A Doctor Says You Need 17 Minutes Outside Every Day. Here’s Why

11 minutes of daily outdoor activity, y'all, lowers risk of premature death by 23%. That is so shocking. That can even be brisk walking in a park. Your sleep begins to improve. Your focus begins to improve. Really? Your mood begins to improve. It's a formula for making your life better, and I don't have to go out and buy anything. Right. I just have to get myself outside in a green or blue space. You said soul-tired, oof, from being constantly plugged in. Soul-tired. Chris, tell us what's going on. Hi, everybody. It is my pleasure to be with you here on the Oprah Podcast. We're outside today, right on my front porch, and my guests couldn't be happier about that. You bet. Dr. John LaPuva is a physician and trained chef. They call him Chef MD, and he's written an eye-opening, eye-opening book called Indoor Epidemic. It's about the healing power of nature, and he means healing literally, and says simply spending intentional time outside can significantly improve your physical health and your mental health. It's the age-old wisdom that parents have been telling children all these years, generations, go outside and play, and none of us are doing that. Dr. We're not doing enough of that, right? Right. And we're not doing it in green and blue spaces. And what does that mean, green and blue spaces? Green spaces are spaces that are surrounded by plants and trees, anything green. So it's your front yard. Could be your front yard if you have one. Yeah. Or it could be a park. Could be a park. Love it if it's a forest. Definitely it's a forest. Yes. But most people don't have forests nearby. Yes. They do have an urban park nearby. Yes. And if we're lucky, we have a backyard and a garden. Yes. Or a community garden. Or any other type of green space. Yeah. Blue space is just a space near water, preferably running water, a stream, a brook, the ocean. But lakes and ponds and pools all count because they have an incredible and direct effect on our. biology. Mm-hmm. Green and blue spaces allow us to use parts of our brain that we currently are not using most of the time. Right. So a person living in a rural area surrounded by trees. Yes. the way I grew up. Yes. versus a person living in concrete, surrounded by buildings who never sees a tree. Yeah. just naturally is going to be healthier and have a better state of mind than a person who is not surrounded by anything green or anything blue. Yes, because they're more likely to get many of the natural cues that our biology evolved to understand. They're more likely to get light, daylight. They're more likely to have movement outside. They're more likely to experience fresh air. Yeah. They're more likely to have natural forces, including the ability to see at a distance. You know, our eyes need distance like our lungs need air. And we haven't really understood the environment as an important part of medical problems, preventing and treating medical problems, until very recently. So I want to jump right in here, Dr. La Puma. Please call me John. Okay. Well, it's hard, but okay. Okay, John, let's jump in. I'm calling you Oprah. Okay, good. Okay, page 86. I thought you were speaking to the world. Is your mind a runaway train, you ask us? A clattering whirlwind of to-do lists, anxious what-ifs, and the endless ping of digital alerts. Do you feel a weariness deep in your bones that sleep cannot touch? Wow, if that sounds familiar, you're not alone. You're battling the indoor epidemic that Dr. La Puma talks about. Well, I don't know about you, but I do feel a bit of a weariness deep in my bones. And I think you just described just about everybody. Tell us about your 7% solution for the indoor epidemic. Well, as you've said, Oprah, the indoor epidemic is the fact that we're spending 93% of our time indoors, which is startling. We only spend about 7% of our time outdoors on average. Yeah, I know. I read that. I was startled. Most people spend 93% of their time indoors. Amazing. Amazing. And the 7% of the time that we spend outdoors is largely incidental. Trying to get to indoors. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe picking up the mail or maybe picking up the door dash outside the door. It's just walking down the sidewalk with your phone in your hand. That's incidental time and it's biologically inactive. Doesn't help you at all. Yeah. Yeah. It's just two hours a week or 17 minutes a day. Two hours a week or 17 minutes a day. And change that time from incidental to intentional specific time in green or blue areas. Right. You can turn those minutes into a kind of medicine and change a lot of what you've just read that so many Americans, so many people worldwide are affected. It's not very hard. Well, I think asking me 17 minutes a day is not like the world doesn't feel like. It's like I have to make a big shift in my life to get 17 minutes a day. No. A lot of things, at that level, a lot of things happen that are good. Yeah. Really? Even having that much time in your mind that you're like, "Oh, I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep." Yeah. Really? Even having that much vigorous activity at that level, that's a 23% drop in premature death. What? Which is amazing. I know. That's 196 studies, over a million people, British Journal of Medicine. I read that and I couldn't, I found that to be shocking. Me too. That there's a 23% drop in your death rate? Yes. In the death rate. That study was actually done with 11 men. 11 minutes of vigorous activity on average. But if you have that in a green or a blue space, you actually stack those benefits. Yeah. You say that on page 149, that 11 minutes of daily outdoor activity, y'all, lowers risk of premature death by 23%. That is just so shocking. Yeah. And what we're talking about is stacking the benefits on top of that, the biological benefits. Yes. And you know what is so interesting is that so much of this comes down to reengaging with the sun, the sky, the soil. And your advice, I think, in chapter one was to meet the morning sun. That's right. Meet the morning sun. Yes. What impact does that have? And what do you mean by that? What I mean by that is within 60 to 90 minutes of waking, the back of your eyes, the back of the retina, has lightened. There's light-sensing cells that will pick up morning light anywhere. You don't have to look directly at the sun. Please don't look directly at the sun. Yeah. Don't wear sunglasses. Just go outside and look at daylight for 10 to 15 minutes, even on a cloudy day. Because outdoor light is 25 to 50 times brighter than indoor light. Right. And that does this. It lets you get a big cortisol. The cortisol boost in the morning, which you want to be awake, helps your coffee work better. You can then set, you're setting your melatonin timer, which helps you go to sleep at night, for about 14 hours later. You're most importantly, perhaps, creating deep sleep for yourself. Deep sleep is slow REM sleep in which you build bone, very important for women who are worried about osteoporosis. You repair muscle from the day, and your glymphatic system kicks in. Your glymphatic system is a brain cleaning system. The circulating spinal fluid around your brain cleans out beta-amyloid and tau, which are the proteins that are associated with Alzheimer's. So in deep sleep, which we actually get less of unfairly as we get older. These three things happen once you set your circadian rhythm. Why do we get less of it as we get older? No one knows. Yeah. And that's one of the parts that we want to research here, because it makes such a dramatic difference in our daily health. Absolutely. So you write about, I say absolutely, because I have that aura ring and I'm always checking how much deep sleep I got, and it's never enough. It's never enough. It isn't. No. But it improves. If you get 15 minutes regularly. Within 60 to 90 minutes of waking, no sunglasses, seeing the sky, because the wavelengths that are blue in the morning. They impinge on the back of your retina, and they tell your brain, hey, wake up, and hey, let's set our circadian rhythm. That's the healing power of the sky. That's the healing power of the morning sun. The morning sun. Healing power of the sky is something different? It is related because, of course, we're looking at the sky to get the sun. But actually, you can be puttering in your garden. You can be doing almost anything as long as those rays come in the first 15 minutes. When you're out in daylight working during the day, you get reinforcement of your circadian rhythm. I know. This was the best choice to be out on the porch because the crew wanted to be inside. And I said, why wouldn't you be outside on the porch where you could see the sky? Whenever you can be on the porch and see green, touch green, smell green, feel the wind, it's actually biologically active. It is giving your biology signals that it is day, you are awake, you are alive, you are alert, you are present, you are engaged, you are beginning to use your senses. Because, as you know, that's how we experience nature. That is, that is, yes. By touching, listening, seeing, smelling, tasting. And you say even the color of the sky and the ocean, the color blue, is healing. Here's what you write on page 53. When we're in a state of blue mind, you call it, our brain chemistry literally shifts the sight, sound, and touch of water, activate the parasympathetic nervous system, dampen the hypothalamic stress circuits, and rebalance neural pathways towards safety, reward, and connection. Why is blue so healing? Again, not known, but it's thought it's because it's a key color in nature. The sky is blued. The ocean is blue. It's thought that those natural signals. that we evolved with, that are ancient, are reflected in our philia, our attraction for the color blue. And that that being near water is part of that. It may also be that the sound of water, particularly moving water, can itself be healing and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, as you say. Well, anybody who knows me knows how much I love trees and love to be surrounded by trees. I even sometimes in the morning, I'm talking to them. What I didn't know until reading this is that they are answering me back in their own way. That's right. So tell us how being around trees actually boosts our immune system. I love that you do that. I do it too. Trees make chemicals called phytoncides, and they make them in their leaves. And they make them as part of their own immune system to ward off. bugs that will eat them. When trees emit phytoncides and send them out into the world, other trees pick them up and also change the chemicals in their leaves so they won't be as tasty to insects. And those very same chemicals, phytoncides, which we can recognize from some aromatherapy, can improve our own immunity. An immunologist named King Lee in Japan in 1985 did studies about phytoncides. He took actually office workers into the forest, and for three days and two nights, they just walked gently in the forest. And they came back and measured how active their immune system was. They made white blood cells 56% more. Natural killer cells were 56% more than they were when they left. Wow. And these natural killer cells, which everybody makes, kill cells in you that have viruses. Kill cells in you that are tumor cells. And that effect lasted not just seven days, but 30 days in those office workers. And he went back to the laboratory and tested these very same chemicals and found the same thing. Well, you write about forest bathing, too, which I just love that term ever since I first heard it. Explain to our audience what it is and why we should all be doing it. Forest bathing is not. Bathing in a forest. It's not. But instead, bathing in the sensory qualities of the forest. It's sensory sipping of the forest, if you will. It's a kind of deliberately cycling through your senses and asking the forest, in a way, to be the therapist, to simply being present. It's going maybe an eighth of a mile in half an hour. It's not exercise. It's a way to breathe the microbial richness of the forest, to see the wind moving. To be in tune with nature. And this does. It's walking through the. Moving through the forest with intention and full-on presence for everything that you're experiencing. Exactly right. And it has the same effect as an initial beta blocker for blood pressure. Drops blood pressure by seven millimeters systolic and four millimeters diastolic. Yeah. So forest bathing is walking through a park or walking through a woods or walking through a forest, if you happen to be around one, and taking in. All of your senses, everything, your feet on the ground, the presence. And I've often heard people say this, that walking barefoot through on grass does something. Does it? You know, I wrote a chapter in the book on grounding, and then I took it out. Yeah. Also called earthing. Yes. Because I wasn't persuaded by the data. It didn't rise to the level of gardening or of looking at the sea and sky and stars. So it hasn't been scientifically proven. But of the 2,200 studies that I read, for this book, which I needed to do to find the science for it, I found that the grounding studies did not measure up as well as the gardening studies, as the forest bathing studies, as the morning light studies, as the dusk studies. As the movement through nature studies, which I call. All of those have been proven. Green exercise. Yes. I mean, there's really nothing easier to get your. But if you want to go barefoot, do it. Please. Yes. Just be careful. Be careful where you're walking barefoot. Everything I do begins with intention. You become exactly what you believe is possible. Especially the Oprah podcast. You're doing good, Aiden. I believe when people share their personal journeys with authenticity. Never thought of it like that. I love that you've never thought of it that way before. And with intention, something beautiful happens. We recognize pieces of our own lives in theirs. We realize. That actually helps, right? We are not alone. 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So we have some folks on Zoom with questions for you. Brooks is an ER doctor who did one of your YouTube video series called How to Treat Cancer. How to Treat Anxiety with Hiking. Brooks, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks you guys so much for having me. What an honor. What did getting outside do for you? Well, I have sort of struggled with anxiety my whole life. It's something that, you know, before I went to medical school, I was having a lot of anxiety. When I went to medical school, I was able to start hiking. I lived close to the outdoors. I was close to a waterfall. I would take my dog. We'd go up hiking. And all of a sudden, this anxiety during what should have been a really, you know, one of the most stressful times of my life, all of a sudden, my anxiety is gone. I'm sleeping great. I'm feeling great. I'm like, wow, this is insane. I feel so wonderful. And so fast forward a little bit. I went to residency, had three years of residency, did not get to go outside at all, really. And so during this time, my anxiety levels rose. I was working a ton and I wasn't sleeping. And I really felt the effects. Yeah. I've been out of residency now three years. And I'm outside and I'm hiking again. And I feel like me again. And I just, my mental health has improved so much. It's like residency is designed to kill people. I mean, I have one of my girls from South Africa in residency. And all I hear is, oh, my God, I'm dying. I'm dying. Yes. Yeah. It's designed to wear you out, right? It's really, honestly, it's a really tough part of the training. Really tough. Yeah. And I hear you're now, Brooks, you are prescribing outdoor time for your emergency room patients. I do all the time. I get people with anxiety and panic attacks like every single day. right? And so they come in and once I've ruled out the emergencies and say, okay, I really think you're having anxiety. I asked them, what do you do? How much are you getting outside? What do you do? And the answer is almost all the time, they're really not getting outside. They're really not doing much. And I tell them, usually I tell them my story a little bit. I try to be honest with them and say, this has changed my life. This has changed my anxiety. As somebody who knows it personally, I said, you need to get outside. You got to walk up some hills. You got to look at the color green. You got to, this is going to change your life. Wow. Wow. Nice. Well, we're happy for you and happy you got out of residency. And now you're a walking advertisement. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. Thank you so much. Good to see you. Thank you. You too. So chapter four of Indoor Epidemic is about movement is medicine. Some of what Brooks is saying, and I could not agree more. You say it matters where though we do our moving. It matters as much where. Right. Yeah. That's the major thesis here, Oprah, that, you know, in my 30 years of practice, the most underestimated health factor I think is where people spend their time. So it's not simply that you're outside, as I've mentioned, it can be incidental time. It's where you walk, where you exercise, where you move needs to be for it to be biologically active near, a green or a blue space. Not the same walking down a sidewalk in Manhattan, Los Angeles. And yet the studies of people walking down a city street and a meadow show that the rumination center in the brain is quieted by walking in the meadow, but actually slightly activated by walking down even a pretty city street. Yeah. Because all other things have to be on alert also. Exactly right. No matter what city street you're on. You're adrenergic. The adrenergic system is in high gear. You're watching for things on either side. You're paying attention to notifications on your phone, most likely. You're wary of traffic. You're mindful of your next meeting. So all of that doesn't allow you to pay attention to the out. I can tell you that after my knee surgery in 2021, I would look out the window and I'd see this tree up on the hill and I'd say, God, I hope one day I could get up there. I hope one day I could get up there. I actually now call it the hope tree. And now the first time I did it, it took me an hour and 38 minutes to get there. Wow. Now I can do it in 28 minutes. Oh, that's awesome. That hike. That's great. But I can tell you that the difference I feel because I've worked out, you know, my whole life, but the difference I feel working out outdoors, hiking, you know, on the mountain, through the hills in the, I can't even tell you the change it's made. It's a, there's a great biologic reason for it. One of the most famous studies here, it was done in 1984, published in science magazine. It's been cited over, 5,000 times where people who had the same operation staying on either side of the hallway, I mentioned it in the book, have some had half had a view of greenery, like you did of that tree, half had a view of a brick wall. The people who had view of greenery outside their hospital room window. I love that study. I know. Had half the opiate requirement, had stayed in the day, in the hospital a day less. And the nurses thought that their hospital stay, was so much better than the one people exactly across the hallway with exactly the same operation and exactly the same medical care. And that changed hospital architecture. I mean, design and what's now being called neuroaesthetics is really an important part of determining behavior, not just intention, but how your environment encourages behavior one way or the other determines really whether you, respond biologically. I get that 100%. We're joined now by Chris who wrote into the podcast saying, lately, I have to admit to myself, something is going on. I'm tired, not just physically tired. You told us, you said, soul tired for being constantly plugged in, soul tired. I'm Ms. Winfrey. Hi, Dr. LaPuma. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I guess what I mean by that is like when I think back on just all the things competing for our attention these days from like constant scrolling, the alerts, the non, the nonstop notifications that that pressure to always be on, I've noticed that it's left me feeling overstimulated and somehow at the same time, empty. Even when I tell myself I'm resting, I catch myself still staring at some sort of screen. And honestly, the more I feel like that I'm connected online, the more disconnected and distant I feel from myself. And it kind of creates this quiet kind of depletion. So, you know, my question to you is like, I would really love and some of the statistics at the beginning of this conversation has been so great already. But I would really love your advice on just emotional regulation because sometimes something as simple as an email or text can send me spiraling and feel so stressful. And I know we live in a digital communicative world now. It's all a part of our lives. But how do we shift our perspective? How do we shift our perspective and not let it control our emotional state? Yeah. Well, Chris, I'm really sorry for this. I know how hard that feels and how difficult that must feel for you. And you must know you're not alone. A lot of people feel exactly the same way, right? Yes. I was describing you in the intro. Your mind is a runaway train. Yeah, that's right. Actually, we're calling this condition digital obesity, where you are just so overwhelmed by pixels, like too much sugar burns out your metabolism. Too many pixels burn out your brain. And that's kind of what's happening to Chris here. And so there are a couple of things. One is when you feel like you're spiraling, you get an email and you want to punch somebody or you feel like I just can't take it anymore. Or just agitated, just agitated. Just agitated. Yeah. You can bypass the thinking part of your brain, which is processing this, by doing something called the dive reflex. So you go into the bathroom and you splash cold water on your face for 15 seconds. What that does is tell the nerve, the trigeminal nerve that innervates your face, that gives your face feeling, to go directly to your vagus nerve, which then will shut off, force quit your stress response. Your blood pressure drops. Your pulse drops. You just feel better right away. Splashing cold water on your face? 15 seconds. And that's because it just goes directly to the brain stem, to the vagus nerve. It doesn't involve your cortex, which is where you're thinking and ruminating. So if you need a force quit, that's what I would do. And then just come back and the stress response will have gone away and you'll be able to begin to make sense of your inbox. But you'll probably need a preventative thing as well. Yeah. The preventative thing might be. To listen at night or in the morning before work to natural regulating sounds. And I like the babbling brook sounds, the light rain sounds, the ocean wave sounds at 50 or 60 decibels, because just five minutes of that allow the brain to relax and feed your sleep if you're doing it before sleep and in the morning, give you calm. Yeah. Yeah. if you're doing it before work. And my guess also, Chris, is that you're not, you may not be spending a lot of time outside. Yeah. Are you in that 93%? Are you 93% indoors? I'm definitely in that 93%. It's not intentional. You know, sometimes I just catch myself off guard and I was like, wow, I don't think I've stepped foot outdoors today just because of how busy the day was or kind of constantly I'm living through, you know, multiple devices. So yeah, I'm definitely in that. And you're one of those incidental people. You're just going from your car to the garage, to the building, to the da, da, da. Yeah. Very much so, yes. I would start there. I mean, I would, why don't you start, do what Brooks did and put yourself on this program, the 7%, why don't you give yourself the 7% solution? It's not going to be hard. 17 minutes a day, you really just clock yourself on your watch. 17 minutes a day outside, intentional in some green space. That's exactly right. And it could start with just, 10 minutes of morning sun. Because that 10 minutes, it'll let you sleep better at night. And it will give you the energy in the morning to face the inbox and power through it. It will set all of the clocks in your body. And actually, this is one of the leading theories of aging that each organ has a clock and the circadian rhythm is managed through the master clock in the brain. So by doing this, you synchronize all the clocks in all of your organs and you then have a chance to begin your day in a way that's organized and logical. And as Oprah says, reinforce that with time outside. And I like that you're beginning with the green exercise, with movement. Yes, yes. Yes. I'm beginning with that because that's what I do. And I know that it works because it works for me. And I was one of those people who, for 25 years in Chicago, I literally went from one garage to the next garage. I would be picked up at 5 a.m. 30 in the morning i would go to the gym i would get leave the gym and then i would go to the garage at the studio and then i wouldn't leave to 10 30 at night i never saw the sky i never saw this so i i know the difference between now being outside and and and forest bathing taking it all in whenever i can huge difference i'll definitely be taking some of these notes and cues into practice so thank you for sharing that and um miss winfrey to your point just taking 17 minutes like if you don't have 17 minutes we have issues so just like you don't have 17 minutes and you don't want to get better right right exactly so i think just penciling that in and just being very intentional about that i will for sure um put that on my calendar moving forward well thanks chris thank you for the question chris i hope you feel better thank you so much thank you so stephen is a ceo and serial entrepreneur stephen welcome to the podcast hi hey oprah it's nice to meet you and john it's great to see you how are you today how are you i hear you've known john for about two years tell us about your ceo reset you had yeah so john um i i knew i needed to make a i needed to make a change because i just wasn't thinking as intentionally as as i needed to be thinking i mean leaving an early stage college sports company it just i just it wasn't as sharp as i wanted to be and and and it if you can't tell i'm not as young as i used to be so um that reset time wasn't uh where it needed to be so at the same time though i really i wasn't looking to add more to my schedule and i wasn't looking for more things to do um so i'm looking for clarity but i'm also looking for something that would travel because i'm on the road a lot so what i loved about john's book was it allowed me to repurpose time that i already had so for example i used to start my day on my phone reading emails reading the news and that would set my agenda now when i'm in california i start my day and i'm up and i'm walking my dogs and beautiful santa barbara and i'm thinking about what i want to do and what are the most important things that i've got to get done that day and i'm setting my priorities versus the screen setting my priorities for me in the morning and it just starts my day off better and it allows me to make better decisions and i'm sharper on that and i feel and that's helping me quite a bit and i can take that on the road with me i can't take the dogs on the road with me but i can i can take that on the road with me um and then i reset it with an afternoon meeting that uh that i take on a walk normally it's a low stress meeting and then the last thing i'm doing john um that we talked about is i'm shutting the screens down 30 minutes before i want to go to sleep and i'm thinking about what i want to do and what are the most important priorities that i have and i'm reading a book so what i love about it is really the same hours just different inputs but i'm getting better outcomes right like better focus better sleep and really less reactive decisions so it's working great for me wow well you'll say well at the same time wow that's great i do have a question though oh all right okay yeah so so john sometimes i mean we're not all perfect right so sometimes you get out like you know you get off you get off the rails so my question for you is like if you get a little bit out of whack and you've fallen a little bit out of the routine because you get an early flight into new york and landed at three in the morning and that thought of i just i'm just like i don't know if i can do it like what what makes a real difference what's that one thing that can make a big difference if i can't fix everything and i gotta get it back on the rails that's a good question it is a good i like that yeah yeah and especially important for someone in a senior leadership position like you are responsible for other people and needing to guide them and help them with their work and let's say that steve is way ahead in many ways right you know he's already walking his dogs he's already getting uh outdoor meetings walking meetings with people he's already um he's already walking the talk literally and it's reflected in his productivity and performance but when something falls off the rail and this is not about being perfect i mean 17 minutes is a minimum effective dose and it actually optimally goes up to five hours a week which is about 42 minutes a day for a longevity benefit but it's not about being perfect it's about it's not about being perfect i mean 17 minutes is a minimum effective dose and it actually optimally goes up to five hours a week which is about 42 minutes a day for a longevity benefit to get back on track it depends what's derailing you but if you're having trouble getting to sleep and a lot of executives are i like a breathing exercise a four seven eight breathing exercise which is sort of a tranquility breath where you're allowing co2 to build up a little bit and you're allowing your um your parasympathetic nervous system to kick in which is inhaling for four through your nose holding for seven and exhaling through your mouth for eight and doing five reps um and it doesn't take long takes a minute uh uh for each and that's less than five minutes really four seven eight breaths the second thing i like during the day if you get off track and you're just you started and you didn't get your 15 minutes outside and you and you didn't you know do the things that you would normally do because that stuff happens yeah is any time in the morning that you can go out because you're in charge you have yourself for the boss um say i need five minutes just go outside and look at daylight because those blue that blue wave flame will tell your eyes you're awake it's good to make cortisol you might not be making melatonin tonight the way that you should but during the day you can re-center yourself by getting a little cortisol boost and that five minutes of daylight which is all you need and especially if you can look at a horizon if you can look as far away as you can that does a couple things for you right away it relaxes your ciliary muscles the muscles around your eye that are so focused on a device like this normally it relaxes them so that a lot of the fatigue that you might be feeling the headache that you might be feeling the tension that you might be feeling when you get off track a lot of that begins to dissipate with just five minutes of looking at a horizon in fact five minutes an hour can help to stall myopia and myopia is nearsightedness which there's epidemic levels of in singapore and much of asia almost 90 percent of people are kids with diopia myopia excuse me and that's because there's so much what's called near work device work that looks like this so steve five minutes of daylight five reps of the four seven eight breaths and when you're in daylight look at the horizon as much as you can if you happen to be uh in an urban canyon among office buildings and you're it's not an easy thing to do um walk to the end of the block and see if you can see further there it's as far as you can see there's no wrong answer for this um it's just as far as you can see because it resets you both physically medically and psychologically wow put it to work next week i'm gonna be in manhattan so i'll put it to work all right love it's a good place to put it to work it is yeah thank you so much thank you so much stephen nice to see you buddy okay uh one of the things what how does this impact kids too because you write that i remember you saying in the book that kids spend less time outdoors than prisoners that's in a maximum security prison that's right kids today i know i know well it's been less time outdoors i know antidepressant prescriptions are up 69 in teenagers in the last six years that's how it's affecting them it's affecting them with isolation with loneliness which in adults has the same mortality risk as 15 cigarettes a day oh my goodness i know and kids need help dramatically yeah you need to read this indoor epidemic it's so shocking it's one thing after another i couldn't even believe that stat about kids spending less time i know you know maximum security guys are looking for that one day one that time out on the yard right they get an hour sometimes they get an hour out in the yard and now kids today aren't even spending that no and it's affecting their mental health and you know this time this minimum effective dose of 17 minutes a day yeah makes everything else you're doing for your health work better yeah it makes it's an improvement it's an enhancement and you say that sleep is a crucial component uh of this book you suggest a night fall ritual i think you call it nightfall ritual what is that it's a cooling down ritual before bed yeah because bright light within um really within 30 minutes of bedtime and there's some data about even earlier but at least 30 minutes of bedtime is a good time to go to bed 30 minutes like Steve is doing, but I like even an hour. Bright blue light suppresses your melatonin by 80% for an hour and a half. And that makes it harder to get to sleep and stay asleep. not have screens before bedtime. Night shift on your phone can help, but it's not actually enough because you, that's why you want to look at dusk, by the way, because you, those red amber wavelengths of the sun tell your brain that you can release, release melatonin that night and that the day is ending, that your temperature needs to cool. So we want to avoid bright light at night before bed. And 40% of us go to sleep with a lamp or a TV on. Turns out that bright, the people who get the most bright light between 1230 in the morning and six in the morning have a 50% increased risk for heart attack and AFib and 30% stroke and heart failure. This is data just from JAMA last year of hundreds of thousands of people followed for nine years in the UK. It's stunning. It has some of the same risk factor for heart disease, bright light between 1230 in the morning and six in the morning. Then the reason is not because you're getting fewer hours of sleep. The reason is that it's disrupting your circadian biology. And that is what we want to give people back. So don't go to sleep with a light or a TV. Don't look at bright light before bed. Read, do this nighttime ritual. Don't get up in the middle of the night and pick up your phone and start reading the news. Please not. No. Instead, do some of the things that Steve was talking about. We want a cup of tea, read a book, write a journal. Yeah. So it's not that it's just keeping you awake or not letting you sleep. It's interrupting the circadian rhythm. Right. The way that your body is keeping track of its normal metabolic processes. Almost half of our genes, turn on and turn off at the right time of day. But they're not activated accurately unless our circadian rhythm is set. Did you feel a sense of what? Urgency or need or great desire in writing this book, Ender Epidemic? Why did you want to do it? I wanted to do it because I myself was caught in somewhat the same, kind of schedule you were, where I just was going, going, going all the time. I was in New York and I was on a book campaign. I should be scheduling a dozen things to do in the time I'm there because I live in California, but I wanted to come back right away. And I did. I like wasted this whole trip, but I didn't know why I wanted to come back, but I had to. I felt like I needed to be outside on the little abandoned nursery that I had bought. And I needed to figure out why I felt that way. And that's why I read these 2200 studies. I figured out the science for this. And I wrote a scientific roadmap so other people could do it. You know, nature is not that easy to commercialize. I didn't do it because I have a widget and need to sell it. I did it because people in the indoors are immune deficient. They have insomnia. They have insulin resistance. They have arthritic creaky joints. They have sedentariness. They have cognitive fog, brain fog. They have reduced attention and attention fatigue. I mean, these things are all and loneliness. These things are all directly a result of the indoor epidemic. And people don't realize that it is impacting their longevity as well. It's causing their telomeres, the caps and their chromosomes to shorten more rapidly. Well, one of the reasons I appreciate what you've written here is because it's a formula, but it's also a way of making your life better. And I don't have to go out and buy anything. Right. I just have to get myself outside. Deliberately. Deliberately. Intentionally. And specifically. In a green or blue space. That's what you have to do. Dr. John LaPuma, thank you so much for being here. What a pleasure. Okay, thank you. And for this eye-opening book. Brooks and Chris and Stephen, thank you all for joining our conversation. And thank you all for listening. And I hope that listening will get you to buy the book. And also, not be among that 93% of people who are indoors. Get outside and have the 7% solution. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Go well, everybody. If you want a copy of Indoor Epidemic by Dr. John LaPuma, you can scan the QR code that's right on your screen. We didn't have time to get into all of it. This book is packed with practical science-backed strategies to help you harness the healing power of nature to lower your stress, improve your sleep, and even extend your life. Take good care of yourself, listeners. Go well. Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you and is serving as a bright spot in your day. That means a lot to me. So here's the thing. I would really appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube or wherever you podcast. 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