, with AI now, we have certain tools available that were never available before, such as volumetric brain imaging. We’re able to look at certain areas of the brain that are key in memory and focus, particularly an area called the hippocampal formation. The term is relevant because this is the area that we want to study for people who start developing memory loss.
We want to assess and see that is it memory loss because of just lifestyle issues or not sleeping well or is it memory loss due to true brain degeneration and Alzheimer’s on a more of a pathological basis? When we have these AI tools available, and one of the products we use is called NeuroQuant, which gives us a volumetric measurement of these structures in the brain.
What we can do is we do a baseline for patients, and then we do a follow-up. In the follow-up, we can see that is that person’s brain degenerating faster than the normal rate that we would normally see. That’s just to give you a tip of the iceberg. Those are the types of measurements we are taking, which are very quantitative rather than just qualitative assessments.
Some people can say, “I feel tired, I’m forgetting things,” but that doesn’t tell me much. When I take a quantitative measurement in terms of brain volume, it truly tells me your brain age, particularly the parts of your brain that have to do with memory. That’s one aspect, just to give you an idea of brain age. When we look at cardiovascular system, another big one for people, because heart disease is a big issue, number one killer in US and worldwide. With tools such as AI processing, we can do a coronary CTA.
From that study, what we can do is we can run an AI algorithm, which actually examines all the vessels, takes a look at the calcified, noncalcified plaque, and gives you a true score of where your cardiovascular system sits. What’s the purpose of all this? The purpose is that, not that the number tells you that you have a cardiovascular age of 42, the average lifespan is 77, so you got this much to live. That’s not the purpose. You don’t do that math.
The purpose is that my work is implementing all these habits and rituals that can either halt or reverse these changes. When people start this, I want people to have a baseline and then a follow-up where we can target and say, “Your cardiovascular system now has improved this much,” and we can see concrete evidence of their biological age reverse.
A couple of things there. The CTA, I know that there’s the Cleerly test, I’ve had the Cleerly test, and that shows the internal pictures of our arteries and our and our heart and cardiovascular system there. That’s really helpful. There’s a brain imaging that shows the hippocampal volume. If the hippocampus is shrinking over time, obviously that’s bad.
I’ve had that done as well, like the full brain MRI. My brain age was about four years younger than my chronological age when I had that test done. I was like, “That’s good.” I have a friend who’s had that scan done once a year for the last few years, and his hippocampal volume has declined. It’s decreased by 16% over the course of a year. That’s like a trigger, a warning. There’s something.
Now it’s a trigger and it puts you in a position where I should do something about this. How do I halt this decline? The trajectory is not looking good based on just those sequential studies. That’s where all the science and all these interventions, from my perspective, come into play.
How A Person Experiences Epigenetic Drift
Yeah. What’s amazing is that there are things that we can do to slow stop, halt or even reverse those things from happening. That’s like the rest of our conversation. Maybe can be focused on that. You’ve come up with these seven triggers or levers that can be pulled. Maybe at a high level, could you just talk about those seven paradigms that you go into in the Primal Health Design and how they how they work and interact with each other?
Zach, to give an overall mindset behind this process, when I started this work, I started digging into the fact that what was that 80-year-old doing to have that brain that looked like a 40-year-old? I knew that it was not all genetics. There is something else at play. I just had to dig that out. What were theses that this they were implementing?
I came across a lot of interesting studies. One study that really sticks out to me was a study that talked about this term called epigenetic drift. What that means is that you can have two people with the same genetics and same exact genome. In this study, they had a set twins, Twin A and Twin B, same set of genes, who had a strong family history of Alzheimer’s, which mean that they were going to develop Alzheimer’s at a fairly early age compared to a normal brain memory degradation that occurs.
Twin A decided that they’re going to do nothing. They’re just going to accept that fate, and this is part of life, and I’m just dealt a bad hand. Let me just go with the flow kind of thing. Twin B said the exact opposite, said that, “I’m going to do everything that’s in my power to improve my memory and whatever research, whatever supplements I can take and whatnot.”
What was interesting is to pronounce somebody and say that somebody has Alzheimer’s, they have to meet certain criteria in terms of cognitive tests and things like that. I don’t think at the time that the study was done, they had this NeuroQuant or brain volumetric imaging at that time, which is fairly new. It would be interesting if they had it. That would be inter very interesting to see the analysis.
Twin A clinically developed Alzheimer’s at 62. Twin B developed clinical Alzheimer’s at 83. You can look at that almost a twenty-year epigenetic drift, which means that there were factors that Twin B implemented that impacted the genomic expression in their person’s body. What I tell people is, essentially, when you look at that, not everybody has this predisposition to Alzheimer’s.
Let’s say you have a good set of genes, but to know the fact that you are in the cockpit of your genome and you got all these levers and your decision is, “What do I turn on?” You are in control, and you have the ability to flip all these, all these levers on to impact your health. Hence, I boiled all bunch of different levers down to seven key ones, which I think played the biggest role in your life.
Seven Paradigms Shifts To Reverse Biological Age
I’ll just give a quick overview what the seven are, and then we can dig deeper as you wish into them. One of the first things I want people to understand is that when you look at health, we have a very reactive health model right now you got a headache, you go to the doctor, they diagnose you, they give you the aspirin, whatnot.
The doctor never says, “Let’s do something. You never get a headache.” We don’t have a proactive model at all. If I could change anything, I would say that we would want to assess people’s biological age upfront and look at the trajectory that they’re going on. If you did 2 or 3 scans and you realized that his brain volume is dropping at a faster rate than usual, so we know the trajectory now and we know that we need to intervene.
If everybody could have that curve and that extrapolated curve from the get go and say, “Here’s your curve. What do you want to do about it?” They’ll say, okay, “No, I want to change this curve.” That’s where I step in. That’s where I say, “Let’s start from the center.” The first aspect, the first dimension is physical health, which is the three paradigms. There are connections with earth, body, and food.
Just to give a high-level aspect to them, earth, when we talk about that, is essentially physically connecting with the earth in terms of grounding and connecting with soil, and getting all the benefits of that, as well as connecting with the rhythms of the earth in terms of the circadian rhythm. We know that our hormone levels, our digestion, everything mimics that circadian rhythm.
If we’re in misalignment with that, all these things are misaligned, and your hormone profile won’t be optimal. The second thing is connecting with the body. One of the key issues is functional movement and primal alignment. What we found that when you are not aligned the way your body’s designed, you have a lot more incidents of pain, particularly back pain, neck pain, and also, your energy levels are low because your body’s spending a lot of time compensating for that lack of alignment.
You talk about food, and again, that’s a whole different episode on its own. For the purposes here, when we talk about food, we want to eat so that we improve our mitochondrial health and of our gut microbiome, which are the two main drivers for biological aid. In yogic terms, there’s a term called sattvic food. That means life-promoting food. It’s food that feeds your mitochondria and optimizes your mitochondrial function and also your gut microbiome.
Once people have a control over this, and this was my first aspect, this is what the health and fitness industry focused on, and everything like that is around these three main connections, two different degrees. When you can get a handle on this, you can move one level out. The second dimension there is the mind-body connection. This is where we address really the mental aspect of developing clarity and focus, and moving from digital distraction to clarity. This mental aspect is so important because in this day and age, most people lack the clarity.
What we’re seeing is that why is this important. When you don’t have the clarity and the focus, people tend to have very low levels of this particular marker we call BDNF, if you’re familiar with that. It’s Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor, which is what drives wiring in your brain. When we talk about neuroscience, this idea of neuroplasticity that your brain is constantly evolving. We used to think the brain was fixed. No, it’s constantly evolving. New experiences, new learning.
However, apart from that, we know that meditation and contemplative practices, I try not to use the word meditation because people are just afraid of that term. I use more focused attention and things like that, but in the book, I give specific practices. When we engage with those terms, all these parameters improve.
When people get a handle over that, they can get an idea that, “I can really change my brain by my practices,” which puts you in a very empowering mode rather than a disempowered mode. When you say, “I’m turning 40 and I’m starting to forget my keys,” and things like that. People are just on a backseat driver mode rather than being in the driver’s seat with their mental health. I think that most of the current medicine tends to stop at these four that we talk about, earth, body, food, and connecting with the mind-body connection. There’s been a lot of discussion of that and whatnot. When I got to the stage, I knew I felt that there was more. That’s where the third layer comes in.
The third layer I found that has been extremely important in my life, when we look at blue zones and the research in countries where you have people with a really high level of longevity and everything like that, what you see is that beyond all of this, what we talked about, these areas have a very strong sense of connection with their purpose in terms of what gives their life meaning. The Japanese term is ikigai, what you are good at, what you love to do, what the world respects of your talent. The last is that what can you get paid for. When you see convergence of all four, then you find your ikigai.
It’s a process, but the people who found their ikigai, if you look at their blood markers, if you look at their inflammatory markers, a lot of these things that we measure in terms of telomere length and whatnot, they tend to have much better biological markers. Finding purpose. Beyond that, when you’re connected with yourself, the connection six is connection with tribe. It’s how you’re connected with your tribe.
We found that loneliness is an epidemic in the United States. We’re digitally connected to everyone, but we’re not actually connected to anyone on a one-on-one basis, or in terms of having a strong tribe. There are many more layers to that. I thought that was it. A few years ago, when my parents passed away, I lost both my parents in a short amount of time, that’s when I could actually finish the book and added paradigm seven.
Paradigm seven, I believe, is I talk about connection with our mortality. This raises a very interesting paradox that I found. I think that the biggest fear people have, when you look at all fears, look at anxiety, you look at stage fear, you look at all fears, all boiled down to fear of death. That fear of death underpins everything we do. You can use it positively when you can wrap your head around the fact that you are mortal, your life changes. What I mean by that is, right now, most people act as if they have endless tomorrows. You’re scrolling all-day, binge-watching Netflix shows and whatnot, as if like, what does it matter? Just another day. There’ll be another day and I’ll do what I need to do. I’ll do all the important stuff tomorrow.
Sometimes tomorrow never comes. What I found is that when you have this idea of an infinite life, you have a very finite mindset. You play win-lose. You’re talking about what’s in it for me. It’s a very finite game. You play, but when you realize you have a finite life, you start playing the infinite game. When you play the infinite game, it becomes more of a life of legacy. More of what impact can I make? How many people are better off because I lived, and that legacy thinking.
That happened after I lost both my parents, and I really had to question that death is not something that happens to other people. It’s something that everyone has an expiration date. I think when people actually wrap their heads around it, it changes the quality of your life so much. We’ve seen many markers. Your baseline cortisol grows down, your sleep quality improves, everything improves. You just live with intention and clarity, which is unparalleled.
Starting With The Baseline Connections
Thank you so much for giving us that overview. It’s super fascinating. I want to dive into some of this here, but if we can just maybe back up for a minute, because you mentioned earlier that you start with a baseline, and so I’m curious, how do you test for that baseline? For things like our connection with mortality, our connection with tribe, how do you get the baseline before someone goes through and makes these changes?
Zach, as I said, we start with the space. For example, with Earth, I talk about the big s’s. The sun, soil, sleep, spine alignment, and what I call is sattvic food or life-giving food. Those are my five s’s. I think that if you do not have control over those big five s’s, to try to teach you meditation and to try to talk about purpose, tribe and all these other connections with mortality, it’s a moot point.
If you just cannot get control over sleeping well and eating that in a way that’s life-promoting or having that connection with the earth and sunlight and doing that alignment, that circadian rhythm, all these parameters won’t make sense. It doesn’t matter because the fact that you’re not sleeping well will be such a big deficit that it will not allow you to experience those higher dimensions of health.
We start with that baseline, those primal connections. When you talk about, for example, connecting with the earth and grounding in the soil, obviously, circadian rhythms, we can get up and look at the sunlight. Having that as the first part of our day can be super helpful to set that circadian rhythm for the rest of the day. For grounding, do you use things like grounding sheets or PEMF mats or other things that you recommend or just walking barefoot outside? What kinds of things can we do to ground ourselves?
We know that grounding mats and those sheets are helpful. I get correspondence from people from Boston that says, “There’s no way I’m going out and stepping outside barefoot.” I said, “I get that.” You can get grounding shoes, you can get grounding mat. It’ll give you that that electrochemical benefit of it. You will not get the microbial benefit of having contact with soil, for sure.
I do mention that people try to connect with nature not just have a grounding mat, but do make an effort to be out there. Maybe structure your week where you can go hiking in the woods. Connecting with the earth is not that you have to physically touch the soil, but where there is soil, it will be in the air, as soon as you are those environments.
Your mucus membrane is absorbing all this, and you are absorbing these microbes. You don’t have to physically eat the dirt or anything like that. Little kids are putting things in their mouth all the time. Just being in those environments, taking time to do that, I think it’s so important in terms of your gut microbiome diversity that it’s key. You have to almost treat it as medicine and implement that in your routine.
Resetting Your Day With Hanging And Squatting
The functional movement and alignment, are you recommending going to the chiropractor once a month? How do you stay aligned?
There are many different approaches to this. I would say the number one thing that is helpful for people is it’s really how you start your day in terms of overall setting the baseline alignment. This is what I mean by that. One of the best things people can do is hang from a bar. One of the things that does, in fact, there’s this orthopedic surgeon who wrote this book, I’m forgetting the name of the book, he talks about that almost 90% of shoulder issues can be handled by just a static hang. When people start doing it, they realize how hard it is to actually hang from a bar. If you can get to 30 seconds, that’s a good start.
Ultimately, you want to be strong enough where you can get to two minutes. If you get that to two minutes, what that means is that you have developed your posterior back muscles, particularly your upper back, and traps to a level where that it can sustain that amount of time on a bar. What that does is that when you get to that level, and when you start progressing, that muscle development and activation in the morning naturally will pull your shoulders back.
One of the things we see in terms of people having back pain, particularly midback pain and neck pain, is that as soon as you sit on your laptop for Zoom meeting, you’ll see people’s shoulders are going in. You have this natural tendency to curve in. You have to bring it back and down, but again, how many times you can intentionally do it, but you’ll forget. During the day, you’ll be in the meeting, and then your body will go back. You’ll do what it wants to do.
The way to train it over time is to have that static hang in the morning, and you’ll see slowly, it starts opening up because those muscles keep, pull your shoulders back. That’s one thing that I found that is extremely helpful. Number two thing that is very important is that be comfortable squatting, and I’m not talking squatting with the barbell on your back and squat, doing those typical lift squats. I’m talking a primal squat, or what we call is ATG, ass-to-grass squat where you’re just squatting all the way down.
If you look at babies or you get a toddlers, they’ll just be in that position playing. It’s such a primal position. When I grew up in Africa, everybody just sat there in a squat and talked, and they’re just chatting. Everybody’s just in a squat. It was just matter of fact, “Let’s just chat and I’m going to stay here in a squat for an hour.” I became so comfortable being in that position. T
O me, it’s a very restful posture. It’s such an important primal design that when you are in that deep squat, it changes the angle of your sacrum in a way that it really strengthens your lumbar musculature and strengthens that whole lumbar spine. First of all, it aligns it properly, it changes the angle of your pelvis. When you can comfortably do that, what we found is that the incidence of low back pain in people who can do an ATG-type squat is extremely low. Low back pain is, from radiology perspective, one of our main diagnosis that we get. Pre-imaging diagnosis, everything is low lumbar spine, indication low back pain. That’s so common. There are many more layers to that, but I would say those two types of things can really set your day.
Doing those in the first thing in the morning opens us up.
It gets you going. When you’re doing it every day, your range of motion, those areas starts improving. When you keep hanging, that strength keeps improving. When you keep squatting, the depth keeps improving. Let’s say you can’t fully squat, see how far you can go and it will improve.
Keeping A Nutritious Lifestyle With Whole Foods
If we’re hanging, do you want our arms straight or elbows bent? Full hang. Straight. As far as food, so eating life-promoting food, I know like in the Ayurvedic medicine, you eat a lot of different kinds of food. They encourage like sweet and sour and all the different flavors and everything, so then you get a really good mixture for your gut microbiome. What do you advise now as the most beneficial life-promoting foods or diet restrictions to follow?
Zach, from the diet perspective, we talk about life-promoting food, food that is optimizing our mitochondrial function and feeding our gut microbiome. I’m fairly practical with people because I realize that you have to blend. The whole restaurant business and everything is designed for our palette. Nothing wrong with that. There are pizza places where I love to go to because it’s just phenomenal pizza. Can I eat that every day? No. I have an 80-20 mindset, and then that’s what I promote to people. I talk about in the book that. At least 80% of the time try to stick with whole foods, which means that it should be a single ingredient on your plate.
I try to get people to design a plate where 80% is a single ingredient. You have your leafy greens, you’ll have your, let’s say legumes, you’ll have other veggies. The 20%, you can put whatever your choice of meal is, whatever you want. Put a protein source you like, or it could be something that is semi-processed or something like that.
Take a more of a sensible approach, because sometimes, I feel when you’re like all or nothing, people don’t stick with a diet. I don’t like the term diet, first of all, because to me, it signals a transient phenomenon. People say, “I’m on a diet.” That means that you’re not going to be on a diet at some point. It’s a very transient term. Let’s just get rid of that.
Pick an approach, pick a lifestyle mindset or a diet mindset that you’re going to carry with you. If you have that 80-20, it gives you enough room to play where you can have that 20% to have those 1 or 2 few meals a week where you go and enjoy the foods you like. You’re also going to enjoy the health benefits of that 80%, which is like the whole foods that I talk about.
Apart from the whole foods, one of the things is that a lot of times, I see people are hungry, but it’s not that they’re hungry. Their body is craving water, not food, because a lot of times, dehydration mimics as hunger. One of the things is that your body’s constantly scanning the food you eat in terms of the hydration level as well. It’s trying to see the food you’re putting in, is it more close to earth and more close to the body composition. Earth is 70% water. If you look at most veggies and you break it down and you do an average, they come down to about 70%, 80% water. When you’re eating water-rich foods, it’s much more better assimilated in your body, and you also get that hydration benefit from it.
Working Your Way Up To 20 Minutes Of Focus Attention
We want to make sure we’re staying hydrated that way as well. The mind-body connection. Meditation, contemplative practices, like you said, if you’re not doing those first four things, or those other three earth, body, food, if we’re not doing those well, then the mind-body connection is harder to introduce. If we have that base, then now introducing meditation, contemplative practices, we can actually change our brain’s neural pathways and create new neural pathways, doing that through meditation or contemporary practices. What does that look like for you on a day-to-day basis?
Meditation is a heavy term for people. In fact, if you talk to Eastern yogic culture, they’ll laugh at the term meditation because they have almost eight different types of meditation practices. They don’t even call it meditation. There are many different levels to it. To simplify things, I tell people, “Let’s use the term focused attention,” which is more palatable. It actually is more symbolic of what we’re trying to do.
The journey for most people is you want to go from anxiety and distraction to attention. Ultimately, when you stick with attention enough, you develop what we call as awareness. A lot of times, when people take meditation classes and whatnot, sometimes the practitioners are getting people to go all the way to this transformative state of awareness and whatnot.
People get frustrated because they don’t experience what the practitioner is maybe trying to teach in those classes. What I tell people is that in this distracted world, if you look at neuroscience and the science of focus and flow and everything like that, you need twenty minutes of focused attention to get into that meditative or flow state.
What I mean by that is that a flow state is where you have what is known as transient hypo frontality. What that term means is that at around that twenty-minute mark, that front part of your brain, which is related to doubting, it’s relating to analyzing, it’s related to, “What are you doing? This is not working,” it steps aside and it allows the primitive part of your brain to actually just come through and shine.
That’s when you feel that connection, the connection with the now the presence, the flow that everybody talks about. It takes about twenty minutes of that. Most people, I would say, in this day and age, are not capable of hitting twenty minutes off the bat. We get 180 notifications every day. Every time you get a notification, your brain pops out of that mode and then it takes twenty minutes to go back if you wanted to do deep work or flow work or meditation.
Essentially, we’ve designed modernity to give people the lack of concentration. There’s no way they can go into a meditative state at all with the way the world is right now. What I teach people is at least can you do two minutes of focused attention. One of the best things people can focus on is something in the now. What is in the now? You could look at a candle flame, you could look at a water dropping, or you could watch your breath, which I found is the most accessible thing because it’s always with you. You can just watch your breath.
There’s a Buddhist term or a Buddhist practice, and I talk about it in the book. It’s called Anapanasati Yoga, Anapana, meaning in breath, out breath. Sati means watching, and yoga meaning a union of mind and body. In this practice, all you’re doing is breath watching. It sounds so simple until you sit down and do it. You realize that every time I sit down to watch my breath, I’m thinking about laundry. I’m thinking about the guy, I need to text what I’m doing tomorrow and you see that.
Every time your mind wanders and you come back and you wander and you come back, you’re building that muscle to stay in that now. That focused attention, even two minutes, is good. When you can get comfortable with 2 to 5 to 10, and you can work yourself to 21, one day, you’ll experience that state where the thinking part of your brain will step aside a little, and you’ll experience that flow.
It’s something that we can work up to over time. Anybody can start. Two minutes, focus on your breath. That’s not too hard.
Every two minutes is rewiring something. As we talked about, if something is malleable, and I’m playing with this clay, even if I play for it with two minutes, I’ve molded it somewhat. I’ve not created the pot yet, but maybe I’ve created a sphere. Tomorrow, I have the chance to mold it even further. Think of it that way. You’re holding this clay, and every day you get to polish it and mold it.
Understanding And Connecting With Your Ikigai
I love that metaphor. The next is purpose or meaning or the Japanese term ikigai. Those give you purpose and meaning. You’re good at it, and you can get paid for it. I find it fascinating that the people who have found that and are experiencing that way of life have better biological markers. That speaks to this mind-body connection, that if we are living a life with purpose and meaning, then our bodies are going to respond at the cellular level. Can you maybe like break that down for us a little bit from your perspective?
Zach, I came upon this because I traversed all these other layers that we talked about. This is a lived journey for me. S I said, the seventh layer only came when I really lost my parents. It’s been a process for me to build a system within me as well. What I found was when I got a handle on all these things we talked about, earth, body, food, mind, mind-body, connection and everything like that, I was going to work. I’m practicing radiology. I’m doing everything. One day, I’m thinking going, “It’s still not there.” It’s not like you wake up and you’re like, “I love my job.” It wasn’t there.
What I found as I dug deeper is that most people are living in this misalignment. I think everybody has a very unique constitution and this unique drive. Some people are what I call is like the physical creators. They want to create things all the time, whether it’s ideas or art or music or whatnot. People are thinkers. They want to come up with new ideas.
Some people are connectors. They want to connect with people all the time and connect with people and have relationships. They’re have very high EQ, emotional quotient. Last, people are more spiritual. They think about things beyond. In our Indian philosophy, we try to put people in this four categories where they tend to have a more dominant portion of one of them.
What I find is that when people don’t nurture that aspect, their dominant quality, they feel suffocated. Zach, let’s say you were just a phenomenal designer, and just very creative in terms of design, in terms of let’s say graphic design and just art and topography and everything like that. You became a stockbroker. You’re making all this money and everything like that.
One day, you’re going to be sitting there, you go like, “This is a great job. I’m getting paid all this money, but it’s just not there. I just feel like there’s something is missing.” It’s because your creativity is suffocated. That aspect is suffocated. That’s what I talk about, misalignment. When you have that misalignment, you’re going to have chronically elevated cortisol. It’ll never bottom out. You will have a chronically elevated cortisol, for sure, because subconsciously, you will always feel that disconnect because you’re not connected with your true purpose or your true gift that you have.
When you cannot express that, that gives you chronically elevated cortisol. We know that chronically elevated cortisol is related to low decreased telomere length and decreased longevity. That probably explains part of why these cultures, where they really chase their ikigai, as we talked about, that tend to have better longevity. It’s probably this factor that I just talked about.
I had to reassess my job and I said, “What is it that I enjoy the most?” I took inventory. I said, “Is it reading the films?” What I came through and I went through everything that I do and what I enjoyed the most, where I could get lost and really do it all day if I had to, was teaching medical students and residents and be a mentor and just making complex concepts easy to understand and apply for students.
When I understood that that was where I need to be, it really made sense. I said, “That makes sense because that makes me all more alive when I wake up and I have to do that a job.” It excites me rather than reading films all day. What happened from there is, I was doing really well in the group and everything like that. I was one of the young partners and they liked my personality. They said, “You’re really good at talking to people. We want you to be the VP of the group.” The president really liked me, and he said, “You’re just one of the younger guys, but we think in terms of succession planning, you’re probably the best thing we can do for the group.”
They gave me this VP job, I was really happy, my family’s happy and everybody’s happy. I’m sitting there, I’m going, “I’m going to be a VP of the group. More admin, more dealing with the hospital and whatnot. Is this lining up with what I really want to do?” It means I’ll be teaching less, less contact with residents, less students. Right at that time, a friend of mine reached out with an academic position. They said, “Do you want to come teach? You’ll be a core faculty and, but you’ll have to leave this job and come over there and whatnot.”
It was one of the hardest decisions, Zach, because I left this high-paying VP job, again, to be like a nobody in another group and be in a teaching position. Three months after becoming a VP, I quit that job and took this other job. It was the best thing I did because every day I wake up, now I live that purpose because I enjoy it. That segued into writing the book and everything like that.
Creating A Big Five Folder Everyday
Life unfolds in a way that you get to live that out and express your true calling, your true passion and reduce your cortisol levels overall and live longer and healthier. I guess it’s a win-win. Great. Connection to tribe is the next one. Having those social connections, and obviously, that’s extremely important. How does that affect us physiologically as well? What are some of the things that you’ve seen there?
What I’ve seen there is that in this day and age, we’re infinitely connected digitally, but we’re not truly connected on a personal basis. If you look at cultures, if you look at particularly the Japanese culture, they have this concept of moai, I don’t know if you’ve heard that term. Moai is what is known as friends for life or a support group that you just grow older with.
It’s not somebody necessarily that is part of a particular discipline. It’s not like a book club or anything like that but it’s a group that is just supports each other through life, through thick and thin. Everybody has issues along time, as things go, as you age, but they’re just tight and they’re there for each other through their whole life.
I thought, “What a beautiful concept.” Those were the people that were living the longest because they had the support system. Maybe you are not in a situation where you can have a true moai. I think that for people to have a tribe that they can connect with, it’s very important. If you look at the Harvard study on longevity, after all this research, and they talk about what was the biggest driver in terms of all-cause mortality, and it was the quality of relationships.
It wasn’t the fact that they smoked or all this stuff. It came to the quality of relationship, which I thought was phenomenal, if you think about it. You take that research and you realize it’s really the deep connections that I have that really impact my longevity. It begs to answer that what tribe are you part of or what tribe should you be part of to support your health?
I think that study was The Good Life. Is that the study you’re referring to?
There are a couple of them, but that’s one of them that you mentioned.
Living Our Finite Lives With Intention
The quality of our relationship is the number one thing. The last one, just to dive in deeper to each of these, the connection with mortality and having that sense that we do have a finite life, so let’s live it on purpose and with intentionality. That actually also brings our cortisol levels down, which is counterintuitive.
Could you break that down a little bit further for us? If all of our fears ultimately are stemming from the fear of death, if we get over that, then is it because we’re not living with fear anymore or is it because we’re living with intentionality every day or looking at our legacy impacts our ikigai? How would you describe that?
I can tell you from a personal perspective, what shifted for me is that I would say growing up and going through medicine as a young doctor and a young partner in a group and everything like that, it was all about really chasing the ROI. It’s like, what’s my return on investment? Putting this much time, what am I getting back? Even my relationship, to some degree, I would say, had become transactional that I’m going to develop this relationship. What’s in it for me? I give him this, he gives me that. It becomes a barter system to some degree.
My dad developed this incurable form of lymphoma, and then it like went downhill pretty quickly. Towards the end, when he passed away, I was looking at his phone to look for pictures for the funeral service and everything like that. Normally, people have like 3,000, 4,000 pictures. I think there’s probably have like 5,000 pictures in my phone right now. When I opened his phone, he only had five pictures. I knew at some point he had thousands but, in the hospital, there were only five pictures. It was like a picture of him and my mom, my fam, my whole family, my brother’s family. He was a big business leader, and that was his ikigai. That was his thing that he has built.
He had a picture of that and one a picture of the place of worship that for him and then you had a picture of that. I looked at that and I said, “Isn’t that interesting? You think you have 5,000 pictures, but really, it’s only those big 3 or 5 things that really mean the most to you.” If I could give the audience here an exercise, I would say create a big five folder in your phone. Take your 4,000, 5,000 pictures, whatever you have, and see if you can boil it down to 5 things that hold meaning to you. In your last day, these are the five pictures that you want to see.
For most people, I would say it’s going to be their significant other, it’s going to be their family, kids and siblings and their parents and whatnot. Maybe a place of worship and all that, but I think 1 of those 5 is going to be the impact you want to make, the legacy you want to live. When you take all those other pictures apart, it’s going to be that one thing that you want to leave behind. What is your gift back to the world? I think that if you wake up with that image and say, “Here’s my impact,” it changes how you approach the day because it’s no longer just another day, but it’s your chance to bring that vision a lot to life. Bring that legacy to life.
Maybe it may not be something that will come to fruition in your lifetime. Maybe it’s a movement you start that other people carry on. Maybe it’s a dialogue you begin and that that continues beyond you. That sense of having that infinite mindset, you’re starting something that is going to live on beyond you. I think it impacts your physiology when you’re operating at that level.
One thing that happened to me is I had to look at my life and I said, “What is my impact or what is my legacy?” I was thinking of writing this book for 25 years. I had all this information collected and everything like that. When that hit me, when those five pictures hit me, and I was trying to put my five pictures to cut together, and apart from family, friends, my spouse and everything like that, I had to come up with that legacy picture. I said, “I’m going to write this damn book that I’ve been trying to write for like 25 years.”
I have all this information. I said like, “Why am I not sharing this and why I’m not giving this information away?” What didn’t happen in 25 years happened in 9 months, really. From that day that I made a decision to do this, I just put everything together and it was like I had to write it, got an editor and just went with it.
I think that when people can make that shift, that sense of urgency develops, that sense of legacy develops, and it’s like the capstone of your health because when that is in place, that whole structure, it gives meaning to why you do grounding. It gives meaning to why you’ll eat well because it’s all of this, because so you can do something that really makes a difference.
Yeah. It’s all working together to ultimately serve that higher purpose. That’s amazing. I love that. I love that exercise, to create a big five folder. That’s so simple. We can all sit down and do that.
I think it just brings everything to life because it makes you focus that what is the most important thing to me. If you begin your day with your big five, then you say, “I’ve got to spend time with my wife. I’ve got to give time to my kids, and then I’ve got to have intention and live my legacy. You’ll not doom scroll, you’ll not binge watch because there will be this bigger driver in your life.
How To Measure Your True Biological Age
Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I’m curious, now that you’ve put this framework together, I’m assuming that you’re following these seven paradigms yourself. What is your biological age and how have you seen your biological age slow or even reverse by following these practices?
There are many different parameters that we can measure for biological age. We can do more specific tests like DNA methylation and everything like that. I did my Cleerly scan with the coronary CTA. Apart from that, one other thing that is a very good parameter, that is how your baseline parasympathetic tonus. We have the sympathetic system, which is like your fight or flight, and then the parasympathetic is on the rest and relaxation. The more you are engaged with these seven paradigms, what I find is that ultimately your life comes to a state of ease, because there’s purpose behind it, there’s legacy behind it, and obviously all the positive health parameters that we talked about.
When you tie in everything you’re doing in terms of health and fitness with purpose, legacy, and connection, you’ll see that your life comes to an ease. When your life comes to an ease, I tell people there is a level of stillness that starts developing within you. It’s hard to put it into words, but what I can say is that you’re not always chasing the return on investment. You’re not chasing that end goal, but you’re chasing the process. You’re chasing experiences. You’re chasing how much I can contribute every day.
The quality really changes. When that stillness develops, and I have a chapter in the book called Stillness versus Illness, that when you have stillness, you’ll have a lot less illness in your life because it has to do with in terms of your overall sympathetic and parasympathetic tone balance. What I’ve seen, one, is that my resting heart rate went down, my heart rate variability, which is like an HRB. You can measure on your iPhone and whatnot. The HRB, everybody’s range is different. I cannot give a number that people need to be at because it depends on where your HRB is.
Let’s say your HRB bounces between 20 to 50. What that means is that when your HRB is on the higher end, around 50, you are at ease. Your body’s at ease. When your body is at ease, everything be is better. Your immunity is better, you’re fighting cancer better, you have low risk of heart disease, your brain function is better. You have higher levels of BDNF, all these things.
What I started noticing that I was spending more time in the higher range of my HRB than before, and when I go to sleep at night, and when I’m just resting during the day, I tend to be on that higher wrench much more than before. I guess if that you could use that as surrogate markers of overall biological age, then it’s working in that sense.
Get In Touch With Dr. Mistry
Thank you so much for, for sharing all of this and diving into each of these paradigms for us and expounding those for us. The book is Primal Health Design. Where can people connect with you? I know your book’s available on Amazon, but what’s the best way?
The best way is there’s a website associated with the book, PrimalHealthDesign.com. On that website, I have two resources that people can actually use, which people have found helpful. I always get asked, “What’s your morning routine? What do you do when you wake up?” I said, “There is an AM routine download,” which is for free. You can go to the website and you can download it for free. You can have it, and that would be a good way to start. The book has a Primal Reset Program within it.
What I found that people need a more of a guided journey through this process and everything that I mentioned in connection with earth, body, food, mind-body, purpose, tribe and connection with our mortality, I take those seven paradigms. What I did is I created a Primal Reset program. It’s a 21-day transformative course that we have finished.
If people are interested in that type of content, where they want a one-on-one conversation with me every day, maybe for 10, 12 minutes every day, I give you these exercises, like the big five type of thing. It will start changing you at all these levels in a 21-day program. If you’re anybody’s interested, they can sign up for that. That’s a great way to connect with me. I’m on LinkedIn, so if anybody wants a question, I always answer all questions and whatnot. One other freebie is I have this newsletter on LinkedIn. It’s called The Aligned Life, and it’s basically aligning with all these seven paradigms. Biweekly, I put out a newsletter. All that is available.
It sounds amazing. Thank you so much for all the great work that you’re doing. It’s obvious and evident and clear that you’ve aligned with your ikigai and you’re leaving a legacy. Thank you for sharing that with us. This has been fantastic, and we’ll have to do it again.
Pleasure, Zach. I think it’s a journey for all of us. What I would say as a parting message is that you are really in the cockpit of your genome. It’s amazing, the number of switches that you can turn on to positively impact your biology, physiology, and psychology. When you know that, and you know that these are the seven master switches, it’s just a question of can you be proactive and act on this or are you going to be like the average American who wait until they get the joint pain, wait until they get the memory loss, and then sometimes, most of the time, it’s too late. I urge people to be proactive about their health, engage with these practices, and they will transform you.
That’s what it’s all about. Thank you so much for sharing today, Kavin. It was wonderful to have you.
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I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Dr. Mistry is such an amazing person. He’s lived such an amazing journey and has so much wisdom to share with us. If we just rehash these seven different paradigms we covered, earth, body, food, mind-body connection, purpose and meaning, or ikigai, connection with tribe and connection with mortality. Those are the seven different paradigms, and we dove into each of those. I know for me, I’m going to check out his morning routine download, but really start the day with a two-minute hang and a deep squat just to get everything aligned to start the day.
Considering the big five, we talked about leaving a legacy and creating a big five folder, what an easy practice that we can all do now to really help us focus on our legacy and what kind of impact we’re going to have, and how that really is the pinnacle that all these other things can support then, and gives us that reason why should we be so concerned about extending our health span?
Why should we be concerned about eating healthily and taking care of our bodies and our minds? Is this all to serve this ultimately higher purpose? Let’s focus on that and then, how can we spend and work our way up to twenty minutes of focused attention, whether that’s meditation or contemplative prayer, or just to focus attention for you that really helps rewire our brains so that we can operate at a high level and have clarity and focus throughout our day? Great stuff. I hope that you’ll check out Dr. Misty’s book, the Primal Health Design. Check him out on his website there as well, and you can download those free resources and sign up for his Primal Reset program as well. Thanks so much for reading. We’ll see you next time.
